buzz

"If you are here, your network will be using all of the latest tools – Twitter, Foursquare, Quora,..."

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:01:00 -0500

“If you are here, your network will be using all of the latest tools – Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, Nexus One, etc., before other networks in other cities will. These networks hit critical mass here earlier and are thus more valuable to the early adopters here. You’ll have a 3-month+ head start on people outside to see what’s coming next. Imagine trying to design next year’s clothing without firsthand immersion in this year’s fashion, in Milan or Paris.”

- From a post titled “Why You Need to be in Silicon Valley”.

In general I hate posts like this. I don’t live in SIlicon Valley, but I do spend quite a bit of time there. I want to believe that twitter streams and blog comments allow anyone, anywhere to follow and make connections with the most plugged in silicon valley digerati. This ought to allow them to spot emerging trends from anywhere they chose to live without being sucked into the Silicon Valley echo chamber.

Is this wishful thinking or does being in Silicon Valley still give you an insurmountable edge?

(via brycedotvc)

I think this is just another case of how people assume their success is directly related to every choice they made and can recommend no other course. In my experience, if you ask anyone where you need to be to start a company, the chief indicator of what their response will be is where they live. If you ask if you should go to business school, the chief indicator is if they went. If you ask how to raise money, what investors, or just where to get your paper supplies, they go back to what they did.

Perfectly understandable but it completely overlooks all of the things particular to the person asking. Where should you start your company? Well, where is YOUR personal network the richest? Where can YOU find the best talent? Where are YOUR customers and investors?

Me? Thanks, but I’m going to ride this whole Brooklyn thing out. Viva la Hot Potato!

Went to see Fuerza Bruta at the Daryl Roth Theatre in Union...

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:50:00 -0500

Went to see Fuerza Bruta at the Daryl Roth Theatre in Union Square tonight. Good stuff.

mattlehrer: Good news is that I truly out did myself this year...

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:35:05 -0500

mattlehrer:

Good news is that I truly out did myself this year with my Christmas decorations. The bad news is that I had to take him down after two days. I had more people come screaming up to my house than ever. Great stories. But two things made me take it down.

First, the cops advised me that it would cause traffic accidents as they almost wrecked when they drove by.

Second, a 55 year old lady grabbed the 75 pound ladder almost killed herself putting it against my house and didn’t realize that it was fake until she climbed to the top (she was not happy). By the way, she was one of the many people who attempted to do that. My yard couldn’t take it either. I have more than a few tire tracks where people literally drove up my yard.

We're live in the App Store!

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 22:39:27 -0500

hotpotatohq:

Great news - the Hot Potato app is live. Thanks very much to Apple for the approval.

You can download it here or can search for hotpotato in iTunes.

Lots more detail coming on this over the weekend, and we haven’t forgotten those who have signed up for an email. We’re working on on the web that will make things easier to use and understand for all of our new users.

Thanks again for all of your support!

"Entrepreneurship exists in the tiny space between madness and genius; and, its journey requires a..."

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:33:50 -0500

“Entrepreneurship exists in the tiny space between madness and genius; and, its journey requires a few cross border violations across both madness and genius to get to the final destination.”

- comment by JLM on the The Herd Instinct (via fred-wilson)

A Night with Hot Potato

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:01:07 -0500

joevc:

Twitter’s explosive growth and the iPhone app store have spawned a fresh batch of real-time data services. Many brilliant minds are searching for sustainable business models in the segment. Last night I tested out one of the most promising new players, Hot Potato.

The startup enables real-time, curated chats around live events. Users can create a discussion thread, either public or private, focused on a game, concert, conference, etc. Users can announce their participation to friends via Twitter and Facebook, then post text, photos, and videos, comment on individual posts or “like” them, view other participants’ profiles, and track “hot” posts.

I accessed Hot Potato via my laptop, as Apple has the iPhone app in review purgatory. I joined a discussion around the Patriots-Saints game. Per the image above, the Pats forced me to abandon the chat for the first ever Hot Potato Gossip Girl discussion, launched by Jon Steinberg, in what was no doubt an historic moment for the series.

