I get a little grumpy around Christmas. I’ve always felt like I get short changed with Chanukah. Alan sent me this hysterical overview that provides a little perspective.
1. Christmas is one day, same day every year, December 25. Jews also love December 25th. It’s another paid day off work. We go to the movies and out for Chinese food. Chanukah is 8 days. It starts the evening of the 24th of Kislev, whenever that falls. No one is ever sure. Jews never know until a non-Jewish friend asks when Chanukah starts, forcing us to consult a calendar so we don’t look like idiots. We all have the same calendar, provided free with a donation from the World Jewish Congress, the kosher butcher or the local Sinai Memorial Chapel (especially in Florida) or other Jewish funeral home.
2. Christmas is a major holiday. Chanukah is a minor holiday with the same theme as most Jewish holidays. They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.
3. Christians get wonderful presents such as jewelry, perfume, stereos, etc. Jews get practical presents such as underwear, socks or the collected works of the Rambam, which looks impressive on the bookshelf.
4. There is only one way to spell Christmas. No one can decide how to spell Chanukah, Chanukkah, Chanukka, Channukah, Hanukah, Hannukah, etc.
5. Christmas is a time of great pressure for husbands and boyfriends. Their partners expect special gifts. Jewish men are relieved of that burden. No one expects a diamond ring on Chanukah.
6. Christmas brings enormous electric bills. Candles are used for Chanukah. Not only are we spared enormous electric bills, but we get to feel good about not contributing to the energy crisis.
7. Christmas carols are beautiful…Silent Night, Come All Ye Faithful etc. Chanukah songs are about dreidels made from clay or having a party and dancing the hora. Of course, we are secretly pleased that many of the beautiful carols were composed and written by our tribal brethren. And don’t Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond sing them beautifully?
8. A home preparing for Christmas smells wonderful. The sweet smell of cookies and cakes baking. Happy people are gathered around in festive moods. A home preparing for Chanukah smells of oil, potatoes and onions. The home, as always, is full of loud people all talking at once.
9. Christian women have fun baking Christmas cookies. Jewish women burn their eyes and cut their hands grating potatoes and onions for latkes on Chanukah. Another reminder of our suffering through the ages.
10. Parents deliver presents to their children during Christmas. Jewish parents have no qualms about withholding a gift on any of the eight nights.
11. The players in the Christmas story have easy to pronounce names such as Mary, Joseph and Jesus. The players in the Chanukah story are Antiochus, Judah Maccabee and Matta whatever. No one can spell it or pronounce it. On the plus side, we can tell our friends anything and they believe we are wonderfully versed in our history.
12. Many Christians believe in the virgin birth. Jews think, “Yossela, Bubela, snap out of it. Your woman is pregnant, you didn’t sleep with her, and now you want to blame G-d? Here’s the number of my shrink”.
13. In recent years, Christmas has become more and more commercialized. The same holds true for Chanukah, even though it is a minor holiday. It makes sense. How could we market a major holiday such as Yom Kippur? Forget about celebrating. Think observing. Come to synagogue, starve yourself for 27 hours, become one with your dehydrated soul, beat your chest, confess your sins, a guaranteed good time for you and your family. Tickets a mere $200 per person. Better stick with Chanukah!
George Bush recently had some deep and insightful thoughts on global warming. “We just need to get nature to cooperate with us. We don’t need to listen to nature. Nature needs to listen to us.”
Tom Evslin’s brilliant blook hackoff.com is grinding through the April 1, 2000 – June 30, 2000 time frame. If you were an executive at a company during Q200 you’ve got to read Chapter 9 as part of a sick, twisted reminder of what was going on. Today’s (and yesterday’s) episodes are the first of the “exec meetings from hell” where the public company realizes it is going to miss it’s numbers in Q200.
The entire blook – soon to be released as a book – is phenomenal and getting better chapter by chapter. If you are a reader, give the whole thing a try. Tom lived this stuff at ITXC and has done an awesome job of capturing the backdrop while incorporating the sex and violence we all expect from a contemporary murder mystery.
Next week is Syndicate. As a result, you are going to see a bunch of bullshit press releases for a wide variety of companies announcing nothing (I’ve already seen a few – how’s that for “embargoed press releases”.) Anyone that knows me knows that I general dislike the “broadly defined” discipline of marketing (I much prefer its skinny and much more powerful sibling “demand generation.”) However – I’m not from the school of “press releases are useless – just blog about it” as I think press releases can serve a purpose especially in conjunction with additional active outreach (e.g. blogs).
