My friend Gary Vaynerchuk put up a video post recently that riffed off of some of the changes we made at Revision3 last week, which included stopping the distribution of his show Wine Library TV. In his post he takes me to task (gently) for waiting for an economic downturn to make tough business decisions.

I could disagree with him, and point out the tough decisions we made over the past year - including taking a chance by releasing an edited version of his show - but there’s definitely a germ of truth in what he says.

However, he’s missing an interesting, and I think vital ingredient that makes venture-backed startups behave differently than many other organizations, and one that makes it harder to make tough decisions while times are good.

As a first time CEO, I’ve learned a lot of lessons, but this was one of the more insidious, because it’s like moving into a tony neighborhood and layering on expenses to keep up with the neighbors. Continuing to invest in less than blue-chip products is similar to adding a gardener, housekeeper, fancy public schools and expensive redecorations to your monthly budget. It just goes with the territory. Here’s what I think I’ve learned and what it means.

Accepting venture financing, at least over the last few years, and definitely in the years leading up to 2001, meant agreeing to hyper growth. You took the money, and made an explicit agreement that you’d double, triple or quadruple growth year over year – revenue, web traffic, viewers, whatever. And for the most part, like taking out a second mortgage to pay for plastic surgery, that seemed rational, intelligent and, well, normal.

But accepting that outsized growth turns you into a gambler. Even relatively prudent folks – like me, who doesn’t even play slot machines in Vegas – can be transformed into the startup version of a riverboat rake, betting some or all of the newfound riches (ie venture investments) on the come line – or even worse, on roulette’s 00.

When the money flows, and times are good, those outsized bets seem, well, prudent. As a CEO who has to live up to those targets, you continue to fund on the come, hoping against hope that your bets will pay off in time for the next board meeting. At a macro-level those bets, apparently, end up paying off once or twice for every 10 investments. That’s better than Roulette and Craps, but just barely. At a micro-level, it can be much worse.

In economic turmoil like today it all changes in an instant. Outsized growth mode morphs into scorched-earth survival, often in a matter of days. Just as today’s households are cutting back on discretionary purchases – borrowing to redecorate, or paying the pool boy out of the pension fund – startups all over, including Revision3, are coring down to the smart parts.

But something interesting happens when you move from growth at all costs, to survival or die. The Riverboat Gambler gets replaced by Ma and Pa Kettle. A husky appetite for risk gets replaced by the VC equivalent of burying your cash in the backyard.

Both extremes are hazardous. Betting on the come keeps you from making those painful decisions at the right time. But backyard burial blinds you to opportunities that could help you bounce back. In retrospect, doing an edited version of Gary’s show wasn’t the right thing to do. But I’m proud of the fact that we tried – for four months. Startups focused on emerging markets have no guideposts – everything could be different tomorrow, so you have to experiment.

Running a venture-backed startup? Beware of becoming a riverboat gambler. Keep trying things and making intelligent bets – but make sure you have the discipline to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em – even when times are good.

  Is it wrong to be infatuated with your video game character?  That’s the question I keep asking myself as I play through the stellar new video game Fable 2, from rock-star developer Peter Molyneux.

The latest installment in the popular Fable world takes place 500 years after the first, and includes a host of new features and capabilities.  I was particularly taken by the stunning new graphics which paint an open Oblivion-like world that offers nearly endless exploration opportunities.  And in this version you even get your very own dog - who becomes a key part of the game,  helping you to uncover hidden treasure and finishing off fallen enemies.

As with the first version, your in-game choices cause your character to evolve towards good or evil - and the rest of the world reacts as your character changes. But this latest version also lets you play through the game as either gender, which sits squarely at the root of my dilemma.

I received an early copy a few days before the official launch, and I’m not sure who was more excited - me or my nine year old son Sam, who has had Fable 2’s launch circled on the calendar for months.  Sam has played through the first version of Fable many times, fascinated by the game’s moral underpinnings, and the ability to directly see the effects of good and evil actions.

Neither the first or second installments are really designed for kids, though.  There are definitely adult themes, and the battles can seem particularly graphic - especially when you lop off an enemy’s head with just the right key combo.  I did have to explain to Sam what a "prostitute" was, during a relatively tame quest in Fable2 (a girl that likes to kiss a lot).  Even though sex is a far bigger part of the game — along with firearms, Fable’s technologists have just invented the condom — you can avoid it entirely, which my son has wisely chosen to do.

