blog.payne.org

I strongly disagree with Greg Linden’s prediction for 2008:

We will see a dot-com crash in 2008. It will be more prolonged and deeper than the crash of 2000.

The crash will be driven by a recession and prolonged slow growth in the US. Global investment capital will flee to quality, ending the speculative dumping of cash on Web 2.0 startups.

Bubble 2.0 will burst, and I agree that US economy and recession risks are huge factors.  But I don’t think it will be comparable to the crash of 2000.

The big factor:  the fundamentals are much different this time around.   Since 2000, customer behavior has evolved significantly (when was the last time you placed an order through an 800 number?).  Broadband adoption passed the half-way mark in the US, and video use has taken off.  AJAX and Flash technologies enable highly interactive user experiences.    Time in front of the television is shifting to time on the Internet.  Off-line advertisting dollars are shifting on-line, because that’s where the users are.

The other factor:  much more of the action this time around is happening outside of traditional venture capital (who’s over-investment behavior drove the first bubble).  As the capital needed to develop a Web idea drops, more entrepreneurs are bootstrapping, raising small amounts from friends, or using their own capital.  Those entrepreneurs are not spending $10m of VC money on launch parties.

Bottom line:  the bubble will burst, but it’s not going to be as bad as 2000.

There have been several reports of AT&T’s “naked DSL” offering (i.e. DSL without the analog phone line), which apparently was condition to merge with BellSouth.

Anyone who understands IP technology knows where this ends:   we’ll just have fat IP pipes (DSL, fiber, cable modem — doesn’t matter).  The latency will be low enough for real-time services (like VOIP), and the bandwidth will be high enough for video streaming.

We’re almost there.

I was setting up our vacation home last year:   we’ve got fast broadband, who needs “digital cable”, a “set top box”, a “radio”, or an “analog phone line”?  We can already download almost all of the audio and video we want to see.

(I did have to give in on the phone; the freeze-alarm out-dial needs to work when the power’s out.)

Like many users, 99% of my app usage has settled into Firefox+Word+Excel+PowerPoint.  Most of the new “apps” that I use are Web-based.

So, using a new app like OmniOutliner is a rare event, and adopting an entirely new category of app (a dedicated outliner) is an extremely rare event.

At the core, I’m a hierarchical thinker and I love outlining.  I usually start a new project by writing down every bit I can think of as quickly as I can, then going back and organizing & refactoring into something coherent.

Word’s outline mode is great, but OmniOutliner has a few features that make it worth having a dedicated tool.  One of the biggest (for me) is columns:  you can add columns of various types, and have the app automatically total/summarize them for you.  For example, if you are outlining project tasks, you can have a column for “effort” (e.g. “6hr”, “2d”) that OmniOutliner will automatically total for you up the outline hierarchy.  Here’s the video tutorial page with many examples.

Thanks to Pito for the suggestion.

(Sorry, Mac only).

We went home for the holidays, and a long-time family friend was lamenting about his retirement.  He thought he had the necessary cash assets, but was having to work more than he expected.  I’ve also had a number of entrepreneur friends mis-estimate the amount they need to “retire”.

Most advisers will give you a ~2% guideline for retirement income:   if you want a lifetime inflation-protected income stream, budget on taking out that amount annually (or aggressively, 3%).  You can’t extrapolate from current CD or T-bill yields:  $1m may get you $50k/year today, but (a) $50k will be worth a lot less 20 years from now, and (b) yields will vary year to year.

Some of the annual gains need to be allocated to increasing the principal to keep up with inflation.  Plus, you have to account for variability in annual returns, and paying taxes (realized cap gains, dividends, interest) on those re-invested gains.  When it’s all netted out, you end up in the 2-3% range for annual income.

(This all applies if you’re relatively young.  Older retirees may be taking out principal each year).

(Photo geek alert)

Adobe Lightroom’s export function lets you choose any post-processing application to run on the exported photos. You can automatically drop your exports into PhotoShop, upload them to Flicker, process them with a custom script, etc.

Here are my notes on writing a custom script to upload photos to my printing service.

Happy New Year to all three of my blog readers!  (…you know who you are)

For today’s bit of esoteric knowledge, last night you may have noticed that we did not have a leap second adjustment this year.  It turns out that man’s timekeeping has gotten more accurate than nature’s (”mean solar time”, the Earth’s rotation is slowing), and there’s a multi-year international debate about what to do about it.

See Wikipedia for the details.

One of the biggest pieces of advice I give entrepreneurs: find an good attorney with experience in startup financing. Do not use your uncle’s friend who’s been doing family law for the past 30 years.

Your investors will have great attorneys, and you need someone who can skillfully represent your interests. Find someone who’s more than a corporate law mechanic, that can contribute business advice during investor negotiations. A good attorney will be able to suggest deal terms, based on their experience with other deals (or even deals with your investors).

Ideally, you can find someone that does nothing but startup financings. Here’s a great list of lawyers with the right kind of experience. (This is the group that worked on the National Venture Capital Association’s Model financing documents.)