Why I'm considering going without health insurance for the first time in 20 years

I've been with Kaiser for the past few years and have enjoyed affordable and ample care. But as of next year that's all about to change thanks to Obama care. My premiums are going up by 55% while my coverage will decline tremendously. I'll let you watch the video on why I think this has happened.

5 changes that will make the Covered California (Calheers.ca,gov) site better instantly

I spent about 30 minutes today to try and sign up for Covered California. Sort of a eat my own dogfood type of effort. Immediately I noticed some really big things that will turn even the most eager users off. I am writing this post so that maybe they will pay attention and make some changes. 

The overarching message here is: "Keep the user in mind". 

To set the stage, I'm a married man in my mid-30s who currently has health insurance through Kaiser Permanente. I work in the technology sector.

I tried about 12 times using the chrome browser to get the login page to load and each time I was greeted with this message: 

Clicking on the link did nothing.

After 12 attempts I switched over to Internet Explorer 10 and was finally able to sign up and login. 

The sign up process was relatively simple with the exception of the fact that it asked me for my SSN without ensuring me that it would stay safe in their hands. I was able to skip this field during the signup process so that was good.

The username has to be 8 characters long which is in my opinion a point of friction and will cause the form to produce and error for 1/2 the people who try to sign up. Why not do a quick edit check with Javascript and let the person know right away before they have to submit the form and see the error? 

Anyway, I then tried to login and got a 404 not found page. I refreshed 2 times and got the login screen which asked me for 5 answers to secret question. As soon as I selected those, it crashed and made me login again. That I will forgive because it is a new site and they're still working out the bugs. But the secret question thing .... it should be optional IMO. 

Then I tried to actually Apply for a plan. That's when things got really ugly. I cannot proceed in this form without providing them with my SSN and Naturalization documentation. WHAT?!! Why do you need these just to show me what plans I qualify for and how much they will be? Why at this stage? And again, I don't feel safe entering my SSN in your 404-Not-Found website just yet, so unless you're gonna make me feel safe with my information with a robust website, then don't ask me this stuff until I'm ready to commit. I can't even navigate directly to www.calheers.ca.gov ... What is v.calheers.ca.gov? You have to know that this is confusing your users. You have to know that I may not be interested in the plans once I see them, so having given you a bunch of information during the shopping stage is just going to drive users away. I would love to see the bounce rates of this page. Let me guess, 100%. 

And really, what is with all the different branding? Are you trying to make me suspicious of you? There is healthcare.gov, that takes me to coveredca.com, that takes me to v.calheers.ca.gov which has the title AHBX portal. How is that user friendly?

But don't worry, CoveredCA. I'm not all negative feedback. I actually have some very simple solutions to make this easier for you:

1) Pick a web domain and stick with it. CoveredCa.com makes sense since people have been hearing it.

2) Allow the user to enter non-personal information and arrive at a quote with details. Then if and only if he chooses to select the plan, make him verify all you want.

3) At least try to have the styling of your site match Healthcare.gov in some meaningful way. Users like continuity, it builds trust.

4) If you want me to enter my SSN and DOB and other identity information ensure me that it's going to be safe somehow. 

5) This initiative already has enough barriers, if I am having trouble using the system, you can be sure that my mother is definitely going to have issues. Things like browser compatibility, Http routing errors, general performance, and post submit error checking are only going to add friction to the process. As it stands right now, I cannot imagine you'll have many people complete the application process, much less sign up for coverage. Glad to help. 

ObamaCare (ACA) for Dummies - Understand it all in 4 minutes

I've been seeing a lot of posts on my social network about the ACA (Accountable Care Act) also known as ObamaCare and it seems to me that nearly all of us are to some degree confused what it means. So I figured why not post some of the major highlights so that you understand them better. Much of what you will read in this post was copied and pasted from Healthcare.gov. So here goes:

What is a Marketplace?

The Marketplace is a new way to find health coverage. It can help if you don’t have coverage now or if you have it but want to look at other options.

Insurance plans in the Marketplace are offered by private companies. They cover the same core set of benefits called essential health benefits. No plan can turn you away or charge you more because you have an illness or medical condition. They must cover treatments for these conditions. Plans can't charge women more than men for the same plan. Many preventive services are covered at no cost to you.

No matter what state you live in, you can use the Marketplace. Some states operate their own Marketplace. In some states, the Marketplace is run by the Federal government. Find a marketplace for yourself.

