But Apple might not be the right behemoth to use as a benchmark for Amazon’s recent performance. In 1994, Walmart’s net sales topped $60 billion for the first time, the neighborhood that Amazon’s playing in today. A decade later, Walmart’s sales had nearly quadrupled to $256 billion. Last year, Walmart’s sales clocked in at just south of $444 billion.
HBO Go is only available to customers who subscribe to the network through their cable or satellite service, and would be the first app on Apple TV that requires pay-TV authentication.
Cristina Cordova: The Biggest Problem in Mobile: Retention
When I read Fred Wilson’s post this morning about the tough times consumer companies are having raising money, his second point resonated with me most:
“distribution is much harder on mobile than web and we see a lot of mobile first startups getting stuck in the transition from successful…
Wake up early. Show up. Learn to think. Be genuine, but appear nice. Use envy for motivation instead of destruction. Do what you say you’re going to do. Ensure balance in every area of your life. Confront repressed thoughts immediately. Surround yourself with people who are better than you ( but remember the thing about envy). Work out every day. Be good at what you do. Make money doing what you love. Have good friends. Never settle.
Congrats to Barack H. Obama for being re-elected as President of the United States of America.
Be impeccable with your word.
Don’t take anything personally.
Don’t make assumptions.
Always do your best.
I’m the one, baby Yeah, I’m the one, baby Since God gave his only begotten son, baby It’s hard preachin’ the gospel to the slums lately So I had to put the church on the drums, baby You on a run, baby You on a run, baby You think you free but you a slave to the funds, baby You think you me, but you ain’t me, what you done lately? Mhm that’s cool but I been runnin’ on the sun, baby We on a galaxy that haters cannot visit That’s my reality so get off my Scott Disick If you ever held a title belt you would know how Michael felt Tyson, Jackson, Jordan - Michael Phelps Yeah, had to take it to another realm Cause everything around me got me underwhelmed Best way to describe my position is at the helm Best way to describe my new whip - Yeeeaaaalmmp
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah
21st September 1909 - 27th April 1972
I hate Facebook likes
This is what you get for trying to fix something that isn’t broken. The call button / keypad design was cleaner in previous versions. This is just ugly
The App Store search in iOS6 is really annoying and makes the discovery of new apps more difficult than it already is.
Lost
With the same sword they knight you, they gon’ good night you with
Shit, that’s only half if they like you
That ain’t even the half what they might do
Don’t believe me, ask Michael
See Martin, see Malcolm
See Biggie, see Pac, see success and its outcome
See Jesus, see Judas
See Caesar, see Brutus, see success is like suicide
Suicide, it’s a suicide
If you succeed, prepare to be crucified
Media meddles, people sue you, you settle
Every step you take, they remind you you’re ghetto
So it’s tough being Bobby Brown
To be Bobby then, you have to be Bobby now
And the question is, “Is to have had and lost
Better than not having at all?
Soon You Will Understand
You’re my best friend’s sister, grown woman and all
But you see how I am around girls; I ruin ‘em all
Plus your mom calls me son, around you since I was small
Shit I watched you mature - nah, this ain’t right
But still when your boyfriend ditched you, life’s a bitch you cried
Over my right shoulder I told you to wipe your eyes
Take your time when you likin a guy
Cause if he sense that your feelings too intense, it’s pimp or die
I bought you earrings on your birthday
Drove you to college your first day
It must be sad, though it hurts to say
We could never be a item, don’t even like him
You deserve better - this is ugly; please don’t love me
There’s better guys out there other than me
(You need a lawyer or a doctor or somebody like that you know)
Like a lawyer or a doctor with a Ph.D
Think of how upset your mother and brother would be
if they found that you was huggin me
Most of these guys have lived for the game of football and eat, breath, sleep football. I was someone who was somewhat forced to play football. I can remember draft day like it was yesterday. My family and I were sitting around and were watching the draft. The phone rings and it’s Bill Parcells. I answer the phone and say “Hello,” and Parcells says, “Curtis, we want to know if you’re interested in being a New England Patriot?” I said, “Yes, yes, sir.” And we hang up the phone. As soon as we hang up the phone I turn around to everyone and I said, “Oh my gosh, I do not want to play football.” No, you’re laughing, but this is the truth. I turned around and said, “I don’t want to play football. I don’t even know that I like football enough to try to make a career out of it.” My pastor at the time was a guy by the name of Leroy Joseph, and I’m so glad he was there to talk some sense into me. He says, “Curtis, look at it this way, man.” He said, “Maybe football is just something that God is giving you to do all those wonderful things that you say you want to do for other people.” I tell you, it was like a light bulb came on in my head. That became my connection with football. I don’t know if he wouldn’t have said that to me if football would have gotten out of me what it got out of me. I definitely wouldn’t be standing here. And ever since he said that, I knew the only way I was going to be successful at this game called football is if I played for a purpose that was bigger than the game itself because I knew that the love for the game just wasn’t in my heart. […] Let me tell you about how I got started playing. So I grew up in a pretty bad neighborhood. But the household that I lived in was even worse. I had a father who I love him dearly and he’s passed and gone on, but he was my guy before he died. But when I was 5 years old, I remember watching him torture my mother, I mean, literally. I don’t necessarily have notes, so I’m going to bare my soul and just bear with