Casino Royale Rocks
Saw a sneak preview of the new Bond movie, Casino Royale, last night. I'm a huge 007 fan, so I've been looking forward to this movie for just about after the credits of the last one started rolling.
Well worth the wait.
I saw in the paper that Daniel Craig brings the franchise back, but I don't want to say that because I think Pierce Brosnan was the one who actually did that... bringing it back from License to Kill, which was, in my opinion, the worst Bond ever. (A View to a Kill can't be the worst, because it has Christopher Walken.)
Casino Royale starts out with Bond even before he was a "00" agent... resetting the story just like they did with Batman Begins.
Daniel Craig reminds me of Connery's Goldfinger performance. Rough around the edges, but every now and then he flashes a smile without being cheesy.
The story, and their actually is one, is well thought out and not predictable at all. Just go see it... even if you're not a Bond fan... it's a great action movie for anyone.
What if this didn't happen on Etsy?
Team Etsy: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
Etsy User Community: Yay! We love you.
Here's how it would look if some other sites went down for two days:
MySpace Tom: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
MySpace Users: Fuck this... we're taking our thong pics to Friendster.
Facebook Mark: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
Facebook Users: Fuck this... we're taking our drunken pics to Friendster.
Friendster Jonathan: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
Friendster Users: *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* Ah, lunchbreak... Back to work, *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click*
YouTube: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
YouTube Users: Fuck this... now we're going to have to figure out how to use BitTorrent to get our illegally posted television clips.
Pincus: Fuck it. We're taking the site down for two days to make it fuckin' better. Fuck our site and everything else.
Tribe members: Why does this guy keep cursing at us and what was with the blood on the logo? Can't we just talk about sushi and Burning Man in peace?
Craig: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
Craiglist Users: Do you ski?
Linden Labs: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
Second Life Residents: Run for your virtual lives! Hide in the American Apparel store! They're going to unplug us! Let us live! Let us live!
Jeff Jarvis: I'm taking Buzzmachine down for two days because old media sucks and they don't get it.
Buzzmachine readers: Death to old media! Death to old media!
NJGuido.com Webmaster: We're taking NJGuido down for two days to make it better.
Guidos: You think you're better then us? Huh? You think you're fuckin' better than us?
Fred Wilson: I'm taking the site down for two days to make it better.
AVC Readers: That's fine... we'll just listen to the Arctic Monkeys in the meantime.
Me: I'm taking the site down for two days to make it better.
Thisisgoingtobebig Readers: Just promise us you won't go back to the gray on black.. that was awful!
Web 2.0 Whac-a-Mole sucks
The great thing about being a Web 2.0 entpreneur is that you could build something usable and more importantly, noticeable, on your own dime (or a few friends and family dimes) and get it bought by confused old web media companies playing Whac-a-Mole with startups.
From what I can tell, Google actually has a vision for their acquisitions: Total digital domination from every angle. Hey, at least it's a goal, or a loose collection of many goals. Regardless, when they bought Writely and Jotspot, you could at least say, "Ah... I see, that makes sense. They're building an office suite." Or, when they bought Dmarc, you could say, "Ah... they want to dominate radio ads, too." In fact, that strategy has so much logic, you could even make the connection and ask, "How long before they buy Spotrunner?"
Try asking yourself who Yahoo! or NewsCorp will buy next... or CondeNast. Who the hell knows, really? There are a lot of acquisitive players out there that I think are making bad homes for startups.
What's worse is that, post-acquisition, some very good ideas are showing very little of the inginuity and continuous product development that made them great in the first place. It's not surprising either. If you are independent, you're trying to run for the gold, beat out your competitors, win the game. Within a big company with a little money in the pockets of the founders, it's highly unlikely the push to innovate will continue. Does anyone think Reddit is going to become any more disruptive or gamechanging at Wired? Sure, it might be more users, but expect any innovation to slow to a crawl.
And that really sucks for users. For some of these startups, we only got to see a taste of what they could have been with a little more development. What ever happened to Konfabulator anyway? Did the end users really fair much better with that company in the hands of Yahoo! than the would have had they gotten some VC funding and tried to build a bigger company? The acquisition environment we have now is really killing innovation and cutting companies off at the pass before they have a chance to make a much bigger impact on the web.
Don't get me wrong. It's hard to turn down these offers... but I was talking to an entreprenuer the other day who said to me, "Listen, I've never had the check put in front of me, but to be honest, I want to do something bigger. That's the reason why I got into this in the first place. I sort of feel like I should go big or go home." I'd like to think I'd have the same sentiment, especially seeing what seems to happen to these startups after acquisition.
At what point does anyone start wondering whether or not some of these companies are acquiring just to crush these startups?
What's your list of companies that are currently private that you hope take a shot at something bigger before getting assimmilated?
2006 ZogSports Fall Dodgeball Champs: Dodge This!
Last night, after 2 kickball seasons, 3 other dodgeball seasons, 3 softball seasons and a football season, on my 10th try, I finally won my first ZogSports Championship! After going 18-6 in the regular season and finishing in second place, Dodge This! edged out Chico's Bail Bonds for it's rightful place in obscure sports history.
