Go The F To Sleep: An Adult's Bedtime Story

Most parents have probably had the experience of the young child who will not sleep, in spite of all attempts to get them to nod off. The parent may be pushed beyond the point of good humor, beyond the point of exhaustion, and beyond any memory that (at one time) having the kid seemed like a good thing.

This book provides those parents with a coping mechanism that makes explicit and brings out of the closet the dark thought, whether muttered or unsaid, that most parents have experienced: "Go the f--- to sleep. Please."

For the very young child, the content of the book may be irrelevant**; the child has their parent speaking to them in gentle, rhythmic tones. You could be saying anything to the kid, just like you might say to your dog, "Good dog, rover, I wish you were a cat Rover, good dog, you're a jerk, good dog" and the dog just loves it. The content of the book is really for the adult, and by focusing on the likely affective state of the adult reader this book may be doing a great service.

The cats nestle close to their kittens now.
The lambs have laid down with the sheep.
You're cozy and warm in your bed, my dear
Please go the f--k to sleep.

The eagles who soar through the sky are at rest
And the creatures who crawl, run and creep.
I know you're not thirsty. That's bullshit. Stop lying.
Lie the f--k down, my darling, and sleep.

The book is beautifully illustrated.




The profanity is gratuitous, but rather than the button-pushing provocation of a Lenny Bruce these doggerel verses give expression to the frustration that most parents face. They may be the equivalent of "It Gets Better" for parents of young children.

Several Experiments in One

There are a few interesting things about this 32-page book. It hasn't been published. You can't go to the store and buy it, but you can pre-order it at Amazon.com and it's on their best-seller list.

Viral Freemium

It has managed to make the best seller list without any marketing, and without any physical product. A PDF version of the book somehow made it to the web, and it's gone viral. Here's a GoogleDocs link to the book.

It's an interesting marketing experiment. By giving the book away, they're creating buzz, people are pre-ordering the book, and then they're printing the physical book in response to known demand rather than on risky speculation.

When a best-selling book has never been printed yet, there's probably some implications for selling virtual books in the context of e-readers like the Kindle or the Nook.

Beneficial Piracy

They leaked the PDF of the 32-page book hoping that people would distribute it to their friends, in a way tempting/enabling their customers to pirate copies of their intellectual property.

Some people contend that piracy helps content creators more than it hurts - content piracy, that is, not Somalia piracy - because piracy builds demand and grows the total market.

** Infant Learning

The premise of the book is that you might read this to the child because they're just a kid and they won't understand it anyway. It's going to be fun to watch when they ask Grandma, "Want to hear my poem?"

Stuxnet Epidemiology

Let's say you want to disable the Iranian centrifuges. You take some generic thumbdrives and load them with pictures of girls that also contain malware, and you leave them where 22-year old technicians will find them. Viola Voilà, you've set the Iranian nuclear program back five years. Thanks, Frank!

Let's say you want to figure out how widely you can distribute a virus. You might embed it in a children's book PDF, start some buzz about how it exists, and let people hunt for and find the file. They'll do the work for you.

Maybe you know enough to not open zip files of free books from unknown sources, and maybe you'll do what most people do - take it to work and use your work computer to open it. (They have virus protection and IT support).

I hope you don't work at NASA.

That'll keep the grownups awake at night.

Cloud Computing, Freemium Storage, and the Business Cycle

It's 10 pm, do you know where your kids files are?

When the economy is growing and new technology and applications are explored because they're nifty, rather than significant, a lot of people are geniuses. When the business cycles turns, which is a certainty, all the kicky little ephemeral things are blown away by reality. Fluff dies; very few people are geniuses in hard times.

Think about a concept like FaceBook, Twitter, Digg, Blogger, Flickr, Picasa, Google (gasp!) -- let's talk about a new startup, Vapor. A couple of hungry young classmates start it off as a cool project in the garage. They can do it on a shoestring, because all they've got is shoestrings, and they don't have dependents.

