I go to Tumblr like some people go to their TV sets. I don't own a TV, never have. I follow about 90 techies on Tumblr. Other than that this blog of mine feeds directly into my Tumblr blog, I mostly just reblog at Tumblr. Following me on Tumblr is as good as following 90 people. I perform an editorial function mostly.
And today there is enormous buzz on Tumblr around Google TV. I have more questions than answers on the topic. I don't fully get it. I have not read up on it much. But the buzz is unavoidable.
I just want faster brodband when it comes to online video. My idea of a TV-internet merger is one where the TV simply disappears. But Google seems to think different.
By the way it was on Tumblr that I came across the Eminem video above. It is a work of art.
TechCrunch: Microsoft’s Ballmer: Android Isn’t Really Free — You Have To Pay Us For Patents: this is all political nonsense and a pathetic play by Microsoft...... The software giant hasn’t been successful in mobile phones, so they’re attempting to ride on Google’s coattails with some software patents. ..... Microsoft is giving phone makers a choice: pay us to use our software, or pay us to use Google’s software. Or pay your lawyers to fight us in court. (Motorola is apparently choosing the latter — no doubt at Google’s urging.)
Microsoft has been left in the dust. It is nowhere on the smartphone stage. It is missing in action on the tablet stage. It was never nowhere on the data software stage. Bing is a joke. And Google is busy cannibalizing Windows - hello Chrome OS, hello Android - and Office - hello Google Apps. So Microsofties actually held a party in Redmond - not making this up - where they ritually buried the iPhone. That has to be a joke.
Now they are out to use legal shenanigans to hurt Android. Android is free. It is meant to be free. So is Windows. Put out a free, minimalist Windows if you want to keep competing. That is the message. Now the innovation is in taking things out and keeping the bare minimum, not in adding yet another feature no one wants and that gives everyone headaches.
But then what is an Economics major CEO gonna do?
TechCrunch
If Web 1.0’s Kryptonite Was the Bust, Web 2.0 Kryptonite Was the Grind: the CEO and founder of the media company I work for were on stage looking awkward and white, but dancing none the less. ..... One word has summed both of these guys for a while now: Tired...... and for me, mostly ended last week when TechCrunch was sold. But the recession didn’t crash this one– exhaustion did. Building media companies– which is what most Web 2.0 businesses are– is a grind. .... We make startups sound easier and more glamorous than they are..... the Industry Standard– the magazine that chronicled the 1990s bubble and held weekly rooftop parties ... A few million dollars is life changing for most people
Should Entrepreneurs Bet It All On The Billion Dollar Exit, Or Cash Out Small?: entrepreneurs are almost always wrong. They really don’t understand their customers; they learn by trial and error..... all the Groupon clones. .... If you’re a founder and own 50% of your startup, a $30 million acquisition can be life-changing. With a $15 million payout, you go from poverty to riches. You’re set for life
New York Times: What Steve Jobs Learned in the Wilderness: But the Jobs of the mid-1980s probably never could have made Apple what it is today if he hadn’t embarked on a torment-filled business odyssey. ..... The Steve Jobs who returned to Apple was a much more capable leader — precisely because he had been badly banged up. He had spent 12 tumultuous, painful years failing to find a way to make the new company profitable. .... In this period, Mr. Jobs did not do much delegating. ...... Apple acquired the company in 1997 and used Next’s software as the basis for the new operating system, Mac OS X...... He didn’t invent the media player, the smartphone or the tablet, but he understood that no one else had yet come up with the equivalent of a Mac. ..... “He’s the same Steve in his passion for excellence, but a new Steve in his understanding of how to empower a large company to realize his vision.”
I am not an Apple person. I have never bought an Apple product, and I think I might stick to that. My smartphone is going to be an Android. I have no plans to get an iPad. I am psyched instead about the Chrome OS netbook. I love Google like some people love Apple. My blogs are on Blogger, not Wordpress.
But Steve Jobs fascinates me, and his story is legend. I am a Steve Jobs fan. Sure. Steve Jobs is no Mozart, not even close. But he strikes me as someone who perhaps really, truly appreciates genius, perhaps the genius of a Mozart, or of an Einstein. His Think Different campaign was modeled after Einstein.
