The following is a letter one of my friends and colleagues wrote to Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison concerning the upcoming Senate vote on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. I have left it unedited, with the exception of replacing his underlines with italics for readability. I think he makes some excellent points here and I concur with his assessment, particularly the point about Houston (and Texas) constantly taking the easy road of eschewing change, resulting in the best minds, ideas and innovations going to the west coast. I am tired of the intellectually lazy, business-as-usual conservative politics here. Because of insipid, brainless dogma, we repeatedly squander every opportunity to do truly great, innovative things. Anyway, enough of my opinion. Enjoy!

To: Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison & John Cornyn
RE: Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act

The Senate is scheduled to debate and vote on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act the first week of June.

As a citizen of Texas, a technology entrepreneur, a co-founder of one of Houston’s first Internet service providers, a veteran of the armed forces, and a current real estate professional, I urge you to seize this historic opportunity and pass this bill.

Here are five compelling reasons to act now:

1. The political opportunity is ripe. 78% of Americans want Congress to act on global warming. We need to take advantage of the tremendous momentum that exists today.
   • Building a domestic renewable energy supply that weans us from a mostly foreign, Middle-Eastern oil supply should be a national security imperative.
   • Carbon emission caps also address a very important LOCAL concern in Houston – our notorious air toxicity and ozone (exacerbated by CO2 and other heat-rapping gases).
2. This isn’t an issue with whether or not you agree with global warming – this is an economic issue now of producing domestic, cleaner energy and spurring technology investment in Texas beyond oil and gas – gas prices are out of control and we need more choices for energy. However, every year we wait equals extra effort. If we delay this bill by just two years, we will have to make twice the annual cuts in carbon emissions to hit the same cumulative reductions by 2020.
3. Someone is going to win the global race to create competitive cleaner energy. Houston and Texas can benefit, with effective leadership, from this growing consensus. Renewable energy promises to become one of the world’s most profitable industries - Japan and Germany already are ahead of us. But advances in renewable energy technologies will not be fully realized without a national cap on global warming pollution – almost every clean-energy entrepreneur agrees with this statement that has been interviewed. Refuse to act and most of the entrepreneurship will go to Silicon Valley just like in 1995 when I was starting Houston’s first large Internet services provider. Please don’t become complicit in a technology brain-drain from Texas 10 years out.
4. The science is unforgiving. As the Earth warms, we approach a “tipping point,” after which large destructive climate changes become inevitable. This is a scientific consensus (like tobacco smoke causes lung cancer) – I am frankly not interested in whether or not policy analysts or members of Congress agree with this consensus or not, especially when it comes to my planet and health.
5. What legacy will the 110th Congress and you leave for Texas? When future generations look back at this moment, they will either praise you and the Senate for starting us down the path to solving the global warming crisis, or blame you and the Senate for squandering this opportunity. If you fail to vote, you stand to put us right back to the 1980’s in Texas while the rest of the nation moves ahead. You have an opportunity to make us a leader in the energy future of America, or to allow us to decline when oil production drops off. It will happen – history is famous for repetition.
6. Finally, have you read Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming by Fred Krupp? What amazes me as a business leader and entrepreneur is his complete embrace of markets - with smart and effective federal leadership - to solve the problem, based on case studies and diligent research. What are you doing to secure Texas in this new emerging energy markets? Please vote FOR the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act when it comes to a vote in June.

Erik Fowler
Houston, TX

I’m usually very loathe to simply link out to another blog’s content, but I thought, with tax season upon us, this post was worth a mention. I think it’s a tremendous testament to social media when a company the size of H&R Block (and one that is in the tax business of all things) embraces social media to strengthen brand awareness. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but I’ve pasted three paragraphs below from the story that relate directly to H&R Block’s use of Twitter. Who ever thunk it?

When people join Twitter, they often send an update out into the world and then go away. Nothing happens. So they don’t get it.” But once they move in to Twitterville, as you call it, and really listen and reply and become part of the community, they’re addicted. There’s nothing like it.

When it comes to truly connecting with customers, I’d say that Twitter has been the most valuable and most effective component of our social media efforts. I went back and looked at our update archive and I realized that more than half of our updates are “@ replies.” Not only have we shared tax tips and advice that serve the general community, but on a one-to-one basis we’ve helped people get jobs and professional tax training.

