f2f2s |

Near the end of this video about pay-what-you-want business models Errol Barnett says, “[N]o one has yet made a substantial profit by offering a product for free.”

Yeah, I dare you to be more wrong sir.

One of the people you mention in your 75 second long segment, Radiohead, made more money off the pay-what-you-want pre-sales of In Rainbows than they did off the entire release of Hail to the Thief.  And the tour they went on afterward sold 1.2 million tickets, the most they’ve ever sold.  That sounds pretty substantial to me.

Dan Pink on Motivation

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

I want to be able to say “Do not show me anything else like this, and de-friend the person who caused this to happen to me in the first place, while also sending him a message explaining just how much I hate all things UGA basketball.”

By the way, how quickly do you think this post gets on the first google page of results for “Younes Idrissi?”  It can’t take too long, what else does he have going on?

Couple nice write ups on Venture Beat.  If you want a little more information on who, where, and what I was working on this summer check these out.

Open-source textbook co. Flat World Knowledge goes back to school with 40,000 new customers
We were shooting for 25-30k users this semester, but over the last few weeks signups were coming super fast and from places we didn’t even have any sales operations.  It just goes to show that if you put a great idea out there, people will find you.

BookRenter vies with Chegg for textbook rental actions
While this one isn’t about FWK on the face, they do get a couple nice mentions.  I especially liked this one in the second paragraph:

With less that $1 million under its belt and one-tenth the number of employees, BookRenter has seen its traffic spike 40 percent in the last year and has brought in an executive from flourishing retail site CafePress, Mehdi Maghsoodnia, to head up its further growth efforts. And he’ll be the first to say that BookRenter fully intends to lap Chegg within the next several academic years. (Although, Flat World’s impressive offering of open-source textbooks that are freely accessible online could prove a bigger threat than both Chegg and BookRenter expect.)

I’d like to think so.

Note: The title of this post is not meant to imply that everyone who works there is male.  I didn’t forget you Jenn, Megan, Sharon, and Liz (among others who I didn’t meet)!

School started up again yesterday and if it wasn’t for my car being all crapped out and at the dealership getting fixed it would’ve been a pretty good day.  As it stands though, I think the classes I’m taking this year will be a lot of fun and very interesting and the incoming class seems to be a good one.  Couple those with the amount of free food we always get on the first week back, and it’s a recipe for a happy Monday.

My internship is now officially over since I’ve finished my short term extra work of last week.  I’m hopeful that there will be a few more projects I get to work on during the semester just to get more experience and hopefully see the company succeed, but I’m not sure if something will come up yet.  I may have something else lined up though, so let’s cross our fingers for that.

The week off of social media actually went shockingly well.  It was a jittery mess at first, much like I expected, thanks to not really knowing what to do to waste 5 minutes of brain activity on between periods of hard work, but I managed to get by.  Allison was right, after a couple days, you don’t think about it.  Clearing out a couple thousand unread google reader items and twitter updates seems to have been no big deal either at this point.  I may have missed something, but I guess I’m still living.

Who knows, maybe this will just be one step towards unplugging me from the grid and I can actually learn to be productive all the time.

And now, we dance

I made it.

And now I’m back to the A-T-L-A-N-T-A-G-A

My last two days of work have been pretty busy.  With school semesters coming up quickly and our products being…less than ideal at the moment there is a ton of work to be done in order to make sure everyone has a good experience this fall.

So, when I went on twitter today to see what had happened in the previous 20 hours I was overwhelmed with 200 new tweets.  Now, I know that sounds ridiculous, quantifying 200 as “overwhelming” since plenty of people get thousands a day, but I actually read them and make notes to read the articles I think may be interesting.  This isn’t a quick browse-and-be-gone deal for me.

In an attempt to regain some sanity and a handle on the days news I went to my google reader.  Over 500 new things.  Christ.  Again, I’m only following stuff I actually care about reading, not stuff that I’m just gonna ‘J’ through (that’s not sexual Gouda, it’s the keyboard command to go to the next post).

If this is what piles up after only a day and a half of neglect, I guess I just never realized how much time I really spend looking at stuff on a day-to-day basis.  That’s kinda ridiculous, honestly.  My resolution then, in an attempt to unwind myself from this mess is to basically ignore any and all social media over the next few days.  Probably gonna go til next Tuesday since I have a bunch of stuff between work, moving back to Atlanta, and running an orientation group for new Tech MBAs.  So yeah, no google reader, no twitter, no facebook, no (gasp) forums.

However, the truly big issue isn’t going to be not reading any of those, the content’s not going anywhere after all.  No, it’s going to be when I finally go back to these services and have to flush everything.  Just dump it.  Don’t read a word.  I’m a terrible mass consumer and pack rat by nature.  I want to see everything, devour it, and file it away in an easily accessible place so that I can bring it back up later whenever the situation dictates.  I mean, I used to keep handwritten logs of things like the NBA draft for no explicable reason other than I just didn’t want to not know what had happened.

Now I’m going to basically be sacrificing thousands of potential stories and, to be completely honest, it makes me feel pretty uneasy.  I don’t know if it’s a nervous feeling or just some kind of uncomfortable, but the idea of missing out on this information that I’ve made some sort of social pact with to consume does not sit well with me.

And I know that’s ridiculous, that’s the worst part.