Steve Jobs is not Einstein or Mozart. Einstein and Mozart belong with each other, not Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs belongs to a different club, the club of Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. That club has few members. College dropouts not born into moneyed backgrounds who changed the trajectories of business history. These are by definition people that talent hunters, recruiters can not find for you. These are not people who are meant to be understood until after the fact, until they have done what needs to be done, and the excellence is out there for the world to see.
Steve Jobs in the wilderness reminds me of the scenes in the Mozart movie where the guy is left out to pasture. He is left to die by people who are too insignificant for the age they live in, let alone for the ages.
"Those people should not have that kind of power," Mozart says at one point. That is how I feel about people who fired Steve Jobs. Those dumbfucks should never have had the power to decide if Steve Jobs should even be fired. There I stand with Larry Ellison.
It took a Larry Ellison to get Steve Jobs back at Apple. Larry knows how to throw his weight around, and he threw his weight around on behalf of his new found best friend, Steve Jobs. It is not like the people who fired Steve Jobs finally decided that Jobs had learned his lessons and now he can come back. They were long gone.
When you give dumb people too much power, Steve Jobs gets fired and a company like Apple loses a decade of its life. Corporate monkeys did not know how to respect a Steve Jobs.
New York Times: Mark Zuckerberg’s Most Valuable Friend: her regular meetings with the famously introverted Mr. Zuckerberg .... Facebook has successfully navigated one of the more perilous stages in a start-up’s life: a period of hypergrowth. ..... Ms. Sandberg’s close ties to many of the world’s largest advertisers, relationships she first developed as a senior executive at Google. ..... has freed Mr. Zuckerberg to focus on what he likes best: the Facebook Web site and its platform. ..... Mr. Zuckerberg, a 26-year-old engineer and product visionary, is socially awkward and reserved. At 41, Ms. Sandberg is the opposite: polished, personable, chatty and at ease in the limelight. ..... Sandberg, who has a Harvard M.B.A. .... Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, says he considers Ms. Sandberg to be a “superstar.” ...... “A lot of people choose to hire people who look exactly like them,” Mr. Zuckerberg says. “Here we just value balance a lot more. It takes work to build those relationships, but if it does work, you end up with a much better system.” ...... Mr. Zuckerberg met Ms. Sandberg at a Christmas party in 2007, and they immediately took a liking to each other. What followed was an intense, six-week business courtship, during which the two dined together multiple times a week. Because both of them are Silicon Valley celebrities, they typically ate at Ms. Sandberg’s house so they could keep their talks confidential. ....... Sandberg also oversees the seemingly arcane operational details that can help a company run smoothly — especially a company that is growing rapidly...... “She’s good at strategy and dives deep and understands how teams work together.” ..... To this day, Ms. Sandberg looks a bit out of place at Facebook. ...... Their penchant for jeans, T-shirts and hoodies is in sharp contrast to her taste for elegant clothing. ...... She went desk to desk to introduce herself, cracking jokes and asking questions. It had the desired effect. ..... mentoring many younger employees — especial Image via CrunchBasely women, encouraging many of them not to shy away from important roles simply because they were planning to start families. ..... Although she was still in her 20s, she played pivotal roles, like helping ramp up aid efforts to Africa by opening Treasury’s door to Bono of U2. ..... “I had never heard of him and said to Sheryl that I only meet with people who have a first name and last name,” Mr. Summers recalls...... The two often socialize, and Mr. Zuckerberg, who was captain of his high school fencing team, has taught Ms. Sandberg’s 5-year-old son a few fencing moves.
"There are not going be that many innovating companies coming from the web."
- Peter Thiel
new york craigslist > manhattan > gigs > computer gigs
Do you have the next Facebook? (Upper West Side)
Date: 2010-10-02, 6:09AM EDT
Reply to: gigs-zedgc-1984693979@craigslist.org
I am looking to provide capital and business guidance for the next great idea. I am a successful entrepreneur and can help take a business to the next level.
If you have a business or idea you have been contemplating and are looking for some type of assistance lets connect.
