The end of Whitcoulls and Borders in New Zealand

If you have a Borders or Whitcoulls voucher, even if you hate the idea of spending double to be allowed to spend your voucher, I recommend you do it quickly, because within a couple of weeks it will be worthless. It was interesting to see that there is no mention of the current situation on the Borders website which talks about eBooks coming soon, although Whitcoulls have been a bit more responsible with a home page announcement.

The demise of these companies isn’t about eBooks, it is largely around debt as pointed out by Liam Dann in this morning’s Business Section of the NZ Herald.  and the business models. I’m not going to discuss the debt because that doesn’t reflect on the industry itself, it reflects on higher level financial decisions and the economy, not on the book trade.

Book stores and music stores are in industries that are steeped in history of “this is how we’ve done it for the last 50 years and why change it if it aint broke”.

As was mentioned in today’s NZ Herald story by Isaac Davison, “In 2010, 9.67 million books were sold, an increase of 1.2 per cent in volume but 0.1 per cent down in value against 2009. This was despite the mark-up on books in New Zealand, which saw paperbacks sold for as much as $20 more than online, even after shipping costs.”

So much for Amazon (of course there were a huge number of Kiwis including myself who purchased from Amazon as well) being the cause of the demise of our local stores.

I also appreciated the comment in the same story from Jo McColl of Unity Books that many people bought hard copy books as a consequence of having purchased eBooks. I’ve done that too. I read eBooks, listen to Audio Books and still have a personal library of around 2,000 print books. The same with music, I listen to lots of music online but have still purchased at least 10 CD’s so far this year.

I might have to go to a separate blog about how Whitcoulls and Borders business model needed to change in order to stay viable and vibrant (ignoring REDGroup‘s debt which doesn’t reflect on the book trade business model itself) because for these guys its too late unless they get a savvy new owner (who will not purchase the chains’ debt) who is ready to adopt a new business model.

REDGroup have called in Administrators. I don’t care who the administrators are. Their role is a short term one and it isn’t about changing the business model or trading back into profit. It is about the creditors.

They will try to negotiate with the book publishers and wholesalers and other suppliers who are desperate to get paid for their product and worried about their future viability in NZ. Inland Revenue want their taxes and will be first in the queue.

They will need to negotiate with the 1,000 staff who will have to have new short term contracts and will be justifiably worried about whether they will get paid at all, let alone have a future with the chain, but at the same time, will be essential should they find a new buyer for the chains.

Based on the outcome of their negotiations a decision will need to be made on whether to go into receivership which is next most likely step. If that happens, enjoy the book sale, because there will be many bargains up for grabs.

The shame of it is that (outside of the decisions that got REDGroup into this financial position) the problem in the trade is that the business model needed to change and like the music industry and other industries, the people running them don’t get it. They should have learned from the music industry, which still doesn’t get it. Other industries who don’t get it include banking, telecommunications and consumer electronics to name a few.

What should they have done and what can other retail businesses do in order to not follow Borders and Whitcoulls into the mire? Subscribe to my blog and I’ll give you a few pointers for free. It isn’t rocket science, but it is a fundamental shift in thinking, whilst also remembering the fundamental simple principles of retail and distributon.

We live in a new world, its exciting and there is a lot of money to be made, but the fatal flaw is thinking that if you do the same thing you have always done, that you will get a different result.

There is an RSS feed to this blog. Come back and read some of my ideas on how companies like Whitcoulls and Borders can thrive and prosper.

Here are a few things I would look at:

• Understanding your business
• Communication with customers
• Communication with staff
• Distribution methods
• Stock turn and inventory management
• Engagement
• In Store Events
• Proximity based marketing
• Shelf Management
• Relationships with community
• Relationships with education
• Location Based Business Analytics
• The Internet
• Gift Registry

I could and probably will go on. The answers are a mixture of the old and the new, neither of which these chains have effectively managed. Borders started in the right direction in the US, but didn’t continue the evolution. International chains like Borders and WH Smith focussed more on the  era of globalization than evolution of the business model. Something that would have made short term heroes who have probably made their money and moved on, but was only ever going to be short term.

