Since I wish to maximize the power of compound interest, my goal is to hit it, but I'm afraid I'm several years behind.
Last summer, we wrote about the launch of a new service from Google called City Tours that marked the search giant’s first foray into the travel space. The service isn’t exactly flashy, but it’s quite practical: tell it what city you’re visiting, and it can generate an optimized travel itinerary featuring a number of landmarks within walking distance. Unfortunately it had a few shortcomings. For one, its directions were all based on distances “as the bird flies”. In other words, it was up to you to figure out the best way to navigate between these landmarks, because Travel Tours would sometimes direct you to walk directly across a river.
Today, Google is releasing an updated version of Travel Tours that takes advantage of the Walking Directions built into Google Maps, which means you’ll be able to rely on them even if you’re not capable of scaling a building in a single bound. You can see the difference in the images below.
Google’s blog post on the release also notes that you can now import Google ‘My Maps’ into City Tours. My Maps, which launched back in 2007, allow you to manually tag your own points of interest on a Google Map. This means you’ll now be able to build out a map of all the landmarks you’d like to see on your trip, then import those into City Tours to get an optimized itinerary.
The service remains in Google Labs.
New Version
Old Version
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Following a bit of planned iTunes Connect downtime for the holidays, LinkedIn came out with the latest version of their iPhone app today. As you might expect from a 3.0 release, the app has been much improved, namely in its user experience. In fact, it looks a lot more like Facebook’s iPhone app now — which we’ll forgive, since that’s an excellent app.
As you can see, there is a new main screen that features 12 main buttons. Yes, this is just like the new Facebook app main screen that features big buttons. With LinkedIn’s you’ll get easy access to “All Updates,” “Status,” “Profiles,” “Discussions,” “Connections,” “Favorites,” “Inbox,” “Invitations,” “Recents,” “Reconnect,” “In Person,” and “Themes.” Of these, the Reconnect, In Person, and Themes areas are entirely new. Reconnect allows you to find people you likely know on LinkedIn with the click of a button. In Person lets you use the iPhone’s Bluetooth to easily swap contact information with any other LinkedIn iPhone use you happen to be nearby at a conference or event. And Themes allows you to change the color of the main screen icons — you can choose pink, orange, gold, and a bunch of other crazy colors to ugly-up your app to your heart’s content.
Previously, the app featured a more standard bottom-bar iPhone navigation where you could switch between updates, your inbox, search, and other elements. This new layout gives you access to a lot more information quickly. The updates areas (All and Status) has also been been made more Facebook-like as each now features a user profile picture next to each update. You can also now comment on each of these updates right from within the app — again, yes, just like Facebook.
It’s also now very easy to “star” any profile to mark it as a favorite, to give you easy access to it. Doing this also creates a filtering mechanism for the update streams.
Find the 3.0 version of the LinkedIn app, available for free in the App Store here.
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- Music:OTT 1 - 2 MTL
I first met Kevin Michaluk of Crackberry fame over the Internet when the BlackBerry Partners Fund was first started. Kevin came up with a zillion ideas for contests, giveaways, and just about anything that would promote the developer community around RIM's BlackBerry devices. When I met Kevin at the first developer's conference it was pretty clear that he had the admiration and respect of developers, rabid BB users and the vast majority of RIM employees. Memo to self: when doing anything on the BB platform, involve Kevin.
Fast forward to today. Our little adventure we call Fixmo is ready to roll out some beta code and there isn't a better place to do this then inside CrackBerry Nation.
Fixmo is entering beta and if you have a BlackBerry device and would like to help kick the tires and give us much needed feedback, stop one is CrackBerry Nation. From there, you'll be guided to the beta, find out about the product, and join the beta. I'm delighted to be working with Kevin and the CrackBerry team. We'll be rolling out some interesting things over the next few weeks and we'll be keeping CB Nation in the loop first so I heartily encourage you to sign up to get the Crackberry blog and be a part of something really fun: CrackBerry Nation.
To read about the beta, go here.
My good buddy Michael Hollend has joined TorQuest Partners. Michael is probably one of the nicest and smartest investment professionals on Bay Street.
TorQuest is a mid-market firm that invests in the big money rounds, typically in the $15 - $100 million range. They invest in a wide range of transactions that don't just span technology. From the website:
TorQuest's private equity funds seek control or joint control through management buyouts, leveraged buyouts, and recapitalizations in companies that operate in established industries. TorQuest is a generalist firm with deep relationships across many different industry sectors, but has developed particular competitive advantages in the most attractive sectors of manufacturing, business services, financial services, food, consumer products, and chemicals. TorQuest is focused primarily on opportunities within Canada, but has made a number of successful U.S. investments as well.