As I was driving back from a meeting this morning I was pondering what things were useful to put in a press release. When I got back to my office, I bumped into Matt Blumberg in the hall and asked him what he thought were useful topics for a press release. He answered immediately “new hires, new customers, new products.”
Those were exactly the same three topics that I had thought of in the car. Lots of companies – including ones that I’m an investor in – are guilty of the “barney press release” (two companies announcing a partnership that is akin to nothing more than saying “I love you, you love me”) – this was particularly pernicious during the Internet bubble. In addition, there are endless content free releases that don’t actually address anything specific. As I scan my RSS headlines, I’m seeing more and more of this – specifically a partnership between two young private companies that doesn’t specify what they are actually doing and why anyone should care or a headline describing something that seems like it might be interesting but – when I dig in – there’s no there there.
Beware the press release that says nothing.
This product is going to really clean up. It’s way more interesting than an Ajax Reader. I can’t wait to get one. It’ll go perfectly with my craptop.
In the past, I’ve written about several of my CTO friends who are bloggers. Niel Robertson, the CTO / co-founder of Newmerix – now joins their ranks with his new blog titled Parallax: Calculating Technology’s Future.
I first met Niel in 1995 in Cambridge, MA. He was an early employee of net.Genesis (I was the chairman, Raj Bhargava was the CEO / co-founder.) A year or so after Raj left net.Genesis, he connected with Niel and started working on a new idea. They cooked up the business that became Service Metrics, which I helped fund in 1998 and was then acquired by Exodus for $280 million in 1999. I fondly recall Niel bitching about having to move to Boulder from Boston (“Boston is so much better”) – Raj said the same type of thing; they both happily live in Boulder now (although they each occasionally go visit Boston to play and presumably get stuck in traffic.)
After Niel left Exodus, he joined Mobius as an entrepreneur-in-residence and started working on a set of new ideas around IT Management. This ultimately turned into Newmerix, which I happily provided the first round of financing for (with IDG Ventures, who was our early co-investor in Service Metrics.)
Niel is an essay writer (he calls his posts “blarticles”), so expect periodic long, thoughtful pieces that are worth sitting quietly and reading.
I wrote yesterday about Quova “becoming a company.” Return Path – which celebrates its six birthday today – also became “a company” this year. I’m incredibly proud of the team at Return Path – we invested in 2000 in a company (actually, “a product”) called Veripost which merged after a year with Return Path when both companies were pursuing their Series B financing. Each company was chasing the same market (ECOA – Email Change of Address), were ahead of their time, were really only “a product”, and had the potential to vanish when the Internet bubble burst.
Instead of vanishing, Matt Blumberg and the Return Path team have done an awesome job of building a real company and having the prescience to acquire Assurance Systems – a company started by George Bilbrey (one of the Veripost founders) – early in it’s life. George’s company formed the core of the Email Delivery Assurance business that Return Path currently dominates and George and his team at Assurance have been key members of the Return Path team.
I’ve shared office space with the Return Path team since the inception of Veripost – hopefully they’ll have a cake today (and will bring me a piece).
There are three words I’m starting to see regularly in the recursive world of blogs (blogs about blogs) and user-generate content (yes – there is an awful lot of user-generated content about user-generated content, including this blog post.)
Unfortunately for my title to be cute, pithy, and remind us of a president who actually had a clue even though he couldn’t manage to keep his zipper up (oops, did I say that), I could only use one of the words. So – how about a haiku since when I get older I want to be like Yoda.
It’s the trust, stupid
Pay attention people
Relevance it is
While you might end up feeling like you are playing buzzword bingo, these three words (ok – concepts) are going to start weaving themselves into a lot of the user-generated content dialogue. Why – just this morning – Judy’s Book (my newest investment) announced “TrustScore(SM)”, a mechanism for delivering at-a-glance scoring of local consumer reviews on the Judy’s Book site.
This stuff isn’t trivial to figure out. Seth Goldstein, who is working on Root Markets and AttentionTrust, is deep into the Attention concept. My friends at NewsGator are deep into the Relevance and Attention concepts. The key – of course – is to get this right and completely hide it from the end user (ah – the brilliance of Google Page Rank). Mr. End User wants to automagically get the most relevant, trusted stuff and ignore the other n-thousand pieces of email / blog / web / RSS clutter that vies for his attention every day.
We need a TLA for Trust / Attention / Relevance – how about TAR? Or ART? Or RAT?
As you may know, I’m the chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). NCWIT’s mission is straightforward – to ensure that women are fully represented in the influential world of information technology and computing. NCWIT has had an awesome fall, including accomplishing the following.
It’s been an honor to work with Lucy Sanders, the CEO of NCWIT, and her team on year three of this incredibly vibrant organization.