The Gong Show

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 a lot of Rob Kalin, the CEO of Etsy, which I found pretty entertaining. Some songs reminded me of Stars because they were romantic indie rock with their girl/boy duets. Other songs reminded me more of Broken Social Scene because of their triumphant climaxes that included a trombone peaking above a crashing wave of multiple distorted guitars. While checking The Most Serene Republic out online right now, I’m not surprised they reminded me of Broken Social Scene and Stars because all three bands are on the same label: Arts & Crafts. However, unlike most bands on Arts & Crafts, The Most Serene Republic doesn’t share any members with Broken Social Scene. I’m sure that fact will change soon as the Broken Social Scene line-up rotates on future tours.

Next up was Die Romantik. The drummer in this band was excellent. He had a ton of passion, but still kept things super tight. He even added vocals to one song. The rest of the group was great too, but they were all kinda introvented, which is surprising for bands in general… there’s usually one extrovent (typically the lead). Their music was kinda like a faster-paced Low… like Low’s “The Great Destroyer”, except more-spirited vocals. The lighting they used was pretty cool. They ran wires 10 ft up in the air across the stage and hung 3 sets of old school light bulbs (like the kind Edison would have created by hand) that were dimly lit so you could see the coils. It added a lot to the atmosphere.

Finally, A Place to Bury Strangers took the stage. Die Romantik ran long, so A Place to Bury Strangers played a pretty short set: just over a half hour. But, it was a half hour of pulverizing awesomeness. Their music is like if Ian Curtis of Joy Division had lived long enough to see some of the Boston hardcore metal scene, like ISIS, and then the result was ran through 8 different petal effects units. The atmosphere was even better: The primary source of light was a movie reel soaking the band members in color. They had a guy in the back operating two 8mm projectors playing looped cuts of grainy, chaotic imagery, and then the operator used a few pieces of cardboard to mix together the results by covering the projectors temporarily. The only other source of light in the room was a strobe that pumped out bursts of light tied to the bass drum kicks. The word “intense” is such an understatement.

If you ever get a chance to see any of these bands live, jump on it. What a great night.

Listen to The Most Serene Republic.
Listen to Die Romantik.
Listen to A Place to Bury Strangers.

Here’s a music video for A Place to Bury Strangers that captures the concert experience pretty well:

[Photo credit (pretty sure this photo is from the same A Place to Bury Strangers show I went to): Mercurialn]

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 online. Almost all of my peers do the same. This story from ABriefMessage is a nice anecdote to capture this overwhelming feeling that print news is antiquated due to the shift to online consumption.

So, as more people consume news online, it gets increasingly cheaper to give each person their news. Paper, ink, bags, boxes, trucks, and delivery personal all cost money. Much more money than bandwidth and servers by contrast. The marginal cost of delivering the news to a customer online practically zero. And, as we all know from econ 101 (which I attended at Wikipedia University, so feel free to tell me how wrong I am in the comments), the price of a good in a competitive market always gets pushed towards its marginal cost.

Therefore, I don’t think we’ll ever see a day when the left side of that newspaper revenue chart shifts over to the right side of the chart. Because it costs essentially nothing to serve each incremental customer in an online news model, each incremental customer expect to pay essentially nothing for the news.

[Note: I found this picture via Lightspeed blog and is originally from the WSJ. Due credit to both.]

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 screen snippet on the right side of this post, each person you email gets analyzed by Xobni. It gives you a histogram of emails per hour from this individual, total communication stats, and some other interesting stuff like phone numbers from sig files which I’ve cut out of this pic.

The most interesting stat Xobni gives you is a ranking (see bottom right of the pic). I’m not exactly sure how the ranking is calculated, but it’s clear that the ranking is a proxy for the people you communicate with most and I’m pretty sure they bake recency of communication into this ranking. Xobni doesn’t give you a view anywhere in their interface of people sorted by their ranking, so to figure out a person’s ranking, you have to search for them in the Xobni search box and look at their profile ranking. This makes for an interesting game: try and guess who are you top 10 ranked people.

This game seems so simple, but it’s deceptively difficult. As you can see Fred’s my #1. I know that Brad is my #2, but #3 is eluding me! How can the third most popular person I email be so hard to identify?! Yet, I’m sure when I find it, it’s going to be a total “oh Duh!” moment because all the other rankings I’ve found seem perfectly accurate.

Dorsey has been the big winner at this game so far. She’s identified everyone in her top 10 except #7. The rest of us are falling behind, but not for a lack of trying.

I love the unintentional (or intentional?) gameplay dynamics in Xobni. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a killer productivity tool, but the procrastination it has given me today is even better. I’m feeling the itch to stop blogging and go back to playing with Xobni right now.

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 empl.): 2 -3 (two developers for every three employees)

It’s not too much of a stretch to say that hedge funds are the new software companies. After all, they have more developers per capita than the latter, and they certainly generate more cash flow per capita.

This begs an interesting question: in an age where nearly every industry has companies that are leveraging original software development to streamline business processes, what is a software company? Surely they’re not just the companies writing a lot of code because every industry has geeks writing code: book publishers (lulu.com) through t-shirt vendors (Threadless) would fit that definition of “software company.”

Are software companies now the ones building platforms, whereas individual industries are building applications off of these platforms? In that case, then Google, Oracle, MSFT, Salesforce, Facebook, etc are all software companies… but, that’s still not quite right. Google is a media company (whether they like it or not). So is Facebook.