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New Ways To Read The News

I’ve written before about the newspaper industry and why newspapers will fade away. In Jeff Jarvis’ book What Would Google Do? there is a prediction that the last newspaper will be printed in 2040.

I no longer subscribe to a daily paper. I do scan the office copy and have a Firefox widget that gives me access to my local paper the New Zealand Herald although they haven’t updated it since March and it doesn’t work properly with the latest Firefox version.

Where I get most of my news from is in fact Twitter. Lots of people still don’t understand the power of Twitter. I’ve found it is the best way to get up to date information about what is going on locally and internationally. If I want to get information, I simply do a search on my Twitter client, Hootsuite, which I can save as a stream so I don’t have to keep searching.

In addition, I use the paper.ly service and have 2 daily Twitter newspapers where the content is generated by the people or businesses I follow. I have 2 daily papers. One is for my generic Twitter account, and the other is for my songwriting business.

The service I use is called Paper.li and my daily online newspapers which you can subscribe to for free are the Luigi Cappel Daily and the other is my Cappel Music paper. I can go to either of these papers and read stories that are of interest to me. The reason I can do this, is because it aggregates Twitter stories with links from people I follow.

A benefit of this is that it focuses me on following people that have something to say that I am in fact interested in. So if you follow me on Twitter you will see that I typically hover around the 2,000 follows as opposed to some people who follow and collect people like they were trying to follow everyone. If I follow you and your tweets don’t interest me, I won’t be following you for long. Doesn’t mean you don’t have something valid to say, just that I only have so much time and there is so much going on.

So my newspaper has a front page and today it includes stories such as Google TV devices being delayed, South Korea’s military exercises, arrests in a UK terror plot, the latest in the Pike River Coal Mine Disaster, faulty Kindles and more. There is a Stories Page, an Arts and Entertainment Page, a Technology Page, and more. You can even subscribe to my paper, or make your own and its all free.

I mentioned searches on Twitter for news as well. I won’t go into hashtags, you can google that if you are interested, but for a couple of examples, here is a search on Heathrow, which has been closed for several days because of snow and ice. The best way to find out what is going on is from people who are there. You’ll probably find photos and lots of human interest stories as well as the latest information. Interesting as I write this, Sky News were saying on TV that Heathrow Airport doesn’t want their cameras at the airport interviewing angry people waiting for their delayed flights.

Another topical example is North Korea which is obviously of great concern to those of us who don’t want to see a new war front.

This isn’t the only way I get news, I also have an iGoogle page which is my RSS feed aggregator. I keep standard news searches there for things that interest me as well as tools such as currency converters, time zone calculations so I don’t miss my online tutorials from Berklee Music out of Boston, weather forecasts and lots more.

So do I need a print newspaper? No. Is that good? Well putting my ecological hat on, according to Wikipedia, 35% of all trees felled are used to generate paper. Newspapers must be a massive proportion of that. We know that we need trees to combat climate change, so I’m doing my little bit:)

Death of the newspaper

Since When Do Major Sporting Events Govern Countries?

Making my first coffee today in the office at 8AM I noticed a story on the front page of the NZ Herald. Funny I can’t seem to find it online, but there were loads of results on the web’s news pages.I’ll share the Huffington Post story here because I can’t find the NZ Herald story online for some strange reason.

Basically the story is that Dutch Brewery Bavaria has been selling orange mini skirts to soccer fans as an ambush marketing stunt.  The clothes were available for sale in the Netherlands and as a very nationalistic country, it is normal behaviour for Dutch people to wear Orange on major occasions such as sporting events and also for children on Queen’s Birthday. So many Dutch people bought these skirts and wore them to the FIFA World Cup match against Denmark. The clothing had a tiny little label that would be very difficult to see with the Bavaria brand on it.

That wasn’t the problem though. The problem was that they allegedly paid a group of 36 blondes to wear them at the match, which is against the rules of sponsorship, where Budweiser are the only official beer sponsor of the map and have exclusive marketing rights. The story in the Herald said that 2 of the 36 women were arrested and charged and if convicted could face fines from 1,000 Rand to a term in prison. Subsequently they were released on Bail and FIFA has said they will not be charging the individuals, they will be bringing charges against the Bavaria Brewery itself.

