Author Archives: Elia Freedman

Entertaining Idiots

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I just don’t get the entertainment industry. First they back SOPA, a law that could basically shut down Google, Yahoo, Facebook YouTube and another billion sites on the web whenever the entertainment industry lawyers don’t like what they are doing. (Apparently those companies and more are preparing to shut down their servers and direct people to call their local politicians if it moves forward. Oh, I’d hate to be a Senator that day.)

Then HBO gets pissy at Netflix and will no longer sell them discs for a discount. And now Warner Brothers announces that the window before movies are available to rent after release will no longer be 28 days; instead, it will be 56. (To which someone on Twitter commented that the BitTorrent window is 28 minutes.)

Why don’t they get it? Why don’t they understand that folks like me, who spent thousands of dollars per year on music, movies, TV shows, and cable, has almost completely gone cold turkey. I buy a song here or there on iTunes. I subscribe to Netflix. I get just the local channels on cable. And I’m done. Even if there was content I wanted to buy I surely would not pay them for it now. I’m fed up with the way Hollywood treats me as a consumer.

I bought new business checks yesterday and the salesman on the phone was telling me about all the ways people figured out how to rip off checks, many of which used Scotch Tape. He was espousing the amazingness of their new checks, which supposedly resist such fraud. All I could of is that if the bank industry was the entertainment industry, they would have sued 3M for supplying the tape years ago.

Rumors of US Death Greatly Exaggerated

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What’s this? Manufacturing plants being built in the US?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/16/us-apple-samsung-idUSTRE7BF0D420111216

The US a net exporter of energy in Q4?
http://online.wsj.com/article/APf917509ee61344a38638e2c08bc47090.html

Once again the conventional wisdom of the US being dead is, well, dying. As I always say about conventional wisdom: always bet the other way.

I Wish I’d Invented Kickstarter

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If I could have invented any business over the past 15 years, I think it would have been Kickstarter.

We are a nation that was built on the promise that a single person could make a huge difference, that you have control of your destiny. But too often businesses are built to prey on our weaknesses, court us with tabloid-like sensationalism, or scare us with FUD [1].

Kickstarter embodies everything that is good about the American spirit. It is an enabler of ideas, making it possible for individuals or small companies to bring those ideas to market through revenues (not debts or capital). And this — helping ideas become products — is a noble endeavor.

There are other ideas out there that are wonderful and uplifting, too, but it is Kickstarter that captures my imagination.

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[1] FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt

Disruptive Only In a Rear-View Mirror

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Interesting quote from Clayton Christensen (via Bryce.vc and this presentation):

Not only are the market applications for disruptive technologies unknown at the time of their development, they are unknowable.

A couple of days ago Chris Dixon wrote the following:

New startup ideas are all around you, in the improvised behaviors of people you know. It takes a keen product eye, however, to notice these improvisational behaviors and recognize which ones are worthy of being developed into standalone products.

He referenced how Instagram, which had both filters and sharing, ate Hipstamatic’s lunch, which only had filters.

Dixon’s comment, though, suffers from hindsight and surviver’s bias. We only know Instagram is more popular because we know Instagram is more popular. Rewind a year or so and who really knows what the outcome will be.

To paraphrase Christensen, no one can know whether the technology will be disruptive before it is.

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UPDATE: I suggest reading the comments. Andy and I have a pretty good conversation there that extends the post nicely.

Slamming the Scales Back to Apple

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Android Platform Versions

In my last post I commented that the restrictions imposed on iOS beta apps tilted the balance to Android development if I was doing both and didn’t have a reason to release iOS first.

Not an hour later, some device info comes out that drops an elephant on the iOS side of my scale. Time frames generously provided by MG Seigler, these numbers should make any Android developer cry:

  • Only 0.6% on the latest version of Android (Ice Cream Sandwich) after 2 months
  • Only  55% have upgraded to the previous version of Android (Gingerbread), which is 1 year old
  • Over 30% are still using Gingerbread, which is more than a 1.5 years old
  • Over 10% are still using Froyo or older versions of the OS, which are at least 2 years old

And here I was, on iOS, debating whether to keep supporting an operating system version that came out mid last year.