2009 January « MattMaroon.com

Archive for January, 2009

iTunes: Crime Against Humanity

Posted in Computers on January 29, 2009 by themaroon

Recently I installed iTunes, because someone I know is doing pretty well with an app and I wanted to check out the app store, and wow. I mean, just wow. Next time I hear someone tell me about how Apple has such great design sense and makes products that just work, I’m just going to respond with "iTunes".

I’ve never had this painful of an experience with software before. I’m pretty sure that using this software for 10 minutes constitutes a violation of the Geneva Conventions. I have a quad core machine on an 8 mbps internet connection, yet I click app store and count off over 20 seconds before it loads.

And then, when it finally does, I get this:

(click to enlarge)

After the instant migraine subsided, I decided to try it out as, you know, a media player. I’ve used it before (though that was a couple versions ago) to load iPods. That was exceptionally brutal, because I had a Nano, and iTunes just wasn’t built to sync collections to devices that don’t have enough storage capacity, it was built to sell your grandma a few songs and put them on the player. But I’d never used it to just play.

Well, I still haven’t, because for some reason, it decided it needed to convert most of my files (which are in FLAC or WMA lossless, because I started encoding music long before there was an iTunes) to AAC, pretty much rendering the program unusable, and the rest of my OS nearly so. I had to kill it with Task Manager, but I’m ordering a silver stake off of Amazon just in case this unholy beast comes back from the dead.

I guess I’m just more of an old school Winamp type guy. I don’t need my player to do a bunch of fancy organizing for me, that’s why I have folders. I don’t want it to convert them all to some other format for no apparent reason (which would take days for me) especially when I already have the codecs installed. I thought I disliked the latest version of Windows Media Player, but after iTunes I’m thinking about marrying it.

I really don’t understand why Apple doesn’t do a better job with this. The iPod is still most people’s only contact with Apple products. It’s what draws them into iPhones and, Apple hopes, computers. Why ship this bloated monstrosity to every new customer?

2 Comments »

Change.gov

Posted in Me Thinking So You Don't Have To on January 24, 2009 by themaroon

I haven’t said much about the inauguration or our new President because really, there isn’t much left to say. I voted for the guy and to a large extent I’m already sick of hearing about him. More specifically, I’m tired of hearing about his race.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for the black community, but I think we’re doing them a disservice. We were already naming roads, schools, and bridges after the man, and he hadn’t even taken office yet. There was some hope that his election would be a turning point in our nation’s racist history, but I don’t think it has been. Racism isn’t over when we elect a black President. That comes when we elect a black President and his race isn’t mentioned in every paragraph about him. It’s when we name airports after him not because of his skin color, but because he did a great job of serving our country.

Nonetheless, I have to say, I’m feeling hopeful. I read this very thorough article in The Economist about the Bush Presidency, which details “a presidency knocked sideways by the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001″ and explains how incompetence, nepotism, anti-intellectualism, and misplaced loyalty led to what may be the worst Presidency in the history of our nation. Then a couple hours later, I was reading about Obama’s executive orders banning torture, extending habeas corpus to the detainees in Cuba, and closing secret prisons. Makes you proud to be an American again.

On Platforms

Posted in Startup on January 23, 2009 by themaroon

I saw this article today about platforms. While I agree with some of its points, the overall conclusion that "Building a business exclusively on top of another service is irresponsible and naïve." is flat out wrong. I always laugh when I hear stuff like that and think "tell it to the guy who made Mob Wars." He’s making (irresponsibly and naively I guess) millions per year exclusively on top of another service.

Being in the Facebook App business now, I sort of know what the author is talking about. You do have to be ever-mindful of the fact that you’re playing in somebody else’s back yard. You’re playing by their rules, and are totally at their mercy.

Still, it can be worth it because there are a few mitigating factors. For one, their interest and yours are usually at least somewhat aligned. Facebook’s success is in no small part due to their platform. It’s expanded the utility of what would otherwise be little more than a place to cyberstalk people (which granted, is popular in its own right) into what is now a place to cyberstalk people and play games. It’s doubled in usefulness.

An application platform doesn’t want to run off all of its developers. Even though they sometimes seem capricious and arbitrary, you can be reasonably certain they’re not going to screw you for no good reason. They can, of course, or they can screw you for a good reason, so it’s a risk factor you certainly should be mindful of. But it’s not as bad as it sounds.

And that risk factor, in the case of some of the more popular platforms, is made up for overwhelmingly by the platform itself. With Facebook or Myspace, you have the ability to grow rapidly and virally, much more easily than you would on the net. Our most recent game, Football Tycoon, has grown to over 50,000 users in about two months, and is gaining a significant chunk of new ones each day. That’s something that just wouldn’t have been doable as a standalone website due to the lack of a compelling invite system.

