A New "Fair Use" Proposal: If you re-publish my content then publish my AdLink
News aggregators and bloggers that carry third party content should carry at least one advertising link associated with that content. It would be the fair thing to do and a large aggregator such as Google News could help establish this practice.  Google News publishes the headline  and the first paragraph of a news story on its site. Since news stories are written in an inverted pyramid format, the headline and first paragraph contain most of the value of a news story. Therefore, it's only fair that if you take most of the value of a news story, then also publish one advertising link from the original site. And if you are a blogger and blog the content or quote it, then the same would apply: publish one advertising link from the original site alongside the content. - For example, if you'd like to republish part of this article, you might agree to publish one of my three advertising links alongside the content:             -Silicon Valley Watcher-reporting on the culture of disruption.           -Silicon Valley Minute-Startups pitch in less than a minute.           -Intel Core2Duo is here!   It's your choice which one of the three to carry, and your choice to do it or not. But over time, it's a practice that would be seen as a mark of respect to the original content creator. And it would help the original content creators recoup some of the cost of producing it--and it would encourage good content. Google News doesn't monetise the news content...[Read Full Article]

Friday Watch: Podcasts, Better Writing, China's Tech, Khosla at Cleantech 2007, Wired Mag Cover: You
Here is the podcast (92 minutes) from the recent Social Media Club in San Francisco on the subject of social media tools and saving the planet: Social Media Club - » Social Media Club San Francisco Podcast ... TauMed.com--a free online health community is preparing for an official public beta launch. You can preview personalization tools and community tools for a "My Health Space" capability in building support networks. Medical sites are very hot these days because of the pharma advertising money. ... The iSuppli market research firm brings attention to China's development of key technology standards for its domestic market which are designed to protect its indigenous companies. There are several major technology standards that have been released or are now under development that will have a major influence on high-technology markets in China, including: · The digital terrestrial television broadcast standard, which will go into effect on Aug. 1. · The AVS standard, which passed the Ministry of Information Industry (MII)’s examination in December 2005 and became a recommended standard on Mar. 1, 2006. · Automotive specifications covering areas including sensors, testing, diagnostics, electromagnetic compatibility and networking and interface protocols. · The TD-SCDMA 3G mobile-phone standard, which is being used on a trial basis by 20,000 consumers in China. · The mobile TV standard, which is yet to be determined by China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT). · WiMAX wireless broadband, a technology that remains in a trial period in China.   Find out more from iSuppli's free...[Read Full Article]

Newspapers and magazines aren't making money online
Here is an interesting post from BizReport. It shows that publishers aren't making money from their online operations. Publishers aren't profiting from online operations - Internet - BizReport Out of 350 international newspaper and magazine executives gathered in Hannover, Germany, for a media conference, only one was able to claim making a profit from their online operations. by Helen Leggatt Furthermore, despite investments totalling millions in marketing dollars, only a handful of the industry players present could claim more than 3 percent of their sales came from online. The economics of publishing online can't support the people and processes that are needed to produce it. This is a serious issue because as the "paper" based economic models get trashed, it is clear that online publishing isn't going to save old media publishers anytime soon. Even if their online revenues were to double tomorrow, it still wouldn't be enougth. It is another example of "you can't get there from here" when it comes to old media transitioning to the new media world. It's because publishers have to compete against online publishers such as Google whose costs of publishing a page of content and ads is miniscule. The reason GOOG or YHOO or Craig's List can sell advertising cheaper is because they don't have to pay for their content. Mostly, their content is machine-generated, or harvested by their spiderbots roaming the Internet, or it is user-contributed as in Craig's List. Online advertising rates reflect this economic reality and thus are held down at low...[Read Full Article]

Silicon Valley Minute II: Who are you and what do you do?
I meet a lot of startups and it can take them 30 minutes and more (if I let them), to tell me what they do. Often, they will tell me more about their competitors than about themselves. I know it is not easy to get a pitch right. When I left the Financial Times in June 2004 to launch Silicon Valley Watcher I took most of the summer off in preparation. I spoke with a lot of friends, colleagues and contacts about my venture. It took me all summer to boil it down from 30 minutes to this: "Silicon Valley Watcher is a news magazine that reports on the business of Silicon Valley." "Who are you and what do you do?" has to be the single most important answer for any company.  Silicon Valley Minute - One-minute pitch  Video by Elizabeth Safran,  RSA Conference 2007, San Francisco February 2007(This is from KSR and this is KSR's mission statement--from their web site:)>KSR is the first Managed Risk Services Provider (MSRP) to expertly align organizations unique risk profiles with a new breed of managed and professional services designed to mitigate corporate and personal liability. KSR’s holistic approach to enterprise risk management blends security, information technology, and operations management with an innovative set of services that ensures ongoing confidentiality, integrity, availability, and efficiency. KSR serves mid-size and large enterprise customers worldwide, and the KSR team is made up world-class experts from organizations such as Verisign, the US National Security Agency (NSA), Netscape, Exodus,...[Read Full Article]

The Achilles' Heel of GOOG's Pay Per Action
My colleague Richard Koman  blogged about Google's latest foray into monetizing online content: GOOG's unveils Pay Per Action advertising. The gist: Advertisers will decide on what they will pay for a specific user action such as filling out mortgage application forms, or a questionnaire, or anything. This goes beyond pay-per-click, Google's main advertising service,  because it potentially involves bringing someone closer to a sale, and so it is more valuable to the advertiser,  and to Google, and to the publisher of a web site. Also, as part of this Pay Per Action model, Google offers a way of embedding links within a web page of content, which brings up an issue of content designed for advertisers. This is typical of Google's observations of what works on the Internet. It always recommends to web site publishers that the format of its advertising links blend into a web page.  With Pay Per Action, website publishers can potentially further blend the content with the advertising. Online content publishers are not doing all that well and so they might be tempted to blend advertising and editorial content but that is dangerous because it could undermine their editorial integrity. Google's advertising models might further erode the editorial integrity of online sites. And it is open to spammers and fraudsters. Filling out a form and getting paid $40 or more,  is easier to hide, and easier to do than having people commit click-fraud on pay-per-click ads.  You could buy a CDROM of thousands of names and addresses,...[Read Full Article]

How Can Collaborative Tools Help Save The Planet?
It was an interesting turnout at the Social Media Club Tuesday evening. Social Media Club is run by my friends Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells. Tuesday's theme was introduced by Raines Cohen and the subject was:"Saving the Earth through Social Media: Public Education about the Global Climate Crisis through Blogging and Web Publishing." Not surprisingly, we barely scratched the surface, which is good because there are many ways to scratch this theme, especially since our tools are so new. I didn't catch everybody's name but here are some of the web sites associated with the people at Tuesday's event, or recommended by them: Kari Daniels and her documentary "Voices of Dissent." Raines Cohen Greener.com - a green search site. Freecycle Changing the World One Gift at a Time Podaddies - Dynamic Video Ads Yahoo! Answers - How can the human race survive the next hundred years Justin.tv Tracked in America The Digital Tipping Point the culture of freedom in cyberspace SOMAcast - South of Market in San Francisco mp3death.com my-currency knowledge is currency Jyte Spread the Cred GUBA - Enjoy, upload, and share free videos. Webstrategy, Inc My apologies if I missed anyone. There was lots of great conversation, Chris will post the podcast. What struck me about the evening was something that I noticed when I first arrived here in 1984--how little debate there is between groups of people. We spend way too much time with people we agree with most of the time. The culture here rewards agreement but not debate. Americans...[Read Full Article]

Notes From VON Conference: Figuring out Video on the Net Business Models
I spent much of Monday and Tuesday in San Jose at the VON (Video on the Net) trade show and conference. This conference was founded by Jeff Pulver, the pioneer of voice on the net, and it is big. It was strange to see a "big" trade show,  many have become "former" or have become tiny. For much of Monday I was at the  Hollywood and Internet Video conference track organized by Cynthia Brumfield (IP Media Monitor). I moderated the last panel of the day: Ordinary People: How is Technology Changing Entertainment? My panel:Nizar Allibhoy, Principal, MediaEnable, LLC Mike Pascarella, President and CEO, Gotuit Media Corp Herve Utheza, Vice-President and Executive Producer of TV Properties, Orb Networks It wasn't a simple topic because we have so many ways to upload, share, tag, and watch entertainment. But the panel did well, pointing out that while much of the day had been spent talking abut how media companies were using technologies to bring interactive entertainment to people, not much had been said about how people are using technologies in new ways. Mr Pascarella's company has several interesting technologies, the main one being the ability to tag parts of an online video and just share clips of just a few seconds long. He believes that advertisers will pay much more for the chance to advertise around popular clips from longer videos. Gotuit only hosts licensed content from large media companies Mr Allibhoy has worked with some very large media companies including Sony Pictures Digital. He has a...[Read Full Article]

BitTorrent.Com founder Says It Is Ahead of Online Video Competitors
(From the keynote of the New Video Summit in San Jose: Andreas Kluth from the Economist interviews Bram Cohen, founder of BitTorrent.) Bram Cohen, founder of BitTorrent, says his company is ahead of other online video sites and has made headway in licensing content with Hollywood. "BitTorrent.com has ten times more Hollywood content than iTunes. We have been talking with Hollywood for a long time and we have the jump on things," said Mr Cohen. Mr Cohen invented the BitTorrent technology which allows peer to peer systems distribute files. This works well with large files such as for audio and video. He founded BitTorrent.com as a site for distributing high quality online video and audio content. He said that other online video sites are hampered by outdated licensing agreements. For example Netflix has a streaming licensing agreement which has different conditions. "We've pioneered a new online licensing model and that is where a lot of innovation has taken place," he said. I asked about YouTube and the online licensing rights. Mr Cohen said: "Yes, YouTube could make use of some of the online download rights but they need to get Hollywood's trust and that will be hard because You Tube is coming from an already bad situation." Mr Kluth pointed out that Mr Cohen was not in Hollywood's good books a few years ago, because the BitTorrent technology was often used to share Hollywood copyrighted content. BitTorrent.com uses Microsoft's DRM technology but Mr Cohen said he is not happy  with the...[Read Full Article]

Warsaw University Team Are World Programming Champions, Again
Warsaw University's team  won the 31st annual World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, sponsored by IBM and held at IBM Tokyo Research Lab. There were 6,099 teams on 6 continents in regional contests and 88 teams qualified for the finals. 25 teams were from North America, 2 from Africa/Middle East, 10 from Latin America, 20 from Europe and Russia, 31 from Asia/South Pacific. Warsaw University solved 8 problem sets, in second place was Tsinghua University with 7 solved, the rest solved 6 or less. Highest scoring US team was MIT in fourth place behind St. Petersburg University. Warsaw won the 2003 championship. Polish programmers have won many international programming contests, reflecting the country's strong history in math and cryptography. Poland is becoming a favored site for many US company development centers. Contest Standings - The 2007 ACM-ICPC World Finals The Problem SetsPast Contests - The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Link to ACM Contest Technorati tags: warsaw university, ACM-ICPC...[Read Full Article]

