It's Rishi

The Steve Jobs Keynote this morning left most, including many Apple die-hards, wanting a bit more to talk about. The item that caught my attention the most was Steve’s announcement that Apple had sold its 1 billionth song on iTunes. Pretty amazing.

I dug up some fun facts about iTunes:

• “The billionth song Speed of Sound was purchased as part of Coldplay’s X&Y album by Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Michigan. As the grand prize winner he will receive a 20-inch iMac, 10 fifth generation iPods (5 white/5 black) and a $10,000 gift card good for any item on the iTunes Music Store. In addition, Apple will establish a scholarship to the world-renowned Juilliard School of Music in his name to commemorate this milestone.” Lucky bastard! (Wikipedia)
• 42 million iPod products have been sold. That’s approximately 25 iTunes downloads per iPod sold.
• At last measure, approximately over 3 million songs sold per day or over 2 thousand songs sold per minute!(Pocket-lint.co.uk)
• In it’s first year, Jobs predicted iTunes would sell 100 million songs. iTunes fell short selling 70 million songs.
• iTunes has 83% of the $1.1 billion online digital music market (Red Herring article)
• It’s estimated that Apple’s profit margin on each song is in the low single digits, or in other words, a few pennies per song sold. Assuming 5%, 1 billion * .05 = $50 million profit since iTunes launch
• Only iPods are compatible with Apple’s DRM. Why? The purpose of iTunes is to sell iPods, not to sell music. The fact that Apple is able to turn a profit on iTunes is all gravy. However, while it’s not really an apples-apples comparison, one could say that the purpose of MacOS is/was to sell Mac hardware….that didn’t work out to well in the long-term.

In response to supporting Slingbox, Verizon says “What runs on our network are our services.”

OK, fine then I’ll just stream my own media with Orb. Oh wait, I can’t do that either with Verizon. According to Verizon’s Acceptable Use Policy (scroll to bottom) their service “cannot be used (1) for uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games, (2) with server devices or with host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, Voice over IP (VoIP), automated machine-to-machine connections, or peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing”

Uh, so what can I do? Oh, that’s right, what I can do is pay big bucks for Verizon’s mediocre, expensive vCAST premium services.

When will Verizon (and other carriers) realize that while they do own their respective networks, they cannot force their customers to use only their own content services. Sure they can try. Verizon has crippled it’s phone’s browsers by limiting 3GPP support, blocking ports, and even crippling the phones itself e.g. crippling Bluetooth so as to further limit customers to their own services.

Carriers spend gobs of money building and operating their cellular infrastructure and I have no problem paying them handsomely every month for the privilege of using it. However, force me to be limited to that carrier’s content and services? Hell no. Verizon, and other carriers with similar strategies, will realize the same fate as access-providers throughout history that had the same isolationist approach, e.g. Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, etc.

Before the widespread availability of the Internet, you were stuck with whatever your access-provider offered. This is essentially the state that we’re in right now with mobile. We’re really just at that tipping point. As mobile phones are just now really becoming true multimedia devices and with the recent arrival of real cellular broadband in all the major metropolitan areas, the mobile web is ready to explode. And you can bet that the breadth and depth of both free and paid services from third-party providers will blow away anything that any carrier will be able to offer.

Note: I would like to say that from the research that I’ve done on this subject over the past several weeks, Sprint is MUCH more liberal than Verizon. They only officially disallow illegal uses of their network (basically like all ISP’s do) and they don’t block ports or cripple devices in any significant way. They still do not allow (unlimited) laptop tethering however. Needless to say, I can’t wait to switch from Verizon to Sprint.

E27 extraordinaire Noah Kagan stumbled upon wankr.com. OK fine it’s a joke BUT nowdays it’s getting pretty hard to figure out what’s real and what’s not. Check out Fleck:

Fleck is: patent pending, world changing, paradigm shifting and user experience enhancing technology. Tagging, search, blog, AJAX and social networking, every WEB2.0 hype is covered.

