Qwikster is to Netflix as AWS is to Amazon

Seems to me, if you name your company ‘Netflix’ and it’s not a streaming movie service – then the company is horribly misnamed.

On the flip side, Netflix has taken years to build a highly efficient distribution pipeline optimized for USPS. And they’ve trained their customers to have high expectations for and quickly report any disruptions in that distribution channel. That’s still an asset, there’s still value there – even if it’s no longer applicable to the core business.

There’s only one other internet-based company so experienced in optimizing the delivery of physical goods: Amazon. But Netflix has done Amazon better – they’ve optimized both the delivery and the return.

When Amazon realized they had excess capacity – they created a new product offering: Amazon Web Services – web hosting, data storage, etc, etc.

Netflix spun off their excess capacity and their physical distribution/return expertise into a new company: Qwikster. There’s nothing specific about movies, entertainment, the internet, in the name. There’s nothing really – except some vague suggestion of ‘quick’ and an even more vague reference to a social network.

Which means – there’s no expectation of just movies. In fact, the Qwikster site suggests a video game rental offering, a product Netflix never provided. And without a concrete expectation in their name – Qwikster could send anything through their channel they think will fit.

Netflix optimized the physical distribution channel for hard-to-find, items generally used infrequently. The real question is – what will Qwikster do w/ Netflix’s unused capacity?

Books?
Finding that space between your local library and Amazon.com.

Office/Home Decor?
Need some non-offensive (or offensive) artwork for the walls in your office or a home you’re trying to sell? Just visit the ‘Decor’ tab in Qwikster.com

Moving Trucks?
Qwikster acquires U-Haul?

Sitting in a room different from the one you are in now

Today, Patrick Rhone and I challenged each other to imagine our respective projects as rooms in our homes.

What color are the walls?

Is there furniture?

Are you sitting? Standing?

How does the room make you feel?

What do you do (an not do) in this room?

I found it a quite interesting and insightful exercise and was reminded of two other projects that came out of sitting in a room different than the one your are in now.

“Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, ‘I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.’ Cage had gone to a place where he expected total silence, and yet heard sound. ‘Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.'”

“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any sem- blance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.” [15:23 (1969, original recording @ http://www.ubu.com/)]

Wait, I thought there was significant business value in my “social graph”?

1. Twitter adds ‘Promoted Tweets’ to everyone’s ‘stream’

“Twitter is expanding its promoted-tweets program and is now including paid tweets from companies that people don’t already follow in their timelines.”

2. Facebook introduces the ‘Subscribe’ button

“Hear from people, even if you’re not friends
Let people hear from you, even if you’re not friends”

What’s missing in both these product announcements?
Any mention of the social graph. Any notion of bi-directional digital relationships.

In fact – both of these announcement are completely counter to the interaction model that allowed both of these companies to gain the trust of their account holders.

The giant sucking sound you hear is the ‘social’ being removed from ‘social media’.

Foxfire

“‘Foxfire’ is the name of a series of books which are anthology collections of material from The Foxfire Magazine. The students’ portrayal of the previously-dismissed culture of Southern Appalachia as a proud, self-sufficient people with simple beliefs, pure joy in living, and rock-solid faith shattered most of the world-at-large’s misconceptions about these ‘hillbillies.'”

The Foxfire books have been in my life as long as I can remember. I can still remember their location in my parents’ bookcase. Just as I remember the location of Fleming’s Art & Ideas (1968, 3rd edition) art history book. Even today, all 4 of these books are next to each other the hallway bookcase. All of them describe cultures, traditions, and artifacts seemingly foreign, primitive, and obsolete.

Chimney buildin’, moonshinin’, ox yoke makin’, blacksmithin’ cowbells.

Yet, everything within the pages of Foxfire was captured less than 50 years ago. That recency makes it as much a survival manual as a history book. As much entertainment as reference. As much novelty as reminder of how far we are from plain living.

$20 Standing Desk

I’m no longer frustrated that I’m not comfortable in the chair
– I got rid of it.

A couple months back, I started a serious and deliberate re-work of my office. While the introduction of a monitor extension arm helped – I was still uncomfortable. By the end of the day, I was achey, cranky, short-tempered, generally more in a mood to take a nap than be a dad.

On a whim, I stopped at IKEA and checked out their AS-IS section where I met a 17″x33″ kitchen wall cabinet for $20. Set sideways on my desk – it was the perfect height for a standing desk.

Plus, the pre-drilled holes were perfect for sending USB and power cables through.

