Where Is Joel?

So apparently people use these “Blogs” for writing or something and not just leaving them alone. I thought I would use this opportunity to talk about Demo Camp exactly one week late. For non-demo campers, demo camp is a place that people with projects/things they have created (often small companies) go to demo the cool things they are working on or building.

So who demoed this time that I liked, what did I think?

1) MyFotoJournal: When at first I saw these guys I thought “This is silly”, another blogging platform, but this time you have to pay for it while others are free.  As a wordpress user however I gotta admit wordpress is hard to make look pretty (Sorry wordpress, you know I love you…  but still) and it is *such* a pain trying to add pictures or videos. I think someone sat down and was like “How hard can we make this process without actually having users leave” did some experimenting and found the solution wordpress currently uses.  Plus FotoJournal is way prettier than flickr. It’s nice to have options right? Apparently lots of people are already using it so good work Kyle Fox and company!

2) Beamdog: I made my thoughts on BeamDog clear earlier. Stop trying to take on steam, make yourself apt for windows. That would be super freeking awesome sweet. On the other hand are people going to pay $20 for some casual game from beamdog when they can get Civ4 from steam for the same price??  Nope. Go change the way people manage their computers and stop fighting a company that has an iron grip on the gaming industry.

3) Empire Avenue: Once again I already discussed these guys earlier. (It’s a stock market where you trade people’s online cred instead of companies.) Fun idea, but I need more reason to come back. I could actually see this doing very well among the same people who use formspring and farmville though. People have time and they spend it online in different ways. I personally spend it writing blog posts read by *maybe* 10 people and looking at naked women. (Wait, what?) Not sure if empire ave. is  my thing, but I could see it working out if they get some ad network involved. Now go buy my stock. “JJ”. I’ll make you bazillions of empire avenue dollars. I promise!

4) AppBoy: Yeah…  I’m gonna start sounding like a debbie downer here…  Except more like a Don downer because I’m a guy and Don is a guys name.  I didn’t entirely understand how this was any more than a fancy looking skin on the app store. It was very fancy looking though.   Oh right…  I forgot to tell you what they do: They are a fancy looking skin for the app store. There’s a ton of money in this space as distribution for mobile software is so easy. So maybe they’ll do well, good luck guys!

5) imgbrew: This was the most “boring” of the demos. It allows you to easy offload image processing to EC2. Aka, oops I have 10 million images to resize, what do I do? ImgBrew! Not like anyone does offloading of tasks to amazon and makes money. Hear me Panda, Zencoder, CrowdSifter, SocialMod?  There’s NO money here.  Or making generic IT stuff easier? How’s that going for you Wufoo?  Oh, you guys all make money? Well…  In that case this is just the kind of simple, awesome service that could do really well.

6) mobizou: I think mobile Coupons is something that is going to make lots of money. Lots and lots of money. Just to clarify I think there is going to be a ton of money in this field. Innovative ways to drive retail become necessities for stores as their competition offers the service and they are forced to offer it as well to keep up. Also these guys are calgarian! For reals. Calgary actually had a product at #democampyeg. The platform is obviously new and there are tons of rough edges, but that’s how all companies start and how demos at demo camp should be. This will go as far as these guys can sell it. And as far as they can fix rough edges. That too.

Now go order some pizza from checkers. You won’t regret it. That stuff is delicious.

Ctrl-C

Everyone should check out TheSixtyOne if they like music.  That’s it.  It’s awesome. It’s kind of digg for music, and lets you discover all sorts of artists that don’t have actual labels but are in fact amazing.  It also has some wicked photography which makes me very happy.  It’s not super duper intuitive to use, but totally worth it.  If y’all want to find me I’m jacksonjoel.  That’s all.

I’ve been thinking about what I wrote about beamdog the other day. Iphone store for the pc. It got me pondering what the 95% use-case for the pc really is. I have a friend (see his blog, acts_as_informative) who always claims apple does so well because they hit the 95% use-case really well and just let the others who aren’t in that use case just go do their own thing.

This makes sense, so I’ve been pondering what I think the perfect computer for the 95% really is.

1. I think it’s managed, like the iphone.  People never really break their iphones because they can only install trusted apps through the apple app store. Most people don’t need access to all sorts of crazy computery stuffs, they just need to have applications that work. Here enters beamdog on pc.  I think the ipad is a very interesting device in this respect, but I don’t think it can replace a pc with keyboard… yet.  The smart people at MS better be keeping their eyes on the ipad, because if they don’t they may very well find the paradigm of computing shifting out from under them and not be ready to move with it.
2. I think it’s mobile. Laptops overtook desktops because once people buy laptops they hang out wherever they are.  If I’m in the kitchen so is my laptop.  Maybe my desktop is a wee bit faster, but aside from gaming it doesn’t do anything that my laptop won’t. I’m just never going to walk to another room to use it when I can use the laptop that’s with me. The laptop is still not a mobile device, I need to carry it around with me everywhere in a backpack. Computers in the future will fit in my pocket.

