kazabyte

Today, the New York Times reports on a "rare fumble" made by Google with respect to on site daycare.  An interesting read, but equally interesting is a story behind the story:

Valleywag reported this story over two weeks ago on June 16. Second, Owen certainly deserves some props/attribution -- a hat tip at least -- for breaking this story.  Yet, there is no mention.  Where's the love?  Lastly, this is just further evidence of the demise of newspaper industry and the growing relevance and importance of the blogosphere -- where's the "new" in newspapers?

Visa has launched a Facebook application for small businesses.

The first  20,000 US  businesses that download the app get $100 of advertising credits.   I'm not sure what that means.... At .2CPM, a business would get 500,000 impressions   That would be a lot of page views for a small business.

With the relationships that Visa has with local businesses, it is a giant entering the online local space.   I'm surprised this isn't huge news all over the online local blogosphere.   

Rumor Alert:

For those that follow academics:  John Ousterhout is going to Stanford!

I have immense respect for John.  He's done great stuff.

Instead of flying Southwest on a recent quick trip to the Bay Area, I decided to give Virgin America a try, even though I'm a pretty loyal Southwest flier.  For the most part, it was a more pleasant experience.

Convenience:  Virgin flies to San Francisco (SFO) not Oakland (OAK).  Because I was going to San Francisco, this was a lot more convenient.

Planes:  New planes and comfortable seats with fancy media services in the seat back -- satellite TV and games with Internet access coming.

Gates:  Very comfortable. In SEA, it's terminal A. In SFO, you fly out of the international terminal. 

Reserved seating:  On Virgin America, I could book specific seats on line in advanced.  (On Southwest, they still have the (modified) "cattle call.")

Cool Factor:  On VirginAmerica, it was a fun experience.  It was  like going to a night club or bar.  If you are going to Las Vegas, I suppose you can get the party started early.  I, however, was preparing to give a talk later in the day and I needed to get a business game face on -- so this, sadly, distracted me.

On the downside, the in flight entertainment system didn't work on my return trip  -- it was down for the entire flight.   I'm assuming they are still getting the bugs worked out.  I found it a bit disturbing that immediately on touch down (literally, when the wheels hit the tarmac), the system tried to re-boot and failed.    There's something about airplane computers failing (even though they are probably completely unrelated to the flight operations) that bother me. Maybe if they didn't display the root console on boot to the seat backs, I'd be  happy in my ignorance.









I hope they got that disk problem fixed.  At least they run Linux.

WTF? 

Macintosh-5: wget www.amazon.com
--10:46:35--  http://www.amazon.com/
           => `index.html'
Resolving www.amazon.com... 72.21.210.11
Connecting to www.amazon.com|72.21.210.11|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 503 Service Unavailable
10:46:35 ERROR 503: Service Unavailable.

I'm talking to a lot of technology entrepreneurs these days.  One question that frequently comes up is, "How do I know if my idea is good?"   While this is a difficult question to answer, invariably, my answer always includes an assessment of market size.

A good idea should address a large market -- preferably a mature industry ripe for disruption.  After all, if you are going to jump into the risky business of doing a startup, the rewards had better be commensurate with the risk.  "If it's high beta, make sure it's high reward," as Sharon Wienbar once said to me.  If the market isn't very big, there isn't much to take.  Sounds so obvious.   As a corallary, disrupting an existing large market is even better.   However, finding a large market to disrupt is often hard to find because you need to be "there" at the right time and place with the right idea.

When Ben and I started MerchantCircle, we decided to attack the local Internet and we knew our customers were going to be local merchants (not consumers).  However, it took us a few months to realize  that it was the Yellow Pages industry that we were going to disrupt.  The Yellow Pages business was/is  mature, successful, and generating  multi-billion dollars a year in advertising.  And, yet, it was clear that consumers were abandoning the phone book for the Internet.  Figuring this out was key to how we focussed the company.

Today, is it really "news" that "Telephone book companies are heading for a long slow decline?"  Well, at least it gives affirmation of our approach, a few years later.  This seems so obvious in 2008.

Nonetheless, we have yet to see a runaway winner disrupting the lucrative Yellow Pages business.  We've seen a few challengers come and go.  As the successful Yellow Pages businesses continue to grapple with their "Innovators Dilemma,"  someone will  "crack the code" in this space and send the Yellow Pages down the path of music labels and newspapers.  Hopefully, it will be MerchantCircle.

As an entrepreneur, I'm bullish on disruption -- go big and transform an existing/successful/mature industry by disrupting it.  Or go home and do something else.

Last year in January, Jim Gray sailed onto the San Francisco Bay but did not return.  Today, in Berkeley, we honor Jim.  I personally will take a moment to recognize Jim for his contributions.  He is an influential pioneer -- a legend -- in Computer Science, the Internet and the World Wide Web.  His contributions touch us all.  It's not just nerdy computer science types -- such as web developers building a MySQL application  -- that  can thank Jim for his contributions to the areas of deep stuff like transaction processing and databases. If you ever booked an airline ticket or used an ATM to get cash, you can thank Jim too.

