Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
July 30, 2008
Glenn Kelman recently observed that Silicon Valley pundits have gone off the deep end arguing that intellectual property should be free Free FREE! Glenn’s correct- we all gotta eat, and if we can’t get paid for our work, most of us won’t do it. That applies to musicians, visual artists, computer programmers, mechanical engineers, and physicists.
But Glenn goes too far when he implies that the only issue here is “what’s mine is mine.”
He discusses the Hasbro/Scrabulous brouhaha and points out that the TechCrunch blog is hypocritical when it criticizes Hasbro’s heavy-handed tactics against the Scrabulous knock-off of it’s Scrabble game, but is outraged when Facebook is copied.
What he misses is that ownership of intellectual property should and does have limits.
On the legal side, games are not subject to copyright.
Even if they were subject to copyright, it’s clear that a lot of games are derived from other games (Scrabble itself is derived from crossword puzzles and from data on the New York Times- should Hasbro have to pay the NYT for every game? No- Scrabble is sufficiently different from crosswords that it’s really a new thing.) I haven’t played Scrabulous, and I’d stipulate that it probably IS a direct ripoff, and that direct ripoffs are sleazy (though a direct ripoff of something from 1936 is different than a direct ripoff of a new piece of art; are the modern remakes of Shakespeare’s Macbeth or of Jane Austen sleazy?)
The basic issue is of public good versus stimulating creative output. Copyright and patents were designed to have limits (in particular time limits) which would let creators profit from their labor, but would also allow others to (eventually) build on their work. There was a recognition that the individual right to profit is important, but that societal good (both in terms of reducing the price of the work, and in terms of the ability to derive works) is also important.
It’s complicated. At least part of the reason it’s complicated is that art and technology are not zero-sum games. Eli Whitney didn’t make money on the cotton gin, and that’s a shame and a crime. But he also made slavery uneconomic (though I don’t think that was his goal), and that turned out to be a very good thing. Volvo invented the modern seatbelt; would it have been reasonable to say that other automakers be disallowed by law from manufacturing seatbelts? If seatbelts had only been in Volvos (and never legislated), would we have airbags? Would we have three-point belts (instead of the early lap belts)? Maybe, maybe not.
Glenn is right to point out the moral shallowness of the simplistic “artists should work for free because people don’t want to pay them” argument. However, he’s wrong if he swings to the other side (”society should assure that only the creators of intellectual property can benefit economically from that property.”) The fair and responsible course is somewhere in the middle.
I found the photo on Sue Parrill’s site, though I believe it’s owned by Paramount.
July 29, 2008
Yesterday, we blogged about a Redfin screenshot that appeared on PhotoshopDisasters, showing a gigantic dog peering through the sliding glass doors of a Shoreline listing. The screenshot was at the top of Reddit all night, and even though PhotoshopDisasters didn’t link to our site, the listing drew 52,036 views on Redfin. The average number of views for other listings in Washington State was 2.19.
The photographer, Dan Achatz, explains on Flickr that the real estate agent who commissioned the shot had asked him to exclude a dog that appeared in the background of the original photo. “So of course,” he writes, “when she said that she didn’t want to see that damn dog in the shot, I had to not only put it in, but it was also absolutely imperative to embellish it.”
Hats off to the agent for going with it and posting the embellished pic. Hopefully the house sells straight-away. In real estate more than any other industry, everyone tries to act all grown up and boring, but nothing is more essential in marketing, or in life generally, than to make someone smile.
July 29, 2008
Why has TechCrunch, the technology community’s most influential voice, taken its stand against creative rights?
The latest attack has been against Hasbro, for disabling the Facebook game Scrabulous, which is nothing more than Hasbro’s Scrabble game on Facebook. In doing this, Hasbro has become a caricature of evil for fighting in court against freedom, pluck and Scrabble.
“Hasbro and EA planned their moves very methodically and waited patiently for their chance to strike,” writes Erick Schonfeld. “Perhaps EA felt that it could not compete with Scrabulous other than by taking it out at the knees.”
Michael Arrington has taken similar positions against digital rights for music, and the blogosphere generally has expressed something like contempt for journalists, artists and others whose work has found a new stage on the Internet but often for the profit of the technology distributor — Google News, YouTube, BitTorrent and, for a while, Napster — rather than the creator.
But how is Scrabulous different than the Facebook lawsuit against StudiVZ, the German Facebook copycat that only last week TechCrunch dismissed as “nothing more than Facebook in red and translated in German?”
Here’s what’s different: that the party being copied was one of us, a software company rather than an old game company that supposedly doesn’t get it.
I know that, of all people, Redfin folks are supposed to stand for liberating data and disintermediating The Man, but I lose my stomach for it when The Man is someone who has created (or paid the creator of) a game, an essay, a photo, a song. We shake our fists at the record labels but at least they’re paying musicians.
