Sunday Brunch - January 29, 2011

The links are back!

Quick new feature, every Sunday Brunch will have a Spotify link to the music that I listened to when I wrote this. This week it what an awesome mix of Ryan Adams music.

• S*it Silicon Valley Says - this is perfectly accurate and hilarious.
• Join the Flock - Twitter's awesome, bad recruiting video. When I was at Kellogg, Dick Costollo, now the CEO of Twitter, would speak to some of my classes and even went out to dinner with a bunch of us. At the time, he was CEO of Feedburner, a small but important RSS technology company in Chicago. He was super smart and very funny in a dry way. He was a stand-up comic in his free time, early in his career. Great guy and it's been fun to watch his ascent to CEO of one of the best tech companies in the world.
• All She Wants is a Ride on a Motorcycle - tearjerker. 
• Kill Hollywood - Paul Graham is one of my favorite tech writers. He runs the ultra successful Y Combinator Tech Incubator. When he says something like this, tens of thousand of young men and women listen, and try to accomplish it. Sometimes all talent needs is a little direction, and he is providing it here.
• Teenager Has Never Seen a Record Before - ouch, I'm getting old.
• Super Amit Update - fantastic story about Super Amit and his quest to find a bone marrow match & donor. This guy lit up the Internet and it was really ispirational. Thankfully all the hard work paid off and he found a match. Now comes the hard part. A friend of mine went through this and I'm happy to report she is doing great two years later!
• Freaky Friday Management Technique - great lesson from a very successful CEO & Investor.
• The Rise & Fall of Personal Computing - staggering graph. iPads & Smartphones are taking over. Not good for Microsoft.
• Flipping the Day - great work advice from 37 Signals. Adding that little extra bit of flexibility to your day can make all the difference.
• "Those Jobs Aren't Coming Back" - eye opening story about a conversation between Steve Jobs and President Obama.
• RIP Bobs - goofy but interesting.
• Zooey Deschanel: Cash is King - good article by my friend Kathryn.
• Evening Magic - Beautiful shot of San Francisco by Fred Larson

Colbert with Maurice Sendak Pt. 2

This Colbert interview with Maurice Sendak was hilarious.

Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Pt. 2 - The Colbert Report - 2012-25-01 - Video Clip | Comedy Central:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Friday Chill Music - January 27, 2012

Sorry Friday Chill Music is a little late this week. I'm posting a link to Phantogram's album, NightLife. Ziser turned me onto them and I really like them. Don't Move is my favorite song on the album. :)

Cat Facts

The single greatest forward I have ever received. Thank you Healy Jones!

Cool Idea: TimeHop

I came across a neat, new company yesterday called TimeHop. Basically you give them the credentials for them to plug into your social media services like Twitter, Facebook, etc and then send you a note every morning about what you were talking about 1 year ago. It's a neat little reminder of what you have been doing in life. Check it out if you have a minute.

Perspective

 

 

Sent to you by Scott via Google Reader:

 

 

Perspective

via Daring Fireball by John Gruber on 1/24/12

Farhad Manjoo:

Apple's profits ($13 billion) exceeded Google's entire revenue ($10.6 billion).

 ★ 

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to Daring Fireball using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

 

 

A VC: The Green Button

This is pretty neat. Being able to access energy consumption data is the first step towards conservation. Someone can build a Mint.com type of service for consumption and the transparency will make us all conserve more.

A VC: The Green Button:

"The Green Button is an initiative promoted by Aneesh Chopra, the CTO of the United States. In a speech last fall, he challenged the utility industry to come up with a simple way to allow consumers to access their utility data. Last week, three big California utilities announced they had made the Green Button available on their websites.

And by sunday, the green button was in a half a dozen web and mobile apps that had been created over the weekend. This is the kind of innovation that gets me excited. The Green Button is like OAuth for energy data. It is a simple standard that the utlities can implement on one side and web/mobile deveopers can implement on the other side. And the result is a ton of information sharing about energy consumption and in all liklihood energy savings that result from more informed consumers."

A Word to the Resourceful

Wise words from Paul Graham of Y Combinator.

A Word to the Resourceful:

"Chasing down all the implications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable conclusions. The best word to describe the failure to do so is probably "denial," though that seems a bit too narrow. A better way to describe the situation would be to say that the unsuccessful founders had the sort of conservatism that comes from weakness. They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world. [1]

The unsuccessful founders weren't stupid. Intellectually they were as capable as the successful founders of following all the implications of what one said to them. They just weren't eager to. "

Big Game Today

Sunday Brunch is being postponed this week so I can concentrate on the football games. :)

Let's hope something magical happens today.

Big Government Sucks Tech Industry Into Their Reality

http://uncrunched.com/2012/01/20/big-government-sucks-tech-industry-into-their-reality/

"Congress is the real winner here. They showed that they can and will pass bills that will cause irreparable harm to the tech industry just because Hollywood is willing to pay them off with huge lobbying dollars. And while SOPA/PIPA may be stalled for now, a big part of the reason is that tech companies got into the lobbying game, too.

From that NY Times article:

Data shows that copyright holders and supporters of the bills outspent opponents substantially in the early stages of the debate. But by many accounts the tech industry has stepped up its lobbying efforts in recent weeks. New spending reports expected shortly indicate whether the balance has shifted.

That's right, slowly but surely, Congress is sucking the tech industry into their world, making us play by their rules. We have to pay them off, literally with cash, or we get slaughtered."