Category: The Internet

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Looking back at 2011

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. Continue reading “Looking back at 2011”

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Moneyball and Big Data

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. Continue reading “Moneyball and Big Data”

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The Real Deal with the Recession and Jobs

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. 


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Making Progress

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.



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I Guess I’m an Early Adopter

I join a TON of new services. I try them all and I love doing so.
Sometimes the networks i join actually stick around.  I got an email today reminding me of this.  In this case i was user 50,000 out of an eventual 100 million.
Nice work LinkedIn.
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SXSW Review

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).
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The “Better-Nevers” of Technology

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.

Continue reading “The “Better-Nevers” of Technology”

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New Startup Ongo Raises $12 MM and Starts Sprinting Off a Cliff

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.

Continue reading “New Startup Ongo Raises $12 MM and Starts Sprinting Off a Cliff”

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Apple is Crushing It

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.

Continue reading “Apple is Crushing It”

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Quora is About to Explode

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.

Continue reading “Quora is About to Explode”