Old Media: You can't get there from here...
Blogged content could carry advertising links... In the SF Chronicle this week there was a lot of discussion about old and new media. Dan Fost had a great front page feature and daily notes on the geek part of the South by Southwest festival which featured top bloggers such as Robert Scoble from Podtech.net. And leading columnists Jon Carroll and David Lazarus discussed the economics of new media and how old media could fit into that landscape.  Mr Lazarus was encouraged by the Viacom suit against YouTube as this showed that "content is king" and that the economics of online media will shift from aggregators such as Google, to creators such as Viacom, and newspapers. Content will be king From my view as an online publisher, and coming from a mainstream media background, I would say that "content will be king" but it will take a while. Right now, even if all the creators took away their content from Google, Yahoo, etc it wouldn't do much good. Because revenues from online advertising cannot support mainstream media's legacy infrastructure costs--buildings, layers of management, pension plans, trucks, printing presses, etc. The billions that Google and the other new media companies make, are a fraction of the billions lost in conventional advertising markets. That's why it costs less to advertise online because the operating costs for a Google or Yahoo are far less than for old media companies. A blogger with a laptop Online advertising models can barely  support popular bloggers, and that is the cost of...[Read Full Article]

GOOG Will Hold Private Search Data for up to 2 Years
Under revisions announced late Wednesday, Google promised to wrap a cloak of anonymity around the vast amounts of information that the Mountain View-based company regularly collects about its millions of users around the world. Google believes it can provide more assurances of privacy by removing key pieces of identifying information from its system every 18 to 24 months. The timetable is designed to comply with a hodgepodge of laws around the world that dictate how long search engines are supposed to retain user information. Google to Adopt New Privacy Measures By Michael Liedtke, AP Business Writer Interesting. Especially since GOOG and the other search engines have often said they are interested in behavioral data rather than individual data. If GOOG didn't collect identifiable data in the first place it wouldn't need a privacy policy. And it wouldn't be vulnerable to this:   Authorities still could demand to review personal information before Google purges it or take legal action seeking to force the company to keep the data beyond the new time limits. Nevertheless, Google's additional safeguards mark the first time it has spelled out precisely how long it will hold onto data that can reveal intimate details about a person's Web surfing habits. I hope it is not the same type of unidentifiable data that AOL released last year, which didn't take much work to identify some users. The unguarded thoughts of the digital haves... The most compelling content on the Internet, by far, is AOL's release of search...[Read Full Article]

Tech CEOs' Green Report Calls for Government Green$$
Tech CEOs go to Washington D.C: TechNet announced its green tech policy agenda during "TechNet Day,” the organization's sixth annual trip to the nation's capital for CEO meetings with leaders in Congress and the Administration.  (The full report is available here: http://www.technet.org/resources/GreenTechReport.pdf)   Some of the proposals:       o Double federal funding for basic energy research       o Enhance the federal government's role as purchaser of new energy technologies       • Fundamental reform of federal tax policy to spur the development and adoption of new energy technologies       o Increase the level of incentives to spur new energy technologies       o Restructure incentives to enable market signals that drive new technologies       o Encourage technology neutrality enabling the marketplace to pick winners       o Establish an effective tradable Renewable Energy Certificate marketplace       o Enable utilities to recover investments in renewable generation and transmission        It is all good stuff. But waiting for the government to do these things is like waiting for the government to admit that global warming was a problem in the first place. It takes way too long and the action is needed now. Silicon Valley should be able to figure out the business models for innovation in clean energy and related "green" markets without government help. Subsidies and government programs remove the effect of market conditions that test business models.  And it can leave worthy green ventures at the mercy of future political decisions. That's a risk that investors don't need. TechNet and other tech related lobby groups have been spectacularly unsuccessful in...[Read Full Article]

Hong Kong Lawmaker Continues Attack on Yahoo over Journalist Jailing in China
Hong Kong's privacy commissioner said there wasn't enough evidence to show that Yahoo's Hong Kong office revealed private information to Chinese authorities that jailed Chinese reporter Shi Tao for ten years.  Hong Kong lawmaker Albert Ho criticized the report and said Chinese court documents specifically cited Yahoo's Hong King office. From AP story: On Wednesday, Ho criticized the privacy commissioner's report, saying Yahoo! Hong Kong is still responsible because it controls the company's China office. ``I have reason to believe the decision (to give information on Shi) was made in Hong Kong,'' Ho said. He said Yahoo! shouldn't have surrendered the information to Chinese authorities unquestioningly. ``As an international company, Yahoo should know there are international standards it should follow, including those involving human rights and privacy. There's no reason for it not to investigate whether (the information Shi released) was a state secret,'' Ho said. Human Rights Watch said earlier Yahoo also supplied information to Chinese authorities that led to the arrests of another journalist and two other Chinese dissidents besides Shi. Link to MercuryNews.com | 03/14/2007 | Official: Yahoo didn't violate Hong Kong privacy laws in case of jailed Chinese journalist   Yahoo and any other US based Internet companies should not collect identifiable data on users in countries which jail dissidents for actions protected in the US. It is the ethical and right thing to do.   Please see SVW: Chinese Dissident's Wife to Sue Yahoo The wife of Chinese dissident has come to the US to sue Yahoo...[Read Full Article]

Mind the Gap: Venture Capital's Exit Problems
 Don Dodge points to some interesting VC figures on his blog that can be summarized as: Exits have averaged $18B over the past 6 years while investments have averaged about $40B over the same time period. Link to Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing For every $1 invested only 45 cents is returned through the sale of a startup or through an IPO. (Maybe all those Web 2.0 investments will pull the funds out of the ditch?)So I guess VCs should be happy to get what they can from selling their portfolio companies to the big players such as Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle, etc.   Don says: Microsoft acquired as many companies as Google and Yahoo combined. Microsoft acquired 19 companies last year. Google acquired 10 and Yahoo acquired 9. IBM also acquired 9 companies. Of course Google spent more on acquisitions, spending $1.65 Billion on YouTube alone. Link to Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing If you don't know Don: Don is currently Director of Business Development for Microsoft's Emerging Business Team. The goal is to help VC's and start-ups be successful with Microsoft, and together, provide great products for our customers.       Don Dodge...[Read Full Article]

US Anti-Terrorism Technology is Monitoring YouTube Videos
Andy Plesser over at Beet.TV has an interesting interview with Alex Laats from Defense contractor BBN about using advanced technologies to analyze and transcribe YouTube videos with 80 per cent accuracy.Beet.TV Exclusive Defense Contractor has Analyzed, Transcribed and Organized 1.5 Million YouTube A major defense department contractor, BBN of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has applied a national security technology application, developed to fight terrorism, to "crawl" the audio tracks of public Internet videos through its Podzinger subsidiary.  Podzinger has analyzed, transcribed and organized some 1.5 million YouTube clips since December and is crawling many thousand every day, according to Alex Laats, who heads the unit. It is interesting that government agencies have this technology and it means that Big Brother is here and now, so let's get used to it....[Read Full Article]

The Right to Respond Should be a Fundamental Right of the Internet
At the Newcomm Forum in Las Vegas this week, I kept hearing a lament that is all too common: how to deal with with negative or incorrect content about a company and its  products on search engine results? Especially if those negative  links are on the first page of results because most users rarely look at more than one page. The same issue applies to individuals too. Publishing  a response to a critic is not enougth because it is unlikely to be ranked on the first page of search results. Similarly, if a critic were to change their mind about a company, an individual,  or product--the search engines could still be serving up the original complaint on that crucial first page of results. This is a serious problem in terms of reputation management for companies, and it will increasingly affect individuals too as they seek new jobs, new partners, etc.  Companies have large resources and there are ways they can influence the search results. Individuals have far less ability to manage their online reputations. The Right to Respond I'm proposing that companies and individuals all should have a level playing field and that a fundamental right of the Internet should be the right to respond to anything that is written, said, or viewed about them. Readers reading a Right to Respond posting will know that it is likely biased but at least they can make up their own minds. There should be a tiny Right to Respond widget or link next to any content. The...[Read Full Article]

UPDATED: Widget Mania Trips a Cascade of Data...and Spyware
I love all the widgets that are coming out. There are some excellent services that offer search, headlines, and many other services. Web site owners can customize these widgets and drop the Javascript code onto their servers. When a visitor comes to their site, part of the page occupied by the widget loads data, text, or images. You can see a widget in action in my side column showing recent visitors and their photos. Widgets can be tiny, for example, at the end of my posts you can see how many blog responses Technorati has found to each article. And it is easy to make them yourself, I'll probably put together an SVW headlines widget that other sites can use. But I wonder about the extra load on servers and bandwidth around the Internet as thousands of new types of widgets offer various services, and are deployed on tens of millions of web pages. Each time a widget containing page is viewed in a web browser, it collects data to display in that page. So, in the above example, Technorati initiates a search for related blog posts whether it was requested or not. This creates a load on Technorati servers which slows down the user experience for anyone initiating a manual search. And it also taxes data bandwidth to move data that wasn't directly requested. This could add up to a "load" tax on the overall Internet as widget mania proliferates. Update: Widget Performance and Spyware issues... I was discussing...[Read Full Article]

Greetings from the Green City of Las Vegas
I've been in Las Vegas since Wednesday for the New Communications Forum speaking on two panels and a workshop. This is one of my favorite conferences, founded by Jennifer McClure and Elizabeth Albrycht. I'm also a founding fellow of the Palo Alto thinktank the Society of New Communications Research, which is closely connected with the conference and provides most of the speakers for the event. I'm backed up terribly on my emails but I'm meeting lots of excellent people and having lots of excellent conversations about the future of media and public relations, as we try to figure out some of the the new rules. I'll have more to write when I get back to San Francisco. --- Thinktank formed to study the new communications channels and their impact on society Think tank studies new communications channels and their impact . . . It has been about two years since my last visit to Las Vegas, and it has changed and grown a lot. I was thinking that Las Vegas might qualify as one of the greenest cities in the US because of the Hoover Dam nearby, which provides all of its power and water. However, the green part of the equation must be balanced against the huge number of visitors arriving by burning massive amounts of carbon from airplanes and cars. Plus if Las Vegas were more conservative in its use of electric power and water, there would be more for other communities, and less carbon powered electricity would be needed overall....[Read Full Article]

