Wonderful news today coming out of NASA today:

NASA took the first concrete step toward returning human beings to the moon Thursday, successfully launching the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on a mission to find the best place to build Earth’s first off-world colony.

The 19-story-high, two-stage rocket and spacecraft launched at 2:32 p.m. PDT. As the huge first-stage Atlas V rocket roared to life at Cape Canaveral in central Florida, NASA spokesman George Diller called it “America’s first step in a lasting return to the moon.”

The $500 million orbiter will spend the next year cruising just 31 miles above the lunar surface, employing a suite of seven instruments to identify landing hazards such as rocks and craters. It will be paying particular attention to the largely unknown lunar poles, where previous missions have picked up hints that water ice may exist in some permanently shadowed craters.

Thousands of sky watchers are expected to turn their telescopes to the moon on the morning of Oct. 9, when the water-seeking satellite steers the fuel-depleted second stage Centaur rocket into a crater at 5,600 mph. For those in the western U.S., where the moon will still be up, the plume should be clearly visible with a moderately sized backyard telescope, NASA said.

Time to start putting forty years of the unprecedented embarrassment of the US space program since the late 1970s.  I’m not sure that any other country has so thoroughly trashed such a magnificent technological edge in a crucial field before, unilaterally.

The space shuttle.  The international space station.   Ugh. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

Ironically, we may look back and give the Bush Administration surprising credit for finally tilting US space exploration back in the right direction.  (Don’t worry, I’m under no delusion that people will say anything nice about Bush 43 for a while…)

There are tremendous technical and commercial advantages to establishing the first, ongoing presence on the Moon.  It’s a little know fact, but as an independent side project at Harvard, I built out an initial business model and operating plan for financing a private moon base.  It’s hard to think back, but at the time (2000), companies were raising $10B-$15B in private capital markets to fund the build-out of fiber-optic networks across the world.

It wasn’t such a stretch to imagine raising $60B in sequential rounds to fund a moon base, particularly when the economics of a moon base are so strong.

You see, the moon is such a hostile environment, that once you have a self-sustaining and expandable eco-system set up, it’s a natural monopoly.  For quite some time, it will always be significantly cheaper to add on to an existing base, rather than build a new one from scratch.

That difference in cost, which is measured in billions, is an incredibly revenue opportunity, assuming there is demand to establish presence on the moon.

It was 2000, but I believe I laid out at least 10 potential revenue lines for the moon base, to help it become cash flow positive, even across that type of capital raise.

(Yes, I was assuming the US would never ratify the Moon Treaty from the insane 1970s.  Beyond ridiculous.)

In any case, very exciting to see us finally moving down the correct path.  My only regret is that if we had moved down this path in the late 1970s, we’d all be jostling for positions on a fully operational moon base by now.

I’m still optimistic that I will be able to travel to the moon in my lifetime.  The only question now is whether it will be a US or Chinese built lunar city.

Of all the unexpected outcomes that have come out of my blogging experiment here on WordPress, one of the most surprising has been the amount of attention I received for a post on why I like investing in timber.

Why I love Timber as an Asset Class (November 10, 2006)

Since then, from time to time, the article has been referenced in investment blogs and journals.  For example, I am still getting hits to my blog based on the following article on Seeking Alpha:

• Considering Timber as an Asset Class (Seeking Alpha, December 2008)

Last year, I was flattered to see a quote of mine show up in Nuwire Investor:

• Timber: A Renewable Resource (Nuwire)

What I didn’t realize at the time I wrote this blog post in January 2008 was that my entire interview was actually posted online.  That’s right. You can read the whole thing in all of its glory:

• Timber Interview: Adam Nash (Nuwire, May 2007)

How embarrassing.  I remember doing this interview over the phone in March 2007 from a conference room from the Toys building at eBay.

Still, it’s a matter of public record now.  So enjoy, if you are curious.  I still do love timber as an asset class.

Just in case you aren’t one of the 225 million Facebook users who received a notification, tonight at 12:01 AM EST (9:01 PM local time), Facebook decided to launch a massive “first-come, first serve” claim on usernames (or handles) on Facebook.

You might be wondering why this is big deal, since these have existed on every other site for years.

Well, the reason is because this is Facebook, and ironically because they waiting this long to launch handles, it’s now moved from part of the new-user experience to a huge virtual geek battle for your name.  (if you want yours, go to http://www.facebook.com/username)

I, of course, claimed “adamnash”.

Not very creative, I know.  When I chose my first username, freshman year at Stanford, I picked a nickname I had in high school.  (To this day, the wonders of the web have preserved old Usenet posting from under than handle… embarrassing.)  Thankfully, when you declare Computer Science as your major at Stanford, you get a virtual second chance – your Xenon address.

With a full name that fits in an old-style unix handle of 8 characters, it seemed too obvious.

I am adamnash.

These days, of course, you can find me at:

• http://www.adamnash.com (my domain)
• http://blog.adamnash.com (WordPress)
• http://www.linkedin.com/in/adamnash (LinkedIn)
• http://www.twitter.com/adamnash (Twitter)
• http://www.google.com/profiles/adamnash (Google)
• http://myworld.ebay.com/adamnash (eBay)

Brilliant from an SEO perspective, I guess.  Not that hot if I was looking for anonymity.

Now, I can safely say, Facebook is safe for “adamnash” as well:

• http://www.facebook.com/adamnash (Facebook)

I feel a little guilty for hogging all the virtual cyberspace for myself.  There are other Adam Nashes out there.  I think there are over 30 on LinkedIn alone.

But not that guilty.  I’ve been “adamnash” since 1992.  I’m not going to stop now.

It’s been quite a while since my last eBay-related post, and nine months since my high traffic post, A Eulogy for eBay Express.  However, this past week Keith Rabois wrote a fairly inflammatory article for TechCrunch that I thought was worth discussing.  Keith is currently an executive at Slide, and was formerly a founder at LinkedIn and an executive at PayPal, so his consumer internet credentials are fairly substantial.

His article was entitled:

TechCrunch: How Facebook, MySpace and YouTube Killed eBay

Told you it was inflammatory.

However, I’m not normally the one to take eBay flame bait.  After all, if I was, I’d be posting twelve times a day on the topic.  But Keith actually hit upon a deeper insight in his piece that is worth calling out, because it provides insight into both eBay and other successful, engaging web products.

Although it was always classified as an e-commerce destination, the quirkiness of the eBay marketplace was once a major source of entertainment on the Web. It was where people sought and bought everything from the first broken laser pointer to Beanie Babies to Bob Dylan’s boyhood home. While the catch—anything from an antique clock to a Gulfstream II—was rewarding for the buyer, it was generally the entertainment and excitement of the chase that brought a buyer to eBay in the first place.

This insight, that eBay’s success was driven by entertainment and engagement is extremely strong.

The rest of the article follows this path:

• In January 2004, over 47% of internet users visited eBay once per month.
• In December 2006, while the % of audience stayed the same, people were spending 3x the time on MySpace
• In 2007 Facebook & Youtube added to this drift of attention and engagement (timeline is off here a bit, since Youtube took off well before 2007).
• eBay stripped out the fun, not pursuing eBay 3.0 strongly enough, and then Donahoe pushed towards an Amazon-focused approach.  Fun gone.

I don’t personally agree with much of the deductive flow here, actually.  Overall, Myspace, Youtube & Facebook have significantly increased the engagement overall on the internet, taking metrics like “daily visits” and “daily unique users” and “time on site” to previously unthinkable numbers.  It isn’t a zero-sum game, per se, because the overall number of users and time spent on consumer internet sites has grown dramatically.

More importantly, the assessment of eBay 3.0 and the current strategy makes it sound like eBay’s current approach is largely management-driven, when in reality the overwhelming global scale and activity of eBay buyers (and sellers) has made the current direction almost fait accompli.  In 2006, the number of eBay listings that were fixed price (including store listings) was already well north of 50% and rising rapidly.  The marketplace was voting through billions of bids, BINs and listings, and it was voting for a higher and higher proportion of fixed price commerce.

But I digress.  The point is that Keith got something very, very right in his article about eBay.

eBay was never meant to be just e-commerce.  It was fun.  It was exciting.  It was empowering.

It was engaging.

There are a couple strong reasons for this.

First, if you’ve read my previous posts on game mechanics in the design of engaging software and websites, you’ll know I’m a big fan of Amy Jo Kim’s work here.  In fact, eBay demonstrates all five of the “fundamental games” that humans like to play.  This wasn’t done intentionally, but it explains a lot of the almost visceral, addictive reaction that people had to eBay.

Second, eBay captured irrational economic behavior on both the buyer and seller side of the marketplace brilliantly.  Buyers exhibited a number of irrational behaviors that we now describe and associate with behavioral finance.

These irrational behaviors on the buyer side, combined with the game mechanics of the site, effectively created a lift in demand.  Combined with the transparency and breadth of the online marketplace, you had literally a huge multiplier on e-commerce demand.

On the seller side, however, engagement was driving irrational behavior too.  Buyers of collectibles became sellers in order to “fund their habits”.  (I know this personally, since I began selling coins on the site to help keep my PayPal “slush fund” fully tanked so I could buy coins…)   More than anything, people fell in love with the empowerment eBay offered.  You didn’t have to have $100,000 to open a business, an SBA loan, or an MBA.  The web was full of stories of people just driving around garage sales, picking up items on clearance at local department stores, and stocking up at flea markets.  Some of these sellers grew businesses that measured in millions of dollars, promoting hope that anyone could build a business on eBay.

