A compact camera that rivals the DSLR

For the past 5 years, I’ve been using a DSLR as my “real camera”. It started when I bought the Canon Rebel and then a few years back I bought the 40d. It’s an amazing camera that is fast & flexible. I have three very different lenses for almost every situation. It takes beautiful pictures.

But there is a problem with the 40d. It’s big & heavy and I end up leaving it home a lot. It’s not easy to carry that thing when I’m running around with three kids.

So the iPhone ends up taking a ton of photos which isn’t great. Sure, it’s excellent for the casual snapshot but I love photography, getting the right light and making pictures. 

My brother has been excited about the micro four thirds system for some time now. He’s a doctor by day and as a hobby runs a micro four thirds message board. He’s been pushing me for the past year. 

A week ago I took the plunge and bought my first micro four thirds camera - the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 (honestly, who names these things).

Quick review: easy, fast, small and takes great pictures. 

My 10 year old daughter took a bunch of shots today. It’s so fast that even in auto mode it didn’t require a flash indoors. 

Here’s a few indoor shots that Sophia took besides this funny self portrait. 

Me / Our dog / James jumping (no flash) 

I absolutely love this camera. It’s light and the 20mm lens that comes with the camera is sweet. Autofocus is fast. It takes HD video. 

Right now the only thing I miss about the 40d for everyday shots is the view finder. The view finder comes in handy on sunny days and some old habits die hard I guess. I’ll probably only use the 40d when I need my telephoto lens - otherwise I’m all about the GF1.

I highly recommend this camera if you are looking for an amazing camera but don’t want to lug around a DSLR, You won’t be disappointed. 

My trouble with eBay

I use eBay from time to time. I buy things that I can’t purchase easily from Amazon or locally, like out of stock items. The perfect use case for me these days is buying vinyl records on eBay. It’s worked like a charm for me every time and I’m buying records across the globe.

Selling on eBay is awful in my experience. I have a lot of gadgets. So recently I decided to list some of them on eBay.

The process to list an item is painful in my opinion but that’s not the bad part.

The bad part is what comes next. Endless requests from people asking if you will end the auction early, or go around ebay, or people bidding & winning an auction and then flaking out. I’m now 0 for 3. I think I’m done.

There has to be a better way. What do you think? Is my experience likes yours or is it much better for everyone else?

Scale first, monetize second

With every (venture backed) consumer web startup there is always the question of when to start thinking about monetization.

If the monthly burn is modest, I usually suggest that startups focus on reaching scale first.

It’s not because I don’t care about revenue or because I embrace “hope as a strategy” (which never works).

Rather it’s because:

1 - when your user base is small it really doesn’t matter if you can get advertising, digital goods, subscription revenue going. The base is so small the conversion will be even smaller.

2 - startups need to focus, especially in the the early stage. With limited resources, the company needs to focus on the product and the users. If you start tinkering revenue too early then you suddenly find yourself having to borrow precious team resources to deal with various revenue projects. They always look small and innocent at first but they can snowball and can distract the team.

3. the ultimate revenue model may surprise you. as the product develops and evolves and your community grows, the revenue model is likely to reveal itself in an entirely new way. I’ve seen this happen several times and it’s a powerful reminder each time.

So when I meet a founder and he/she tells me that they are confident that they can monetize their future service with ads or subscription or whatever, I blow by that slide. I want to know about the product and how they are planning on growing the service to reach scale. That’s a leap of faith we both need to take at some level but that’s what I want to talk about vs a 2015 revenue forecast.

p.s.: Congrats to our portfolio company Tumblr for focusing on growth. Last year I remember David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, came to a board mtg. and said he was going to delay his monetization experiments and focus on growth. He had a game plan and told us about it. I’m so glad he did just that.

Sonos S5

We’ve been using Sonos for years. In my opinion it’s the best whole house audio system that I’ve ever used and I’ve tried a number of them. (And it’s designed by a startup)

Last year, our Sonos experience became even better when they came out with a new touch remote and an iPhone app. With a touch of a button I have last.fm, rhapsody and our local music library streaming in multiple rooms of our house. We had been using Sonos in three rooms of our house plus the patio.

The pre-requisite with Sonos is that you need speakers in every room where you want audio. Any type of speakers will do. But sometimes setting up speakers is a hassle. Putting two speakers in ideal locations isn’t always convenient so that’s why some of our rooms aren’t available to our Sonos.

That was until I bought the Sonos S5 last week. The S5 is a single amp/speaker system. Plug it in, press a button and it automatically joins your Sonos music network. It just works. I think the audio quality is excellent for an average size room.

I’m so happy with the S5 that I’m absolutely going to get a few more.

Developing Chrome Extensions

I’ve been using Google Chrome as my default browser since the day it was released. I have firefox purely as a backup for the extensions that I count on.

But more of those extensions are coming to Chrome everyday and new ones are actually coming out on Chrome first.

One of my favorite Chrome exensions is Dan Kantour’s Extension.fm. I’ve been playing around with it all afternoon. Note that Extension.fm came out on Chrome first.

For those of you that don’t know, Dan is the creator of Streampad which is a music player that sits on the bottom of my blog. Using Streampad you can easily playback all of the songs that are on bijansabet.com as well as bijan.fm

Anyway, back to Extension.fm. Extension.fm does a few things and does them very well. Once you add the extension to Chrome it will provide an easy mp3 player for all the tracks it finds on a web page. Here’s a screen grab of what it looks like. It also supports last.fm’s audio scrobbler. It’s fantastic to use along with the Tumblr Dashboard.

I was emailing with Dan today and asked him about his experience developing for Chrome vs Firefox. Dan told me that Chrome is easier and better in every way. It’s all html/css/javascript and straightforward with built in tools. And Chrome checks every 30 minutes for updated extensions. Push it to the server and thats it. No restart after the update.

As a user, easy install and no restart are big things. It’s amazing how the Blackberry almost always asks to restart after app installs. Chrome and iPhone don’t.

According to Google Analytics, 22% of the visitors to my blog are using Chrome. It will be interesting to see what that number looks like 6months from now — especially if more developers agree with Dan.