What are "essential health benefits"?

Essential health benefits must include items and services within at least the following 10 categories: 

• ambulatory patient services
• emergency services
• hospitalization
• maternity and newborn care
• mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment
•  prescription drugs
• rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices
• laboratory services
• preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management
• pediatric services, including oral and vision care.

Insurance policies must cover these benefits in order to be certified and offered in the Health Insurance Marketplace, and all Medicaid state plans must cover these services by 2014.

How should I choose a plan?

Plans in the new market place are put into 4 basic categories:

• Bronze
• Silver
• Gold
• Platinum

IMPORTANT: The categories do not reflect the quality or amount of care the plans provide.

The category you choose affects how much your premium costs each month and what portion of the bill you pay for things like hospital visits or prescription medications.

You just gotta ask yourself: Do you expect a lot of doctor visits or need regular prescriptions?

• If you do, you may want a Gold or Platinum plan.
• If you don't, you may prefer a Bronze or Silver plan. But keep in mind that if you get in a serious accident or have an unexpected health problem, Bronze and Silver plans will require you to pay more of the costs.

What are the different plans? 

Basically there are two categories:

• Private: Depending on your household income you may qualify for reduced premiums. All plans cover essential health benefits, pre-existing conditions, and preventive care. If you don’t qualify for lower costs, you can still use the Marketplace to buy insurance at the standard price.
• Medicaid and CHIP (Children Health Insurance Program): Both of these are for those with VERY limited income. 

When can I sign up and when does coverage begin?

Marketplace open enrollment begins October 1, 2013  and ends March 31, 2014. If you enroll by December 15, 2013, coverage can begin as soon as January 1, 2014.

Do I have to offer health coverage to my employees?

Short answer: If you have less than 50 FTE employees, No. Otherwise, maybe. Long answer.

What if I'm self-employed (and have no employees)?
You're not considered an employer. You can use the individual Marketplace to find coverage that fits your needs.

What is AIM and do I qualify? 

AIM: Access for Infants and Mothers provides low cost health insurance coverage to uninsured, middle income pregnant women. The total cost is 1.5% of the subscriber's adjusted annual household income. This is much less than the cost under Covered California. If you are pregnant, with income between $3,256 - $4,884 per month for a family of 3, you may qualify for AIM. You’ll find a complete income chart by family size for AIM here: http://www.aim.ca.gov/costs/income_guidelines.aspx . Medi-Cal provides coverage if your income is below these limits.

What if I don't want insurance?

Most people must have health coverage in 2014 or pay a fee. If you don’t have coverage in 2014, you’ll have to pay a penalty of $95 per adult, $47.50 per child, or 1% of your income (whichever is higher). The fee increases every year. Some people may qualify for an exemption to this fee.

Will there be enough doctors and will they accept these plans?

Maybe, maybe not. But that's the beauty of a free market (all private plans). It will self-adjust until it works. Nothing is sustainable without all parties benefiting to some degree and it may take a few years but it will adjust appropriately. In the mean time, your doctor may not accept your new plan but some doctor somewhere will. If you don't like it, opt for a more expensive option or pay cash for your care. 

To Conclude ...

If you already have health insurance then ACA shouldn't effect you unless you want to shop again starting today. 

If you don't have health insurance now you have to have it and you can get some very basic insurance very cheap. It won't be great, but nothing cheap ever is. 

If you have very low income, you now have an option you didn't have before.

Ready to apply? Get started.

Questions? Call 1-800-318-2596, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. (TTY: 1-855-889-4325)

Things I take for granted Part 1: Hot Shower

So lately I've been noticing some very big things that we take for granted. If you really think about it, a hot shower is just about the most luxurious amenity in our homes these days. On any given morning, I can roll out of bed and walk into my shower and turn the faucet on and within seconds, water perfectly heated to my desired temperature flows out effortlessly for as long as I like. I can literally sit for an hour and relax under this substance that in parts of the world could satisfy the survival needs of hundreds of dying thirsty villagers.

