Peso Update

Back in early March I posted about what I thought the peso was going to do against the dollar and I was worried that we were heading towards $20 pesos per US $. I’m happy to say that I was specularly wrong. Turns out I was looking at the peso at the it’s lowest value and in the last couple months the peso has recovered quite a bit. As of today the peso stands at $13.16 pesos to the US $, which is about $4 pesos lower than I expected. Here is a graph¹ of the most recent monthly average exchange rates.

I still wouldn’t call this stable, but it is much more so than a couple months ago and at this point, it is what the most that can be asked for.

1. Have I mentioned how awesome Google Docs graphs are.  Simple clean and easy to embed.  Watch out Excel.  You can see the data and graph in Google Docs. ↩

Hawk’s Eye photo albums are back

In 2007 Megan and I stopped using our photo galleries hosted on this site and started using Google’s Picasa Web Albums instead.  There were a lot of reasons for doing this, but we were never quite satisfied with Picasa Web Albums.  I’ve been looking for a self-hosted solution for a while and finally found a good one called ZenPhoto.  It even had a theme based on the design I had used for the the old galleries created by Doug Bowman, who happens to the new creative director at Twitter.

So now all of our photo albums old and new are available at Hawk’s Eye. We’ll post new photos and galleries there and you can subscribe to a RSS feed of the galleries and leave comments on the photos. Some captions are still missing, but I’ll work to add those over the next week or so.

GuadalajaraReporter.com – 1 year later

A year ago today the Guadalajara Reporter launched a completely new site that was developed by me.  So I thought that it might be a good time to talk about what this last year has brought to the site, what I think about working on a newspaper website, and what I think about the future newspapers in general.

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Where is the Peso going?

It hasn’t been a good time to be paid in Mexican Pesos if you are thinking in US Dollars.  This isn’t really the most helpful way to think about the situation, but it is almost inevitable when you have bills to pay in the US and you live and work in Mexico.  It is probably best to ignore this if you are saving Pesos and planning to spend those savings upon your return to the US.  That hasn’t stopped me from thinking about it.

Since August 4th of last year the cost of a US Dollar has gone from costing $9.87 Pesos to $15.24 Pesos (as of March 4th).  This is an increase of over 60% in about 7 months and is the largest increase in recent history.  The other day I was looking at the graph on Google Finance and realized that the progression from August was nearly linear.  So I graphed out the trend in Excel and sure enough it was close to linear (with the exception of a peak in November and December).

Click for larger version

So back to the title of the post; I’m not a financial analyst (but I play one on the web) and my prediction is as likely to be completely wrong as it is to be even slightly right, but if you push the trend line out a few months in the future, where is the peso going?  As you can see from the graph to the left, it looks like we are heading towards $20 pesos to the dollar by September.  That’s a 100% increase in a bit more than a year.  That’s probably good news if you live in the US (as goods and services from Mexico are cheaper) and also good if you are planning to travel to Mexico anytime soon.  For expats living in Mexico with US funds, this is also good news, although getting your favorite US made products from the local Walmart is going to get pricy.  For expats, like me, who earn their living in Pesos, this is very bad news. The average Mexican is going to feel the pinch as well, since imported consumer goods are going to cost a lot more.

Hopefully my projection is wrong (and like I said, it probably is), but so far the peso doesn’t seem to be going anywhere but down.

Connectivity and information design

I just ran accross a very interesting study called the “Connectivity Scorecard” about the reltive connectedness of different countries. Normally these kind of studies talk about averge speed of connections and percentage of people with high-speed internet connections, but this study takes a much more holistic approach to the idea of connectivity and talks about 6 different components:

• Consumer Usage & Skills
• Consumer Infrastructure
• Business Usage & Skills
• Business Infrastructure
• Government Usage & Skills
• Government Infrastructure

The great thing about this methodology is that it adds many different dimensions to the idea of connectivity by expanding both the sectors looked at and the going beyond mere infrastructure. This rings true to me because it allows a country like Mexico to score highly on Consumer Usage & Skills while still ranking the country fairly poorly on Consumer Infrastructure.  Mexico has lots of internet users in internet cafes and similiar locations, but fairly poor penetration of broadband internet to the home.  It also alows the US to rank very highly in the study despite the relitevely poor Consumer Infrastructure score.

The only issues I have with this study is in the interface and design of the report.  Here are the issues I noticed:

• Country color:  I can find no rhyme or reason behind the color chosen for each country.  At first I though it might have something to do with their ranking on the chart, but that didn’t seem to fit.  Then I thought it was a regional designation, but that also doesn’t work.  I really can’t tell why the countries are in a particular color.

   

• No way to compare two countries: This seems like an obvious shortcoming especially given the wornderful radar charts used to display the varias components of the score.  It would be nice to be able to choose 2 or more countries and see their relative scores on a radar chart or in a table.  This would allow quick comparisons to understand why, for example, the US got a score of 7.71 and Sweden got a score of 7.47.