How many Postmen want their kids to be Postmen?
Sorting office - Jobs worth striking for!
I absolutely hope the answer to the title question is none or at least not many. However the way the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) is carrying on you’d think that working in a sorting office is a job worth aspiring to. Don’t get me wrong (yeah this is the bit where I say some unpalatable things) because being a postman or working in a sorting office is not a bad thing in itself.
People’s situations vary and of course there are many reasons why someone would be working there, but one thing I can say is that I look down upon anyone who works there and doesn’t aspire for more. Either for themself or their family. Themself because if you’re not working there to better yourself then I really hope you’re doing it to elevate your family. Note that I used the word elevate, by which I mean those workers shouldn’t just be looking to feed their families. There’s more to life than food. Really there is.
Anyway, the gist of the strike if you don’t know or are working in a sorting office (in which case you don’t know) is that the Royal Mail wants to modernise. In 2007 they rolled out a four phase plan to help achieve that modernisation, which the CWU agreed to. I’m not sure why they couldn’t have five phases as it’s common knowledge that all good plans either run for five years or have five phases!
Fast forward to 2009 and they have surprisingly implemented three of those phases save for the last one which calls for rolling out a ‘walk sequencing machine, a device which organises letters into the order the postmen and women will deliver them the next morning.’ A pretty neat idea which to my untrained ear says ‘lower costs, efficiency, speed’ and all the good things that any decent business and it’s customers should hope for. Of course it probably means many jobs in the sorting office will be lost, but hey who wants to haggle over menial jobs being lost? Oh……. the CWU?
The situation would be really funny to me if people’s skilled jobs didn’t rely on the Royal Mail. Losing professional jobs is one thing. But sorters *%?!! This really takes the biscuit. The CWU wants to save menial jobs even though surely the modernisation will result in skilled jobs being created. Granted there’ll be fewer than the lost ones, but hey who really wants their kids to grow up to be Post Men?
A truly hazardous profession.
BP’s oil a shot in the arm for our addicted economies
So BP found has made a ‘giant’ new oil discovery in it’s Gulf of Mexico fields. Good timing for those oil and fuel prices that were starting to go up again, huh?
Well, I for one am not holding my breath for a stabilisation at the current prices of fuel. However, I really hoped that things were going to continue down the same road with reserves of oil and gas dwindling, and our consumption of said fuels holding steady. Humanity has made great strides in making greener flights, cars and consumer electronics. Whilst we’re not nearly enough there, innovation and technological progress in that area is the best way forward in lowering our dependence on oil.
Necessity is the mother of invention and I believe the continued progress we’ve been making could be stunted if yet more oil is found in ‘giant’ quantities. I’m not naive enough to think we could ever be 100% free from our oil habit, but Iike any alcoholic, I’d rather we knew we could do without it.
In all, I’d like to see oil prices come down as a result of low demand and not higher supply.
iLike didn’t believe the hype
Nic Brisbourne the London based venture capitalist yesterday blogged about the lessons of iLike's low valuation. The gist of the article was that iLike, a business based around a Facebook app that allows users to share and interact around music, had been sold for the relatively low figure of $20 million. Nic says;
It seems to me there are two big takeaways here.
1. It is important to build value as well as traffic
Ultimately the true measure of value is net cash flow and it seems that despite being profitable there simply wasn't much scale to iLike's business in revenue terms. I would speculate that is partly because not all their 50m users were very active (it is telling they always quote total registered users not active users) and partly because the inventory they do have doesn't monetise that well. Widgets on social networks suffer from the double whammy of limited real estate in an environment where ads perform poorly.
It is worth noting here, as David Pakman of partner at VC firm Venrock points out, that traffic is often a good lead indicator of value, just not always
.
2. Dependence is a weakness
The other big problem for iLike seems to have been that 70-80% of its traffic came from Facebook, making them vulnerable to changes in FB's terms of service or if FB decided to launch their own music service. So iLike was dependent for its future on the good will of Facebook, and If there is even a small chance that iLike could have its ioxygen (sic) cut off nobody is going to risk paying too much for the company. This problem is all the more acute when the company you are dependent on hasn't sorted out its own business model and is somewhat unpredictable
These are very valid points for any web-based business to take on board. Nevertheless I'm just not sure they apply in the case of iLike and I commented to that end. (Updated: Nic has commented below with more insight and futher clarifying the background information. Be sure to read that.)
I'm guessing, but I think iLike's founders and investors probably knew the value of the company they were building. That they cashed out a slightly profitable company at $20 million, with other bidders on hand seems to suggest that they got what they were looking for and where not unhappy with the price. It would have been easy for them to move along thinking they'd grow and/or get more down the line.
This however, is a lesson to the tech media, analysts and all those who build copy cat businesses. Hype does not equate to a high valuation. It seems iLike (quite rightly) didn't believe the hype.
