Things have not been going well since George W. Bush decided to leave the US government's MasterCard at the bar. Especially not for people like me - who doesn't even live in the US.
My hourly rate is about DKK 900 (Danish Kroner) per hour (it varies depending on the type of work - strategic help costs more, simple concepts costs less). My rate is not that expensive. It is cheaper than the amount expensive consultants take, but also expensive enough to only get serious requests.
But my prices has gone through the roof ever since George W. Bush decided to see if he could bankrupt a country:
I have gone from having a fair price, to being overly greedy - without ever changing my rates. The result is noticeable. US Companies can no longer afford my services - and 39% of my visitors come from the US.
Another problem is my Google Advertisements. I do not make that much from ads (read: very little actually), but I lost 9% of my ad revenue within the last 12 month alone - due to unfavorable exchanges rates.
Only 5-10% of my annual income is from freelance work, and only 0.5% is from my ads revenue. I am not going bankrupt. It is just annoying!
Of course, buying products in the US is now insanely cheap. I recently bought "The Art of Cars, by Pixar" from Amazon - and the price difference between Amazon.com (USA) vs. Amazon.co.uk (Europe) is huge:
I can almost buy two books from the US store for the same price as the one in England - and this is true for every product.
Although it's fun that I can buy US products for almost no money at all, it is disastrous for US as a country.
BTW: Didn't George W. Bush bankrupt his last company too? The congress should put him under financial administration before China starts to outsource to the US because "it is cheaper that way"...
These days, everyone talks about HTML5. All the big guys like Apple, Google, and Microsoft put a lot of effort into making it happen. Google is especially focused on bringing HTML5 and web apps into the world.
Want to try out the new Digg 4 - go here http://new.digg.com (limited access - be quick)
Earlier today On2, the company behind the video codec used in the FLV video format (used by Flash), told us that they will discontinue their Flix video product line.
There is one story that keeps popping up about Wired Magazine reporting that 26% of their traffic is now coming from the iPad. A truly amazing number. But there something odd about it. I'm not seeing that anywhere else. So I did a little digging.
My use of the stream have now reached a point where I am no longer looking for news. Instead, my world is pretty much divided into two types of information. Updates that are followable, and updates that isn’t. I am now spending 99% of my time on the first group.
Foursquare Grader has compiled a list of the percentage of people who have been rewarded a badge on Foursquare. This tells us a lot about how it is being used. Most social networks have a relatively low activity rate, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
A few days ago I wrote, “Facebook is Dying, Social is Not,” and it appears that I hit a nerve. The article has so far been read by more than 25,000+ readers, in less than 3 days. It is safe to say that the complexity and privacy issues are something people really cares about.
Every now and then a short video is released that show just how much the world has changed. One of the best ones are “The Social Media Revolution” from Socialnomics. Yesterday they released an updated version, with all the latest stats.
You might have heard it already, but Google have released a new beta version of Chrome, which breaks new records in speed. And to show off how fast it really is they have made a little video.
RescueTime, a company the provides time management software, recently did a survey on what men and women spend their time one. Interesting study, but I don’t think they made the right conclusions.
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