I have to wonder if Mel Gibson’s upcoming film, “Apocalypto,” is going to include the obliteration of the Mayan culture at the direction of Catholic priests.
bq. CNN.com – New Mel Gibson film to be in Mayan – Jul 26, 2005
bq. A year after breaking box-office records with “The Passion of the Christ,” which was shot in Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew, Gibson has struck a deal with the Walt Disney Co. to release his next picture in a Mayan dialect.
p. via “Defamer”:http://www.defamer.com
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
bq. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Commercial weblog empresario, Jason Calacanis makes a “damning comparision”:http://calacanis.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000590049190/ between the difference between MTV’s TV coverage of Live8, and the streaming webcast offered by AOLTV.
bq. The biggest take away for me yesterday at Live8 outside of the very important cause we were all supporting was that AOL exposed that MTV is a fraud. MTV is no longer about music or freedom — it’s about being locked into banal commentary by vapid models drenched in cheesy advertising.
(It’s not news that MTV is about banal commentary, vapid models and cheesy advertising, but I couldn’t resist quoting the dig.)
He continues:
bq. The torch passed from MTV to AOLMusic as AOL proved — 10 years after steaming media on the Internet started — that the Internet is a much better experience then TV. Heck, it’s even better then cable TV!
bq. The difference was shocking: you could switch from high-speed stream of the raw footage on AOLMusic or you could watch idiotic VJays talk over the highly anticipated Pink Floyd reunion.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a couple of posts about the opportunities for “small organizations to do big things”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000594.html , and the impact this might be having on the “venture capital”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000598.html industry.
This past week, Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite and JotSpot “wrote about this dynamic”:http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2005/06/its_a_great_tim.html in his blog, noting that:
bq. “Excite.com took $3,000,000 to get from idea to launch. JotSpot took $100,000.”
The reasons are pretty familiar: adecade of progress in Moore’s law, open source infrastructure, globalized labor markets, and search engine marketing.
He wraps up his post by outlining how this changes an entrepreneur’s relationship with Venture Capital.
David Heinemeier Hansson, one of the people behind “Basecamp”:http://www.basecamphq.com, goes “further than Kraus”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/entrepreneurs_angels_and_the_cost_of_launch.php :
bq. As part of a debt-free company that didn�t need angels to launch and is operating on revenues instead of VC, I naturally have a somewhat different perspective. […]
bq. Now that all the fixed costs are gone, you�re left with the requirements of time and passion. […] I think that story is actually a lot more interesting since its not just lowering the costs of an existing model, it�s throwing it out and opting for a new one entirely.
bq. As mini-investments from VCs and angels become the next big thing, I hope more crews will think hard and consider whether they could do without. Look at the project that costs $100,000 and figure out how to make it cost $20,000 over the shoulders of three guys. Do it out of your own pocket and you�ll be forced to reckon with constraints earlier and more intensely.
bq. Constraints drive innovation and getting your idea out in the wild in two months instead of six will likely do you a world of good. A month or two out the gates, you�ll have a pretty good idea of whether you �got something� or not.
This is why I think the VC industry is in for some interesting times.
bq. In an interview with Larry Magid on ITConversations, RealNetwork’s Rob Glaser said [at minute 2:45] that in a given month over 90% of Rhapsody’s one million songs are played at least once and the top 100 songs make up only 1% of the listens.
Dan Bricklin’s Blog
p. Via the excellent “David Weinberger”:http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/
Over a decade ago, I remember thinking that Boeing was being pretty damn shortsighted. They were getting the 777 off the ground, so to speak, and were drawing a lot of criticism locally for contracting so much airframe work off to Japanese companies. Most of the criticism was labor-oriented, that Boeing was forsaking Puget Sound area workers.
Some of the criticism focused on the fact that Boeing was basically giving away their engineering know-how and that at some point, there wouldn’t be anything left. Someone (I believe someone connected to Boeing) defended this action, saying that they still held a critical advantage in wing technology which would give them the edge over any attempt at completion for whole airframes from their suppliers.
I thought that was a pretty naive assumption. I knew there were companies building small commercial jets and figured they’d used that experience to build a capacity for larger airframes that could eventually challenge Boeing while it was busy worrying about Airbus.
It’s interesting to see where things are now:
Of course, I missed the real reason these manufacturers would be interesting: Small planes are starting to compete with larger aircraft. As Elisabeth Eaves notes in one of her “dispatches from the Paris Air show for Slate”:http://www.slate.com/id/2120937/entry/2121076/
Air Canada used to fly an Airbus A319, which seats 122 passengers, once a day between Calgary, Alberta, and Houston, Texas. As of this month, it flies a smaller jet, the 75-seat Bombardier CRJ 705, twice a day instead.
I’d made the mistake of accepting on Boeing’s own terms that larger jets would continue their singular importance to airtravel. Airbus made a bet along those lines with the A380, which can carry 500-800 passengers and is designed for the hub-and-spoke model favored by the big airlines. The problem they are facing is that during peak hours, takeoff and landing slots are saturated, so flying bigger planes will increase the number of passengers they can carry.
This assumes that the passengers really want to travel the hub-and-spoke way in the first place. The smaller aircraft makers are betting otherwise. The Calgary-Houston example aside, many of the smaller jets have been serving on regional duty, replacing turboprops to haul people from major hubs to smaller regional airports that don’t merit service from a 737. However, they clearly expect growth from selling to airlines flying between smaller cities, bypassing the major hubs altogether.
“Boeing”:http://www.boeing.com/commercial is pursuing a similar strategy, though at a different level of scale, by betting the company on a new aircraft, the 787 Dreamliner. The Dreamliner distinguishes itself not by sheer size, like the A380, but by delivering the per-passenger fuel efficiency and speed of a wide body aircraft in a mid-sized jet. They are doing so because they also believe that people would prefer point-to-point flights to the hub-and-spoke cattle-call, though they are targeting routes with heavier traffic (and greater distances) than Embraer and Bombardier.
“James Fallows”:http://www.jamesfallows.com/ has an excellent book called Free Flight