But there’s a new wrinkle that potentially makes the international-roaming experience better on Sprint and Verizon iPhones than it is on AT&T. Sprint plans to sell the iPhone 4S with its micro-SIM slot unlocked; Verizon’s will be initially locked, but if you’ve been a customer in good standing for 60 days, you can call Verizon and ask for an “international unlock.” (A Verizon spokesperson told me that this is Verizon’s standard policy for all world phones—it’s just the first time it’s manifested itself on an iPhone.)

This is awesome. My biggest annoyance while traveling in Southeast Asia over the summer was having to use a jerry-rigged hardware SIM unlocker called Gevey. Horrible experience. [Source: Macworld]

It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs. This means no change: one website, one account, one password… in other words, no Qwikster. […]

We’re constantly improving our streaming selection. We’ve recently added hundreds of movies from Paramount, Sony, Universal, Fox, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, MGM and Miramax. Plus, in the last couple of weeks alone, we’ve added over 3,500 TV episodes from ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, USA, E!, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, ABC Family, Discovery Channel, TLC, SyFy, A&E, History, and PBS.

We value our members, and we are committed to making Netflix the best place to get movies & TV shows.

It’s amazing how quickly Reed Hastings has changed his tone from the heartfelt “we screwed up” to the meaningless PR-speak of “we value our members.” There is...

I spent a half year writing software art to generate special effects for Tron Legacy, working at Digital Domain with Bradley “GMUNK” Munkowitz, Jake Sargeant, and David “dlew” Lewandowski. This page has taken a long time to be published because I’ve had to await clearance.

This is awesome; you don’t see this kind of attention to detail in many movies.

Pinterest, the infectious virtual bulletin board site, is poised to close a large round of funding — reportedly more than $25 million — with Andreessen Horowitz, which values the company at $200 million.

Pinterest is really well designed, and Ben Silbermann is a smart guy. I remember when he first pitched Pinterest to me a year or so ago, I kept thinking to myself, “this’ll never work.” Ha.

I just closed the sale of Lifepath.me to a Singaporean guy who bought it on eBay, and I figured it would be prudent to do an accounting of the time spent and revenue I pulled in from the service. Before that, though, I want to touch on the single most important lesson I learned through the process. I hadn’t been expecting to charge for accounts, but the Stripe javascript payments API was so easy, I figured it would be a cool gimmick. It turned out to be slightly profitable (for more than I had expected, to be sure), but more than that, it changed my perception of charging for things on the web.

People are willing to pay for things. It’s amazing! People are willing to put their credit card number into a form to buy things, and while that seems stupidly obvious to anyone who has ever bought anything, it doesn’t really hit you as a product developer until you after start getting “new...

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

And the...

This commercial epitomizes how to “not get” your customers. Anyone know the firm that made it?

[August 25th, 2009] 

Facebook has been in partnership discussions with various companies to fully integrate music download with the Facebook profile. Most of these deals would have resulted in the wrong user experience and I’ve done my best to stop them where they didn’t make sense. In particular, there’s no way that iTunes could enable the right experience on Facebook. Business development teams have a bias for working with the top player in a given market, especially when they don’t understand that market. Unfortunately, partnering with iTunes would not only have created the wrong user experience, it would have had disastrous consequences for the emerging digital music industry.

and

At Napster, I never got a chance to implement any of these really interesting second generation social features. We were stuck with our rudimentary first generation product. The interface we built was

If someone said they wanted to control their phone with voice, most designers and developers would have come up with something like Android Voice Actions, which basically mimic things you’d normally do with your phone’s touchscreen. Voice Actions are definitely a ‘good enough’ solution to using voice commands to control the phone.

But what if you wanted to do better? After all, voice is a totally different interface, so why bring over the baggage of the touchscreen when you’re not going to use it?

Notice how the Apple video introducing Siri has no narration, and how the Android video ends with, “I know that’s a lot to remember…”

You should follow me on Twitter here.

From Michael Arrington:

MG, who I worked with for several years at TechCrunch, will join me and Patrick Gallagher in the next couple of weeks.

MG could have started his own blog to rival TechCrunch (and I believe he could have succeeded), but chose to become a VC instead. Interesting. Also read Erick Schonfeld’s article at TechCrunch here. Notice how many times he says “I” instead of “we”.