Mike Lewis

With the new year, i’m going to try to do some more things.  Here’s what i have in mind: 

Read More. I hit a reading rut in 2011 where i went a few months without finishing a book. This was for good reasons (i was pretty busy doing actual work), but I want to get back to reading a book a month. I’m already on a good path as i’m busting out Ebert’s memoir and also Lean Startup and i’m really enjoying both. 

Exercise More. I used to exercise every day and lately i’ve been finding myself at only 2 or 3 times a week.  I want to give crossfit a go and stay at 4 times a week for the entire year.  Some other goals are: biking to and from Boulder from Denver twice a month in the summer.  And, possibly, doing a triathlon if I can get back in the pool.  

Eating Better.   I still have horrible eating habits.  I eat portions way too large and i eat stuff that’s just not good for me (ahem, Domino’s pizza).  I haven’t been able to do smaller portions.  I think cooking will help this (see next).  

Cook More.  My goal is to cook at least once a month in 2012 (twelve times total).  I had the same goal in 2011 and failed miserably with only about 4 or 5 cooking attempts.  I’m looking forward to Liz’s blog (one that is going to tell me exactly what to make) helping me out here.  Hopefully I’ll be a master chef by the end of the year. 

These are my lifestyle goals for 2012.  You have any you’re doing that i’m missing? 

I wrote a post 9 months ago about whether FourSquare or Quora were going to break out as great companies. Many in the office chose Quora and i chose FourSquare. I didn’t know anything at the time, but i just had a hunch.

I’m still not correct.  Quora is doing really well still but more and more people are recognizing Foursquare as a pioneer.  In fact, yesterday, Anil Dash wrote a great post about why it’s such a compelling company, stating:

[Foursquare] has blossomed into truly impressive execution: Foursquare is the one startup that’s doing the most remarkable job of any company out there in product strategy and product creation.

He sites these 6 main points as to why:

1. Core platform
2. Reliable iteration
3. Technical competence
4. Design innovation
5. Thoughtful business model
6. Meaningful API’s

It’s a good read, check it out.

Some things i’ll remember about 2011:

Steve Jobs’ Death & Legacy. As Esquire says…

No one ever died the way Steve Jobs died. Other people have died of cancer. Other people have died in the public eye.  But no one has ever died with the inexorable logic of their mortality feeding into a logic of expectation that they themselves created and aroused.

Reading about Steve Jobs in 2011 was a terrific experience.  He inspired me to take my passion in products to the next level.  He was truly a special individual and will be missed.

Mavericks vs. Heat. The stage was set: a team of underdogs who lost to the Heat in 2006 vs. a team of selfish divas. Down 2-1 and nearly 3-1, the scappy Mavs fought back and took the title in the most exciting NBA Finals I’ve ever seen.

Iraq Ends & Osama Bin Laden is Killed.  More and more our involvement in the Middle East is winding down.  All troops in Iraq were brought home this year and the death of Osama Bin Laden, to me, marked the beginning of the end of our crazy experiences over there.

My Crazy Travel.  For 2011, i was on the road for 26 weekends.  That’s up from 21 in 2010 and pretty much every other weekend for the year.

The Japan Earthquake.  The impact was incredible.  The entire world saw it on YouTube. It was the first natural disaster i watched dozens of videos of.  The world keeps getting smaller and smaller.

Crazy Politics.  Gabrielle Giffords getting shot. Michelle Bachman saying some ridiculous stuff.  Herman Cain being a frontrunner for a brief period.  Rick Perry forgetting the third item.  Ron Paul being Ron Paul. It’s all a prelude to an interesting 2012.

My One Year Wedding Anniversary.  Diane and I got away and went to the middle of nowhere (in Puget Sound) and it was a fantastic break.  We hope to do it every year.

Coming up next, some predictions for the new year and things i’m determined to change in 2012…

I recently listened to an interesting podcast interview of Chris Rock.  One phrase he mentioned was that George W. Bush was the first “Cable-Channel President.” What he meant by this is that you used to have candidates and presidents that attempted to appeal to the entire country – similar to Network television – but now you have presidents and candidates that try to appeal only to their audience – like Cable channels – and don’t care about nationwide approval.  

This is an interesting concept, because if you try to appeal to everyone – like a Network show – you tend to appear successful or correct only a fraction of the time to most voters, but if you focus on a niche, you’ll be loved by some and strongly disliked by everyone else.  The highs are higher but the lows are lower.  

You can definitely see this play out in American politics today.  Instead of trying to appeal to everyone and find a middle ground, candidates simply talk to their niche and alienate everyone else.  In most categories such as music, film, education, etc. I love this as it allows me to find exactly what resonates with me, but when you’re trying to run a country, i don’t think it works.   

I just finished the Steve Jobs book and it was probably one of the most enjoyable books i’ve read in a long long time. I might say the past 10 years.  Here’s why:

Steve Jobs really cared about his products, deeply.  He had an intuitive feel for what the consumer wanted, and what he wanted.  He truly wanted his products to be close to art.   Even though very few in the industry believed him, even after the Macintosh had been around for over 10 years, he continued to hold on to this belief.  Each button, CD tray, color, and line was important to him. There’s a great passage in the book when he found out that the CD-ROM drive of a Mac was a tray instead a slot and it brought him to tears.

It was also fascinating to hear about the infant PC industry.  I had no idea how the PC industry started. I knew there was Apple and i knew there were was IBM but i didn’t understand how it emerged.  The narrative of the hobbyists building the board in garages makes sense to me, and i now understand.

I also didn’t understand how Jobs could get kicked out of his own company by a CEO and board that he selected.  But, after reading the story, i’m surprised he didn’t get kicked out sooner.   To hear of his return and his path back towards success was riveting.  Just a great story.  I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s enjoys Apple even a little bit.  Most people didn’t revere Jobs that much when he was alive (except, obviously the fanboys) but looking back at his accomplishments and commitment to excellence and innovation, we have to place him in the pantheon of business and product innovators.
I do think the world is a better place for having him here and i wish more people followed his path and held on to their dreams and reached for the stars.  It’s a great thing when it happens and actually works.

I went a great man-date with Julian last week and saw “Like Crazy” which stars Felicty Jones and Anton Yelchin as two college students who fall in love.  It’s not a rom-com but rather a romance.  Here are some thoughts…

The film is a very realistic portrayal of 20′s romance.  Anyone who has ever been in a long distance relationship in their 20′s will relate to this film.  You feel high on the relationship one second and then it drags and disappears.

Great use and progression of cell phone technology. Finally we see the impact texting can have on a character.  It always bothers me that this doesn’t happen more in movies. Also, the technology was pretty accurate – from the clamshell to the iPhone, it was some very realistic mobile movie footage.

That Chair. This is the actual chair (below) which was on display at the Arclight. In the film, it made me think that only in LA could you sell a really unconformatable chair for lots of money and have it as your business.  That’s why he could never move to London.  The Brits wouldn’t stand for expensive uncomfortable furniture.

How about Jennifer Lawrence!  She was given a small part as the backup girlfriend, but man did she sell it.  So well, in fact, that i think she stole most of those scenes and I think she did too good of a job.  You can tell that she’s going to be a star.

Let’s talk about the end.  Do they stay together? I think so. Felicity Jones was always way more into Anton than the other way around.  She approached him and left him a note on his car.  She suggested they get married.  And at the end, she came over to LA and has no plans of going nowhere.  Throughout their relationship, Anton was not one to rock the boat.  Thus, i think he’ll stick with it and they’ll come back around.  I’m optimistic for them.

Finally, i also got hold of the note that Felicty writes him in the beginning.  It’s below.

I just had an interesting breakfast with Tom Higley which i try to do once a month but ends up being about every other.  He sat down this morning and said, have you seen the movie “Moneyball” and then we got into a very interesting talk about what that film means in today’s world.  Here’s a few thoughts we had.

Aaron Sorkin can take any story and make it interesting.  He took a horrible book about Facebook (Accidental Millionaires) and wrote a fantastic and Oscar-winning script for The Social Network, and here he took a stats-filled non-fiction book about baseball and made an interesting movie.
The story of the Oakland A’s is not as simple as it was told.  They did not just find high on-base percentage players and ride that to a successful season.  No sir.  One thing that always beats good hitting is good pitching and there’s no mention of pitching in this entire movie. Why? Because it didn’t fit the narrative. Was their staff good? Hell, yes. The had a trio called “The Big Three” of Barry Zito, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder.  Zito was their ace.  He went 23-5 and won the Cy Young award that year.   Mulder won 19 games, and Hudson led the league in shutouts.  That seems pretty relevant to me – you might want to mention it.

Brad Pitt is a true movie star.  You know who the movie stars are in this world when a person can get a movie like this made.  It was a non-fiction book about baseball stats without a romance or female interest anywhere to be seen.  Yet it still got funded and made.  That’s the power of Brad Pitt.

If the film The Social Network announced the arrival of the social aspect of the web, then Moneyball announced the arrival of Big Data.  More than anything, the internet is being built on a stack of stats.  There A/B testing, the Lean Startup movement, and other strategies that are incorporating data into everyday company life.  Tom mentioned to me the difference between Zynga and Entertainment Arts (EA).  Video games were once made, and still are (i.e. Call of Duty) as franchises were you spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make a game and then hope people play it.  Zynga is a company that gets a group of 5 developers together, creates a game, then uses tests and data to see if it catches on.  If it does, it continues, and if it doesn’t, they kill it.  They are riding that strategy to an IPO that values them at $20 billion (with a ‘b’).

Data has changed the game industry, the advertising industry, and many others.  Data is telling us what’s important and what isn’t.  That’s a very 2011 attribute and I can’t think of a better way to express it than through Moneyball.

Oh, by the way, i think that – as a movie – the film is somewhat overrated and only a 7 out of 10.

I’ve got the mp3′s of the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson and i’ve been listening on my daily commute for the past few weeks. So far, i’m 25% through the book and loving it. Here’s what i like about the book so far.

• Describing the social, music, and industry scene of Silicon Valley in the late 60′s and early 70′s is fascinating. The confluence of hippies, technology and drugs must have been amazing.
• The hobbyist movement around electrical engineering. What people thought of computers and how the PC emerged from microprocessors and silicon. It’s so hard now, in a world where there’s a computer on every shelf, to imagine how people didn’t logically think of the PC.
• Steve Jobs vs. Woz. It was an interesting partnership and highlights how you need different people with different talents to get a business off the ground.

A few people asked me this week how keep track of things i need to get things done.  So, let me tell you.

First, I keep an ongoing Task list. I have a big list and then i have a line in that list that i put each day of the things i want to accomplish that day.  This way i can move things up and down that list.  I actually have two lists – a personal list and a work list. I find that it’s helpful to keep them separate as i try to accomplish the work list when i’m at work and then when i leave, i consider my time to get those tasks done as over.  Then i’m on personal time.  It’s helpful to keep them separate.  How do i keep these tasks? I use Google Tasks.  It’s nicely tied into both my email and my calendar.  Also, there’s an app (I use GooTasks) that synch with the Gmail version so i can grab tasks when i’m on the go.

Second, i have a “one-touch” policy.  I’m not sure who told me about this but the idea is that you should touch things only once.  If you can read, process and reply all at one time, it’s better than filing to do later.  I do this with physical mail and i also try to do it with email.  I’m not as good as some, but i’ve found that the more you do this, the more you get done. My business partner Toby is actually a master of this.

Third, i subscribe to the “Daily Inches” mantra of consistency. This is best expressed in the Al Pacino speech in “Any Given Sunday” (listen to it here). The idea is that if you really want to make big changes – this could be your life, your work or whatever – the best way is to make progress daily.  You don’t ahve to do it all at once, but just make a little progress every day and you’ll get there.  For instance, if you want to increase your arm strength in the gym, you don’t want to go on a weekend and try to lift weights for 20 hours straight.  No, it’s better to work out a little bit each day for an extended period of time.  Make a little progress, every day.

There it is.  My three easy steps to getting things done – Lewis-style.  Most of it is common sense, but thought i’d share.  Tasks, one-touch, and daily inches.   What is your philosophy for getting things done?

If you haven’t noticed, there’s a new movement on the web to animate GIF, but to only animate them a little bit and to do it in a way to make them appear 3D.  I’m really loving it.  Take a look at the Steve Z image below and tell me you don’t like it.  I dare you. 

I’ve been reading all the news about Steve Jobs’ death these past few days. It’s one of the few stories that i can’t get enough of.  Because of all the articles, i didn’t want to post anything about it and be just another post about a topic that everyone knows about.  But i’m going to anyway.  I’m going to post for myself and because i think it’s important to write about people that impact you.

Steve Jobs was a hero of mine.  Not in a childish Superman-y way, but in a real day-to-day way. I spend my days discussing, inventing, reviewing and managing the production of online products.  This is what i do.  Every day.  Lots of people do this.  I’m friends with hundreds of them. Steve Jobs also did this.  But Steve did it differently. He was able to make products that came directly from his imagination and make them real.  This is something that is amazingly hard to do.

I also admire him as an entrepreneur.  He had a passion and a vision that was rare.  He envisioned 30 years ago a world where hardware and software met.  A world where the public can get excited about technology, where technology achieves cult status.  He got fired for thinking this way.  Seriously, read this article.  This thinking got him canned.  The CEO who replaced him said this of Steve’s thinking in the 80′s,

But Steve was thinking about something entirely different. He felt that the computer was going to change the world and it it was going to become what he called “the bicycle for the mind.” It would enable individuals to have this incredible capability that they never dreamed of before.

He got fired and regrouped.  Talk about a 2nd act.  First Pixar and then NEXT and then back to Apple.  His passion and focus made him successful every step of the way.  You can’t be an entrepreneur and not be inspired by his story.

I remember the first time i put the iPhone in my hand and used it. I was sitting at the Washington Nations game with Drew Mowery.  He had one and showed me.  Using it was like a window into the future.  That’s a rare feeling to have. It happened over 4 years ago and i still remember it.  I feel lucky to have been alive when he was around and building products.

As an innovator and as an entrepreneur, I’ll miss Steve Jobs.

Last weekend, I did a doubler at the local cineplex (with D, Jules and Abbie) of Moneyball and 50/50.  We were thinking Moneyball was going to be a our big “oh wow” movie but I was shocked when i left the theater totally floored by 50/50 instead.

50/50 is yet another cancer movie and i was expecting a tearjerker along the lines of Stepmom, A Sweet November, My Sister’s Keeper, or Life as a House.  These are good films but none of them would be tops of my end of the year list.

50/50 is different.  Unlike most films like this, it’s a comedy and its mix of earnetness and comedy makes it a special film.  The story of the real-life writer of the film who is a comedy writer is a great one to learn about, but even if you don’t know that, this is a film worth putting on your list.

Some thoughts i had about this movie:

• Its amazing how well Bryce Dallas Howard plays a total emotionless bitch.  She’s nailed that role both here and The Help.  I hope she had another side to her.
• I never understood how Anna Kendrick could be a movie star.  ”Up in the Air” was good but didn’t make me think she could be a star.  But now i do.  She was great.
• Skelator, the dog, is amazing.  Great call by the filmmakers on putting in an ugly yet adorable dog.

The film year is not over yet and actually most of the good movies haven’t even been released yet, so it’s easy to put this one at the top.   Another one at the top is the MMA film “Warrior” which is one of the most action-packed and exciting movies about forgiveness that i’ve ever seen.  Don’t mistake it for an action flick.  Make sure to check it out – you won’t be sorry.

Over the past two years, I’ve found that Colorado and Denver in particular to be filled with really nice folks.  The interactions here remind me of my childhood in Minnesota where you get a heavy dose of “Minnesota Nice” in each conversation.  While people here aren’t quite that nice, they are still extraordinarily friendly.

My first month here, i got pulled over by a Denver cop for rolling through a stop sign.  He asked me why i did it and i replied that i was lost and looking at my iPhone map.  Instead of looking at me like a moron (which i am) and writing out a ticket, he instead asked me for the address of where i was going, jumped into his car, pulled up along side me and said, “follow me, i know where it is.”  Yep, that really happened.

Today i saw these photos below of mailboxes in and around Denver. I thought they were pretty cute and a good example of the vibe you can get from this city.   Enjoy:

I hear a lot these days about job creation and growth and the economy.  I really do worry about people who have have been out of job for over a year.  Not working is totally destructive to a persons self-confidence and self-worth (not to mention bank account) and anyone out of the workforce for extended periods of time are in a really bad place. 

It seems that there are two recessions going on:  (1) the usually cyclical one and (2) the loss of factory jobs to the internet and overseas workers.   #1 will return, but #2 is gone forever for the US.  It’s not coming back.