Not me.  When the game arrived, Sam immediately began playing as a boy.  After an hour I began my own character - and since you can play a girl I figured I’d give it a try.

But after carefully evolving my character Missy through the first third of the game, keeping her away from fatty snacks, and focusing her training, I’d grown abnormally fond of the girl.  Sure, I’d given her a more winsome haircut, and found some dye to turn her blond.  And yeah, I’d discovered the adolescent joy of stripping her down to her skivies; the Fable equivalent of ogling underwear models in the Sunday paper.

I’d even maneuvered her into becoming a master Blacksmith, in part because you need a job in Fable to raise enough money to buy weapon, houses and baubles.  I could have focused on woodcutting, bartending or bounty hunting, but truth be told a topless Missy just looked so darn good making swords I couldn’t help myself.

I’d grown so fond of her, alas, that I wouldn’t even let her flirt with other guys.  I’m not completely heartless, however, I did find her a nice lesbian barmaid to settle down with - alas, they’ll never have babies together, but they do appear to enjoy consensual sex.  It’s hard to tell, though, because as soon as they get into bed the lights go out.

The game itself follows roughly the same arc as the first version.  Your family gets knocked off early, and you spend the rest of the game saving the world and getting revenge.  In the first version you spend a few years in jail, and fight a series of gladiator-style battles in the arena.  In this version, you spend 10 years in the Spire, and fight a series of gladiator-style battles in the

Even though you can now fight with guns, battle hasn’t changed much.  You still button-mash your way to glory with hack and slash attacks and magic.  You no longer have a finite reservoir of magic (aka Will), instead you hold the magic button down to build up Will for more involved spells.  This is both good and bad - you never run out of magic in a fight, but you can’t immediately whack your enemies with a super-powerful spell.  The game also moved the magic button to the RED B, which was a major problem - as I frequently found myself accidentally casting spells in towns, scaring away potential lovers, shopkeepers and other townfolk, and incrementing my "bad meter".

On the plus side, in Fable 2 you never die.  Run out of life force, and you fall to the ground, lose any unassimilated experience points, and then rise to fight again - albeit with a brand-new disfiguring scar.  My son thought these blemishes were cool looking - I was horrified, and worked overtime to keep my Missy pure.

Neither Sam nor I have finished yet, although he’s much further along than me.  It’s not a game you rush to complete though, as much of the fun is found building your life, becoming an expert at different skills, and performing the various interconnected quests.

Even though its 500 years later, the world seems familiar, the characters haven’t changed a lot, and you still get the somewhat guilty pleasure of kicking chickens and munching on crunchy chicks.  It does seem harder, however, to become really good, or truly evil, but that’s OK.  As long as I can keep growing my character’s attributes and exploring the amazingly detailed and often wryly humorous world, that’s OK.  But next time, perhaps, I’ll opt for a male character instead.  Until then, don’t tell my wife, please, about my emotional attachment to Fable.  She just wouldn’t understand.

One of my absolute favorite programs of the era came from a company called ConnectSoft.  Based in Bellevue Washington, just a stone’s throw from the Microsoft borg, these plucky developers built a universal email package called "E-Mail Connection"

Featuring a whimsical sense of humor, spearheaded by marketing head Bill McEwan (who would later go on to take over Amiga), the company never took itself too seriously - even though its fanatical users sung the programs praises from dawn till dusk.

It did a simple thing, yet did it well.  The program accessed each of your many mail accounts, and delivered all your mail into a single in-box.  No longer would power geeks have to visit three or four sites to collect all their mail.  It was so good that noted curmudgeon John Dvorak actually gave it a "Best of 1995" award.

One of the most powerful features:  A unified address book that would automatically add an entry for anyone sending you email, regardless of service.

What happened to ConnectSoft?  The Internet.  Once most users gravitated to web-based mail, and those email programs became easy to link up, the need for a universal inbox waned.  The proprietary connectivity services, including MCIMail, AOL Mail, Prodigy and CompuServe all faded away.

Oh, and the borg hastened the decline as well, once Outlook supported POP mail, along with webmail programs.   The company attempted to move upmarket to corporate, and downmakret to kids mail, but in the end its day was done.  Technology had advanced beyond its solution.

