Quotulatiousness

March 15, 2013

Will the death of Google Reader also be the death of RSS?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Felix Salmon on the knock-on ramifications of Google’s announcement that it is killing Google Reader:

But whether or not Reader was ever going to be a good business for Google, it was from day one a fantastic public service for its users. Google started as a public service — a way to find what you were looking for on the internet — and didn’t stop there. Google would also do things like buy the entire Usenet archives, or scan millions of out-of-print books, or put thousands of people to work making maps, all in order to be able to get all sorts of information to anybody who wants it. [. . .]

The problem with the death of Reader is that it was the architecture underpinning lots of other services — the connective tissue of just about all RSS readers and services, from Summify to Reeder to Flipboard. You didn’t even need to use Google Reader; it was just the master central repository of your master OPML list, all the different feeds that you were subscribed to. Google spent real money to provide that public service, and it’s going to be sorely missed. As Marco Arment says, “every major iOS RSS client is still dependent on Google Reader for feed crawling and sync.”

Arment sees a silver lining in the cloud, saying that with Google gone, “we’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.” I’m less sanguine. Building an RSS sync platform is a hard and pretty thankless task, it costs real money, and it might not work at all — especially in a world where less and less content is actually available in RSS format. (You can subscribe to my Tumblr feed in RSS format, but there’s no such feed for my posts on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Path or even Google+.)

RSS has been dying for years — that’s why Google killed Reader. It was a lovely open format; it has sadly been replaced with proprietary feeds like the ones we get from Twitter and Facebook. That’s not an improvement, but it is reality. Google, with Reader, was really providing the life-support mechanism for RSS. Once Reader is gone, I fear that RSS won’t last much longer.

Is Lockheed’s C-130 Hercules the all-time champion in US pork barrel politics?

Filed under: Business, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Ian Geldard linked to this rather interesting history lesson on the Lockheed C-130 transport aircraft (the RCAF is also a user of this type of plane, along with a large number of other air forces):

USAF Lockheed Hercules C-130 at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo (Photo from Wikimedia)

USAF Lockheed Hercules C-130 at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo (Photo from Wikimedia)

Here’s where the story starts to get interesting. After 25 years, the Pentagon decided that it was well stocked with C-130s, so President Jimmy Carter’s administration stopped asking Congress for more of them.

Lockheed was in trouble. A few years earlier, the Air Force had started looking into replacing the Hercules with a new medium-sized transport plane that could handle really short runways, and Lockheed wasn’t selected as one of the finalists. Facing bankruptcy due to cost overruns and cancellations of programs, the company squeezed Uncle Sam for a bailout of around $1 billion in loan guarantees and other relief (which was unusual back then, as William Hartung points out his magisterial Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex).

[. . .]

So what did Lockheed do about the fate of the C-130? It bypassed the Pentagon and went straight to Congress. Using a procedure known as a congressional “add-on” — that is, an earmark — Lockheed was able to sell the military another fleet of C-130s that it didn’t want.

To be fair, the Air Force did request some C-130s. Thanks to Senator John McCain, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) did a study of how many more C-130s the Air Force requested between 1978 and 1998. The answer: Five.

How many did Congress add on? Two hundred and fifty-six.

[. . .]

The Air Force’s approach of passing unwanted Herks off to the Air Guard and Reserves worked out nicely for Lockheed. The company allied with Air Guard and reservist advocacy groups to lobby Congress further. In an era of base closures, heavily lobbied governors would use the arrival of new planes to argue for the continuing life of bases in their states. In turn, states and their congressional delegations would fight to get new planes or hang onto existing ones. It was a veritable Lockheed feedback loop. Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus quoted a Pentagon official as seeing C-130 politics as a twist on the old military-industrial complex: “a triangle of the Guard, Lockheed, and politicians.”

The result: the military was often prevented from retiring the oldest Herks, the ones that really needed to be put out to pasture. For example, as Pincus reported, the Joint Chiefs and the Air Force concluded in 1996 that they had 50 more C-130s than they needed, but Congress stymied efforts to retire any of them. One tactic used was to hold nominees hostage: a Kentucky senator repeatedly held up Air Force promotions until four Kentucky Air Guard C-130s were taken off the chopping block.