An iPhone app can take advantage of the app store’s distribution network to sell or give away millions of copies in no time. A Twitter app can leverage the intense engagement users have with the service to quickly build a product that thousands of people will love.

It’s just a matter of risk and reward. You’re taking the risk of your overlord making changes that aversely affect you, but you’re gaining the reward of virality, distribution, or engagement. It’s a tradeoff to be sure, but not one that isn’t sometimes worth making, or that is patently irresponsible or naïve, so long as you’re mindful of it.

1 Comment »

How To Download All Of Your Favorite Shows Effortlessly And Watch Them Anywhere

Posted in Computers on January 19, 2009 by themaroon

Last year I decided to cancel cable. The reason was that I don’t watch that much TV, but the few shows I do enjoy I found myself downloading, even though I had a DVR, because it’s easier.

I’ve since told a lot of my more technologically-savvy friends about it, and I’m shocked to find that even those who use both Bittorrent and RSS on a daily basis don’t know that you can combine the two, or how wondrous the result is. So I thought I’d write a brief tutorial on how to use Bittorrent RSS, the easy way, to snag all of your favorite shows. (Only get the ones that are legal for you to download of course.)

I’m going to assume you’re using a Bittorrent client that has RSS functionality. My favorite by far is uTorrent (and I’ve tried them all) for Windows. To my knowledge the uTorrent Mac client doesn’t support RSS, and Transmission is a steaming pile, so if you’re an OSX user you might be SOL. Good luck with your Apple TV I guess.

Anyway, step 1 is to find an RSS feed for your show. I recommend tvrss.net. They’ve got the most reliable feeds. You can also use Mininova, but you have to add “&direct” to the end of your feed, and you’re probably going to get frustrated since it’s unmoderated and half the time you’ll discover you got nothing but some .exe file that’s almost certainly a virus.

Once you’ve found your show, choose a distribution group (I like EZTV, but your mileage may vary according to the show) and then right click where it says “Search-based RSS Feed” and copy location. Your clipboard now contains the url. Here’s what it would look like if you wanted to find the show Scrubs:

Now Step 2. Open up uTorrent, and click the RSS icon in the toolbar. You’ll see the UI guys were such geniuses that they automatically pasted your clipboard into the Feed URL box:

I like to give mine a custom alias just so they’re easy to manage in the uTorrent sidebar. Set it to automatically download (because really, what’s the point otherwise?) and click “Use smart episode filter”. Often the show will appear multiple times, but you really only need to download it once.

Click OK and you’re set to go. Every time there’s a new episode of Scrubs, you’ll automatically download it, in HDTV and commercial free.

The bonus to this is that if you set your default directory to one that’s shared publicly on your network you can watch it in any room of your house that has a television or an Xbox 360. For the latter, simply open up the My Videos folder, select the computer it’s on, and play. The shows will all come in in DivX or XviD, so you can’t play them through Media Center.

For bonus points when you travel, use a syncing program like Dropbox or Zumodrive. I actually prefer Zumodrive for this particular application because my laptop has a relatively small (and nearly full) hard drive. Dropbox will automatically put every video file I download into it and fill up my disc, whereas with Zumo it will remain in the cloud until I want to watch it. If storage space isn’t a factor, both work about the same.

To do that, simply go into uTorrent preferences, click “Directories”, and put a check next to “Move completed downloads to:” Aim your downloads at your Zumodrive:

Now you can just watch them on your laptop from the hotel. On my last trip to Las Vegas I was even able to download them from a tethered EVDO connection, where Bittorrenting would have been impossible.

That’s pretty much my media setup. I’ve got my main desktop downloading shows in my home office upstairs. I watch them either there (from my couch) or in my first-floor living room through the Xbox. I’ve got a dirt cheap PC in my exercise room attached to an LCD TV. And when I travel, I’ve got Zumodrive.

5 Comments »

My Crunchies Picks

Posted in tech on January 12, 2009 by themaroon

Here are some of the Crunchies categories with results and my thoughts. I meant to give these before hand, but it was a really busy week. Today’s a me-day though.

Best Application Or Service

Get Satisfaction
Google Reader (winner)
Minted
Meebo
MySpace Music (runner-up)
Yelp

They nailed that one, though I think there’s a strong argument for Yelp as runner-up. Using Meebo is about as enjoyable as a root canal. Minted I’ve never heard of, though it actually looks cool. This is the Crunchies though, leave your business model at the door.

