I laughed today when reading an interesting Andrew Odlyzko paper on tolls that cites the Monty Python test for taxes:

Man In Bowler Hat: To boost the British economy I'd tax all foreigners living abroad.

Ah, isn't that the hallmark of all the best taxes?

One of the curses of doing what I do is I talk to a lot of boring people about boring things -- and then they're puzzled why I don't want to talk further. One of the other curses, however, is that I talk to a lot of incredibly interesting people about interesting things -- and then all too often can't tell anyone else what was discussed.

I have had the latter happen twice in the last twenty-four hours, once with an early-stage company and once with a new product from a larger company. In neither case can I talk about what I heard, but it was fantastically cool and it makes me vibrate like a tuning fork that I can't share it with people here. Soon though ....

News that Evan William is taking venture money for Twitter got me thinking. Is VC bashing finally passe?

We went through a period in the late 1990s during which people lusted after VCs and stalked them at conferences. It was as if people believed that not only was venture capital crucial, but a VC imprimatur was the surest sign of future success. That was complete moonshine, of course.

More recently we have been through another period (which is still ongoing in some remote geographies) when it has been cool to bash VCs. They're clueless! They're old! They're dumb! They wear funny clothes! They can't code! They passed on my last deal! Usually people then went on to talk about how the economics of startups had changed, and how you could build a consumer IT company on a VC-less shoestring, and then sell it for $5m. Coool.

Now, however, I am increasingly at conferences and elsewhere where some of the smartest entrepreneurs I know roll their eyes when any VC-bashing starts: "Dude, that's so 2005." Instead, people who need outside capital/network/assistance are coming looking for it; and people who don't need it are operating without. Neither feel the need to pretend that we live in a world where either you need venture capital, or you don't. Nice.

Reasonableness and realism in the VC/entrepreneur relationship. Who would have thought?

Well, so much for the multi-touch-meets-accelerometer version of FeedBurner. While I had looked forward to being able to swing my laptop around my head and then caress it to get traffic stats, the Google acquisition of FeedBurner will almost certainly kill that project. Damn.

Oh well, congratulations anyway to Dick, et al., at Feedburner. This is great stuff, and I couldn't be happier for him/them.

Okay, fine, I would be a little happier if I had FeedBurner stock. And sure, yeah, if the multi-touch version had come out. And if Dick was better about answering my emails. Sure.

But other than that, I couldn't be happier. Unless ... oh, never mind.

For all the fans/haters out there, Rafat has a nice photo collage of Bill Gates & Steve Jobs at this week's D conference. Click on it for a larger version.

Just felt the p-wave bang of a quake here in San Diego. Epicenter was near Palm Springs, so about 150 miles away, and magnitude was 4.2. Was a nice jolt.

More here, and you can look at the live California quake map here.

My friend Herb Greenberg and I did our (now) twice-weekly "Fear & Greed" segment on CNBC tonight. You can find it here.

The topics were the turnarounds at Wal-mart and Dell, with the former including some sort of analogy by Herb about Coke. We concluded with Herb doing a noisy victory lap for his mostly correct comment earlier in the week about the recent Gates/Job get-together here in San Diego.

Here is a sneak peek at some of the links from my weekly Weekend Reading column at TheStreet.com:

• ExxonMobil is only spending on exploration 60% of what it did, inflation-adjusted, in 1981 (Time)
  
• Fewer DVR users skip ads than previously thought (AdAge)
  
• Baidu is planning to take on Google in Europe (Telegraph)
  
• The myth of the Great American Savings Myth (Paul Kasriel)
  
• Microsoft's Vista no better than XP when it comes to viruses and malware (CRN)
  
• Africa's oil dreams: With discoveries increasing, what is the outlook for oil (Time)
  
• Lazard biotech analyst Joel Sendek is the "Weird Al" of Wall Street (Fortune)
  
• Personal genetics' impact on medicine (Forbes)
  
• Dan Altman's new book on the economy "Connected: 24 Hours in the Global Economy " is getting good reviews (NY Times)
  

There has been lots of chatter in recent months about the supposed age issue in entrepreneurship, the idea that most of the people worth backing are under 35. I've laid out my view on that subject already, so I won't repeat it. I do, however, want to prod people to generally shut up about the age thing.

Case in point: I know too many thirty-something (and younger) venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, media people and others who chatter about their age as if it's a tangible, manipulable attribute. Similarly, I know many eminence grise in all these areas who do the same thing.

Stop it. Sure, age sometimes can be an asset, and it does go either way now and then, but go easy on it. There are many things in life you are or can be responsible for, but the date of your birth is not one of them. When I meet someone who makes too much of their calendar age, one way or the other, I usually find myself thinking fairly quickly that I'm meeting someone who doesn't have much of importance that they've accomplished on their own to talk about.