Pictured (L to R): Allison Auman, Rebecca May, Alex Lunney, Nancy Kish (seated), James Pastore, Charlie O'Donnell (me, seated), Abby King, Evan Timbie, Erick Bond, Courtney Bongiolatti. Not pictured: Doug Miller (injured reserve)
nextNY Blog about NYC Tech
The group at nextNY decided that NYC tech could use another voice... or 400 of them... so we started blogging. Go take a look. We're going to profile NYC companies, people, cover events, etc...
Getting into this online stuff: Part II - A better way to bookmark and favorite links on the web using del.icio.us
This is the second installment of posts I plan to use for the class I'm teaching at Fordham. It's probably a little remedial for hardcore techies, but it might be the kind of things you send to friends who might not be as tech savvy. See the prior post at the bottom...
So, you've been surfing the web for 10+ years now.
How many bookmarks or favorites do you have? 5? 10? 50? So in 10 years you've only seen 25 things on the web worth saving?
What about discovering new things? Are you one of those people who gets stuff sent to them or are you always the first to find something?
I want to share a really useful tool I use called del.icio.us. It has a screwy name because it's actually at the "icio.us" domain... You can get to it from delicious.com, but that just takes all the novelty out of it.
del.icio.us is a better way to remember, discover, and share URLs. It may not seem compelling at first, but I guarantee once you use it a few times, particulalry the first time you retrieve or discover a new link, you'll be hooked.
What is it?
del.icio.us is a way to store your links online. So, right off the bat, anything you save can be easily retrieved from other computers that you use? New computer? Home computer. No problem. And no searching through e-mails for links anymore either. Welcome to 2006.
All of the del.icio.us links are saved with your own keywords. No more trying to figure out if the Barry Bonds story goes in the sports folder or the steroids folder. (If you even have folders for links.) Just "tag" it (attach keywords) using words that will help you retrieve it later... Just "jerk" or "jerk, baseball, juice, BALCO, SFGiants, and Bonds." You'll never lose a link again, because you stored it using any and all of your own words. I never lose the Central Park softball field finder because I have it tagged "central park, maps, and softball".
By default, links in del.icio.us are public. You might freak out at first, but keep in mind the following... You don't have to have any personally identifyable information displayed in your account. If you want to be metsfan06 in del.icio.us, no one will really know who you are. Also, you can make any of your links private. In my year and a half of using del.icio.us, I think I've done this twice, and I actually set my name to be viewable in my del.icio.us account. Look at most of your bookmarks. Would it matter if any of them were public? Maybe a handful, but I doubt that's the case for most.
The value of the public default in del.icio.us is that you can discover new links tagged by the community of other users, and there are over a million. You can check out the most popular links tagged PHP at del.icio.us/popular/php or the most popular things tagged funny at del.icio.us/popular/funny. Because there are over a million del.icio.us users, most of these tags are pretty deep in their content. You can also check out combinations (but just a chronology...it doesn't do popular for combos) of tags. Check out links tagged nyc and food at del.icio.us/tag/food+nyc for a good restaurant recommendation. There's no rating system on del.icio.us, because, as the founder put it, links only have two settings... "stuff worth saving" and "everything else". Plus, you can discover other users who have similar interests. I found a guy who was tagging cool Brooklyn restaurants and places "naveen" at del.icio.us/naveen/hangout. I didn't even know who he was, but followed what he was tagging hangout.
One last thing and then we'll get to the how. You can tag links for specific people right at the moment you save it for yourself. If you find a link you want me to see, just tag it as usual, but also add the tag for:ceonyc. When I want to tag something for Shaival, our biz dev guy here, its for:sshah06 or for Kristina, our Oddcast intern, its for:kw11. You have to know your friend's screenname...there's no user search.
Oh, you can also subscribe to any person's links, any tag, any combo, or the popular lists, by RSS.
Here's how to use it:
First off, it's much easier to use it in Firefox, because they've built a really nice little extension. Plus, you should be using Firefox anyway....less bugs and holes, plus webpages pretty much display the way the auther intended. IE does screwy things to the web.
1) Register here.
2) Get the firefox extension.
3) Restart your browser.
4) Now you've got these two buttons on your toolbar. One for tagging pages and one for retreiving your tagged pages.
5) When you tag a page, use space seperated keywords that make sense to you. For me, I always use a combination of general subject tags and ones that intidcate to me why I tagged them. So, this post might be tagged "del.icio.us howto web bookmarks favorites fordhamclass". You can use as many or as few as you like and it doesn't matter if they make sense to anyone else but you. So, someone looking for better ways to manage bookmarks would find this post through the "bookmarks" tag, but no one would ever care about or look for something tagged "fordhamclass". That tag is for my purposes. The neat thing about tagging is that I just did something for myself...tagged a link so I can find later, and others still benefit.
There are lots of other neat features of del.icio.us, like creating linkrolls for your blog or automatic once a day blog posts of all your links from that day. Take some time to explore it. I guarantee that if you get into the habit of using it, you'll find it really useful and you'll never forget anything you saw on the web.
