this is sippey.typepad.com

oh thank god

It was about time.

Strawberry Shortcake was having an identity crisis. The "it" doll and cartoon star of the 1980s was just not connecting with modern girls. Too candy-obsessed. Too ditzy. Too fond of wearing bloomers. So her owner, American Greetings Properties, worked for a year on what it calls a “fruit-forward” makeover. Strawberry Shortcake, part of a line of scented dolls, now prefers fresh fruit to gumdrops, appears to wear just a dab of lipstick (but no rouge), and spends her time chatting on a cellphone instead of brushing her calico cat, Custard.

In other words... "The Princesses have been kicking us in the ass while those God awful Bratz girls have been kicking us upside the head, so people we have to do something... I know, let's give her a cellphone! That'll make it all better."

infectious!

Kudos to Tim Roberts on launching Infectious, his new company which brings easy-to-apply car art to the masses. They've got simple icons, accent kits, hood pieces, door kits, side kits and full car customization kits -- all installable by normal humans.

Tim first told me about the idea for this company a few years ago (before he was at Odeo, I think?) and I'm really excited to see it come to life. Their site is super fun to explore, and I can imagine all sorts of interesting ways they could drive more artwork into their catalog. Their blog is great, and Michael Arrington had a post a couple of weeks ago with some video of just how easy it is to install the stickers on your car.

Now, to figure out just the right way to spice up the boring gray hybrid...

wsj on the fall of bear stearns

The Journal has been running its three-part series on the fall of Bear Stearns, and it's absolutely worth reading, assuming you have a reasonable amount of stomach lining to spare. Worth quoting at length, this excerpt about the Sunday night conference call between a group of "Wall Street CEOs" (the Journal's words, not mine) discussing the (then) $2 per share buy out of Bear by J.P. Morgan...

Messrs. Geithner and Dimon led off with some brief remarks, noting that J.P. Morgan would be guaranteeing Bear Stearns's debts and that if the pact hadn't come together, the market impact may have been catastrophic. During the question-and-answer session, Citigroup Inc.'s new CEO, Vikram Pandit, spoke up.

Mr. Pandit -- who did not initially identify himself -- asked a shrewd but technical question: How would the deal affect the risk to Bear Stearns's trading partners on certain long-term contracts?

The query irked Mr. Dimon. "Who is this?" he snapped. Mr. Pandit identified himself as "Vikram." Offended that Mr. Pandit was taking up time with what he considered granular inquiries, Mr. Dimon shot back, "Stop being such a jerk." He added that Citigroup "should thank us" for staving off further mayhem on Wall Street.

The online feature has all sorts of video and links to archived stories about the fall.

working overtime

“I want to thank you, Mr. Secretary, for working over the weekend."
President Bush, thanking Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for, ya know, putting in a few extra hours to prop up the financial markets.

Speaking of which, there was a piece in the Times on Sunday morning before the JP Morgan deal was announced that valued the Bear Stearns tower in midtown at $1 billion.  Compare and contrast that figure with the $270 million purchase price for the firm...including the real estate.

we're here to compete

(Update 3/12/08:  Wow, I guess all this talk about competition struck a nerve.)

Since when does "competing" equal "playing dirty"? 

Yesterday we ran a post on movabletype.com that touts the advantages of Movable Type over the soon-to-be-released (any day now) Wordpress 2.5. Was the title of the post ("A Wordpress 2.5 Upgrade Guide") cheeky? Sure. Was the post timed for the release of 2.5? Of course! But was the post an accurate representation of the capabilities of Movable Type? Absolutely.

In response (as I'm sure you've seen by now if you read TechCrunch), Matt Mullenwegg twittered "six apart is getting desperate - and dirty." 

I don't call our post desperate or dirty -- I call it competing.

At Six Apart we've been working extraordinarily hard on MT, and we're proud of the product. Over the past year it's been great to see the platform energized and have loads of bloggers moving to MT -- and in some cases even coming back after leaving us for a while. And as Anil pointed out in the post, we know we're not done -- we have an ambitious development schedule for the MT platform, which has evolved from a professional blogging tool to a powerful social networking platform.

