I’ve spent a massive amount of my time while running Infinity Softworks managing risk. In this case I’m talking about business and technical risk. When do I count revenues? How reliant am I on a partner? How reliant am I on a technology sticking around?

Sometimes I’ve been good at this. I’m conservative about deals, for instance, never adding cash expectations to my budget until the contracts are signed. Sometimes I’ve been bad at this. We were extremely reliant on Palm in 2004 and didn’t even understand how reliant we were. When the relationship failed 70% of our revenue disappeared at the same time.

Yesterday App.net announced that renewals didn’t meet expectations and that the product would continue but that the team developing it would no longer be full-time. Development would be open sourced.

This doesn’t bode well for those that rely on ADN for log in and syncing services, the developer back-ends. If I did, I would be looking for an alternative right now. In managing a business it seems that I am always surrounded by risk. My goal is to minimize it as much as possible where possible.

This is one of the reasons we don’t do log ins with Facebook or Twitter or Google. This is one of the reasons we prefer to manage our own servers. This is one of the reasons we have multiple revenue sources. As I was planning Equals one of the things I thought about was all of these risks. It is one of the reasons we chose to develop the web version first and mobile-specific versions later. Relying on Apple, Google, Samsung and Amazon to provide us customers is dangerous, especially if we factor in the rules that go along with participating in someone else’s store.

Honestly, it isn’t possible to get rid of all risk. But it is important to consider which risks are worth taking and eliminate all the rest.

I’ve had the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite for about a week now and have used it every day. As background, my first Kindle was the Kindle Touch released last year. I found it to be deficient in two significant ways: 1) its touch interface was not very responsive and 2) in order to read in even a shaded room I needed an external light.

On last year’s Touch model the responsiveness of the user interface was horrible, even after the update. It was typical to tap the screen and have it not react for multiple seconds. Often times I would tap a second time thinking I didn’t hit it correctly and then it would do whatever I asked, like flip the page, twice.

The need for a light, even when the room was just a little dark, was another pet peeve. Not only did I have to carry an external light with me, but I would have to attach this clunky thing that always got in the way of the screen (shadows or the light’s arm) in some way. The light, by the way, had two settings: bright and blaring. I read a lot in bed at 3am, trying to clear my head so I can fall back to sleep. My goal is to not wake my wife. I couldn’t make the old light dim enough.

Amazon pushed the Touches e-ink display as a replacement for paper but it really wasn’t. In every way — resolution to coloring — that e-ink display was pretty mediocre. Speaking of color, the e-ink displays were significantly darker than paper so reading in a room with a little natural light but not a direct light on the screen made the e-ink impossible to read even when paper was readable.

I can report in every way that the Paperwhite is superior to the previous Touch model. It is very responsive to screen taps, for one. I no longer am left wondering whether my selection registered or not. Furthermore, the screen with lighting on is excellent. It solves all of the problems I had with the previous model (while introducing one nitpick). The controls are quickly available and it is easy enough to turn the screen down to its lowest settings.

At the low end, the screen replicates the color of paper much closer. And with a simple adjustment, making the light brighter by just a few notches, I get plenty of light to read at 3am without disturbing my wife sleeping next to me. We are both a lot happier!

My nitpick is that the backlighting leaves a slight shadow at the bottom of the screen. At first I noticed it readily but after a few days it faded into the background.

The Paperwhite is much closer to my ideal reading device than the Touch was. I’m quite happy to have paid the $119.

I want to relay a theory I have about starting a business but in order to do so I want you to envision something: a person in a translucent bubble. The person is right in the middle, somehow floating there, able to see in all directions (at least to some degree). That’s the start-up.

In order to grow the business the person in the bubble needs to push as hard as it can on a spot in the bubble. It doesn’t move easily nor does it expand easily. One person can only push so hard, two people can push a little better, but adding too many people into the bubble means no one can move or push as there are too many people in there. The goal at this stage is to move the bubble and at some point grow the bubble so more people can push it in the right direction.

The beauty of the bubble is that it can go in any direction at this stage. It is standing still and any path might be the right one.

So I was thinking about the magazine and newspaper industry this morning and thinking that this is an industry that has too many people in the bubble and their momentum has carried them down the wrong path. Now, they are trying to reverse course, move in a new direction, and in many cases trying to do it with all these people.

Another problem for the industry though is that their backs are against the wall. I take this analogy quite literally — the bubble is pushed up against a wall. That limits the directions the business can go, hemming them in.

One final thought: better to burst your own bubble then let someone else do it. Better to force a change in direction before your back is against the wall.

I’ve changed my Twitter profile picture to include a “Stop SOPA” badge. The goal is to see this badge completely populate my Twitter feed (and everyone else’s) and then maybe Congress will realize that they should drop this damaging legislation.

Go here to do it. It only takes a second (and the site even makes it simple to switch back): http://www.blackoutsopa.org