Emptying my link box here this morning, so more links that people may find interesting:

• Netscape co-founder and friend Marc Andreessen finally has a blog (pmarca)
• Amyris wants to take its anti-malaria technology to biofuels (NY Times/Pontin)
• James Watson (yes, that James Watson) last week became the first person to get his genome on a disk (NY Times)
• Periodicity in hurricane strikes (NY Times)
• As an aside, does anyone else think Google is really fighting privacy critics in letting people see how it indexes the web (NY Times)
• People underestimate the impact of paying off a small amount of mortgage principal early (Lifehacker)
  

I hadn't realized until this morning the scale of the anti- G-8 riots in German. Staggering and saddening.

Germany's worst riots in decades erupted on Saturday, leaving almost a thousand people injured and overshadowing Berlin's preparations for this week's Group of Eight wealthy nations' summit.

A spokesman for the security forces said on Sunday that approximately 430 police officers were injured in the violent street battles between militant activists and heavily-armed police in Rostock, north-eastern Germany. 125 arrests were made, police said.

[via FT]

From Steve Leuthold in the weekend Barron's, the aging U.S. bull market.


Interesting, but without distributions, sample size, and variance, a little tough to figure how concerned you should be.

At the risk of making life too easy for early-stage companies I'm talking to, here are three of my favorite questions to ask the team -- which is usually only 2-3 people at this stage -- in one of the first meetings. I usually select a different person for each distinct question

1. I'm a star prospective employee (I usually alternate between salesperson and engineer) you'd like to hire. Recruit me.
2. I'm a nervous prospective customer. Gently size the opportunity, and then sell me.
3. I'm an angel investor you've just met. You have one minute, so get me interested in taking you seriously.

These questions may or may not sound trite, but you would be amazed at how effective they can be at figuring out how clearly the team understands what it's trying to do, what it's not trying to do, where the value is, why the timing's right (or wrong), and whether they can communicate with passion in a crowded market why they're great.

Another anecdotal sign of the continuing high level of interest in search marketing, search engine optimization, etc.: Danny's (admittedly interesting-looking) Search Marketing Expo event in Seattle this week is sold out.

Nice to know that I'm not the only one who practices just so that I can look spontaneous when doing speeches and media stuff, only to make a hash of it now and then anyway. Read on for The Police drummer Stewart Copeland publicly bemoaning a "disaster gig" from The Police on their current tour:

I stride manfully to my drums. Andy has started the opening guitar riff to MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE and the crowd is going nuts. Problem is, I missed hearing him start. Is he on the first time around or the second? I look over at Sting and he’s not much help, his cue is me – and I’m lost. Never mind. “Crack!” on the snare and I’m in, so Sting starts singing. Problem is, he heard my crack as two in the bar, but it was actually four – so we are half a bar out of sync with each other. Andy is in Idaho.

Well we are professionals so we soon get sorted, but the groove is eluding us. We crash through MESSAGE and then go strait into SYNCHRONICITY. But there is just something wrong. We just can’t get on the good foot. We shamble through the song and hit the big ending. Last night Sting did a big leap for the cut-off hit, and he makes the same move tonight, but he gets the footwork just a little bit wrong and doesn’t quite achieve lift-off. The mighty Sting momentarily looks like a petulant pansy instead of the god of rock.

[via StewartCopeland.net]

Having only just started his blog, Marc Andreessen is out of the blog-blocks  with a lengthy, contrarian and critical piece about the non-bubble in technology. While various digerati have been wailing about the current frothiness in technology, especially in the Bay Area, Marc's with me (including in this weekend's NY Times) in saying, "What bubble?".

The gist of his argument is that we're genetically programmed to be nervous economic Nellies. As a result, we are over-eager bubble-spotters, and, as we know from behavioral finance, get more pain from losses than pleasure from gains.

Anyway, there is also good stuff on saber tooth tigers, so read Marc's whole thing.

Btw, Gary Rivlin pretty much nails the context for all of this in the aforementioned NY Times piece. Here are the opening two paras:

GRANDPA lived through the Depression, and life thereafter was indelibly shaped by haunting memories of soup kitchens and hobos. Similarly, the digerati of Silicon Valley endured the 1990s dot-com bubble, and since then have lived with the psychic shock of its ignoble end.

The average valley entrepreneur tends to spot bubbles everywhere, much the way granddad feared financial ruin every time a grandchild carelessly scraped leftover food into the trash.

This is such an important insight, and a central reason why things have really only just begun in the current wave of change.

A controversial piece at CRN (that I linked to earlier today) saying its tests show Microsoft's Vista and XP are a wash when it comes to security issues has sparked a heated conversation at the site. Worth reading.

It's nice to see Michelle Leder get some more deserved attention for her site Footnoted. A kind of ad hoc spelunking expedition through wrongly overlooked information in financial filings, Michelle's site gets a profile from my friend Herb Greenberg in his weekend Wall Street Journal column.

This may just be an artifact of most Americans failing geography -- or that we live in a post-geography world of business -- but I was fascinated by a new survey of brands' countries of origin. College-age respondents in the U.S. were asked for the the home country of some of the best-known brands in the world, and they did poorly -- even on some very high-profile companies.

