by Brendon J. Wilson

Entrepreneur Meetup

We had a great meetup with some really interesting attendees. Much animated discussion that, oddly enough, just happened to coincide with topic I sent out on the agenda: creative marketing.

Attendees

  • Bego Gerber: is an independent business development agent working on a “pro-sumer” (as opposed to consumer) product that enables individuals to buy directly by from companies at wholesale prices, as well as receive rebates on the products they purchase. (You’ll need a password for his web site: ebiz)
  • Phil Johnson: is a musician working fulltime to promote both his band, Roadside Attraction, and the band’s record label, Dangerous Grooves.
  • Anthony Ettinger: is a software engineer who has two side projects – a politics-focused discussion site called It’s All Politics, and a search engine optimization site called Top 25 Web. He’s looking for ways to turn these resources into a steady revenue stream.
  • Brendon Wilson: is a product manager at PGP.

Topics Discussed

  • The majority of the conversation centered on the creative marketing techniques being used by the attendees to find new customers for their products. On the personal side, Bego uses the personal touch to spot potential customers and business partners; for example, wouldn’t that smartly-dressed woman in the line at Starbucks with her child, obviously going to work, like another income stream that would allow her to stay at home with her child? For Anthony’s business, most of the new “customers” for his come to him via Google or other web sites, and so the challenge for him is to stimulate enough interest via valuable content to encourage linking that will drive traffic. In the world of rock’n’roll, Phil and his band are using a combination of sampler CDs (one of which he provided to each attendee), surveys, and email lists to not only get his band’s music out there, but also understand the audience for their music; particularly interesting is his band’s use of email – after a show, they send an email to all concert attendees, inviting them to download the MP3s of the live show. Great stuff on all sides.
  • Some of the conversation focused on how to enable consumers themselves to generate the value of the product. For example, Anthony has been toying with the idea of releasing his partially completed search engine optimization book via a Wiki on his web site, thus enabling his community to flesh out the book and add value to his site. For Phil, a similar effort using message boards on his band’s web site met with limited success due to a flood of comment spam/inappropriate content that limited the usefulness of the effort.
  • Many thoughts on the difficulty of “rising above the noise”. As more access to technology enables anyone to publish music, software, or other content, how do you get your message out there and gain an audience? This group’s opinion appears to be that the only way to succeed in this environment will be for entrepreneurs to build a core committed audience, one that will closely follow the artist’s work and spread the word of what they’re doing, not simply because they’re the “hot new fad”, but more because their is a strong bond between the audience and the artist that transcends the commercial nature of the artist’s work.

Interesting Books, Movies, and Events

in Entrepreneurship 1 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Kickin’ At The Lick

Ashley and I headed up the deadly winding road to the top of Mount Hamilton last evening to visit the Lick Observatory – we’d won tickets to participate in the observatory’s Summer Visitors Program. Normally, the observatory is only open during the day, but the Summer Visitor Program invites visitors to view the stars through the 40-inch and 36-inch telescopes and listen to some of the observatory’s staff talk about the history of the observatory, and the research it is currently undertaking.

We managed to catch both the science lecture by Dr. David Koo, and the history lecture by Dorothy Schaumberg, curator of the Lick Observatory Archives. Dr. Koo’s lecture focused on how cosmologists are currently struggling to understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy. To be honest, I’m not sure I understood either of them any better after the lecture – the main thing I took out of Dr. Koo’s talk was that the history and knowledge of the human race are insignificant when compared with the scale on which the universe operates.

Dorothy’s lecture on the history of the Lick Observatory started with background on James Lick, a famed local entrepreneur who left the money required to create the observatory. Dorothy gave a lively account of the man’s life and times, culminating in Lick being buried in the base of the 36-inch telescope at the Lick Observatory, and then traced through the history of the astronomers who made their names at the observatory. Of particular note: the fifth moon of Jupiter, Amalthea, discovered by Edward Barnard on his first night using the telescope.

After the lectures, we were treated by the telescopes of both the Lick Observatory and a number of amateur astronomers to views of M11 (The Wild Duck Cluster), M31 (The Andromeda Galaxy), M57 (The Ring Nebula), and M17 (The Swan Nebula).

