Posts from October 2006

I am aware that this blog is loading particularly slowly lately. If you want a fast load, go to FastAVC.

I’ve installed a firefox plugin (thank Joshua) that will help me figure out the culprit and fix it.

Sorry about the delays you are experiencing.

I took a bunch of kids to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers last night at the Continental Arena. Three of The Four Fellas were there as well as Emily and a friend of hers.

It was the first time I’ve seen the Chili Peppers do a whole set live and I was impressed. Flea plays the bass like nobody I’ve ever seen. It’s like a weapon in his hands.

But John Frusciante was the real eye opener for me. He is a throwback to the guitar gods of the 70s and 80s. The recent Stadium Arcadium record has a song on it called Turn It Again (second to last song on the record, should have been the ending song) in which John Frusciante delivers the most amazing guitar solo on a studio record in years. He is something to behold.

And behold him we did (short 30 second clip).

So the people at Microsoft have decided that they know better than me how I want my feed to look in their new browser.

Now I appreciate their effort to make a feed look decent in a browser. RSS has suffered mightily from the screen full of XML that many get when they click on a RSS link.

FeedBurner addressed that several years ago with their "browser friendly" feed presentation service. And Microsoft picked up on that idea and they present feeds nicely in Internet Explorer 7. Unfortunately they don’t recognize my style sheet and so fastavc.com (which is just my feed with some styling on it) looks like this in IE7.

This is how its supposed to look:

What’s worse is that Microsoft also strips off services that allow you to subscribe to the feed in various feed readers (another popular feature of FeedBurner’s browser friendly service). And, you guessed it, they only allow you to subscribe to the feed in IE7. I thought we were finally witnessing a nicer Microsoft. I guess not.

I’ve never eaten at Chipotle’s so I am not going to comment on this stock.

I walked over to Irving Plaza in the rain last night after everyone at home had called it a night and caught an amazing set by TV On The Radio. These guys have such an intense sound and they had it on display in spades last night. The audio on this 90 second clip is terrible (too loud for my camera mic I think) but it gives you a good sense of the band.

Buy Return To Cookie Mountain at Amazon

  I’m not an addict. 
  Originally uploaded by umop ap!sdn (ej).

I am writing this on my Blackberry 8700 walking up Fifth avenue from my home to my office. Its a regular thing with me. I bump into people all the time. One time I bumped into my friend while he was walking down fifth avenue typing on his blackberry.

I do stop and look up when I cross the streets. I almost got taken out by a truck last month and that scared the shit out of me.

If this sounds like a guy talking at a 12 steps program, it is.

I am addicted to my blackberry. I have been since I got my first pager style unit in 1998. I’ve learned to manage my addiction. I don’t bring my blackberry to bed, to my kids sports games, to dinner with the Gotham Gal. (Just bumped into a large woman in a red coat. She was not pleased)

Last year I tried other smartphones. I had a fling with Treo. It ended in acrimony over unreliability. Then I tried Windows Mobile. What was I thinking? Then Sidekick which I loved but it didn’t synch with outlook and so now I’ve passed Sidekick and smartphone addiction on to my kids. I see myself in them and it kills me.

So here’s my point. Owning RIMM is the equivalent of owning Phillip Morris or Constellation Brands without the lawsuits (yet).

Just had a glancing blow with a guy’s briefcase. He didn’t seem to notice

I’ve never owned RIMM the stock and don’t own it now. It certainly seems like a stock where the good news is already baked into the story.

But I think they’ve got to move behind the enterprise and into the hands of consumers. Put a camera into the 8700. Knock $100 off the price. Build a killer instant messaging client. My kids are addicted, but not to Blackberry. If they can suck my kids and their friends into the Blackberry addiction, the sky is the limit for this stock.

Just had my third collision. And now I am at work. That’s about par (just missed another person).

That’s my take on RIMM. Here’s Wallstrip‘s take:

  Claire McCaskill 
  Originally uploaded by PUB DEF.

The New York Times today reports that the Republican party is pulling out of Ohio as they’ve concluded that Mike DeWine can’t beat Sherrod Brown. That’s great news for Sherrod, but bad news for our other favorite Senate candidate, Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

According to the New York Times:

At the start of the fall campaign, national Republican leaders
developed a strategy to pour most of the national money into three
states — Ohio, Tennessee and Missouri — to create a firewall against a
Democratic takeover. One Republican Party official said Mr. DeWine’s
continued problems in Ohio had persuaded them to in effect rebuild a
firewall that has now partly collapsed, and to find a state to replace
it.

