The upcoming release of the iPhone will raise the stakes in the multibillion dollar fight between cellular carriers and cellular handset manufacturers. In America, the carriers have the upper hand dictating which phones and services will be available on their networks. Internationally it’s the opposite, people can buy any phone they want knowing that they can just take their GSM card and it will work anywhere.

If the iPhone is so good that people actually switch carriers, then carriers will have to roll over and forever bow to the power of the handset manufacturers. It won’t happen quickly but it will happen. That’s probably a good thing for end users who are ever resentful of their long term contracts and nickel and dime overcharging by carriers.

One of the hottest topics of conversations in our area is the still crazy real estate market. Here are some sites that will help you feel in the know about how things are going around here.

• MLS The Master Listing Service. If you’ve never vistited MLS, then you probably don’t even care about real estate.
• Zillow: Probably the best known of web2.0 real estate sites. They explicitly try to avoid competing with realtors. They attempt to estimate values for homes all across the US(I’m still a bit skeptical about the accuracy for my area).
• Redfin: Another nice web2.0 real estate site. A new kind of real estate brokerage service. They charge a flat fee $3k for selling a house and only %1(minimum $3k) for buying a house, but they require you to do most of the work. They are essentially just paper pushers, but that means you can save huge bucks. They are only work in the SF Bay Area and Seattle.
• Altos Research: A site I just discovered that gives nice breakdowns of real estate trends by area. For instance, you can see that Atherton has a median home price of $4.25 million, ouch.

One of my odder high school memories is a playground game we used to play when I was a junior and senior called Butts Up. The best way to describe it is like a game of multiplayer handball played with a tennis ball where you can catch and rethrow the ball on the outdoor court. Each person(sometimes 6-8 people would play) would have to in turn catch the ball before the 2nd bounce and throw it off the wall back into the court.

The oddities of the court made it kinda tricky. The wall was 15-20 feet wide, but was about 12 feet off the ground and about 6 feet tall because it was the outside of a second story cement balcony. So throwing the ball to hit the wall wasn’t too hard but it wasn’t a gimme either. The court was probably about 30×30 so you could move people and make them miss their catch, but going for winners was pretty risky.

The reason the game was called Butts Up was the way that penalties were assessed. When a player didn’t make their catch or threw the ball out of bounds, they’d be Butts Up. The victim would have to bend over and stand still. Every other player would get a free throw at his butt from about 30 feet away.

It was a game of competitive athletic humiliation, no wonder we loved it.

I was extremely fortunate yesterday when a co-worker randomly mentioned that he was selling some tickets on Craigslist and I asked what for. He said they were for the Police in Oakland that night and offered to sell one to me. I didn’t even think they were playing in the Bay Area, so I jumped on it and 6 hours later I was 15 rows away from Sting and the band.

I’d say overall a very good concert. It was helped by the fact that we had great seats, I didn’t have to wait in line for tickets, and I didn’t build up big expectations in anticipation (although I did pay the standard exorbitant face value +surcharges of tickets today).

Things of note:

They are old. Stewart Copeland in particular has aged quite a bit. Andy Summers also looks pretty old. Sting was the least aged of the three. They are all still talented though.

Sting is still a very good frontman, he doesn’t have the consistent high vocal range of his younger days, but he can hit it when he has to. My friend felt like the rendition of Don’t Stand So Close to Me lost a lot because Sting sang the chorus in a lower octave, but I thought it was a refreshing change. And Sting still did Roxanne with his usually range.

They sang a mix of old and really old stuff. No new songs, none of Sting’s solo songs, no non-Police songs. A couple of less popular songs. I particularly liked that they played Driven To Tears and Invisible Sun.

The concert was a relatively no-frills affair. They let their music stand on its own and I respect that. They all played their traditional instruments, and didn’t have even a keyboard, nor any backup singers. The lighting and staging systems were pretty simple and generally showed the visual theme of the album of the current song. eg: the LED-like display of the Ghost in the Machine cover, or the red,yellow, blue painted stripes of Synchronicity. There were no pyrotechnics, no fancy props or floating displays.

I’m happy I went. It only happens once every 24 years and by the next time they want a reunion, they’ll all be dead.

We shopped a couple of houses the past couple of weekends and one thing that I noticed was the prevalence of the in-law unit. I think of an in-law unit as a detached room with at least a 1/2 bathroom, and usually a kitchen too. I think 3-4 of the 15 houses we saw had it.

I think there’s several macroeconomic and demographic reasons that these in-law units are growing in popularity.

First is the cost of land, it’s hard to find affordable land in this area to build on. This means that Boomerang kids are moving back home and houses need extra space to accommodate them, but with a semblance of independence. But many families can’t support a second full house so the kids move back home to build wealth before they get their own place. Because of the high cost of housing, some families are willing to rent out a separate studio to recoup some of their housing costs.

A second factor is the large income gap between high income people and low income people makes nannies pretty common these days. When I grew up, only the super rich had them, these days I know lots of people with them. Giving a nanny her own studio is convenient for both the family and the nanny.

Third is the rising number of retirees combined with the skyrocketing cost of health care. Aging baby boomers are more likely to move in with their kids to help take care of grandkids or so they can be taken care of themselves. This is cheaper and probably a better investment than moving a grandparent into a nursing home.

None of these factors show any signs of subsiding. While the housing market may have slowed a bit the other two factors appear to only be accelerating, so it makes me wonder are these going to become more popular? Assuming you already have a 3 or 4 bedroom house, would you rather add yet another bedroom or an in-law unit? Which is a better investment(presumably the in-law unit costs more)?

I’ve been playing around with Google Analytics lately, both for chen.net and sc2-wiki.com. It’s easy to set up and very powerful. It gives any webmaster a lot of information about visitors, content and conversion rates. Everyone with a small or medium sized web site should set it up to see what sort of new insights it can provide you about your traffic. Even enterprise web sites with analytics capabilities should give it a shot to see what it can do.

The most surprising thing about Analytics is that Google gives it away for free. Competitors would charge 10’s or 100’s of thousands of dollars for the sort of information that it provides. Why? Two reasons:

Tight integration with Adwords. Insight into web traffic is going to allow Google customers to really expand the keyword search traffic that they can buy. If you know what your customers are doing and if they are generating revenue, you can spend a lot more money buying web traffic that will actually convert into sales for you.

Information domination. The greater the reach of Analytics, the more data that Google can collect about the whole internet. Google could track me and notice I visit Blogger.com, chen.net, a bunch of Starcraft sites and Google Reader and they can correlate all the information together in ways that no other company can. Google’s unparalleled reach and data mining can extend their lead in the one thing that they do best: monetization of traffic.