Kimbal Musk just put up a blog about his brother Elon’s rocket launch that is scheduled for tomorrow on Kwajalein Atoll. I wrote about it yesterday – Kimbal has a lot more pictures up and I expect he’ll be reporting live (or hopefully simply “alive”) from the scene tomorrow.
Jim Collins has an outstanding short essay titled “Lessons From A Student Of Life” as a tribute to Peter Drucker in the 11/28/05 Business Week.
Stephen Wolfram has accomplished some remarkable things in his life, including creating Mathematica, a very successful private company called Wolfram Research, a set of amazing mathematics web sites including The Wolfram Integrator, and an overwhelming tome called A New Kind of Science
Now Wolfram brings us Ringtones (well – WolframTones). If you ever wondered about the math behind ringtones, now is your chance to play around and create your own ringtones using “simple programs from Wolfram’s computational universe, music theory, and Mathemetica algorithms.”
Nerd heaven.
In my last post in the Business Plan series, I promised to tell you about “The Industry”. This is an important early section of a business plan that frames the overall industry the company is part of. It’s important to keep this section short (if I want to learn the history of an industry, I’ll read a history book, not a business plan.) The first part (or first few paragraphs) should describe the industry generally and then become more specific about the segment of the industry that the company is going to address.
In 1987, people talked about “the microcomputer software industry.” The gorillas of this business were Microsoft and Lotus – gigantic software companies weighing in at $200 million in annual revenue. There were many smaller companies (Ashton-Tate, Aldus, T/Maker, MicroPro, WordPerfect anyone) – of which today’s generation of entrepreneurs has never heard. Following is how I described the microcomputer software industry in my business plan in 1987.
In the ten years since Microsoft introduced the world to personal computer software via Microsoft Basic, the microcomputer software industry has grown from nothing to a multi-billion dollar business. In the wake of this growth are thousands of software companies ranging from garage operations to $200 million giants such as Microsoft and Lotus. For a while, thousands of people became rich overnight using a simple formula – create a new piece of software and toss it out into the market via magazine ads and user groups. Software heroes were common – all one needed was something neat. Even the high school computer hacker got in on the action (much to the amazement of his parents who soon were making less money working full time) by spending his afternoons writing a game and selling it to an established company.
It was inevitable that an industry (this industry is narrowly defined as the microcomputer software industry - specifically companies writing software for IBM PC, PC compatible, and Apple computers) growing this rapidly would attract some hungry, experienced capitalists. These people took the form of senior engineers, venture capitalists, and MBAs. As the pool became more populated, the structure became increasingly chaotic. No longer was simply anyone able to succeed – competition began to play a significant factor. The rest of the business world took notice as software companies began going public, large companies started divisions that developed software, and Business Week ran feature articles on the software revolution.
As 1987 begins, the microcomputer software industry is entering adolescence. The organizational frenzy of the past is becoming less of a factor. Do not interpret this as a slowdown in activity – the software industry is busier than ever. It has merely taken on some structure. Methodologies for success are being established and are becoming the norm. The days of easy money for everyone are over.
If you substitute “Internet” or “Web 2.0” for “microcomputer software industry”, does is still work? (Entertainingly, whenever I try to type “microcomputer software” I end up typing microsoft first.)
Think back to 1992. “It’s the economy, stupid!” Amy and I watched The War Room
Change vs. more of the same
The economy, stupid
Don’t forget health care.
Carville is an absolute genius and unbelievably entertaining as a special bonus feature. I’d team up with that dude any day just for the laughs. Stephanopoulos reminded me of Sam Seaborn which – it turns out – was intentional.
If you haven’t used Technorati for a while because of either performance or accuracy issues, try it again. Dave Sifry – Technorati’s CEO – has a post up describing their performance improvements. As a Technorati investor, I’ve given Dave and team lots of steady feedback and have watched with happiness as the performance, relevance, and accuracy has steadily improved as they’ve continued to scale up and tune their infrastructure to handle the massive number of blogs that they are indexing. Oh – and they’ve added a bunch of cool new features along the way. Dave and his team listen – if you have issues after trying it again, email me and I’ll pass it on or give them feedback directly.