Instead we should focus on the future.  I read a good post today by Seth Godin where he writes about this very topic.  He states:

When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a ‘real’ job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn’t a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

Gears are going to be shifted regardless. In one direction is lowered expectations and plenty of burger flipping. In the other is a race to the top, in which individuals who are awaiting instructions begin to give them instead.

The future feels a lot more like marketing–it’s impromptu, it’s based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people–and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.

This means we may need to change our expecations, change our training and change how we engage with the future. Still, it’s better than fighting for a status quo that is no longer. The good news is clear: every forever recession is followed by a lifetime of growth from the next thing…

Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects. It will change the fabric of our society along the way. No one is demanding that we like the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an irreplaceable linchpin, the faster the pain will fade, as we get down to the work that needs to be (and now can be) done.

This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything.

 I like that. Let’s move forward rather than trying to bring back the past. 

When there’s something serious on the line, that’s when players try their hardest – and THAT is definitely the best time to be watching sports.  

You see it in the NBA playoffs, in March Madness and you’re seeting it now in the last few games of the MLB season.  Two teams – the Boston Red Sox and the Tampa Rays – are battling for the wild card spot.  Last night, they were tied with 2 games left.  They both won by 1 run last night to keep it tied with 1 final game left.   Both those games were tight with tension.  Both teams lettign it all hang out.  Let me share some things that happened last night (posted here in ESPN): 

So, all of this happened on Tuesday in two games in the American League, where all that’s at stake is a playoff spot, one team trying to avoid a colossal collapse, the other team trying to prove that small-market franchises can slay the wealthy dragon, maybe an MVP award, and the pain and suffering of an entire Nation:

• A triple play. It may end up as the most important triple play in major league history.
• A rookie catcher, in the biggest game of the season, making his first career start behind the plate in the majors.
• That catcher — Boston’s Ryan Lavarnway, only the third Yale player drafted since 1965 to reach the big leagues — throwing out a baserunner trying to steal third base and then hitting a three-run home run, the first of his career. And then hitting his second career home run.
• An intentional walk … to bring Alex Rodriguez to the plate.
• The Red Sox hitting a guy cleanup who has never started in the cleanup position before.
• Nick Swisher doubling off the center-field wall, but Mark Teixeira not scoring from second base on the play.
• Jacoby Ellsbury showing why he may be the AL’s Most Valuable Player with another clutch home run.
• Adam Jones, fouling off pitch after pitch from Jonathan Papelbon with the tying run at second base in the bottom of the ninth, Orioles fans standing like they had a playoff berth on the line.
• Matt Joyce, Matt Joyce, Matt Joyce. You made Tampa Bay fans very happy.

Like i said, I love it when sports matter.  These things happen. 
 

Over here at Kapost, we talk to a lot of publishers and people creating content.  These are all sorts of people such as large known publishers, college newspapers, small company blogs and mommy blogs.

We noticed one obvious trend and one not so obvious one.

The obvious trend is that traditional journalism is struggling.  Companies that rely on their content to generate traffic for ad revenue are hurting.  They aren’t getting enough money for their content so they are doing all they can to get leaner and meaner.

The not so obvious trend is that many companies who are not content-based companies are hiring more and more journalists for themselves. They are doing so to populate their blog.  This is a marketing tactic and one that is pretty effective and becoming more and more popular.  This is a large emerging segment and, in my opinion, is the future of content.

My partner Toby wrote a great piece about this that was published today about this topic.  He goes even deeper and gives some good samples of why hiring journalists for non-content companies work and why it doesn’t for ad-supported folks.   He compares Fitness Magazine with the company Weight Watchers.  Both produce high volumes of content about dieting and exercise for essentially the same audience.  He concludes:

Fitness likely generates around a $6.50 effective CPM for the ads that it runs, a blended rate for its direct-sold and remnant inventory that is consistent with industry averages. Assuming that three ads are run on each page and that the average visitor visits five pages, Fitness would have an ARPU of about $0.10.

Weight Watchers, on the other hand, does not run ads, but tries to convert visitors into becoming paying customers. Given its $194 price point and a conservative 2 percent conversion assumption, the ARPU for Weight Watchers is $4. What we see here is a 40X ARPU difference between the media publisher and the content marketer.

This is a big difference.  People follow the money, and the money now is in content for marketing and not content for revenue.   That’s the future.

…when you open up a menu at a bar (Bunny’s) and you can order Walleye Fingers.

On another note, I didn’t know that the bar Bunnys in St. Louis Park got its name because the owner needed a sign and the sign maker had a spare sign with the name “Bunny’s” on it.  So he got it for cheap and that became the name of the bar.  Funny.

AOL released their earnings last week and the market did a collective vomit-in-their-mouth over the results and their market cap dropped by one third.

Lots of the criticism came from AOL’s expenses in producing content and skepticism that they will ever make enough money on the content they are producing.  It also came out that they are spending $160 million a year on Patch which equals about $150k a year on each site.  One analyst (Robert Peck at Quasar Capita) said about AOL, ”If you sell lemonade for $1 and it costs $800 to make it, that’s not a great business.”

Personally, I think AOL should continue to focus and pursue Patch. What’s their alternative?  Since Tim Armstrong has taken over, AOL has gone down the path of being an online content company.  That’s their strategy.  To abandon it would mean to become something completely different – something they have no vision or focus on.  Web companies don’t succeed and don’t create value by copying existing incumbents. They do it by innovating and building new distinct and unique offerings.  A hyperlocal site that covers and reports local news, that has local advertising and other deals tied in will exist.  The world is asking for it. AOL is uniquely positioned to build and provide it.  The newspaper is dead, and in 10 years online/mobile outlets are going to be the primary way news is found and read.

Of course, there is a question of whether they are structuring it correctly.  $150,000 a year seems steep for each site.  Could they do it more efficiently? I’m sure they can.  And, even people working there are admitting that their current attemps at revenue have been bad. But to call for them to stop doing it is just dumb.  I’m bullish and still believe in Patch and i think it’s a bold and interesting strategy for AOL and their only chance of being a relevant company in the web space.  I hope they make it work.

I’m a big NBA fan.  Each year i get excited to see how the MN Timberwolves do and i’m especially excited this year.

The only way to become great in the NBA is through the draft.  It’s the only way to get the true superstar and you need the true superstar to win a championship.  You have no idea when you draft Dwanye Wade or Kobe Bryant if they are going to be All-NBA or out of the league in 5 years.  Some players fizzle, some grow to superstardom – you never know.  But one thing you do know is that if a player becomes an elite player, the Timberwolves will NEVER get them unless they already had them.

This year i’m especially excited because we have two new rookies that could be the next players that set the league on fire.  They are Ricky Rubio and Derrick Williams.

Both were drafted high (Rubio at 5, Williams at 2) and both were touted to be one of the best in their class.  How they will actually perform, nobody knows.  But i’m pretty frickin’ pumped to see Rubio leading fast breaks with Williams and Wes Johnson on one wing and Kevin Love trailing for 3′s and rebounds.

Check out this video. Just a few years ago people were talking about Greg Oden as one of of the best draft picks in recent memory.  The number two pick – Kevin Durant – was considered risky.  Well, here’s a video of him taken yesterday when he went absolutely insane.  I’m hoping some of that similar draft luck comes to the T-Wolves.

I get tired of remembering and also tired of writing.

My new desire is to just speak stuff and have it appear.  Twitter was easier than blogging but talking is even easier than that.

Henry James dictated his novels to his secretaries and it seemed to work out ok for him.  I was always hesitant of voice recognition but it’s now so good in fact that I just dictated this entire blog post via the Dragon app on my iPhone. It was a total joy.  I’m able to talk at 300 words a minute but I can only type and 50. It’s actually a no-brainer and I’m now wishing there’s a version of Dragon I can just leave running all day and have a text archives of my conversations in the office. I want everything I talk about be captured.

The web is already filled with tons of useless babble – and it’s about to be filled with a lot more of it. 

I have a new love in the office and it’s called Turntable.fm.  If you haven’t heard about this web application, it’s a website where you can go and play music.  Except it’s not just you playing music, it’s a table where you and up to 4 other friends each rotate playing music.  So, you play a song, then your friend, then another friend and then back to you (if only 3 people in the room).  If you’ve in an office where music playing is public or you want to get music suggestions from friends, this is the perfect application.

There have been a million music applications built in the past 5 years, so the question is: why is turntable successful where the other ones weren’t. Here’s why:

1. It’s inherently social.  The internet is a different medium.  It’s not TV, it’s not print and it’s not a stereo.  It’s wrong to try to recreate any of those (although people try all the time).  It’s a new medium and it’s key characteristic is that it’s an interactive place.  What was a Zagat’s book became Yelp. What was an encylopedia became Wikipedia. Items that embrace the crowd work.  This is what Turntable has done.  It’s embracing other people and making that it’s key characteristic.
2. Music discovery.  There’s a circle of music consumption that we used to pitch at Qloud that goes, (1) you buy a song, (2) you play a song, (3) you find a new song and then go back to step 1.   With iTunes, Amazon and many others, the markets in Steps 1 and 2 are pretty mature. However, the discovery piece is still wide open.  Pandora is doing a good job there but there’s still not a dominant service that will tell you what your friends want to hear.  We did a pretty good job at Qloud and it’s one of the reasons we got to 25 million monthly uniques but it’s still a problem on the web.  Ask your friend how they find out about new music and most will say that they don’t.

Sure there are other reasons why it works (huge catalog of music and it’s free) but i believe the two above are the main reasons.  It should also be noted that just because it’s popular, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be lucrative.  In my opinion, a music startup is still a bad idea. If you don’t believe me, ask Imeem and iLike – both of which had tens of millions of users – how they made out (Imeem sold for $1MM after raising 25MM and iLIke sold for $15MM after raising $16MM).

I thought this was a good graphic of how some companies are organized. Cool little diagram. Thanks to MacL3 for it.

There’s a program that has only 10 minute-long episodes that’s on only at midnight once a week on the channel Adult Swim.  It may be random, but man is it glorious.  I challenge you not to love this show.  Check out this quick episode:

The show is created by Rob Corddry – who most of you know from Comedy Central – and the storyline centers on the staff of Childrens Hospital, a hospital for children, named after a doctor named Arthur Childrens. The hospital sporadically (and usually without reason) is mentioned as being located within Brazil, despite making virtually no effort to conceal that the series is shot in Los Angeles, California. Corddry is part of an amazing ensemble cast portraying the doctors, which includes Rob Hubel, Ken Marino (Party Down), Megan Mullaly (also from Party Down), Malin Akerman, Henry Winkler and many other commedians you probably know such as Michael Cera who does the intercom annoucements in the hospital.

The show is now in it’s third season.  I personally think the 3rd season has been the funniest so i would jump directly there if you can.  Enjoy my friends.  It’s aways such a treat to find such awesomeness.

You can read all over the internet how hard it is to build a company from scratch.  There’s customer development which leads to product/market fit which leads to revenue which leads to profitability.  And that’s only if everything goes right.  It’s a challenge.

The analogy i always have in my head is a walk in the woods.  When you start a business, it’s like walking through a dense jungle.  You have a machete, hacking your way through the brush, and talking to whoever you can, trying to find a path.  Once you get a product and a sense of direction, you find a path, the walk becomes a little bit easier but, as they say, you’re not out of the woods.

As you talk to more customers and continue to develop your product, that path becomes wider and eventually turns into a dirt road.  Improving the sales and dev process plus hiring more help turns that road into a paved road and eventually, if everything goes right, it becomes a highway.

Each step of the way is exciting.  Right now at Kapost we’ve built a path and we’re working hard to turn that into a road.  It’s hard and challenging but it’s also damn fun.  We have a great team of folks and the daily progress we’re making is impressive.

Last week I spoke at the NYC Hacks/Hackers conference which was a pretty great gettogether of journalists and technology folks. I spoke about all the editorial tools that Kapost provides and got a pretty good response.

One other company that was there was a company called Narrative Science and they sort of blew my mind. This company takes formatted data – think of a baseball box score or census results – and algorithmically turns that data into a news story. So, a boxscore that used to just be 9 innings with numbers in it becomes this:

Michigan held off Iowa for a 7-5 win on Saturday. The Hawkeyes (16-21) were unable to overcome a four-run sixth inning deficit. The Hawkeyes clawed back in the eighth inning, putting up one run.

Whoa.

They are doing 1000 stories a week, and now that they have the template for baseball nailed, they are going into census data, crime information and other avenues that typically just produce data. It’s only a matter of time before SkyNet appears.

Granted i was only in Austin for 2 days of the South by Soutwest festival, but here’s my take on it.

SXSW has now become a Spring Break for nerds. Similar to if you went to Daytona Beach for a real spring break and how you’d get sick of tequila and dance music, people at SXSW get overdosed of Apps, Twitter and the words “social” and “media”. With so many people shouting in your face, it had to tell what anyone is saying.

That said, here are some highlights:

1. The group messaging apps were out in full effect.  GroupMe, Beluga and others were there.  These are fun apps.  My favorite is GroupMe and if you haven’t tried it – i recommend you do.  It’s a good way to keep in touch with people.   Here’s a good roundup of all the group messaging apps.
2. Uber Cabs were everywhere.  They were the big winners of the show.  It was impossible to attend this year’s event and not hear of Uber.    Fantastic marketing job done by them.
3. The gaming Keynote by Scavengr CEO was the talk of the weekend.  it’s nice to see a talk that’s well put-together and stimulating.  Gaming is in lots of apps, and with good reason.  If you can find the video of this, you should watch it (and tell me where it is so i can see it too).

I’ve been asked this question a bit lately.  I remember a funny Friends episode where the gang played a trivia game about how well each person knows the other friends.  The final winner-take-all question asked to the group was, “What does Chandler do for work?”  To which nobody, not even his wife, could answer.  Well, it seems that I’m the Chandler Bing of my friends.

I’m not too surprised by this as the startup that Toby, Nader and I started last year, named Kapost, has shifted (aka “pivoted”) three times in the past 18 months so I frequently end up describing my work in different ways to the same person.  I could see where the confusion comes from.   Luckily, describing my job just got a little bit easier today when we launched a new commercial describing Kapost.   What we do is build software to help Editors of websites manage their users and the content they want to publish.   Watch the commercial below to get a more fun and colorful explanation of this.

I was thinking about my life and the web the other day and talking to some friends over lunch about how I love that i’m married to a woman who enjoys the web and has intellectual curiosity about it. I was then approached by a woman in a restaurant who was eavesdropping on my conversation. She called me over and then went on for 10 minutes telling me how my love of technology is what’s making the world so horrible. How my blind devotion to electricity is polluting the lakes and ruining the planet. I’ll spare you the “conversation” but let’s just say, i left wishing she hadn’t felt a need to share and that my friends were quicker to pull me away.

So, for her and her hatred of technology, I’d like to share a quote i just read:

“When department stores had Christmas window with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78′s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart”

History repeats itself. The world is changing and that change frightens people and computers are thus responsible for the problems. This isn’t the case. It’s not the web making the world a worse place. Relax people.

The above quote is from a great piece in the New Yorker (thanks to Sara for sending to me) which compares the three types of people that focus on the web: the Never-Betters (probably me), The Better-Nevers (woman at restaurant) and the Ever-Wasers. All are seen as flawed in the article. The author does come to a point where every author talking about this topic does – Steve Johnson came to a similar conclusion here – where he states that the world and the self are a bit different with the web around but it’s not as radical as everyone is claiming. I like his library analogy. Reading it, I picture myself in a room with a bed in the Baker Tower library stacks and living there. He writes,

There’s a spooky sense where the Internet is just a loud and unlimited library in which we now live – as if one went to sleep every night in the college stacks, surrounded by pamphlets and polemics and possibilities. There is the sociology section, the science section, old sheet music and menus, ….It is odd and new to be living in the library; but there isn’t anything odd and new about the library.

I like that. It isn’t the Internet that’s the issue, it’s the omnipresence of it. This point is further punctuated in the book “Hamlet’s Blackberry” where the author describes that the family in the book makes a deal to have Unplugged Sunday to better themselves, and that the No Screens agreement doesn’t include television. What? It was only 20-30 years ago when all this madness towards the Internet was similarly being directed at the “boob tube”. But, as the NY’er author points out, “once you’re not everything, you can be merely something. The real demon in the machine is the tirelessness of the user.”

Yes, this I wholeheartedly agree. So, i guess if it wasn’t this one Internety thing, it’d be something else shiny and culture-altering i’d be throwing my heart and spirit into. Me – for now i’m quite happy with what we’ve got. Sorry crazy woman from the restaurant.

