Thought Press.

Travel, life-improvement, social networks — It’s all there on the web. Here are a few feel-good sites to visit:

Goodreads - A social network for book readers. List your books and review them. See what your friends and others are reading. Look up book reviews from other readers.

Swaptree - Trade books, music, and DVDs with others. For free.

stickK.com - Make a commitment contract for yourself to reach a goal (eat healthier, lose weight, live greener). The incentive is money. Fail your goal and the money you down can go to a charity, a charity you don’t support, or a friend or foe. Succeed and you get your money back.

Walk Score - Type in an address and see how walkable the neighborhood is.

TripTouch - This should be your homepage wherever you travel. Open up the site and you get a snapshot page of local info on the city in which you’re currently located.

I have spoken in the past about delegating. It’s becoming a much larger trend, now with services popping up overseas in, where else, India. Blogs and news articles discuss outsourcing your personal tasks. Now companies like Your Man In India, Get Friday, and AskSunday allow you to outsource individual tasks or projects and pay by the hour. Small businesses may choose this cheaper route as an alternative to hiring another full-time employee.

Tim Ferriss wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, which talks about living your “dream life” by outsourcing a lot of your life / tasks. His book doesn’t come without criticism, and many say he is selfish that something comes from taking pride in work. Still, outsourcing and delegating tasks help you manage your time. Sunday is a personal assistant service co-founded by Steve Ludmer, a Penn grad with a great deal of business management background. “Sunday is committed to simplifying our member’s lives by providing personal, travel and tech support assistance via the Internet and telephone.” Their call centers are in India and the Philippines.

What makes Sunday different from a typical concierge service is that there are few limits. Most concierge services will try to stay away from medical or financial requests and they won’t give you a wake up call. They won’t but something on eBay for you or Craigslist and they won”t purchase tickets from just any source. Sunday will. Sunday will call your cable company, wait on hold for you and patch you in when a rep comes on the line. They’ve called a magazine for me to check on the status of a gift subscription. The best part is that they turn around results in often less than an hour. The price is cheap: $29 for 30 requests per month. Less than a dollar per request. Hey, it’s outsourcing.

Feedback on Sunday:

• The few times I’ve called, I tend to reach one individual (Bruce). Sunday is not about caller experience. They barely ask questions. Because of this you have to be as detailed as possible. They listen to you and say, “Okay, we’ll email you.” No date or time when to expect the results.
• Since speaking with a person is more like speaking at them, it’s probably better to use their voicemail feature and leave a message with your request.
• Turnaround time impressed me. Less than an hour for Boston restaurants with wine tasting menus (they even called the places to confirm). 12 minutes for a request to call a magazine customer service for me (I emailed the request).
• Most large US-based concierge services take your request and simply add it to their queue, often taking 24 hours for the restaurant request (above). I asked Sunday to send me a spreadsheet with external hard drive options, prices, etc. I got that in one hour. My credit card concierge said it would be three business days!
• It’s great if you want to make a personal call (like to your bank) but can’t at work. Email your details and they’ll call for you.

The bottom line is that Sunday is impressive in getting it done in a timely manner and doing exactly what you ask without much of an “experience.” Larger concierges strive to give you a call experience, often provide pull and access, and try to add value–but turnaround time can be way too long.

Sunday Perks:

• Reminder calls
• Make your doctor appointment
• General information
• International calling (make calls for you and patch you in as needed)
• An online profile that the rep can access
• They typically begin a request right away
• Can access your email accounts or Google calendar (passwords are encrypted through the Sunday Portal)
• Travel agency
• Computer tech support

Sunday Projects is similar to sites like Your Man In India (YMII), which perform larger projects (business, data, entry, research, presentations) and charge by the hour or quote a price depending on the project. YMII focuses mainly on NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) and can assist with anything regarding India such as sending your family flowers, helping with taxes, relocating to India, etcetera. Outsourcing has become personal. It’s obvious that Sunday can only offer their services so cheap because of this. They’re looking for a cheap solution, not something focused on customer experience.

>> Read more about Americans outsourcing to Asia [1, 2, 3]

What was the fasting rising Google search of 2007? iPhone. Google’s 2007 Year-End Zeitgeist was recently released and showcases the “collective consciousness” of our world and the top newsmakers.

It also clues us into the consciousness of the Presidential campaign:

It’s also been an exciting year for celebrity happenings. February was a spike in Britney Spears searches after she shaved off all her hair. Or June when Paris Hilton was released from jail. Then there’s the Hannah Montana craze, for which searches far topped the Rolling Stones:

Diets, ringtones, game consoles, sports - Google shows trends in not only our search patterns, but delves deep into our thinking. What’s on our mind? Google looks at the top Who is, What is, How is searches:

Who is God?
What is love?
How to kiss

>> View the full 2007 Zeitgeist here

Not sure if you’ve seen the power of Google Maps’ newish Street View feature. They’ve recently expanded and now feature 360 degree street-level photography in 21 US cities.
I’ve just recently discovered it since they’ve expanded to Boston. I would say that 95% of streets in Boston are covered. Google used special cameras attached to vehicles that drove through every street. Coverage even expands out into suburbs.

So not only can you see a location from above by satellite, but you can zoom down and see what it looks like to stand there. Let’s say you’re planning a trip to Boston and you want to see the State House. Take a look before you get there. Just enter a location or click any highlighted road on the Street View map and you’re there. Pan around.

It’s great if you’re going somewhere for the first time and you don’t know what the business or house looks like.