As a marketer, I appreciate that brands pay outrageously high sponsorship fees to be able to advertise at major sporting events and expect protection, but how far should they be allowed to go? If I like a brand, why shouldn’t I be allowed to wear their clothing. I play poker and have played in tournaments sponsored by Jack Daniels and have won Jack Daniels clothing. If a group of my friends who also won their branded clothing to an event, could I be in trouble? If the organisers of the poker tournament encouraged me to wear their clothing at the event, would they be in trouble? Remember that the logo on the clothing, these 36 girls were wearing was only on a tiny tag that if you wanted to read it, you would have to get so close to the garment that you might get arrested on other charges.

Next year we have the 2011 Rugby World Cup in New Zealand and the International Rugby Board is running by the same rules. According to the IRB even the letters RWC in succession have been trade marked. In effect I could be breaking the law just be blogging the letters RWC. When did it become possible for a sporting body to prosecute people or businesses for using 3 letters in succession. I mean, we only have 26 letters in our alphabet! So what if they were the initials for your company? Are you breaking the law? If I worked for or supported the Roger Wright Centre in Christchurch, and they had corporate clothing, I wouldn’t be allowed to wear it to any World Cup matches in New Zealand.

So what happens to other companies or organisations that use RWC in their name? Have they lost the rights to their business names? What happens if their staff want to be proud of the company and go to a match in company clothing? RWC stands for Redwood City in California. It stands for Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester New York which has a proud sporting history.

I think this is very scary and another example of large corporations wanting to own and control everything. Some of those corporations in the drug world may now own the patents to some of my DNA!

Anyway, before you go to any of the matches in South Africa this year or in New Zealand next year, make sure you don’t have any clothing showing off any brands that haven’t paid the IRB for the use of the letters RWC or any of the other trademarked groups of letters. They probably won’t have Sky in the holding cells.

NZ Herald Landlords taking money we need

It’s soapbox time folks. Over the last week, there have been several stories in the NZ media about businesses complaining that people are investing in rental properties instead of buying shares and options in companies on the share market. The latest was in yesterday’s NZ Herald.

I take exception to their bleating and here’s why. Many years ago I worked for a company called RC Dimock as a divisional sales manager. A number of us got together under the guidance of the Financial Controller and formed a share club. We all put money in each week and collaborated on which companies we would invest in.

I really enjoyed it. I read every copy of NBR, charted the daily value of stocks, learned about all aspects of stocks and bonds and invested more in our own company, my employer when we were purchased by Anzon Investments. As time went on, I started investing independently, continued staying up to date with large reliable companies and punted on more risky investments in various industries.

I had my own broker and whilst my investments were not massive, I was young and suspecting that superannuation was not going to give me any sort of lifestyle, I was looking for ways to improve that situation when it came.

As well as Anzon, I joined many people who invested their life savings in NZ stalwarts including Brierley Investments, Carter Holt, Robert Jones and many other companies. Then came Black Tuesday and many Kiwis lost their entire retirement savings.

Friends and colleagues lost almost everything they had, whilst the senior managers of the public companies moved on and in many cases their old boys club helped them pick themselves up again.

When I got married and started a family, we bought our first modest home and gave up any form of lifestyle for a few years paying at times over 21% interest, but we were building some security. Other people’s poor business decisions and the economic climate were not going to take this from us, providing we were able to maintain the payments.

Subsequently I worked for a company which was embezzled by it’s CEO and lost 10’s of thousands of dollars in salary, commissions and a large company credit card bill that my boss had run up without my knowledge. I then learned what it means to get a company credit card and you sign a form in good faith saying that you are jointly and severally liable for a company credit card. The credit card company who were coincidentally owned by my bank told me that I could either pay for the company credit card, or they would sell my house and give me the change after the 9 month bill was paid.

Further in my career, when I was making a lot of money for my new employer of almost 7 years, I was made redundant when the company was sold, along with several of my colleagues and my MD. The decision was made on the basis of a spreadsheet looking only at what they were paying us, not the great success we were achieving, over budget in ebit and sales.