People-Powered Search: Wikipedia founder's challenge to GOOG, YHOO; and Eurekster
TOKYO (Reuters) - The online collaboration responsible for Wikipedia plans to build a search engine to rival those of Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) and Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), the founder of the popular Internet encyclopaedia said on Thursday. Wikia Inc., the commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia, is aiming to take as much as 5 percent of the lucrative Internet search market, Jimmy Wales said at a news conference in Tokyo. "The idea that Google has some edge because they've got super-duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now," he said. Describing the two Internet firms as "black boxes" that won't disclose how they rank search results, Wales said collaborative search technology could transform the power structure of the Internet. Link to Wikipedia founder says to challenge Google, Yahoo - Yahoo! News Interesting. I've been writing about people-powered search compared with machines and algorithms: Is Search Broken? Search seems to be broken...part 2 Eurekster seems to be well positioned in this area already. I like what they are doing with Swicki, which uses people-powered search. It has a very easy to interface and a ton of management tools. I set up this "Search Silicon Valley" Swicki in just a few minutes: check out the Search Silicon Valley swicki at eurekster.com...[Read Full Article]

MSFT copyright blast at GOOG explained: Teaming with AP and thousands of newspaper sites
Andy Plesser over at Beet. TV interviewed Jim Kathman, head of AP's global broadcast strategy: The Associated Press, the world's largest news organization, and Microsoft have developed an online video platform for thousands of U.S. newspapers, television and radio stations to upload, publish and monetize locally-created video. The new system is in beta tests with some 30 newspaper publishers and broadcasters including The Miami Herald, the Houston Chronicle and the Rocky Mountain News.  The program will go live in about 30 days. Link to Beet.TV: Exclusive: Microsoft and the Associated Press Teaming with Thousands of Newspapers and Broadcasters in New Online Video Network MSFT's attack on Google's use and interpretation of copyright makes lots of sense considering the upcoming launch of this service. But can MSFT get more revenues to the publishers than Google? Google's AdSense advertising network for publishers does not pay much, but can MSFT make sure publisher's get more revenue? MSFT could offer 100 percent to publishers in order to lure them away from AdSense. We might even get into an advertising war in which MSFT or GOOG, or YHOO offer 125 percent or more... MSFT has a ton of cash--this would be a quick way to buy large market share....[Read Full Article]

IDC: We face a looming crisis - we won't have anywhere to store hundreds of exabytes of data
 As if we didn't have global warming and many other things to worry about... IDC estimates that the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. But the amount of stuff generated is expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes (closing in on 1 zettabyte) in 2010. Source: Tech researchers calculate digital info Interesting, IDC, the world renowned market research firm, is saying that we will generate nearly 1,000 exabytes of data by 2010 yet only have the capacity to store about 600 exabytes. But how is it that we would be able to generate almost 1 zettabyte of data in the first place--without having a place to store it...? Surely, if we can generate it, we are able to store it, because data comes to us from data storage systems... Is IDC talking about data that we might like to store but we won't be able to store?  Then that figure is meaningless, because there is no end of data we might want to capture and store in the future. And there is no end of these type of useless market research forecasts, imho....[Read Full Article]

Search seems to be broken...part 2
(Thank you all for your comments on this topic of search...)   The holy grail within search is to be able to serve up the right search result from one user click. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button next to the "Google Search" button constantly tests this ability. One day it might very well be the only button found there because the underlying search technologies will be hugely improved. And researchers within the search engine communities will be widely recognized for their groundbreaking work--I'm certain that there will be future Nobel prize winners among them. But improvements in search, through the development of better algorithms and IT architectures, will very likely be of lesser value over the next few years compared with what can be achieved developing "people-powered" search technologies. It can be seen in sites such as Digg, which is a  better news aggregator using people-powered technologies, than machine-powered Google News, which states near the bottom of its page: "The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program." It is not just at Digg, there are "people-powered" search efforts all across the globe, involving tens of millions of people,  laboring every day to help improve the search experience. This is done by adding tags, site maps, headlines, etc, -- they are creating ever larger amounts of valuable search metadata about content. And we are just at the beginning of this trend. It is a markedly new phase in the development of search, one best described as "people-powered and technology-enabled."  As opposed...[Read Full Article]

Is Search Broken?
Search engines say they use complex algorithms to help users find exactly what they want Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button (btw, does anybody use it?), right below the search box implies that very thing. The legions of top Ph.Ds working for the search engines publish oodles of scientific papers on complex mathematical concepts related to search.  Recent Papers Written by Googlers A complete, co-inductive syntactic theory of sequential control and state Achieving Anonymity via Clustering in a Metric Space An Assertional Correctness Proof of a Self-Stabilizing l-Exclusion Algorithm On-the-fly sharing for streamed aggregation Programmable clustering Using Many Machines to Handle an Enormous Error-Correcting Code It all looks very impressive but it seems to have more to do with contributing to the mythology surrounding search--that is very complex and scientific--than to the actual reality of how search is done. From my vantage point as an online publisher, it is clear that search is increasingly "people-powered" rather than machine-powered. There are millions of people helping the searchbots find information. Here are some examples and gripes: - There are many publishers that try to make sure their headlines catch the attention of the search engines rather than catch the attention of readers. The same is true for content, editors increasingly optimize it for the search engines rather than the readers. - Why should I have to tag my content, and tag it according to the specific formats that Technorati, and other search engines recommend?  Aren't they supposed to do that? - Google relies on a...[Read Full Article]

BackLinks & BackStories: A week in review. . .
How the media sausage gets made is a vital part of media literacy. In the spirit of adding transparency and showing how my media is made, here are some background notes on my past week. .... It was a busy week and I'm days behind on my emails (sorry everyone!). My inbox is the bane of my life because I can never catch up. I'm out and about most of the day and then I need time to write, which means my inbox is often the last thing I get to. And if I get a day or two behind on my emails I hate going there, which means it piles up even more... [SMS + cell phone ( 415 336 7547) are usually best way to get me if all else fails.]   Saturday- I spent most of the day writing articles instead of working on a new project, Silicon Valley Minute short vid pitches by startups - who are you and what do you do.) I wrote a bunch of posts, some exclusively for our new sister site New Rules Communications - the new rules in media and pr -One of the articles was about how Silicon Valley is becoming transformed into a Media Valley. It received lots of links over the next few days. It reminded me that timing is everything for some ideas... Silicon Valley has become Media Valley    see: 52 blog reactions ... Sunday- I went to Kezar Pavilion to celebrate the life of Pablo Heising, a friend who...[Read Full Article]

Anheuser Busch teams with MingleNow: Can online social networks sell beer?
It is a sunny, crisp mid-afternoon, and Gurbaksh Chahal, the CEO of BlueLithium advertising network,  is wearing a stunning blue striped suit by a French designer as we walk along a dowdy part of Divisadero Street, in San Francisco. I am meeting with him and top brand management executives from Anheuser Busch, who are dressed more conservatively,  to discuss plans to use online social networks to sell beer. The research group of BlueLithium, the second largest US online advertising network, last year came up with an idea for MingleNow. It is an online social network organized around the offline world.   Since friends gather around the same bars, restuarants and clubs, there is a potential opportunity to create social networks built around these common points of community. (SVW: MingleNow - social networking that mingles online and offline.) Following a private beta last year, BlueLithium is making a big push with MingleNow this year. Its goal is to have 2m active users by the end of 2007. And Mr Chahal has landed Anheuser Busch as a key launch partner for the venture. Tom Shipley, director of Global Industry Development at Anheuser Busch explains the reasons for the alliance. He shows me charts of beer consumption over the last 35 years. He points to the problem: beer's high point was in 1995 when it reached a  61 per cent share,  compared with hard liquor and wine. By the end of 2005 it had declined to 57 per cent. "For the last 18 months we have been running a campaign called...[Read Full Article]

Podtech.net: the dark horse of the new media pack
I recently popped in on John Furrier and team over at Podtech.net, in their new HQ on Page Mill Road, right next to the Wall Street Journal's Palo Alto printing plant. It's a perfect contrast of new and old media distribution models. Podtech is very much a media company of these times: its printing press is the Internet and its focus is on publishing video and audio content. It wants to become the YouTube of compelling video content for Silicon Valley and beyond... and to take over the world, of course.   These are healthy ambitions for a Silicon Valley startup. And Mr Furrier's New Jersey roots bring an extra kick to the company's ambitions. What has impressed me for a long time about Mr Furrier is that his instincts as a media entrepreneur have been spot on. His analysis of media and the disruption of the economic models in that sector is very similar to mine but we get to our analysis by different routes. Mr Furrier is a software developer by training so he uses a lot of software engineering metaphors. For example, he says there will be new jobs such as a "media developer." My term for this is "media engineer" but we both mean the same thing--media professionals, such as journalists, that know some coding too (XML, Javascript, CSS, RSS.) I worked as a software engineer a long long time ago, so my analysis comes from having worked in mainstream media and now working in the new (conversational) media. We see things...[Read Full Article]

To be or not to be a media company? There is a lot at stake...
And by Richard Koman for Silicon Valley Watcher. Yesterday my colleague Richard Koman wrote that a federal judge ruled that Google, Yahoo, Time Warner and Microsoft could refuse advertising.  Search engines are constitutionally similar to newspapers, the decision says and they have the same limited First Amendment rights as newspapers to accept or reject advertising. Link to:   Judge Google is a media company, legally speaking Interesting. Google says it is not a media company yet it invokes legal protections granted to newspapers. Here is Rachel Rosmarin from Forbes: Is Google a media company? Its officials often skirt around the concept, for fear of offending potential partners or competitors. Yet under the Communications Decency Act (CDA) Google and other search engine companies are not considered media companies and are protected from legal liabilities arising from what they publish--newspapers have no such shielding. Could this recent legal ruling lead to the loss of CDA protection for Google and similar companies? Richard commented: That's interesting. This dismissal decision actually has it both ways. Google is given the free speech protections of a newspaper and the court cites Miami Herald (newspapers can't be required to print candidate responses to editorials), Daily Nebraskan (decision not to print gay ads protected as free speech), Associates & Aldrich Co (newspaper can't be  compelled to print ad as is; right to edit). At the same time, Google is an online service provider under CDA. So they are protected from the liability that newspapers have for the editorial decisions they make. That's...[Read Full Article]