I live in Southern California. An arid desert with no substantial fresh water source. The seemingly
limitless water gushing out of my shower head has no business being anywhere near my house. Technically, I shouldn't even be able to live here much less use up ridiculous amounts of water every morning. So am I really taking it for granted? Well, in 1960, California voters approved financing for construction of the initial features of the State Water Project (SWP). The project includes some 22 dams and reservoirs, a Delta pumping plant, a 444-mile-long aqueduct that carries water from the Delta through the San Joaquin Valley to southern California. The project begins at Oroville Dam on the Feather River and ends at Lake Perris near Riverside. At the Tehachapi Mountains, giant pumps lift the water from the California Aqueduct some 2,000 feet over the mountains and into southern California. The rest of my water comes from the Colorado River. A 1440 mile long river that runs through seven states, several Indian Reservations and Mexico. And about 30% of it comes from under ground well sources. All that water goes through reservoirs, treatment facilities and is finally delivered through large distribution networks that were developed to pipe treated surface and groundwater to my home where it waits at the tap for me to turn on the faucet. Oh and I totally skipped over the fact that a similar thing has to happen with natural gas, which goes through similar pipelines to get to my house, and is used to heat up 80 gallons at a time to near boiling temperatures and keep it there until I'm ready to use it in the morning. And yes, every day, I take all that for granted.

The lie about saving for your retirement

I got out of college in the late 90s in the middle of perhaps the best job market in decades. The biggest requirement for a well paying job with great benefits was being able to fog up a mirror consistently. So like many in my class, I put my dreams of graduate school on hold to pursue a well paying job and never looked back. The company I worked for hired me and a few dozen others as "College Hires" and sent us out for  two week of training in of all places Mishawaka IN. There were close to 60 of us and since for most of us, our first paycheck was the most money we had ever made, our employer, being socially responsible, felt it was necessary to give us some training on retirement planning.

The session was taught by So-and-so from Such-and-such Investments LLC and focused on the 401K plan and a diversified portfolio and made some grandiose claims about how saving a nickel a day when we were 23 could be turn into a million dollars when we're retired. There wasn't a word about anything other than ways to manage your money in how to plan for retirement. We all bought it. All of it. 

The Cliff Carl took us too

Fast forward 15 years and a day after my wedding I met Carl. He was walking along the beach in Palos Verdes, CA when my wife and I ran into him and he told us about a small cliff we could dive from about a mile away. He led the way and we followed. He was fast and in our great wedding shape we had a hard time keeping pace. After a few dives I talked to Carl and quickly found he was a Viet Nam vet and a retired professional who now works part time as a consultant. What came next was a total shock. Carl was 73. I had figured him for 53 max. He told me about his grand kids and how he can still outrun them and how he spends most of his free time with them playing around.

Carl made me think of all the others in his age who spend most of their time at the doctor's office and hardly ever have time for their families. And even when they have time, the quality of the time they spend with their family is affected by the poor health. They can't be active and they spend most of their money on medical expenses. That short conversation with Carl showed me the inauthentic lie retirement planning had been all along. What were we saving all this money for? To pay our medical bills when we get old? That's precisely it.

Medicare covers only 59% of the cost of health care for seniors and that's predicted to only decrease making the personal contribution a larger percentage of the care. In fact, a couple aged 65 might need $387,000 saved in order to be confident of covering their health care costs in retirement, not including outlays for long-term care, finds a report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI). Add that to the fact that the cost of healthcare and the worker contribution are increasing at a much faster rater than compensation and inflation, and you get to know why saving money for your retirement should be re-branded as saving money for your healthcare.

Healthcare expenses for seniors increased by 5% in 2011 from the previous year. And that percentage increase is likely to be small compared to what we see year-over-year in the next 20 years. So the dollars you save today will have to grow by 5% annually just to meet the increase in your future healthcare costs, and they have to grow by an additional 6% to meet Such-n-such Investments LLC's projections for you to retire by 70. That's 11% annual increase in your retirement savings just so you can have 90% chance of having enough money to survive. If you know anything about money, you know that 11% is a ridiculous expectation.

You may have already jumped ahead of me here and figured out for yourself that an investment in your health and wellness is far greater than an investment in your 401K. Not only is being healthy going to prevent unnecessary healthcare dollars from being spent, but you'll be able to work and keep active well into your sixties and seventies if you are healthy and well. I'm not saying that you shouldn't save your money, but I am confident that your health and wellness will count far more than your money. No amount of money is going to cure diabetes, heart disease, or any of the other dozens of completely preventable killers that will have you spend your old age in a wheelchair.

What's more, my new friend Carl, even though retired, still works 20-25 hours a week doing consulting. That's additional income he can count on in his 70s which is allowing him to be net positive far longer than the average for his generation. I'm no mathematician, so I used Bloomberg's 401k calculator to determine how much a very well deciplined 23 year old could save for retirement if he starts out making 50k/year and contributes 5% of all his income for the next 42 years towards retirement.

