We had to work a little to fit all these bikes in. Dominque and I were the only ones to stop by this temple. There was a Black Buddha inside. Unusual to say the least. Buddhas ringed the entire temple. The whole thing overlooks the Mekong in dramatic fashion. This was our lunch stop on the way to Chaing Khong. It's actually not hard to take. They grow their own stuff here. I noticed that as soon as we ordered a young girl ran out to collect some onions and lemon grass.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Laos - Start of a New Adventure
We had to work a little to fit all these bikes in. Dominque and I were the only ones to stop by this temple. There was a Black Buddha inside. Unusual to say the least. Buddhas ringed the entire temple. The whole thing overlooks the Mekong in dramatic fashion. This was our lunch stop on the way to Chaing Khong. It's actually not hard to take. They grow their own stuff here. I noticed that as soon as we ordered a young girl ran out to collect some onions and lemon grass.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Indochine Feb 16
Indochine - Feb 14
Jim with Red Dao
Friday, February 12, 2010
Paolo and Federica (aka "Freddy")
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Indochine February 9
This is the inside of the museum: An artistic display. I have no idea what this had to do with HCM: Quotes from HCM are on this pyramid: This is a shot of the Golden Lake Hotel where we are staying in Hanoi. It is right in the heart of the action and very nice:
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Indochine Feb 6
Indochine - Feb 5
A few hours later... We made it to JFK without a problem. We stashed the bike at left luggage. I didn't think that there were any left luggage places at any US airports (for security reasons). It is very convenient so I was glad to find it. An airport worker told me that the fee for leaving a bag was nominal. It turned out to be $16 dollars per day. I suppose in NY there is a different meaning to the word nominal. In Bangkok, it's $2.50. We hadn't made a hotel reservation in NY since we weren't entirely sure the plane was going to leave DC. We were therefore in need of finding a place when we arrived. The service desk at the airport said their least expensive room near the airport was $170, We ended up using our cell phones to bid on a room via Priceline. We ended up at the Hilton for $97 total with taxes which, with the benefit of hindsight, was a very good deal indeed. I am posting this to the blog using Posterous. We will see how that works out. You create an email and then send it to a posterous email account from which it is reposted to wherever you choose. The advantage of this is you can create your post offline and then use email to easily post when you have internet access. The big question is how well it will be formated and whether images make it through. If this looks like hell you'll know why. I am tossing in this picture just to see how if it makes it through....
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Marketing is not my forte, but.....
A couple weeks ago I received a call from Constant Contact. I use their newsletter distribution service. It makes things much easier. They had a question for me: "would I participate in an upcoming Webinar panel on using Constant Contact and social media?". It took me a nano-second to say "you bet". It's visibility and I can't imagine I wouldn't learn plenty. I've never listened or participated in a "webinar", but in a prior life I've done plenty of business videoconferencing. It can't be much different.
Anyway, the knowledge that I will be doing the webinar and having an interest in appearing knowledgeable to the couple thousand people I have been advised will be listening to it has inspired me to look at a few things. One is Facebook statistics. What I like about Facebook is you can easily target people on a number of different dimensions: age, geography, gender, interests, etc etc. The interest category is what I tend to focus on. Facebook can easily identify people with an interest in cycling since they naturally become fans of the many cycling related pages.
What has caught my attention is the demographic and growth pattern for Facebook. As of Jan 4, 2009, about 80% of Facebook users are under the age of 35. That's not especially great for me since most people who have the schedule flexibility and an interest in an overseas cycling tour are over the age of 35. Evidence of that is that the vast majority of folks following the Far and Away Facebook Fan page are in the 35 to 55 age range. However, the real eye-opener for me was that the growth rate in that age group is HUGE...an annual rate of 600%. It's a category that is doubling every 2 months! No other category even comes close. The parent, adult, working crowd is very quickly following the college age crowd to Facebook.
The upshot, of course, is that any business that doesn't have a presence in social media is missing a big opportunity. Plenty of companies, big and small, have a Fan page etc etc. But what really surprised me is a recent study of some 4 million websites which showed that only 5% of websites link their site to a Facebook or Twitter presence. I could find no statistics on how many sites have taken the relatively easy step of making their content more "viewable" on the tiny screens of increasingly popular mobile devices, but I would guess it's even less.
Maybe the apparent slowness to link all the web stuff together is a function of the folks maintaining websites being in the small (but growing!) 35 to 55 age category? My only comment is "get with it!" Which, of course, is no doubt the whole point of the Constant Contact Webinar........