Silicon Valley Minute: Who are you and what do you do?
I'd like to introduce a new project, Silicon Valley Minute. It is a sub-minute video pitch by a company that answers: "Who are you and what do you do?" I meet a lot of startups and it can take them 30 minutes and more (if I let them), to tell me what they do. Often, they will tell me more about their competitors than about themselves. I know it is not easy to get a pitch right. When I left the Financial Times in June 2004 to launch Silicon Valley Watcher I took most of the summer off in preparation. I spoke with a lot of friends, colleagues and contacts about my venture. It took me all summer to boil it down from 30 minutes to this: "Silicon Valley Watcher is a news magazine that reports on the business of Silicon Valley." "Who are you and what do you do?" has to be the single most important answer for any company. To help startups get their pitch right, I teamed up with Elizabeth Safran, formerly with Trainer Communications, to launch the first  Silicon Valley Minute pitches. Elizabeth has worked with many startups and knows the challenges they face in getting their message right. We have ten sub-one minute videos of company pitches that can be rated, commented, emailed...and maybe improved. They were taken at the recent RSA Security conference. Each one looks well delivered. However, each one took an average of one hour and seven takes - so it is not as easy as it...[Read Full Article]

Low turnout for Silicon Valley Tech Policy Summit - do tech companies care about policy?
There was a low turnout at the Silicon Valley Tech Policy Summit in San Jose that was attributed to six inches of snow  in Washington D.C. which grounded travelers. But that doesn't explain why there weren't lots of Silicon Valley execs at the two day conference. Or rather, it shows that Silicon Valley's traditional lack of interest in politics continues, despite numerous reasons why such ignorance can be damaging. Star power such as Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal and other top editors from the Financial Times, Time, Forbes, BusinessWeek, Newsweek and even blog publisher Om Malik -- couldn't draw much of a local crowd. I popped in on Tuesday and caught a few panels. The Future of the Internet panel moderated by Declan McCullagh, News.com was lackluster with Jim Dempsey, policy director, Center for Democracy and Technology, Lauren Gelman, Assoc. Director of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, and Andrew McLaughlin, head of global public policy and senior counsel at Google. There was a lot of talk but little was said. I complained about it to Sean Garrett, one of the founders of  463 Communications, helping tech companies to "navigate the intersection of technology, public policy and government." He said that much of the talk was in a type of "code" that is understandable by those that deal with Washington politics. "For example, one person at my table was surprised at what the Google guy had to say. And often, it is not what they say, but what the don't...[Read Full Article]

Tech Policy Summit: Kara and the poster boys of social media
Kara Swisher moderated Policy 2.0: Social Media and Government Regulation. This panel had many of the leading poster boys of "Web 2.0 and social media." Jonathan Abrams, the former Friendster CEO, was there. He is now CEO of Socializr, which is in private beta and which he described as a cross between Friendster and Evite. Also on stage: Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg; Reid Hoffman, president of LinkedIn; and David Sifry, CEO of Technorati. Ms Swisher kept the conversation rolling and interesting but there was absolutely zero discussion of government regulation and social media! It became an apt illustration of how little interest there is in government policy among tech companies coming from a top Silicon Valley journalist and the stars of the Web 2.0 movement. With the topic dismissed, the panel discussed other subjects. Ms Swisher gave Mr Adelson a withering look when she pointed out that Digg profited from posting copyrighted material and was "feeding off of other people's content."  Mr Adelson noted that not a single copyright holder had ever complained about being featured on Digg. Identity on the Internet was discussed, and Mr Hoffman said  LinkedIn offered a way for others to discover sanctioned information about their identities. The panel talked a lot about new media and old media. David Sifry of Technorati was very impressive, he came out with some excellent insights, sharing a lot of the points I've made many times about media and blogging. He talked abut how the blogs need big media and vice...[Read Full Article]

Tech Policy Summit: Tech companies have deep pockets and short arms
Elizabeth Corcoran, an editor at Forbes, moderated Developing Top Talent: Education, Immigration, and Innovation Leadership. She did a fine, spirited job trying to enliven the panel members: Phil Bond, head of the Information Technology Association of America. Dr. AnnaLee Saxenian, Dean, UC Berkeley's school of Information, and Rosen Sharma, CEO of Solidcore Systems. She eventually succeeded in her mission and there were some interesting points made. Mr Sharma said that the work visa process to bring in a foreign worker is too long, at least 3 months to arrange for an interview when it used to be done the same day. He said that even if the visa process were opened up, it is not clear that the US could attract the world's top talent. He said China, for example, was hiring "hordes" of top medical practitioners to staff its medical universities. Mr Bond complained that tech companies no longer had the same glamerous appeal they once had among politicians. And that the tech sector voice was too fragmented, it was split among too many associations. He added that the tech industry wasn't able to bring attention to the positive aspects outsourcing, that it actually does create jobs here. Ms. Saxenian said that tech companies lost a lot of their glamour after the dotcom bust. And that tech companies have never spent enough money contributing to political campaigns. "The politicians like to say that the tech companies have deep pockets and short arms," she said. . . . Please also see:  Low turnout...[Read Full Article]

Silicon Valley has become Media Valley - someone should tell NYC
 Silicon Valley is rapidly turning into Media Valley--and New York, NY should look out--the capital of the media world is shifting about 3,000 miles westwards. Some of Silicon Valley's largest companies are media companies: Google, Yahoo, EBay, for example are media companies--they publish pages of content and advertising around it. Some of the most interesting and most valuable new Silicon Valley companies, such as Youtube, Facebook are based here in Northern California. So is Craigslist, the seventh largest online media company in the English language world (in terms of traffic). Take a look at Business 2.0's 25 startups to watch and look at how many of these mostly "social" media and advertising companies and are based in the Bay Area:18. Only two are based in New York. Masters of the Universe But if you work in Manhattan you feel at the center of the media universe. Midtown and the Avenue of the Americas is where the capital of the media industry has sat for many decades. Whenever I am in New York, it feels as if I am in the coolest, the most media saviest place in the world. Just as in the famous New Yorker magazine cover, in which New York is depicted large and the Rest of the World is shown as distant, small, and uninteresting, that's the way it feels to me when I'm there. As a media professional, New York has always been a mecca, where I love to be. It was one of the perks...[Read Full Article]

An anthropologist explains Web 2.0 in pictures
Excellent video describing Web 2.0. It's probably the best definition I've seen. (Hattip Chris Dichtel.) By Michael Wesch Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. It is not surprising that an anthropologist put this together. It must be boom times for that profession, I would think!!! After all, they study social networks full time....[Read Full Article]

Friday Watch: Ze Frank came to town; Email your dreams into your future; A community for parents; UberPulse blog; Creative Commons chatter; Picasso is in town
A couple of weeks back I got to meet Ze Frank thanks to Nick Douglas. Ze is a very thoughtful chap, we had an interesting discussion about the dark side of community. Ze Frank lives in New York and is one of the pioneers of vidblogs, last year he won a Vloggie for his “The Show.” He makes his money by speaking at conferences. (zefrank - live shows.) Ze has one of the most interesting web sites with hours of fun. Check out this item! See also: Link to Laughing Squid » Ze Frank ... A reader writes: Link to Dreaminder. Remind yourself of your dreams There's innovation on handling your dreams:A website called Dreaminder enables you to write down your dream and send it to yourself in the future. On the date you specify, you will receive your dream in the email you entered. At that point, you have the opportunity to compare the life you live with your dreams and see how far you've come. . . . A reader writes: Schoolparentnet.com is a great secured site community for parents of pre-k through 12 grades. Schoolparentnet focus on providing tools and connections for parents through their schools for fundraising events, activities, projects and trips.  . . . Jean-Baptise Su is now publishing  UberPulse - a weblog about tech and Silicon Valley, with lots of video. . . . The Creative Commons Salon on Wednesday evening at ShineSF was dull despite a decent sized crowd which chattered away noisily through the presentations. Creative...[Read Full Article]

Innovation and Disruption - the semantic battle solved
I've been thinking a lot about innovation and what it means the past couple of weeks. It's a topic I've delved into before too, with Geoffrey Moore (see posts at end). My complaint is that "innovation" is used too broadly these days, its meaning is being diluted, it is being used to describe incremental improvements in business process rather than disruptive, which is its more traditional use. Here is how I can prove it: -The term "innovation" is being used by a lot of people and companies these days. They would only use the term if it held a special significance in our culture--and it clearly does. But it is appended to things that offer "incremental" improvements and thus they are made to sound better than they would be. -Our history books are full of innovations--none of them are "incremental" they are all game changing, disruptive technologies. Show me one that is incremental.   I can't fight the broad trend to dilute the meaning of innovation. IBM, Geoffrey Moore, et al, have a lot more resources to call upon and can make changes in meaning over time. Therefore, I will give up using innovation in my tag line..."reporting on the business and culture of innovation." Instead, I'll use this: "Silicon Valley Watcher: Reporting on the business and culture of disruption." I think it is a more powerful way of saying "innovation." - - - Additional Info: Innovation inflation - innovation is everywhere, even on business cards   Geoffrey Moore: Disrupting myths of disruptive...[Read Full Article]

The New Video Summit - Silicon Valley meets Hollywood
I'll be speaking at The New Video Summit coming up on March 19 to 22 in San Jose. Looks to be an interesting event. If you decide to go please use priority code IPM1. Bram Cohen, CEO of BiTorrent will keynote. Plus: Mike Lang, EVP, Business Development and Strategy, Fox Networks Daniel Scheinman, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Media Solutions Group Brent Weinstein, Head of Digital Media, United Talent Agency  Tara Maitra, Vice President, General Manager, Content Services, TiVo Inc. Dina Kaplan, Founder & CEO, Blip.tv Dmitry Shapiro, CEO, Veoh Robert Petty, Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of the Board, ROO Group Michael Gordon, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder, Limelight Networks Herve Utheza, Vice-President and Executive Producer of TV Properties, Orb Networks Chris O'Brien, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, Motionbox Nizar Allibhoy, Principal, MediaEnable, LLC Matt Sanchez, President, CEO, Co-Founder, VideoEgg Om Malik, Gigaom Rafat Ali, Paidcontent.org Andreas Kluth, The Economist Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher    ...[Read Full Article]

A proposal for a unit of innovation/disruption
I was discussing innovation Wednesday evening with my old buddy Tom Abate from The SF Chronicle. These chats always provide lots of fodder for posts. And in talking about innovation I began to wonder if it was synonymous with disruption. I think it is, because if innovation is not disruptive it won't get funding, at least not here in Silicon Valley. Is there a unit of disruption? I'll propose one: a $1Billion unit of disruption reached over 5 years (BUD). 1 BUD = A business process that has the potential to generate $1bn in annual sales within five years. That's about the minimum upside that a Silicon Valley startup needs to show in order to get funding. More is better, a five BUD would be stellar. And 1 BUD = 1 Innovation Unit. Because Innovation has to be disruptive, imho. ... Tom Abate: MiniMediaGuy...[Read Full Article]