Here is a summary chart showing actual and named country for some of the most mis-identified brands:Some money quotes from the release:

College students may love to use the latest gadgets and wear the hottest fashions, but they may not know where their favorite brands originate, according to exclusive new research from market research firm  Anderson Analytics. Fifty three percent of students thought Finnish cell phone company Nokia to be Japanese, while 57.8 percent thought Korean electronics company Samsung was Japanese.
And 48.5 percent mistakenly thought Adidas clothing came from the United States, not Germany.

"For the most part, this next generation of educated American consumers either have no clue where the brands they use come from or simply assume everything comes from the United
States, Japan or Germany," said Tom H. C. Anderson, Managing Director, Anderson Analytics.

More here.

Matt Creamer of AdAge went a week without TV, and he has some practical insights -- including that the Google of video could well be bigger than Google. Too bad I can't embed it, but you can watch the video here.

Two quick bits of Matthew Simmons-related peak oil reading/viewing. First, this set of PowerPoint slides, and then the following appearance on Bloomberg Television.

The June 29th launch date aside, my main impression of Apple's new iPhone ads is that Apple is consciously underpromoting iPhone's ... phone aspect. None of the ads show dialing, and even answering a call is an afterthought. Markoff captures this in the Times -- "You mean it's a cellphone, too?", one customer said -- and that's striking.

While short-sellers abandoning the market usually signals an approaching top, there are two interesting pieces over at CBS Marketwatch that argue structural changes in the short-selling market -- including a 2.5-fold increase in the amount of capital devoted to short-selling -- are changing the business dramatically.

1. More equity hedge funds turns to shorting ETFs
2. A new kind of short squeeze
   

Some interesting (and likely self-serving) musings from a European MVNO operator on the prominence of communications over content in mobile:

"The first myth that people tend to believe is that content is king in the mobile domain. You have to think about the medium. Mobile is a communications channel, not a content channel. The next generation of the mobile experience will still be around communication, not content. ... [Content] is really something that everyone is looking to be the next holy grail in the industry, but if you look at the research for our audience – 16-24 year olds - mobile is a communications channel, not a content channel."

[via MocoNews]

I would never have believed the kind of technology embedded in high-end rice cookers if we didn't have one here at Casa Kedrosky. Fascinating article on same in today's WSJ. Call it -- pace one of my favorite investing themes -- the prosumer-ification of everything.

More than four years ago, Japan's Toshiba Corp. began working on a top-secret electronic device. The $830 machine -- which some say resembles a tiny spaceship -- had a powerful vacuum pump to suck all the air out. It was designed to withstand 264 pounds of pressure, and it made use of silver and powdered diamonds. Production of the contraption, which takes about 30 people to assemble, started last year.

Toshiba's creation is the "Vacuum Pressure Cooker," the company's most expensive rice cooker ever. The pressure makes it possible to boil the water in the cooker at a higher temperature, thus making for fatter, shinier and sweeter grains of rice. The air-sucking filter creates a vacuum causing the rice to absorb water more quickly while it soaks. The silver and diamond dust are used to coat the cooking vessel so as to distribute heat evenly, so every grain of rice has the same texture.

"It was a lot of work," says Noriko Saito, one of Toshiba's chief rice-cooker developers.

This documentary about Andrew Wiles proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is magical stuff. I saw it when it came out, and it's wonderful to have it online.
Now, if only we had Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven too ...

While the discussion is a little awry -- c'mon, Facebook does not need monetization help -- Jim Cramer tips Google as a Facebook buyer on TheStreet video today. I have no idea how to link directly, so just follow the URL.

obDisclosure: I write weekly for the Cramer-founded TheStreet.com.

As if Google Streetview wasn't giving Google PR people enough headaches, apparently the would-be JFK terrorists loved Google Earth's image quality so much they used it to to size up that New York airport for their planned attack. And now that Drudge is on The Smoking Gun's story, the politicians will be right behind.

 In a federal criminal complaint, an excerpt from which you'll find below, one of the accused, Abdul Kadir, reportedly told cohorts to use the popular satellite software after he determined that surveillance video shot by the men was "not sufficiently detailed for operational purposes."

This is, of course, mostly wrong-headed nervousness. Any technology can be used for many purposes -- if terrorists used Macs would we be going after Apple? -- but we are the most nervous about the newest technologies. In this case, we are so nervous about the newly transparent society (hat tip, David Brin) in which we live, we are looking for reasons to panic about image technology -- and we'll find 'em.

[TSG via Drudge]

Apparently you can't get a bet anymore if you want to wager that Harry Potter doesn't die in the upcoming and final Harry Potter book.

William Hill Plc, a London-based bookmaker, is so sure of Harry's demise that it stopped accepting wagers and shifted betting to the possible killers. Lord Voldemort, who murdered Potter's parents, is the most likely villain, at 2-1 odds, followed by Professor Snape, one of his teachers, at 5-2.

"Every penny was on Harry dying, and it became untenable,'' said Rupert Adams, a William Hill spokesman. "People are obsessed about this book."