But sometimes it seems like everything repeats itself.  I still have a shrink-wrapped copy of E-Mail Connection on the shelf in the garage, and I’m beginning to look at it much more wistfully.  That’s because over the past year or two I’ve ended up with a handful of incompatible email clients and no easy way to consolidate them together.

Take Facebook, for example.  I get tons of mail on Facebook, but the interface is even more primitive than the early days of Compuserve.  Linked-In, too, has its own proprietary email format that reminds me of MCI Mail - and not favorably either.  Pownce, Plurk, Twitter, all these messaging systems require separate programs, separate connections and separate sessions to access.  And what if I want to forward a note from someone at Facebook to someone at Linked In?  It’s a 12 step process that’ll drive you to drink.

So here’s your very own million-dollar idea of the day.  Someone, please purchase the assets of E-Mail Connection and build the 2008 version of it.  Because not only am I drowning in email, I"m drowning in email services.  I can’t keep up!  And I’ll bet Dvorak will give you an award for it too.

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After about a year of using Windows XP, it was standard operating procedure to strip your PC down to its bare hard drive, reinstall the OS, and then one-by-one reinstall your favorite applications.  Much like painting the deck or cleaning the gutters, this distasteful task made the rest of the year much more livable.

Vista promised to do away with the annual PC rebuild chore.    But like so many Vista promises, this one’s not true either.  I’ve had a Vista notebook for about 9 months.  Love it - it’s a red XPS1330 from Dell.  But over the past few months its gotten more and more sluggish. 

The ultimate insult, though, came when my Ethernet port refused to recognize DHCP connections.  Nope, it would only connect to a router - even a DHCP enabled one - with a static IP address.  Have you ever asked the concierge at a Sheraton hotel for a DNS, gateway and static IP address for your room?  Much hilarity and slapstick comedy ensues, but the codes, alas, rarely arrive.

So I resolved to strip my XPS down to its core, and build it back with just the programs I needed.  At least, after my rebuild, if it remained sluggish and uncommunicative I could blame Dell, not Microsoft, and maybe talk my way into a new computer.

So here’s how I did it (and if you’re planning to do it too, follow these steps)

1. Download and run Belarc Advisor:  This is key.  the free Belarc Advisor gives you reams and reams of info about your system, and some of it is priceless.  It analyzes all the software on your computer, and then gives you both the installation codes and the internal codes for your system.  This lets you reinstall Office 2007, for example, if you have the CDs but not the program code.  If you’re like me, and you buy software and then promptly lose the installation sticker, you’ll really need this data.
2. Make a Backup;  Definitely make a complete, end to end backup of your system.  However, if you like to skate on thin ice and cut corners, absolutely positively do this:
   • use Vista’s excellent "Backup and Restore Center" to make a backup of your files and folders.  You can select all types of files here, but to limit the size of the backup I’d deselect TV Shows, Videos, Music and Compressed Files (if you don’t already have them stored somewhere else — if you don’t, then just back it all up).
   • Oh, and I suggest that you go out and buy a 350 or 500 megabyte gigabyte <!> USB hard drive for this.  They’re cheap, and yes they will save your butt someday.
   • You’re not done, though.  Just for safety sake, it’s time to create another backup on that removable hard drive.  Go to your own personal folder (it’s typically your name, like Jim or Betty).  That folder contains all sorts of stuff, like documents, music, contacts, downloads, etc.  You want to make a complete copy of that folder onto your removable hard drive as well.  Before you get started, hit the "Organize" menu button, and select "Folder and Search Options"   click the "View" tab and then under the "Hidden files and folders" option, select the radio-button "Show hidden files and folders".  Click OK, and then go copy everything in your personal folder over to that hard drive.  You really want that "AppData" folder backed up too.
3. Now rebuild your system.  Dell makes this drop-dead easy by creating a separate partition, and putting a clean copy of the system - and a program to install it with - right there.  If your PC vendor doesn’t have that, see if you can track down the Rescue disk that came with the system.  If you built it yourself, I hope you did a Ghost or other system image when you first got it configured.  If not, you’ll have to start back with the OS, and move on from there.
4. Even though I loaded Dell’s image, there was still a lot of work to do.  First I had to delete a half-dozen craplets that Dell shoves onto its base install.  Then I had to download updated drivers for the hardware, and force Vista to upgrade to SP1 . 
5. After all that was done, I used the Backup and Restore Center to restore the files and settings I’d created in step 2.1 above.  Then I installed all my favorite apps, and I was ready to go!