Of course, there was a kernel of truth to this.  An unprecedented number of successful businesses were built over eBay.  But most sellers were nowhere near any sort of traditional business scale.  There is a reason, after all, that PowerSeller starts at just $1000 a month.  And that’s $1000 of sales revenue, not profits.

Can you imagine any real-world storefront with only $12,000 a year in sales?

People would spend 8, 10, even 12-hours a day looking for inventory, listing items, answering questions, and shipping goods.  When people went to the first eBay Live, they even made sure that on the road trip out to California, they brought enough packing materials to keep shipping items.  They made buyers happy because it wasn’t just a business for them, it was a way of life.

In every sense of the word, it was irrational commerce.  It was a labor of love, not economics.  Sure, it was a good way to pad the income of a family.  But for many the money was just a rationalization – they were really in it for the excitement, the activity, the empowerment, and of course, the community.  If you calculated the “wage rate” of many of these sellers, it would be shockingly low.  But no one did, because that wasn’t the point.  It was fun.  It was empowering.  And it was only just the beginning…

I didn’t get to go to the first eBay Live in 2002, but I did go to three starting with the third in New Orleans in 2004.  I’ll never forget, at one point Pierre was touring the booths (I believe he was giving a speech that day).  A group of us were discussing how to manage the insanity of the event – the intensity and sometimes aggression of some attendees who had to have every pin, every collectible.

I won’t get the quote right, but Pierre said something there that has stayed with me to this day.  To paraphrase, he said that he loved the energy, and that the insanity is part of what made eBay great.  If eBay became just another sales channel, then it would lose its magic.

It has been five years,  and for me personally the growth in my understanding of game mechanics, behavioral finance, and web 2.0 product design have given me terms and tools to help explain the irrational engagement that people had with eBay, and currently have with sites like Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter.

eBay has a very metrics-driven culture, but while site and business metrics accurately reported the results of the incredibly engagement and activity on eBay, as always they never actually provided  the full picture around causality.

So, from my point of view, Facebook, MySpace & Youtube did not kill eBay.  (eBay, of course, is no where near killed in any case, since it continues to be an incredibly large and active site.)

Instead, eBay fell victim to a much more insidious threat than simple competition for eyeballs or time on site.  It fell victim to a version of the Innovator’s Dilemma.  There is a limit to how many people will wrap their lives around selling on eBay.  There is a limit to what percent of people’s purchases they will pursue through an auction process.  There is a limit to the disposable income to spend on collectibles and hard-to-find items – most purchases, in fact, are of new, standard commodity products.  Thus the company and the site follows the aggregated votes of hundreds of millions of buyers and millions of sellers, their “best customers”, and those votes are eventually dominated by the bulk of the e-commerce market.

Reading articles this weekend, like this piece in VentureBeat, they quote Donahoe in the Wall Street Journal as follows:

Asked about eBay’s identity, Mr. Donahoe said he wants shopping on the site to offer the same sort of low-price experience as buying at bulk retailer Costco Wholesale Corp. There, “the inventory is somewhat fluid, but everything they’ve got is a great deal,” he says in an interview.

(Ironic for me, since Costco was one of the examples we looked to frequently in the design and thought behind eBay Express.  I am a huge, unrepentent fan of Costco as both a customer and as a student of great companies.)

eBay 2009 cannot go back to the eBay of 1999, or even 2004.  The size and scale and make-up of the market means that any attempt to “crowd-out” the less engaging aspects of the market would mean drastically reducing the size of eBay.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t hope.  There is still time for eBay to re-invigorate its experience to capture and create elements that drive engagement.  There is time to learn from both the past and the present, and chart a course that will inspire and empower millions.

The original needs that drove eBay to success still exist.  People are finding some of the serendipity and empowerment from Craigslist… but it’s not as actionable or broad.   The game mechanics, for the most part, aren’t there.  Amazon has increased its breadth, but it’s truly an ecosystem designed for large sellers (by eBay standards).  Google has enabled independent websites to purchase traffic… to an extent.  But the more you make selling online like running a business, the more you lose that sense that this is fun instead of work.

Collectors still want to collect.  People still want to find ways to make a little extra money and to be a part of something bigger.  Little kids still collect and trade things from a very young age – no matter if they are stickers, baseball cards, Pokemon, or whatever small colorful items come in sets with variable rarity.  I sold my brother’s broken iPhone (he dropped it in the ocean) for $130 to a man on an island (Reunion) that I had never heard of.  Those eBay stories still exist. Small businesses are still being built on eBay.  Sellers are multi-channel, but eBay can and should offer them unique dynamics that capture a disproportionate amount of their attention, if not their business.  Apple has a small fraction of the computer market, but it captures the lionshare of its attention.  That could be eBay if it was prepared to act boldly and ask hard questions about what eBay reall should be… and shouldn’t be.

eBay cannot be MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Twitter.  Nor should it be.

It should be eBay.

Update (5/27/2009): Turns out I had missed a great post from Rob Go on this same topic, just a few days ago.  Worth reading.

Funny thing happened to me over the weekend.

My immediate family (parents, siblings, etc) were visiting to see the new baby, Jordan.  My mom is holding the baby in the yard, sitting under the plum tree.

All of a sudden, it hits me.  I’ve seen that picture before.

Sure enough, I whip out my iPhone (yes, I have a lot of photos on my iPhone), and quickly flip to the photo.  It’s the ultrasound from January (when the baby was about 20 weeks along.

Kind of amazing.  I remember remarking back in January about that little sharp nose.

Before I get into this, let me just warn that this post contains spoilers.  Don’t read any further if you haven’t seen the new Star Trek movie.  Or at least, don’t read any further and then complain to me.

First off, I know that the movie is doing really well.  I also know that almost everyone seems to really like it.  So I don’t expect this post to be popular.  Still, there were a few small things (and one large thing) that bothered me about it, and it seemed blog worthy.

The big issue is the premise of the “reboot” logic.  This movie was explicitly designed to appeal to a whole new audience, and as a result, it deviates in many ways from the previous “canon”, ie, the character & future history established by the other movies and TV Series.

Unlike Superman Returns, or The Dark Knight, however, this movie tries to explain away the differences with a plot device.

The plot device is as follows:

A Romulan captain of a mining ship, in the late 24th century, witnesses the destruction of Romulus.  Infuriated, he blames Spock for failing to save the planet (and his wife and child).  He attacks (old) Spock, falls through a black hole and ends up in the early 23rd century.  As a result, the timeline is forever changed, because the first thing he does (almost) is kill George Kirk, James T. Kirk’s father, putting him (and Starfleet) on a different path.

Ugh, it sounds worse when I write it.  It felt pretty par-for-the-course in theater for a Star Trek time-travel plot.

Here’s the big problem. The last two years of the Star Trek series Enterprise were literally based on the Temporal Cold War.  (In fact, this was an extension in some ways of the “Relativity” episode in Star Trek Voyager and the “Trials and Tribble-ations” episode of Deep Space Nine.)  Without descending into a geek singularity, the basis premise is that in the future, time travel technology is mastered, leading to a set of accords among governments to “protect” the timeline.  Some people violate those accords (”The Temporal Accords“), and thus there are future Federation people and ships whose purpose is to help apprehend these criminals and restore the original timeline.

I’m not talking about one or two flaky episodes here with a minor inconsistency.  I’m talking about dozens of episodes and a major timeline of future history with key events between the 20th century all the way to the 31st century.

In any case, in order to believe this plot reboot, you have to believe that somehow with all those time ships and policing, Agent Daniels, the USS Relativity, and all those others just let a random mining captain from Romulus rewrite the history of the Federation without correction.  They go to huge lengths to save Captain Archer, but not Captain Kirk?

Sorry.  That doesn’t work.

I think what I’m more disappointed about is that the movie didn’t even try to explain it away.  For example:

Old Spock from the future, for example, could have added 30 seconds to his explanation to either New Kirk or New Spock to say that this timeline is permanent, or why it won’t be fixed.

Spock: “In general, major timeline changes in the past have been corrected by the Federation in future centuries.  However, we had been warned that the use of “red matter” could leave us vulnerable to untrackable temporal events.  In my rush to save Romulus, I have put the entire future at risk.”

This really wouldn’t bother me if the movie was a clean reboot of the series, like Battlestar Galactica.  But J.J. Abrams is trying to have his cake and eat it too.  He clumsily and awkwardly brings everyone together for the new Enterprise crew (exactly how unlikely was it that Scotty would be on that one base on that one moon…)  In some ways, the half-hearted attempt to maintain continuity with the time travel device is worse than just doing a straight reboot, no questions asked.

Now I realize I fall into a very tiny minority of people who even watched Star Trek Enterprise (or Voyager for that matter).  And I realize I fall in an even smaller fraction who liked Enterprise.  (1 in a million?)

Still, if they wanted to hardball ignore the series, they could have just asserted something early that made it clear that the series Star Trek Enterprise didn’t exist in this universe (ala Superman III/IV being axed in Superman Returns).  For example, they could have just asserted that this was the first human starship with the name Enterprise.

The most ironic element to the reboot plot device is that the one series it doesn’t change is Star Trek Enterprise, because that series takes place before the federation was founded!  So in this timeline, we don’t know whether there will be a Captain Picard, a Deep Space Nine, or a Captain Janeway.