- Preferred Deal Size:
-
- Equity Investment of C$15 - $100 million per transaction
- Enterprise Value of C$40 - $250 million
-
Investment Preferences:
- Corporate Spin-Off
- Entrepreneurial Transition
- Management Buyout
- PIPE Investments
- Growth and Expansion Capital
- Recapitalizations
An great example happens to be Lowepro photography bags which I swear by. I've taken this stuff all over the world, including Antarctica, and these bags just rock. This is from the TorQuest website:
-----------
Business Description
DayMen Photo Marketing LP is the trademark holder of Lowepro, the worldwide leading brand of protective carrying bags and packs for imaging and electronic equipment. DayMen and its subsidiaries oversee the design, manufacturing, marketing and merchandising of Lowepro products, which are distributed through DayMen's wholly-owned operations in Canada, US, UK and Germany as well as through third party distributors in over 90 countries. In addition to Lowepro branded products, the DayMen companies distribute a number of other photographic and consumer electronic products and accessories in the imaging and photography industries.
Investment Thesis
TorQuest has invested in DayMen based on the Company’s outstanding track record of growth and the prospects for continuing on its growth trajectory. DayMen will continue to benefit from the worldwide growth in the imaging market and the growing importance of photographic accessories to retailer profitability. DayMen also has a number of identified opportunities to enter new markets. Lowepro is the leading brand in the industry and is known for its innovative designs and quality. Finally, DayMen and its subsidiaries are led by an outstanding management team, which has partnered with us on this acquisition.
-----------
Congrats to TorQuest, you scored big in landing Michael.
despite seeing doors with the red cross sign, there's no doctor in the resort. he's in cancun, and will take an hour to get here on top of the $90USD charge to call him plus whatever he costs and whatever he prescribes.
of course by the time we get back to the resort i'm breathing well enough to not want to spend that kind of money/time dealing with this. found a nearby pharmacia with oral ventolin and sinutabs. sinutab is helping the head, saving the ventolin in case things get tight again. most of the inflammation seems centered in the throat now, nothing i can really do about that but wait it out with clear liquids and more ibuprofen.
should have looked for some vitamin C.
even ascorbic acid tablets would do at this point.
we're going to make another try for Chichen on wednesday.
tomorrow is another day with my uncle, eating and shopping in Playa Del Carmen
Of all the things Google has launched this past year, the most useful may be its Music Onebox feature that allows you to easily play popular music from Google Search results. Following its debut in October, I found myself using it left and right for songs I wanted to listen to. One thing I noticed was that while deals were in place with iLike, imeem, Rhapsody, and Pandora, the majority of the one-click play results were from the streaming music service Lala. This was awesome because most of the songs served up by Lala were the full versions. But fast forward to today, and it’s a much different story: Lala Onebox results are few and far between.
Why? It’s hard to know for sure, but it seems pretty likely that Apple’s recent deal to purchase Lala is at play. At the very least, it would seem that behind-the-scenes politics are dictating the results now being shown. We noted at the time of the Apple/Lala deal that it could change the Onebox offering, and it looks like it has. Plenty of results that used to serve up a Lala play option now default to iLike, which itself is now a part of MySpace Music (as is imeem). In fact, doing a random sampling of 30 popular songs brought yielded 28 iLike Onebox results, and only 2 Lala results. The problem with this is that for the majority of iLike Onebox results, you can only listen to either 30 or 90 second clips, rather than the entire songs, like you could on Lala. That obviously makes Google Music Onebox music much less useful.
A couple weeks ago, BusinessWeek got a comment from R.J. Pittman, Google’s director of product management, stating the Apple’s Lala deal would not alter the Google/Lala agreement. “We are agreeing to continue to leave the service as it is,” he said. (Apple declined to comment on the matter.) But this may simply mean that Lala will remain as one of the Onebox options, but has been taken out as the featured player for most musical content.
“We have enjoyed a good relationship with Apple for many years, and that continues to be the case,” Pittman also told BusinessWeek. That’s true, but there has definitely been a growing divide between the two in recent months as their interests continue to overlap. This has become a big enough issue that Google CEO Eric Schmidt had to step down from Apple’s Board in August despite assurances that he had no plans to do so leading up to that.
It’s not clear if it is Apple or Google that would have wanted Lala to be less prominently featured in Music Onebox, but it’s certainly possible that neither really liked the placement. After all, in pitching the idea to the record labels, Google likely played up the idea as an alternative to iTunes. The music labels have long sought a viable alternative to Apple’s musical powerhouse that could restore some leveraging power to them. Meanwhile, Apple will now have to foot the bill for Lala streaming — and that means paying the labels for every clip longer than 30-seconds, we hear. So they probably don’t want all those Lala clips being served up either.