WTF? Believe it or not, I’m pretty sure Fleck is a bonafide company. Of course, like any proper Web 2.0 company does, they’re developing in stealth-mode but you can leave your e-mail address to sign up for an exclusive private beta. These guys clearly have been drinking the Web2.0 crazy juice. I’ll admit, I do kinda like their logo though.

And I can’t finish this rant without mentioning TagWorld (MySpace clone) who proudly proclaims on their homepage that their site is “complete with powerful Web2.0 tools!” As if naming the site TagWorld wasn’t Web2.0-cliche enough.

/rant

VW launched a great marketing campaign for the new 5th generation GTI which recently launched here in the US. Over the past 2-3 generations, the GTI has lost much of what made early generation GTI’s so popular. Sluggish and heavy where the original GTI’s were agile and light. Well, VW has definitely come back swinging with the latest generation GTI and the marketing campaign they’ve gone with definitely reflects this. The markething theme is “Make friends with your Fast”. What’s your “Fast” you ask?

Check out some of these great commercials for the GTI featuring Fast:
Cop
Streamlined
Wind

If you’re still not convinced that this is a great marketing campaign, take a look at how much these official VW Fast packages (only 600 were made for promotional purposes) are selling for:
$300+ Fast packages on eBay

UPDATE: VW Project Fast documentary (I think this is the DVD that comes with the promotional package)

Blogs to Riches: The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom. Oh, and just for reference while reading the article, I’m not an A, B, or C-list blogger. I’m probably a Z-lister. =(

The author, Clive Thompson, referencing Clay Shirky, an instructor at New York University specializing in the social dynamics of the Internet, has this scientific explanation of the grossly disproportionate traffic flow in the blogging world:

Economists and network scientists have a name for Shirky’s curve: a “power-law distribution.” Power laws are not limited to the Web; in fact, they’re common to many social systems. If you chart the world’s wealth, it forms a power-law curve: A tiny number of rich people possess most of the world’s capital, while almost everyone else has little or none. The employment of movie actors follows the curve, too, because a small group appears in dozens of films while the rest are chronically underemployed. The pattern even emerges in studies of sexual activity in urban areas: A small minority bed-hop, while the rest of us are mostly monogamous.

The power law is dominant because of a quirk of human behavior: When we are asked to decide among a dizzying array of options, we do not act like dispassionate decision-makers, weighing each option on its own merits. Movie producers pick stars who have already been employed by other producers. Investors give money to entrepreneurs who are already loaded with cash. Popularity breeds popularity.

Anyways, the article is a bit longish but well worth the read. It offers some great insight into the blogging community.

UPDATE: Clay Shirky’s original article Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality published back in 2003.

“The Hydrogen RE features a rotary engine that can run on either gasoline or hydrogen with the flick of a switch.”

Curb weight is still pretty svelte at 1,460kg (~3200lb). Max hydrogen output is 109PS and gasoline is 210PS.

Pretty damn cool. Unfortunately, Mazda is only selling 10 vehicles this year on a lease-only basis at a pricetag of over $3,500/month

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When I first heard that Michelle Kwan was officially withdrawing from the Olympic games, like most people I know, I was saddened by the news. I’m not going to even pretend like I understand what she’s feeling, but after learning more about her life and career, I really feel I’ve been engrained with a profound lesson from her story:

Everybody’s got dreams. They motivate us to try harder and inspire us to think bigger. Most people describe their dream in terms of a position or an award. Win a Super Bowl. Be CEO. Marry a supermodel. Be filthy rich. But if you think that you’ll only be happy if you achieve that dream, then you’re setting yourself up for major disappointment in the future. The reality is, most of us will not ever achieve our dreams. Let’s face it. There’s only a couple dozen Super Bowl rings given out every year, only 1 CEO per company and only 1 gold medal (per sport) every 4 years. Whether we fail to reach our dreams because of our own doing or because of factors beyond our control, the fact is that we have a very, very slim chance. It doesn’t have much to do with whether we’re worthy of it, it’s basically just probability.