Bummer of the evening: running over a rock two minutes out of the Lick Observatory parking lot, puncturing our car’s front left tire. D’oh!

in Personal 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Freedom & Privacy

My buddy Kevin was lamenting having to give his ID to get into LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week. Yes, the response from the LinuxWorld security was absurd (“it’s for security reasons”), but it’s interesting to note Kevin’s failure to grasp a key point: he didn’t have to go to LinuxWorld. Nobody was forcing him to reveal his identity – as long as LinuxWorld was up front with its requirements for entry (or offered a refund if Kevin refused to provide his ID) I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with what LinuxWorld did.

At the risk of infringing Bruce Schneier: privacy is a trade-off. It’s a free country – companies have a right to dictate the conditions under which they’re willing to sell to a consumer, and consumers have the right to decide whether or not they feel like accepting those terms. If you don’t like the terms, then there’s a simple solution: don’t buy the company’s product or service. It’s not like LinuxWorld security held Kevin down and went through his wallet – he could have just walked away.

It’s relatively easy to protect your privacy, as long as you’re willing to accept the inconvenience, cost, and lost opportunities. Don’t like companies tracking your purchasing habits? Fine – say good-bye to easy access to credit via credit cards, say good-bye to discount cards that “save” you money (the “save” is in quotes because the prices are usually inflated to encourage participation in discount schemes). Don’t want your movements to be traceable? Fine – get rid of your cell phone. Now, I’ll admit it’s effectively impossible to stand up to every company, all of the time, especially if you want to get anything done in life. But no one’s holding a gun to your head.

I think people overestimate the value of their freedom and privacy – they’ll scream bloody murder against laws that allow the government to collate data it already has on citizens, but sign away the same information in a heartbeat to save 10% on their groceries. It also appears people misunderstand the freedoms to which they think they’re entitled. Sure, you have a right to assemble – but only peacefully, without blocking free passage, and on public land. Sure, you have the right to free speech – but not to make threats, or spread libel. You can’t protest in the mall – it’s private property. And if you and a couple hundred friends are going to protest at the Democratic National Convention, don’t be surprised if the police put you in “free speech” cage. Those are the rules – any ideas of your own on the subject are merely creative works of fiction.

For those areas where you have a choice between preserving your privacy and buying into another product or service, it’s up to you to stick to your guns. If enough people had the courage to vote with their dollars, maybe companies would get the message. Until then, be prepared to present your “papers” along with your cash.

in Personal / Politics / Technology 7 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

The Canadian Candidate

Somewhere between the ads for summer blockbuster movies like The Manchurian Candidate and debates on the legality of fictional presidential assassinations, I forgot something: my real reason for being in the States. Yes, I know, it’s shocking! I admit it – I have an ulterior motive, a hidden agenda, if you will, for my current habitation of the United States. I am a secret agent, a warrior on the front lines of Canada’s covert bid for world domination.

My status as an agent of the revolution had lain dormant in my brain recently, its priority lurking somewhere above “keep breathing, for God’s sake, just keep breathing” but marginally below “you really could go for a bacon sandwich right about now”. Then it hit me: mmm…I really could go for a bacon sandwich right about now. And as I perused the back of the package of Safeway Select Bacon while Ashley made breakfast, I was jarred from my status as a sleeper agent for the puck-slapping, syrup-sucking empire by the package’s undoubtedly malevolent hypnotic message:

Canadians have long been respected for their unique institutions – the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (they always get their man), hockey (most of the great players are from Canada), maple syrup (experts acknowledge it’s the best in the world) and bacon.

Mounties? Hockey? Syrup-flavoured bacon?

With a start, it all came flooding back. Of course! That’s what I was here to do – it was all so obvious! And yet I’d missed all the signs. Comrade Shatner had obviously been attempting to contact me, encoding his message in a rehash of a Pulp song so horrid, I’m amazed no one uncovered its true meaning. It must have been urgent – the last time such a dire message was sent, Shatner had to butcher a Beatles classic. It was not pretty (then again, it was nowhere near as weird as what Spock has been up to recently).

With my mental fog lifted, I reviewed the plans to convert Americans to our ways. Flooding the American market with cheap drugs to illustrate the value of socialized healthcare? Check. Brainwashing the masses with imported Canadian rock stars, actors, and subversive films, each conveying subliminal pro-Canada messages? Check, check and check.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes, that’s right – message received Comrade Shatner! I am proceeding to Stage Two: defeating the entire US military in a bloodless coup. Brendon to base, Brendon to base…prepare to deploy Anne Murray…

in Entertainment 4 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

To Infinity…

You know what I love about Silicon Valley? When you go to an event at a place like the Computer History Museum to hear someone talk about something like the exploration of Mars, it’s not some guy from the local university. It’s a guy from NASA. In fact, it’s Peter Theisinger, the former Project Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Project. You can’t beat that – and hey, even if it was just a guy from the local university, the local university is Stanford, so that wouldn’t have been too shabby either.