Innovation inflation - innovation is everywhere, even on business cards
About 15 miles south of San Jose, down a country lane, and hidden behind one of the scenic rolling hills of "Steinbeck country" is IBM's Silicon Valley research and development labs. It used to be called Santa Teresa Labs, opened in 1977 with about 3,000 square feet, housing about 1300 researchers, mostly working on software projects. It is miles from Silicon Valley and out in the middle of nowhere, but this is one of IBM's top research labs. Clearly, IBM renamed the labs because it wanted it to be associated closely with Silicon Valley, and with innovation - the life blood of Silicon Valley. I was there recently for an event that showcased some of IBM's customers (EBay, Yahoo)  and IBM's technologies. I heard a lot about innovation. Innovation was by far the most commonly used term by the presenters. I also heard a lot about IBM's "Innovation Jam." This is an event that takes place once a year and was started in 2001, bringing together tens of thousands of IBM people, and customers, in a three-day brainstorming festival. I had two questions: The first was "what is innovation?" I was told that it means bringing people together to create new ways of thinking and of doing things. I was told that Innovation Jam created a whole pipeline of projects and that some of those became significant businesses, etc. But what I really heard between the lines, was that IBM was using collaborative technologies to create business ideas and...[Read Full Article]

A beastly Technorati rank...
I was just checking my Technorati ranking and noticed this...(!)...[Read Full Article]

Yakety Yak: There are several ways to monetize Web 2.0
I love to remind people that blogging is by far and away the most honest form of self promotion bar none. Because if you can't walk the walk and talk the talk it becomes very obvious--you can't fake it. About 99.999 per cent of bloggers out there make their money from their day jobs, they establish thought leadership in their professions, whether it is a lawyer, or a consultant, or an industry executive--their blog is a way to draw attention and monetize their day job, or promote their books, consulting, or any other related products. The trouble with being a journalist blogger, however, is that I have nothing but this news journalism to sell. Which is why I would like to write a book, and I think I have a good title and some good content: IMHO: 25 Essays From The Future (let me know what you think of the title). It will be based on some of my writings here and elsewhere, and it will be about trends and life in Silicon Valley. The main reason I'd like to write a book is not that a book is a direct pathway to  paying my rent, books generally don't make much money for their authors. But, there is an opportunity for speaking engagements and public speaking that pays very well. Take a look at these speaker fees, which some of our top Web 2.0 evangelists collect many times per year (these are starting amounts, sometimes less in return for promotional...[Read Full Article]

Sponsorwatch: Cohn & Wolfe leader sponsor of New Rules Communications
We are pleased to announce Cohn & Wolfe as a sponsor of our new sister site: New Rules Communications - reporting on the new rules in media and pr. It also marks the launch of Cohn & Wolfe's blog: Boomerang - What goes around, comes around. I think it is important for PR firms to show how they are using new media in their business in order for them to be able to show clients that they understand the new media and how it works. This type of understanding can only be had by doing and not by saying or reading about it. Tony Obregon at Cohn & Wolfe has been spearheading new media practices,  along with Chris Knight and Annie Longsworth. I'm impressed with the team at the San Francisco office and the mix of clients they have been working with. And it is a much different culture than the valley PR firms. I'm always keen to be associated with companies and organizations that are trying out new things and there are many new things to try out these days. And I've turned down sponsorship opportunities with companies that I felt were not trying out anything new but just wanted to be seen as if they were. Media and PR are changing rapidly because of all the new media technologies pouring out of Silicon Valley and beyond, and the new rules that are emerging will set the format for the next decade. I want to help discover and establish the...[Read Full Article]

SwitchPlanet launch: Trade stuff you have for stuff you want
Chris Samarin just launched SwitchPlanet.com as a private beta and would love to get some feedback on the site. He is also able to sign up some private beta testers (csamarin(at)gmail.com.) Chris explains: Basic concept...recycle the things you have and no longer need to get the stuff you want all for free(no sign up fees, no transaction fees, no monthly fees, etc.). Because it's free we give members the option to make a donation that goes into our SwitchFund that gets distributed among charities and non-profits.  Members can also create profiles and socialize and all that great stuff. I'm a one man shop, with a dev team, but no funding or marketing "guru" to help get the word out.  A quick look into the future…I'm looking to add SMS member verification (similar to how Gmail works when you sign up) before we come out of private beta and then start rolling out new features like friends and groups as well as branch out into the UK and into other switch-able items like books, tools or whatever else the members ask for during the open beta period.  ...[Read Full Article]

GOOGlink WiFi signal could crowd out other WiFis
Here is an interesting wrinkle in the battle over the Public Internet (PI) in San Francisco. The proposed Google/Earthlink "free" WiFi could take up all the available bandwidth on the WiFi radio frequency. Here is Tim Redmond from Politics Another problem with Googlink Wifi: Sarah Phelan gets into it here. Sasha puts it this way: The network will be exclusive. Although the network is not an explicit monopoly, it will essentially take up all the bandwidth at the frequency wi-fi uses, so it would be difficult or impossible to have a competing network without using a completely different (and likely more expensive) technology. Think about this for a second. San Francisco is full of all sorts of little (and not-so-little) wi-fi networks. SFLAN, for example, is building a free wifi service with a rooftop-to-rooftop backbone. Lots of people have smaller wi-fi setups that let them, for example, sit out in their backyards with a laptop and check their email. And if Googlink puts up its private wi-fi cloud, all of those other networks will run into interference. I'm not an expert on the technical details here, but Tim Pozar, who runs United Layer, is, and here's how he explaned it to me: "The type of spectrum we're using is interference-prone. There's just not that much space on the spectrum. The number of access points that are required [to set up citywide wi-fi] could mean one every block. That's a lot of radio frequency energy. It will significantly impact others who...[Read Full Article]

Zolved: Harvesting the community wisdom of geeks about gizmos
This is a great idea: Zolved.com is growing a community of people and answers to common consumer tech problems. As we get more and more digital gadgets and objects, making them work right, and work collaboratively with all our other gadgets gets to be very challenging. Quite often people abandon digital gadgets because they are too difficult to learn to operate. This could do a lot to help sell digital products. Also, Zolved offers a killer feature, it lets you remotely take control of your parent's PC, for example, to help solve problems. Here is Ratan Tipirneni, Founder and CEO to explain more about his company: Zolved.com harnesses the knowledge of thousands of consumers who have successfully solved technical problems and directs proven solutions from the knowing to those consumers who need to know.    The power of many individuals is put in service to the needs of one, along with targeted content obtained through vertical searching of industry manufacturers and experts.   Zolved.com technical experts then filter the content.  The result is the best match between a problem and speedy solution.If community-based assistance can’t resolve an issue, Zolved.com visitors can receive an answer by stating their problem and receiving an answer from Zolved.com's extended team of worldwide technical experts, or “gurus,” both within the company and the community at large.   Answers can be immediately available and, if not, a guru will often research the problem and respond with an answer once found.Local Technical Resources Zolved.com recognizes that not...[Read Full Article]

Google loses an "L" has anyone seen it?
Caroline Andreolle points out that today's Valentine's day Google page is missing an "l."...[Read Full Article]

Yahoo Music Chief exit surprisingly fast...
Sarah Spitz from radio station 89.9 KCRW-FM in Santa Monica says Dave Goldberg's departure from Yahoo Music was a big surprise since he had just been on a panel discussion that was posted yesterday: Jason Calacanis hosted, Steve Marks of RIAA, Dave Goldberg, Eric Garland of Big Champagne.com and Celia Hirschman, of indie label One Little Indian discussed the subject. http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/pc/pc070213the_music_industry_a --- 2.13.07: Yahoo Music execs resign UPDATE: Here's the official statement from Yahoo: Statement: David Goldberg and Robert Roback, Vice Presidents and General Managers of Yahoo! Music, have resigned. As the founders of LAUNCH Media and the leaders of Yahoo! Music, Dave and Bob have made... Posted by Richard Koman on February 13, 2007 10:16 AM Yahoo exec says removing DRM from music boosts sales Steve Jobs' recent call to take DRM off music allies him with Dave Goldberg, head of Yahoo Music, one of the top competitors to Apple's iTunes. I met with Dave Goldberg recently, when he was in town along with other Yahoo... Posted by Tom Foremski on February 11, 2007 5:25 PM  ...[Read Full Article]

After a hard day's night a little help from my invisible friends
I tend to work late in the day and into the night because the evening events are often poorly attended by other journalists, and so there is a greater chance of bringing back a scoop. Tuesday evening I went to HP's launch of enterprise OS and server products. I quickly recovered from that event and happily looked forward to one of my favorite bands Los Amigos Invisible, playing a five minute walk away at The Independent. It was a show that I couldn't imagine. Lucky me. My Invisible Friends are playing at The Independent today, too, Feb 14.   (Let me know if you like them.)...[Read Full Article]

Is HP an IT services company?
I popped into HP's launch of its latest HP-UX operating system and new servers Tuesday evening. It was held at 111 Minna Art Gallery in San Francisco rather than Palo Alto, where HP usually does such things. I would rather HP had held the launch in Palo Alto because then I wouldn't have gone to it. It was a deadly dull affair but I did get a chance to catch up with some of my colleagues, Don Clark, Dan Farber, Tom Saunders, Jean Baptiste, and friends at HP. Up on the small stage there were three HP enterprise execs. One talked about the new version of HP-UX and how it makes everything 30 per cent faster. Another person talked about blade servers and more performance per watt than competitors. I also heard several times that Sun is not a very good enterprise company, (I will follow up on that lead later.) Ann Livermore, HP Services chief was supposed to be there but did not show up. Was it bait-and-switch? I don't know but  it made me wonder: Why were the HP execs talking about operating systems and servers and not about IT solutions? Whenever I used to hear Ann Livermore, or Carly Fiorina the message over the past seven years has been that HP is an IT solutions company. I didn't hear a thing about IT solutions, just a bunch of stuff about application performance from HP operating systems and servers. I didn't hear about any specific applications, just "average"...[Read Full Article]

SVW Interview: CTO John Roese on Nortel's Burn the Boats Strategy for 4G
The clap and rumble of thunder is followed within seconds by the sound of a torrential, tropical downpour. I'm sitting in the Tonga Room, in the bowels of the swank Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, with John Roese, CTO of Nortel, the $11bn Canadian telecoms equipment giant. The thunder and lighting and tropical rain storms are fake, and only briefly interupt our conversation, which must sound like mumbo jumbo to many of the happy hour crowd that is sitting on adjoining tables. As soon as I met Mr Roese that Thursday evening, we launched straight into a conversation about the IPSEC standard, and then into an alphabet soup of acronyms associated with a multitude of communications standards and Internet technologies. But that's what this sector is about: billions of dollars being staked by telecommunications, cable companies, government agencies and enterprises on numerous existing and next generation communications and networking technologies. The problem is that not all sectors of the market are as fast moving as others. There is a lot of older telecommunications and Internet infrastructure in place. Yet there is a fourth generation (4G) of mobile wireless and communications technologies ready to roll. They offer dramatic improvements in capacity and equally dramatic reductions in costs. Burn the boats However, there is still a lot of 3G and older equipment being purchased with few gung ho proponents for 4G. It is a status quo that Nortel was once happy to support unti just a few months ago,  when it came up...[Read Full Article]

