LIVEdigitally

Author Archives: Jeremy Toeman

EchoStar/DISH Networks is buying Sling Media!

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Holy crap, that’s all I can say. OK, not really, I can say a lot more. Mazel Tov. Congrats. Holy f*ing crap! Sling Media (my former employer) just got picked up for a cool $380 million (nice timeline here too). Holy crap! Sorry for all the pseudo-pottymouthedness, but come on, holy crap!

I think this was a pretty solid win-win relationship. Echostar is in heavy competition with DirecTV (and the cable co’s) today, and needs to start bolstering for the pretty much already-in-progress war with the Internets for TV. Sling brings not just the cool gadgets and yet-to-be-released Clip+Sling technology to the company, more importantly it brings knowhow.

Very few folks out there have really done anything “right” when it comes to PC and TV convergence. TiVo? Yes… Then there’s… uhm… let’s see… Apple? No. Microsoft? Kinda. ReplayTV? Who’zat? Seriously, you can count the successes in this space on a finger or two, and the failures can pile up enough terrible technology to fill HP’s garage!  Sling has some knowhow, and Echostar can use it!

I am curious to see what becomes of the hardware side of the business. Will it be “Slingbox from Echostar?” Will we see a combined Dishplayer (the Echostar set-top-box with DVR features) with built-in Slinging? Or will they leave the unit independently running in San Mateo, building up a successful retail/hardware business? After all, they did eat Sony’s lunch when it came to the LocationFree TV (and the Vaio group is lucky they don’t ship laptops, since I could macramé a better one than the SZ-VGN460 – imagine if Sling built one!).

There’s a lot of options for these two companies and I’m excited to watch the future, knowing I was a part of the past. Now for some quick congrats to the whole team, and special thanks to Blake, Jason, and Bhupen for bringing me on board back in June ’04, as well as Rich for always having my back. Even more thanks and congrats to Brian J (best officemate ever), Alex, Raghu, Alexei (no more commuting!), John N, Dee, Cindy, George W (shh!), Brian M (finish your house already!), Vicky (90 hours per week is too many), Dave M (ykhik?), Jamie, Johnny G, Gregg (we’ll always have Orlando), Chris, Jeff (funny guy, no really!), Tami, Dave Z (sure, you’ll work for Brian, but not me?), Sharon (queen of beta), Teresa, Stephan, and every else I’m forgetting but have way too much adrenaline to focus right now.

Mazel Tov!

Unsubstantiated rumor floods blogosphere

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In the past couple of hours, a story that originated at the WSJ has gotten the entire TechMeme-fueled blogosphere in a tizzy. The story asserts Microsoft’s interest in acquiring a stake of Facebook, which would lock in some advertising dollars and send the valuation of FB to roughly $10(ish) billion dollars (which in a completely unrelated twist is the amount of money the US government claims illegal workers somehow “cost” California each year. I’m in a little bit of a funk about the immigration process these days, so sorry for the bizarre display of cynicism). Here’s a little snapshot of TechMeme:

msft_facebook_techmeme.jpg

Now for some quotes from the article:

could value Facebook at $10 billion or more, according to people familiar with the matter.

Google Inc. has also expressed strong interest in a possible Facebook investment, said people familiar with the matter.

a stake potentially valued at roughly $300 million to $500 million, the people familiar with those talks said.

The people familiar with the matter said that the discussions are still preliminary and Facebook could wind up not taking an investment from either Microsoft or Google.

A Facebook spokeswoman and spokesmen for Microsoft and Google declined to comment.

Uh… hmm. First, maybe we can get the article’s authors a thesaurus (I hear they’re online now!) and find at least one other phrase for “people familiar with…” Second, how do we know this is news? Don’t get me wrong, I believe it’s a possibility, but I’d certainly like to get some substantiation here. I’m a little surprised that this has so much attention at this stage (from Valleywag, Mathew Ingram, TechCrunch, Scoble, Om Malik, etc).