Heading to Boston by Amtrak? Check out South Station. Check out Macy’s in Downtown Crossing. Check out Flamepoeira, my favorite coffee shop in the North End. How about the Prudential:

The upcoming Presidential election has got some big issues, one of which is America’s health care problem. But Daniel Brook makes a good point in Good Magazine:

“… it’s puzzling that when the presidential candidates talk about their health-care proposals, they only talk about poor kids and Wal-Mart workers. This doesn’t square with my experience of the health-care crisis. I know plenty of people who are sweating health-care coverage. None of them are poor kids. And they don’t work at Wal-Mart.”

The US has a pretty low self-employment rate compared to other countries and what is holding freelancers, artists, creative folk, and other people back from pursuing their own businesses, asks Brooks? Health care. Or lack thereof. Now think about countries with universal health care. Health care is not an obstacle to self-employment. Politicians need to stop focusing on the Wal-Mart workers, and pay attention to everyone whose dreams may be barred because of something that should be a universal right.

“Lately, Americans have come to think of the governmental safety net as being not for the ambitious but for people who can’t take care of themselves—like poor kids. But the metaphor “safety net” comes from the piece of circus equipment that lets the trapeze artist attempt his or her most daring feats.
It’s time the proverbial trapeze artists among us spoke up. And time the candidates listened.”

>> Read Daniel Brook’s full article here.

Slate’s Chad Lorenz has brought up an interesting insight: Is email dying?

It seems that us young people are foregoing email for other messaging mediums like IM, Twitter, and Facebook messages. Forget old fashioned email party invites: It’s a Evites, Facebook or Google event invites. But maybe that’s slow. You might as well RSVP by IM!

Personally, I find fewer people are quickly responding to email. Now it’s instant responses that are expected. Texts or IMs. Goodbye Yahoo and Hotmail account. At least Gmail has a chat feature … and I tend to use that more than typing an old fashioned electronic mail.

As we head into the new year, it’s important to look back and see what events occurred that will lead us into future trends. Trendwatching.com has compiled a fantastic report on important consumer trends that will take center stage in 2008.

Items like the iPhone has created a revolution about “status spheres”. It’s all about lifestyle and having the latest. But, there are many different kinds of spheres, according to Trendwatching.com, high net work individuals increased 8.3% this year creating more disposable income and more of a market for premium products (like $17,000 pacifiers). These people make up we we call the “traditional” status sphere. Then there’s the online sphere which is all about online presence and status or the eco sphere which includes people trying to greenify their lives.

This ties in with the next trend for 2008: Premiumization — making any product into something even more, like high-end $20 bottles of Evian water. It’s about catering to the rich and making those in debt, poorer.

More trends to bloom in ‘08: Need for instant gratification, obsession with the web, narrower–more local–social networks, and ecommerce, eco-awareness, and make-it-yourself and personalized products.

Read the full trend briefing here.

One huge trend that began at the beginning of Apple’s existence was a growing cohort of people who became followers of Apple’s innovation and insanely great ideas. Not only that. Macintosh has become a “lifestyle”.

Since then sprouted fan and rumor sites, a Cult of Mac book and blog, forums, product unwrapping ceremonies. The Cult of Mac book says that Apple has become sexualized in the eyes of its hardcore followers (see undressing below). New product and software releases, store openings pull thousands out to retail stores in long lines and hours of waiting. When have you seen that for Microsoft?

When they get home they take “undressing” or unboxing photos of their new Mac, exemplifying Apple’s artsy and efficient packaging. There’s even a site devoted to unboxing ceremonies: Unbox.IT

With Apple’s Mac market share rising above 8% and the release of Leopard, you can expect the Cult of Mac base to grow. More will find themselves checking AppleInsider.com or MacRumors to find out about the newest Apple product rumors or taking unboxing photos and posting them to their Flickr. Macintosh is a lifestyle, for sure.

Today at work someone sent me a blog link that got me laughing harder than I ever have. I couldn’t control myself. Johnny Virgil writes a blog called 15 Minute Lunch, in which he posts many humorous entries about all sorts of things he encounters. It turns out that the other day he found a 1977 JCPenney. What comes is a series of old school catalog pictures and some pretty freaking hilarious commentary.

>> View the post here. You’ll laugh pretty hard.

This is a response to a comment by Kate on my Sexist Products entry. She feels this was my opinion, not surprisingly, after a discussion we had on why women, on average, make 25% less than men (according to a GAO report).

There are many reasons that feminist organizations do not often take into account when reporting these numbers. The GAO concluded some reasons: Many women leave their job either to have a child or raise a family. When they decide to return to a career they have fallen behind the amount of time they were out of the workforce. They are not in the same point in their career or experience as they may have been if they hadn’t left work. So, if you compare men and women in their same period of life, you will most likely find women with a lesser median salary partly because of this gap in career experience. Women also tend to have fewer years of work experience.

Another possible reason is that women do not tend to ask for a raise or promotion as often as men do. We should not discount any discrimination, as black people also statistically make less, though factors such as education and time in the workforce must be considered. There are many reasons such as this that contribute to women earning less than men.

CNNMoney.com’s Jeanne Sahadi published an article called the “76-cent myth“, and she comes to similar conclusions, but doesn’t discount any discrimination (which may account for a quarter of the wage gap):

“But all the wage-gap ratio reflects is a comparison of the median earnings of all working women and men who log at least 35 hours a week on the job, any job. That’s it.

“It doesn’t compare those with equal work, equal training, equal education or equal tenure. Nor does it take into account the hours of overtime worked.”

>> Read more about the pay gap and the GAO report.