March 14, 2013

The scare stories about increasing antibiotic resistance

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Health, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

In sp!ked, Robin Walsh debunks some of the scare factor from recent reports about antibiotic resistant diseases and the looming pandemic:

The UK’s chief medical officer (CMO), Professor Dame Sally Davies, made a splash in the media this week with her warning that antibiotic resistance is the new climate change. There is a ‘catastrophic threat’ of ‘untreatable’ diseases, she said, which promise to return us to a ‘nineteenth century’ state of affairs. The CMO has form: she warned the House of Commons health select committee about the same problem in similarly stringent terms back in January — a case not so much of apocalypse now, as apocalypse again.

As with all such stories, reading the actual CMO’s report leavens some of the hysterical excesses of the press, which were stoked up by the CMO’s excitable media appearances. Setting out the epidemiology of infectious diseases in the UK, the report highlights that while some drug-resistant infections, such as the well-known Clostridium difficile (C diff) and MRSA, are becoming less widespread, there is an increasing occurence of harder to treat multi-drug resistant bacterial infections, which, although still only in the hundreds of cases per year, are on the rise. The report states that only five antibiotics to fight such infections are currently in phase II or III trials, so the cupboard seems worryingly bare of new, necessary drugs.

So if we’re running short on drugs, how can we make more? A sensible article in the British Medical Journal from 2010 clearly set out the challenges facing the development of new antibiotics. Firstly, there are many regulatory hurdles that make running clinical trials in this area difficult. More importantly, there is a major financial disincentive for drug companies to develop antibiotics. Currently, drugs which are profitable are those for chronic conditions that are prescribed lifelong: painkillers for arthritis, diabetes drugs, and the like. A drug that you take once to cure you is unprofitable; doubly so if it is likely to be husbanded to prevent resistance developing until the patent runs out. A change in government payments to incentivise new antibiotics, like that which already applies to so-called ‘orphan’ drugs for rare diseases, would be an easy and rational step towards producing more drugs that meet our needs.

March 12, 2013

A stunning technical achievement

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:22

No, not the tablet — the stunning ability to condescend to half of the human race:

The ePad Femme: for women everywhere who have no interests except their own bodies and having babies, which is apparently all of them.

The ePad Femme: for women everywhere who have no interests except their own bodies and having babies, which is apparently all of them.

At long last, a company has designed a tablet fit for the use of an entire gender that has, thus far, apparently gone unserved. The ePad Femme, designed and distributed by the Eurostar Group, is an eight-inch tablet that comes pre-loaded with apps concerning yoga, grocery shopping, and cooking. Thank the heavens, ladies may never trouble their pretty heads with such difficulties as finding and downloading their own apps ever again.

The tablet was first announced back in October but received a marketing push in February as “the perfect Valentine’s Day gift,” noted one site. The tablet runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, or as a woman might call it, “the Android screensaver.” Eurostar calls the ePad Femme “the first tablet specifically for ladies.”

Several sites highlight that the tablet “comes in light pink.” Despite our best efforts, we’ve failed to find an image verifying that the actual body of the tablet is pink, so we assume this is in reference to the home screen wallpaper. Just as well, since what woman is going to figure out how to configure that, am I right? Settings, right? What even are they?

Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, Eurostar associate vice president of marketing Mani Nair said that the tablet comes with the preloaded womanly applications so the user can “just turn it on and log in to cooking recipes or yoga.” He went on to state that the ePad Femme “makes a perfect gadget for a woman who might find difficulties in terms of downloading these applications and it is a quick reference.”

March 11, 2013

Chris Kluwe on the PR disaster that was the SimCity 5 launch

Filed under: Business, Gaming — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:13

In addition to his “day job” as the punter for the Minnesota Vikings, and his public advocacy role in pushing for same-sex marriage, Chris Kluwe is also a gamer. In this latter persona, he was invited to review the new SimCity 5 release from EA games on behalf of PC Gamer. Business Insider had to bleep out a fair bit of raw Kluwe-ism in the aftermath:

Hi. I’m Chris. I’ve been playing SimCity ever since the Super Nintendo version, and I’ve always been a huge fan of the franchise (SimCity 3000 is my favorite). Thus, when PC Gamer came to me and said “Hey Chris! We want you to play the new SimCity 5 with us in our Celebrity SimCity region,” I wasted no time in responding with a resounding “Hell yeah!”