[via Bloomberg]

I had a fun conversation today with an entrepreneur where we figured out that too many VCs are really just Waldorf and Statler -- that is, codgers kibitizing from the balcony -- albeit not nearly as amusing.

Don't ask what this is all about, because I have no idea. Nevertheless, check out Infectious Greed as ... cats.

The first quarter 2007 numbers are out for ad expenditures, and they are solid, if largely unimpressive. By way of context, they are skewed by last year's Olympic advertising and they show a fall off in non-Internet areas. The latter category, however, kicked ad ass, with online display advertising (CPM) up a smashing 16.7% year-over-year.

“After a sluggish January, the pace of advertising expenditures picked up slightly at the end of the quarter,” said Steven Fredericks, president and CEO of TNS Media Intelligence. “We also must recognize that 2007 first quarter results are adversely affected by comparisons against last year’s Winter Olympics. However, after factoring out the incremental contribution of special events, it is apparent that core growth rates have slowed further from last year’s lackluster levels.”

Ad Spending By Media

Only six of the 19 measured media registered year-over-year gains in the first quarter. Internet display advertising posted a 16.7 percent increase to $2.70 billion, as marketers continued to expand their online programs. Consumer magazines advanced 7.1 percent to $5.17 billion on the strength of higher rate card pricing and a modest uptick in page counts. Cable Network expenditures were up 6.3% to $3.82 billion, with niche interest channels pacing ahead.

Broadcast TV comparisons were adversely affected by the absence of the biennial Olympic Games event. Network TV ad spending tumbled 7.2 percent to $6.05 billion while Spot TV expenditures slipped 4.1 percent to $3.74 billion.

Newspaper and Radio media continued to significantly lag the overall market. Expenditures for Local Newspapers fell 4.6 percent to $5.39 billion on persistently weak demand from the auto, telecom and real estate categories. Radio spending declined 2.1 percent to $2.29 billion.

I'm traveling today, so updates may be more sporadic than usual.

Having highlighted his new blog last weekend, I now want my friend Marc to stop posting so much good stuff. He's making the rest of us look bad.

• The Pmarca guide to personal productivity
• Why there's no such thing as Web 2.0

Hey, maybe he'll burn himself out :-)

You know you travel too often when you find yourself trying to optimize the personal disassembly/reassembly around airport security. It's like the old puzzle of the fox, the goat, and the cabbage. Which goes off/on first?

For example, if you take your shoes off last, then they will arrive after your luggage has been screened, leaving you trying to shove your feet into your shoes while impatient fellow passengers mill about.

After much iteration, my current system works like this:

1. Remove items from laptop bag while approach screening machine.
   
2. Take off shoes and put them on counter. This is important to do first.
   
3. Put laptop, wallet, keys and phone in one tray, and leave that on counter.
4. Put laptop on counter behind tray with laptop.
5. Put rollerbag on counter behind laptop bag.
6. Push everything along in four-item train into screening machine.

It's important to put shoes on counter immediately, because otherwise you risk having them come last. You can always put on shoes while fumbling with other bags, so it's best if you put them through first.

Similarly, if you put laptop and wallet ahead of laptop bag, you can grab those items and insert wallet in pocket and flip the laptop into the laptop bag in one smooth move.

By the time the roller bag comes through you should have keys and wallet in pocket, laptop in bag, shoes on feet, and out you whiz while the tourists are still trying to find their boarding passes that they mistakenly put in their luggage.

Pace the usual market dictum of "buy the rumor, sell the news", the usual way to play Apple stock around the iPhone launch would be to hold the stock until a few days before the launch, and then sell it, perhaps as late as the day before launch.

Looking back to Apple's iPod launch on October 23, 2001 -- which might not be the the best example, given the proximity to 9/11 -- Apple stock climbed 6% in the week leading up, and then fell 4.6% on the day the new iPod was unveiled.

Will the same thing happen with iPhone? A naive read says "Yes", that we're seeing the run right now. Apple stock is up 21% in the last month, and almost 5% in the last week. So, be selling your Apple stock on June 28th, right?

Sure, sell some -- and sell some now, for that matter -- but not so fast. The iPhone launch, like few other tech products before it, has become, for better or worse, a cultural phenomenon. There will almost certainly be people who hear about the launch via front page stories in the NY Times, etc., about long lines expected at AT&T/Cingular stores, and so on. In that regard it will be more like Microsoft's Windows 95, a cross-over product that got buzz far beyond the tech community.

So, how did Microsoft's stock do on Win 95 launch date? It climbed 1.2%, and a further 5% over the next week. Despite tons of hype about Win 95's release, the company's stock found cross-over retail appeal post-launch.

While I won't argue that Apple stock will do the same, I also think the behavior of Apple stock around iPhone launch could violate more than a few naive rules about how you should trade tech company product launches.

Been meaning to mention this for a while, but there is a patent showdown looming in the ad insertion market, and it could get messy. I'm in meetings so no time for more detailed comment, but you can find more reading here:

• Patent showdown brewing in targeted ad insertion
• Concurrent plays the patent card
• U.S. PTO #6,161,142

While it's a typically loopy and over-reaching process patent, it is still potentially bad news for online advertising in general, and Google/Yahoo et al., in particular. Also for a range of ad-related video startups I've been looking at.

