May 8th, 2012 § Comments Off on “I live by morals, I do… § permalink
“I live by morals, I don’t live by laws, laws are something made by assholes.”
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I find this quote incredibly telling of the revolution we are witnessing now. New generation of geeks is dumping everything the human race learned in the last 500 years and is going back to basics, figuring out new world order as we go.
Laws used to be codification of morals, then they were hijacked by assholes who can’t use the internet to control us anymore, which gives us a temproray upper hand.
It’s necessary, and it’s dangerous.
May 8th, 2012 § Comments Off on Union Square Ventures adds technology ‘advocate’ to its payroll – how about other experts? § permalink
“WE ARE SAVING THROUGH PAYROLL SAVINGS” – NARA – 516067 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Great and important move, that USV probably decided to do because it has to be done right and there is nobody else who would take it on themselves.
It’s an established fact that technology and politics are increasingly finding themselves at loggerheads with one another, as issues of privacy, piracy, and copyright, not to mention net neutrality and media consolidation cut a larger profile on the national stage.
via: thenextweb.com
I was actually thinking recently that a different kind of activity would make sense for early stage VC – provide experts in residence for their startups, for instance: cutting edge virality ninjas, scalability/big data experts, startups finance expert… these guys should be seasoned, amazing, unaffordable by a normal startup, but if shared amongst a portfolio, they could really make a huge difference.
May 3rd, 2012 § Comments Off on iTunes Match begins rolling out in Slovenia! § permalink
first: itunes match is awesome! not because it makes your music ‘legal’, but because it manages to reduce the storage space needed on the planet by several orders of magnitude. the fact that all the music is on all devices is just a bonus 🙂
and secondly, wow to have it available in slovenia! we are not third digital world anymore!
Apple has slowly rolled out its iTunes Match service worldwide over the past few months, but today it looks like more countries were added, because the music matching service began rolling out in Italy, Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, and Austria.
via: 9to5mac.com
May 2nd, 2012 § Comments Off on not gonna fly: hyperink, ebooks from everyone § permalink
i like books, i like blogs, i like long tail models, but i don’t think this will work:
With the “Blog To Books” program, Hyperink assigns a staff editor to curate a blogger’s posts, structure them into a narrative format, and then create a book in PDF, epub, and mobi formats.
from: Techcrunch
it’s not the amount of work really, but the available supply and demand – there is not much of either:
- i’d guess there is less than 20k blogs that will ever want to create a sellable ebook
- i’d guess that each of them will sell 50 ebooks, mainly as gifts for their friends
it saddens me when investors and media pump up the expectations of otherwise interesting startup teams. sure you can argue that if the team is right, they will pivot from this idea anyway. but in b3c marketplace businesses like this, it usually takes a lot of energy to get enough disproof that you can actually decide to pivot.
meh.