I mean, what could go wrong?

(Other than the inevitable giant lizards, meteor showers, and poor sewage planning that happen in every SimCity game)

[. . .]

At the time of writing this piece, SimCity 5 has been active for almost 62 hours. Of those 62 hours, I’ve been able to log in for around ten. Of those ten, four consisted of massive latency issues and corrupted games, so (quick calculation here), I’ve had access to the actual game for maybe 10 percent of the time I’ve had it. EA’s servers are, to put it bluntly, utterly bug[redacted], and there’s no option to play the game offline.

Therein lies the heart of my problem. SimCity is, at its heart, a single player game. Having access to other players’ cities is cool, but I want to build MY city, and I don’t want some [redacted], totally unnecessary “always on” DRM to keep me from playing the game (full disclosure: PC Gamer was kind enough to provide me with a download code for the game, so you can only imagine my rage levels if I had actually put money into EA’s pockets for this “experience”).

And now the math:

Sadly, EA seems to have failed to do some very simple math. Let’s look at an example. We’ll assume that for an amazingly successful game like SimCity, about 20,000 people will end up pirating it (those who have the technical knowhow and Internet savvy to find a working crack). I have 160,000 Twitter followers, of whom around 50,000 follow me for gaming. I just told those 50,000 people NOT to buy SimCity because EA cannot handle its s***, and the game is unplayable. We’ll say half those people listen to me and haven’t bought the game already. Soooo, carrying the pi, we see that EA is already out 5,000 more sales than if they had just created a normal, single player offline capable game with multiplayer components.

(Don’t forget, “always on” DRM also screws over people who don’t have access to Internet for large periods of time, like rural areas and travelers. More lost sales!)

In addition to the bad PR of a terrible launch experience, EA is also reportedly refusing to process refunds to purchasers despite having made this an explicit promise in their pre-release information package.

Science fiction’s blindspot on the looming corporate menace of the future

Filed under: Books, Business, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

Kevin Williamson wonders why the dystopic corporate giant of so many science fiction books and movies doesn’t seem to be getting any closer to reality:

That the future will be dominated by amoral international (or interstellar) corporations is a constant theme of science fiction and, not unrelatedly, of progressive political thought. The rogues’ gallery includes Cyberdyne Systems (Terminator), Weyland-Yutani (Alien), Omni Consumer Products (Robocop), and Charlton Heston’s friends at Soylent Inc. The gold standard of the genre is the Tyrel Corporation, from Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The film, which is indisputably a visual masterpiece, is much heavier on the theme of corporate dominance than the novel is, which is strange: The corporation of 1982 was a smaller and weaker thing than the corporation of 1968.

At its best, science fiction imagines a future that illuminates the present, but on the subject of the social role of the corporation, science fiction has long been backward-looking, out of touch with the reality it would analyze. The cultural imagination at large shares this error, though it is difficult to say how much this defect in science fiction is a result of the cultural error and how much it is the cause. But it would be difficult to overstate how deeply the specter of the villainous corporation shapes American political thought. The influence is more visible the farther to the left one moves along the political spectrum. Occupy Wall Street was probably at least as much influenced by science-fiction visions of corporate dystopias as it was by any kind of organized political thought. There were unmistakably Maoist elements to Occupy, but the sinister connotations of the very word “corporation” are by no means heard by only those ears attached to the addled heads of committed leftists.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was set in 1992, Blade Runner in 2019, yet here we are, well into the 21st century, and there is still no colossal Tyrel Corporation bestriding the globe, and nothing like the corporate sovereignties of Jennifer Government. As myth, the corporate dystopia remains undiminished in its power. But the function of myths is to illuminate reality, and the reality is that there is no Tyrel Corporation today, and none on the horizon. If you want to know what the corporation of tomorrow looks like, don’t think Cyberdyne — think Groupon.

You would not know it from reading fiction, speaking with Occupy types, or listening to the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, but the corporation as we know it is in decline: The average size of a corporation as measured by personnel has been diminishing since 1975. In 1955 the largest U.S. company, General Motors, employed 576,000 people out of a U.S. population of 166 million; today Exxon Mobil, the largest U.S. company, employs only 82,000 people. Microsoft employs fewer than 100,000 people worldwide; Google employs about 54,000, and Facebook fewer than 6,000.

