Pajama Entrepreneur

Not exactly a business you can do in your pajamas and quite hazardous but fascinating and rewarding if you are up to it: opening a restaurant in Kabul (Afghanistan). A number of foreign women have opened restaurants in Kabul according to Women’s eNews, offering Thai, Mexican, Filipino, Indian and other kinds of cuisines to residents. It’s not for the faint-hearted. Entrepreneurs must meet United Nations security specifications, which means stationing armed guards at the doors and installing barbed wire around the perimeter. On the other hand, there is a large group of expats and Afghans working in Kabul, who are willing to spend money for chicken adobo and lamb tikka masala.

[via Broadsheet]

Cory Doctorow has written an excellent piece about how Facebook suffers from exactly the same dilemma suffered by earlier online social networks: when everyone’s on, it’s not cool anymore. And worse — you’ll need to “defriend” people. Oh how to do this without offending people? You can’t. Here’s an excerpt from Cory’s article:

You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please. It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war.

I left LinkedIn, a popular business networking site precisely because lots of people wanted to be my contact and began pestering me for endorsements even though I hardly knew them. It was a complete waste of time. If I need to contact someone, I don’t need to go through LinkedIn. I have a very good network already and my friends are more than willing to make introductions to other people.

Here’s an excerpt from a post on Marc Andreessen’s blog about the rise of Hollywood owner-entrepreneurs who don’t need the old studio system to bring their works to the public:

“The world is about to change,” Frank says. “Anyone with an Apple computer can make a movie now — it’s never been a more democratic medium. The studios should be very afraid. Once the independent financiers start going directly to writers, things could change really fast. I ask myself every week — why aren’t we all working with them? Look at the movies they’ve made. They are the new Medicis. While the studios peddle dreary remakes and special-effects extravaganzas, the movies that really get people talking — such as “Crash,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Michael Clayton” and the upcoming “Juno” — have been financed by outside investors. None of the films had a big budget, but fiscal discipline and artistic autonomy often fuels creativity. “Ten million dollars to $30 million is where ambiguity stays alive, where you can have complexity in storytelling,” Gilroy says. “When you get up to a certain budget number with studio films, the bad guys have to all wear black hats.”

Please read the entire article, it’s very well written.

Here is a screenshot of my Facebook newsfeed dated 10 November 2007. Pay attention to the California Car Insurance sponsored ad in my feed. Is this all Facebook can do - insert stupid irrelevant sponsored ads about California car insurance to a person who lives in Amsterdam?

Facebook is purportedly worth $15 billion. If my company were worth even $1 billion, I would spend at least $100M working on a super-targeted advertising solution and with that kind of money, $100M, I could do it. First, I would definitely ask the person to whom I am showing the ads what he or she is interested in.

Clearly, I don’t live in California. Even without asking me, Facebook would have known NOT to show the ad. Who gets ripped off? The advertiser. Who gets annoyed? Me.

If this is all Facebook can muster, what can I expect next in my feed? Dog and cat food ads, even though I own no pets? Weight-loss diet ads even though I weigh 100 lbs (five feet four inches in height)?

Wouldn’t surprise me. Sloppy, unprofessional work from a company worth bucket loads of money. I am not impressed.

UPDATE: Several hours later, I see on the left hand side of my Facebook feeds, two ads delivered one after the other: (1) Botox and (2) Tired of Dating?

First, I do NOT need Botox. I may be 46 years old but I don’t have hideous wrinkles and the thought of getting large needle next to my head to inject poison sounds gruesome to me. Second, I don’t give a damn about dating or being tired of dating. Where the hell does Facebook get this idea that I need wrinkle-reducing treatments or help in my romantic life? Is my photo THAT bad?

Microsoft launched a unified communications platform (merging email, instant messaging and telephony) that Business Division President Jeff Raikes claims will put an end to telephone tag:

“The era of dialing blind, the era of playing phone tag, the era of voice-mail jam…that era is ending . . . I don’t want to get in touch with your number. I want to get in touch with you.

Sorry Jeff, but actually most of the time, I don’t want to talk to people. I want them to leave a message in my email box which I can either read or listen to in order to determine whether it is worth responding to. Based on what I hear and read, I will respond.

Why do companies love offering products like this - a hodgepodge of stuff that does not really solve a pressing problem? Right now my problem is I get too many emails from business contacts, friends, family, email newsletters, etc. The last thing I need is people managing to reach me via phone interrupting my already busy day.

I want FILTERS, intelligent ones, and I have a few solutions already using email, but nothing is optimal. Messages from close friends and family go into a mailbox marked “read right away”. I have various mailboxes for different levels of urgency. But what I certainly don’t need is a solution that allows people to talk to me whenever THEY want, not when I want.

Orange, Apple’s exclusive partner in France, is required to sell the iPhone unlocked, if requested by a customer. The reason: French law prohibits the tying of a device to a cellular service. Operators can sell phones for a lower price if they subsidize it, but if the customer just wants the phone, they have to sell it to him or her, even at a higher price. Read my post on Muniwireless.

Law professor Tim Wu says there’s nothing illegal about an iPhone user unlocking his phone plus it’s so much fun:

The good news is that my iPhone works flawlessly. With my existing T-Mobile account, I get 1,300 more minutes of talk time than I would have received from AT&T for a comparably priced plan; I also now have a phone that I can take to Asia and Europe. I avoided a $200 termination fee, AT&T’s activation fee, and having to wait for AT&T to port my existing number. On the downside, I don’t have AT&T’s visual voicemail, and I have to stay away from Apple’s software upgrades, which might brick the phone. But it’s easy to download third-party apps, like iPong. Best of all, my geek friends are impressed.

Read the rest of Professor Wu’s article on Slate. In the meantime, Apple’s most recent attempt (version 1.1.1) to turn its customers’ iPhones into $500 paperweights has failed. Hackers have figured out a way to hack that as well, giving users, once again, the freedom to user their phones however they want to.

UPDATE: Dewayne Hendricks emailed me to say that hackers have read access to the filesystem on the iPhone, but not complete write access. They’re very close though. Click here to visit the iPhone hacker site.