Regardless of the reason, Google Music Onebox is now a lot less useful, and that’s too bad.
Update: As some people have noted in the comments, results on searches vary — but it’s important to make sure you’re logged out of your Google account and you clear you cookies. The reason is that Google keeps track of your preferences in a cookie.
[photo: flickr/duncan harris]
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As soon as her leash/seatbelt were off, she had to greet each cat.
She sniffed every corner.
She checked the trash can in my study. (This is a new vice, she takes orange peels.)
She yapped at me a few times to announce she was home before bolting off to bounce on the bed.
She stood at the back door and mumbled that she needed to go out (the only time she's quiet, strangely).
She bounced back into the bedroom and found the Everlasting Squeaker Toy, codename "Goldfish".
She squeaked it enthusiastically like she's never squeaked it before.
"ZOMG GOLDFISH! ZOMG! I MISSED YOU! I MISSED YOU LOTS AND LOTS!"
We knew that the holidays were going to be super busy for iPhone developers — in a good way. Gaming community platform PlayHaven and mobile ad exchange Mobclix released data yesterday saying that iPhone game usage is likely to set record in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, called a “Game Rush,” with usage 28 times greater than the same weekly period last year.
One developer, Oliver Cameron of Taptivate, the developer of Voices (an application that morphs your voice into different sounds like Darth Vader, Chipmunks, etc), sent me an email saying that sales have been through the roof for them, and their app is now in the 44th spot because of the “Game Rush” as they’re calling it. It’s one of those “it’s stupid but fun” kind of apps that usually move well when people are looking for quick apps to download.
Cameron mentioned that sales were as high as 18,769 downloads of the $0.99 app on December 25th. So if you do the math, that’s $18,581.31 in sales, not including Apple’s 30% cut. If you included Apple’s cut, the app made $12,688 in one day. Those are some pretty crazy numbers, regardless. Check out a graph of Voice’s sales numbers below as well.
The app in total has made a little more then $250,000 sales, which got me thinking: If this app is #44 on the App Store, imagine what the number one and two apps were doing (Skee-Ball and Live Cams). We also just spoke with Colin Smith, Vice President of Freeverse, which said that their application, Skee-Ball sold 47,926 units — which is about 10x what it did the previous Friday. Another one of their apps, Flick Fishing, sold 31,741 units on Christmas day.
We’re also hearing that an app which has been one of the most popular since the launch of the App Store 18 months ago, saw its downloads on Christmas Day double its previous record for a single day.
All of this could well point to the possibility that Apple itself set a record in the amount of iPhones and iPod Touches sold during the holiday season.
Update: More numbers are coming in. Lima Sky’s Doodle Jump, which just hit the 1 million download mark about a week ago, managed to sell 80,000 units on Christmas day alone. Two days prior, they were pushing around 15,000 per day; two days later, they were hovering around 35,000. All in all, they sold 197,821 copies between 12/23 and 12/27 – at .99c a pop, we’re calculating that they took in just shy of $139,000 after Apple’s cut.
Update: Even more numbers to report as Tapulous, developers of the popular Tap Tap Revenge series, check in with good news. They’ve pulled down over 2 million installs of Tap Tap Revenge 3 since going free last Wednesday, 700,000 of which came on Christmas day. Between Tap Tap Revenge 1/2/3 and the Metallica/Lady GaGa editions, Tapulous now has 5 applications in the Top 100 grossing apps.
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Music fans looking looking for an alternative to the iTunes/iPod ecosystem are getting a new option this week with the release of Songbird 1.4, which introduces support for CD ripping and syncing Mass Storage Class (MSC) Devices. The first feature is fairly self explanatory (and frankly I can’t believe it took this long to include), but it’s the latter that’s the most compelling: Songbird now features improved sync for a number of popular MSC devices, including the HTC Hero, Motorola Droid, Nokia N900, and the Palm Pre. The new features are available on Windows only for now, with Mac support planned for release early next year.
To be clear, Songbird has actually offered some MSC support before now, but CEO Jerrell Jimerson says that oftentimes devices don’t work as well as they should using generic support. Songbird has been working with manufacturers to try to make the syncing process as seamless as possible. They’ve inked a deal with Nokia, and are also engaged in less formal partnerships with a number of other manufacturers.
It’s been a rough year for Songbird. As we reported back in September, Songbird’s founding CEO Rob Lord left the company after burning through $8 million from Sequoia Capital and Atlas Ventures. The company brought on board Jimerson earlier this year to replace him, who managed to help raise a new round of funding (though it washed out prior investors and Sequoia didn’t participate). But there’s an opportunity for Songbird to serve as a music platform for Apple’s competitors, and it looks like that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Jimerson says that Songbird’s core functionality, which serves as a media player for both content saved locally to your computer and music that’s streamed from the web, remains fully intact. But the company is also looking to make the product more appealing to a broader userbase. And that includes forming more partnerships.
