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- Jim Breyer Doesn’t Think More IPOs Are The Answer
- The Tick-Tock: When Big Names Leave, Who Wins?
- The Nook Tablet vs. Kindle Fire Drop Test
- Review: The Samsung Captivate Glide For AT&T
- From The Myojo-Waraku 2011 Festival In Fukuoka, Japan: Demos From 8 Asian Startups
- Jim Breyer: “We See 10,000 Media Business Plans A Year, And Invest In About Ten”
- Facebook and the Age of Curation Through Unsharing
- The Brilliant Way To Negotiate In Three Easy Lessons
- Sorry Kids, Here’s Why I Don’t Have 5000 Free #FacebookCredits For You
- Dog Bites Man; Pope Condemns Violence; Publishing Still Doesn’t Get It
| Jim Breyer Doesn’t Think More IPOs Are The Answer Posted: 20 Nov 2011 09:03 AM PST Jim Breyer is one of the few venture capitalists in Silicon Valley who loves investing in media companies. (He was on the board of Marvel, and now is an investor and board member of Legendary Pictures, producer of such hits as The Dark Knight, 300, and Inception—he sits on the board of News Corp as well). In the video interview above, which took place at the Techonomy conference last week, we continue our discussion of media investments (watch Part I). “One of my first investments was Tetris,” Breyer tells me. Towards the middle of the clip, I ask Breyer what he thinks about the current IPO market and whether he agrees with Steve Case, who argues that we need more IPOs to create more jobs—"90% of job growth is after a company goes public." Breyer disagrees with Case that IPOs are the answer. At About the 2:35 mark, he says that the IPO process could be made a little bit easier, but ushering in a flood of IPOs could cause more problems than it solves. ” What I would never want to see is a repeat of when public companies were created twice a day and investors lost 80% of their money,” he cautions. Breyer thinks it’s better to keep access to IPOs more selective and “make it a high bar.” He adds, “There really is no rush. At the same time I am a big believer that the greatest challenge for an entrepreneur is to build a sustainable company that matters.” And that usually means going public instead of selling to another company.
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| The Tick-Tock: When Big Names Leave, Who Wins? Posted: 20 Nov 2011 08:06 AM PST  This story dropped a few days ago but it seemed like a good choice to share on a lazy Sunday and the topic is something that’s been kicking around in the old sub-conscious for a while. Jim Romenseko has long been the go-to media critic at Poynter.org where he spent twelve years poking at – and changing – the online/print media landscape. On November 10 Poynter essentially forced him out by accusing him of misattribution weeks before retirement and he recently wrote about how the whole thing went down, in typical online style. The He-Said-She-Said, it seems, has been replaced by the He-Emailed-She-Emailed. First, why is this important? As odd as this sounds, the rules are still changing in the world of blogging. When I started at Gizmodo in 2005, the job consisted of summarizing 28+ stories a day with plenty of links to the source. Hence the formulation at the end of most posts, “JoesBlog via JoesMomsBlog via TheJoeAggregator,” ad absurdum. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. That has changed but essentially you want to link to your source. So for anyone to accuse Romenesko of misattribution is probably sour grapes or, more likely, simply an effort to criticize the critic in order to improve this “journalistic process” called blogging. Romenesko knows how to do this stuff but, that said, he’s out at Poynter and now he’s blogging at JimRomenesko.com. He notes that move was pretty hard to make:
With the misattribution story, however, he feared his reputation would be sunk as he left. The latter is true and if the site is any guide, he’s still got a loyal following. All’s well, as they say, that ends well. If I hadn’t have brought it up you probably wouldn’t have known about the whole ordeal. In the grand scheme of things, it’s unimportant. Other big departures – Dan Frommer from BusinessInsider, Harry McCracken from PC World, and the recent departures from this perch high over the battle-scarred fields of Silicon Valley – point to a lesson that media folks and entrepreneurs can both take to heart: it’s so easy to make something new and, with enough effort, a little audience, and some intelligence, there can always be a second act. Sure TC and BI and PCWorld and Engadget have been reduced by the loss of their big names but bold moves in one industry are often seen as earth-shattering and life-changing while, on the aggregate, nothing has changed. Arrington still posts great stuff, Romenesko will still do what he did, and BI and Poynter (and TC) will muddle along, somehow, producing content much as it had in the past. So to answer my headline question, I don’t think it’s a question of winning or losing. It’s a question of change. Is the organization strong enough to survive a big name departure? Will the loss of the lead programmer to an Ashram in West Virginia really change that much at an organization? Will the move of Top-Notch CEO #1 to Hot Start-Up #2 effect Top-Notch CEO #2 at Hot Start-Up #1? With the right people in place around him or her, the organization is self-healing. If it doesn’t heal, there are larger structural problems at play than whether Jim is blogging at a different URL. [Image: PHOTOBUAY/Shutterstock]
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| The Nook Tablet vs. Kindle Fire Drop Test Posted: 20 Nov 2011 06:43 AM PST I hate these kind of videos. There’s enough waste in electronics that we don’t need to destroy stuff that is in already perfect condition (hence our refusal to post those ridiculous Will It Blend videos). However, this is for science! A seemingly new site, Gizmoslip did a Mythbusters on the Nook Tablet and theKindle Fire. The winner, as you’ll find out, was the Nook Tablet. The Fire’s screen shattered fairly effusively while the Nook took some long cracks in the corner. Does this prove anything? Probably not, but clearly the Nook’s fairly clunky-looking plastic edging was good for something.