This new Neilsen's data on commercial viewing is really throwing a wrench into television ad spending:

This year's "upfront" TV ad sales market is stalled with buyers and sellers confused - and in some cases bickering - over new Nielsen ratings used to set rates.

Three weeks after the major networks unveiled their new fall shows to advertisers, there are lots of talks taking place but no deals yet to buy spots for the upcoming season.

[via NY Post]

Any readers users of StreetAccount? I keep hearing good things about the service.

Once again, emptying my ever-overflowing link box:

• AT&T stores are hiring iCops for iPhone iLaunch (AppleInsider)
• Great new data on domain name registrations, shows up 30% y-o-y (Verisign)
• Faux post-Murdoch WSJ front page (WashPost)

I'm in meetings today and tomorrow and generally incommunicado, and apparently the stock market can't stand my absence. Sorry about that.

I have written about this a few times before, but I remain endlessly fascinated with the current state of synthetic biology and parallels with design automation's early day. It was the subject of a keynote talk at DAC earlier today in San Diego.

As expected, Limelight Networks came flying out of the gate today. The newly public content delivery company is up 53%, with both its pricing and stock offering increased in the last few days.

I like the company and CDN sector oodles, but the Akamai lawsuit remains a big overhang. Hearings aren't expected until summer, and this is likely to go to trial early next year.

Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:

• Roger McNamee explains the Palm investment (Boomtown)
• Mobile CPMs are too high (AdAge)
• Gaming CNBC's investing contest relied on a simple browser session trick (BWeek)
  

Two interesting books reviewed in today's Times:

• The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy (NYT/Amazon)
• The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture (NYT/Amazon)
  

Decent NYT piece this morning on the irritating issue of software patents.

But don’t software companies need patent protection? In fact,
companies, especially those that are focused on innovation, don’t:
software is already protected by copyright law, and there’s no reason
any industry needs both types of protection. The rules of copyright are
simpler and protection is available to everyone at very low cost. In
contrast, the patent system is cumbersome and expensive. Applying for
patents and conducting patent searches can cost tens of thousands of
dollars. That is not a huge burden for large companies like Microsoft,
but it can be a serious burden for the small start-up firms that
produce some of the most important software innovations.

Yet, as the Vonage case demonstrates, participating in the patent
system is not optional. Independent invention is not a defense to
patent infringement, and large software companies now hold so many
patents that it is almost impossible to create useful software without
infringing some of them. Therefore, the only means of self-defense is
the one Mr. Gates identified 16 years ago: stockpile patents to use as
bargaining chips in litigation. Vonage didn’t do that, and it’s now
paying a very high price.

As most readers of this site know, I'm an unapologetic fan of the letters of activist investors Dan Loeb and Robert Chapman to their portfolio companies. We have a great collection of Chapman's latest authorship in letters to BMHC contained in a new SEC filing.

Here is a multisyllabic sample:

... it is our sincere intention for this initial written communication with you and the balance of the Board to be considered amicable and productive, rather than invective or, as past activist targets have claimed, viscerally scurrilous. Uncharacteristically, Chapman Capital is not taking this approach because May flowers have intoxicated me with unalloyed happiness or inexplicable tolerance for excessive “agency issues” in BMHC’s corporate governance. Instead, our behavior is the direct response to your responsible, accountable, fiduciary-duty cognizant reception to Chapman Capital’s initial accosting of, and ensuing dialog with, you and Mr. Smartt. In fact, you could provide a public service by calling and educating the corporate cretins in respective management and director positions at Entertainment Distribution Company/EDCI (Clarke H. Bailey - (212) 333-8478; and James M. Caparro - (917) 974-4061), Vitesse Semiconductor (James A. (Hole)/Cole - (805) 497-3222) and FSI International (Donald S. Mitchell - (858) 759-7783; and Benno G. Sand - (612) 840-5702). Hopefully, this letter will be viewed as yet another in a steady stream of constructive communications, the aim of which is to remedy the undervaluation of BMHC due in large part to its bloated cost structure and depressed operating margins within its SelectBuild construction services division (“SelectBuild”).

An interesting report last week from a Bear Stearns analyst looked at the trends in the aggregate percentage of U.S. Internet traffic accounted for by the six top user-generated content sites (i.e., Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Wikipedia, Blogger, and Digg):

• 2004: 0-1%
• 2005: 7%
• 2006: 13%

As opposed to the long tail, let's call it the "fat head" of Internet content.

