February 2012
11 posts
Watch This: This Is What You See When You Crash... →
Earlier this week we showed you Jeb Corliss’ brush with death, as he hit the side of Table Mountain while attempting a wingsuit jump. Now, the footage from the cameras mounted to his helmet is available—and it looks terrifying. When Jeb jumped off of Table Mountain, he sure as hell wasn’t…
Cycle
You know you are near the top of a hipster hype cycle when adults think riding around on scooters looks cool rather than dorky.
Irony
MG really doesn’t get the irony of this?
He made his name being the loudest echo in the informal Apple PR echo chamber.
Horrifying
There is little more horrifying than software specifications written by people who have never written a line of code in their lives.
Can someone explain
…why it takes ClipperCard 72 hours to add rides to my account if I purchase them on the website?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/andrewsullivan/rApM/... →
Cable TV Content Bundles
If you hate content bundling and want a la carte TV choices blame the content providers, not the MSOs.
“I just want to make sure you understood this. The MVPDs (multichannel video programming distributors) have always had the opportunity to offer small packages. What they don’t have is the opportunity to offer ESPN on small packages. The deal basically requires ESPN to be offered on...
2 tags
Google Self Driving Car
Katy and I were running errands last night in Palo Alto and saw a google self driving car. Katy was unaware of these vehicles and after getting over her initial shock over the concept said:
“They are easy to spot, they are the only cars on the road using their turn signals”
3 tags
X-Box as Trojan Horse
X-Box will be an underestimated and effective trojan horse in the battle of the connected living room.
January 2012
40 posts
Apple Becomes World's Biggest Maker of Computers,... →
I would actually call them computing appliances rather than computers. A computer is general purpose machine that can be instructed by the user to run a user defined workflow process (sometimes called a program). My dishwasher has a computer in it. The appliance wrapper removes me a layer away from the computer. The same is true with the iPad.
thegongshow:
parislemon:
Cue dozens of people...
Why does anyone ever use MS Outlook?
“At Trinity, only 2.4 percent of children from families with no previous...”
– Scraping the $40,000 Ceiling at New York City Private Schools - NYTimes.com
Ugly, ugly statistic.
(via jericsinger)
Pet Peeve
People who go through all kinds of machinations to try and use MS Excel as a database instead of just setting up a database.
1 tag
Duh...
Netflix Streaming Margins Are 11 Percent, DVD Margins Are 52 Percent
“Out of Netflix’s total $847 million in revenues last quarter, $476 million came from streaming and $370 million came from DVD rentals (the remainder came from international). The streaming business also twice as many subscribers: 21.7 million versus 11.2 million. But the DVD business contributed the vast majority of...
KoPoint Audio Campaign Coverage →
kopoint:
The KoPoint political team has been hard at work producing independent audio content from the 2012 presidential campaign cycle. Gain greater insight on the American political system by listening to our podcasts and live reports.
Get involved with KoPoint politics.
Gingrich Didn't Earn Millions as Historian
My historian friends seem unsurprised.
"Twitter seeing 3 to 5 percent engagement on...
I don’t believe this. I do not believe organic tweets see 3 - 5 percent engagement. Unless we’re defining “engagement” in some random way.
Go Patriots.
The GOP nominating Newt Gingrich would be as effective for their electoral hopes in the fall as the Democrats nominating Nancy Pelosi.
“The points of friction actually work in Hollywood’s favor. It’s a constraint...”
– Sarah Lacy
Friends with Kindles
Is it worth an extra $50 to get the 3G one or do you just load it on wifi and not worry about it?
Information Arbitrage: The perils of "free riders" →
This was the death of Yahoo!. Bad hiring.
informationarbitrage:
Starting a company is, by its nature, an “all in” affair. You’ve either got the passion to run through walls, suffer painful failures and do unnatural things to achieve success or you don’t. And given the challenges of building a company and the tremendous amount of hard work and stress borne by…
“I’ve talked to nearly 30,000 people on this show, and all 30,000 had one thing...”
