Category: Business

Startup Weekend

Back about 7 or 8 years ago, I was in the lounge at an industry tradeshow — I think it was ISPCON, but I’m not sure — hanging out and shooting the shit with about a dozen assorted techies & entrepreneurs. At one point, someone looked around the circle and said, “gee, we could start a hell of a company with the talent right here.” Everyone laughed.

Years later, someone has taken that idea and run with it. And I really wish I’d known about it before it happened, because it sounds like an amazing experience.

Good luck, VoSnap!

On Web 2.0 and Unoriginality Redux

I’ve been feeling very much in the minority this week. First off, Google launched their new Street View. By and large, the tech community seems to love it. Me, I feel very, very uncomfortable that someone can sit at their leisure at their desk, call up a highly detailed photo of the outside of my home, and view it from any number of different angles, all without having to be on the scene. But clearly, I’m missing something, because just about everyone else seems to think it’s uber-cool, or at the very least, slick.

Now, Google is introducing Google Gears, and I am similarly unimpressed. Off-line access to web-based apps is one of the big issues for web-based computing, and it was only a matter of time before someone filled that rather obvious gap. However, solving that problem only brings another one into focus — web based apps don’t have even a remotely comparable feature set as their desktop-based rivals in some rather vital areas. Sure, it’s great that your feed reader will work on an airplane, but Google Docs is not even close to being a good replacement for MS Word.

And this brings me back to some comments I made about Web 2.0 just last month:

What I would really love to see is people spending all that time, talent, and money on solving the problems that have NOT been solved yet. Search technology, for example. We’ve made some big strides in text-based search (although there is still much to do there too), but searching around graphics, video, or audio is lagging far behind. Or if you want to focus on web-based technology, can someone please come up with a cross-platform web conferencing system that doesn’t suck?

Maybe, as with Street View, there’s something to Google Gears that I am just not seeing. Maybe all those big honking piles of desktop code really do need to be replaced with slightly less big honking piles of Ajaxifed XML and JavaScript.

Maybe I need an attitude adjustment, or just a vacation.

Or maybe not. Maybe I’m right, and we need new solutions to new problems much more than we need more solutions to problems that have already been solved.

Trendspotting: FOG / DOG

Robert Scoble reads his feeds and notices that Fear of Google / Distrust of Google is growing.

I have no idea if Google is evil or not – I like to think they are not, but I don’t have any knowledge one way or the other – but I completely agree that Google’s public face is not helping matters.

Scoble’s whole piece is good, but the closing comment is particularly apt:

I think Google has to be very transparent, very warm, and very open when it comes to privacy and the data it’s collecting on all of us and to many of us it’s coming across as closed, cold, and opaque. That leads to bad PR. Bad PR — if continued unabated — leads to government action. Just ask my friends at Microsoft.

Indeed.

Now It Gets Interesting

Looks like someone is finally going to offer iTunes some real competition. Amazon has a press release out announcing that it:

will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels. EMI Music’s digital catalog is the latest addition to the store. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. Amazon’s DRM-free MP3s will free customers to play their music on virtually any of their personal devices — including PCs, Macs(TM), iPods(TM), Zunes(TM), Zens(TM) — and to burn songs to CDs for personal use.

“Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO.

I’ve been happily buying music from iTunes because they have most of the music I want, at what I consider a fair price, with DRM that’s at least manageable. If I can get all that without any DRM, well, that would be even more awesome.

I’m not surprised Amazon is doing this. They’re one of the few companies big enough to stand up to the recoding industry and push back against their ridiculous demands. And if Amazon can get a decent selection of music available, then this will be a major shot across the bow of Apple.

Happy Earth Day

Here’s some of the most sane writing I’ve seen on the subject:

It is not possible to for an average person to live a reasonably prosperous North American (or even European) lifestyle and reduce their footprint to one planet by themselves.

This point is worth pausing on, because so much of the green marketing BS around us tells us that the planetary crises we face are our fault, that it is our responsibility to fix them and that buying products which are marketed as “green” will fix that problem. The myth of individual lifestyle responsibility is so strong, most of us don’t even comment on it anymore. But in many ways, it’s a lie. What most needs to be changed in the world are the systems in which we are all enmeshed, and we ourselves, acting alone, are almost powerless to change those systems. To do that, we need better information, stronger connections and new ways of thinking.

Oh so true. Replacing your lightbulbs or recycling your cans is great, truly, but what’s really going to turn this planet around is not what individual people do in their own homes, it’s what happens in the factories and the oil refineries and in the boardrooms of companies across the world. You want to see real change? That’s where it needs to happen. Organizations like Forest Ethics get that. Some others don’t.

Go, buy some new CF lightbulbs today if it makes you feel better. Just don’t mistake that for an action that’s really helping the planet.