broadstuff

So there I am, working away, with Spotify on playing some stuff I really like, when suddenly on comes this music track Ad - its totally different in style and volume, and is advertising a type of music I don't like. It totally jarred with the music of a few seconds before, the shock was visceral. I was incensed enough to Twitter:

Hey Spotify - inserting a few seconds of some random singer that totally jars with what I'm listening to at the time really doesn't work !

Which of course brought a few sensible replies on the lines of "buy the premium service", "turn it off until its over" etc. But there was one reply which I really had to blog about - David Jennings, fellow Tuttler and expert on all matters to do with online music, noted that:

I recorded the same thing ("audio whiplash" with ads) abt We7

We7 being a music service a few years ago (where are they now....). For those of you who don't know him, David wrote "Net, Blogs & Rock n Roll" which in my view is still the definitive guide to online music in the social media age - and other online media by inference. Anyone who fancies themselves a strategist or expert in this industry needs to read David's book.

What David wrote in his blog (also called Net, Blogs and Rock n Roll) about this issue, over here, in a piece entitled "Audio whiplash from personalised ads with free music downloads", was:

.....listen to that audio whiplash between the ad and the track itself. When you're listening to French chansons from the '20s and '30s, just the tone of the ad is enough to make it come across like an aural invasion, and thus counterproductive in getting across the message.

Given that my selection of tracks is probably a better guide to my personality, lifestyle and buying habits than my age and gender, why not tailor the ads to the music rather than the listener demographics? No need for the clever software (patent pending) then, but the 'creatives' at the ad agencies might have to work a bit harder to think about the context in which their work will be heard.

"Audio Whiplash" was exactly the right term. That shift in music really had impact, I felt mentally assaulted. I hated the advertised music and artist far more than I would have in a neutral environment, and I was incensed with Spotify for being so insensitive as to play it when I was listening to something so different, that I liked.

Its interesting to think about why I had this reaction. Music may have the charms to soothe the most savage breast, but it certainly works in reverse if its the wrong music. My initial hypothesis is that music reaches deep into us and bypasses some of our more rational functions, so that when it goes wrong, the reaction is far more visceral than even a popup Ad will cause.

In my view, any service that is dealing with music probably has to be far more careful to tailor the Ads to what the person is listening to, and as David notes, music selection is probably a far better guide to personality - and mood - than any blander demographics. Spotify and other music stations are in my view sitting on a goldmine of realtime user demographic data, but its clearly very early days in terms of using it. Considering David wrote his piece in 2007, its clear that there is still much to learn.

Or maybe its just me - others thoughts?

The FT reports that:

Facebook announced sweeping changes to its privacy policy on Thursday, after facing threats of legal action from Canada’s privacy commissioner.

Facebook, the social networking site, agreed to limit the amount of data that third-party applications would be automatically granted, in order to clarify the terms around the storage of personal data and to refrain from storing e-mail addresses of people who were invited to join the site but did not sign up. The changes will take Facebook a year to implement.

“We’re satisfied that, with these changes, Facebook is on the way to meeting the requirements of Canada’s privacy law,” said Jennifer Stoddart, privacy commissioner of Canada. “The privacy of people using the site – not only in Canada, but around the world – will be far better protected.”

The other people breathing down Facebook's neck are the European Union and some of its member countries, as Facebook potentially violates some of the conditions of their data protection acts.

Facebook's latest play is to try to encourage users to make more of their information publicly available, but the question one is left with is "why don't US privacy laws offer these basic protections to their own citizens?".

Our advice remains, with all US based services that take a lot of your data, to be careful with what personal data you disclose. Many of their economic models rely on using your data, and with the ongoing failure of Ad-funding models the temptation to slip from use to abuse will be irresistable in some cases. And its a heck of a lot harder to get legal recourse in a foreign country, especially one which seems to have very weak privacy protection laws.

(hat tip Katherine Corrick for pointing out article)

Since everyone else is at it.....

Although the Snow Leopard is named after the Leopard, it is a significant forking of the DNA code (in fact being closer to the Tiger), and is thus called Panthera Uncia, rather than Panthera Pardus, being uniquely adapted for operating in cold, high altitude environments. From Wikipedia:

Snow leopards are smaller than the other big cats but like them, exhibit a range of sizes, generally weighing between 27 and 54 kilograms (60 and 120 lb). Body length ranges from 75 to 130 centimetres (30 to 50 in), with a tail of nearly the same length.