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| Review: The Samsung Captivate Glide For AT&T Posted: 20 Nov 2011 05:00 AM PST  Short VersionKeyboard-loving Android fans historically haven’t had much luck with AT&T’s lineup — a quick look at their wares reveals only a handful of options, none of which are terribly impressive. The Captivate Glide is AT&T’s most recent attempt at marrying a full QWERTY keyboard and a competitive spec sheet, but will it find an audience outside of hardcore messagers? Read on to find out. Features:
Pros:
Cons:
Full ReviewHardware One of the first things you notice when you pick up the Captivate Glide is how light it is. It’s not the thinnest phone you’ll ever see, but even with a four-row QWERTY keyboard in tow, the Glide feels comparable in weight to an iPhone 4S. It’s lack of heft is due in large part to its plastic body, and while it definitely helps keep the ounces off, it doesn’t do much to give the device a sturdy feel. Take the Glide’s rear, for example. Much like on the Focus S, Samsung has fitted the battery cover with a nice grippy textured finish. Pop that bad boy off though (be careful!), and you’ll be looking at an incredibly flimsy piece of plastic. My jaw would clench whenever I had to remove or install the thing, as I was afraid I would accidentally damage it. When the Glide is closed it feels solid enough, but that soon changes when you slide the keyboard open. The slide mechanism leaps into action with little provocation, and there’s a little bit of play between the screen and keyboard halves. It’s a fairly minor gripe, but a more solid slide could have gone a long way in making the hardware feel more robust. Sadly, while that same keyboard is one of the Glide’s big selling points, it’s far from perfect. The four-row layout is reasonably spacious, but it isn’t helped by the fact that the keys are almost completely flat. It’s especially rough for people who are accustomed to using the tips of their fingers or their nails on a keyboard, because there’s a tendency to graze the metal grid that separates the keys instead. There were also more than a few occasions where my nail would dig into the plastic of the key but miss the actual button underneath. What’s more, the four standard Android buttons make appear on either side of the keyboard. It seems like a thoughtful addition for a while, until your thumb inevitably glances off of the Home button instead of the Alt or Shift keys. After using it for a few days though, I slowly found myself using the flats of my thumbs with more success. Keyboard fans considering the Glide really need to go to a store and play with one, because it’s going to be a “love-it-or-hate-it” experience. Like with the original Captivate, Samsung and AT&T have bucked the trend of including a microSD card in the box, but this time users only have 8GB of internal storage to play with. Some customers won’t mind, but those of you looking to load up your media library may want to get those memory cards ready. In spite of all the Glide’s physical quirks, Samsung’s now-classic Super AMOLED display still looks great. I won’t go into too much detail here since nearly everyone has seen one of them in action by now, but new smartphone owners can expect crisp, vibrant colors on the Glide’s 4-inch display. Software Users of Samsung’s Galaxy S II line will find themselves with at home with the Glide, as they both run the same version of Samsung’s custom TouchWiz UI. I’m generally not a fan of the custom UIs some companies feel obligated to throw on their Android devices, but I think TouchWiz is far and away the least offensive of the bunch. It’s brightly colored, it’s user-friendly, and adds quite a bit of novel functionality to the mix without completely obscuring its Android underpinnings. As is usually the case, AT&T has seen fit to load up the Glide with a bit of their standard bloatware. This time around, the culprits include AT&T Family Map, AT&T Code Scanner, Live TV, myAT&T, Qik Lite, YP, and Asphalt 6. Fortunately a few of them can be uninstalled outright, while the rest of them can be thrown into a folder in the app drawer and forgotten. Samsung’s own apps and services make an appearance on the Glide, with most of them performing as well as could be expected. AllShare did an admirable job of accessing every episode of This American Life on