As a huge lover of the sitcom Seinfeld, I loved this trailer.  A great mashup of scenes to make the movie, “Jerry The Great”

The new company Ongo announced today that it’s raised $12 million from a handful of big media companies (Washington Post, NY Times, and Gannett who publishes USA Today).  The service they are offering is, according to the NY TImes article about the investment:

Ongo is for readers who peruse a variety of publications every day and want to read them all in one place. It shows articles from about 20 publications, and is in talks with dozens more.

The catch: Readers pay $6.99 a month for the service, while most of the Web sites whose articles it shows are free. In exchange, readers see no ads or cluttered pages, and can search for articles, save them and share them with friends — all from one site.

The article then has this quote from the founder, “I just don’t think my friends are as good as professional editors in finding stories for me to read.”

I don’t see any way for this company to succeed.

It will fail for two reasons:

1. Nobody is going to pay for content.  It’s free now and will remain free for most readers.  If a NY Times article one day costs money to read, that user either won’t read it and/or will find a free alternative.  There’s a surplus of free content on the web.
2. His quote, “I just don’t think my friends are as good as professional editors in finding stories for me to read,” is just wrong. I’ll grant that the Ongo service could better than going to just the NY Times, but pulling stories from 20 sites (even 100) isn’t going to be more interesting than pulling content from the millions that are out there – and my friends are doing a great job of curating them on Twitter, Paper.li, or in Google Reader.

On that last point, the key to web publishing is to harness the power of the people.  There are so many sites on the web, and new good ones emerging every day.  Let the people find the good stuff; use the crowd as a curator. Once users submit articles, then use another level of professional Editors to showcase the best of the crowd’s submissions. That’s what sites BuzzFeed and Gawker are doing. That’s the future, not putting up a Paywall.

This underscores the main problem with web publishing, and that’s that the traditional publishing model doesn’t work for the web.  The NY Times, The Washington Post and Gannett are stuck in a 1999 publishing scheme.  There’s a quote from Barry Diller from IAC in 2009 where he talks about web content, saying, “It is not free, and is not going to be.  Users just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online” and then Rupert Murdoch of News Corp agrees with him, saying,  “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.”

Clay Shirky did a great job of interpreting these quotes.  His interpretation of what the large media companies are trying to say:

Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.

That is exactly right.  They don’t know how to change their model to adjust for the web economics.  You need less on staff writers, more freelancers, you need more articles, and more depth.  There exists sites that are making great content with this alternative business model, they are SB Nation, Seeking Alpha, Gawker, Breaking Media, The Huffington Post, and others.  It’s just sad to see Ongo’s investment today to create a $12 million dollar bandaid for large media.

** Writer’s note:  My new company, Kapost, is driving this new publishing model.  We make it easy for Editors to manage writers and content so they CAN create content cost effectively.

Say what you will about Apple’s product and their company culture.  They can be closed (vs. Google’s “open”) and the company can be arrogant, but you have to admire how successful they are right now.  Their domination of the consumer electronics industry is just staggering.  Never before in my life have i seen a company firing on all cylinders like this.  It truly something to witness.

Let me give you some facts from their latest earning’s call this week.

• The first astonishing statistic, is that Apple’s revenue grew 71% in the past year.  Large companies like Apple’s just don’t grow 70% year over year.  Apple is now on a revenue run-rate of more than $100 billion a year.  Just as amazing, it is expecting to grow another 60%+ in the first quarter of this year.

All their products are crushing it.

The App ecosystem is now deployed across all products.  Buying an app on Mac App Store goes to iPod and to iPhone. It’s all related and working nicely.   Look at these stats:

• Mac sales grew 23% in a market that grew only 3%.  This is 8x the market rate.
• iPods remain at 70% of the market
• iTunes is now a $4 billion dollar a year business with nobody even coming close.  Users are now renting and purchasing over 400,000 TV episodes and over 150,000 movies per day.
• iPads already account for 7% of all PC’s shipped
• The retails stores are now a $16 billion a year business and revenue grew 95% last year.
• The Mac App Store just launched and sold 1 million apps the first day

The competition is nowhere.  Google Android tablets have an OS (Honeycomb) which isn’t fully speced and hasn’t launched yet anywhere.  That means as Apple rolls out v2 of the iPad which millions of apps, the closest competitor has yet to fully launch v1.   The Android phone OS will definitely be the dominant player in the market.  Every phone will use it because there are zero alternatives.  But Google nor the handset makers won’t cash on its success anywhere close to how Apple’s cashing in on the iPhone.  The iPhone supply can’t meet demand.  It can’t meet demand so there’s no reason to think that Apple is scared of competition there.

Is Microsoft supposed to be king of Enterprise?  iPhone and iPad have now penetrated the enterprise and taking names (over 80% penetration of Fortune 100).  Where’s the competition?.  If I was MS or RIM, i’d be very very worried.

This is before they’ve had any success integrating in all their latest acquisitions.  These are Lala (subscription cloud-based music service), Quattro (mobile advertising), Siri (killer voice recognition), and Poly9 (maps and 3D).  These, especially the Quattro, could open entire new markets for them although it remains to be seen how that plays out.

So, Apple is cruising and margins for the company as a whole is are almost 40% so while i can see others catch up (Google, Samsung), there’s no way they will actually challenge the freight-train that is Apple.

I didn’t post this last year but it has stayed with me.  It’s a great speech by CEO/Founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.  It’s the commencement speech to Princeton’s Class of 2010, delivered on May 30, 2010.   Choices are incredibly important and now, at the beginning of 2011, it’s good to step back and think about what choices we’ll make this upcoming year.  Here’s to you and me, building a great story also.  Read on….

As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

This is a group with many gifts. I’m sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I’m confident that’s the case because admission is competitive and if there weren’t some signs that you’re clever, the dean of admission wouldn’t have let you in.

Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans — plodding as we are — will astonish ourselves. We’ll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we’ll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we’ve synthesized life. In the coming years, we’ll not only synthesize it, but we’ll engineer it to specifications. I believe you’ll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton — all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?

I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.” That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!

I’ve noticed over the past year or so that the number of friends of mine who blog is decreasing.  I’m seeing less posts.  To me this is because Twitter and Facebook have taken all their thoughts.  The “I love Tron!” thoughts are now going into status messages and not into blog posts.  Which, to me, is fine.

But there’s actually been an increase in long-form posts i’m seeing.  The blogs i’m reading are full of actual articles of great stuff.  It’s great to get the “I love Tron” type comments on to Facebook and Twitter so the blog can hold longer form of actual thoughts and analysis.

I recently read a great article by Clive Thompson about just this topic.  His theory is that something more complex and interesting is actually happening.  He says, “The torrent of short-form thinking is actually a catalyst for more long-form meditation.”  He states, “We talk a lot, then we dive deep.”

I totally agree.  I put lots of links and crap into Twitter and then when I actually have something to say, like now, I go to the blog to put it down on paper.   I’m not the only one.  Popular blogger Anil Dash writes, “I save the little stuff for Twitter and blog only when I have something big to say.”  Clive’s article supports this by saying that one survey found that the most popular blog posts today are the longest ones, 1,600 words on average.

So, keep on Tweeting, Tumblring and Facebooking, but don’t forget to share your deeper more interesting thoughts.  Those are the ones I love.

I’ve seen it before.  It happened with Twitter and with MySpace.  Sometimes there’s a confluence of media attention and star power that makes a website just explode – and that is about to happen to Quora.

If you haven’t heard of this website, enjoy this moment in time. It’s probably the last moment you won’t hear or read someone talk about this great new Q&A site that’s emerged.   By the end of 2011, Quora will be seen as one of the breakout hits.

Now, i have nothing against the site. In fact, i think it’s a great service that’s been implemented wonderfully.  It has great UX and frontend design.  It’s truly collaborative.  Mix that in with some great content and great users and you’ve got a good little site.

I also do think that it represents a step forward towards how content will appear on the web.   Wikipedia is great but it is hard for regular people to edit can contribute.  The Quora site is easy to use and amassing some great content.   The web is built for interactivitity and Quora is one of the most interactive content sites around.  This is its niche.

I like it.  I’m just preparing for the onslaught of media attention that’s about to happen over the next 12 months.

When you click on the Movies app on your iPhone, you get this popup advertisement:

The only way to get past it without being taken to the Living Social site is to click “I Hate Cupcakes”

Sure, it’s cheating and misleading, but I’m guessing the click-through rates for this one is off the charts.  Who doesn’t loves cupcakes?

Next Three Days is a new film with Russel Crowe and Elizabeth Banks. It’s also written and directed by Paul Haggis who won Oscars for Crash (writer/director) and Million Dollar Baby (writer).

I really liked this film. Imagine your wife is wrongly imprisoned and your life just falls apart. That’s what happens here. Russell Crowe can’t handle it and decides he’s going to bust his wife out. He doesn’t know how but he’s going to do it. The movie does a good job of showing how he plots the job as well as how he has to change psychologically. Mentally, he has to do things he never thought possible. The film is a good look at how how a man can change given the right motivation.

Some people thought it had a dragging/slow middle half. I actually liked it as they showed Russell methodically going through each step. Haggis diliberately did this and in an interview he says.

that’s what the great films from the 40s through the 70s did; they took the time to invest in the characters and everyone when I was making this movie said, ‘Oh, it’s got to go fast. It’s got to go fast. Things have to happen.’ I said, ‘No they don’t. Sorry, it’s not the film we’re making.’ This is a film that’s going to get you to invest in these characters and care so when they run, you’re going to care that they’re running and when they jump into a car, you’re going to care that it starts and it’s not just one thriller after another that you sit back and go, ‘Oh, cool. Look at that CG.’ No, I want to be inside the character. I want you to sweat when this character’s sweating. So that’s what I was hoping to accomplish.

For me he definitely succeeded in this task. The end was one of the most nerve-racking 30 minutes of film I’ve seen in years. Because, as Haggis says, I knew the stakes and the characters, you really feel the suspense. I definitely recommend this film. 8 out of 10

Denzel makes a predictable train movie – again. Chris Pine seems like he’s on the train trying to think of the best story he can say about his wife that we’d find even remotely interesting. He does’t succeed.

Honestly, instead of seeing this film, you should just watch the SNL parody (below). It’s the same thing but funny. Movie 4 out of 10. Parody: 9 / 10.

I’ve seen a slew of movies over the past 2 weeks (read: 6). Instead of one monster post of all of them, i’ll do a short review of one each day.

Today’s movie Burlesque. This film has a really strong beginning. The scene where Christina Aguilera’s character earns a spot in the show was well done. We really care about her and then when starts singing, it really hits home. I was sitting there thinking that this might be a modern day A Chorus Line. But no, it’s not. Around 35 minutes in, Burlesque slips into a mediocre movie, and it doesn’t really tell us anything about any of the characters. We know where Aguilera comes from but not how she learned to sing or dance or got her motivation to be a performer. Similarly, the other characters couldn’t even be called 1-demensional. I would say maybe 1/2 demensional. We got no background on any of them – even the guy Aguilera falls in love with. Apparently she likes him because he works at the same place, he had a couch she could sleep on and is good looking. That’s about all we know of him and of her criteria.

As the movie continued, I was waiting for the True Hollywood Story death spiral that always occurs to a newly crowned star – see Ray, The Runaways, and Walk the Line for film examples. That doesn’t happen here. In fact, nothing happens. While it’s refreshing that Aguilera stays the same grounded person throughout the film, it’s also boring. Also, the Cher solo needed to be cut. She didn’t hold my attention at all. I know she’s had a #1 hit in every decade since the 50′s but this isn’t her song for this decade. It sucked

All that nastiness aside, this movie isn’t as bad as you think it could be. 6 out of 10.

Nick Denton who has been on the forefront of blogging and online publishing for the past decade is shaking things up again. He’s redesigning the Gawker websites (Gizmodo, Deadspin, Gawker, Defamer, etc.) to be able to better showcase top stories, making video more prominent, and making articles easier to scan. It’s also interesting to hear what he’s learned over the years. His main point – scoops and exclusives dictate the winners. He writes in a statement he released on Gawker:

One law of media competition applies as strongly to web properties as it did to their predecessors: scoops drive audience growth. Gawker Media experienced that rule, painfully, as Harvey Levin’s TMZ eclipsed our overly bloggy Hollywood site, Defamer. TMZ’s growth was built upon three gigantic stories: Mel Gibson’s meltdown; Michael Richards’ racist outburst; and Michael Jackson’s death.

He goes on to argue that simply reposting stories that are elsewhere on the web is a broken strategy:

For that, let’s look at the biggest exclusive of all — early shots of the iPhone 4 — which made Gizmodo into a household name. That episode more than any other demonstrated the bankruptcy of the classic blog column. In order to keep video of the iPhone prototype at the top of the reverse chronological flow, Gizmodo actually stopped publishing for several hours. How ridiculous!

Another interesting move they are making is moving to more video. In the past, he explained, is that video is twice as hard to produce without twice the payoff. Also, they felt that this was the differentiated skill of TV networks/ However, it’s now changed for them as making videos are easier and they are finding that TV companies are just as entrenched in legacy formats and methods with video as they have been for text. As he says, “Gawker bloggers, once they’re as familiar with iMovie as with cut-and-paste, can beat them.”

The new site looks more like ESPN Sportscenter and PTI than a typical blog like Techcrunch.  And that’s the point.  Put the big story front and center and the rest to the side.  It remains to be seen though that whether catering to the scoop and the new non-familiar user will alienate the daily reader, which is their bread and butter.   Personally, I like the move.  Even if it doesn’t work, I admire companies that are trying new tactics and innovating.  Denton’s been right in the past and if anyone knows online publishing and readership behaviors it’s him – so I’d guess that this is the correct move.

Yesterday, Leslie Nielson died at the age of 84. He was a very unique comedian. He’s undoubtably best remembered for his Airplane! and Naked Guns roles. He used that fame to do a bunch of other films but nothing beat Lt. Frank Drebin from Police Squad.  His performance in the first Naked Gun was probably my earliest memory of laughing uncontrollably in a movie theater.  I was unable to contain myself.

There’s a good story of when Leslie hosted SNL back in 1989. I’ll quote NPR who wrote about it:

In the monologue, Leslie explained that he didn’t understand why he had been asked to host a comedy show, because he was neither a comedian nor a comic. A comedian, he explained, was someone who says funny things. A comic was someone who says things in a funny way.

Nielsen, on the other hand, was someone who said unfunny things in an unfunny way, and for some reason, people laughed. To demonstrate this, he delivered an innocuous line – something along the lines of “Mr. Jones, sit down, I’d like to talk to you about your son” – twice. The first time, he said it as though he were in a drama, and the response was muted.

Then he told us that he was going to say the exact same unfunny line as Lt. Frank Drebin, in an unfunny way, and he did exactly that, and the audience exploded. It wasn’t just indulging him as prompted, either. Without actually tilting his delivery in that direction, Nielsen made it genuinely funny.

I couldn’t find the YouTube clip for this but it shows exactly why he’s a master at what he does and it makes you appreciate his craft. Saying unfunny things in an unfunny manner and magically having the result be funny is an incredibly hard trick. And nobody ever did it better.

This has nothing to do with anything, but the dunks that Blake Griffin was throwing down tonight were incroyable. Check this:

I’ve seen some interesting videos of the past weeks that i thought i’d share.

The first video is a kids Middel School football game. Watch this video and keep in mind that the coach and team planned this play for whenever there was a penalty against his team. The plan was that when his team got a 5 yard penalty, he would start yelling that it is actually a 10 yard penalty. He’d yell really loud. That’s what’s happening when this video starts. Watch away:

This guy wrote the following statement and then submitted a video. It’s fantastic:

As a kid growing up in a time where mutants reigned supreme in the city and lasers accompanied by wailing guitars were standard, I felt that a homage was required. What better way to show your love for such a thing than a polygonal unicorn emerging from the hood of a countach. I paid my dues.

I recently read a great interview by John Scully where he talks about Steve Jobs.  Scully was CEO of Apple for almost a decade.  It’s just a great read.  For anyone in the tech business, this is a story about our times about a man who more than anyone else has invented products that impact our lives.

Here are some good quotes:

The time that I first met Jobs, which was over 25 years ago, he was putting together the same first principles that I call the Steve Jobs methodology of how to build great products.

Steve from the moment I met him always loved beautiful products, especially hardware. He came to my house and he was fascinated because I had special hinges and locks designed for doors. I had studied as an industrial designer and the thing that connected Steve and me was industrial design. It wasn’t computing.

On Steve jobs being a minimalist:

What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do – but the things that you decide not to do. He’s a minimalist.

I remember going into Steve’s house and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed. He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around but he was incredibly careful in what he selected. The same thing was true with Apple. Here’s someone who starts with the user experience, who believes that industrial design shouldn’t be compared to what other people were doing with technology products but it should be compared to people were doing with jewelry… Go back to my lock example, and hinges and a door with beautiful brass, finely machined, mechanical devices. And I think that reflects everything that I have ever seen that Steve has touched.

