This is a great 5 minute video from the British version of American Idol. It’s the story of a 47 year old Susan Boyle and her audition for the show. This is why the web beats mainstream TV. The fact that i can watch this little clip which is better than 90% of the scripted shows on network television is why i have great love for the internet.
I’ve been getting some great music over the past few months and i thought i’d share. Here are my top 11 tracks of 2009 so far.
(1) Uylsses by Franz Ferdinand. This band had the badass single Take Me Out a few years ago and i wouldn’t have been surprised if they ended up a one-hit wonder. But they rebounded with a new album in 2009. It has one good song called Lucid Dreams and another total classic here in Uylsses. The first 90 seconds get me incredibly pumped and it’s tops on my running mix. Click for the mp3.
(2) 1901 by Phoenix. As many of you know, Phoenix is one of my favorite bands (lots of past entries). Their last album It’s Never Been Like That is a classic and one of my top 10 all-time. They have a new album out this year called Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and it’s really really good. It’s only 9 songs and 5 of them are top notch. The best of the bunch is 1901 which is worth a listen (mp3).
(3) and (4) Oh, No and Fitz & Dizzyspells by Andrew Bird. There are 2 songs here and both are killer sing-songy tunes from his new Noble Beast album. Plus, i love the whistling in the beginning of Oh, No and in the middle of Fitz & Dizzy. The song Oh, No was the first song i got addicted to and just when i thought i was getting Bird out of my head, Fitz came along and sucked me in for another month. These songs will make you happy (especially Fitz). Here’s Oh, No mp3 and here is F&D’s mp3.
Continue reading “Top 11 Tracks of 2009 (so far)”
There’s a growing trend in the media to attack facebook. It started when their redesign got pretty bad reviews, continued when their CFO left, and now is gaining steam as mainstream outlets are questioning it’s core business proposition. There are three different things here and the media is pointing to them as an indication of Facebook‘s failure. I disagree. Here’s why:
Product enhancements. One thing i’ve admired about Facebook is their ability to keep pushing their product forward. They introduced a great photo experience before any of their competitors (and have grown to be #1 on the web). Even as they were experience phenomenal growth (they hit 8 million student readers), they completely redid their home page when they introduced the News Feed. While initially hated by their users (FB blog) and the media (Time article), it set the standard for how social networks should display user activity and is now seen as a stroke of genius. And growth climbed even higher. At 70 million users they then completely redid the profile page to be a feed-based page as this is the best way for users to continuously portray themselves (see Tumblr for an example). This was hated at first too. Now, they redone the Facebook Home page to better showcase conversations and user activity. Is it like Twitter? Yes. Is it hated by their users? Yes. But it is also an improvement. More than any other company i know of, Facebook is constantly pushing to get better in all areas and doing it fearlessly. Even if they misstep, I applaud them for it. From my experience at AOL i’ve seen that when yoy have a large user base it’s very easy to become tentative and second-guess every move. Not changing becomes the easiest path. It also means you start dying. This latest change is more an indication that they’re not dying but moving forward.
Valuation. Facebook got an absurd $15 billion valuation from Microsoft when it sold them some equity. That deal was more than just equity sales but it also solidified Microsoft’s relationship with them as their exclusive third-party ad provider (story). That valuation has become a problem as every new raise that happens in the industry (Twitter, FriendFeed) is evaluated against it. Facebook is now raising at a more reasonable level at a $5 billion valuation. I don’t think this is an indication of failure of FB but rather a reflection (a) that these raises are straight equity and not part of an ad sales agreement, and (b) the market is the worst it’s ever been. I think it’s ridiculous to think that the environment is the same as it was in October 2007.
Business Model. The media talks about Facebook’s failure to make an ad business out of their inventory. Time’s article this past week was called, “Facebook Takes a Dive: Why Social Networks Are Bad Businesses.” This is completely ridiculous. First of all, MySpace is making money. Let me repeat. MySpace is making money. They were bought by Fox for $580 million and they then immediately did a deal with Google to sell ads on their search page from 2006 to 2010 for $900 million dollars (details here). That’s a quick profit of $320 million. Everything else on top of that year-in and year-out seems to be gravy. The article in Time continues to say:
What is true is that social network sites have had trouble making money. MySpace was supposed to be a big part of the revenue growth at News Corp. Wall St. thought Murdoch was a genius to buy it. Last year, News Corp had to admit that MySpace would not hit its revenue targets. That is usually not the hallmark of a property that is going to take over the Internet. Analysts believe that MySpace rival Facebook had revenue of $265 million last year. That is astonishingly low for a company that had 57 million unique visitors in the U.S. last month. And, Facebook also has a very large international user base.