Shoot me an email to start.
Thanks!
Jeff
it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
Compensation: Funding
PostingID: 1984693979
Peter Thiel: We Would Be A Lot More Careful About Funding Facebook Today. But…: What he meant is that he would think twice about investing in Facebook again because there are not going be that many innovating companies coming from the web. He thinks that a lot of the current big guys, like Google and Yelp, will be at the forefront of innovation and that there’s not many game-changers emerging that will innovate on the web. He tells Lacy, “Yelp of cellphones will be Yelp, the Google of cellphones will be Google.”
TechCrunch: How Facebook Can Become Bigger In Five Years Than Google Is Today: Facebook will grow without needing to cut into Google’s core business of text ads, which are still 99% of Google’s profits ..... because Madison Avenue’s brands are less interested in targeting than they are in broadcasting to vast mother-loving buckets of demographically correct eyeballs, and Facebook has become the perfect platform for that. ...... Facebook already has more page views than Google. People already spend more time spent on Facebook than Google. ..... For many consumers, Facebook is the Web....... Facebook’s second-mover advantage affords the company the luxury of offering both types of Internet money-making product: Advertising and Commerce..... targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions feed into the next series of even-better-targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions ..... Television advertising represented $60 billion in 2009, or roughly one out of every two dollars spent on advertising in the U.S. ..... Facebook “is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. ..... brand advertising, which accounts for 90 percent of the $600 billion ad market. ..... . Yahoo just paid $1 per like, and buying fans is only going to get more expensive as the lifetime value of a “fan” is better understood. ...... Facebook Credits are poised to be this generation’s American Express .... Facebook is running the real mafia wars, taking 30% while letting the game developers do the heavy lifting. ..... PayPal’s 2009 revenue was $2.8 billion with 87 million active accounts ..... The most famous example of this in our industry is Microsoft’s inability to come to terms with the Web. When Windows and Office were making money hand over fist, text ads were as small as mouse balls. .... in 2004 when Jason Kottke boldly predicted that Google would become “the biggest and most important company in the world in 5-8 years” by selling access to the world’s biggest, best, and most cleverly utilized map of the web
Image via CrunchBaseMy favorite TechCrunch writer - Sarah Lacy - has a piece on my favorite character in tech: Larry Ellison. Coincidence?
This Leo Apotheker - (please do not ask me to pronounce the dude's last name) - move by HP is all human drama, and n-o-t-h-i-n-g to do with technology.
It is like after Bush 2004 burnt into John Kerry's forearm that he was a Mr. Flip Flop, Kerry duly delivered the line afterwards: "I actually voted for the Iraq War before I voted against it."
Losers have a way of falling into the mousetrap neatly laid out for them.
I mean, duh. What was the HP Board thinking? They are like, okay Larry, hit me baby one more time. HP has been primarily a hardware company. Name one HP software product, quick. You can't. Name one HP enterprise software product. I don't think such a thing exists. And they got Thepo. HP's days as an independent company might be numbered.
This Apothepo guy used to run SAP when SAP was actually competing with Oracle. SAP to this day prides itself in being an all software company. They think Larry going into hardware is a mistake. To Larry's credit he thinks SAP's very existence is a mistake. That is not a fight between equals. Ring the bells, end the fight.
Wall Street Journal: Larry Ellison ‘Speechless’ Over New CEO of H-P: Larry Ellison, the outspoken CEO of Oracle, said he is having trouble finding words to describe his reaction to H-P naming former SAP chief Leo Apotheker as its new top man–and then found plenty of them. .... SAP, where Apotheker worked for more than 20 years, is Oracle’s largest competitor for business-application programs, and Ellison seldom misses an opportunity to take pot shots at the company. ..... When Oracle and H-P settled the lawsuit regarding Hurd’s hiring, both companies put out statements lauding the other as a valuable partner.
I walked out. Spent some time in the bookstore next door. I had quietly noted down a time slot that might work. It was close to 7PM.
I walked in again about 15 minutes before that. I bought a ticket. I am glad I did.
This actually is a very well made movie. It is a movie. It is a fictionalized version of what happened, but there are too many parallels.
