Matt Hobbs

Well, after a few hectic days of gossip the truth is out.. Google has actually bought youTube for a paltry $1.65 billion in shares. Wow. That means a 1 cent drop in price from the current value of $4.29 means a loss of.. ooo.. $5 million. That’s painful. Time for me to upload some more videos of my nephew singing – they must be worth something now.

What is most amazing about this, other than the flurry of internet rumour over the past few days, is that youTube only launched back in February 2005 – which makes their valuation roughly $1 billion/year. The combination of a great service and hooking into mySpace early on has accelerated them to a stage where they now have an estimated 72 million users. Oh, that and not being too fussy about letting people upload copyrighted content of course.. Their only concession to that was a while back limiting the upload length of content to three minutes – early on you could upload entire films if you wanted, and many complete episodes of brand new shows (especially South Park’s amazing scientology bashing). Now of course youTube are negotiating with many content providers to prevent law suits. As someone keeps saying to me, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

In other exciting news – the re-designed Tridias site is now live. Go check it out and buy toys from the lovely folks (if you’re in the UK). If you find any problems with the site’s HTML then let me know.

Steven Levitt, author of the wonderful Freakonomics, has a great post about the benefits of committing all when you undertake something. In the article he describes a poker game in which, due to time constraints, he suddenly announces to everyone that he is going to bet everything on every hand, whatever he’s holding…

Now this may seem like a strange decision, what if you’re holding a losing hand – surely you should bet nothing? But his point is this; you don’t know for sure if you are holding a winning or losing hand, but poker’s not all about the cards. By committing everything, showing faith and not having to split his attention on making decisions about how to play his hand, he made the game so much easier to play and confused his opponents.

Now how does this apply to real life? Think of the mental energy you save by commiting to one solution and believing in it, rather than having to decide on one of two options? Look at the entrepreneurs, who believe 110% in what they do – even if everyone around them thinks they’re crazy. That passion. That focus. It’s like the entrepreneur is totally in love with the idea – another idea might come along, but even if it’s highly attractive it’s left by the wayside. This reminds me somewhat of the concept of ‘attention economy’ – you have a limited amount of attention (intellectual, emotional, etc) that you can deploy, so the decisions we make individually and en mass cause a general economic movement. This attention economy is readily apparent in the current Web 2.0 Internet movement.

Now if you’ll excuse me.. I’m off to my local casino.

As I wandered down 5th Avenue yesterday I stumbled across Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror at the Rockefeller Center (my photos of the Sky Mirror). This installation is up until 19th October only, so go check it out. My first impression was that it was interesting but nowhere near as visceral as Marsyas at the Tate Modern. Though I love Kapoor’s work in general personally I find that his reflective metal pieces are the least compelling. Anyways, go check it out and make up your own mind.

In a random search related to one of my own entrepreneurial efforts I came across the Museum of Modern Betas. A simple concept – capture a screenshot and a wait list for all the new sites currently in Beta around the world. Cute. Although as the creator freely admits, the site is currently in alpha itself so it needs a bit of tweaking – luckily this prevents infinite recursion of course.

This book of collected short stories by David Sedaris is constantly amusing. The stories are mostly written from the first person viewpoint of different protaganists, from irate mothers to a hard working Elf at a department store, but each one shares Sedaris’ off-beat, witty and sometimes slightly bitchy viewpoint. A good subway read. Oh, and if you want a great daily read in a similar vein then check out my friend Sandra’s blog, especially now she’s about to move to New York.

According to Gawker there’s a new contender in town to replace the current fleet of NYC taxis. The new taxi is designed to be better on the environment, running on lithium ion batteries in slow traffic, but surely it would be great to have a new design icon driving round New York’s streets rather than a frikkin’ shoebox on wheels? As for me I’m still reeling from when they stopped doing the celebrity recordings such as Adam West telling you to “Bat buckle up”. And how come I can’t find any of those recordings on the web? Sigh.

While I was up in Montreal my bon ami Mateo re-launched his website – including some great photos of his amazing digital light painting. Go check it out.

Oh, and it was also his birthday. So click on the photo for more pics of that too.

John Peel is somewhat of a legend for anyone even slightly interested in music in England. His evening shows on BBC Radio presented an ecletic range of sounds depending entirely on what he liked and not what music company reps pushed on him. Peel is also credited with, if not launching, then accelerating the popularity of many new bands from the White Stripes to the Undertones (not alphabetically of course). So it came as somewhat of a shock when Peel died a relatively early death in his 60s whilst holidaying in Peru, and public mourning followed.

Margrave of the marshes is part autobiography from John himself, and part written by his wife Sheila based on his diaries and her recollections. The first half is pure Peel, the turn of phrase, the slight knowing rubs at fame – you can almost here his accent in every sentence. Although not an epic life by any means, Peel’s life is full of interesting moments and it’s fascinating to see how he came upon his final ‘career’, or his vocation really. It comes as a bit of a shock when you hit the second half of the book and leave the familiar waters of John’s writing and continue the journey with Sheila, or ‘The Pig’ as she was affectionately known. Sheila’s tone is slightly more matter of fact and dry, but the love between them both and their family is very apparent and it’s great to have a different perspective.

This book isn’t a must read unless you’re even slightly into British music, in which case it’s a great background to a great man. We miss you John!

Thanks to a delightfully green & grey pamphlet from the NYC Office of Emergency Management (OEM) I’ve found out that my house is in the highest risk of flooding during a hurricane related surge… Good thing I live on the top floor then I guess. Gives me more time to collate and file my collection of animals by gender before jumping in my ark and sailing away.

On my flight back down from Montreal to New York this early, sunny morning I glanced out of the window and saw two Virgin America planes, which caught my sleepy self so by surprise I didn’t have time to snap any piccies. Virgin America? What? Turns out they’re due to launch soon with service around America along the lines of jetBlue I believe and like the Virgin Blue service in Australia.

I tend to favour Virgin when I fly trans-atlantically due to a combination of a) good inflight entertainment and b) I figure religious fanatics of a terrorist nature would rather attack airlines with country names in them and definately not ones with the name of the type of people they’re hoping to meet after they die. So this is good news for me when I fly in America. Yay me! Maybe they’ll even have a route between New York and Montreal…