May 2008
49 posts
April 2008
65 posts
More thinking about Obama and his (former) pastor
Obama may have lacked some judgment in associating with Wright but that is nothing compared to the fact that Hillary and McCain both voted for the US to go to war in Iraq which has resulted in the loss of over 500,000 people.
The Wright issue is a distraction from the real issues, the fact that the US attacked another country and overthrew its government without any evidence behind its...
Airlines Advertising
I do not understand why Airlines Advertise. 99% of people don’t care what airline they fly as long as it is the cheapest ticket. The other 1% like me fly a single airline because of the benefits. Both groups are not swayed by advertising. In an industry which seems to only loose money it is amazing that all I see our their advertisements.
System and Organizational Scaling
Nice post from Albert over at Union Square Ventures on Scaling
continuations:
Many of the high growth companies in our portfolio have run into scaling issues. There is a lot of information out there on various technical approaches to scaling. What most of those leave out is the interaction between the choice of architecture and organizational scaling. Some architectures lend themselves...
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do...”
– Mark Twain (via onherway) Found this on Tumblr Radar this morning. (via bijan)
A Pod Cast I just did with Rich over at TMCnet.com... →
South Park Over Logging →
This was a good episode but my favorite is still “Make Love not Warcraft” in Season 10. That is a classic.
fred-wilson:
Ethan sent me this short clip of a South Park episode that ran recently. He thinks it might be funnier than Guitar Queer-O which Ethan also turned me onto. Here’s the teaser clip. See for…
Pride comes before a tumble - Los Angeles Times →
Nice article on Tumblr in the LA Times.
(via david)
Great choice Bijan
bijan:
Open Your Eyes -...
From Messes To Successes →
This is a great post from Fred. When you are moving fast you make mistakes which creates messes. The trick that I have found is try not to allow yourself to make mistakes that can kill you, because as long as you can stay in the game and you work hard you can pretty much make anything into a success.
fred-wilson: I was emailing with a top technology blogger yesterday and he said about one of...
The political race
I am watching Fox News right now in the lounge. I am so tired of the presidential race already. Everyone is talking about negative ads, preachers and other ridiculous things.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died in Iraq due to our (the US’s) bad decisions, our economy has serious issues, etc.
I wish people would focus on the serious issues and leave it at that. Everyone has...
Donate to Obama
Done, I am voting with Amex today.
marco:
If you’re an Obama supporter and can afford to do so, consider donating to his campaign today. Want to change politics? Vote with your dollars. It sucks that the country is run this way, but it is, and contributing to a campaign is (sadly) the best way to make your vote count.
“It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the...”
– The Low Road to Victory - New York Times Incidentally, this is by the same New York Times Editorial Board that earlier already endorsed Clinton. (via squashed)
We underestimated it a bit...
So as part of a re-branding we also rolled out a really cool contact book integration feature. We spent a ton of time looking at how it would effect performance if all of our customers loaded their contact books into the system. After a lot of testing we felt comfortable that if all of our customers had contact books in the system that it would not effect our production systems. We were...
Dude Crashes Bike on Google Street View →
Awesome!
cubicle17: To say this was impeccable timing would be an understatement. (via yewknee)
Tech Crunch Post on SimulScribe's new name
Too often in the rush of trying to launch something new, entrepreneurs pay too little attention to coming up with a good name for their product or company. It might start off as a part-time project and they just want to get it up and running. So they pick the first name that comes to mind—often something awful—and then they are stuck with it. That is what happened to SimulScribe, a handy...
“Amazon will be like a book store that sells cocaine out the back door. Books...”
– I LOVE the cloud!
Amazon’s cloud computing will surpass its retailing business | ZDNet.com (via daryn)
Xobni is Inbox Spelled Backwards →
If it is true then Congrats to Matt and Sean and the rest of the Xobni team. These guys have been working their asses off on this thing.
Xobni is a great product, I just hope that if you guys did sell to Microsoft that you held out for Yahoo money:)
fred-wilson:
Now here is a surprise. Microsoft has apparently agreed to acquire Xobni. Don’t get me wrong. I love the product and I love the...
The greatest Blackberry tip ever!
I should be paid for this tip but it would not be fair as Ari Katz who is on my SimulScribe team showed me this. The worst part of the blackberry is having emails and sms combined, the stupid device does this by default (see Bijan’s frustration of this below)
The fix:
Open your email folder
Scroll down to options
Click on “General Options”
Then where is says “SMS...
“Do you think if Barack Obama had left his seriously ill wife after having had...”
– Question for the Class (via azspot)
Meetups →
I agree 100% I think that going to the “traditional” events let’s you meet traditional and normal people, overall pretty boring.
For me Tumblr has been great. In fact Fred and I are having breakfast tomorrow morning and I invited Chris an entrepreneur who I met on Tumblr and his business partner Ben, because I thought it would be more fun.
I really enjoy sitting with a bunch...
“I don’t think so. It’s like a personality disorder. You are born...”
– Fred Wilson answering the question, Can entrepreneurship be taught/learned?
Bad Merger Season
Microsoft-Yahoo
Northwest-Delta
Blockbuster-Circuit City
When will everyone learn that it is hard enough to merge two great companies let alone two companies with issues.
I guess we will be looking forward to a good write down season shortly.
SimulScribe wins IT Week Magazine Editors Choice... →
Always cool to win an award.
Blog Crime Fighting →
Great article in the New York Times about how a stolen car was tracked down in Canada through a car enthusiasts forum. The owner of the forum Shelton Kwan is a friend of a friend and I did some car racing stuff with him last summer.
Anyway really cool story about how a group of people on this forum used online and offline resources to track this car down and have the thief arrested in 48 hours.
...