my desktop, though unfortunately the app isn’t able to stream content in the background. Samsung’s Social Hub seeks to aggregate your social media and email accounts into one location for easy access. While I’m sure it would be a great solution for some, Social Hub doesn’t play nice with Google Voice accounts so much of its appeal is lost on me. Strangely, Samsung’s preloaded Media Hub app refuses to start up without a microSD card installed. Since the Glide doesn’t come with one, people who are truly itching to use it will have to drop a few bucks for one. Performance The Glide’s physical feel may be lackluster, but that’s certainly not the case when it comes to performance. There was virtually zero lag while scrolling through apps and navigating menus, and the Glide was always very responsive. Sure, it’s not the same kind of powerhouse as the Droid RAZR or the HTC Rezound, but there’s more than enough oomph under the Glide’s hood to deliver a smooth ride. Even my usual test videos (a few episodes of Doctor Who and The League) ran like butter on the device. After being disappointed by some other Tegra 2-powered devices, the Glide’s battery life was a pleasant surprise. After a normal day of texting, answering emails, web browsing, and streaming music from Rdio, the Glide managed to hang in there for around 11 hours. Your mileage may vary from mine, but I don’t foresee too many problems for people who spend the better part of their day away from power outlets. Control freaks can also keep an eye on Samsung’s preloaded task manager widget to kill apps as soon as possible, if they happen to be really hard up for juice. As far as taking photos are concerned, the Glide is no slouch. Given the small sensor fitted inside, the Glide faces the same problem that plagues nearly all phone cameras: solid results can be had when there’s light out, but iffy shots are abound when it gets dim. Still, the Glide is capable of capturing some solid shots while keeping shutter lag to a minimum, even if the colors seemed a bit muted at times. Video recording on the other hand left a little to be desired: there’s no way to force the Glide to focus on a subject, so you’re left waiting for the autofocus to catch up to you. Sadly, audio was a bit of a toss-up. Phone call quality was usually very good, although there was a tendency to for the audio to become slightly muffled at times. The rear-facing speaker leaves much to be desired though — the volume could be cranked up to a respectable level, but music and calls routed through it sounded hollow and distant. In fact, the speaker actually seemed incapable of playing parts of certain songs, which was puzzling to say the least. ConclusionThe Captivate Glide is a textbook example of a mixed bag: the body skews a bit toward the chintzy side of things, but the power of its internals make for an almost consistently smooth Android experience. Avid keyboard fans who don’t mind the Glide’s flat layout would be hard-pressed to find anything better in AT&T’s portfolio, but again that isn’t saying much considering the competition. If you’re not a physical QWERTY devotee though, you’re probably better off spending the extra $50 for the flagship Galaxy S II with its better screen, faster processor, and slimmer frame.
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| From The Myojo-Waraku 2011 Festival In Fukuoka, Japan: Demos From 8 Asian Startups Posted: 19 Nov 2011 06:51 PM PST  Last weekend, I attended Myojo-Waraku 2011 [JP] in Fukuoka/Southern Japan, a three-day tech and creative festival highly inspired by SXSW. Much like the event in the US, the idea for the counterpart in Japan (the first ever) is to bring together people from different fields, namely movies, music, games and interactive. More information about Myojo-Waraku 2011 can be found here. In the interactive part, a few hours of the program were reserved for the so-called Startup Showcase, which gave a total of eight startups from Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore the chance to demo their services on-stage. Here are thumbnail sketches of all the startups that presented at Myojo-Waraku 2011: Gluecast [JP] Oooi [JP] Switcheroo
Sageby Innova Technology Crowsnest Zusaar [JP] Myojo-Waraku 2011 counted a total of 1,250 attendees for its first event. You can view videos from the event here and pictures here.
