July 9th, 2009 at 8:33 pm by Ari Shohat

“Lottery Winner Can’t Stop Losing” – Human nature


Filed under: Life Happens 2 Comments

Via this story:

For all his multimillion-dollar lottery winnings, Jack Whittaker can’t seem to do anything but lose.

The man who landed a $315 million jackpot on Christmas Day seven years ago has since lost his wife to divorce, his granddaughter to drugs and now his daughter, found dead in her West Virginia home on July 5, according to the Charleston Daily Mail.

Whittaker has also been arrested on charges of driving drunk, lost more than $500,000 in cash to thieves and settled with the parents of a teenage friend of his granddaughter’s who died at his house from a drug overdose.

A surprising number of other lottery winners share his pain.
Money amplifies the type of person you already are, nothing more nothing less. And it enables you to go down the path you were on even faster. If you have always been a nasty person, money will enable you to be even more nasty to everyone since now you won’t have much social incentive to hold you in line.
If you are a wasteful person, getting a lot of money will enable you to waste a lot of it. If you have no goals in life, fool around with drugs, etc, money will just enable you to do so much more of that.
If you are a giver, you will now give charities even more money if you strike rich. If you are an investor, you’ll invest even more of it. If you are an entreprenuerr you will try and create even more stuff. Money is just a metric like velocity and volume, not a test of talent or character. Full post here

July 7th, 2009 at 1:48 pm by Ari Shohat

Still here – a quick update


Filed under: Blogging 0 Comments

So I’ve been told I need to start blogging again.

Can be such a drain on time to think about, besides isn’t everyone on Facebook and Twitter these days? Just teasing.

So I’ve been increasingly quiet lately, just trying to focus inward and bs less. But I know nobody cares to read about me, so maybe just a bit of what’s going on.

Digitally Imported has started it’s redesign, finally. It’s actually way on it’s way now. Thanks to 99designs.com we found many great ideas and picked a winner. Now we’re refining design before we start on CSS and coding.

Launched 5 new electronic channels the other week, that was and is still quite exciting. Tune in if you’d like.

Started work on the JazzRadio.com project, it’s about time I put some domain names to use. Mark my words, give a year or so, this should be a big deal in the jazz radio world. The competition is about to begin.

And last but not least, we’re expecting PayToAsk to be completed this week in a form where we can begin real world testing. I promised for ages to fill you in, but this time really it’s getting close, finally!

And what are you folks up to these days? Share your projects or difficulties with stuff these days in the comments. Full post here


April 9th, 2009 at 2:36 pm by Ari Shohat

Going to RAIN Summit 2009 in Las Vegas


Filed under: Streaming, Web 0 Comments

RAIN Summit 2009

If you are in the Internet Radio space, you might have heard about the annual RAIN Las Vegas summit.

If not, you might want to take a look. It’s a more private gathering than any big conventions, and a great way to talk about what’s going on in Internet radio trends and meet the people from various companies.

It’s on Monday, April 20th. If you’re going, I’ll see you there. Do say hello if we haven’t met before! Full post here


March 20th, 2009 at 3:00 pm by Ari Shohat

Sirius founder: satellite radio won’t be able to compete


Filed under: General Rants 3 Comments

Saw this over on RAIN few editions ago, but was on vacation so only posting now:

Sirius founder Martine Rothblatt told Fortune Magazine that she believes satellite radio won’t be able to compete with in-car Internet radio. “There’s going to be ever more bandwidth available to distribute content totally via terrestrial cellular infrastructure. And that will leave fewer and fewer unique market attributes to satellite radio,” she said.

Amen, I was saying this for the last 6 years. The last 2 years people are actually starting to believe it.

Actually what I’ve been saying is that satellite’s only hope to survive is to build a very strong online brand and presence. That might mean they’d have to buy other net radio brands to boost their portfolio in addition to their own (well, it’s only 1 company now after the merger).

But it looks like Sirius just may end up becoming irrelevant on its own 5-8 years from now, without even staging a last minute attempt at being relevant. Even if they do, it won’t be Sirius anymore, nor will it be “satellite radio”. Full post here


February 27th, 2009 at 7:18 pm by Ari Shohat

Been a long month – good bye SteadyHost


Filed under: Business, Life Happens 2 Comments

Office moved to Palo Alto – check

Transition to a new data center – check

Closing the doors at SteadyHost.com – check

Booking a vacation week for next month – check :)

It’s been a a very demanding month, if not more. You see, today was the last day that my colocation and hosting business SteadyHost was up. Today we removed the final servers, and shut down the network.

