-
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (via philphys)
-
(Source: cautioncreatures, via soimadeabigmistake)
-
(Source: l-o-s-i-n-g-m-y-s-o-u-l, via soimadeabigmistake)
-
-
When It Feels Right
By Mila Jaroniec
When it feels right, you’re going to do it because you can’t not. You’re going to stop playing pretend and you’re going to throw yourself into it face first, or ass first, I don’t know what. And you won’t know when that’s going to be until it happens.
When it feels right it’s going to make you feel level, supported. Everything will stand still and make sense for a minute; suddenly you’ll have the last word in the irritating crossword puzzle. You’ll fill it in, stand back and acknowledge, and everything’s going to be right where you put it. And then everything will be clear.
Originally, you’re going to be doing something else. You’re going to be living out some other plan for your life with the best of intentions. This plan used to be Plan B but actually turned out to be Plan A because let’s be serious, the real Plan A wasn’t a plan to begin with; it was this nebulously attractive question mark inkblot that you weren’t sure how to even approach so you left it alone, left it in the “dreams” category and moved on. You’re not going to dig out the original Plan A until you feel so not alive you can’t breathe and start to panic.
People and their crazy romantic notions: “I’d be an artist if I could,” or “I’d travel if I could,” or “I’d do all these things if I had the time/money/motivation.” Everyone would do everything if they had the fundamental resources necessary. Yeah, maybe — you do have to be realistic. Be totally realistic for ten minutes without a break and take note of how you feel. That’s the crushing weight of limitations. But, the thing about limitations is there’s usually a way around them. Not becoming a ballerina because you don’t have legs is one thing. Not becoming a ballerina because you don’t have a tutu is something else entirely.
For example: recently I had an inspiring lady tell me about another inspiring lady, a French filmmaker (I can’t write her name because I don’t know how to spell it or what it even sounds like; sorry, I was drunk when she told me) who wanted to make films but didn’t have any money to spare for equipment. Since you can’t really make a film without equipment and taking out a loan wasn’t a viable option for her, she decided to attack her dream differently: she started writing, with the vague hope that someone someday would take interest in her work and translate it to film. And let her direct it.
And that actually f-cking happened.
If you really want something, you have to work with that you have.
When something feels right, even if it’s crazy it’s going to make the most sense. Everything else will feel like a lie, a weak approximation; you’ll feel like you’re placating yourself or whoever you think you have to please by doing it but deep down you’ll know what’s really going on. When it feels right it’s going to pull insistently, tug at your sleeve like an annoying five-year old, wave its arms until you look at it. It’s going to make you lose sleep but you won’t feel tired.
When it feels right, it’ll be tangible. The hazy “dream” state of it will evaporate and it will become a map, a strategy. You’ll get off your tiptoes and stop being afraid. You’ll do it because it’s in your blood.
And you won’t know when that will happen, or if it ever will; but when it feels right, you’ll know.
(Source: thoughtcatalog.com)
-
(Source: nathaliagnr, via soimadeabigmistake)
-
tweets from the archives
“I don’t understand why one would try to be a social studies teacher for secondary schools.
At that level, they should have realized the societal ramifications of institutionalized academia, as well as the stranglehold of politics on culture. Fucking ironic to hear what they teach “
“Reading blogs made by supposed hippie tweens makes me want to kill myself.
We are probably the first generation that enjoys feasting on pre made, recycled culture.
Thanks to all the teens who made us the most uncool, pretentious, self-indulgent and self-important generation.”“Finally some exposure on the band-aid solutions our beloved PAP comes up with. SGreans have another 4 years to repent bit.ly/GIP0K2”
“Everyday, someone on my timeline will feel obligated to retweet an inspirational quote that is probably just common sense”
-Chad Sor, twitter
-
weekly highlights
“FB’s IPO runs the risk of being another bloated bubble burst with no concrete plans in place for monetization #waytoohopeful”
“The new app center is a solid example of FB’s continued archaic thinkings”
“Illuminati is the tinfoil man’s version of capitalistic hierarchy.”
“Obama publicly expressed support for same sex marriage. Pity society is nowhere near as progressive for that “
“The real challenge for stylistic typography is information density #notforthemasses”
“Why listen to only specific songs on an album while skipping the rest? It’s like reading only a specific chapter in a book. #Assbackwards”
-Chad Sor, twitter
-
Here’s Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years
By Eric Jackson
We think of Google and Facebook as Web gorillas. They’ll be around forever. Yet, with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years. Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone. And there’s some academic theory to back up that view, along with casual observations from recent history.
