I have been contemplating a rethinking of what I put on my blog, and what it looks like. You might call it a redesign, but I really wanted to think about what sort of connection I produce and share with the world, and I wanted my blog to be that portal. Maybe such a personal portal is something different? As part of this rethinking, I want to chance what I put on my here, and how it is referenced. I want it to represent how I have grown and changed over the years, and I want it to communicate something graphically. Right now the only reason that I see in using something like Wordpress, or Drupal would be to manage my RSS feeds, otherwise I think I would like more control over the html of each post than WP2.0 and drupal seem to lean towards. What do you think is important to post?

After a post in an OpenSocial list, Johannes was able to take a look at it, and blog about his experience with HappyHour. It’s a nice walk through that shows you the basics of installing and running your first gadget.

For only one OpenSocial container that I know of, does it implement the gadgets.* logic that mirrors a lot of nice functionality found in Google Gadgets. One of the features that I REALLY miss is the userPrefs feature that allowed a developer to declaratively define user settings for a given app. Unfortunately even though Orkut is compliant with the OpenSocial Container Spec many containers are not. In fact all of the containers that I have seen, do not fully implement the Gadget spec, as they are supposed to with OpenSocial.

“”
To host OpenSocial apps, your website must implement the OpenSocial API Specification. In most cases, this means that you connect your own social network’s backends to the OpenSocial Service Provider Interface (SPI), which is part of Shindig, to allow an OpenSocial app to access your site’s data. However, it is possible to use data from another social network as well, should you prefer. The SPI implements:

• Adding and removing friends
• Adding and removing apps
• Storing activities
• Retrieving activity streams for self and friends
• Storing and retrieving per-app and per-app-per-user data

This is really a pain in the ass, to track down which features are supported, and in what capacity. It is one thing if the spec calls for a feature to be optional, but in more than one case, core features are not working on a subset of OpenSocial 0.7 containers like Hi5, MySpace, and Ning to start the list off. Is it so hard to ask, that someone document that they will not implement a CORE feature, and why they choose that solution. Is it also too hard to ask Google to maintain their docs if a CORE feature has now become optional. If we as gadget developers have chosen to start businesses on OpenSocial, or Facebook apps, we need to at least find out what is going on.

Ok, so the work around for my favorite feature can be found in using JavaScript, or a JavaScript to Flash bridge using externalInterface to manage some user settings with opensocial.DataRequest for “newFetchPersonAppDataRequest” and “newUpdatePersonAppDataRequest” which are less declarative, and much more complicated to implement. The good news is that Orkut, MySpace, and Hi5 implement this feature at least poorly, if not well. Orkut’s implementation seems pretty robust, but on the forums for both MySpace and Hi5 people have been complaining about the persistence of such settings. You might want to cache values in either cookies, google gears, or DOM:storage (a HTML app browser storage resource, that is not sent on each request like a cookie).

I am currently working on an external library that right now depends on both mootools and jQuery to display the form. I would like some help on this, and to open source it so that this nice little feature can get easier for other developers to use and extend. You can see a basic version 0 example here. I still need to link this up to OpenSocial, and I was thinking of using an interesting serverless OpenSocial tool called HappyHour, that allows you to virtualize your container with the help of some slick JS code, and a GoogleGears install.

After seeing Iron Man the 2nd time this weekend, it struck me that the $9 ticket price was more than the $8.50 ticket price that I had paid just a few months ago to treat my friend to the cinema. I am not really sure I understand the rise in ticket price. Is it just profiteering, a yearly increase or is there an economic pressure there that is causing the price to rise along with housing prices, rice, gasoline, and the cost of corn. Hmm, maybe it’s group logic, maybe someone said, HEY, prices are rising across the board, it must be a good idea for us to raise prices too. Maybe, its because minimum wage hikes are doing what they are designed to to(inflate prices). Many of you might not care about a $.50 increase, but you should, that is a 6% increase, and if our economy inflated 6%, that is huge news for the US, that means that you, just got a 6% pay cut in your job. How would you feel if your boss, just called you into work and told you that you would be taking a 6% pay cut because other Americans are not being so productive.

As a whole, I hope this post has a bit of sarcasm in it, but it also might open the fiscal eyes of a few Americans to how economic pressures can come from a number of angles and how it affects the things we do in every day life.

So, we might want to itemize the different pressures that could effect a ticket price.

• employee wages
• production costs
• international exchange rates
• interest rates

So like any analysis we need to first find out where the costs, expenses, and revenues come from. According to a fiscal report by the nations largest theater company, Regal Entertainment Group, on page 30 of the report, they detail revenue as 67.8% ticket prices, 27.6% concessions, and 4.6% other (probably pre-preview ads). From their report, you can infer that ~$4 of the $7.43 they charge on average for a movie ticket goes just to the film rental and promotion of the film, ie to the movie studios. A movie film can sometimes spend 1/2 of its budget on promotion, while on average I think its about 1/4 of the budget. Also of note, is on average the theater will bring in $3.03 on concessions per ticket, while spending only $.43 on raw product cost, but don’t take that as an 86% profit, you still have people to employ, equipment, and property fees. So there are still plenty of expenses that are shared and at this point I think its hard to think of concessions and ticket prices as separate businesses. So the average movie goer brings in 10.96 in revenue, with about $.50 of that coming from other or (advertising opportunities).

