I fail to see anything but Dutch tulips in this. What can Apple possibly gain here, in real terms, not "Uhm we need to be social" lingo?
I could understand Google's, FB's, even MS' interest; they all found ways to monetize eyeballs, even though FB is still trying to mature and Bing seems to be moving backwards. But Apple? They sell high-end hipster equipment. What do they need a free SMS spamming service for? I can already tell the world what I had for breakfast and which mobile device I elected to publish this momentous bit of information with, I'm not sure more integration will make my customer experience better in any meaningful way.
Honestly, I tried to watch the trailer and stay serious, but I was smiling the whole time, as if I was watching a new comedy show. After years of M$-spoofs, jokes and parodies, my brain seems to have associated a certain kind of expectation with watching Microsoft-related media that might not quite be the kind of reaction MS is looking for here.
Still, I'll tune in and abuse my Pavlovian conditioning. Haha.
I don't really care one way or another. Sure, if you make me live in a technological enclave of IT geniuses, we might discuss the intellectual beauty of different ways of classifying and sorting domains, but in the "real world"...just leave it alone and let people register achievify.app and successly.mobile if that's what they want to do.
I don't want to downplay the effort it takes to get funding, but based on the experience I had talking to VCs, as well as the experience of colleagues and friends who got VCs for horribly structured deals, I find it very hard not to lose respect for some part of the community.
If I invest in something, I'm not looking for vague, emotional attributes like "leadership DNA" or "burning desire" (I've seen Amway conventions), I'm looking for meaningful, tested models, facts, tactics - like the "Moneyball" approach, even if the founder is a bit goofy and I have to ask a couple of times before I get the right response.
Sadly, that's not the approach I'm seeing, and it very rarely is the approach I see other people having success with. I can enter a room, present a marketing plan that has made me money for years and after a while people will go to the bathroom and not come back, or I'll get complaints about how boring those numbers are. On the other hand, if I get an expensive executive board, make a lot of interesting although meaningless claims and choose a hyped-up market, somebody will pay for my shitty deal. Sure, the reaction is understandable - we're hard wired to react more strongly to new or potentially life-changing information and the best approach would consist of the best of both worlds. Still, given the choice, I'd expect people handling serious amounts of money to train themselves to look behind the hype and focus on the data, not "Hey I like that guy I want him to succeed", if only because of all the cash that has been burned by interesting people on crappy business ideas.
Now, to hedge some of what I'm saying: There are lots of great VCs who understand their field much better than I ever could, and if you're looking for capital, there's no excuse for making a boring presentation. But, and this is just my PoV, some VCs display a lot of overconfidence when it comes to judging personalities and a distaste for dealing with the - sometimes boring - data points that are more useful in deciding whether a business is feasible or not.
If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas social media will go big in two years, what do you think I'm going to pick?
If you can't get the thing properly patented, you're not going to fund it with social media in or out. The trouble isn't social media, it's that monetization is a really limited incentive within an industrial society where lots of great ideas fall into the category of public goods or reduction of externalities that just aren't incentivized properly and hence never get realized.
Say you come up with a great project to revolutionize education, health, energy or transportation - it might be to disruptive for governments to fund it (assuming there's a budget), but if there's no way to exclude non-buyers from benefiting, you're not going to get private funding either.
If there's revolution of thought within this century, I'm predicting it'll be in economics. I'm fine with a market economy for consumer products, but it shouldn't be the only game in town.
If the VCs you're talking to are all switching to social media now, you're probably talking to the wrong guys anyway. Sure, there might be a few who understand the risks and opportunities, but blindly following trends smells like ignorance, and ignorant investors are the worst you can get. If you have to follow the Silicon Valley model, concentrate on the folks who specialize on deals within your particular industry.
Also, VC doesn't appear to be the smartest choice here anyway. Apply for grants, talk to people who understand the problem your startup is going to solve, start a Kickstarter, go to banks (rarely works, but when it does, it does) and if that's not enough, try VC. I'm not saying VC is always a bad choice, but it's real usefulness is in rapid business development, not starting a brand new, R&D-intensive enterprise, which is kind of implied by will pay me nothing for ten years.