But we do know, of course, that Scott Bakula was captain of the NX-01 Enterprise.  Rich, rich irony for fans who hated that series.

Don’t get me wrong – I liked the movie enough to see it again, and I think it achieved its goal of reaching out to people who have never seen Star Trek before (or didn’t watch much of it.)  I was actually surprised to see so many “wink wink, nudge nudge” moments in the film – references to other characters, catch phrases, moments, etc.  When Spock gives the transwarp transport formula to Scotty, I half-way expected some reference to transparent aluminum (Star Trek IV).

Maybe that’s what bothered me the most – they clearly put some effort into lining this up with canon in minor ways that didn’t really matter, but then ignored the big gaping hole around time travel.

Anyway, just for fun, here are some other small nits that bugged me:

• There is a canyon in Iowa?
• Was the Nokia placement really necessary?  Did it even make sense?  There are still private companies in the future?  They still operate?
• Wow!  The Enterprise is really big now.  Huge.  How big is the crew?  That Romulan ship must be immense.  Kirk can just run around and find his way?  It must be miles long!
• Captain Pike decides to make a not-quite-graduate with 3 years in the academy First Officer.  Really?  Maybe they know more about nature vs. nurture in the future.
• Sulu carries a sword around with him?
• Movie jumps the shark when Kirk crash lands on the ice planet/moon.
  • First, he plays Empire Strikes Back with the native wildlife (unnecessary).
  • Second, he just happens to crash within a few miles of Spock?
  • Exactly how close is this moon/planet to Vulcan, so that it appears huge in the sky of this world?
  • Spock is placed within walking distance of a Federation outpost, and is waiting for… ?
  • Scotty just happens to be stationed at this outpost?
  • Spock doesn’t go with Kirk because he doesn’t want to hurt the bonding experience for Kirk & Spock?  Seriously?  He’s really taking this new timeline thing in stride.
• “Red” matter?  That’s what they went with?  “Red” matter?  Was this sponsored by Bono or something?
• Flagship of the fleet goes to new graduate.  I know there isn’t supposed to be a lot of politics in the future, but I have to think someone got passed over here and is kind of pissed about it.

Looking forward to Terminator Salvation (which deals with timeline inconsistencies better), Up, Transformers, GI Joe, Harry Potter…

Those of you who follow me on Twitter (or who received an email), this blog post is about old news.  But I thought I’d share here, for posterity, the fact that last Wednesday, my wife & I were blessed with the birth of our third son, Jordan Gabriel.  He weighed 9 lbs. 1 oz., and was 21 inches long.

While we’re still adapting to life with three kids in the house, I thought I’d note the tech milestone as well.  When my first son was born, we had a birth blog to commemorate the event.  That was less than five years ago.  Clearly in just that short time we’ve moved on to newer modes of obsessive documentation.

I guess that answers the question on whether Twitter competes and/or substitutes for blogging.

In any case, welcome to the world Jordan.  Our first Twitter baby.  (In fact, one of my colleagues at LinkedIn was kind enough to reserve @jordannash for him…)

Posted in Blogging, Family, Twitter ]]> http://blog.adamnash.com/2009/05/12/jordan-my-first-twitter-baby/feed/ 5 adamnash Jordan Jordan Jordan Jordan Tweet http://blog.adamnash.com/2009/05/02/get-ready-for-teo-twitter-event-optimization/ http://blog.adamnash.com/2009/05/02/get-ready-for-teo-twitter-event-optimization/#comments Sat, 02 May 2009 02:49:01 +0000 Adam Nash http://blog.adamnash.com/?p=1144 ]]>

That’s right, everyone.  A new acronym is born.

Get ready for consultants, product managers, marketing executives, and knowledgeable technorati everywhere to be talking about the most important traffic driver since… SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

That’s right, 2009 is the year of TEO.  Twitter Event Optimization.

The logic is simple enough.  Twitter is growing by incredible rates, and it’s inherently a high activity, highly connected distribution model.  That means that pushing out events to Twitter can help drive traffic to your application or service.

When a user pushes out a link to your content, it magnifies distribution a large number of ways:

• The tweet/link is pushed to all of their followers (sometimes to multiple clients/locations)
• The tweet is sometimes retweeted (at a fractional rate) to a 2nd degree of followers
• The tweet shows up in countless Twitter searches for terms/keywords
• The tweet is indexed in Google for natural search
• The tweet, if hashtagged, comes up for anyone reviewing that particular topic.  (Topics on Twitter are often flagged with a # symbol.  Example: #swineflu)

One of the hardest problems that websites face is traffic generation, and I can see it in the eyes of marketing and media executives everyone.  They look at Twitter, and they see… engagement.  attention.  TRAFFIC.

And they want it.

Thus, TEO is born.  Like SEO before it, there will be a range of skillsets that will quickly be developed, and then sold to countless companies everywhere:

• Optimizing your website to get users to issue events to Twitter (manually or automatically)
• Optimizing the content of an event to promote click-through
• Optimizing the content of an event to trigger retweeting (RT)
• Optimizing the tracking of the links on Twitter for effectiveness (already happening)
• Optimizing the landing pages of your site, so that non-members who click through from Twitter get a good experience and “convert” to direct users.
• The list goes on…

I really haven’t seen this much collective energy around a new traffic source since Google really hit the scene in volume, and everyone realized that an alternative to paying for search advertising was to invest in optimizing your content for natural search.

It’s hard to argue that this will be good for the Twitter eco-system.  Google has fielded armies of engineers and incredibly advanced technology to help keep natural search effective.  One of the challenges Twitter will definitely face is keeping their stream relatively “clean” of manufactured content.  Whether that’s something that can be done by end users, or whether deep technology will be needed is yet to be determined.

In any case, I’m not sure if I am the first to coin the term… it’s hard to believe that with the huge buzz around Twitter that this one hasn’t been claimed already.  But, just in case you heard it here first, remember:

2009 is all about TEO

Found this courtesy of CoinNews.net:

Rick Mercer, Canadian satirist and TV personality, throws his brand of humor into the mix as he tours the Royal Canadian Mint in Ottawa.

Watch Rick as he walks through the Mint’s gold vault, checks out the gold refinery process, the Mint’s rolling room and finishes the tour by handling several gold coin blanks and striking some special coins.

Best coin video… ever. 

Yeah, it was that kind of weekend.

I went to check email Saturday morning, and was greeted with quite a shock.  My Mac Pro was locked in some sort of grey screen.  No icon, no progress, nothing.

A quick press of the power button confirmed it – simple power down.  No real OS boot.

On Friday night, before bed, I had shutdown the machine.  Some apps had been misbehaving, and I thought a full shut down & reboot was in order.  Apparently that reboot had failed.

I don’t know how “normal people” deal with problems like this.  When I say “normal”, I mean people who haven’t actually developed software on the Mac, who haven’t worked repairing Macs, and who haven’t spent countless hours futzing with their own machines.

Just in case its useful, here’s what I did.  The good news is that it proves out the benefit of using backup software, like Time Machine.  The bad news is that it also proves that this stuff is still way too hard:

1) Tried to reboot. Yes, I know, not rocket science.  But there is always that hope that just rebooting will magically “fix” the problem.  In this case, rebooting went into an endless loop.  Grey screen, Apple logo, spin icon… then grey screen and reboot.  Kept repeating.  Bad news.

The lack of either the blinking folder or the regular boot sequence told me I was on dangerous ground.  It was either a hardware issue, or the system was corrupted.  In either case, the machine was not getting to the normal boot sequence.

2) Tried to boot of DVD. For those “Dodgeball” movie fans, “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.”  For Macs, “If you can boot of a DVD, then your hardware can boot anything.”  It’s not totally true, but true enough.  In my case, it proved harder than you might think.   The machine wasn’t getting far enough in the boot sequence to load Bluetooth, so my wireless keyboard was useless.  Fortunately, I keep a USB keyboard around.  Plugged in, holding down the “C” key (nostalgia: the “C” is for CD, and they never migrated to “D” for DVD.)  In any case, if there is no DVD in the drive with a bootable OS, it opens the tray.  Got the tray opened, popped in the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard DVD, and began to boot.  Total time spent: 20 minutes.

3) Diagnose the boot drive. On the Mac OS DVD, a little known trick is that while the installer is running, you can go to the Menu Bar, and select “Disk Utility” to run diagnostics on your disk.  I did so, and discovered some bad news.  My main system drive, a 300GB Western Digital, had problems.  Worse, Disk Utility basically told me that I was crazy if I thought it could fix them.  Drat.  Time spent: 10 minutes.

4) Get Mac OS X installed on another hard drive. Running the system off DVD is slow, and you are limited in options without a full Finder.  Fortunately, my iTunes HD had a few hundred GB free.  Installed OS X on that drive and rebooted.  While that happened, I went to have breakfast and actually get productive chores done.  Time spent: 30+ minutes.  Who knows, I didn’t come back to the machine for several hours.

5) Assess whether the system drive is lost cause.  I was ready to run down to Fry’s to get a new HD (or better yet, a new SSD.  Why not turn tragedy into opportunity?)  Unfortunately, the disk mounted.  Interesting.  I did get a strange system warning that I’d never seen before, telling me the disk had problems and that I should reformat it.  Never waste access to a dying disk.  I immediately tried to use Disk Utility to create a disk image of the disk, but it failed.  (You do this by dragging the hard drive icon from the desktop over the Disk Utility application).  Some cryptic error.  Fortunately, a Finder copy of my user directory worked, providing an extra backup of files, just in case.  Time spent: 20 minutes.

