Balkan Beat Box - My Baby
I heard this song on the radio while driving around Israel with Court. The musicians are Israeli, but formed in Brooklyn. Small world.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because
they have a streak of unsociability and need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.
—
Anonymous member of Royal Geographical Society, quoted by David Grann in The Lost City of Z.
Nicholas Felton gave me the book and I can’t put it down. It’s an account of Col. Percy Harrison Fawcet, one of the last great explorers commissioned to chart the thousands of blanks present on maps back then. Later in life, he plotted his own expedition to find the Lost City of Z, an elusive city of gold thought to exist in the middle of South America’s jungles. He never returned, and since several modern-day Dr. Livingstones have sought to find traces of him.
Anonymous asked: Is Spurd launching anytime soon?
Spurd is a partnership between Patrick Moberg and me. We worked full-time together from Sep 2008 to Sep 2009 prototyping concepts but were ultimately stymied by our perfectionism and lack of interesting business models.
There are a handful of ideas that continue to excite us, but my unexpected romance with Boxee means less time to work on them — they’re more cute than big ideas, which for many reasons causes me not to dub them with as much priority.
Patrick and I have a strong creative bond and my gut is that after more rounds of trial and error we’ll eventually produce something that we’re both proud to make public.
Anonymous asked: Who would you recommend (can be an individual or small shop) in Brooklyn or downtown Manhattan for UI/UX contract work to build exceptionally sharp reporting/stats/analytics interfaces. The client is a VC-backed startup.
I recommend Nicholas Felton.
Anonymous asked: what was your major in college?
Studio Art, shorthand for painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture. Truly, I chose this path because it was the surest way to surround myself with liberal people on an otherwise very conservative campus.
Anonymous asked: You, and the rest of the CV founders seem to write frequently about the internet as not being a worthy business idea, yet you have certainly made a more than sustainable living, and perhaps more importantly, developed a great reputation for yourself to further your career, off of internet business ventures, do you think this is a recent phenomenon? Was it, or did it at least seem, different when you got into the business in the late 90's, or have you always viewed the internet as being a horrible way to achieve business success?
I can’t recall anything discouraging I’ve written about the Internet as a business platform. Perhaps you’re referencing Ricky’s frequent self-depricating smacks on advertising models? In these cases I generally agree with him.
However, I believe every generation has its great frontier industry — publishing, railroads, broadcasting, etc — and the Internet is certainly my generation’s easiest lever to pull and create wealth.
Of course, I work on the Internet for reasons other than just money — the incredible feats of one to many! — but if I thought it were absolutely profitless I would have changed careers.
The most significant of my few Internet-Entrepreneur-as-a-lifestyle complaints is the intangibility of what I do. But that quality is quickly improving (See: Vimeo Meetups and Boxee Box).
To be perfectly clear, I’m working as hard as I can now, on the Internet, so that I can ‘buy back’ later years of my life to be more free to do what I want: raise kids full-time, build houses and travel.
Casey posted a new position to our Jobs page: Senior Backend Developer.
This position is essential to create and maintain a new web experience for Boxee. It will be a mixture of Backend and Application development. We’re a small team, so the more hats you can wear the better.
Come join us on the ground floor of building the next generation of TV.