The service was raw but has significant potential for both users and advertisers. Real-time user generated content faces multiple challenges, from information overload, to lack of editorial control, to accessibility. The confluence of Hot Potato’s capabilities addressing these issues could make it a winner.

Curation is the key to addressing both information overload and editorial control. There is an abundance of chat-based options around live events, but they’re typically overrun with blowhards like myself that will make insane claims about Brady Quinn’s ability to throw deep, or Shaq’s athleticism. This idiocy is half the fun, but the ability to mute the idiots when appropriate makes the experience more engaging. Hot Potato will allow you to focus on posts contributed by your friends or from strangers that are generating the most interest amongst participants.

Accessibility is addressed via smartphone apps, which allow users at the live event to share near-time, personal thoughts and visuals with viewers watching from home, bringing them closer to the real experience.

As an aside, I must say that despite all the complaints about the iPhone app store, it was the first, quasi-open platform with a critical mass of distributed handsets. Before its deployment, app developers had to break through with carriers, which is a Herculean task for any startup. Luckily the success of the iPhone is leading to more initiatives like the Blackberry app store and Joint Innovation Lab, an open mobile services platform launched by SoftBank Corp (disclosure: SoftBank Capital is an affiliate), China Mobile, Verizon, and Vodafone, which will address their 1 Billion aggregate customers.

Getting back to Hot Potato, I think the site has significant commercial potential for highly targeted, sponsored chats, if it can provide moderation tools such as filtering of foul language (which I was guilty of during the Pats performance last night) and offensive imagery. The inevitable deluge of spam will also need to be controlled, but users should be able to help police spam in real-time.

I look forward to tracking the progress of Hot Potato and other emerging players in the world of real-time data. Hot Potato’s iPhone app, which reportedly has superior functionality to the desktop version, is expecting an imminent release. You can be the first to know by signing up at their homepage.

Dharmesh Shah’s talk at Startup Bootcamp on inbound...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:08:16 -0500

Dharmesh Shah’s talk at Startup Bootcamp on inbound marketing. If you haven’t given this any thought, the time it takes to watch this is the best possible use of your next 30 minutes.

patrickmoberg: Lessons from a Dog - My family never had a dog...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:34:56 -0500

patrickmoberg:

Lessons from a Dog - My family never had a dog when I was younger, so I don’t know a whole lot about them, but recently there’s been a couple running around the office I work out of. Here’s a couple things I’ve picked up on.

Patrick is truly one of my favorite people and this is just one more example. Great talent and what’s more, he gets stuff done. He is always creating something.

"Many people ask my what Neoteny (my company’s name) means. It means the retention of childlike..."

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:47:12 -0400

“Many people ask my what Neoteny (my company’s name) means. It means the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood. I first heard it from Timothy Leary when we were working on a book together. (It was called “The New Breed” about the techno youth culture. We never finished it, but I still have a pile of notes. Maybe I should get around to publishing some of it someday…) Tim loved the word. He used it to mean all of the great things that you often lose in adulthood such as curiosity, playfulness, imagination, joy, humor, wonder, etc. It is a biology term that the people in evolutionary theory use to when discussing traits that we retain in adulthood like lack of body hair, etc. There is a good web site about Neoteny at www.neoteny.org. Adulthood in the past meant that you finished learning most of what you needed to learn and you switched to production mode and started focusing on repeating tasks and narrowing your focus. I think that with the amount of change in the world today, it is impossible to “grow up” and finish your learning. I think Neoteny will become more and more of a survival trait in the future.”

- i never knew what Neoteny meant. Now I do. It’s an excellent word and I agree with Joi about the increasing importance of it. I’m going to see him today a few times and will tell him so myself.

The Meaning of Neoteny - Joi Ito’s Web

(via fred-wilson)

The timing of these two showing up in my twitter stream was...

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:25:42 -0400

The timing of these two showing up in my twitter stream was great.

Don’t worry, boys. The Hot Potato is coming.

