AlexHopmann.com

Andy writes about how Amazon is going into the home grocery business similar to the WebVan/HomeGrocers of the past. I’m hoping this will be successful. I’m assuming this is also related to the same-day delivery thing that Amazon has been already offering in certain markets. If so they are well set up to have the critical mass necessary to make this sort of thing work. I’m hoping they pull it off- we order from Safeway sometimes for home delivery but I miss the level of service that Home Grocer used to provide.

I was chatting with some friends recently about buying TV on the Internet. It was on the way towards almost making sense not getting cable or messing with DVR and just getting the individual TV shows you want a-la-carte. With Unbox, iTunes, and the XBox video service you just download the shows you want, pay for each show, and enjoy.

Done right this should be a huge win for the TV networks. It seems like the only downside for them is that they lose the advantage of their wide distribution, but that is going to happen whether they play or not. The only stumbling block to make it more widespread is cost. At $2 for most TV shows whether they are 20 min (cut out the ads) or 40 minutes, high definition or not, its just not quite a no-brainer to watch everything online. If the Daily Show and Colbert Report were more like $1 per show and even better you could get a cheaper subscription I’d be there. But at $2 per show, that is 20nights/month X $4/night = $80/month. Sounds like the studios are being greedy. Here they have this opportunity to make some really solid revenue streams from their shows and get off the falling interruption advertising market.

And then the news today is that NBC is pulling out of iTunes because they want to charge $5 per show. Wacky and clueless. NBC was slow to put many of their shows on Amazon Unbox, but I see that Law and Order is up there now.

Hopefully they won’t jack it up to $5. Like I said, and $2 per HD episode, they have a great thing going and probably have ~$40/season extra revenue from me, especially if they do a better job posting the episodes right around when they go live. If they get greedy I’ll just continue to DVR it…

Word is out that the BioShock game installs a rootkit on your system to implement some wacky copy-protection scheme. Too bad, I’d heard interesting things about this game but there is no game in the world worth destabilizing your system with a rootkit.

Moreover its amazing that folks are still not getting it with things like this. I understand publishers wanting to protect their IP, but why not go with the Valve Steam approach or the World of Warcraft approach? I’m sure lots of people would be annoyed that they need to register an account on an Internet site to play a game they buy in a store but (a) Stores and physical CDs are just so old fashions, and (b) however annoying it might be, its way better than copy protection and physical CDs.

I’d MUCH rather have an account I need to sign into than having to tote around physical CDs. With the account approach you can let people install the game on multiple computers because they can only sign in to one at a time with the account they have registered.

I’m working on a project where I need to debug an ASP.net application that is running on a Longhorn Server that is a domain controller. Whenever I try to attach a debugger to the target process from my user account (which is a member of the administrators groups) it gives me an access denied message.

What makes this especially frustrating is that I had this exact same problem about a week ago, and I was stupid and forgot to blog about how I solved it last time. My memory is quite poor and this is one of the major reasons why I write these blog entries. Plus I probably receive more “thank you” email about some previous posts where I blogged about some solutions to these sort of things, so hopefully it can be useful for a wider audience.

I finally got it working but the frustrating thing is that I’m not sure which step did the trick. I added my user account to as many groups as I could by opening the Administrator account and going to each group it belongs to. It also took me a bit to remember to turn off User Account Control- I’m sure that could have been part of the problem. You also need to remember to reboot the machine since many of these settings don’t take effect without a reboot.

Everyone should read this.

Yesterday I placed an order with Amazon. I ordered a couple of older CDs, the new album from M.I.A. (which is only $7.99- its cool to see the prices of music coming down), and a spare battery for my camera. I’m a Prime member so its all free two day shipping, but I think I missed the cut-off for shipping yesterday so it should all be here on Friday.

Today a package shows up from Amazon with the $13.30 battery. It appears it was delivered by “WRX”, which I assume is their same-day service for stuff they have in the Seattle warehouses. Pretty amazing.

Tafiti has just gone online- it is a new web search experience by Microsoft and Jackson Fish with a lot of the development work done by my Launch21 partner Peyman Oreizy.

There are two immediate things that strike me as cool about Tafiti- first of all, its built in Silverlight and is a great showcase for how the Silverlight platform can enable much richer web experiences than we have seen before.

The second aspect is as a different angle on vertical search. Rather than doing a vertical focus of topic (like CouponLooker which specializes in coupon codes), it focuses on helping when you are using search as a research tool. I probably won’t be going to Tafiti if I just need to do a simple query to find the name of a web-site I need to visit, but for drilling down into a topic across book results, news, photos and more, it provides some neat capabilities to “bookshelf” results as you go along and come back to them.

All done in a gorgeous UI that should help clarify the sort of thing that the Jackson Fish folks mean when they talk about great software experiences. Congrats to Microsoft for pursuing this project and finding great ways to experiment with new innovative interfaces.

Years ago I registered to vote by absentee ballot all the time. Its much easier to get the ballet in the mail, have a chance to study the candidates and issues with a computer nearby and make my decisions.