Re:Don't care for lionheart, I'll go with smoke
on
Diablo III Released
·
· Score: 1
Hoping for the same regarding depth. After playing D2 for years (Hell, I'm building a summoner right now), I'm a bit afraid of a Godfather 3 scenario. The beta seemed nice, but I'll lay off the game until someone gives me a thumbs up about replayability and all. Strangely, I never got into Torchlight at all. I don't think it's a bad game and there's nothing that really bugged me, as was the case a few times with Titan Quest (which I liked and finished a couple times, though), I just can't get myself interested.
1) Lift weights.
- It saves time: 30-60 minutes 2-3x a week suffice for a decent workout.
- It trains your whole body: Don't waste time on machines, you don't need 'em. Let a good trainer show you the popular full-body exercises and practice with low weights until you can do them correctly. It's all you need to bulk up or lose some kg.
- It's not as gruesome as it sounds: Most of the time is spent recovering from the last set, and the short bursts of pushing yourself to the limit are actually enjoyable, once you get into it.
- Increase weights regularly, change exercises and intensity when you hit a plateau.
- Some additional cardio doesn't hurt, obviously.
2) Fix your nutrition
- Don't eat too much crap.
- If you're trying to bulk up, eat something with protein every few hours.
- If you're trying to lose weight, reduce your calorie intake. Complex carbs will keep you from feeling powerless and low-calorie foods will keep you from feeling hungry. Sure, there's always the sense of "I must eat more", but that's just part of the process.
- Generally, complex carbs, fish/poultry & vegetables are good things to put in your face.
3) Sleep 7-8 hours a night
There's really not that much more to it, unless you're a pro-bodybuilder who's despairing because of a slight asymmetry of his pecs. I've met a dozen folks in the local gym who have used very simple workout and nutrition plans, look great, and still get results.
As the other AC said, the terms aren't specific. If you want something more meaningful, try the political compass (or grid), which splits the usual left/right range into two lines, one each for social and economic views. A pro-market social conservative would be upper right, while a left-libertarian would score in the lower left. It would also take care of the problem with the word "libertarian" which has been claimed by Ayn Rand's crowd, much to the chagrin of libertarians outside the US.
Don't care about the troll, but for anyone who doesn't want to look it up:
"Liberal" in Australia's Liberal Party refers to economic liberalism, not center-left politics. They're pretty firm in right-wing territory, including the obligatory hate against homosexuals and women's rights. Add gun crazies, religious zealots and Birchers and you'd have the GOP*.
*I'll refrain from making the obvious "Remove gun crazies, religious zealots and Birchers from the GOP and you're left with nothing" joke. Well, maybe not.
Yes, the interface is all cute, it runs smoothly and doesn't spam the hell out of me. Still, filesharing isn't new. Syncing isn't new. Coming up with something similar is just what is supposed to happen in a competitive marketplace.
If Google launched a smear campaign against Dropbox and came up with some severely restrictive and sloppy alternative, maybe the comparison would make sense. But so...meh. Btw, I heard Google's financial statements are hard to read. They're totally the new Enron.
I wouldn't care that much if DRM allowed me to actually use the files I purchased.
As an ex-member of Audible, in order to actually listen the books I bought, I'd have to get an mp3 converter, get it to accept the codec I pieced together from Audible's software, which then would change every few months, rendering the old "hack" useless. Now I just pirate everything and save myself a few hours of work. I'm not that much into piracy and I wouldn't mind paying $15 for the privilege of having someone read a book to me, but going through all the hassle just so I can open the files on the OS I want in the player I want doesn't sound like a worthy investment of time.
Same principle applies to ebooks. When I want to re-read the tome on corporate marketing I bought seven years ago, I head over to the study and pick it up. If I buy an e-reader with its own proprietary format now, will I still be able to read the book after a decade has passed? I'm not too sure, I kinda envision myself browsing the web for a kindle-to-google-glasses-converter.
Revolution seems like a surefire way to end up in another totalitarian nightmare.
I'd be more interested in economic research that dares to leave the mainstream of market theory and private parties. Even accounting for all that is wrong with capitalism, it does a pretty good job evaluating goods and services and providing decentralized incentives for people to engage in the economy. Of course, some of these incentives suck and the pricing mechanism tends to ignore social, environmental and future costs and effects.