March 7, 2013

This is why I recently stopped linking to the National Post

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:18

Michael Geist explains:

… if someone wants to post a quote from Selley or anything else written by the National Post, they are now presented with pop-up box seeking a licence that starts at $150 for the Internet posting of 100 words with an extra fee of 50 cents for each additional word (the price is cut in half for non-profits).

[. . .]

None of this requires a licence or payment. In fact, the amount of copying is often so insubstantial that a fair dealing analysis is not even needed. Last year, the Federal Court of Canada ruled that several paragraphs from a National Post column by Jonathan Kay posted to an Internet chat site did not constitute copying a substantial part of the work. If there was a fair dealing analysis, there is no doubt that copying a hundred words out of an article would easily meet the fair dealing standard. In fact, the Supreme Court of Canada has indicated that copying full articles in some circumstances may be permitted.

I make no money from my blogging … in fact I pay money to maintain the web site. The idea of spending $150 per quotation from any source is pretty much a guarantee that I won’t be linking to that source very much at all. At about the same time the National Post brought in their pay-to-quote policy, they also launched a reader rewards program. The idea seemed to be that you log in to their site, it tracks everything you read and then you get a pony at the end of the day, or week, or month, or Baktun, or something. Or maybe not … I really didn’t pay too much attention.

March 5, 2013

China claims the shipbuilding title

Filed under: Business, China — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

Strategy Page talks about the success of Chinese shipyards:

Last year South Korea lost its decade long battle with China to retain its lead in ship building. Because of a five year depression in the world market for shipping, South Korean ship exports fell 30 percent last year, to $37.8 billion. China, helped by government subsidies, saw ship exports fall only 10.3 percent, leaving China with $39.2 billion in export sales. The Chinese government has also been giving its ship builders lots of new orders for warships, which made its yards more profitable and better able to beat South Korea on price. The Chinese government also provides its ship builders with more loans, allowing the builders to offer better credit terms to customers. South Korea is still ahead of China in total orders for ships. As of last year South Korea had 35 percent of these orders versus 33.3 percent for China.

China has been helping its shipyards for over a decade and that has enabled Chinese ship builders to gradually catch up to South Korea and Japan. It was only four years ago, sooner than anyone expected, that China surpassed South Korea as the world’s largest shipbuilder in terms of tonnage. In late 2009, Chinese yards had orders for 54.96 million CGT of ships, compared to 53.63 million CGT for South Korea. Thus China had 34.7 percent of the world market. In 2000, South Korea took the lead from Japan by having the largest share of the world shipbuilding market.

CGT stands for Compensated Gross Tons. This is a new standard for measuring shipyard effort. Gross tons has long been used as a measure of the volume within a ship. CGT expands on this by adding adjustments for the complexity of the ship design. Thus a chemical tanker would end up with a value four times that of a container ship. China is producing far more ships, in terms of tonnage of steel and internal volume, than South Korea, mainly because a much larger portion of Chinese ships are simple designs. South Korea has, over the years, pioneered the design, and construction, of more complex ships (chemical, and Liquid Natural gas carriers.)

Toronto the oh-so-sophisticated: riding crop sales up in Toronto, but not in the rest of the GTA

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

The Toronto Star takes the opportunity to remind their readers that Toronto tastes are so much more refined than those louts in the 905 who haven’t even heard of the Fifty Shades books:

Feeling strangely sadomasochistic these days?

It turns out you’re not alone.

Just ask Concetta Tucciarone, manager of the Greenhawk Harness & Equestrian Supplies store in North York, where sales of riding crops have mysteriously doubled during the past year or so.

The question is: why?

And the answer, apparently, has nothing to do with horses but owes everything to a sexually adventurous university student named Anastasia Steele and her dark, brooding passion for the mysterious young entrepreneur Christian Grey, “a man who is beautiful, brilliant, and intimidating.”

Plus: pretty handy with a riding crop.

Or, as the Marquis de Sade once wrote: “It is always by way of pain that one arrives at pleasure.”

This is a story about pain, pleasure — and equestrian goods.

