It was only a matter of time until I posted about the iPhone. I’m one of the biggest Apple supporters in the world, having written my college paper on the 1984 ad-campaign, had every line of Mac growing up (IIe, LC, Centris, Quadra, PowerPC, G3, G4, Intel), and even had Macworld official posters mounted on the walls of my bedroom at my folks house.

Now that the company is transitioning from a computer company to an entertainment/hardware company, they are going to be going through some unforeseen difficulties. They have been the baby of Wall Street of late and are in the press everyday about the upcoming launch of the Apple iPhone which is labeled by some as the greatest thing to happen to mobile since the original cell phones were released.

The question I find asking myself is… am I going to buy an iPhone? I have ample reason to do so: my Razor is acting strange and my Blackberry is getting sick (turning off every now and again).

But I do not think I will buy one yet. The reason for this is exactly what my brother tells me about cars. If you’re going to buy a high-end car, never buy the first model year. There are times that it doesn’t hold true, but for the most part, the first model year of most products has faults. It’s impossible for the engineers and testers to predict all the problems and only the masses could help fix the bugs by crowdsourced testing.

The issue with releasing the iPhone is that everyone has such high hopes for it. Apple has done a terrific job marketing this phone and the hype surrounding it is incredible. However, is this hype unattainable by Apple? Have they set the bar too high?

Another interesting issue is that the launch of this phone is so important to Apple (an analyst said that it would possible even be a $10B business for them) but they are leaving it in the hands of another company, AT&T to get it to the market? That’s fascinating… no? Yes, you can buy an iPhone in one of the Official Apple stores in your city, but the phone is located at the many AT&T locations throughout the world. It’s also AT&T who will be doing the brunt of the support around the phone.

I just find it fascinating that with such an important product launch, Apple is trusting AT&T with the sales and support of their device. Lets see if AT&T can live up to the bar… it’s the highest I’ve seen raised in a long time. Did you know the first lines in Manhattan have already formed… 4 days early?!

Just released this morning:   The iPhone activiation is really cool - you do it at home.  That will cut down on the lines tremendously!   The rate plans are also fairly priced and seem to be custom for Apple.

And once the kinks have been ironed out of the phone, you will probably find one in my possession.

There’s been quite a bit of chatter recently as Mark Zuckerberg released his social platform.  Fred Wilson and Brad Feld have been trading posts on the issues surrounding Facebook’s applications and widgets.  One issue that I’d certainly side with Fred on is about invitation overload.  I’ve gotten over 25 invitations over the past week inviting me to all different Facebook applications.  I’ve accepted only 2 of the invitations and that was even a stretch for me.   Too much clutter and noise.

Andrew Chen, a friend of mine who is an Entrepreneur In Residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures (and former co-founder of Revenue Science) has done an interview with InsideFacebook.com.  Chen goes on to say that he says a hard road ahead for widget developers as the revenue model is unproven.  Read more here.

Where there are problems, there can be solutions.  What they are… I do not know yet, but I wouldn’t totally discount Facebook yet.

Valleywag had a nice post about seven things that bother us about the future.  I won’t steal the thunder from Valleywag (read it here), but here are the seven things they have pointed out:

1. Cellphones on planes
2. Animated billboards
3. Aggressive in-car GPS
4. Camera-wearing freaks
5. Even more iPods
6. Traffic cameras
7. Energy-saving wonks

Having weighed the positives and negatives of cellphones on planes, I would side with Valleywag.  I wouldn’t want to sit next to someone who is going to be on the phone even 10% of a flight… and once multiple people start talking, it’ll be very loud.

As for the iPods, I didn’t expect them to be on this list.  Valleywag makes the point that it’s annoying to see so many people wearing the ear buds.  I understand that point… but I’d take them off this list.

Read the article, it’s amusing.

Over at Marketing.fm, Lee talks about a few really simple ideas for RSS. I’ve stated in the past that RSS needs to piggy back on a larger application in order to be adopted by the mainstream and I believe Google’s purchase of Feedburner will certainly help that.

RSS is a life saver for me. Well, not really a life saver, but has helped me free up time by not having to click over to a hundred websites or so each day to follow stories and news relevant to me. The issue that I have is that since my OPML is fairly large, I get quite a few updates and not all the updates are extremely relevant to me. What I’d like to see emerge is a tool that filters my feeds by either some sort of relevance (keyword density, etc) or by learning what I read and picking up similar stories (intelligent feed reading).

