Category: observations

Today, off to the UW Medical Center with a gallon jug of bodily fluids, carefully collected over the past 24 hours, in hopes of gaining some insight into how kidney stones are formed.

I hope it helps.

STEVE HEYER’S MANIFESTO FOR A NEW AGE OF MARKETING

People are always saying that this medium or that medium is in decay, declining, going away. No medium goes away; its role changes. That’s all. And as media fragmentation continues… and as new choices continue to emerge and technology leaps out ahead of consumers’ wishes to change the way they behave… it’s incumbent upon us all — advertisers, marketers, creators of content and culture, everyone in this game — to think. And to think differently about how we’ll connect with consumers in the future.

This is worth reading if you’re interested in how your attention, your time, is going to be commoditized in future.

King County Library System — How To Install & Use the LibraryLookup Tool

LibraryLookup is a small bit of JavaScript (a bookmarklet) that you add to your Bookmarks.

Excellent.

douglasp

I sent the below email to Steve Jobs today.

I think Mr Purdy was in some of my UW CSE classes: he was slumming, since he knew all the material cold.

I find his weblog thrugh Dave Winer: he mentioned how MSFT needs a human face (other than Gates and Ballmer).

Other stuff on this page worth reading as well.

Senator Byrd – Virtual Newsroom

Have we not learned that after winning the war one must always secure the peace?

You can hear his voice ringing through the Senate as you read this. Please do read it.

Due Diligence

(I should also mention geography as a negative selector. Since early stage investing is inherently hands-on, many funds won’t do early deals very far from their home offices. Our rule is now ‘Pacific time zone only.’ Distance also makes the networking more difficult, even in the Internet age.)

A Web Site With Fizz

The widespread and generally unchallenged Net belief is that the age of communication – from e-mail to teleconferencing to wireless devices everywhere – will finally make physical presence and location irrelevant. Work will be farmed out around the world, wherever talented people are available. The living-hell of airline travel and commuting will diminish, as we perform our work from a location we choose.

Everyone knows the evidence of this proposition. People log in from around the world to connect with the head office. Cargo ships deliver countless wares produced overseas using designs sent to manufacturers by e-mail. But consider the evidence on the other side:

* The real-estate premium for choice, central locations – Manhattan, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle – vs. the hinterlands is higher than ever before, suggesting that people in the same business find physical proximity to work worth an ever-rising price.
* Well over half of all U.S. venture capital flows through Northern California, rather than dispersing – as it would if location didn’t count.
* The biggest and most fiercely competitive knowledge-industry companies make a point of concentrating their work in central locations, rather than scattering it across the country. Land is far pricier in Redmond, Wash., than in Amarillo, Texas, but Microsoft (MSFT) keeps putting its new buildings close to the old Redmond ones.
* Just as the “paperless office” era has led to steadily higher pulp consumption, so the age of the “virtual office” has led to more passengers on the airways and more commuters on the roadways than ever before.

So the question is: Why should we think it will ever be different? When, exactly, will location and face-to-face contact cease to be as important as they are now? The person who can offer the best fact-based argument wins the prize. Decision of the judge (me) is subjective, and final. The reward is a meal and drink in the San Francisco area – where, odds are, the winner is already based.

An old question: so far, the answer is no.

Due Diligence

Latent Semantics was invented at Bellcore in late 1980s, by an All-Star information science team including Tom Landauer, George Furnas, and Sue Dumais. (IP alert: It’s patented.) There’s a more recent description from Tom Landauer’s university group here (PDF) and another overview under Creative Commons license here.

So all that mumbling and griping about being a Prime Mover in this space were an utter waste of time. I remember reading that if you tell a VC that you’re the only one working on a solution to problem X, that tells them problem X isn’t a compelling problem: you can watch their eyes glaze over as they mentally move on to the next presentation. I thought that was bad, but far worse is to be unaware that your big idea was patented 10 years earlier.

It’s a very deflating feeling. I had no idea this had been done already. Perhaps a more tech-savvy legal team would have known how to find the facts. I don’t know.

Pthbthbthbth.

Guardian Unlimited | Online | Ministers of sound

Last week, Clear Channel, the American radio and concert promotion giant, was reported to be preparing plans to offer live recordings of concerts on CD, at the venue, five minutes after the curtain falls. According to a report in the Boston Globe, by recording directly off the sound mixing desk, and using a bank of cheap CD burners, they will be able to sell concert goers perfect recordings.

The scheme is reportedly to be piloted in small venues in spring with, most likely, the first MP3s appearing on file-sharing networks around 30 minutes later.

And there lies the rub. For bands whose main audience is the live one, allowing fans live recordings of the previous night’s show could be a winner. For the more possessive record labels, it’s a potential nightmare. When stadia could shift 20,000 CDs in an evening and provide free advertising for the rest of the tour, it is so potentially lucrative, it might just be the one that forces labels to reconsider their policy towards file sharing.

This is an interesting development. Will all acts go along with it? Why not? After all, you just paid for the show, why not take it home? But then the filesharing aspect rears its head: will the record companies be willing to accept that music recordings for which they paid zero production cost and zero promotion cost will be available as viral marketing tools that at least some listeners will have paid for the privilege of distributing?

If this doesn’t wake them up, what will?
Continue reading “every show is a live album, every fan a sales rep”

The Safari Update 2-12-03 improves the compatibility with popular web sites based on Safari user feedback, further improves the performance of loading web pages and Flash content, adds support for XML, increases standards conformance and delivers improved application stability. The update also enables access to web sites that offer self-signed security certificates.

It — 1.0 beta v60 — still doesn’t let me post to MovableType.