Posts from January 2007

Apple Store Soho


  Apple Store Soho 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

I hate to shop in stores. I love to shop online. That’s not universal in our family. The Gotham Gal and Jessica and Emily can spend hours strolling from store to store. But not me.

There’s really only one thing I’d rather buy in person than online, and that’s anything in the Apple Store. Howard compared it to a religious experience in the first Wallstrip episode and to be honest, he wasn’t far from the truth.

The minute you walk in you are greeted by pleasant young people with name tags who ask if they can help you. There is usually U2 or The Fray or Bob Marley playing loud enough that you can hear it but not too loud.

I told the young man named Patrick that I wanted to buy two Macbooks. One for the Gotham Gal and one to replace the old kitchen laptop. I told him I wanted them upgraded to the max ram.

He took care of it while I walked around the store playing with all kinds of fun stuff. I was out of there in less than ten minutes.

I had to come back an hour later to pick up the laptops because they did the RAM upgrade right then and there for me.

It’s a great experience in every way. They are pleasant, knowledgeable, and fast. And there’s ton of fun stuff to play with if you have to wait.

BTW – I now have four 512mb modules for the Apple MacBook. I don’t need them. If you want them, send me an email. First come, first serve. I’ll send them if you pay for the shipping.

UPDATE – The first response was a suggestion to give the memory to an open source project. Great suggestion and that’s where its going.

#NYC

Widget Removal - Please Vote

Well my post on Widgets today generated some good comments. My favorite was the constant refrain that widgets are about self expression. Indeed.

But I also recognize that my blog has possibly gone a bit overboard.  So I am going to remove a bunch of widgets next week. You get to vote for which ones should stay.

Here are the ones that are going to stay, no matter how you vote:

1) In Heavy Rotation – Sonos sponsors this widget which generates money to charity. It stays.
2) Ads – They aren’t technically widgets, but they generate money to charity. They stay.
3) Portfolio company widgets; Sitepal, Etsy, Indeed, and Delicious (for old times sake). My portfolio companies are how I make money. They stay.

Everything else is subject to removal. Please vote for the ones you want to stay.

#Bling#VC & Technology

Nick Is Against Widgets

Nick Denton has come out against widgets and listed five reasons for that stance on Valleywag.

And he lists this blog as an example for one of his reasons:


2. A sluggish page is a bad page. A page only loads
as fast as the slowest widget. All those annoyingly flickering messages
in the status bar of the browser — Read, Connecting to, Waiting for. I
blame widgets. Fred Wilson’s blog is a laboratory for these web
modules: the venture capitalist’s site is said by Alexa to be among the slowest on the web, with a load time of 11 seconds.

Well, you can read this blog in a feed reader and avoid the widgets entirely. And now that I load the center column first, you can read the blog on the web and be off to another page before all the widgets load (and Alexa is wrong, it takes a lot longer than 11 seconds for that to happen).

But Nick is missing the point of widgets entirely. You can’t build a business on widgets alone. But if you have a business; YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, Digg, etc, etc, you can get distribution on other’s pages with widgets. It’s a content and brand distribution strategy.

Maybe Gawker blogs will never carry widgets because Nick is a purist and believes that widgets are "a violation of blog principles". I’d like to see where those prinicipals are written down, because I missed them and want to know what other principals I am violating.

#Bling#VC & Technology

Snowy Church Yard


  Snowy Church Yard 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

It’s barely snowed this year in New York City.

Jessica’s friend who moved here from Los Angeles last summer called her all excited yesterday and shouted "it’s snowing!".

I love the snow and I’ve missed it.

So on the way to work, I shot this photo.

It’s a sight I see every day, usually twice a day, on the way to and from work.

But it looked even sweeter today.

#Photo of the Day

Roaming

Four of the greatest inventions of my lifetime are ATMs, EZpass, cellphones, and subscription music. Three of these inventions have adopted roaming and the other one needs to.

When I first used an ATM in the late 70s, you had to find an ATM for your bank. But soon there were networks like Cirrus that allowed you to "roam" to any ATM and pay a small charge. That made life so much easier.

The same thing happened with cellular phones. When I landed in Venice last month, my blackberry immediately connected to some italian wireless phone company and I was in business.

EZpass, the prepaid toll system we use here in New York, is an amazing thing. I never wait in line at the toll booth anymore. And when I drive in New Jersey, their automated toll system recognizes my EZPass and lets my through in the fast lane.

But that’s not how it works with subscription music. Some people use Napster. Some use Rhapsody. Some use Yahoo Music. I think these services should get together and let their users "roam" onto other networks. Let’s say my brother uses Napster and he wants to send me a link to a song by Gomez. He sends me a Napster link and I can’t listen. But I should be able to do that. Either translate that link to a Rhapsody link or let me log into Napster using my Rhapsody account.

ATMs, cellphones, and automated toll systems have shown that by being open everyone wins. The subscription music services should take a page from their playbook and do the same.

#VC & Technology

More on Stockpickr

I wrote a bit about Stockpickr, a new social network for people who like to trade stocks, last week.

The founder is a guy named James Altucher and Lindsay interviewed him today on Wallstrip. I found it interesting. I hope you do too. The interview is about 3 mins long but stick around to the end for the "long short" game. That’s always the best part of these interviews.

#VC & Technology

Scrobblers

A couple years ago, I found audioscrobbler and I saw the future of music discovery.

Since then, I’ve seen Mog, iLike, and others copy the idea and build interesting music discovery services around the simple idea of recording your music listens and using that data to power music services that are customized to your tastes.

I am interested in creating a list of all the various services that are out there that use some version of music scrobbling technology. Please feel free to add any and all such services in the comments.

#My Music#VC & Technology

Ask The VC

I get questions posed to me by entrepreneurs all the time, either via private email or via public comments on this blog. The range of questions is wide and it’s clear to me that entrepreneurs are hungry for information on the startup process, the funding process, and a host of other issues.

I try to answer as many of these questions as I can, but I’ve never wanted this blog to become a Q&A service.

Thankfully, someone else has stepped up to the plate and done something to fill this need. Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group have launched Ask The VC and it’s been up and running for a couple weeks now. I’ve added it to my daily feed (which is different than my feed reader/blog roll) and I plan on commenting on their posts regularly.

This is a great addition to the venture capital blogging phenomenon which I guess I helped to spark (but did not start). A lot of people scratch their heads about why so many VCs blog. Is it because we have all this free time on our hands? No, not really. I write most of my posts between 5am and 6am in the morning when the rest of my house is sleeping. I believe it’s largely a “thinking out loud” phenomenon. Our job is to identify trends early, find the companies that will benefit most from them, and then figure out how to get our capital invested in these companies. Thinking out loud helps on all three fronts. So I expect the “VC blogging thing” has legs and we’ll continue to see more of it, not less.

#VC & Technology