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| Jim Breyer: “We See 10,000 Media Business Plans A Year, And Invest In About Ten” Posted: 19 Nov 2011 03:22 PM PST  Jim Breyer, the star venture partner at Accel, is a very busy man. He sits on the boards of Facebook, Walmart, News Corp, and Dell, among others. I caught up with him last week at the Techonomy conference, where he talked about what areas Accel is investing in. In Part I of my video interview above, he explains his interest in the “intersection of media, technology and consumer commerce.” Accel’s focus these days is very much social, mobile, and global. “We have more partners in China than Palo Alto,” he tells me. Brazil is huge also. He is also intrigued by “next-generation social TV” and how mobile and social will change entertainment consumption. “What gets us excited as venture capitalists is how the video experience is intersecting with social and changing consumption,” he says. But most media startups don’t quite yet fit the bill. “We see 10,000 media business plans a year, and we invest in about ten,” he notes. One of those is Angry Birds, which he considers a media company and Accel just invested in (through partner Rich Wong). He hints that Accel invested in Angry Birds because of what they saw in its pipeline, as much as for what it’s already built. I came away from this interview feeling more strongly than before that the future of media is very much mobile and social, like all good things on the internet.
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| Facebook and the Age of Curation Through Unsharing Posted: 19 Nov 2011 02:01 PM PST  Facebook’s Open Graph is ushering in a monumental shift in how we curate what we share. Curation used to mean opting in to sharing. You found or did something you thought your audience would care about, and you went to the trouble of sharing it. This worked when we didn’t have so much content at our finger tips, but as more news and media consumption moves online, the friction of constantly opting in exhausts us and we don’t bother to distribute what others might enjoy. That’s why I believe we are entering the age of curation through unsharing, and it will force us to change. Some believe “frictionless sharing” via Open Graphs will be the death of curation. That signal will be drowned out by noise as the content we consume but that’s not worth the attention of others is automatically published to our friends and followers. This is a big problem for curation, but it is temporary. It stems from a lack of understanding of curation through unsharing by both the users and developers of Open Graph apps. Users still expect to have to actively share something in order for it to reach their audience. That’s no longer true. Instead we’ll need to learn to filter out the noise in reverse, opting out when we don’t want to share instead of opting in when we do. That’s a huge behavioral realignment that will take time and won’t come easy. If learned, though, we’ll be able to dance across the web from one piece of great content to the next, sharing it all effortlessly, and only having to stop when something deserves to be struck from the record. And as algorithms improve to show us what’s most relevant, we won’t have to unshare as often. I love listening to music and reading news, and I love helping my friends discover songs and articles. But before Open Graph apps, I had to actively share each piece of content to the news feed. To my audience, there was no distinction between what I really wanted to highlight, and what was enjoyable but not necessarily crucial. This is why Ticker is brilliant. It creates a channel for casual opt out sharing of high volumes of content, a distinct complement to the channels for explicit opt in sharing we’ve always known. This granularity allows for more curation, not less. I can still take a song that touches me and opt in to posting it directly to the news feed, where Facebook intelligently gives it more visibility. But through the Ticker I can also share hundreds of songs, all that I enjoy to a lesser extent, and give people who respect my taste a way to discover vetted content. To make this work, though, we’ll need the app developers to cooperate by making it easy for us to mark an article as unread, remove the last song we heard from the Ticker, etc. I reviewed the sharing controls of all the major news reader apps, and some like The Washington Post and The Guardian are doing their part by providing simple unsharing options. Unfortunately, some developer like Newscorp with The Daily app are trying to maximize virality by not offering unshare options. They are overemphasizing the short-term, and not thinking enough about being apps that facilitate the new model of curation — apps people will want to return to. We need to pressure them to provide unsharing options by telling them so and not using them if they don’t. Until we have both learned to unshare and have the capability to do so, this will indeed be the dark age of curation. But we have the power to set the norms. Go read a ton of articles using a responsible app, unshare from the Ticker each one you wouldn’t recommend, and explicitly post links to the news feed to those you think are must-reads. If you see low-quality content shared to the Ticker, tell your friends to utilize the unshare button. This isn’t natural. Often the best product design is translating existing behavior patterns to new mediums. But the proliferation of content, in both volume and access, requires a brand new conception of sharing and curation. Together we can bring about a golden age.
