Pure Genius

Star Trek II condensed into a 90 second Italian opera, via Robot Chicken.

Incidentally, the first time I searched for this, I couldn't find it (I forgot the title was in Italian). This was the error message.

Keeping a Casual Eye on ASUR, Part IV

The stock soars on news that the interim CEO picked up 500k shares. So far, so good for Sandberg and associates. The stock is now higher than the cash-out offer. The gamble of small holders to turn down the 36 cents per share in cash may yet work out.

We'll keep an eye on this, for reasons I mentioned in previous posts.

Star

A comment on Fred Wilson's blog about Jim Carroll's recent passing reminded me of the Cult song that was featured on the film version of Carroll's The Basketball Diaries. I didn't know there was a video for the song, but here it is, via YouTube. The silver-clad model is supposed to evoke the Lady Liberty, I suppose, but she reminds me a little of the robot from Metropolis.

Template Concept for New Blog

This template combines elements of the logo with another image and a semi-custom Wordpress theme. Feel free to share your feedback in the comments.

The Secret to Making Money Online

37 Signals again. Here's David Heinemeier Hansson, the partner who created Ruby on Rails, giving his take on how to make money online. This is from last year, but it's new to me. Maybe it's new to you too.

37 Signals Satirizes Freeconomics

37 Signals founder Jason Fried's take on the current wave of venture capital interest in Internet-based companies that aren't making money, "PRESS RELEASE: 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT". Excerpts:

CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.

Founder Jason Fried informed his employees about the new deal at a recent company-wide meeting. The financing round was led by Yardstick Capital and Institutionalized Venture Partners.

In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money.

[...]

A $100 billion value for 37signals is “not outlandish,” says Aanandamayee Bhatnagar, a finance professor and valuation guru at Grenada State’s Schnook School of Business. Bhatnagar points to a leaked, confidential corporate strategy plan that projects 37signals will attract twelve billion users by the end of 2013.

How will the company overcome the fact that there are only 6.8 billion people alive today? “Why limit users to people?” said Bhatnagar.

In order to determine the valuation of companies, Bhatnagar typically applies the following formula: [(Twitter followers x Facebook fans) + (# of employees x 1000)] x (RSS subscribers + daily page views) + (monthly burn rate x Google’s stock price)2 and then doubles if it they use Ruby on Rails^[1] or if the CEO has run a business into the ground before.

I wonder if Fred Wilson, venture capitalist investor in Twitter, among other Internet businesses, will respond to this on his blog. If so, it should lead to a spirited discussion in the comments.

^[1]Ruby on Rails, the web framework my developers use, was created by one of the partners in 37 Signals. My web developers mentioned this to me when I asked them if they had read the book Getting Real by 37 Signals, which I had first heard about from this video blog post from Tim Ferriss's site.

The Ear Inn

We met family friends for dinner last night at a historic dive in SoHo called The Ear Inn (pictured above¹). Last week, I had seen a Guardian article on the "50 best things to eat in the world"; number three on that list was the burger at a New York City restaurant called Little Owl. George, an old friend of my parents, enjoys a good burger, so I invited him to join us. It turned out that Little Owl doesn't offer burgers for dinner, so George suggested the Ear Inn. An old man, he enjoys visiting old places. His son Jimmy joined us.

The family loves meat: Jimmy mentioned he was taking a charcuterie class at the French Culinary Institute in town. He wants to learn how to age his own steaks. He made an interesting point about burgers -- an obvious one, in hindsight, but an interesting one nonetheless: places that cook all their burgers well done (e.g., Five Guys, In-and-Out Burger, etc.) ought to be considered in a separate category from restaurants where you can get burgers cooked to order. That's a distinction Matt and I didn't make when we listed our top five burger places². Jimmy also noted how difficult it is for restaurants to do something seemingly so simple: consistently cook a burger to order. I mentioned that celebrity chef Bobby Flay's Burger Palace doesn't seem to be able to do this. His stated M.O. is to cook the burgers medium but you have good odds of getting your burger bloody or overcooked instead. The Ear Inn cooked our medium burgers the way we ordered them. Good burger, but no fries: there's no fryer in the cramped kitchen.

¹The writing on the wall in the photo, next to the arrow, says that the blue line represents the water's edge of the island as it was in 1766.

²Matt's been too busy to post regularly on his eating blog, thanks in part to Launching Innovation, but if he reads this post, he'll have another two burger places to check out when the dust settles.