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| Cover of Amitabh Bachchan |
My birthday is not mine. My official birthday is the actual birthday of Amitabh Bachchan. I grew up watching this guy. I am an evergreen fan.
If I were Tumblr I'd declare a public holiday on this piece of news.
The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Bachchan Moves His Blog To Tumblr
My birthday is not mine. My official birthday is the actual birthday of Amitabh Bachchan. I grew up watching this guy. I am an evergreen fan.
If I were Tumblr I'd declare a public holiday on this piece of news.
Does Geography Matter?
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| Image by GRP Partners via CrunchBase |
San Francisco is considered the number one place for tech startups in the country today. New York City is number two. Does geography matter? Will the exact same startup fare better in San Fran than in New York? What does it mean to be number one? And what does San Fran have that Silicon Valley, only tens of miles to the south, does not have? What, you might ask, is going on?
I think geography matters, but number two is a very good place to be, especially if your startup does not depend on having the best of the best engineers, more of which might be out there in the Bay Area. If yours is a high touch startup, NYC might be good too.
San Francisco is a city like Palto Alto is not. But then, by that count, New York City is the mother of all cities, as Saddam Hussein might have said.
The suggestion seems to be first decide where you want to live. For many that place is New York.
It’s not that young people wanted to live in Mountain View in the past. In fact, so many DID NOT that companies like Google & Yahoo! had free buses with wifi from San Francisco to their Palo Alto and Sunnyvale headquarters.
You know the story. You get older. You get married. You have a kid. Then another. Suddenly you feel the pull for a backyard and nearby parks. And a bigger house wouldn’t hurt so that when your mother-in-law is in town for 3 weeks it doesn’t feel like you see her quite so much.
So you move outside the city – even though you feel a strong pull to stay. It’s why many of the older executives at San Francisco startups live in Marine County and commute in. Or they do so from Burlingame, San Ramon or even Palo Alto.
Mobile 3.0: Scoble Cracks It
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| Image via CrunchBase |
First mobile was the standard old cell phone. You talked into it. The second mobile era was brought to us by the iPhone. You poked at a screen. The third era will bring us a mobile that saves us from clicking on the screen.Scoble is talking about a phone that makes sense of everything - which is a lot of things, and tells you like it were a really smart assistant. No need to ask. It knows you, it knows where you are, what you are doing, what your plans are. And so it tells you things. Like, time to get ready for the next meeting. Pretty cool.
Looks like Scoble has figured out the Facebook and Amazon smartphones. In that way he is like the guy who "stole" the iPhone before it came to the market.
Internet Addiction
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| English: Rebecca Skloot at the 2010 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, United States. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
He made a partial list of friends, colleagues, and collaborators he'd met through the Interwebs and it did not feel like these people were a symptom of his disease: Megan Garber, Robin Sloan, Evgeny Morozov, Tim Maly, Robinson Meyer, Clay Shirky, Dan Sinker, Alexandra Samuel, Dave Roberts, Zeynep Tufekci, Clara Jeffery, Felix Salmon, multiple Chris Andersons, Rebecca Skloot, Chris Mims, John Pavlus, Sarah Weinman, Rita King, Josh Fouts, Jacob Wolman, Alex Howard, Maria Popova, Katie Baynes, Nathan Jurgenson, Biella Coleman, Gustavo Arellano, Jon Christensen, David Dobbs, Steve Silberman, Ian Bogost.A lot of work is online or in front of the computer. And people stay connected even when out and about, mobile being the buzzword. But that does not take away from the fact you need to keep a good balance.
Do you eat well? Do you have close friends you meet often and hang out with in person? Do you spend meaningful time with family? Do you exercise regularly? Do you go for long walks? I recommend staying disconnected for one 24 hour period during the weekend.
China, Russia, Even India, To Some Extent America
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| Internet Caffe Internet cafe , Republica Dominicana (Photo credit: Remolacha.net pics) |
China is out there. We all know that. India surprised me months back by going after the major tech companies. Russia is now making major moves to shut up the Internet. Sorry for that awkward metaphor.
But then similar stuff has been happening in DC, so far with no major success.
It is because the Internet challenges the concept of the nation state itself.
Netflix: The Misexperiment
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| Image via CrunchBase |
Influential voices at the company departed just before Netflix embarked on a doomed attempt to spinoff DVD operations. Reed Hastings stopped listening, and that's when the trouble started...... The company lost 800,000 subscribers, its stock price dropped 77 percent in four months, and management's reputation was battered. Hastings went from Fortune magazine's Businessperson of the Year to the target of Saturday Night Live satire...... He became one of those executives with the "visionary" label, who can predict where a market is going before it happens, and was asked to join the board of directors of two of the most important companies in tech, Microsoft and Facebook....... Some employees were stunned by how quickly and unemotionally DVD operations, the backbone of the business for a decade, was split off from the company..... Netflix's data showed that interest in DVDs was declining. If given a choice, people preferred the instantaneous gratification from streaming video..... Move too fast, and you alienate customers. Move too slow, and you lose them to someone else. Damned if you do, and damned if you don't. .... "DVDs are a cash cow for Netflix," Pachter said. "Why would you kill off that business before it's harvested? Consumers weren't looking for Reed to get out of the DVD business. They were just looking for more streaming content." ..... The CEO got a new nickname: "Greed" Hastings..... a bewildering, still-unanswered question: How could a company that had built such customer loyalty be, at the same time, so tin-eared to what those customers wanted and so slow to respond when they made their wishes clear?
I supported the move last year. (Netflix Cut Off The Gangrene Limb) I guess it was not the best of moves for Netflix. Perhaps the timing was not right. Bill Gates dipped into the tablet form factor a decade ago. It was a little early.
Now you know why BlackBerry is not making fast and furious moves. (Kidding)
Apple's Mysterious HQ
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| Image via CrunchBase |
The secrets Apple keeps
All the Ways Apple Keeps Secrets (That We Know Of)
4 bizarre ways Apple guards its secrets
The Facebook Like Button: Not Working Right Now
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| Image via CrunchBase |
For two articles in a row the Facebook Like button is not working for me. First I thought maybe I am not signed into Facebook. Not so. I was signed in. Then I thought maybe it is just on one site. But when it happened for two articles on two different sites I figured I had come across something. And I am sure others have noted and reported. But I just wanted to throw it in as well.
Facebook being a site that has never had a fail whale.
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