Look at his apartment back then:

Steve on org structures:

The other thing about Steve was that he did not respect large organizations. He felt that they were bureaucratic and ineffective. He would basically call them “bozos.” That was his term for organizations that he didn’t respect.

The Mac team they were all in one building and they eventually got to one hundred people. Steve had a rule that there could never be more than one hundred people on the Mac team. So if you wanted to add someone you had to take someone out. And the thinking was a typical Steve Jobs observation: “I can’t remember more than a hundred first names so I only want to be around people that I know personally. So if it gets bigger than a hundred people, it will force us to go to a different organization structure where I can’t work that way. The way I like to work is where I touch everything.”

At his core, Steve is a designer:

The thing that separated Steve Jobs from other people like Bill Gates — Bill was brilliant too — but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market. He would put out whatever he had to put out there to own that space. Steve would never do that. Steve believed in perfection. Steve was willing to take extraordinary chances in trying new product areas but it was always from the vantage point of being a designer. So when I think about different kinds of CEOs — CEOs who are great leaders, CEOs who are great turnaround artists, great deal negotiators, great people motivators — but the great skill that Steve has is he’s a great designer. Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing.

More stories:

An anecdotal story, a friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day and this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he’s a vendor for Apple) and when he went into the meeting at Apple as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.

Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Microsoft hires some of the smartest people in the world. They are known for their incredibly challenging test they put people through to get hired. It’s not an issue of people being smart and talented. It’s that design at Apple is at the highest level of the organization, led by Steve personally. Design at other companies is not there. It is buried down in the bureaucracy somewhere

On being chosen as CEO over Jobs:

Looking back, it was a big mistake that I was ever hired as CEO. I was not the first choice that Steve wanted to be the CEO. He was the first choice, but the board wasn’t prepared to make him CEO when he was 25, 26 years old.

They exhausted all of the obvious high-tech candidates to be CEO… Ultimately, David Rockefeller, who was a shareholder in Apple, said let’s try a different industry and let’s go to the top head hunter in the United States who isn’t in high tech: Gerry Roche.

They went and recruited me. I came in not knowing anything about computers. The idea was that Steve and I were going to work as partners. He would be the technical person and I would be the marketing person.

The reason why I said it was a mistake to have hired me as CEO was Steve always wanted to be CEO. It would have been much more honest if the board had said, “Let’s figure out a way for him to be CEO. You could focus on the stuff that you bring and he focuses on the stuff he brings.”

Remember, he was the chairman of the board, the largest shareholder and he ran the Macintosh division, so he was above me and below me. It was a little bit of a façade and my guess is that we never would have had the breakup if the board had done a better job of thinking through not just how do we get a CEO to come and join the company that Steve will approve of, but how do we make sure that we create a situation where this thing is going to be successful over time?

My sense is that when Steve left (in 1986, after the board rejected his bid to replace Sculley as CEO) I still didn’t know very much about computers.

My decision was first to fix the company, but I didn’t know how to fix companies and to get it back to be successful again.

All the stuff we did then were all his ideas. I understood his methodology. We never changed it. So we didn’t license the products. We focused on industrial design. We actually built up our own in-house design organization, which they have to this day. We developed the PowerBook… We developed QuickTime. All these things were built around Steve’s philosophy… It was all about sales and marketing and the evolution of the products.

All the design ideas were clearly Steve’s. The one who should really be given credit for all that stuff while I was there is really Steve.

And there’s more.  As i said, it’s just a great read.

We were discussing today what the new large rock band of America is. Who is the new U2? Some made a convincing argument for Kings of Leon. I was thinking that I had hoped it would have been The Killers after their awesome debut of Hot Fuss and their severely underrated Sam’s Town. However, two crappy albums later it looks like the best is behind us for them.

It then struck me that this is exactly how I feel about M. Night Shyamalan. Let me explain:

Legendary Debut Album, Hot Fuss, and Debut Movie, The Sixth Sense
M. Night’s The Sixth Sense was a monster of a movie. Not only one of the most quotable movies of the year (“I see dead people”) but also just a great film. So good it was nominated for six academy awards, including Best Picture. Similarly, the debut album by The Killers, Hot Fuss, was a bombshell of an album. It had five songs that will be played on rock radio stations for the next 50 years in “Somebody Told Me”, “Mr. Brightside”, “All These Things That I’ve Done” and “Smile Like You Mean It”. It was #1 on the charts for 50 weeks and won the Grammy for Best Rock Album. Both the movie and album killed it. Great start to both of their careers.

Strong Underrated Second Effort in Album, Sam’s Town, and Movie, Unbreakable
The film Unbreakable was released to generally positives reviews. Some people loved it (Tarantino placed it on his top 20 list of films released since 1992) but most thought it was inferior to Sixth Sense. It grossed $250 million worldwide and has a cult following of users who are often heard clamoring for a sequel. The album Sam’s Town was a great effort. It has three great songs in “When You Were Young,” “The River is Wild,” and “Sam’s Town”. Like Unbreakable to Sixth Sense, the album was nowhere near the smash hit of Hot Fuss but went to #2 on the charts and sold 1.2 million albums.

At this point the expectations were off the charts. Both had done a legendary album/film and a really really good one. That’s 2 for 2. I couldn’t wait for what was next.

And that’s exactly when the wheels came off. After the strong start and solid followup, both the Killers and M. Night dabbled in mediocrity for a number of years. M. Night made Signs, The Village and Lady In The Water. None of these were terrible. None of them were that good either. Similarly, The Killers released Day & Age which has a catchy single in “Human.” It isn’t good but isn’t bad either.

It’s the present where both of them descend into crap. M. Night’s latest film, The Last Airbender, was a total debacle. Nobody went to see it. It received 6% on Rotten Tomatoes. Similarly, the lead singer of The Killers, Brandon Flowers, came out with a new album this year called Flamingo where the best review of it by BBC Music said, “there’s a slight feeling of blandness about the whole thing”

It’s too bad. I liked both of them. I guess we can only hope that they both regain their old form eventually.

I was driving through Boulder yesterday and CU is in session. Driving past the students is always a highlight of my day. Here’s a guy we say yesterday:

I love the blue socks, the blue sunglasses, and the blue backpack. Just a glorious getup.

I’ve long thought about how the newspaper industry is changing (especially because my new startup is targeted towards the publishing industry) and this past week i found something really amazing interesting.

Let me start by saying that i find my feeds (both Facebook and Twitter) way more interesting than any website I read.  I typically get all my news from Google Reader where i’ve imported  all the sites and feeds that i’m interested in.  This is a great way to quickly process information but it doesn’t give me any information from other sites (obviously). The great part of Twitter and Facebook is that my friends provide links from all around the web.

So, while at BlogWorld last week i learned about Paper.li which creates a personal newspaper based on your Twitter feed.  My personal paper is here.  It looks at all the links submitted by your Twitter friends, see what those stories are and creates a paper of those stories.  It also knows the categories of those links so it creates a Sports and Technology section for you.  For instance, this morning my Paper.li has this Business section:

This is similar to what the company Flipboard is doing – although that’s only an iPad app.  The beauty of this is that it’s taking my feed, which has all the information i want, and placing it in the format that i want – as a nice webpage where i don’t have to click through each link to consume them.  It’s eliminating links and making my life prettier and easier.  What a great way to start a morning

I just saw a great video that breaks down Led Zepplin and how many of their tracks were stolen from other tracks.  While interesting, it makes the larger point which i completely agree with that “everything is a remix” today and it always has been.  Taking previously created content and altering it to make something similar but also original and unique is what art’s all about.

Over the past few years, i’ve grown to love the music mashup which is when a DJ takes two or more (sometime a dozen) songs and mixes them all together to create a new song.  Some of my favorites have U2+a rap song, an instrumental with Star Wars soundtrack, and 80′s classic with Jay-Z (links to all songs are below).  I’ve noticed a few things: (a) that listening to these tracks is totally different than listening to the original, even though they sound extremely similar; (b) the best music mashups have a classic rock backbone and then from another tune faster lyrics on top of it.

Mashups and remixes of all kind are all over.  I’m seeing it in TV shows, for instance in The O.C. where they did an episode just like the Spider Man movie or when Avatar recycles the plot from Dances With Wolves.  Everyone has biases and influences so it’s rare to find something truly original.  Even when copying though, you are creating something new.  When Twitter launched, people thought it was just a copy of the News Feed application that was just one part of Facebook ,but it’s grown into something completely different than Facebook.  I always thought a cool movie idea would be an entire movie and narrative but every lined used is from another film.  Some lines are famous, and others wouldn’t be as recognizable. I think it’s a cool thought.

I’m pro-remix.  I think more people should try it.  Personally, I have a goal for myself over the next 12 months to actually create a music mashup of my own where i can actually use the tracks i enjoy the most to make something original.   I’ll let you know how it goes.

Here are my favorite music mashups that i’ve posted on my music blog where i post one good song every weekday:

• Push The Button
• Callin’ for a great mashup
• 99 Balloons and Problems
• American Edit’s Broken Song
• Beatles Mashed Up
• KiD’s Prayer
• Pause for a Mashup
• Cure Mash
• Mashup Letterbomb
• Jay-Z Collision With Linkin Park
• My Sharona Mash
• Lady Tigra Mashup

I saw the new film The Social Network this weekend and loved it.  This was an interesting film for me.  It was the first film where i knew or met many of the major characters.

• I’ve spent a good deal of time with Sean Parker.  We’ve worked together (briefly at AOL).  We’ve partied together when we both spent a week crashing at Spencer’s place in Hermosa. We’ve collaborated on a company together- my dad and I angel invested in Plaxo
• I’ve met with the Winklevoss twins.   They came down to look at Ruckus in 2006 when they were still doing ConnectU
• Others i’ve only met once or seen indirectly, such as Dustin and Peter Thiel.

But, it’s safe to say that i know the cast of characters which made the film incredibly satisfying.   Fincher and Sorkin nailed it as the characters in real life are very much how they are depicted.

The fact that this is a good movie can be attributed directly to Fincher and Sorkin.  The writing and directing is phenomenal.  Fincher takes his modern, slick style with awesome music and combines it with smart, quick dialogue.  You’re forced to keep up.  The result is great storytelling.  A mediocre plot become fascinating because of them.

The interesting parts to me are:

The ethical scale. In the web industry, there’s a huge hacker culture where technology grit and talent is valued over rules.  There are no rules.  Zuckerberg completely embraces this and the Winklevoss twins are on the other end of the spectrum.  Every other character is somewhere in the middle of this scale.   I see this every day when i see and talk to programmers who are trying to do something unique and innovative.  This is how Napster came to be.  This is how Skype happened.  It’s part of the web culture and i thought the film did a good job of showing the two types of people converging into the web business.

Sean Parker. He’s quite a character and I’ve had the pleasure of hanging with him a few times.  He is just as the movie describes as he’s very charismatic and love parties, high fashion, models and going to trendy spots.  But the film doesn’t do him justice in a couple of areas.  First, he’s a social software genius. He understands better than others how to make a site social and gain millions of users.  The movie makes him look like he totally mooched off Facebook.  It should be noted that he’s responsible for some huge contributions such as the News Feed.   In addition to the Peter Thiel money, he also helped with the Accel $10 million investment.  These are huge things.

There’s also a class system matrix here. You have old money (Eduardo and Winklevoss), you have no money (Zuckerberg) and you have new money (Sean Parker and Peter Thiel).    You have a kid with a chip on his shoulder making something extremely valuable.  Those with old money and traditional business models in their head (Eduardo and The Twins) want it and want to fit this round peg into their square hole.  The new money characters (Parker and Theil) know the true potential of Facebook, what it can accomplish, and that growing it now is the better strategy.  This was a very real dynamic and in fact i wrote about it 18 months ago when everyone in the media was writing about how Facebook pageviews are worthless and how they won’t be able to monetize and the social network business as we know it isn’t nearly as valuable as we thought.  It was all crap and it was because this is new unchartered waters.

The product is king. In the consumer internet business, the product on the page is the single most important thing.  Making the user experience tight, fast, and easy is the difference between a successful site and one that nobody uses.   This is why you can have two websites that do the exact same thing but one is a huge success and the other goes out of business (see the example between Mint and Wesebe).  This is especially true with social networks where it’s a winner take all game.  Network effects cause there to be one big site and lots of losers.  Zuckerberg knows this.  He intuitively understands the user experience.  Facebook is a great experience.  This is also why he discounts The Twins and their ambition.  Just having an idea is only a small part of making a site and a business.  He knows this, I know it and The Twins probably know this.

History of social networks and Exclusivity. For the casual viewer, i think the film might seem like Zuckerberg invented the modern day social network.  This just isn’t true.  Before Facebook there was Friendster, MySpace and half a dozen other social networks that had profiles and friend linkage.  Facebook’s defining characteristic was it’s default privacy settings – it’s exclusivity.  There’s an important scene in the film when Zuckerberg realizes that this is the idea behind the Harvard Connection and this idea makes social networks fun and more realistic.  This exclusivity was Facebook’s major point of distinction for the first few years of its existence and it’s interesting that this one point was not his idea.  Granted, he may have a better product sense than others and built a great site, but it was all founded on shady ground.  Putting in the work and developing the actual product is 99% of a web business, but if the main difference between Facebook and every other social network is not something you came up with, then that’s a problem.  And apparently that problem equals $65 million dollars.  Seems like more than a fair trade

Startup Culture. I thought the film did a great job of displaying web and startup culture.  Sure, it’s a group of people who don’t sleep but more importantly it’s a group of people who believe what they’re doing is the single most important thing on the planet.  They dream of kingdoms and a world domination.  Every feature they implement is a step in that direction which is why it’s ok to sacrifice social lives, money and sleep.  You saw that allure in this film.  That house in Palo Alto reminded me of the Fincher’s Fight Club house where another, different kind of cult was brewing only the one about Facebook was and is real.  It happens every day in the valley and across the world with startups.

All in all, I thought it was a great film and found myself thinking and talking about it for days afterwards.  You should check it out.

I love the Fitbit service.  I’ve been using it now for 8 months.It’s a great little service that allows you to track your activity.  The UI is also quite slick so entering in your weight and food is a snap.  As with most things, i’ve found that the more I track it, the more I tend to improve in that area.   So, the more i see how my activity rates are, the more active i become.

I have one main problem with the Fitbit. I don’t like carrying the bit.  Sure it synchs easily but it’d be so much better if it was tied into a device that i’m carrying with me already such as my iPhone.   Two huge advantages: my iPhone is always in my pocket and I have never mistakenly thrown it into the laundry.  The fitbit device is so small. I know of a several people who have destroyed it by putting it in the wash.

So, fitbit, when can we expect the iPhone app?  Even if it requires a hardware case to be around the phone, that’s fine with me.  Just bring it on.   Thanks

Well done twinkies!

The Twins dominated the Central Division in the first decade of the new century, winning or trying for the win in the division in seven of those ten years (’02, ’03, ’04, ’06, ’08, ’09, and ’10).

What gets me is that every year the critics pick the Twins to lose. Every year. Each spring i pick up Sports Illustrated to read about how the Twins don’t have the hitting or pitching to take the division and almost every year we prove them wrong.

This year we lost former AL MVP Justin Morneau for the entire season in June and still managed the best record in baseball for the second half of the year. It’s our adherence to fundamentals, an amazing farm system and good solid baseball that allows us to plug the gaps and pump out win after win after win.

Check out some of these quotes:

In 2006, the Twins won the division but were picked by most to finish 4th in our division. One quote:

Boy, I bet the Twins are wishing they hadn’t cut David Ortiz right about now. This team has almost as little pop as the Dodgers, if that’s at all possible. Shannon Stewart was a third-round pick in CBS Sportsline’s Bizarro draft. Tony Batista – did he even play last year? (Yes, in Japan – Ed.) – was a second round pick. Luis Castillo was a fifth-round pick. Kyle Lohse was an eighth-round pick. You get the idea. These guys are stiffs, which is a shame, because they have some nasty pitching.

In 2008, they were picked to finish last in their division. Instead they tied for first. NY Sports Day said,

“the loss of Hunter in the outfield seals the Twins’ last-place finish. “

and also in 2008, another quote:

Minnesota has a decent young core of players, led by Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau, Delmon Young and Michael Cuddyer. But it’s quite likely that the Twins will take a big step backward in 2008

In 2009 they won the division again and one preview said,

I honestly do not believe that Minnesota has enough offensively to compete for a division crown this season. It’s never good when there is prolonged talk about your leading hitter and starting catcher having potentially severe back problems in his early twenties.

All those being said, congratulations to the team. Once again they delivered and let’s hope they put the smack down on the Yankees this year in the playoffs.