Why do we place so much importance on these dreams? I think it’s because we associate dreams with immense happiness. Well, does your life so far support this association? Have you ever dreamt of something, got it, and lived an immensely happy life ever since. Probably not. My guess is that once the novelty wore off, you pretty much returned to the same emotional state you were before. Studies have shown repeatedly that lottery winners are not any happier and victims of serious, life-altering injuries are no sadder than the average person. It’s a really difficult (and counterintuitive) thing to accept , but the truth is that even if your dream does come true, it’s not going to bring you the immense happiness you expect. It really won’t change you much at all.

But before you get all depressed, let me talk about the lesson that I learned from Michelle. She said at the press conference:

I’ve learned that it’s not about the gold. It’s about the spirit of it and about the sport itself. I have no regrets, I tried my hardest and if I don’t win the gold, it’s okay. I’ve had a great career. I’ve been very lucky. This is a sport. It’s beautiful.

At first, when I heard that I was like “yeah right”. But, as I read more about her story, I started to realize that she was being absolutely honest. There is simply no other way to explain her die-hard dedication to her skating even after two heart-wrenching disappointments in the ‘98 and ‘02 Olympics. What totally blew me away was I watched an A&E Biography on her, where in an interview, she said she actually started to cry during her ‘02 Olympics Exhibition skating routine because she was just overwhelmed with the love and perfectness of what she was doing on the rink. Some say that this was one of her most memorable performances ever. Now keep in mind that just the night before this, she had made a small error which caused her dream for Olympic gold to be once again unfulfilled. I can’t even imagine how I would have handled myself in such a situation. Michelle has won more championships than any other skater ever has or (probably) will, yet ultimately it’s the act of skating itself that brings her immense happiness. That’s why she has continued to push (and dominate) in what has been a career of extreme peaks and valleys.

Everyone’s life will have peaks and valleys as well. Nobody knows what the future holds in each of our lives. The only thing we really know is what it is we love doing. So, I encourage you to take a step back and reflect about what it is you truly love doing. If you can figure it out, make a promise to yourself to work your ass off so that if you’re lucky, you will be able to spend as many of your waking hours doing that thing you love. Just like Michelle, pursuing what you love will bring peaks and valleys, but when your time is up, you won’t have any regrets because there’s nothing else you would have rather been doing in your precious time here on this planet. What more than that can you honestly ask from life?

UPDATE:
Some cool videos of her on YouTube.
A&E Biography from 2004
2002 Olympic Exhibition routine (I seriously do understand how someone musters up the strength to pull this off after what happened the night before)

I’ve spent the last year writing an enormous amount of PHP code for Dontbuyjunk and Turf. Before we started the project, I would have labelled myself as a server engineer. Even though I had worked on extremely large-scale web applications at my former employer, Ariba, I was on the server team and rarely dealt with any code components that were client-facing. I would have labelled myself also as an advanced Perl programmer. Perl was the only scripting language I had exposure to, so when I jumped into PHP for this project, I immediately loved it. It was leaps and bounds more convenient to code web apps with PHP over Perl. Many of the functions one would need were already there and the developer community, while not as mature as Perl, was certainly rich with depth.

Fast forward a year and my view of PHP has changed quite a bit. I still think its a very convenient way to code web apps that are very view-centric (or page-centric, whatever), such as WordPress where you have the main page, the post page, the archive page, etc. However, for building more complex web applications where there are several components, PHP just doesn’t feel well-suited for the job. Even though it is quite full-featured from a language perspective, it sometimes feels clooged together. Like, for example, the object-oriented support, which again, while being decently feature rich, it feels kind of forced when I’m writing OO code in PHP. It’s like yeah I can write decent OO code but I’m only doing it to follow my own coding convention, PHP doesn’t really give a crap and moreover other programmers working on the project will do their own thing and soon enough you start to get a mess.