401K Summary
Your Contribution:	5%
Employer Match Rate:	50%
Percentage of Contribution Employer Matches:	100%
Investment Rate:	5%
Salary Increase Rate:	5%
Value of Your 401(k)Plan in 42 Years:	$1,223,797.79

The answer is $1.22M. That's with a 5% consistent salary increase. Not a bad loot. But if that 23 year old starts today, he'll be 65 in 2055. Now earlier we said that the cost of Healthcare is increasing at 5% a year and for a 65 year old in the US it's close to 15k/year. If the growth continues at 5%, then in 2055 the cost his health care will be closer to $116k per year. Not to mention that if his additional living costs go up by even 2% year over year at a modest 40K for current cost of living, he's looking at $92k/year to pay his non-healthcare related expenses living very modestly. 

$92K + $116K(healthcare) = $208K Total cost of modest living in 2055

And that's just his 65 year old self. If you notice the graph above has a much higher rate of change when he's in his 70s. His cost of living is likely to be well into $300k/year when he's Carl's age. And the majority, more than half, of the cost will be his healthcare cost. 

Well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that an investment in your wellness will pay much higher dividends than an investment in your 401K when you retire in 2055. I'm not saying you shouldn't save your money. But I would rather see a few of those dollars go towards:

• Eating healthier and natural foods
• Buying better, more natural groceries and cooking at home
• Gym membership and exercise equipment
• Adventure travel that involves activity
• Better chairs, beds, and furniture that ensures better posture
• Moving to geographical areas with lower smog and other environmental hazards
• Cycling or walking as a means of transportation
• Dedicating yourself to an active lifestyle

What investments are you making in your wellness?

Amazon AWS, Should I choose a reserved or OnDemand EC2 instance?

Well I'm glad you ask. I set out to answer the same question for our mobile app backend servers. Our mobile app currently runs on two Medium EC2 instances along with several other services like RDS, S3, and SES. We also have 1 micro development server, and 1 micro test server. Setting this all up can be a real challenge but figuring out how much it's all going to cost you is nothing short of rocket surgery.

Reserved vs. OnDemand EC2 AWS instances Cost Analysis

As you may already know, much of your AWS bill is going to come from your EC2 instances (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud). Now Amazon gives you this nifty "simple" calculator to use to determine what your total cost is going to be but if you're like me, that's only going to confuse you more than help. To further complicated things, Amazon gives you several choices on how you can consume these instance:

• On Demand - "pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments"
• Spot - "bid for unused Amazon EC2 capacity" and save upto 50+% but variable availability.
• Reserved - make a low, one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly charge for that instance. This reserved option comes with several options of it's own based on how much you want to use the thing.
• Low Utilization
• Medium Utilization
• High Utilization

The trouble is you now need to answer some tough questions. What do I need this instance for? How much utilization do I need (how much uptime)? And how long am I willing to commit for? I had these same questions but wanted a way to see all the hard dollars before I made a decision. In the case of our app, I know I'll need the two medium instances for at least the next 5-6 months and potentially longer. As for the Micro instances, they are actually quite useful regardless of what's going on so we may use them for the entire year no matter what is happening. But is it all worth committing to a whole year?

So I took a few minutes (okay an hour) to sift through all the pricing information on the AWS pricing site and put together a spreadsheet that gave me the information I needed, mainly:

• Compare the cost of several sizes of reserved vs. OnDemand instances over 6 and 12 months
• Determine the % savings over 6 and 12 months  on all utilizations and sizes
• Determine how long it would take for us to break even with the 1 year commitment.

I found some pretty neat stuff. It turns out that the reserved instances can save you upto 44% in 1 year when compared to OnDemand instances when you pick the heavy utilization option and since our app is always on we would likely choose that option. It's important to understand what AWS intended for the different utilization types. They don't mean you are getting a different kind of instance, it's just a billing scheme. You're able to get a deeper discount if you're using more, that's all. So effectively, the following savings is what you can expect:

Reserved EC2 Savings over 6 and 12 months

Another thing I found interesting was that even if you're using the instance at 100% utilization, you're better of with the light utilization option if you're only going to keep it less than 7.5 months. Haha, how did I get that number?

