I went on Amazon today looking for some new music and I found the All-American Rejects new album was out. So I listened to the preview and decided, well, I haven’t tried Amazon’s MP3 Download store yet so why not.. I’m not sure I want to buy a physical copy of this album because I have their last one and I’m not listening to it a whole lot.

I see that I will have to download Amazon MP3 Downloader to purchase the album. Well, I guess it can’t hurt..  The album is just $2.99 this way so whatever. I click to buy, log in, and I see this:

(Amazon MP3 Purchases are limited to U.S. customers.)

There we go. Great. Always these US-only and other regional rights boundaries. And it doesn’t end there. Even if I would have been a US citizen and able to buy the album, I would only be able to download it ONCE! Lose it, in a hard drive crash or forgetting to migrate it when switching computers, and you’re screwed. Even though you paid for it.

So basically I’m thinking… What the **** is my incentive here not to just go on a torrent website and download it? It takes out 99 % of the hassle of legally buying it and I can get it again should I happen to lose it.

Oh yea, and I wanted to get my Canadian friend an invite to try Spotify beta. A great piece of music software in my book. But that didn’t work out either because of the issues, again, with rights.

Bob Warfield, executive vice president of products at Helpstream, blogged about their success using Amazon Web Services.

Meanwhile, I can’t imagine why startups are fooling around with their own data centers. Easy for me to say, we were too just one short week ago!

Read his post on:
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/one-week-later-on-amazon-web-services/

ZDNet features their migration in an article here: Migrating to Amazon Web Services: The blueprint.

The biggest pop is clearly hardware costs. Helpstream reckons it will deliver savings of 59 percent overall by moving to Amazon. Anecdotally, Warfield noted that customers have seen a performance improvement.

I found this good article today:

I hope that by telling you this story, you can make sure it doesn’t happen to you. It’s the story of the Boomerang Founder.Colorado Startups, Dec 2008

You should read the whole article. Good advice that can save you time and money.

Nothing new on my Startup Valuation series just yet. But here’s something funny!

Check out this blog post:
http://holykaw.com/this-is-why-richard-branson-is

Loopia is running a Christmas Special on .se domains. 9 SEK per domain.

https://www.loopia.se/

Every now and then you see some company that are well known for something specific and it’s not unusual that their slogan is “More than just *something*”. Something being whatever core product or service they are known for. Is this good or bad?

Probably many of these have made a lot of money selling their core product or service and it might still be their main source of income. Naturally they want to expand business and sell other things too, but then they are also entering new territory where they might not have much experience. And do they have a competitive edge over other businesses? It can be risky. What if some of their loyal customers don’t like or don’t identify with the other things they started selling? Worst-case scenario: It kills their core business. But of course it can also play out the other way and result in increased revenue and profit.

What are your thoughts on this?

Freakonomics was a good read. It made me think. That’s the whole idea with the book.

It’s a best-seller written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Steven Levitt has a very interesting approach to economic studies. He asks totally odd questions like “What do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?” or “Why do drug dealers still live at home with their moms?”. You’ll find the answers to these questions in the book along with many other very interesting facts. I guarantee you a few “Ahaa” and “Wow” moments throughout the book.

Steven David “Steve” Levitt (born May 29, 1967) is a prominent American economist best known for his work on crime, in particular on the link between legalized abortion and crime rates. Source: Wikipedia

Stephen J. Dubner (born August 26, 1963) is an American journalist who has written four books and numerous articles. Source: Wikipedia