I haven’t used RSS for all it’s applications yet, as Lee talks about the following scenario that I would probably find useful:

Travel: Kayak.com is brilliant. You can design a customizable RSS update based on your travel criteria. For example, I have customizable updates for flight routes that I want to monitor. When tickets from New York to San Juan, PR go below $100, I will be notified (and hopefully soon be on the beach).

This scenario is brilliant. I was hunting for a television not too long ago and would have loved to setup a feed so I didn’t have to rely on checking a half dozen or so websites each day (or even going to shopzilla or other meta vertical searches).

All told, I’m excited at the future of filtered information and believe that Google can do some interesting things with Feedburner.

Just had a random thought… RSS brings me back to the days of PointCast 

Happy Fathers Day!  What a crazy few days…

Saturday, spent the day roaming around Manhattan showing the city to my friend and colleague, Cristian.  We started at the South Street Sea Port and went to the tip of Manhattan to see the Statue of Liberty, then up to Soho to the Apple Store (more on that below), to McSorleys to meetup with a few of my best friends, then out to dinner in the East Village, and then out to Union Square for dessert.  Even stoped in to 15 East to say hi to Masato.

We went to the Apple store because Sherri needed a new operating system update for her iBook G4.  Her office uses a remote desktop application and her older OS isn’t supported any more.  We spoke to an Apple genius and they showed us what we needed, brought us over to the shelf where they were, asked if we wanted to buy it, then rang us up on the spot - (credit card and all…) and the receipt was emailed directly to me.  We did not have to wait in any lines or walk over to the counter, they swiped my credit card on a Palm (or something)… simply amazing.  It was like my own personal shopping experience!

On the way up to the Lake House today, we were listening to a 1998 concert of the Dave Matthews Band (I know, a shocker) and they were playing Drive In, Drive Out.  I looked all over the internet for this particular line, but couldn’t find it from the studio album.  Dave must have improvised as he was singing, as he does this quite often at his shows:

Don’t sell your soul for gold, you’ll be as good as nothing

This rings true.  Very true.  The minute I heard this line, I thought to myself, how many times do we do things/or put up with things that are wrong… just to make some money?  I can guarantee the majority of folks out there have done this at some point in their life.  For me, life is about learning… and sometimes we get too comfortable in some situations.  As long as I’m challenged and I’m always learning, I’m content and motivated.

We spoke about this briefly in the car and got different points of view on this line… and we all came to the conclusion that different people have different goals in life, but as long as you’re doing ‘good’ (as Google says), you’re doing OK.

Had a fabulous time at the lake house today with both my family and Sherri’s (their first time) and was extremely excited to spend some time with my all-to-busy brother, who is now over at Next New Networks as a network manager [of automotive] and Executive Producer of Fastlane Daily.  If you’re a car enthusiast, you should certainly check out the daily show (weekdays) as they feature extremely relevant auto entusiast news from both the mainstream media and the Internet in short 5-8 minute segments.

Entourage is back and we’re in a new season (technically).  It’s interesting to see a “reality show” of a television show - I’m not sure how much I like this new format but it’s too new to decide.  There was also too much emphasis on the director of the movie focusing his attention on the woman actress, but I’m not a television critic so I’ll stop talking now.

Time for bed.

A good VC friend sent me an email this morning with a tid-bit from an article from Danny Gillespie over at Private Equity HUB.  It certainly made me laugh with it’s sarcastic tone and I think a lot of us will resonate with bits and pieces of it.  Here it is…

3:45 am – Wake up in cold sweat, pray that the rising star CFO that VC1 brought to the company doesn’t mis-forecast $3MM in cash like he did last quarter.

4:14 am – Wake up in cold sweat, pray that the rising star VP Sales that VC2 brought to the table doesn’t confuse the saying “Under Promise and Over Deliver” again. If he does, prepare for the revolt in Engineering. Note To Self (NTS) maybe show Gandhi @movie night so the notion of peaceful demonstrations are fresh in their head.

5:47 am – Wake up for good, blackberry is buzzing with an email from the “rising star” partner @ VC3. Little puke probably had a developer write an app to auto-send every morning @ 5:45. NTS – find out if his testicles have dropped yet.

5:48 am – Crawl out from under desk, roll up futon, join head of engineering in break room to start water for French press. Shoulda thought long and hard about this job when every bathroom in the building had a shower.