Well, lets say:

L= upfront cost of light utilization

c= hourly cost of light utilization

H= upfront cost of heavy utilization

h= hourly cost of heavy utilization

X= Number of hours  before it's suitable to upgrade from Light to High. 

Then:

L+(cX) = H+(hX) 

so

X= (L - H) / (h - c)

Divide that number by 720 (The number of hours in a month) and you get 7.5

As similar calculations will show that you're better off for 8.3 months on Low vs. Medium, and 6 months on Medium vs. Heavy. In other words, at full utilization:

Months before I should upgraded from

Small to Medium: 8.3 months

Small to High: 7.5 months

Medium to High: 6 months

All this actually makes the medium option a lame duck unless your needs are unique. 

So the basic lesson here is, if you're planning to keep an instance for at least 100 days (3.3 months) at full utilization, you're better off buying into the AWS reserved instance. 

Here's a link to the google spreadsheet I put together so you can do your own variation. Also note that the numbers don't apply to the micro instance the same way as they do to the other instances. 

Cheers

LINK TO THE GOOGLE SPREADSHEET

The incredibly low cost of doing business

12 years ago I founded my first startup. Everything was impossible. I literally had to invent every piece of it myself. The only thing we got free back then was a copy of Linux. Everything else we had to pay for or basically invent on our own. Just hosting a simple video clip about our server appliance was going to cost us a fortune if more than 1000 people watched it. And since we had to develop everything ourselves it took several months to get the smallest idea off the ground.

Today I can have an enterprise ready application with a distribution channel, online/mobile multi-media broadcasting capabilities, unlimited space and bandwidth, with all the social bells and whistles ready over a weekend. And it's all free, or almost free.

Between the Amazon AWS, Google Applications, WordPress, Facebook APIs, Google Maps, and YouTube alone I am probably saving millions of dollars in infrastructure. Think about it! Ten years ago in order to put together a video streaming application, I would have to build a huge server farm, buy some ridiculous amount of bandwidth and space, and then pay a few dozen developers to develop an application for me. Today I just embed a piece of code from a 3rd party API and I'm on my way. These applications have also reduced the launch time required for new ideas from months to days. There is really no excuse for not trying to execute a new idea these days.

The challenge has gone from creating something, to creating something that's earth-shattering enough to garner the attention of a few hundred thousand people. The nice thing now is that you can try your idea right away, if it doesn't work, then you can move on to the next idea. This level of agility is increasing in a break-neck pace and the number of products on the market has exponentially increased over the past three years.

As an investor, when startups tell me that they need millions of dollars to develop their app nowadays I turn and run for the hills. There is absolutely nothing that should cost that much to do a real proof of concept. Recently, with DishClips, I realized that most of what we were working the hardest on was available for free from FourSquare. I have since realized that there are very few things that we need to develop on our own. Information is freely available all around us. It's the ingenuity it takes to turn that information into actionable decisions that adds value. And doing that, often costs very little. 

How to start your own consulting business

I've been a consultant for 15 years now and every so often people ask me how they can do the same. The question is somewhat annoying because it suggests that what I do is easy enough that there's just a formula to it. But nonetheless there is some wisdom that applies across the board to any area of consulting that you may get into. The basic question always becomes: How do I get customers?

The answer depends on the type of consulting you're looking to do of course...
But the old fashioned ways are still best. Forming relationships with customers is the only great way to get new clients. Word of mouth is basically your best tool.

Here are some general ideas that have helped me put my consulting business together over the years (and some things I would still love to do):