When I was a PhD student 15 years ago, I studied with Don Hambrick who is a scholar known for a career showing the effects of management teams and directors (for good and for ill) on their organizations’ strategies and performance. One of the central tenets of this school of thought on organizations is that senior teams and directors have an outsized influence on organizational outcomes. What’s more, their backgrounds (including education and career paths) have a big effect on how they see the world, various competitive situations and the choices they make.There’s another school of thought which takes the opposite view called population ecology or organizational ecology which put forward that managers don’t really matter all that much. This view grew out of sociologists who’d taken to study organizations in the 1970s. They assert that organizational outcomes have much more to do with industry effects than who the CEO is and the choices he or she makes. They study birth and death rates of populations of organizations, as well as the effects of age, competition and resources in the surrounding environment on an organization’s birth and death rate. Most of these organizational ecology scholars come out of the University of California at Berkeley.
As a graduate student, I didn’t have much time for this ecology line of thinking. I believed in the power of the individual executive to overcome all challenges in the external environment. We can always point to dynamic CEOs as case studies, even though the sociologists would say those are the equivalent of celebrating the smarts of lottery winners.
As I age and watch what’s happening in the world of Internet and mobile, I can’t stop thinking of these ecologists though.
More and more in the Internet space, it seems that your long-term viability as a company is dependent on when you were born.
Think of the differences between generations and when we talk about how the Baby Boomers behave differently from Gen X’ers and additional differences with the Millennials. Each generation is perceived to see the world in a very unique way that translates into their buying decisions and countless other habits.
In the tech Internet world, we’ve really had 3 generations:
Web 1.0 (companies founded from 1994 – 2001, including Netscape, Yahoo! (YHOO), AOL (AOL), Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY)),
Web 2.0 or Social (companies founded from 2002 – 2009, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), and Groupon (GRPN)),
and now Mobile (from 2010 – present, including Instagram).
With each succeeding generation in tech the Internet, it seems the prior generation can’t quite wrap its head around the subtle changes that the next generation brings. Web 1.0 companies did a great job of aggregating data and presenting it in an easy to digest portal fashion. Google did a good job organizing the chaos of the Web better than AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and all the other search engines that preceded it. Amazon did a great job of centralizing the chaos of e-commerce shopping and putting all you needed in one place.
When Web 2.0 companies began to emerge, they seemed to gravitate to the importance of social connections. MySpace built a network of people with a passion for music initially. Facebook got college students. LinkedIn got the white collar professionals. Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon showed how users could generate content themselves and make the overall community more valuable.
Yet, Web 1.0 companies never really seemed to be able to grasp the importance of building a social community and tapping into the backgrounds of those users. Even when it seems painfully obvious to everyone, there just doesn’t seem to be the capacity of these older companies to shift to a new paradigm. Why has Amazon done so little in social? And Google? Even as they pour billions at the problem, their primary business model which made them successful in the first place seems to override their expansion into some new way of thinking.Mobile companies born since 2010 have a very different view of the world. These companies – and Instagram is the most topical example at the moment – view the mobile smartphone as the primary (and oftentimes exclusive) platform for their application. They don’t even think of launching via a web site. They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites.
We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.
Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies still seem unsure how to adapt to this new paradigm. Facebook is the triumphant winner of social companies. It will go public in a few weeks and probably hit $140 billion in market capitalization. Yet, it loses money in mobile and has rather simple iPhone and iPad versions of its desktop experience. It is just trying to figure out how to make money on the web – as it only had $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011 and its revenues actually decelerated in Q1 of this year relative to Q4 of last year. It has no idea how it will make money in mobile.The failed history of Web 1.0 companies adapting to the world of social suggests that Facebook will be as woeful at adapting to social mobile as Google has been with its “ghost town” Google+ initiative last year.
The organizational ecologists talked about the “liability of obsolescence” which is a growing mismatch between an organization’s inherent product strategy and its operating environment over time. This probably is a good explanation for what we’re seeing in the tech world today.
Are companies like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo! obsolete? They’re still growing. They still have enormous audiences. They also have very talented managers.
But with each new paradigm shift (first to social, now to mobile, and next to whatever else), the older generations get increasingly out of touch and likely closer to their significant decline. What’s more, the tech world in which we live in seems to be speeding up. Tim Cook had an interesting line about the velocity of change in his earnings call last week:
“
through the last quarter, I should say, which is just 2 years after we shipped the initial iPad, we’ve sold 67 million. And to put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs and 5 years for that many iPods and over 3 years for that many iPhones. And we were extremely happy with the trajectory on all of those products. And so I think iPad, it’s a profound product.”
