Terry Jones

Amazon, intentionally or not, have done a great job with their special offer feature that suggests a second book to you and offers you both at the same time for a discount.

One could argue that it’s not in their interests to offer you a second book that you would buy later anyway at its normal price. (Yes, you can argue that it’s implicitly in their interest because it creates goodwill.)

At least in this customer’s experience, they do a great job of offering me things that I might want but never offering me anything I already know that I want. You might think that that’s because I always immediately buy everything I want, but that’s not true.

Today they slipped up and offered me something I knew in advance that I also wanted. I went to look at Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, and after I clicked to see the book, I wondered if they might just maybe offer me Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. And… they did.

That’s a first for me. I buy lots of books on Amazon, and I’ve never been offered something I knew I wanted.

Of course it’s also in their interests to occasionally slip up like this. Then people write blog posts praising them and saying how good their algorithms are.

At least for me, Amazon’s “better together” is almost pitch perfect. They consistently land tempting titles just outside the small ring of books I’ve already decided I’m going to buy at some later point. (Note that making special offers like this is very different from the far simpler “customers who bought X also bought Y” – which is just a lookup.) It’s easy to imagine Amazon’s algorithms trying to figure out what I’m almost certainly going to buy anyway, and what I might well buy but probably wont, and picking something tantalizing and just over the edge, just out of reach. What a great way to push readers’ boundaries while making more sales and not leaving money on the table.

Whatever’s going on, and whatever you think might be going on, it’s clearly not simple to keep customers happy and enthusiastic via special offers that do not sacrifice money the customer would in fact spend anyway.

I’ve spent many hours reading about Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services since they were announced. They’re certainly very attractive, and they are being put to heavy use by many companies. There’s a list of examples over on O’Reilly Radar. Don MacAskill of SmugMug gave a great talk at ETech about SmugMug’s use of S3. SmugMug have something like 200TB in storage at S3.

I think S3 and EC2 are fantastic and innovative offerings from Amazon. I’d love to use them for my own project.

But if you read the Web Services Licensing Agreement, it’s quite worrying. Or at least it should be worrying for anyone whose potentially S3/EC2-reliant service may one day rub Amazon the wrong way.

Here are a few extracts:

5. You agree to provide such additional information and/or other materials related to your Application as reasonably requested by us or our affiliates to verify your compliance with this Agreement.

What does “other materials” include? Source code?

If your Application is available as an online solution, you acknowledge and agree that we (and/or our affiliates) may crawl or otherwise monitor your Application for the purpose of verifying your compliance with this Agreement, and that you will not seek to block or otherwise interfere with such crawling or monitoring (and that we and/or our affiliates may use technical means to overcome any methods used on your Application to block or interfere with such crawling or monitoring).

“Otherwise monitor” is pretty creepy and all-encompassing. I’m supposed to give Amazon blanket permission to monitor my service in any way they choose? I think it’s fair enough for them to reserve the right and means to verify that I’m in accordance with the agreed T&C, but the above language is…. well, see below.

If your Application is a desktop solution, you agree to furnish a copy of your Application upon request for the purpose of verifying your compliance with this Agreement.

What does this mean? Source code?

And then we get to the real kicker:

8) If your Application is determined (for any reason or no reason at all, in our sole discretion) to be unsuitable for Amazon Web Services, we may suspend your access to Amazon Web Services or terminate this Agreement at any time, without notice.

Wow.

But big net-and-web-friendly Amazon, they wouldn’t just pull the plug on something they didn’t like. Would they? The experience of Zlio might make you wonder, as might the experience of Alexaholic Statsaholic.

From what little I know of those two cases, I don’t see a reason to condemn Amazon. But they do give pause, and section 8 of the T&C is frightening. There’s more in the agreement that I find vague (just what is an Amazon Property?), but that’s enough examples for now.

IANAL, but I’ve worked on and negotiated dozens of contracts. What we have here is a contract for services drawn up by the lawyers of just one party. This is the kind of shot across the bows you can take when your side gets to draft the contract, and it inevitably comes back with Unacceptable or Rejected all over the place, especially when you’ve egregriously over-reached. You know you’re over-reaching, of course. You get to frame the terms of the contract, which is why it’s so nice to do the first draft.