I was reading Nick Flynn’s new book The Ticking Is The Bomb and he recites in the Allegory of the Cave which came from a Plato dream.  

In this dream prisoners, locked-up in a cave since childhood, are chained in such a way that they cannot look away from the wall they are facing.  Even their heads are fixed, somehow, in that one direction.  Behind the prisoners, some still children, is a walkway, sightly elevated, and along this walkway the jailers, or their assistants, carry various objects back and forth.  Beyond the walkway a fire burns, continuously, a large fire, and this fire casts light onto the objects, which then cast shadows on the wall for the prisoners to contemplate.  The object might be something benign, a bunch of carrots, say, but as a shadow the carrots can appear frightful – each could be a knife.  Or an apple could be a rock that could crush a man’s hands. Or his son’s testicles. Or a jar of milk could be a jar of acid, if all one sees, all one is allowed to see, are shadows.  And the jailers grunt and snort, sounds that echo off the walls and so seem, to the prisoners, to come from the shadows themselves.  And don’t forget the fire, which makes another sound, and which heats their backs, perhaps too much, and fills the cave with smoke, making it hard to breathe.  It must seem a little like hell, with its silent goons carrying menacing shapes, with your head strapped into place, though this allegory comes from a time well before we perfected our modern-day concept of hell.

I have found this to be quite true in startups as well.  If all you see are TechCrunch articles or tweets of possible competitors, you can’t help but imagine the worst.  All you can do is try to get out of the cave and into your customers offices and work on actually solving problems and adding value.  The rest are only shadows.

I am a huge Foursquare users. I registered the day that it launched at SXSW, I’m mayor of sixteen places and have checked in over 450 days. Whenever i go to a place, i immediately think of checking in. I’ve also tried out all of the competitors, such as Loopt and Gowalla. While those are ok, Foursquare was the best for me.

So, when Facebook launcehd “Places” i was curious to give it a shot. And after just a few days, I think it’s going to be a viable competitor and will keep many mainstream users from ever using Foursquare. Here’s why:

There are three reasons why people use Foursquare:

1. Socially. To tell their friends where they are so they can join them.
2. As a game. To become “mayor” of a place and to check in more than other people
3. MyWare. To log where in the world you’ve been

The first reason – to connect with your friends – is the most powerful and is the reason most people use a service like this. The main issue with Foursquare is that not many of their friends are on it, so this didn’t happen for most. It only worked this way for power users and early adopters who have other power users and early adopters as friends (people like me). This is where FB Places shine. The first day of using it, i had more friends on it than on Foursquare and it was immediately more useful for me. I could actually see where many of my friends were. Foursquare never did this well.

The second reason – to play as a game and to become a mayor – doesn’t work for FB Places. There is no game in Facebook. It’s just to connect. I can see rewards happening in the future the same way that some restaurants or shops post messages on their FB pages for free coffee or cupcakes. I actually do miss this on FB. I found myself not checking into a place this weekend for a second time because i asked myself, “what’s the point?” I knew it would annoy my friends and i was leaving soon anyway. I checked on Foursquare but not FB.

The third reason will never happen on Facebook but will on Foursquare. You can see my stats page here. It’s great to see and view all the places i’ve been. Will most users like this? Not at all. I’m a rare breed in my love of tracking myself.

To sum up, i really think FB Places is going to crush it. Despite Friday being the biggest day in Foursquare history and their claim that the rising tide will raise all ships, I think that unless Foursquare can continue to out innovate Facebook, I think FB will leave Foursquare behind in the dust. Once again, Facebook proves taht although it’s large and has an amazingly large userbase, they aren’t afraid to make big changes and innovate. This is why they are the internet king right now. Did anyone think that Yahoo! if they couldn’t buy Foursquare would actually build something. Yeah right.

Scott Pilgrim (9 out of 10)
This is one of the more clever and entertaining movies of the summer. Sure, it’s one big video game, but it’s still visually stimulating and super funny. The comedy never stops in this one.   Kudos to director Edgar Wright’s ability to capture the entire comic book series (6 books) in 112 minutes.

There are six fights, one after another, which makes this one of the few movies with more than one major climax. Each fight could have been the big finale to any other movie: one involves a Bollywood-style dance number, one is a musical duel, and one is the big “Final Boss” that doesn’t end how you think.

The atmosphere in this film is huge. There’s both a Seinfeld and Nintendo references that i thoroughly enjoyed. The music has Beck, Metric and Broken Social Scene, along with old school 8-bit video game noises. Everything in this movie is over-the-top and excessively nerdy. From the music and sound to the look and feel of just the first thirty seconds of the film, you know exactly what you’re getting into.

Inception (8.5 out of 10)
Posted all my thoughts on this here and here

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (8.5 of 10) and Girl Who Plays With Fire (9 out of 10)
I saw both of these this summer. Take Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. i think Begins is a better cohesive movie, end-to-end, but Dark Knight is a great sequel with broader scope and more action. And, i think It works as a great movie only because it’s a sequel. Similarly, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a better individual movie. It’s tight and complete but The Girl Who Plays With Fire is a fantastic sequel. It takes the foundation of Tattoo and really blows it out.

Considering the first movie is mostly about one person and the second is all about another, it’s amazing how well these are connected, yet also how different they are. One is a methodical while other is frantic. One is focused with only 2 characters really, while the other all over the place with over 10. Regardless, both are fantastic and worth seeing.

The Other Guys (8 out of 10)
It’s great to have Will Ferrell back. I was worried he was going down the Eddie Murphy path where his movies got worse as he got older. But The Other Guys was one of his best. If you think of all the Will Ferrell movies and the ones where he gives the best performance, i’d rank Anchorman first, Talledega Nights second and this film third (and i do think Blades of Glory is underrated). Here he’s amazing as a homely cop but even funnier when he turns into his alter ego, Gator. I’d put this up against any of his other films.

Salt (6 our of 10)
This movie was just not at all interesting to me. Angelina’s character didn’t really talk the entire time. [**Spoiler Alert**] For the entire movie, you can’t tell you if she’s on Russia’s side or US’s. Thus, you have no idea what her character really thinks of really feels. You’re just watching her maybe kill people (maybe just maim), and based on those actions you’re led to believe she’s Russian. Of course, by the end of the movie, you realize that you’ve just been manipulated by fancy editing and lack of information. Pretty lame if you ask me. I’m just mad that the director wanted to make a movie like that.

Of course, the most interesting thing about the movie is the director, Phillip Noyce. It’s the same guy who was big in the studio system decades ago, doing Patriot Games, Clear & Present Danger and others. Then he moved back to Australia and did small indie flicks like Rabbit Proof Fence and The Quiet American. When he did, he employed a woman to stay in Hollywood and just read scripts. Specifically spy scripts. This is because he’s obsessed with spies. Growing up, his dad was a spy for Australia, and as a kid he used to go through town and follow people inconspicuously. So, this type of movie was the only thing that would bring him back to the studios. And after 5 years his woman found one. This is it. You can learn more in this KCRW podcast.

While that’s cool and all, i still wish it was a better movie.

Dinner With Shmucks (5 out of 10)
One of the more disappointing comedies of the summer. Steve Carrell is more annoying than funny and the plot is just rough. Say you meet a guy who is ruining your life – he tells your girlfriend about an old girlfriend, tells her to get lost, and then destroys your house by throwing wine bottles at all walls and tables. Now imagine this guy says he’s left his keys at your house, would you make a bed for him on your couch or would you drive him home? It wouldn’t be a movie if he just goes home but it’s a bad movie because he stays – because nobody would behave like the people in this movie. Don’t ever see this film

The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.   - William Gibson

I did see the future this summer – just in bits and pieces.  Let me explain….

As many of you know, i had an amazing experience at Techstars this summer. Not only did we evolve our company Kapost in a new and better direction, but we got to meet and interact with some incredible mentors and entrepreneurs.

There’s a company i worked right next to this summer called Gearbox.  This is two guys who are hard core robotics nerds – and i mean that in the best way.  They have the only desk i’ve ever seen at a startup that has soldering irons and wrenches.

When they first arrived to Techstars, it was clear that they didn’t really know the best direction to take their company.  They weren’t alone, lots of us had unclear paths.  But they had a passion for robots, gaming and mobile devices and were looking for how best to apply this. As the months passed, they decided on a direction that was well aligned with this passion – which resulted in the Orbbott or the “Gearbox Ball.”

What is it? This is a robotic ball that is controlled by your iPhone or Android device.  Not only is controlled but there are apps on your phone that you can use with the ball.  Apps like Sumo (where you play against another ball) or Golf or, my favorite, “follow me” app. This is an application where you put the phone in your pocket and the Ball just follows you around the room.  It speeds up when you’re far away and backs up if you approach it.  I don’t know why, but i love this idea.  It’s the best version of a robotic dog or cat i’ve heard of.

You can see a video below of them demo’ing their ball.  It’s a great idea. They’ve invented a whole category of toys called “Smart Toys” and i think i’ve just seen the future.  Thankfully, i was lucky enough to see it emerge from the very beginning.

Discovered two cool things about Inception this week

First, there is some analysis done about when Leo wears his wedding ring. If you pay attention to when he has it on (clue: only in dreams), you can figure out the final scene in the movie.  That link is here

Second, this video below shows how the main score of the movie has a subliminal tune embedded in it.  Which pretty much blew my mind.  Thanks to Gawker for that.

I saw Inception this week. I’m assuming most of you know that this is a movie written and directed by Chris Nolan. Nolan is the same guy who wrote and directed Memento, The Prestige (with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale), Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. So, he can both mind screw you (Memento and Prestige) and wow you with effects and spectacle (Batman movies).

I though the film great and here’s why. It was truly original. Sure, there have been dream movies before. But in a world where most of the films are sequels and remakes, this movie was a plot that nobody had come close to. Mental espionage is not a common genre. You could argue this was the classic heist movie where one last job is all they need to accomplish but when you’re not stealing anything but instead placing a thought inside someone’s head – it’s a bit different. So i guess the context was the original bit. I loved the introduction of the plot and explanation of the concept. Similar to how the best part of Batman Begins is when we see how Batman came to be and who is responsible, the best part of Inception is learning how this dream hijacking occurs and who is required within it. Even as hit the third act of the movie, you’re learning the details of being inside dreams.

Also similar to Batman Begins and Dark Knight, the end of the movie is disappointing compared to the beginning and middle. Thousands of people shooting and missing the good guys while they lay people out with one punch is not a clever way to end a movie that relies on thoughtfulness and intricate details. Memento probably has the best ending of a movie of the past 10 years and thus i hold Nolan to a higher standard here. He’s gotten lazy with Batman.

The women in the movie were also great. Ellen Page was a great student and has never looked more girl-like, especially when you place her next to Marion Cotillard (the woman from La Vie en Rose). The scene where the two are next to each other is like a class in the difference between what a girl is compared to a woman. Marion Cotillard was also a phenomenal femme fatal. One last woman that drags the man down, literally.

I could see this film winning a slew of Oscars, but because the idea and execution was the show not the characters, the awards are for Writing, Director and potentially Picture not for actor or actress

Some other notes:

• Great to see Tom Berenger in there. Haven’t seen him in quite a while. Loved it
• Note from JT: when cillian murphy opens the safe and there’s a paper windmill in there isn’t that a symbol for green since his father seemed to be an oil tycoon?  Interesting nuance.
• I’m not the biggest Joseph Gordon-Levitt especially since he overacted his SNL show but i thought he pulled it off.  I would have preferred James Franco who was originally cast for that role
• I think they could have done without the entire third level (snow level) madness.  It was just too much and the movie still would have been sweet if it was a more tame level or just make level 2 more detailed.

After reading Toby’s suggestion, i picked up the novel City of Thieves by David Benioff. Let me tell you, this book is really great – one of the best books i’ve read in a long time. I bought for $4 used on Amazon – do yourself a favor and get it.

The story starts with a screenwriter (the guy who wrote 25th Hour) talking to his grandfather about WWII. It’s his grandfather’s story that takes us to Leningrad in 1942 when he was 17. He gives us the core story but then leaves the interview session telling Benioff, “you’re the writer, make it up.” And he comes up with a fantastic tale

It’s not that long but is still a great story of friends, war, snipers, girls, and a box of eggs. Read it

Some great points are made by the Cracked gang about the beloved Back to the Future.  Points such as

1. Did Marty trigger the civil rights movement?
2. Isn’t it weird that George’s and Loraine’s son looks just like the guy Loraine tried to sleep with in high school?
3. How did Biff go from rapist to butler?

All that and more in the video below:

Bill -

Love the column and the podcast – read/listen religiously.

I used to play soccer in college. I’m just stating so you can see i have some credibility to what i’m about to say.

I had to write because one thing is driving me crazy. You and others keep claiming that Lebron James and other NBA stars like Dwight Howard would be amazing on the soccer field. See your recent podcast with Chris Collinsworth (here). These players are incredible athletes but this is just not the case, and anyone who has played soccer would know that if you see a 6′ 8″ guy playing against you, you would be psyched. There is no way, no matter how athletically talented they are, that would be good players. This is due to 2 main reasons: (1) foot size and (2) quickness.

To shoot or hit a long ball well, you need to hit the soccer ball with your instep, which is the top of your foot. People with big feet are notoriously bad at kicking a ball far and accurately. It’s possible, but if you’re huge (over 6’5″) it would be super tough. Quickness is another issue. Being fast on your first 3 steps is so crucial to a soccer player. You see it all the time at the top of the box, where a player is trying to get just a little bit of space to get a shot off. The bigger you are, the less quick you are. Think of Lebron trying to guard the quickest point guards all day. It wouldn’t go that well.

For both of these reasons, if you’re super small and really quick you can be the best player in the world. See Messi and Maradona (both 5’5″-ish). If you’re gigantic, you probably won’t be.

BUT, i do agree with your general idea that if the best players in America played soccer, we’d dominate. In fact, in 2006 i made up the US starting 11 if we had our pick of the best players and they were super fast, strong and quick dudes (Barry Sanders would have been ideal). That post is here

Anyway, please don’t say anymore how good of a soccer player Lebron would be. It drives me nuts.

Thanks and keep on kicking ass -

Mike Lewis

Thanks to TheBoss for bringing this to my attention

An amazing piece of trivia is that July 6th is the day that Marty McFly went to in the future.

Anyone see him out and about?

Just a great picture.

The score was 0-0.  The ref raised the sign indicating 4 min of extra time.  The US team has wasted chances all day and all tournament. They played both sloppy defense and potent attacking.  But it was all over.  The US had blown its chance.  It was the easiest group in its history.  I could hear all the naysayers talking on ESPN’s PTI  and other radio shows.  We just suck at soccer.  You couldn’t advance ahead of Slovenia – it’s the size of New Jersey!? You couldn’t beat Algeria?.  The ref system is stupid, when’s the NFL start?.  Tim Howard recalls his though when the 90th minute came, saying:

I just thought the crazy thing is we could be on a plane tomorrow. It didn’t mean anything in the game, but I didn’t want to go home. I was kind of apprehensive about losing.

All the progress US Soccer had made over the past 8 to 20 years with the introduction of an MLS team, a quarterfinal finish in 2002 and the beginning of players playing successfully in Europe would all be for naught with a loss and elimination.  It would be the ultimate disappointment and I could tell the American public would once again sour on the sport.  I would dredding hearing Chuck Klosterman and Tony Kornheiser talk about how we suck and will forever suck at the world’s game.

But then the exact opposite happens.  Three minutes from going home, we score.  A fraction from elimination and we become champions setting a record for the fewest total minutes that a World Cup group winner had been leading in its first three games: a grand total of two minutes.

Not only am i happy to watch the US play this Saturday in the 2nd round but i’m happy for soccer in America.  For the first time since i can remember am i hearing people talk about what an exciting and fun sport it is.  People are beginning to understand why the rest of the world loves it.  This game will directly lead to future successes on the pitch in future World Cups.  There’s an 8 year old right now who wants to score the next huge goal in 2032 and because of today’s victory he’s much more likely to stick with soccer than go to football or basketball.  I couldn’t happier about all of it.  As Landon Donvan said after the game,

I used to see this game we play as just a game,” said Donovan, “and I think I’ve realized particularly during this tournament that it’s more than that. It’s an opportunity to inspire. And not only inspire other people but inspire yourself and your teammates. I think tonight is going to do a lot more for me and other people than maybe we’ll realize.

I completely agree.  Congrats guys.  Good luck on Saturday

I read a great post that opened my eyes to something interesting going on about Facebook’s privacy issue.   The issue has to do with how they position themselves in regard to being either a communications platform or a content platform – and how this impacts how they treat privacy.  If you look at this chart:

You see there are two sections: Communication and Content.  Both are directions that a company can focus on.  What’s interesting is the relationship between virality and revenue potential.   The more focused an application is on Communication, the easier and more quickly it spreads – but it can’t easily sell ads or monetize.  The more Content-centric an application is, the easier it is to monetize (ads are more relevant with higher CTR) but it’s hard to get the app to spread and grow.

