Last week, AOL acquired an amazing small startup called Truveo that has developed a completely new way to find and catalog video content online.  Rather than singing its praises, however, I encourage you to check it out at Truveo.com and compare it with other leading video search engines like Yahoo and MSN.  For example, a quick search for "hoyas basketball" — to check on my alma mater Georgetown’s team — found nothing on MSN and a few videos from February and March of last year on Yahoo!  On Truveo, by comparison, the very first result was ESPN highlights from our game against the West Virginia Mountaineers on Wednesday.  Check it out.  It’s very cool.   .

I just finished reading Black Ice:  The Lost History of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes, 1895-1925 by George and Darril Fosty.  I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about this little-known league and the enormous and far-reaching impact it had on the sport of ice hockey.

I have XM radio in my car, and it’s fabulous. It’s whatever type of music I want, whenver I want it. They even have an NHL channel with NHL shows. And the growth of paid radio as an industry is an interesting example of how consumers can be convinced to pay for something that was once free, but only if they get better quality and more choice.

I have XM radio in my car, and it’s fabulous.  It’s whatever type of music I want, whenver I want it.  They even have an NHL channel with NHL shows.  And the growth of paid radio as an industry is an interesting example of how consumers can be convinced to pay for something that was once free, but only if they get better quality and more choice.

The model for radio since its invention has always been free.  The radio stations offer you – the consumer – great music, but in exchange, they expect you to listen to their ads.  But over the past few decades, as big media companies rolled up smaller radio stations, independent stations disappeared, the variety of music faded, and most playlists became a never-ending repetition of bad Top 40s songs.  Consumers searching for their favorite music or news — whether reggae, or classical, or latin, or sports — found themselves without any options.The satellite radio companies saw that need and immediately filled it.  And because they offered more choice, better programming, higher quality, and more innovation, consumers responded — even though they had to PAY to get it.   A similar thing happened during the transition from free TV to paid cable, as consumers opted to pay to get a hundred channels of vibrant programming on cable rather than get just a handful of broadcast channels for free. 

Hugh Panero, a good friend of mine and a big Caps fan, grew up in the cable industry, and now he’s applying those same lessons to the satellite radio industry as CEO of XM Radio.

Check out XM Radio on AOL.com 

It’s a telling lesson for those of us in the Internet business, as our business is

Artists you probably know:

Bob Marley John Lennon Foo Fighters Sheryl Crowe Beck

And some you might not

The Zutons Ozomatli Dialated Peoples Daft Punk

Margaret Cheney’ biography of Nikola Tesla tells the story of one of the great scientists and characters of our time.  Anyone who is interested in the history of science or in the man whose work has been fundamental to our knowledge of computers and robotics should read this book.   It’s also a great reminder of the adage that behind every great man is a great publicist.  Tesla should have been more famous than Edison, but apparently he lacked Edison’s PR team.

Sunday was my 50th birthday, and as I celebrated with my family, I started thinking about a few of the things I wish I’d known as a younger man.

Twenty-five years ago, my first business was just taking off.  It was a consumer business — publishing — but based on technology.  And the lesson I learned in that business is one that applies equally to everything I’ve done since:  Stay close to your customer.  Whenever I’ve gotten more than two steps removed from my actual customer, or I’ve stopped really using my products, my products — and my business — have suffered.  When I was publishing my magazine, and I read every page and went to the focus groups, it did pretty good.  But when it started to expand, I hired an editor, and a publisher, and a group editor and a group publisher, and I sometimes only read the magazine when it came out.  Guess what?  It did worse.  As I got further away from the product, and less in tune with my consumers, the product wasn’t as good and my business did worse.  That’s the challenge:  How do you scale and grow a business while staying really close to your customers and the product?  It’s a balancing act.  You can be innovative and take risks when your company is small and private, but it’s much tougher when you get to be big and public.  The other thing, on a personal level, is how time accelerates as you get older.  I was looking at colleges with my son the other day.   When I joined AOL in 1993, he was just four years old.  Now he’s 17, and next year he goes away to college.  People say that the older you get, the faster time flies.  Well, they’re right.  And despite all the time I spend with my family, there will never be enough. 

The C-word is back. Last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has become *the* show for new media, and what’s driving it is convergence.

The C-word is back.  Last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has become *the* show for new media, and what’s driving it is convergence.

In fact, despite the name, the star of the show this year wasn’t some gee-whiz new tech gadget but a raft of new ways for consumers to download, watch, save, and exchange their favorite songs, shows, and videos.  With announcement after announcement by leading content providers, Internet companies, and hardware makers, CES was a huge step toward that oft-discussed but long-unfulfilled vision of a converged world.  (Check out AOL’s announcement with Intel for just one example.)For the past decade, most media on the Internet has been stuck in the electronic equivalent of primordial ooze.  We knew that convergence would eventually come, but change came slowly.  Moore’s law continued to make chips faster, broadband adoption continued to grow, and new devices like cell phones and iPods continued to proliferate.  But the most important factor in laying the groundwork for a converged world has been social, rather than technological: a new generation of consumers who look at "new media" as THE media. With all those trends at work, you finally have a critical mass for media convergence to being in earnest.  It’s still really early in the adoption, of course.  Only a few million paid videos have been downloaded so far.  We’re not even at day one for that industry.  But videos are going to follow the same growth pattern as music, and the same thing was true of legal music downloads until a couple years ago.  This year, however, Apple announced that it will likely sell 1 *billion* songs online.  That’s good.  But even that industry is still in a very early phase of adoption. 

Nonetheless, I think we will look back and see this year as the tipping point when convergence was transformed from a hollow buzzword into a real consumer-driven trend.

The good news for AOL is that we’ve been working toward this goal for many years now, and it’s very rewarding to see our vision finally becoming a reality.  As Woody Allen said, 70% of success in life is just showing up, and companies like AOL have been showing up

Just saw "The Power of Good" on HBO about Nicholas Winton, an Englishman who saved the lives of over 600 children in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Be sure to see it.

If you click here – your new AIM superbuddy will be a cartoon caricature of me.

Every person has events take place when they are younger that shape and guide how they lead the rest of their life. For me, one such event took place in the early 1980s, just after I sold my first company. Without going into all the details, suffice it to say that I had a close brush with my own mortality, and it made me rethink my priorities and how I planned to lead my life going forward. At the time, I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant to live life on offense, but I decided that a good place to start was by giving myself a scorecard – a tool that I could use to make sure that I accomplish everything I want to with my life. I spent the next few days writing down all of my personal and professional goals and there are 101 items on the list. So far I’ve managed to check off 74 of them, and I fully intend to do the rest, although going into outer space may be a bit of a reach.Over the years, I’ve encouraged many people, friends and strangers alike, to create their own lists, to chart out their own goals and dreams and to always live their lives on offense. Continue reading →