[Bear Stears via Barrons]

Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet:

• Iran forecasts oil to hit $80 a barrel this year (Reuters)
  
• Hedge funds are increasingly correlated to the broader markets (NY Times)
  
• Christmas '07 toy outlook is big on plush-plus-online (NY Post)
  
• Prices in real estate foreclosure auctions no better than traditional sales (NY Times)
  
• Research: The interval of observation is crucial in analyzing stocks (SSRN)
  
• Genentech is under pressure in its core cancer market (SF Chronicle)
  
• Whole Foods about to get a SoCal boost as rest of industry set to strike (Reuters)
  

Snippets from an interesting interview with IDEO founder, and Stanford professor, David Kelley:

• We don't believe in this notion of a bunch of smart people sitting around being clever. We believe in this notion that you hang out with the people who will benefit, and develop real empathy for them. Look for latent, nonobvious needs that they have. Then give it to the smart people to try to figure out innovation.

• We like this notion of prototyping, so we're moving every year. It drives the facilities people nuts. We move in, live there for a year and say, "How could we improve this space," then we move to another building on campus.

• I believe my [two-sided, Stanford on one side, and IDEO on the other, business] card is illegal in the university. I don't care. I have tenure.

Funny Sunday magazine NY Times interview with the creator of HBO's Entourage program. He is planning a new, avarice-centric series on hedge-fund guys in New York:

Why do you find the subject of money so interesting? Sadly, right now, that’s the world people are aspiring to. You have Harvard-educated medical doctors who would rather work at an investment bank than try to cure cancer, and that’s the wish-fulfillment lifestyle that I play into.

The desire to make money is nothing new. No, but now people are looking for the home runs constantly. That’s the difference. People are seeing shortcuts and easy routes.

How much do you earn? I’m not going to tell you.

About $3 million a year? Yeah, you can put it in that neighborhood.

What do you do with all that dough? I don’t really spend a lot of money. I’m not a flashy guy. I drive a Lexus hybrid. I don’t have a lot of things that I really care about besides my kids.

Kids can be costly to raise, especially once they discover batteries. Lucas is 5 and Maya is 3, so a firetruck and a doll keep them happy for a couple of weeks.

Some fascinating stuff going on when you get beneath the respective hoods of CNN's decline and CNN.com's ascent in recent years. It starts with traffic, as the following figure shows, and it continues to revenue, with CNN's revenues dropping 11% since 2003, and CNN.com's revenues doubling to $71.4m.



Best quote from a related AdAge piece is this:

"We're all pretty convinced that news doesn't break on TV anymore," said Eric Bader, senior VP-managing director of digital connections at MediaVest. "Almost everybody across pretty much every economic and age demographic learns of breaking news online, increasingly on mobile."

Powerful -- and true -- stuff.

For my money, the best entry in my friend Marc's three-part-er (see 1 and 2) on the venture business is the third one. While the other two are useful enough, it is in the last one where Marc ponders one of the deep mysteries of venture capital: Why an asset class with such horrible recent returns still has such a large -- and growing! -- amount of money under management.

The gist: It has to do with one of those great tricks the market has a habit of pulling. Professional investors figured out that a) they were under-exposed to alternative investments (which includes venture); and b) that they had a bad habit of pulling out at the trough. So, they reversed things, upping their allocation to venture and hanging tough with the asset class, just as things went to shit in 2001. That meant that they hung tough after the biggest venture bubble in history, which has kept the asset class far better fed than it has right to be, neatly dooming returns in the process.

Aren't markets such wonderful humiliators?

Lots of places doing live Apple WWDC coverage this morning. Here are some of the best, with MacRumorsLive leading the list:

• MacRumorsLive
• Engadget
• sitening (Twitter)
• sitening (S3 page)
• Gizmodo
  

Well, that's that. So, did we see any revelations, any big stuff, in the Apple WWDC keynote today? I don't think so, but let's review:

• Leopard on target for an October release. Knew that.
• Leopard is cool and graphical and stuff. Knew that.
  
• iPhone is out June 29. Knew that.
• iPhone is out at at 6pm on June 29. Didn't know that, so will stay off roads.
  
• Apple is letting developers do some more work building apps for iPhone. Knew that.
• Apple is releasing a version of its Safari browser for Windows. Didn't know that, and I wish Steve would have poked a real stick in Bill's eye instead last week at D, but I guess we'll have to settle for the software version.
  

Matter of fact, about the only interesting part came at 11:22 of the Jobsnote:

11:22 am   Head of Apple iPhone software had some trouble typing with the iPhone on-screen keyboard

The stock was briefly trading up, post-keynote, so apparently the absence of news isn't troubling people. Maybe there was some concern that Jobs would fall into the orchestra pit. Whew, didn't happen.

[Update] Valleywag has a good look at what was announced in the WWDC and its materiality.

Check here for one smart Apple observer's take on who attended Apple's WWDC yesterday on why it was such a bust, even for developers.

This was the most attended and least interesting WWDC that I have been to. No iPhone love. Leopard is cool but late. Games are nice, but most of what was shown has been already seen. Given that one can watch a video of the Keynote already from Apple’s site, I don’t know if I will make this annual pilgrimage next year. Will I buy an iPhone. For sure. Will I get Leopard and continue to use Apple gear. Definitely. Am I an Apple fan. Not really.

