Nationalizing the US Financial system

Think we're not?

Freddie and Fannie= Owned by the government. Controls over 1/2 of the mortgages in America.

A.I.G.= Owned by the government. Insures a huge percentage (globally) of all the 'mortgage debt instruments'.

And we're being dumb about it.

Dumbness example:

Sunday- A.I.G. asks for a $40Billion loan to stave off a change in it's credit rating.
Monday- Fed's say no. Monday night: Credit agencies lower A.I.G.'s credit rating
Tuesday- A.I.G. says it may have to liquidate. Tuesday night: Fed says, no no.. here's $85 Billion

$85 Billion vs. $40 Billion.

Why did it happen? The short answer appears to be the Fed's tried to scare the existing players (Goldmans, etc.) into funding A.I.G. and lost the stare down.

The cost to you and me? $45 billion.

Dumness galore.

E.T. and I.T.

For decades the US has been on the leading edge of information technology (I.T.) and this has driven our economy (and the worlds) to new heights of prosperity, but it's soon to be the 2nd most important industry.

Energy is where it's at this century. The age of cheap energy is over and finding, developing and deploying (mostly) renewable energy sources is where the action will be. Thomas Friedman (NYT columnist and book author) calls this Energy Technology or E.T.

The railroads lost the battle to the auto/truck makers in the middle of the last century by thinking of their business as 'trains' and not 'transportation'.

The Oil companies of today are doing the same exact thing (and recruiting the politicians, like McCain's VP pick: Palen).

It's about ENERGY, not Oil. Investing only in an energy source with a finite supply is a waste of investment.

It's too bad today's Big Oil guys don't get that they're in the Energy business... not, just, the Oil business. They have the money to make the transition, at least today. But they won't in 10 years.

Big Oil is going the route of the train giants of yesteryear: focusing only on today and not investing for tomorrow.

Godin and Interns

Create a facebook group to recruit and filter interns.

Brilliant! Simple! Obvious! Why the hell didn't I think of this?

Seth Godin, a guy who really gets the world in ways many don't, recently needed some interns (paid...so he was hoping for a good response) and boy did he get that response. Over 150+ applied from around the world. Then, he tried something clever, and very obvious, but to my knowledge not done before, to help filter them down to the 5 he'd actually hire: He started a facebook group.

Unable to just pick a PDF or two, I invited the applicants to join a Facebook group I had set up. Then I let them meet each other and hang out online.

It was absolutely fascinating. Within a day, the group had divided into four camps:

* The game-show contestants, quick on the trigger, who were searching for a quick yes or no. Most of them left.
* The lurkers. They were there, but we couldn't tell.
* The followers. They waited for someone to tell them what to do.
* The leaders. A few started conversations, directed initiatives and got to work.

Want to guess who I hired? (It was a paid gig and five ended up spending time with me in NY on a somewhat rolling basis). If you're hiring for people to work online, I can't imagine not screening people in this way. This is the work, and you can watch people do it for real before you hire them.

Did I say brilliant? Brilliant. He only needed five (paid) but also thought, what the hell, let's set up some unpaid virtual intern work using basecamp, see who signs up. Over 60 of the original 150+ applicants did and good things happened.

Original/full Post here.

Is the smallness of Web 2.0 killing the big wins?

Great story from the New York Times.

Judy Estrin, who has built several Silicon Valley companies and was the chief technology officer of Cisco Systems, says Silicon Valley is in trouble. In a new book, “Closing the Innovation Gap,” which will be in bookstores Tuesday, she writes that the valley’s problems are symptomatic of a crisis in innovation facing the country as a whole.

I have to agree, but it's not just Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, I'm learning this from direct personal experience with my own startup.

We started as ClickCaster, a podcasting platform that was veryy good at making it simple to create and publish an audio or video podcast. We built a great product and great team. We did everything 'right', but podcasting, so far, hasn't become a business. So, about 6 months ago, we sold it to a company down in Texas (the URL, userbase and a license for the software). We kept the software and intellectual property as well as the team that built it and brought in some new business folks that really understand video.

