Rakesh Agrawal's Blog — Founder, Investor, Houstonian

I spent July 4th hanging out with my sister and her housemates at the Berkeley Marina Pier, where they had a sort of carnival going on.  While we sat in our front row seats for the fireworks, an idea occurred to me.  It seems pretty obvious, but here’s the idea:

People are always in groups at events like these — some couples, some families, some friend groups.  And people may or may not have a camera amongst their group, and even where there is one, most people shy away from asking someone to take a photograph of their group.  So the idea basically goes like this:

1) someone from an online photo printing company, say Ofoto, should be at events like these

2) they should run around taking pictures of families, friends, and couples that they see

3) they should hand out cards with a URL on it that will take them to the photographs from the event on the Ofoto website

You’d have a certain number of people visit the Ofoto website and from there some people would share the photographs by e-mail with other members of their family and some people would actually order prints of their photographs.  Ofoto entices potential customers with something free, gets referals to other potential customers and potentially also drives sales of photo prints.  Everyone wins.

(a larger version of my favorite from the group below…)

After a quick meeting in Los Angeles and Gnomedex in Seattle, I flew down to Oakland and spent the weekend hanging out with one of my younger sisters, Arti. She did her Ph.D. in Chemistry at Berkeley (p chem) and is now getting a masters in accupuncture. A photologue of my trip:

Thai restaurant mascot at the corner of Bancroft and Oxford

Berkeley bumper sticker

Vegan raw food place that Arti and I ate at (it was OK…)

Parasailing (is that what it’s called?) at the beach on CA-1, near Santa Cruz (I was just taking photographs before our hike, not participating!)

An outlook from our hike

Arti, Soumya and I picnic and then throw a disc around at Crissy Field, at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge

Sunset at Green’s restaurant (taken by Soumya)

Making the trek out the Berkeley Marina on July 4th for the fireworks with Arti and her housemates

They had free valet parking at the Berkeley Marina July 4th carnival, as long as your method of transport was ‘bicycle’.

Having claimed our seats, we wait for the fireworks to begin

This is probably my favorite photograph from the evening, taken after the sun had set while we were waiting for the fireworks to begin. The lights are the lamposts that line the pier.

One of the cool fireworks photographs

——

Most of the photographs from my trip are here — I also have some images that need to be stitched together for panoramic shots so look forward to those a little bit later. Autostitch (recommended by lifehacker) is the first tool I tried and it didn’t work very well on my images.

Philg has a review of Edward Tufte’s new book, Beautiful Evidence.  I attended a one day seminar given by Tufte a couple of months ago and I took a lot away from it.  Phil highlights one of the key Tufte ideas that I left the seminar with, display device resolution, in his brief review.

Sheesh, I’m really out of it today. Hopefully it’ll pass soon.

Michael Arrington, author of TechCrunch, lead a session focused mostly on start-up Internet companies. Notes from that:

• Calls TechCrunch a micro-business, he employs 5 people
• Defines success as 1) making money AND 2) making the Internet a better place to hang out
• Rejects the notion that we’re all in an echo chamber and that none of these new companies won’t go mainstream (Digg gets as much traffic as the New York Times)
• YouTube is cool, he started watching SNL again after “20 years” because he saw a clip from the show there
• They spent $75,000 to launch Edgeio
• Pointed out Fox’s acquisition person in the audience, Heather
• He says MySpace is pulling a Friendster — slow page loads, things breaking, not enough people
• Chastised Scott Rafer (feedster founder, now with dogster — myspaces for pets) for not promoting the industry

Mike over at TechCrunch has a much better look at TechCrunch than my brief first glance. Mike concludes with, IMO, the most significant thing about PA — they support open identity standards (among other open standards) so they win loyal users through trust instead of “lock-in”. I remember hearing Marc pitch the value of data portability at Gnomedex last year so I know shipping PA is is a big milestone for him and his team. Congratulations guys!

At LAX on my way to Seattle after a brief stop here for a meeting this morning…

Not sure what this is called, but it’s a sure sign that you’ve arrived in LA

On Sepulveda getting out of the airport.

Hollywood Boulevard… I was waiting to cross the street and I found myself standing next to Spiderman.

Yes, my meeting in Los Angeles was with none other than… Darth Vader.  Evidently these guys make big bucks walking around Hollywood Boulevard dressed up as famous movie characters, posing for pics.

Amy’s Ice Cream really knows how to do ice cream. They hire the right people and they train them to be generous and fun and responsive to customers. I read an interview with their founder once and she said something to the effect of, “Our job as an ice cream shop is to take care of you — whether you are here because you just aced a test or because you just failed one.” It’s a simple strategy for an ice cream shop and one the Amy’s executes extremely well on. (And, yes, their ice cream is pretty darn good too.)

(photos courtesy of shozu and my cingular 2125 telephone)

(P.S. when I say Amy’s is in a category of its own among ice cream shops, I’m comparing it to Baskin Robbins, Marble Slab (don’t get me started), and TCBY.  Cold Stone comes close.)