Honeymoon in Tanzania from Sean Flynn on Vimeo.

If you need some convincing, here's a quick rundown on the accomplishments: 

• 4th in NL batting average (.333); .394 for the month of June!
• tied for 5th in NL doubles (23)  
• tied for 3rd in NL multi-hit games (30)
• 7th in NL slugging percentage (.566) 
• 8th in NL extra-base hits (38)
• 8th in NL hits (93) 
• 9th in NL OPS (.954)

Hmmm, what is wrong with this picture? The call-to-action on this screenshot below clearly says FREE. The app is also listed in the navigation section of the App Store under the FREE app sub-section. But then the first sentence of the app description says you will be charged $9.99 per month for the application. WTF? Can they be any more confusing?

As it turns out, the app (or better put, the shell of the app minus the part that actually does anything uesful) is free. You can download it and you won't be charged a dime. Just don't expect it to do anything useful! Once downloaded, you can then launch the app and decide at that point whether or not you want to register for the service and opt-in to the monthly subscription fee. 

Perhaps I'm the odd ball here, but couldn't they have described that whole process a bit better in the app description? Looking at the comments from users in the app store, it appears that I'm not the only one that was confused.

In response to this latest turn of events, Om Malik has written a very thorough analysis of what happened and why the company never took off. If you are a tech geek like me, I'd definitely recommend you read his post in its entirety. As usual, it is a thoughtful piece, and one with which I generally agree.

That being said, I tend to think that Joost failed for far simpler reasons than he outlines. Yes, they got big too fast. Yes, they had organizational issues. And yes, they were spread out across many geographic locations. But the bottom line? They failed because they did not deliver a compelling customer experience. 

Amongst all of the reasons for Joost's failure that Om outlines, the most important are the two he refers to as "client vs. browser" and "big media dis-connect". In other words, they had a crappy product filled with really crappy content. Not a good recipe for success.

Yes, they eventually added some better content, and yes, they eventually launched a web-based experience, but that was long after the early adopters had tested out the product only to find a big, heavy download filled with craptastic video programming. Not a good strategy to get evangelists singing your praises to the world!

For me this story hammers home two very important tenets that every consumer-facing technology company should hold dear:

1. Always have a relentless focus on delivering simple, kick-ass product experiences that will wow your customers 
2. Celebrity founders, industry buzz, and big, famous partners are overrated, and they will not compensate for a poor user experience

• 1998 - 2003: good luck finding any TV shows online
• 2004: you can now find some TV shows online, but you better be prepared to open up the wallet, and don't expect to have a chance to see it until well after the show first airs on regular TV
• 2005: thanks to YouTube, you can now views TV shows online for free, but the video quality is poor and grainy, and you have to watch the shows broken down into 10 minute segments
• 2006 - 2007: TV shows finally available in high quality video directly from the networks (with advertising of course), but only if you have the patience to wait days (and sometimes weeks) after the original airing on TV
• 2008: NBC airs the premiere of 30 Rock on Hulu a full week in advance of the airing on regular TV!!!

* For you historians out there, I might be a bit off on my dates but you get my drift.

Bottom line, this is awesome. NBC finally understands that airing TV shows online first drives awareness (and ultimately ratings). Sure, 30 Rock's ratings will be up this week since Tina Fey has been the hardest working woman in Hollywood doing her Sarah Palin impressions, but getting the show out there online first will also add fuel to the fire.

For the one of you out there reading this right now I know what you are saying...a post on this blog won't add fuel to any fire. To which I say you are right of course. But I have a feeling that Gawker and The New York Observer will more than pick up my slack!

On a related note, the premiere is brilliant. And anyone that still thinks long-form video doesn't have a place online really needs to watch Hulu in full screen on a 15 inch MacBook Pro.

Anyways, check the premiere out for yourself below:

Targeting & personalization done wrong:

Like many others, the economic situation has me thinking about my personal wealth (or rather the destruction of my personal wealth!) more than normal. So I go to my eTrade account a little more often these days than typical. In any event, here is a partial screenshot of the home page I landed on this morning after signing in:

Why on earth are they showing me a banner ad for a Complete Savings account when they know that I have a Complete Savings account already! In this case it's made even more ridiculous by the fact that the offer is literally pixels away from my account information. Considering there are a fair number of eTrade products that I don't have (e.g., a 401K roll-over) you'd think they'd be pitching me something else. I generally like eTrade, but this is really bad. Not only is it annoying, but they are also leaving money on the table.