It is good drama. Kevin Spacey is the executive producer. That adds to the weight, I believe.
Facebook has become too big a cultural phenomenon to have been able to avoid a movie like this made. Too many people who will not pick up a book on the topic want to know what happened.
The dramatizations aside, I did not feel Zuck got demonized or anything like that. The lawsuits were but harassments posssible in murky legal environments.
Mark Zuckerberg did not steal the idea from anyone, those guys should never have received any money. Those were bogus lawsuits. He got blackmailed, and the system allowed that.
The best line of the movie is when Zuck says: "You have a part of my attention."
The guy presented as cofounder was not a cofounder. Zuck wrote all that early code.
A big omission in the movie is Zuck's steady girlfriend of so many long years. She is not shown at all.
And of course the movie totally misses out on the engineering behind the phenomenon called Facebook.
But then movies perhaps are supposed to be drama, and hence the total focus on the lawsuits. Lawsuits make for friction make for drama. Image via Wikipedia
The movie is well made, it is not accurate, was not meant to be, although most people will believe most details.
Facebook the company has no big reason to dislike the movie, really. There is much dramatization, not much demonization.
The basic movie ingredients are actually in top form. I can see this movie making a lot of money worldwide.
Image via WikipediaI have no plans to go see the movie. I stand in solidarity with Mark Zuckerberg on this one. That is not saying I might never see the movie. At some point I will. This is fiction. This is no documentary. This is not a book.
The Facebook story fascinates me. Just like the Google story fascinates me. Just like the Microsoft story fascinates. Larry Ellison fascinates me. If I watch the movie, I think I am going to come out hungry for books on the subject.
This movie is a dramatization. This is Hollywood trying to figure out something it has not been able to figure out. Hollywood has been at war with Silicon Valley. Hollywood has so far not figured out business models that Silicon Valley technologies ask for. But this movie is not Hollywood assaulting the valley. Hollywood is too disorganized to do such a thing. But some organizing takes place at subliminal levels, like when Tea Party white people talk code to rally against Barack Obama's blackness.
At the end of the day, this is just a movie. In the mean time, go read Sree's review.
Sree Srinivasan: Six Things Learned Watching 'The Social Network': I am not a movie critic and, thanks to my 7-year-old twins, I don't get to see a lot of non-animated movies. .... Oscar winner Kevin Spacey is listed as a producer. ..... Parker helps speed up the estrangement between Zuckerberg and Saverin in the movie and also suggests changing the name to just "Facebook." Timberlake is a scene stealer. The pop star appears to had a lot of fun playing a guy out to make lots of money without much regard for morals and rules. .... smartphones confiscated from those attending that screening ...... a lot of people did manage to take phones into the theater, as there were various glowing screens in the darkened theater. A security guard marched up and down the aisles and shined a flashlight on the offenders until they put away their phones.
Redfiff: Aseem Chabbra: How Facebook Came To Be: a curly haired, Jewish American Harvard University undergrad, and a cocky genius Marc Zuckerberg. ..... Harvard authorities caught up with Zuckerberg accusing him of hacking and breaching the university's secure systems and he was placed on probation. ...... Following the probation, as Zuckerberg's name spreads in the hallways and the courtyards at Harvard, he is approached by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss -- twin brothers ...... and their Indian American friend Divya Narendra from Queens, New York .... Zuckerberg stalls the project by sending unsubstantial emails to the three, while developing the prototype of what he eventually called The Facebook. He later drops "The" from the name of the company on advice of his mentor -- Napster co-founder Sean Parker .... Zuckerberg is a programming genius with little business sense. .... intrigues, jealousies and deceptions.
The Chromium Blog: WebP, a new image format for the Web: a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images....Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today.
The engineering accomplishment might be the easy part. Adoption might be the hard part. There still are people whose ISP is AOL. Most people who use IE use some primitive version.