Who I would have nominated: I think Xbox Live has to come in here. It’s had a killer year, especially with Arcade and now Netflix integration. It’s kind of like the iPhone platform but with 2x the units in circulation, attached to everyone’s living room television, and focused around treating developers well and allowing them, even encouraging them, to actually make money.

Best Technology Innovation/Achievement

Facebook Connect (runner-up)
Google Friend Connect
Google Chrome
Windows Live Mesh (winner)
Swype
Yahoo BOSS

I like BOSS here. A hundred times I’ve had some idea as to how search could be improved, but every one of them requires tremendous effort. Indexing the web is a massive undertaking. Now with BOSS, I could actually get them done.

Mesh, by the way, is awesome even in it’s infancy. In my travelling days I used dyndns and port forwarding to allow me to remote desktop into to one of my home PCs. It worked to some extent, but given the hotel connection and the other moving parts it was problematic to say the least. With Mesh it’s trivial to log in and snag a file.

Connect is cool too, I’m waiting to see if/how that one shakes out. Chrome is neat but like 95% of what Google launches/acquires, it won’t amount to anything. Swype looks interesting from the website, but as I can’t find any products it’s actually on, I may never know.

Best Design

Animoto (runner-up)
Cooliris (winner)
Friendfeed
Infectious
Lala
Sliderocket

I still hate Cooliris because a previous product of theirs, that showed you previews of any link you hover over, caused me to accidentally drop a table in PHPMyAdmin. I like FriendFeed, but they don’t belong here. There’s a difference between minimalism and good design.

My nominee: Mint.com. Kongregate.com is pretty fresh too.

Best Bootstrapped Startup

BackType
GitHub (winner)
Socialcast
StatSheet
12seconds.tv (runner-up)

2008 was the year of GitHub, everyone else was playing for second place. BackType is pretty neat, and would be my second pick. I had no idea they were bootstrapped. Actually, I’ve never read anything at all about their founding team.

Statsheet might turn out awesome once it gets any sports anyone cares about. The others seem kinda like me-too Web 2.0 fluff, especially the runner up.

Most Likely To Make The World A Better Place

Akoha
Causes
CO2Stats
GoodGuide (winner)
Kiva (runner-up)
Better Place

I probably would have reversed those. Kiva’s pretty awesome, and based on the same concept that Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for. I guess TechCrunch readers didn’t find that as appealing as “Yelp for the stuff in the really smelly section of Whole Foods”.

My nomination: Ride Share.

Best Enterprise Startup

Amazon Web Services (winner)
Force.com
Google App Engine (runner-up)
Yammer
Zoho

Has anyone used Google App Engine yet? At all? Ever? That product seems to be a bigger dud than Lively. AWS is undisputed king here probably, but I’d go with Force.com for the silver.

My nominee: Microsoft. They’re no less a startup than Amazon or Google, and they make way more money off of enterprise than anyone.

Best International Startup

eBuddy (winner)
Fotonauts
OpenX
Vente-privee
Wuala (runner-up)

I’ll abstain since the only one I know of is OpenX, and wow is their UI awful.

Best Clean Tech Startup

Better Place (runner-up)
Boston Power
ElectraDrive
Laurus Energy
Project Frog (winner)

Nothing useful to say here, except I like frogs. So I agree.

Best New Gadget/Device

Android G1 (runner-up)
Ausus EEE 1000 Series
Flip MinoHD
iPhone 3G (winner)
SlingCatcher

Hard to argue with iPhone 3G’s sales numbers. I don’t own any of these. MinoHD looks sweet though.

My nomination for cool-looking gadget I haven’t used: Dash GPS.

Best Time Sink Site/Application

Mob Wars
iBowl
Tap Tap Range (winner)
Zivity
Texas Hold Em (runner-up)

If you’re looking at it from the most-enjoyable angle, they got it right. From the business angle it’s a little different.

Mob Wars and its clones make more profit in one month than every private company in these all of the above categories combined will make in their entire existence. (Granted, that would be true of a company that broke even, but you get what I mean.) It’s not even close. Texas Hold’em (I’m assuming the mean the Zynga game) probably makes more money than any one Mob Wars version alone, so it’s a good runner-up from that angle too.

Zivity, despite having pictures of naked women, gets barely more traffic than my blog. How is that possible? I could probably throw some soft core in every post here and do better than them, and I wouldn’t need to raise $8 million to do it. Some VC is going to be fired over that one.

Best Mobile Startup

ChaCha (runner-up)
Evernote (winner)
Posterous
Qik
Skyfire
Truphone

Evernote had to win, they’ve been en fuego, though Qik is too. I would have pegged them for second. Chacha looks cool. Skyfire is cool, it makes web-browsing a little less painful for those of us not on an iPhone. Is Posterous a mobile startup? I wouldn’t have put them in this category.

