I Tunes Could be Better

I think one feature that would really enhance the i-tunes experience is having updates from your favorite bands. I think there should be a feature where you can "subscribe" to your favorite bands and receive updates from them when new music, concert tickets, video etc... become available.

Having i-tunes run through the internet would help this, but in any case, when a band you have subscribed to, say puts concert tickets up for sale, you should recieve a news feed on your itunes or even if you have an i-phone you could have it sent directly to your phone as an alert. This makes the experience more personal and keeps you constantly connected with both i-tunes and its content.

Ecommerce is about ease

Instead of looking at a huge ecommerce site like Amazon.com I want to look at a site on a smaller scale that larger ones such as Amazon could take notes from.

The website merchdirect.com sells merchandise for a wide array of rock bands. Their homepage is very simple and eyecatching with a lot of pictures of various new merchandise. The only drawback on their page is there is no "search" function, only a pulldown menu of all the bands they represent. I think once they grow larger it would be much more useful to implement a search function that also includes recommendations on similar bands to those you are looking at.

One feature i really like is that each bands merchandise page you go to isnt just a standard look but rather allows the bands to reflect their image by putting up different backgrounds etc...

The transactions are very simple and it allows you to buy merchandise from many different bands stores at once so that you can save on shipping.

I think bigger sites like Amazon could take a cue from merchdirect.com in eliminating a lot of the clutter on their pages and keeping the essentials of what your customers need.

Starting companies with your friends is hard to do

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#2



I think the movie Startup.com was compelling as a whole. It was a rare look into a process that can be very exciting, complicated, and disastrous as the movie showed. Having considered an entrepreneurial route with friends before, it was fascinating to watch how much success and heartbreak the whole process can cause.

Particularly what i learned from the movie was that if you are going to start a business, whether with close friends or not, it is absolutely crucial to be able to separate professional realms from personal. You have to be able to be one distinct person at work and totally separate that from who you are at home.

Easy money is sweet!

My buddy just told me about this site called yuwie.com Its like a myspace site but you actually get paid for being on there depending on how many referrals/profile views you get a month. Not really sure how well it works yet, but its free to sign up so its worth a shot.

If you want to check it out go to this link :) Lets make some money together! http://yuwietip.com/i?i=481243

Here's an example of how payment can work:

The super bowl was funny

Being a completely unbiased observer to the game i found it very amusing to watch fans of both teams brag back and forth. No sooner did i recieve a text from my friend celebrating the patriots touchdown with a "Yeah yeah yeah!" than did the Giants strike back with the game winner.
This elicited a simple response of "what was that?" Personally i did not have a preference as to who won, but it was fun to rub it in to the Pat fans who thought they had a sure thing.

I heard a statistic the other day that said that more domestic violence occurs in America on Superbowl Sunday than any other day of the year. After watching how insane people get during the game this year made that stat easy to believe.

That being said, the commercials this year were way better than last year.