Facebook has entered the realm uber-stable websites, such that when I couldn’t access it a few minutes ago I immediately blamed my internet connection. But it looks like it’s not just me. Oops! Good luck to the engineers on call.

from https://downdetector.com/status/facebook

I recently purchased a Roku. Amazon sent me this email reminding me that I could use Instant Video on my new device and linked to some setup instructions. Besides being useful, it will also help instant video get more usage. This is product integration (amazon store, instant video) at a level rarely seen by large companies. Bravo. 

In December I first talked about streaming stats for The Interview. More data has been released for early January which gives us another data point.

Rentals clearly dominate both the overall revenue and individual streams. This is expected, given the intangibility of digital content and the price sensitivity at play. The run rate has also slowed considerably, though it’s hard to know exactly how much given just three data points (including the zero point on 12/24). This certainly won’t change the status quo of theater exclusives, but it does suggest that most people who want to consume a film are able to do so digitally. The platform has matured.  

 

Microsoft recently launched the Nokia 215, a $30 basic phone with 2g internet and Facebook/Messenger. This is a genius short term play. There are billions of people who can benefit from this phone but would not find a smartphone compelling. 

Imagine for a moment that you live in a village in Kenya. Smartphones have two key downsides. They’re expensive, which makes them targets for theft and damage. And they have terrible battery life. 1 or 2 days compared to the 29 days that the 215 and other basic phones can last. This is critically important when you only have access to electricity once a week when a truck comes by with batteries.

However, you might still want a smartphone. The killer smartphone app is is messaging. Not search, not the web, but messaging. M essaging is important because it allows you to contact friends, businesses, and family. Sending a message on WhatsApp is somewhere around 1/30th the price of sending that same message over SMS. Cheap enough to potentially make a smartphone worth it despite their downsides. 

This is where the Nokia 215 comes in. If you and your friends use Facebook Messenger user then this phone has everything you need. Tremendous battery life, highly inexpensive, and built in Messenger. Quartz is incredibly pessimistic, but I would not write this phone off just yet. It might just be a home run.

A decade ago my brother and I discovered Chin’s Asia Fresh. At first it was just another Chinese restaurant that kept our parents happy because they didn’t use MSG. But as the years went by we moved away it became one of a few places that my brother and I would return to whenever we visited home. This became tradition, and was strangely one of the things I looked forward to when returning to Minnesota. 

At some point Chin’s was bought out, and bit by bit started changing, but it wasn’t until the menu got swapped out that we suddenly lost interest. The taste of our favorite dish was key. I feel this way for a handful of other restaurants, but the list is tiny. For many others it’s the atmosphere or connivence or people or price that brings me back. So many different reasons to prefer a restaurant must make it hard to change, because changing anything will annoy at least some people, but at the same time there might be a need that isn’t being satisfied by the current experience. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that The Interview has been streamed 2 million times and has reached $15 million in streaming sales. They didn’t give numbers on purchases versus rentals, but since we know that the purchase price is $15 and the rental price is $6 some quick math gives us the following breakdown:

• 333,000 purchases ($5,000,000)

• 1,666,000 rentals ($10,000,000)

People seem almost 5x as likely to rent versus buy, and rentals are both higher in volume and in revenue. This is in comparison to the nearly $3 million in theater sales. 

Now, for streaming versus theaters. Assuming $12 per theater ticket, the streams are equivalent to 1.25 million tickets sold. Assuming an average of 2 people watching each stream, that’s 4 million people who have paid to stream The Interview. That’s a lot of extra people for the same revenue. On the other hand, I watched it on my flight back from Minnesota to San Francisco (downloaded from Google Play), and I definitely wouldn’t have seen it in the theater. I wonder if we’ll get studios and actors claiming that streaming devalues movies like some artists claim it does for music. 

 

Here I was, reading Lonely Planet Colombia to prep for my upcoming trip. I had found a couple of promising hostels, and selected the name of one of them to perform a google search. To my surprise, I couldn’t copy the name. I tried another selection. Still nothing. On the web, I got a slightly more helpful error “Not available for this book.”

