February 25, 2005 | Permalink | Tag:
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Friday Watch: One more tribute to Blogger Patron Saint Hunter S; Sedate Wired Raves; Peggy Noonan predicts the Watcher; and other wraps...

Best of the Watcher this week:

If the Internet is a disruptive technology where is the disruption?
-Essay on the disruptive media technology.

The Weekend Wrap starts here...

One more Gonzo tribute…

Thank you, Hunter S. Thompson, for pushing the boundaries of what was considered journalism, and for your passion, honesty and downright fun!

You pioneered a new journalism that inspires us blogger journalists to do the same: to challenge accepted formats, to rail against anything that rails us, and to have the courage to expose ourselves as individuals with faults, warts, and the occasional divine inspiration.

If the Blogosphere had patron saints, I would propose Hunter for canonization.

Wired Rave Awards at the Fillmore

Tom Abate and I popped in. Not much there there. Lots of interesting people but no awards ceremony! Even a ten-minute thing of sorts would have been better than none, and better than long. As it was, it was more like going to The Fillmore to see a gig. Chris Anderson was there of course, fresh in from NYC (where I hear he’d been Gawking around.)

Stand alone TV Blogger

When I recently ran into assistant trainee hedge fund manager Cory Johnson, I said I wanted to pitch him through my blog on becoming a “TV blogger.” Here’s the pitch:

"You’d be the first to do it: a stand alone TV business news broadcaster --a la Al Franken on Saturday Night Live-- but without a satellite dish on your head. Wandering Silicon Valley with a hand-held wireless video camera interviewing people, covering events and making news broadcasts: “Silicon Valley Closed Circuit Cory.” It’ll be virtually real-time, except we’ll have a 30-minute cache to beep out the boring bits and add some data before broadcast."

Things you probably didn’t know about the GOOG

Google keeps track of the performance and reliability of every type of disk drive it uses in its massive, distributed, PC-based supercomputer, right down to the individual factory that produces it. This is important in calculating the failure rates of the huge numbers of computer components it uses.

What drove Become.com co-founder to start the business?

“My wife told me I had to go get a job. I’d been at home for six months between ventures,” says Michael Yang, CEO of the recently-launched beta shopping search site Become.com.

Peggy Noonan now knows the Watcher…

Dan Farber recently pointed out a very good column on blogging by book author Peggy Noonan in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. In it she mentions that it’s only a matter of time before a journalist at Newsweek or some other top tier news publication leaves to become a full time blogger and be supported by the sponsorship of one or more companies.

I dropped a note to Ms. Noonan complimenting her on the column, and mentioned that SiliconValleyWatcher had already fulfilled her prophecy! Before she'd even made it —-that’s how far ahead of the game SiliconValleyWatcher is :-)

Here is Ms. Noonan’s extremely prompt and gracious reply:

Tom, thanks -- I didn't know. I'll go to your site. Great good fortune to you. Peggy Noonan

MySpace thrives and survives—but how long Friendster?

A note from Hitwise the hits tracker:

While many have questioned the sustainability of social networking sites, one has figured a way to build traffic levels exponentially higher than any other and keep users coming back for more. According to Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service, the market share of U.S. Internet visits to social-networking Web site MySpace (www.myspace.com) skyrocketed 1,252 percent the week ending Feb. 19, 2005 versus the same week last year (ending Feb. 21, 2004). MySpace is currently the 12th most visited Web site, and its traffic share is more than 12 times greater than other popular services, including its next closest competitor, Friendster (www.friendster.com).

The world’s only blogging anesthesiologist writes:

Dear Tom, I read your FT piece in today's paper with much interest. Apart from Jurek Martin, who not coincidentally is based in the U.S., no one on the FT seems to have a clue about what's about to happen re: blogs. Still pounding away in their barn on those horseshoes, while the early cars sputter by. In fairness, though, the New York Times and Washington Post are equally bewildered: they write a bit more about the phenomenon, but don't understand that they must change or die — or at least, wither dreadfully. I hope you continue to write a piece for the FT every now and then, if not regularly: let the Brits know what's happening.

Best,
Joe Stirt, M.D.
http://www.bookofjoe.com
'world's only blogging anesthesiologist'
USA Today 'Hot Site' -LINK-

John Thompson, CEO of Symantec tells critics of his Veritas acquisition deal that they know nothing about software strategy.

In the latest Red Herring magazine, article John Thompson lambasts critics of the merger (I was literally the first, two hours after it was first announced --Wall Street followed a few weeks later.)