Still, there should be a way to take all that we know about economics, game theory, psychology, etc., and distill it into a useful groundwork of a sustainable, scalable and fair economy that can be tested and validated on a small scale. After that, if people want to, they can still pick up torches and pitchforks, or simply move to a place that doesn't use 18th century economics as its M.O.
Considering that we're in a pretty tech-savvy crowd, disruptive innovation like this shouldn't seem too outrageous.
The Scary Startup - Are you overwhelmed with the complexity of Lean Startup Methodology? Is finding a real business model just too hard? Stop trying, build a free platform with mass appeal, brand it as threatening to the big players and sell for imaginary valuations! Coming Q3 2012, $29.99 Hardcover, $39.99 Kindle Edition with missing pages and no graphics.
While I'm still unsure how they got their investors to accept a $500M valuation (Series B, was it?), going into a meeting thinking "Yeah, $2B for a popular photo sharing app platform sounds about right" must take some cojones. I probably couldn't sell Instagram for $200M, I wouldn't even know where to start. "So, we have this platform and our users are totally committed to the experience and not just using it because it's hip...and we all know that social media startups tend to stay popular and don't crash after a year or two...and crap, we can totally monetize that thing, like print photos on mugs and stuff...that's like an instant $80M/year right there, minus the cost of the mugs, of course. So, whaddaya say, two billion?"
They might underestimate our military capacity, though, if they see what passes for entertainment around here.
The ensuing moment of surprise should give us enough time to take the most pressing action, i.e., change our FB status to dead.
First we have an old guy who talks to an invisible man explain to us how Marxism is unrealistic, now 21st century tech is used to teach us 7th century philosophy.
I think I'll be starting a new religion which proposes that we're in fact living under bizarro-God who delights in random acts of chaos and irony and the real one is in charge of another universe.
I don't think that the kind of species we are is the problem here.
Capitalism prides itself on setting good incentives, but some of the real incentives that are created are just destructive and wicked, as is demonstrated nicely in this story.
You can't just assume that people using massive amounts of tech and labor for their own self-interest is going to be just fine for everyone, as long as we put a bunch of regulations in place. I'd really like to see more research into alternative economic systems, I feel like it's time to move on to something smarter.
Slashdot Mirror
I have, but this isn't really one of them. I'm genuinely curious whether there's a strategic dimension I'm oblivious to.
I fail to see anything but Dutch tulips in this. What can Apple possibly gain here, in real terms, not "Uhm we need to be social" lingo?
I could understand Google's, FB's, even MS' interest; they all found ways to monetize eyeballs, even though FB is still trying to mature and Bing seems to be moving backwards. But Apple? They sell high-end hipster equipment. What do they need a free SMS spamming service for? I can already tell the world what I had for breakfast and which mobile device I elected to publish this momentous bit of information with, I'm not sure more integration will make my customer experience better in any meaningful way.
Honestly, I tried to watch the trailer and stay serious, but I was smiling the whole time, as if I was watching a new comedy show. After years of M$-spoofs, jokes and parodies, my brain seems to have associated a certain kind of expectation with watching Microsoft-related media that might not quite be the kind of reaction MS is looking for here.
Still, I'll tune in and abuse my Pavlovian conditioning. Haha.
I don't really care one way or another. Sure, if you make me live in a technological enclave of IT geniuses, we might discuss the intellectual beauty of different ways of classifying and sorting domains, but in the "real world"...just leave it alone and let people register achievify.app and successly.mobile if that's what they want to do.
I don't want to downplay the effort it takes to get funding, but based on the experience I had talking to VCs, as well as the experience of colleagues and friends who got VCs for horribly structured deals, I find it very hard not to lose respect for some part of the community.
If I invest in something, I'm not looking for vague, emotional attributes like "leadership DNA" or "burning desire" (I've seen Amway conventions), I'm looking for meaningful, tested models, facts, tactics - like the "Moneyball" approach, even if the founder is a bit goofy and I have to ask a couple of times before I get the right response.
Sadly, that's not the approach I'm seeing, and it very rarely is the approach I see other people having success with. I can enter a room, present a marketing plan that has made me money for years and after a while people will go to the bathroom and not come back, or I'll get complaints about how boring those numbers are. On the other hand, if I get an expensive executive board, make a lot of interesting although meaningless claims and choose a hyped-up market, somebody will pay for my shitty deal. Sure, the reaction is understandable - we're hard wired to react more strongly to new or potentially life-changing information and the best approach would consist of the best of both worlds. Still, given the choice, I'd expect people handling serious amounts of money to train themselves to look behind the hype and focus on the data, not "Hey I like that guy I want him to succeed", if only because of all the cash that has been burned by interesting people on crappy business ideas.