Other "Getting into this online stuff posts":
Getting into this online stuff: Part I - Blogging as the Industry Cocktail Party
Artificially intelligent avatar: And he's even local!
So we just blogged about our new AI skin on the Oddcast blog. I'm so impressed, b/c when I just asked him where he lives, he answered and returned the question.
I answered "New York City."
He responded, "Which borough?"
I'm proud to say that Oddcast is hiring local avatars who know their way around NYC!
Bicycles do not fit with the kind of image New York Sports Club is trying to project... WTF?
It is beautiful out in New York City today... currently 58 and expected to get up to 67. It will probably be 22 by Monday, but what can you do.
Anyway, I biked in this morning and made my usual stop at the gym first, to workout and and cleanup. The NYSC on 35th and Madison, unlike the other ones I've been to, has no poles in front of it... no parking meter, streetlamp... anything. The only place to lock my bike is on the corner of 36th against the walk/don't walk sign... which is a little ways down. I'm not totally comfortable with that, and so I asked at the gym about a place to put it inside.
So, the woman at the desk said that I couldn't bring it in because they couldn't be responsible. I wasn't asking for that... I just felt safer if it was inside. And, actually, if they had a bike rack inside, and someone came in with some clippers, I'd imagine she'd at least call the cops or something, just to be nice. She suggested I talk to the manager.
The manager said there were some places around the corner, which of course, defeats the purpose. He also said they tried to get the city to put in some bike racks across the street, but they didn't get anywhere. "What about a rack in the club here?" The club has a double entrence and in between the inner and outer doors, there's a perfect space for a small bike rack.
This is where it gets ridiculous.
"Oh, we can't have that because this is a high visability club."
I knew what he meant, but I just wanted to get him to say it.
"High visability?"
"Well, it's a nice location that a lot of people come to so we can't go messing it up with a bunch of bikes that people can see."
"Umm... doesn't biking sort of fit with the whole gym concept? You know... exercise. Just seems to me a gym, of all places, should be bike friendly?"
"I see how that might make sense, but I don't think that's something we're going to do here."
The ironic thing is that, every year, New York Sports Club sponsors a team in the Five Borough Bike Tour.
They're all about biking, so long as it's not near one of their clubs, because bikes are aestheticly displeasing. Let me tell you, bikes are pretty far down the list of aestheticly displeasing things I've seen at the gym... I wish they would ban the hairy naked guy that towels off next to me with one foot up on the bench.
Virtual Sales or Virtual Advertising?
Soon, you'll be able to buy Coke in Cyworld.
Good for Cyworld, but is it good for Coke?
Now that I'm in the virtual biz, I've been thinking a lot about the promise of virtual goods.
It's certainly a very attractive idea... put something up there that cost you peanuts to create, get lots of people to buy it, and voila.... 99% margains.
But let's think about it for the brand. Cyworld has 20 million users worldwide. Let's say that half of these are active users, as oppossed to people like me that check out a lot of stuff and come back to very little.
Also, let's say that they could get 3% conversion rates on the Coke bottle, which even then is very generous, because not all of these people are active users.
So, that's 300,000 Cokes. Now, unlike regular Coke, you only need to buy one digital Coke, assuming the technology isn't there for you to drink it and need another. 300,000 virtual Cokes at what? Fifty cents? $150,000 in revenue for Coke plus the branding awareness within a closed network.
For a company that made $23 billion in revenue in 2005, I don't really think that's going to move the needle.
What if, instead of trying to sell these things, they paid Cyworld that money at a $10 CPM to put Coke vending machines in Cyworld for free.
That would be 15,000,000 impressions of Coke among a lot more than 150k users.
Personally, I think Coke would benefit more by spending the money to push (or have users pull for free) their way into these virtual worlds than trying to get into the business of selling virtual goods. Coke's business is to sell real drinkable soda, not 1's and 0's. If you're a brand thinking of selling virtual stuff, I think you're going to be sort of underwhelmed with the results compared to the buzz you could generate by freeing up your brands within these virtual spaces and letting them play.
Radar Love: Newsgator Go!
"When I get lonely, and I'm sure I've had enough
She sends her comfort, comin' in from above
Don't need no radio at all
We've got a thing that's called radar love
We’ve got a line in the sky, radar love"
I just installed Newsgator Go! on my Pocket PC-6700 and I love it. I had been falling behind a bit in my feed consumption and I definitely caught up this morning. I sync on my walk to the subway, read underground, and sync up again so that the web version knows which posts I've read. Very easy... very fast.
I do have a couple of feature requests, though:
- When I'm done reading posts in a feed, I can hit "Mark all" with a thumb button, but then I have to it OK in the corner to close out of a feed. I want a "Mark all and close" or a "next feed" button.
- I'd like to sort my feeds (and this is Newsgator-wide) by number of unread posts.
- Clipping doesn't really do anything for me. Its an extra step. I clip stuff, then I have to go back to the web to either tag it in del.icio.us or blog about it or get rid of it. I'd love to tag and/or blog about it right from my phone.