And yes, OK, Amazon is offering a service, they can define the price and the T&C as they see fit, and you can like it or lump it. But there’s another way, which is to push back a little.

S3 and EC2, and most likely future Amazon offerings, are important. They change a lot and they deserve to be widely used. It’s worth fighting about because they’re so great, because the T&C could be fixed, and because drafters of contractual terms like these expect you to push back.

Potential customers shouldn’t have to worry that Amazon might cut them off without warning and without reason. We should instead speak up and push for a better deal. Because right now the terms of the deal are totally one-sided. Amazon are big enough and mature enough and smart enough to know that it’s in their interests to make S3, EC2 and the rest of their web services as big as possible, and of course they know that their T&C are over-reaching.

If you’re building something that Amazon may one day decide they don’t like, or that they want to compete with, I’d be careful about using S3 or EC2. What if Amazon come along one day and offer to buy you for a deliberately lowball price—or else? What if [insert evil villain] calls up Jeff Bezos one day and makes a deal to have your service cut off? That’s going to be totally opaque to you, and you have no recourse. What if Amazon is bought by XXX, who then decide to cut you off? This may all sound farfetched, but these sorts of things do happen.

Comment #2 on the Zlio RW/W page I referenced above makes an important point. Amazon’s platform is akin to an operating system on which services can be built. Amazon promotes it like a platform. But they reserve the right to dump you unceremoniously, without notice, and without reason. Come on Amazon! We may be fragile startups dying to use your services, but we’re not idiots. If you want to build a platform and have people use it, do it properly. Otherwise, you’re just reserving the right to act like Microsoft after they finally woke up and realized that they could write applications for their OS too, and proceeded to use ugly means to wipe out competitors – to their ongoing and deserved detriment. But even Microsoft didn’t have an EULA that said they could take the OS away from you any time they felt like it.

Given a choice between Amazon cutting the price on S3 again and having them revise their T&C, I’d much rather the latter. But if we all silently accept their T&C, there’s no reason for them to revisit.

A few small changes could make Amazon’s web services irresistible.

Antonio over at the Onda has a post up about Productivity and being Always-On. He’s got comments turned off, so I’m going to make a few here.

First of all, I really enjoy Antonio’s writings. That’s why I read his blog. But today I just need to push back a little :-) I think all four of Antonio’s points about what you can expect to go wrong are rather weak and/or misleading.

Let’s go through them.

Power (this one was on me for being unprepared). Between Spain and England, I discovered 3 different plug types. What is more, if you travel with a laptop and a phone (more than one device to plug in) and check in late, good luck getting the hotels to have anything to lend you to plug your American appliances in.

You could substitute the U.S. for Spain or the UK in this sentence and it would remain true. There’s actually a good deal of standardized plug size across Europe. Yes, the UK and the US (and some other countries) do things differently. But Spain is part of a large swathe of countries that follow a standard. I could mention the use of 110 volt devices, but I wont. But I do suggest, just for fun, going to the reception of some US hotels and asking them if they have a European plug converter they could lend you. Or try asking for two. I’ve lived 10 years in the US and 10 years in Europe and I have a fairly strong opinion about where you’re more likely to find accommodating help for stuff that requires regular employees of a company to even be aware of the existence of other countries.

Consistent SMS/data on your cellphone. Having just switched to a GSM network, I was really excited by the prospect of 3G networks and zippy-fast mobile data. While voice worked everywhere, SMS and data did not. In fact, SMS was the flakiest of all of the services that I’ve come to rely on— I could receive messages almost everywhere, but I had at best 50% odds of being able to send them.

I’d put this down to (probably) having a mixture of Europe and US carriers involved. I also spent nearly 5 years working in the cell phone industry and know first hand from various carriers that passing SMS between their networks is (or was a few years back) hugely flaky. Someone from a US carrier (I don’t remember which), told me that, officially, US-Euro SMS was not supported by their network but that messages did sometimes “leak” through, but they weren’t sure how! In Spain I find SMS extremely reliable, and I send probably 200/month. When in the US I also have not-infrequent problems, in both directions.