1) Attend user groups and seminars in your related industry and meet people. Make sure you listen to what they're doing so you can spot trends and understand where the needs are.
2) Get to know your competitor - And offer to subcontract work through them at a reasonable rate so they're still meeting their margins. These are typically larger outfits that have been in business several years and have an established client base. It goes without saying, NEVER try and steal a client from anyone who is open to giving you work. 
3) Contribute on related forums online until you're viewed as an expert and make sure your contact information is visible in your signature
4) Contribute to existing blogs in your area of expertise. Most bloggers will welcome contributors who are contributing actual information.
5) Look for full time job postings in your area and offer your services as a temporary solution until they have found someone to fill the role.
6) Simplify and target your offering so that you're not viewed as the jack of all trades. You want to have a focused niche as much as you can so that clients can believe you're an expert in the area.
7) Use your LinkedIn network (and others) to reach out to people that may do the hiring and share your work with them.
8) Project based consulting is by far the best way to get your foot in the door. Try and understand the capital planning process at potential clients, this will help you with your timing. There are several services online that list RFPs online. Some are fee based and some are free.
9) Don't discount yourself. You're only worth what you say you are. And if you're saying you charge 25% of your competitor then you're 25% as good in the eyes of those who don't know your work well.
10) Keep up with trends in your industry and use them in your writing. Don't bombard your potential customers (even if it's a very small list) with e-mails. Wait until you have something that can contribute and then send an email to them. Write about upcoming events and what they should do to prepare (year-end, new regulatory events...)
11) Offer training webinars online in areas that you're an expert and give away 20% of the solution in 30 minutes. Then, even if poorly attended, make them available online for later viewing. Make sure your contact information is always easy to find.
12) Get to know all the other consultants in your niche. This is perhaps the most important. Form a relationship with them. As a consultant in the IT industry, I often come across work that I cannot take on and I refer that work to others that I know well and trust. Don't look at anyone as a competitor, they're your referral network, nothing else. Share with them what you're doing and listen to what they're up to. Offer to help whenever you can and become part of their trusted network of people they can reach out to when opportunities arise. 
This of course applies both ways. Be sure to go out of your way to forward opportunities to others when you come across them. 

And lastly...
13) When you get new clients, never lose them. This means going out of your way to make projects successful. You must become the reason and the possibility for project success if you want the benefit of referrals. Get to know everyone you can at the client site and be respectful and courteous to everyone you meet. Don't involve yourself in politics at your client's company. Get the job done. Keep up with people at old clients ESPECIALLY when they change jobs. This is a new opportunity for your to use the same contacts to get new clients.  

Why we chose the iPhone vs. Android for our app

Developing a mobile application is the number one goal of almost all startups these days. Without it you're just not sexy enough. DishClips is no exception. In fact, being that DishClips is the Social Video Guide for Restaurant Dishes, our application is really a mobile application.

Trouble is, contrary to popular belief, mobile applications cost a lot of money to produce. There's the server side components and API, the graphics, sounds, UI design, UI programming, testing, marketing and hundreds of hours of constant pivoting is required to produce a worthy mobile application that has any social ties. At a minimum, you're looking at $15k + 3 months of time to get your first iteration released to the market. And that doesn't including any marketing costs. Also worth noting, is that the cost of developing an iPhone app and an Android app is nearly the same as developing two different applications. That is to say there isn't much gained in the way of leveraging one towards the other. So while developing an iPhone app might cost you $15k, developing on both platforms will likely cost close to $30k.

The fact that most startups are cash strapped not withstanding, it doesn't make much sense to develop the app for both platforms at the same time. The two platforms have different audiences and different advantages. Additionally, the lessons learned while developing on one platform can be leveraged when developing for the second platform. An advantage that is lost if you're developing for both platforms simultaneously. It is not surprising then that most applications are developed for one platform first and then for the other.

So how do you make the decision on which to develop for first? Here's a list of things we had to consider and so can you.

1) Who is our audience? As a social video guide to restaurant dishes we're targeting the 20-45 crowd in major metropolitan areas with dispensable income who can afford to eat out several times a week. As it turns out the cross section of this population with the iPone-Owner world is over 75% vs. 45% for Android users. This made our choice a lot easier.

2) What does your app have to be good at? For instance, our app has to be great at video capture and geo-location. The video capture quality of the iPhone 4S is consistently great. On Android devices however, depending on the device the experience may vary. It will likely take several days of quality testing on multiple devices to ensure the same quality on an Android device as it does on an iPhone device when it comes to video capture. Precious times that startups like DishClips just can't afford.

3) What is your competition doing? Being a startup has lots of great advantages. Being small is one of them. The big competition in our market segment like Yelp does lots of research on our behalf. We looked at several foodie applications on both iPhone and Android before making our final decision. It turns out that the adoption rate of iPhone apps within foodies is far greater than that of Android apps in the same localities within the United States.

Our application is currently in it's second beta release and we're super excited about it's upcoming release in early August 2012. We've learned so many things while developing our application that have changed the original design tremendously. I cannot imagine the additional costs we would have had if we were making all these changes on two separate development platforms. We're also learning that what will work on the iPhone seldom works the same on Android so the UI design elements will have to be completely redesigned for our Android application which we're currently wire-framing. I'll leave the differences between the two for another post.

