These are select images from Day One of my recent trip to Cody, Wyoming. Shot with the built-in 3.2 megapixel camera of my faithful T-Mobile Blackberry 8900. Surprisingly in the middle of nowhere I am getting full signal strength.
I am a big fan of Pixar and the movies they make. I love how they use technology to build great animation franchises and tell great human stories. I was way too busy this weekend doing nothing, otherwise I would seen the new Pixar/Disney movie, Up.
Wall Street analysts had been very negative about this movie, Up has turned out to be third best Pixar movie based on the opening weekend collections. The flick about a grumpy old man, a precocious boy and a flying house took in about $68.2 million this past weekend. J.P. Morgan analysts expect the movie to take in $280-to-$300 million in domestic box office. That is a lot of money for a movie that was supposed to be a dud.
I started working on GigaOM mostly at my neighborhood Starbucks store. I would sit there after work, and plan how I would turn GigaOM from “one man and a blog” to a media company. It goes without saying that I have a special fondness for the location and for Starbucks. Of course, I am not as fond of the chain as as Rafael Antonio Lozano Jr. aka Winter who is on a mission to visit almost all Starbucks stores, chronicling his journey on Starbuckseverywhere.net.
Just like me, Starbucks has been home to many wanna-prenuers and web workers. Easy access to the Internet, ample sitting space and coffee (while expensive). When we started the company, I used Starbucks as a place to meet companies. Often I would spend somewhere between $15-and-$25 a day at the Starbucks, so much so they made me “customer of the week” once. However, lately something about Starbucks has not been feeling right. They are making some cuts because of the economy, some of them understandable, others just plain illogical.
For instance, I can’t understand why they shut down all their locations at 6 p.m. in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. Most places are teaming teeming with people when they start shutting down the stores at six. What that tells me is that the chain has become so big that it doesn’t have the ability to hone in on the needs of stores based on their location. More importantly, the quality of the coffee seems to be off as well. In comparison, Peet’s drinks always taste better and feel less “industrial.”
Having reduced my coffee intake to a couple of decaf espressos, I can’t say I got to Starbucks for coffee. Instead, I continue to use it for a place to write and meet (despite having an office), but the attraction is going down by the day.
I was discussing exactly this very thing (where else but at Starbucks) and he pointed out that Starbucks’ has the Detroit problem. Starbucks, he said, was not focusing on it core competency (good coffee) and unique selling point (a place to gather.)The music level is too loud to have a conversation, thus making it less attractive as a place to hang out with friends, colleagues and acquaintances. This in turn, gives Starbucks more feel of a “chain.”
That is why many of us find joys in patronizing smaller cafes such as Blue Bottle Coffee and Philz in San Francisco. There are countless others dotting the American landscape. The irony is that Starbucks is responsible for making fancy coffee drinks part of the American life.
Photo courtesy of Marcopako via Flickr.
Earlier today I tweeted that “fascinating, intriguing & interesting are 3 most overused words that show bloggers need a writing refresher.” I think they are like crutches used by some of us, mostly because we can’t find a better way to pen down our thoughts. Instead of being clear, coherent and simple in our message, we resort to words that typically obfuscate. Describing one’s state of mind or a neural response to a news story or a photograph is something that doesn’t capture the reason behind a blog post. Of course, I have used those three words as a way to weasel out of hard thinking… so I shouldn’t complain.
In response to my tweet, Olly shared a link to an old George Orwell essay: Politics & the English Language. “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks,” Orwell so eloquently writes. “It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language.” At the end of this essay, Orwell offers six simple rules that make for clear and quality writing:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Inga & Anush from Armenia are in Eurovision song contest with their track, Jan Jan (Nor Par). The video of the song is … so Bollywood. I bet, these girls are going to see their song ripped off by some Bollywood music producer and yet become a massive hit in India. Of course one of my deejay friends is going to come up with a near perfect Bhangra-mix. PS: I don’t have a clue what they are singing about, but it is energetic and fun. (via)
Earlier this week, following my blog post over on GigaOM about Kindle DX, NPR called and chatted with me about the device and whether it will save newspapers. I told them exactly what I told Sarah Lacy over on Yahoo Tech Ticker.
There are days when you look up at a perfect blue sky and wonder if life can get any better.
From a visit to the San Francisco Botanical Gardens with my pal Joyce Kim. It was the perfect way to spend a Sunday. I love the camera on my Blackberry 8900 Curve.
Earlier this month I spoke with German Radio Journalist Marcus Schuler about the impact of ultra band (50 megabits and even higher speed connections) on our Internet experience and the emergence of the real time web. Twitter is just the beginning of this real-time internet – the simplest manifestation of this long term trend – that spells the end of communications and start of an interaction society. Schuler put up the video of the interview on his blog. Have a look!