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| The Brilliant Way To Negotiate In Three Easy Lessons Posted: 19 Nov 2011 01:00 PM PST  Editor's note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him @jaltucher. When I was reading Walter Isaacson's biography on Steve Jobs it suddenly brought back memories of the FBI repeatedly hitting the buzzer for my apartment rather forcefully ten years ago. Isaacson mentions that Steve Jobs and Dr. Larry Brilliant were best friends. Flashback to ten years ago, Larry Brilliant calls the FBI and tells them I might know something about where Osama Bin Laden keeps his money. True story. The next thing I know, someone is ringing my buzzer, "The police! We need to come up." Then when we let them in (after I briefly considered running down the back staircase) they flashed their badges "FBI". They said, "we had to say "police" because we didn't want to scare anyone on the street by saying 'FBI'. " Uhhh. Do you really think that is the difference between inducing fear and creating a feeling of calm? Let's hold off on that for a second. Three other things come to mind, maybe four, when I think of Larry Brilliant. A) First off, what a great name. It's like he's a mad scientist in a Flash Gordon movie (the old black and white ones, not the one where Freddie Mercury is singing while they are flying on these weird metal wings). B) Second, when Larry was running Google.org I had an idea for him and after all we went through (the FBI?) I thought he would respond but he didn't C) The most valuable thing I learned from Larry Brilliant was when we were taking a break in 1999 from looking at an ancient coin collection being held in the World Trade Center. Everyone there knew Larry and from booth to booth we were sifting through the ancient Israeli coins, coins with Alexander the Great carved beautifully into 2000-year-old silver, coins that I didn't know the history of but Larry patiently explained. It was beautiful, interesting, and tiring, so we grabbed a coffee , sat down at a table and I asked Larry, for lack of anything else to talk about: what is the key to great negotiation? Larry was the CEO of some public company then. A company that two years later I would help the new management liquidate but that’s another story. The reason I asked is because I consider myself a good salesperson. I don't have many skills, but there's always a point with each person, on each topic, where they will say "Yes" to something. So many girls said, "No"to me in high school I had to dig deep and understand where that "yes" point was so I didn't have to go through as much agony as an adult. [See. "7 Things I Learned from my 8 Greatest Teachers"]. Negotiation is all about boundaries and finding where to put the fence so both neighbors are happy. But when you train yourself to be too eager for the "Yes" then it becomes very hard to put up a boundary where you are saying "No". But negotiation is almost as important as sales. By the way, it's not as important. Much more important to get the foot in the door (the first "yes") then have the door slammed in your face. But once the foot is in the door you have to make sure it's not chopped off. This is negotiation. So I had to learn negotiation the hard way. In some cases by being out-negotiated. In some cases by observing people negotiating on my behalf (which involves more divisions in profits when you can't negotiate for yourself) and in some cases by having a guy like Brilliant give me some tips which I remembered. How to Negotiate: A) Have more points to discuss than the other side. Larry said to me that day, "most people in a negotiation think it's just about the money. If you are selling a product it costs "X". if you are selling a company, it costs "Y". But that's just a small part of a negotiation. Before you sit down for a negotiation make a list of all the things that are important to you. If you are selling a company there's issues about salary, vacation, how long are you locked up (if it's a stock deal), who do you report to, what your title is, how long is the employment contract for, how can you get more money if your division becomes more profitable than anyone thought, how your employees will be treated, how will your business expenses be treated, what responsibilities you have, and so on and so on. Really spend time coming up with your list, depending on the negotiation." Then, to make his point he reached into his pocket, in the middle of this ancient coin show, and he pulled out a dime and a nickel. "This way," he said, "if you have more points to discuss. You can give up the nickels." He pushed the nickel towards me. "And keep the dimes." B) Have a mathematical formula. In 2007 I was negotiating the sale of my company, Stockpickr.com to thestreet.com. I was negotiating "against" Steve Elkes, who was previously COO of iVillage and managed to sell ivillage to GE for $500 million where it was never seen or heard from again. [See also, "The Day Stockpickr was Going to Go Out of Business - a Story of Friendship"] It was only later that I realized how genius Steve was at negotiation when he used this one simple trick. Before we started negotiating he