6) Reformat system drive. Well, Mac OS X told me to, right?  I was surprised, but I tried it.  Disk Utility was able to reformat the drive – I noticed the old formatting was Mac OS X, without journaling enabled.  Wow.  Was the drive that old?  In any case, I reformatted with the appropriate GUID setting for booting Intel macs, and with journaling enabled.  Afterward, a quick Disk Verify confirmed a shocking outcome… the drive was fine.  Time spent: 10 minutes.

7) Reinstalled Mac OS X on System Drive. Tempt fate?  Sure, why not.  This was the first time I had a hard drive crash after using Time Machine, and I was eager to try it out.  When you install Mac OS X 10.5 now, it asks you if you are migrating from another machine.  You can specify a Time Machine backup.  I was pleased to see the last one was from 10:59pm on Friday… less than 1/2 hour before the “great crash of 2009″.  Unfortunately, this process seems to take hours.  160GB of material for some reason took over 3 hours.  No way I’m sitting around for this!  Time spent: 3 hours+

Get everything up to date. I came back to the machine that evening.  It booted, seemed fine.  Even had my old accounts on the login screen.  I signed in, and everything looked normal.  All files/folders in the right places… except iPhoto failed to launch, and iTunes complained that it didn’t understand my library.  Whoops.  The DVD installed Mac OS 10.5… but we’re on 10.5.6 these days, and my apps and files had been upgraded.

Brief rant: I’m really wondering why Apple hasn’t tied the update logs from it’s automatic updates to the restore from Time Machine.  It’s pretty obvious that the Time Machine backup has a system on it that has a series of updates installed – would not be hard to boot the OS with instructions to download and install those updates.

In any case, Apple Mail tried to “import” my Mail folder.  I cancelled that and quit.  iTunes offered to create a new library, and I declined.  Phew.  Hope I’m safe.   Ran the System Update system preference, and discovered about 10 updates waiting for me.  Downloading them and installing would take… 2 hours!   Let it run over night.  Time spent: 2 hours + one nights sleep.

9) Get everything up to date… again. In the morning, after breakfast, checked on the machine.  Was booted, looked fine… except now Apple Mail had lost all of my old mail, and iPhoto still wouldn’t boot.  iTunes was fine, though.   Ran System Update again… and there were another 8 updates, clearly waiting for the last 10 to run.  Great.  Fine, let’s update some more.  Time spent: 1 hour + me leaving for the morning.

10) Restore Mail. Thank goodness I’m paranoid.  I copied the “Mail” folder in my “User > adamnash > Library” folder from the “extra” backup I had made to my System drive.  3GB to copy, but hard drive to hard drive over internal SATA 2 bus is wicked fast.  Time spent: 15 minutes.

11) Everyone lived happily ever after. It was about 11:30am on Sunday, literally about 36 hours since the crash happened.  And everything was back to normal.  Seriously, I doubt you could have easily figured out anything had happened.  Even little details like my browser history were there.  Firefox re-opened with the same 20 tabs I had open on Friday.  It was if the last 36 hours had been a test, and since I had kept calm and walked through the steps, I had passed.

So, what did I learn from this?  A few things:

• Keep a Mac OS X boot DVD handy. Most people lose track of this, because it came with their Mac when they bought it.  Don’t lose it.  I prefer the retail disc myself – it’s worth the cost to have one.
• Disk Utility is your friend. There was a time when Apple utility software sucked, and you had to go third party.  There are still superior third party tools out there (and for serious hard drive crashes, you need them.)  But these days, starting with the standard Apple software is a good bet.
• Migration Assistant has come into its own. I’ve used it now for work and home.  It’s very good.  Not perfect, but better than hand-crafting system restores.  Very impressed with the Time Machine integration.  If it was smart enough to handle Apple Update history, I’d be truly happy with it.
• Don’t underestimate the value of an extra hard drive. The reason my restore was relatively painless is that I had another hard drive that I could boot the system off of.  Without that, you have to depend on the DVD.  Ouch.  If you have a tower, and extra hard drive is cheap insurance (and extra storage).   If not, consider a cheap firewire external drive.
• Time Machine is good. Look, if you care about your files, you should backup.  Period.  Time Machine makes it painless.  I’m really impressed – backup systems are only really tested when you need them, and I needed Time Machine today.  It came through.
• Beward of hard reboots.  The reason my system had problems is likely due to a software conflict I had been ignoring – XTorrent and my .Mac screensaver.   I would come home to a locked up machine, and would be forced to hard reboot the system.  Hard reboots = increased risk of file system damage.  I played Russian roulette one too many times, and paid the price.  36 hours of it.

Mostly, however, I discovered that after 18 years of fixing/restoring Macs, it’s still stressful dealing with a crash like this.  I just can’t imagine why any normal human being would know or care about all the steps above, or how they would be expected to keep multiple backups, hard drives, and techniques handy to manage this type of issue.  It’s 2009 for goodness sake.  By now the computers should be taking care of themselves.

In any case, I hope the above proves useful to a reader or two.  If not, maybe the story will prove either entertaining or depressing, depending on your perspective.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has recommended ending the the long-standing drama surrounding the F-22 (nee, the F-22A) supersonic fighter, capping the program with a purchase of four more planes in 2009, bringing the total number to 183.

A pair of F-22 Raptors during an Air Force training flight.
(Thomas Meneguin — U.s. Air Force Via Associated Press)

A bit of a sad day for me, really.

There is a nice column in the Washington Post today from the Air Force explaining why they support the decision to end the program, 60 planes shy of the 243 total they had originally estimated to be needed in a post-cold war world, and almost 600 shy of the pre-1989 estimate.

We are often asked: How many F-22s does the Air Force need? The answer, of course, depends on what we are being asked to do. When the program began, late in the Cold War, it was estimated that 740 would be needed. Since then, the Defense Department has constantly reassessed how many major combat operations we might be challenged to conduct, where such conflicts might arise, whether or how much they might overlap, what are the strategies and capabilities of potential opponents, and U.S. objectives.

These assessments have concluded that, over time, a progressively more sophisticated mix of aircraft, weapons and networking capabilities will enable us to produce needed combat power with fewer platforms. As requirements for fighter inventories have declined and F-22 program costs have risen, the department imposed a funding cap and in December 2004 approved a program of 183 aircraft.

Much has been made of the cost over-runs in the F-22 program, and there is some truth to those complaints.  Of course, they have been exaggerated in recent years since manufacturing planes is a volume business, and the average cost per plane drops significantly as you increase volume and speed delivery.

It may seem strange to wax nostalgic for a super-sonic aircraft, but I remember the F-22 fondly.  When I was in high school, I read Aviation Weekly regularly as one of the requirements for my high school debate research (the topic for the year was space exploration).  I remember at the time the race between the F-21 and F-22: competing prototypes for a new air superiority fighter that would line up against the latest generation MiG fighters from the USSR, and which would be able to deliver Mach 2.0+ speeds without afterburners and with low radar reflection.

It was post-1987, so already the era of disillusionment with the ridiculous mediocrity of the US space program had set in.  But warplanes were still an area of rapid technological advancement, and raw engineering wonder.  It was pre-1991, so the cold war was still there to propel investment in military technology.

The F-22 won the contest, of course.  As fate would have it, about the same time, the USSR lost the contest.  Almost immediately, the plane and the program were caught in an ongoing battle for existence – a battle that lasted almost twenty years.

There are good arguments by better informed people on the merits and liabilities of the F-22 program.  Right now, I’m not really interested in discussing them.

Instead, I want to take a moment to contemplate the wonder and excitement that aerospace used to hold for me and a generation of kids.  A time when the space program was filled with the best and the brightest, and when the best engineers devoted themselves to conquering air and space.

In truth, that time pre-dated me.  But I still felt the echoes of it in the late 1980s.  I was an intern at NASA Ames in 1990-1.  I dreamed of a robust space program, and limitless advancement in aerospace.

The F-22 was my desktop picture for the better part of the 1990s for goodness sake.

Of course, the much less impressive F-35 joint strike fighter program will continue.  And spurred by Space-X and the private sector, there may even be some signs of life in the US Space Program, particularly once we get rid of the generational vacuum that was the Space Shuttle.  The Orion may yet fly, and we may yet have a base on the moon, and land men on Mars.  Twenty years later than I had hoped, but better late than never, I suppose.

A moment of silence tonight, however, for the F-22.  A truly beautiful aircraft.

It’s a tough job market this year, particularly for newly graduating college students and graduate students.

At LinkedIn, we work every day to help professionals leverage their two most important assets, their reputation and their relationships, to make them more productive.  Getting that first full time position can be hard, so we’ve put together a new mini-site for new graduates called the ‘09 Grad Guide.

Check it out, we have a version for college grads and graduate students.

Please feel free to forward to friends and family who are graduating this year.  We’re hoping it will help the hundreds of thousands of new graudates this year find their first dream job, and begin their careers.

If you have not been following the latest Twitter drama, I thought I’d share it briefly here on this blog.

Meet Connor Riley.  She seems like a nice enough young woman, going to UC Berkeley.  Her personal student website is online, including her resume.  After all, she is looking for a job.

Good news!  She landed an offer from Cisco, one of the few big tech companies hiring these days.

