Saturday, August 27, 2005

Hurricane Katrina takes aim at New Orleans, a city that is dangerously vulnerable to a category 4 hurricane. It is entirely below sea level, when you walk along the waterfront, you look up at the Mississippi River. The city is being evacuated now.  

SciGuy: "New Orleans will fill up like a fish bowl." 

American RadioWorks: Hurricane Risk for New Orleans. 

National Hurricane Center RSS feed.  

TechCrunch: "Google Talk works and it looks and sounds cool. It’s now the 15th IM client on my desktop." 

I'm going on a Labor Day car cruise on with Scoble & Son. Where to go, where to go? It's gotta be somewhere close to The Silicon Valley, like Monterey or Sacramento. Maybe Marin or Santa Cruz? A railroad museum? Fry's? Is there a new Spiderman movie?  

Doc Searls: "I can't code, but I can make a helluva cappuccino." 

Mary Hodder likes Google Talk, but... 

Om Malik: "The record business is split into two camps -- one that wants price of downloads to stay at 99 cents, and the boneheads." 

Speaking of the online music biz, here's why Kleiner-Perkins invested in Podshow. First, a caveat, this is just tea-leave-reading and wild speculation. OK, as reported here in June, Google has an iTunes clone in the works. Probably works great with cell phones, unlike iTunes itself which works great with iPods (of course). KP has the inside track because they have a Google board seat, and Doerr is architecting the whole thing anyway. Enter Podshow, which gets a sweet deal with Google to provide the first apps and content for their iTunes me-too, all the while in bed with Uncle Steve on iTunes. Instant mini-bubble, Podshow goes public, Adam and Ron retire to Miami, and KP pockets the profits.