We’ve previously heard that Songbird has a deal with Phillips to install the software in 5 million music players, which would be a big win for the company. Jimerson wouldn’t comment on that, but it seems like it would fit with Songbird’s new strategy.
Songbird’s increasing support for media sync makes it a more direct competitor to DoubleTwist, another powerful iTunes alternative that supports many devices and that also has a brilliant marketing team.
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For most of this year, Digg was on a roll, racking up more users, adding Facebook Connect, speeding up its site, launching new features like Digg Trends, and hiring key executives.
But its latest growth spurt stopped in September, 2009 when it peaked at 32 million unique visitors worldwide, according to comScore. In November, its worldwide visitors were down 15 percent to 27 million, which is about half the number of people who visit Twitter.com. Digg was passed by Twitter back in March (see chart below).
Two months of declines is not the end of the world. Even Twitter is seeing its growth flatten, and on an annual basis, Digg is still up 62 percent. Maybe once it launches Realtime Digg, which it’s been working on since at least six months, it will get back on that growth curve. It’s hard to compete with Facebook and Twitter, but adding more realtime elements could be just what Digg needs to stay in the race.
If you were Kevin Rose, what would you do to try to catch up to Twitter again?
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What’s amazing to me is how very musical this remix is, especially given that the only sounds that were added by the artist (POGO!) were chords and beats – all the vocals are true samples, no auto tune (I believe.) I suggest we dance out the holiday heebies jeebies and lets get back to real life, gritty and glorious and painful as it is.
Over at the DIY tutorial site...
It's almost January 1st, 2010 and we've been mulling over our favorites of 2009 — and the previous decade. Here we present the first installment of our "Of the Decade" lists.
"Innovative" is nearly a bankrupt word in this business, but with a little perspective one might be able to tell which products were so. Here are our choices. Guess what's not on it?
The design is simple. A rubber ring stretches over...
Please enjoy my 2009 music wrap-up. I'm slacking this year: no mixtape, no micro-reviews. However, it is a list of 40 fantastic albums that I advise you to acquire at your early convenience.
- Music:Metric -- Gold Guns Girls
the trouble is, as an adult, she doesn't want to read too many children's books (though we all know they can be much fun) and asked me for reading recommendations.
it then occurred to me:
a long way gone by ishmael baeh.
simple, translated english,
but a fascinating story
(or so my friends tell me).
not much more comes to mind, guys.
any recommendations?
Unless you’ve been living offline for the past year, you’ve undoubtedly heard and/or seen “I’m On A Boat,” Lonely Island’s mock hip hop song/video. Today brings a response to it in the form of a group of Apple fanbois rapping about their love of using Apple products. They even have one character autotuned up, just like T-Pain in the “I’m On A Boat” version. No word on if they used the I Am T-Pain iPhone app to get the effect, but a major plus if so.
It’s pretty standard stuff: Love Macs, love iPods, love iPhones — hate PCs, hate Zunes, hate drivers and viruses, etc. Fairly well made, this isn’t nearly as bad as the Bing Jingle, but it’s still a little cringe-inducing. Sample line: “I’m pluggin girls, you at work pluggin in devices.”
These guys clearly have an agenda as they run the site Switch to Mac — you can probably guess what that’s about. This video is technically the follow-up to their “Mac or PC” rap video.
[thanks Banyan]
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The second batch of 150 tickets to attend the Crunchies Awards are on sale now, courtesy of Eventbrite. Balcony seats are $45 (orchestra is sold out.)
Remember that voting is open through midnight PST, Wednesday, January 6. Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote daily for their favorite people, products and companies of the year.
The Crunchies Awards celebrate the best tech accomplishments of 2009 and will be held at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco on Friday, January 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm PST. Along with our co-hosts, GigaOm and VentureBeat, we will announce the winners from 18 different award categories live on stage.
Orchestra and balcony tickets include access to the after party hosted across the street in City Hall’s Grand Rotunda through midnight. There will be a sponsor-hosted bar, savory nibbles and desserts, music and a game room, featuring a mix of traditional and online games to play. Check out more party photos from 2008 and 2007.
There are plenty of ways to sponsor and support the after-party energy. Contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde if you’d like to sponsor: card-game tables, demo tables, photo booths or walls, drinks or food, giveaways and prizes and the like. We have creative packages available in all shapes and sizes. Room for award benefactors and entertainment sponsors for the ceremony too.