I’m also a little surprised that there was virtually no impact to Microsoft’s stock.

ps – don’t forget, the Sony SZ-VGN460N laptop is still one of the worst laptops on the market and even though that has nothing to do with my post, I’m still so unbelievably angry at Sony that I’m keeping the theme alive. Don’t buy it!

Dave McClure to VCs & Lawyers: Get your act together!

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Ah, I love a good rant. I especially love one that targets industries that move along at ridiculously sluggish paces when it comes to technology adoption. Dave McClure has apparently been spending a wee bit too much time with lawyers lately, and goes on without pulling punches lamenting their holding on to a “lots of paperwork” approach to getting things done. Here’s a highlight to whet your appetite :

Over the past 3-4 months, i’ve made a few small investments in several startups and become an advisor to a few others. The amount of paper, email, & faxes i have exchanged to get these deals done is F’ING MIND-BOGGLING. Aren’t we in the 21st century? Don’t we all use the web & online transactions for everything? Aren’t you supposed to be ADVISORS to startups that make lives simpler & use the INTARWEB to get rid of all the paper, delay, & complexity we HATE LIKE THE PLAGUE?!? Or did you all grow up with Ted Stevens or something?

Now go read the rest, it’s excellent.

Note to Plaxo – hey, quit it!

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I started using Plaxo years ago as a mechanism to “safeguard” my contacts. In the marketing field, my network (“rolodex”) is one of my more important assets, so having an online service to help me migrate the database from computer to computer is wonderful. I think this is now my 5th or 6th laptop owned since originally signing up to Plaxo, and each migration has gone fairly smoothly. Even to my Sony Vaio SZ-VGN460N, the worst computer I have ever owned in my life.

Now there’s always been a little rivalry of sorts with LinkedIn, even though they both have distinct value propositions (Plaxo being slightly more useful in my eyes). But with rapid onslaught of Facebook in the post-collegiate world this year, it seems like everybody even tangentially related to the social networking space is either jumping on board with a Facebook App (shameless plug – rate Facebook applications here!!!) or trying to compete with a similar styled offering.

Unfortunately, from all outward appearances, Plaxo is taking the “slightly more evil” route of diong business. Plaxo seems to be going down the route of near-invasion of privacy combined with phishing-style email updates. Today I received an email entitled “What’s happening in your Pulse”:

plaxopulse_screenshot.jpg

As you can see from the screenshot, I have a few updates from some colleagues. Now first off, I never asked for said updates, which puts this into the spam category of email. Secondly, I am pretty sure nobody on the list has opted in to having Plaxo track and share this information with me, which is a privacy invasion (yes, I know that these are all publicly accessible things, but without the opt-in, it’s dubious).  Thirdly, it is absolutely ridiculous that these aren’t active links to the activity updates!  I’m supposed to go to Plaxo Pulse just to get the links I want.

In my eyes, this is a shameful betrayal of users on Plaxo’s part.  They have created a “service” designed without any consent on anyone’s behalf.  In doing so, they have most certainly lost me as an evangelist, and have opened the door for any competitor with a similar offering to rapidly snatch me up.  What a terrible business, product, and marketing decision they have made.  I wonder how many people it took to make it?

Vista selling poorly – as it should

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To be clear, I am not anti-Microsoft nor pro-Apple. I am anti-bad products, and pro-good ones.

Mark my words, Vista will go down in history as a bigger debaucle than Windows Millenium Edition – not because it’s technically worse, but because it’s 7 years later and they should have known better. Details to substantiate the title of this post are here. Microsoft has handed market opportunity to Apple on a silver platter. I was absolutely fine with XP, and still consider it my favorite OS to-date, but if you are forced with a new computer buying decision, either find a PC that can get XP support, or pick up a Mac.

