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An Interview with David Hersh

In early August, I promised an interview with David Hersh "in a few weeks." It took me a while to prepare myself, but finally I was able to reach out to him. David, who co-founded the formerly (more below) social networking site Multiply , was kind enough to give me some of his time to answer a few questions. LS: At the end of my August 2 blog entry I briefly introduced Multiply, but I'm sure I didn't do it justice. Can you elaborate on what Multiply does, and what your role is within the company? DH: Multiply is a social networking site that has recently evolved into a social shopping site. The service was built to allow people to share photos, videos and blogs with friends and family on fully customizable personal web sites. We discovered that those tools as well as the social communication tools that underlie the media sharing also work great for someone looking to set up an online storefront and build an e-commerce business with little to no out-of-pocke

A Time for Thanks

Every year around this time, I take a few moments to think about the wonderful things in my life for which I am very thankful. This year the activity took on special significance because, 4 days ago, my mother suffered a cardiopulmonary attack (a heart attack coupled with respiratory failure) and has been in a coma since. Not surprisingly, I immediately came home to be with my father who has been her spouse for 43 years and has been profoundly affected by this. What is surprising is that this isn't the first time she's been comatose. In fact, I jokingly say to anyone who will listen that my mother has cheated death so many times she probably owes him money or something. The last time, my mother developed a sudden case of bacterial meningitis and was unconscious for 11 days before waking up and, in her characteristic fashion, complaining that she didn't have her makeup and similar implements with her to avoid looking like a fashion nightmare. The very wonderful Dr. Sam L

Post-Mortem

I try to avoid religious diatribes. I recognize that religion is an intensely personal matter, and I can remember when people would canvas door-to-door, interrupting my family during dinnertime growing up. I also try to avoid political discussions. In my opinion, people either take a "half interested" view of politics or are rabid fanatics of everything that goes on in Washington D.C., their states, and their locales. Politically induced rabies tends to induce blindness and a general lack of common sense in people too, which is the reason why I avoid it. (I'll leave my general loathing of politicians and the tendency of them in general to put personal interests above the good of the people; lobbying ['nuff said]; and related topics out of this discussion.) Still, Tuesday saw the biggest swing in Congress since the 40's so it is my civic duty to comment: I'm glad it's over. I realize that the Republicans felt the need to recapture Congress given the tr

Perception is Reality

Edit: ironically, this article on the latest security debacle at Facebook was released today on the Wall Street Journal. You can't script this stuff. Really. The subject for this blog entry is an oft-repeated mantra of mine. I'm not sure if I've discussed this here before, but I would argue that even if I have it is worth repeating. The inspiration for this subject is a recently reported "feature" of Facebook that any of your contacts that were kind enough to enter their phone numbers in their profile have that information visible to anyone in your network unless they were savvy enough to make that information visible to their friends only. Of course, when one of my Facebook friends found out that the had access to their friends' phone numbers they panicked. "ZOMGWTF!!1!11!!uno" was essentially the response, and all of their friends chimed in with similar ones after they confirmed it. Even Yours Truly responded in kind and dutifully reposted

Get Your Head Out of the Cloud

Two weeks ago, I was at a large pharmaceutical client talking to a senior IT executive when the word "cloud" was mentioned in passing. He chuckled and responded that this was simply the nom du jour for something that has been in use for a number of years now. For example... Client / Server . When Microsoft DNA became popular with redundant web, application and database servers this was, in essence, a cloud albeit one that was limited in its ability to scale since you couldn't rapidly add new machines to the mix as demand required it. (And DNA wasn't the first time this setup was used either - Microsoft simply made it sound fashionable.) Application Service Provider (ASP). This was, in reality, a variant of Client / Server because essentially it was the exact same architecture run instead on another company's infrastructure. From a conceptual perspective, however, this was very similar to cloud computing as it's defined today: your application is deploy