Facebook started, of course, as a closed network for college students where they could “connect” and communicate.  As the statement above would suggest, this caused it to spread very quickly.  And it did.  However the site wasn’t making much  money.  Now, they find themselves with a slew (if you can call 500 million people that) of users and a desire to monetize.  It then makes sense for it to move up the scale and become more of a content company.  Thus, you see lots of Like buttons all over the place, a payment platform, and an ad platform to make this as effective as possible

The problem is with privacy.  Users were led to Facebook thinking it was on the Communication side of the fence.  However, it’s ambition is to be more in the middle because that is where it can both spread quickly and make money.  The privacy rules of a Communication web application and Facebook now are longer in agreement .  You can’t ask people to “Friend” and communicate with work people, parents, and close personal acquaintances and then also ask them to make that information public as if it is Content.  That there is a fundamental problem.

There’s an interesting Rule that’s being discussed in Hollywood these days that has to do with the lack of interaction between women in film. The Rule states that woman are neglected in a film if the film doesn’t satisfy these three Rules:

1. There are two women in the film
2. These women have names
3. These women talk to each other about something other than a man

Some of my favorite films of all time don’t satisfy this rule – such as Big Lebowski and The Dark Knight.   This week John August, a screenwriter of major films (Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), is saying that now that he knows about this rule, he’s going to try to bring it to every one of his subsequent films.  He says in his blog post:

Looking back through my movies, I’m struck by how rarely the female characters actually do talk to each other. In Big Fish, it’s only a brief moment with Sandra and Josephine. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it’s a throwaway moment between Violet and Veruca. Titan A.E. fails the test unless you know that the alien Stith is technically female.

In each of these cases, I had to spend a few minutes just to come up with these (admittedly slight) examples.

Also, I find it fascinating that the Reverse Bechdel Test is almost meaningless. Pretty much every movie made includes two named male characters talking about something other than a woman.

Here’s the original comic strip that invented the rule:

And if you want to see how many films apply, check out this video:

Interesting….

One week, 2 crazy movies.  Let me go into depth here….

Last week i saw the movie Crank 2: High Voltage. This movie is totally insane.   To illustrate how out there the film is, i’d like to repost comedian Aziz Ansari’s tweets he had while watching the movie where he reports on what’s actually happening on screen:

A dog just bit a cops duck off!

“FULL BODY TOURETTES!”

Chev is having sex on a horse racing track!!!!!  (this scene lasted 10x longer than I thought it could!)

Horse race sex scene is easily one of the most dumb/ridiculous things ever in a film. Can’t believe it. Crank 1 is dead to me.

Surely everyone has mentioned this, but Chev Chelios just killed an Asian dude and said “Chicken… and Broccoli.” Speechless.

RT @scottaukerman Here’s a lesson, kids: Tattooing your entire face will get you exactly ONE movie role.

RT @jwoliner The last “blooper” consisted of showing how an extra had shit himself. Going out with class!

Basically, I don’t want to give the impression that its cool to text or Twitter in a theatre, BUT if there is a movie with a character named PoonDong… I think its a unique situation and we were respectful in how we did

That’s right.  All of these things happened and more. For instance, there’s a Godzilla scene where Jason Statham becomes a 60 foot giant and fights in an electricity farm – for no major reason.  You have Amy Smart, the guy who played “Pedro” from Napolian Dynamite, David Carradine, Corey Haim, Jason Statham, and Ron Jeremy.   The horserace scene was so ridiculous that i had to buy the song that was playing during it out of respect. I could go on and on about how absurd this movie is, but i think you should do yourself a favor and get some beers and actually watch it for yourself.

But, my week doesn’t stop there.  I also saw the movie Splice on Sunday.  That took insanity to a whole other level.

I thought there was going to be a small alien-like thing that was just going to take out the lab and make for cool scenes similar to the movie Alien and Aliens.  However, what i was NOT prepared for was the little mutant to grow up to be like a human, have a tail with a stinger, go live with the doctors in their farm, start drawing pictures, have mutant sex with the Adrian Brody, get a pet kitten, grow wings, morph into a man, get buried alive, and then rape the mom.  THAT was unexpected and totally insane.  If you are looking for a humongous WFT, go check out this movie.

Ok, go about your business. Just had to report on that. Nothing more to see here.  Move along

Whoa, i just got sent this.  Apparently in south Jacksonville, near the St. Augustine outlet in the new KB Homes subdivsion they found a 15 foot Diamondback rattlesnake.  That’s right, 15 foot!  Apparently it’s the biggest every caught on record.

Some facts about this snake:

• One bite from a snake this large contains enough venom to kill over 40 full grown men
• The head alone is larger than the hand of a normal sized man.
• A bite from those fangs would equal being penetrated by two  1/4 inch screwdrivers.
• A snake this size could easily swallow a 2 year-old child.
• A snake this size has an approximately 5 and 1/2 foot accurate striking distance. (The distance for an average size Rattlesnake is about 2 feet)
• Judging by the size of the snake, it is estimated to weigh over 170 pounds. How much do you weigh?

This past weekend i watched this video from Fred Wilson about what are the 10 Golden Principles of a Web application. Fred has been an investor for over 20 years and is on the board of some of this decade’s premier companies such as Twitter, FourSquare, Tumblr, Etsy, Delicous, and more.

The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps from Carsonified on Vimeo.

1. Speed.  Fred sees speed more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature and he argues that this is more important with mainstream users an early-adopters who are more forgiving.  Everyday users have no tolerance for slugish apps.  I heard the same thing from Google when they presented at Techstars.  They measure everything and if it’s slow, they fix it.  Fred mentioned pingom as something they use to measure every portfolio company.
2. Instant Utility.  If a user has to spend too long to configure the service – it won’t catch on.  YouTube is a great example of how it won by providing instant feedback rather than delaying the gratification.
3. Voice.  Consumer software is media today.  Consumers approach in the same way the approach magazines, tv shows, etc.. Software has to have a personality and if it has no attitude, then it won’t catch on.
4. Simplicity.  Just one main feature at launch.  Fred points to Delicious as a perfect example of this.  Make the app super simple and then go from there.  There are lots of good posts on how to focus on this.
5. Programmability.   Make your app accessible from other developers.  This means read+write API’s and if’s not “write” it’s not an API and might as well be RSS.   Allow other developers to add energy, data and richness.  In Fred’s mind this is absolutely essential and he’s hesitant to invest in anything that isn’t programmable.
6. Personalizable.  You want make your app infused with your user’s energy.
7. REST URLs.  Make your app easy to navigate – give everything a URL. This also makes is discoverable from Google.
8. Discoverable.  There are millions of web pages and web applications.   This point means SEO but it also means that your app itself should be self-promoting.  This means social media and branding.
9. Clean.  This is UI requirement.  You need to be able to come to the page and be able to immediately determine what to do and what’s going on.   It has to be inviting and simple.
10. Playful.  An app should be fun to use and it’s use should encourage future use.  Weigh Watchers is a good example as it establishes points and goals and getting the points and acheiving goals is something that should be embedded in each application

There one more interesting point he spits out at the end about the name and brand of a company.  He talks about how important it is to him that the company purchases the actual name of the company.  For example, Foursquare was playfoursquare.com and they insisted that they change.  He also insisted that del.icio.us become delicious.com.

The 10 principles are interesting to think about and a good checklist for any startup to have.  I’ve definitely been guilty of ignoring some of these in my past work.   Interesting stuff

I have a friend, let’s call him “HotRod” who had tickets for this Thursday’s Laker game. Unfortunately, he couldn’t go. So, he put the tickets up on Craigslist. He was expecting some nice cash offers as it’s game 5 of a big series. Here was his favorite response:

Whoa. You can guess what his response was. Of course we want to see pictures. Hotrod replied,

These are the 205 tickets. Hmmm…I’d need to see pics before deciding. I usually take cash.

to which the guy replied

i understand they’re good tix, but like i said, we’re HUGE fans

And then sent these photos

It is AMAZING what people will do for tickets these days

Only 3 weeks away from The World Cup and the excitement inside my brain is building. If you’re not feeling it, watch the following video which is Nike’s three-minute World Cup short film which follows a match featuring the brand’s top footballers and shows how one play can lead to a future of success or failure.

The video, called “Write the Future,” premieres on TV in 32 countries during the UEFA Champions League final on Saturday, but was posted early by Nike on NikeFootball.com. The ad features Cristiano Ronaldo, Didier Drogba, Wayne Rooney, Landon Donovan, Thiago Silva and Ronaldinho (even though he didn’t make Brazil’s World Cup roster), plus cameos by Roger Federer, Kobe Bryant and Homer Simpson.

Alejandro González Iñárritu directed the Nike short and cast his “Amores perros” star Gael García Bernal as Ronaldo. Incredible work overall by the swoosh.

In case that video didn’t get you excited, here’s another short little commercial:

Only 21 days till kick off!

This month, The Daily Beast pointed out in “Tech’s 29 Most Powerful Colleges” and it had Dartmouth at the top. As The Beast says,

Our goal was to identify which colleges, compared student-for-student, have turned out the most undergraduates destined for high-tech greatness. While our results included many prestigious names, the rankings produced surprises as well. At the top of the list is a spot nearly 3,000 miles away from Silicon Valley.

That right baby! These results don’t surprise me. Making my way through the tech entrepreneurial world, I’ve encountered lots of Dartmouth alums as both entrepreneurs and VC’s. Dartmouth also has a long history in pioneering technology. Some key notes:

• In 1956, a Dartmouth math professor coined the phrase “artificial intelligence” and “AI” (link)
• In the 60′s, The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, was the first large-scale time-sharing system to be implemented successfully – setting the stage for the large server farms we see today at large companies such as Google.
• 1964, Dartmouth created the BASIC programming language which became a extremely popular language in the 70′s and 80′s.  In 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed a version of BASIC as their initial plan for Microsoft and today’s MS Visual Basic is still a derivative of that initial creation.
• Since 1991, computers have been mandatory for all students and in 1988 had campus-wide email working (before AOL!)
• In 1999, Wired magazine named Dartmouth the #1 most wired College in the country and in 2001, it became the first school in the country to be completely wireless (link)

It’s clear the Dartmouth is doing something right.  It’s nice to get the recognition.

Here is a guy by the name of Corey Goldfeder who used Back to the Future to propose to his girlfriend in one of the most creative and unique ever imagined.

Goldfeder’s plan was pretty intricate. First, he spent 15 hours using a digital camera, a make-shift green screen and a 30-day free trial of Pinnacle Studio software to edit himself into Back to the Future as Marty during a scene opposite Doc Brown. He then spent a few minutes talking to Doc, as himself, about whether or not he should propose, cleverly working Doc’s real responses from the movie into their conversation.  That would have been enough for most people.

But then Corey continued. He then convinced his girlfriend that there was a Michael J. Fox retrospective taking place at a theater downtown where they were screening Back to the Future. In cahoots with the theater, they put up signage out front making it look like the event and screening were indeed real, and Goldfeder snagged about 20 friends to show up as audience members. He then showed up with his gal, the lights went down, Back to the Future began as planned, and then when they got to the selected scene Marty McFly was instantly replaced by Corey Goldfeder, who, after a little chit chat with Doc, turned it over to himself to do the actual proposal. And of course she said yes.

The video is private right now for some reason, but you can watch part of it on Fox News (fast forward to 1:35):

This is incredible.  Not only for the amount of time but for the subject matter too.  Back To The Future is one of the all time classics.  It’s great.  I would love to somehow incorporate it into my wedding.  Here’s a pic of the couple:

There’s been lots of talk about how Apple’s market cap is about to equal Microsoft’s.  People love to discuss this because of the battle the two companies have fought over the past 3 decades.  Microsoft famously beat out Apple for PC dominance in the 80′s and 90′s by being open while Apple remained stubbornly closed.  Today, many people look at the Android/iPhone battle in the same light: one company with a superior product (Apple) and another that may be less polished but open to be used on other people’s hardware (Google’s Android)

I’ve heard quite often over the past year how Apple is crazy to go down the same path again.  However, i read a good summary today by Mark Sigal on O’Reilly’s blog about why this isn’t the case.  His five main points are:

1. Retail Distribution: During the PC Wars, everything came down to distribution and presence on limited retail shelf space. To be successful, you had to be on the shelves of retailers like ComputerLand, CompUSA, Circuit City, Office Depot and MicroAge. Given the wide variety of hardware OEMs making Wintel-based PCs, both shelf-space for Macs and the technical know-how to sell them were severely limited, making a differentiation story like Apple’s a hard sell. Today, Apple Stores drive a superior environment for consumers to experience hardware hands-on and get educated about the full breadth of Apple products. An aside, this is a consumer touch point that Google absolutely lacks.
2. Pricing overhang: A primary reason for Apple’s crushing defeat by Microsoft was Apple’s misguided notion that it could charge grossly higher dollars for Mac products than Windows-based PC offerings. Contrast this with the present, where Apple is consistent in their assertion and awareness that it cannot and will not leave pricing overhang (i.e. a sufficient pricing gap between its products and the competition). This avoids the past dynamic where consumers saw picking Apple products as an either/or decision, in terms of price vs premier experience. iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad all have followed this course.
3. Developer ecosystem: It is a truism that in platform plays he who wins the hearts and minds of developers, wins the war. In the PC era, Apple forgot this, bungling badly by launching and abandoning technology initiatives, co-opting and competing with their developers and routinely missed promised milestones. By contrast, Microsoft provided clear delineation points for developers, integrated core technologies across all products, and made sure developer tools readily supported these core initiatives. No less, Microsoft excelled at ensuring that the ecosystem made money. Lesson learned, Apple is moving on to the 4.0 stage of its mobile platform, has consistently hit promised milestones, has done yeomen’s work on evangelizing key technologies within the platform (and third-party developer creations – “There’s an app for that”), and developed multiple ways for developers to monetize their products. No less, they have offered 100 percent distribution to 85 million iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads, and one-click monetization via same. Nested in every one of these devices is a giant vending machine that is bottomless and never closes. By contrast, Google has taught consumers to expect free, the Android Market is hobbled by poor discovery and clunky, inconsistent monetization workflows. Most damning, despite touted high-volume third-party applications, there are (seemingly) no breakout third-party developer successes, despite Android being around two-thirds as long as the iPhone platform.
4. Consumer technology adoption: During the PC era, large enterprises essentially dictated the industry winners by virtue of standardizing on a given vendor or type of solution. This created a winner-takes-all dynamic, inasmuch as consumers would ultimately buy the same solutions that had been blessed by large enterprises. By virtue of its conservative nature (remember the motto, “No ever got fired for buying IBM”?), staid Microsoft always felt like a safer choice than crazy Apple. And besides, accounting could solicit bids from multiple hardware vendors, which they liked. By contrast, today’s breakthrough adoption begins in the consumer realm and filters back to enterprises, not the other way around.
5. Microsoft-like resilience: I remember too well the Microsoft mantra “Embrace-Extend-Extinguish,” which basically meant that any segment worth owning Microsoft would ultimately dominate by the 3.0 version of its competing product.  They were ruthless in squeezing the lifeblood out of competitors through any means necessary. But, give Microsoft full props for manifesting an unyielding resilience to keep working its product offering and market assault until victory was at hand. Considering Apple’s rise from the ashes to re-create a very profitable Mac business — the dominance it has created with iPod and iTunes; the powerhouse iPhone and iPhone platform and the ambitious, and already well-regarded iPad — does anyone wonder about Apple’s resilience? By contrast, Google remains almost completely dependent upon search and advertising, despite launching so many new product offerings and seriously pursuing M&A over the past several years. Arguably, Google’s famously loosely coupled structure leads to a lot of seeds being planted, but so too, it seems to a less than laser-like focus on seeing those seeds to cultivation and full harvest. It begs the question, “Can a tiger change its stripes?”

I carry around both an iPhone and a Droid so I’m witness the battle every day when i pull both out and decide which to make a call or text on.   They are both good phones.  The Android phones get refreshed every month when a new manufacturer comes out with the latest, whereas i have to wait a year for each new iPhone.  That said, the iPhone is better and because of points 1-5 above, i suspect Apple will clean house for at least a few more years.

There was an announcement today from Last.fm that read:

CBS-owned (NYSE: CBS) social music discovery and radio service Last.fm announced on Tuesday that it is discontinuing the on-demand song streaming service on its website, which had been available for the past two years in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, and will no longer host music videos.