Don’t forget – don’t buy the Sony Vaio SZ-460N (now, 3 months later, the Sony Vaio SZ-470N), as it is a terrible laptop with terrible support from Sony.

ps – I am sorry to my friends at Microsoft, I’m sure this is a rough time for many of you. Hopefully messages like these make their way up the food chain to enough people to make sure you don’t ship anything else like this in the future.

pps – for those of you at Microsoft who were responsible for this mess, I hope you are paying a lot of attention, and not writing off these complaints as from some minority population. You’ve made a huge mistake. My wife doesn’t like Vista on my laptop (that Vaio SZ-460N, you remember, the $2500 piece of junk that gets outperformed by my $1100 MacBook?), nor does my mother like Vista on her new Dell laptop. It’s a big stinking mess, and you should be out with brooms and mops cleaning it up, whatever it takes.

2nd Annual Mobile Rules! Competition

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Well, last year it was called Web2Mobile, but now it’s called Mobile Rules, but it’s the same thing.  FinNode is sponsoring a competition to help promote some innovation in the mobile space.

Got a cool idea for a mobile app (heck, maybe even a non-iPhone one)?  Sign up here.

Personally, I’m hoping to see some intelligent use of social networking and location-based services.  Too many terrible uses of these technologies in the mobile world to-date.  I don’t need something that tells me my friend is ten feet away from me, or shows me the closest gas station when I don’t ask for it.  Bring my calendar into play live.  Figure out the traffic ahead of time for my route and SMS me if I should take a detour on the way somewhere.  Let me know how many parking spaces are available in a garage nearby when I’ve already bought tickets to the movie in a close proximity.  C’mon, make my life better!

Meanwhile, I’ll reserve the next 160 characters for a mobile update:  shutting down now to grab a drink in the bar downstairs.

First Month with a MacBook

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Just to set the tone properly right off the bat, it’s been pretty good.  Overall, the things I like and use outweigh the things that frustrate me.  Fundamentally computing today shouldn’t be a frustrating experience, but it was exactly that which led me from my ~$2500 (top of the line) Sony Vaio SZ460N (don’t buy it!) with Vista (don’t upgrade to it!) to my ~$1000 (bottom of the line) MacBook.

Now all gushiness aside, while I’ve gotten a lot further into learning how to use OS X, I still find myself wanting some things to function different than they do.  More than anything, it’s the use of keyboard shortcuts and menus.  Yes, there are tons of KB shortcuts (this list was very helpful) that you can learn and gain greater control over the environment, but I find them unintuitive and hard to learn.  Shift-Apple-4 followed by the Space Bar is “take screenshot” – how the heck am I supposed to remember that?? Also, I don’t understand why there isn’t a way to use the keyboard to navigate pull-down menus.  Just seems odd that I can’t push “Alt-F” and use the arrows to find whatever I want.

Switching back to some of the things I do like.  Force-Quit is just great.  Sure, it’d be swell if nothing ever crashed (hah) but it does (in fact, so far I’ve had to force quit iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, NeoOffice, Firefox, and Photo Booth).  With only two exceptions, force quitting has worked – perfectly and instantly.  This is leaps and bounds above the equivalent in Windows (XP or Vista).  I also am impressed with the integration between applications.  If I create an album in iPhoto while working with Comic Life (fun!), the album is there without any needed refresh in either app.  Nice.

Most importantly I feel like I am computing with more confidence.  I am confident that my computer is available within 10 seconds of opening the lid; with Vista I wasn’t.  I am confident that I can close the lid and when I open it, I won’t lose data; with Vista I wasn’t. I am confident that my applications will not stop working when I download some third-party plug-in; with Vista I wasn’t.

This confidence is of huge importance to me, since my livelihood is made by using the computer.  Would I prefer to still have the same comforts of XP?  Probably.  I like QuickSilver, but Google Desktop Search was better.  I like iPhoto, but I prefer knowing where all my files actually are on the hard drive.  iMovie is a better experience than Windows Movie Maker, but it actually is less reliable for me (read why).  Office XP was still, hands-down, the best office/productivity package I’ve used, so I’m hoping that ’08 will be similar.