I painstakingly typed in the words into Google, and continued on my way. This happened again and again, and I reluctantly migrated to other sources such as trip advisor. 

I presume that copy was disabled due to some misguided desire to prevent copyright infringement. But that fear misses the value of guides such as Lonely Planet. They’re more valuable than a random travel website because they promise to be curated. Sites that copy the content fail to copy the brand, the promise. And so in that sense, Lonely Planet has nothing to worry about. Now, if people no longer value that curation or are unwilling to pay for it, that’s a whole different problem.

Replacing the Taxi and the family car is clearly a huge market for Uber. But once that’s done, then what? There is the relatively expected push into logistics, see UberKITTENS, UberTREE, and Uber Goodwill as examples. But what other opportunities could they pursue?

##UberCommute

Uber could reduce rush hour traffic by 90% by removing the pain points of a shared commute. Here is how it would work: 

• When you get into your car to drive to work, pull up uber and mark yourself as an UberCOMMUTE driver.

• Others who work and live nearby you request an UberCOMMUTE when they are ready to leave for work. 

• UBER matches commuters, and falls back to UberPOOL when a commute driver isn’t available.

Theoretically an UberCOMMUTE driver would be willing to work for significantly less than a typical UberX driver because they are guaranteed to be going in the direction of their commute. 50% less? 75% less? This also allows you to use high occupancy lanes on the freeway. This entire process could be streamlined by a notification on the lock screen that leaves you one swipe away from a carpool.

##UberSLOPES

How awesome would it be to jump in an Uber which brings you to a bus to the mountains for a weekend of skiing? Leave whenever you’re ready, right from your doorstep. Avoid the many hours of driving, avoid the chains, avoid the mountain storms. Uber handles everything. 

##UberMAP

Follow these 4 easy steps:

• Develop a camera that attaches to a car’s side mirror.

• Require drivers to use said cameras

• Stitch the images together 

• Offer your users a realtime street view

This is game changing for a number of reasons. First, it’s safer for both drivers and riders. Second, it eliminates street view’s biggest weakness – stale data. Third, it allows Uber to move up the chain and be not only the logistics provider but also the map. Offering a maps product is a form of distribution, similar to how Chrome and Android are distribution platforms for Google search. 

REI recently ran their annual sale, which includes a 20% off coupon. Without really thinking I copied the code from my email and typed it into REI’s search (I credit Google for training this type of search everything behavior). Surprisingly, the folks at REI have thought of this, and helpfully displayed a page that explained how to use my coupon. Very smart.

A couple of us went climbing at Mt. Tam today. I didn’t realize it had such gorgeous views of the bay area. Climbing is pretty awesome when you turn around and are greeted by this:

The above is a map of curb ramps. Turns out that San Francisco publishes a huge amount of public data online at data.sfgov.org. A great example of how governments can provide a public good in the age of the internet. 

Today my team released a new lab for Chrome users that enables drag & drop song uploads and a pop out mini player. The excitement in the office was palpable and served to further energize folks, and reflecting on the experience I have a number of takeaways

• Having real time metrics to watch is incredibly stimulating

• Seeing other people and news talk about your work induces warm fuzzies

• There’s nothing quite like launching when it comes to validating one’s work

I’m proud of the team and what we have accomplished so far, and I’m looking forward to more amazing work in the future. 

Snapped this photo today a few blocks from my house. One Medical Group has a new physical presence in San Francisco, for a total of 11 locations in the city. They have been operating since 2007 trying to sell subscription-based health care, where you pay an annual fee to access your doctor. Their primary benefit seems to be greater access to your doctor, from same day visits to online communication & ordering.

At first glance it’s unclear why these benefits require a subscription, but I can speculate. Perhaps it is a signaling mechanism that shows doctors that their patients won’t just jump ship. Or perhaps there is now an incentive for better service because retention directly means more revenue. Whatever the reason, it seems to be an interesting experiment in an age when subscription access to care seems to be in decline.

