Disqus - Latest Comments for Jon Smirl

Re: Hiring a VP of Engineering or CTO For Non-Techie (First Time) Founders

Jon Smirl — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 09:55:48 -0000

No really competent CTO is going to work for you. This startup is too far along for them to get a founders stock package. Those friends doing the programming probably have more stock than the new CTO will get. Unless it is pretty obvious you're on a rocket ride to the moon and they want to hang on; they'll clone you and start their own version.

Re: Hiring a VP of Engineering or CTO For Non-Techie (First Time) Founders

Jon Smirl — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 09:55:48 -0000

Re: 2006/02/23/googles-new-strategy-spray-and-pray/

Jon Smirl — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 12:05:40 -0000

Why wouldn't Google want to do simple page hosting? They are already doing it via their page cache. If you are creating the pages on their servers they can probably make sure you are getting ads from adsense. Besides, its a lot easier and cheaper to crawl pages on your own server than to get them from some one else.

Content drives ads, free hosting captures content, makes sense to me.

Re: 2007/06/08/sonos-funded/

Jon Smirl — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 12:32:42 -0000

What are they doing with $40M? How are they planning on generating a return on that much capital?

Re: 2007/06/13/slacker-station-creator/

Jon Smirl — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 21:27:25 -0000

Slacker.com has $55.5M in funding now, what are they spending all that cash on? Web site and royalties don't cost that much. Hardware could but a mobile player is easy to OEM.

Re: 2007/09/24/iforem-launches-a-pay-once-store-forver-service/

Jon Smirl — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:59:37 -0000

Ridiculously expensive. Dreamhost.com will store 8GB for $20 and they've already been in business ten years. All the downloads you want included.

Re: 2007/11/02/why-google-gets-a-free-ride/

Jon Smirl — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 09:31:55 -0000

Google is using fair tactics to compete. Bundling IE with Windows for free, spending $2B to develop and promote it, all without attempting to get a dime in revenue or profits is not a fair tactic.

A fair competitive business is one that you could conceive of a VC backing. No VC would even consider backing MSIE the way it was done.

Microsoft did the equivalent of the gas industry buying all of the electricity producers in 1900 and shutting them down in order to extend the life of gas lighting for another 20 years. Preventing the future from happening is not a good thing.

Re: 2007/11/14/music-industry-decline/

Jon Smirl — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 07:41:00 -0000

Let's just admit the CD is dead and music for private consumption by consumers is really advertising for the band. Now everyone can focus on making money again via live performances and commercial use. Given the ability of consumers to make limitless free copies there is no other possible outcome for music.

Re: 2007/11/14/comcast-sued/

Jon Smirl — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:50:32 -0000

FIOS blocks web traffic (port 80) but allows you to do all the p2p you want. Isn't that twisted? Block the legal service and encourage the illegal (mostly) one.

Re: 2008/01/17/time-warner-cable-pricing/

Jon Smirl — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 04:14:05 -0000

They will have to stop advertising unlimited access. Of course they will put their bandwidth limits into fine print that needs a layer and a microscope to read.

It's not the 5% of the people using the net that is the problem. TW only wants the 95% of people that will pay $40/mth to read their email from home. Those people are greatly over paying for what they consume and are very profitable.

Peer to peer relies on upload bandwidth. Most cable systems cap you at 128-384K up while giving you 6Mb down. A better solution for this would be to lower the upload speed to 32K and give "free" bursts to 1Mb for say upto 10MB an hour.

To see how much they are loosing (if any) assume 384K up 24/7 for a month. That's 124GB/mth in transit fees worst case. At $0.50/GB that's $64. failt to

Re: 2008/02/11/piracy-better-than-them/

Jon Smirl — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 08:59:31 -0000

Record labels are missing the burden of archiving music that is purchased. End users are terrible at maintaining permanent archives of things they bought. How many people have effective backups of important pictures that they have taken with their digital cameras?

You buy music, load it into an iPod. Lose the iPod. Now what? Your hard disk crashes, you buy another PC, etc. It is very easy to lose the music you paid for. If you lose it you have to buy it again. The cost of the user maintaining the archival copy greatly raises the effective cost of buying the music.

Compare this to downloading. If you don't like something just delete it. You can always download it again later. If you lose your device, no big deal, just download again. No DRM issues when you switch MP3 players too.

k

Re: 2008/03/14/preemptive-piracy-tax/

Jon Smirl — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:28:25 -0000

The fee can't be involuntary on each ISP. I have two houses with different ISPs and my wife and I are on different phone systems. That's would make me pay the fee four times.

One fair method of splitting the fees would be based on revenues from live performance. You want more from the fees, get on the road and tour. That would also sort things out when bands tour out of their home country. Just sending the fee to the RIAA shuts out indie bands and bands signed by RIAA organizations in other countries.

My favorite is to get the RIAA out of retail and instead license web sites on a wholesale basis. It's then up to the web site to figure out how to pay the RIAA. Note that the monetization point in music is when it is being browsed and selected, not when it is being played.

Re: 2008/05/18/pew-internet-poll/

Jon Smirl — Sun, 18 May 2008 20:52:46 -0000

Pick three different product categories like books, toys and computers and you would get a completely different set of answers. Music, phones and real estate all have markets that are messed up on the Internet in various ways. Music has downloading, phones have contracts, real estate purchase can't be completed online. The study is flawed in thinking experiences in those three messed up categories can be applied to the Internet as a whole.

Re: 2008/06/15/mediadefender-p2p-ads/

Jon Smirl — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 14:28:34 -0000

These people will never get it. The monetization point in music downloading is the point where you are choosing what music to download. They just don't get it -- do the advertising at the point in time where you can target the user and the user is paying attention.

Embedding ads in the listening stream only serves to annoy the listener. Haven't you noticed the decline in radio? Who listens to radio at home anymore? You just do it while driving since they have a captive monopoly.

This will simply hand the monetization to the implementors of the p2p apps. Build your own download servers or license people to do it for you. If you drop the DRM and license fees on the downloads, people will freely delete the files and redownload them multiple times (more pageviews).

Re: 2008/07/31/netflix-needs-to-change-to-make-streaming-big/

Jon Smirl — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:27:52 -0000

I'll go along with Netflix wanting every movie streamable and it's the MPAA crowd stopping it.

Re: 2008/09/08/google-news-archive/

Jon Smirl — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:22:49 -0000

Don't forget, due to the Disney Corporation Perpetual Annuity Act only articles from before 1923 are available to be indexed. Starting in 2019 we'll have access to 1924.

Re: 2008/12/02/pandora-vs-lastfm/

Jon Smirl — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:21:55 -0000

I abandoned Pandora last month when they switched from a three hour "are you listening" popup to a one hour one. I don't like being interrupted in the middle of my work to go click on a stupid popup all of the time. The music selection on Pandora was better, but the popup sent me back to last.fm.

Memory is also an issue. My last.fm player is 400KB. Pandora is 220MB plus the browser. That's an insane amount of memory for a music player.

Re: Hiring a VP of Engineering or CTO For Non-Techie (First Time) Founders

Jon Smirl — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 09:55:48 -0000