BijanBlog

The Fall of an American Icon

  THE FALL OF AN AMERICAN ICON 
  Originally uploaded by maebmij.

It's hard to believe that this was the cover of Business Week in 1996 (full story here)

Everyone at the time was predicting the downfall of Apple Computer.

And today Apple announced yet another amazing quarter. They sold 10M ipods, 2.1M macs and 1.1M iphones this quarter. They generated $3.5B in net income for the year. The company now has over $15B in cash and no debt. And the are telling the street that Q1FY08 is going to be huge.

This company is simply incredible.

Go Apple.

(disclosure: i own apple stock. and i'm not selling anytime soon)

Dave's River of News

Over the weekend Dave Winer sent me a link to his latest creation. Essentially, it's the entire NYT listed in outline form and by keywords. Dave's post describes his thinking behind this creation.

It's pretty exciting. It certainly a better way to navigate the NYT. So simple. No clutter, no fuss, no seductive editorial titles steering your attention. Just the news. Ready to digest.

I think it could have important implications for news and other content types as well.

And I'd love to see mobile news sites presented this way.

Very cool.

Web 2.0 summit: photos & SteveB's memorable quote

Just a quick post before I goto bed tonight.

Dave Winer just sent an email with his slide show from the web 2.0 summit today. Yours truly is somewhere in the bunch along with some other familiar faces & friends.

I think Steve Ballmer probably had the most memorable line at the event today.

During an animated discussion at the Web 2.0 Summit moderated by organizer John Battelle, Ballmer took a paternal tone, saying Microsoft's own Web search technology needed improvements.

"You're just 3 years old, and we've got you in there playing basketball with a 12-year-old," Ballmer gushed and gesticulated, nearly popping out of his seat. "You're growing up quick and getting better every day, and you've got all the potential in world, and it may take you 'til you're 7, 8, 9 or 10, but you're gonna dunk and you're gonna dunk on the other guy some day, Johnny." [from CNNMoney via GigaOM].

It was actually really funny....delivered only the way Steve can do it.

Oh, and I also have a tree planted for me in Niger. It was the attendee gift from the event. This is so much better than typical conference swag.

Bubblicious

I'm at the Web 2.0 summit in SF.

In addition to seeing some old friends, I've met a ton of new companies and new people trying to change the world. I met too many people yesterday with new ideas that my head is spinning. The excitement is infectious.

With all of the entrepreneurs running around, VCs running around, and panel after panel, it's not surprising that many folks are wondering if we are in another bubble and if Crash 2.0 is coming soon. My friend Scott Rafer believes we are months away from the next bust. Josh on the other hand points out why the crash-predictors have been actually been with us for a long time.

During one of the panels I actually sat in on, the founder of Topix had a slide about broadband penetration in the US since 2000. Its hard to remember but when the stock market tanked the last time around, broadband penetration in the US market was just under 10%. In retrospect it's hard to believe that we were able to build so many businesses  going after so few users. Yes, I know people will remind me that sites in those days were optimized for dialup but c'mon, we know that was just a bandaid. The user experience for dialup is just lame. (think about mobile internet for a moment).

I can't predict when the next crash will come. As an investor, I wish I could.

But I'm encouraged by some entrepreneurs and VCs trying to learn from the past. And I'm encouraged that there are more of us online & connected than ever.

And besides, bulls are more fun than bears :)

More about Dopplr

So my love affair with Dopplr continues.

I had Dan Gillmor in my office yesterday who is one of the founders of the service and a really cool guy.

He asked me how the service could be improved. I told him three things :

1. Outlook and gcal sync. Obvious.

2. Twitter support. I want to broadcast on twitter from dopplr automatically when i'm traveling on the day of travel.

3. LinkedIn style questions to my network on Dopplr.  Imagine sending out a question like "what hotel should I stay at for my upcoming trip to nyc?" or it could be used to answer howard's question about SF. That would be powerful. And would be a big step towards User Reviews 2.0. Content with context.

Rhapsody TV.....almost here

I've been wanting waiting for Rhapsody TV. Feels like forever. I want Rhapsody on my existing cable set top box which in my case is the Comcast HD DVR.

Well today Rhapsody and TiVo agreed to devilver Rhapsody TV on TiVo boxes. Henry Blodget says this one is a  loser. I think it's smart and can only hope that this service shows up on the upcoming TiVo service on Comcast.

My friend Nabeel is a big fan of the TiVo HD box with cable card. I've been holding off because it doesn't do VOD.

But Rhapsody TV may just push me over to Nabeel's camp.

Dear Dopplr. I was wrong about you.

So I can't remember who first invited me to Dopplr. It was either Rafer or Prashant.

Dopplr is an online service for frequent travelers. You put in all of your upcoming trips and you hope that your traveling friends do the same.

I joined several months ago. And in the beginning I didn't get it. It felt hard to use. It felt like yet another weak social network asking me to re-create myself online. I had to invite more friends to yet another service.

Lots of folks asked me what I thought and I would just reply,  "it's okay". Which is code for "it's not for me".

But I was wrong. Way wrong.

It clicked about a month ago for me. Once I had a core group of friends using the service it became incredibly useful. Now I love Dopplr. It's fantastic. It's made for folks like me that travel a lot and have friends that travel a lot. Using Dopplr I've been able to connect with my west coast friends while I'm traveling or when they are in NYC or Boston.

I'd like to see some improvements to Dopplr. Integrating with Twitter is a no-brainer. Also, to sync based on categories to Outlook or Gcal is also a must.

I was wrong about you Dopplr. I'm glad I stuck it out.

Dopplr is still in private beta but if you want to give it a try leave a comment here and I'll send you an invite. Here's my profile on Dopplr.

My continued beef with OpenOffice and office web apps

Everyone seems to be tickled with all of the various open source and proprietary alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Especially Mac users, since we have been offered the same old version of MS Office for years and years. It doesn't even run native on the Mac yet.

I wish Mac-heads would stop putting so much energy on Word, Excel and Powerpoint alternatives. That's not the problem and hasn't been for years. The two apps that are important for us Mac users is a browser and email app. Thankfully Firefox has come to our rescue. Remember how bad browsing was on a Mac before Firefox.

But we haven't solved the email nightmare. We need an alternative to MS Entourage! We need a new open source or proprietary mail client that works with Microsoft Exchange. The reality is that business world ain't moving off of Exchange any time soon (I'm counting on Google and/or Yahoo's Zimbra though).

Apple's own Mail.app doesn't work with Exchange. In fact there isn't any mail client that runs on the Mac that works with MS Exchange except for.....Microsoft Entourage (2004 edition). It's so bad that folks like Fred now has a Windows machine in his office.

I suspect he's not alone.

What do David Filo, Chad Hurley & Marc Andreessen have in common?

During TC40 today, all three were asked who they admire the most outside of their own company.

They all gave the same answer: Steve Jobs.

No brainer.

What do you think?

Howard interiews David Karp

I really enjoy my friend Howard's interviews on Wallstrip. His weekend show is called Naked Putz.

Last week he interviewed David Karp. I met David over a year ago when he was consulting for our portfolio company Next New Networks. David is the creator of Tumblr and super guy.