No this wasn’t due to the economy at all. I am a very happy guy to finally close this chapter, it feels great. We got into this business a bit out of necessity. We streamed so much for Internet radio projects, it made sense to be in somewhat of a wholesale position.

Hey it was even fairly profitable, and we had customers who were with us for years. The problem was that it took a good chunk of my time, and the time of some others working on the team. I can safely say on average this took 1/3 of my time over last few years. It helped pay the bills, and if I were to do it exclusively I am sure it would be an even bigger success.

So yes, it’s being shut down despite having been a success and turning a decent profit.

Why now? When the data center lease expired, the space in NY was rented by Google instead. It was either moving it to a new data center, or shutting down. This isn’t my element, and it’s not too pleasing to work on it. At the same time I am getting quite good bandwidth rates through the contacts I’ve made over the years. So we chose to phase it out – and today was the last day.

You know what they say about one door closing and another opening. Ironically as SteadyHost is now done with, PayToAsk is getting very close to being ready for its first release. I really do hope to tell you more about it in upcoming posts. I’ll drink to that tonight! Full post here


February 13th, 2009 at 1:54 pm by Ari Shohat

Frames of Failure


Filed under: General Rants, Life Happens 0 Comments

Jeremy’s post on failure rang true to me.

Failure is someone’s judgement call, including your own. But a judgment is made on a snapshot in time, usually without getting the complete picture.

Often people make a judgement as if it was on just one or two frames of a film. They have no idea what frames were or are to follow, yet they make a call on a few. I don’t blame them, seeing is believing.

But increase or decrease your range of frames – how many frames you actually count in your judgement over time – and the result may change.

I guess same can be said for success. Judge too soon it may look great, expand your frame set and the story can change to a failure (just ask Bernie Madoff, I know, I digress!)

I don’t know, maybe failure is when a consensus is reached among many that it really is a failure. But it’s still subjective. Galileo was proving that the Earth moves around the sun, yet the consensus of the ignorants got the attention of the Inquisition.

This is a long way to say that failure is required to get to success. It doesn’t guarantee success, but at some point the frame of reference will paint future success as current failure. That’s because you try, and hopefully learn, and adapt. You keep making steps like a baby so you can learn how to walk, and you fail and fall until one day you’re on your feet. You fail, so you can succeed.

But without trying and failing, you are always living by consensus. Not my cup of tea. Full post here


February 12th, 2009 at 8:52 pm by Ari Shohat

Amusing reader comments on thesun.co.uk


Filed under: General Rants 3 Comments
Okay, this is totally random. Maybe it’s just that I am not British and it’s otherwise not amusing.
geertgreat asks:
will you boycott all dominos pizza………..
…….now that one of its stores has gone halal?

Farmer_Fred replies:
Oi wooddn’t goo tew enny o’ them thar playces, lood o’ rubbish. Burger King, or shood oi say Bogie Burgers, ar even werse, soo oi woodn’t goo there oither.

But besides that, that’s quite a xenophobic question to begin with, wow! I would be upset myself if someone suggested a place be boycotted just for being also Kosher.

Sounds like these people don’t even know what halal means. Sounds like they think it means “lace the food with something strange”!

PS:how did I mispell Amusing? fixed. Full post here


February 10th, 2009 at 7:53 pm by Ari Shohat

Greetings from the Bay Area


Filed under: General Rants 2 Comments

I know I should be writing here more. To be honest, I want to but I’ve been feeling terribly guilty about such prospect because I have so much to do.

Next week, we’ll be moving the office here from Burlingame to downtown Palo Alto.

I am excited. Last week I had a meeting with someone in San Francisco. As cool as it is, there are certain elements in comparison (like bums nearly everywhere they shouldn’t be) which just make Palo Alto more like the place to be for me.

Sadly, once the lease expires back in the New York office after March, I don’t think we’ll be renewing any space there. Our guys who work in NY will have to telecommute. It’s not that sad I guess, being leaner is best for all these days. More like life moves on!

Until next time, enjoy the view:

Full post here

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About Me

I am a young web entrepreneur, and this blog is here to share my impressions.

Some of my ongoing projects:
Digitally Imported Radio, SKY.fm, and PayToAsk.com coming soon.


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