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Kobe jumps over a speeding car - amazing, but stupid and irresponsible for someone with his fan base. Even if it’s fake, which it probably is, how many kids see if they can do it too and get hurt or worse trying? One dead kid and all the laughing will stop.

The TechCrunch/Popsugar event last night was good fun. I liked the way the integrated demos around the room. It gave everybody something to do in addition to chatting and drinking. I’m sure it took a lot of work to put together so thanks to Techcrunch and Popsugar for a great night.

Here’s a short video clip I took at the party.

And here’s a pictures from across the room. BTW that’s Marina from Hot for Words interviewing someone from Wired in the foreground.

Jason Calacanis has some good thoughts on the after party and friends here.

Just for kicks I thought I would see what Google, Yahoo and MS search sites would reveal when I typed in their respective names and the work sucks. Google was probably the most even treatment. Yahoo seem to have a lot of results from Yahoo sites.

MS takes the cake. The second answer under a search for Microsoft Sucks on Live.com yields google.com followed by support.microsoft.com and then YouTube. It also has a university listing for MicroSoft Sucks.

Yahoo gets second prize for it’s cover up links to Yahoo sites.

Google gets the honesty award:

Robert Scoble describes some “real roadblocks to data portability“. He makes some good points that may make it challenging to implement automated data portability.

In short he says,

So, the story is, doing the simplest of data portability (for instance, making all systems understand when I changed my email address) is going to take a lot of work and a lot of cooperation between all of the players). Doing the toughest stuff (like sharing of some of the social graph, or making things like photos and videos portable) will take a lot longer.

For some reason, we expect this highly disparate systems to magically integrate with each other and let data flow between them without problem. Anyone who has spent time working in the systems integration arena knows that this is really hard.

I think it might be helpful to look at this differently. Today, we have human powered system integration. I am my own data portability hub carrying information about me from one place to the other and manually going to each place to update my data. Aside from the manual intensity of this process, I kind of like it. I like the fact that I have control over the data and where it goes.

Expecting disparate systems to get to data portability is going to take a long time. However, I could publish my own data portability feed. It would contain the data about me, the services I subscribe to, and include my friends feeds to designate who else I am connected to.

I would leave the security settings aside for now and let me manage my settings within the context of a service. These security settings are likely to require more privacy and will be much harder to handle.

This kind of data portability feed should not be hard to implement and would get things started sooner rather than later.

Now this is really interesting.  It should make language a much smaller barrier.  More discussion here.

This and this are good to see from Amazon.  My team built the same thing back in 2000, but e-commerce collapsed and took the company out with it. Amazon has done a nice job presenting their fulfillment as a service offering.  More discussion here.

This is a snapshot of Google searches for the last 24 hours. The top listing was as of 7:37 Pacific Time.

It’s kind of interesting to see what dominates the public interest and how much attention we give to different things.

Twitter, Facebook and now YouTube.

Oh yeah, the iPhone SDK.

The interview focuses on the next steps in the OS and most interestingly on cloud computing.

In particular I liked the part about Amazon’s ability to make money on AWS

OM: When do you think utility computing can be a profitable business; are we’re looking at like maybe two years, four years out before it actually starts to become a profitable entity?

RAY OZZIE: (Let’s) take (one company) who is in the market today: Amazon. They chose a price point. There are either customers at that price point or not. They may have priced themselves at expected costs as opposed to actual today costs, but it doesn’t really matter. They could have brought it out at twice the existing price and there still would have been a customer base, and they’d be making money at birth.

Jason Calacanis started an interesting debate about keeping costs down in a startup. One of his points was to fire people who were not workaholics, later changed to fire people who don’t love their work.

Fire people who are not workaholics. don’t love their work… come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. don’t work at a startup if you’re not into it–go work at the post office or stabucks if you’re not into it you want balance in your life. For realz.

He got some heat from Duncan Riley from TechCrunch and the guys at 37 Signals. I my opinion Calacanis is right.

Startups run on cash. It’s like oxygen to them and without cash you will die a painful death. Anyone who has stressed out to the point of feeling like you’re going to throw up about missing a payroll or has had to close down an operation knows just how precious cash and time are.

The right people make all the positive difference in the world. Pissing away time and money on the wrong people is a sure path to failure. And not only do slackers waste time and money, they demoralize the people who are working hard to make it a success.