Peter delivered a pretty detailed and animated retelling of the history of the Mars Rover project, starting with the conception of the project shortly after the Mars Polar Lander splattered into the surface of Mars due to a are-we-using-meters-or-feet? software error. The pace of the project sounds absolutely breakneck – missing the launch window means you can’t launch for another two years.

Peter Theisinger, former Project Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover ProjectThe technological challenges overcome by Peter’s team to get to Mars were just incredible. Sure there were the mundane problems – like, “Whoops! The other airbag we were hoping to salvage and use from another mission appears to be irreparably damaged!” Then there were the other, slightly more difficult issues, such as “Gee! We have to slow the spacecraft from 12,000 mph to Mach 2, at which speed we need to deploy a parachute without turning it into Cheese Whiz!” Despite all of these setbacks, including the positively suicidal entry, descent and landing sequence dubbed the “Six Minutes of Terror“, and the parachute design (solved using the wind tunnel at NASA Ames Research Center, just up the road from our apartment), all of these problems were solved in time for the launch.

Except the software for the robot – that was developed en route to Mars.

Is it just me, or is this a damning statement on the state of software development? “We can send a robot to Mars, but we can’t develop the software for the robot prior to the launch date!” Oh well, at least they got the units right this time – they chose feet, right? No, wait! Meters! Aaaaaah!

Peter closed the evening on a mixed note. First, he talked about why NASA works on these projects: to inspire others, especially kids, to get interested in science. Great stuff. But then he talked about a team member whose son graduated school one month, got married the next, got deployed to Iraq in the third month, and was killed in action in the fourth. It was the flag from his son’s casket that graced the wall of the control room during the landing of the Mars rovers.

I’m not sure how I was supposed to feel about this piece of information – it seemed incongruous. It made me feel vaguely uneasy. Was Peter’s message “the world’s a bad place, we’re trying to make it better, we wish this stuff didn’t happen”? Or was it “we have to stop the terrorists and we support our military despite the costs?” I’m not sure – in the absence of additional clues, I think I’ll choose to interpret it solely as Peter’s recognition of another, less technological yet considerably more daunting, social challenge the team had to overcome to be successful, and that all of humankind has to overcome as we hurtle through space on our journey to infinity.

in Technology 3 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Wagging The Dog

Rox Populi’s list of popular political films is topped by my personal favourite, Wag the Dog. It’s especially timely that Marc posted a pointer to Rox Populi’s entry on this topic given that I just saw the movie recently on DVD. Of particular note on the DVD version of the film is a set of spectacular extra features that examine the history of political films that have focused on the topic of big government/big media pulling the wool over the public’s eyes.

The DVD’s first special feature, “The Line Between Truth and Fiction”, does a fantastic job of tracing the history of government and private industry employing the media to distort the public’s perception of war and the motivation for going to war for political gain and personal profit. In particular, the feature highlights William Randolph Hearst‘s brand of “yellow journalism” during the Spanish-American War (“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”), D.W. Griffith‘s re-editing of enemy film footage to create pseudo-documentaries during WWI, and Leni Reifenstaht‘s pro-Nazi propaganda film “Triumph Des Willens“, a film that, according to Goebbels himself, trained the population to “obey a law they did not even know but which they could recite in their dreams.” While we may snigger at the thought that people could be so easily conditioned, the feature points to the “Triumph Without Victory” report on the 1991 Gulf War, which scrutinized the events of the war and concluded that the coverage of the war was heavily sanitized and manipulated to curry support for the war.

“The Line Between Truth and Fiction” provides a great overview of influential political/media-centric films, including:

The second special feature, titled “From Washington to Hollywood and Back”, closes with an interview with the director of Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson:

Q: So, will the next generation be able to tell the difference between real news and news that has been faked?
Barry Levinson: We only have certain visual images of the Gulf War – it’s almost like a shared, you know, collective. You say, well my God, how come we don’t have…that was it? That was all we got from it? It was incredibly controlled, and you could have faked any one of those pieces very easily – the way they show, you know, the building and whatever – you could fake all of that. And that was one of the things, when David Mamet and I were discussing this project, is how much you can fake. By the time, if you find out that it’s not true, it doesn’t matter – we’re onto the next thing. The possibility of faking images, it’s certainly possible. Will it happen, to what extent it will happen, you know, that’s the basis of Wag.