Hope to see you there.
FINALISTS: If you haven’t already, please contact us asap so we can get you set up with your two complimentary passes to attend.
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There are a plethora of online invitation sites that let invitees and event organize utilize both Facebook and Twitter to publicize events to their social graphs. Cocodot, Pingg and others will pull in Tweets about an event by hashtag and also allow invitees to Tweet about the party from its platform. VeVite has a different twist on social event invitations by providing a deeper integration with Twitter.
Invites are sent via Direct Message, with a link back to the event on VeVite to RSVP. Once you login via your Twitter credentials, you can RSVP, and your comments on the page are automatically shared on Twitter as well. A host can only invite 250 people every 24 hours because of a Twitter DM restriction. But if the event is “open” then anyone can RSVP without getting a DM.
VeVite’s UI is pretty barebones and doesn’t offer any bells and whistles with its service that might make it more appealing. The startup’s founder Sam Bensalem says that the VeVite plans to add Facebook and Gmail integration in the coming weeks. VeVite will also include payments integration, so host can charge for events similar to Eventbrite. But Bensalem says that the platform will be catered more towards casual meetups and events. Competitors include TwtVite and TwitMesh.
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Last summer, on a sunny but oppressively hot day, I found myself on the roof of a 1960s-era highrise apartment building in Kwun Tong. Among the lines of billowing laundry were several [...]
Me to self: *Great, Middle-of-nowhere, Utah. Well, I suppose it can't always be Milan.*
Me to sales rep: Sure!
*looks up Park City, Utah*
Me to self: *Oh. Oh. Home of the Sundance Film Festival. Which ends January 31.*
Me to sales rep: Actually, if you could make it the week before, that would be even better! ;-)
ESR: I was actually going to ask you if you could do that week! It'll be one of those two; I'll know for sure by the 5th.
In our latest employment-specific round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from 5th Cell, Terminal Reality and more.
Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.
It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.
Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:
Robot Entertainment: Game Developer
"Robot Entertainment is a world-class independent game development studio owned and operated by many of the founders of Ensemble Studios. With a team that has proven experience and expertise in creating games that appeal to massive audiences, Robot Entertainment is focused on titles that set new standards for their respective genres as well as groundbreaking original IPs."
Terminal Reality: AI Programmer
"Terminal Reality Inc, is an independent Dallas-area developer devoted to developing top-quality games and technology. Since opening its doors in 1994 Terminal Reality has developed & shipped over 28 game titles including the recently released Ghostbusters: The Video Game on XBox 360, PS3 and PC. Terminal Reality is looking for a programmer who will be able to develop state of the art AI systems. This is your chance to be a part of a talented team working on an exciting AAA Natal Title!"
I'm not particularly in support of the Olympics. I'm none too enchanted with the rhetoric of protest, either. I don't feel capable of expanding particulars, so take it as premise.
At least, however, I would have embedded myself in a worldy and physical event for once.
You know, it would have been nice to be involved, or at least present, or at least acknowledge that there are things happening around me and that people are out there trying to make it happen.
You know, even if I didn't become an independant pysical agent on that day, at least I would have allowed myself to the possibility.
I'm not used to that desire, I'm hoping it can be nurtured. Perhaps I should make this into a resolution.
- Music:Wavves - California Goths | Powerd by Last.fm
What’s not to like about free directory assistance? Investors are pouring yet another $6.75 million into Jingle Networks, the company behind 1-800-FREE-411. The funding round was disclosed today in an SEC filing, and it brings the total amount raised by the company to almost $90 million.
The investors in this round were not disclosed in the filing, but previous investors include First Round Capital, Goldman Sachs, Hearst, and Liberty Associated Partners.
Jingle runs voice ads before giving out directory assistance numbers, and competes with GOOG-411. Last year, before the U.S. financial meltdown, it was looking to IPO, launched a broader voice ad network, and even hit profitability on a per-call basis.
The IPO talk stopped as soon as the advertising recession hit, and you’ve got to wonder how that voice ad network is doing now, and whether it is still profitable per call. I’d be surprised. If they were profitable, why would they have to raise $6.7 million now, on top of the $7.5 million they raised just last February. Maybe this one will get the company back over the hump and ready for an exit.
Update: CEO Scott Kliger responds, saying that the company’s main service is still profitable, and that this round will be used to expand its mobile ad network, Jingle Connect. He writes:
First, all of our current investors participated in this round. Second, the voice service is profitable and has continued to be profitable despite the difficult economic climate for advertising during the end of ‘08 and the first half of ‘09. This round, however, is intended to dramatically expand the growth of our mobile ad network, Jingle Connect which was launched in mid-2008 and has seen sequential growth of over 300%. We believe we have an enormous opportunity in the convergence of the geo, local and mobile ad spaces for both voice and visual and we look to extend that lead with these funds.