My Nightmare

I'm sure this doesn't fall under the "quality blog entry" concept that I mentioned two entries ago, but I'm also not one to shy away from pointing out the good and the bad in customer service either. Here's the Executive Summary for you, which I am sure will hook you into reading the rest: I lost a hard drive that had no backup; recovered it completely using freeware ; fried my motherboard in the process of permanently installing the previously lost hard drive; replaced the motherboard and the CPU (just in case); and now have a working computer again 4 weeks later. How all of this happened is something I can't explain. (Well, maybe I can. More on that later.) Three years ago, I bought an external, 500G USB 2.0 Fantom drive from MicroNet . The reviews on NewEgg were positive overall; the price (at that time) was very good; and I was running out of disk space on my internal drive so I bought it. About a month before the really bad stuff occurred, the

Remembering the Living

I have had many (older) good friends pass away during my life, and invariably during the memorial service someone says that this is a time of joyful reflection and not mourning. It is okay to be sad at their passing, they continue, but we should be thankful that they are reunited with God. On this ninth anniversary of September 11, I'd like to think of this as a joyful occasion then. I am not talking about those who passed away on that fateful day, however; I am talking about those who survived that day, whether they were in the area on the day itself or had some relation to the events of that day. It is not my intention to trivialize the deaths of the many who were lost. Like you, I mourned them, even more so since I worked in the South Tower up until the year prior. In fact, on that day I was on the 31st floor of the tallest building on the lower East Side (save for those in the Financial District) and had a clear view of the events as they occurred including the planes'

"Lazy-fare"

Quick note: last week I didn't write an entry here - it was intentional. I keep writing about the same nonsense, news articles, and I am starting to become hypersensitive to the fact that I sound like a broken record. So I wanted to step back; write less frequently; and write about more quality topics. My oldest daughter visited last week. As I am wont to do, I took the opportunity to help her increase her vocabulary as we spent time together. This visit, the words of the day were vernacular , diction , and colloquialism . (I also explained the difference between a clutch and a klatch since she is a fashion minded social butterfly, but I digress...) To explain vernacular I used the examples of borough vs. boro , doughnut vs. donut , and light vs. lite . To hone the point, I essentially described the latter word in each pair as an expression (pun intended) of laziness in communication. In fact, I said, so many people were lazy in their desire to communicate that these

All Things iPhone

After a week "off" (read: no blog) I feel a bit better. When I reviewed my last two weeks' worth of tweets I found a lot of stuff relating to the iPhone, so I thought I'd share my thoughts about what's happening. After all, the iPhone continues to dominate everyone's thoughts - it is my duty to provide alternate viewpoints or news on alternatives in order for you to be able to make informed decisions...right? Right. You'd still buy an iPhone, wouldn't you? Maybe not. According to a recent article in InfoWorld , the quality (or lack thereof) of AT&T's network is starting to have an impact on iPhone sales. Of course, the article goes on to describe the underlying survey's implication for Verizon since, of course, everyone assumes that the elimination of the exclusivity contract would mean that Verizon would be the first carrier to...uh...carry it. The article does note that the survey respondents probably didn't consider that curren

Education

In late February of this year, I wrote about a forward thinking school district where, among other things, it installed wireless Internet on one of its school buses. This type of thinking, I claimed, was allowing students to get more done rather than abuse the privilege as people suspected would happen. Education has been a steadily under-appreciated topic in this country, in my opinion. Granted, there are the stories of teachers who are relegated to the "rubber room" in NYC (which has since been abolished); the teachers union who protects the under performers simply because they have tenure; etc. But I personally know several good teachers who are paid ridiculously low salaries considering the importance of the work they do. (And yet they still do it because of their love for what they do especially given how much of a positive impact they can have on today's youth.) An Op-Ed piece in the NY Times yesterday highlighted exactly the amount of damage our neglect and pe

Who to Believe?