Web 2.0 heads offline: Fabrik acquires much larger SimpleTech group in $43m cash deal
To succeed in the consumer space, scale is very important which means an M&A wave is inevitable. Fabrik, a startup based in San Mateo, late Sunday announced it had acquired the consumer products business of SimpleTech. Fabrik offers online consumer media storage along with software to manage all types of media such as movies, music, and photos. This deal gives the web services company a physical presence through SimpleTech's retail channels Fabrik says that SimpleTech is the third largest US "provider of hard disk drive-based external, portable and network storage solutions for consumers and small business users. The purchase also includes the company’s flash memory cards, USB flash drives and memory upgrades." It is a cash deal valued at about $43m. It also brings together executives who used to work with each other, which will help, since the two businesses are very dissimilar. Foremski's Take: Fabrik's move is smart because it can acquire new customers for its web services business at a low cost. Customers of SimpleTech's products are very likely to be consumers looking for solutions to storing large numbers of media files, which is Fabrik's business. Memory/storage  devices can easily be linked to online media management services such as the free version of myfabrik. Then come the opportunities to upsell premium services and other memory products into the consumer media market. Otherwise, to rise above the noise level in consumer media would cost Fabrik tens of millions of dollars in annual marketing costs. This strategy is a more effective...[Read Full Article]

Yahoo exec says removing DRM from music boosts sales
Steve Jobs' recent call to take DRM off music allies him with Dave Goldberg, head of Yahoo Music, one of the top competitors to Apple's iTunes. I met with Dave Goldberg recently, when he was in town along with other Yahoo media execs, and asked him about DRM. "I've long advocated removing DRM on music because there is already a lot of music available without  DRM, and it just makes things complicated for the user." He said that Yahoo Music has done experiments where it has offered music with or without DRM, and that removing DRM boosts music sales. He said that the Microsoft DRM that Yahoo Music uses "doesn't work half the time." Mr Goldberg said that Yahoo Music will explore ways it can get "off the PC." He said that there would be an announcement later this year with a large partner. Removing DRM would make it easier for music to be played on different systems. "The car is the one thing that is keeping CD sales alive. Getting music into the car is a challenge, I don't know what the best solution is," Mr Goldberg said. ....... Additional Info: Jobs welcomes the death of DRMYahoo Media Group reorganizes to monetize major brands - with or without permission 1.24.07: Apple DRM illegal in Norway In media, the medium defines the DRM DVD Jon says he has cracked Apple DRM Digital Rights Management Primer .......Yahoo Music exec suggests we'd all be better off without DRM...[Read Full Article]

Iceland's geo hotspots could power GOOG server farms
I was recently chatting with a financial analyst from Norway about Iceland and the M&A wave that has been happening. Icelandic companies are on a tear acquiring large companies elsewhere. This is a nation of about 300k people. He happened to mention that energy is virtually free in Iceland because of all the geothermal hotspots there. Very cheap electric power attracts aluminum smelters. But where there are aluminum smelters GOOG is not far behind these days. GOOG also wants cheap electric power for its data centers, and that is why it is building a massive data center in Oregon, tapping into cheap(er) hydroelectric power. How long before GOOG data centers spring up in Iceland? And what is the next step in this approach? How about IP/data processing embedded in the electric power supply. You pay for the electricity but you get the communications/data processing for next to free......[Read Full Article]

San Francisco: GOOG/Earthlink WiFi project runs into ACLU concerns
The San Francisco WiFi deal with Google and Earthlink has run into more problems: (Hat tip Kimo Crossman)   http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/aclu-puts-heat-on-earthlink-and-google-in-san-fran/2007-02-08 ACLU puts heat on Earthlink and Google in San Fran February 8, 2007 · In: Wi-Fi | Wireless Regulation As if Earthlink and Google aren't getting enough heat over their muni-WiFi project in San Francisco. The ACLU of Northern California told the city's Board of Supervisors that its contract with Earthlink and Google doesn't have enough privacy and speech protections when it comes to the information Earthlink and Google will collect and share about end users. The contract doesn't have any limits on what kind of information Earthlink will collect, while the terms for Google call for requiring "minimal" information on login without defining what minimal means. The ACLU also said customers should be able to opt in or out of any service that collects data on what they look at on the Internet, and no provisions exist. For more about the ACLU's concerns in San Francisco:- read this article from InfoWorld ---- More here from WebProNews, and here from Light Reading.   http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/google_strategy/more_trouble_ahead_for_googles_sf_wifi_plan.html...[Read Full Article]

The Vikings are in GOOG's rear mirror and coming up FAST
FAST Search and Transfer has suddenly popped into my sphere of attention and I mean really popped. I got to spend some time at FAST's user conference at the end of last week, and it was an educational experience that got me interested in search again. This Norwegian based enterprise software search company has made the subject of search compelling again. For too long GOOG has made it appear as if it had already won the search wars--anything better would be an incremental improvement. Yet enterprise search--which is where FAST has staked its expertise--is a much more interesting subject than I imagined, and much more interesting than consumer search. Enterprise search is much more difficult problem, and one of the most challenging problems in IT. Consumer search can be vague and still be successful. It can bring up a list of nearly relevant sites or documents, and usually that is all that is needed. But in the enterprise, search is usually needed to find something very specific, a contract, a purchase order, a memo.  And there are all sorts of conditions associated with access to data, some security based, others are regulatory. Search quickly becomes quite a complex process and one that can lead to other things. Enterprises use a lot of structured data, but there is also a massive amount of unstructured data too. Search in the enterprise could potentially bring the two data world's together. You might even be able to create enterprise applications by using modified...[Read Full Article]

IDC study will reveal the dark matter of search queries
Susan Feldman, a senior analyst at IDC, will release on Friday the results of a groundbreaking study that shoots down one of the largest myths in search engine marketing: that the majority of traffic to web sites comes from the top ten search engines. By comparing publicly available traffic data from companies such as Nielsen Research, with research of its own, IDC found a big discrepancy in terms of the number of search queries tracked. Ms Feldman said, "Our model showed that there were seven to ten times more search queries being made and that the large search engines had only about 30 per cent of the search query traffic." Ms Feldman said that the missing search queries, the dark matter of the search engine world, were coming from direct queries. People would go to a web site such as Amazon.com and type in a search query. "This means that there is a massive business opportunity still to be had. The top search engines do not own the web, at least yet," said Ms Feldman. The IDC results will be released at a Friday session at a conference organized by Fast Search & Transfer, a client of IDC and a vendor of search enterprise software. Earlier this week Fast introduced its AdMomentum product which allows online publishers to set up their own advertising networks instead of sharing revenues with Google, Yahoo or other ad networks. . . . Foremski's Take: The IDC findings are not a revelation for any...[Read Full Article]

The GOOG threat to traditional PR
I ran into Andy Lark, earlier this week. Andy used to be corporate comms chief at Sun Microsystems. He now spends most of his time as Chief Marketing Officer at LogLogic, a fast growing enterprise software company. LogLogic, like many other startups, uses a PR agency to help get its message out to potential customers. Andy told me that he recently noticed that he was starting to spend more money on buying Google adwords than on PR. And when push comes to shove, I know where most cmpanies will put their money. You can pin a ROI on GOOG adwords that you can't with PR This is a very significant crossover point. It represents one of the many threats to traditional PR. And there are many PR agencies that only understand the old approach, no matter what they say about new/social media. There is a disconnect in the PR world that is going to hit that industry hard. .... Additional info: Andy Lark's Blog. SVW: Andy Lark agrees...blogging is disrupting PR...[Read Full Article]

Poor turnout at Josh Wolf Benefit
I popped into the Josh Wolf benefit and it was very poorly attended. And it is because he doesn't have the same kind of backing that journalists-with-a-job have. Such as those at the San Francisco Chronicle facing similar US government assaults on the freedoms of expression, and journalism. With that kind of poor support I think Josh should just give the grand jury the video tapes, there is no sense in resistance if it is not appreciated. Why spend all that time in jail if it isn't noticed? Let's choose these battles with less suffering for those involved. All those that feel that Josh should stand up for Shield Laws and the rights of journalists were not there on Tuesday evening at the House of Shields. Josh Wolf is a hardcore journalist and with bigger cojones than most of his peers. He should not be rotting in jail for a group of people that don't recognize his stand, or that of his stalwart family and friends, imho. Free Josh Wolf. .... Jailed journalist's mom asks for support for son and Bill of Rights...[Read Full Article]

As San Francisco ponders its Public Internet, FON gives away 10,000 routers
San Francisco holds the first of a series of public hearings at City Hall on the municipal Wi-Fi Google/Earthlink Project: Wednesday Feb 7 at 3pm City Hall, Board Chamber, room 250, Budget and Finance Committee. First District Supervisor Jake McGoldrick has sponsored a resolution on the project. San Francisco Budget Analyst report:"Fiscal Feasibility Analysis of a Municipally-Owned Citywide Wireless Broadband Network."   San Francisco Examiner has an editorial by on the SF Wi-Fi deal by Supervisor McGoldrick saying it should not be rushed through. S.F. should not rush free Wi-Fi deal When The City selects one company to take over our public assets to provide service, the only guarantee is that the provider will dictate the quality and cost of service. The consumers lose. Government loses its governance. And taxpayers are subsidizing EarthLink/Google’s businesses by paying for its infrastructure while being charged for their services. EarthLink/Google should not reap the benefits of the public’s use without giving much in return. . . . Another way to offer public Internet access is through FON, a company that sells routers that have a public and private WiFi channels. Users share their WiFi connection with anybody within range while keeping a secure private connection. To celebrate its one year birthday FON is giving away 10,000 WiFi routers for free in the US. FON is backed by Google, Skype, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures and has more than 250,000 users in 140 countries. Please see SVW:The battle for the last-mile heats up as...[Read Full Article]