Malcolm Gladwell: Football, dog fighting, and brain damage

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:38:27 -0400

Malcolm Gladwell: Football, dog fighting, and brain damage:

mattlehrer:

Research released the findings of an N.F.L.-funded phone survey of just over a thousand randomly selected retired N.F.L. players—all of whom had played in the league for at least three seasons. Self-reported studies are notoriously unreliable instruments, but, even so, the results were alarming. Of those players who were older than fifty, 6.1 per cent reported that they had received a diagnosis of “dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or other memory-related disease.” That’s five times higher than the national average for that age group. For players between the ages of thirty and forty-nine, the reported rate was nineteen times the national average. (The N.F.L. has distributed five million dollars to former players with dementia.)

…

In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt called an emergency summit at the White House, alarmed, as the historian John Sayle Watterson writes, “that the brutality of the prize ring had invaded college football and might end up destroying it.” Columbia University dropped the sport entirely. A professor at the University of Chicago called it a “boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport.” In December of 1905, the presidents of twelve prominent colleges met in New York and came within one vote of abolishing the game. But the main objection at the time was to a style of play—densely and dangerously packed offensive strategies—that, it turns out, could be largely corrected with rule changes, like the legalization of the forward pass and the doubling of the first-down distance from five yards to ten. Today, when we consider subtler and more insidious forms of injury, it’s far from clear whether the problem is the style of play or the play itself.

…

In one way or another, plenty of organizations select for gameness. The Marine Corps does so, and so does medicine, when it puts young doctors through the exhausting rigors of residency. But those who select for gameness have a responsibility not to abuse that trust: if you have men in your charge who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march them to the edge of the cliff—and dogfighting fails this test. Gameness, Carl Semencic argues, in “The World of Fighting Dogs” (1984), is no more than a dog’s “desire to please an owner at any expense to itself.”

…

Professional football players, too, are selected for gameness. When Kyle Turley was knocked unconscious, in that game against the Packers, he returned to practice four days later because, he said, “I didn’t want to miss a game.” Once, in the years when he was still playing, he woke up and fell into a wall as he got out of bed. “I start puking all over,” he recalled. “So I said to my wife, ‘Take me to practice.’ I didn’t want to miss practice.” The same season that he was knocked unconscious, he began to have pain in his hips. He received three cortisone shots, and kept playing. At the end of the season, he discovered that he had a herniated disk. He underwent surgery, and four months later was back at training camp. “They put me in full-contact practice from day one,” he said. “After the first day, I knew I wasn’t right. They told me, ‘You’ve had the surgery. You’re fine. You should just fight through it.’ It’s like you’re programmed. You’ve got to go without question—I’m a warrior. I can block that out of my mind. I go out, two days later. Full contact. Two-a-days. My back locks up again. I had re-herniated the same disk that got operated on four months ago, and bulged the disk above it.” As one of Turley’s old coaches once said, “He plays the game as it should be played, all out,” which is to say that he put the game above his own well-being.

via Rob.

"This is an odd award. You’d expect it to come later in Obama’s presidency and tied to some..."

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:48:31 -0400

“This is an odd award. You’d expect it to come later in Obama’s presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the ‘hyper-power’ as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it’s a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was ‘normal history’ rather than dark aberration.”

- Josh Marshall (via langer)

"If you’re never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances."

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 11:55:17 -0400

“If you’re never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances.”

- Julia Sorel

I am frequently surprised at the average person’s lack of willingness to try to accomplish something potentially a little beyond their abilities.

"When we were building Flickr, we worked very hard. We worked all waking hours, we didn’t stop. My..."

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:25:34 -0400

“When we were building Flickr, we worked very hard. We worked all waking hours, we didn’t stop. My Hunch cofounder Chris Dixon and I were talking about how hard we worked on our first startups, his being Site Advisor, acquired by McAfee — 14-18 hours a day. We agreed that a lot of what we then considered “working hard” was actually “freaking out”. Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn’t have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn’t — and other time-consuming activities. This time around we have eliminated a lot of freaking out time. We seem to be working less hard this time, even making it home in time for dinner.”