It's like a deluge...of tweets. When I first signed up to Twitter, I tweeted about everything. I had a lot on my mind so I felt the need to climb the highest e-mountain and shout it all at the top of my lungs. That mountain, of course, was Twitter. Then the love affair faded. After venting my frustration with the business world - "I cudda been a contendah!" - I went back to doing what I did before, namely playing my guitar and BF:BC2 at night after the baby went to sleep and the wife and I watched our daily shows on the DVR. But this week, my tweeting has roared back to life. It has a mind of its own, and it seems uncontrollable. It's almost as if...as if...my level of tweeting has double dipped into the realm of hyperactivity. Speaking of double dipping, it should be no surprise that I'm still reading articles about a W...or is it just a V? The answer to that depends on who you ask. MSNBC claims (in an article in the Politics section, go figure) that any

Good Money / Bad Money

With each new week, I worry just a little bit more that I'm boring my readers. After all, it seems like the same stuff surfaces each week in the news and, of course, I'm compelled to write about it. In a perverted way, I almost want to start my own hedge fund because it seems that the companies I've been writing about show up for a few weeks in a row and not for the right reasons. Take, for example, Dell computer. Two weeks ago I told you about a lawsuit against them for knowingly selling computers with faulty parts in them. Ironically, the law firm defending them was a victim of the same crime with over 1,000 defective computers from the company. This week, Dell is once again in the news but for other reasons. Apparently, it has been using subsidies paid to it by Intel to inflate its own earnings statements. In my personal opinion this should have never occurred but not because what it did was against the law. Instead, it is my opinion that the subsidies should ha

Collection of Thoughts

I arrived in Dallas late last night and, when I got up this morning to check my email, I realized that I didn't write an entry yesterday. ("For shame!") What could I discuss today? Apple. They are becoming a piñata because of their missteps. Last week, they admitted there were issues; said they would give free bumpers to people who requested them; and then said that every phone has this same issue. Of course, the other phone manufacturers called bullshit on Apple and hit back rather hard. Goldman Sachs. They settled with the government; paid a $500mm fine (which is nothing to a company that practically mints their own dollars); and admitted no wrongdoing. I will be the one to call bullshit on this one and wonder aloud how our justice system is so screwed up that a major player in the financial meltdown essentially gets off with barely a slap on the wrist . These topics have been overexposed that I'm sure you're tired of them, so here's something comple

The New Toyota, Part 2

After last week's entry, I received a fair amount of flack from readers complaining that I was anti-Apple and that the company's products really don't deserve the constant tongue lashing that the haters keep delivering. I can relate to their viewpoint: nearly 20 years ago I was berating the Windows lovers for hating OS/2, which was obviously a better operating system. It was frustrating because I was right on the technical points but I missed the bigger picture, which is that a company has an obligation to its user community to do the right thing. (IBM let the OS/2 user base down considerably back then, but that's a story for another day.) I'm not going to rehash last week's story, but I find it ironic that accusations have been leveled again against Apple after it appears that several iTunes accounts have been hacked . The Infoworld article describes how several hundred accounts have had unauthorized purchases made on behalf of the account owners, sometim

The New Toyota

Apple has finally " jumped the shark ." For those of you who aren't familiar with the idiom, it was originally coined in response to an episode of Happy Days when Fonzie jumps over a shark to prove his courage. Critics and viewers alike consider this point in the show's history to be the beginning of its decline. In general, the idiom is used to describe a moment of downturn for a previously successful enterprise. In my opinion, Apple is close to reaching that point if it hasn't already. Granted, Steve Jobs and Company have never been in the majority in terms of market share, but they've always had a rabidly fanatical following. Still, when you call your user community a bunch of idiots and fail to acknowledge that the real problem lies with your untouchable product then you start to sow the seeds of your own ruin. And this is exactly what has happened. CNN recently reported that Apple's response to users' complaints about cell phone reception

Copyright Infringement?