Snow leopards have long thick fur, the base colour of which varies from smoky grey to yellowish tan, with whitish underparts. They have dark grey to black open rosettes on their body with small spots of the same colour on their heads and larger spots on their legs and tail.

This compares to the Leopard and its many variants:

Head and body length is between 125 and 165 cm (49 and 65 in) and the tail reaches 60 to 110 cm (24 to 43 in). Shoulder height is 45 to 80 cm (18 to 31 in). Males are about 30% larger than females, weighing 37 to 91 kg (82 to 200 lb) compared to 28 to 60 kg (62 to 130 lb) for females.

And the other great rosette-spotted cat, the Jaguar (Panthera Onca):

....weights are normally in the range of 56–96 kilograms (124–211 lb). Larger males have been recorded at 159 kilograms (350 lb)[26] (roughly matching a tigress or lioness), and smaller ones have extremely low weights of 36 kilograms (80 lb). Females are typically 10–20% smaller than males. The length of the cat varies from 1.62–1.83 meters (5.3–6 ft), and its tail may add a further 75 centimeters (30 in). It stands about 67–76 centimeters (27–30 in) tall at the shoulders

We do not compare these cats with the Cheetah (Acinonyx Jubatus) in this review, which is totally different and optimised totally for speed, whereas the other cats are built for general purpose operation. Snow Leopards have no speed advantages over Leopards, but have been seen making c 15m (46 ft) jumps.

The Snow Leopard, like the Leopard, does not have spots in its rosettes whereas the Jaguar does. In addition there is no known example of a Snow Leopard with Melanism functionality which you can get in Leopards and Jaguars. Melanism is result of a dominant allele and causes the fur to be near black in colour (ie Black Panthers). Also, the Snow Leopard cannot roar due to the dropping of some morphological features of the larynx.

Snow Leopards are very rare, on account of the extreme difficulty of finding their elusive prey, Yetis. To the best of our knowledge they have not yet learned how to catch mountaineers which we think would be a rather useful adaptation in the next release into the wild, and we encourage zookeepers to let them practice on visitors.

(Sorry, naming computer operating systems after the Great Cats is just naff. Rodents, marine micro-organisms or even faraway star systems, fine.....)

There - I've said it - no pussy-footing around on this blog

Readers of this blog are invited to go back to an article we did earlier this year on YouTube economics, which showed that it swings hugely on the % of its videos (very small today) that can be advertised against. The problem with UGC video is that its seen as very risky, for a variety of reasons (taste, quality, legality). Today, YouTube carries on in its attempts to make money by increasing the % withcuration of the "hit head" of its UGC video collection. :

We decided it was time to spread the wealth. Today we're excited to announce that we're extending the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos on our site. Now, when you upload a video to YouTube that accumulates lots of views, we may invite you to monetize that video and start earning revenue from it. To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video's virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service. If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an email and see an "Enable Revenue Sharing" message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account:

Once you've chosen to enable revenue sharing, YouTube will sell advertising against your video and pay you a revenue share into your Google AdSense account each month.

This is thus an attempt to get the UGC videos that actually could make money to actually make money, by wrapping them in a program that is safe to advertise against, and has proven its quality by the quantity of hits. Videos are more expensive to serve than searches, owing to their bigger file size, so the transaction return per Ad has to be higher - hence the curation only of the "hit head" UGC videos.

By the way, if a proof of the general economic uselessness of the Long Tail in current new media was needed*, this is it. Follow the money, as they say...... in venality veritas.

(*apart from being a large number to bamboozle dumb companies to part with plenty of money to buy your New Media entity, that is )

Stanford University Research:

High-tech jugglers are everywhere – keeping up several e-mail and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television and jumping from one website to another while plowing through homework assignments.

But after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.

"They're suckers for irrelevancy," said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Everything distracts them."

That largely explains the whole Social Media phenomenon and microblogging in particular .

Even more interesting is that multi-taskers are much worse at filtering, remembering, prioritising and were even slower at switching from task to task.

