Alex Schleber › Comments

"Curated/related: http://www.antipope.org/charli... "The inadmissible assumptions By Charlie StrossUnderlying all debate on the future of the internet are a constellation of unspoken assumptions. These include: a) Advertising is socially neutral or good, b) Internet content provision on the internet is therefore best funded by selling eyeballs to advertisers, c) Most people just want to consume content the way they used to consume TV or movies, and it's socially acceptable to orient the internet around this model (call it the broadcasting fallacy),... Reality check: a) All advertising tends towards the state of spam (which is merely free-as-in-dirt-cheap-and-unregulated advertising)..." --- Well said. Interruption marketing is slowly but surely coming to an end. People will not tolerate it int the future for all but the rarest of use cases." - Alex Schleber

"re:showers - get a $20 or so / month 24-Hour Fitness membership -> gym, showers, many even have sauna & lap pools. Problem solved..." - Alex Schleber

"While I really like that idea as well, that would be far too logical for the movie theater chains to consider... ;)" - Alex Schleber

"The brilliant Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin (by now a minor chain in that region) has solved a lot of your concerns for a long time: 1) Real food: Check. Adult beverages: Check. Friendly waitstaff hurries them to your table: Check. 2) They do have a pretty strong/ingenious message starring some celebrities at the start of each movie against cell phones & talking. "We will take you...out." I like your auto-silence signal idea though. The other day a star conductor in Europe halted a major performance of an opera or concert due to a cell phone going off in the audience... 3) As to the volume level on dialogues specifically, I've thought for years that someone needs to create a sound equalizer for home use, as one is always adjusting between action scenes (way too loud) and turning back up for barely audible dialogues, especially if you have room-mates/significant others trying to sleep/study in the later hours of the night. Really Hollywood could fix that to some extent by having..." - Alex Schleber

"Wrote this a while back: "Sony is making a huge mistake by not going the $1/month route for complete/unlimited streaming music access with their own new offering. Because that would put it in the complete impulse purchase, don't-need-to-think, will-likely-never-cancel-for-any-reason category. What if they could thereby garner 100 Million users, thus spending about $1.2 Billion, or in other words about 20% of what still is left of the global music industry?! If Apple doesn't do it, then someone else eventually will. *Only then will some in the #dinomedia come to see, that the race was not about who was still going to eek out some residual "crumbs" profits from the Old System, but who was going to wholesale import the masses into their Ecosystem.* "" - Alex Schleber

The book conundrum, would you rather sell 2 or 3 books for $10 and whine about piracy and DRM or sell a whole bunch on Smashwords for $1 - WarLord

"Until the #dinomedia in all of its guises (newspapers, film, music) understand the new realities leading to this: http://alexschleber.amplify.co... there will be little common ground to argue on..." - Alex Schleber

"Some interesting thoughts, especially re: BestBuy + B&N combo (high capex up front though, no?) re: 2) nah, Nokia / WP7+ is toast... sorry. They didn't capture any new mindshare at CES, which may well have been their last chance. See here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/11... or here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/11..." - Alex Schleber

"Many great points.There is a lot to digest, but right off the bat I would think of a few posts that I wrote/curated myself in the last year. Certainly I agree on Klout being a cancer of sorts, as well as the filter bubble and issues of Power Law Effects with Twitter Trending Topics et al.:http://alexschleber.amplify.co..., there are many issues there and you may have seen my highlight a good handful of posts in recent weeks from+Mahendra Palsule etc." - Alex Schleber

"Many great points.There is a lot to digest, but right off the bat I would think of a few posts that I wrote/curated myself in the last year. Certainly I agree on Klout being a cancer of sorts, as well as the filter bubble and issues of Power Law Effects with Twitter Trending Topics et al.:http://alexschleber.amplify.co..., there are many issues there and you may have seen my highlight a good handful of posts in recent weeks from+Mahendra Palsule etc." - Alex Schleber

"You are absolutely right re: Siri, and that is why Google decided several years ago that it HAD to do Android to not find themselves suddenly cut off on mobile platforms..." - Alex Schleber

"Oh noooooo, did they just stop the live stream?! Big mistake, you keep the show on the road, and in truth they could have put any ad/promo-like interstitials they ever wanted for the next 2.5 hours. How hard can it be to get some interns/people/etc. to keep chatting away about the iPhone 4S-maybe-5-but-who-knows?!" - Alex Schleber

"Cue "The Great Unveiling", umpteenth take -> http://businessmindhacks.com/p..." - Alex Schleber

"Why didn't you just buy a Macbook Air and set it up to dual boot Win7 and MacOSX? Still better industrial design and very likely battery life..." - Alex Schleber

"What part of "moat strategy" did you not understand? Android is Google's way of keeping you in their (mostly search) ecosystem, which they are able to monetize better than anyone else. To the tune of ~ $10B in profit per year ( http://investor.google.com/fin... ). THAT is worth protecting, and so far Android's up to 50% share appears to make them right on this point. So the patent attacks have necessitated that Google spend somewhere between say $4B-$8B (they could end up selling off the handset business to e.g. Huawei, and the set-top box business to someone else), to buffer Android. Is that worth it to buy into the future on mobile platforms, and be able to continue to make $10B / year? You tell me. MSFT is willing to lose $3B / year on Bing and their other Internet Division properties, because they feel they need to be there in the future. And so far they can't quite buy their way into mobile at all, either with WP7 or tablets. Google has made a decent stand with Android in..." - Alex Schleber

