Wednesday, March 26, 2008

The Darjeeling Limited is worth it just for this song

I watched the movie last night, nothing to write home about but I love this song by Peter Sarstedt. Enjoy!

Saturday, March 22, 2008

What is best in life?

Gotta love Arny in this scene. My secret ambition of becoming governor of New Jersey in 2024 is still alive - I might have to get a movie gig like this before though... Kudos to Andrew Chen for posting this.

YouTube - Conan - What is Best in Life

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Is Meebo worth the same as Bear Stearns (BSC)?

Another crazy day on Wall Street, another crazy valuation being shopped around in the valley! According to TechCrunch, Meebo, a no-download chat platform combining access to the most popular instant messaging clients is aiming for a $250MM valuation in their latest round.
Don't get me wrong, Meebo is an exciting company and with AOL opening up AIM they might even have a chance to become legitimate (an AOL insider tells me Meebo isn't exactly liked in Dulles, VA). But the same amount that JP Morgan Chase paid for Bear Stearns yesterday - that seems ludicrous to me. Then again, the guys at Meebo probably don't have billions of toxic CDOs tucked away in the server room!

The food fight video

This is pretty funny! Found on

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Social gaming is the evolution of casual online gaming

Mashable last week has a good post covering the emerging field of social gaming that companies like zynga, and SGN are aspiring to dominate. Zynga etc. are the natural evolution of first gen online casual gaming companies like Oberon Media; whereas Oberon went to portals (MSN) for distribution, Zynga etc. go to the social networks. As far as I know, one of the issues that Oberon is/was constantly facing is that the margins on these games get thinner and thinner as the traffic owner (portal/social network) and the game developer ask for increasingly larger shares of the revenues.
It'll be interesting to see whether they can work out rev-share models that make it attractive enough for all parties (developer, zynga etc., social network) to work together and provide value (read: ways to kill time) to consumers on social networks. Another interesting company in this space is Bunchball which offers a suite of products to help site owners drive engagement through games, rankings and avatars.
As someone on the social network site here at Takkle I'm excited about all of these coming to market as they are developing interesting applications to plug into our network and thus serve our users.

Monday, March 10, 2008

The long tail of social networks

Here's an interesting post about some key metrics for social networks. This is an expansion of Compete's rankings released last week. To me, what this really shows is that people use the sites very differently. Whereas sites such as Orkut, Facebook and Myspace clearly get very high repeat frequencies from heavy user-to-user interaction, other sites with lower ratios probably attract more casual browsers. That's not necessarily a bad thing, just something to keep in mind when you try to evaluate these sites.
Joining Dots: Social Networks Long Tail

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Why I am now a fan of Fedex

Yesterday I got a piece of furniture delivered by Fedex. They notified me of a failed delivery attempt by email (you can setup triggers on their site) and when I called them to schedule delivery for Saturday they were very helpful.
The best part follows: a few minutes later I got a call from their driver asking me what time that afternoon he could come and deliver the package. He was very friendly and promptly setup a time. He showed up at the agreed time, schlepped it up to my apartment and left.
That's what i call great customer service - courteous, friendly and fast. I tried to become a fan of Fedex on Facebook - alas! no page yet. So Fedex get a Facebook page, i'll be your first fan!

My Personal DNA

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