If you want something chewy to read over Thanksgiving, I recommend FeedBurner’s thoughtful piece titled How feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued and consumed (also available as a PDF.) This is the first article in FeedBurner’s “Feed For Thought” market reports. Fred Wilson also had a good post on The Second Coming of RSS worth chewing on. I promise neither of them are turkeys.
On Friday 11/25, Elon Musk’s new company, SpaceX will launch their first rocket, the Falcon 1, at 1pm PST. I got a note from Elon’s brother Kimball – who now runs an awesome restaurant in Boulder called The Kitchen – with some photos.
Yes – that’s a rocket ship on a remote island called Kwajalein Atoll. According to Kimball, Kwaj is the largest Atoll in the world, 1,400 miles away from Guam, 2,100 miles away from Hawaii, has a population of 2,500, a runway, a small military base, and a lot of excited rocket scientists hanging around.
After a magnificent long weekend in the Bahamas, my return to American soil was via the Miami Airport. Blech. The best part of the airport was the landing on the runway.
We taxied for a while, eventually ending up in the middle of the airfield next to an active runway (holy shit – did that plane just take off next to us?) A bus pulled up, we got off the plane and crowded on it, and then drove around in a circle for 10 minutes, enjoying the smell of exhaust mixed with jet fumes, eventually ending up at a terminal. We went up an escalator and wandered past a huge number of gun-toting security dudes. Eventually we made our way through the very nice and tidy customs area (I didn’t understand a word the custom agent said to me – he definitely wasn’t speaking English), down another escalator to a dingy baggage claim area, where we walked past rows of doors that were locked. Eventually we found the one open door (hint: it was the one with the long line of people), waited a while, and got waived through the bag check area.
The door magically opened into another huge space – this one not so dingy – but with completely incomprehensible signage. Now – I’m a good traveler – I travel a lot – and usually just do it by feel, but this time I had to stop and think about what to do next. We found a departure monitor, but the flights were listed alphabetically by airline and then by time. We didn’t remember which airline we were on so a manual scan of the monitor eventually turned up Denver as our destination city near the last entry (yes – we were flying on United / Ted). Eventually, a disheveled looking woman guarding the elevator from a plastic chair grunted “check in floor two” at us and it dawned on us that we should take the elevator up a level.
Voila. Another huge space. For some reason we weren’t checked in all the way through to Denver, so we wandered over to the United check in counter. The computer kiosk worked fine and we went in search of the next line. This one was only 100 or so people long waiting for another escalator up. We waited and eventually had our boarding pass scrutinized by another person that spoke to me in a language I didn’t understand. Up the escalator we went, to face another line, this one 200 or so people long. Ah – security, TSA, line – cool – I’m in familiar territory. Apparently in the Miami airport “keep your baggage with you at all times” means “leave your bags wherever the hell you want – we won’t do anything to them” which was even more entertaining after we told the TSA guy about the stray baggage (I’m not sure he understood the language I was speaking, which I’m certain was English.)
Eventually we cleared security. Almost there, or so we thought. We wandered down a dingy looking hallway (Terminal F), noticing the holes in the tiles, ceiling crap all over the floor, and stuff that looked eerily like asbestos coating the carpet. You could smell the mold even before you saw it and everything in this hallway felt damp, except for the stunning black and white photographs of people lying mostly naked on the beach that adorned the wall (at least they have an appreciation of art in Terminal F.)
We finally got to the gate – a sea of purple chairs in the midst of a handful of crappy food stores. Remarkably, they had free WiFi, but no power outlets anywhere (unless you were willing to stand up next to the pay phones, far away from everyone else). A weak excuse for a strawberry smoothie allowed me to deny reality for a little while – I’m on the plane now and will be home soon.
What is this “Ted” thing anyway? This feels like a bad excuse for Frontier.
On Sunday, I discovered via The New Yorker (11/14/05, p. 38) that “… ‘Samuel Alito’ is an anagram of ‘I am a sellout’ …”