Was it faster?  Heck yes.  Could I connect via DHCP on the Ethernet port.  Heck Yes.  Am I happy?  Heck yes, except, of course, for the 3 hours or so I spent on the rebuild.

Let this be a lesson to you.  Vista is like a pot of water, and we’re like a frog.  Over time that pot of water slowly gets warmer and warmer, making our systems more and more sluggish.  Don’t wait until the pot boils!  Get out and rebuild your system today.

That’s just wrong-headed, old media thinking.  True success with Internet video means thinking of it not as a farm team for existing media (broadcast/cable), but as a new way to communicate, a new medium with its own story-telling arc, rhythm and feel.

If you’re just testing what will ultimately end up being 22 and 44 minute television shows, with 3-7 acts and plenty of time for commercial breaks, you’re doing it wrong.

At Revision3, we think different.  Our end goal is to create great programming that lives and dies on the Internet. Success, for us, is predicated on Internet viewership, not on some eventual broadcast or cable deal.

Check out Diggnation, or SYSTM.  Would those shows make it on TV?  How about Scam School?  Maybe as a vignette here or there, but not a repeatable segment.

Even Web Drifter, which was originally designed for Comedy Central, is at its core a great web program.

Moonves and I agree on at least one thing - Internet video won’t kill broadcast or cable, it’s an additive thing.  But it will develop into something entirely different.  And true success will be found by those who embrace the vagaries of the media, not try to cow-path an old media vision into a new media landscape.

It always makes me happy to see MSM miss the boat when it comes to new media like this.   They’re just going to need us even more once they realize how completely they’ve screwed it up.

Comments, as always, welcome.

Thin, sleek, yet rounded in all the right ways, she walked through the door and captured my heart. Our courtship was brief, our romance torrid, our attraction mutual. Soon she was shacking up with me and sharing my heart and my pocket.

As regular readers know, I’ve had a really, really “complex” relationship with smartphones. I was the first person to do a hands-on review of the Treo 650 – which I then ended up carrying around for years. The same for T-Mobile’s Wing, and the Helio Ocean. I loved each of them deeply and completely, despite their obvious flaws. But in the end those flaws gave birth to smoldering resentment that turned into animosity and hate.

My latest fling with T-Mobile’s Wing started out well, but I’m so over her. That’s why I was so happy about receiving an evaluation copy of Nokia’s new E71 phone. It seemed to have it all: a slim slab no thicker than an iPhone, full typable QWERTY keyboard, a nice bright screen,a built in Exchange (and by extension Zimbra) email client, and all the Symbian apps you could download.

During the first few weeks I was overjoyed by the phone’s performance. Compared to the sluggish Wing, it was downright peppy. Switching the phone’s offline/online state was nearly instantaneous – compared to what seemed to take an eternity on the Wing. And battery life was eye-opening. No longer would I be penalized with a brick when forgetting to charge overnight – the E71 lasted for days between charging.

And the keyboard. Oh, I could wax eloquently about its sculpted keys, satisfying click and intuitive layout. My thumbs, it seemed, were made for its curvaceous charms.

But that’s not to say our relationship was not without its warts. Although the phone’s built in ringer, alarm and alerts were mellifluously melodious, I found it nearly impossible to figure out how to turn them down – much to the chagrin of my cubicle-mates. The volume controls on the side of the phone only control speaker level when you’re on a call; instead you have to define distinct “profiles” to change alert and ring-tone volume.

The phone also lacks standard USB ports, instead opting for non-standard connectors. But the Bluetooth is quite fast, and the PC-based desktop transfer application so good, it really didn’t bother me.

I also found the 3.2 megapixel camera a bit clunky, and its pictures somewhat red. I also quickly grew tired of the phone’s habit of dropping into the camera when I pressed the exit button too many times.

But those were just minor gripes. The more I used it, the more I liked it. The phone came with a screen condom, to protect it from abuse, but the screen held up well to unprotected intercourse – although I dropped it regularly (not on purpose), the screen showed nary a scratch. The Wing, by contrast, is barely visible now because of self-inflicted flaws over 6 months of regular use.