– I love this quote from Oprah. I’m not an Oprah fan at all, never watched her show in its entirety nor quoted her.
Yet this strikes home as very true and a core human behavior. For all the people I work with and for myself. Thanks to Bryce for surfacing this in his post.
(via awaldstein)
Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 →
Does this surprise anyone? Huge valuations combined with iffy revenues that don’t support the valuations and commissioned salespeople are going to lead to more and more abuse.
“Hi, this is Mike from Yelp,” the voice would say. “You’ve had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You’ve had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top....
barackobama:
“While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”
- The White House, responding this morning to a petition on SOPA and online piracy
Twitter Shuts Down Proxlet? →
Is this a hardball acquisition play? “Nice feature, but we’re going to shut you down, and now that you’re worth nothing we’d like to buy you.”
2 tags
Todd Palin Endorses Gingrich
I may be nuts, but I may not be. Todd Palin endorsed Newt Gingrich this week. I think we’re seeing the beginning of a set up.
Newt Gingrich is not going to be the nominee. No one believes he can get it. In fact of everyone in the race I think he has amongst the worst chances of being the nominee.
Mitt Romney will be the nominee.
The evangelical wing of the GOP is not going to be happy...
Get Glue Raises Money (something here is odd) →
100 million checkins from 2 million users seems unlikely (they also mention 350M total checkins, comments, and ratings). Users going from 750K to 2 million (~2.6X) but checkins grew 1000% (10X) is also hard to reconcile. Not all 2 million users are active, many connect via FB or twitter and never use the service. I’m supposed to believe an average of 50 checkins per registered user (plus...
1 tag
The Death of the Tea Party
The GOP is going to nominate a private equity guy, a wall street insider, who, when he was a governor created the model for Obama’s health care plan (which they consider socialism). This from a policy standpoint goes against everything the Tea Party supposedly stood for.
The message of the tea party has been distilled down to its essence. They hate Barack Obama as a person.
Simple Early Stage Terms →
“As a general rule, deviation from a simple and elegant term sheet (especially in early rounds of financing) can cause strain, and super pro-rata rights is just another (new and emerging) example.”
Why I Hate Android
What MG always fails to realize is that Google bought Android years before the iPhone was announced. In fact Google bought Android before Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s BOD.
But MG’s hate has nothing to do with rationality, it’s a religious war for him.
parislemon:
Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those...
Strong Opinions @marksbirch: Loving Ideas Vs.... →
“They just give you a smile and tell you you’re awesome.”
Until you miss a quarter and then they don’t. Then they go all passive aggressive with you. Which given they’ve given you no useful feedback earlier in the relationship is not helpful.
marksbirch:
dwellman:
“Beware the VC who loves every idea.”
Cheerleaders make for useless investors. You do not have any idea...
The Pats signing Josh McDaniels earlier this week is starting to look like a really good move.
Can a dome team like the Saints go to Green Bay in January and win outdoors in the cold?
Hey Newt, which of your marriages was the sacramental one?
GOP debate
Is on at the same time as the football playoffs
Bijan Sabet: Thinking about shared connected... →
+1. The devices that truly need accounts the most (and a quick and easy way to switch between them) are iPads.
bijan:
Today’s connected devices are more interesting than ever.
And we know know- the the simpler the better.
My 10yr got a kindle for Christmas this year. I didn’t have to teach her how to use it. The Kindle is linked to my Amazon Kindle account. She finds a book, buys a book and...
Loose Campaign / Tour Travel Schedule
danpatterson:
More details TK - excited to share more information about the campaign. For now, this is my loose travel schedule.
Looks like I’ll be in New Hampshire tomorrow, January 7th, through Tuesday the 10. I then travel to Boston on Wednesday, January 11th, Prividence on the 12th, and Philly on the 13th and 14th.
Tour media will be curated on Storify, status and location updates will be...
