Posts from June 2004

I finally saw one on my blog today. For hosting services. Not particularly targeted at my readers but I do think the new ad format will increase click thru.

A great post from the RSS blog on various people’s RSS wishlists.

My favorite is the family photo RSS feed. That is a killer idea.

I am off to London for some meetings. Postings will be light for the next couple days.

I finally got around to seeing the movie.

It is gratuitous, slanted, and the consummate hatchet job. It’s everything that the Michael Moore hating critics have said it is.

But what I took from it was one huge primal scream from Michael Moore saying “For What?”. And that’s the question I’ve been dealing with for the past year and a half along with what appears to be many of my fellow americans. Finally we have something to vent our pain with. And that is why the movie was sold at at 4:30pm on a work day. And that is why this movie is going to do over $100 million at the box office before its done. And that is why America is so polarized. And that is why George W. Bush may well lose an election when the economy is turning sharply in his favor.

Rafat Ali broke this story about three weeks ago. Real Networks and Starz have teamed up to sell movies over the Internet.

I am headed to London for a two-day business trip tomorrow so I figured it would be a good time to try out this service. It’s easy enough to download the new version of Real Player you need to use the service. You have to give them your credit card info even though the first two weeks are free. That should be enough time for me to figure out if I want to join the service.

I downloaded Eight Mile and Taxi Driver. It took me about an hour and a half each with 512kb DSL service.

I don’t plan to watch them until I am on the airplane so you’ll have to wait for a complete review, but so far, so good. This could have some strong appeal to the business traveler who has broadband access at his disposal.

I bet if they used Bit Torrent it would download a lot faster!

I’ve been working on a bunch of things this year that I haven’t been able to blog about because they are confidential. Some of them will happen. Some of them won’t.

One of them happened last week and was announced today on CEO Matt Blumberg’s blog. That in itself is pretty cool.

Return Path is a much bigger company today with a lineup of value-added email services that is truly must have for email marketers. The reason is that Return Path bought Netcreations, the first double opt-in email address network.

Return Path was already a leader in getting email through to inboxes (delivery assurance), email address change data services (ECOA), and now they are a leader in email customer acquisition.

As Matt points out in his post, marketer’s two highest priorities in email today are building permissioned email lists the right way and getting legitimate permissioned email through to inboxes. Return Path is now the leader in both areas.

Congratulations to Matt and his team at Return Path and welcome aboard to Mike Mayor and his team at Netcreations.

You all have heard me sing the praises of Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose record.

Metacritic gives this record a 95 rating which is the highest rating this year and the second highest ever.

I guess others share my view.

How’s this for transparency? How often does the owner of a NBA basketball team tell the world what he’s thinking about his players, the press, and his plans for next year?

I know its hard to admit that the black thing on your desk that used to have a rotary dial on it has turned into something as amorphous as software. But its true. Telephony is just software.

Read the linked Supernova speech from Niklas Zennstrom, the founder of Skype for more on this.

Thanks to Rajesh Jain for the link.

Brad Feld posts about why Mobius invested in NewsGator. That’s an incredibly valuable thing to do for a whole host of readers. Thanks Brad. Keep it up.