I take that to mean that all of DeWine’s money is now headed to Missouri and Tennesee to fund negative attack ads against Claire McCaskill and Harold Ford.

I am most concerned about Claire because I know her and like her. She’s not some wacky liberal. She’s a tough pragmatic former prosecutor tuned state treasurer who came a couple perecentage points from getting elected Governor of Missouri in 2004. I’ve met with Claire on a number of occasions. She’s the kind of Democrat who has friends on both sides of the table and can get stuff done.

But she’s going to get pummelled with crap like this that has already shown up on YouTube.

The only thing Claire can do is fight back, and fight back hard. And the way our political system works, that means Claire needs more money. Don’t get me started on the need for campaign finance reform, I’ll save that for another post.

For now the only thing you can do if you want to help Claire is go here and send her some money.

In my continuing quest to outline all the important things we look for in a deal, I’ve addressed the reasons we look to be the lead investor on the Union Square Ventures weblog.

If you are interested, give it a read.

  Apple logo in Chicago 
  Originally uploaded by Nicolas Gompel.

Back in the spring of 2004, Jessica received a bunch of cash gifts for her bat mitzvah. We encouraged her to give some to charity and invest the rest. She wanted to buy Apple stock (AAPL). We agreed that was a good idea and she bought shares at $25/share. The stock has split 2/1 since, reducing her cost to $12.50/share and it currently trades at $75/share. That’s a sweet 6x in 2.5 years and Jessica is convinced she’s going to be in the hedge fund business when she gets older. I have to remind her that her other three picks (NOK, TWX, and GPS) have not exactly outperformed the market.

When Emily found herself in the same place, she also chose to buy AAPL although she went with some other picks for the rest of her investment cash. She thinks Apple is still a great company and a great stock. I tend to agree.

I myself don’t own AAPL but I did convert from a ThinkPad to a MacBook Pro in the past six months and I generally lean toward Apple products when I have a choice. Steve Jobs is one of those entrepreneurial CEO/owners who lead their companies with intensity and vision. Bill Gates used to be like that. Rupert Murdoch still is. Sergey and Larry might be on that list too.

But I have a number of misgivings about Apple the company that keeps me from being a bigger fan of AAPL the stock. As brilliant of a marketer as Steve Jobs is, he’s also from the "control everything" school of technology architecture. OSX only runs on Apple hardware. You can’t play music bought from most online music stores on the iPod. And .Mac is the only online service supported by the iLife suite of products. What if I’d rather send my photos in iPhoto to Flickr? I can do that but not nearly as easy as I could send them to .Mac.

For now, that approach doesn’t seem to be causing any problems for Apple, but I think openness is the winning strategy in the long run. Google is way more open with their technology than Apple is. And I think Google gets a lot of value out of that approach. Maybe Steve Jobs will wake up and smell the coffee, but somehow I doubt it.

The reason I bring this subject up is AAPL is the stock of the day at Wallstrip (if you are reading this in my feed, click on that Wallstrip link). Howard thinks that the growing retail empire is the catalyst that’s causing the stock to be at its all-time high.

I think the retail stores are another stroke of marketing genius. The stores in NYC are always mobbed. They are the closest thing to disneyworld in New York City. But the stores are full of people checking their emails and it’s not that easy to actually learn anything about the products there. I’d go to Tekserve or Digital Revolution over the Apple store for sure if I wanted information. And I’d much rather buy something at the Apple webstore than wait in the huge lines at their physical stores. That’s exactly what we did with Emily’s new MacBook. We picked the one she liked at the store in Soho and then left and bought it online later. So I am not sold that the retail stores are much more than a marketing expense for Apple. A smart one for sure. But maybe not the driver of growth that Howard thinks it is.

So back to AAPL the stock, I think its certainly a good stock to own and I am happy that my kids are Apple shareholders. But I worry about the long term sustainability of the current momentum the company has. Is the iPod franchise at risk of being commoditized by low end players? I think eventually it will be. Is the web going to eventually be the OS? Yes, I think it will be. Will Apple be cool forever? Who knows.

So I am long AAPL, sort of.