Did we mention that there is a Geo Land Rush going on?
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The place is nice, the food is very good, and I am inspired to attempt, at home, what I ate.
I have a thing against polite wait staff. They makes me uncomfortable, and I was so pleased to overhear our waitress chatting with a bar staff about how she couldn't wait to be done this week's stint. It made the place so much more pleasant, as did asking the front staff about the decor and what they went through to keep the brassy feel in their inheritance of the old Seagram machinst builidng.
ASIDE: I once had the crustiest waitress one time at Ethel's who openly admitted that she was putting all of us on one bill because 'once you guys start sitting on other people's laps I just can't keep it all straight.' and who advised a soft-spoken friend of mine to order 'veggie' tacos instead of 'bean' tacos because it was too loud in the place for her to efficiently distinguish between bean and beef. I adored her. The valu-mart people I'm _not+ living with seemed taken aback; they asked my thoughts on her while I was shopping one day. :EDISA
Dinner started uncomfortably (the same old questions of having girlfriends, having clean rooms, having short hair, considering M.B.A's, visiting distant family in distant countries, that always results in hours of smiles and quick non-commital assent and lowered eyes.
But my mum and I shared a half-bottle of wine and got onto more interesting things, my parents recent cruise, knitting. My mum was none-too-impressed with the "Resident Asshole" business cards, but she's resigned herself to such things.
A tender moment: My mother sighs and wonders why, despite her best intentions and efforts, she raised such "strange" children. It wasn't an accusation, but for the first time her sense of being benuinely overwhelmed by parenthood showed through.
It sounds mean, but it's a fair cop. Her siblings and siblings-in-law all have children well on their way towards marriage and doctorates, who come over with friendly significant others, and then there's slacker me who won't put up with family reunions and isn't particularly interested in fiscal or social success. And there's my brother, whose situation is finally -- if mildly -- being discussed as-it-is (though what to do about it, if anything, I couldn't tell you.)
My father remained silent, this was very much a mother-son conversation. It might have been the sharing of the wine, where he sipped beer.
- Music:Wavves - Sun Opens My Eyes | Powered by Last.fm
Though our 2009 Commoner Letter series has officially come to an end, we are pleased to announce one final letter, this time from our Founder and Board Member Lawrence Lessig. Professor Lessig needs little introduction, so I’ll leave it to him tell you in his own words why supporting the mission of Creative Commons is vital for anyone who cares about building a culture of free and legal online sharing. If you, like Professor Lessig and hundreds of thousands of creators and consumers around the world, care about sustaining CC in the long term, then I encourage you to give back to CC and invest in the work we do. As an added incentive to answer Professor Lessig’s call for support, Attributor and wikiHow are currently matching gifts made to CC – so donate today and make your year-end gift really count!
It is the end of another year, and I find myself frantically reaching out through as many channels as I can to get friends of the commons to support Creative Commons. I’ve been writing emails — yes, actual hand-made emails — to everyone who’s given significant contributions to us before but not this year. I’ve been writing to others who should be giving but haven’t so far. And I’ve been writing more machine made emails (like, for example this) to everyone else.
My freneticism about this is in part personal, part not. The part that’s not is the stuff that you’ve been reading about — about Creative Commons — in all these letters. You’ve helped us build something important and valuable, that is supporting a much bigger and much more valuable ecology of creativity that everyone should be celebrating. If I had thought at the start to predict when I knew we had marked our space, it would have been when the White House, Al Jazeera, and Wikipedia all adopted CC licenses. That happened this year. And now that it has happened, we all have an even stronger obligation to make sure this thing that thousands helped build over the past 7 years continues to grow and succeed and inspire.
But the part of the frenetic that’s personal is that I worry that I myself am not doing enough for this amazing organization that I helped found. That I’m an absent father — or worse. That because I felt I had to devote the majority of my energy to a new, and truly impossible project — fighting “institutional corruption,” especially as it debilitates our government — I was leaving this child on its own a bit too early.
I can’t hide that I fear exactly this. This year in particular, despite our receiving more contributions than ever in our history, we are struggling to meet our goal. The desert that is corporate contributions has hit us hard, and that forces all of us (and especially, absent fathers) to work harder.
That is why I asked the team at Creative Commons to let me write this last Commoner letter for the year. Tough times force us to shake out the old, and focus on the future. Creative Commons will be an even bigger part of a much saner future. A world is beginning to recognize the place for reasonableness and balance. They are beginning to practice that using our tools.