The phone’s coverage was adequate. I’m a T-Mobile customer, and thus ran into coverage problems in New York and parts of San Francisco. Some of those I blame on the phone, but most of them upon the network. Data service was pretty fast – I loved Google Maps, for example, after I loaded it up – it worked great with the built in GPS.

After two months of constant companionship, we were happier than the day we met.

Alas, in the end, she waltzed right out of my life, just like all the others. But unlike most breakups, I wasn’t the one yelling and throwing things – nor was she. Nope, in this case she laid down an ultimatum: Lay out the big bucks or she was heading home to Finland. It was really hard to let her go – but in the end she was simply too high-class, and at $400 too expensive for my meager means.

So it’s back to the Wing. Yeah I’m cheap. But better a devil I know, with all her flaws, than a high-priced ice queen. But I sure do miss her.

Want to see video?  Check out the following video I shot with David Prager in the Revision3 studios.  It’s a prototype, so let me know what you think.

	Wow, I had no idea the folks at Sling were readying a new version of their player!  I went to download the sling player on Sunday night and found a surprise - a beta of Player 2.0
	What’s so cool about this?  Two things, as far as I can see.  First, finally, the Sling Player has a pause button!  That’s right, you can see it down at the bottom of this image..  and I’ve blown it up here:
	Finally, I can skip over commercials when watching the sling player, rather than using the slow remote control capability.  But with that said, I could certainly see some improvements.

First, how about a user-definable buffer?  The buffer is just an hour, which makes no sense.  What if I want to sling a football game, and then watch it later? 

Second, why can’t I save my buffer?  At least for locked local viewing?

And third, how about a 30 second skip button?  That would be awesome.

The next cool thing - they’ve added a program guide, that’ll let you tune your remote cable or SAT box by what’s on, which means no more slow-mo navigating the on-screen guide.  Powered by Zap2It, the guide loads quickly, and is easy to navigate.   Click on a show, and you’ll be immediately jumped to that channel (if you’re using the IR blaster - I’m not because my DirecTV HR-21 has RF remotes, but with RF enabled there’s no IR ability…  FAIL to DirecTV, but that’s another story).

Of course I want more.  Why can’t I schedule recordings?  Click on a show in the future, and have the Sling automatically connect, record and save.  That would be even more amazing.  And if they can do that, why not put the local box into slow-mo, and then record in slow-mo over the Internet, but then speed it up to real time so that I collect even more bits over a slower connection.  Why not?

There’s more too.  But suffice it to say that as a Sling User I love the new features.  But like anything, Sling, when you give me a taste, I just want more, more, more!

Oh, and you Mactards are just going to have to cry in your lattes.  It works on Windows only.  Check it out on the Sling Media Download site.

Apparently we now have an ability to “Leave Your Mark. Save Humanity”, through “Operation Immortality”. Basically it’s an opportunity to upload and store a sequence of your DNA and shoot it off into the stars (or at least the International Space Station). The person who emailed me (who will remain anonymous), was inviting one of my co-workers to be included in this chance to send a “message to the universe”.

So if, say, we blow ourselves to pieces because we can’t agree on which god is the right one, then some future race of super beings is going to find us, and clone us from this stored DNA.

Right. Let’s imagine all the things that have to go right for this to happen after we destroy the earth.

1: Aliens have to find the DNA
2: They will have to have some sort of “reader” that will read whatever the DNA sequence is stored on (the person emailing me wanted the DNA delivered on a USB stick - what if the aliens opted for the “Firewire” fork instead?).
3: The aliens will need to be dumb enough to clone back a race that managed to obliterate itself because it couldn’t agree to disagree.

Yup, it’s the 21st century version of cryogenics. Now I know the real business model for 23 and me!

jim

For you math challenged, that averages out to 4 million per episode.  I’ve seen the numbers, and I know that it’s really, really hard to get even a quarter of a million views per episode over the course of an online video series, so those total numbers for the HP underwritten series, seemed to be the web video version of Operation Market-Garden.