Cartoon courtesy Geek n Poke, hat tip Zoli Erdos

No - the munchkins seem quite happy to give away pictures of their naked teenage daughters for 5% off (as one chap at SXSW earlier this year put it). And now, more evidence - Ad Age reports that:

Fetchback, an advertising network that specializes in ad "retargeting," added a link within its ad units that, when clicked, took consumers to a page that explained who the advertiser was and how the ad got there and gave contact info for Fetchback, as well as a way to opt out of future targeting.

When Fetchback compared the rate at which people opted out before it added the link and after, it found that it actually went down slightly. It's early data and a limited sample -- two weeks' worth, both before and after -- but it shows that fears that consumers will choose to eschew web targeting en masse are perhaps overblown.

No surprises there I'm afraid. We got this all wrong, big time, - 3 years ago we predicted the "consumer backlash" on privacy within 2 years - the signs were all there, and then Beacon came out - surely, we thought, the scales would fall from their eyes - but turns out that the average grockle just don't care. There are some concerns that this study is a bt self serving :

Ideally, the online-ad industry wants to remain self-regulated, and improving the friendliness and ease of opting out is one way to convince legislators and regulators it takes the job seriously. More than a half dozen industry organizations recently launched a new set of regulations in hopes of staving off government involvement.

But we have searched in vain for major grass roots concern about online privacy for 2 years. Initially we thought it may be nefarious attempts to hide the small print (a la Facebook), sneaky opt ins etc etc or just consumer naivete - but in reality most people will do anything for a discount. Hand over all your shopping data for a penny back in every £10? - sure thing, here's my supermarket card!

It would appear the UK inadvertently cleared the decks of some basic video restrictions 25 years ago - from the FT:

An administrative blunder under the Thatcher government that has only just come to light has opened the door for retailers to sell unauthorised DVDs and video games, including banned films and pornography, to anyone, including under-age children without legal threat.

The Crown Prosecution Service has been told to drop cases relating to offences under the Video Recordings Act, which imposes statutory requirements for videos, DVDs and some video games to be classified and age-rated by the British Board of Film Classification.

The Conservative government’s apparent failure to notify the European Union of the existence of the VRA in 1984 means that the legislation is no longer enforceable in the UK.

“As 25 years ago the then British government did not notify the European Commission of the VRA’s classification and labelling requirements, they cannot now be enforced against individuals in the UK courts,” said a letter from Barbara Follett, parliamentary under secretary of state at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

The DCMS discovered the error during preparatory work for the digital economy bill, which is going to make “Pegi”, Europe’s current voluntary video games rating system, legally enforceable. The department received legal advice from government lawyers on Friday.

You can't make this stuff up! We now await with eagerness a large cache of previously banned material to be "released into the wild" (aka left on a train in transit from one government department to another....... )

FFI Plain Preferred Term Sheet -

There has been quite an outbreak of rational behaviour in startupland in recent weeks, the gist of it being that a set of simplified agreements could be used rather than individual negotiations every time. This would save a lot of money in legal fees as wll as time and hassle. I was reminded of this via TechCrunch's post on TheFunded's Adeo Ressi's Sample Memorandum (see above). I have a few other articles on the spike about this too:

Firstly, Chris Dixon did an excellent summary of very common terms over here. The post is so good I've reproduced it entirely:

I have come to believe there is a clearly dominant set of deal terms. Here they are:

- Investors get either common stock or 1x non-participating preferred stock. Anything more than that (participating preferred, multiple liquidation preferences) divide incentives of investors and the entrepreneurs. Also, this sort of crud tends to get amplified in follow on rounds.

- Pro rata rights for investors. Not super pro rata rights (explaining why this new trendy term is a bad idea requires a separate blog post). This means basically that investors have the right to put more money in follow on rounds. This should include all investors - including small angels when they are investing alongside big VCs. There are two reasons this term is important 1) it seems fair that investors have the option to reinvest in good companies - they took a risk at the early stage after all 2) in certain situations it lets investors “protect” their investments from possible valuation manipulation (this has never happened to me but more experienced investors tell me horror stories about stuff that went on in the last downturn - 2001-2004).

- Founder vesting w/ acceleration on change of control. I talk about this in detail here. If your lawyer tries to talk you out of founder vesting (as some seem to be doing lately), I suggest you get a new lawyer.

