Have Started Playing CityVille

I am a pretty accomplished farmer at Farmville on Facebook. But then I have not been active in months. I have played Angry Birds on Google+. But today I decided to play CityVille on the Google+ platform. It is fun.

I had managed to never spend a dime on Farmville. Cityville cost me 10 bucks on the first day. I am like, I can't wait, let's go get some energy. That was five bucks. Before you know I had put down another five bucks for a few thousand coins.

The Zynga business model works.

I am in mind to go back to growing my city only organically, as they say in tech startup world. Act lean.

I see me spending a few minutes every day to slowly build my city.

Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea
Played Farmville After Long Months
Farmville Has Not Been Loading For Me
Farmville's Got Competition

Now This Is What I Call A Blog Post

Kickstarter (Photo credit: Laughing Squid)There are blog posts and there are blog posts. Check out this blog post by the phenomenon by the name of Kickstarter.

There are crazy days and then there are days like yesterday. Kickstarter has experienced some frantic hours but nothing like what happened in the 24-hour span between Wednesday at 6:54pm and Thursday at 6:44pm. Two million-dollar projects, a major political speech involving Kickstarter, an amazing band launching a project for a comeback 20 years in the making... the list goes on. Here's a minute-by-minute breakdown of the day's events.

Related articles

• Kickstarter's craziest 24 hours (kickstarter.com)
• Double Fine Adventure On Kickstarter (rubbishcorp.com)
• Kickstarter comes of age as a big-time funding platform (gigaom.com)
• Kickstarter Comes Into Its Own (allthingsd.com)
• Meet the New Kings of Kickstarter: How Double Fine Gamified Game Funding (readwriteweb.com)
• This Kickstarter Project Raised Nearly $1 Million in One Day (businessinsider.com)
• Kickstarter sees two projects hit the $1 million mark (slashgear.com)
• Kickstarter racks up over $2 million for two projects (news.cnet.com)
• Kickstarter racks up over $2 million for two projects (news.cnet.com)
• 5 Critical Steps to Getting Your Creative Project Funded on Kickstarter (thinktraffic.net)

HTML5

Wikipedia: HTML5

the fifth revision of the HTML standard (created in 1990 and standardized as HTML4 as of 1997) ...... core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML 4, but XHTML 1 and DOM Level 2 HTML as well ..... introduces markup and application programming interfaces (APIs) for complex web applications ...... Many features of HTML5 have been built with the consideration of being able to run on low-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets. In December 2011 research firm Strategy Analytics forecast sales of HTML5 compatible phones will top 1 billion in 2013. ...... new video, audio and canvas elements, as well as the integration of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) content that replaces the uses of generic object tags ........ new elements, such as section, article, header and nav, are designed to enrich the semantic content of documents ...... The W3C is developing a comprehensive test suite to achieve broad interoperability for the full specification by 2014, which is now the target date for Recommendation. ..... advancing HTML5 to Recommendation provides the entire Web ecosystem with a stable, tested, interoperable standard. ...... Ian Hickson of Google is the editor of HTML5. ...... Some deprecated elements from HTML 4.01 have been dropped, including purely presentational elements such as font and center, whose effects are achieved using Cascading Style Sheets. There is also a renewed emphasis on the importance of DOM scripting (e.g., JavaScript) in Web behavior. ......... In addition to specifying markup, HTML5 specifies scripting application programming interfaces (APIs) ...... The canvas element for immediate mode 2D drawing. ..... Timed media playback ..... Offline Web Applications ..... Document editing ...... Drag-and-drop .... Cross-document messaging ..... Browser history management .... MIME type and protocol handler registration ..... Microdata .... Web Storage, a key-value pair storage framework that provides behaviour similar to Cookies but with larger storage capacity and improved API. ..... Geolocation .... HTML5 alone cannot provide animation within web pages. Either JavaScript or CSS3 is necessary for animating HTML elements. ..... XHTML5 is the XML serialization of HTML5. .... XHTML5 requires XML's strict, well-formed syntax. ...... September 2011, 34 of the world's top 100 Web sites were using HTML5 ..... As of 1 April 2011, this logo is official. ..... The W3C then said the logo "represents HTML5, the cornerstone for modern Web applications".

Niggas In Paris

Paris Action (5)
Paris Action

#hiphopnews Jay-Z & Kanye West Heat Up The 'Net, Explode W/ "N*ggas In Paris" Music Video: Grammy-win... bit.ly/AsgsaX #omgstacks

— Izu Ent. (@OMGStacks) February 9, 2012

The Email Conundrum

Cover of Groundhog Day/Ghostbusters/StripesFred Wilson: The Black Hole Of Email

I don't want to make email work better for me. I don't want to hire an assistant to do email for me. I don't want to try some new magical app that will make email better for me. ...... I give email an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening, and I dive into it throughout the day. The result is probably three hours a day in total. That's all I'm going to give email. And it is not enough to manage the inbound flow.