So, a month later, I’m definitely a happy camper.  The transition is still in-progress, but if you are considering making the switch, it’s not quite the uphill battle I thought it would be (some of these helped a lot).  I would not recommend picking up the same model I use, definitely spring for the bigger HDD and RAM (2GB minimum).  I’m happy with my MacBook, though will continue to wait patiently for my MacBook Touch.

New Theme…

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Been meaning to get around to updating the theme for a long long while now.  Trying some new ones out over the next few weeks til I settle in on something.  If anyone has some highly recommended WordPress themes, please let me know!

My Email vs Spam Dilemma

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For the past few years I’ve used the @livedigitally domain as my primary email.  One method of attempting to curb some spam was by using the site name as the target email address, so I have things like flickr@, sonos@, evite@, etc.  Lots of people do this as a simple way of  (1) auto-sorting incoming emails, and more importantly (2) tracking who is selling our information to mailing lists.  It works well for both needs.  I’ve done this so much that I can’t even track the number of emails like these I use…

Unfortunately, some type of spam/zombie system occasionally uses the livedigitally domain to send out thousands of spams to people.  The emails cover the typical range of mortgate rates, university diplomas, increasing the size of a body part (or two), or my personal favorite, helping men get over the painful humiliation of not pleasing her good (bad grammar is de rigeur here).  The spams come from literally hundreds of different phony addresses such as LizasalonStovall@, DarcypitchstoneCaron@, and others like that.

When the emails go out, lots of people get harassed, and I get a smaller amount of bouncebacks, typically 1500-2500 at a time.  I’ve done a bit of Googling on it, can’t find much of an answer as a method to prevent it from happening.  So what I want to do is at least stop getting all the bouncebacks.  The problem is, I can’t figure out any way to do that, other than turning off the catchall email address I use.  Which brings me back to the opening issue, as it requires my use of the catchall account.

Anyone have any recommendations here? I’m open to all sorts of things, including hunting down spammers and hurting them.  A lot.  But I doubt that’ll happen, so anything a bit more realistic for my pacifist self would be nice.

The "right" way to rev gadgets and pricing

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In case you missed it, Apple announced they were discontinuing one iPhone and dropping the price on the second by 33%, all a mere 68 days after launch. Steve Jobs, the absolute master at generating hype, frenzy, and fandom in the consumer technology industry, dismissed this as “that’s technology.” Apparently a few people disagree (three highlights here here and here). I am one of these people.

In “the old days” all the way back in the 80s and even 90s, most consumer electronics products were cycled about once per year. Much like the auto industry, you knew full well if you bought a 100W Sony receiver with Dolby surround, the next year you’d see a 110W Sony receiver with Dolby Digital. That’s technology.

Jump ahead to today. Most consumer electronics devices still get cycled about once a year-ish, and the updates happen at different, but predictable times of the year. Flat panel displays tend to come out over the course of the Summer and early Fall, etc. Computers and mobile phones, on the other hand, are cycled fairly continuously, but again, predictable patterns exist, both in timing and pricing.

In the past two weeks, I now have two examples of companies (Apple now, Canon previously) ignoring any patterns, and simply “walk all over” their existing customers in the sake of bringing new things to market or dropping prices. These are the kinds of habits that create a chink in the armor of customer loyalty. And these chinks are exactly the moments that create opportunities for competitors.

So my advice to these manufacturers, and any others, is to think very carefully about your existing customers and how they will perceive your glorious news. If you bought an iPod nano last Xmas, you probably aren’t too upset about a new one – it’s been a while. If you bought one last month, my hunch is you are pissed. You might not do anything about it today, but the next time you are looking into buying a product, the competition might just have a chance to attract your attention.