Slate: The Other Social Network:That spring, Goldberg started instant messaging with Mark Zuckerberg. In March, he met with Zuckerberg and Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder and early Facebook investor, at a Starbucks on 96th Street. According to Goldberg, Parker tried to persuade Zuckerberg to acquire CU Community. Zuckerberg didn't tip his hand, but Goldberg says they kept in touch. In June, he says, Zuckerberg invited him to Palo Alto, Calif., where the Facebook crew had moved to work on the site. Goldberg flew out and stayed with Zuckerberg and pals for two weeks. "I think we went to one Stanford party," he says. There was "no crazy partying or drinking," Goldberg says, despite what The Social Network may suggest...... One factor was that Zuckerberg's site had the financial means to expand. Goldberg says he turned down advertisers, including MTV, and didn't seek out venture capital .... He started writing a food blog
The dude should have joined the Facebook team at the earliest possible date. Capitalism.
The Official Google Blog: What does the future of display advertising look like?: “Display 2015: Smart and Sexy.” ...... Display advertising really is at the heart of what we’re doing at Google these days. 99 percent of our top 1,000 clients are now running campaigns on the Google Display Network. And last year, they increased their spending on display advertising by over 75 percent. .... in five years, there will be five metrics that advertisers commonly regard as more important than the click ... Watch
Google probably feels "stuck" with its traditional revenue source, the ads that show up with search results, the spartan text ads. Unless it goes into mobile, into display, its market value is not going to compete with Apple. This new push for display ads is Google's idea of an iPad. It is a new thing to do. But it is not like Google is going into display ads, something it so avoided when starting out. Google's display ads will be a new, interactive, social kind. Google intends to reinvent display advertising on the web.
With this push Google is looking for its next big growth. This is no one trick pony.
In The News
Wall Street Journal: Digits: Google Wants to Make Online Display Ads ‘Sexy’: “On television, [networks] generally made more money by showing more ads,” said Shishir Mehrotra, a YouTube executive. “Online video will reverse that trend.” .... display advertising would be one of his company’s next $10 billion-plus businesses.
New York Times Backs News-Aggregation Software Company: Ongo describes itself as providing “computer and telecommunications software for use in aggregating and viewing news and syndication feeds.” ..... News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal, has been talking to media companies about creating a cable TV-type business for news, allowing consumers to set up one bill to access digital content from multiple media companies.
New York Time: Bits: By the Numbers: Apple, Microsoft, Dell, H.P.: $49.53 billion — That’s the gap separating Apple and Microsoft .... on the back of strong iPhone sales and rising interest in the iPad. ..... $52.47 billion — That’s the gap between Apple’s value and that of Exxon Mobil ... Dell .. can claim more patents than Apple
Amazon Introduces Kindle for the Web: lets digital book buyers read books on the Web and also offers the ability to embed book samples on blogs or other Web sites, similar to the function offered with video clips on YouTube.
New York Times: Media Decoder: Google Predicts More Social, and Profitable, Display Ads: a Web where the ads are more social, mobile and real-time — and a lot more profitable..... cellphone screens would be the No. 1 screen for viewing the Web by 2015..... “Static banner ads will become a thing of the past.” ..... a “meta media phenomenon.” .... Display advertising will grow to be a $50 billion market. .... companies would have more time to focus on the creative aspects of their marketing campaigns. “The technology should just work”
Gizmodo: The Plans For Steve Jobs' New House: more of a small, private retreat than any towering glass-and-steel tech chapel or totem of wealth. ..... Jobs intends to populate the 6 acres with an assortment of indigenous flora; a simple three-car garage; a modest 5 bedroom home with plenty of windows and decks; a network of lighted stone walkways; and even a private vegetable garden. Everything is neat, tight, pragmatic, and in its place. ..... No chauffeur's cottage, no cook's cottage, and no tennis courts. In fact, when compared something like Larry Ellison's $70 million feudal Japan themed estate located right up the road, Jobs' new digs seem downright monkish—if not Buffettian..... almost Zen ..... At a time when architect and design firms are just starting to apply to Apple's design principles to the building of homes (clean, tight, nothing unnecessary), Steve Jobs has gone and designed the iPhone of houses. ..... the home was clearly built for a man (there's a distinct lack of a woman's touch here) who likes privacy, a natural setting, and working. Especially working...... a person whose life if very internal. He does not want what is going on outside to interfere with what is going on inside
