Month: August 2011

Like many of you, I’ve read Warren Buffets NYT op-ed.

I’ve also read Arringtons, Screw the Rich post. http://t.co/Ku49HHR

To be clear I am not a macro economics expert. I loved the class in undergrad but that was a few years ago :)

I have a very simple way of looking at this

1. I would like to see the country do more with less waste. Everyone does. When I hear people say we shouldn’t have a national health plan unless we can guarantee it won’t have any waste, I throw up a little. Having some waste is unfortunately the cost of goods sold. If no waste was truly a requirement for government programs, we wouldn’t have a military (count the pork projects) or public education. I’m glad we have both.

Id like to remove as much waste as possible. But there will always be some.

2. In a troubled economy like ours, there is a massive and growing population that needs help. They need better education and they need jobs. And yes, they need healthcare. What happens if the government funds a new bridge and the worker gets hurt and doesn’t have healthcare. A simple example but a real one. Healthcare costs are bringing many families down

3. There are two reasons why we as a nation need to help the growing population here that is suffering.

-because we should care about those less fortunate. Forget tax breaks, tax deductions. Forget how or why the less fortunate got there for a moment. The point is that a huge population (add up unemployment + underemployment and you get a number at or over 20%). That’s an insane percentage of our nation that live in crisis. We should take care of them. It’s the right thing to do.

-if you don’t agree with the above reason there is another reason that is self serving to wealthy people. If there isn’t a change, and gets worse , and the percentage grows from 20% of our country to 25% and then goes up again. What happens next? It wont be pretty. See London for recent examples.

4. Preserving bush tax cuts for the rich don’t make sense in the world we live in. Trickle down economics don’t work. If they did work we wouldn’t see a the accelerated spread between the rich and poor.

5. If VCs and entrepreneurs have to pay an increase on taxes, it won’t have an impact on my love for my work. I wouldn’t give it up. And I don’t know any founders that wouldnt have started their company if there was a different tax code.

6. I’m sure I’m gonna get a lot of heat for this post to many. There are clearly many that see red when they hear that we as a society should take care of each others.

People will suggest, the way to help those on need is to give them jobs not raise taxes on the wealthy. Of course I violently agree that job creation is a must. I see startup land and innovation as a critical path forward. But it will take time and what should we do I’m the interim?

Now there will be others that will just say, hey dude you are free to pay as much as you want in taxes. Just send the government more money. I get the reaction. But snark aside, we need a thoughtful and complete plan to get our country going. Not an ad hoc move by a few.

That’s all I got on the subject for now.

Update: a few folks have pointed out that our needless wars should stop to help with our cost control. I agree completely. Bring our troops home now.

(please excuse the typos and poor writing. Wrote this quickly on my iPhone)

A few years ago I wrote a post about what music labels could learn from the app store model (http://bijansabet.com/post/272385429/).

Unfortunately it’s as hard as ever for startup to get licensed. Thats not good for anyone.

We need a way for artists to get paid and for consumers to get smooth and easy access

Last week I had lunch with my friend Anthony (twitter.com/fascinated) who is the creator of the Hype Machine (http://hypem.com).

I mentioned that as much as I love rdio and spotify, the idea of sharing links to songs from those paid services to Twitter was the functional equivalent of tweeting a link to a news story sitting behind a pay wall. That’s a poor user experience and as a result i never tweet a link to a story behind a paywall. And I don’t tweet a song that sits behind a pay wall either.

This morning Fred wrote about the NYT’s porous pay wall (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/08/on-porous-paywalls.html). That’s a fantastic model. Easy for casual visitors but payment is required for active users.

I’d love to see music labels adopt a porous wall as well. It would increase shared links to music and I bet it would increase subscriptions too.

Update 5:24pm: a number of folks have pointed out by email and Twitter (eg https://twitter.com/pegobry/status/102831734369959936) that spotify is porous because of their ad model. I think it’s a nice start but porous in my mind means they should get rid of the desktop app requirement, lose registration requirement and work on all platforms.

(please excuse typos and lack of links. wrote this in my iPad).

Fred’s post today about files vs the cloud is really excellent.

This past weekend, our firm switched from Microsoft Exchange server that we self host to Google Apps. It feels good to get more desktop software off my Macs amongst other benefits of moving to Google. 

One thing that Fred talks about in that post that resonates with me are the steps to get music from one service into another. I love listening to music online. In fact, my iphone today doesn’t have any local songs on it. 

Soundcloud is great for this. It’s very easy to get SoundCloud tunes into Tumblr for example. Inside the Tumblr Dashboard, you can select audio post and then automatically grab a track from Soundcloud. It works great. All the music stays in SoundCloud and Tumblr just plays it back. No file transfer anywhere in that process. 

Another way to get music into Tumblr is with exfm. Simply install exfm’s extension into Chrome. Then when you hit any music blog, you can play the song as you would normall do or you can select “Share” and then choose Tumblr.

For example, here’s a great indie music blog – Indie Rock Cafe.

Recently, Indie Rock Cafe posted a free single that the band Beiruit released to the public. When I click the “+” button that exfm inserted in the player, i can “note” it which saves it to my exfm profile page or I can share to Tumblr. 

This is what it looks like:

The cloud is a wonderful place to be. 

I’d love to see photos smoothly move through the clouds like music is starting to. That would sweet.