1000 Flowers Bloom

Watchmen

I watched the Watchmen (hah) on Saturday and I walked away impressed.

The graphic novel was one that I had enjoyed years ago but never believed could be made into a movie. I thought at best that it could be a trainwreck. I was doubly nervous when I heard that the director Zack Synder was the same one who had directed 300, which I thought was a pretty awful movie.

I was wrong.

The movie certainly has it's flaws and at 3 hours it's a LONG movie but it gets some things totally right.

One of the best lines from a movie comes when one of the vigilante heroes is arrested and put in prison:

"You don't seem to understand. I'm not trapped here with you. You're trapped here with ME"

The opening credits are also brilliant:

Farewell to Mike Homer

Mike Homer passed away on February 1, 2009.

I worked for Kontiki, which he founded, back in 2001 when I first came out to Silicon Valley. He wasn't always the easiest person to work for but he was crazy smart and a good person.

I am still good friends with many of those who were there with me and I'll never forget him or my time there.

Lazy reporting from Businessweek

Michael Arrington calls out Businessweek for their article about "Most Successful Startups in 2008". Businessweek decided that the measure that they would use for success was the amount of venture capital that a company had raised. They argue in a follow up article that they were transparent about their measurement. However the point to is not the transparency but the laziness/stupidity of the argument. It would have been much more honest if they admitted that.

The companies who raised the money don't (or shouldn't) measure success by the amount of money raised and the VCs who invested in those companies certainly don't measure success that way either.

Why is deflation such a bad thing?

It seems like deflation worries in the media are fairly prevalent these days. Here's a snippet from a typical article (this from CNN):

"Deflation usually represents a system-wide contraction in demand, with consumers waiting on the sidelines as they wait for prices to decline even further."

Doesn't this happen in the consumer electronics industry all the time? In fact, obsolescence seems built into the model. The same digital camera you bought last year can be had for half the price this year and that cycle of innovation keeps a fairly constant fast pace. You can in fact almost guarantee that you are paying more for the electronics you are buying today than you would tomorrow.

This doesn't seem to stop spending though.

Starwars a capella tribute to John Williams

Hah - couldn't resist re-posting this. Found from Sara. Revel in the geek awesomeness.

Bailing out the car industry

Bailing out the car industry seems like a crazy idea to me. The market is clearly sending signals saying that the car industry as it is configured now is not effective. We should go ahead and let these car companies fail if they can't make it.

"Automakers already want an additional $50 billion in loans from Congress to help them survive tough economic conditions and pay for health care obligations for retirees."

That's on top of the $25 Billion that has already been given to them. $75 Billion total!

How many car startups could we have for that much money? Imagine it was $100M for each one, you could fund 750 companies that would surely be more effective than the ones we have now!!!

Defrag 2008 - Thoughts on Serendiptiy

I was speaking at Defrag 2008 on the panel about Serendipity. A few things hit me as I have been digesting this panel (and election results) over the last 24 hours.

The definition of serendipity is not well understood. From Dictionary.com:

"an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident."

Carla Thompson from Guidewire really pounded on the accident part of the definition and insisted that anything that interfered with accident or the randomness of the desirable discoveries was polluting the concept of serendipity.

As I reflect on this more I think that serendipity is like luck - preparation meeting opportunity.

You can set yourself up for serendipitous events by preparing to get lucky.

A few great examples from the panel from Kevin Marks in the audience:

• Pixar designs its offices in such a way to maximize serendipity (from Kevin Marks on Twitter)
• One of the reasons Google has free lunches is to get people to mingle with random people instead of just eating at their desks.

I think that Aggregate Knowledge is really providing people with the preparation part of having the opportunity to have serendipitious discoveries. The behavioral context that is analyzed and the recommendations which are generated creates the framework and the structure for people to have serendipitous discoveries.

Defrag 2008 has been eye opening

So this is one of the few conferences that I've gone to that has really opened my eyes. Specifically the whole Twitter phenomena.

I have to say that at first I didn't "get it". It seemed super distracting and pretty much a waste of time. Why do Twitter when Instant Messaging and blogging exist?

I won't say that I'm a total convert but certainly the quality of the conversations happening in realtime was pretty neat. Here's a link to the twitter backchannel during the panel session I was on. We were able to check that out and get a lot of participation in the panel that otherwise wouldn't have happened.

I won't say I'm a convert yet but I'm certainly going to play around with it more.

Defrag 2008

I'm in Denver today and tomorrow at the Defrag Conference. It's a really interesting conference with great topics and speakers.

My panel is - Finding Serendipitous Content through Context on Tuesday at 1 PM.

If you're around the conference please drop by and say hello!

Testing your Eyeballing skills

Random fun post.

Found this eyeballing test on Sara's blog. I scored 3.66. How did you do?