Month: April 2007

Sophia’s note asking for new tunes for her ipod – page 1
Originally uploaded by bsabet. my oldest daughter, sophia, dropped this note off on my desk at home today. She wanted me to refresh her playlists on her ipod. She’s 8.

Translation:

To Daddy

iPod

-Hannah Montana
-Wake up on a Saturday night (by Hilary Duff)
-Jessica Simpson

[on the second page was]

-Ashley Tisdale
-I do anything you want me to (she meant “Sundress” by Ben Kweller)

(via BijanBlog)

Another week of twittering and I’m still getting a feel. And the benefit seems to be evolving for me personally. It’s definitely addicting

I like how I can easily and quickly publish something

But it’s also a persistent, always-on chat room for the 19 or so friends I have in my twitter network

And I also like how 3rd parties are supporting twitter.

I can now post my current tune on YottaMusic to twitter

I use Twitterrific as my desktop client to publish and to tune in

I can think of a few others mashups with twitter – maybe 2-3 of our portfolio companies. Hmmm.

I’ve had a few scanners over the years.

They all sucked. Generally they had bad software and were super slooooow. Scanning pages of documents was a non-starter. Scanning old photos was even worse.

As a result, I never used these things.

That all changed this last week. My friends Stu and Jason gave me a demo of the Fujitsu ScanSnap S500M at their office. This scanner is unbelievable. I ordered mine a few days later. Received it yesterday.

This thing is super fast. And when I say fast, I’m talking 2 seconds per page or photo. Honest. You can feed in 20 pages at a time. No problem. It does single or double sided and it’s smart enough to deal with a mixed bag. And it doesn’t care what size document you are scanning.

And it’s a breeze to set up and use. You press one button. The software is a great too.

I never thought I would write such a gushing review on a scanner of all things – but this is so worth it.

I’m scanning everything and shredding docs from now on. This is going to be great for the kids report cards, art projects, bank statements, photos etc etc.

(via BijanBlog)

Since we started Spark, I’ve received business plans & presentations in a variety of formats – online demos, powerpoint, word docs, webex, online videos, games and even a cd-rom.

And today I received my first business plan in a wordpress blog. Here’s what the biz plan’ navigation looked like :

The text inside the plan, as you would expect, had links to various websites and related information. It was concise, thoughtful and easy to read.

This came from an entrepreneur that I know and respect a great deal so I’m not surprised this is his format of choice.

But it’s a first for me. I liked it.

(via BijanBlog)

A couple of months ago, I started including Feedburner’s ad network in my RSS feeds. I did it mostly out of curiosity. I wanted to see stats in action, impressions, click thru rates, cpc rates, types of ad units etc.

I’d like to use this blog to also do some good deeds as well. I’m looking into Kiva. In the meantime I’m now going to add Feedburner’s ads into my blog posts. These ads are inserted only below the first item on every page of this blog so hopefully it won’t be too jarring.

I also recently joined Amazon’s affiliate program and where it makes sense I’m going to use that affiliate code in my posts (consumer electronics, music, etc).

I’m going to give all proceeds from the Feedburner ad network and Amazon affiliate fees to a non profit. I haven’t decided which one yet. But at the end of the year I will post the non profit and the amount.

I would really like to hear about any experiences other people have using their blogs to generate funding for non-profits. DonorsChoose looks interesting. Others?

(via BijanBlog)

I’ve been using YottaMusic for awhile. It’s a great front end for Rhapsody. My yottamusic profile says that I’ve played 2200 tracks on YottaMusic.

Back in November I suggested to Luke on their forums and email that we need a way to sync the YottaMusic library and playlists with Rhapsody. Then any playlist on YottaMusic would be accessible on our Sonos system.

Well yesterday Luke emailed me and told me that YottaMusic now syncs with Rhapsody. If you want to give it a try this new beta feature then go here for the easy steps to sync. It’s a one time thing. And it works great.

YottaMusic started out as a great search & discovery front end to Rhapsody. Then they added Last.fm support and now Rhapsody sync.

Well done.

(via BijanBlog)