But you need to help us to continue building that future. One click will get that started. Please, as you complete the list of great orgs to support this year, be certain you have reserved a space for us. This year more than any other before, we need that support. Donate today.
Thank you.
—–
Lessig
We’re absolutely thrilled to announce that our longtime friends Attributor and wikiHow have come together in the final days of our annual campaign to generously match the next $5,500 in donations! wikiHow has committed to giving $3000 and Attributor $2500, so please join them and show you care about the future of Creative Commons and building a culture of sharing. Even if you’ve already donated, please consider giving whatever you can today – it will automatically be doubled!
We’re proud to have the continued support of both wikiHow and Attributor, who, since each company’s founding, have been dedicated advocates of the commons and have demonstrated how we can use the Internet as a powerful digital tool to promote collaboration, innovation, and the sharing of information.
wikiHow is “a collaboration to build and share the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual.” Every month, millions of people turn to the multilingual site to learn how to do something new, and it relies on the knowledge, creativity, and contributions of people around the globe to make it a unique and useful tool. wikiHow supports Creative Commons because, in the words of its founder, Jack Herrick, “I’d like to live in a world where knowledge can grow and be built upon by many. Creative Commons creates the infrastructure to make this information sharing possible.” Check out wikiHow’s redesigned Web site.
Attributor provides the free service FairShare, first previewed at the CC tech summit in 2008. FairShare lets you assign a CC license to your work and receive information on how and where it is shared with others. Results come back as an RSS feed and include information about the percentage of your work re-used, whether you’ve received attribution and if ads are present. According to Attributor VP, Rich Pearson, “We’re a proud supporter of Creative Commons and do everything we can to spread their vision of saving the world from failed sharing.”
Please join Rich, Jack, and the rest of the folks at Attributor and wikiHow in investing in Creative Commons and a bright future for the world of online sharing. Your support helps, and every contribution counts, so please give what you can and donate today!
Memories of the Future got a nice write up in the Toledo Free Press:
There’s one thing that Wil Wheaton wants to make very clear: “Memories of the Future” is not, repeat, NOT a “tell-all” book about his time working on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
“It was extraordinarily important to me that this was not some kind of stupid, gossipy book,” Wheaton said. “I despise that kind of thing. I just hate it. It’s the reality television of literature, and I absolutely cannot stand it.”
Indeed, “Memories of the Future” is instead a funny review of, and a loving tribute to, the first season of “Next Generation,” which began its television run in 1987.
I also saw that Happiest Days of Our Lives was used as an example of one of those new-fangled paper-style books:
Today I picked up a paper book to read just for fun — The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton. Long-time (since this spring!) Kindle user that I am, I immediately noticed the dashing use of color on its front cover, but when I opened it, I was disappointed that I couldn’t scale the font size down from the default. It seems that paper books have only one font option — what are all these Kindle forum posters complaining about with its six sizes of a single font?
On the very first page, I encountered a word I wasn’t familiar with (Namaste). I thought I knew what it meant from the context clues, and even had the thought that on the Kindle, I could just highlight it and confirm my guess. But my paper dictionary was in the basement, so I didn’t bother looking it up until I wrote this post. (My hunch was reasonably correct.)
Interface-wise, the paper book is solid, and crashes, lockups, or other malfunctions are rare. I have, however, noted severe stability problems when attempting to read outdoors, especially when it’s windy (which, since I live in Kansas, is pretty much always). Pages start turning themselves, even without me making the “turn page” gesture. Sometimes the book will even lose its memory of my last page read. This is rather annoying, and might even involve a lengthy search for a suitable temporary replacement bookmark. Also, I haven’t tried it, but I suspect that the trick of putting a Kindle in a ziplock bag to read at the beach or in the tub without risk of getting it wet would be impractical with a paper book.
That entire post is really funny and clever, and I think you should read the whole thing. Go ahead, I'll wait.
See? Wasn't it funny? I like clever writing that is funny.
Speaking of The Happiest Days Of Our Lives, I know a non-zero number of people have been waiting very patiently for the special edition to be released by Subterranean Press. I wanted to explain, again, why it's been a year: After the book was announced, I spent almost two months digging through published and unpublished material for the expanded parts of the book, then I spent another month or so rewriting and polishing the stuff that made the cut. After that, I wrote additional introductions and notes to go with each chapter. That was the first delay (and, honestly, I thought it was entirely reasonable, since the book was announced as a pre-order) The biggest delay, and the first serious problem, though, was a software compatibility issue between me and the copy editor. OpenOffice and Word don't track notes the same way, but neither of us knew this until we'd both spent a lot of time working in our respective suites, completely oblivious to the work of the other. Finally, we realized what was wrong, and had to go all the way back to the beginning of the copy editing process the old way, printing the entire manuscript out on paper and making notes in the margins. It had a certain nostalgic value, but it took forever to get all that shit straightened out.