Steele and Grey, as many readers doubtless know already, are the central characters in the decadent Fifty Shades trilogy of novels, a chart-topping publishing phenomenon penned by American writer E. L. James, a woman who has brought bondage and sadomasochism — and riding crops — into the North American cultural mainstream.

The in-crowd in Toronto are apparently thrashing away at one another in the approved style, but the peasants in the rest of the GTA still haven’t clued in:

“We have not noticed an increase at all,” says a sales clerk at the Picov’s Horsemen Centre in Ajax, who identifies herself only as Diane. “I guess in Durham Region, they’re not aware of those books.”

The same seems to be true at The Equine Emporium in Mississauga.

“Generally, we just sell to riders,” says sales clerk Jennifer Babos.

Ditto Carmen Griscti, owner of Baker’s Harness and Saddlery in Markham, who hasn’t detected a recent spike in riding-crop sales, either — but wishes he had.

“I wish I was downtown,” he says. “Can you imagine? I’d make a killing.”

March 4, 2013

Hollywood accounting tricks … bring your own popcorn for this one

Filed under: Business, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:01

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick is looking forward to some amusing courtroom antics as this case comes up:

We’ve discussed a few times the concept of Hollywood Accounting, which covers the various tricks of the trade pulled by the big studios to basically keep all the money for themselves, and guarantees that the movie is never, ever seen as “profitable,” as that would mean they would need to share some of the profits. It appears that we may be about to see significantly more dirty laundry revealing some of that Hollywood Accounting in detail. And this time, it’s extra special because it involves two companies who were corporate siblings for much of the time in dispute, as both were owned by Vivendi. However, StudioCanal is now suing Universal, claiming that Universal pulled accounting tricks to deny giving StudioCanal many, many millions of dollars that were owed.

Admit it, you probably know someone who would wear this “ironically”

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

Amazon Keep Calm and blank T-shirt

Pete Ashton explains how such an item appears on the Amazon.com website:

Nobody made, or approved, the design. This is the headfuck moment that most people can’t comprehend. There’s a completely understandable assumption that someone decided it would be a great idea to sell Keep Calm t-shirts with the word Rape on them and, because they exist (which they don’t, but let’s assume they do) that there’s a reasonable demand for them. This is because we’re used to there being a cost in producing a product like a t-shirt and an economic requirement to mass-produce them in huge numbers. If there’s a significant cost then a decision has to be made whether to spend it or not. We’re looking to blame whoever made that decision, or lament that it was even an option.

But, as we see above, there’s no cost involved. The shirts don’t exist. All that exists is a graphics file on a computer ready to be printed onto a shirt if an order comes through. Still, you might say, someone had to make that file, to type those words and click save. Not necessarily.

The t-shirts are created by an algorithm. The word “algorithm” is a little scary to some people because they don’t know what it means. It’s basically a process automated by a computer programme, sometimes simple, sometimes complex as hell. Amazon’s recommendations are powered by an algorithm. They look at what you’ve been browsing and buying, find patterns in that behaviour and show you things the algorithm thinks you might like to buy. Amazon’s algorithms are very complex and powerful, which is why they work. The algorithm that creates these t-shirts is not complex or powerful. This is how I expect it works.

1) Start a sentence with the words KEEP CALM AND.
2) Pick a word from this long list of verbs. Any word will do. Don’t worry, I’m sure they’re all fine.
3) Finish the sentence with one of the following: OFF, THEM, IT, A LOT or US.
4) Lay these words out in the classic Keep Calm style.
5) Create a mockup jpeg of a t-shirt.
6) Submit the design to Amazon using our boilerplate t-shirt description.
7) Go back to 1 and start again.

H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.

March 3, 2013

California’s retroactive tax grab

Filed under: Business, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:03

The state of California seems determined to drive out the remaining businesses that pay taxes. Here’s Wendy McElroy with news of a retroactive change to a small business tax break:

California cannot chase business away fast enough, it seems: high taxes, cap-and-trade, voracious unions, bankrupt cities, and now retroactive taxation.

Shortly before the Christmas holidays and oh so quietly, the California Franchise Tax Board (FTB) rescinded a tax break that dated back to 1993. The Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) exclusion allowed small businesses and investors who met certain conditions to exclude or to defer 50 percent of the profits of sold stock from their personal income taxes. The incentive was intended to lure startup companies of under $50 million into the state.

