A bunch of us SmugMuggers, Robert Scoble, and Kristopher & Thomas from Zooomr are here in Palo Alto on University Avenue waiting for our iPhones. Kevin Rose from digg was here for awhile, broadcasting, but I’m not sure if he’s gonna broadcast anymore tonight. Zooomr is, though, on ZooomrTV.

Come on by and say hi!

(We still don’t know if we can actually use the iPhones we’re gonna buy, but we’ll try our hardest.)

Holy. Crap.

I’m so bummed. We’ve got our sleeping bags ready to go so we can get iPhones for the SmugMuggers. We even have SmugMuggers who flew in from out of town so they could join the party on University Avenue (click that link, it’s worth it). Like most companies, we have a corporate plan with AT&T so we can share minutes, save money, etc etc.

They won’t sell us iPhones. Not one phone, not twenty phones. For any price. At all. Neither will Apple.

Why on earth isn’t anyone covering this? Isn’t this a big deal to anyone but me? Yes, ok, I realize I’m coming across as a fanboy, but I’ve hated my mobile phone for decades now. I think there may finally be one that I don’t hate - only they don’t want to sell me one.

*sigh*

UPDATED 6/28/07 9:15am to answer some questions:

- No, this wasn’t some clueless rep at an AT&T store. I asked our AT&T business account rep, our Apple business account rep (we spent over $500k/year with Apple), and even some Apple VPs. They were very clear - if your account isn’t “personal responsibility” (you pay the bill, your Social is on the account), you’re outta luck.

- No, I’m not hoping to get business discounts on the phone. I’m fine paying full market rate. Heck, I’d even pay more. Just let me buy one for heaven’s sake! Better yet, let me buy them for my team!

Going to eat at La Fiesta and geek out again this week on May 24th. Come if that sounds like your thing!

Don’t forget about all the Lunch 2.0 events this summer, too. (It must be intern season!)

Sorry, Matt, I couldn’t resist.

Seriously, Matt’s post entitled Meaningful Overnight Relationship really hit home over here. For whatever reason, we’ve started getting the “Wow, you’re an overnight success! How did you do it?” questions a lot here at SmugMug lately. (Answer: “Work really hard for 6 years and maybe, just maybe, people will start to notice” … of course, that leads to the inevitable “Wow, you were so young!” line of questions that Matt is still getting…).

Sam Walton probably said it best when talking about Wal-Mart: “Like most other overnight successes, it was about 20 years in the making.” But Matt says it extremely well, too. I think his story, and Ben & Mena Trott’s, and Howard Schultz’s, and SmugMug’s are much more exciting than a typical get-rich-quick story. These are the kind of stories that power lasting successes and this list is long. Most of your favorite brands these days have a story like this behind them, rather than a “I sold to Yahoogle” story.

On a related note, we’ll send you a free copy of Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur’s Soul if you’re interested in these sorts of stories. The book is full of great ones from lots of “overnight successes”.

And finally, we do love WordPress. You’re reading a WordPress blog right now.

Found out a friend of mine got a lift to D: All Things Digital last year. On a VC’s private jet. Lucky duck.

Right now, I’m planning on flying coach into San Diego and driving to D, like last year, but let’s see just how powerful this blog thing is:

Do you have access to a private jet? Are you going to D? Give me a ride! I’ll let you pick my brain about any business or technology I know anything about (SmugMug, bootstrapping to profitability, Amazon Web Services, datacenters for startups, LAMP, whatever) the entire trip. Come on, no-one was going to sit in that extra seat anyway!

Oh, and if you know someone who’s going who fits these criteria, pass my plea along.

Send all jet offers to don-AT-smugmug. Thanks!

I just started something called LunchGeeks. Basically, a bunch of geeks get together for lunch once a month, and self-organize into small groups to eat and compare notes. I’m hoping it’ll be fun for everyone. If it sounds like your thing, by all means, come and tell your friends.

In the immortal words of Douglas Adams - Don’t Panic!

I moved my blog from the old location at /onethumb to the new home at /don

Hopefully I got all the redirect stuff sorted out and Google will find my 301s to be tasty and delectable. If not, I’ll see you in limbo somewhere.

Let me know if any links don’t work properly or something, otherwise, enjoy the clearer and easier-to-remember URL.

ZDNet asks a stupid question - “Blogs turn 10 - who’s the father?“

Stupid for two reasons: First, blogging is older than 10 years. Second, I doubt anyone could prove who the father was anyway. Like most technology changes, blogging evolved naturally.

How do I know blogging is older than 10 years? Because I was blogging in 1995. We didn’t call it blogging, and it was missing some bells & whistles like RSS feeds, but blogging it was. At a dinner at GDC two weeks ago, I even ran into someone who’d gotten flamed on my blog during 1996. And there were a lot of people blogging before I did it - I was a copycat.