This is really where Java shines. It’s a pure, from-the-ground-up object-oriented language and everything from how code is physically organized to the linking to the VM to the language itself is sensical, refined and heck even fascinating sometimes. I sometimes look back to some of the Java projects I’ve worked on, even the gigantic messy Ariba ones, and smile. For me, programming is not just about writing code sufficient to meet the task, it’s about designing elegant, efficient code that you enjoy re-reading – like a good book – can’t wait to have your peers look at. (Granted, there are plenty of times when I’m working on an insignficant task where I do just need something that works.)

I spent the past couple of days learning about and playing around with Ruby on Rails. I’m not going to go into detail about the background of RoR as there are plenty of other sites which describe it better than I can. Basically though, Ruby is an object-oriented programming language created by Yukihiro Matsumoto. One of the design philosophies of Ruby is the “principle of least surprise”:

I believe people want to express themselves when they program. They don’t want to fight with the language. Programming languages must feel natural to programmers. I tried to make people enjoy programming and concentrate on the fun and creative part of programming when they use Ruby.

Sounds good to me. And if you start poking around with Ruby I think you’ll generally agree. What really has brought Ruby into the limelight is the Rails MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework which was created by David Heinemeier Hansson (founder of 37Signals). I’ve played around with MVC frameworks, namely Struts, before and to be honest I never quite felt comfortable with them. That could also be because before when I experimented with MVC concepts, I hadn’t done much full-circle application development. Like I said, I was mainly just a server/back-end guy. But now that I’ve worked on all aspects of application development for the web, I have learned how development does sort of gravitate towards the MVC model. For Revunity, even though we never planned it, we ended up with controllers, models, and views, except that it’s somewhat of a mess. =) As I dug deeper, I was thoroughly impressed with Rails. RoR doesn’t, of course, do anything that you could not do with other languages/frameworks. But, so far, what it does seem to do is make me as a developer more efficient. Much of the tedious stuff is taken care of. I can focus on the meat of the application.

I had a couple conversations with friends about RoR and the question came up about scalability. I started to wonder the same thing and did a lot of digging. It seems like RoR apps do compare well in terms of performance with other platforms. However, I came across this post by David Hansson himself, It’s boring to scale with Ruby on Rails that re-focused my perspective on RoR. Particularly this quote:

The point is that the cost per request is plummeting, but the cost of programming is not. Thus, we have to find ways to trade efficiency in the runtime for efficiency in the “thought time” in order to make the development of applications cheaper. I believed we’ve long since entered an age where simplicity of development and maintenance is where the real value lies.

I very much agree with this. CPU cycles, storage, bandwidth, etc. are all commodities which are getting cheaper by the day. The cost of developers, and I’m talking about the passionate engineers/innovators not just dime-a-dozen coders, remains a very expensive and scarce resource. So, if RoR makes developers more efficient and happy about building applications, then it’s value is truly gargantuous.

I’m looking forward to getting involved in a project, whether for serious or for fun, where RoR will be the right tool for the job. I’m curious to see what issues (other than the obvious ones like relatively limited developer community) I will find with RoR and whether my feelings toward it will change once I have some real experience with it.

I was having lunch with a friend of mine a couple days ago and while we were eating, I was ranting to him about how if you search for “Rishi Khaitan” on Google, itsrishi.com is not the first result. Before I knew it I started explaining to him how Google ranks results, SEO, etc. About a minute into it, he interrupted me and was like “I guess I never really thought about how Google does it’s thing. I love Google ’cause it just works.” I thought about what he said some more. It hit me that I’ve become accustomed to talking endlessly about how things work with my geeky friends that sometimes I’ve lost focus on what’s really important. Users universally want one thing. They want things to “just work”.