Vapor starts out as a concept, a logo, a web site and a server. They build a Web 2.0 application as a startup, then they get some venture capital (VC) money and begin to ramp up. Users come in because it's free and start contributing to the network. The connections among the users become valuable to them, and Vapor starts to fill a perceived need the audience never knew they had.

Soon, all the people in your (college class, family, soccer league) are on Vapor. Vapor gets its third round of VC funding. They're selling ads on their website, and Tshirts. There's no physical product, the value is in the accumulated network and the presence of so many people.

Vapor gets bought out by MegaCorp (which was the founder's fantasy all along). MegaCorp still lets you store your (pictures, diary, blog, contact info, travel plans) for free, and you can upgrade to premium services (hence freemium) like a concierge travel service, and a database listing the must-see's at the towns you're about to visit.

Businesses will offer these free services, these audacious proposals, because the barriers to entry are so low as to be non-existing, the marginal cost of storing data (photos, calendars, contacts, diaries, itineraries) approaches zero, the potential lifetime value of a customer is enormous, and the value of a relationship with a large group of web-accessing Americans is significant.

In other words, it costs almost nothing to store data, and if you can provide a little free service in a freemium model you might end up with a very valuable database. If it doesn't work you really haven't lost that much money, and you and your startup buddies have had fun, gained experience, and made contacts. There's a small likelihood of fantastic wealth, no risk or downside.

Ah, finally, the word appears: risk. What would happen if you kept a person's diary, and it was very important to somebody (like a publisher) and then your server blew up and you lost the data? That would be a bad thing; it doesn't fit the business plan. So the Vapor lawyer writes Terms of Service (TOS) that says, we're not responsible for any loss of files/data, and we're not responsible for any impact of your files/data. The audience is getting this for free, and they're getting what they've paid for.

But Then the economy goes through a prolonged bad patch. At first a little bit of bad times is a good thing for the sharks; the competitors with good ideas and shaky financing sell their concept cheap, and the sharks snatch them up and increase their odds of MegaCorp buyout Nirvana. But if the tough times get really serious and the funding dries up, all of a sudden the freemium companies can't keep storing your data for free; there is a bill that becomes due. It might not cost much per user but now they've got 30 million users, and they're not hungry youngsters in a garage anymore; they've got a building and whiteboards and Herman Miller chairs and kids, and all their stock options are underwater.

So what does Vapor 2.1 do? Hire an old-school CEO, update the logo, re-organize, fire people, and cut expenses. They calculate their burn rate vs. cash available, and hope that the world changes before the cash is gone. About halfway to the zero-cash date, they start shutting down free services in an attempt to delay the inevitable, in hopes of a savior.

And - I'm sorry to have gone on so long - what does this matter? Isn't this the American way? Why should a Pittsburgher care?

Because your photos are all on Flickr or Picasa, and if they fold you really don't have a copy anymore because your old laptop died in October, and there aren't any more copies of that picture of you giving Big Ben advice in training camp.

The freemium online storage companies (and that's what they are, really, is storage companies - storing your data online) have no obligation to preserve or back up your files. Their financial plan doesn't provide for treating your blog entries like future literature, or treating those photos of your kid and your grandmother like they're important.

So the first question of this post is a play on the old public service announcement: Do you know where your children are? Except today's slogan is: Do you know where your data is? Do you have backup copies of all your information that somebody's storing for free for you? Is there anything out there that you'd hate to lose?

There's a tendency to say, well those social services weren't serious business anyway, they weren't (harrumph!) Business-to-Business B2B endeavors, it'll never effect the important things (business).

The problem is that businesses are moving to Cloud Computing, where your servers aren't in your building or your data center - they're out there (somewhere), being run by an outsourcing vendor. These are rigorous systems with robust capabilities, but they're run as a commodity, on razor-thin margins, in a must-profit world. There have been some problems with the cloud. If some of these enterprise cloud storage outfits go poof, any business that relied upon them will probably follow suit.

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