Dave Winer apparently claims to have the longest running blog on the Internet. Sorry, Dave, but that’s just not true - I know my friend sTeve started blogging in 1995 or 1996 with sCary’s Quakeholio (which has changed names, but still remains his). I believe my friends Blue and Redwood did as well. All of their sites have evolved into news-focused sites around video games, not unlike all the so-called “modern” bloggers who are now doing news and commentary, but the point remains - they’ve been blogging longer than 10 years, and so have I. We definitely weren’t the first, either - we didn’t invent the idea.

sTeve may very well have been the first blogger hired for the fact that he blogged, though. Ritual Entertainment hired him on February 8th, 1997, to come be their in-house blogger.

ZDNet got the whole .plan thing right, though - and ironically, much of sCary’s, Blue’s, and my initial posts were just reposts and commentary on id Software’s .plan updates.

But I’m still not sure why we care… ?

Had our first ultrasound yesterday, saw the heartbeat, we’re in business! My twins don’t know it yet, but they’ll be thrilled.

That makes 5 SmugMuggers (out of 20) who are pregnant. It’s going to be a busy fall - we’re all within a few months of each other. As Robert Scoble told me yesterday, “There’s something in the water” (he’s expecting a little one of his own in September).

So I apologize in advance if our feature releases get a little sparse this fall - we’ll all be busy changing diapers and burping babies.

Life is wonderful!

(And is it strange that I announced it first on Twitter before my blog or any emails? I think it is, but I can’t put my finger on why).

There are three major players about to vie for a spot in your living room to download videos: Xbox 360, AppleTV, and Amazon Unbox on your TiVo. I have an Xbox 360, a TiVo Series 3, and my AppleTV should be here “any day now” (right Apple?). Saying that I’m thrilled at the ability to order movies from my recliner is an understatement.

Some of you will howl that Netflix and BitTorrent and other things should fall into this category too. I say “Nay!”. I’ve built and re-built so-called Media Center PCs before and I’m sick of it. I don’t want a PC in my gear stack, I just want a device that does one thing well: A giant video store in the sky.

So, how does Amazon Unbox stack up? Let me break it down:

THE GOOD

• Amazon lets you rent OR buy your movies. This is super important, and something Apple is blowing, big time. How many movies that you see do you really want to own? If they’re not Disney (if you have kids), or Indiana Jones or something, you probably want to watch it once. So you want to rent. But there are still those few movies you want to watch over and over and over.. so you want to buy. Give consumers the choice! We’re smart - we’ll figure it out! This is a big win for Amazon.
• Amazon keeps your purchases “in the sky.” This is huge! If I run out of room on my TiVo and delete something that I later want to watch, I’m not out of luck. Amazon will happily re-download it to my TiVo and I’m all set. Apple loses out on this one too - I’ve lost songs I’ve bought from iTunes and had to re-buy. That sucks… they have my purchase history, why can’t they give me another copy?
• 1-Click rocks. Ok, the patent thing was stupid and silly, but nonetheless, being able to click “Buy Now” and have the video almost instantly appear on my TiVo really really rocks. It downloads, for me, 2X realtime (1 hour TV = 30 min download), and I can watch it before it’s finished. Xbox 360 sucks here - you have to wait for it to finish a big chunk first, and it’s terribly slow.

THE BAD

• The selection isn’t that great, yet. I’ve bought a bunch of TV shows, but some of them I really wanted, like The Sopranos or Lost, just aren’t there.
• Browsing for stuff is confusing. I browsed through the TiVo listings and found movies that I couldn’t actually get for my TiVo. Want to watch Sum of All Fears, for example? Tough, it’s listed in the TiVo section but only available on Windows PCs. Ugh.
• They have rentals only for movies. Um, hello? How many times do I really want to watch an episode of 24? Let me rent those, as well. I’ll happily buy every episode of the Simpsons, but I want to rent 24. Gimme the option.
• No HD. Xbox 360 already offers 720p downloads. I’d gladly pay more for HD versions of my favorite movies and TV episodes. I already do with HD-DVDs, afterall.
• Wish I could browse Amazon Unbox from my TiVo. I’m not smart enough to know how this could be done well, but maybe using Amazon recommendations + TiVo thumbs up/down, it could get smart about what to offer me? My wife doesn’t want to open a web browser to buy her movies, she wants to use her remote.

THE UGLY

• There’s something terribly wrong with the video encoding. Anytime there’s a lot of horizontal movement (especially camera pans), the video gets all jittery and ghosty. Plus the interlaced picture structure is super-visible. I’ve done enough video editing and encoding that I’m gonna make a guess here: they inverted the interlaced frames and have encoded it wrong. For most scenes it’s tolerable (but not good!), but for some, it’s downright awful. I’m hoping this is a simple oversight and will get fixed, but of the 6 or so shows I’ve watched so far, they all had this problem.

All-in-all, I think it’s off to a good start. Certainly competitive, and I’m certainly going to use it more than the Xbox 360’s download stuff, which was very disappointing. I’m glad there are big competitors duking it out - that means you and I win.

I’m happy to pay the content holders a reasonable price to download this stuff in a convenient way. It’s no secret that every TV show and DVD is available for free via bittorrent, but the same can be said about music, and I love shopping at iTunes. The people who make this stuff do deserve to get paid, and I’m happy to help. I wish they wouldn’t muck it up with DRM so that I could use it more easily, but hey, that’s life.

Word to the wise: I’d buy *MORE* of this stuff if it were DRM free.