Google Ornaments - a Holiday Easter Egg?
December 22, 2007 | 2 Comments
I was just doing a search for “.at” domain, and the results page had ornaments displaying. As of right now, this search still does that, but I can’t get any other searches doing that:
Focusing Up: CNET - A Stock To Watch
December 20, 2007 | 1 Comment
I use to dabble in stocks in the dot-com days and before then, roughly 1996. It was the summer before my Senior year in high school and I was in the shape of my life, because I’d wake up at 5:30am, go to the gym to work-out, come home to watch CNBC and eat some cereal — CNBC in the morning use to get me juiced. I told my Dad to be investing in Intel and Yahoo back then — and he made a killing over those years.
Since then, and since the dot-com days when I turned $3k into $12.5k, then played all of that on margin ($25k total), and then the bubble burst and I received an end check of $0.11 (which I still have to this day as a scar reminder) — I haven’t done any investing in the market. In fact, when I tell my friends various stocks to look at (MIVA - I thought it was a good acquisition target) — they typically go down; ditto on my sports picks. You can pretty much bet against whatever I say in regards to stocks and sports.
But I have to put one out there — CNET. I haven’t looked at their income statement or balance sheet, and I don’t even know who is running that place right now (it’s Neil Ashe) — but whoever it is, they seem to be doing a great job “trimming the fat”. Their founder/CEO resigned a year ago and all the trimming has been happening since then. The past few months they have really tightened down to sell-off assets that aren’t part of their core. They sold Webshots and now just closed shop on their RSS reader product. They also recently secured a $250mm credit line.
They seem to be really working on FOCUSING. Focus is such a difficult thing to do — particularly as a young startup when you’re trying to get your feet on some steady ground (aka generating revenue and doing whatever it takes to do to accomplish that) or as a big public company when investors want to see increased returns. According to comScore, CNET’s News.com has dropped from 11mm monthly pageviews to 6mm monthly pageviews in the past year alone (although pageviews is a misleading metric in this AJAX world — I should focus on unique visitors and time spent).
Look for CNET to sell/close other assets like AllYouCanUpload (photo upload site), Consumating (dating site for geeks; ah hem Digg? er, this post is about focusing, digg doesn’t need a dating site), etc.
I digress — back to their stock, is it a buy or a sell? I like this simple ‘Ratings‘ feature by TheStreet.com — it looks at financial metrics, what analysts are saying, etc., and gives a rating from A to F (like grades in school). CNET is a sell with a ‘D+’ rating. I didn’t look at that before writing this post, but as you can see — I’m not the best with picking winners in the market. I’m the same with betting on horses — I go for the risky 80:1 bets, because if they pay-off, they pay-off BIG. But that’s me, a risky entrepreneur.
The real question is: What does the brand CNET mean to you? It means news and reviews to me — whether it’s video games or tech news. But that brand image has been diluting over the years.
Music recommendation: The Silent Years
December 13, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I never talk about music on this blog, despite it being likely my biggest passion in life. One band that blows my mind is a small band out of Detroit called ‘The Silent Years‘. Their album can be played over, and over, and over again — all in a row. (Yes I have done this)
They are giving away their debut album for free online this holiday season — I highly recommend downloading it.
P.S. If you’re looking for another album that is mind blowing — check out an 8-person band from Indianapolis called Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s. Their debut is called ‘Dust of Retreat‘.
If I could invest in bands, it’d be these two horses.
Juno: The “Little Miss Sunshine” of 2007
December 7, 2007 | 1 Comment
The new movie Juno is awesome. If you liked the movie ‘Little Miss Sunshine‘, then you’ll love this film just as much. There are still some free screenings going down of Juno — see if you can get some free passes to a theater near you.
Web Startup Ideas - The List and The Drought
December 6, 2007 | 3 Comments
I’ve published a ton of my web startup ideas in the past (see my Archive page and scroll through them), but have shown a bit of a drought here on my site. I still get them daily, but now I write them in a little notepad that sits behind my wallet in my jeans each day.
My buddy Andrew Hyde hooked me up with a few of these “moleskin” pads — they are great and handy. Everyone should have one of these on them at all times, along with a pen — you never know when inspiration will strike. I also have a notepad with pen next to my bed.
Facebook giving stock to Universal Music? Full length songs removed from Myspace for Universal Music artists - Ouch to MySpace.
December 3, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Very interesting — the only reason MySpace still really exists, is because every music artist is on it. As Universal retracts full songs from MySpace, that cripples MySpace a bit — and will get users to go to other services like Facebook, iLike, Purevolume … [if Universal isn’t telling artists to remove full songs from those services].
Does Universal have ownership in any of MySpace’s competitors? Wouldn’t surprise me if Facebook gave them some stock in an effort to get consumers to follow artists over to Facebook.
My MySpace Days Are Over
December 3, 2007 | 3 Comments
I’ll likely let my profile sit there, but those days are over. The only comments I get anymore are from my “friends”, but are really bots that have hacked my friends’ accounts, and have posted comments on my page on behalf of my friends. I wonder how many people on MySpace realize they’ve been caught in a phishing scam — and thus, how many don’t have a private email anymore. I bet the number is high — like at least 5%.
It’s easy to get caught by the phishing scams — they are very deceptive on MySpace. You click a link that looks like a myspace URL, but really that’s just the sub-sub-sub-sub domain of some phishing site, then it shows a page that looks like MySpace and asks you to login [again], which isn’t a rare occurrence given that MySpace does that quite a bit. Then the user just gave their login credentials over to some hacker.
Literally the last 6 of 7 comments in the past 3 months have been hacked comments not by my friends. MySpace needs to do something to earn credibility… fast. (One idea: assign a few people to be finding all the spam, hacks, phishing activities going on — and erase all of those comment posts / links).
Jakob, Zach, Vimeo, IAC, and Corporate America’s Red Tape
December 3, 2007 | 2 Comments
I posted a comment to a post that I’m sure will get lost on TechCrunch regarding Jakob Lodwick leaving IAC (fired, apparently):
- IMO, Vimeo has, to this day, the tightest design I’ve ever seen in my life — and I’ve seen a lot of websites.
- You can’t put entrepreneurs into a sluggish corporate environment and expect them to stick. I spoke to Zach and Jakob at SXSW ‘07 soon after IAC took a share in their company; they were going on their first meeting the following week in hopes of getting their hands on updating Evite. Obviously the red tape was way too thick and they weren’t able to do that.
- IAC would have benefited by putting Zach/Jakob in as Co-Strategic Officers or some BS title, but basically giving them all the rights to overhaul stuff. Yes I am shocked that Evite with their website from 1996 still is the event site king.
- I can’t believe IAC doesn’t have a social network in their portfolio (I still say buy Friendster; yes it lost the long-term USA battle, but it’s a solid brand and could grow with integration into IAC’s powerhouse of Internet brands).
- Jakob definitely has some bucks, he just did his first angel investment (into Tumblr — another slickly designed, simple app).
- Jakob and Zach will come back at us with something that rocks.
Oh - and I went to RIT for 2 years (great school!).