And as far as the wi-fi is concerned, it does seem to be fairly ubiquitous, but in 100% of the cases it was expensive and encumbered by either its billing mechanism or by some lame proxy server setup that blocked most of the useful Internet services you’d want to get access to.

The same could easily be said of the US, and probably every other country. This is too general a complaint – I’ve encountered expensive brain-dead wifi all over the place. One pleasant exception is the airport at Las Vegas, with free wifi. Plus see below.

Overall Internet speed. Finally, the speed of “broadband” connections (especially in Spain) is painful. In this new world of rich Internet applications, it’s easy to forget that we’ve only just been able to get to the point where we can use them in the US and that this is far from a given for other parts of the world. For instance, in Spain Tabblo.com was completely unusable, and even Gmail was severely hobbled by the dearth of bandwidth.

This is also very weak. Who was the ISP? In what city? What sort of bandwidth was the contract? How many different places, ISPs, did you try out? It’s like saying “I went to the US and my broadband connection sucked, so therefore broadband connections suck in the US”. FWIW, I’ve had an ADSL connection with a fixed IP address in Barcelona for about 7 years. I had the connection for several years, at a cost of about US$30/month during which the CEO of the company I worked for in Manhattan couldn’t even get any DSL connection to his Manhattan apartment. I mean nothing. He was using a modem for years while I had a much zippier always-on connection. These days I have a theoretical max of 1Mb up and 20Mb down, and the last time I tested it it was running at about 6Mb. A connection at that speed can be had from Ya for just US$26/month. I ssh into servers and the connections stay up until I close them (often many days). I can even work with Tabblo. I know dozens of people here who use GMail as their only mail source, and I’ve seen it working just fine, without noticeable delay.

That’s it for now I guess. While I’m sure Antonio’s experiences happened, they read like someone comparing their comfortable home setup with what they experienced as a foreign tourist. Of course those experiences will be very different, even if the underlying services are identical. You see the same thing when tourists complain about how expensive a country is. Yes, you can pay 12 euros (US$16!) for a large (and I mean beer stein large) Fanta on the Ramblas. But that says more about you than it does about Spain :-)

I like George Orwell. A tired fool got me started on the four-volume collection of Orwell’s essays, journalism, and letters. It’s great. Among many things I could say, one is that you know you’re reading someone damned good if you’re fascinated by their thoughts on something you formerly had no interest or experience in. There’s the essay on Dickens that I mentioned earlier, essays on cheap vulgar postcards, boys magazines, and much else besides. Gore Vidal is similarly compelling, and I think I would take his collected essays even over those of Orwell. Christopher Hitchens is similarly provocative but not in the same class as a writer. Very few are.

Today I was reading an Orwell review of three T. S. Eliot poems. I’m not into Eliot and I’m not into poetry. Like Gore Vidal’s, Orwell’s reviews are wonderful – balanced and surgical skewerings. Anyway, I came across the following, which I enjoyed enormously and decided to post:

But the trouble is that conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on ‘despairing of life’ into a ripe old age. One cannot go on and on being ‘decadent’, since decadence means falling and one can only be said to be falling if one is going to reach the bottom reasonably soon. Sooner or later one is obliged to adopt a positive attitude towards life and society. It would be putting it too crudely to say that every poet in our time must either die young, enter the Catholic Church, or join the Communist party, but in fact the escape from the consciousness of futility is along those general lines. There are other deaths besides physical death, and there are other sects and creeds besides the Catholic Church and the Communist Party, but it remains true that after a certain age one must either stop writing or dedicate oneself to some purpose not wholly aesthetic. Such a dedication necessarily means a break with the past:

every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

Apart from the fact that I am much too impatient to read poetry, one of my problems is that I never have any idea what it’s about. But at least the above is clear. It wonderfully captures the inevitable progression from the troubled search for meaning of existential youth to the amorphous struggles of the serial entrepreneur.

