January 2011
18 posts
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Reality Is Broken: Piano Edition
I have been reading and thoroughly enjoying “Reality is Broken” by Jane McGonigal (love the name too!). One basic premise of book is that games are engaging exactly because they represent a “better” version of reality in which missions are clear, feedback is more direct, failing is fun (careening off the track), … At the same time, I have started to learn how to...
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Egypt, the Internet, and the Second Amendment
We live in a time of amazing transformation. Nowhere has this been more apparent recently than in Tunisia and Egypt where people are fighting against entrenched regimes and for democracy. In both places the Internet has played a critical role as an organizing, information and documentation tool. So it is not surprising that authorities in Egypt have taken steps to cut off the people there from...
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NASA Heavy Lift Strategy Doesn't Make Sense
And now for something completely different. Like most (all?) geeks, I love the idea of human space travel. I know we have got tons of problems to fix here, but I don’t think that should deter us from pursuing some of our other dreams (after all we wouldn’t have airplanes either had folks waited for everything else to be dandy). So I was dismayed to read that NASA’s mandate...
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Don't Compete - Change the Game
I know that “don’t compete - change the game” can easily be seen as kind of a trite slogan. But I still find myself in many meetings with startups where the strategy can be summed up by: our plan is to do this better than our competitors. While out-executing others is possible and companies succeed with that approach, it is really difficult. It is especially difficult, if one...
Lufthansa Or How Not To Provide Customer Service
I took a Lufthansa flight from Newark to Munich to attend DLD11. As usual, I booked economy in keeping with my philosophy of doing what most entrepreneurs of early stage startups would do. As it turned out, I had enough miles to upgrade to business. Now my fare was not an upgradeable fare, so I offered to pay the difference. The ticket agent proceeded to make the necessary changes which took a lot of time (15 minutes). Finally she swiped my credit card and then as the very last step, she swiped my frequent flyer card. Just as I had a big grin on my face, ready to receive my business class boarding pass, she said: "now I just need your PIN." "My PIN? But you have my frequent flyer card in your hand." "Yes, but it's a debit card not a credit card" "Really?" "Really"
Turns out that you can't redeem Lufthansa miles without your PIN. So I set about finding my PIN. Attempt 1: Calling the Miles and More program. Result: customer service line is available only on weekdays. Attempt 2: Self-service on the web. Result: we will email or mail your PIN to you. "Or mail?" Come again? Attempt 3: Talk to the local supervisor. Result: Sorry I can't help you. At this point about 30 minutes had passed. The agent now started to back out all the work she had done with me standing there fuming. This took almost another 15 minutes.
Net result: Lufthansa had just wasted 45 minutes of my time for not getting me into business class. They had also wasted an opportunity to make another 300 dollars of completely incremental revenues and burn 50,000 miles (which are otherwise a liability for them) on a flight that had 20 percent utilization in business class. All because they made it ridiculously hard to redeem miles and did not in any way empower their local agents to override this in a situation where it would have made completely obvious sense. Now add to this a blog post that details the experience.
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Rooting for Larry and the Internet
I am thrilled to see Larry Page take over as CEO from Eric Schmidt. In a post a few months back I had expressed my worry that Google was headed the way of Yahoo under too much “professional management” and not enough visionary founder leadership (contrasting it at the time with Facebook). Instead of a list of 6 things that he should do, I believe Larry really only needs to succeed...
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LivingSocial, Groupon and Defensibility
LivingSocial yesterday was selling $20 for $10, which is a good deal for everyone buying it (and remembering to then make use of their Amazon gift card). Not surprisingly, they sold at least 1 million for a total value of $20 million. Now if everyone who bought one of these were a new LivingSocial registered user, that would amount to a $10 customer acquisition cost. That’s of course a...
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Android Badly Needs a Successful Tablet
If there was any doubt, the iPad is a huge winner for Apple with 7.3 million units shipped in the last quarter. Casual observation from flying a fair bit has made that obvious over the last few months. You can’t walk through a packed air plane (and they are mostly packed these days) without seeing a ton of iPads. Most people are watching movies on theirs, some play games and very few do...
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We Need to Refactor Government
Fred posted over the weekend about deficit reduction. What we really need though is not cutting within the existing system, but rather restructuring government for the age of the Internet. We currently seem to be in the habit of piling patches upon poorly working systems. It is as if we were trying to cope with decades of technical debt with a couple of maintenance releases as opposed to a...
Inflation Coming?
Apologies up front for no links as I am typing this on the train to the city. I am curious to find out whether anyone else thinks that 2011 will be the year that inflation returns (and possibly with a vengeance). Both based on newspaper reports and talking to friends who do business in China it seems that prices there are going up quickly. Given how much we import that would suggest we will see...
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Guns
Much has already been said about the need for more gun control in the aftermath of the Arizona shooting of Rep. Giffords. I am in complete agreement that we need much tighter controls, especially for assault weapons (which should encompass semi-automatics). One point I have not seen is the need for pro-active education about guns. In the absence of such, people will form their views of guns...
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Kinect and the Metaverse
Our older son had wanted an XBox for a long time, but I was loath to add yet another gaming console to our Gamecube and Wii. With the release of the Kinect controller, however, I could no longer resist as I badly wanted it myself! So over the holidays we got one and it is as amazing as everyone says. As in the early days of the Wii, it is some of the simplest games that provide the greatest...
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Google (or Microsoft) Should Pick Up Delicious
After at first appearing to be shutting it down, Yahoo is now apparently selling delicious (or possibly giving it away). Google or Microsoft should be first in line to pick it up, but especially Google. Why? Because delicious would help immensely with battling spam and content farms, something many folks have criticized Google for lately, including Jeff Atwood and Marco Arment. That was of...
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Global Namespace for People (Part 4)
So given the previous parts of this series (1, 2, 3), what might an alternative solution to the global namespace for people look like? First, we should have some criteria for how the system operates. Here are the ones that come to mind:
Secure decentralized operation that’s not controlled by a single entity
Human readable/memorable names
Globally unique
Until yesterday I was blissfully...
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Global Namespace for People (Part 3)
I ended yesterday’s post by saying that I would write about potential solutions to the global namespace problem for people (parts 1 and 2). So here we go with a post on what seems to be happening (to be followed by a final post on possible alternatives). The de facto solution for an increasing number of services appears to be delegating their namespace to Facebook or Twitter or both. ...
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Global Namespace for People (Part 2)
Yesterday, I started a short series of posts on the global namespace for consumer web services. My quick and highly unscientific survey of readers showed a surprisingly high usage of usernames based on real names. I suspect that to be highly skewed by the audience for my blog. An important historic alternative has been to pick a distinctive username that bears no relationship to one’s...
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Global Namespace for People (Part 1)
I have been thinking a lot recently about the global namespace for people. My thoughts on this are far from settled and there are a lot of them, so I have decided to break this up into a bunch of different posts. When I was growing up near Nuremberg, Germany, I often had my last name “Wenger” misspelled as “Wegner” because the latter was a common last name in my region...
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The Private IPO
Yes, I realize that’s a contradiction, but it seems to capture the essence of deals such as Goldman’s investment in Facebook at a $50B valuation and Groupon’s half-complete $950 million fundraising effort. These deals are designed to provide significant liquidity for insiders (especially early investors and employees), provide a piggy bank for continued aggressive growth and...