So forgive me for having a lack of faith in business as a way of protecting my future lifestyle if and when I reach retirement age.

I started learning about rental properties, LAQC company structures, negative gearing and tax benefits, in as much as being able to claim depreciation and costs against my personal income and invested in a rental property.

Some people thought I was rich because I had a rental property, but my own home remained modest and I was having to subsidise the rental to cover the cost of the 100% mortgage, i.e. I had zero equity. My first tenants were a young family with 4 kids. Sometimes they would call me and say they couldn’t make the rent and could they pay the following week. I was paying around $170 a week to top up the mortgage, because the rent didn’t cover it. Then there was property insurance, fixing appliances, calling in drainlayers when they tried to flush nappies and other unmentionables down the toilet. These are just a few of the issues I had, and if it wasn’t for the ability to recover some of these losses against my income tax I would have gone broke.

The family were never going to be able to buy their own home and didn’t take great care of mine. They couldn’t pay a rent that would cover my costs, market rents did not reflect the cost of owning property. My hope was that over time the property value would increase and I would recoup my losses.

The key to my rationale, which I still subscribe to, is that I was making my own decisions and having control in the level of risk I was prepared to take. I wasn’t going to have my safety net taken away by some entrepreneur who was travelling first class around the world, who was able to walk away and start again when he had spent all my investment savings.

Owning a rental property is a business. There is a need for rental properties. The Government has quit most of their State Housing stock and people who can’t afford to buy their own homes, around 35% of the NZ population, over 1.5 million people do not own their own homes. So who is going to take responsibility for them?

When people set up a public company and use our funds to run them and take risks with, we have no control over how they use our money. If things turn sour as they have for many Kiwis trying to invest their hard earned money, they walk away and set up their next business. Investing in public or private companies is high risk. For people who can afford that risk, great, enjoy. But most owners (think big mortgage) of rental properties are not wealthy people, they are just people trying to make sure they can afford a little lifestyle when they retire without being a burden on their family. It is not easy owning rental property and the odd example of someone who has built up a rental empire is the exception, not the rule. The majority are Mum’s and Dad’s who don’t want to live on a combined income of $478 a week.

Could you live on $478 a week including rent, power and phone? What would that give you for food? Forget entertainment. On the other side, there is the potential for people to live much longer than in previous years and with Baby Boomers, less tax payers to heklp support them.

If the Government wants us to invest in business instead of rental property, they should give us some security against the risk of public companies. Of course they will also have to invest in providing rental accomodation for the 35% of us who can’t afford to own their own homes. What are the odds of that? About the same as that of people who invested their life savings in Brierley Investment shares. Telecom shares anyone?

Low Carbon Future

I’ve just finished reading an excellent story by Chris Barton in the NZ Herald, which is a good primer for the Copenhagen conference that John Key is going to? The cricket on TV is on in the background and apparently Key is in Wellington watching New Zealand vs Pakistan, so he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to get to the airport.

He quotes Phil Scadden, a geo-scientist from Dunedin, as saying that by 2025 we could cover all our energy needs using wind, hydro, geothermal and other relatively green sources if we were prepared to spend a great deal of money.

I find it hard to believe that NZ will spend the money, especially if we are insistent on Kyoto and other deals which would require us to pay other countries who have less carbon emissions than us. For my money I think that we should invest the same amount of money on cleaning up our own act.

I ask myself if we can afford to be prissy about seeing lots of wind turbines on hilltops. Personally I think they look really good. I was in the Netherlands earlier this year and the site of hundreds of wind turbines was quite inspiring. I don’t have a problem with having them far enough away so they don’t cause noise polution. We have plenty of great spots in the country that are almost always windy, such as Ohakea, which I believe from memory means place where four winds meet. It certainly never disappointed when I used to go down to the Ohakea Air Base to race land yachts, a very green speed sport:)

Something that annoys me when we talk about clean and green in this country is the lack of emission controls for diesel vehicles. If I was given a dollar for each diesel soot sprewing truck, with black soot backs delivering frozen meat, I would be able to retire today.

