The offending list of start-ups
While he’s known as a goofball on the big screen, Ashton Kutcher has been able to shed that image in the real world with his savvy investing skills. He has quite a portfolio, including such successes as Foursquare and Skype, but his latest endeavor as a magazine editor has left him with some serious egg on his face.
Kutcher has become a huge representative for our generation. He’s ambitious, successful, charitable, tech-loving, handsome, business savvy, and interested in all of the up-and-coming “next big things.” However, despite his seemingly best intentions, he also has a tendency to get himself into trouble, which also makes him into a problem for our rep.
Earlier this year, he started a campaign against human trafficking, but experts came forward disputing the shocking numbers they used as severely overshot. His latest scandal involves being the editor for the online, Facebook-only edition of Details magazine, in which he shamelessly (and without disclosure) endorses all those startups he invested in. His failure to disclose this conflict of interest could even land him in some serious trouble with the FTC.
Aside from this controversy, though, the online issue of Details is just another tech step forward Ashton wanted to be a part of. Apart from the few pages of shameless self-promoting, the remaining 40 or so pages were pretty great. It was easy to navigate through, to revisit pages, and had a nice clean finish to it. Reading on a small laptop screen was no problem – the zooming and scrolling down the page were seamless, and it maintained your zoom level from page to page, so there wasn’t a need for continuous readjusting. Comparing it to looking through the bits and pieces of issues most magazines provide in a blog-like form on their websites, there was no comparison. This felt whole and unified, rather than scattered and unorganized.
Easy, seamless navigation
The rest of the content was informative and relevant. One problem was it felt like there were a lot more ads than normal, but as this was a Facebook only issue, Details smartly included links to each advertiser’s Facebook pages underneath the issue so I could quickly get more info about the advertisers if I wanted to. The advertisements were also attractive and relevant to the content, so it wasn’t too irritating.
As far as Kutcher’s huge conflict of interest goes, reading through the “Generation Next” list, I couldn’t help but question if any of the startups he endorsed were actually better than what I use now for those purposes.
A few of them seem promising or are already well known, like Hipmunk (a back to basics flight and hotel search), Chegg (a textbook rental and purchasing site that often beats Amazon’s used prices) and Posterous (a microblogging site). SeatGeek aggregates tickets for sale across the major sales sites and predicts when you should buy before a price hike – very cool in theory, and definitely worth trying.
On the flip side, many appear to be trying to fill a need we already have filled by a titan, and with their current features will attract a small group of people who have a very specific complaint against the norm. TinyChat offers up to 12-way video chatting (why you’d ever want to simultaneously talk to that many people is beyond me), but other than that it seems no competitor for Skype at the moment. TinyChat’s biggest brag is that it doesn’t require any downloads, but I like Skype being separate from my browser.
Blekko’s slashtag feature doesn’t feel intuitive, and while kind of cool, isn’t enough incentive for me to abandon Google, despite my annoyance with Google’s tabs in the new layout. Path is a good alternative to Flickr if you want a very small group to be able to see your photos, but if you’re all about sharing, it’s not for you. Chomp promises to be better than iTunes Genius for finding you apps you might like, but upon searching for apps the results are nearly identical to the results you get in the App Store.
It seems most of the startups Kutcher has in his portfolio will find some success, but a lot of them cater to too small an audience to really be the next big thing.
What do you think? Did Ashton make an unforgivable mistake? Or is this issue of Details worth his little slip-up?
He’s admirable in many aspects, but taking on a serious editing role is not without responsibilities. He shouldn’t trivialize just about any profession like that just because we’re all in an overly democratic information business.
I definitely agree it’s not a position to be trivialized, but have you seen the issue? I actually enjoyed reading through it. I’m sure he wasn’t quite as involved with overseeing it as an editor usually would be though. And he could have seriously paid for his faux pas if the FTC had decided to investigate him (they’ve said they won’t). He skidded by on that one.