Dave Winer didn’t like my movie recommendation: Dave saw Superman in iMax 3D and wonders what the heck I was thinking. (Sorry.) For me, the excitement came from being overwhelmed by the giant screen and being immersed and surrounded by the sound and 3D. As I said then, it was the experience, not the movie plot. Oh, and I experienced plenty of vertigo. I do agree with Dave on two things: Finder Neverland is a great movie (I saw it for the first time on cable recently) and Spiderman 2 provides more vertigo thrills (and is an all-round much better movie).

Here, I’ll try to make it up to Dave and anyone else disappointed with that movie suggestion with this double feature recommendation based on my serendipitous movie-watching of the past week. Go see Andy Garcia’s (very) long, but surprisingly compelling film, The Lost City and then watch one of the greatest movies of all time, The Godfather, Part II. In both movies, Havana on New Year’s Eve, 1958, makes for riveting drama. (But based on my attempt to watch it once more, skip The Godfather, Part III — it’s as bad as you remember — despite, ironically, a good performance by Andy Garcia.)

A bubble in crash stories: The LA Times today has a curious story that echos similar curious stories recently. It’s a story that, by its construction and headline, implies there is another Internet boom and bust in the making. At the same time, the article makes some rather common sense observations that display how a flurry of VC investments in a narrow-band of “Web 2.0″ startups is quite different to the real financial boom and bust of 1998-2002.

Quote:

The current run-up does differ from the late-1990s bubble that began to implode in 2000, wiping out within two years $5 trillion in paper wealth on Nasdaq, the stock market on which the shares of many tech companies are traded. The market value of Nasdaq companies peaked at $6.7 trillion in March 2000 and bottomed out at $1.6 trillion in October 2002. It has since rebounded to $3.6 trillion. One key difference is that the volume of venture investment is much lower than it was during the first Internet boom’s height. The amount invested in the first quarter of this year was just one-fifth the $28.1 billion spent in the first quarter of 2000, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ MoneyTree report, which tracks venture investment. Also significant is the lack of investor appetite for initial public offerings. Unlike the last round of online exuberance, small investors aren’t likely to buy shares in an online pet store with a sock-puppet spokesman.

As I’ve said here many, many times. There will be a huge amount of VC money wiped out in the over-exuberant investments now taking place. However, VCs are professional investors. They know (or claim to) the risks inherent in making early bets on companies that have no revenues to speak of. If they lose everything they invest, it still can’t be classified as a “bust” if the losses are limited to the founders and the professional startup investors. Let’s get this straight once more: VCs are not widows and ophans who are taking money out of mattresses to invest in an IPO of Pets.com.

Oh, speaking of Pets.com, the LA Times story includes this quote:

Some venture capital investors, once burned, are twice as skeptical this time around. For example, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, which backed one of the poster children for the dot-com implosion, Pets.com, is studiously avoiding next-generation Web companies.

So answer this: How is a company that creates something called a Widgetizer Engine not a next-generation Web company? And please don’t use the Web 1.0 terms “infrastructure” and “tools” in the answer.

(via: PaidContent.org)

Technorati Tags: vc, web2.0

Hanging out at the mall: When I hear the words “Saturday night,” “Opry” and “Mall,” together, “gang shooting” is not the first term that pops into my mind.

While I still recommend going to see Superman at the IMAX theater there, please discourage your group from “flashing gang signs at each other.”

Which reminds me, Do you know how to identify gang members at Opry Mills Mall? The ones wearing blue overalls are members of the Bibs. The ones in red overalls are members of the Buds.

The other Rex reviews ‘The Long Tail’ so I don’t have to: Rex Sorgatz was not expecting to find much new in the “eternal-work-in-progress” The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson. But, like me, the other Rex really likes it. (By the way, the other Rex now lives in Seattle where he works at Microsoft.)

Quote:

“The Long Tail will zap you with enough aphorisms to instantly transform you into the hottest internet bon vivant at the next Valleywag-crashed party. Simply toss out these maxims over Web 2.0 martinis: “Scarcity requires hits.” “The mass market is turning into a market of niches.” “The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes.” “If the twentieth-century entertainment industry was about hits, the twenty-first century will be equally about niches.” Are you writing these down?

But you realize an odd thing about 50 pages into this book: you’re not bored. You suspect you should be bored by either the pop economics or the glib utopianism or perhaps, alas, the hash tables. But, somehow, you enjoy the stories that illustrate the overall economic theories. And, most of all, the data points are simply delicious. You want to memorize them for the next time you argue with your friends about topics that feel true but which you don’t actually know are true.”

My observation: Journalists (as I point out here often) are notoriously intimidated, perplexed or bamboozled by data and statistics. Reporters often look for numbers that support a story they already want to tell. Chris Anderson, on the other hand, knows how to listen to numbers and let them tell their stories. The talent it takes to do that is rare…and, ironically, will help this book about the economics of the non-blockbuster, become a blockbuster. Which is good, as somewhere at the end of 2005, I predicted on one of those year-end lists Rex Sorgatz maintains, that Long Tail would be this year’s big hit.

Technorati Tags: brandrex, fimoculous, chris+anderson