- This stuff is all so standard that there is no reason you should pay more than $10K for the financing (including both sides). I personally use Gunderson and think they are great. Whoever you choose, I strongly recommend you go with a “standard” startup lawfirm (Gunderson, Wilson Sonsini, Fenwick etc). I tried going with a non-standard one once and the results were disastrous. Also, when you go with a standard firm and get their standard docs it can expedite later rounds as VCs are familiar with them.

- A board consisting of 1 investor, 1 management and 1 mutually agreed upon independent director. (Or 2 VCs, 2 mgmt and 1 indy). As an entrepreneur, the way I think of this is if both my investors and an independent director who I approved want to fire me, I must be doing a pretty crappy job and deserve it.

- Founder salaries - these should be “subsistence” level and no more. If the founders are wealthy, the number should be zero. If they aren’t, it should be whatever lets them not worry about money but not save any. This is very, very important. Peter Thiel said it best here. (I would actually go further and say this should be true of all employees at all non-profitable startups - but that is a longer topic).

- If small angels are investing alongside big VCs, they should get all the same economic rights as the VCs but no control rights. Economics rights means share price, any warrants if there are any (hopefully there aren’t), and pro-rata rights. Control rights means things like the right to block later financings, selling the company etc. I once had to track down a tiny investor in the mountains of Italy to get a signature. It’s a real pain and unnecessary.

- Option pool - normally 10-20%. This comes out of the pre-money so founders should be aware that the number is very important in terms of their dilution. Ideally the % should be based on a hiring plan and not just a deal point. (Side note to entrepreneurs - whenever you want to debate something with a VC, frame it in operational terms since it’s hard for them to argue with that).

- All the other stuff (registration rights, dividends etc) should be standard NVCA terms.

- Valuation & amount- My preference is to keep all terms as above and only negotiate over 2 things - valuation and amount raised. The amount raised should be enough to hit whatever milestones you think will get the company further financing, plus some fudge factor of, say, 50% because things always take longer and cost more than you think. The valuation is obviously a matter of market conditions, how competitive the deal is etc. One thing I would say is if you expect to raise more money (and you should expect to), make sure your post-money valuation is one that you will be able to “beat” in your next round. There is nothing more dilutive and morale crushing than a down round.

I also have the Venture Hacks analysis of option allocation, hat tip Christine.net

"To allocate the option pool from the hiring plan, use these current ranges for option grants in Silicon Valley:

Title Range (%)

- CEO 5 - 10
- COO 2 - 5
- VP 1 - 2
- Independent Board Member 1
- Director 0.4 - 1.25
- Lead Engineer 0.5 - 1
- 5+ years experience Engineer 0.33 - 0.66
- Manager or Junior Engineer 0.2 - 0.33

"These are rough ranges – not bell curves – for new hires once a company has raised its Series A. Option grants go down as the company gets closer to its Series B, starts making money, and otherwise reduces risk.
the
"The top end of these ranges are for proven elite contributors. Most option grants are near the bottom of the ranges. Many factors affect option allocations including the quality of the existing team, the size of the opportunity, and the experience of the new hire."

Then there was Fred Wilson on the travails of Tranche Investing, which partly comes about because the transaction costs of any particular round are so high:

I agree with Chris that tranched investing is a bad idea all around. But first, let me explain how it works.

The entrepreneur will agree to raise a set amount of money, let's call it $3mm for a set amount of equity, let's say it is 25% of the company ($9mm pre, $12mm post). If it is three tranches, then $1mm will come in at the first closing and the entrepreneur will dilute 8.33% (1/3 of 25%). There will be a set of agreed upon milestones set in advance. Let's say tranche two miletstone is the shipping of a product and tranche three is the first contracted revenue for that product. When each of those milestones is hit, the investors will invest the second and third $1mm tranches and the entire round will be completed and the full 25% dilution will have been taken.

Let's be honest and see this as what it is. It's an option for the investor to put more money in at the old price as the investment increases in value and the risk is mitigated. It's a bad deal for the entpreneur and a great deal for the investor.