Truer words could not have been spoken. After all, a disturbing percentage of Americans still believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al-Qaida, despite evidence to the contrary.

Will it be different in the future? We can only look with intense interest to the blogger coverage of the upcoming Democratic National Convention. Though print, radio, and television reporters once had unrestricted access to the “behind the scenes” politicking, that access was soon terminated once politicians understood the power of the media in molding the public’s perceptions of them and the issues. As politicians and the media became more interdependent on each other, this cozy relationship spawned “a generation of reporters and politicians who were no longer looking at each other like strangers, but as classmates agreeing not to tell on each other”? Will bloggers fall into the same trap? Only time will tell.

in Entertainment / Politics 2 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Tagging Humans

I was thinking evil thoughts today. Really evil. A species of malevolent ruminations worthy of a pension-raiding, investor-swindling, mother-selling, capitalist bastard. The variety of mental transmissions that tickle the antennas of card-carrying, tin-foil hat wearing, professional paranoids everywhere, inducing ulcers, panic, and cerebral aneurisms.

I was thinking about tracking every noteworthy individual on the planet.

Everyone has been focused on the looming RFID revolution. Whether here or abroad, retailers are tripping over themselves for the chance to shave an extra tenth of a point off the cost of selling you underwear by reducing or eliminating supply chain costs. In the process, a lot of people have been getting concerned about RFID’s potential to violate personal privacy, with concerns ranging from the bland (RFID in that shirt from Benetton will be used to sell you more crap) to the downright diabolical (RFID will mark you for death).

But why bother waiting for RFID, when nearly every person in North America owns a cell phone – a piece of radio hardware that actively emits a unique radio signature? Only a hapless introvert doesn’t own a cell-phone these days – like me! Those individuals that don’t own a cell phone probably don’t buy much stuff anyway – like me! – a capitalist bastard wouldn’t care about these individuals anyway.

Already, we’ve seen cell-phone based location services for tracking teenagers, or 911 calls. But all of these use some form of GPS-enabled or cell-tower enabled triangulation technology – I’m talking about something much simpler: a receiver that detects cell phones at close range (a few feet) and decodes the cell phone’s unique identifier, and a glob of software to cram that the unique identifier into a database. Imagine the possibilities:

  • Track movement through a store: a store could scatter a number of these receivers throughout a store, gaining insight into how customers move through a store, and which areas customers never visit. It would also enable the store to infer which products customers appeared to be interested in (based on where they stopped within the store) but didn’t purchase – opening the possibility for an individually tailored marketing campaign.
  • Reconcile data: though large chains can already reconcile credit card information to gain a more complete profile of their customers, what if the customer pays cash? Data loss! By tracking the customer on an ongoing basis, a store would be more likely to eventually be able to tie cash purchases to a particular person – sooner or later, the customer will use a credit card, thereby enabling their cash purchases to be tied to the credit card owner.
  • Figure out which customers not to sell to: on a larger scale, a mall could offer this service to all of its merchants – if you’re Old Navy, why would you try to sell jeans to a customer that you know just came from the Gap and already bought a pair of jeans there? Maybe you should try to sell them a shirt instead.
  • Grouping purchases: who comes into the store with whom? Who does the purchasing? Additional demographic insight abounds.
  • Fraud prevention (this one from Ashley): Once a cell phone is mapped to a person, it’s a simple task to figure out whether or not the person presenting the credit card needs to be subjected to additional scrutiny. After all, if the person at the cash register is carrying a cell phone with an identifier that doesn’t match that the one associated with the credit card, chances are you’ve got yerself a fraud.

The more I think about it, this isn’t really evil. Actually, it’s tedious – really, really tedious.

Do we really need to gather more data? Especially when it’s data that someone will never look at, never analyze, and never use to stop interrupting me with ads for stuff I would never buy in a million years? Probably not. Yes, there will probably be some privacy violations; however, as Scott McNealy said, you have zero privacy anyway. And if he’s wrong, well, I can only say this: if the Department of Defense can’t track its expenses, what chance does it or other corporations have of effectively tracking individuals by RFID, cell phones, or any other means?

To those that have grandiose visions of gaining insight into the consumer soul through technology: good freaking luck. To those that would worry about Big Brother leering over your every move: they already do it, they’re bad at it, and frankly your life just isn’t that interesting – relax.

in Technology 4 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Mini-Bubble??

