2nd Street, Philadelphia, outside of Cedar’s, the best Lebanese food, ever.
Letter From Alexander Graham Bell : 1915
American Telephone & Telegraph Company was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.
We think it’s important that everyone who invests in AT&T understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.
At AT&T, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the Pony Express — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.
Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to food, water, shelter and electricity — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. AT&T aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.
There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.
We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.
Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.
Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.
At AT&T, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.
People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.
By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.
…
We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.
We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.
… The Phreaker Way … [blah blah blah]
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gbattle sez:
I’ll leave the search and replace to create Facebook’s future Wikipedia entry as an exercise for the reader.
What turntable almost looked like
We were perusing some old files and this was what the first designed version of turntable looked like. It’s funny looking back at it and feels like something out of TRON. Ultimately it didn’t fit in with the feel we wanted to give (making turntable feel like a small trendy, but homey venue).
gbattle sez:
This is hot, if only for the option of using it. I wish Turntable.fm allowed room owners to skin their venues like old school WinAmp (or Trillian, or your fave customizable desktop app from back in the day). That would be pretty awesome to personalize the rooms and not merely the Avatars, reflecting the vibe of the room. Imagine going to a club where all the rooms have different music but looked the same like some Agrestic community? Yup [Lame Button].
Three men enter. Only one exits with a drool filled sweater.
The first recording I ever purchased was Kiss’ Rock And Roll Over in the summer of 1978. I knew I wanted a Kiss record and this was the most colorful one. It was a cassette actually, and it cost me $6.98 at K-Mart. I remember the cassette very clearly as it had a white case with a yellow sticker. I was in my basement the first time I pressed play on it. The studio version of “Calling Dr. Love” was especially catchy along with “Mr. Speed”, not that an 8 year old kid would know what either song was about. The first vinyl I ever purchased was Kiss Alive II, a double album. It took a while for me to save enough money to eventually buy Kiss Alive I which was the most expensive Kiss album at the time.
peHUB » Correlation Ventures Closes $165M Fund That Will Use Predictive Analytics
I don’t get this.
(via jryu)
So these guys contacted me last year and I was completely sketched out. This is as close to “dumb money” as a VC could ever be. They’re a bunch of Wall St quants who think they’ve got a model that “proves” an investment will be successful or not. Frankly, entrepreneurs should demand more from their investors than cash. Their oversubscription, in my opinion, speaks more to the stock market’s volatility and asset managers’ desperation to find alternative asset classes with attractive returns.
(via caterpillarcowboy)
When the VC fund’s name belies the fact that its investment thesis isn’t causal but correlated, and it still raises a boatload of money, it signals that investors are willfully grabbing at straws. If I pick my nose and Facebook goes up on Second Market, can I sell you guys my future boogers?
(via caterpillarcowboy)
Our son Weston is Steve Jobs.
The world is not ready.
Nyquil: Organic Seasonality
I’m sick.
I’ve been coughing and hacking up a lung since New Year’s Eve, and it’s finally starting to break. There’s a bug going around, and I caught this one from Hannah’s father (we’ve traveled a bunch over the holidays, it’s taken its toll on me I guess).
Though rarely sick, when I am, I sleep awfully and I’m a giant grump - total pain. I sought refuge with people who could commiserate with my malaise, and found the above Nyquil mentions via Twitter Search.
Now, I’m not a Nyquil user, but I found this fascinating. Yes, tis the season to be merry, but it’s also the season to be sick as a dog. Also, nighttime is when people feel the insomniac ramifications of the flu bug. The amazing thing is that, unlike most Twitter trending topics that are common event based, this one trended due to its organic seasonality:
- height of flu bug
- during the night
- before the first day back to work after the holidays
- similar treatment via America’s preferred legal knockout drug
The organic building of ephemeral community among individual-yet-similar experiences vs. shared consumption of popular events indicates how deep Twitter’s behavioral rabbit hole goes (and how much value they have yet to extract). Nyquil couldn’t have pulled this off if they tried, although, the idea of over-the-counter medicines advertising “hey, if you’re sick, tell us!” may be the next genius cold remedy marketing campaign - heard it here first. Or alternately, Cambell’s will personally deliver chicken soup to your home if you tell them how sick you are.
2012: the year of preying off the weak and sickly.
Family photo, holiday edition in Buffalo.**
** I tell you, Warby Parker should hire us to promote their frames.
Paying for pixels | The Economist (via ninakix)
Oh The Economist, there’s a stark difference between a sales tax and an income tax. In a virtual world, where it’s completely legal to fabricate Ponzi schemes (= freemium around virtual goods + false scarcity + artificial urgency), I wouldn’t be too quick to levy an income tax on a system where most people lose in the gentle dance of joy of gain and fear of loss. Game companies need not go bust for players to claim virtual losses against real taxable income. It could work similar to gambling or trading, which is a messy prospect - you can’t have it both ways governments. Maybe they’ll treat all activities in the virtual realm as unrealized income/paper gains and only tax people when they wish to convert to real currencies. However, the time horizon on your virtual good ownership may then come into play, creating short and long term virtual gains tax rates (where long term virtual gains tax rates are lower because they represent a less speculative interest in the underlying gaming economy). Oh, what a glorious mess.
“Bitcoin, take me away from all this madness!”
(via ninakix)
I’m very proud of Hassan Johnson and Billy Sierra-Lenhert, co-founders of ThaTrunk (location-based networking), for agreeing to let me mentor them during their DreamIt Fall ‘11 journey. Their Mashable writeup only anchors my support even further. Great work gentlemen … the real work begins now! #nowackdemos
Quick Thoughts on the Upcoming Zynga IPO
As the world eagerly awaits the latest social web IPO with Zynga, many have focused on the event’s significance as evidence of Facebook’s platform power. However, Zynga’s rapid ascendency marks two milestones that I believe are much more significant.
For one, Zynga has long been the largest Amazon Web Services customer, with an estimated tens of thousands of instances spanning every global AWS region (arguably, Zynga financed the expansion of AWS’ footprint). Yes, Zynga is planning a move over to their own co-located machines as there are gigantic cost savings to be realized, but they are the first company who scaled to IPO 100% within the cloud. Indeed, if we are to compare the platform power of Facebook and Amazon, remember that Facebook only introduced their 30% “platform tax” on transactions in 2010, while Amazon got paid for every byte sent and CPU cycle logged from day zero. Bezos is #winning.
Further, Zynga is the first IPO based upon a pure transaction-based freemium model, creating a social engagement funnel where ~95% of customers are free-riding and subsidized by the rabid virtual commerce activity of the remaining ~5%. How the market treats the merits of free over the long haul has yet to be seen, but there’s a wide array of startups with IPO potential leveraging Zynga’s “freemium in the cloud” playbook.
YouTube's Monetization Gap with Hulu - via Digiday
When it comes to sheer revenue, YouTube is blowing the doors off of Hulu. Analysts peg YouTube’s 2011 haul at anywhere between $1.2 billion and $1.6 billion, while Hulu has said it expects to pull in $500 million this year — a number that includes revenue from its subscription service Hulu Plus.
gbattle sez:
I’m confident that the gap would be even wider if you consider revenue per minute of video inventory (ie. storage costs) or revenue per minute of video served (bandwidth costs). Concentrated value of exclusive content leads to capital efficiency and increased profit margins.
(via caterpillarcowboy)
