I’d rather be surfing

Just watched one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in a while: Air Guitar Nation! Do yourself a favor and put it in your Netflix queue or just buy it. Half the time I kept wondering if it was a mockumentary but its completely serious.

I can’t wait to go to next years Air Guitar competition in SF.

5. Its not an iPhone (and its not on AT&T): All the early adopters have iPhones plus a two year contract with AT&T. Sucks for them. The real question is, who will provide the network until Google gets their own piece of the pie?

4. Open Platform: Its highly likely that the Gphone will have a platform for which any developer can create applications. The OS itself is probably a flavor of Linux but will probably have API hooks for Java.

3. Google Apps for Mobile: Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Maps and all the other goodies will come installed on the Gphone. And the default interface isn’t some crazy menu system that no one can use but the “One Box” search interface that we all know and love.

2. 3G (no G is not for Google): Not a sloooooow EDGE connection. Real 3G! Fast enough to download all the websites, emails and YouTube clips you could ever want.

1. Free?: Probably not but likely cheaper than the iPhone.

Bonus Reasons:

1. The Gphone will support javascript and css? The iPhone and some Nokia Series 60 devices already use Webkit as a basis for their browsers and Google may follow.

2. Grand Central support: One number, one voicemail box, and tons of killer features.

3. 800-GOOG-411: If you can’t type, you can always call…

Of course, this is my take on the Gphone. We’ll know the truth when the phone is actually released.

BTW - “gPhone” seems incorrect to me. Apple would call it a “gPhone” while Google will probably call it a “Gphone” (see Gmail for example).

Did you get your tickets to the Guitar Hero Championship in San Francisco?

I did.

The NYTimes recently ran a story about the growing interest in websites catering to the ‘older demographic’. From Multiply to Eons, apparently Grey is the new Black.

I am not surprised.

About a year and a half ago, I was talking with a friend who co-founded a social networking company here in San Francisco. I told him I had an idea for a direction that I think his company could take especially considering their existing traffic was of an older demographic. It wasn’t sexy or web2.0 but I thought it had a huge upside.

I said, “Social networking for ‘older’ people. I call it Oldster!”

Obviously, the name was a twist on the social networking company Friendster, famous for its fickle user base and crash and burn story. Friendster’s old user base is pretty much the same one that has vaulted MySpace and Friendster into the top traffic sites on the internets. Its made up of younger people who are web savvy and have extremely limited attention spans. Not an easy crowd to monetize because of their lack of time and money.

What’s interesting about the Oldsters of the world is the stickiness of the users.  Contrast that with the five second attention span of Digg users… Which type of user would you want?

Oldster - its not sexy but its sticky.

I met Thorsten von Eicken,  CTO of RightScale, at the Amazon Startup Project.  RightScale was one of the companies who had a kiosk setup and were demoing their product.  I got the 5 minute overview and was very impressed.  (Check out the video)

I’ll check out the product and write more on it soon.

I know its a couple of days late but here is part 1 of my notes from the Amazon Startup Project San Francisco.  It was a great event particularly leading up to the first meetup of AWSome.ws.

First up was Adam Selipsky, VP of AWS. Adam started by summarizing the history of AWS:

• started about 5 years ago
• ECS was first service but inflexible
• decided to decoupled data from presentation
• started looking at expansion
• what are the other pieces needed for any service?
  • storage, compute power, fps, sqs etc

Next he talked about the Design Principals behind the services:

• reliability
• scalability (up and down)
• speed
• simplicity (when possible)
• cost effective (low up front investment => ongoing costs)

Next Adam spoke about surprises

• rate of adoption => higher than expected (S3 0 - 5B objects in 1yr)
• people spend a lot of time dealing with “muck”
  • “muck” undifferentiated infrastructure costs
• speed to market has increased
• some companies claimed using AWS trimmed 2-6 months off their production time

Adam answers “is this a real Amazon business?”

• Yes, third step in customer chain
• consumers => 3rd party associates => and finally developers

Announcing the AWS Developer Challenge:

• looking for ways to find good ideas
• http://aws.amazon.com/startupchallenge
• winner will receive
  • 50k in cash
  • 50k in service credit
  • access to AWS experts
  • seed money

I only watch MTV during the award shows, the VMAs and MTV Movie Awards, and really only because my girlfriend watches those shows.   The rest of the time I can’t stand MTV.  The Hills?  ‘Nuff said.

Anyway, the VMAs are pretty pathetic…  Britney and Chris Brown weren’t even trying to lip sync accurately…  WTF?!  The best part was Justin Timberlake “challeng[ing] MTV to play more Videos”.  Good luck with that.  MTV is all “reality” all the time.  (Actually the best part was Miss Teen South Carolina!!)

Too bad its not about the music anymore.  At least MTV is not an accurate depiction of the Music Industry, which despite MTV’s ignorance, is better than ever.  New and different music is being created faster than ever before and its available to anyone on the internets.  Too bad for MTV but great for us fans who don’t listen to the 10 artists that get face time on MTV year after year.

Now all we need is a better way to pay for the music we like.

Tuesday night, I went to see Brian Jonestown Massacre at the Independent.  I mostly agree with HardRockChick’s review of the BJM show.  She was a little too forgiving though.  I don’t think someone playing the Independent is bad-ass enough to come on an hour and a half late and play a few songs between smoke breaks and arrogant and incoherent rants.  Axl Rose is about the only one that can get away with that shit.