Yahoo is already a shell of its 2000 self. There is increasing chatter (including from me) about how Google’s facing a painful multiple contraction, once its desktop search business (still accounting for the vast majority of its revenues and profits) starts to fall off a cliff as users dramatically drop traditional search for new ways of getting information they want in a mobile world. Is Amazon destined to decline? There seem to be no signs of it today and people will still need to buy stuff in a mobile world, but the new mobile platform will certainly open the possibilities for new entrants that Amazon can’t even imagine today.
Facebook is also probably facing a tough road ahead as this shift to mobile happens. As Hamish McKenzie said last week, “I suspect that Facebook will try to address that issue [of the shift to mobile] by breaking up its various features into separate apps or HTML5 sites: one for messaging, one for the news feed, one for photos, and, perhaps, one for an address book. But that fragments the core product, probably to its detriment.”
Considering how long Facebook dragged its feet to get into mobile in the first place, the data suggests they will be exactly as slow to change as Google was to social. Does the Instagram acquisition change that? Not really, in my view. It shows they’re really fearful of being displaced by a mobile upstart. However, why would bolting on a mobile app to a Web 2.0 platform (and a very good one at that) change any of the underlying dynamics we’re discussing here? I doubt it.
What about Apple? Where does it fit in to this classification scheme?
Apple is really a hardware company, so it’s difficult to put it into a bucket related to web apps. It certainly seemed very Web 1.0 with its Ping social application. Yet it’s succeeded in mobile from making the best hardware and software ecosystem for apps to proliferate on. In some ways, as long as it has a successful iOS platform, it doesn’t care which Web 1.0, 2.0 and mobile companies fail or succeed on top of it. Maybe that’s why so many non-mobile companies seem to want to emulate Apple. Google bought Motorola Mobility (MMI) to get into the hardware business. Facebook and Baidu (BIDU) are rumored to be launching their own mobile OS.
The bottom line is that the next 5 – 8 years could be incredibly dynamic. It’s possible that both Google and Facebook could be shells of their current selves – or gone entirely.
They will have all the money in the world to try and adapt to the shift to mobile but history suggests they won’t be able to successfully do it. I often hear Google bulls point to the market share of Android or Eric Schmidt’s hypothesis that Google could one day charge all Android subscribers $10 a month for value-added services as proof of future profits. Yet, where are all the great social success stories by Web 1.0 companies? I imagine we’ll see as many great examples of social companies jumping horses mid-race to become great mobile companies.
It’s a lot easier to start asking Siri for information instead of typing search terms into a box compared to thousands of enterprises ceasing to upgrade to the next version of Windows. Google’s 76% market share. Facebook’s 900 million monthly users. They just aren’t as sticky as they seem.
And does anyone think the pace of change is going to increase in the next 5 years versus the last? That we’re going to see fewer innovations, fewer start-ups trying more stuff on cheaper and more powerful processing power? In all likelihood, we could have an entirely new way of gathering information and interacting with ads in a new mobile world than what we’re currently used to today.
The Googles and Facebooks of tomorrow might not even exist today. And several Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies might be completely wiped off the map by then.
Fortunes will be made by those who adapt to and invest in this complete greenfield.
Those who own the future are going to be the ones who create it. It’s all up for grabs. Web monopolies are not as sticky as the monopolies of old.(Source: forbes.com)
-
Five Calls To Make On Facebook’s IPO
By Clem Chambers
Facebook’s impending IPO is a piece of stock market history in the making. Not since Google (GOOG) went public in 2004 has there been so much buzz, excitement and controversy surrounding a new listing.
How can Facebook be worth US$100,000,000,000? That’s roughly US$300 per American, or US$15 for every human breathing.Put that way, you could in fact say the price is cheap–if only in comparison to Apple (AAPL), currently roughly worth US$1,500 for every American and US$100 for every soul hanging to the planet’s surface.
In reality of course, no one likes to value companies this way, especially when they are technological and financial juggernauts.
You shouldn’t think of the ratios, but the opportunity.
Remember, Facebook isn’t just a company, it’s a way of life for many. A miracle, a phenomenon, call it what you like, the social networking giant is undoubtedly not only the next big thing, it’s the big thing right now.
As its IPO looms closer, potential investors in Facebook seeking to make the right call should ask themselves the following five questions:
1. Are you a trader or an investor?
When mixed, trading and investing can result in a dangerous cocktail, so it’s important to ask yourself which category you see yourself in.