I’d also like to know why NZ is following other countries, with Feed-in Tarriffs, which I have previously blogged about. The concept was raised a long time ago by the Green Party, where there would be subsidies and incentives for people to put solar panels on their rooves and allowed them to sell surplus power into the grid.

Anyway, this whole situation disturbs me. Instead of fixing our problem at home, we want to pay other countries who are more fortunate than us, in having more trees etc. NZ has the ability to be self sustainable if we put our brilliant scientists and inventers on the job. We could be isolated from a lot of the problems of climate change in other parts of the world. Once we have it licked, then we can give them access to our know how. That might make a great new export for us.

For now, I’ve been for a 9 1/2 km bush walk/jog, finished my blog and am going to go and by an electric lawn mower. It is plastic, doesn’t need oil or petrol, won’t rust and will therefore last much longer.

Another Reason Why Newspapers Will Fade Away

This morning for the 2nd time in 2 weeks my NZ Herald wasn’t delivered. This happened a couple of times previously with the Sunday Herald which was actually the one I used to enjoy the most. After the 2nd time I cancelled it. Two weeks ago when my Saturday Herald didn’t turn up, I tried to call them and got a voice message saying that I had called outside of working hours. I thought to myself that perhaps reading hours might disappear as well and this morning I told them that 3 strikes and they could say goodbye to my subscription.

This is one of the reasons why newspapers are on the way out. Not only are they reliant on people who really don’t want to go out on wet cold dark winter mornings, but a printed newspaper is becoming so inefficient.

I get headline tweets from the NZ Herald along with 1,648 other people, with links to the stories I want to read. Online I can see the headlines and major stories on their homepage and then I can see the headlines for each section and go straight to the stories that interest me. The Herald is only one publication I subscribe to on Twitter, there are several news services that flick past me on the side of my browser using Twitbin which is a Firefox plugin.

I also use iGoogle for my RSS feed. This gives me the latest news on all the topics I want to keep up to date on. That includes lots of streams around topics such as GPS, LBS, Psychology, Music and much more. It updates itself automatically all day and I can see which stories I have read in case my memory fails me.

Twitter of course is also a great vehicle for getting the latest news about anything. It told me that there was an earthquake in LA just as I boarded a plane there, although it turned out to be inconsequential. It told me what was going on in Iran and even if you can’t spell swine flu you’ll find out what’s happening to real people like Izzy who just found out her brother has it.  If you could spell it correctly you’ll find out what is happening, which famous people have just caught it and more than you’ll ever want to know.

I started off saying that newspapers are closing and you probably thought I was exaggerating didn’t you. Well think again. Here are a few examples.

• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed over 146 years and is considering continuing online.
• Colorado’s oldest newspaper The Rocky Mountain Times has run out of time.
• Michigan’s Ann Arbor News has closed after 174 years.

Of course there are also stories around the world talking about job cuts in the newspaper industry like this one in the Guardian.

This doesn’t mean, of course that we don’t want news. Of course we do, but we have new vehicles that are far more efficient, we now have a choice, in fact we’re spoiled for it. Did you wait for news about Michael Jackson’s death to appear in the newspaper? Of course not, it was on every TV news channel and you got it up to date. By the time the newspapers came out, the stories that were in it, such as him not being dead, but only in a coma, had long since been refuted.

The big problem for the print media companies, is that they don’t know how, or if they can monetise the online media. There are of course ways that they can do this, but they have to switch their thinking, which is so enrenched in ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’ that many of them won’t be doing it at all in the future. Sounds a lot like the recording industry doesn’t it?

New Powers for Medical Health Officers over Swine Flu

I should have seen this one coming from a mile away. While a lot of people still have their heads in the sand, the New Zealand Government have made Swine Flu a notifiable disease. In itself, that just makes sense, but in fact according to a NZ Herald story this morning, this means that they have authority to demand that people isolate themselves at home, or face fines or mandatory isolation in hospital or worse. 

There are many things to start thinking now, even if you still think it won’t happen to you. If you are isolated at home, do you have everything you need for at least a week? Will this mean that your family that lives with you or your flatmates will also have to stay home too? After all they will be at a higher risk of also getting infected. So if your whole house is quarantined, how do you get your basic supplies like bread and milk?