A couple of weeks ago, I heard Julie Hanna Farris of Scalix contrast the current environment in Silicon Valley with that of the Bubble era:

It’s been interesting to reflect on the past nine years. Scalix is my fifth startup. The first startup was in ’95 at the beginning of the bubble, and so I watched what happened as we went up the bubble. The last startup was a company that had an $850 million dollar exit after one year. I watched the discipline of the investment banking community completely go out the window from the first startup (it was the “four to five quarters” discipline) to my last company. They would approach us and sit down and talk with us and we’d say, “Well, we’re working on our first big deal and we think we’re going to have revenue soon,” and they’d say, “Well, you don’t really need that – why don’t we talk about taking you out?” It was a bizarre experience.

Scalix also is two years old – we started during a desert, and I started the company as an entrepreneur-in-residence at a venture firm. I’ve often wondered if that hadn’t been our start, if we would have been able to get off the ground because it was quite an adverse climate. I think the return to discipline is valuable – I think what disciplined a company after the crash was fear. And the combination of discipline and fear created a really hostile climate for entrepreneurs. The bar became very high – became, in some ways, impossibly high. Advising the venture firm that I was involved with on deals as they were coming in the door, I was a lot of great stuff, a lot of great entrepreneurs, and it was kind of sad to see that they didn’t really have a chance to get going because of the fear and because a lot of the unanswered questions (because they were so early stage)…there weren’t answers to the questions that were on the table.

We’ve seen a balance come back, but I’m concerned that we’re actually in a mini-bubble now, again. It seems we have a difficult time being balanced and sanguine and getting real about what it takes to build a long-term sustaining company. I think that part of that is coming off the high of the party that felt really good and intellectually knowing, “Well, gee, that was a passing thing,” and another part, an irrational part, saying, “Well, maybe we can do that again”. I see some of that going on right now.

The past month has seen a lot of action. Hell, the last week has seen a lot of action. Yahoo acquired Oddpost; Microsoft acquired Lookout; Google acquired Picasa; Symantec snapped up Brightmail and TurnTide in quick succession. Reaching back a little further, Friendster got VC money, and NewsGator got VC money. Looking forward, Novell appears to be cash heavy and looking for acquisitions.

It hasn’t all been funding and acquisitions. There is much jockeying for strategic alignment and position, and trends of note in the news as well. Flickr (a hometown favourite) and Feedburner decided to get together; MovableType got themselves a new CEO and acquired its French partner; both Microsoft and Sun approved internal employee blogs; bloggers have been invited to the Democratic National Convention; and Technorati has just passed the 3 million blog mark. Meanwhile, Apple has announced a new iPod to follow up on its Airport Express. Things are hopping in the circle of Silicon Valley life.

What’s going on? Is this the start of something real or a bunch of geek intellectual wanking? Is Julie right? Is this activity a result of a lack of discipline, a land rush? Or the Next Big Thing? While, it’s unclear where all of this will end up, I find it interesting to note all of these technologies are enablers for the individual – individuals create the content, individuals control the content, and individuals use technology to choose which content matters to them. Not a distributor or broadcaster in site. Provided the lawmakers don’t get in the way with silly legislation, this has the makings of a truly liberating wave of technology for consumers, a new era of interpersonal connections.

The trick, of course, will be figuring out if anyone can make a buck off it!

in Business / Entrepreneurship 4 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Cloak And Google

Friday brought a flurry of breathless news stories on the appearance of mysterious billboard along Highway 101 in Silicon Valley.

The billboard states:

{ First 10 digit prime in consecutive digits of e }.com

In almost zero seconds flat, not only was the puzzle solved, but also the owner of the mysterious advertisement and its associated web site revealed to be Google. The second part of the puzzle, a mathematics problem at the aforementioned website, required a little bit of time and lateral thinking to solve, but was similarly discovered and broadcast across the Internet in short order.

The part that interests me about this: here’s Google, renowned for its search technology – why do they have to go to these levels to find good candidates for open positions? While I can understand they are undoubtedly deluged by applications for open positions (my wife, for example, has applied several times for several Google jobs for which she is ideally suited and has not even scored an interview), this is Google we’re talking about – don’t they have a crack team of spare PhDs stowed somewhere to solve this kind of problem? And if not, what hope do they have of solving the problem of enabling search on enterprise desktops (unstructured data) when they appear unable to solve the problem for resumes (an arguably fairly structured form of information).