Unfortunately, she sent out a message on Twitter that was captured as follows:

She apparently didn’t understand that by default, everyone can see  you tweet.  Needless to say, someone at Cisco saw this tweet (likely from a saved search or TweetDeck stream for “Cisco”) and responded as follows:

Thus, the “Cisco Fatty” incident was born.   Amazing stream – you can see the Twitter search here.  The drama.  The intrigue.  A couple articles:

• How to lose your job in 140 characters or less
• Twitter Search: Not your friend if you tweet something bad

Connor actually posted a response on her personal site.  It’s not much, but here’s a sample:

Sometimes in the course of applying for a job, it becomes apparent that it’s a job you don’t want to do. I declined one such job early on Tuesday, and then, because I live at some distance from many of my close friends, I decided to use Twitter to tell them about what I had been thinking.

Let me tell you about how I use Twitter: I have 45 friends. I know all of them. They know me. 95% of them have lived in a dorm or a house with me. I practically can’t offend them, although sometimes I try.

So one checkbox stood between my using Twitter correctly to suit my needs and my using Twitter in a way that would make @timmylevad start baying for my head.

It’s not really that compelling.  Still, I found myself thinking about a few things:

1. Get used to “Bad Tweet” stories. We’ve heard a few “bad tweet” stories before (remember the “Memphis” incident?).  And we’ll hear more.  It’s the new, hot social medium, and these stories will take on a life of their own.
2. The bad economy affects reactions. This would be one of those classic schadenfreude stories, except that with the economy where it is, people are particularly indignant at anyone who would flaunt and dismiss a great job at a great company like Cisco.  It’s overstating the case, but in some ways, this taps into anger the same way the AIG bonuses do.  This is just a Gen Y, techie version.
3. Twitter seems private, but is public. There are least two very clever aspects to Twitter that have helped its member and usage growth.  The first is being designed, from the ground up, to separate “following” from “follower”.  Who you see is kept separate from who sees you.  The second, however, is a play on privacy.  Twitter feels private, and the interface leads you to believe that only the people following you can see your tweets.  However, in reality, everyone can see everyone else’s tweets by default.  The advent of realtime search streams has only made this more obvious.

People use Twitter like its a new, better form of group chat… but it isn’t.  These messages don’t just go to friends and family on your buddy list.  These updates don’t go only to your connections. And until the interface changes to suggest to people that their tweets are public, we’re going to see more and more people make the same mistake that Connor did.

This is a note I meant to post over a week ago, but didn’t get around to it.

The question is, would you pay $12.99 for 5 hours of Facebook?

The reason I ask is, until a couple weeks ago, I would have assumed the answer was no.  Facebook has become the latest in a line of great, free internet products.  It flows open and free, like a trillion pages of Niagara Falls, unimpeded by usage charges.

Then I flew Virgin America to JFK & back.  5-6 hours each way.  And the flights had Wi-Fi.

(The Wi-Fi was fantastic, by the way.  I got a phenomenal amount of work done on the plane, and having live access to email and the web was incredibly useful.  Having realtime access to Twitter wasn’t as useful, but certainly was fun.  I also saw some funny behavior patterns – like people watching live sports on the laptops while their seat-back television was on CNN or CNBC.  Anyway, I digress…)

For $12.99 you got wi-fi… for about 5 hours.  Worth the cost most likely to make the flight productive for work, especially compared to an $8 snack pack.

Next to me on the plan was a woman, likely 20-25 years of age.  As soon as we were allowed to use our laptops, she flipped hers open, paid the $12.99… and went to Facebook.

I was sitting one seat away from her, so I could see what she was doing.  She spent about 3 hours on Facebook, with a small amount of miscellaneous web surfing mixed in.  But it was almost all Facebook.

It was interesting to me, because the economics of Facebook have been fodder for discussion in the Valley for a couple of years now.  And here I was, watching someone pay $12.99 for Facebook.

It then occurred to me how much money the “dumb pipes” of the internet are really making.  How many people upgrade their internet service to broadband because they want to make YouTube faster?  How many people are effectively paying the service providers to access content created by others?  How many people pay charges for internet service at hotels, airports, coffee shops?  To wireless providers, cable providers, satellite providers, phone providers?

It’s an interesting counter-balance to the argument that the service providers give for bandwidth throttling and other pricing power maneuvers.  They would still argue they aren’t getting enough of the pie.

Still, I’m pretty sure that Facebook got 0% of that $12.99.

Makes you realize why AOL actually worked back in the day.  You know, in simpler times.

I normally don’t comment on politics here, but wanted to share a couple thoughts I had about the recent churn and furor over the $165M in bonuses paid out to approximately 370 employees in the AIG financial products division.  As everyone now knows, this is the same division that apparently ended up with such large unhedged exposure that it required $170B of US government “investment” to prevent global economic collapse.

Now that’s chutzpa.  World record chutzpa.

Obama is pushing hard to get this reversed.  Trouble is, the contracts were signed before the bailout, and Connecticut actually has a law that requires double payment of withheld compensation.  Way to go, worker protection laws.  A couple thoughts:

1. Avoid Bankruptcy at your own peril.  Our legal & financial system is like a giant, complex distributed system.  As anyone who works on distributed systems knows, common definitions and patterns are essential.  We have a pattern that’s been built over more than a hundred years for having debts greater than ability to pay.  It’s called bankruptcy.

   The problem is, AIG never went bankrupt.  That means all of the common agreements and assumptions, both written and unwritten, about failed businesses no longer apply.  In a bankrupt company, all debts are subject to negotiation, including wages and compensation.  Every state is different, but the lattitude to control the existence of prior contracts is huge.  By not letting AIG go bankrupt, we’ve probably actually limited the number of options we have in this and thousands of other situations tremendously, because there isn’t a hundred+ years of legal precedent for businesses that “should have failed but didn’t because of US government investment”.  Nope.  None.  As a result, a lot of laws that apply to companies that don’t go bankrupt apply here.

   This should be a giant warning flag to anyone who thinks keeping the auto companies in pseudo-bankruptcy is a good idea.  (They themselves are beginning to realize that negotiations with creditors, suppliers, distributors and the UAW are very complicated when you can’t invalidate contracts…)

2. Sunshine may be the best disinfectant. I’ve heard a variety of proposals on this topic, ranging from the fatalistic (you can’t take the money back) to the extreme (we’ll fire anyone who takes the bonus.)  I’m skeptical that the latter really has teeth (Here.  Take $3M.  Don’t come back!), and I’m concerned the former declares defeat.

   Here is a middle proposal.  Publicity.  Cuomo is right on this one.  Give in to the subpoena. Publicly list the name of every single employee of AIG that receives a bonus over $5000 this year.  Name, Title, City, State.  Give them the option of declining the bonus, or appearing on the list.

   In this economy, with this attention from the public and the government, that list is one place I wouldn’t want my name to be.  It would follow you forever, and that’s assuming the government doesn’t directly target you.

Just a thought.  It might be naive, and I’m not sure of the legality of putting names on a list like that where a lynch mob might literally come out with torches and pitchforks.  But it’s a thought.

Got the graphic from CNET.  They have some details about the event:

Apple distributed invitations Thursday for a March 17 special event in Cupertino, Calif., to discuss the iPhone 3.0 software and a new software development kit.

Next Tuesday’s event will come a little more than a year after Apple unveiled the original SDK at the iPhone 2.0 software event, setting the stage for over 25,000 iPhone applications to make their way onto the App Store. Speculation about a new iPhone had mostly centered on new hardware features, rather than software upgrades, but it seems Apple has something up its sleeve.

Hoping to see OS-level support for some missing basics:

• Clipboard (cut & paste)
• Background processing (some form of mult-tasking where apps can receive updates even when they aren’t front-most)

I’m wondering if we’ll see any significant hardware enhancements or new models announced.  The iPhone currently drives developers to really focus on a single screen size… would be nice to see more robust handling for multiple sizes/shapes to give more flexibility to hardware in the future.  It’s not that you can’t make resolution-independent applications today – you can.   It’s just not encouraged or optimal.

MegaPhone?

Caught this news today – rumors of Apple ordering a large number of ten-inch touchscreens from the same provider of iPhone screens:

Apple Orders Touch Screens for Q3

I hope its true.  I’ve realized that my iPhone has really become my preferred portable computing device.  I’ve gotten very used to the swipes, the pokes, the pinches.  I’ve grown to appreciate and need the fluid animation, the transparency, the flow of the interface.  I believe I now prefer the iPhone interface to Mac OS X, and that’s saying a lot.

My iPhone is about Twitter (Tweetie is my client of choice), LinkedIn, Mail (Exchange integration gets me work email so much better than Outlook Web Access), and of course, the web.  The endless supply of applications doesn’t hurt either.

I realized a few months ago that, while I still have a large Mac Pro tower at home for heavy lifting, more often than not when I’m hope I just want a bigger iPhone.  On the go, I’m happy to have something that fits in my pocket.  At home, I’d like to have something bigger when I’m sitting at the table, on the couch, etc.  My wife has a MacBook today, and I tend to use it around the house for a lightweight machine.  But more and more, I find myself preferring my iPhone to the MacBook.  I just wish it was bigger.

All the rumors last year were about the “iPhone Nano”.  The analogy was simple, even if misnamed.  Apple initially launched the iPod with a larger device and a hard drive.  But they hit scale with a cheaper iPod Mini, and then, of course, the iPod Nano, which hit $99 and unprecedented unit sales.