But then, thanks to an insightful article from Tilzy.TV’s Jamison Tilsner, I discovered how they were planning to deliver those amazing view counts:  they’re pushing the videos into banner ad slots across thousands of web sites.  That means that if you stop by a favorite site, instead of an ad for the University of Phoenix, or Windows Vista, you’ll get an episode streamed into that ad spot.

It’s not a unique strategy.  Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane’s latest show Cavalcade will be distributed, via Google, into ad slots all across the Internet too.

Is this a breakthrough in video distribution, or just another dumb idea.  If you saw the headline, you’ll know where I stand, and here’s why.

I spent much of the last ten years running Internet sites.  I launched ZDTV’s web site, and then moved on to Ziff Davis to resuscitate the web presence for PCMag.com, ExtremeTech, eWeek.com and many more sites.   What I learned should be no surprise with anyone with a TiVo:  standard ad units are easily ignored by most consumers.

If they can skip them, the will.  If they can run ad blockers, they’ll do that too.  But even if they don’t block the ads, human beings seem to have this selective attention capability (which probably originally evolved to help us pick the prey or predator from the weeds) that essentially helps us tune out those ad units.

Pick any site you visit regularly.  Pop it up on your browser right now.  Did your eye just slide over the ad units on the page?  Bet it did.   Evolution basically turned our brains into ad-unit irrelevancy engines.  That’s why an increasingly strident series of ad types flood the net, from prestitials to video.

And yes, those MPU ad formats (the big almost square ones) have recently become a graveyard of video ads.  Microsoft’s running its Vista surprise campaign videos everywhere, as are many others.  But these are the exact same places that Dorm Storm and Cavalcade are playing.

And that’s the problem. We’ve been conditioned to interpret those rectangles of screen real estate as ads - and to ignore them.  When a video autoplays in one of those slots we naturally tune it out - or feel terribly guilty when we’re sucked into watching it. 

Oh, and I learned something else too:  autoplay ads suck.  Blindsiding web surfers with videos that autoplay is the web equivalent of farting in an elevator.  It’s just wrong. 

So that’s why I’m so skeptical of these attempts to juice video plays by inserting them into ad streams.  Sure, they’ll report these "autoplay" numbers as if they were actual video views.  But they’re not.  It’s as if they pumped the video through that huge video billboard on Highway 101 and counted every commuter as a viewer.  That’s not an impression, it’s an illusion.

It’s not only wrong, but it’ll generate lots of ill will as well.  If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and poops like a duck, it’s a duck.  And from where I sit (and for most web surfers), stuffing video content into ad units is just ducked-up.

But that’s not how it works in real life, at least for gamers who actually have a real life.

Photo: Shadow Viking

I love epic video games.  But I don’t always have the time to play them straight through until completion.  Occasionally I have to go to work, play with my family, pay bills, coach basketball, or some other RW task.  Sometimes those things can conspire to keep me from a great game for days, even weeks at a time.

Then when I come back, there’s that sense of fog.  Of questioning.  Of "WTF do I do now?"

It’s the same feeling I get when I read a great Sci-fi/Fantasy book that’s part of a longer series - but the sequel has yet to be published.  Good multi-book authors always include a plot summary at the top of subsequent installments, whether it’s explicit, or implied in the first chapter(s).

But the vast majority of games don’t do that at all.  And it’s frustrating as all heck. 

Take the latest Zelda game from Nintendo, Twilight Princess.  I stopped playing a few months ago, can’t remember why.  But I’m on vacation this week, and thought I’d pick it up again.  But I’m clueless as to what to do next.  Sure, there’s always Thelma’s Bar, but it’s useless.  And yeah, I could look up a walkthrough, and try to compare what I have (three mirror shards, ball and chain, etc) and compare them to where I need to be.  But even those are imperfect - I’ve tried.

So here I am, wanting to finish a great game, but stymied by the game’s inability to tell me what I need to do next.

Some games get it.  Paper Mario, for example, has a wizard who can tell you what to do next - for a few coins.

Why doesn’t every game do that?  It should. Because if gaming wants to move beyond the hard-core it needs to embrace a changing gaming rythm and flow.  Because not everyone who *could* enjoy that game will have an uninterrupted flow of hours and hours across days and days to play your game.  And with complicated plot twists, a multitude of quests and wide-open worlds, more and more of us are going to need that "FAIL" function that will help us get back into the game.    Broaden your audience game developers, and realize that not everyone games like you do.