I went to see A Place to Bury Strangers at the Mercury Lounge on Sept 20th. The openers were Die Romantik and The Most Serene Republic. The show was great across the board; every band was excellent in their own way.
The Most Serene Republic was up first. The lead singer reminded me [...]

From the WSJ, a picture of newspaper revenues offline (left) and online (right):

As exemplified by the picture above, newspapers can’t figure out how to make money online. However, it feels like primary news consumption is moving online at a much faster rate than online news revenues are growing.
I exclusively consume my news [...]

USV has been consumed by Xobni. Fred invited me to reflect on it today, so I’m doing that now.
Xobni is a great productivity tool; however, everyone at USV is getting very distracted by Xobni at the same time because we’re all playing a game I call: “Whose Your #1?”
As you can see in the [...]

Paul Kedrosky has the killer insight of the week:
Here is a factoid that jumped out at me yesterday, one having to do with the ratio of software developers to non-developers at a major quant fund versus a major software company:
- Oracle (56,000 empl.): 1 - 8 (one developer for every eight employees)
- Renaissance Technologies (178 [...]

About a year ago I wrote about how Threadless is a presage for the new form of product design. Products will be crowdsourced. These products will have incredibly small markets, but that won’t matter because common product design and realization expenses will be reduced by this new model. Fabrication will be on-demand (no [...]

This was one of the best posts I’ve read all year.
Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result. They call it a “dollar auction.” The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one [...]

I finally found episodic video content on the web that I enjoy more than TV. I am eagerly awaiting the next episode of Zero Punctuation.
Zero Punctuation is a crude, sarcastic and witty video review of a new or upcoming game. It is made by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw whose opinions about gaming are on [...]

At the risk of becoming an xkcd link blog (two re-blogs in one week), I had to post this comic in light of my recent musings regarding Consumer Values.
This comic does a great job of explaining why my opinions about mass consumer appeal of products and the importance of certain characteristics is completely bunk. [...]

Apparently people with good credit are penalized at AT&T. Their convenience prepaid plan on the iPhone is only available to people who fail a credit check. If you have good credit, pre-paid is not an option. From AVC this morning:
After about five minutes, the manager got on the line. I repeated my case, [...]