And we shake our heads at newsrooms, but every one has become a wasteland of empty cubes, which is a travesty when more people are reading the news than ever before. Spare me the examples of bands who offer their albums for free, then ask for donations; this is nothing more than online busking, the luxury of a great violinist sawing away at a subway stop.
It isn’t easy being a musician, a game-make or a writer but these are exactly the people who should benefit the most from the Internet, not through netizens’ pseudo-altruism but via the medium that all of TechCrunch’s hyper-capitalists purport to respect: commerce.
That we should get everything for free was once a kind of adolescent anarchism but Chris Anderson and others have made it into something much bigger, the new religion of Silicon Valley. For the folks who don’t have venture capital, free’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
TechCrunch is one of the best blogs out there because it has always stood up for the creative guy over the thief. You guys should do that now, even if it’s for Hasbro.
Photocredit (yes, I’m dimly aware of the irony): Wiseacre on Flickr.
July 28, 2008
There’s a home for sale in Shoreline that is either much smaller than it seems, or is being menaced by a giant golden shepherd. Here’s one of the listing photos:
The screen shot, taken from Redfin’s site, has already been featured on PhotoshopDisasters. Seemingly the only rational explanation for the photo is that it’s a marketing gimmick, which in posting about the property on this blog, I have just fallen for…
July 3, 2008
Lots of prominent venture capitalists, including Fred Wilson and now Bill Gurley, are writing this week about the dearth of IPOs first reported by Matt Richtel in the New York Times. This quarter was the first since 1978 that a venture-financed company didn’t go public.
But the real headline isn’t the dearth itself, but the fact that some of the smartest people in VC are fine with it. It’s like the PGA moved the Masters to a pitch-and-putt, and Tiger Woods applauded the decision.
The argument goes that a public company just isn’t a worthwhile aspiration anymore for Internet or software companies, in large part because of a lions-tigers-and-bears litany of regulations that the National Association of Venture Capitalists is asking everyone to complain about. Bill cites 15 (holy cow!) companies in Benchmark’s portfolio with more than $50 million in revenues, all still private.
“I don’t think we have a demand problem, we have a supply problem,” Bill writes. “No one wants to manage a public company.”
This is a pleasant conceit, that all of us could manage a public company if only we wanted to. But the real supply problem is how many companies can — not how many want to — grow into large, profitable, stand-alone businesses.
In this respect, Bill chose the wrong threshold for companies that could go public. At $50 million in revenues, you would be spending 2 - 4% of revenues (roughly $1 - 2 million per year) on the costs of being public. That doesn’t sound good.
But how many Web 2.0 companies today have a chance of reaching $100 million in revenues, then $500 million? Maybe we have the next Google, eBay, or Amazon among our ranks now. If so, I doubt the new regulations are enough to deter them from growing into public companies.
Characterizing folks who cash out as just smarter or more realistic than those who want to build a stand-alone business seems just as misguided as the 90’s macho insistence on an IPO for its own sake. There are some businesses where M&A makes more sense, and others that can prosper on their own (forget the companies so disruptive or weird that few companies will want to buy them).
M&A today is just a different game of the musical chairs we played in 1999. Who is going to be left to buy technology companies if technology companies stop going public? It can’t just be Google and Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and IAC forever.
That means we have to keep building business to be businesses, not just to get bought. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who, if they could grow a business to $100 million and beyond, would prefer to keep building it rather than get acquired. The hard part for us isn’t the regulations, it’s getting past $100 million, which takes patience, big thinking, and a huge appetite for risk.
When brilliant folks like Bill Gurley and Fred Wilson start giving up on that project, it’s time for high-tech to get its mojo back.
June 21, 2008
There was a fire in the Seattle-based data center that Redfin uses to host our web servers, causing a loss of service between approximately 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. Pacific Time. The entire data center was shut down by the fire department, including universal power supplies. Thanks to Redfin’s Chris Neitzert and his team, the site is now up and running. Throughout the interruption, our agents have of course stayed at their posts working with clients. But as the data center installs new equipment, it is possible that we will experience much-briefer interruptions in our website service around midnight tonight. We will continue to be available by telephone at 877-973-3346 or through the direct number our clients have for their agents.
For now, we apologize for the interruption in our service.
June 19, 2008
There’s a juicy conversation about short sales on Redfin’s Bay Area Forums, from the rare bird who successfully completed a short sale (which is when you buy a home for less than what is owed on the mortgage, requiring bank approval) in Pittsburg, California. He explains what it takes to win:
- Be promiscuous: I think most importantly, don’t come in expecting to get your first choice. Or your second. Or even your third. We made offers on four houses and were preparing to make an offer on a fifth when the third one finally came though. It’s kinda hit or miss with the banks, which are inundated with foreclosures and short sales…
- Don’t expect the pick of the litter: I had to change my mindset away from finding “the perfect house” to finding “a house we could live in” and then making offers on several houses before we finally got one.
- You don’t have a deal ’til the bank gets an appraisal: We made an offer (at the asking price), the bank then had the property “appraised” and counter offered, then we increased our offer $10k, and that was accepted after a few weeks.