We’ve helped others overcome the anxiety associated with doing their taxes on their own for the first time. We’re having a blast participating in @zefrank’s Colorwars (how could H&R Block resist a “veryGreenTeam”?). We’ve discovered and resolved customer support issues and we’ve met and thanked very happy customers. It sounds crazy, but I actually feel like H&R Block has made some friends on Twitter. We even had a customer call us out as part of @garyvee’s Good People Day! We couldn’t ask for more than that.

I know all the Friedmanist laissez-faire, free marketeers will jump all over my shit about this, but the current financial crisis, and every crisis prior, certainly makes a strong case about tighter regulation of Wall Street. Here’s the recipe: 1 part great wealth creation phenomenon and 1 part Wall Street greed yields a huge serving of crisis. Make no mistake, the Internet bubble wasn’t created by technology companies or entrepreneurs. It was created by greedy financiers and Wall Street. Don’t get me wrong — I certainly hope to have a ridiculous pay day with Wall Street’s help (I had a Wall Street pay day before, but the bubble burst before my section 144 stock was free to trade), which is precisely why I would like more effective oversight to prevent another bubble from bursting in my face.

The Internet bubble would never have been were it not for Wall Street, in my opinion. It would have been an extended, sustainable period of prosperity that awarded innovation (not the “let’s sell $1 bills for 95 cents and make it up in volume” kind of innovation that was improperly awarded during the bubble). The current sub-prime mortgage crisis is another example of a bubble created where none existed. The rose colored glasses on Wall Street were all too willing to give AAA ratings to mortgage backed securities that really were absolute crap. The “greater fool theory” is all too real a phenomenon in the apparent zero-sum game that is Wall Street finance (it doesn’t need to be). The problem is, we’re running out of fools. Additionally, our entire financial system gets downgraded as you can rest assured the fools who got bitten once won’t be back to the trough any time soon. Meanwhile, our currency weakens and more of our debt is in foreign hands.

It seems we repeat history all too often and never learn anything from it. Sorry Gordon Gecko, greed isn’t that great after all.

Here’s the scenario: you issue a purchase order for $50,000 worth of product from a hardware manufacturer. The product is to be shipped to your location via Fedex. Fedex loses the shipment. The shipper did not insure the shipment. Who’s responsible for coughing up $50K? Answer: you are. Shocking, I know. Why?

I wanted to share this brief experience my business partner and I had regarding receiving such a product shipment. Rules for commerce are typically governed by the Uniform Commercial Code. The purchase order in this case specified the shipment was FOB Origin (or FOB Carrier). This is where the rules come into play which govern which party has responsibility. Basically, if you are shipped something FOB (Free On Board) and it is anything other than FOB Destination (i.e., your location), you are responsible for the shipment. If you want the shipment insured, the onus is on you to require the shipper to insure it accordingly on the purchase agreement.

This is one of those instances where I had to learn this from experience. We mistakenly assumed the shipper would insure such expensive equipment while in transit. Don’t ever make this assumption. Luckily, in our case, the manufacturer “did the right thing” and replaced the shipment for us. From now on, we’ll be ordering everything either FOB Destination or requiring the shipper to insure the freight (which you can have added to your invoice). Please make sure you do the same!

Irreverent, funny, and good representation of what happened in the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. Check out the slide show from Google Docs here.

I can certainly identify with this Business Week story about Sprint’s business troubles, largely stemming from customer service woes. I was a customer of Sprint’s for 3 years, relatively happy with the service. The trouble came when I decided to switch service plans to reduce my minutes since I was taking time off work and no longer needed the huge pool of minutes I previously required. Using the Sprint website, I modified my plan. I had my online banking configured to pay Sprint automatically the same amount every month. After confirming the service plan change, I modified my online payments to reflect the new amount. I got a service disconnect notice about 3 months later (I never really paid much attention to the online bills and opted out of receiving paper bills) with a bill attached for nearly $300! Upon calling customer service (this is in 2004), I learned that my service plan in fact never was changed. Of course they had no record of the change I made and it was my dumb luck I didn’t write down the confirmation number the website had given me (nor saved the website - I always do this now). The customer representative said she would be happy to change my plan once I paid the amount due. Explaining my story resulted in nothing more than, “well I’m very sorry.” I had her escalate me to the manager on duty. Again I explained my story and said I would even prepay or renew my contract (I was month to month since my initial contract had expired) if they would simply give me the benefit of the doubt. I thought I had some leverage since I had been spending a decent chunk of change with them and even kept the phone active when I was living in Europe in 2001! Nada. Zip.