Revenue breakdown

• $7.43 -> admissions
• $3.03 -> concessions
• $0.50 -> other

Cost breakdown

• $3.94 -> film rental
• $0.43 -> concession raw cost
• $1.38 -> property rental
• $2.85 -> other (staff?)
• $0.26 -> general (options, dividends, admistrative)
• $0.76 -> depreciation (generally 1/20th of capitol equipment replacement costs like projectors, screens, seats, etc..)
• $0.02 -> other payouts

actual average profit per customer = $1.33 or 13.3%

going back to rising costs

So if we go back to our rising costs we can now evaluate how much ticket prices should increase this year to either maintain a profit percentage or to push it a little bit. Most companies do not like to push revenue to much, and @ 13.3% Regal is all ready doing pretty well for a service based business, but 15% margins would not be out of the industry spec either.

employee wages

So according to the minimum wage standards set by the federal government, listed here at wikipedia, wages in 2007 were $5.85 an hour and will increase in 2008 to $6.55 (11.9%), and to $7.25(10.7% over 2008) in 2009. Since healthy inflation is between ~2% and ~6%, these are some steep increases in wages, so in 2 years time wages will increase 23.9%. That means that if your ticket price was a pure service(one based on pay grades related to minimum wage), you should see at %25 increase in per consumer visit costs, or ~$2.50 between concessions and ticket prices. Now fortunately for us, we can see that about 1/3 of the movie goer experience is related to staff, so the net increase will be about $0.43, just to cover the new minimum wage hikes.

wages + $0.43 per ticket

production costs

This one is a fairly costly metric to determine, and I suspect that would effect the film rental fees, and production costs of a given film. These expenses will show up in 2009-2011 as films in production now will see hire production costs and will make it to theaters 2-3 years from now. I suspect in about 1 year the decision making process will change based on the production cost metrics that come in this year. So we again have the wage factors coming in, plus a number of other costs being added to the US economy from the housing bubble fallout, including fiscal financing costs. Lets just call this even in the next 2 years as technology might drive down cost, as much as other factors increase it. Over all the price effects of what happens today will be 2-5 years out. This is why Spielberg, and other film makers are looking to see if audiences will put up with a $14 ticket price for 3d films. Theaters will need to purchase new equipment, and it will add to the production cost of the film, hopefully minimally for the studios, but I suspect it will be a net even for everyone, except the consumer. I also suppose that shipping costs of the film might be included here, but those should be minimal also, especially if digital distribution offsets this.

production costs no change this year

international exchange rates

Movie making and watching is an international experience, theater companies again make their money in dollars, and the dollar has been falling. Against the Pound, Euro, Yen and the Canadian Luni, it has lost more than 30% of its value and it should have because of overly low interest rates, and an artificial housing boom created by them, Americans are defaulting on loans more often than they were 5 years ago. This means that the non gold standard US dollar is based solely on the faith that some random dollar will be repaid to some random lender. Right now, the default rates are less than 30%, but for a market that thrives on stability, any unknown here causes a cost. So again the sinking dollar means that it costs more to advertise a movie abroad, and it costs more to produce it abroad. For Americans looking to crew on a film, like Milwaukee is looking for, this is good news, it means that films are less likely to be produced in foreign countries. However, it does mean that films will have a more expensive global footprint. Again, I think that we will see other effects from this, movies will have stories that focus on American soil, and we might seek to constrain production timeliness abroad, I don’t know what that means, but movies like Lord of the Rings were all shot together abroad, and it is unlikely that we will see a production budget today approved like that, as it would cost more than 30% more today, than it would have 3-5 years ago.

net change today 0 but in a few years ??? who knows

concessions

Since popcorn is a corn product, and corn produces Ethanol, and the federal government is increasing the amount of “BioFuel” we use. Corn prices are rising here in the midwest. A few years ago, you could get ears of corn 10/$1, and last year we saw them at about 4/$1, this year they are still at 1/$, and near July 4th (corn season) we will see what the real price of corn will be. So, it looks like corn won’t be the culprit this year until at least July 4th, after this summers blockbusters have all come out. Since corn prices did increase last year, and they are expected to increase in price this year, this might effect your movie going experience. Since the raw cost of concessions are $0.43 per ticket, we may see those costs go up $0.25-$.50, and the average revenue per customer going up $.50-.75 to cover the difference.

popcorn and drinks +$.25 this year, and +$.25 next year

Over all, it looks like movie theaters will be adjusting prices by about $1-$2 across the nation. This is a huge jump, some of it will be due to the above inflation page hikes, some will be due to the increase in raw costs for popcorn, and some of it will be from new equipment purchases to account for more 3d films like Beowulf. So, unless movie studios, and movie theater companies are willing to take the fiscal hit to see how it all pans out, I would expect ticket prices to climb $2 from 2007, to 2009.

I think Firefox (FF) has become more than just a web browser to me, its actually a more important interface for me than my OS is. Switching between Linux and Windows is becoming easier because more of my apps just work in both, and mostly because they are online or plug-ins for FF. So, when Firefox goes through an upgrade and my plug-ins break, I feel very web naked, which makes it hard to stay on the edge. You might try to install both FF2 and FF3b5 side by side so that you can dev in one, and play with the other, but you may not have success even if you follow this article on doing it. I found that there was one caveat in how it was done. There is a difference in the install procedure for “Minefield” and “FF3b5” (Firefox 3 beta 5), and it’s in how disruptive it is.

Firefox 3 beta 5 will try to trigger all of your FF2 links into Firefox 3, which is grand if you are a general user. In fact over the past few months a number of the plug-ins that I use have made the jump, but some of the more valuable ones like Firebug are still only available in FF2. So if you are going to check out FF3b5, you should follow the above guide, and instead of installing FF3b5, you should go for the “Minefield” or nightly build which will work side by side with FF2.