Can we get some consistency please? This past week, a Federal Judge in New York granted Google's request for a summary judgment against Viacom based on the "Safe Harbor" act. Viacom had filed suit (and does plan to appeal this ruling) stating that YouTube is a "den of thieves" since many copyrighted works are uploaded every day to the site. Since some of these legal thingumyjigs may be foreign to you, I'll break it down a bit. First, a summary judgment is requested at the outset of the case by one of the sides. Essentially, either the plaintiff or the defendant are telling the presiding judge, "look, your honor, this is a huge waste of time; the other side has no chance in hell of winning this case so can we please cut to the chase? Judge Judy comes on in 15 minutes." While this is requested in a relatively frequent manner, it is rarely granted because judges are generally predisposed to give everyone their day in court. The fact that this

Adaptability

This may seem obvious, but business isn't about who can do the neatest thing - it's about expectations and delivery . In other words, your customer has an expectation that you'll meet their needs; and you have to deliver on your statement that you can meet that need. This doesn't have to be a retail business. In fact, any business transaction falls under that statement. But sometimes business professionals just don't get this aspect of their jobs, careers, or their business (if they own one). As a result, they get mired in the past while their peers leap ahead of them because they are willing to embrace the future or at least the present. Consider, as an example, the publishing business. With the ever growing (and I'll claim that it still is growing) use of the Internet as a source of information, publications find themselves in an interesting position: do they continue the part of their business that is the printed publication? I asked Gary Paris , publi

Building a Brand

Ah, the Holy Grail of marketing: a brand that is so well established that the sales team has no purpose other than to print out contracts and collect commission checks. This is a win-win because the salespeople would rather stay at home sipping a glass of Chianti (with fava beans no doubt, eh Sir. Hopkins?); the business has a greater degree of confidence that the product(s) associated with the brand will make money; and the marketing people / advertising agency gets to come to work for another week. Take for example one of the most vile things ever to be consumed by the American public: The Jersey Shore . Personally, I think that the glamorization of the cast with their obvious lack of social mores ( see this article ); no sense of etiquette; and monstrous egos is a crime against America. (Note to BP: when you figure out how to contain the Gulf Oil spill, can you apply the same technique to The Situation ? Thanks.) In spite of my misgivings and no lack of desire to vilify them

Ceilings and Floors

This week will be a momentous week. Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed below 10,000 , and it didn't close above that mark on Friday. Worse, it didn't break 10,000 even during intraday trading on Friday, and that's a bad sign. I never really understood the true psychology behind ceilings and floors on the stock market. What I mean is that I understand the statement that investors cling to numbers that fall on nice, definable boundaries. Furthermore, I understand that once those boundaries are crossed, it's not easy to cross them again in the near future and in the opposite direction. Still, I don't know why this happens. But that doesn't matter. What does matter is that the DJIA is in dangerous territory this week. Last week's jobs report ( CNN Money had a nice write-up ) had a very important detail buried in it: in spite of the fact that 431,000 jobs were added in May, 411,000 of those jobs were for US Census based work, which is ver

Wrong Side of the Dice

(Personal note: given that I'm a self-professed conservative, I would have never though that I would rely so much on the New York Times, since it is generally recognized as having liberal leanings. But one can't deny the quality of the writing nor the timeliness of the topics there.) There are oodles of documented cases where, during the years when the housing market was flying off of the handle, many parties took advantage of the situation to assume more risk than they should have. - Financial institutions created new and "interesting" (better than some words I could use) ways to loan money to people who could not understand how they were getting in over their heads. - People who really shouldn't be allowed to borrow money used "no income verification" package to by a house using a mortgage they couldn't afford. - People who thought they could make a quick buck flipping a house by slapping a fresh coat or paint on the interior and exterior. I'

Panic..Panic..Panic..

Here I am, a day late with my blog, and I haven't a clue what topic I will write about. (Or at least that's what I want you to think.) Yet here I am. British Petroleum has found out the hard way what the consequences are of not having all of your contingencies accounted for prior to finding out that Murphy is going to hit you where you are weakest. (There's no need to add a link there, since you can throw a stone and hit 20 news websites with articles on the Gulf disaster.) I have also discovered this on a few occasions - most notably this week with my blog (see? I wasn't necessarily fibbing after all) - and I can assure you that losing control of the situation is never fun, especially when the situation wasn't fun to begin with. My wife says I have "control issues." I counter with the statement that I simply don't like not knowing what to expect. In ITIL (which is, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, a collection of business proc