I tried to purchase contact lenses from walgreens.com today. Some time ago I got one of their rewards cards, and wanted to link it to my account. Apparently something went wrong with their infrastructure, and the card didn’t get linked. Instead of outright failing they give you this message, which says that you will get the tangible benefits (cheaper stuff) during this session anyways. This response almost completely made up for the failure, and was refreshing.

Even better would be an email some time in the next few days that said “we fixed our problems, and have activated your rewards card. Thanks!” Here’s hoping that happens.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that our house purchased a Hue starter kit. I finally had some time to hack on it and have my first home automation project: the Hue Sunset. It changes an accent light color in our living room on the hour for each hour past 6pm. Hopefully we will grow accustomed to the light changing and be able to know the rough time instinctively. 

I’d like to do the complementary Hue Sunrise as well, to tell me what time it is in the morning without needing to get out of bed, but the Hue bulb’s wireless doesn’t reach my room. Because they form a mesh network this just means I need to buy more bulbs.

I finally got around to watching Life of Pi. It’s a phenomenal film that kept me glued to the screen from the moment I started. Watching it made me wish I could go back and interview my 8th grade self after reading the novel, to see my reactions to the questions about religion, humanity, and narrative raised by the story. In the absence of those reactions I’ll have to make do with some current thoughts.

Something that will stick with me this time around is the need for life to have meaning. Going through the motions isn’t enough.

Snowboarders usually have a preferred foot to have forward but the best boarders have trained themselves to be ambidextrous. I’ve tried to get better at riding with my weak foot (known as riding switch) but have never been very good at it. Today i went switch up the chair switch, and in just a few short runs became almost comfortable. Not fully committing and only riding down switch was holding me back.

Why didn’t I do this before? I told myself that I didn’t want to wreck my right boot, which was still in pristine condition due to always being strapped in, but the real reason was because I was scared at falling at the top of the lift. A silly reason to be honest. What’s your real reason?

 

On my way back from the bouldering gym I always bike past a UPS distribution center. It’s not terribly exciting, just a truck or two parked in front. But yesterday more lights were on and something caught my eye.

![Sunset Circle of Honor

Presidio Circle of Honor](/squarespace_images/static_523dff22e4b07afea7f3302b_523dff9fe4b09034aa65d0e45323206fe4b064132312c8d2_1430968684693_IMG_20140313_211445616_HDR.jpg) Sunset Circle of Honor

Presidio Circle of Honor

Circle of Honor. That sounds regal. As I snapped the photo the security guard started walking towards me clearly indicating his disapproval. “Don’t worry, I’ll be gone in a moment” I said. 

UPS has a Circle of Honor blog, where they honor drivers with 25 years of save driving. Very cool, and something that newer companies can only dream of doing. Sometimes age has its benefits.

I’ve recently been on a quest to improve the battery life on my Moto X. When I started, my phone would typically last about 12 hours on a charge, even when I was hardly using it throughout the day. With some luck and experimentation I found that Moves and Google Keep both eat away at my battery throughout the day. Moves is an app that records all of your movements, and its battery usage makes sense. But I have no idea why Keep keeps waking up. Perhaps to sync reminders? Who knows. For now, both are disabled and when my phone is idle my battery settings percentage bar chart looks like this:

I wonder why Android OS uses such a large percentage of my battery. Time to dig deeper.

California doesn’t really understand the concept of seasons. Most of the world thinks of hot and cold, changing leaves and budding roses. Seasons in California primarily mean longer or shorter days, and a just few rainfalls or none at all. But the quirky daylight savings time switch brings joy. An “extra” hour of daylight! Never mind that you could have the same thing by shifting your own schedule, it’s a great feeling to suddenly have the option to be outdoors in the evening, and people here are noticeably happier for it. I usually get home in the dark and it’s hard to be motivated. Yesterday, I was greeted with this gorgeous sight

I was so excited that I spontaneously took a bike ride around the city before heading to the climbing gym. Amazing.