Jailed journalist's mom asks for support for son and Bill of Rights
From Liz Wolf-Spada: Tomorrow, February 6, Josh will become the journalist longest imprisoned for refusing to testify before a grand jury. As his mom, I am angry and outraged that my son, a man of principle, who is a patriot, who is standing up for our US Constitution is jailed by a government that has shown no respect, or even understanding of the Bill of Rights. Please write Congress asking that they do for Josh what they are attempting to do for the Chronicle reporters. Rescind the subpoena, purge the civil contempt charge from his record and release him immediately. Just last Tuesday, his lawyers were denied the opportunity for a hearing to present evidence as to why Josh would never testify. The judge ruled on this without even allowing the lawyers to present their case or respond to the US Attorney's statement. There is no evidence that the US Attorney is even actively investigating ANY crime from that protest, and there IS evidence from the SFPD report that the only damage that police car suffered was a broken tail light. Please visit http://www.joshwolf.net freejosh (at) pbwiki.com.His proud and very concerned mom,Liz Wolf-Spada   ........... The Free Josh Wolf Coalition will be holding a press conference on the front steps of San Francisco City Hall at noon on Feb 6. Please help spread the word about this important event. Press conference press release WHAT: Free Josh Wolf Coalition Press Conference WHEN: Tuesday, February 6th, Noon WHERE: 1 Carlton B. Goodlett...[Read Full Article]

FAST AdMomentum: Publishers Can Throw Out the Third-Party Ad Networks
FAST Search and Transfer, the European based search giant, today announced software that allows online publishers to serve contextual ads to their readers. The FAST AdMomentum software could increase ad revenues by more than 200 per cent for some publishers, compared with large advertising networks such as Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network. This is a software package installed in a publisher's data center. FAST says that it could also be used by a third party to offer a ready made online contextual advertising network that could be used to service many smaller online publishers such as blog networks. This means it could be used to compete with up and coming advertising networks such as FM Advertising, and AdBrite. Publishers collect between 30 per cent to 70 per cent of the revenues that their advertising network partners receive--an amount that varies according to each deal. Google doesn't disclose the revenue split. With AdMomentum, large publishers can establish their own advertising networks that support contextual ads, and also offer a wide variety of other types of advertising revenue such as impressions, pay per click, and also auctions. Advertisers have a self-service interface and the software API is compatible with current advertisement tracking tools. More than a dozen large publishers around the world have been beta testing the software. Perry Solomon, VP of strategic market development at FAST, told SVW: "AdMomentum can be used to target ads to specific groups of people. One of our customers in Norway is using it to target ads to people...[Read Full Article]

Yahoo Media Group reorganizes to monetize major brands - with or without permission
Yahoo's top media execs came up from Santa Monica Tuesday to Yahoo HQ to present a new strategy for monetizing audiences of major entertainment brands such as TV's "Lost" and Nintendo's Wii. Vince Broady, head of Games and Entertainment, Scott Moore, head of News and Information, and David Goldberg, head of Yahoo Music, presented their strategies at a lunch event for top media. One of their largest initiatives is "Brand Universe" which pulls together Yahoo users in message boards, Flickr photos, Yahoo Groups, and other Yahoo sections into one location. This makes it easier to sell advertising because of the larger aggregated numbers. Vince Broady, is in charge of Brand Universe. "We will pick 100 of the top entertainment brand names and highlight and promote those brands on Yahoo. We will work with the brand owners but we can do this even if some companies don't want to work with us." Mr Broady said that Yahoo already knows what TV shows, music, films, games, game consoles will likely succeed, and which brands have momentum just from studying its users. "We saw very early on that Nintendo Wii would do well and so Wii became the first brand that we rolled out as part of Brand Universe." David Goldberg from Yahoo Music said, "We can tell with 100 per cent accuracy which songs will fail within seven days of their release." Yahoo said it would share its "Yahoo Pulse" data on which brands are doing well with brand owners because it would help them craft...[Read Full Article]

Chip industry rushing into over capacity?
Timothy Arcuri, a top chip analyst at Citigroup Investment Research raises a warning in a research note "Maybe Different This Time (But We Doubt It)." *       The chip industry has added more mfg capacity in each of past 3 yrs than any yr in history except C2000. Assuming WFE spend +5-10% in C2007 (on track, barring pushouts), this means 4 of top 5 capacity-add yrs occurred since '03.*       Memory fundamentals have been weakening, yet equipment stocks/tool orders have barely reacted. DRAM prices down ~20% past 4 wks (+ Elpida guiding CQ1 price -20% Q/Q) and Toshiba (which has raised capex past 3 yrs) is considering delay of a new NAND fab (Fab 5, according to Nikkei News).For complete note please use the following link: https://www.citigroupgeo.com/pdf/SBD96680.pdf Investors are bullish that the launch of Microsoft Vista operating system will drive new PC sales and memory chips because it won't run on most PCs/notebooks. But will businesses and consumers upgrade? Here is Computerworld: * Users Not Rushing on Vista, Office 2007http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/1226967/429922/49017/2/ Intel and IBM recently revealed their 45nm process, which means they can pack lots more chips onto each silicon wafer. Within a year Intel will have three 300mm fabs cranking out 45nm chips. Just one 300nm fab can produce a flood of chips. More chips equals lower prices means lower priced PCs means higher sales of computer products. But it means tough times for chipmakers that can't compete at 45nm with 300mm fabs at $3bn a piece....[Read Full Article]

US Tech Firms Lame Excuse on China Business
U.S. Tech Companies Urge Washington to Confront China on Internet Censorship WASHINGTON (AP) -- American technology giants urged the U.S. government Tuesday to do more to confront China and other countries about Internet censorship. Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. also defended themselves against accusations that they have helped governments such as China's crush dissent in return for access to booming Internet markets. Andrew McLaughlin, senior counsel for Google, told a State Department-sponsored conference on Internet freedom that his company is trying to use its presence in countries that are restrictive to provide communication options, such as e-mail and blogs, for people who may not have other ways to talk to each other freely.    Give me a break. What a flimsy excuse for GOOG's China business. What's so noble about providing email and blogs in China? There are plenty of providers of such services. And communicating freely in China is not to be encouraged because these US companies will turn you over to the Chinese authorities in a Silicon Valley nanosecond, if asked. They want the US government to take on China on Internet censorship. Usually tech companies want to keep the government out of anything to do with anything. It's easier to pass the buck than act in an ethical manner. Do No Evil? How about Do Some Good. I know that some of the the employees of YHOO, GOOG and MSFT feel that way, and maybe the rest too. How about the management?    ...[Read Full Article]

Fake Steve Jobs blog taken down
I'm sad to hear that the fake Steve Jobs blog is being taken down for legal reasons, enjoy it while you can: Well my friggin lawyers are advising me that I will have to shut down this scandalous old blog. Details not worth going into here. Someday I'll be able to explain. Maybe I'll write a book or something. Maybe a really beautiful e-Book that you can carry in your pocket and which will be sleek and elegant and shiny, with rounded corners and an extremely hi-res touch screen and only one button. Anyhoo, I've really enjoyed having this naked conversation with you, and I hope I've managed to restore a sense of childlike wonder to your life. http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/   At least we have the fake Robert Scoble blog! (Hat tip to Fake Steve!) There’s a new sort of social networking event that a few people have tipped me off about. It’ s kind of like LinkedIn, except that you meet offline in small groups of about 6 people. You eat food and drink alcohol while talking IRL about the latest great Gunjian technology. I think this “dinner party” network could be the next Orkut. Scoobietron - Pro Dork Blogger...[Read Full Article]

Harvard Business Review's 20 counter-culture breakthrough ideas
The Harvard Business Review has a list of top 20 "Breakthrough Ideas for 2007." Some interesting, ideas here that are counter-culture in that they challenge accepted thinking in many different areas. Siobhan Ford from HBR says that the list is free to read for all of February and that the most popular ones so far are:   The Accidental Influentials—Forget the Tipping Point. New research shows that ordinary people, not influentials, are the best word-of-mouth marketers. Living with Continuous Partial Attention—The increased “coping mechanism” we’ve adapted to keep up with information flying across our radar 24/7, thanks to the endless bandwidth of technology. Can a backlash be far off? An Emerging Hotbed of User-Centered Innovation—Customers aren’t just voicing their needs to companies that are willing to listen; they’re inventing and often building what they want. The Folly of Accountabilism—Accountability has gone horribly wrong, tricking people to believe they can control their lives by adhering to specific rules of right and wrong. The HBR List Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 I also found #2, #9, #10, #11 and #14 fascinating.   Here is the list with links to the individual articles....[Read Full Article]

Reposting due to server problems...
The server over at TotalChoice Hosting has been going down all week and has erased all of this week's entries and comments. I'm reposting some of the entries but I don't have copies of all the comments, my apologies....[Read Full Article]

IBM says Intel not alone in solving 45nm chip roadblock
(Intel is an SVW sponsor.) IBM says it has matched Intel's chip breakthrough with the discovery of materials that can make chips smaller and faster. "Until now, the chip industry was facing a major roadblock in terms of how far we could push current technology," said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president of Science and Technology, IBM Research. "After more than ten years of effort, we now have a way forward. IBM's East Fishkill fab in New York will start producing 45nm chips in 2008. . . . Foremski's Take: IBM is one of the only chipmakers that can take on Intel in bragging rights around leading edge chip technologies. IBM has pioneered a lot of important chip technologies. For example, It figured out a way of using copper in chips so that the metal wouldn't contaminate the entire wafer. It also pioneered silicon-on-insulator (SOI)--a technology that boosts the speed of chips. (Intel won't touch SOI, it says there are better ways to achieve a similar performance boost.) The difference between the two chipmakers is that IBM is in the foundry business, it makes chips for whoever pays the invoice. Intel is not, it works only for itself. Using IBM to make your chips gives you access to leading edge  technologies but it doesn't come cheap. And that is the challenge that the AMD/IBM alliance faces: to be able to match Intel's 45nm process at a comparable cost of production.   Here is IBM's announcement:...[Read Full Article]

Intel says it has secret materials that make chips faster and smaller
[Intel is an SVW sponsor.] [UPDATE: Please also see: IBM says Intel not alone in solving 45nm chip roadblock] People mistake Intel for being a microprocessor manufacturer. That's just an application of what it does best: it knows how to make the world's most advanced chips in massive quantities. Late last week Intel briefed reporters and analysts on what is likely the most significant breakthrough in chip making since the late 1960s. Intel said it had discovered materials that would enable it to make the world's tiniest chips in high volumes--and place it years ahead of competitors seeking to do the same. With the its new materials, Intel is able to make chips with geometries of 45 nanometers, half the size of most leading edge chips at 90nm. Intel shares a lot of its chip research but it said it will keep these materials secret. If the information leaked out, it would enable competitors to shave years off their R&D efforts and enter lucrative chip markets years earlier. Quite rightly, Intel is racing to take advantage of this lead. It is building three giant chip fabs which will use its secret process on silicon wafers the size of large dinner plates, 300mm (12 inch) across. By the end of this year two fabs will be completed and ramping into high volume production, closely followed by a third in Israel, in early 2008--all using this advanced chip making process. This means servers, desktops, and notebooks  will run faster and cooler and will be...[Read Full Article]

