The other day I was watching some young kids get all excited about getting their first email accounts. “YOU CAN ADD PICTURES AND SEND THEM!” or “LOOK IF I RESPOND IT SORTS THE MESSAGES INTO CONVERSATIONS. COOL!” or “WOW THAT WAS REALLY FAST!”. And I was thinking that was really cute how they get all excited over simple technology. Then I turned back to my computer to see what exact day and time I was going to be able to buy the new Droid.
I don’t generally short stocks but for the longest time I told anyone that would listen that the stocks that I would short, if I did do such a thing, would be the stocks of the satellite radio players. They reminded me of AOL early on. Data wants to be free and tiny walled gardens cannot compete with 6 billions authors. My overall thesis has proven correct but I was wrong on the how, almost. Turns out Apple’s iPhone probably did more to kill Sirius than the Internet. However if there was any doubt of the ultimate demise of satellite radio’s dumb, unprofitable business model, the nail in the coffin has arrived in the form of Slacker and Pandora portable radio. Pandora is available on the iPhone. Slacker is available on the Blackberry (giving non-descript middle managers across the globe new potential for self-perceived coolness). I just loaded Slacker onto my Blackberry, and now there is simply no reason to use Sirius. You can kiss the remaining $0.35 of share price goodby.
Now slacker portable is not the portable music Internet. It’s not the 10,000 college radio stations available online (I guess I’m still going to have to build that app). It’s also not the millions of playlists available on sites like lastfm.com. But it is a great portfolio of radio stations plus any station of your own that you want to create. It’ll probably also go a good way toward finally putting a bullet in FM radio (and therefore part of CBS) as soon as the average consumer figures out how to get their phone playing through their car stereo. iPhone is going a long way in paving the way here as well.
When you’re running a startup it’s pretty hard to get comparable salary and equity compensation data. There are general compensation sources but the mix between equity and salaries is generally different for venture-backed companies than normal companies, small or large. So when we first got our startup running a great resource was the compensation study done every year by J Robert Scott and Ernst and Young. It focuses on private companies in technology and life sciences. They are currently looking for participants for their most recent study and I highly recommend participating. Compensation is a critical aspect of hiring an ‘A’ team and having data as an objective reference point is really helpful both in setting salary and equity levels and also communicating compensation policies to employees.
If you listen to music on your computer check out Slacker.com. It’s like Pandora but has a much better mix when you seed a station. They have some good radio stations as well. And it’s free. Oh and you can listen on your Blackberry.
If you ever need to take screenshots or partial screen shots check out Jing. I take a lot of partial captures for product, marketing, and sales presentations. I also take them for things like this blog. Usually I use SnagIt but Jing is a much cooler, more functional way to take captures. It’s from the same company, TechSmith. Think of it as the Web 2.0 version of SnagIt. And it’s free.
This is one of those ideas that seem so obvious once you hear them. A town in England, Huddersfield, is using power generated from the trash it collects to power its electric garbage collection trucks. Brilliant! How can this not be the future of trash collection. Next we need sun tanning salons to run on their own sunning lamps.
Another one for the “kinda cool” category. A joint team from the University of Maryland and University of Michigan have declared the ability to generate “long-distance” (1-meter) teleportation. They apparently managed to teleport the quantum state of two atoms a meter apart. It reminds me of compact disks coming from Einstein’s work on photons and photoelectric effect. Is it just me or is it really weird and kind of scary that we could possibly harness and use forces we have absolutely no real understanding of.
File this under the “Just kinda cool” category. The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is working on piezoelectric roads that generate electricity as cars drive over them. Using crystals the experimental road generates 400 kilowatts of power per hour. Not a lot but… I like the outside the box/herd thinking.
Combine this with the MIT City Car and a trolley like electricity system and we might have something. Perhaps a more realistic version of Minority Report-like Singapore MonicMRT or England’s Ultra.
Foreign dependence on oil is the triple threat: economic vulnerability, killing the planet, and inciting traditional, terrorist, and religious wars. We need a Manhattan Project slash Go to the Moon by the End of the Decade-like commitment to attack this problem. It’s gotten lip-service and the occasional ineffective government initiative for the past 40 years. We haven’t moved the dial at all. What we need is an aggressive yet realistic program to get energy independent. Now I’m not sure about the math or the pitfalls of the proposal but Andy Grove has an interesting article in the latest edition of McKinsey Quarterly. In it Mr. Grove makes a convincing, concise argument for retrofitting existing cars with batteries as the most practical and expedient method of getting us off our dependence on foreign oil. He makes some really interesting points:
- 80% of cars in the U.S. drive daily distances that wouldn’t make any use of gasoline in a hybrid engine,
- Replacing existing U.S. cars with new hybrids would take too long. If 10 auto makers did as good a job as Toyota in rolling out hybrids, in 10 years they would still only account for 5% of all cars on the road,
- The $10 billion cost of a pilot program is peanuts given everything else we are throwing money at,
- We’d have an opportunity to grow a strategic industry – battery technology
Again, I haven’t looked into the math so I’m taking Mr. Grove’s word for it. But it makes for an interesting discussion.
Battery technology versus alternative fuels is a really interesting dynamic in reducing our foreign oil habit. It’s similar to the disk storage versus high-bandwidth downloads for digital distribution. Storage improvements drive down the alternative cost of just-in-time delivery. In the case of cars, increasing battery technology will drive down costs across the board for powering cars even if batteries themselves aren’t employed widely. However, electric/battery-powered cars are inevitable as we move the technology forward. Witness the recent advance by a Korean research team in solving silicon degradation problems that prevent silicon from replacing graphite in batteries as an example of the progression. Battery technology, in cars and elsewhere, is not there just yet but it’s just a function of time.
A new browser was/is not at the top of my wish list. However I’m really enjoying Google Chrome. It’s only game-changing in the sense that Google’s search was game-changing when it came out. It doesn’t cook dinner or anything. It just works better, faster. Faster, however, is the main thing. It is just so much faster than IE, even Firefox. You don’t appreciate it until you try. Now IE seems painfully sluggish in comparison. It definitely makes surfing more pleasurable. It’s not a complete alternative to IE. Just like Firefox, Sharepoint breaks. Also a bunch of css/javascript-filled web sites haven’t been made compatible yet. Nothing major, just some annoying format glitchs from time-to-time. Assuming that over time the web developer community embraces it as a legitimate platform to include when coding, Chrome will probably be my default browser from now on. Which is surprising since I wasn’t looking for a new one.
The headline is obviously me being funny on a couple fronts. I don’t think it would be news to many people that Microsoft is no longer innovating – at least not outside of developer tools. I was just reading an article on cio.com Windows 7: The Five Most Talked-About Features. It was informative on a couple of fronts. First, I didn’t know “talked-about” was hyphenated. Second, more to the point, is that if these are the most talked-about features then it’s still been about 15 years since Microsoft has actually done anything interesting regarding operating systems. According to the article the five most interesting things Microsoft has spent millions developing in their latest OS include fixing a flawed security UI from the previous version, copying the way Mac does a few things, and adding touch-screen capabilities. Yes MSFT’s OS has gotten more modern but the last improvement they made that really made my life easier was multi-tasking. Touch-screen might be cool but that’ll depend on innovation coming from the ISV community. Someday Microsoft might surprise us with something that really helps us in our daily lives but I wouldn’t put any money on it.
