Lee Semel

I’ve been looking for a device like this for a long time, and finally found one. This miniature amp lets you ditch your tinny, underpowered computer speakers, and directly hook up high-quality stereo speakers directly to your computer. Despite being inexpensive, it has a great sound. If you get the original, be sure to get an AC adapter for it as well, otherwise it runs on batteries. In my opinion, the maker of this product doesn’t know what it’s got on its hands — it seems to be targeted toward audiophiles, but at this combination of low price and high quality, anyone who uses their computer as their music source should get one.

Saatchi Gallery makes the NY Times with a niche social networking website dedicated to artists to view and share their work. A lot of entrepreneurs are trying to create riffs on MySpace, so I wonder if this is part of the next wave of social networking… sites for narrow audiences, associated with established brand names for cachet, and used as sort of a recruiting or A&R mechanism to find the best people in a given community. For instance Pixar could create a community for aspiring 3D animators, or Google a social network for programmers.

NextNY, a networking/social group I’m involved with, had its final meeting of the year this week. Since Charlie O’Donnell started the group this spring by announcing it at a Meetup, it’s grown from one guy’s idea to a group of more than 200 people, according the membership list on our Wiki. That’s pretty impressive. I wonder how many members we’ll be able to count this time next year.

I was part of a team, led by my brother Matt, that produced a commercial for Firefox to enter in the Firefox Flicks contest. It’s been selected as one of four to air on TV, right now, in Boston and San Francisco. If you’re in one of those cities and want to catch it, here’s a partial schedule. And if you haven’t seen it at all, you can watch it here.

If you have a need for a Thinkpad that’s been drilled through, spray painted red, is missing half the keys, and has been subject to a pyrotechnic explosion, I’ve got one for you. Sorry, no warranty!

I’m a collector of everything related to architecture and urbanism in New York City, especially books and old maps. And I was an avid player of SimCity when I had more time for games. So I was especially excited to find out about The New York City Journals, a blog based on a detailed recreation of New York in SimCity. The author recreates not only the buildings, but major events, like the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Upper East Side plane crash.

The most successful sites are starting to become more and more like games, according to Amy Jo Kim. Sites like eBay and YouTube thrive and become addictive by incorporating game-like activities: collecting items, earning points, getting performance feedback, making deals and exchanges with other players, and creating customizations. The prediction: The way we consume media now is on the way out, and in the future media will incorporate lessons from all types of games, from Space Invaders to Legend of Zelda, to create a richer experience.

The Viral Learning Center will teach you everything you need!

About two years ago, I made a prediction: That for every section on Craigslist there would be a whole company founded to improve on it. These startups would try to one-up Craigslist with a better interface, better features, social networking, or search tailored toward their particular type of listing. It looks like that’s pretty much what happened. Can anyone point to any section of Craigslist that doesn’t correspond to some Web 2.0 company?

I fail to understand why there’s such a rush of entrepreneurs to get into the latest “hot space.” Do entrepreneurs really think they’ll succeed by jumping into an area that’s already been publicized to death, with massive competition already lined up, and where Google, Yahoo and the other major companies have already made their big acquisitions? I’d much rather work on something completely obscure and out of left field, and develop it until it becomes the next “hot space.”

Maybe I’m missing something obvious — please enlighten me on the logic here.