I’m trying to work. But right now I’m not working, I’m writing this.

Q: Why am I writing this instead of working?

A: Because my MacBook Pro has decided to spend 2 minutes showing the spinning color wheel in the application I was trying to use.

I used to have a 17″ G4 Powerbook with 2GB of RAM. When people asked me what I thought of it I was always very positive and enthusiastic in my reply. Then I got a 17″ MacBook Pro, and I hate it and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Every single day, probably half a dozen times, I’ll be using some application (in this case Aquamacs, a version of Emacs for the Mac) when, for no apparent reason, the mouse cursor will change to the spinning pizza wheel of death, and remain that way for up to a couple of minutes. This happens to me in Firefox too, so it’s definitely not an Emacs thing. It probably happens in other apps too, I haven’t paid as much attention as I probably should have.

I’m too busy swearing at the machine.

Anyway….. what the hell!? I wish I could just throw this piece of junk away and get something that just works. I’m planning to head back to Linux next time around. I can’t believe that this machine could have made it out the door. But I need it too much to be able to just send it back, so I’m stuck, and I resort to cursing and blogging.

I have other complaints too. I run a make clean that removes a bunch of files (around 20M of stuff, not that many files). Sometimes the rm command will just sit there for 15 or 20 seconds before completing. What’s it thinking about? I run unit tests on Python code all the time. Sometimes the python command to run the tests will just sit there, the other day it was taking almost a minute to launch python. Yes, I know, I can go look at what’s going on on my machine, and I do, and sometimes, yes, it’s busy. But this is just ridiculous. I’ve been using UNIX for 25 years and I haven’t had to wait for things like this since the early 80’s (and then on a machine I was sharing with up to 128 others). It’s infuriating to have the expensive latest and greatest laptop and then have it perform like a dog.

FWIW, the machine is probably a year old. Probably these seem like small problems, but I think Apple really screwed up, and there’s plenty of complaints online about problems with these laptops. Blast them to hell.

Now back to work – if I can manage to get a cursor in Emacs, that is.

At some point I read a description of why entrepreneurs pitching VCs is a bad mix: because you have people who can’t explain anything meeting people who can’t understand anything. That’s unfair all round of course, but still…. Having done some of this and had people just not “get” it, you can’t but wonder why they don’t get it. Of course part of it can be about the pitch itself, the presentation, etc etc. But even if you suppose everything is ideal, investing (both as a founder and as a financial backer) are both an act of faith.

There’s lots of evidence for this. To begin with, if it were a science and there were quantifiable measures, those things would presumably be known and you’d have a lot fewer startups and a lot fewer investors, simply because failure would be rare.

Until recently I thought there was more of a lack of vision on the investor side. But now I’m not so sure. For example, the Google guys were apparently running around search engine companies trying to sell their idea (vision? early startup?) for $1M. They couldn’t find a buyer. What an extraordinary lack of….. what? On the one hand you want to laugh at those idiot companies (and VCs) who couldn’t see the huge value. OK, maybe. But the more extraordinary thing is that Larry Page and Sergei Brin couldn’t see it either! That’s pretty amazing when you think about it. Even the entrepreneurs couldn’t see the enormous value. They somehow decided that $1M would be an acceptable deal. Talk about a lack of vision and belief.

So you can’t really blame the poor VCs or others who fail to invest. If the founding tech people can’t see the value and don’t believe, who else is going to?

I usually enjoy Paul Graham’s essays. In a recent one, The Hacker’s Guide To Investors, he says:

Risk is always proportionate to reward. So the most successful startup of all is likely to have seemed an extremely risky bet at first, and that is exactly the kind VCs won’t touch.

Which is also pretty interesting. In some ways it’s like a horoscope – appealing to every dreamer who believes they’re sitting on a billion-dollar idea. But if the always is true in the above quote, then if it happens that you are in fact sitting on something that will bring huge rewards, then it by definition must appear hugely risky.