So that process, which should have taken a couple weeks, took close to three months. Then, once we got that all squared away, I had to get a bunch of pictures together, caption them, fact-check the captions with my parents and siblings, then get all that stuff to Subterranean Press. I also held up this part of the process for a couple more weeks while I looked for even more unpublished pictures that neither me nor my mom could find.
Finally, I asked my son Ryan (who is a creative writing student) if he wanted to write an afterword. He said he would, but it would take some time because he's in college and has his own responsibilities. I was willing to wait, because I thought it would be awesome to have his contribution to in the book, and I figured at this point (August) another couple weeks didn't make that big a difference. It ended up taking about 6 or 8 weeks, but I think it will ultimately be worth the delay (please note that I am not an objective source of information in this regard.)
Finally, the manuscript was turned in, the pictures were approved, the layout was all set ... and then the signature pages arrived. I had to sign something like 2500 pages, and it was important to me that each one looked like it was the only one I'd signed. I could have blown through it, of course, and gotten it done in a couple of days, but that would have guaranteed disappointment to everyone who bought the book and waited almost a year to get it. So I limited myself to between 50 and 75 pages at a "session," and it took several weeks to work my way through them all.
Oh, also, keep in mind that during all of these months, I was working on other projects, including several television shows that took me away from the Happiest Days project for weeks at a time.
So all of those delays stacked up on top of each other, until everything was finally finished about six or eight weeks ago. I realize that this is a very long time to wait for something, and I also realize that I've probably killed any chance of doing other special editions with Subterranean Press because this one took so long, but I sincerely believe that it will be worth the wait, because I've seen it, and it's something very special.
Have you ever tried to get rid of a bad habit, or change yourself for the better– quit something you enjoyed even though it was bad for you?
I tried to quit coffee a few years ago because I was drinking so much of it, and figured switching to tea might be an option. It didn’t last long. It wasn’t the addiction, really, but because I looked into my future and– get this– I didn’t like the person I’d be without coffee.
Weird right?
I’ve been drinking coffee for so long that I see it as an innate part of my personality. It’s something that I enjoy a lot and spend time and energy going out to find. It’s so ingrained, in fact, that I see myself as being less than whole if it were gone.
Now, imagine that I had heart problems– that I had to quit coffee entirely. This emotional attachment keeps me from making the right decision. Picture it a little like losing a significant other even though the relationship is clearly sour, or moving from your childhood home even though it doesn’t work for you anymore. You can’t imagine your life without this thing, so you keep it going even though it’s clearly doing damage. We do it all the time.
In reality, we are massively adaptable. Shocking as it sounds, I could lose a limb and be fine within a couple of months– even imagine that it was the best thing that ever happened to me. But here, in the present, we look at our lives and our habits as parts of ourselves, and we don’t want to change because we’d feel strangely incomplete.
When these massive changes do happen, however, we have no problem seeing them in a positive way. From here (the present), we look back and go “Thank God that happened in that way, or I wouldn’t have become the person I am now.” But at the time, we hated it. Seeing yourself from the future is a great way to fight this impulse; to be able to know that you’ll look back on this and recognize how valuable this difficult act was.
So the inevitable conclusion is that, no matter what happens, we’ll be pretty much ok. We can lose our jobs, change all of our habits, and even have a major, life-altering accident and be alright, and still be ourselves– assuming we can keep looking forward. As long as you think there are good things coming, everything will actually be fine.
So even if we don’t like the idea of change, we should probably do it anyway. Changing as an experiment and challenge can help you prove your strength to yourself, helping you become more confident, etc. Sometimes, it even makes sense to do it just because you can. But another great reason to do it is practice– going through something hard in order to build a habit of being able to do it when the time is right. If we’re used to our comforts all the time, and we suddenly have to go without, it’s much more difficult than if we’re used to having less.
So we’re coming up on New Year’s. A lot of us are going to make resolutions to change, but we won’t have our heart into it, or we’ll lose our resolve really quickly. How can we prevent that? Share your tips with me, I’d love to hear how you make it happen. Maybe this way we’ll have a resolution we actually keep.
Hot news, everyone. I just received word from a reliable source deep within the confines of a Chinese brothel, that that our own John Biggs is making a 9.789-inch Apple Tablet in his basement. Now, you wouldn't know that this random house in a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood is actually the home of a Apple design genius, but that's what our source says, so it must be true. And all those random reports about Innolux and Cheng Uei Precision producing the Apple slate are just unfounded Internet rumors and should be ignored as such. What's behind the jump here is the truth.
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