But as Chris explains, there are other problems with this approach:
Milestones change anyway: At the early stage you often realize that what milestones you originally thought were important actually were the wrong milestones. So you either have to renegotiate the milestones or the entrepreneur ends up targeting the wrong things just to get the money.

The idea that you are going to hard wire the key goals of an early stage company is nutty. The best entpreneurs weave and bob their way into the market, changing things as they go. Setting hard goals is a mistake early on in the life of a company.

You all know this blog well enough to know what we're thinking, right

Thats right - why now? Why, after all these years of VC handle cranking is everything being changed? Standardised T&C's, and even the worker bees getting some money early like at Facebook?

Some people hypothesize its the open nature of the Internet, information flows around so fast now that it will force transparency and homogeneity into the market. We think its much simpler than that - its about transaction and opportunity costs.

Transaction Costs

Simply put, Moore'Law seems to apply to startups too - at least it has since abput 2000 - ie every 2 years you can launch the same startup with half the money the last one needed. This means that after 8 or spo years they are starting up on 1/10th the costs of the dotcoms, so having £30,000 ($50,000) terms negotiations makes no sense - the transaction costs more than the company.

Opportunity Costs

Most startups aren't worth the wallpaper they buy after about 18 months, but some make a lot of money. Those are the nes every Funder wants. But, in a world of little differentiation between funders (everybody will introduce you to the right people, hire the right talent, yadda yadda), and the probable oversupply, one way to differentiate is to hand value back the entrepreneur. And instead of handing back the funders' stake, this way they hand back cash consumed in the early stages - gold dust to startups - while keeping stakes and valuations

Update - interesting discussion from VentureBeat on how, owing to a combination of lower cost to startup and nervous climate, "Seed" funding ($0.5 - $2m) is the new "Series A" ($2-5m) - but beware:

Many VCs will propose a seed deal using a Series A term sheet (whether by design or mere convenience), and this can end up costing the company much more than it bargained for. Here are some tips for entrepreneurs when negotiating seed deals (with the caveat that each deal is different, and rarely will an entrepreneur get their way in all of these categories):

- Don’t give away too much of the company too early. VCs shouldn’t expect more than around 20-40% of a raw start-up when investing seed-stage.
- Avoid giving investors more than a 1x liquidation preference, and try to ensure that it is “non participating” (i.e., after the investors’ preference is taken, all remaining proceeds are allocated only to the holders of common stock).
- Don’t give investors Series-A-type control rights. A VC should expect to receive one board seat, but not to control the board, following a seed financing. Also, while it is customary to give investors voting “block” rights on financings and on a sale of the company, entrepreneurs should avoid granting voting rights that give VCs blocks on operational matters at this stage.
- Keep other “investor rights” to a minimum. For example, try to avoid granting demand registration rights, ROFRs on founder stock transfers or drag-along rights.
- Many VCs will want a “super-pro rata” right in seed deals, giving the VC the right to increase its ownership percentage in the next round. This is not necessarily unreasonable, but take care to ensure that in agreeing to super pro-ratas the company is leaving room for a new VC to lead the next round.
- Beware of the negative market perception that results when the VC that seeded your company declines to participate in the Series A. This happens. Raise this issue with the seed VC early on to assess the risk of this happening, and always keep your communication channels open with other VCs interested in what you are doing.

On the other hand, Seed funding is far more risky, so the funder will require tighter safeguards......

Scott Rafer blogs on his lessons learned from Lookery's demise:

Coulda-Shoulda #1. We exposed ourselves to a huge single point of failure called Facebook. I’ve ranted for years about how bad an idea it is for startups to be mobile-carrier dependent. In retrospect, there is no difference between Verizon Wireless and Facebook in this context. To succeed in that kind of environment requires any number of resources. One of them is clearly significant outside financing, which we’d explicitly chosen to do without. We could have and should have used the proceeds of the convertible note to get out from under Facebook’s thumb rather to invest further in the Facebook Platform.

Coulda-Shoulda #2. Predictably and reasonably, Facebook acted in their own interest rather than ours. Their Summer 2008 redesign supported Facebook’s goals elegantly but hurt our publishers and us in ways that became clear just weeks after we’d raised another ~$2M. At this point, we made a mistake endemic to startup people. We followed our natural inclination as problem solvers rather than getting out while the getting was good. If we’d sold the ad network the minute we understood that we could no longer make it successful, we would have saved a couple hundred thousand dollars in working capital. Plus, the ad network would have fetched three to five times its low-six figure sale price less than 60 days later. That’s a million dollar mistake I made in a very short period of time. I should understand sunk costs better than this.

