Hi, this is Frank Romano from WhatTheyThink.com.  Welcome back to another episode.  Several pieces of news that I picked up this week that were rather interesting.  A government report.  A government report.  That always scares me.  Four companies control the wireless market.  They just don’t tell us who they are.  I mean it’s kind of interesting.  You know give me the list.  AT&T and Verizon are mentioned, but not the other two and I don’t know who the other two are.  It would be very interesting to find that out, but here is a little statistic from here that is rather interesting.  The number of cell phone subscribers in the United States is at 285 million at the end of 2009.  285 million cell phone subscribers.  In 1989 it was 3.5 million.  3.5 million to 285 million.  According to this we’re paying half as much as we paid in 1999.  All right, we’re all going to have a cell phone.  By the way, you can’t walk down the street, go anywhere without people talking on their cell phones oblivious to everything going on around them.  We’re all connected.

Pace Magazine, that’s a cultural magazine of some sort, announced that they’re not going to print.  Pace Magazine says goodbye to print.  It started in 2002.  It’s been nominated for a number of awards, but I thought the quote that the publisher made we rather interesting.  He laid off all 11 staff members and he said, “We don’t see this as the magazine being dead.”  “We just see it taking a break right now.”  All right, but you just laid off all 11 staff members, so who is going to…?   I guess you’re going to hire them back later on.

This is the most interesting.  The chairman and publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was in the Netherlands.  I'm sorry, was in London for a conference and he was quoted as saying, “We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD, to be determined.”  Well we know far, far into the future it’s entirely possible that you’ll have only electronic newspapers.  It’s entirely possible.  I mean if you ever watch the original Star Trek series there was never any paper on that ship.  Did you ever notice that?  There was never paper.  They all carried things like tablets around with them.  I guess they were predicting the iPad. 

In any case the author of this article goes on to say that the thing that sustains, that makes the New York Times the New York Times is a very large newsroom on which they spend 200 million dollars, reporters, editors and others to put all that content together and they do some arithmetic.  What would happen if you had to pay for the New York Times online, there was no paper edition?  Maybe, maybe they might hit 250 million dollars, but that wouldn’t sustain a 200 million dollar newsroom.  The best they might get is a 100 million dollar newsroom.  Now that is still pretty good because most news sites don’t even have that, so the problem in the future is without paper and the price and the premium you put on paper how will you get the kind of money to have the quality content that people want to buy?  We’ll see.

Well Michael Yah [ph] says that I haven’t done a “What is it” in awhile, so I thought… I just went around our IT here to see if there was anything that was interesting and I found this.  Now you can see that it has a lens and then it has this little object that goes back and forth.  Now I've covered over the name of it.  I would like the name, but I don’t know if any of you will get that, but try be as specific as possible.  What is it?  The email address for me should be underneath the video somewhere hopefully and so email me.  The first one that gives me the best answer, not just the first answer, the best answer will get a free copy of the Pocket Pal.  No, I think I'll send you copy of the book on the future of print that I just did.  That might be better for you at this stage of the game, although you can tell me your preference if so desire.  So what is it?  And that’s all My Opinion.  Take care.

I'm still not planning to move to China, but it makes it sound pretty inviting.