Now, imagine if apple just stuck a monitor output and a keyboard input on an iphone, then beefed the iphone up a wee bit so it was a little faster. I could have my computer everywhere, I wouldn’t worry about it getting a virus, and for most people it covers what they do with their computer namely:

1. Music
2. Communication via twitter, facebook, email
3. Possibly some word processing if I’m in school. (Ok, not yet, but not far off)
4. Watching movies/tv
5. Sharing media (for example pictures, which I can…  joyously even take with this device)
6. Getting information from the internet like recipes or wikipedia use.
7. Even better, with internet storage like dropbox I don’t even need a big hard drive so the small iphone hd is perfect

An iphone costs 200$ with plan.  You might want 1-2 monitors around the house it could plug into if I wanted to do serious browsing for say another 300$ for 2 + 2 keyboards.  500$ is about the price of a current netbook.  I think maybe this is what apple is trying to do with the ipad, but it misses the key point of being more mobile than my laptop and I’m still really not sold on an onscreen keyboard for all of my input, but it *does* plug into a keyboard.  Just a few thoughts I thought I would puke up while waiting my turn to get on the computer I need in the lab.

Joel

This post follows directly fron an issue we have been having with SnackPanda lately. We are looking for a good domain registrar that we can resell for. This isn’t because we care at all about making money off of selling domain names. It’s because we want domain registration to be a seamless invisible process to our clients. What we found is that many domain registrars provide a high barrier to entry to reselling domain names through them. Many ask for a high up front “down payment” before they allow any domain resale for example.

At first this seemed curious to me. Why would a store provide a barrier to entry to people who are planning on driving more traffic in their direction? It doesn’t really make any sense. My first thought was the barrier was there so that when buying a domain someone couldn’t claim to be a resaler and buy a domain at 8.50$ instead of 9.50$. But the more I thought about it that just seemed stupid, if this were the case they would provide a service where I could resell domains at the price I would normally pay. Then finally the answer occurred to me. Domain registrars don’t actually want you to resell their domains.

?!?!? What?!?! Seems bizarre right? Why would a domain registrar not want you to give them more business? The answer is that they don’t actually make any money off of selling domains. Say a domain registrar makes 3$ per domain and registers a million in a year. That’s only 3 million dollars. Seems like a ton of money, but for a company like godaddy which cleared over half a billion last year it’s a mere drop in the bucket. If anyone has ever registered at godaddy they know that to buy a domain you have to navigate through a million pages of “Do you also want to add this useful thing?”. Godaddy makes money on the extras they sell! For every domain name registration someone else resells that does not force the user to go through their crazy options they don’t make money.

This in fact is just the common practice of variable pricing applied to the internet. When you buy a coffee at Starbucks and get Venti it costs them virtually no more than to give you a tall, and yet you pay significantly more. Stores want to price items so the consumer who is willing to pay more for the item does. The same practice happens in retail with sales. People willing to pay more buy the item at full price, people less willing buy it on sale at the end of the season. In domain registration some people may be willing to pay 80$ for a registration, some might be discouraged by anything more than 10$. The registrar wants both of these people’s business but needs some way to part the person willing to pay more from their 80$ so they offer upselling options.

The last example of this I’m going to give on this ramble is Intel. Intel for while (and still may) deliberately breaks some processors to make them go slower. Because of this some slower processors were in fact more expensive to produce than the expensive processors. It was necessary however because without having different processor speeds there is no way to part consumers from exactly the amount of money they were willing to pay.

Use this wisely in your businesses. Extra upselling features don’t need to be magnificent, they do however need to exist so that you give consumers willing to pay more for your product the opportunity to pay more. Don’t believe me? Start looking around, you’ll see variable pricing everywhere!
Thanks for listening to my rant. Joel out.

I HATE HATE HATE these stupid screens. Yes, I understand that they make colours more vivid or some sort of mumbo jumbo like that but did anyone stop to think that people actually *use* laptops? We carry them around, not sit with them is some sort of dank dark basement. My Macbook is completely impossible to use anywhere that is bright light.
Yesterday while trying to take a picture of how the middle of the screen is brighter in bright sun than the rest of the screen I managed to take this. I actually really like the photo, but seriously, this is actually a picture of my LAPTOP SCREEN. … Take a moment to contemplate that… The following picture is a picture of the actual screen of my laptop. Someone try and tell me that’s good design.

Picture of my MacBook Screen.