We created a new company called Medioh and started work on what I call Broadband Social Television. Everyone we've talked to says it's the right thing and the right direction, including customers, and we've got a big jump on it with years of experience dealing with media on the web (creating it, aggregating it and distributing it with a social networking twist).

We want to augment, or better yet, replace, much of the existing media infrastructure with web based solutions. Tools, content and social sharing aspects... all at an order of magnitude less cost to implement, but with the same really big advertising revenues associated with traditional television.

The problem is, it's a swing for the fence kind of play.

There's significant competition, and, the huge legacy media companies think they know what's going o. Some do, but most don't. It just scares the hell out of investors because it's obvious there are only going to be a few winners.

In a word: A Bit-O-Chaos.

I love chaos. Within chaos lies massive opportunity, if you've got the ramp/resources to sniff it out and make it real.

We're as well positioned as anyone to do that (better than most) and we've started the conversation with VC's, but we're not getting alot of traction. Granted, it's early days, but the initial discussions, to date, aren't as encouraging as i'd like.

The market meltdown hasn't helped and, potentially, has killed off pretty much all the potential funding. People are afraid.

As Judy says, the 'big' plays scare today's investors. They're looking for the short term win.

Ms. Estrin traces Silicon Valley’s troubles to the tech boom. She said that’s when entrepreneurs and venture capitalists started focusing more on starting companies to turn around and sell them and less on building successful companies for the long term.

“Starting in 1998, there was such a shift in Silicon Valley toward chasing money and short-term returns,” she said.

For us, I suspect some of the problem comes from the "ITV" or "IPTV" push 10 years ago that failed so miserably. Billions where spent and it didn't take off. Everyone thought it would take a year or two and viola! we'd have webtv everywhere.

As Bill Gates says, we tend to overestimate what will happen in the next year, and underestimate what will happen in the next 10 years. He was so right.

It's been 10 years since the boondoggle of internet video from the late 90's, and the infrastructure, audience, technology and inclination is now very much there and very real.

But the money guys are afraid. They remember (or have heard) the late 90's horror stories and don't want to take the risk.

And as the article says her book implies, it's a broad problem.

Our fund raising situation? I think, we're just a symptom.

Boulder Parking: A Sort Of Protection Racket?

I've heard of this, but I just experienced it directly today.

Boulder is running a scam on it's citizens and as far as I'm concerned it's a form of parking ticket enforcement fraud.

Know what this feels like? It feels like a revenue generating operation that's a tiny bit like a protection racket.

In an approx. 30 day period from mid June to mid July, the meter maids gave me three $15 tickets, and within 45 days of the last ticket, turned it into $180 in fines and booted my car (another $40 charge). $220.00.

Not a bad hall for 3 slips of paper and 6 minutes of meter maid time. How many times does this happen in a day? How much revenue does this generate for the city?

What' the ROI for the city? I'm betting: really really good.

Interestingly, this was all with zero warning. No letters (at least none that I got), no warning stickers on the car, nothing.

Apparently, Boulder enforces the 'laws of the state' around parking much more stringently than it does, for instance, laws about smoking pot in public (ever been to the annual '420' event?). I'm not against the 420, but it's "against the law" too. Do they get 'tickets'? Nope.

Sooo... what heinous crime did my car commit?

I have no front license plate. The reason is there is no place to put it (no plate holder , no holes for screws). I just got it a few months ago and haven't gotten around to buying a drill and putting the front plate on yet.

This is one of those 'you have to look for it' kind of tickets. You have to walk around the car and look for no plate. I park in the same general area downtown and apparently I've caught the eye of the meter maid who own this particular turf.

Why the need for front license plates? I think it has to do with red light cameras that take a picture of your front license plate and send you a really big fine in the mail. Apparently cities all over the country (like Boulder) are adding more of these cameras to their red lights and shortening the yellow light span to produce more tickets.

Oh.. you think a city would never do that? Think again:

In fact, six U.S. cities have been found guilty of shortening the yellow light cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners. Those local governments have completely ignored the safety benefit of increasing the yellow light time and decided to install red-light cameras, shorten the yellow light duration, and collect the profits instead.