6:23 am – Latest Wired RSS feed must be out  ‘cause I just got a voicemail from partner @ VC4 asking if we are considering genomics in the strategic plan.  I remind him that we market Chia pets (www.chiasforu.com), he tells me to call him later once I’ve socialized the idea with my staff.

6:30 am – Still pondering how the f%^& my predecessor managed to screw up the cap sheet and get 8 VCs in this deal.  Might be worth it to take a haircut and reduce the “counseling” churn.

7:00 am – Call home, ask wife what day it is, asked her to remind me how old the kids were and reminded her that we’re in this together and it’ll all be worthwhile. Hang up phone and do best Stuart Smalley in the mirror… need a cardigan. Call wife back and tell her “Happy Anniversary”…damn cell signal dropped the call.

7:03 am – Begin prep for upcoming board meeting. Feels like we are having one of these every three weeks… oh wait, we are.

1:00 pm – Rev 9 of board pitch done, stomach churning, ponder whether the stomach can actually digest itself, shrug shoulders and pop another Prilosec and score a Pop Tart from the break room vending machine.

1:15 pm – Call from partner @ VC5 asking me if I knew that genomics was hot. Notify him that he has the wrong guy on the line and that he needs to call Rob at his other portfolio company, NanoBioGenomicBlogwerks. He tells me “Sorry, man it has been go, go, go, so gotta go.”  NTS – contact Kauffman and find out if they have been giving out grants to VCs hiring kids from the short bus.

1:30 pm – Meet with new VP of Operations. He asks when he gets to meet his staff, I tell him to go look in the mirror. He asks about an admin, I inform him that VC5 has a portfolio company that does outsourced administrative duties and no, they can’t take your clothes to the cleaners but sure can screw the living sh*t out of a plane, car and hotel reservation. I didn’t know there were flights into Austin, MN but now I do. Remind him to specify state and country when booking.

3:00 pm – Sit down to answer email… 250 new since this morning… support pharm industry and pop Ibuprofen, Sudafed and chase it with a cold cup of French roast.

5:00 pm – Shower and put on something with a collar. Off to VC6’s portfolio CEO networking event otherwise known as “Dead Men Walking.” 3 in 5 of us won’t be around at the next one and not because we attained a liquidity event.

7:00 pm – Slip out of networking event. Receive call from VC7 asking if we can find value in looking at a niche marketing play they have. Remind him that he is calling me about using our company’s product. Apologizes saying, “man, it’s been just go, go, go lately. Hey, what about using an outsourced administrative play?” I tell him that we are considering genomics and he gives me a “Hell Yeah”.  NTS – find out if that guy was in banking or consulting before… probably both.

9:00 pm – Remember to thank the vending company for populating the machine with Pop Tarts, Chex Mix and Ding Dongs… one day I might ingest something other than carbohydrates.

11:00 pm – Call from VC8, wants to check on how I am holding up. “Wow” I think, “nice to see some humanity in this madness.” Check that, bad cell signal, he asks me why I am holding up the board pitch for his review. Reminds me to setup the hotel for the board meeting. I tell him I’ll use our outsourced admin to handle it. Hope he likes Holiday Inns, Geo Metros and flying on AirTran. Remind myself that passive-aggressive behavior has served many in my chain well.

Midnight – Collapse in a pool of drool on my desk.

Back in the day when we had the Apple computers, my favorite video game was Oregon Trail. I remember sitting in 3rd grade, racing across the country getting typhoid, having my cattle stolen, and finding gold. Those were the glory days. A few years later, Myst was released for the Mac and it was one of the most beautiful games ever released (IMHO). I remember playing the puzzle game for hours upon hours…. then suddenly, something happened:

Apple left the video game space… or better yet, developers left Appe b/c it was too expensive to make games for the Macintosh (not enough sales to justify the cost).

It’s now June 11, 2007 and today, Steve Jobs has announced that Electronic Arts will be developing games for the Macintosh platform. At the World Wide Developers Conference, Bing Gordon, co-founder of Electronic Arts (ERTS) got on stage and announced a few upcoming titles for the Mac: C&C3, Battlefield 2142, NFS Carbon, and in July, Harry Potter (Phoenix).

I am extremely excited. Apple is increasing their market share (and their valuation is showing this) and has lots of room to grow. The Intel chipset has allowed them to level the playing field with Redmond (Microsoft) and really take gigantic leaps.