So let me get this straight, even though MySpace is profitable at $500-800 million dollars a year in revenues and even though it’s generated hundreds of millions of dollars for News Corp it’s a bad business becuase they missed their revenue target last year? That is completely ridiculous. Facebook is a differnt issue. They have repeatedly said that they are deprioritizing ad revenue and instead focusing on growth and user engagement. Since they started saying this (starting in late 2007), they have grown from 50 to 200 million users. I’d say that’s pretty good execution. Facebook makes about $275 million a year. Could they make another 100-200 million if they started selling more ads on search pages and profile pages? Absolutely.
All of these reasons above are why sensationalist articles discussing the demise of the social network drive me nuts. Nobody knows what the future holds, but one thing that we can pretty much be sure of is that sites that have great user engagement and activity – and facebook has over 20 million users update their status at least once a day – will get the ad dollars. Nick O’Neil has a good post on AllFacebook today on why he’s willing to pay a $34 CPM on facebook. It’s not the silver bullet but it shows that there is a profitable end in sight for the company and it’s not necessarily the horrible business the media would like it to be.
While reading the highly entertaining mailbag by Bill Simmons, i read this from one of his readers:
Recently, Morgan Freeman came to my town to help celebrate the opening of one of his restaurants, Pig ‘N Whistle BBQ. He came around and greeted every table and talked with each guest, and everyone was getting their picture taken with him. I had a stroke of genius, though, and had my phone out. When Mr. Freeman reached our table, I asked if he would be so kind as to record a message for me. He said yes. Now I have this on my cell: “This is actor Morgan Freeman, Barnz is away from his phone right now but leave a message and he will call you back, I hope … I hope.” Is there a better choice for voicemail and a specific person to leave it?
— Barnz, Fayettesville, Ark.
That’s truly amazing. Of course Bill provided a few that he’d rather see:
2. Jack Nicholson: “This is Jack Nicholson. Bill isn’t home right now. You’re entitled to leave a message for him. Just know that I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain where he is, especially to someone who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said ‘thank you’ and went on your way. Either way, I don’t give a DAMN what you think you’re entitled to!!!”
3. Al Pacino: “Hi, this is Al Pacino. I don’t know where Bill is right now. But I do know this. Life is just a game of inches. I am still willing to fight and die for that inch because that is what LIVING is!!! The six inches in front of your face!!!!! Now I can’t make you leave a message. You gotta do it. So wait for the beep.”
4. Buffalo Bill (from Silence of the Lambs): “This is Jame Gumb answering Bill’s cell phone. Bill’s not here. (Long pause.) Is this a great big fat person?”
It’s pretty funny – can you think of anything better?
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I just overheard someone ripping on Ben Affleck. Say what you will about him – with JLo and Gigli he doesn’t have much wiggle room – but he does have 3 of the better monologues in the past 15 years. They are:
The job interview of Good Will Hunting:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hWIr9_noRo]
The middle of Boiler Room:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8JkSEvyFhM]
The end of Chasing Amy:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XfJY5QR3Lc]
I personally like the interview the best. He also has made (adapted and directed) the best Boston movie I know of in Gone Baby Gone. The Departed is great but Baby is better and more boston-ish.
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This week there was lots of buzz around Bit.ly, a URL shortener company from Beatworks that raised 2 million dollars. Betaworks is an incubator started by John Borthwick who i had the priveldge of working with at AOL. Bit.ly is pretty sweet. Check out the things it can do for you:
That’s pretty slick indeed. I think it’s interesting to see that investors see a service that helps developers and others garner more value from the web as a legitmate business. I’m presonally not sure where the business is in there.
An interesting post i read related to this is Delicious Joshua Schachter’s blog post about URL shorteners. As he states, there are 3 people involved in shortening: (1) the site the link refers to, (2) the site/service – the transit – containing the shortened URL, and (3) the user clicking on the shortened URL. In his view, ALL are harmed from this service. As he states:
The transit’s main problem with these systems is that a link that used to be transparent is now opaque and requires a lookup operation. From my past experience with Delicious, I know that a huge proportion of shortened links are just a disguise for spam, so examining the expanded URL is a necessary step. The transit has to hit every shortened link to get at the underlying link and hope that it doesn’t get throttled. It also has to log and store every redirect it ever sees.
The site where the link points to has milder problems. It’s possible that the redirection steps steals search juice. It certainly makes it harder to track down links to the published site if the publisher ever needs to reach their authors. And the publisher may lose information about the source of its traffic.
But the biggest burden falls on the clicker, the person who follows the links. The extra layer of indirection slows down browsing with additional DNS lookups and server hits. A new and potentially unreliable middleman now sits between the link and its destination. And the long-term archivability of the hyperlink now depends on the health of a third party. The shortener may decide a link is a Terms Of Service violation and delete it. If the shortener accidentally erases a database, forgets to renew its domain, or just disappears, the link will break. If a top-level domain changes its policy on commercial use, the link will break. If the shortener gets hacked, every link becomes a potential phishing attack.