Instant Ubiquitous Access to Actionable Information

Sounds great right? I mean who would argue that instant access to information is a bad thing? Some might even think we have that now. What with smartphones permanently attached to our hands we're a living, breathing encyclopedia of information. But what is information anyway? At the heart of it there are two types of information. Actionable and In-actionable (I know that's not a real word).

The Internet is filled with in-actionable information. That is information, that once understood, doesn't prompt any new action. Like the air-speed velocity of an African swallow. It might be interesting, but it's not quite actionable. It certainly is something that can be researched and discovered almost instantly.

And example of actionable information might be the supply and demand information for heating oil in the Southern California region for the past three months. Now if I knew that information I might be able to make some real decisions. There are dozens of companies (Mostly startups) working on just that kind of information delivery today. And while that sounds awesome, I invite you to consider that it's eventually not very good for business.

For years, retailers have depended on the inequity of information on the part of the buyer to make a profits. I remember years ago when I was in high school and I went out to buy what every high-schooler wanted at the time. A booming car stereo. I went to the local Good Guys (or Circuit City) or whatever other thing it was called that's not in business any more. The guy behind the counter rattled off a bunch of terms like "Cross-over", "EQ", and "highs, mids, and lows" then pointed me over to an Alpine unit that cost $400. At that point, in 1993, he was my entire source of knowledge. There was really no other way I could find out more information about that unit and how well it compared to other units unless I waited for Car Audio Magazine to do a comparison story on it. And even then I'd have to wonder if it was a sponsored advertorial or a real story. What's more is, I really had no way of finding out if I was being charged a fair price for the unit or not. For all I knew the store 6 blocks away was selling the same unit for $200. So in 1993, or for that matter the thousands of years that proceeded 2008(ish), the retail world depended on this inequity of information to make money. Retailers could literally charge 1000% on most products without ever being questioned and consumers had no way of ever finding out if they'd be had. This is how retail has worked for thousands of years.

Last week I walked into a Bed Bath and Beyond to buy a fabric steamer for our green screen. There were 6 models on the shelf. I scanned all the UPC codes on each one and within seconds read dozens of reviews on each product and determine which was the right unit for me. What's more is I compared prices with several thousand other retailers around the country and decided that I was getting a fair price for the steamer I picked up. Bed Bath and Beyond was not able to make more than just a few percent profit on this bulky unit that takes up several feet of shelf space. Good for me, bad for them.

This phenomenon is very similar to what occurred in the late 1800s with the advent of the Telegraph. Prior to the Telegraph, speedy horsemen and train conductors would deliver information on pricing and trends from town to town to secure large profits on commodities. If the price of gold or cattle had gone down by 20% for example, the first vendor that had access to that information in a city could afford to lower his prices in anticipation of a new and cheaper shipment. He could potentially beat the competition by days. When the Telegraph first was introduced to the market place, the inequity of information widened and retailers had to learn to be more agile and update their information sources. It took decades for world to catch up to this new method of communication. In the mean time some extreme fortunes were made on day old information. Some today liken it to knowing the lottery numbers, days before they're announced. Imagine if you, in California, know something about the price of gold days before anyone else did.

Consider that what I was able to do with my iPhone is still not available to more than 70% of the US population. What will become of retail when there's always some vendor, somewhere across the country that's willing to make only pennies on the sale of the same product? You guessed it, they can't survive.

Many brands are keenly aware of this phenomenon and are putting in measures to correct for it. LuluLemon, Oakley, and Apple for example have retail stores of their own and fix prices on their branded products so the consumer is always aware and confident of the pricing they're getting.

This ever narrowing information gap applies to far more than retail however. It applies to everything. If you had real-time, actionable information about every company listed on the NYSE for example, you might make some better trades. But if everyone had the same information instantly, what would happen? Mind you I'm not talking about news, I'm talking about actionable, decision-ready information. For instance, imagine a decision support system that would determine the price of Oranges based on thousands of metrics and could also provide you with actual demand information world wide, minute by minute. Now imagine that information was available to everyone. How difficult would it be to make money trading Oranges then?

It is difficult to imagine that the information gap can get so narrow. But who would have thought ten years ago that I, the consumer, would be able to stand inside a store, and find out the prices for thousands of competing products and vendors within seconds and make actionable decision about my purchase?

Online shopping engines like Amazon will eventually eradicate all retailers. But what will become of the marketplace that runs capitalism when the information gap collapses? Will the spirit of competition be enough to win? Only time will tell.