The monitor peeks just over the top of the cabinet at an viewing angle that feels much more natural to me. My optometrist recommended that I relax my eyes throughout the day by not look a the screen – instead look at something a couple feet away (like the blank wall across the room). With this angle and height of the monitor, I can easily remove the monitor from my field of vision

The top (cabinet’s side) is just big enough for my notebook, keyboard, and trackpad. Nothing more. No room for clutter. Everything else that I might need – pens, notecards, test computers, storage drives – are all tucked inside the cabinet.

On the floor – an old yoga mat folded in half.

The lack of a chair keeps me free to wiggle, fidget, lean, stretch, and think, in a way that allows me to get into, and maintain, the flow of work very easily.

After working on at the standing desk for a just few weeks the thought of sitting down in a chair for long periods of times sounds hot, restrictive, and a form of entrapment.

Oh, the cute cat picture, in the corner , that’s the HP TouchPad blasting jungletrain.net.

Where’s Your Ghost Deer?

In the daily churn it’s easy to miss truly remarkable projects. Remarkable in origin, in execution, and in presentation. Projects that market themselves. Projects that compel you. That haunt you. That remind you somewhere, deep inside you, there is an extraordinarily meaningful project – that must be birthed. And you’re the only one that can.

“The beer itself is a robust 28% blonde ale. After fermentation it is aged for 6 months in some amazing whisky, bourbon, rum and sherry barrels. There is only one Ghost Deer head and this beer will only ever be available on draft, served in a stemmed 1/3 pint glass, direct from the mouth of the deer himself. The elusive deer is going to be resident in BrewDog Edinburgh for a very limited time period commencing at 5pm on Wednesday the 7th of September. The deer himself will decide where he will next appear.”

Where is your Ghost Deer?

Tomorrow It’s Amazon & Mozilla & Samsung

(tl;dr – I call sputnik on Google, Apple, and Facebook)

At any given point in tech culture, there are favorites. Favorite places to work, favorite companies to talk and write about. A few years ago the favorites were; Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. Long ago, I’m sure the favorites were – IBM, Remington, and Smith-Corona. At one point, I’m sure Western Union was a favorite. Today, the favorites seem to be Apple, Facebook, and Google. Unsinkable.

Apple is at an inflection point. They’ve never had so much love and I’ve never felt so ambivalent about them. I like their laptops, keyboards, monitors, and trackpads. Their software efforts (merging of iOS & Mac OS X, app stores, the monstrosity that is iTunes, Ping) and awkward social & internet efforts really concern me. As much as I love their hardware – I’ve lost faith in their software.

Similarly the zeitgeist is turning from Google.

It’s in the air – you can smell it. The Google Search Results page – once the example of how to make an excitingly useful product without any crap – is increasing fully of it. Confusing, cluttered, and filled with spam and tracking bugs. The recently launched Google+ is a hail-mary and that’s turning into a sock puppet. Their fixation on ‘real names’ and introducing a ‘+name’ rather than the established ‘@name’ is as trite and silly as Microsoft moving the close button across the screen in Windows. Or the British putting ‘u’s in words that shouldn’t have them.

I commend Google on the mass-shuttering projects not core to their advertising businesses – Google Labs, and so many others. I think they should continue that trend and reduce their core offerings to 4.

Their complex and conflicted relationships with both open-source software and personal privacy concerns me. Additionally, I currently see Google’s $0 offerings as a strong disincentive for continued innovation – for both Google and other market entrants. The the last time there was an exciting new email client was…um…when Facebook opened to the general public?

All the while, there’s great, foundational work being done by non-favorites.

Amazon’s uniquely positioned to drive the commercial web, providing common sense personal privacy, and fostering web-based innovation as reasonable prices – look at Amazon Web Services and the Amazon Kindle. There’s a platform and a channel – and I’m not sure which is which. Plus, every transaction has a price. How ever small. That non-zero price makes all the difference. And unlike Google & Facebook, Amazon’s not promoting their use of sexy, open source technologies as a recruitment tool. Amazon is the straight-forward, commercial web.

Mozilla is continually re-thinking the web browser. Their vision accommodates multiple devices, multiple experiences, a notion of privacy, both live connections and offline (Firefox Sync, Aurora, etc). This will be an increasingly strong use case. My work with Kernest has shown me how much our web experience is reliant on the browser vendors’ vision of the internet. Having consistencies across those experiences makes them all more usable – and Mozilla is innovating here.

To me, Samsung has the second best hardware in all of tech-land (Apple’s lawyers have argued Samsung has the best hardware). I’ve only two complaints about the Galaxy S 4G handset; measly 1-day long stand-by battery life, it’s tied to Google. Once Samsung relaunches a Teflon-ed version of the Galaxy Tab – they’ll have the high-end mobile hardware market.