came up with a simple formula that was so simple and made so much sense that it was easy for me to say "yes" to it as the basis of the negotiation. Only later did I realize what had happened. He said, "Look, thestreet trades for 20x earnings. So the Board will agree to something half of that so the deal is immediately accretive." I nodded my head. Made sense. I said, "let's use next year's earnings." He agreed. Seemed simple. Steve said, "So we'll take all of your ad inventory, take your expected users based on your current growth, use our CPM (cost per thousand impressions) since we will fill up your ad inventory, and then subtract out your expenses, which is really just your salary, and there we have your earnings and we'll multiply that by 10." Simple formula. I nodded my head. He had already used one simple sub-trick against me which is not worth an entire bullet point but worth a mini bullet: "THE BOARD". So suddenly it wasn't me negotiating against Steve – he had an invisible backup in a worst case scenario. He put the element of fear in me. Some mysterious force, "the Board" could be erratic or foolhardy at the last minute so he would help me by coming up with this simple formula that the mysterious, and perhaps dangerous, board, would easily agree to. So, the formula sounded like it made total common sense. Particulary since it seemed like he was on my side against “the Board”. I agreed. I immediately started adding up my numbers and thestreet's CPM was common knowledge in their SEC filings. We agreed to meet in a couple of days while he "researched" what the CPM was and looked at my traffic numbers. All negotiators act dumb at first and as they “increase their knowledge” you inevitably get screwed. We met again in a couple of days. This time he had the head of ad sales with him. Steve said, "I don't know all these numbers myself but Tom can explain them." This is another sub-point, ALWAYS ACT STUPID and defer to experts that everyone agrees is an expert. In other words, you are outsourcing the hard parts of the negotiation so you can remain “friends” with the other side. Tom said, "The SEC filings say we get a $16 CPM but that's wrong. We give away a lot of free ad inventory and we have sponsorships on specific sites so you have to subtract that from the $16. It's really more like a $7 CPM." Since I had already agreed to the "formula" that was the basis of the negotiation I was stuck trying to figure out if that $7 was real or if he was BS-ing me. But we spent an hour looking at it in every which way and $7 CPM was the number. So I had to nod my head again. Then Steve said, "and you really have other expenses: we'll provide an office, insurance but let's just focus on your salary as the expenses." Uh-oh! He was giving me nickels to take the dimes! But he got me to feeling a sigh of relief to set me up for the fall. "And some of your traffic growth simply comes from us sending you traffic so if we didn't buy you, you wouldn't have that growth. We would just send that traffic elsewhere. So we have to discount that slightly." By this point I was so eager to just agree to anything. I just wanted to plug the right numbers into the formula we had decided on. All the calculations I had been doing on my own went right out the window. "So I guess the number is X", he said. And X it was. Since that’s what the formula spit out. About 1/3 of what I thought I was going to get but I had agreed to the formula. Touché, Steve. The good side of that negotiation is that from that point, the entire deal closed in a week. The fastest I've ever seen a deal close. So I felt good about that. [See also, "10 Things I Learned from Jim Cramer"] But the key I learned was:
C) Alternatives. This is obvious. But pulling it off is often difficult, particularly when you actually don’t have alternatives. You have to have guts and know how to make the other side feel fear. In late 1999 I was negotiating with several partners on starting a venture capital firm. The firm was going to be called 212 Ventures. Investcorp faxed us a term sheet. $100mm to start the fund, a good sized management fee and a good sized performance fee (I actually forget what they were, but assume it was the usual 2 and 20), and they would help us raise another $100mm. I immediately got down on my knees, clasped my hands together and started crying while begging Mark K (then at CSFB, now at DB) "Accept before they change their minds!" And he, correctly, said, "just hold on a second. I want to spend a few days thinking about this." We had no other real choices. And having a $200mm VC fund could mean a lot of money per year. Having zero VC experience it seemed like a miracle that anyone would offer me this opportunity. I couldn't sleep that weekend, I so badly wanted to take the offer. Mark didn't like the deal. He again used the nickel and dime thing. He wanted us (versus Investcorp) to have more control over how decisions were made, he wanted more expenses paid for by the fund, he wanted a higher performance fee, etc. He had a list of demands much bigger than theirs. He said to them, "listen, these guys have every private equity fund calling them. Every private equity fund realizes