Needless to say I was quite exasperated by this point and simply wasn’t going to tolerate it any longer. I told her something to the effect that they could shove my account and balance where the sun didn’t shine and they would never get another penny from me, ever. After going through 3 other providers, including Cingular (another customer service nightmare), I landed with T-Mobile and have never looked back. The mobile phone service providers really need to use T-Mobile as a case study on how to run a customer service organization.

I still haven’t paid Sprint and never will.

Business Week has re-released its original story about the importance of Social Media (i.e., blogs). This time, many of the predictions and facts are annotated with updated information snippets. It is certainly an interesting re-read to see how far we’ve come!

I would like to think Steve Ballmer read my damning indictment of him and his company and my recommendations when deciding to share more of the company’s secrets. The New York Times story quotes Ballmer as saying the company was adapting to “the opportunities and risks of a more connected, more services-oriented world.”

According to the story, by Steve Lohr in today’s Technology section:

Microsoft said on Thursday that it would open up and share many more of its technical secrets with the rest of the software industry and competitors. Microsoft executives, in a conference call, characterized the announcement as a “strategic shift” in the company’s business practices and its handling of technical information . . .

The broader goal, they said, is to bring Microsoft’s flagship personal computer products — the Windows operating system and Office productivity programs — further into the Internet era of computing. Increasingly, people want a seamless flow of documents, data and programming code among desktop PCs and the Internet, especially as they make the shift from using software on a PC to using services on the Web.

The story also quotes Microsoft’s general counsel as saying, “qualitatively and quantitatively different from anything we’ve done in the past.”

I think this is great news, however I am not 100% sure of its sincerity. Did Microsoft finally wake up and realize the world around them or is this some surreptitious strategy to gain regulator approval to pursue Yahoo and continue with business as usual?

I suppose I’m the eternal optimist and hope they really are changing their tune and overall company strategy to fit the realities of the current marketplace. Microsoft has plenty to teach the industry; they certainly have much to learn from it.

We will have to stay tuned and see. Microsoft has much to do to de-vilify itself and step down as the industry bully and consider itself an important part of the technology ecosystem. It needs to become a shepherd of open standards and interoperability. A rising tide of industry-wide innovation will lift all boats and broaden technology’s reach, which will help technology achieve its promise.

Seriously, get a life, SCO and SNCP. In case you haven’t heard, SCO filed chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year as a result of its failed lawsuits against Linux vendors and customers. Now it has courted a new suitor, Stephen Norris Capital Partners, to the tune of $100 million to continue it’s nonsensical war against open source and Linux.

At least companies that put out crappy software and/or fall seriously short in the ethics department still actually try to innovate and compete (e.g., Microsoft - though conspiracy theories abound that say they’re behind all this nonsense). This cause, however, is only about greed, opportunism, desperation, and psychopathy, pure and simple. Perhaps these guys ought to try to better life on the planet with their “largesse.” Perhaps someone could actually innovate with that money. You know, find a cure for cancer, or develop social programs to eliminate poverty. I certainly hope the bankruptcy court sees this for the extortionist fraud it is and severs it off at the head.

Even if their case has some merit (which it certainly doesn’t appear to given what’s transpired and SCO’s own tactics of declaring bankruptcy weeks before going to trial), from a moral perspective what they’re doing is simply wrong. With all that’s at stake, with users and governments around the world benefiting from the spread of free software, this is analogous to a rogue enterprise waging a trillion dollar intellectual property battle to blot out the use of antibiotics. It doesn’t make economic sense, legal sense, or business sense, and smacks of moral turpitude.

I thought this post was very interesting, especially given the fact I told my dad he should think about using a blog for his university classes that he teaches. The thought was he could put his syllabi, curriculum, assignments, learning material, tips and much more in a well-suited environment. And he wouldn’t even need to learn HTML (to date he has created online content in MS Word and uploaded the file after saved as HTML; we know what that markup looks like)! It makes perfect sense to me.

I co-founded an online backup company a couple of years ago which targets schools throughout the country to back up their data. As I traveled around to all the big trade shows to see the latest technology tools available to teachers and the education marketplace, I left feeling much of it was the same old, rehashed stuff. In fact I was actually involved several years ago in funding and launching an e-learning company that had a different twist to address this void. Unfortunately our timing was really bad (though there were certainly other issues as well) and it closed its doors. I really think OpenCourseWare built around the WordPress core makes tons of sense. It’s extensible, scalable, and easy to use. I will be keeping an eye on their progress . . .