Apple is positioned well. They have an operating system that works, hardware that is beautiful, peripheral devices such as the iPod that have significant traction, software that is universal (iTunes), and a to-be-released phone that is estimated to grow their company, +$10B. Are their competitors this well rounded? I’d argue no… and Apple can only grow… the have tons of market share to steal.

This is Apple’s resurgence back into the market. The video game industry should take them seriously as the Apple reach is increasing quarter over quarter.

I’ll be buying a few Apple/EA games for our house… sorry Sherri, but the games are calling!

Quite possibly the worst finale ever.

They did leave it open for a much rumored movie… there are many ways the story could unfold.  Many sites let you place bets on whether or not Tony lived… I wonder how much money was gambled on this show in total?

I’m always looking to draw parallels between things and one I’d like to share is my analogy of the music world and the startup world, both of which I feel extremely passionate about.

Dave Matthews Band is my favorite band, and though I’ve blogged about them before, I’m going to use them in an analogy. Feel free to replace this band with one of your choosing and I’m sure the band members will still work.

In the startup world, different people bring various skills to the company. Many times, people have overlapping skill sets, but if staffed correctly, a solid startup will have specialists in various areas. Since I’m a digital media guy, I’m going to lay out a digital media startup:

• CEO/President
• Sales Guru (EVP, Sales)
• Technology Guru (CTO)
• Marketing Guru (CMO)
• Financial Wizard (CFO)

These five positions are generally found in most [if not all] digital media startups and are staffed ideally by the highest caliber members possible. The members of these positions have exemplified significant amplitude to their positions and lead their respective charge with a team reporting to them.

Drawing the parallels with DMB, you will find:

• CEO/Pesident: Dave Matthews
• Sales Guru (EVP, Sales): Carter Beauford
• Technology Guru (CTO): Stefan Lessard
• Marketing Guru (CMO): Boyd Tinsley
• Financial Wizard (CFO): Leroi Moore

CEO/President: More often than not, the public face of the company and the most vocal. Dave, being the frontman (arguably with drummer, Carter Beauford) and setting the tone for the band. Rallies the team through ups and downs and has significant pressure applied by fans (the board) to produce good music.

Sales Guru: Without this rockstar of sales, the company isn’t going anywhere. At the end of the day, the company must generate revenue and if the co. hasn’t taken any funding, the days will be short lived. The drummer, Carter Beauford, keeps the band moving. He calls the shots and decides where the music will go (should they jam out #41, or end it quickly).

Technology Guru: Yes, Stefan Lessard (bassist) would be the technology guru… why? Because technology is an enabler. The technology must be present to successfully run the digital media company, but generally, it holds everything together and provides the beat/bassline that everything else follows. Take the bass out of the song and it’ll sound empty; too much base and it’ll sound terrible. During the song Anyone Seen the Bridge, the technology would shine as there is a minor solo by Lessard.

Marketing Guru: The marketing guru is generally responsible for how the company looks and reacts to the market. This also includes public relations and the conversation the band has indirectly with the fans. Boyd Tinsley, violinist of the Dave Matthews Band fills this role extremely well. Solos, solos, and more solos, but other times, blends in well with the band and plays in the background. Whether it’s a full solo (think product announcement) in Too Much, or blending into the background [everyday marketing] in Two Step, Boyd is a significant part of the band.

Financial Wizard: The financial wizard of the company makes sure everything is moving forward and the expenses and revenues check. Leroi Moore, DMB’s saxophonist watches the band from the sideline and fills in any gaps – and has the ability to blow a horn should the band be off beat. Generally very quiet and sometimes reclusive, these wizards understand numbers and know them cold.

A major touring act such as the Dave Matthews Band could not survive without it’s techs (drum & guitar techs), food crew, staff, roadies, drivers, road managers, personal managers, and business managers (as well as label staff). In the business world, this equals investors, mentors, board members, advisors, and consultants.

It’s fascinating to draw the parallels between the music industry and the startup world, but as you dig deeper into it, you’ll see it for yourself.

“Everybody wake up, if you’re living with your eyes closed.” – Dave Matthews Band

Yahoo is unveiling a new internet advertising pricing model:  paying a different price on traffic depending upon quality.

“Quality” is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of the ability of our partners’ sites to deliver more interested, valuable customers to you.

While we do not know much else, you can read the full announcement here.