I don't have this problem. Usually when I am online I treat emails like they were text messages. I read and reply immediately. Saves me time. Short replies are not considered rude since I was polite enough to reply immediately. If I read an email but do not, can not reply immediately I use the Mark It As Unread feature to come to it later. I mean, Gmail is so central to my work, when I am emailing, I am working. My tech consulting team is global and email is absolutely the best way to keep moving. I look forward to the emails.

But then I don't read half the emails I get. You see who or what (usually what) sent it, you read the subject line and you realize they are not even worth deleting. Deleting would cost time. Instead I might mass delete in a few months. Mass deleting emails is fun. It is amazing how emails lose value over time. (Inbox Zero)

But I am nowhere close to Fred Wilson's scale. My question to Fred is, how big is your Inbox? Granted you don't read more than three out of 10 emails you get, but is your Inbox 99% full? Have you paid for a petabyte of Gmail space? Did Zynga go IPO?

That is not to say the Inbox is not a serious innovation territory. But the ultimate barrier there is human. You could end up with the best filters and still end up with too much email. I mean, if you have only three hours a day for email, there are only so many emails you can read. So you better have a great ultimate filter for people whose emails you don't want to miss.

I already have those filters. I use several platforms. If you are a stranger who just wants to say hello, send a tweet. That is the best way. If you know me well, send a Facebook email.

I don't even use the Priority Inbox. I guess I don't have an email problem. Not yet.

Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way
Adam Smith And The Inbox Space
The Inbox: Like Search Before Google
The Inbox Could See New Life This Year
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
My Gmail Prayers Heard: Multiple Inboxes

Who you gonna call?

Spotify Vision Specialist: A No Go

My pitch two days ago (over email) with Spotify has ended up being a no go, and that's okay. One has to be Vision Specialist to one's own startup. For me that is microfinance. I am thinking six months. Max six.

Spotify Now Advertising On Netizen

+ 20-25 hours a week, rare week 30, 6 months
+ $100 per hour plus an equivalent in equity, 5K sign up bonus
+ 20 hours of face time with the CEO, 1-2 hours at a time, spread over
the final 4 months
+ 10 hours each with the top 10 people in the company - face time (not
phone, not Skype)
+ A few trips to Sweden in Spring/Summer
+ Interacting with as many employees as possible mostly in party settings

Vision Specialist
Spotify right now is headed to becoming a mid-tier company.
Noone thinks of it as a future Google/Amazon/Facebook.
My job would be to create that vision and inject it into the company.
I think Spotify could end up a truly big tech company.

Hardware (IBM) -------> Software (Microsoft) --------> One Site
(Google/Facebook) -----> Content/Mindfood (music/movies/books)

I hope to launch my own microfinance startup later this year.
http://technbiz.blogspot.com/2011/02/googlefacebook-of-microfinance.html
That is why I never thought in terms of going full time with you guys.
Otherwise it would have made tremendous sense to do so. You guys are
pre-IPO.

SmartWatch

GigaOm: Sony to try the smartwatch game for a second time

Twitter ---> Instagram ---> FoodSpotting
Seven Screens

When you move from the level of Instagram to the level of FoodSpotting there are 100 possibilities. It is the same when you move from the smartphone to the smartwatch. The smartphone is Instagram. The smartwatch is FoodSpotting and 100 other services like it. You are looking at Tens Of Billions Of Devices.

Dating In The 80s, Pre eHarmony

Via Wiktor Macura

Boxee is Cannibalizing Television

GigaOm: Boxee clashes with cable companies over encryption

Piya O Re Piya

Instagram Does Not Know What It Has On Its Hands

Image via CrunchBase

"The only thing that will make other platforms happen is natural growth of the team. I think we didn't expect how quickly we'd grow a year ago when we were like ‘oh let's work on Android next.' Everything became a priority, and because everything became a priority we had to focus on what was most important which was to keep the site going and make users really happy. A person is a person is a person no matter what phone you own. I'm excited to be on Android someday. Are you kidding me? Our growth is going to double." - Kevin Systrom

This is an insane thing to be saying.

Instagram is one of those lucky companies that does not have to worry about money. It can raise money. And it is not true there are only 10 good engineers on the planet. So if it not lack of resources or talent, what holds them back?

I think the Instagram guys might have hit the jackpot but they don't really fathom the full implications of what they have in their hands.

They should raise 50 million and grow to 50 engineers. Right away.

Mark Suster's Web Second Applies To Istagram
Kevin Shitstorm Of Instagram