Posts from April 2006

Jack White is one of the most talented musicians putting out new music these days.  I love the White Stripes and the record he made with Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose, was on my list of the ten best records of 2004.

He’s got another collaboration record coming out, this time with pop music whiz Brendan Benson.  They call themselves The Raconteurs and their record is called Broken Boy Soldiers.

The single, Steady As She Goes, is great and it’s playing on the radio and you can listen to it on Rhapsody or buy it on iTunes.

Like all Jack White records, there is a serious Led Zeppelin influence on this record which is just fine with me.  And this song, Blue Veins, is no exception.

Blue Veins

I hope you like it.

Max sent me a link to Shack Watchers, which is a social photblogging service designed to let people know how long the line is at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park in NYC, about three blocks from our office.

It’s a really great idea, but an even better idea would be for Danny Meyer, the genius behind the Shake Shack, Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, and a number of other top restaurants in NYC, to put up a realtime webcam somewhere on the roof of the Shake Shack and put the video up on the Shake Shack website.

I am not an expert in such things, but I bet it wouldn’t cost more than a couple thousand bucks to do it and the goodwill they’d get from the community would be enormous.

It’s been a while since I did a "sucking in the 70s post".

I’ve been meaning to post about our Chevy Vega for a while, but just haven’t gotten around to it.

I learned to drive in a Chevy Vega and it was my first car.  I shared with my brother Rod who is a year older than me.

Rod says it was a 1974 hatchback. My dad says either 1974 or 1975.  My guess is 1974.  Rod knew that car better than anyone else in our house.

It was bright red Orange.  My dad says he got a great deal on it because nobody wanted it in that color.

Ours was manual transmission.  Maybe they all were.  Who knows?

That car was a major lemon.  Not just our car.  Every Chevy Vega.

It was the worst car ever made according to many people who know a lot more about cars than me.

It had an alluminum engine.  It consumed a ton of oil.  And it made noises.

The interior fell apart. The ride was terrible.

But even with all of that abuse I just laid on the Chevy Vega, I have a soft spot in my heart for that car.

I failed my driver’s test in that car.  My dad thought we should pass the drivers test in a stick shift.  So that’s what I tried to do.  But I was so nervous doing the parallel parking test, that I kept stalling out on the clutch.  Eventually I passed the drivers test in my parents automatic station wagon.

Before I had a license, my brother used to drive the car.

I really wanted to drive it too.

One day, when my parents were out, I decided to take the Vega for a spin. So I got the keys, went into the driveway, turned on the car, and pulled out of the driveway.

There was a pretty steep hill on the way out of the neighborhood we lived in.

As I was driving down that hill, I passed my parents heading up the hill.

The look I got from both of them is still planted front and center in my brain.

Lot’s of good memories from that 1974 Chevy Vega.

The worst car ever made.

User generated content can generate cash, but typically not a lot of cash.

Adsense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Amazon Affiliate Program, Feedburner, Commission Junction, and a host of other services are happy to pay you for the right to put ads or links on your pages.

But the amount of money that results is usually not enough to quit your day job.

I give my blogging revenues away to charity. It makes me feel good. But even that has its issues. If the money is sent to me directly, I get a 1099 and generally have to pay taxes on the money I am giving away. I can take a deduction for that money, but there are limitations on the deductions and I get hosed by the IRS for doing something good.

This morning, as I was blogging and doing email, I was listening to Radio Paradise, a listener supported internet radio station. I was hit with the urge to direct all the money I make on Yahoo! Publisher Network for the next month to Radio Paradise. It was too hard, so I didn’t do it.  I sent them cash via paypal instead.

What I want is a place I can send all the money I am getting from these various services to.  I don’t want to pay taxes on that money unless I ultimately take it down personally. I want to be able to send that money anywhere I want, to my blog host provider, to my podcast host provider, to charity, to Radio Paradise, or anywhere else that I feel like it should go.

It would be great if PayPal or someone else could build this. I’d use it

UPDATE: On my bike ride this morning, I thought some more about this and figured out that PayPal was already halfway there to creating this virtual bank account I want. Feedburner currently pays via PayPal. If Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, CJ, and other third party networks would support a PayPal payment option, I’d basically have what I need except for the tax implications which would remain a nuisance.

Jim Griffin asked an interesting question in the comments section of my initial Internet Radio Rocks post:

If you had the choice between access to Internet radio, satellite
radio, HD radio, AM/FM radio or various "pull" forms of digital media
(MP3 player, Rhapsody, etc.), how would you rank your choices? To which
would you turn first?

The answer to this is, of course, "it depends".