So yes -- we're going to compete. And we're going to name check our competition in blog posts when we feel it's warranted. Matt shouldn't have a problem with that -- after all, he has a long history of name checking Six Apart and our products...including characterizing one of our most prominent TypePad bloggers as a "sharecropper." (I'll leave the value judgment re. that particular choice of words as an exercise for the reader.)

Finally, if you're a dyed-in-the-wool Wordpress fan and we have no chance of ever convincing you to switch to a Six Apart product, that's fine. But you should recognize that having a strong, healthy and evolving set of alternatives to those provided by Automattic is only good for blogging. As Anil said in his post, all of us at Six Apart are here because we take seriously our responsibility to invent the future of blogging. We're doing that with our products, we're proud of the work we're doing, and we're here to compete.

optimistic hyperbolic nonsense. and beer.

Via Waxy, who is, actually, in Austin this weekend, Mat Honan's post on his fake stream of <140 char posts from southby. Worth quoting at length.

So there I am. In Austin. Drunk. Foolish. Recklessly and unknowingly wealthy. Using pointless hashtags in my 140 character messages, and generally espousing the kind of optimistic hyperbolic nonsense that would indicate I have no memory of the years 1999 and 2000 when everyone with any sense realized it’s just a business, and not some sort of Utopian Flan we shall all consume together in glory!

But it is just a business. And if you ever fucking forget that at the end of the day your only purpose is to deliver to your customers what they need, you shall soon be back to tapping your trust fund. If you are not already.

Sure, it would be nice to be there. After all, I like the nighlife, baby.

"I wouldn't call it a courtesy call."
Steve Ballmer on the call he placed to Jerry Yang last night.

yes, i'm obsessed with bags

Yesterday American Public Media's Marketplace ran a segment on the death of the plastic shopping bag and the rise of the reusable. Here in San Francisco plastic shopping bags have been banned, and when you're around town you see more and more folks trucking around their consumables in their own bags.

The Marketplace story featured Vincent Cobb, president of the ecommerce site Reusablebags.com, which sells, obviously, a wide variety of reusable shopping bags -- from ultracompact to thermal to heavy duty. They're also venturing into the "Fashionable" category, with about 15 SKUs that are a little less utilitarian and a little more "high design." The entire category of reusable shopping bag is relatively new; though Reusablebags.com was started in 2003, searches for similar product on eBags.com, the gorilla in the bags space, came up empty.

Which brings me to the opportunity: designer and custom-printed reusable shopping bags. The trend setters in the major cities (where banning or reducing the use of plastic shopping bags is likely to happen) are going to look at the shopping bag as another outlet for self-expression. In the near term, look for boutiques in these cities to start carrying limited run high-design reusable shopping bags.

And then, look for the shopping bag to jump to the mass-customization and community-designed segments. How long until Zazzle or Qoop offers custom printed shopping bags? Wouldn't you just love to guilt your friends and family into adopting a reusable bag with a bag that features pictures of their kids? ("Do it for the children...") Or how about skinnycorp spinning out a threadless or Naked and Angry tailored for shopping bags? The clever illustration opportunities are endless...

things i didn't know, latest in a series

Via Mike, I learned something about meerkats today: they don't wear headphones.

Meerkats demonstrate altruistic behavior within their colonies; one or more meerkats stand sentry (lookout) while others are foraging or playing, to warn them of approaching dangers. When a predator is spotted, the meerkat performing as sentry gives a warning bark, and other members of the gang will run and hide in one of the many bolt holes they have spread across their territory. The sentry meerkat is the first to reappear from the burrow and search for predators, constantly barking to keep the others underground. If there is no threat, the sentry meerkat stops signaling and the others feel safe to emerge.

Who's your meerkat?

what else do you need to know?

Michael is enjoying his brand new pair of Keen sneakers, which he bought from Zappos.  Michael is enjoying a triple grande latte, which he bought from the Starbucks at the corner of 4th and Brannan. Michael is comfortably clad in a pair of Levi 501 blue jeans, which he bought at the Levi's store in Union Square in San Francisco.  Michael is typing on a 13" white Apple MacBook, which was purchased for him through CDW's remarkable online store.