Well, I don’t want an iPhone Nano.  I want a big iPhone, 4x the size, same operating system, applications, etc.  Just bigger.  Maybe boost the storage too, so I can fit larger resolution video on it as well.  I want a MegaPhone.

In fact, calling it a phone is a misnomer.  While I wouldn’t mind the ability to make a call from the device, I think what I’m really saying is I want a jumbo-sized iPod Touch.  The MegaPod Touch?

Caught this article yesterday on the new 2009 Lincoln pennies:

2009 Lincoln Penny Mania

A quick review of recently completed eBay auctions shows unmarked rolls selling for $30 to $50 each. Single pennies have sold for $2 to $4 each. Rolls with a Lincoln postage stamp and cancellation from the first day of issue at Hogdenville, Kentucky have sold for over $200. Most astoundingly, a single 2009-P Lincoln Cent graded NGC MS66RD and attributed “First Day of Issue” has sold for $400.

View the current eBay auctions.

It’s truly bizzare.  $0.50 rolls of the new Lincoln pennies are going for $30-$50 on eBay.  That’s insane.  We’re talking about a coin that will be minted in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, this year.

What I would love to do is to “short” these rolls – effectively presell them at this price, collect money now, and then send the rolls in a few months when you’ll be able to source them at less than $1/roll.

Unfortunately, that violates eBay policy. It’s for good reason, since short selling actual inventory is hard to distinguish from a scam transaction.  After all, how do you know the seller will make good on the future delivery?  What is the recourse for the buyer?

The lack of short selling, however, means that temporary supply/demand imbalances like this lead to effective price gouging for buyers who assume the eBay price is “fair”.  It’s certainly fair for the moment, but the expected ROI on this purchase for the collector is likely to be disasterous.

Still, I wouldn’t mind the ability to short sell a few hundred rolls.  If you have access to a bank that actually has these rolls, you’d be a fool not to put them up on eBay quickly, before the prices settle down.  Do I have any readers in Kentucky?  If so, can you pick me up a box?

Read this news today with great interest:

Apple, EMI unveil iTunes Pass

Apple has just launched a new service called Pass for its popular iTunes music store.  It’s like a season pass for a favorite artist, in this case the electro band Depeche Mode…  Before thinking this is Apple’s entree into the music subscription business, which is something Steve Jobs has pooh-poohed in the past, note that iTunes Pass is quite different.

Under an all-you-can eat music subscription plan at a place such as Rhapsody, you have access to the material only as long as you keep paying a fee. With iTunes Pass, you own the content that has been downloaded, even after the pass expires.

I’ve written a bit about this in the past, but it’s shocking to see Apple so close, and yet so far, from what might be a truly disruptive innovation in digital television.

The iTunes Pass is the right idea, but the wrong market.  We don’t need this for music, we need this for digital television & movies.

When Apple launched Apple TV, it highlighted the ability to subscribe to a season of television.  The idea was you pay a fee up front, and then as episodes of that show come out, they would automatically download to your iTunes (and then synch with your AppleTV), allowing you to watch a show with both digital convenience and without waiting until the end of the season to buy a DVD.  This was a great concept for a few reasons:

1. Ability to easily “catch up” with a season/show that was already underway.  This is a very common problem, particularly with serial shows where you miss the first few episodes before friends/news reaches you with a recommendation.  (This is the reason I didn’t get to watch 24 in real time until Season 3…)
2. Ability to “own” the shows permanently – not a transient state like a traditional DVR.
3. Ability to watch on TV.  Let’s face it, that’s where you want to watch the show, not on your PC.
4. Automatic download, in the background.  Shows would be waiting for you as they appeared.

The problems, however, with the execution were equally significant:

1. Lack of seasons.  For many shows, Apple provided the current season, but not previous seasons.  Thus, if you wanted to watch “Lost”, you couldn’t “catch up” with Seasons 1 & 2.
2. Timeliness.  Next day would have been OK, and in the beginning that was the plan.  In reality, some shows would show up days or weeks later.  Ideally, the download would literally begin at the official showtime EST in the US.
3. Pricing.  They used DVD pricing, which frankly is just ridiculous.  The idea that you’d reasonably pay $30-$50 for a season of TV that can be had through traditional distribution channels for free makes sense in the historical model of buying specific shows/seasons in low volume, but isn’t a mass market play for general television consumption.  If in a given season (Winter 2009) I’m watching 6-8 shows, there is no way you are going to get $200+ out of me for the privilege unless you 100% substitute for my cable bill.

The pricing issue in particular led me to a hypothetical model that could potentially benefit both Apple & the networks by disintermediating the traditional cable/sattelite duopoly.  Basically, every network could attempt to become “HBO”.  HBO pioneered the idea of a premium channel – an extra monthly charge you’d pay for unlimited access to content.  Thanks to the VCR, that also included the ability to “time shift” that content for your own use.

On iTunes, NBC could be as valuable as HBO.   Imagine an iTunes Pass where, for a monthly fee, you could subscribe to The Office.  You would automatically get new episodes as they come out, as well as download old episodes (like a podcast).  These would all be watchable on AppleTV, as well as your iPhone.  That’s something worth paying for.

Now imagine that for a monthly subscription fee, you could actually do that with any NBC show.  The Office.  My Name is Earl.  ER.  30 Rock.   Whatever you want.  You would become an “NBC subscriber”.  NBC would have a premium revenue stream, and would then focus on providing high quality content to lure in new subscribers, and to keep existing subscribers.  They would also have their own “distribution channel” within iTunes – they could now launch new shows and pilots for a fraction of the cost & risk by delivering them to people automatically, and making the marginal cost of subscribing to a new show effectively zero for the user.  Sunk cost.

Subscribing to a network could be an upsell from an individual hit show.  Subscribe to The Office for $5/month.  Or subscribe to all of NBC for $10/month.  Network families could offer the same bundle of channels to individuals that they currently offer to the cable & sattelite companies.  Get the entire family of NBC channels for $15/month.

There is likely some price in that ballpark where NBC would be agnostic between someone watching them on cable vs. subscribing on iTunes.

Per-show pricing doesn’t get you scale.  But owning a customer relationship as a network is incredibly valuable.  These subscriptions could also be platform agnostic long term – no reason you can’t have versions that support Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, etc.

People already are beginning to question their premium movie-channel cable subscriptions in favor of Netflix/Blockbuster service.  Network subscriptions could substitute for the primary cable bill.

Right now, I watch shows on Fox, NBC, ABC, HBO, SCIFI & FX.   There is a price where I’d gladly shift over to a digital subscription to get the benefits of the content combined with the benefits of professional, digital files that I could watch anywhere, anytime (time shifting & location shifting).

The thing that I love about this model is that, from a games theory perspective, there is significant value to the first “defector” – the network that moves to this pricing model first.  For example, if HBO offered this service through iTunes, I’d subscribe immediately.  Obviously, the cable & sattelite companies would fight this tooth & nail – but I’m not sure they have a leg to stand on in preventing this.  After all, Comcast can’t prevent NBC from offering channels to DirecTV, etc.

It’s still fascinating to me how many insights I gain from the traffic to my own personal blog.

Today, I checked my stats briefly and noticed something really strange: my post about eBay Express, A Eulogy for eBay Express, had jumped with a vengence to the number one post on the blog.  My overall traffic spiked a bit too.  A little strange for a post that is over 6 months old.

Perusing my top referring sites, I saw one obvious culprit: eBay Strategies.  Scot Wingo has a new post up entitled Episode IV – How to fix eBay (you are here) – A NEW HOPE – Introducing eBay 2.0. It’s a long post, but there are a couple of paragraphs in it that point directly to my last eBay Express post:

You may recall an experiment eBay had called eBay Express where they tried to extend the brand with a different fixed-price site, but failed.  Ex-eBayer, Adam Nash had a great eulogy and behind-the-scenes view of what happened that I recommend everyone read to see his perspective.

I always likened eBay Express to diet donuts.  It just isn’t an extension and you are admitting that, well, if you have an eBay express, that makes eBay – what- eBay slow and poky?  There were other problems too that Adam details, like they didn’t send it any traffic and small things like that.  Also the way the inventory worked was all jacked-up, it was a sub-set of fixed-price items on eBay (what?!).  I’ve read all of Adams thoughts on eBay Express and chatted with him before on what eBay’s doing wrong/right and many of his ideas have found their way into eBay 2.0. (BTW, eBay needs to get this guy back.)

OK, it’s hard not to find that last line flattering.

Scot’s post is fairly long and detailed, and while I don’t agree with everything in the article, I did find all the talk of “New Coke” amusing in one sense.  You see, Malcom Gladwell’s book Blink had just been released when we kicked off the eBay Express concept efforts.  As a result, one of the specific guiding statements for the project was: “Don’t build New Coke.”  As I mentioned in my original post, one of our key goals for eBay Express was to NOT change the original eBay, but instead focus our efforts on a new site in order to protect what buyers & sellers loved about eBay.com.  Our analogy was, in fact, Diet Coke, which is not totally surprising given that I have an entire category for Diet Coke-related posts on this blog…

Still, the branding point around the name “eBay Express” is fair, and as I mentioned previously, branding was one of the obvious mistakes made in retrospect.

In any case, a little more snooping and I discovered that while eBay Strategies was the source of some of the new traffic, even more traffic was being sourced from the Seeking Alpha distribution of the article.  I’ve been an active reader of Seeking Alpha as an investment site for years, and I’ve noticed their recent push for sourcing content from any major blogger.  However, this is some real evidence that bloggers who leverage Seeking Alpha are likely seeing significant boosts in distribution.