Now, to hedge some of what I'm saying: There are lots of great VCs who understand their field much better than I ever could, and if you're looking for capital, there's no excuse for making a boring presentation. But, and this is just my PoV, some VCs display a lot of overconfidence when it comes to judging personalities and a distaste for dealing with the - sometimes boring - data points that are more useful in deciding whether a business is feasible or not.
"Consumer products" is a bad choice of words, I'm using it as !=public goods, not !=B2B/B2G
If you can't get the thing properly patented, you're not going to fund it with social media in or out. The trouble isn't social media, it's that monetization is a really limited incentive within an industrial society where lots of great ideas fall into the category of public goods or reduction of externalities that just aren't incentivized properly and hence never get realized.
Say you come up with a great project to revolutionize education, health, energy or transportation - it might be to disruptive for governments to fund it (assuming there's a budget), but if there's no way to exclude non-buyers from benefiting, you're not going to get private funding either.
If there's revolution of thought within this century, I'm predicting it'll be in economics. I'm fine with a market economy for consumer products, but it shouldn't be the only game in town.
If the VCs you're talking to are all switching to social media now, you're probably talking to the wrong guys anyway. Sure, there might be a few who understand the risks and opportunities, but blindly following trends smells like ignorance, and ignorant investors are the worst you can get. If you have to follow the Silicon Valley model, concentrate on the folks who specialize on deals within your particular industry.
Also, VC doesn't appear to be the smartest choice here anyway. Apply for grants, talk to people who understand the problem your startup is going to solve, start a Kickstarter, go to banks (rarely works, but when it does, it does) and if that's not enough, try VC. I'm not saying VC is always a bad choice, but it's real usefulness is in rapid business development, not starting a brand new, R&D-intensive enterprise, which is kind of implied by will pay me nothing for ten years.
Hoping for the same regarding depth. After playing D2 for years (Hell, I'm building a summoner right now), I'm a bit afraid of a Godfather 3 scenario. The beta seemed nice, but I'll lay off the game until someone gives me a thumbs up about replayability and all.
Strangely, I never got into Torchlight at all. I don't think it's a bad game and there's nothing that really bugged me, as was the case a few times with Titan Quest (which I liked and finished a couple times, though), I just can't get myself interested.
1) Lift weights.
- It saves time: 30-60 minutes 2-3x a week suffice for a decent workout.
- It trains your whole body: Don't waste time on machines, you don't need 'em. Let a good trainer show you the popular full-body exercises and practice with low weights until you can do them correctly. It's all you need to bulk up or lose some kg.
- It's not as gruesome as it sounds: Most of the time is spent recovering from the last set, and the short bursts of pushing yourself to the limit are actually enjoyable, once you get into it.
- Increase weights regularly, change exercises and intensity when you hit a plateau.
- Some additional cardio doesn't hurt, obviously.
2) Fix your nutrition
- Don't eat too much crap.
- If you're trying to bulk up, eat something with protein every few hours.
- If you're trying to lose weight, reduce your calorie intake. Complex carbs will keep you from feeling powerless and low-calorie foods will keep you from feeling hungry. Sure, there's always the sense of "I must eat more", but that's just part of the process.
- Generally, complex carbs, fish/poultry & vegetables are good things to put in your face.
3) Sleep 7-8 hours a night
There's really not that much more to it, unless you're a pro-bodybuilder who's despairing because of a slight asymmetry of his pecs. I've met a dozen folks in the local gym who have used very simple workout and nutrition plans, look great, and still get results.
Maybe. No. Yes. No. Yes.
As the other AC said, the terms aren't specific. If you want something more meaningful, try the political compass (or grid), which splits the usual left/right range into two lines, one each for social and economic views. A pro-market social conservative would be upper right, while a left-libertarian would score in the lower left. It would also take care of the problem with the word "libertarian" which has been claimed by Ayn Rand's crowd, much to the chagrin of libertarians outside the US.