My nominee: SGN. They keep pumping out one popular mobile app after another. Still a weak category though.

Best Mobile Application

Google Mobile Application (runner-up)
imeem mobile (winner)
Pandora Radio
rolando
ShopSavvy
Ocarina

I don’t use any, but I’ve messed with Ocarina and it’s pretty damn cool. Then again, my dog is named Link, so I’m biased. I did download Pandora for Windows Mobile, but then I realized that I never want to listen to music on my phone. I wish my car had A2DP in its Bluetooth options.

My nominee: Shazam. Wow is that cool, both from a “how the hell did they do that” perspective, and from the practicality one. Also, I like Urban Spoon, but only because the name is hilarious. It sounds like an app that finds black people for you to snuggle with.

Best Startup Founder

Linda Avery and Anne Wojcicki (23andMe)
Michael Birch and Xochi Birch (Bebo)
Robert Kalin (Etsy)
Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone (Twitter ) (winner)
Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris, Sanjeev Singh, Bret Taylor (FriendFeed ) (runner-up)

Is this a joke? Even most of the people who love Twitter admit that they’ve botched the execution in almost every way imaginable from the very moment they started. I’d give the
m worst startup founders if that were a category. They took a great idea, built a shoddy implementation, and have since done everything they could to make the people who love it stop using it.

FriendFeed has been “the Twitter that actually works” since they launched, so they have to do better. But if I rephrase this category as Founder Whose Startup I’d Most Like To Own 10% Of In My 401k If They Were Publicly Traded, Etsy’s the runaway favorite, with Anne Wojcicicicicicicicicki and company at 23andMe at a distant #2.

Best Startup CEO

Tony Hsieh (Zappos)
Jason Kilar (Hulu) (runner-up)
Elon Musk (SpaceX)
Andy Rubin (Android)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) (winner)

Yeah, I’m not buying it at all. They’ve got traffic, but Hulu will mint money, Zappos already does, and the verdict is out on whether or not Facebook will ever really be worth anything. Zappos has copycats from both Amazon and Gap Inc, Facebook is a copycat.

Again, going by the 401k theory, Zappos is far and away the winner. I’d rather own them than Facebook by a very, very wide margin. After that I’d choose SpaceX, assuming they get some rockets to not explode during liftoff. That’s sort of a big deal for a company that makes passenger spacecraft, though I guess if they can’t improve they can at least repurpose them as weapons and sell them to Hamas.

Android hasn’t been a startup since Google acquired them in 2005, so again, totally ridiculous categorization. They might as well just add Linux or Ruby on Rails to this category while they’re at it.

Best New Startup Of 2008

Dropbox (runner-up)
FriendFeed (winner)
GoodGuide
Tapulous
Topspin Media
Yammer

Tough category. FriendFeed’s pretty neat. I use Dropbox, it’s pretty awesome, and I can think of ways for it to actually achieve revenue. I like what I’m seeing from Tapulous a lot too. They’re the one company that seems to have a shot at both competing in the app-store, where free apps are overweighted, yet still making money. The rest of the category is a dud.

My nominee: Github deserves at least a nomination here too. They’re popular among the early adopters, and growing. They have a business model. I don’t know if they’re profitable, but it would shock me if they weren’t.

Best Overall Startup In 2008

Amazon Web Services
Facebook (winner)
Android
hulu
Twitter (runner-up)

Who the hell is categorizing here? One of these is a partnership between publicly traded corporations, one is a product of a publicly traded corporation, one of them is an open-source software project managed by division of a publicly traded corporation. If AWS is eligible, then Xbox Live Arcade should be too.

I’d choose to own the 2 that are actually startups in the following order:

Facebook
Twitter

So technically I guess TechCrunch got it right. Facebook wins almost by default, because unlike Twitter it actually works more often than not and has some tiny, almost imperceptible glimmer of a business model. Then again, I still subscribe to the outdated notion that businesses exist to make money, rather than to waste private equity, and I can think of at least 100 startups I’d put ahead of either.

My nominee for this category: Zynga. Those guys are monetizing at an alarming rate. By the 401k theory they might be my top pick right now. In fact, while I’m at it, throw their founders in the Best Founders category and they’re at least runner up there too, probably the same in CEO.

3 Comments »

The First Phone I've Been Excited About In A Long Time

Posted in tech on January 10, 2009 by themaroon

I have to say, I’m drinking the Palm Pre
koolaid. This device is going to go far. I might even buy some Palm Shares.

