Please just take 5 seconds and share this video with your twitter/facebook friends?

This made me cry.  And umm... I never cry.  Okay, that's a lie.  I almost never cry.

I hope to make this a social media success story.  Please help this young lady with just 5 seconds of your time.

Believe in Karma.   Please pay it forward?

Please watch this and share this link: http://bit.ly/cCGPl6

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The timing of this article is almost perfect.

For the past week, I've been begging some very talented Waterloo undergraduate "Co-op Students" (Canadian term for interns) to join Kontagent.  Our very own pirate ship.  (Read the above linked article to understand the statement -- but if you don't read it, here it is: Pirates = Risk Taking Entrepreneurs )

Begging.  Yes.  Begging.

Why?

Because these are the very best of the brightest students. 

Almost in every case in this upcoming term, these students have multiple offers from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Mozilla, [insert elite brand name here].

MULTIPLE OFFERS.

Often paying WAY more than we could ever afford.

Why?

Because students, Canadian students especially, and most people in general don't know what its like to be a Pirate.  

That and  because these students are f'ing amazingly talented -- and worth every hour that I volenteer to speak at Waterloo to hopefully (selfishly) inspire these students to do a startup, and hopefully join Kontagent one day.

But a pirate's life is a hard life.  It means making sacrifices like less pay, longer hours, more stress.

But so many of us are condition in school to take the straight and narrow, easy way out -- of hard-work to guaranteed success.

But for Pirates, its about the risk -- and the love of risk.  As Michael said in his article in TechCrunch -- the RISK IS THE REWARD.  Its knowing that everything you do makes an immediate impact.  Its the thrill of uncertainty of not knowing if you're going to crash and burn or if you'll change the world.   

Everytime I go into battle for top co-op student talent at Waterloo, I sell the adventure.  Sometimes I win.  Sometimes I lose to the security blanket of working at Google.

But its worth it.    

Because every student I rescue from the pits of the guaranteed "success" of working at a good big firm.  I (selfishly) create an opportunity for a student to become an entrepreneur (that may one day graduate and come work for our company and not some generic super successful brand name tech company).  

That and I often get some amazing talent that makes a huge difference in the company.

So there you have it.  This is why I love my life.  Its because I get to be a modern day pirate -- every single day.

If there was ever a formula to my "success"  its this:

My Life = Pirates Life = A Hard Life = A Awesome Life = Eternal Happiness.

And this is why I think my life is awesome, and why I love every day of my life since I started being a baseball card pirate when I was 13 years old selling baseball cards to my friends in the school yard. :)

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So I was asked by an analyst to put into words something that I've been espousing for sometime in presentations and panels for sometime about this topic.  So I thought I might as well throw it up here as well:

We have moved from physical goods to digital goods, from physical delivery to digital delivery.  Whats MOST interesting about whats happening now is the disruption in discovery and distribution of information and services, esp. in online entertainment and games.  The same disruption that happened to physical entertainment to digital delivery (i.e. CDs to iTunes, DVDs to Netflix) is happening to digital distribution.  We are no longer reliant on going to a "portal" -- in essence a "trusted aggregator" of digital goods and services to find and discovery quality games and entertainment that we once did with portals like Yahoo Games, because of the proliferation of social networks and virality, people discover and adopt more and more games because of invitations and notifications from friends.   Distribution is now baked into the game mechanic, in essence, your distribution channel effectiveness and scale is correlated to how well you are able to acquire customers -- and in turn amplify their voices though systematic viral engineering to spread your services/goods across the network.  

Interesting to see that Rogers that dibs on it.

The videos look very very slick.

Plus device has a 8.1MP camera, totally custom UI / skin, very slick 3D capabilities:

This is a great article from Bill Gurley on iPhone vs. Android.  Which is similar to much of my thinking.

Boils down to this:

iPhone = Apple of the PC Era = Control Platform for Superior UX (user experience)

Android = Microsoft of the PC Era = Open Platform and Cater to Customizations

But also inspired this rant what I think of the Berry

But what about RIM/BerryOS, Palm/PalmOS, Microsoft/WinOS and Nokia/Symbian?

- Nokia, Palm: too far behind to be a part of the real "super smart phone/OS" race.  Nokia still stuck in feature phone land, PalmOS/PalmPre is so slow, i could make coffee between switching apps sometimes.

- Microsoft: has a decent shot at being #3.  Windows Mobile v7 is way late.  Some devices like the HD2 look awesome, but too little too late IMO.

- RIM: Will sadly, likely go from a platform that should have stayed at the #1 spot, to going to fight MS for the #3 position

RIM's BlackBerry keyboard based smart phones are still the best PHONES of any smartphone on the market for a business user.  I've seen even consumers fall in love with the Berry without an email or data plan simply because of how functional it is, and how responsive the entire user experience is.

The issue is their OS and their lack of innovative consumer product DNA is killing them.  

