May 2008
49 posts
Let's just set gas at $20 per gallon
The below is a GREAT post from Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch. This is exactly why I want gas prices to be as high as possible, because high prices (as long as they don’t keep dropping back down short term) will create the incentive to fix the problem of energy not just band-aid it. Now I realize that the below may not be the exact answer but again with a big incentive the answer will come...
3 tags
Can this even be legal?
So when I upgraded my American Express to one of those stupid Black Cards I canceled the old card that I had with them. That was in February of 2006. Fast forward to yesterday. My wife called me and told me that her credit card (which is off of my main account) was declined. So I looked at all of the cards that our off of my account, the business and the personal and all the balances were paid...
“McCain has apparently invited two governors and Romney to his ranch in Arizona...”
– From AVC, talking about candidates choosing a VP. I am worried that Obama can not be the US president because it seems that everyone else has a ranch and I am pretty sure that he is ranch-less.
Comments →
I agree 100% with Daryn on this. I like how the re-blog function works on Tumblr but comments still serve a great purpose. There are a lot of people that read my Tumblr that are not Tumblr users, for them comments are the only way to interact. Also there are times when a re-blog is not necessary. Many times I do not want to fill-up pages in my blog with my comments to other things as it is too...
“The prices that we’re paying at the pump today are, I think, going to be ‘the...”
– This is exactly what we need to once and for all fix this energy problem. Every time I see things like this I get excited because at $15 per gallon someone will figure out something better. I am hopeful that the solution will come from America and will help us to regain some of our lost power in...
BUG + Twitter = a big idea
This is why I think that BUG is going to be such a big hit. There are so many services out there that can be matched to hardware for incredible experiences. It will only get cooler from here I can not wait for my BUG package to arrive, shoudl be here soon. bijan: A few days ago Peter Semmelhack, the founder/ceo of Bug Labs, sent me an email about a new app they built for the BUG. It was a...
Netflix announces $100 set top player →
This is sort of a big deal… The problem still remains that the movie libraries that you can get on these boxes is old stuff. The new stuff is too expensive to offer and Hollywood has it locked up. It would be in the Studios interest to figure out a standard rev share to allow lots of entrepreneurs go out there and figure out which model works best. It would grow the industry overall. I...
Do customers really know what they want?
In listening to customer requests for new features you have to be very careful in my experience to sift through what customers want and how it effects the experience of the product. When you set up a PhoneTag account by default we do not send SMS of the transcription to the customer. We offer this option but it is opt in only. That is because we feel that currently SMS, in the way that we do it,...
Blog fight
I am having what I would call a “Blog Fight” on Dan Graham’s blog. He wrote PhoneTag a suggestion urging us to do our service for free and I wrote him back a very nice email explaining why we charge. He then published that email as well as some nasty comments, it is pretty funny, check it out by clicking here. Update: I made the following comment at the end of this guy’s...
PhoneTag Fuck's Voicemail
| View | Upload your own We have been having a lot of fun with our Fuck Voicemail T-shirts.
Watchreally funny… bijan: By now, you may have seen the video of a younger and very angry Bill O’Reilly (original here). Some thing don’t change with time. Well the very creative and hilarious folks at Barely Political have put this together and it’s so funny. Enjoy. (disclosure: Barely Political is one of the fine online properties of Next New Networks. They are also a Spark portfolio...
Disqus and Seesmic Pair Up For Video Comments →
I think that Video comments are cute but clunky. Text is still the best medium for communication, it is viewable from every device and is simple and easy to access. Most of the time that I am viewing blogs I am on the phone or somewhere that video (with audio) would be inaccessible. Video as a blog comment to me is a backwards move and because of that I do not think that we will see any serious...
Successful Launch of Grand Central Integration
While I am bouncing around Asia this week we had a really successful launch of our PhoneTag Grand Central Integration yesterday. We built a hack to allow our service to work with Grand Central which was kind of a fun thing to do since Grand Central has kept itself a walled garden. We had awesome posts in, Gizmodo, Mashable and a few others. If you are a user of Grand Central you need to try our...
WatchI am tired just thinking of all of the work that was put into this. jakoblodwick: fat: This is one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a long time. (via sean) This is one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a long time.
Free Idea for Microsoft
I had lunch with one of the best VC’s in the valley today. At that lunch we were speaking about all sorts of business models. We spoke a little about the MSFT/YHOO deal and how that went. I strongly felt from the beginning that MSFT buying YHOO for even $33 per share (around $40+ billion total) was just an absurd amount of money for what they would get out of it. Anyway so we came up with...
Cheap vs. Stupid
At PhoneTag and any other business I am involved in I am always very attentive to the money out. I count every dollar spent as $10 since an investor that put that money in expects at least a 10x return on their money. So for example last night when I stayed in the Bay Area I stayed in my favorite cheap hotel, The Cardinal in Palo Alto, it is $80 a night but you do have to deal with a shared...
“It is entirely possible that before Twitter makes its first penny, it will...”
– This is a really interesting post (I suggest you read the whole thing) and it will be very interesting to see how this plays out. I like many tech entrepreneurs I have watched Twitter very closely as they have grown. The openness of the Twitter platform has until now been one of its great...
WatchI know the guys over at Pure Pwnage through one of my best friends in Calgary. These guys are Geek TV and they are awesome. Check out the work that they did to beat guitar hero, very cool.
Yahoo and MSFT not going to happen, I hope this is... →
47 dead Americans in Iraq last month. Lets talk...
We should never use the number of how many “Americans” died in Iraq. We should only use the number of how many people died in Iraq, if you use that number then it would be over 1,000 people died in Iraq in April. It does not matter where the person is from, death is death. A big part of America’s problem is our way of thinking, an American life is worth the same as any other...