"What part of "moat strategy" did you not understand? Android is Google's way of keeping you in their (mostly search) ecosystem, which they are able to monetize better than anyone else. To the tune of ~ $10B in profit per year ( http://investor.google.com/fin... ). THAT is worth protecting, and so far Android's up to 50% share appears to make them right on this point. So the patent attacks have necessitated that Google spend somewhere between say $4B-$8B (they could end up selling off the handset business to e.g. Huawei, and the set-top box business to someone else), to buffer Android. Is that worth it to buy into the future on mobile platforms, and be able to continue to make $10B / year? You tell me. MSFT is willing to lose $3B / year on Bing and their other Internet Division properties, because they feel they need to be there in the future. And so far they can't quite buy their way into mobile at all, either with WP7 or tablets. Google has made a decent stand with Android in..." - Alex Schleber

"You yourself say that Apple et al. could always shut off/disallow Google's applications on their mobile devices. Which is why they more or less had to go with the Android strategy, which has been run as a "Moat Strategy" from the beginning: http://alexschleber.amplify.co... initial cost was a very low $50M or so in Android acquisition, plus dev cost since then. Which up to now has bought Google nearly 50% share. What's not to like?So now it turned out that due to the #PatentAttacks, the price has gone up. Fine. But Google may have actually gotten a decent price on the Motorola deal:They paid ~$9.5B ($12.5B - $3B in MMI balance sheet cash) for 17,000 patents, plus 7,500 pending. Too keep our math easy, let's assume they paid $10B (because some of that MMI cash is of course tied up for operations), and that they'll only get about half of the pending patents approved. So $10B / 20,000 = $500,000 per patent.The MSFT/Apple/et al. consortium just paid $4.5B for 6,000 patents, or $750,000..." - Alex Schleber

"You yourself say that Apple et al. could always shut off/disallow Google's applications on their mobile devices. Which is why they more or less had to go with the Android strategy, which has been run as a "Moat Strategy" from the beginning: http://alexschleber.amplify.co... initial cost was a very low $50M or so in Android acquisition, plus dev cost since then. Which up to now has bought Google nearly 50% share. What's not to like?So now it turned out that due to the #PatentAttacks, the price has gone up. Fine. But Google may have actually gotten a decent price on the Motorola deal:They paid ~$9.5B ($12.5B - $3B in MMI balance sheet cash) for 17,000 patents, plus 7,500 pending. Too keep our math easy, let's assume they paid $10B (because some of that MMI cash is of course tied up for operations), and that they'll only get about half of the pending patents approved. So $10B / 20,000 = $500,000 per patent.The MSFT/Apple/et al. consortium just paid $4.5B for 6,000 patents, or $750,000..." - Alex Schleber

"OK, but how does that explain the "few things are as exciting..." bit?! WP = just another silo to dead-end stuff you type into it. Change is coming... ;)" - Alex Schleber

"OK, but how does that explain the "few things are as exciting..." bit?! WP = just another silo to dead-end stuff you type into it. Change is coming... ;)" - Alex Schleber

"Why? Wordpress codebase is a mess..." - Alex Schleber

"Why? Wordpress codebase is a mess..." - Alex Schleber

""There are no perspective hacks. None." I disagree 100%. There are dozens of them, maybe hundreds. Here is my most recent short list: 1) “One theory always stuck with me. It’s fairly straightforward: it says we stigmatise the things we’re most afraid of in order to create distance between ourselves and the stigmatised trait." 2) From ZenHabits: “Your life’s an experiment: Everything you do, everything you try, everything that does or doesn’t work out, whether you like it or not, it’s all an experiment. It’s up to you to decide to learn from it. That’s the ultimate daily practice." 3) "If it's true that digital content/utterances are all going to $0, then that means that you must create things that cannot be digitally copied, or are so comprehensive in terms of being an entire system, that even if it spreads freely far and wide, the threads always lead back to you. Wordpress would be an example of this. No one doubts whether Matt Mullenweg created it... The truth is, talk is cheap, and..." - Alex Schleber

""There are no perspective hacks. None." I disagree 100%. There are dozens of them, maybe hundreds. Here is my most recent short list: 1) “One theory always stuck with me. It’s fairly straightforward: it says we stigmatise the things we’re most afraid of in order to create distance between ourselves and the stigmatised trait." 2) From ZenHabits: “Your life’s an experiment: Everything you do, everything you try, everything that does or doesn’t work out, whether you like it or not, it’s all an experiment. It’s up to you to decide to learn from it. That’s the ultimate daily practice." 3) From me: "If it's true that digital content/utterances are all going to $0, then that means that you must create things that cannot be digitally copied, or are so comprehensive in terms of being an entire system, that even if it spreads freely far and wide, the threads always lead back to you. Wordpress would be an example of this. No one doubts whether Matt Mullenweg created it... The truth is, talk is..." - Alex Schleber

"Yep. Are you on G+ yet?" - Alex Schleber

"Yep. Are you on G+ yet?" - Alex Schleber

"Mashable = Walmart of Tech/SM blogs. Maybe 1 in 10 posts are useful." - Alex Schleber

"Mashable = Walmart of Tech/SM blogs. Maybe 1 in 10 posts are useful." - Alex Schleber

"Have you seen the G+me browser extension yet? Game-changer. Now Twitter should really be worried -> http://t.co/3L7PEsn" - Alex Schleber

"Have you seen the G+me browser extension yet? Game-changer. Now Twitter should really be worried -> http://t.co/3L7PEsn" - Alex Schleber

"You are exactly right. This blows everything else so far away, with the exception of "Replies & more", which is also indispensable. One request to huy'z: Can you add a faster toggle between the two view types? Or does it have to stay with the extension options like that?" - Alex Schleber