Today is a primary election in King County and the mail-in ballot at a reminder to remove the stub (tiny extra piece of paper) from your ballot or else it might push your postage over $.41 (a normal stamp). Which brings up a better question- why do you have to pay postage to vote anyway? Voting is our most basic government function and as mail-in voting becomes more commonplace, doesn’t the postage become a form of (very small) poll tax?

So let’s get our elections commissions to solve this problem- either via pre-paid postage envelopes or better yet a national postal service rule that ballots don’t require postage (much like congress gets to send free mail).

There have been a couple of posts lately about VC funding and how much money you should take. The frequent advice from all sides (not just the VC guys) is to not get too hung up on what percentage of the company you end up with- get enough money to make the company successful, give enough equity to the other major players in the company to make the company successful.

This is all true as far as it goes, but it glosses over the key distinction between the non-VC funded company where the founders are keeping close to 100% vs. the situation once you accept funding. When you take that step, you are greatly increasing the size of the bet you are making. It is easy to think of it as “this should be a safer business play since I have money in the bank to fund whatever I need to do to be successful”. But at the same time you have changed the level of the acceptable outcomes. As a 3 or 4 person founder-bootstrapped company, you can all be very happy making $1-2M revenue or selling out for $5M. There are tons of business ideas that fit in this space that represent perfectly reasonable “base hits”. But generally with that bigger investment you are now in a mode of swinging for the fences, needing to target $100M+ in value to make it all work out.

Now, there are also lots of businesses that fit this model, but I suspect there are a lot more of those base-hit opportunities than the home-run ones. In baseball, the big home run hitters tend to not have the highest batting averages…

Please don’t misinterpret this post as to suggest that I’m down on VC. Its just that many new entrepreneurs I speak with at meet-ups seem to assume that it is the only model and/or don’t take the time to think about whether it is the right fit for their specific business idea and/or life goals. It is also worth noting that some segments of the VC industry are adapting and figuring out ways to make smaller investments make sense, creating incubators, etc.

I’ve got the Media Center PC all going now, except for the TV tuner and that I’m planning on using it as a workstation for the next two months or so. But its time to start considering more seriously the new workstation PC that will replace it.

News has just popped up about the launch date and prices for the Penryn processors so there is a little bit of data to go on- looks like the big rollout day is November 11th so it will be close to the end of November probably to pull it all together. Most of the parts that I’m considering have not really hit the market yet or are so new that the pricing is still astronomical. Also it looks like they aren’t hitting 3.33ghz on the high end, only 3.13ghz for a whopping $1200. At those prices its going to be really tempting to take a step back to the 3ghz model or further. [Correction- this data is for the Xeon server processors, not the desktop ones I would be using]/

Meanwhile, I’m also hoping to get a motherboard with the high end P38 chipset (not available yet anywhere that I have seen although it was announced months ago) and ideally DD3 RAM which is currently priced so high as to be unrealistic. Stay tuned to see if I hold out for the P38 and fast RAM or just bail and get another Asus P5K with lots of cheap DD2 RAM. Given that I like to play with multiple server boxes running in VMs, it seems like an easy bet to go for more RAM (4GB or more) over faster RAM which in benchmarks I’ve seen is only good for a 2-5% boost, although with the quad-core CPU with a 1333mhz front-side bus, its quite possible that DDR2 800mhz RAM would really hold it back.

Rough equipment list-

CPU: Intel Penryn 4x 3ghz 1333mhz bus. $850
Motherboard: Asus P5K Deluxe P38 equivalent. $275
Case: Zalman HD-135 Media Case. ~$275 ??? Undecided. Another HD-135 actually seems like a reasonable idea. I can keep the computer in my rack totally away from my desk.
Power Supply: Zalman Ultra-Quiet 500W $119 Works well in the other machine, although I’m considering a 600W given the faster CPU and higher end video card.
Memory: 4GB (2GBx2) DDR3 1333mhz PC6400 CAS4 (currently $750 for 4×1gb, no way I’m going to pay that much)
Video: ??? GF 8800GTS 640MB or ATI HD2900XT 512MB $400
DVD Burner: Sony Optiarc 18X DVD+R 8X SATA- $33
Hard Drive: Seagate 750GB $199 x 2.

Total right now is $3100 although I’m hoping to get it well down under $3000 before I start buying the pieces. I can trace back to 1987, the high end computers I’ve bought have always been $3000-$4000, and while there have been amazing breakthroughs in the cost of lower-end systems, the industry still does a good job extracting at least $3000 from people who want more power. I could probably drop 20% performance and get it down to about $2200 which is worth considering

Step down from the top system-
CPU: Intel Penryn 4x 2.66ghz 1333mhz bus. ~$500
Motherboard: Asus P5K Deluxe. $220
Cheaper case: $200
Power Supply: Zalman Ultra-Quiet 500W $119 Works well in the other machine, although I’m considering a 600W given the faster CPU and higher end video card.
Memory: 4GB (2GBx2) DDR2 800mhz $400
Video: ??? GF 8800GTS 640MB or ATI HD2900XT 512MB $400
DVD Burner: Sony Optiarc 18X DVD+R 8X SATA- $33
Hard Drive: Seagate 750GB $150×2 (by that time)
= $2172

Correction: The prices and release dates are for the Xeon processors. There is still hope that there will be a desktop Penryn processor that hits 3.33ghz and for an earlier release.