- Caterina Fake - Working hard is overrated - Sept 25, 2009

Startups are hard. They require an insane amount of hard work and stress. But I like how Caterina calls out the difference between freaking out vs working hard.

(via bijan)

"Most Infomercial-esque: Ajay Kulkarni from Sensobi, a company making a “personal relationship..."

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:48:00 -0400

“Most Infomercial-esque: Ajay Kulkarni from Sensobi, a company making a “personal relationship management” app for the BlackBerry, was so emphatic he could’ve sold a thousand ShamWows. (My neighbor was downloading the app while the presentation was still going on.)”

- Boston.com article on TechStars Boston Investor Evening. My boy loves his blackberry. Go Sensobi.

funsizebytes: lindstifa: This is why I married them. Reblogged...

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:30:33 -0400

funsizebytes:

lindstifa:

This is why I married them.

Reblogged because it made me smile for having married well.

Amen.

Men, Women, and Parking Spaces

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:45:05 -0400

funsizebytes:

Subtitle: Wherein I take my personal observations and consider them normative…

Yesterday, I wrote:

I just realized that the difference between the way men & women choose a parking place for a car has everything to do with public bathrooms.

I have long noticed a difference between myself and my wife when choosing a parking spot in a not-crowded parking lot.

I will leave at least one vacant spot between myself and the next car.

She will park right next to another car even if she doesn’t have to.

Yesterday I realized that our friend (also female) had done the same thing.

Maybe it was because the parking lot just had the lines re-painted, but suddenly I saw it just like each spot was a urinal.

Every man over the age of reason understands that when choosing a urinal, you choose the one as far away from any other guy as possible. There was even an email which circulated a few years ago which had ASCII drawings showing how to decide.

But the rules boil down to this:

Unless you are at a sporting event, concert, or other extremely-high bathroom-volume experience, you do not choose to stand next to another guy at the urinal. Ever.

I mentioned this to The Wife and at first she laughed—but then she added: “Well, see, we always choose a bathroom stall next to someone in case there isn’t any toilet paper.”

I rest my case.

Really, what more evidence do you need?

Coda: when not using the urinal, men might choose a bathroom stall next to another guy. Most guys will try to get some distance between them and the next guy, but really, our highest priorities for the sit-down are a) clean seat and b) no previous unflushed content. Also, if we look down and there is no toilet paper, there is exactly a 0.000000% chance that we would ask the guy in the next stall for toilet paper. Seriously, I would sooner use my underwear as toilet paper than stick my hand under another guy’s stall asking for toilet paper, because these are your options for what happens next:

1) He pees on your hand

2) He poops on your hand

3) He ignores you

4) He’s an elected Republican official and puts his dick in your hand because he thinks you gave “the signal”

5) He comes out of his stall, kicks in the door to your stall, and beats the crap out of you.

6) He actually gives you toilet paper.

Now I know that seems like a one-in-six chance, but really, that last option is like 2% because “getting your hand peed on” has about a 75% probability.

merlin: YouTube - The Wire Season 1 Opening &...

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:32:30 -0400

merlin:

YouTube - The Wire Season 1 Opening & Intro

“Got to. This America, man.”

"In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible."

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:06:38 -0400

“In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.”

- Michael McFaul, National Security Council by way of Signal vs Noise

Pssst, wanna buy a Prada bag for $20?

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:19:44 -0400

smartasshat:

A Movado watch for $25, a Gucci handbag for $20.

…

Federal officials, working with the Derry police, spent two years investigating the sale of counterfeit products at a local flea market.

…

Buying a product that looks like the real thing but isn’t may seem like a victimless crime, but it isn’t. Among the victims are the people who lost a job or didn’t get one because of the counterfeit trade

…

Wow. Unbelievably flawed logic. No one who pays $20 for a Gucci bag would pay $700 for it if the fake weren’t around. Yeah, I get that they shouldn’t be allowed to put fake labels on shit, but a two year investigation to raid a flea market? Please.

Haha… that logic is pretty self-serving. To their point though (but certainly not in agreement), those that are willing to drop $700 on a handbag are going to be less likely if the $20 version is being flaunted by the “undesirables”.