From a tiny corner table at a busy Samovar Tea Lounge (samovarlife.com) in San Francisco, Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose jump into another random brain spew episode by starting off with a little medical update on Tim's recent ER visit for some elbow issues. Other topics include: - the new (now old) iPhone 3GS, talking some about the new updates and then a short comparison with the Palm Pre. - personal experiences with start-ups and pitching new ideas through avenues like Y Combinator http://ycombinator.com/ where Tim was then able to find and invest in startups like RescueTime http://www.rescuetime.com/ and Posterous http://posterous.com/ - Kevin, as a recent mentor at Demo days, gives up five things you can do as a new startup - to get your ideas in front of influencers. - Tim recently gave a speech about per user metrics, unique visitors coming to your site - cost per acquisition, and lifetime value of the customer. - Website Optimzer - http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/b/index.html - Google Analytics - http://www.google.com/analytics/ - KISSmetrics (http://kissmetrics.com). - WordCamp (http://central.wordcamp.org). - List of Speakers at WordCamp (http://2009.sf.wordcamp.org/speakers). - Tim's "How to Blog Without Killing Yourself" talk. (http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/06/29/how-to-build-a-high-traffic-blog-without-killing-yourself). - Tim talks about the Living Language series (http://www.randomhouse.com/livinglanguage) and its flaws. ------------------------------- Additional In-depth Notes on the last portion: In the previous episode of "Random" (Link: http://bit.ly/RandomEp3), Kevin & Tim spoke a bit about language learning last time. He mentioned a book series called "The Living Language Series" (Link: http://bit.ly/LivingLanguage), which is a very high quality series. But that doesn't mean its perfect, as Tim points out in this episode. He gives his insight on how he evaluates textbooks, how he uses them and his own criterion on how he selected the mentioned series of textbooks. He goes on to talk about the issues he has like how it is structured to how the book teaches recognition and comprehention, he even gives you tips on how to easier work with the textbook. Kevin then attempts to read some Mandarin Chinese to Tim and... Kidna well, you be the judge. He continiues to say that the book doesn't provide enough visual recognition to the reader, which "makes the book easier to print", but not to fully understand. This means that just because you HEAR how something is said, doesn't mean that the word you repeat is used in the same context of what other people hear since many words sound the same but are written differently and mean very different things. Do you agree with Kevin's theory about watching foreign films to learn a language? For example, Tim mentions that David Prager (Link: http://twitter.com/dlprager) of Revision3 (Link: http://revision3.com/) about Netflix's streaming service (Link: http://www.netflix.com/HowItWorks) and how you can stream any movie or collection of movies and start learning rather than going down to a local video store like Blockbuster to see if they have in in stock. Which would you rather do? Oh, and Flash Cards help too. Recommended Media: In Other Words: The Science And Psychology Of Second-language Acquisition (Link: http://bit.ly/KenjiHakuta), Google Search on "Cognitive Neuroscience research on language acquisition" (Link: http://bit.ly/BrainScience), Eat Drink Man Woman by Ang Lee (Link: http://bit.ly/NetflixPrager)