If you throw in the initial observation that even the founders cannot assess value, then I think you get three things. One: a feeling of taking huge risk is a necessary part of building something that’s hugely rewarding (i.e., if you don’t have that feeling, then you’re probably not building such a thing). Two: even if you are building such a thing, you cannot know it. You just have to believe. Three: if you cannot know it, but can see huge risk, you can’t expect investors to see things any differently. So to get them to invest you really have to make them believers too.

I’m about to book a cheap flight from JFK to Madrid with Air Comet. There are some alarming and amusing comments about the airline online. See this page for example – search for hot red smocks and slit skirts. I flew that route with them about a month ago and everything went smoothly.

And the low, low, price? Just 83 euros one way!

According to this site a 12-hour flight needs 110 tons of fuel. Mine’s a 6:15 flight, so call it 55 tons of fuel. A ton is 2000 pounds according to google, so 110,000 pounds of fuel are needed. Jet engine fuel is like kerosene and weighs about 6 pounds per gallon. So that’s 110,000 / 6 = 18,333 gallons of fuel for the trip. Fedex charges a fuel surcharge when the price of jet fuel rises above $0.98, so let’s assume Air Comet is paying $0.80 per gallon.

Thus the price of fuel alone for the trip is roughly 18,333 x $0.80 = $14,666.

The plane is an Airbus 313, which has a capacity of 295. If we assume the flight is full, Air Comet needs to charge each passenger just under $50 for fuel alone. 83 euros is about $110. So Air Comet can cover the cost of fuel. Good.

Continuing, that leaves $60 of my ticket price times 295 passengers, or roughly $17K to pay for everything else.

This all assumes that everyone is paying the same low price, which of course they are not.

While googling for the above numbers, I found an article about the first model plane that crossed the Atlantic. It weighed 11 pounds (5 kilos) and got about 3,000 miles per gallon of fuel, i.e., less than $1 of fuel for the whole trip.

I find it amazing that huge corporations are unable to see that attempts to copy protect things always fail. Here’s another one gone wrong. Undoubtedly, millions were spent on getting this protection in place, and it’s picked apart by one guy in a mere 8 days.

There are so many examples of this. I guess it can’t be that “they” don’t know their schemes will be broken. Perhaps they assume that, but also know that just a small percentage of customers will avail themselves of the means to use the crack. If so, it’s certainly better to use some form of protection, but why not face facts and put less effort into making it obscure. After all, what’s the difference between an elaborate scheme that’s cracked in 8 days and a trivial one that’s cracked in an hour?

Here’s something that seems new. It’s a shop where you can go to get legal help.

Maybe I’m behind the times, but this seems like an idea with huge potential. The legal profession could do with some shaking up. There are several hurdles that make getting legal advice feel like such a big deal. It’s supposedly very expensive. You need to make an appointment. You feel like it’s something you just want to do for major problems. You wonder if you should dress up to go to the lawyer’s fancy office. You need to go to the richest part of town. You expect the process of talking to a lawyer to be complex and drawn out, advice to be full of qualifications, and to encounter a broad range of issues whose scope the lawyer will take pains to describe. You expect to be billed by the hour and through the nose, and you somehow need to know when to cut the legal advice (and the billing) off because it’s probably no longer important or relevant.

That all seems a bit old-fashioned. It’s in the strong interests of the lawyers to keep things semi-obscure and to maintain their priesthood at your expense.

The creation of easily accessible walk-in legal shops like lomaslegal seems to strike at the heart of this old-fashioned system. I think it’s great. I also think there’s a strong chance the traditional legal firms will turn up their noses at this sort of initiative, just like the traditional airlines turned up their noses at budget airlines offering cheap and easy no-frills service to the masses. Given that the law is so vast, that we bump into it so often, and that the legal profession preserves itself in a self-interested archaic state, it seems like there’s the strong potential for change.

Another initiative, also in Spain, is iAbogado. You just call them and pay a euro a minute. Or you can buy an electronic token and IM them for half an hour (though I’ve no idea why anyone would choose that low-bandwidth option).

But…. maybe it’s just me who’s behind the times and this sort of thing is already commonplace elsewhere.

