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I sold my MacBook Pro July 26, 2008

Posted by sdpurtill in : Apple , 1 comment so far

Goodbye Apple, we had a terrible relationship from the start, so I won’t be sad to see you go. Maybe I’ll try again a year from now.

An Update for Everyone July 15, 2008

Posted by sdpurtill in : Life, Updates , 3comments

These last few months have been a whirlwind and I can’t believe we’re already in mid-July. That sentence was so cliché. Anyways, here are some highlights:

And for the next few months:

These last few months have been amazing - and as always, really looking forward to what the future has in store!

PS if I missed anything put it in the comments and I’ll add it. Thanks!

Quality vs Efficiency July 8, 2008

Posted by sdpurtill in : Technology, Web 2.0, Information, Ideas , 2comments

Walter Chrysler once said, “Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.” Companies succeed because of the “laziness” trait found in people - I think of it in a more positive way as the endless search for absolute efficiency. Nearly every electronic device you own and website you go to were built with the intention of making your life more efficient. If people didn’t care about getting from A to B the fastest, Google wouldn’t have a 200B market cap, Tumblr wouldn’t exist, you’d do meetings in person instead of IM, cell phone cameras would have never taken off, and for that matter cell phones probably would have never taken off (cost:efficiency ratio wouldn’t be justified by consumers).

This has become very real for me recently after buying a Canon EOS 20D camera (digital SLR). I could get into the camera and spend 10 minutes talking about all the features, how much fun it is to shoot with, how well the pictures turn out (here’s my Flickr), etc., but I still don’t use it a tenth as much as I use the always-out-of-focus-and-way-too-pixelated camera on my BlackBerry Pearl. It’s a very simple equation in my head: walk around all day with an expensive bulky camera strapped around your neck (not to mention how lame you look going to parties with an SLR) OR pull out a hand sized device and snap a picture in 3 seconds.

Forget the quality of the photos for a second; what is my goal in taking photos? Personally, the photos *I want* are moments frozen in time that I will be able to go back to in 5, 10, 20 years to see how much I’ve changed. I feel the best way to do this is to always have the camera on my cell phone ready to fire, because the moments that you remember come and go so fast it’s hard to know when you should have your digital SLR ready to freeze a moment. I also think that when you are dragging around a SLR to an event/concert/function you miss out on a lot of the fun because you’re so engaged in taking pictures of other people having fun and sights that you forget to live in the moment. A cell phone camera lets you live in the moment and capture an image to prove that it happened/you were there.

The most important part of the photography efficiency war is ease of publishing. Taking the photo is only the beginning. With an SLR you generally do some post production on the RAW files and then spend an hour or two uploading them to Flickr/Facebook/your blog. With a cell phone camera the process is: snap -> email -> done. This process takes about 12 seconds for me. If you have a Tumblr account you know what I mean. I’ve become so used to emailing photos to my Tumblr that anytime I compose an email on my BlackBerry I begin writing “Tu” in the TO field of the message.

And I’ve come to realize - the photos I find most interesting on the internet are ones snapped with cell phones. The quality on all phones are terrible right now (even the Nokia N95 is pretty bad), but in the next few years I expect the cell phone companies to come out with major improvements on their cameras. This will hopefully end the barrage of people at tech events walking around with their bulky SLRs and making sure to capture moments - along with 30 other photographers - of a few people having fun. There is still a need for artistic photography which will never run dry, but that will eventually find its place too.

Whatever product you are building or thinking of building, keep in mind that the you can sacrifice quality for efficiency. The biggest proof for that has been the huge success of cell phone cameras even though SLRs are in a similar price range and take exponentially higher quality photos.

On a final note, there are still very obvious efficiency holes that need to be patched up (governments and education are #1 and #2 on the need list). I am talking about your next startup.

Gawker for Colleges July 3, 2008

Posted by sdpurtill in : Web 2.0, Money, Ideas, Gawker , 3comments

If you follow SamPurtill.com I’m sure you know that I’m a huge fan of Gawker Media and anything Nick Denton touches. I’ve been kicking this idea around for awhile and felt like publishing it because 1) ideas are cheap and 2) the amount of energy/passion required to execute on this idea are so great that I think the only people that could do it need to contact me. Here are my thoughts.

