“Italian Engineering” is an oxymoron

I’m a glutton for punishment. For better and for worse I now own my fourth Italian motorized vehicle, a Ducati 999 motorcycle. It’s always amusing to me when I find examples of anomalous technical data that could only be proffered by Italian engineers. To wit, I wanted to verify the proper tire pressures on the bike. The user manual I have lists the pressures as such:

If you convert these to PSI, you’ll find that there’s about a 7% difference between the two values. Close enough for Italian engineering .

The Natick Collection – Show Me the Customers

The new addition to the Natick Mall Collection has opened. Not all the shops are live yet, but about half or so are. The boss and I were able to spend a couple hours having dinner and wandering about the place tonight.

The presumed crown jewel, Neiman Marcus, opens Satuday. Despite my prior ranting about Neiman’s email spam, as the day grows closer, I’m quite curious to check it out. Hopefully it’ll be a “Stanford Shopping Center” Neiman’s and not a “Copley Square” Neiman’s.

More broadly, I’m damn curious to see how this whole mall collection expansion plays out. I have serious reservations about whether the market can support that many square feet of high-end retail. I remember when the Atrium Mall originally opened in Newton. Its aspirations were clearly to out-class the Chestnut Hill Mall across the street. That didn’t pan out, and both malls are now owned by Simon.

We had dinner at Sel de la Terre. I knew of the original restaurant in Boston, but have never been to it. Perhaps it’s the growing pains of being open only a week or so, but we won’t be rushing back. Half of the food was mediocre at best, and the other half was excellent. Wacky. The service was no better than Olive Garden (ugh) or Friday’s (double-ugh) down the street. Don’t get me started on the hostess. Either Sel de la Terre’s hiring standards stink, or their training processes stink. Either way, it’s unacceptable at the price point, and is certainly not what I expected from Mr. McClelland (though it was everything I expected out of Metro-West (that’s not a compliment, and, yes, I live here)). If you absolutely must try it out, maybe you should give them a month or two to get their shit together.

All that said, the new wing of the mall collection makes for, at a minimum, some great window shopping and people-watching! And you can iFondle at the Apple store!!

Closed Platform Risk

Last week, Danah Boyd of the Berkman Center blogged about her confusion with the fascination with Facebook. Danah questions the reliance by companies on a platform they have no control over and the risks to which that dependency can expose them.

… I don’t understand … why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook. What am I missing here?

Robin Chase, CEO of GoLoCo, presented at last night’s Web Innovators’ Group event. During her demo, Robin got flustered to the point that I thought she was going to throw a laptop out the window of the Royal Sonesta into the Charles River.

GoLoCo started (as I understand it) as a web site. The company enables people to share rides. When the Facebook API came around, GoLoCo made a bold commitment to leave the WWW and instead leverage all the great benefits of an existing, big, structured social network to build its service out. Check out the GoLoCo Facebook app.

Unfortunately, like all ‘platforms’, Facebook has bugs, bumps, and challenges for its developers. To exacerbate the problem, Facebook isn’t an established organization like Microsoft, which probably has on the order of 10,000 employees dedicated to infrastructure development and support. Nor are the Facebook API and infrastructure open-sourced so that messy issues can be sorted out by the community or the application developer themselves.

The media and many entrepreneurs (yours truly included) have had something of a love-fest these last few months about what the Facebook API enables. As time progresses, more complicated applications will push the limits of the Facebook platform. I’m bullish on Facebook and I hope they can support their developers optimally.

UPDATE: Interesting blog post on this topic from a musician who has been through some related troubles.

iFondle

I think Apple makes some of the neatest geek products on the planet. If Apple knows how to do one thing right, it knows how to create object value. When you see an Apple product somewhere, you want to touch it and explore it. It beckons to you.

This evening I was speaking with Jeff Brandes of EveryScape and the topic of the CambridgeSide Galleria came up. He said he likes to park in the mall’s garage so he has an excuse to stop by the Apple store and ‘fondle’ stuff. I bent over laughing because ‘fondle’ is so damn true!

I spent 20 minutes last night in that same store drooling over the new iPod nano. I fondled every color! I also fondled, caressed, and whispered sweet nothings to an iPod classic 80GB, imagining on it my entire 70GB music collection (the ’small’ version, down-sampled from the half-TB of lossless audio on my home server).

Fickle Social Networkers

Maggie forwarded me a snippet from an article in last week’s NY Times Magazine about music producer extraordinaire Rick Rubin and Columbia Records. Columbia had a group of 20 college interns for the summer and they focus-group tested them as they exited back to school. Mark DiDia, head of operations, had this to share about the output:

The … focus groups … told us that MySpace is over, it’s just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That’s how they hear about music, bands, everything.

I haven’t seen the survey data, and the data sample wasn’t large, but assuming the conclusions were sound, I was very much struck by the casualness of the commentary about Facebook.

Facebook started in 2004 focused on college students. Facebook’s future will be wholly defined by how or whether they can extend their service to grow with their demographic. The challenge with this of course is the risk of de-focusing – of ending up serving multiple demographics each in a mediocre way instead of serving a focused market stellarly.

Can a single social network be all things to all people? Facebook is going to try. My gut says it might not be a good idea. It’s going to be wildly educational to watch. If the Columbia Record interns are right, the Facebook user base could be hanging out elsewhere in short order.

Any economics majors on the CNN editorial staff?

An article on CNN today entitled “Oil prices hit all-time high” made me blow my top. Oil prices hit their modern-era all-time high in 1979 when, adjusted to 2007 dollars,  the price per barrel crossed the $100 mark. While today’s $78.23 number is nothing to sneeze at, it’s a far cry from the “all-time high”.

Still Life With Shards

Stunning images.

Kudos to Dave for the pointer – thanks!

TrustPlus Goes Live

Before the day is out (T minus 2 minutes), I would be remiss to not blog about the fact that TrustPlus went into public beta this morning. It’s been a ton of work to get here, and we’re all very proud of what we’ve accomplished thus far. There is certainly plenty more work to do, but we’ve got all the right foundation poured, and framing in place.

We’ve gotten some nice press on the launch as well.

Please surf on over and check us out. If you like what you see, sign up and help us make the Internet the safest place on Earth. If you don’t like what you see, email us and let us know! This is beta – we want lots of feedback.

I Owe Scott Kirsner a Beer

Scott’s article in this weekend’s Globe was another fun read about east -vs- west coast venture capital. Facebook started in Boston, relocated to the valley, and now has an estimated market cap of $6B. Woulda been nice to have that here in Boston.

I appreciate the effort Scott is making to push the local community (entrepreneurs and investors) to think more about these issues. I’ve never met Scott, but I definitely want to buy him a beer. Keep up the good work, sir!

Message to iSheep: Grow Up.

From this CNN article:

Apple CEO Steve Jobs apologized and offered $100 credits Thursday to people who shelled out up to $599 for an iPhone this summer and were burned when the company chopped $200 from the expensive model’s price.

He apologized? Gimme a break. It’s cutting edge technology. It’s always expensive if you want to be the first guy on the block with a new toy. The fast followers almost always get a price break which gives them their necessary self-satisfaction over their early-adopter counterparts – it’s part of the game.

Shame on the iSheep for whining about a price cut. What did they expect? No sympathy. Duh.