Month: October 2007

  THE FALL OF AN AMERICAN ICON 
  Originally uploaded by maebmij.

It’s hard to believe that this was the cover of Business Week in 1996 (full story here)

Everyone at the time was predicting the downfall of Apple Computer.

And today Apple announced yet another amazing quarter. They sold 10M ipods, 2.1M macs and 1.1M iphones this quarter. They generated $3.5B in net income for the year. The company now has over $15B in cash and no debt. And the are telling the street that Q1FY08 is going to be huge.

This company is simply incredible.

Go Apple.

(disclosure: i own apple stock. and i’m not selling anytime soon)

The Fall of an American Icon

I spent nearly 10 years working in the bay area. I worked at a number of startups and most importantly I worked with some amazing people. And I worked with those same amazing people over and over again in different companies.

My experience was hardly the exception. Many great companies in Silicon Valley have teams that have worked together time and time again.

When I moved back to Boston I forgot all about non-competes. I was frankly surprised that employers not only require them but they actually enforce them. This means that if you leave a company, you are not allowed to work for a competitor. The definition of a “competitor” is often broad and confusing.

As a result Boston startups have a real disadvantage from day 0. Boston entrepreneurs have one arm tied behind their back compared to their west coast counterparts. Imagine if Mass. didn’t have a non-compete. What could the successful alumni from EMC, Lotus, Lycos, Akamai, DEC, Avid, Sonus, Groove, etc have possibly created after leaving those companies?

Or think about the reverse? What if CA had a non-compete. We might not have seen Intel, AMD, Apple, Oracle, SalesForce.com, Adobe, ,  develop the way they did (those companies were started by entrepreneurs that were at “competitive” companies prior).

There are many reasons why the east coast vs west coast debate continues. There are some complex issues at work and it might take some time.

Getting rid of the non-compete should be an easy one though. Let’s do it.

Let’s get rid of the Non-Compete

I’ve been using Dave Winer’s Flickr-to-Twitter for a few months now.

Using Dave’s software, I take a photo with my iPhone or Curve, email it to flickr, and it automatically posts to Twitter with the name of the photo and the url. It works simply and perfectly.

It’s one of my favorite uses of Twitter & flickr. Sharing a photo “in the moment”. But it is been a closed service and unavailable to the general public.

Until now. Dave has decided to open up the service to anyone. If you use Twitter and use Flickr then this is a no brainer. You’ll love it.

If you use Flickr and haven’t tried Twitter than I bet this will get you start twittering away.

Flickr+Twitter by Dave Winer

Several years ago I simply gave up on the radio. I decided it wasn’t for me. Music on the radio felt stale and I couldn’t stand the commercials.

So I decided to listen to my personal music collection as a substitute for radio. It began with a big honking server that stored my Mp3 collection. I have gone through too many “player” devices that access this server. My favorite right now is Sonos. And while we love our Sonos and mp3 server. It’s not a system to discover new music. It’s just a fancy home networked ipod in many ways.

Music discovery for me nowadays is practically 100% online. Places like Hype Machine, Project Playlist, various mp3 blogs, Last.fm give me more than i could imagine.

But I can’t get any of that internet radio goodness in the car or on my home audio system. For our cars, we are satellite radio subscribers. Lauren has XM radio. I have SIRIUS in my car. It’s better than terrestrial radio but in many ways it’s still lame.

The big problem with broadcast radio (satellite or terrestrial) is that it’s broadcast. It’s one-way. You can’t share it with friends. You can’t comment on it. You can’t keep history. You can’t create a playlist. You can’t personalize it. And broadcast will never give you the range of internet radio content. Even satellite radio, with all of their channels, has a limited playlist per channel.

The broadcast radio industry is trying to catch up. HD is smart. And they recently agreed on an iTunes-based tagging service. Linking broadcast with the web is a good idea. It’s certainly better than my current method of tagging the radio :)

HD radio and satellite radio feel like a band-aid. it’s just an interim step while we wait for the inevitable. We want a full internet radio experience in our cars, on our mobile phones and on our home entertainment systems.

That’s what I want. Give me Radio 2.0

Radio 2.0

Someone recently trashed me pretty good.

It was an entrepreneur and he wasn’t happy that I didn’t invest in his company. I was very clear on why I wasn’t going to invest this time around. I told him directly & clearly & quickly. But I guess that wasn’t good enough. So he took it out on me behind my back. And I found out. Maybe I was supposed to?

The odd thing is that this person then called me for advice a week or so later. He has a bunch of VC friends so i was a quite surprised that he reached out to me about his particular question.

Odd behavior coming from a guy that trashed me.

Anyway, I answered his questions and gave him some pointers.

Felt good giving him advice. But also felt pretty bad too.

Time to forget it I suppose.

Getting trashed