Don't care about the troll, but for anyone who doesn't want to look it up:
"Liberal" in Australia's Liberal Party refers to economic liberalism, not center-left politics. They're pretty firm in right-wing territory, including the obligatory hate against homosexuals and women's rights. Add gun crazies, religious zealots and Birchers and you'd have the GOP*.
*I'll refrain from making the obvious "Remove gun crazies, religious zealots and Birchers from the GOP and you're left with nothing" joke. Well, maybe not.
Come on, what's innovative about Dropbox?
Yes, the interface is all cute, it runs smoothly and doesn't spam the hell out of me. Still, filesharing isn't new. Syncing isn't new. Coming up with something similar is just what is supposed to happen in a competitive marketplace.
If Google launched a smear campaign against Dropbox and came up with some severely restrictive and sloppy alternative, maybe the comparison would make sense. But so...meh. Btw, I heard Google's financial statements are hard to read. They're totally the new Enron.
I wouldn't care that much if DRM allowed me to actually use the files I purchased.
As an ex-member of Audible, in order to actually listen the books I bought, I'd have to get an mp3 converter, get it to accept the codec I pieced together from Audible's software, which then would change every few months, rendering the old "hack" useless. Now I just pirate everything and save myself a few hours of work.
I'm not that much into piracy and I wouldn't mind paying $15 for the privilege of having someone read a book to me, but going through all the hassle just so I can open the files on the OS I want in the player I want doesn't sound like a worthy investment of time.
Same principle applies to ebooks. When I want to re-read the tome on corporate marketing I bought seven years ago, I head over to the study and pick it up. If I buy an e-reader with its own proprietary format now, will I still be able to read the book after a decade has passed? I'm not too sure, I kinda envision myself browsing the web for a kindle-to-google-glasses-converter.
Revolution seems like a surefire way to end up in another totalitarian nightmare.
I'd be more interested in economic research that dares to leave the mainstream of market theory and private parties. Even accounting for all that is wrong with capitalism, it does a pretty good job evaluating goods and services and providing decentralized incentives for people to engage in the economy. Of course, some of these incentives suck and the pricing mechanism tends to ignore social, environmental and future costs and effects.
Still, there should be a way to take all that we know about economics, game theory, psychology, etc., and distill it into a useful groundwork of a sustainable, scalable and fair economy that can be tested and validated on a small scale. After that, if people want to, they can still pick up torches and pitchforks, or simply move to a place that doesn't use 18th century economics as its M.O.
Considering that we're in a pretty tech-savvy crowd, disruptive innovation like this shouldn't seem too outrageous.
The Scary Startup - Are you overwhelmed with the complexity of Lean Startup Methodology? Is finding a real business model just too hard? Stop trying, build a free platform with mass appeal, brand it as threatening to the big players and sell for imaginary valuations! Coming Q3 2012, $29.99 Hardcover, $39.99 Kindle Edition with missing pages and no graphics.
While I'm still unsure how they got their investors to accept a $500M valuation (Series B, was it?), going into a meeting thinking "Yeah, $2B for a popular photo sharing app platform sounds about right" must take some cojones. I probably couldn't sell Instagram for $200M, I wouldn't even know where to start.
"So, we have this platform and our users are totally committed to the experience and not just using it because it's hip...and we all know that social media startups tend to stay popular and don't crash after a year or two...and crap, we can totally monetize that thing, like print photos on mugs and stuff...that's like an instant $80M/year right there, minus the cost of the mugs, of course. So, whaddaya say, two billion?"
They might underestimate our military capacity, though, if they see what passes for entertainment around here.
The ensuing moment of surprise should give us enough time to take the most pressing action, i.e., change our FB status to dead.
First we have an old guy who talks to an invisible man explain to us how Marxism is unrealistic, now 21st century tech is used to teach us 7th century philosophy. I think I'll be starting a new religion which proposes that we're in fact living under bizarro-God who delights in random acts of chaos and irony and the real one is in charge of another universe.
I don't think that the kind of species we are is the problem here. Capitalism prides itself on setting good incentives, but some of the real incentives that are created are just destructive and wicked, as is demonstrated nicely in this story. You can't just assume that people using massive amounts of tech and labor for their own self-interest is going to be just fine for everyone, as long as we put a bunch of regulations in place. I'd really like to see more research into alternative economic systems, I feel like it's time to move on to something smarter.