wilschroter

I'm not sure how people are surprised by this. If you already have the track on your hard drive and now you have to PAY to listen to it then Apple isn't really giving you anything you didn't already have (convenience, obviously). It's a nice service, but realize that they have already lost the sale.

I think the concept of a highly enabled, connected, and active senior class has a lot more impact than people are considering. The points made about a society that financially cannot retire are powerful because it forces us to adapt a much longer view on our career objectives (which is always healthy).

There was talk that this information may expose deliberate ties to the financiers of Al Quida including Saudi royalty. Not that this is new information per se, but awfully damning evidence if its found on the hard drive of bin Laden.

If so many people who are willing to use the app are inherently confused by the use case, isn't THAT the failure point?

I don't remember being confused why Friendster was useful when it ushered in social networking. It worked because the use case was obvious.

One thing I love about what this guy has done is the fact that he actually sees this stuff through. He didn't just talk about these ideas - he made them happen. It's one thing to do that for a Web site that two guys build in a room. It's quite another to literally put a rocket in orbit.

I can't even begin to fathom the magnitude of this considering how many people likely use the same login credentials for all of their sites.

The problem you run into is that communicating both the nature of the breach and convincing people to respond accordingly is incredibly hard.

This will continue to happen across many sites. I think after enough of these breaches, though, people will start to think about the protection of their online identities a lot differently, which is good, albeit at a painful cost.

Is it not the case that you can already attach ads to an app that ties into geolocation?

Isn't it safe to just say that every technology fades with time? The only constant in our industry is that we will all become less relevant in time.

I think you may be considerably overlooking the amount of integration Microsoft has into both the personal mindset of consumers as well as the enterprise. While they may in fact go the way of IBM and become less relevant over time, I wouldn't overlook the fact that they have remained on top in many categories over many sea changes. I don't know that the other companies you mention have demonstrated their staying power (Apple circa 1992 was not exactly "on top")

I know Doug Merrill personally and he's one the smartest, most forthright guys you'll ever meet. You're dead wrong to judge him otherwise on his picture or anything else.

If not AOL, who would be the most likely (i.e. biggest cash out) for TC?

I just use http://www.unsubscribe.com and it fixes my junk mail and mailing list problem once and for all.

I think there's something to be said for focusing on what the market rewards, and clearly the market wasn't rewarding yahoo for having great technology in 1998. Nor did it reward Google for having great enterprise search. You can't fault Jerry and David for not seeing search when the market had clearly supported banners with no basis for search as a viable model yet.

Having lived on the east coast, midwest, and west coast, I would say the resources are certainly different at a business level (capital, talent, etc) although you can certainly make do wherever you go.

However, anyone who thinks there are hot girls in SF has never left SF.

My favorite is from Larry Ellison, who basically says "Warren Buffet told me to write this, so I did." That's what I inferred from his message, which is pure Ellison.

FWIW I'd highly recommend considering doing it at the Coloft space in Santa Monica.