Mark Maunder with some real numbers on why making a little money makes a big difference:

Say you’re a consumer web business. You have some growth and some traction. You close an angel round for $400k in Month 1. In month 2 you start spending it and your burn rate is $25k for salaries, office and hosting. It takes you 4 months to get the product into shape and launch.

In your first month of launch you make a meagre $500 bucks. And lets say you suck at marketing and your revenue increases by $1000 per month so that a year after you launch your product (17 months after getting funded) you’re making $12,500 per month in revenue.

Even two years after getting funded you’re still only making $19,500 which is far from breaking even.

But what this does it it slows your burn rate enough and buys you enough time so that you never run out of money. That means you can keep paying yourself a full salary and growing your business and you never run out of cash. In month 29 your bank balance drops down to $12,500, but then it starts increasing again because in Month 30 you break even.

McGee has a general “recipe” for foaming milk with out steam.
I just tried a version of it — 1/2 cup 2% cold milk in a 1 c glass jar, shake hard til volume doubles (30 sec), microwave for 30″ et voila! beautiful, foamy steamed milk. Out of curiosity, I tried another 30″ of heating and the foam bubbled out and collapsed… so a larger jar is recommended just in case!

To make a flavored drink with this, try: 1 part warm frothy milk and carefuly stir in 1 part hot double concentrated milky beverage (like hot chocolate).

Heh

Gaming developer Storm8 has been sued for allegedly collecting phone numbers of iPhone users who downloaded the company’s popular games from the iTunes app store.

Suit coming from Lynwood, WA.

A collection of iPhone home screens.

a New Zealand study that claims a medium-size dog leaves a larger ecological footprint than an SUV.

Given the rumored more-dogs-than-children ratio in Seattle, the irony is palpable…

I’m fascinated by application groupthink. Everyone who reads DaringFireball apparently also uses OmniFocus, Instapaper, Birdhouse, Tweetie, SimpleNote, MyTexts…

You get the idea. So now I keep my eyes open for productivity / cool interface apps that will help me join the borg. This could be one of them.

Again, at first, this seems very democratic and very nice. After all, it’s great to throw a party for the whole world and let them drink your wine and have conversations with your kids. But, be honest here, would you rather have a private dinner with Steve Jobs, or would you rather have a dinner with Steve Jobs and 5,000 people who you don’t really know?

Must-read post from Scoble on “the chatroom problem,” and why some services devolve into useless drivel and others maintain their relevance. The upshot: self-defined community limits make for good community.

Another scam: Video Professor. Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD from Video Professor. The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them. Most users never return them because they don’t know about the extra charge.

Like in any industry, there’s easy money in gaming and there’s hard money. And the better way to make a sustainable gaming community is to focus on making a really good game and treating your users with respect (the hard way).

Given that Fred Wilson is an investor in Zynga, I’m a little surprised he hasn’t said anything in their defense.

That said, I haven’t played any of the games TC mentions in this post, so I don’t know how prominent the “scams” are; if only a few people “buy” in game points to begin with…there’s a lot of nuance to this.

The main opposition in the contract appears to revolve around the “atmospheric” provision, which allows employers to use actors in 20 voice roles, for up to 300 words, at the “daily base rate” of $782 for four hours of work. That means Nolan North might not just be the lead in your next video game, but play every character in the adventure — we wonder how his falsetto is for female voices.

I quit Google Reader over a year ago, but for an entirely different reason than any of the ones Scoble offers — I like to see web sites. The designs and colors are fun to see, and I feel like going through GR is, you know, work.

Manohla Dargis of the NYTimes on Jackson’s concert movie:

At once a greatest-hits compendium and a suggestive glance at what might have been, the movie — which had its premiere Tuesday and opened Wednesday on a staggering 18,000 screens worldwide — has been so nakedly designed to serve so many different agendas that it seemed unlikely anything would be left for Mr. Jackson’s fans beyond the sheer spectacle of such colossal posthumous exploitation.

Ouch.

Scalzi explains why the Obama administration is not making a mistake by calling out Fox News:

Meanwhile the noise is all covered by multiple other news outlets, which in aggregate reach a much larger audience, which show Fox News anchors and personalities in the middle of ideological conniptions, confirming to the general population the proposition that, indeed, Fox News is more interested in politics than news, and reinforcing the impression that Fox News and the GOP are reading off the same page.

Time for me to get back into the forum thing. I forgot how vibrant this gaming community is.

I can’t decide if this is nuts or awesome:

Mr. Toth has built a precise replica of a first-class cabin from a Pan Am World Airways 747 in the garage of his two-bedroom condo in Redondo Beach, Calif. The setup includes almost everything fliers in the late 1970s and 1980s would have found onboard: pairs of red-and-blue reclining seats, original overhead luggage bins and a curved, red-carpeted staircase.