Those all sound hairy, although it seems that Bit.ly has taken care of the some of the problems of the site disappearing by caching the page. Even still, is the additional metrics provided by Bit.ly worth the loss of SEO juice? It will be interesting to see how services like this begin to change the linking landscape and whether their services of providing accurate gauges of what’s “hot” are useful
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I did an interview last night for USC business school where i was asked a lot of questions about Qloud and its beginnings. Questions like “What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs? What have you learned?” Well here goes…
i often hear people talk about “doing something big.” While I admire their desire to change the world, i find it interesting that quite often the companies that do end up changing the world started as small passion projects/startups. And the business model they find is usually nowhere in sight at the beginning. Some examples:
This thought of doing something you believe in and are passionate about regardless of the size really hit home for me when i heard Kathy Sierra’s keynote at SXSW this year. She had 16 points on how to make breakthroughs happen. Point #15 was Don’t mistake narrow for shallow. She pointed at hyper-focused blogs like Passive Aggressive Notes and the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks as mastering a very tiny sliver of the internet. But you could point to the 3 i mention above (Facebook, Craigslist, and Google) as examples of companies that started narrow and gradually expanded to be game-changers.
When thinking about companies, i think it’s important people try new ideas and things they are passionate about. You’re going to be working 24 hours a day 7 days a week on one idea, so you have to love it. Or as Tim O’Reilly says Work on Stuff That Matters. It’s clear that startups don’t have all the answers when they begin so at least you can start with something you’re willing to continuously think about.
I was again struck with this thought this morning when i read Clay Shirky’s great post about newspaper and the change they are going through. He too talks about Craigslist saying:
Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.
So, my advice to aspiring entreprenuers is – (a) focus o something you love; (b) don’t focus on changing the world but rather focus on doing something, one thing, extremely well. If you execute on those 2 points, it’s easy to expand into something more powerful and profitable.
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This is a great post done by my boy Travis Kalanick who is one of the most kick-ass entreprenuers out there. He kept RedSwoosh alive from 2001-2008 before he sold to Akamai. There are quite a few tough years in there but he completely scrapped it out and rocked it. His post outlines what every entreprenuer needs to know when raising money. Check it out here.
One part i liked talks about bringing the passion, saying:
Passion/Chrisma is the X-factor. It separates the men from the boys in fundraising. If you’re doing a startup, you’re trying to change the world, you’ve kicked your cushy job to the curb, you’ve had Ramen noodles for breakfast lunch and dinner as far as you can remember, and maybe you’ve moved back in with the ‘rents. You’ve definitely got the passion…why else would you be doing this? Don’t be afraid to show it. Every pitch could be your last one (i.e. the dude across the table writes you a check!), know that… give it your all… listen to some music that pumps you up before you get into the meeting, think about all of the great shit you’re doing and could do.
My favorite music to listen to is this speech by Al Pacino. I find it really motivating – and it got the job done when i was pounding the pavement in Palo Alto. Click here to listen: Inches are Everywhere!
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I had to laugh at this video about twitter.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w]
I spent a lot of time this weekend explaining Twitter to people. People want to know not just what it is but why they should use it. It’s confusing for people who have never tried it. It’s so simple yet so confounding. This chart explains the early stages well: 
One thing i’ve noticed in my explanations is that Twitter is much more like MySpace than Facebook. I also heard the term “egocasting” for the first time. It makes sense. Both Facebook and MySpace are social networks but if you look at their architecture, you’ll see that Twitter is more like MySpace in that all profiles are public by default and it’s a place for sharing.
Let me explain more. one of the strangest things i noticed during SXSW last week was that during panels, whenever someone asked a question, they came up to the microphone and (a) stated their name, (b) said their twitter handle, (c) asked their question. Everyone did that. It was amazing. People at SXSW are entrepreneurs but more than promoting their company, they are there to promote themselves. People are brands now more than ever and promoting yourself and your brand is more important now more than ever. Twitter lets you do that better than any other social tool. Just like MySpace allowed bands to simply say, “hey go to www.myspace.com/pinkfloyd” users can say, “hey just go to twitter.com/pescatello to find out about me.” It’s public, it’s just a URL and it will provide all the info you need to get to know someone.
Whether it’s good or bad that the popular tools of society are built to broadcast yourself out to the world is a good question. Regardless of the answer, the fact is that Twitter is here and embraced and only go to grow in strength and adoption. There’s a whole other post on why Twitter caught on. I do think it’s a good tool for our time and it combination of “egocasting,” easy mobile usage, and a great API have helped. I’d love to hear more about what you think. Please comment below
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