Caine's Arcade

Maybe you've seen it already on Reddit or somewhere on Facebook, but if you haven't... find yourself 11 minutes over your morning coffee or at home with your kids in the evening and watch the inspiring story of Caine's Arcade.  A nine-year old boy with a dream, endless creativity and energy, a supportive dad, and some wonderful people in the community (the real community and the online community) who helped spread the word.

This is the story of entrepreneurship in its most pure form: an idea for something new and an unwavering determination to do whatever it takes to bring it to life and have others experience it.  It's what's driven me in my career as an entrepreneur and what inspires me now in searching for entrepreneurs and ideas to fund as an investor.  Caine Monroy tackles all the things every entrepreneur faces: technical challenges, financial or resource constraints, marketing issues, even the skepticism of others or the fear of ridicule by one's peers for failure.  What's so refreshing is the purity of the drive in this case... there's no concept of getting rich from selling stock, no debate about IPO vs. selling to Google or Facebook, no thoughts of intellectual property, no lawyers, and ok, and no venture capitalists or board members.  There's simply the desire to make the vision come true and to see others enjoy the creation.  How wonderful.




I was so moved by Caine's story that I'm making a donation to his scholarship fund and am hoping to go visit Caine with some of my similarly inspired friends and colleagues to learn from him, be inspired again, and remind myself of why I do what I do.

Goin' Retrophonic

I've had it with telephones...

Many of my friends gave up their land-line phones years ago.  Not me.  For some reason I'm just not ready to cut the copper cords at home - I just like having phones that I can pick up when they ring, have no static or dropouts, and sit their on the desk or table waiting to do their one, single, important function.  I don't have a good reason, I just like them... so I still buy wired phones.

Yes, that's phones, plural.  I buy way too many of them.  Not because I need them in every room or to update the style, but because no matter what brand I buy, or how much I spend, it turns out that they are all complete junk. 

The latest piece of junk is a two-line RCA unit that is so poorly designed that if you activate the speakerphone, it creates a feedback loop with its own microphone and you can't hear anything.  Astoundingly, this $100+ phone seems to have never had its speakerphone function tested by the designers, as it is completely useless.  And, more recently, half the time you press the "7" button it doesn't do anything.  Total crap.

OK, I'm old - or at least old enough to remember that as a young boy in the early 1970's, you couldn't buy your own phones, you leased them from the phone company, and they were big, hulking, heavy things with no special features, but they always worked and sounded crystal clear.  The phone installer guy that brought them to you did NOT ever want to come back again to fix them, so they were made to be practically indestructable.  You could drop one from 6 feet onto a stone tile floor and it wouldn't crack, dent, or malfunction in any way.  

I started yearning for those days last week when this latest supposed "professional-quality" RCA Crap-o-phone I have at home bit the dust.  It occurred to me there was no reason to buy another $120 disposable plastic phone when I could probably find a good working old one on ebay.  And so I did.

No surprise, if you look around, for anywhere from $15-$80 you can buy a "vintage" beautiful old Bell analog telephone on ebay or from plenty of online vintage phone stores.  Most are still as reliable as the day they were manufactured.  And our phone network in most parts of the country still happily handle these old analog behemoths with true "plug-and-play" functionality.  Even the old rotary dial phones, with their click-clack pulse dialing method, work just fine if you have regular phone service (not VOIP).

My new desk phone at home.
For real!

So THIS is my new desk phone in my home office.  No really, it is.  And I love it!  It's a beautiful 1954 Cherry Red Western Electric 500 Rotary Phone. The thing weighs a ton!  When you pick it up, it feels laughably heavy at first, but after just a few minutes you realize that it just feels incredibly solid, strong, and... comforting.

Pick up the receiver and this thing sounds so incredibly clear that it makes you realize how bad the typical electronic phone today really is.  TVs sound better today, radios sound better, but phones have definitely gone backwards.

I even like dialing on the rotary dial.  (Funny how we still all use the verb "dial" to this day despite the fact that most consumers buying phones today have probably never even touched an actual rotary "dial" on a real phone?)

My kids are amazed by it and think it's cool.  (But my son tried to dial it simply by inserting a finger into each number hole, one after the other, as if there were touch-sensitive pads under each hole in the dial.  The concept of rotating the dial is completely illogical to kids raised in the pushbutton and touchpad world.)

I grabbed my iPhone to call my own home number, and my new/old cherry red phone rang...  it didn't beep, chirp, or play a tune, I mean it really RANG...  little, actual metal hammers striking real, analog metal bells.  The volume dial under the phone actually moves the bells further apart from each other to soften the ring.

Now, however, I'm concerned.  I keep browsing that ebay category and seeing so many beautiful, cool, retro phones and eyeing all the other crap phones around our house just begging to be retro-replaced.

I bet my daughter would love a mid-70's lemon yellow Western Electric Sculptura.

For my son, no doubt it has to be a 1970 Western Electric Telstar roll-top phone with the retractable cord...

I may be hooked...

Apple's Astounding Market Cap In Perspective

Here's a pretty astounding fact...

At the time I'm writing this post, the market capitalization of Apple is larger than that of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, Netflix, and Adobe...  combined.