I’m not advocating 3-month leaks on new products with pricing and tech specs revealed far too soon. I get that you have inventory that needs sell-off. But establish some patterns, we’ll learn and follow them. New iPod once a year? Great, no problem. iPhone discount just before the Holidays? Makes sense, we’re expecting it. Need to rush a new model to market to stay competitive? Excellent – set up an upgrade program for anyone who has made a purchase in the past 30 days.

The bottom line is easy: treat your existing customers with the respect and gratitude they deserve – they are the ones most responsible for delivering you your next batch of customers.

UPDATE: To the masses, Steve just did another wunderboy move with fresh kool-aid.  Still not drinkable where I come from, but something is better than nothing, right?

Bug Labs – it's about the space between

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Bug Lab’s CEO Peter blogged yesterday about the “pizza tail“. No, it’s not an analysis of the long tail of pizza (featuring combos such as Peach+Anchovies+Potatoes or Corn+Pumpkin+Cinnamon), it’s an interpretation of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory applied to the consumer electronics/gadget industry.

I’ve spent the better part of 10 years designing gadgets for different companies, and there’s an unfortunately sad truth about the lack of successful innovation in the consumer electronics industry.  The key word there is “successful” as there are numerous entrants into the space, from Prismiq to Dash, from Presto to TiVo.  TiVo is a success in that it returned a lot of money to its investors and is still afloat numerous years later, albeit on questionable footing.  Prismiq won best in show at CES in 2003, then couldn’t sell enough units to keep the company alive. Dash is pre-launch, with an uphill battle ahead of them (though I *love* the concept), where they are taking on a rather entrenched industry.  Presto launched late last year, and again I feel it’s a good concept, with many barriers to “success”.

The common ground problem these companies all have to face?  Hardware.  It’s expensive with a capital every darn letter in the word!  Expensive to design, expensive to built, expensive to test, expensive to sell, expensive to support, you get the drift by now.

This leaves the field of innovation in hardware rather thin, thus creating Peter’s “pizza tail”.  In fact, the 4 companies I named above are truly variations on existing categories (TiVo=VCR, Prismiq=DVD player without the DVD, Dash=GPS, Presto=Printer).  When people ask me about the gadgets you can build with BUG, I actually prefer to leave the question unanswered.  I have a few ideas of my own, but I think the space between the categories will be defined by the first generation of Bug Labs’ customers.

I look forward to watching engineers, product designers, and entrepreneurs have the ability to innovate in hardware without facing the ridiculous cost and resource strains it takes to start a gadget company.  Until then, I’ll take a slice with Pepperoni+Mushrooms.  Okay, you can throw a little red onions on there too.

I want a WidgetBlocker

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Saw Ryan’s two-part anti-IntelliTXT rant, and I have to say I’m in 100% agreement with him. Now I’m going to go one step further. I want a full-on end-user-configurable WidgetBlocker. Widgets are unquestionably slowing down page loading, so if how about putting the control in my hands? Here’s my note to my blogging friends:

I, for one, don’t much care who your recent readers were, or what you are listening to on Last.FM (don’t take it personally – it’s just not why I visit your blog). If I want to see your photos, I’ll go to Flickr. I don’t need to see the latest cartoon from GapingVoid (though they are hilarious – but I’ll go there when I want to see them). I don’t care how many feedburner subscribers you have. I don’t really mind your most recent microblog/tweet entry, but do you need it to be in a 250px tall box?

For those of you who need to make money of your blog, fine, show the ads, I understand. But if you are just doing it to get an extra $50 bucks a month, maybe you should think about decluttering a little. At the very least, how about just cleaning up the layout enough that you don’t show ads that look like regular content?

There is a reason for services like My.Yahoo, PageFlakes and NetVibes.  Maybe we can shift the widgetworld into letting people publish to each others’ pages, rather than slow down my ability to read your blog.  So, I’ve gone ahead and registered widgetblocker.com.  Anyone want to build the plugin with me?