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One of the things that has driven Apple's success is its remarkable ability to understand its product as thoroughly as its customer. This reflects in the incredibly well-designed interface of all its machines: whether it's the jaw droppingly slim Mac Book Air or the revolutionary and seductively aesthetic Ipod touch. An apple machine connects with its user like nothing else can. And it is this bond that has translated into bucks!

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Heh. I love that video.

bijan

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That vid is killer. And by the way. Rush is not heavy metal, nor is Ray Charles \m/

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I might suggest a pretty awesome book for understanding the entrepreneurial code, "The Answer." http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?rta=blog

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yeah! but i dont have a info about typepad but i have written something about important rules of opening new website, it can be help who wants to open a website! Dont forget to designing... http://www.5001.net/2008/05/important-rules-in-...

Have a nice day.....

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It's great to see the emotional aspect of a dad.

Your 'sleeping' photo feels so warm.

Thanks

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@bijan - Josh and i discussed this briefly. he was careful not to say crash-predictors were wrong. I've been saying spring '08 for 4+ years now. I'm either on it or I'm not.

@alex - I'm not suggesting it will be anywhere near the scale or violence of the last one. I'm only saying that technology innovation and consolidation is inescapably cyclical and we are not in the innovation part of the cycle any longer. Facebook's rise feels a lot like Google's rise in '99 to me. Just because they did wonderfully for the following several years doesn't require that everyone else did.

My best guess on the trigger will be a marginal decrease in keyword bids where the last couple percent of demand vastly increases prices. If that happens, Google comes in a penny light one quarter, and things get messy.

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I think a lot of people are building VERY niche products and fooling themselves with early adopter traffic numbers that their products have mainstream appeal. I've seen very few products recently with mainstream appeal. TechCrunch/Scobleizer traffic means nothing other than you have a market size of ~500K.

The good news is most of these companies have minimal investment in them. If you start to see niche products start to raise big rounds at high valuations, then I'll start thinking bubble.

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the good news is, if there is a "crash" it will be a very long and slow one and consumers and amateurs will get hurt very little, if at all.

unlike the wildly overheated public markets of the late 1990s and early 2000's, the "bubble" problem here is a huge oversupply of venture capital and a commensurate undersupply of IRR (above market returns). consumers and amateurs and day traders and the like simply arent involved

any case, at some point (though only heaven knows when) the LPs of the world will say, i've been pumping money into VC funds for a deacde and i could have made more money in a savings account at my corner community bank. and the oversupply of capital will dry up and less deals will get funded with less capital and the casual interlopers (partners at VC firms and entrepreneurs who mistakenly think they're in it for rthe easy money) will disappear and the asset class will correct itself and reuturns will, well, return

and the only folks who will get hurt (if yiou can call it that) are the pension funds and endowments -- the LPs -- who will write down and write off their VC investments

but unless there is a general market flame out or meklt down (and I for one see little risk of that) then the LPs losses will be more than made up for by gains and/or stability in the rest of their portfolios -- they have little invested in VC relative to their overall portfolios

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the good news is, if there is a "crash" it will be a very looong and slow one and consumers and amateurs will get hurt very little

the problem here is a huge oversupply of venture capital and a commensurate undersupply of IRR (above market returns)

at some point (though only heaven knows when) the LPs of the world will say, i've been pumping money into VC funds for a deacde and i could have made more money in a savings account at my corner community bank. and the oversupply of capital will dry up and less deals will get funded with less capital and the casual interlopers (partners at VC firms and entrepreneurs who mistakenly think they're in it for rthe easy money) will disappear and the asset class will correct itself and reuturns will, well, return

and the only folks who will get hurt (if yiou can call it that) are the pension funds and endowments -- the LPs -- who will write down and write off their VC investments

but unless there is a general market flame out or meklt down (and I for one see little risk of that) then the LPs losses will be more than made up for by gains and/or stability in the rest of their portfolios -- they have little invested in VC relative to their overall portfolios

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the last bust was because people were speculating on stocks. what would be the cause for the bust, tech stocks are not trading now?

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btw @henry for some reason you had a bunch of duplicate posts so I deleted the dupes.

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hey henry,

My TVs are linked to my audio system. and having a big screen to drive the UI, see album art, playlists, etc is a great party jukebox machine.

we have sonos as well in my house. mostly because i didn't want to wait around for Rhapsody TV. it's fine but I wish I had it on my TV as well.

also, a lot of folks I know don't want more/new hardware in their house. they don't want to pay for new stuff, they don't want to deal with installing new stuff, they don't want to network new stuff, etc. That's why Rhapsody TV on existing hardware is a good idea in my view.

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Bijan, a quick question... How will you use the Rhapsody TV service? I just don't understand the appeal of having music on your TV system (unless the TV system is also your audio system, which for some folks it obviously is). Thanks. Henry Blodget

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Microsoft made a deal with Apple to support the Mac with Office for 5 years. That deal was struck almost 2 years ago. Maybe Apple's going to push iWork to the point where they can tell Microsoft to go to hell in another 3 years. Probably not though...

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Hmm. I did send it to you. I'll try again.

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Trying your new comment system. Invite you sent a couple days ago never arrived in my inbox (or spam filter). Can you resend? I'd still love to try it.

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Sure. Pls send me an email to bijan at sparkcapital dot com

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Hey Bijan, I've actually heard a lot about Dopplr and was surprised to see you blogging about it. Can you shoot me over an invite?

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It was great meeting you in person.

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"Death or Glory" contains perhaps the finest line ever written in rock and roll (and right up there in literature, generally):

"I believe in this and its been tested by research:
He who fucks nuns will later join the Church."

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Great thanks. Brad feld tells me that feedburner will make this easy. I'm happy about that.

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Hi! I saw your blog mentioned at Amin's Photo blog.

I am using Blogger, so I don't know if there is a difference in how feeds are treated by Feedburner, but I believe all you have to do is change the url of the source of your feed (Original Feed), and the readers will be automagically pointed to your new feed.

I noticed that there is a typepad in your Feed url, but I don't know if that could be an issue or not.

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Awesome. Does that mean that people that currently subscribe to this feed won't have to make any changes ?

Thx brad.

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Bijan - you shouldn't have to do "anything" to "move" your FeedBurner feed. The URL is totally portable - once you've got your new blog set up just go into your FeedBurner account and point your RSS feed (or Atom feed) at your FeedBurner URL. If you need help, email me and I'll stop being a VC for two minutes and be your tech support guy.

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