they missed the Silicon Valley boat and now wants in. I can't stop them from choosing another fund but if you agree to these things, I can get them to agree." He said again, “every single one of your competitors is calling these guys”. They weren’t but he correctly assumed they wouldn’t fact-check that. Back to the sub-point from above, he used us as his “Board" to scare them and he also scared them with the fact that we were considering alternatives when I was on my knees and praying to god that he would just accept the offer. Then he ignored them. They tried calling a few times. He didn't call back. They emailed. He didn't email back. They capitulated on every one of his terms. We accepted. The rest of that story didn't turn out so well. But that's perhaps the topic for another article. He used another trick in this: “no news” is actually “bad news” in negotiation. If someone is not responding to you, it means they are likely going to say “no” to you. He used that to his advantage to convince them that we really did have alternatives. So they became eager to capitulate. If I had been in charge of that and just said an immediate "yes" things would've turned out much worse a year or so later when Investcorp was sick and tired of us (of me). [See, "My Worst Decisions as a Venture Capitalist - and 10 Unusual Things I didn't Know About Google"] As for Dr. Larry Brilliant, who cured Smallpox in India in the 70s, was Steve Jobs best friend, ran Google.org, and now runs Jeff Skoll's charitable holdings, and the story of the FBI, "UBL" (as the FBI referred to Osama) and the mystery of UBL's money, I will eave that for another story. This one has gone on long enough. Photo of Larry Brilliant by Joi Ito
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| Sorry Kids, Here’s Why I Don’t Have 5000 Free #FacebookCredits For You Posted: 19 Nov 2011 12:48 PM PST  Hi children of the world, I actually don't have 5000 Facebook Credits to give to each of you. I'm sorry about that, I wish I did. But before you get upset, let me explain. A few years ago, back when I was at VentureBeat, I wrote a post about an early version of Credits that Facebook had been testing out. It wasn’t the virtual currency payment system that you use in FarmVille today, it was an experimental social reputation currency. You could do things like give people Credits for status update that you thought were smart or useful. Accumulating lots of Credits indicated you had a good reputation with your Facebook friends. Fast forward to this past August. My long-forgotten Facebook author page started getting dozens of Wall posts from Facebook users — mostly children — from around the world. Every one of them was pleading with me to provide the 5000 free Facebook Credits that they claimed I’d promised them. Annoyed, I turned off Wall posts. They resorted to commenting on my profile picture. I couldn’t figure it out. I have definitely never promised anyone free Credits. I mean, I’m a tech blogger. I give people free coverage if I think they deserve it, and that’s it. After continuing to delete comments day after day, I started asking other writer friends to see if they were experiencing anything similar, and I posted on my page Wall asking what exactly was going on. The answer came in two parts. MG reminded me about the post, and some of the Credit-seekers directed me to the following Blogger site: http://free5000-game-credits.blogspot.com/ There, I discovered a page with a doctored screenshot from my old post. Instead of the original image showing me giving MG “+10″ Credits “at 4:41pm April 3rd,” the image had been Photoshopped to say “+5000 #FacebookCredits,” with instructions to “Please confirm you would like 5000 free Facebook credits by typing #FacebookCredits in the comments box below. (Your browser will automatically redirect you after [to my author page].” As of when I took the screenshot below, the web page had accumulated nearly 55,000 Likes and more than 18,000 comments. What are the key takeaways from this major tech news story? - Children of the world, don’t believe every free giveaway on the internet, especially if it’s in the form of a horribly designed web site with flashing animations that asks you to provide your Facebook information in exchange for an absurdly large gift. I’m not quite sure what the site owner is doing with all your likes, but possibilities include selling the data they gather through the button, or using the publishing feature to push other scams to your news feed. Seriously, Facebook Credits scams are a big problem. - This is my first weekend at TechCrunch, and if MG posted about the Google goats right after joining (which is an environmentally sound idea, in my opinion), then it’s only proper that I post something this silly - Whoever made the free Credits page sucks - If you publish to the internet, watch out for how your content might get abused by unscrupulous parties - Whoever is running the scam appears to have recently moved on from misusing me to tricking users into sharing an awful video; hopefully Blogger will shut this account down soon - Become a fan of my Facebook page AND YOU TOO CAN RECEIVE FREE 5000 #FacebookCredits!!!!!