College Gawker

Overview:
Basis of the idea comes from what we’ve seen Gawker do. There is a huge market for a college gossip blogs with campus reporters. There are several issues that would need researching before launching the company, mostly on the guidelines for what the reporters aren’t allowed to write about (preferably nothing, I don’t believe in censorship).

The Problem:
I think the best way to gather gossip in college right now is through Facebook. Gossip news is the most addicting kind of news because people are infatuated with the lives of others (instead of living their own).

The Solution:
Instead of letting Facebook decide what comes into the News Feed, why couldn’t you hire a few reporters to create news feeds for each college? Although Facebook will report on only the people you let in your Friends list, this would be much more interesting because the reporting would be more unique/funnier/original/HUMAN.

Reporters:
Hire 3-4 students to be reporters. Have 1 managing editor. For the first few reporters, try hiring sophomores/juniors as they would be better for getting to know the audience (as opposed to seniors who are leaving and freshman who don’t know enough people yet). Hire reporters that are well connected, have a large following on Facebook, attend all the parties. Hire from various social crowds.

Reporting Guidelines:
Minimum of 2 posts per day on weekdays. On weekends have 1 reporter make all the posts (SPIEGELMAN!). Posts of all different sizes, whatever drives pageviews. Controversial posts are good. Posts with pictures are better. Posts with videos are even better than controversial posts with pictures.

Reporter Topics:
Party Report. Fameballs. Caption Contest. Drunk People. Fights. So Indie. The Brotherhood. We Read The News So You Don’t Have To. Religious Fanatics. Sorority Girls. Hipsters. Emo Kids. The 90’s Called. Valley Girls. Fanboys. Nerds. Rumors. Someone Needs To Graduate. Dorm Stories. Pure Racism.

Reporter Pay Scheme:
Reporters are paid per amount of views. Every 1k PERMALINK (very important) pageviews the reporter gets $6-7 (depending on how the ad/promotion dollars come out). Also paid a base salary (at the beginning $1-200/mo), but this is contingent on having a following on the site (can’t be paying reporters with a dead site).

Commenters:
Anyone with a school address would be allowed to comment on their school’s blog. Anyone else that would like to comment has to audition, and if the reporters like them they can become a regular. Just like Gawker, commenters can be followed and have friends.

Technology:
Would need to program a simple blogging platform. Record all unique page views to each post. Run a cron job every 10 minutes that updates the # of page views on a post. Posts, comments, users, star commenters, followers, etc. Very simple. Could even use movable type.

How is this going to make money?
Some ideas
1) A hardcore/highly targeted audience is worth a ton of money — more than just the ad dollars that can come from the page views. The INFLUENCE you can have on these people.
2) Using the influence you have on the readers, you can begin to promote parties/events that are going on around the school. Do deals with the event organizers saying for every 100 people that show up, certain amount of money would go to us. Could be big for concert/party promotions around campus that need a minimum amount of people show up to break even

Seeding the network:
The hardest part about this idea will be the beginning of it at each campus. How are you going to get those first 1000 that follow/comment? What’s going to draw them? How will you get the word out? Several ideas
- Controversial posts that get in the news. Mainstream news.
- Be the first to break all the stories around campus, beat mainstream news.
- Post videos/pictures about popular people, promote like crazy on Facebook
- Facebook/MySpace promotion - sharing links, etc.
- Advertising in school newspaper
- Advertising around school - putting up posters/flyers in dorm rooms and apartments
- Advertise on school website (if allowed)
- Events for “elite” commenters
- Slow and steady will win. Will have a very hard time first 4-6 months I think, but after you get your initial commenting users things will start flying. More important than viewers is commenters, because commenters will make the site GREAT.

Downside: defamation lawsuits, getting kicked out of school. I’m sure there are loopholes and ways to get around these laws, would consult a lawyer about it.

Highly doubt I’ll ever do something like this but if I do… Well, you saw it here first.