To all IT folks out there: the Code Monkey Song and Video

Kudos to Amber Mac for posting this great video today- the Code Monkey song by Jonathan Coulton. Enjoy!

Urbandaddy recommends a great new service for all of you out there who tend to lose keys in the Big Apple. It's a company started by two enterprising ex waiters called New Your Key. They lock up a copy of your keys in a secure vault for only $30 a year - and deliver them to you wherever you are for only another $20 when in need. Sounds like a great service to me!

Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs featuring the C64

Found this over at Cameron's blog - really funny video about Bill and Steve:

Look out for this guy when you take a swim in the ocean

National Geographic shows this cool video of a giant squid that uses light (no light saber though) to attack its prey. Pretty scary!

Business travel sites roundup

Good listing from Business2 in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue:
- Expertflyer.com for those out there who really want to optimize their fares (paid service)
- Hopstop for the ecologically conscious public transport user
- Athletic Minded Traveler for those who want to actually exercise while traveling.

I'd only add Kayak to this because it has the best search functionality out there - and afterwards you can always buy from the airline website...

The new media value chain

Good post on this over at Always On on the new and old media value chain. The apparent lack of good inventory still seems to be the major factor preventing further online growth. I think the next years will be fruitful ones for all content owners who start developing a strong monetization strategy quickly. Especially like the chart here:

Happy Valentine's Day Google or should we say Googe?

A friend of mine pointed this out today:


seems like they're missing an l in there - or are they rebranding themselves?

2000 Bloggers

2000 Bloggers is a fun viral idea that is spreading pretty quickly around the web. It shows how you can use free software, a good idea and some blogging to create a decent amount of buzz and a lot of links for participating bloggers like me. Really enjoyed this one.

Great Web2.0 Description

Love it. Thanks to Fabrice for posting

Outsourcing software development

Good post on this by Darren Herman today. He highlights some of the options for offshoring/outsourcing programming to developing countries. I've also done some thinking on this recently and I agree with Darren that you have to have very tightly written specs and I think most importantly - a strong head of IT who can manage offshored relationships and business expectations. The CEO of a social networking startup I talked to recently has offshored 50% of his IT team via Rentacoder and so far it's going fairly well. I'm also interested in this from a big-company point of view - how do you do this without alienating your internal IT department and managing it successfully.

Create your own mission statement

Great little tool by our friend Dilbert. Save your time and effort and quickly create a powerful mission statement. Have fun!

The art of the start

Just saw this great video of Guy Kawasaki's speech at TiECON 2006. It's 40 minutes long and definitely worthwhile watching. You can also buy the corresponding book The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything

Pandora Meetup with Tim Westergren in NYC

Freezing temperatures didn't keep about 120 New Yorkers from flocking to a Cinema in the Village last night to meet Tim Westergren - the founder of Pandora. The session was mostly Q&A and the crowd consisted predominantly of music/Pandora enthusiasts so most questions focused on enhancements and better music selection.
Some interesting facts/trivia about Pandora (which I consider one of the most useful launches of the last few years) though:
- Guy Kawasaki provided the initial seed money for Pandora
- They went through 3 years of bootstrapping before finally getting some money from VCs in 2003
- The day they went to "Free" they got 250,000 visitors
- They're now at 5.5MM registered users!
- Revenue model will remain advertising - Tim is convinced of that
- 90210 is the most popular ZIP code (hint, hint: you have to be a US resident to listen)
- the DMCA enables and restricts Pandora in what they do - so you won't be able to listen to Madonna three times in a row here...

And now the good news - they're adding 15,000! new songs every month and classical music is coming soon!

Cheers to Tim and the free T-Shirt!

Millions of Myspace Merchants

Paidcontent has a story on a possible deal between Ebay and Myspace today. The idea is to enable myspacers to place a shopping widget onto their pages and complete ebay auctions/store sales right there on the page through a paypal integration. This is not the first time I'm hearing this idea (Cruxy has a similar widget for digital content) but if this is done between two of the largest sites out there it will be truly interesting to watch the decentralization of commerce continue.