I wonder if I have any posts that are Seeking Alpha worthy… I’ll have to think about experimenting with them at some point.  I’ve actually been cited in Seeking Alpha posts before, but typically with pointers to my articles on investing in Timber as an asset class…

I’m sharing this fix with the world, so that others need not live my pain.

Last night, I returned from Lake Tahoe with 451 beautiful shots of our family snow trip, all taken with my Canon 40D SLR.  Each shot was captured in both large format JPG and RAW format.

Unfortunately, after loading all my images into iPhoto ‘09, I ran into a real problem:

When I double-clicked any of the JPG files to edit/view them, they displayed a purely black screen.  It was strange because the thumbnails were fine, the RAW files were fine, and when I opened the JPG files in Photoshop CS3, they were fine.

There was no way around it.  Relaunching iPhoto did not help.  Rebuilding the library did not help.  Rebuilding thumbnails did not help.  Reloading the images from the compact flash card did not help.

I shuddered to think about the wisdom of upgrading to iPhoto ‘09.  After all, at least iPhoto ‘08 could display JPG files.  My only hope: the Canon 40D is a popular camera, and has been out for a while.  This must be a solved issue.

My searches on Google turned up a few articles and discussions, but nothing convincing.  Some threads on the Apple Discussion forums.  A post or two on other Mac sites.

Fortunately, I found the answer.  But let me first tell you what it wasn’t:

• It wasn’t the PowerPC (I have an Intel-based Mac Pro)
• It wasn’t file size
• It wasn’t iPhoto ‘09
• It wasn’t the Canon 40D

Unfortunately, several sites fingered these things as culprits.  All wild goose chases.

Here is what it was:

• A corrupted install of Mac OS X 10.5.6

Hard to believe, but the auto-update I had done just before leaving for vacation was the culprit.  Thanks to one tip, I downloaded the full combo installer for the Mac OS X 10.5.6 Upgrade from Apple.

A full re-install of the update, a reboot, and all was well.

I hope this tip finds someone out there in good stead.  Seeing your precious photos reduced to a black screen is frightening to the core, even if you know the photo files themselves are not corrupted.

Last year, I had the opportunity to speak at the PDMA International 2008 conference in Orlando, FL.  I gave a talk entitled:

“Building a World Class Web 2.0 Product Organization”

While I posted this presentation to Slideshare and on my LinkedIn profile, it turns out I never actually posted it here on this blog.

Christina Wodtke, author of Elegant Hack and a Principal at LinkedIn, gave a talk this week on Product Management and borrowed a few of my slides.  As a result of that talk, I saw this blog post, about the definition of a product manager, come through my Google Alerts today.

For those of you who’ve worked with me, it’s a classic “Adam Nash slide“.  The tell-tale sign is the use of simple geometric shapes, typically in pastel colors.  (I’m not proud of my limited PowerPoint skills.  In fact, you could say I’m proud that I don’t have advanced PowerPoint skills.)

Anyway, I’m glad to see that the content was useful/interesting for both Christina and her audience.  It was also a great reminder to post the deck here too for anyone who is interested.

BTW The second edition of Christina’s book on information architecture is now available on Amazon.  You might want to check it out.

Interesting milestone this week.  My very first patent granted.

USPTO: Patent #7,490,056

• Filed: November, 2004
• Granted: February 10, 2009

Ironically, I wouldn’t have known about it except for a promotion catalog I got in the mail today with a list of plaques I could buy to commemorate this patent from some souvenir company in Florida.  Yes, I know.  Weird.

This was the first of several patent applications I submitted while at eBay.  This particular application surrounded the logic and algorithm around assessing popularity for e-commerce listings based on “following” behavior, aka “Watch” in eBay terms.

Yes, this was the “Most Watched” patent, from the debut of eBay Pulse.  (Sadly, it looks like the patent office has actually moved faster approving this patent than eBay has updating eBay Pulse since that 2004 launch.)

There is a lot I could comment on here about the USPTO, the dubious nature of software patents, the length of time, etc.  Normally, I’d go on at length about some of these issues.

Instead, however, I’ll just note that it’s a somewhat sentimental moment for me, because I always remember hearing about how my late grandfather had filed an important patent on his path to business success.

This news is from tomorrow’s New York Times:

Scientists in Germany Draft Neanderthal Genome

It’s about 63% complete at this point.  We live in magical times, scientifically.  Unbelievable.

Some nice tidbits from the article:

The Neanderthal genome, when fully analyzed, is expected to shed light on many critical aspects of human evolution. It will help document two important sets of genetic changes: those that occurred between 5.7 million years ago, when the human line split from the line leading to chimpanzees, and 300,000 years ago, when Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans parted ways; and second, the changes in the human line after it diverged from Neanderthals.

An early inference that can be drawn from the new findings, which were announced Thursday in Leipzig, Germany, is that there is no significant trace of Neanderthal genes in modern humans. This confounds the speculation that modern humans could have interbred with Neanderthals, thus benefiting from the genes that adapted the Neanderthals to the cold climate that prevailed in Europe in last ice age, which ended 10,000 years ago. Researchers have not ascertained if human genes entered the Neanderthal population.

Unfortunate for me – I had long been in the camp that speculated that Neanderthals weren’t actually a true species by the definition of inter-breeding.  I had expected that we’d discover some genetic evidence of interbreeding.

We’re in such early days of understanding our genome, it may be hard to appreciate how the advances in information science and genomics will profounding affect our understanding of species, both current & extinct.

I’m going to be on the lookout for more formal academic writings on this research.  A little surprised to see this come out today, instead of Tuesday, which is the official “Science Times” day…

It’s been about a year since my last post on the Kindle, and sadly, nothing has really changed.  I still see the device as popular among my more venture-savvy friends and colleagues, particularly if they travel frequently.  Overall, however, I find the prospect fairly uncompelling.

To restate my comments from a year ago:

I think the problem is that I’m emotionally attached to my library. I surround myself with my books. They remind me of what I’ve read, and even in some cases, who I was when I read them.

Unfortunately, while I’d love to flip through some of them more frequently, the physical form gets in the way. I know I would love to have all my books in electronic form, the same way that I have my CD library now on my iPod, or my DVD library on my AppleTV/Mac Mini.

I still feel like Amazon is not really pushing to convert book readers to digital.  However, there is a program I could get behind:

Let me send you my books. Yes, my physical books. When I send you them, give me download access to the e-book form, for my Kindle. Let me trade you my paper for electrons, in high quality form.

This is the same strategy that retailers like EB Games has been able to use to bring life back into video game retailing.  Set up a volume program to receive used books, and either resell them or donate them to recoup fractional costs.  Effectively subsidize the transition from paper to digital for readers who have large collections.  In fact, they could likely turn it into a phenomenal charity program, providing millions of books to needy libraries and schools around the country.

Once they have a majority of their works in digital form, the advantage of the Kindle takes over.  Incremental sales will be purely digital, and you’ll lock those readers into your format.

Sure, Amazon would need to negotiate some sort of “bulk rate” with publishers to effectively re-license the books to readers.  But if publishers are smart, they’ll realize that the likelihood of selling someone a digital copy of something they already own in print is close to zero.  In fact, the net dollars from such a program could actually even help justify better economics on the cost of the Kindle itself.

One of the things that has always impressed me about Amazon is their willingness to look past short-term financials toward long term strategic advantage and user needs.  I think that’s why I still believe that Amazon could be the type of company to make this type of program a reality.   If they don’t do it, however, I wonder if Google just might.

Let’s see if I have to write this post again in 2010.

Quick post to highlight the launch of LinkedIn in German last night:

LinkedIn Blog: Nächste Haltestelle: Deutsch

Great work to Nico & the whole team on this next milestone for LinkedIn.  I’m really enjoying the launch video that the team put together:

I’ve been reading (thank you, Google Translate) some of the local coverage about the launch.  I have to admit, TechCrunch gets a special nod that I give to any blog post that references Fight Club well.

Truth be told, I think Kevin summarized our motivation best in the opening of his blog post:

With increasing international travel and interaction, we know how critical communication is to commerce. And while English is used in parts of the world, many of us would like the option to do business in our native language.

We’re excited about this launch because it represents the first step in our process of learning more directly from our German users what features and functionality they find most useful.  We continue to believe that leveraging your professional reputation and your professional network is the best way to make professionals more productive, worldwide.

Great post today on Guy Kawasaki’s blog:

Ten Ways to Find a Job Using LinkedIn

It’s a very timely post because I find that, even among my fairly young and tech-savvy friends, people still have trouble imagining how to best leverage their professional network online to help them with their job search.  Too often, people think of social networks as just an online roladex or messaging client.  They don’t realize that while there is great advantage in keeping up with your connections, the true transformative power is the ability to look past the people you know directly to explore options in your broader network.

Here is a quote from the article:

Searching for a job can suck if you constrain yourself to the typical tools such as online jobs boards, trade publications, CraigsList, and networking with only your close friends. In these kinds of times, you need to use all the weapons that you can, and one that many people don’t—or at least don’t use to the fullest extent, is LinkedIn.