Issues w/ the Berry:

1) BlackBerryOS Looks like Ass: The OS and UX still feels like Windows 3.1 in an era of Aero powered 3D desktops.  The icons used even in the latest version look like they are from the 80s (that said Nokia and Google both don't seem to have done a lot better and looks as if they keep hiring design school rejects to create most of their icons)

2) BlackBerryOS 3rd Party Dev  Platform Suck Balls: The platform is difficult for developers to build on.

3) RIM Has No Critical Mass Usage of Touch Screen: There are too few touch screen devices shipped from RIM to get game developers remotely excited about the platform.

So why do I still own RIM stock?   Besides the fact that my most favorite productivity device of all time is still the BlackBerry...

RIM does 3 things awesome well:

1) Great / Fast Email Experience (important to enterprise market)

2) Great IM/BlackBerry Messenger Ecosystem/Experience (important to consumer) 

3) Knows how to Build the Best Mobile Hardware Keyboard (important to everyone)

None of this matters however if they don't continue to innovate.  Here's a 3 areas that I think they should innovate on to help them stay competitive in 2010:

1) Own Location Messaging: They bought Dash Networks, put some of the Nav/GPS experience/IP to work and make BB Messenger even more addictive with great geo features.  If they can get this rolled out in an interesting way, the install base that they have will far exceed that of the tiny installation of Gowalla or FourSquare.  That said, I think those companies are all very innovative, and I don't think RIM should be focused so much on the fun element, but rather the P2P aspect of friend-finding.

2) Own Social Messaging: Invest and build the BEST Facebook Integration experience: you guys built the best email experience on mobile devices, now build the best social-messaging platform on top of the best mobile device with a hardware keyboard in the industry.  There's no better way to update your status than to use a Berry keyboard.  Just as Google allows you to sync all your data with your gmail account and gcal.  Look to Palm Pre as a starting point of making Facebook Connect as the basis for building a social messaging phone form the ground up.  Log-in w/ FBconnect, sync your contacts, integrate messaging and contacts with Facebook.  Be THE social phone that the Palm was suppose to be (but is way too slow to actually work, and not as integrated as it could/should have been)  

3) Own Flash: Get the best damn implementation of Flash on your devices -- which seems like ages ago since it was announced, and get a real browser working, and you'll have a shot at competing.  I don't think people care if you re-write the OS or not, or if you lose the existing applications that work in the legacy OS -- the thing that matters most is: will your 2010 phones with with Flash better than the other guys?  And will it have a competitive/fast browser experience.  Get flash right, and the Berry can immediate attract a massive number of developers that can contribute to its platform.

4) Own Style + Personalization: Bonus - Hire a good Sr. UI design director that has some real authority and influence: seriously, it wouldn't take that much to make your device icons and skins looks much better than the default AndroidOS.  The only people I've seen that come close to being decent are the Palm folks.  I mean, you could probably spend 1/10,000th of your engineering budget and get 10x better design than the Corel Draw clip art pack styled icons and look and feel.  Ok, that's a bit mean, but seriously -- give user experience design, and polish some thought.  You may never be Apple, but at least you could be competitive with Palm.

I had the opportunity to visit Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat/Oman, and Fujairah not long ago, visiting the region was a real eye opener.

What I found most interesting was the amount of interest and investment that were being made not just in real estate, but what seemed like a real desire to build up a technology hub as well.

That said, Dubai still felt quite unfinished and seemed even at that time when things were going full steam ahead, perhaps 5-10 years away from being a real "finished" city.

Gut reaction was, wow, indie developer making real bank on the app store!

Then I put it into perspective: that's over 8 months, about $125k a month.  That's assuming that the $1M number if POST apple's 30% cut.

Lets forget that for a moment.  Lets say the app made a over $1M in one single month.

Woop-Dee-Do.

Now before you all start calling me a hater  -- I sincerely have crazy respect for the guys who built this awesome barcode scanning app (something I've always dreamt of wanting to have and even at one point contemplated building in the distant past). Lets put this in relative terms to the Facebook platform for indie developers:

I know for fact, indie developers that have made hundreds of thousands (to million+) a month, for many months, on Facebook.

If $100k-$300k a month is a big deal on the app store as a TOP paid app for multiple months is a big deal, with little in the way of recurring revenues off the one app is a fantastic success story:

Then I stand by my opinion that it still the economics still suck to build for the iPhone platform as compared to the Facebook platform, and perhaps this suckage is a good thing for apple for innovation as I've talked before in a prior posting.

That said, I suspect/hope things will change for the better on the iPhone platform.

Someone had to say it, but pound for pound, hour for hour, the pay off is still better for a developer to build FB apps than iPhone apps today.

As I said before, this is just another great data point for those that are evaluating between the two platforms to build for.

All that being said of course, if I had to build something -- I'd always build something that I'd find most interesting AND lucrative.  But never just one or the other -- as you'll never win if there isn't a good balance between the two.