Coulda-Shoulda #3. Once we sold the ad network, I fell into a bad old habit — persuading my team to build something before the market was ready for it.... .... Lookery’s Profile SaaS/universal cookie mechanism is far more economic and effective than cookie exchange systems in a world where ad media and targeting data are separate commodities. That world is a year or more in the future.

As Scott notes in hindsight:

.....there are three key moments at which a different and defensible decision might have made all the difference. In chronological order, the sins Lookery committed under my leadership were continuing our dependency on a large partner (March 2008), not knowing when to cut bait on a failing asset (September 2008), and building ahead of the market (December 2008). I and we made any number of other mistakes, but all the rest were correctable.

This is a gentleman's post from a chap who clearly has some integrity, and kudos for writing it. To be fair, cutting bait is a damned hard thing to predict and time, and the whole essence of entrepreneurialism is to build ahead of the market, so I think (iii) above is beating ones self too hard with hindsight. The strategic point is well made, and it equally well applies to people building stuff now on Twitter's API.

There is another lesson I take away from all this though - there will always be people willing to fund these businesses (looking at those lining up to fund Twitter API based based startups it seems thaey forget nothing and remember nothing, as it were...) So, would Lookery have been better off to grab a lump of outside money to give them runway to change the model after it was clear Facebook was a dead end? Another year or two of sitting pretty wouldn't have hurt right now methinks.

More evidence of the timing of an IPO from a Bloomberg article discussing Facebook's increasing hiring:

Facebook Inc. plans to expand its staff by as much as 50 percent this year as it benefits from a surplus of engineers amid the recession, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said. “No one else has been hiring,” Zuckerberg, 25, said in an interview. “It’s been a great environment for us because the economy has helped out.”

Seemingly contradicting that is this comment, however:

Zuckerberg said he’s trying to keep a lid on costs, an effort to reach positive cash flow next year (my italics). In May, Facebook moved into a decades-old building in Palo Alto, California, that he calls “the bunker” -- with unfinished cement floors and fading stickers on the front door.

“The thing I want to remind people of is we’re way closer to the beginning than the end,” Zuckerberg said in the Aug. 20 interview. “A lot of times buildings can be a signal that you’ve made it. I would rather that our building feel much more like a very large garage.”

In today's market (or any market except the most bubbly), cashflow positive is a pre-requisite for an IPO of this size. In fact fully profitable may well be the yardstick if recession continues, but failing that, wearing a hairshirt building sets the right tone for the analysts and PR scribblers. What is most interesting is that they clearly believe they will very probably need to make an IPO to get the next major tranche of funding.

Anyway, revenues are expected to be $500m this year (I believe this may be possible, because Marc Andreesson has been on record about it). With a 50% increase in staff to c 1,500 that's an approximate staffing cost of c $150m (assuming fully loaded costs of c $100k per employee per annum) - say $200m with contractors etc, which is only 40% of revenues, low for this sort of business (the "wetware" is usually the bulk of costs in any non pure-video web outfit).

Apparently Zuckerberg has tried to stay close to cash positive since founding, but assuming a more than doubling of revenues to $500m requires only a 50% increase in staff will be an interesting one to watch (one cannot help but suspect the real staffing requirements will only be met post IPO and the current troops will be flogged like (option owning) mules . Keeping 'em happy will be key! ).

This makes the ostensible reason for the decision to buy Friendfeed a bit odd though - the entire annual bill for the new 500-odd people would be c $50m, about what Facebook paid for Friendfeed. I don't fully buy that it was "for the talent" - if you are going to buy another 500 people there is a good chance that the top 10% are as good as anything Friendfeed has, so one can only assume they believe it's acquisition was required to add to the IPO credibility story - maybe to shore up the "real time" story so it doesn't look like a yesterday's man compared to Twitter.

(This will be interesting to watch, making tech acquisitions work "in the knitting" is very hard, too often they wind up being slowly strangled by the acquirer's cultural arrogance )