I won’t paraphrase the entire article here – it’s worth reading directly. But it is worth noting the three steps that I highly recommend, regardless of whether you are looking for a job or not:

1. Be found. It’s almost criminal to leave your LinkedIn profile unfinished.  Think of it as search optimization, but not for a website – for you.  The more positions you list, education you cite, and skills you highlight, the more likely it is that the right people will find you.  It’s not hard – in fact, if you have a resume handy from your last job search, you can fill in a profile typically with a few minutes of cut & paste.   Most people are shocked to find out how many great opportunities find them once they fill out their professional profile.  Don’t let them have all fun.
2. Get your network online. Your network is one of your most valuable assets, but it does little good for you offline.  Upload your addressbook, invite the people you want to connect with, and get connected.  Most people don’t realize that having your network online means that you can now use it as a personalized search engine for both who and what you know.  That’s why, by the way, you only want to connect with people you actually know.  It’s no good finding out you are one degree away from the company of your dreams, if that connection doesn’t know you from Adam (pardon the expression).  Worse, that false connection can even “crowd out” a real connection to that company in the LinkedIn search engine.  Your relationships are the heart of social relevance – use them.
3. SEARCH! You’d think that after a decade of Google people would get this, but it’s amazing to watch the light go on once they search for something other than a name.  Interested in working for clean tech?  Try searching for it.  Search the company directory on LinkedIn.  Find companies in your favorite industry, in your favorite city.  Then search your network (”People Search”) for that company name.  If you’ve done steps 1 & 2, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what a small world it is.  If you are looking for a job, and you aren’t spending hours a day on LinkedIn, chances are it’s because you haven’t discovered the power of people search.

Hope this helps people out there who want to get started.  We’ll be posting more helpful tips on the LinkedIn blog as the weeks go by as well.  We’re all hoping that LinkedIn can be a real force for good in 2009, helping people find the right job in a very tough market.

Update (02/03/2009): This post was popular enough that we’ve actually created an updated version for the official LinkedIn blog.  Check it out.

This is actually news from last week, but Google announced that they are repricing their employee stock options.

John Batelle has fairly representative coverage on his blog.  His post cites coverage from Adam Lashinsky at Fortune (a personal favorite as a journalist) with a fairly typical dig on the issue.  Here’s the actual quote:

One last item of note. Google is offering employees the opportunity to exchange underwater stock options for newly priced options due to the stock price having been hammered. (The only catch in the exchange is that employees will have to wait an additional 12 months before selling re-priced options.) The stock price is  currently around $300, compared with $700 in late 2007. The number of shares eligible for exchange is about 3% of the shares outstanding, and the exchange will result in a charge to earnings of $460 million over a five-year period.

One must re-phrase this last bit in English: Google is transferring almost half a billion dollars in wealth from shareholders to employees, and for what ….? Motivation and retention, says Google. This a well known farce, as old as the Valley, which tells itself first that it offers generous stock options as a form of incentive and then, when share prices plummet, moves the ball so its employees, whose incentives apparently didn’t work (as if the stock price were under their control) can be re-incentivized. Retention? Would someone please tell me where the average Google employee is going to go right now?

To be clear, there have always been people who have a significant problem with employee stock option repricing, and with good reason.  Theoretically, options are supposed to align employee interests with shareholders.  In an ideal world, the employee wins if the shareholders win.   Repricing, therefore, breaks this model, because, after all, no one reprices the shares purchased by outside shareholders when the stock tanks.

Somewhere in the post-2000 bubble hangover, this criticism went from being a common argument to conventional wisdom.  Accounting standards were changed to require the expensing of employee stock options, and stock option repricing became largely verboten.

I rarely see anyone in the financial press explaining anymore why, in fact, there are very good arguments for stock option repricing.  So, I’m going to take a quick crack at it here.  Even if you disagree, it does a disservice to not reflect both sides of the argument fairly.

First, and foremost, it’s important to note that, while options are intended to help align employee interests with shareholders, stock options, in fact, do not do this in all situations.  The problem is the inflection point in the curve.

This is a simple chart that shows the intrinsic value to an employee of a stock option with a strike price of 50 at different stock prices.  Notice the blue line, which is stock, actually reflects a 1:1 ratio of value.  If the stock is worth $10, the employee gets $10, etc.  For the stock option, however, there is a “break” in the line.  Below $50, the employee gets $0.  Above $50, the employee gets $1 for every $1 of stock price increase.

In general, employee stock options are granted at the strike price of the stock roughly on the date that they join.  So, the assumption is, this aligns the employee with gains after they join.  In theory, it’s even better than stock, because if the stock drops, they get no value for gains made before the date of their join.

This sounds good in theory, but we know that it has real problems, on both the upside and the downside.

On the upside, most stocks go up every year.  (Yes, I know.  In 2009, it’s hard to remember that.)  If the stock market itself goes up 7% every year, then an employee will see real returns on their stock options for just “matching the average”.  In fact, they can actually see real material gains over long periods even by underperforming their benchmark index.

However, since shareholders also enjoy that benefit, it tends to only get complaints when you see incredible gains by executives with huge option packages.   No one likes to see an outsized pay package for undersized performance.

On the downside, however, the problem is much more severe.  Let’s say our stock example from above drops to $25, a price that the company hasn’t been at for 3 years.  The good news is that shareholder alignment works, to a point, as advertised.  Not only are shareholder gains for the last 3 years wiped out, but so are the option grants for employees who joined in the last 3 years, and even any other employees who received grants in the past 3 years.

That part seems fine… at first.

Where does the company go from here?  Now we need to talk about the principle of sunk cost.  Sunk costs are costs that cannot be recovered, and therefore should be ignored when making future investment decisions.  (More rigorous explanation on Wikipedia).  For stocks, it’s important to remember the stock market does not care what you paid for a stock.  It has no memory.  The question for a shareholder (barring external effects like taxes, etc) is purely where you think the stock will go from here.

But now we see that the employee is no longer aligned with the shareholder!  From $25, most shareholders would love to see a gain of 20%, which would take the stock to $30.  But for employees, a $30 share price and a $25 share price mean the same thing:  $0.

Worse, if employees leave the company, and get a job at a new company, they will get option prices at today’s stock price.  In fact, if the employee quits the company, and then is rehired back, they would actually get their options priced at today’s stock price.

In a world of at-will employment, this is a big problem.  True, as Adam Lashinsky pokes at, most employees won’t be able to find a new job so fast.  But many of the good ones can.  And they will.  Because your competitor can actually come in with in a simple, fair market offer for the employee, and beat your implicit offer of zero.  Even if they don’t do it today, these problems tend to persist for long periods of time, and employees have long memories.  You may find that your best talent starts leaving, and then you get snowball effects because great talent is hyper-aware when other talent leaves.

So what is a company to do?

In a perfect world, the company would have a very tight and accurate evaluation of their best talent, and would target “retention compensation” proportionally to their people based on their value.  This would both minimize the risk of flight, and would also help “re-align incentives” for the gains going forward.

Unfortunately, the mechanics and accounting of repricing makes this fairly prohibitive.   As a result, it tends to be an all-or-nothing option.

The truth is, repricing stock options can be one of the best things to realign employee incentives going forward.  It resets the vesting period, basically treating employees like new employees.  The employees do not get to go back in time and recover their equity compensation for the past three years.  The new vesting period basically wipes out the history.  They literally no longer own the rights to the shares – they have to re-earn them.  In fact, if the employee quits the next day, they will take no stock with them, even if they worked for the company for three years.

As a result, stock option repricing actually re-aligns employees more closely with shareholders than nay-sayers give credit for.

Last thoughts

While I am explaining the reasons why repricing stock options makes sense, there is still the significant problem of “repeat abuse”.  If employees believe all options will be repriced for all drops, then you end up with a moral hazard, where you might actually want to drive down the price, get your options repriced, and then recover easy gains.  True, the market is fairly hostile to repricing due to the accounting charge, so it’s unlikely this would happen, but it’s still a real concern.

As a result, my recommendation would actually be that companies faced with this situation actually use the opportunity to not reprice stock options, but move to actual stock-based compensation.  Both have an accounting charge, but actual stock-based compensation serves three purposes:

• The new stock grants can be better targeted to employees based on performance and value
• The new stock grants have immediate value, serving as a kind of retention bonus
• The new stock grants align the employee with shareholders going forward in both up and down markets

So while I do believe that repricing stock options gets a “bum wrap” in the financial media, I also believe that there may be potentially better compensation alternatives, particularly for public companies.

I have to say, I am completely uninterested in the inauguration “event” that is going on right now.   Then again, I’m not really into the Academy Awards either.  My guess it has something to do with the amazing amount of real work to be done, and the amazing amount of time, effort and money being thrown instead into a party in Washington D.C.

In any case, of all the inauguration coverage, so far I’ve found this piece the most interesting:

That’s right, the entire inauguration, including hand-built mini-figures of over 1000 people, including the entire Obama family.  Note, these are not the typical mini-figs – they are actually 4-inch people made of lego blocks.  Amazing.

Now that’s historic.  Thank you, LA Times.

I know I posted on this topic last week, but I thought I’d add an update after the big Battlestar Galactica debut this past Friday.  Interesting to see how frak parties everywhere translated into traffic.

So far, despite the debut on Friday, it looks like my traffic may have peaked yesterday, on Saturday.  5380 hits to the blog that day, with my most popular BSG posts taking the top 5 slots for article popularity.

Why?  Check out the top 10 referring searches from Google, Yahoo, etc:

Notice a pattern?  I’ve discovered that my blog post is the number one result in Google for the search “fifth cylon”.  At least, it is today.