Sure, Google has a simple interface and is very fast, but what makes it so ubiquitous is the fact that it doesn’t require any specialized knowledge of its user in order to work well and reliably. You type in some search words, click Search, you get good results. That’s it. Everytime. When things “just work” you feel in control. When you drive, it’s the same thing. Gas pedal go. Brake pedal stop. Everytime. There’s a sense of satisfaction and control that people have when driving. Could you imagine if even 5% of the time, the brake pedal did something else? We’d have a lot less people driving that’s for sure. But this isn’t just an issue of reliability. Complexity of operation is just as important. Just about everyone today owns at least one camera. You press the button, it takes a picture. You don’t have to know jack about what’s going on. It just works. What if auto-focusing was never invented? If you had to manually focus every shot, there would be a whole lot less cameras sold. Things that “just work” make us feel confident and in control which in turn makes us feel comfortable and joyful.

There will always be successful products which offer lots of functionality because their primary market demands it, such as SLR cameras which are intended for photography hobbyists and professionals. Such products are complex and most people won’t be happy with it. But that’s fine. Most people will choose more accessible, mainstream options.

The lesson here is, if you’re aiming to make your product a household name, you gotta make sure it “just works”. I know this doesn’t sound like rocket science, but I seem to come across countless products which promise to be the next “big thing” yet violate this basic principle.

These days, I hear this phrase all the time in reaction to the launch of a new Web-based company. In fact, as a result of this attitude most users have, the vast majority of Web companies that recently launched have no intention of charging their users. They know their users won’t pay, so there’s no point in stunting market adoption by even trying. Such businesses, those that don’t involve a transaction from which they can take a cut (eBay, PayPal), are built to generate cash flow through advertising revenue – at least for the forseeable future until a better revenue model is stumbled upon (or better yet flip the company to GYM before you need to deal with the revenue issue).

Why is it that many people have this attitude towards Web-based services? I think a big part of it comes from the fact that the Web is advancing at such a fast pace. No matter what the product category, barriers to entry are being broken down at an ever-faster pace. This means that whatever the product is, there is likely to be significant competition. And, in the rare case, that the product is the first of its kind, you can expect a couple formidable competitors to be right around the corner. Competitors will often try to gain an edge by charging users less for the service or offer it for no-charge at all.

This phenomenon is now very familiar to most Internet users. When I see a service that sounds useful but costs money, I’m either thinking:
a) Let me try to find a similar service that’s free, even if it’s not quite as good OR
b) I’ll just wait a little while for a competitor to launch the same service and give it to me for free.

Further contributing to this trend is the “lets launch it and see if it sticks” attitude of many Web businesses, especially in the now “Web 2.0″ culture of building simple, user-centric applications. Such applications are generally cheap to develop, launch, and operate. This allows for revenue generation to take a back seat to market share growth. This is reminiscent of the dot-com bubble except that now the cost of failure isn’t that high.

The good news in all this is that people are still more than happy to be profitted off of through advertising. We tolerate long commercial breaks in our TV programming, full-page ads in magazines and newspapers, and chunks of webpages dedicated to text and banner ads. Even though there is the AdBlock extension for Firefox, which effectively blocks most ads, I notice that most people don’t download and use it. But can you really build a big business on the Web that relies solely on ad revenue? From what I can tell, the answer is generally no unless you have tremendous scale (Google) or your service is closely tied to a transaction (Shopping.com).

What’s going to happen is that because, most products aren’t going to “stick”, competition in any one market will shrink significantly. Either of two cases will happen. The first case is that because competition will shrink down to just a couple players, all players will start charging and consumers will be forced into paying. The companies that do survive will have a kick-ass product that you won’t mind paying for (or willing to pay for “premium” service). The second case is that the product will continue to be offered for free by YGM with the intent that they will upsell one of their other premium services to you.

Side Note: An interesting trend that is sprouting up is sites such as Squidoo that will let you earn advertising revenue off of the content that you contribute to the site. As far as I can tell, the site isn’t blowing up with users or content. Contributing content involves me spending time. The amount of money I expect to earn must be significantly greater than the time-value I will invest. A big problem is that most people don’t really understand online advertising and are unlikely to see much dollar value potential in a couple AdSense text ads next to their content.