I go to a few concerts every year. Let me re-phrase that. I get dragged to a few concerts every year by my wife. Though I'm not against live music, my wife is the far bigger fan and I'm happy to accompany her. We recently saw The Shins at the Fox Theater in downtown Oakland. I have to admit, the two old-time venues in Oakland (The Fox and The Paramount) both look pretty darn good after their restoration. Specifically, the uniqueness and historic feel to both theaters is a win for the city. Almost every performer I've seen at either of these places, goes out of their way to comment on how beautiful the interior is. I'm not saying places like The Independent or The Fillmore don't have their own charm and rich history but there's a certain blandness to the interior of those venues. Stepping into the Fox or Paramount is like taking a step back in time to when the Oakland nightlife was more vibrant. Let's hope their restorations echo into the surrounding areas and bring Oakland's downtown back to the good old days.
 
Pardon the poor photo qualities. The iPhone camera leaves much to be desired in low-light situations.

I've written before about the US auto industry. In a previous post I spoke of Toyota being a company the US auto companies should emulate. Today, we see that even Toyota is not immune to the recession. I still think they're in a much better position to weather this storm than any US company but when a well run shop like Toyota loses $7.7 billion in a quarter, that can't be good.

I used to have a ton of issues with Comcast's Internet service. But over the past few months, they've slowly started to make improvements to the service. Specifically, they've really bumped up their upload speeds. I'm watching The Players Championship via my Slingbox and I'm averaging between 1000 to 1500 Kbps. This time last year, I would have topped out around 500 Kbps. Supposedly, they might be bumping up upload speeds for the standard service to about 4MB later this year. Can't wait!

It's strange how themes seem to emerge in our daily lives. The History Channel had a program about Sun Tzu's Art of War a few days ago (interesting if not a little campy with the graphics and re-enactments). Then a friend forwards this interesting article about junior girls basketball from the New Yorker. They both highlight a specific tenant of competition, be it sports or war. Always attack your enemies weaknesses and never engage them in the things they do exceptionally well.
 
Centrro is in a very large, very competitive market that is currently dominated by much larger players with much larger war chests. We'll never be able to out spend out competition but instead of spending $1.00 to make $1.10 (of course, multiply that by millions), we've decided to take the route of spending $1.00 to make $3.00 or, in some cases, $6.00. We do this by engaging in certain channels that our competitors either disregard or cannot efficiently play in. Over time, this efficiency will allow us to grow large enough to enter more mainstream channels but still carry over the learnings and processes from our best channels.
 
The other thing I found interesting about the New Yorker article was that instead of adapting and innovating, the Goliaths tend to force the Davids to play their game by their rules. How many times have we seen the music industry sue their way out of an issue? Now the movie industry is doing the same. Kudos to Redwood City girls basketball team and their coaches for thinking outside the box!