December 2009
18 posts
Deal-a-Day Appeal
The long time success of Woot and rapid rise of Groupon is an interesting case in consumer psychology.
Retailers (both e-commerce and Brick-and-Mortar store) compete on a couple criteria: price, selection, convenience, and service. Stores deliberately emphasize some of these criteria over others. For example, Zappos has done everything it can to associate it’s brand with the best customer...
Watch@solidea sent me a set of buckyballs. They’re too fun. Here’s a video of happy bucky turning into surprised bucky when I try to give him a nose.
Reverse Lake Wobegon Effect
cdixon:
Bill Gates walks into a bar, suddenly the average wealth of people in the bar goes from thousands to millions. And also now everyone in the bar except Bill has below average wealth. Similarly, contributors to user generated websites like Wikipedia are almost all below average. There are a few people who contribute a ton, and a whole lot of people who contribute very little. This is...
Open Letter to Disney
Dear Disney,
I currently pay $50/mo for basic cable in HD. The only channel I watch that I can’t get over-the-air is ESPN. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I just give the $50/mo to you? You do the math.
Hugs and Kisses, Andrew Parker Disgruntled cable subscriber
PS: Picture Unrelated
AT&T Infrastructure Strategy
If I ran AT&T Wireless, I don’t think I’d spend a penny on building additional 3G infrastructure. The brand damage that AT&T has done to themselves with poor network performance is irreparable at this point. They could drop $1BN on 3G network support and see little-to-no marketing benefit because they’ve dug such a deep hole for themselves. PR fiascos like Operation...
User Contribution in Media Consumption
I’m trying to put some form behind an unfinished idea rattling around my head. I’m thinking about how users pay for their consumption of media. In some businesses, you pay money in exchange for content (Paid databases like LexisNexis). In other businesses, you pay with data exhaust that you create in the consumption process (such as Google).
These two means of paying are not...
SEM Musings
In an 20,000 foot conversation with @ericfriedman about the SEM sector yesterday, I asked the following question, and it has been rattling around my brain for a few hours now…
In the next three years, will you be able to buy Yahoo and Bing search ads in Google’s AdWords campaign creator dashboard? If so, what would that mean for Google as a publisher?
Google has aggregated up so...
Software:Law::Oil:Water
I was disappointed to read this post that the Software Freedom Law Center is suing a variety of hardware manufacturers and retailers that sold hardware product which violated GPL v2 licensing.
I’m all in favor of GPL and it’s legal siblings. And, normally my blog posts are 100% “Rah Rah” open source and free software. But, suing people is remarkably unproductive, and so...
Starfire - Low
A beautiful song capable of being...
Duo Bands
I love duo bands. It’s amazing to watch two people create so much sound and work off each other. Duo bands are top of mind for me right now because I saw two of them tonight (She Keeps Bees and Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs) both of which killed it.
Some of my favorite duos right now:
Matt and Kim
Fuck Buttons
Japandroids
The Books
I especially love it when the two members of a...
Productive Bug
My work laptop has the most productive software bug I have ever seen. It slows down time.
For the second time this week, at about 5pm, my computer started churning pretty hard. The fans started whirring and the processor activity never dropped below 40% of capacity. My computer was operating well enough that I didn’t bother taking the time to restart it, but it was noticably slower. As...
Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs - Indeed You...
Network Evangelism
There are many characteristics of investing in networks that interest me, but this one I’m about to describe might be my favorite. In a business where all the customers are organized in a network, in order for your customers to succeed, they naturally pull you along with their success.
Take our investment in Etsy for example. Once a customer lists a product with Etsy, they then need to try to...
Craigslist Blocking Bit.ly
I just tried to make a craigslist listing for a piece of furniture I’m selling. I used a bit.ly link to the original item with the intention that I would be able to get analytics on how many people were clicking through on the link.
When I went to finalize my posting, I got the following error:
This posting is being blocked:
The following term(s) cannot be used: “bit.ly”
Many...
Tools of the Trade
I’m always interested to see the tools that extremely talented people use. It’s remarkable how little they matter.
I remember when I was taking guitar lessons back in school, I was having trouble wrapping my head around the fingering on a particular solo. My teacher took the guitar out of my hand, and made the solo absolutely sing. I remember thinking that my guitar looked...