I’m not exactly sure what problem this advertisement was designed to solve. According to CNet, Google comments on the numerous tactics it has been using to find qualified candidates:

“As you can imagine, we get many, many resumes every day, so we developed this little process to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.”

But does this latest attempt really solve the problem of too many low quality resumes? Anyone looking for a job at Google doesn’t need to figure out the answer for this problem – ironically, they’ll be able to just use Google to find the answer now that everyone on the Internet is gabbing about it. The fatal flaw in Google’s plan was that it failed to incorporate a dynamic element to the problem – the puzzle erects no barriers to prevent a different person from using the answer. If Google had been smart, they would have made the problem different for each person who visited the first puzzle’s web site, enabling them to further cut down on the number of flakes dumping their crappy resume to Google.

That said, it was still a brilliant plan. Google seems to really have the hang of viral marketing and building value by letting its customers/audience do the work. I recently heard that Google’s initial marketing had a similar bent: they handed out golf shirts to VCs. Clever. Gmail also had a very viral marketing plan which allowed people to join by invitation. Even the original search technology is viral to a certain extent – Google leaves the problem of organizing data to web sites, and simply scoops up to the links to extract context and provide matches to search terms.

Maybe that’s what disappoints me about the latest scheme: it clever, but not as clever as I’ve come to expect from Google.

And for those of you who simply arrived here searching for the answer to the math puzzle, here it is. After going to http://7427466391.com you’ll be presented with another anonymous web page stating:

Congratulations. You’ve made it to level 2. Go to www.Linux.org and enter Bobsyouruncle as the login and the answer to this equation as the password.

f(1)= 7182818284
f(2)= 8182845904
f(3)= 8747135266
f(4)= 7427466391
f(5)= __________

So, what’s the next number in the sequence? Once you realize the sequences are from the constant e, there were a number of ways to attack this problem – for one, you could have just brute-forced the login with a simple script to iterate through all the 10-digit sequences in e. But a little observation shows all the sequences have the property that the sum of the number in the sequence is 49. Thus, f(5) is the next 10-digit sequence in e whose individual digits sum to 49. Rather than solve this problem manually, you could just write a quick piece of code to solve the problem. For your reference, the digits of e are:

71828182845904523536028747135266249775724709369995
95749669676277240766303535475945713821785251664274
27466391932003059921817413596629043572900334295260
59563073813232862794349076323382988075319525101901
15738341879307021540891499348841675092447614606680
82264800168477411853742345442437107539077744992069
55170276183860626133138458300075204493382656029760
67371132007093287091274437470472306969772093101416
92836819025515108657463772111252389784425056953696
77078544996996794686445490598793163688923009879312
77361782154249992295763514822082698951936680331825
288693984964651058209392398294887933203625094431…

While I could provide you with the code to perform the final step, I’d hate to kneecap Google’s efforts entirely. Most of the hard work is done – if you’re really that lazy, you might try looking at the screenshots on MarketingVOX – they’ll show you the email address where you end up submitting your resume. I’m not sure if this is cheating or not – sometimes the best way to win the game is to avoid having to play it at all – but I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether that’s right or not.

in Technology 8 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

There’s Hope Yet

Jon Stewart is god. Note the capitalization: not the God, in the typical sense of an omnipotent, omniscient, vengeful creator of all. Lord knows (again, not that Lord – this guy sells ponchos in Berkeley) I don’t want to incur the wrath of any possible-but-not-probable all-seeing creator who lives in the sky, on the off chance that I’m wrong and he actually does exist. Nevertheless, blasphemy aside, Jon Stewart is a god.

“But Brendon,” I hear you, my entirely fictitious readership, asking, “Why is Jon Stewart a god?”

Simple – his is the only news show, ironically, not willing to follow the mainstream press’ script, choosing instead to ask the tough questions. Well, the only one in the US at least – those Irish reporters have been spoiling for a fight. The Irish never submit, never answer to anybody. Apparently their reporters aren’t too fond of submitting questions in advance either.

Nobody gets their news from “news” programs anymore – they never seem break the important stories first, if at all, anymore. No wonder people are turning to comedy shows for their political coverage. How weird is this? The quality of news programs has been deteriorating for years into entertainment disguised as news – but it appears to work both ways? While the press may sneer at the “reporters” on Entertainment Tonight, at least Kojo has the balls to come up with his own questions rather than letting his interviewees’ handlers suggest fashion questions.

To the rest of press, I can only offer this suggestion: start studying your notes – you might learn something.

in Entertainment 1 comments