A software company can’t just be a company that sells software. First of all, simply selling a string of “0″s and “1″s is a tired business model. Most players that used to sell compiled code are now doing SaaS instead. And, these SaaS companies are often not selling software at all. They’re giving software away for free and then selling support (think: Firefox, RedHat, IBM, etc). Those SaaS companies are “consultants” (just like McKinsey) by that definition. Besides, if the definition of “software company” is just a company that sells software then there are hardly any software companies left, and I don’t think that’s true… people use the term “software company” to describe companies all the time today.

I think the old concept of a “software company” is pretty dated. The only way to really understand the definition of the phrase today is from a pragmatic approach. Software companies are the companies that people say are software companies in conversation. The term is now defined by its usage; there’s no longer a common thread that is exclusive to just this set of companies. Rorty is probably smiling from beyond the grave about my application of his pragmatic linguistic philosophy.

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 inventory constraints), like lulu does for books, and a subset of the market will do the design themselves, so R&D costs will drastically reduced.

I’m not saying that the current era of mass-market product design will die. There will always be room in the world for great product innovators like Apple to build devices with mass-market appeal. But, crowdsourced design will fill in the long tail of gaps where a need does exist, but it’s a small need in a niche community. Bug labs has a great analogy to a pizza pie in filling this long tail of needs (they call it the pizza tail).

Ponoko, which launched at TechCrunch 40 this week, is big step toward realizing this world of crowdsource product design. Ponoko is a personal manufacturing platform. People can co-create physical goods, and all product fabrication is on-demand (enabled by efficiency of laser cutting production and programming).

As soon as I saw the power of Threadless I could feel this wave coming. There’s no reason why the crowdsource power of Threadless will stop at T-Shirts, and Ponoko is just another step along the way of making my academic background in Product Design obsolete :) I love it.

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 wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in. The first bids a penny, looking to make 99 cents. The second bids 2 cents, the third 3 cents, and so on, each feeling they have a chance at something good on the cheap. The early stages are fun, and the bidders wonder what possessed the professor to be willing to lose some money.

The problem surfaces when the bidders get up close to a dollar. After 99 cents the last vestige of profitability disappears, but the bidding continues between the two highest players. They now realize that they stand to lose no matter what, but that they can still buffer their losses by winning the dollar. They just have to outlast the other player. Following this strategy, the two hapless students usually run the bid up several dollars, turning the apparent shot at easy money into a ghastly battle of spiraling disaster.

Theoretically, there is no stable outcome once the dynamic gets going. The only clear limit is the exhaustion of one of the player’s total funds. In the classroom, the auction generally ends with the grudging decision of one player to “irrationally” accept the larger loss and get out of the terrible spiral. Economists call the dollar auction pattern an irrational escalation of commitment. We might also call it the war in Iraq.

I find this concept very entertaining. It would have made a good business model for eBay ;) . However, I’m incredibly frustrated that the US government is playing this sucker’s game with the lives of human soldiers.

This seems to have been reblogged widely. I found it here, and the original source is here.

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 par with the majority of frustrated game critics: there’s no original games being made, sequels and remakes suck, the console wars are foolishly focused on a graphics arms race, genuinely interesting games rarely perform well financially because gamers don’t know what’s good for them, etc. I don’t entirely agree with these stances, but Yahtzee is so damn funny it doesn’t matter. The subtitle of Yahtzee’s blog is “If Bruce Campbell were a website, he’d be this one.” I wish I’d thought of that :)

You need to be two things to enjoy these videos: 1) a jaded gamer 2) a fan of unapologetic, crude humor. If you qualify, do yourself a favor and watch the videos embedded below (or check out the complete list of Zero Punctuation videos to date).

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. :)

On a slightly related note, this comic actually touches on a crucial component of good user experience testing practices. When doing user testing you want the participant to speak their internal monologue thought process outloud. Speaking all thoughts aloud is incredibly unnatural for participants, and I have had to remind every participant I have ever tested to say more about what they are thinking. A great way to get around this issue is to test participants in pairs of two. Then, quite naturally without instruction, participants will speak their internal monologue because they are articulating it to their partner, just like the shopping teams of geeks in the cartoon above. I learned this technique from a guest lecture by Will Wright. It’s how they tested The Sims for “fun factor”, and it led to some brilliant discoveries that the designers would not have found otherwise.

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, asked him to authorize a prepaid plan for my phone. He said he could not do so. That it was AT&T policy to only issue pre-paid plans to people with valid social security numbers who fail a credit check.

Brutal. Time to go ignore my bills for the next 3 months ;)

Seriously though, I now have no where to go! I’m planning on leaving Verizon at the beginning of October in protest over their lawsuit against the FCC. I had Sprint for 4 years, and their customer service made me feel like an untouchable, so I won’t go there. Fred’s AT&T experience has convinced me I shouldn’t go there. All that’s left is T-Mobile, but their network is atrociously bad. I have no options left.

Time to buy a Nokia N800 and load it with Skype. Jumping from wifi island to wifi island around the city has the unbeatable price of “free” and would comparable service quality to T-Mobile ;)

Update: By complete coincidence, I received my Verizon Wireless bill this month a few minutes ago, and it said that I had accepted a one year extension of my contract in exchange for one free month of service. I did nothing of the sort and had to forcefully push my way through customer service in order to get them to reverse the error. I hate the carriers!