Spassmeister

Apple Computers no panacea

this is not news to anybody with a mac. Oh, it's great that the virus teams are not staying up nights as often to hit the lower market share apples, but in the past couple years I've had far more problems with mac computers than in all the prior years:

my G5 had a "coolant leak" that required a week in the Crywolf repair shop
my Macbook pro had a freezing problem that required a new board
my daughter's mac book pro (late 2008) has been down with problems for weeks now including keyboard freezing, trackpad freezing, no detection of the airport
my other dual-core G5 has had to be in for a memory failure

in short, every single computer that i've purchased from Apple in the past two years has had a significant hardware problem that required one week+ of shop time to correct.

that's why I found this NY Times article about the high ratings on mac computers so puzzling. Perhaps the PCs are just so much worse, but frankly that makes little sense.

Sexting

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I'm Shocked. Really. Well, not really. You give young people phones with cameras..and what do you expect? in an era of "girls gone wild" this should surprise nobody. What should surprise people is that some enlightened law enforcement officials have read the letter of the child pornography laws strictly (so far so good) and decided that the proper course of action is to arrest the teens involved. This makes little sense.

Yes - such activity does appear to violate these laws. Laws crafted to PROTECT teens against predators, not punish crazy/quasi-normal teen behavior. And they guy they arrested had an image sent to his cell phone. We used to call that "push" in the business. How can a photo pushed to a teenager from another teenager be construed as anything truly "criminal" in the vein that this law was crafted? this is not exploitation, just sort of dumb.

You never think it's going to go this way

Well, many don't. some do however. Call them skeptics or realists. They miss the great times but are well protected on the downside. Many never would have thought that 5% of a well funded startup would be worth $0.01 after a couple of years and $1B later, but many are in this boat (or in the water without a life preserver)

NASDAQ
Real-Time Snapshot:
02/06/2009 11:04 AM EST
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Superbowl - wow what a game...and thanks Hulu

Anybody who actually watched the game - and the terrific halftime show - had to admit this was one of the best SuperBowls ever. The first half ended with a bang and so did the end of the game. And The Boss commanded viewers to "put down your chicken wings" and watch his 12 minute show.

As always, there were many great commercials as well. Many TiVo fans - but not the sport fan variety - were actually using the FF function in reverse: fast forwarding past the game to watch the commercials. Ironically, one of the best commercials - and there were so many to choose from - was from on-line video firm Hulu. That is, you would go to their site to re-play high quality versions of the commercials. And if watching the commercials was not enough, the playback of the commercials was sponsored by Coke and others. Several on-line job hunting websites had ads as well reflecting some strength in that market as well as a sign of the times.

After all, "you're not going to turn of your television and computer at the same time"

HNY 2009

How exciting to be starting a new year which must hold more promise than the last did. Fourteen months ago one of the board members of my last company told me "beware of 2008! it looks to be a dramatic slowdown compared with 2007". This man is in the hotel business where people book ahead a year in advance and he'd already seen a slowdown.

One of the many positive byproducts of networking outside of one's inner circle are market facts that you would typically only see months, or perhaps quarters, later. Some friends who work in commercial real estate are also great sources of information on future business growth...well...there's some new space available near the Doubletree hotel in the Carmel Valley area of San Diego (I'm always amazed at how transformational a hotel's web photos/images can be...this hotel is next to a virtually vacant office building and surrounded by two freeways, a huge street and a taco bell...find ANY of those in the photos of the hotel...)

I'm using Apple's MobileMe service now that i'm not an enterprise Exchange user any longer. For a month I pondered what I was doing wrong with my contacts until I saw an upgrade that performed that sync too. Thanks. So far it has not been all that smooth. but i'll save the details for later, but it needs some work.

Well, heading out to CES tomorrow. Should be interesting as usual, but all reports are subduded. We'll be reporting from the floor of CES Thursday and Friday. Lots of new insight on developments from last year and 2009.

NextWave and Billion Dollar Lessons

After the spectacular failure of NextWave in San Diego, it seems fitting to spend some time reviewing what went right and what went wrong based on public information and filed 10K and 10Q documents, as well as other public domain documents. More on this coming in January, but as a pre-cursor here's a book that covers the same topic:

Billion Dollar Lessons "what you can learn from the most inexcusable business failures of the last 25 years". This came a bit early to study NW, so we will cover it on Spassmeister.com..Here's an interview with the author.