Uber-investor Jim Rogers says the U.S. government is "lying" about the rate of inflation.

A day in the life of a VC-backed CEO, via PE Hub. Oh, ouch.

3:45 am – Wake up in cold sweat, pray that the rising star CFO that VC1 brought to the company doesn’t mis-forecast $3MM in cash like he did last quarter.

4:14 am – Wake up in cold sweat, pray that the rising star VP Sales that VC2 brought to the table doesn’t confuse the saying “Under Promise and Over Deliver” again. If he does, prepare for the revolt in Engineering. Note To Self (NTS) maybe show Gandhi @movie night so the notion of peaceful demonstrations are fresh in their head.

5:47 am – Wake up for good, blackberry is buzzing with an email from the “rising star” partner @ VC3. Little puke probably had a developer write an app to auto-send every morning @ 5:45. NTS – find out if his testicles have dropped yet.

5:48 am – Crawl out from under desk, roll up futon, join head of engineering in break room to start water for French press. Shoulda thought long and hard about this job when every bathroom in the building had a shower.

6:23 am – Latest Wired RSS feed must be out ‘cause I just got a voicemail from partner @ VC4 asking if we are considering genomics in the strategic plan. I remind him that we market Chia pets (wwwchiasforu.com), he tells me to call him later once I’ve socialized the idea with my staff.

6:30 am – Still pondering how the f%^& my predecessor managed to screw up the cap sheet and get 8 VCs in this deal. Might be worth it to take a haircut and reduce the “counseling” churn.

7:00 am – Call home, ask wife what day it is, asked her to remind me how old the kids were and reminded her that we’re in this together and it’ll all be worthwhile. Hang up phone and do best Stuart Smalley in the mirror… need a cardigan. Call wife back and tell her “Happy Anniversary”…damn cell signal dropped the call.

7:03 am – Begin prep for upcoming board meeting. Feels like we are having one of these every three weeks…oh wait, we are.

1:00 pm – Rev 9 of board pitch done, stomach churning, ponder whether the stomach can actually digest itself, shrug shoulders and pop another Prilosec and score a Pop Tart from the break room vending machine.

1:15 pm – Call from partner @ VC5 asking me if I knew that genomics was hot. Notify him that he has the wrong guy on the line and that he needs to call Rob his other portfolio company, NanoBioGenomicBlogwerks. He tells me “Sorry, man it has been go, go, go, so gotta go.” NTS – contact Kauffman and find out if they have been giving out grants to VCs hiring kids from the short bus.

1:30 pm – Meet with new VP of Operations. He asks when he gets to meet his staff, I tell him to go look in the mirror. He asks about an admin, I inform him that VC5 has a portfolio company that does outsourced administrative duties and no, they can’t take your clothes to the cleaners but sure can screw the living sh*t out of a plane, car and hotel reservation. I didn’t know there were flights into Austin, MN but now I do. Remind him to specify state and country when booking.

3:00 pm – Sit down to answer email… 250 new since this morning…support pharm industry and pop Ibuprofen, Sudafed and chase it with a cold cup of French roast.

5:00 pm – shower and put on something with a collar. Off to VC6’s portfolio CEO networking event otherwise known as “Dead Men Walking”. 3 in 5 of us won’t be around at the next one and not because we attained a liquidity event.

7:00 pm – Slip out of networking event. Receive call from VC7 asking if we can find value in looking at a niche marketing play they have. Remind him that he is calling me about using our company’s product. Apologizes saying, “man, it’s been just go, go, go lately. Hey, what about using an outsourced administrative play?” I tell him that we are considering genomics and he gives me a “Hell Yeah”. NTS – find out if that guy was in banking or consulting before…probably both.

9:00 pm – Remember to thank the vending company for populating the machine with Pop Tarts, Chex Mix and Ding Dongs… one day I might ingest something other than carbohydrates.

11:00 pm – Call from VC8, wants to check on how I am holding up. “Wow” I think, “nice to see some humanity in this madness.” Check that, bad cell signal, he asks me why I am holding up the board pitch for his review. Reminds me to setup the hotel for the board meeting. I tell him I’ll use our outsourced admin to handle it. Hope he likes Holiday Inns, Geo Metros and flying on AirTran. Remind myself that passive-aggressive behavior has served many in my chain well.

Midnight – Collapse in a pool of drool on my desk.

Interesting, another popular blogger just got a "real" job.

Brian Stelter, the TVNewser blogger, is joining the [New York] Times next month as an 8i reporter to cover the media world for NYTimes.com and for the paper. He will report to media editor Bruce Headlam, and will work closely with Business Day reporters and with our friends in Culture, including television editor Steve Reddicliffe and reporters Bill Carter, Jacques Steinberg and Ed Wyatt.

Okay, this is hands-down the strangest headline (and story) I've ever seen to cross a supposedly fact-based newswire:

Who Blew Up WWE(R) Chairman Mr. McMahon?
Tuesday June 12, 11:23 am ET

STAMFORD, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--While some might say "The Sopranos" went out with a whimper, last night on USA Network, WWE's "Monday Night RAW®" went out with a bang. At the end of his self-anointed "Mr. McMahon Appreciation Night," WWE Chairman Mr. McMahon entered his limousine when it suddenly exploded. The shocking ending raised a myriad of questions: How could Mr. McMahon have survived the fiery explosion? And who could've committed such a heinous act?