- How long it takes depends a lot on the lender: I believe that different lenders are getting slammed with these short sales at different rates, and some banks are better equipped to deal with short sales than others.
Not earth-shattering rocket science, and we would suggest you could save yourself some time on all those offers by checking out how many banks have to approve the deal and how long they have to do it before the foreclosure auction — but for all the talk about short sales, someone who has actually closed on one is sometimes hard to find.
May 22, 2008
The inevitable blog post about a blogger’s feelings on blogging doesn’t do much for me. The confessional tone is often only a more devious ploy for attention, and the solipsism of the post is an uncomfortable reminder of the solipsism of the form, with everyone talking to ourselves, while hardly anyone listens.
So why, when I felt so busy this morning, couldn’t I stop reading the New York Times Magazine’s ten-page essay from a former Gawker blogger about blogging, written by Emily Gould? At first it was the picture of the author sleeping beside her laptop. Then it was this one beautiful sentence: she wrote after a breakup that she felt like “the last living speaker of some dying language.”
And finally it was that she seemed like the most unlikely person in the world to explain what every blogger sooner or later learns: that communication without the possibility of privacy is hardly communication at all (whenever someone I’ve met for a hot chocolate asks “How are you? I mean, really?” I first try to remember if he has a blog), that your voice really does sound that way on the answering machine, that the accumulation of hastily written (and sometimes not-so-hastily-written), calculating, heartfelt, boring, argumentative, funny posts might be who you really are, less likable than you’d hoped, irrevocably given away to strangers.
Reading the essay’s description of people blogging morning, noon and night, it was hard not to think of Adam Gopnik’s description of Shakespeare characters as “compulsion machines, capable of charm.”
The comments are also good: “Turn off the computer, drive to Coney Island and jump in the ocean. Cleanse yourself and start all over again. You won’t be missing a thing.” And: “Will the cure for cancer get this many pages [in the paper]?” And: “At first, I thought I was reading the sophomore page of the student newspaper at Harding High in Yokelville, Ohio. Then I realized that it was the New York Times. Just awful.” Reading a perfect snark like that, I still bounce up and down with excitement, which is exactly what Emily was arguing against.
Sometimes I feel like God first created people, and then the Internet, so that after we’re gone, there will still be an elaborate record — perhaps even a blueprint for our re-creation, like a self-replicating piece of DNA — of our contradictions, our multitudes.
May 16, 2008
A few months back, we released a new version of the site that let our customers download listing stats and past sales data to a spreadsheet. Then last Tuesday night, we began to require registration on Redfin’s site before allowing customers to download results from the map. People typically use this data when they’re doing a Comparative Market Analysis or CMA.
We made the change because a few of the MLSs to which we belong have requested that don’t allow indiscriminate access to listing data. As one MLS has already pointed out, this will help protect home-sellers from being snail-mail spammed by movers. It’s a way to balance buyers’ hunger for information with sellers’ privacy.
And no, we’re not complaining about the MLS. As we observed this week in the New York Times, MLSs are getting more and more Internet-friendly all the time. We know how hard it is for them to set up rules that all the brokers can abide by when sharing their data, and we like belonging to the MLS. Being able to show all the homes for sale is much better for us than trying to build our own partial database, which is what the non-brokers have to do.
Here’s an example of the data you can download once you’re logged in:
Several Redfin users have noticed the change. One asked us the question:
I can’t seem to see/find the download button when pulling data for homes that have sold, to build comparisons.
What am I missing?
Thanks,
ZK
ZK, you’re not missing anything, but now you need to register and log in to see the data. If you register, we won’t spam you, sell or rent your email address, or otherwise do nefarious things. And of course you get to use all kinds of cool site features like email updates on your search, RSS feeds, and the ability to tell the difference between homes for which you’ve viewed details (lighter colors) and those for which you haven’t (darker).
We think registration for download is a good thing: serious buyers still get the data that helps them make a sound offer, as well as other benefits. And sellers don’t get spammed.
May 5, 2008
While in general we believe that more information is better, we recently learned how the information on our website can be used for indecorous purposes. The winner of DC Metrocentric’s most recent PriceChecker competition used Redfin to look up the price of a DC condo, rather than make a guess. DC Metrocentric is a blog about housing and development in and around Washington, DC. We’re fans of their PriceChecker series in which they profile a property and ask readers to guess the price. After a few days, they reveal the listing price and a winner based on the closest guess. The property profiles are great, especially if the property has an animal skin rug.
The winner of the latest PriceChecker found the list price on Redfin. In the comments, Roy, the winner, admits he used Redfin to get the price. Fransie wants Roy’s “PriceChecker Crown revoked.” Clearly the commenters are having fun with this. While we’re glad that Roy uses Redfin and was able to find the property, we hope this doesn’t lead to the downfall of the PriceChecker series. What do you think? Cheating or smart research?
Photo credit: laffy4k on Flickr.
