Rakesh Agrawal's Blog — Founder, Investor, Houstonian

“Television networks in the United States have lost almost a quarter of their audiences due of the Hollywood writers’ strike…”

I’m looking for an iPhone cradle that will fit my iPhone with the cover on. I want to put one on my desk at work and one on my bedside table at home. There are all types of iPhone cradles available out there (as shown above) but everything I’ve come across appears to be fitted exactly to a bare, cover-less iPhone. The only thing that I think *might* work is this cradle from Incipio:

But, as far as I can tell, this thing isn’t actually shipping (yet) and I haven’t gotten any response from emails sent to the company either.

It’s a lot of fun to see clever solutions to problems in products that we use everyday. The fly in the urinal is a great example of such a clever solution:

Problem? Guys without aim and the ensuing mess.

Solution? Give ’em something to point at. Fun (possibly) for the “user” and accomplishes an important goal (less mess in the bathroom).

Brilliant, I say.

Like Marc Andreessen, I think there are big changes coming with the way Hollywood works (read his post entitled rebuilding hollywood in silicon valley’s image). So on that topic, read this post by the co-creator of Ask a Ninja, Kent Nichols on the old way for creating a TV a show:

1. Graduate from Harvard (lesser Ivies are okay, but let’s be realistic), where you were a key member of the Lampoon staff
2. Arrive in Hollywood with a spec script of the hot sitcom or drama from last season (this year that would be 30 Rock or Ugly Betty)
3. If you’re lucky, get hired as a Writer’s Assistant, or Production Assistant on a series
4. Spend the next five years working up the chain to finally get to be an actual writer
5. Once you’re actually allowed to write on a show, then you work your way up the producing chain, which is the same thing as being a writer, but you also get paid a lot more money.
6. After 5-7 years of working your way up to being an executive producer level type, you’ll be allowed to pitch networks your ideas for shows.
7. If the networks like your show, you’ll be paid to write a script.
8. If they like the script, they’ll shoot it and make it into a pilot.
9. If they like the pilot, they’ll order 12 more episodes.
10. If those first 12 episodes get an audience, they order 12 more.
11. If the season did well enough in the rating, or it’s a critical darling, it’ll get another season.
12. Repeat steps 6-12 until you’re 45, when people stop calling you anymore.

And his guess at the new model that will emerge:

1. A few creative people decide to make a show
2. The show hopefully garners attention from the YouTubes of the world
3. A production company comes in and helps give the show consistency and makes some money through ad sales and merchandising
4. Network licenses the show once it proves that it’s gained an audience

Yup, that’s almost exactly what a friend of mine and I talked about earlier this month.

Jason Calacanis talks about a bad unsubscribe form at zagat.com — I call this “soft spam”. “Soft spam” are those pesky emails, like the one Jason’s referring to, that make it hard for the user to unsubscribe. In Jason’s example, Zagat wants him to login to his account again and it’s likely that he doesn’t remember the password anymore which means he has to go through a “forgot password” screen, reset or retrieve his password, get that from his email, go back to the site, login, find the screen where he can unsubscribe and then unsubscribe.

“Soft spam” like this sucks and I’ve started using Gmail’s newish “Filter messages like this” option to killfile stuff like this straight to the trash:

I also happened to write about this earlier this week:

I’m a big fan of Gmail’s “filter messages like this” option that makes it quick and easy to kill what I call “soft spam” — the stuff that is unsolicited but loosely tied to something you did or signed up for and not something you can easily, authoritatively unsubscribe from. For example: you sign up the exhibit at a tradeshow, they sell your address to people that sell shipping services, pop-up booth displays, etc. You attend a tradeshow in Taiwan and subsequently every manufacturer in taiwan/china is “happy to is meeting you” and wants to sell you “high-quality hello kitty USB styrofoam missile launchers, only 10,000 MOQ!!!”. Unsubscribing from some of these is difficult so I just quickly create a filter that sends ‘em straight to the trash. 🙂 Ah sweet, sweet google mail filters.

Matt Mullenweg, fellow Houstonian, recently switched his website to http://ma.tt/ (a domain name registered in Trinidad and Tobago). Join the club Matt! What club would that be? Why, people who have their names as domain names through a foreign country top-level domain of course.

I switched this blog to http://rake.sh/ about a year and a half ago, thanks to the country of St. Helena (they control the .sh domain name). But, I confess that I got the idea when I saw Pete Rojas’ personal website at http://roj.as. Anyways, I like my domain but it *is* a pain to spell it out to people because most people just don’t expect a domain name to end in anything but .com. The other thing I worry about is whether world politics could ever result in my domain name being taken away from me.

Here’s to hoping that the United States doesn’t declare war on St. Helena (or, for Matt’s sake, Trinidad and Tobago!) 🙂