Chris Sacca's 'What is left?'

Feedburner is where it's at . . .

For those of you who subcribe to my blog by feed, I wanted to note that I recently enabled a new feed for this site at Feedburner. Typepad still does not permit redirects for discovery of new feeds. Therefore, please feel free to direct yourself (or your feed reader) to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChrisSaccasWhatIsLeft

The del.icio.us integration will only be happening through Feedburner from now on.

For those of you who don't know what I am talking about, a feed reader allows you to subscribe to my blog and others so that updates for all of them will all be collected in one convenient place for you to read them. So, instead of visiting each blog to see if they have updated each day, you can just log in to one place.

To get started I recommend Bloglines or the Google Reader.

If you needed confirmation there is a housing bubble . . .

"We bought a house to store our furniture in. Not only did we save the money we would pay for storage, but I am sure we will make a nice return on the flip."
- Overheard from guy in Seat 4C on my America West flight from JFK to Phoenix

In hindsight, I should have seen the writing on the wall for the 2000 stock market crash when  TVs in the sports bars around the country had  switched from ESPN to CNBC. This time around, for the housing bubble, what will the concurrent indicator be? There have been countless pieces written about loose credit, speculative buying, and mounting interest rate pressure. However, when you hear a guy note that he bought a house to store some furniture, that has to signal a top, no?

Hedgestreet is now offering a futures market by which one can short residential housing prices. What do you think? I would be more interested if I could trade in markets I deem to be "purer" than San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Meaning, finite amounts of land in unique places like San Francisco make me hesitant to ever be truly exposed to a naked short. That said, the heartland and mountain states appear to be chock full of cities where irrational real estate exuberance has taken hold.

Insanity - brought to you by Google News

I was traveling yesterday and, while waiting in an airport security line, used my Blackberry to see what was shaking on Google News. The headlines speak for themselves:

US Dismisses Guantanamo Torture Report
US Plays Down Italy's Decision to Withdraw Troops from Iraq
Split Emerges in West's Front Against Iran

Meanwhile, back at the ranch:

Senate Votes to Preserve English
Senate Okays Higher Fines for Indecency

All this and surprising levels of apathy about the $70B tax break  Bush signed and the recently revealed NSA domestic spying mess. Sigh.

Badges? We do need some stinking badges . . .

Last week at the Comventures Connections Summit I was impressed and relieved when the name badge I was issued listed my name in a large font with bold letters:

CHRIS

GOOGLE

No, I haven't changed my last name from Sacca. Instead, a conference organizer finally got smart about optimizing standard issue laminates for their intended purpose – to actually facilitate introductions and dialogue.

As someone who attends dozens of confabs a year, I am continually frustrated and amazed by the absurdly small fonts and minimization of participant company names on name tags. I keep each of them I have ever been issued, and as I thumb through the stack, the consistency of hard to read print across them almost seems conspiratorial.

I don't want to sound insincere or shallow on this point. However, when I am at a networking event, its hard to make conversation on the basis of someone's last name alone. “Gutenstein, eh? I had a Gutenstein in my first grade class. Well, he wasn't so much in my class as my younger brother's . . .”

Instead, the most salient discourse is going to result when you and I have an inkling of what the other does for a living. We can certainly segue from our business underpinnings into any number of fulfilling topics. However, the fact you work at Facebook, or Wired, or SONY gives us a lot to talk about right off the bat. If I don't recognize your company name, maybe I will stop to ask out of curiosity. Either way, it gets us off on a productive foot.

So, please, conference hosts, let's put big bold letters on badges. Thanks!