Now those who were ensnared have not only lost that tax break for the future; many are also being taxed retroactively back to 2008. Plus interest. Plus possible penalties.

Arms merchant’s golden customer: an Arab nation with oil money

Filed under: Britain, Business, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

Strategy Page explains why some of the most lucrative customers for high-tech weaponry are Arab nations:

Britain has been quite successful selling their new Typhoon fighter to Middle East nations. Two years ago Saudi Arabia bought 72 Typhoons from Britain. That was followed by an order for 12 from Oman and now the UAE (United Arab Emirates) is negotiating the purchase of 60 of these expensive aircraft. This is big money, as the aircraft have a basic price of $65 million each and there are many ways to greatly increase that. For warplanes sold to Arab Gulf states there is an additional bonanza. The biggest additional cost is providing support services and personnel to keep the aircraft operational. The Typhoon manufacturer, BAE Systems, is energetically recruiting qualified maintenance personnel to keep these aircraft flying. This a much larger profit center for Arab customers than for anyone else. Few local Arabs will be recruited for this work and most of these technicians will come from the West. That is very expensive. Why can’t locals be found for these high paying jobs? The reason is simple; there are few Arabs qualified or even interested in such exacting work. This is a common problem in the Middle East.

For example, the unemployment rate in Saudi Arabia is 12 percent and many of those men are unemployed by choice. Not even counted [are] most women, who are barred from most jobs because they are women. Arab men tend to have a very high opinion of themselves, and most jobs available, even to poorly educated young men, do not satisfy. Thus most Saudis prefer a government job, where the work is easy, the pay is good, the title is flattering, and life is boring. Thus 90 percent of employed Saudis work for the government. In the non-government sector of the economy, 90 percent of the jobs are performed by foreigners. These foreigners comprise 27 percent of the Saudi population, mostly to staff all the non-government jobs and actually make the economy work. This means most young Saudi men have few challenges. One might say that many of them are desperate for some test of their worth, but a job in the competitive civilian economy does not do it, nor does the military.

The Saudi employment situation is not unique. The UAE (United Arab Emirates) has foreigners occupying 99 percent of the non-government jobs. The unemployment rate is 23 percent, but only a tenth of those are actually looking for a job. A survey indicated that most of the unemployed are idle by choice. Kuwait is more entrepreneurial, with only 80 percent of the non-government jobs taken by foreigners. The other Gulf Arab states (which have less oil) have a similar situation.

Reason magazine’s Sequestration Sale

Filed under: Business, Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:32

Reason Sequestration Sale

You actually need to click on the link to enjoy your 34-cent savings (let alone activate the hyperlinks), but you get the idea. Give it as a gift to your loved one or frenemy who thinks the sequester is a CIA-like Tea Party coup, or a homelessness generating machine, or merely a teacher-euthanasia experiment. There is only one political magazine like this, ladies and germs, for which we can all be thankful!

March 1, 2013

Kickstarter promotion: win a day with Chris Kluwe

Filed under: Business, Football, Gaming — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:33

Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe has been in the news a heck of a lot for any non-quarterback. He’s probably the most newsworthy punter in the NFL in the last 25 years or more. A new Kickstarter initiative is trying to take advantage of Kluwe’s popularity to raise money for their project:

Former Chicago Bears’ linebacker Hunter Hillenmeyer has designs on launching something called “Overdog.” According to this interview with Hillenmeyer in Forbes, what Overdog is designed to do is connect athletes that like to play video games to … well … other people that like to play video games.

[. . .]

Before Overdog can launch, Hillenmeyer wants to raise $100,000 for various aspects of the project. In order to do this, they’ve done what pretty much everyone with a project is doing these days. . .started their own Kickstarter to raise money. Like other Kickstarter drives, there are various levels of pledges you can give, with a higher pledge giving you a higher level of recognition, access, whatever. One of the levels you can pledge at … and there are only four spots available at this level … will give you the following:

    The Kluwe Experience. Describing a day with OverDog advisory board member Chris Kluwe any other way would be shortchanging him. One lucky fan will have the chance to receive a punting lesson (in Minneapolis), play some video games (likely World of Warcraft), and soak in the wisdom from the NFL’s most interesting man. Unfortunately, travel is not included but a Forever Subscription is.

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