If pundits are right and it effects up to 60% of the population, or even only 10% are isolated, what happens to business? Grocery stores and other retailers who are in spittle distance of their customers will be at high risk because they are dealing with large volumes of people all day.

The schools represent a high risk, they have always helped spread illnesses, if one child has the measles, flu or any other contagious disease, it is a given that several others will also get it.

If people disobey the isolation requirements, then there are even greater risks, because this group will very likely carry the virus, so I have no problem with the mandate. However, the risk of people not obeying the rules is also high. In today’s economy, people don’t want to risk losing their jobs and many will continue to work because they need the money. In my office for example, staff get 5 days of sick leave a year, which is pretty easy to bite into if you have a flu or cold. There are people who will therefore have no sick leave, or not enough available and don’t want to use their holidays, but can’t afford to be sick without leave, so for as long as they can, they will continue to work.

Schools have been given detailed instructions on what to do in the case of an outbreak, including hygiene instructions, but in my opinion, most businesses are thinking that Bird Flu went nowhere and Swine Flu will do the same, so they aren’t taking precautions and they don’t have contingency plans should a large group of staff fall ill. The air conditioning systems will do a good job of spreading the virus, and some businesses may have to cease trading for several weeks, because while the illness might be gone in 7 days or so, people won’t be considerate enough to all catch the Swine Flu at the same time. 

Of course they could go to a Swine Flu Party. What sort of idiots would do something like that? Well it appears they are, using the same rationale that moms use when their friends children have chicken pox, “Let’s get it over with now”. The problem with Swine Flu is that unlike traditional flu, the virus has no respect for age or health and is capable of killing people of all ages and of course the domino effect would hasten the spread of this nasty illness. 

The new powers aren’t just a NZ initiative however, the same is occuring around the world, in Australia, Mexico of course and most other countries are now drafting legislation that will help them try to fight this problem.

So, are you ready? Do you still think it won’t happen to you, your friends or family, or perhaps your work mates? How prepared are you?

How to get or spread Swine Flu

It was interesting to note that after my blog, Swine Flu is a bit close to home, where I pointed out that Air New Zealand were not telling the full story about how germs can spread on a plane by saying that the filters in their air conditioning system were very good at killing 99.9% of bugs and virus material, that there was a story in this morning’s NZ Herald, pointing out that even wearing a face mask only stops around 50% of contaminant material from entering the surrounding air. They also said that health officials are trying to track down the 367 passengers on the flight which brought the Kiwi students home after their trip to Mexico.

I can understand concerns within the airlines, because people contracting Swine Flu simply by contamination from fellow passengers could stop a lot of people from flying when they don’t have to which could be a commercial disaster.

Some time ago I wrote a blog called wash your hands after you do your business. On a 12 hour flight from Los Angeles to New Zealand, most people are likely to use the conveniences a couple of times during the flight. Several of them will not wash their hands after they have done their business and will then use the door handle to make their exit. The next person that comes along who does wash their hands, will find possibly end up with contamination from the previous user. Now they sit down and pick up their book or newspaper, lick their finger to wet it and turn the page, or finger a pen and put it in your mouth and guess what, they are now at risk from not one, but several people who had poor hygiene habits. That’s of course only one example. Maybe you shake hands with someone on the flight, or are sitting next to someone and you pass their tray from them to the cabin crew after they have had a meal. The opportunities are endless and the risks are many. There is no easy answer to this unfortunately.

Meanwhile if you have a look at the Google Swine Flu Map, you will see that it has now progressed to Sydney and since the flight that brought the Kiwi Students back arrived, there are now suspected outbreaks throughout NZ, confirming that no matter how good the ventilation system is on the plane, it can’t stop viruses from spreading.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

Swine Flu Is a Bit Close to Home

Yesterday I posted a blog about Swine Flu, this is an interesting situation which will be at the forefront of many people’s minds for some time to come.

We live in interesting times. It seems analogous to the way banks have behaved since the ’89 meltdown when they said they would never be as free with their lending again, such as 100% mortgage loans. we relaxed after the Bird Flu fizzled out, but now we have a new strain N1H1 which apparently comes from pigs but is related to the bird flu. Whilst it appears that Tamiflu has a positive effect on this, there are of course no vaccines because it is new.