Although full details have not been disclosed, initial reports indicate that Mr. McMahon is presumed dead. An official investigation into Monday night's events is currently underway with no one being ruled out as a suspect. Throughout the night, people from Mr. McMahon's past - from Donald Trump to Snoop Dogg to Bob Costas to Stone Cold Steve Austin(TM) - had less than flattering things to say about the WWE Chairman, but would any go so far as to actually blow him up?

I'm assuming we'll shortly see an SEC filing saying "our CEO blew up". I can't wait.

Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:

• Nice set of agriculture business blogs (DTN)
  
• AOL launches open APIs for Xdrive (AOL)
• CDC probing reports of 11 sick passengers at Miami airport (DJ)
• Google leading Cisco in acquisitions so far this year (DJ)
• Me is now integrated with Userplane (SNAPP)
• Option "F" for VC-backed companies, and Facebook app development (marc)
  
• Hedge fund activism pays, but not as well as it used to (SSRN)
  

Will someone please soon sign up Alan Greenspan for a consulting gig? He's back to predicting China problems, but he has now upped the rhetorical ante by offering that price-earnings ratios are 'discounting nirvana.'

Yeesh. I hope he gets some new clients quickly.

[via Reuters]

The NYT's ever-intrepid John Markoff today reminds those few people on Alpha Centauri who didn't know it already that Apple's imminent iPhone won't have a traditional mechanical keyboard. Whoa!

Of course, for those of here on Earth that's not really news. What's more, the usually reliably scoop-driven Mr. M. doesn't even a buried revelation in the piece like he normally does.

Instead, it seems that Markoff wanted to remind people of Apple's last experiment in touch-centric interface design, the Newton. It was, of course, a bust. Even Markoff, however, concedes that the comparison is largely irrelevant.

Nevertheless, as a blast from the past here are two favorite images from the Newton days. Below you'll see a Doonesbury strip lampooning its pure character recognition, and to the right is a screenshot from a classic The Simpsons episode where "Beat up Martin" wrongly became "Eat up Martha".

Angel investor Ron Conway is unhappy that some "third-tier VCs" are offering entrepreneurs cash from the financing to get the entrepreneur to go with that VC. While I hear Ron's argument -- all the money raised belongs in the company -- and I am as fond of restraint of trade as the next quasi-monopolist, I am more sanguine. Some points in favor:

• Entrepreneurs don't get to diversify against financial risk, while VCs do
• Third-tier VCs should be free to compete on price against first-tier investors, and that includes buying common shares/bribes
• Making life harder for first-tier VCs is always a good thing

More broadly, there is a self-correcting mechanism in here. If entrepreneurs lose motivation, or deals become uneconomic, returns will suffer. Sure, that won't happen right away, but nothing does in venture capital.

As an aside, while Kara at Boomtown has had some decent interviews, she really needs to learn how to shut up (and I mean that in the nicest way possible) while interviewing. Hearing her constant behind camera "uh-huhs" is irritating as heck.

Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:

• My friend Barry sez this is worst jobs recovery since WWII (Reuters)
• Apple's current stock decline isn't biggest this year, or in top five of last 12 months
• Korean digital movie distribution is underway (Variety)
• Intel tells customers it will cut prices 50% over next three months (Bloomberg)

A nearly decade-old piece of quasi-journalism I wrote for the now-defunct magazine Lingua Franca is  newly available on the web. The subject is the economics of "charismatic megafauna", i.e., the kinds of large, appealing and furry animals people like to save.

Read it here.

Funny anecdote from an interview with Neil Rimer of Index Ventures. He was apparently at a recent conference in the Bay Area where one discussion was about whether it was worth doing doing venture investing outside the U.S., especially in Europe or Asia. Neil overheard someone saying, "Now, what Europe really needs is a Skype."

Classic stuff. Watch here at around the 5:50 mark.

Congratulations to Owen Thomas, the new editor over at Valleywag. I doubt this means Nick Denton is disappearing entirely -- he seems to have too much fun posting -- but it will be in great hands with Owen.

In case you're not from these parts, Valleywag has become the default insider sheet of almost everyone I know in tech finance. Everyone reads it -- including most of the people who claim they don't.

Meant to link to this earlier in the week, but BP's 2007 Statistical Review of World Energy came out Tuesday, and it's excellent, data-rich stuff. It has come under some criticism for purportedly showing that world oil reserves take us out another 40 years at current depletion rates, but, even if true, that's cold comfort.

Nevertheless, the report is well worth reading, and the slide deck alone is a keeper. An example:

A tidbit from an iPhone user this week: All outgoing iPhone-sent emails contain the tagline "Sent from my iPhone". Shades of Blackberry, of course, but also sensible viral mark