Mike DiBenedetto dot com

Here’s a scene that happens every day with my new iPad: I wake up late, gather my stuff together and rush out of the house on the way to a meeting/class/appointment.  I hop on the the subway, pull out my iPad, open up Pulse, Flipboard, NYT, WSJ or any other news app only to discover I forgot to open them up while I still had 3G or wifi service.  So now I have a shiny new iPad loaded with great news apps that are full of yesterday’s news.

I know I’m only complaining that the iPad doesn’t have true multi-tasking, which has been a sore point for iPhone and iPad owners since they debuted.  However, for New Yorkers, this is a huge drawback as many of us probably turn on our iPad or news app on our iPhone for the first time every day while on the subway.  It’s a huge problem and I wish there was a way around it.

When I used to have a Droid (before it was stolen), I would keep all my news apps open in the background.  Sure, it drained the battery a bit, but every morning I had all the news I wanted at my finger tips, whether or not I was 30 feet below the streets of New York hurtling downtown on a 3 train.

I was a first gen Kindle lover and then I was a second gen Kindle lover. It is a fantastic way to read books. I even have subscribed to the WSJ and the FT on it and have enjoyed the interface for both. But as soon as I got an iPad, I put my Kindle in a drawer and have not taken it out since. I have been playing games on my iPad, emailing friends and reading two books so far through the Kindle app [Jonathan Knee's Curse of the Mogul and Jeff Bussgang's Mastering the VC Game btw].
However, as a nice relaxing family vacation approaches, I am finding myself excited to pull out the old Kindle once again. This is because three of my favorite things about the iPad make it an incredibly frustrating reading device:

• The beautiful high gloss screen – The iPad’s screen is gorgeous for movies, photos and games but it sucks for reading large quantities of text. When I’m outside, the sun’s reflection makes it impossible to read. And when I’m inside, every light source within a mile seems to find its way to my iPad so it can reflect directly in my eyes. The Kindle on the other hand has a dull, ugly screen that is perfect for reading.
• The multi-touch screen – While great for web browsing and playing Harbor Master, the touch screen causes me to repeatedly and inadvertently change the page while reading. Every time I reposition the iPad, I inevitably hit the screen by accident and advance one page. Very annoying.
• All the awesome other stuff you can do – Sometimes when I settle down to read, I don’t want to be able to easily surf the web, check my email, or play a game. I just want to read. But if a distraction is there, I won’t be able to resist it. I wish I was more disciplined but I’m just not.

So even though I love my iPad and have been seriously neglecting my Kindle, I have come to the conclusion that there definitely is room, not just in the market but in my life, for both devices.

Related articles

• Kindle, iPad Aren’t Mortal Enemies (pcworld.com)

During the last few weeks, I have rediscovered my love of blowing hours aimlessly playing the guitar.  And in so doing, I had a thought about how simple technologies are going to create a super class of guitar maestros in the near future.

When I was in high school, I had to learn how to play songs the hard way.  Playing songs on repeat while trying to work out the parts.  Or I would shell out hard-earned cash for sheet music with tabs.  Or most likely I would beg a friend to teach me.  As a result, it was hard for me to build a growing repertoire of songs that were challenging but fun to play.  However, in my most recent phase of music playing, whenever I hear a great song that I’d like to learn, I fire up YouTube and search for “how to play ______ on guitar” and I usually have a number of video tutorials to choose from.  This has made it infinitely easier to learn licks and riffs that I never could figure out on my own.  In the past four weeks, I have gotten better at guitar than I did in the past six years.  That is exciting.  That is disruptive.  And that makes me excited to see what kids who grow up with this infinite supply of free lessons make of it.

Here’s one video that I recently watched while learning how to play Neil Young‘s “The Needle and the Damage Done.”

Needle and the Damage Done Tutorial

Yesterday, InSITE hosted entrepreneur turned VC Jeff Bussgang (twitter, blog) at the Stone Creek Tavern in NYC for a talk about his book “Mastering the VC Game.”  It was a great event overall, but one thing that Jeff said really struck me.