It was interesting to read in the NZ Herald this morning that Air New Zealand was saying that their aircraft are safe for fellow passengers because filters in the aircraft’s air conditioning system filter 99.9% of airborne viruses. Funny then how so many of us who travel on long haul flights end up coming down with some sort of virus within a short period of time after a flight.

Of course these filters require that you sneeze into them. A lot of people look into lights to help them sneeze (I must explore that sometime, or ifyou know why, please share the answer in a comment), but you lift your head to the light and then sneeze on the way down, creating a nice arc of germs.

So how fast does a sneeze travel through the air? Well according to the appropriately named site Blurtit, the fastest recorded sneeze was 102 Miles per hour! I would say that the germs from even an average 50MPH sneeze could travel a fair distance in an aircraft cabin.

Some more news from this morning’s NZ Herald was that the students that came back to Auckland after a school trip to mexico come from not one but 2 colleges, Rangititoto and Northcote College. The story also said that some of the kids who were ok when they arrived are now also showing symptoms. I wonder how many people they have been in contact with. The ones who are ill have been quarantined in their homes, but it didn’t say whether their sublings and parents were also quarantined or were going to their schools and workplaces.

What I find really interesting is the coincidence in the numbers. Greater Mexico City has a population of around 22 million people. 1300 reported people with Swine Flu is around 0.00005% of the population and yet a group of 20 odd Auckland kids have been exposed to it. It makes you wonder if the real number is far greater, but these are the only ones that they are prepared to announce. In a city of that size it must be spreading like wildfire.

There is of course already a Swine Flu Google Map, so you can keep an eye on how it spreads.

Is your household prepared for a pandemic?

Just as a footnote, if you have Sky TV, there is a movie called Doomsday on tonight, which is about a virus in Scotland, where they quarantine the whole country. I won’t be home to watch it, but its funny how its on TV tonight. I love coincidences.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

Legacy Locker passes all your web accounts on to your beneficiary

I read a story in this morning’s NZ Herald which doesn’t appear to be available online. It was about a new web site which people can use to pass on all their passwords and account details for everything they do on the web from your online banking to all your web sites, social networking pages etc.

This was something I hadn’t considered before from my own perspective, or from those I leave behind. There are of course practical issues, such as having access to my online banking accounts but also my blogs, the sites where I post my music, such as MySpace and Music Forte, and my social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

The practical things are important because I would want to ensure that my beneficiaries have access to all my assets, but there are also the emotional considerations. Unless someone does something about it, my blogs and my social networking pages will remain forever. Personally I think it would be nice to leave a digital footprint behind, especially for my music, but also where people can remember me, almost like a legacy, where my own perspectives can be seen, rather than other people’s interpretations of them.

The NZ Herald story, which came from Telegraph Group Ltd, (which I also couldn’t find online) raised issues of the pain that it might cause to people left behind, when their loved ones pass away, seeing all their posts, photos and other net based activities, like footprints in the sand that people can see in time to come. It could be very painful.

On the other hand, I would love to be able to access information left by my forefathers. I have travel diaries from my grandparents and a small number of photos, but mostly their information is lost forever, or scattered, not shared, amongst my many cousins, uncles and aunts.

So the Legacy Locker service allows you to ensure that people left behind have access to all your accounts and can follow through on your wishes after you pass on. I don’t know how they find out that you have died, their must be a mechanism for that, but you have the ability to write an email that will be delivered to your beneficiaries after your death, so that they have access to all the information you want them to find.

It looks like they have all the systems you need including bank level security, to ensure that your data is safe. Check them out here.

They make a good point on their site that online assets have value. There may be areas of financial value, but there is also the intrinsic value of having access to photos that you may not have ever printed, music, diaries / blogs and traces of all your relationships, business, family and friends.

The pricing is also very reasonable, $30 a year, a flat fee of $300 and you can also have a free trial. I’m not so sure about the free trial other than being able to evaluate how it all works, but it is something I would probably do if I was going to sign up. Will I sign up, not at the moment, but maybe some time in the future, who knows?