What, Last.fm didn’t like paying tons of cash to have people play music for free? That’s amazing! Of course they cancelled this. They were offering free services which grew traffic but not monetizing those users at all. Not surprisingly someone asked why their offered the freebies. The release continued to read:

The company also said a number of new digital music services will now support “scrobbling” of tracks to users’ Last.fm charts. They include Spotify, The Hype Machine, MOG, We7 and Vevo.

This is the only reason i know of that people use Last.fm. People want to know what their most popular track is and it’s interesting to see what are the most played tracks. Where does this lead? It leads to last.fm being the Neilsons or Comscore or Billboard of the future. This site will tell us what’s popular and by who. In my mind, this is the future they have.  I wonder if CBS is regretting paying $280 million in cash for them.

There is an ancient Chinese story of an old master potter who attempted to develop a new glaze for his porcelain vases. It became the central focus of his life. Everyday he tended the flames of his kilns to a white heat, controlling the temperature to an exact degree. Every day he experimented with the chemistry of the glazes he applied, but still he could not achieve the beauty he desired and imagined was possible in a glaze. Finally, having tried everything he decided his meaningful life was over and walked into the molten heat of the fully fired kiln. When his assistants opened up the kiln and took out the vases, they found the glaze on the vases the most exquisite they had ever encountered. The master himself had disappeared into his creations.

Working within a company so long, it’s easy to see how your blood and bone can become part of the product and ultimately make something truly unique.  Giving a company your all, walking into the fire is both painful and pretty romantic.   The poet, David Whyte talks about this proverb, saying:

Work is the very fire where we are baked to perfection, and like the master of the fire itself, we add the essential ingredient and fulfillment when we walk into the flames ourselves and fuel the transformation of ordinary, everyday forms into the exquisite and the rare.

It’s an interesting analogy because in you can see that the potter, in disappearing into the kiln, he created something he loved and something truly special, but he also dies.  In doing his work he ceases to be a person that the rest of the world can interact with and relate to.

Such is the life of working on a startup

(thanks to Jerry Colonna for writing about this first)

When listening again to the classic We Are The World, i couldn’t help but think what a great song it is. It was written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and became the fastest selling American pop song single ever.

We Are The World (download here)

Some notes on the song:

• Michael Jackson pretty much wrote the entire song himself.  Sure, Lionel was there but it’s mostly MJ’s work.
• All the musician came from the American Music Awards.  All came in limousines except Bruce Springsteen who drove a pickup truck and parked it outside and paid for meter parking
• There was a big sign listed above the studio with the words, “Leave your ego at the door.”
• Prince bailed at the last minute because the organizer called him a creep (guess he didn’t see the sign)

ANyway, a good song to go back to and check out

The following advice below the image is from Scott Adams, the creator and writer of the comic strip Dilbert.  I was talking with my sister about careers the other day and this sprung to mind.  It’s not a specific roadmap but something to keep in mind as you accrue experience.

Scott says….

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.

…Get a degree in business on top of your engineering degree, law degree, medical degree, science degree, or whatever. Suddenly you’re in charge, or maybe you’re starting your own company using your combined knowledge.

Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix…

It sounds like generic advice, but you’d be hard pressed to find any successful person who didn’t have about three skills in the top 25%.

There’s a good article in Slate about how the TV show The Wire is becoming a common item for professors to assign to college students.  Some schools have a whole course dedicated to it.  As many of you know, i’m a huge fan of the show and can understand why profs would use it.

One of the professors teaching a course on the show is the sociologist William Julius Wilson—his class, at Harvard, will be offered this fall.  He says,

Although The Wire is fiction, not a documentary, its depiction of [the] systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of the urban poor is more poignant and compelling [than] that of any published study, including my own

That’s how badass the show is.  Anyone who hasn’t checked it out, should get into it.

I saw the movie Waking Sleeping Beauty a few weeks ago which takes a look at Disney’s Animation Studio from the years 1984, when it hit it’s lowest point after releasing The Black Cauldron (which got out-grossed by The Care Bears), to 1994 when it released it 4th straight mega blockbuster, The Lion King.

In 1984 Disney’s animation studio was filled with old-timers and young eager newcomers such as Brad Bird, Jon Lasseter, and Tim Burton.  The old timers lacked the passion and the youngsters lacked the experience.  For years they were at an impasse and it resulted in really lame, tired movies.  Disney recognized this and hired Michael Eisner, Frank Wells and Jefferey Katzenberg.   The new brass didn’t immediately recognize the importance of animation, nor really understand it.  They did know that change was needed and went about the standard “weed, feed and seed” strategy that I’ve seen in my startup experience.  This is a technique of getting rid of the old/bad talent (weed), bringing in new hires (seed) and empowering those who have great ideas (feed).  It almost always works.

What makes the film interesting is that even though this is a documentary, the footage is all in the time period. There are no talking heads in 2009 telling us how it is.  It’s only interviews from the 80′s with all its hair, sytles and the culture.

The animation workers had to endure quite a bit from 1980 to 1988 when they produced their first hit in decades, The Little Mermaid.  Bringing in outside song writers for Mermaid proved to be a stroke of genius.  From that film they gained confidence and experience and then scored another massive hit with Aladin.  After Aladin, they immediately started working on Beauty and The Beast this time with some swagger.  When Beauty premiered at the NY Film Festival in draft form,  it received a standing ovation and went on to be one of the rare animated films to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.   After Beauty and The Beast, egos were looming large.  Eisner was jealous of Katzenberg for promoting himself as the head of the Animation studio and the animators all were getting agents, high salaries, and big heads.  Despite that, you could tell that they knew they had something special and they were able to rally together once more to score another major hit with Lion King – which shattered all major box office records at the time.  After the release of the Lion King, Frank Wells died, Katzenberg quit, and the animators fell under their own egotistical weight.

I saw the film with the director/producer who worked at Disney during this entire period.  In his Q&A afterwards commented that everyone knew they were doing something special, but in the end you can’t keep a winning team together for too long – talented people just become too expensive.  In any industry or endeavor, you can’t keep a winning team together forever.  Think of the Red Sox, Shaq & Kobe, Microsoft, etc.

This is a fun film to watch.  It captures an amazing run of films we all know and love, and the turmoil, passion and business antics that went into making Disney a phenomenon.

I just saw the film The Ghost Writer and is was awesome.  Really great.  I felt the way i feel when i’m watching an old Hitchcock movie for the first time.  That feeling when watching a movie that everyone tells you have to see becuase it’s so good and then you finally get around to watching it.  You know it’s good from the beginning and as the film continues it gets better and better and you can just feel the goodness of the movie as you watch it.  That happened here.

The movie was writen by Robert Harris who is a former BBC TV reporter and political columnist.  He actively supported Tony Blair until the Iraq War, which Harris felt was a mistake. When Blair resigned in ’07, Harris quit his job to write the novel The Ghost. So, the similarities between Blair and Adam Lang, Cherie Blair and Ruth Lang, Hatherton and Halliburton, etc. are definitely intentional.

I also love it because it’s a classic film noir.  The rarely make films this way anymore because people want action instead of suspense, love instead of skepticism, optimism instead of curruption and happy endings instead of killing the good guy.  Well, I like warm fuzzies and Jennifer Aniston as much as the next guy, but what a i LOVE is a good old kick-ass Noir.  Let me explain:

• The whole movie is dark and rainy.  I was freezing in the theater and i couldn’t tell if i was actually cold or if it was just the film’s atmosphere.  That atmosphere — a rain-swept Martha’s Vineyard in winter — has an ominous, gray chill, and the main interior looks just as cold.  Interesting note: the movie was filmed in Germany and all the views of the ocean were done with green screen. Classic noir.
• Corruption rules.  No matter how hard the Ghost tries to find out the truth and do the right thing, he’s in over his head – just like his predecesor was and it’s likely to get him killed.  Everyone is cheating on everyone else either sexually or professionally.  Who can you trust?  If you’re familiar with Polanski’s other classic, Chinatown, you’ll know that the answer is nobody.  Classic noir.
• Mysteries and Clues.  There are dead bodies and they point to clues which point back to the dead body which point to something. What? We don’t know.  The story is great and you can actually try to figure it out, which is amazingly novel these days.  In the latest Sherlock Holmes, did you ever for a minute follow the mystery that was trying to be solved?  I didn’t.  That’s why that movie sucks and this movie is awesome.
• Women are deadly and the last ones standing.  There’s a reason the phrase “femme fatale” was given to the noir genre. Oops, did that give anything away?  Sorry about that.
• Everyone dies. Well not everyone, but this film has no problem killing people you like. And it doesn’t kill them in a cheesy way like a gun shootout but in an old school way – with one giant event.  Classic noir.

Polanski did an amazing job.  There is obviously a big parallel between Polaski and the character Lang as both are exiles sought by a court.    Apparently the Swiss arrested him while they were filming this and he finished the film while in prison.  I haven’t seen the documentary about him that came out last year but i do know that he’s got a way of making really good movies.

There’s an intersting advertising network that i learned about at SXSW this week called The Deck. They do one thing differently and it substantially impacts everything else: they get rid of the CPM. Selling ads by the 1000 holdover from the days of print media and TV where companies wanted to align ads to circulation and ratings. Deck does things differenly.

If you look at the three constituents of ad sales: publishers (the web site), readers, and the advertisers. The CPM is beneficial only to the advertiser. With CPM, publishers optimize their site for page views. This results in chopping stories into 3 pages, making photo galleries, lack of ajax, or other gimicks that result in more page views at the expense of user enjoyment. Typically when sites begin to focus on monetizing, they get worse for the reader, not better.

The Deck is an ad network. They represent both publishers (Twitteriffic, Daring Fireball, etc.) and advertisers (Rackspace, Gowalla, KickApps, etc.). They subjectively vet both of them.  The also have the following rules:

1. They will only represent websites of a certain type. In this case it’s sites focused on design or technology
2. They will only place ads of products they like or endorse
3. They then will place only one ad per page of one size and of one format. They charge the advertiser a monthly rate and sign yearly contracts wht the publishers.
4. Their ads have up to 80 characters and one image

Does it work? Definitely. They are way oversubscribed for both advertisers and publishers. Even though advertisers get less impressions, they are more effective. Thus, 7 out of 10 advertisers return month after month. Publishers have more attractive, less cluttered sites and no longer have to worry about chasing pages. Sure they want an audience and the bigger the better but whether it’s 3 page views per user or 10, it doesn’t matter

The author of Daring Fireball has a story of when he was using Google Ads instead of Deck. For a while his most successful, in revenue terms, article was one where he compared a certain design to a man’s toupee. What he found was all the Google Ads next to his article had to do with men’s hairpieces.  He also found that men’s hairpiece keywords are very highly priced and he earned 7x the amount of money on that page than other pages. This was troubling for him because he then started thinking about what words are valuable to Google when writing articles rather than what he readers want. His revenue (and interests) were properly aligned with advertisers nor readers.

Deck is an interesting example of someone innovating around ad networks. I find it fascinating as i really don’t like the CPM either. But, does it scale to other, non design/technology sectors? Maybe. I think it requires the readers to be intelligent and (somewhat)affluent. So i could see Travel or Cars having a similar ad network. But it gets harder after that.

Traditional Late Night TV has become a joke to me lately. Even though i love Conan, he wasn’t that funny at the new slot. . Leno just doesn’t do it for me either. That said, this clip is fantastic. More of this and i might be adjusting the ol’ Tivo.

I’m now seeing that this has over 1.5 million views so maybe i’m late to the party. Oh well, still worth a post:

I don’t know who is running the marketing department over at Old Spice or what ad agency they are using, but someone needs to get a raise because they have been knocking it out of the park for the past year or two. One of my favorite ads last year was an Old Spice ad featuring Bruce Campbell. He just keeps on walking, describing the je ne sais quoi of Old Spice and showing us the biggest sailing painting in history….

This year they’ve hit gold again with this ad. Look at the ad, now back at the blog, now back at the ad…:

What do you think? Any other ads that you like better?

So, if you didn’t catch the Oscars last night. Here’s what you missed: 2 really good moments (videos below) and lots of average stuff. Steve Martin and Alec weren’t that great. Each one of theme would have done better on their own but together it was a mess.

A truly absurd moment when the best short Oscar was being accepted. Here’s what happened. The director and the producer of the film are in a huge fight. When the winner was announced, the director of the film ran down from his seat while his mom blocked the producer with her cane. The director started thanking people when the producer finally made it to the stage. She then proceeded to talk over him for the rest of the time allotted while we, the viewer at home, just stared and wondered, What the hell is going on?!. Watch the speech below and here’s a link to the story.

Sandra Bullock was a GINORMOUS upset. She was the last person i thought would win. Seriously, the last. I wanted Carey Mulligan, thought Meryl would win, but could have understood if Gabby or Helen had taken it. But Sandra?? No way. She totally made up for it with one of the best Oscar speeches i’ve heard. It was thoughtful, coherent, funny and to the point. Good work

Of course, i was wrong about Avatar and i feel good for Kathryn “Point Break” Bigelow (and Lizard) but i do feel that there is a James Cameron backlash going on. It’s too bad because it was the better film. I don’t care that much because he’ll buy everyone that doesn’t like him eventually.

Oh well, i can’t wait for next year when Tron cleans up.

My sister is a smart lovable gal.  Sometimes she is wrong and she hates it when people point this out to her.   She responded to my recent Oscar predictions post with some interesting comments.  She said,

I won’t remember Avatar in ten years. Hell, I can barely remember it now; I had to go re-read a review to remind myself of what the actual plot was. I left Avatar thinking “Wow, you know, that looked really cool.” But Best Picture? Really? No.

and

I should note now that my brother compares the Oscar race between Avatar and Hurt Locker to the Star Wars vs. Rocky Oscar race for Best Picture, and where he comes down on the side of Star Wars on that one, I’m firmly in the Rocky camp.

Interesting comments.  But totally wrong. As an older brother, it is my duty to explain why.  Here we go:

Liz, first off I can see why you’d think this way.  You said you got sick from the 3D for Avatar and in your review you can’t even remember what the plot of Avatar was.  Well if you were so sick and you don’t know what the movie was about, you probably shouldn’t pick it for Best Picture.  But just realize that you’re in the minority and the rest of the country is quite aware of what occurred on the screen and loved it.  Maybe you should to rewatch in non-3D

Now about Rocky vs. Star Wars.  Have you seen the first Rocky lately?  The dialogue is atrocious. Rocky’s relationship with Adrian is one of the worst written and acted relationship in cinema.  It’s severely dated.

Star Wars is a different story altogether.  If you don’t think Star Wars was a seminal film in cinema history, you’re retarded.

Star Wars references are so deeply embedded in popular culture that you don’t even realize it.  You can’t even watch CNN now without them trying to copy many of the technological ideas that were first shown in a movie over 30 years old now (election hologram anyone?)  Everyday references to the main characters and themes of Star Wars are casually made. Darth Vader has become an iconic villain.  Phrases like “evil empire” and “may the force be with you” have become part of the popular lexicon in EVERY industry and culture.  Do you even remember what Apollo Creed’s nickname was?

Rocky is a good movie, but Star Wars was a good movie that changed cinema forever.  Almost all (or the majority) of science fiction films have been influenced by Star Wars and it basically created the modern-day blockbuster genre.  How many Rocky parodies are there?  Could you imagine a Spaceballs or Fanboys of Rocky?  No, the only thing keeping the Rocky films alive are Sly Stone’s attempt to remake the original time and time again.

I could go on and on about how Star Wars impacted both society and film but i think you get my point.  It was a major game-changer. This is why i compare it to Avatar.  While i don’t think Avatar will have the impact of Star Wars, i do believe it represents a large step-function in how films will be made going forward.  Major dramatic films are being made in 3D.  Future films will be made, realistically, without actors.  Think about that.  Major realistic, dramatic films without actors.  That’s what Avatar has introduced.

Let me just say that in 2007, NASA launched a space shuttle carrying a pair of Rocky’s shorts into space to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the film.  Wait, no, that’s a lie.  They didn’t.   What they DID do is launch the space shuttle with the original lightsaber on board.  It was the lightsaber that was used by Luke Skywalker. After spending two weeks in orbit, they brought the lightsaber back to Earth on November 7.  And you think this film, Star Wars, where they are doing event like this and making more references to over 30 years after the film was released shouldn’t win a “Best Picture” Oscar.  Really Liz?  Really?

The Oscars are coming this weekend. I’ve done a pretty good job this year of seeing most of the nominated movies.  So, without further blabbing, here’s my predictions for who will take the Oscar home and who I think should.