I was surprised after reading about Google lending YouTube $15M to get them through the month before they closed the deal that there wasn’t more of a fuss.

If YouTube were hurting that badly, they may not have been able to make payroll. They could perhaps have tried going to the bank for the money, on the strength of the presumed Google deal and a letter of intent. Getting a loan from your acquirer seems rather odd, at least in an arm’s length transaction.

Given that it sounds like YouTube were about to hit the wall, it’s incredible that the price was still so high. How come Google didn’t beat them down? It’s not like they didn’t know YouTube were desperate – they lent them the $15M after all.

So how did the deal still get done at the massive valuation? The obvious answer is that Sequoia was on both ends of the deal.

I bet Sequoia must have been tempted to provide YouTube with the $15M of capital themselves (= more stock), while simultaneously getting YouTube acquired by Google. I guess there are only so many ways you can have your cake and eat it though before things start to really stink. Plausible deniability is important; that would have been a step too far, with their thumb directly in the pie. Plus they’d have been putting the screws on the YouTube founders that way, perhaps thereby jeopardizing the bigger deal.

You’d think Google shareholders would be making a fuss about this.

Speaking of anal sex, I went to see if pooTube.com was taken. It is, and it leads to youTube. I thought it would be the perfect domain for an anal sex site. I like it (the name, I mean) a lot.

There’s yet more dirt on the Google / YouTube deal. I’ve thought several times already that I wouldn’t be surprised if the deal didn’t close. I don’t remember when it’s due to close, maybe as soon as December. It would be a major stumble for Google, but I’m not convinced that that would be worse than going ahead. It feels to me like the whole thing is built on sand, and that we’re seeing that now.

YouTube is changing so quickly, with tens of thousands of pieces of content being pulled very publically, lots of semi-negative write-ups, the threat of many lawsuits, the apparently desperate last-minute behind-the-scenes deal-making that went on the day they got it done, other video sites moving to share revenue with content providers, etc.

It all has a feeling of extreme volatility to me. It wouldn’t surprise me to see YouTube’s value plummet if this continues for long. Is it too late for Google to pull the plug?

I think there’s probably almost no brand faithfulness in the online video world. Sure, coolness is important, but coolness can change overnight. And then you’re left with what? What does someone who uploads a video actually want? Basically, they want storage space, a URL to point their friends to, and maybe somewhere for people to leave comments or a rating. A bit of revenue would be nice. Your average Joe probably doesn’t care about much more. It’s a bit like buying gas.

I don’t think it makes sense to run out and short Google over this, but I do think the potential for a major disruption is there. If it happened and people suddenly saw Google as just another company, capable of making big errors, there might be a disproportionally large adjustment in their stock price.

Pure speculation of course. I’m very interested to see how this plays out.

From here:

So, while you think enviously about the $1.65 billion YouTube snagged from Google (or, as someone pointed out, approximately $3 million per day of their existence), you can feel some sympathy for Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp — owners of the site utube.com. Turns out, plenty of people have been hearing the name YouTube and assuming it was UTube. So, those people have been checking out the wrong site… and knocking it completely offline (which is why we won’t bother even linking to it now). Of course, the head of Universal Tube knows an opportunity when his web server stats show it to him. He’s already turned down a million dollar offer on the domain, and is holding out for at least $2.5 million.

From this article:

I had the pleasure of moderating the presenters at the Stirr mixer last
night (see also ValleyWag coverage). I like these gatherings, mostly
because the pitches are very brief: Entrepreneurs get 60 seconds to make
their case. Also, Stirr events are at bars. Can’t beat that. (By the way,
the 60-second pitch is not briefest pitch format. At the upcoming SF Beta
event, the presenters will have to cram their pitches into haiku.)

I love it, and I’d love to try it. It levels the playing field beautifully – with grass cutting blades set to Super Low. There isn’t much room for marketing fluff in a haiku.

Apple-funded study reveals that $1999 Apple 30″ displays result in up to 50% productivity gains^*.

Hurry while stocks last.

* On certain tasks, such as mouse move and click.

Delicious/Yahoo are apparently planning to focus on people. Good for them.