The power of PI: The rise of community owned Internets
From the news story: "San Francisco activist groups rally against Google/Earthlink "monopoly" deal for free WiFi " Several San Francisco activist groups and non-profit internet companies have joined together to protest a proposed deal between the city and a Google/Earthlink partnership to provide free WiFi. Called the Public Net San Francisco coalition, the group issued a statement Friday insisting that the city government kill a multi-million dollar pending deal with Google and Earthlink. Instead, the coalition says the city's existing high speed fiber optic network has plenty of spare capacity to support a high-speed Internet network open to every resident regardless of income.   The Google/Earthlink deal with San Francisco could potentially establish a model for municipalities across the US and in other countries. It would be the start of a massive new market for giant Internet companies such as Google and Earthlink. The San Francisco deal could put them in the forefront of a race with competitors to dominate the next big business opportunity: the gold rush to monetise local markets.  It has long been my opinion that communities will increasingly seek to own their "Internet airspace." Why should the local hardware store pay Google or Yahoo to reach its customers just a mile or two away? Why let Internet giants thousands of miles away become the gatekeepers for local commercial transactions? It sucks money out of a community. But there is no need for a middleman, there is no need for a GOOG or YHOO tax on people engaged...[Read Full Article]

The battle for a Publc Internet (PI): San Francisco activist groups rally against Google/Earthlink "monopoly" deal for free WiFi
Several San Francisco activist groups and non-profit internet companies have joined together to protest a proposed deal between the city and a Google/Earthlink partnership to provide free WiFi. Called the Public Net San Francisco coalition, the group issued a statement Friday insisting that the city government kill a multi-million dollar pending deal with Google and Earthlink. Instead, the coalition says the city's existing high speed fiber optic network has plenty of spare capacity to support a high-speed Internet network open to every resident regardless of income. Bruce Wolfe of the San Francisco People's Organization, said that the proposed Google/Earthlink free WiFi network would be too slow to support many common Internet uses, such as telephony and online video. It would leave San Francisco residents "in the digital dust." Eric Brooks, with the activist group Our City, criticized San Francisco's Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) for rushing through a contract process with little public input. "After nearly a century of San Franciscans suffering rip-offs and incredibly bad service under the monopoly control of our public utilities by corporations like PG&E, Comcast, and AT&T, it amazes me that DTIS can stand there with a straight face and try to convince us that we should let a multinational corporate partnership own and control our new public communications system," said Mr Brooks. The city already has much of the infrastructure in place to build a WiFi network as much as 100 times faster than the snail-paced Google/Earthlink WiFi technology. It's a...[Read Full Article]

SVW interview: John McHugh head of HP's ProCurve Networking - second largest network company
On Tuesday Hewlett-Packard's ProCurve Networking, the second largest enterprise network equipment vendor, will announce its vision for the next five years: Adaptive Networks. I recently met with John McHugh VP and general manager of ProCurve Networking. This HP business has been growing at about 25 per cent per year over the past five years, a fast pace of growth under the leadership of  Mr McHugh, a 25 year HP veteran who joined straight out of college. It is an impressive achievement, especially since few people associate HP with network equipment. Yet it is precisely this fact that has helped ProCurve build its business. Looking at Mr McHugh's business card, the HP logo occupies a tiny piece of the real-estate, and that is done on purpose. Mr McHugh's insight was to keep the HP name low-key, knowing that that would help ProCurve establish a distinct identity and communicate an image of a singularly focused business. "I didn't want to make the same mistakes that others have done, such as Dell, where its network business is seen as ancillary to its main business. ProCurve is full of people that are veterans in the network business, we speak the same language as our customers. And we re-invest about 12 per cent of our revenues in R&D. These things are very important to network equipment buyers," said Mr McHugh. ProCurve's focus comes at a time when market leader Cisco Systems is moving into consumer and other markets. Cisco also talks about the network...[Read Full Article]

Press releases are not blogs - social media discussion
By Tom Foremski There has been quite a bit of discussion lately about the "social media press release" following a panel I was on at the Third Thursday event last Thursday. Stowe Boyd later raised some good points about the PR industry and its use of the word "social" and "audiences" in the context of blogging. The problem lies in the terminology that the PR industry is using. It wants to use the blogging platform to distribute press releases but these are not blog posts. And the way the PR industry uses "social" is far different from what has been the accepted understanding. Many people have gotten hung up on the terms being used and that is understandable. And that is why I prefer more neutral terms that won't snag people's cultural sensitivity, that's the point of communicating clearly. However, we aren't going to get rid of the term "social" in the PR context and the discussions are good because they promote and educate others on what is being talked about. When it comes to companies communicating with their customers, partners, communities, their staff, a blogging platform is a perfect vehicle for press releases because Movable Type or Wordpress has all the tools and features built in for discoverability by search engines, and by others. It has links, tags, keywords, it has trackback and talkback, it can accumulate information over time, it is a type of free-floating document on the internet. These days, we don't publish to a web site...[Read Full Article]

New Comm Forum conference and discount for SVW readers
I've been speaking at New Comm Forum since the first one in January 2005 and it is my favorite conference because of the people it attracts and the topics. New Comm Forum is about trying to figure out the new rules of communications in media and PR brought about by the use of two-way media technologies that we have at our disposal, such as blogs, wikis, social media releases, etc. This year it is in Las Vegas from March 7 to 9 and SVW readers can get a $200 discount by using the promo code 612SHN. More information is here: http://www.newcommforum.com/...[Read Full Article]

VC investments highest in 5 years - Life Sciences leads, no sign of mania
Latest data from PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree report, shows decent sized increase in VC deals and money invested. This means steady investment rises and no sign of over funding mania:   Venture capitalists invested $25.5 billion in 3,416 deals in 2006, realizing a 10 percent increase in deal volume and a 12 percent increase in dollar value, according to the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Financial.  The year, which marked the highest level of investment since 2001, saw quarterly investment levels remain steady in the $5- to 6-billion dollar range, as the venture industry invested in the traditional technology and life sciences sectors and began a deliberate foray into the energy sector.   The year was characterized by significant growth in the life sciences sector, with biotech and medical device investing both reaching record high levels.  Other areas of growth included Media/Entertainment, Energy and Internet-Specific companies.  Seed and Early-Stage companies received more financing and dollars in 2006 but the largest gains were in the Expansion Stage deals during the year.  First-time financings reached the highest level since 2001.   Investments in the fourth quarter of 2006 totaled $5.7 billion in 802 deals, down from $6.6 billion in the third quarter of 2006, but were well within the range of $4.3 to $6.9 billion investments seen over past five years.   Here is the breakout (I added the bold in this section):   The Life Sciences sector (Biotechnology and Medical...[Read Full Article]

The not-so-shocking Intel/Sun alliance
(Intel is a sponsor of SVW) Monday's news that Sun will make Intel Xeon servers and Intel will promote Solaris shocked some observers. Sun's former CEO Scott McNealy used to say nasty things about Intel's Itanium 64-bit microprocessor, a competitor to Sun's SPARC chip. But that was then, when Sun still thought it had to own the stack. These days, it is less about the microprocessor and more about the system. Sun realizes that it is in the business of selling data center systems to data centers. And customers are asking for Xeon servers along with AMD, and SPARC servers, that Sun sells. And selling is a good thing. And the fact that Intel will promote Solaris along with Linux and other operating systems is good for Intel because it encourages sales of servers. What this alliance shows is that Intel has made a lot of progress in catching up to AMD's lead in low-power consuming servers. Otherwise Sun would not be getting requests from customers for Intel hardware. What this alliance needs is the addition of Hewlett-Packard, that would worry IBM. Then we'd see a West Coast/East Coast rivalry that could become very interesting to watch....[Read Full Article]

Will private equity funds gobble up tech and then the rest of corporate America?
A short series of posts on the fastest growing trend in Silicon Valley (and the rest of the world): examining the potential consequences of mergers and acquisitions by massive private equity funds. - IBM and large Silicon Valley companies are obvious acquisition targets as private equity firms readily raise multi-billion dollar funds. Click here to read . . . . . . - Will companies emerge leaner and meaner from private equity acquisitions? Or will they be weakened from higher debt loads? Their temporary owners know much about financial engineering but what about strategic positioning? . . . - Small investors are cut out of the lucrative deals pursued by private equity funds because only the very rich are allowed to invest. Yet many small investors will end up on the wrong end of those deals. They face a likely scenario that their employer will be acquired by private equity funds and that their new owners will ask for salary and other restructuring concessions. It builds on stress between the super rich and those that aren't. . . . - Will we witness the failure of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations and the populist movement for greater corporate transparency? The expense, and the management distraction of SOX compliance is a prime reason for taking public companies private. Plus, private companies suffer less from public scrutiny, a distinct competitive advantage.  . . . - What is the future for NYSE, NASDAQ and other stock markets? With the prospect of fewer public companies as private equity firms snap them up and take them...[Read Full Article]

IBM and top Silicon Valley companies could become targets for private equity firms
IBM, the world's largest computer and IT services company, could become an acquisition target for private equity firms said Steve Bengston, managing director at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Mr Bengston was speaking at a recent lunch panel on trends and predictions for 2007 organized by FountainBlue. Also on the panel was Fred Greguras, a top lawyer at Fenwick and West, and Rick Ellinger, a venture capitalist with WCA Technology, and myself. Private equity firms are raising ever larger funds and making ever larger acquisitions, some as large as $35bn, said Mr Bengston. At that rate, it is only a matter of time before even some of the largest tech companies become targets. IBM has a current market capitalization of about $145.5bn. To take the company private would require a premium to be paid. But several private equity firms could potentially finance such a deal. "IBM is a perfect candidate for private equity firms, there is a lot of restructuring that could be done," said Mr Bengston.  If such a deal were to happen, the new owners would be free to breakup the company into several large business groups. This is a strategy that IBM considered before Lou Gerstner took over as CEO in 1993. He spent nearly ten years restructuring IBM but keeping its major business groups intact. Mr Gerstner retired from IBM in December 2002 and is now a member of the Carlyle Group, one of the world's largest private equity groups. It would be ironic if Mr Gerstner were to be brought...[Read Full Article]

Wednesday: Talking about SVW on two panels
Wednesday morning I spoke on a panel alongside some of the top journalists covering Silicon Valley:  David Kirkpatrick from Fortune, Jay Bonasia from Investor's Business Daily, and