The Blog of Burgher Jon

Sauerkraut Recipe from Cooks.com

As I go through the week, I use twitter to send out little updates and links.  I realize that I do this quite a bit and that not all of you have Twitter, so with that in mind I’d like to take Sunday to do sort of a week in review.  I’ve selected the most useful of my tweets from the last week and placed them in to the categories that I use in this blog.  Please let me know if you find this useful or if you don’t like it.

Me

• I just unlocked the “Local” badge on @foursquare!http://4sq.com/bMFFrb
• Sometimes when you sit down and think about how to pitch/teach your startups message, you remember why you are so excited about what you do.

Personal Technology

• Finally got a chance to try @seesmic‘s client. Pretty nifty Twitter interface. http://tinyurl.com/3rc7ro
• iPad vs. Stone. Advantage iPad, barely. http://tinyurl.com/yjnv52x
• Interesting Insight… “Get real, geeks – The iPad is the Apple for Mum, not you” http://tinyurl.com/yajut5j
• Electric Car Company, Tesla to go public. Doesn’t expect to make a profit till 2012. http://tinyurl.com/yjbeq73

Pittsburgh

• Pittsburgh-Area New Housing Permits up in 4Q2009http://tinyurl.com/yzyvdqn
• Reports: PNC close to selling Global Investment Servicing to BNY Mellon http://tinyurl.com/yj7c9v2
• RT @techburgh: Hey, @Twitter, Pittsburgh really needs to be on your trending cities list. Can I get a RT ‘Burgers?
• Crazy Image of the flooding downtown (from the post-gazette)http://tinyurl.com/yle3qq6

Startups

• Roger Ehrenberg launches an interesting VC Fund focused around “Big Data” http://tinyurl.com/yjyaygy

Tech News

• NYT: Cell phone bans don’t reduce accidents.http://tinyurl.com/yf24j44

Other

• RT @nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: J.D. Salinger, Author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ Is Dead at 91

Dear Youth of Pittsburgh,

I want to tell you about a sport that has more drama than football or hockey.  A sport where you can watch every play and see the skill of one man pitted against another.  One where you can see both individual excellence and team camaraderie displayed not once or twice a week, but 6 or 7 days a week.  You can get to know the broadcasters; one of whom is a local treasure who actually hit two holes in one in the same round.  You can do all this while only half paying attention and getting your homework done.  What is this enchanting, mystical sport?  Baseball and believe it or not, Pittsburgh has a team.

That’s right, that blue/beige building in the Heinz Field parking actually holds a third professional sports team in Pittsburgh; the Pittsburgh Pirates.  The Pirates actually predate the Penguins AND the Steelers.  I urge you to start to follow this rag-tag bunch of baseball players.  They are fun to watch, are quickly blossoming in to a good team and might inspire a lifetime love of a sport that’s easy to fall in love with.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cavell

P.S.  For related thoughts please see, Dejan Kovacevic’s thoughts at the PBC Blog.

Don’t be confused by the news this morning that Mario Lemieux wants to buy the Pirates.  It would (I think) be good for the city and the team.  However, it wouldn’t be nearly as good for us as it would be for him.  Just a couple, top-of-my-head thoughts on how:

1. A TV Network – I guarantee there’s one CEO who spat out his coffee when he read the story this morning, the guy at Fox Sports Net – Pittsburgh.  Lemieux would almost certainly want to build a TV Network that would show the 244 combined Pirates/Penguins games.  This would essentially cut out the middle-man (FSN) and allow all of the money to flow back in to the teams.  This is (as I said) a good thing for us, but not as good as it is for Mario.
2. Economies of Scale – You can reduce the redundancy; ticket sales teams, PR offices, etc…  With the teams having (mostly) separate seasons this collapsing of expenses would be even more pronounced.  Without being intimately familiar with either teams’ net income statement, I’m going to guess the savings here would be HUGE.  That would leave more money for on the field/ice development (good for us) but mostly more money in Mario’s pocket (good for him).

Bottom Line: I think Mario has done a good job with the Penguins and could with the Pirates.  However, any success he’s had beyond Nutting can be mostly attributed to luck.  If Alvarez and McCutchen turn out to be as good as Crosby and Malkin we’ll all think Nutting is the best owner in sports.  I think this would be a good thing for the Pirates, but not quite as good as most of Pittsburgh is likely to believe.

HTML stands for Hyper-Text Markup Language.  Essentially, anything (including this page of this blog) that you view through your browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Chrome) is written in HTML.  Currently, HTML is setup to show pages of written text and pictures.  Whenever you add videos,  music or active integration to a page, you need to add a third party player.

Last week, YouTube became one of a select few sites to offer HTML 5 support.  It’s in beta, but it’s worth the link.  For an overview of HTML 5, may I suggest the Wikipedia page on it.  Briefly, HTML 5 makes things like video and sound part of the page rather then requiring a player.  It also enables a richer display and storage of data.

Most of the press on YouTube’s support of HTML 5 has centered around the effects of the standard on Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.  I think these miss the larger impact of HTML 5 though, the progress toward a browser that functions as an operating system.  HTML 5’s support for Rich Internet Applications (applications that feel like desktop programs, but run in the web), will allow applications like Google Docs to replace office.  It will allow applications like SalesForce.com to replace Siebel, and other such SaaS companies to replace standard software companies.  As this transformation nears completion (still years away), people will be able to buy less powerful computers (think tablets) running skinny operating systems (think Chrome OS) that essentially are just web browsers.

That is the really exciting thing about HTML 5; not that Microsoft Silverlight going down isn’t a nice byproduct.



10 years ago, most people had two primary electronic devices; a desktop computer (or one at the office and one at home) and a cell phone.  In the past 10 years (particularly over the last 2 or 3), a number of devices have emerged that fit in-between these devices.  To this point though, the more mobile a product is, the less functional it has been.

In my opinion, if something is going to shakeup the mobile device world, it must not fit on this spectrum.  The closest any device has come to breaking this spectrum is the iPhone.  Apple was the first company to give us a (popular) device that was just as mobile as a cell phone, but had much of the functionality of a laptop.  We all saw how rapidly and enthusiastically the tech world accepted the iPhone.

The reason I am not impressed with the iPad is that it does not break this continuum, at least not by itself.  If/When HTML5, better Rich Internet Applications and wider adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) models become the norm rather than the exception; you will see tablets take off.  At that point, I will use a tablet computer for all of the things I use a laptop for.  In this kind of a world, I won’t need local storage or massive compute power on the machine that I produce presentations, documents and diagrams on.  I will perform all these functions using my browser and software such as Google Docs.  This way I will be able to use a tablet for everything I use a laptop for today.  Then a tablet might make serious headway in to the mainstream, but this won’t be because of the technology Apple unveiled yesterday.