It was a piece of advice for business school students with a passion for entrepreneurship who don’t immediately go work for a startup.  He said that the more traditional paths for  MBAs, e.g., consulting, big companies, finance, can have some benefits for an entrepreneurial career, but they come with one huge danger – golden handcuffs.  These jobs start you out at a salary that is roughly comparable to a startup salary (maybe 40-60K more but in the same ballpark), but after a few years, you might be making upwards of 100-200k more than you would at a startup.  At that point, when you presumably have a mortgage, an expensive lifestyle, perhaps a family, it can be very hard to take such a pay cut.

So Jeff’s advice for MBAs entering these more lucrative fields was keep your burn rate low.  If you think you want to go back to a startup, live like you would live on a startup salary.  His way of phrasing it really struck me.  It’s the same thing I would think you’d tell a startup that is temporarily flush with VC cash.  Don’t fly first class.  Don’t rent expensive office space.  Don’t buy the fancy stuff for your launch party.  Live like you might need that cash more later.

And while I personally don’t know how my life and career will pan out, I know that entrepreneurship is a passion of mine.  So this concept of keeping your burn rate low is something I think I will consider no matter what I do in the next five to ten years. Don’t buy an apartment on the upper-whichever-side.  Don’t eat at Nobu every weekend.  Don’t holiday on St. Barts.  Go to the same bars that you went to before school.  Borrow your friend’s family house in the country like you did in college.  Live in a rental in Brooklyn.  Eat at that great Thai place with the $8 pad thai.  Doesn’t sound so bad at all…

Last night I saw David Fincher‘s “The Social Network” and this morning I finished reading David Kirkpatrick‘s “The Facebook Effect.” For two accounts that ostensibly tell the same story, you couldn’t imagine two wildly different narratives, with vastly different characters with nearly opposite motivations.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in tech circles, talking to developers, and reading and thinking about technology and Facebook in particular, it is impossible not to come away from the movie feeling deeply disappointed. What an opportunity to dramatize the rise of the geek! Geeks are the new rock stars – geeky bands, geeky actors, geeky movies and geeky web servcies are now hip. And so how cool would it be to see Zuckerberg as a college kid with a ridiculously big vision trying to create the future? And how cool would it be to see him going from the immature sophomore who built Facemash while drunk to becoming the self-assured CEO who is the envy of most every other entrepreneur and executive in the country? Even better would be to see how the youthful Mark Zuckerberg made stupid, careless mistakes that led his best friend to sue him for millions of dollars and then to see whether or not he is that same person.  That is a story worth telling.

Unfortunately, however, the film panders to everyone who disdains the new geek movement and yet secretly feels inferior. Mark Z., according to the film, may be a billionaire genius, but at least he isn’t smooth with girls and can’t carry a conversation.   Scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin would have us believe that Mark created Facebook to be cool.  However, that thinking ignores the fact that MySpace was seen as more cool in 2004-2005 while Facebook was seen as more useful, which was how Zuckerberg intended it.  The movie also suggests that Zuckerberg was motivated largely by a desire to join a Harvard Final Club, yet doesn’t bother to go into why he dropped out of school never to return to Harvard once Facebook began to take off.  Additionally, the movie does not even touch on how such a socially inept asshole would be able to create the most addictive social site in history.  Those are the kinds of frustrating inconsistencies that made “The Social Network” hard to enjoy even on a fictional level.  I suppose it is unfair to criticize a movie for not sticking to facts, but if Sorkin and Fincher wanted to make up a story, why not go the extra mile and make up names?

While Kirkpatrick’s book, on the other hand, has been somewhat unfairly criticized as being more hagiography than unbiased retelling, it does go a long way to capture the thinking that drives Facebook.  It unfortunately glosses a bit over what happened with Saverin.  For that account, see Business Insider‘s coverage here.  The book does a great job of coherently presenting the characters, flaws and all, against the backdrop of the rise of social networking.  Unfortunately, the book does lag when it devotes page after page to describing features that nearly every reader already knows and uses.  Overall, it is a quick, fun read that more than once reminded me of John Battelle’s fantastic “The Search,” which chronicled the rise of Google.