The reasons I’ve never bought an iPhone are that I care about the following features in descending order of importance:

1. Call Quality

2. Email/SMS

3. Network

4. Web Surfing

5. Tethering

6. Amusement

7. Camera/Video Camera

That’s not uncommon, in fact, it’s pretty typical in the business world, which is still where most smartphones are sold. The iPhone’s call quality is notoriously abysmal, and though they made up a little ground on number 2 when they got Active Sync, they’re still Class B there due to lack of a dedicated keypad. While the iPhone pretty much blows away the competition in terms of #4 and #6, and it’s good enough for #2 for most people I’m sure, it blows on #3 and #7, and doesn’t even step up to the plate on #5. (Supposedly it will soon, but its utility will be greatly limited by AT&T’s atrocious network).

Moreover, I would say that most people place #3 further up the list than I do. People choose the network and then the phone, and Apple hasn’t changed that noticeably. Networks spend a lot of money in advertising and promotional bucks, and they have lots of extra features that encourage loyalty. For instance, they use the network effect with family plans and by making all calls or SMSes to other customers of the same network free. My wife is on Verizon, and she alone is probably 50% of my phone calls, so for a device to get me to switch it would have to be that much more appealing. And then there’s just plain laziness, as switching is more work than not.

So Palm, like Android, has a chance. Apple’s strategy has worked well, but it has major holes, and this Palm unit looks like it exploits them, perhaps even more efficiently than Android at this juncture.

And the best part of all is they’ve got a solid shot of beating them on one of the fronts they own: the app platform. The iPhone is far and away the leader in this area. It has seen a tremendous amount of development, and with good reason. It has a sizeable user base, which is a key component in any platform. And sure, there are bigger platforms, but (until recently anyway) not on phones that have Wi-Fi, GPS, touch screens, etc.

Through iTunes it also has pioneered the powerful centralized store that offers serious revenue or distribution to top apps. That, of course, has its own problems, but it creates the sort of a lottery that attracts independent developers.

But the iPhone platform is also, in many ways, problematic. Programming native apps in Objective C is really hard work (or so the friends who’ve done it tell me). Palm greatly reduces the barriers to entry by making app development html/css/javascript-based, meaning any web developer (maybe even me) could get started.

For Palm to really compete in the app department, they need to do the following:

1. Open the phone to multiple carriers. Check. The Pre is starting out on Sprint, but will hit others after a few months. If your phone is on multiple carriers that collectively serve four times as many customers, it only needs to be some amount greater than 25% as appealing to get the same market share. I’m not sure how much greater (depends how strongly people really are attached to their network) but it’s not much.

2. Put the same OS on multiple form factors. Check. They’ve indicated this will be coming down the pipeline. Believe it or not, a lot of people just don’t want a smartphone. I tend to view them like wine, in that anyone who doesn’t like them just hasn’t found the right one yet. But just like wine, a lot of people never will care for whatever reason. Give them a free-with-contract clamshell that can still run many of the games and other apps, and you’ve expanded your user base significantly.

3. Make the app store more conducive to paid apps. This will return higher profits for Palm from app sales, which can be plowed back into marketing. And most importantly, it will return higher profits to developers, who will of course blog about it, thus encouraging more development. No word on this yet from Palm.

There have been more blog entries than I can count about what’s wrong with the app store’s apparent policy of ranking them by volume, which heavily favors free apps, and every one of them contains a suggestion as to how to fix it. For instance, showing the two separately, or sorting by revenue, etc. I’m not entirely sure the best way to run a store, but I’m convinced it isn’t the way iTunes does it.

4. Be developer friendly. With the exception of Loopt, Apple has treated their developers like parasites. They finally got rid of the NDA, which was absurd, but they still rule the approval process in a capricious and arbitrary manner that discourages serious investment in the platform. The worst part is, they’re only hurting themselves. There’s no reason whatsoever to worry about someone competing with your apps on your hardware platform. So a third party builds something that has some of the same functionality that iTunes should have but doesn’t, such as automatically downloading podcasts. What do you care? It just makes them love your iPhone more. You weren’t charging for iTunes anyway, but you did charge for the phone they were running it on.

It makes no sense. No app on an iPhone competes with Apple. Blackberry, WinMo, Android and Palm compete with Apple. Motorola, RIM, HTC, and the other Palm compete with Apple. iPhone developers are mercenaries fighting on Apple’s side.

Palm has stated that they won’t deny developers in that fashion, they better live up to it. They’ve got a real shot here. Their stock is up almost 100%, but I think people are still underestimating. That reminds me, I have to invest my year’s contribution to my IRA…

7 Comments »

MattMaroon.com