I am on an Internet radio binge right now.  I am listening to Radio Paradise all the time. It’s an amazing listener supported internet radio station that plays great music all the time.

But I can’t get Radio Paradise in my car, yet.

So when I am in my car, I settle for traditional AM/FM. I used to have an HD Radio in my car, but when I traded it in, I got a car that doesn’t take a aftermarket radio so I am back to traditional AM/FM right now.  I like HD radio better because I like the HD2 channels like Country 103.5-1 and Deep Cuts Classic Rock 104.3-2.

I have never personally been a big fan of Satellite Radio because I don’t spend huge amounts of time in my car and the local radio stations like WFUV and WBGO work fine when I am in NYC and WEHM is great when I am in Long Island.  But I think Satellite is great if you are a Stern fan or if you spend a lot of time in your car.

I go in phases when I want to control my music and when I want someone else to play music for me.  When I want to control my music, I tend to listen to my music collection or Rhapsody.  When I want someone else to play music for me, I tend to listen to podcasts or Internet Radio.

So the bottom line is I don’t have one mode of listening.  I mix and match it a lot.  I’d be interested in what others have to say on this subject.

The comments to my Patently Absurd post are just terrific.  I want to thank everyone who took the time to add something to the discussion. I’ve learned a lot in the past 24 hours about what’s wrong and right about our patent system.  I still think we ought to scale it back, way back, but there are some good arguments in favor of patents that are well articulated in the comments section.

So go read them.

Last week I was in Austin and added Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Texas Flood to my Nuggets list.  In that post I mentioned a band that I loved in the early 90s, Poi Dog Pondering.  Pamela Parker picked up on that in the comments and added that she also was a big fan of Poi Dog.

So that led me to pull out the two Poi Dog records we own and play them.  We own the self titled debut album and the follow up, Wishing Like A Mountain.

Both are great records with a wonderful earthy pop sound, influenced by american roots music.  But my favorite and the one I always think of when I think of this band is the debut record, Poi Dog Pondering.

The song Postcard From A Dream is worth the price of the record alone.

You can get the record on Amazon.

I just posted a longish thought piece about web services and the enterprise on the Union Square Ventures weblog.

We believe the enterprise is going to quickly become a big user of web services and "web 2.0" technologies and techniques.  Read why we think that here.

Brad Feld has a good post up about software patents where he argues that they should be abolished.

I completely agree with Brad about software patents, I think they are useless as a business tool.

Until they are abolished however, I encourage all of our portoflio companies to file for as many as they need for defensive purposes. I posted a cliche of the week on this last year.

But I’d like to dig deeper on this issue of Intellectual Property (IP) protection.  We, as a country, have had a policy of broad intellectual propery protections (copywrights, patents, etc) as a means to foster innovation.

As it was told to me, the idea is to encourage people to come up with innovative ideas by giving them long term exclusive rights to those ideas. I am sure that many of you who read this blog have a deeper understanding of the prinicipals behind intellectual property rights and the logic behind them so feel free to weigh in on this in the comments.

I suppose that there is some logic to that argument, but having spent the past twenty years of my life working with people who are risking their time, energy, and money (and the money of my firm and our partners) on innovative ideas, I honestly don’t see the logic in our patent system and some of the copyright system.

If you look at the arts for example, innovation by one artist leads to innovation by another artist.  If Picasso had patented cubism, would we have had the burst of energy around that way of thinking about painting?  If Chuck Berry had patented his approach to rythm and blues, would we have gotten Keith Richards?  If Shakespeare had patented his approach to tragedies and comedies, would that have stifled or encouraged innovation in theater and literature?

My point is this.  Innovation is an evolution. Everybody takes from everybody else. A truly competitve darwinian system where it’s survival of the fittest may produce orders of magnitude more innovation than a system where someone gets to keep a lid on their invention (if in fact it is their invention which is a serious problem with our current system).

I think of the patent system in our country a bit like the tenure system in our academic institutions.  It protects ideas and people that may not deserve to be protected and it allows for underperformance and it stifles creativity and energy.

Clearly we cannot abolish our system of intellectual property overnight.  Many billions of dollars (including tens of millions of capital I manage) has been invested in companies that are using intellectual property protection as a competitive weapon.  If there is going to be change, it must be gradual.

But I am encouraging all of us, the readers of this blog, other bloggers, academics, politicians, public policy wonks, and anyone else who cares about innovation in our country and the world at large to think hard about a world without patents and less intellectual property protection broadly speaking and what impact that would have on innovation and the flow of capital around innovation.

I believe we need a new way in the years to come.  Our current approach is holding us back, not taking us forward.