Best Picture

This is the most interesting race because we have two very different front-runners.  The Hurt Locker is a great story with an extremely authentic look at human nature and war.  Avatar is a technological marvel but is also has a thin plot.  It’s also interesting because this is the first year with the crazy new voting structure.  There are 10 films nominated.  The voters rank the ten in order of preference. If one film has over 50% of #1 votes, it wins.  If not, then the film with the least #1 votes is elinimated and those votes are redistributed and the process begins again.  This means a film that doesn’t originally have the most #1 votes could end up winning.  Whatever, i don’t really care that much.  Here’s what i think:

The Hurt Locker is a great film.  Maybe my favorite war movie ever. It’s raw and gutsy.  Avatar is also a great movie.  It has a generic story but the look and feel of the film was spectacular.  When i left the theater, I had a “holy crap, that was really something” feeling that rarely happens after a movie.  Ten years from now, i’ll remember my Avatar viewing but probably not my Hurt Locker experience.  Thus, i’m voting for Avatar. Which will win?  Star Wars, a similarly seminal film, lost out to Rocky in 1977.  But Lord of The Rings won in 2003.   I don’t think LOTR wins if it’s only one film.  I think in general, the Academy doesn’t like voting for big blockbusters but i have a hunch Avatar wins here.  I want:  Avatar / Should Win: Avatar

Best Actress

All i can say is that Carey Mulligan was the best performance this year.  Hands down. That girl will be a star.  Sure, Meryl Streep was good in a Julia Childs movie but that movie wasn’t good.  If Sandra Bullock wins, i’ll throw up on my TV.  She was good but she was playing Sandra Bullock with a southern accent. Puh-lease.   Give it to Carrey.  I didn’t see Precious but i heard that gal was great.  So caveat this pick.   That said, i know that the Academy has a love affair with Meryl Streep and loves her.  They also hate giving it to first-timers.  I want: Carey Mulligan / Should Win: Meryl Streep

Best Actor

I’ll tell you right now that Jeff Bridges wins here.  Everyone loves him.  He’s awesome.  He’s The Dude. This is a total lock.  I’m still pissed that the guy from Notorious was nominated.  This guy not only acted like Biggie Smalls but was able to rap like him.  He’s the most nuanced rapper in history and this guy got it down. We gave an Oscar to Jamie Fox for Ray Charles and Reese for June Carter, we should give one to this guy.   Of the nominees who were actually nominated, i like Jeremy Renner the best. His performance was amazing. He owned that movie.  The George Clooney and Morgan Freeman nominations are a total joke.  I like both those guys but those are the best acting performances of the year? Really? I don’t think so.  So, I want: Jeremy Renner / Should Win: Jeff Bridges

Best Director

This is so similar to Best Picture.  I love The Hurt Locker and i give her extra props because she directed Point Break (check out this for a great spoof) but you have to give it to James Cameron.  It was always believed we’d get to a point where human actors were necessary.  A world where you’re only limited by your imagination.  George Lucas wanted that with Jar Jar Binks.  Nobody had been able to do it.  Now we have. James accomplished it – all it took was perseverance and half a billion dollars.   BUT, everyone hates James Cameron. People think he’s a dick.  I see the Academy not wanting him on the podium. Especially after his “I’m the king of the world” speech last time.  I see an upset and Kathryn winning.  I want: James Cameron / Should Win: Kathryn Bigelow

Best Supporting Actor

This one is even easier than Best Actor.  Christoph Waltz wins hands down.  He rocked that movie so hard, it wasn’t even funny.  His personality was so cunning and creepy.  You could see him toying with the other actors.  A little gesture here, an inflection here.  He put on an acting seminar.  Everyone else just pulled up a chair and starting taking notes.  I want: Christoph Waltz / Should Win: Christoph Waltz

Best Supporting Actress

I have no idea who wins this. I hear the Precious gal was great.  Of the other 4, i like Vera Farmiga the best.  She was great in The Departed and was great here too.  Maggie was ok, but not award-winning.  Anna was good but more annoying than inspiring.  Penelope Cruz was in a horrible movie.  So it’s between Mo’nique and Vera.  I’ll wager that Mo’nique gets it because it seems to be more of a moving role.  I want: Vera Farmiga / Should Win: Mo’nique

Best Animated Film

Up is the best animated film but my favorite is Fantastic Mr. Fox.  It is one of my favorite films of the entire year.  Wes Anderson goodness.  I’ve seen the film twice and would be happy to see it another 20 times.  Loved it. I want: Fantastic Mr. Fox / Should Win: Up

Original Screenplay

The Hurt Locker takes this one.  The Coen brothers wrote a seriously awesome screenplay in Serious Man but it wasn’t that fun and the Academy hates not fun movies that aren’t about the Holocaust.  I don’t think anyone really took Inglorious Basterds seriously and people will feel bad voting for Avatar over Hurt Locker and want to throw the film at least one Oscar.  I want: Hurt Locker / Should Win: Hurt Locker

Adapted Screenplay

Everyone loves Jason Reitman.  He’s cool, he’s on a roll, his movies are good and his part of the Hollywood family.  People see Up In The Air and they think it’s a movie of our times.  It’s not, but they’ll give him the Oscar anyway.  I personally prefer An Education. That movie was creepy, joyful, and inspiring all at the same time. Nicky Hornby rocked that one.  He’s also been a on a roll with About a Boy and High Fidelity.  I want: An Education & Nick Hornby / Should Win: Jason Reitman

If this doesn’t inspire you to hit the gym, i don’t know what will.  It’s a good advertisement for cheese.  Thanks mom for sharing…

Just add a Little Jon song and you have a GREAT video.  Enjoy folks:

John Hughes wrote and directed some of my favorite childhood movies.  Movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Uncle Buck and more.  I was pretty sad to hear about his death last year.   There is a good article in Vanity Fair this month with quotes from actors from his movies including Matthew Broderick, Anthony Michael Hall, and Molly Ringwald.  Some good excerpts:

Ringwald: I remember the first thing that I saw of him—I didn’t know what he looked like; I didn’t know anything—were his tennis shoes. He was really into sneakers. It was not what I really thought of as a film director. His hair was spiky. He looked kind of relatable to me.

Hall: The word “dweebie”? Gotta credit Judd Nelson for that. I was on the Breakfast Clubset when he ad-libbed that. I think Judd’s responsible for that being part of our vernacular: him yelling, “You’re a neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie!” I remember John laughing.

Broderick: It was extremely pleasing to make John laugh. He had a quiet, very real, uncontrollable laugh: an eyes-closed, head-half-down, bent-over-quiet thing.

Hall: There’s a scene in The Breakfast Club between the principal and the janitor, Paul Gleason and John Kapelos, where one asks, “Who’d you want to be when you grow up?” and the other says, “John Lennon.” I think that was really John to some extent. He was such a Beatles fan.

Hall: When I was doing Weird Science, I got a call from my agent on a Wednesday, saying, “Stanley Kubrick is interested in you for a role in his Vietnam drama that he’s doing, Full Metal Jacket.” Got a call back on a Friday saying, “Well, now he wants you for the lead, as Private Joker. He’s gonna call you tomorrow.”  All I can compare this to is waiting for Oz to call. The stories preceded him: his privacy, living in London, sort of extricating himself from Hollywood, all that shit. I was shaking in my boots. The phone rings. Stanley Kubrick gets on and says, “I want you to know: I just screened Sixteen Candles three times … and you’re my favorite actor since I saw Jack in Easy Rider!” I’m like, “Whaaa? Am I fucking hearing this?”

The long and short of it was, it was such a drawn-out, wild process of negotiating with Kubrick, via his attorneys, that it had a real effect on my family. [Hall ultimately withdrew from the negotiations.] But my point in telling this story is, had I not had this collaboration with this great guy, I never would have gotten that call from Kubrick. I received the greatest compliment of my life, and I owe that to John Hughes.

As Kermit used to say, “it’s not easy being green,” which is why i thought these items were pretty cool…

First there’s a new Puma phone that was announced this week at MWC (the largest mobile conference in the world) and instead of trying to compete with iPhone/Android and trying to do everything it’s just a cool phone, with some cool “fun” features (pedometer, compass, audio player with turntable) and a solar panel on the back so you don’t run out of juice.  Pretty sweet.

Second, there is some more solar powered stuff:

These are lamps on a highway that are wind powered. As far as practical renewable energy concepts go, these wind-powered highway lights are pretty elegant.  I don’t see why we don’t get these on EVERY highway.

Finally, there’s just some bike new from LA:

Los Angeles is known for its freeways, and those guys are impossible to ride a bike on. That’s where a proposal from a cycling activism organization called the L.A Bike Working Group comes in. The group recently proposed a “Backbone Bikeway Network”–a system of bikeways that is comparable to a freeway for cyclists.  I don’t see this happening any time soon, but it would be really great if it did

I watched An Education this weekend and thought it was a great movie.   The film tells the story of a 16-year-old girl who is the target of a sophisticated seduction by a 35-year-old man. This happens in 1961, when 16-year-old girls were more naive and were actually (sort of) looking for older men to take care of them.

The movie has a good script, but the real story is the job played by British actress Carey Mulligan who plays the 16-year old girl.  Watching the movie with the Kesners, we all couldn’t help but comment how she reminds us of Audrey Hepburn.  There’s no one else that came to mind.  The movie could have been sad or creepy but because of Carey’s lightness and joy of character, it is instead it is a romance.  In 1998, I remember watching the movie Playing By Heart which has a few small roles for a little-known actress named Angelina Jolie.  I remember and seeing her absolutely kill every scene. I knew i was watching someone who was going to be a star.  Although two completely different actresses, I felt the same way about An Education and Carey.

Check it out – it’s a good movie.

Wes Anderson was rumored to be directing the new Spider-Man. Here’s a take of what that’d look like

I’m not sure if you’ve heard about the iPad.  Unless you’ve been under a rock, you can’t avoid the Apple madness.  I’m up in San Francisco this week and couldn’t help but feel the Apple riptide and get drawn into the hype.  So I watched the announcement and here are my thoughts

The iPad is super-duper slick.  I can see some great use-cases for it, such as:

• If i was pitching a presentation to someone at a restaurant, in an elevator, or anywhere – the iPad would be a much better way to present the presentation than a laptop.  I could see it becoming a must-have for entrepreneurs
• If i had kids and a family room with lots of people, having a family iPad that people use publicly would be great. Anyone in the family could us it in front of the TV or as the home iTunes download system for movies and TV shows that syncs with their AppleTV
• Games. This could be one of the most sick gaming machines. It has the graphics, accelerometer, and connection needed to really be badass. I could see someone making a truly unique iPad gaming experience.

All these great ideas and reviews make me love the iPad but i’m not going to get one.  I’m not feeling it yet (not because of the video joke and jokes) and here’s why

• i have an iPhone and i have a Macbook. I’m not feeling a huge need to have an iPad. If i did, i would want to replace my MacBook and i don’t think the iPad is powerful enough to be a replacement yet. I want all my songs on it (need more than 64 GB) and i want to run a browser and email at the same time. Until those happen, my laptop is vastly superior.
• The A4 chip seems like a bad idea.  No way Apple is going to consistently be better than Intel or AMD at making low power chips.  Maybe they can now and early billions from it, but it can’t be a long-term solution
• No camera bums me out.  I’m not sure but i think I’m going to want to take pics with the iPad. Maybe not but i like video skyping and i like taking random pics.  Give me a camera

If you know, you know that i feel that i’ve seen the future. I know what i want and where i want Apple to take me.  It’s this:

• I want an iPhone device that has huge storage, enough for music (b/c i don’t see cloud music solution for another 5 years), and a fast enough processor that i can put all my files on it and use Google Docs and Dropbox for shared files
• A portable keyboard and docked monitor so i can plug my phone into them and use it as a desktop computer when i’m at home or at work.
• Over time, the files get saved more and more in the cloud and my phone become a portable processor, harddrive and network card.  That’s all

I saw with the iPad a keyboard doc and saw this future is coming.  It’s coming but slowly.  i can’t wait

I’m reading Roger Ebert’s great essay about Making Out Is Its Own Reward and thinking to myself, “Ebert’s writing is the best kept secret on the Internet.”

Last week I read his article Nil By Mouth where he describes how it feels to not be able to eat following his throat surgery. He offers some great observations from religious to the social.  It’s an amazing essay and a must read for anyone who eats to appreciate what truly results from a meal. Hint: it’s not the food.  One passage:

One day in the hospital my brother-in-law Johnny Hammel and his wife Eunice came to visit. They are two of my favorite people. They’re Jehovah’s Witnesses, and know I’m not. I mention that because they interpreted my story in terms of their faith. I described my fantasies about root beer. I could smell it, taste it, feel it. I desired it. I said I’d remembered so clearly that day with my father for the first time in 60 years.

“You never thought about it before?” Johnny asked.

“Not once.”

“Could be, when the Lord took away your drinking, he gave you back that memory.”

Whether my higher power was the Lord or Cormac McCarthy, those were the words I needed to hear. And from that time I began to replace what I had lost with what I remembered. If I think I want an orange soda right now, it is after all only a desire. People have those all the time. For that matter, when I had the chance, when was the last time I held one of those tall Nehi glass bottles? I doubt I ever had one from a can.

In this latest essay Making Out Is Its Own Reward, Ebert provides a trip back in time to a period where America’s youth was held by all parts of society to the “3 foot rule” where when you’re with a girl/guy 3 of your 4 feet had to be on the floor. He discusses the impact it had on a poor professor who was a touch more liberal, what it meant for him and his life as a teenager in the 50′s, and how that relates to kids today.

The blog from Ebert is a treasure. Some article are solely focused on movies but regardless to topic the writing is fantastic. You get the sense that he’s willing to write about anything with honesty and care. I hope it continues as can’t wait to see what he writes next

I was listening today to an NPR podcast with George Lucas (download). He has a new book out where he discusses the 300 most influential and impressive blockbuster movies to him. For each film, he does some significant research into the casting, the shooting schedule, the budget, and the result. He adjusts for inflation so you can see the true impact older films had. Some interesting tidbits:

• The average ticket price in 1910 was $6 and the average ticket price today is $6. I find that amazing.
• The music licensing for Lucas’ first film American Graffiti cost him 70k because he was instructed to keep his costs under 10% of his 700k budget. He licensed 2 albums worth of rock. People told him that he was insane to do that. Every other film prior to that had be scored. Nobody had thrown music on top of film. First, it’s amazing that this is the film that changed that. Second, a year later the studio was trying to license all the music for an album to be released and it cost them $1 million. In one year, the industry changed that much. Wow
• Jurrasic Park was the one movie that really changed the digital landscape.  Prior to that everything looked like an effect. After JP he knew you could make anything
• Star Wars was revolutionary to Lucas in that you could make a 2 foot green person seem lifelike. That was the first time there had been an imaginary life-like character in film. Really changed the game. 2001 was the biggest movie at the time and was seen as the best, most creative sci-fi film ever. However, Lucas saw it as a set of still shots and wanted to introduce energy into special effects shot. He wanted to be able to pan the camera through space and not just have one shot.
• 3D is new and Lucas looked at using it for Episode I but the techology wasn’t there.
• He and Spielberg used to trade equity points in their films.  Lucas always thought Spielberg’s films were better than his and Spielberg thought the opposite so each trades a few points of equity in each of their films before they were released.  For example, Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind came out when Star Wars came out and Lucas preferred Close Encounters and Spielberg thought Star Wars would crush it.  Guess Steven knew better

Sure i ordered it in October and it took forever, but it’s finally here. I now have a fitbit

For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s a little clip you were around. The clip (called a “Tracker”) contains a motion sensor like the ones found in the Nintendo Wii. The Tracker senses my motion in three dimensions and converts this into useful information about my daily activities. The Tracker measures the intensity and duration of my physical activities, calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, how long it took me to fall asleep, the number of times I woke up throughout the night and how long I was actually asleep vs just lying in bed.

It’s pretty awesome stats and all i have to do is wear this little clip. Also, the clip uploads the data to my Mac without attaching it. All in all, it’s pretty sweet.

One thing i’ve noticed is how nice the web interface is. Entering in foods, water, and stuff is a breeze. Anyway, it’s my first day with this thing. We’ll see how it works. Stay tuned.

Lakehouse by Of Monsters and Men   (download here)
This is one of my favorite tunes of the new year from a six-piece band from Iceland. The lyrics don’t really make sense but it’s still catchy.  Enjoy 

Truth by Alexander    (download here) (Buy from Amazon)
This is one of my favorite songs of the year.  It’s just so chill and laid back and how can you complain to such bad-ass whistling.  This is the frontman from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

Ghosts That We Knew by Mumford and Sons (download here)
A new song by British guys.  This one is another slow burn and is just beautiful.  Enjoy

Something Good Can Work by Two Door Cinema   (download here) (Buy from Amazon)
You’d never know these guys are from Northern Ireland.  ”Oh Oh” – if this doesn’t get stuck in your head, something’s wrong with you.