Targeting & personalization done well:

Thankfully others out there are doing a much better job. And I'm not just referring to ad targeting. Check this out. This morning I get the following email from MyBlogLog:

Absolutely brilliant. I read techticker quite a bit, but I had never taken the time to join the techticker MyBlogLog community. Rather than wait for me to do this on my own, MyBlogLog pushed me along and helped me do what they already knew I'd like to do, but am just to busy or lazy to do myself. And of course they also show me how to opt out if I really don't want to join the community for some reason.

Experiences like this one remind why I love the web so much. A newspaper has no idea which stories I read over and over again. A bank can't change their advertising banners hanging from the ceiling for every customer that walks in. But the web fixes all of this. The web can be built specifically for each one of us. If you are out there building a web product take advantage of this. Your users will love you for it.

We are in the midst of two seemingly never-ending wars. We are facing the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. We have nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance. We are witnessing unprecedented price increases for gas and food. We are witnessing the earth's surface warm year after year. We have an annual budget deficit in 2008 estimated at greater than $400Bn. And yet the presidential candidates' campaigns are focusing on subjects that happened more than 20 years old, that are at worst of dubious veracity and at best just plain misleading, and that are completely devoid of proposed solutions to any of the major challenges that we are currently facing as a nation.

Let's hope that Tom Brokaw can bring the debate and the candidates back to the key issues tomorrow night in Nashville.

Well, it's nearly here and Walt Mossberg has come out with his official review. Nothing surprising really. He lauds both the 3G data speeds and GPS, but also knocks it for potential battery life issues and the fact that you'll now pay more over the 2 year contract (since AT&T has raised the price for unlimited data plan to offset the lower upfront price).

Bottom line...nothing in there that will stop me from buying it come Friday!

Here's his video review if you are interested in hearing firsthand....

But it happened. Kobe stayed in LA and they later picked up Paul Gasol. The Celtics somehow managed to pick up both Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen. And now we have the two most storied franchises in basketball back in the finals together for the first time since 1987.

Since the peak in 1998 for Jordan's last championship, the NBA Finals Nielsen ratings have been in decline. But something tells me that this series might just beat out last year's pathetic showing for the Spurs vs. Cavaliers Finals. If a return to the Lakers and Celtics in the finals together doesn't do it, then nothing will.

As for the 2007 HBS graduating class, it appears that 40% are headed for "market sensitive" careers, up from 37% in 2006 and 30% in 2005. So if you believe the theory, then you better be selling! Or rather you better have been selling already because as you see in the graph below, all of the major indices are down in the last 12 months (i.e., basically since the time the 2007 class graduated).

But enough with the intro. On to my point. Fortune magazine just came out with its annual list of the top 100 most desirable MBA employers. And while it doesn't allow you to break out the list to just HBS grads, let's assume for a moment that all MBA grads - not just the poor folks at HBS - are bad at picking their career paths. If the theory works for all MBA students, then perhaps this list enables you to infer not only which way the stock market as a whole is headed, but also where specific companies are headed?

Who's at the top of the list for the class of 2008? Google. Does this mean GOOG is ready for a fall? Well, they were #2 in 2006 and the stock rocketed upwards during the year that followed that class's graduation. By 2007 they had got the #1 spot, but the stock is still slightly up since the 2007 MBA grads joined the workforce.

Could this finally be the year the theory works and GOOG drops? Should we sell? Should we sell AAPL (#4 on the 2008 list)?

My own hypothesis: the theory might work fairly well when guessing the direction of the market as a whole, but it will break down and have less success when applied to individual companies. Get a big enough sample size and you will be okay. Focus in on a single data point (or company) and there are too many external factors that could change the outcome. In statistical terms, pick a single point in a normal distribution and you may be well off the mean. But take the full sample and you'll zero right in on the mean.

Or perhaps the MBA grads are not as quite as useless as every engineer in the valley suspects!