me. But I remember watching him torture you. He had my mother locked in the bathroom. Had her sitting on the edge of the tub, and he turned on all the hot water and stopped the tub up so that the hot water would eventually flow on her legs. He dared her to move. As the hot water flowed up and started going on her legs and going on her feet and she would flinch a little bit, he would rush into the bathroom, take her hair and burn it with a lighter. He would come back out, watch her some more, she’d move again, and he would go in there with a cigarette and put cigarette burns all over her legs which she still bares to this day. I’ve seen him beat her up like she was a man. I’ve seen him throw her down the steps. I’ve witnessed this woman go to they got a bet on whether I’m going to cry or not. So I’m going to hold it in. I’ve watched my mother get punched in the face, have a black eye and then go to work with make up on just to support our family. I’ve watched this. She did everything to raise me and in hindsight when you’re a kid and your mother’s tough on you, you don’t necessarily understand why. I used to think it was because my dad was so tough on her that it would just naturally make her tough on me. I heard a saying one time that says, “Hurt people, hurt people.” And my mother was dealing with so much hurt and pain, and I know that she had to take some of that out somewhere. Mom, I’m so grateful that I was there for you to even take some of that pain out on, because you deserved it. By the time I was 5, my dad was gone. My mother, because we couldn’t afford it, she would work two and three jobs. She tied a shoe string around my neck with a key and taught me how to come in the house. I’d come from kindergarten and first grade almost for two years and stay in the house by myself till like 9:30, 10:00 at night, and my mother said it broke her heart every single day walking up those steps. We lived in sort of a low income housing project type environment, and I would always be sitting in that front window because I was scared. So I was so petrified of being in the house by myself. I didn’t even watch “Scooby Doo”. I was that scared. The ghosts on “Scooby Doo” scared the heck out of me. But my mother made a way for me to start staying in between her and my grandmother. When I was 9, my mother, she walks into my grandmother’s bedroom and found her murdered. Found her murdered with a knife in her chest, and her neck was broken and everything, eyes wide open, blood everywhere. And for me as a little kid, all the other family, they come in and you hear the whispers from adults as a little kid, and they affect you a certain way. I just heard everyone saying, “If that happened to me, I would go crazy. I would lose my mind.” For me, crazy was kind of like what my dad was. So in my mind, as a 9 year old, my mother told me the only thing that got her through that was I came up to her and grabbed her hand and said, “Mom, are you going crazy?” And she looked down at me and said, “No. Why do you ask me that?” And I just said, “Well, that’s good because if you go crazy, nobody’s going to be here to take care of me.” I’m so grateful to my mother. That is the strongest individual that I’ve ever known, and I appreciate her so much. If all those things and the story gets better. But just for right now, just entertain me. If that wasn’t enough on my mother. When I was 13, her sister, who was like my other mother got killed and died an even worse or more painful death than my grandmother did. Even through that, my mother stayed strong and raised me. By the time I was 15, growing up in the environment that I was in, I had so many brushes with death. I remember one distinct time a guy had a gun to my head, a loaded gun to my head, pulled the trigger seven times. God’s honest truth, the bullet didn’t come out. He wasn’t pointing the gun at me and pulled the trigger and a bullet came out. I was too young to even recognize that God was saving my life.[…] And at the same time my gym teacher was the head football coach. His name is Mark Wittgartner, he’s here. He comes up to me while we’re in school, and he says, “Son, I want you to play for our football team.” I said, well, “I don’t really have an interest, Coach.” He said, well, listen, if you don’t do something with your life, from what I hear about you, you’re going to end up dead or in jail pretty soon. With him in one ear and my mother in the other ear, football became the default that I fell into. And Coach Mark Wittgartner, you have no idea what you were saying to me, but I believe what you said could have been the possible thing that saved my life. I think you were right. He also told me, “Curtis, if you play, I think you’ll get a scholarship. I think you’re that good. You’ll get a scholarship to anywhere you want to go in the country.” But to me, I didn’t really care, it didn’t make sense. But it was like, “No, now that’s two thing that’s I don’t like, football and school.” I wasn’t really for that, but to appease my mother, I played football. I ended up doing well in football. My senior year I broke about every rushing record. And just like Coach Mark Wittgartner said, every school in the country recruited me. And I had to go to college, reluctantly. And because Pitt was right down the street, I chose Pitt by default. I’m so grateful to Coach Sal Sunseri and Coach Paul Hackett, because my freshman year, they were the ones who kind of kept me straight. Just to fast forward to me going into the NFL, well, even before that, by the time I was a junior, my life was so bad that I literally thought—this is something everyone knows—I always thought I would die before I was 21. […] At my eulogy, I don’t want my daughter or whoever it may be giving my eulogy to talk about how many yards I gained or touchdowns I scored. I want my daughter to be able to talk about the man that Curtis Martin was. How when she was growing up, she looked for a man who was like her father. That he was a man of integrity, a man of strong character, and a God fearing man. That’s what I want. Then at the end of the day, she could say, oh yeah, and he was a pretty good football player. Thank you all.