I’m am currently jaded on ebay. The reason will become clear given my last three transactions:
1. Tried to buy a watch. Paid. The watch never arrived. Needed to fight to get my money back.
2. Tried to buy the same watch. Repeat step 1. Gave up on buying watch.
3. Bought Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens. Lens does not focus to infinity. (Sample shots following.)

f/1.4

f/5

As you can see it gets a bit better when stopped down, but still not good. And who buys an expensive f/1.4 lens to use at f/5 when a cheap lens would do the same thing. (And in this case better)

Anyways, I’m mad, and I have to pay the shipping back. But the guy has never had a negative comment, so maybe I can get something worked out. Either way chances of me using ebay any time again soon are slim.

Joel out.

First Pfizer buys Wyeth creating a drug super giant, then Merck “bought” Schering-Plough and finally Wyeth eats Genentech. And who says M&A are not alive and well in this economic climate? Of course all of these acquisitions make sense, drug makers still need to make drugs during recessions so they had cash on hand and the competition was weak, but that’s not what I want to talk about. Merck’s purchase of Schering-Plough is the one that is particularly interesting.

The structure of the deal with Schering-Plough was as follows:
a) Merck gives Schering 41 000 000 000$.
b) Schering acquires Merck.
c) Schering installs the executive from Merck.
d) Schering moves into Merck’s headquarters.
e) Schering changes it’s name to Merck.

That is pretty dang fishy as far as I’m concerned. At issue here is the fact that Schering sells some drugs in partnership with J&J and the contract says that if they are ever bought J&J gets the entire rights to the drugs. The contract however did not think to include anything about buying someone else and changing their name. If I were J&J I would be pretty irked about the situation.

Aside from the strange structure of the deal it is also notable because Merck is a company that has traditionally grown their business via small acquisitions and their own research. The “purchase” of Schering is indicative of the state of big Pharma, too many drugs going off patent, not enough new one coming in to replace them, merge or die. Pharmaceuticals need to find ways to research new drugs faster, or maybe we just need to accept that we are already really good at stopping people from dying and the pace of research is slowing because problems we haven’t solved are hard. (Note, I don’t really buy that research pace is slowing down, in fact quite the opposite…) Lastly Merck’s acquisition is not a good sign for any small biotech firms currently in existence. Merck has generated fantastic returns for VCs and entrepreneurs of late, but they won’t have much cash for further acquisitions after this deal. Just a thought for entrepreneurs who have had Merck in mind as an exit strategy. have a good weekend all!

Joel

To put this simply, this guy should spend the rest of his life in jail. For those of you asking who Scott Reuben is, he is the man behind the “research” that indicated COX-2 pain inhibitors are superior for recovery and pain relief to steroidal anti-inflammatories. COX-2 pain killers are significantly riskier than the steroidal variety, but his research indicated that there was significant enough benefit to offset the risk. As it turns out much of his research was a sham. Many purported benefits of these drugs either do not exist, or worse, are actually disadvantages.

If none of this makes sense than this sums it up, Vioxx is a COX-2 inhibitor, and the risk with vioxx was death by heart attack. Ie. based on Mr. Reuben’s findings people took drugs that KILLED them. It stuns me that this does not have more press coverage. Now if this is not bad enough, and in my opinion it is almost tantamount to murder, Mr Reubens studies have set the scientific community back in looking for actual treatments for people with chronic pain. I’d be interested to hear what anyone who has arthritis has to say about the man. This fraud is despicable and I sincerely hope that he is punished accordingly.

This is very cool. If you do not think what I am about to write is cool please never read anything I have to write ever ever again. You are not worthy. This month in England there were three people fitted with “bionic eyes.” You read that correctly, bionic eyes. These three people were *blind*. Using technology were able to regain some vision via connecting a camera to their brains. … Wait for a second so I can reiterate that, a “Camera to their brains.” You heard that correctly folks. Pretty dang amazing.

News article here.

This post is a shout out to my homies (ie. some people I have never met) at the University of Toronto. Last week they published breakthrough results demonstrating how to turn adult skin cells into embryonic stem cells. Now I know you are all very impressed, but just in case you are not let me elaborate.

Unlike our normal cells which only get to replicate about 20 times before dying stem cells can replicate as many times as they want. Also unlike our normal cells which are stuck forever more being whatever kind of cell they are (ie. a muscle cell is relegated to the sad fate of always being a muscle cell) they can become ANY kind of cell.

So what? SO WHAT?!? Really??!? Thing we could do with embryonic stem cells:

a) As we get older our skin cells senesce and stop growing and start dying giving us saggy skin and wrinkles. Using stem cells we could inject *new* skin cells that will replicate giving 90 year olds skin as smooth as a baby.
b) People smarter than me claim we could cure Alzheimer’s. I don’t get it, but I trust them.
c) At some point we could even *grow* prostetics for people using their own DNA. Destroyed your knee? No problem!

I have a feeling the next 20 years in biotech are going to be VERY interesting.