Without a doubt, Facebook is going to provide miles of trading opportunities. Trading Facebook is a no-brainer for ‘trading types,’ who will be able to put their skills to the test during what is sure to be a months-long volatility fest.
Aside from penny share volatility, mountainous liquidity to surf means instant gratification will be possible, along with an easy exit, even from giant trading positions.
If you see yourself an investor however, you shouldn’t think about the short game. Instead, focus on whether Facebook will prove a good investment by the end of your ‘timeline’–taking into account its start from a giant valuation that would appear to take most of the upside out of the equation on day one.2. Is Facebook the end of the road or the beginning of a new chapter?
Has Facebook already had its day? Does the IPO in fact amount to the exit of insiders who feel the exponential growth of the company has hit a ceiling only they can judge? After all, they are the ones with access to mountains of data on their product and insights into how the business works. With half of everyone capable of being on Facebook already on Facebook, is the IPO the end of the story or just the beginning?
Know any people with Facebook exhaustion? Is Facebook AOL 2.0? Of course, a trader won’t care a bit. Up or down is the same to them, so long as they bet the right way on the trade.
3. Can Facebook get its revenue motoring?
There was a time when Google monopolized the Web, or at least the English speaking part of it. To this day, the company still takes a lion’s share of money made online.
The advent of Facebook created a second key entry point to the Web. The social networking site’s impenetrable login was able to keep the Google data-vampire out of its house, preventing the search engine’s mighty vacuum from sucking up, re-purposing and reselling data via its powerful advertising algo-wraiths.
This means Facebook, owner of your social life, is head-to-head with Google, owner of your data-soul. Google effectively drains US$40 billion dollars annually from the media ad pool, killing newspapers and crippling a host of static media in the process.
Now Facebook has a crack at that pie. If it gets it right, it could carve chunks out of Google’s bloated income, while simultaneously grabbing pieces of the dwindling, old media pie. Yet Facebook is struggling with this, for the same reason as Bing and Yahoo are struggling.
FB simply does not do the great job Google does of empowering advertisers to grab you by the eyeballs via an idiot-proof platform with instant access to the most powerful marketing medium on the planet.
Can Facebook get its advertising platform to the same level as Google’s? Advertisers would love this, but as of now Facebook’s offering is lame and expensive.My company, ADVFN.com would write Facebook a check for a million bucks if it could give me a cost of acquisition lower than Google’s. Today it isn’t even close, but will tomorrow be different? If the ad platform were to be brought up to scratch, a US$100 billion market cap is not so outrageous when compared to Google’s US$200 billion. If the company can’t achieve this, then it’ll just be Yahoo 2.0.
4. Will some Facebook in your portfolio make you more or less diversified?Maybe some Facebook shares will give you the exposure you need to the dotcom Boom 2. Maybe you already have too much of the high beta stocks in your portfolio already.
Becoming undiversified is a dangerous game, so if you are up to your gills in Apple, Google, Amazon, Linkedin and Groupon already, maybe you need to think about a rebalancing of your net darlings, rather than a simple buy.
Top slice some of those fat returns, perhaps. In a way, it’s kind of pointless to ask people to be careful investing in stocks like these. The reason investors like Buffett don’t play in this field is because the valuation metric for these kind of stocks are in a world all their own–far away from basic investing principles that old timers adhere to.
However, if your portfolio is the kind value investors stick to, perhaps a bit of Facebook beta might be a good thing to sprinkle in. The blade of diversification cuts both ways. Risk is good, so long as you have the right balance.
5. Is the market going up or down?
You can’t buck the market. If you think, like many, that the world is going to hell in a hand basket and that the U.S. is going to go bust under untold trillions of debt, then investing in Facebook is simply hiring a great suite on the Titanic.
Yet it’s not only overall market conditions that need be considered.
Is the Facebook IPO just the Netscape IPO of dotcom Boom 2, i.e. the start of a crazy run that will see Apple above a trillion dollar market cap and lots of new Web companies springing up in a fountain of golden equity IPOs?
If we are in for dotcom Boom 2 then everything rises for the duration, Facebook, of course zooming into the firmament. If the market is in for a run then why wouldn’t the most pervasive web environment ever created not be worth hundreds of billions?
Traders should have their Level 2 and their Linkedin and Groupon historic intraday charts at the ready while bearish investors should stand well back. Dotcom 2 believers should dive right in and those short of beta in their portfolios should take a dab at the IPO.
Meanwhile the muppets so beloved by Goldman will pile in without any thought whatsoever in any event. After all, what can be more fun than a dotcom rollercoaster?(Source: forbes.com)