Boulder uses traffic tickets to create substantial amounts of revenue. They sent out over 10,000 red light tickets last year alone.

Back to parking tickets.

Normally I pay things like parking tickets right away (simplifies life) but these three tickets got put into a cubby hole and I simply forgot about them. Simple human mistake.

I don't even mind paying a penalty. Say, 25% of the value of the ticket....but $180 for $45 in parking tickets? All within 60 days of getting the tickets and then booting my car with no warning?

What the hell is that about? That's about 1600% annual interest rate. Even the IRS doesn't dream of doing something that outrageous. The only people that get rates like that are loan sharks and, last time I looked, that's illegal.

And booting the car with no warning? That's the municipal equivalent of a loan shark 'breaking an arm' until you pay up.

If a business tried all that they'd be brought up on modified RICO charges.

I'm getting a new bumper sticker made up:

Boulder: Bring your pot but don't f**k with our meter maids.

Is Apple a Republican?

I don't mean this in the political sense, I mean it in the 'how we do business' sense.

I've noticed that Apple simply never, ever, says it's sorry. It also never admits it's wrong without being called on it, repeatedly, by many sources, over days or weeks (sometimes months). The latest example being the 3G phones unreliability and the MobileMe online service outages and outright failures.

Apple is also the most secretive company in the business. everything is a secret, even inside the company with product teams working on the same product. It's compartmentalized and everyone is isolated from everyone else (outside of their immediate group). Sound a bit like our current administration? Just a little?

I've also noticed that all the latest "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads, although cute, funny and fluffy, are negative ads. Negative in the sense of attack ads, similar to what the Republican's do so very well.

I know.. it's a stretch, but comparing the Rovian Republican attack ads to Apple ad's that have the PC guy doing most of the talking, usually pointing out what's wrong with the PC or the OS, vs. having the Apple guy talk about what's good about itself seems like a reasonably fair comparison.

The only difference is Apple does it with a sense of wry humor .. all soft and fluffy... vs the lead pipe/scare the hell out of you Republican approach. Same result though: You're left with the kind of residual feeling that the other guy's a loser and not to be trusted (or purchased over an Apple product).

Have you seen a positive Republican advertisement lately?

Watch the Apple Ads. Have you seen a positive Apple ad for the Mac (that's not denigrating the PC somehow) lately?

Me neither.

And the similarities between the control freak Jobs and the control freak Cheney are alot closer than any of the Mac Fanboys would ever want to admit.

I'm bi-computational. I own two Mac's and an iPhone. I also own several PC's. I use them all for different things. Apple makes an overall great product. I'm not really attacking the products there, I'm criticizing the company itself, and it's way of doing business, more than anything.

I could also expand this a bit more into the 'elite' (meaning: Rich/Republican) vs. 'everyday joe' (meaning: Average/Everyman/Democrat) argument and make a pretty convincing case for how PC's, which are cheap, ubiquitous, easy to repair (or just replace) are the every day joe computer where the Mac is (perceived as) expensive, difficult to upgrade/repair and generally embraced by more of the rich elite, but, being the Libertarian Hippie that I am, i won't go any farther with that line of thought.

So, add it up: Denying problems that are obvious to everyone, ignoring problems and not addressing them unless the press exposes them over and over and then doing something minor to create the idea that you're trying to alleviate the pain, but still not admitting fault; obsessive secrecy about everything they do both inside the organization and in what's presented outside and, finally, attacking your opponents relentlessly via attack ads sounds a lot to me like business as usual for the Republicans.

And now, if you just stop a minute and think about, Apple Inc as well.

Steve Jobs may be a far left Buddhist/democrat, but his company looks very Republican to me.

UPDATE: How to upgrade a Mac (click for original):

Ultimate Geek Out

It doesn't get much better (or more geeky) than this.

Presenting the Large Hadron Rap:



White female science writer turned rapper Katherine McAlpine knocks it out of the irony park.

You have no choice but to love it.