Respectfully, I point out the poetic irony and sadness that all of our collective search efforts and queries for Jim have returned a null result.

I've been doing a bit of travel (planning) in the recent past -- here are three tidbits I've found useful.


Best Reason to Join Southwest's Rapid Rewards Program.  At SeaTac (that's Seattle Tacoma International -- SEA -- for you non-locals), Rapid Rewards members can use the priority queue reserved for "premier" travelers at the airport security check point.  On most airlines, only first/business class passengers or passengers that have elite status on a frequent flier program (i.e. you've accumulated a bizillion miles) get access to the queue.  Sign up for the Rapid Rewards program and you can avoid those long lines at security and zip straight to your gate.  It's free and you don't have to have flown any flights.

Hopefully, this feature will be extended to other airports as well.

Also, Southwest remains the best carrier for frequent travel up and down the west coast.  Low cost, flexible scheduling, and no penalties for cancellations make it the best experience for those quick trips between SFO/OAK, LAX, SEA, LAS.  And it's fast and easy to accumulate free trips once you've signed up for Rapid Rewards.



Best Use of United Mileage Plus.  I rarely fly United anymore.  Service sucks and I don't travel  SEA/SFO->NYC/BOS with regularity anymore, where United flights were convenient (Plus JetBlue and Virgin America are much better experiences for these trips.)   However, I've accumulated a lot of frequent flier miles on United.  Using miles on their Mileage Plus "saver" program, you can fly to Asia for 60,000 miles . For a mere 30,000 miles more (90,00 total) you can go business class.  Well worth it if you can find a seat.   If you can't find a seat, don't start looking for a "standard" award (which will cost you 200,000 miles).  Try booking a first class saver seat -- there's more inventory than that for business class -- and it will only cost you 120,000 miles.  In short, using frequent flier miles for business (or first) class instead of coach for international travel is a great deal.



Use Tripit.  When you book a flight online, send a copy of your booking to plans@tripit.com.  You get a master itinerary and more.   No registration at Tripit is required.

What I really like about Tripit is the "no registration" part.  You don't have to register, login, or even visit their  website.   It's a clever application design that I haven't seen anywhere else.  From an end user perspective, the friction to use Tripit is minimal.  Kudos to the team for figuring this out. 

[Caveat:  Seems like there might be some Terms of Service issues with respect to privacy since you, the end user, don't agree to anything.  Hopefully Tripit has done something reasonable here.]

We stopped by Moose's the other Friday night to catch up with Paul Boutin holding court.  I hadn't seen Paul in years.  Paul is one of my favorite writers these days.  Make that nerd-come-famous-writer. 

I met Paul when he came over from Boston fresh off of Athena.  We'd hang out at Cafe Montmartre in Palo Alto on Friday nights with Isaac.   I think Dave Lemke was his hero.  Later, I wondered if he and Steve Jobs were twins separated at birth:

















Today, there's the Bono thing, which I don't quite get but fully appreciate:




This seems to have come full circle:



























Paul, it was great seeing you.  Seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same!

After peaking at $747.25/share, Google (GOOG) closed today at $508.95.  It's been a sharp decline over the past few months, but its meteoric rise since its IPO was even more phenomenal.  If you are a Google employee that's been around for, say, 2 years or even longer,  you have vested shares that are worth real money.  Secretly, you calculate your net worth more than a few times a week.  "Holy Sh*t", you think to yourself,  "I'm worth X millions of dollars, not even counting the unvested shares." You are quite pleased and you also rationalize the latest drop as only a temporary downturn.  The stock price will jump back, you say to yourself.  After all, Google *defines* the Internet.  You work for the greatest company ever.  Yet, maybe in the back of your mind, you are a bit concerned -- should you have sold some stock yesterday?  That recent decline looks kinda like the last decline.  And, even after a 30% decline, you are still in the money.  "Might as well stick it out", you tell yourself.  So, you continue to hold out -- selling nothing or only a small amount of your shares.

Maybe you exercised some options but did not sell -- holding out for potentially long term capital gain treatment on your winnings earnings.  You weren't figuring on the decline and maybe you forgot about the AMT implications.  Maybe that worry is another trigger in your mind that you should sell.  Or, maybe you've chosen to ignore it.

You are truly blessed.  You've made a great choice to come work at Google.  You've been rewarded handsomely.  All those free meals, massages, and trips re-affirm your greatness.  And, you are among the select few that get to define the future.  It's all good, isn't it?

Maybe Google is truly a unique experience and the stock will rebound.  It's kinda hard to tell.  However, our past, the repeated boom-bust cycles in the Valley of yesteryears, says something different.  Certainly, Google's success dwarfs the successes of most all other "booms."  But, we've seen this pattern before:



















Can we say with any certainty that the bust is not coming?  For you, the happy Googler, I truly hope this is a temporary "correction" in stock price.  However, I keep thinking that maybe you should take some money "off the table" and be rewarded for your efforts, just in case.