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| Dog Bites Man; Pope Condemns Violence; Publishing Still Doesn’t Get It Posted: 19 Nov 2011 11:11 AM PST  I’m an author, but thankfully I’m not a member of the Authors Guild, that “not-for-profit American organization of and for authors”, who a few days ago issued a statement that first lauded publishers for not signing on to Amazon’s new Kindle book-lending program for Amazon Prime members, and then condemned those few publishers who did agree, citing a bizarre and convoluted argument that authors aren’t protected by such an agreement. That argument concludes: “[Publishers should] not decide for themselves how to step into this brave new world of subscription models without solving all this before they receive their first dollar. My guess is that most publishers, when faced with the complexity of the problem and the unlikelihood of finding a solution that makes everyone happy, will decide it's just not worth the trouble. And that, perhaps, would be the best outcome of all.” Oh my. The stupid, it burns. Memo to the publishing industry: recent history strongly indicates that subscription models are what your customers–you know, the people who read the books you publish–want. They want Hulu for television, Netflix for movies, Spotify for music. Do you really think they don’t want a similar model for books? (When in fact, history shows it’s what they’ve always wanted?) Follow @mathewi@mathewi Mathew Ingram if libraries didn't exist already, would book publishers ever allow them to be created? I doubt it Here’s a very simple proposition. Treat your customers well, and they’ll treat you well. Treat them like thieves, and they’ll steal from you. If you fear the future, if you fear change, then your fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do you really think “refusing to give your customers what they want” is anything other than a stunningly self-destructive business model? Have you learned nothing from the RIAA? I suppose not. “Learning” doesn’t seem to be something the publishing industry appears to be good at. Take the e-book market, which according to the Authors Guild is “the lone bright spot for the industry.” Are big publishers like HarperCollins fanning the flames of that spark, by making their e-books as good as possible? Well, let’s take a quick look at the evidence. In September the new Neal Stephenson novel, REAMDE, came out. Neal Stephenson! The perennial worldwide bestseller beloved by techies everywhere! Anticipation was high. Follow @shawnyeager@shawnyeager Shawn Yeager Neal Stephenson's new novel, Reamde: A Novel, just automagically appeared on my Kindle. There goes my next few nights. If there was ever a surefire e-book success, REAMDE was it. So of course HarperCollins went out of their way to make it the best, classiest, most beguiling e-book edition of all time, right? Follow @AgentShana@AgentShana Shana Cohen Stephenson's REAMDE (in kindle) has missing words, letters, and inconsistent capitalization. Embarrassing, @harpercollins Follow @kirkbiglione@kirkbiglione Kirk Biglione Reamde has vanished from the Kindle store. I assume that means @harpercollins has realized it's an eBook disaster of epic proportions. Speaking as someone who’s had two novels published by HarperCollins: how incredibly embarrassing. Well, that was just a freak one-off, right? Weird mistakes happen. It’s not like they make a habit of butchering beloved books… oh, wait. Follow @pablod@pablod Pablo Defendini Again?!?! MT “@mattstaggs: Terry Pratchett’s “Snuff”: an ebook full of typos from HarperCollins soc.li/qvRh50k” Follow @ardaniel@ardaniel Ard Collier (Janice) @pablod Dude, look it up in the iBooks store. Even the DESCRIPTION is riddled with weird spacing errors. It’s just depressing. How can we expect the publishing industry to adapt, evolve, and thrive in the digital world when, four years after the Kindle was introduced, they still haven’t even figured out how to format e-books correctly? It gets even worse at the bookseller level. After Amazon negotiated a deal with DC Comics for the exclusive digital rights to some graphic novels, Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million stopped selling those books in their stores. (Full disclosure: I’m also the author of a graphic novel for DC’s Vertigo imprint, though I don’t think it’s part of this deal.) Ah, the old “angrily depriving our customers of the ability to buy stuff they might want” business model. Strange how that never seems to work. Readers are unhappy. They complain about inflated ebook prices, which publishers set; indeed, a class-action lawsuit alleging ebook price-fixing by publishers was filed a few months ago. No wonder Amazon is increasingly becoming a publisher in its own right, as is its competitor Kobo. They seem to have decided that if they can’t find any smart, competent publishers to deal with, then they’ll have to become one themselves. The existing publishers have responded by, um, offering online sales data to their authors, for the first time. Wow, that sure changes everything, eh? What would a smart and reasonable publisher have done? They would have realized that sticking their fingers in their ears and hoping the future doesn’t come is not an intelligent strategy. They would have noted that, as the Authors Guild said, Amazon is especially eager to make their lending library aka subscription service a success right now, in the face of increasing competition from Kobo, the Nook, and iBooks. And they would have used this leverage to negotiate a short-term, test-the-waters subscription licensing deal with both Amazon and their authors. (Hopefully one that treats the latter group better than Spotify treats musicians.) Time is not on their side. As authors — including Neal Stephenson — jump ship to Amazon and Kobo, and as subscription services increasingly become treated as inevitable rather than revolutionary, the negotiating leverage held by traditional publishers (and the Authors Guild) will steadily decline. Now was the time to take a bold leap into the future. Instead they sat down, closed their eyes, and hoped it wasn’t coming. Good luck with that.
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