Stay Curious My Friends

Forbes posted a great article entitled “You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You“. It does a really great job summarizing why piracy is not going away, and why the real problem is the lack of innovation from the music/movie industry.

Yes, it’s true that nothing will ever kill piracy. But it’s equally true that nothing will ever kill the movie, music or video game industries either. Projects with bloated budgets and massively overpaid talent might start to fade away, but that can only be a good thing creatively for all the industries. To threaten us with the idea that pop culture is going to disappear entirely because of piracy is just moronic.

I believe in paying money for products that earn it. I do not believe in a pricing and distribution model that still thinks it’s 1998. And I really don’t believe in censoring the internet so that studio and label executives can add a few more millions onto their already enormous money pile.

Treat your customers with respect , and they’ll do the same to you. And that is how you fight piracy.

Read the rest here…

I get a lot of emails, and I’ve never seen such a terrible unsubscribe process. Apparently in order to subscribe from the Citrix sales newsletter you have to provide first name, last name, email, and a lot more.

A huge UI and ease of use failure, so I just mark it as spam. Which hurts their deliverability and causes them more problems because they didn’t design correctly.

Thomas Friedman has been on fire the last couple years, there isn’t much he has said that I haven’t agreed with. His latest column is entitled Average Is Over and is a MUST read.

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

In the last decade Americans have found that they are now competing for more and more jobs against people in other countries as well as gains in automation technology. I’m not going to call this good or bad, just inevitable.

What I find kinda funny is politicians in the USA complain about companies hiring people abroad, or moving factories abroad, but in the next sentence they say they don’t want the government in a free market. A free market doesn’t necessarily produce the best market for the people working in a specific country. It produces the best market for buyers and sellers.

Amazon I really need you to add an easy service that notifies me when author’s release new books. Especially as I’m trying more and more independent authors through my Kindle and it would help them market!

There is demand too! About to try some other services that do it, but it’s a pain. I would like an easy interface that lists any books I’ve read, let me rate them, and track the authors new works.
*As per a previous post I would like an iTunes for books too. It is nearly impossible for me to tell what I have read and haven’t on the Kindle with 400+books, or classify them. If you build something with a clean UI will probably get more reviews too on your website.

I just finished reading First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently and highly recommend it. Very interesting group of studies…

One of the most striking things mentioned was how long an employee stays at a company depends on how their relationship with their immediate supervisor is. But I wonder how that translates to looser working environments when employees are remote. Or when they have more independence does that mean they are more their supervisor and they enjoy it more, or less?

Anyway, just some thoughts I’ve been thinking on plus how to improve the relationship between our customers and staff. As it’s hard to receive technical advice from someone when you are frustrated. We added photos and little bios to all our support tickets and online chat at Site5 and are working to further that. I think the next step is giving customers the option to upload their own pictures, bios, and other details so that our team feels like they know them too so that the anger and frustration is better deflected. Plus it makes it more fun to know what someone else is building, and what they are trying to achieve, and then help them achieve that.

I highly recommend the book Business Model Generation (Amazon Link), it is an invaluable tool in examining your business, new business ideas, new product ideas, etc. They basically divide a business into the following canvas that helps you sort everything out, take a look at the canvas which will explain everything.

The book rocks because they go through so many examples based on companies like Apple, Google, Skype, etc. And through different business models and business model theories such as freemium, open businesses, multi sided platforms, long tail / niche, unbundling models, etc. Just great stuff that spawns ideas. I ended up with about 5 pages of notes to think about on some of our current businesses.

Anyone heard of any services renting out kittens or puppies for the weekend? Or even dogs or cats?

Seems like it would be a good service and has some medical benefits for people in hospitals, or just home from one, or depressed or so on. A slightly crazier business idea but might be able to upsell them the full thing once they are attached, maybe animal shelters can start doing this.

Marc Andreessen wrote an amazing article on how software development is become a big trend (duh), followed by the TechCrunch crew with how great the job market is if you are a coder. Here is a short sound bite from Marc’s article:

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I’ve observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.

The article is just great and I totally agree with what he says. Software is the future of the global economy, and the American economy needs to really harness this. The platforms that are emerging allow businesses/developers to sell their software to a global economy. The iPhone and Android platforms give you access to sell your apps, the web provides an even broader market. And most importantly more and more people are comfortable using online software for more and more of what they do.

Just look at what has happened with WordPress, they provide an eco-system and now an entire economy has emerged around theme/plugin sales for that app. This is the reason why we created our startup WebPub. It is going to eventually be an app store for every web app and supporting files out there, Magento, WordPress, Drupal, ModX, etc. We want to allow designers/developers anywhere the ability to sell their themes/plugins/add-ons easily.

TechCrunch also does a good job of explaining why despite high unemployment it is really hard to find developers. And why we need to really do everything we can to teach programming in school and expose it to more people so that hopefully more people develop a passion for it.

I really really love my job, sometimes its stressful but always rewarding. This week I spent about 6 hours building a website redo for a LinkedIn group Joel and I started in 08 and it was really fun. The group now has over 10,000 members and I’m hoping we can really build it into something great over the coming years! Fun to still build websites no matter where you end up.

Props to WordPress for powering it and making it so easy to do advanced things in 1/10th the time it used to take. And Props to ThemeForest for giving designers a marketplace (although i think you need to pay a higher % and I’m going to give you competition soon).

Last week I ran around the Saratoga National Battlefield Park and it was amazing! I’m a history nut so I’m pretty easy to please but this park was particularly well done. The signs explaining what went on were well done, some included maps, some had voice overviews, and they even had a few rangers to answer questions at some of the locations along the route. Still, I wanted more information and I think a lot more people would be interested and visit the parks if more information was provided. I’d love to see an iPhone/iPad app for the national park service that provided history information via text, voice, pictures, and video of all the parks in the USA. Not only for historical locations, but also natural locations.

Just imagine how amazing it would be at the Saratoga park to whip out your iPhone or iPad on stop #4 and listen/read to as much information about the battle in that spot. Or to see a timeline of the battle, and maps, and animated movements of the forces at this important battle. Or at stop #10 to learn about the family that lived in that farm, what happened before the battle and after. The ranger could answer a lot of my questions but this could be even better.

And this could also work at natural parks, information on hikes, maps, information on trees/animals/birds etc. Even social features like a listing of people looking for someone to run a trail with on x date etc.

I’d love for the iPhone/iPad to one day be able to use their camera to view a location and draw fortification lines and structures virtually. How awesome would it be to hold up your iPhone along a ridge, and virtual fortifications and trenches show up to show where the Americans or British dug in to fight. Or if this could be done in Europe being able to hold up to Hardian’s Wall locations and see what the wall was thought to look like, or even soldiers moving around. I can’t wait for augmented reality!