I guess the knows-nothing comment would also apply to the Silicon Valley head of a v. large company who recently told me, “That deal makes no sense whatsoever; and I’m a good friend of John’s.”

BTW, did we know that the plans for the merged company will retire the Veritas brand in favor of Symantec? Does an anti-virus brand have the heft to make it as a heavy-duty enterprise IT systems brand?
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February 25, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Friday Watch
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Congrats to Media Guerrilla for Best Blog Award!

We are very pleased to see that Mike Manuel has received the due recognition he deserves for his ground breaking blog Media Guerrilla. He is the winner of the 2005 Business Blogging Awards for Best PR Blog.

It takes a lot of work to consistently produce great copy and Mike does that while also staying on top of a demanding job at Voce, the Silicon Valley public relations firm.

February 25, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Mediasphere
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Publisher’s Note: An open letter to Dan Gillmor… (could the blogosphere please deliver c/o Dan Gillmor –thanks!)

From Tom Foremski, publisher/editor /reporter at SiliconValleyWatcher.com.

Dan, you’ve done it again! You’ve sparked a fantastic conversation on the subject of blogging, and the differences between this new form of journalism and the old forms. And I’m glad that Silicon Valley Watcher is a key part of this conversation, because that is what excites us the most.

Dan Gillmor: Oops, he did it again!

My earlier entry about Tibco becoming our sponsor was very important to me and the people that have worked with me on this project. I’ve been so busy trying to produce a quality product that I have had no time to even let anybody know that sponsorships were available.

I’ve been living off my savings since June 2004, and lately I’ve been considering dredging the depths of my sofa; so I was very happy when Tibco approached me about becoming a sponsor. Infineon Systems and others have also approached me about sponsoring Silicon Valley Watcher.

And the amazing thing was that I didn’t have to “sell” my product, the product sold itself! I had discovered yet another fascinating aspect of this “blogging” format: that if you focus on quality you will be rewarded, the world will indeed beat a path to your door!

Dan, you know way more about this stuff than I do. I’m a newbie. I’ve only been doing this for about five months; you’ve been doing it for years. I’m still in awe at the many aspects of blogging there are, and sometimes giddy with the freedom, but also aware of the responsibilities freedom to publish carries.

I love the ability to write in so many styles: I can write news, features, columns; but also write very introspectively, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes flippant, but always upfront and honest. And you can’t fake this stuff; otherwise the authenticity is not there and the voice is lost,

You know more than I do about this stuff; I’m still a goggle-eyed newbie with my jaw on the floor thinking about all the things I can/want to do with this format.

When I left the Financial Times at the end of May 2004 to become a blogger, I wanted to do it the clean way. I didn’t want to start a blog while I was at the FT.

I wanted to see if it was possible for a journalist at a top-tier newspaper publication to leave and set themselves up as a “stand-alone” journalist, as Chris Nolan terms it, and do it straight.

I did not want to first build my “blogging brand” on top of my employer’s brand while they are also paying my salary. I know a lot of publications allow that; but I think that its because they don’t really understand what is going, on and when they do wisen up it will lead to problems.

Somehow, I became the first journalist to leave a top-tier newspaper job to become a full-time blogger, seven months before you left the San Jose Mercury. And I did it the hard way, without having ever blogged before, or built up a prior blogging brand at my former employer.

What is my business model, people kept asking me? I told them it was to make money! I did not know what the business model would be; I guessed it would be a combination of traditional and new models in publishing. And that the value recovery mechanisms for online content were still in development and would be figured out by the broader community, sooner or later.

However, I did know what one half of the business model equation is: to produce a high quality, compelling editorial product. Without a compelling product I knew couldn't complete the second half of the equation: revenues. And so that has been my single-minded focus: to try to give as much value as I can in my work, to focus always on quality and value creation. And to not forget those time-honored principles of great newspapers: scoops, interviews, features, raising hell on occassion, and being involved in the debates and discussions that matter to our communities.

There are also new territories to explore in this blogging format; and we don’t yet know what the best practices are, in many cases. That’s the exciting part of this blogging stuff, being part of the process that figures out some these best practices. I know that’s what excites my team and many of my peers and colleagues around the world.

I’ve been happy to offer my newbie observations on the subject of blogging in this blog. I’ve suggested color coding text for example, to identify relationships such as yellow for a friend, or brown if I’m “brown nosing,” and a green text would indicate a money link, or red if I’m dating them :-)

I’ve also criticized the concept of “stand alone” journalist as being ridiculous, because it quickly leads to very gray areas if you are pitching advertisers, and reporting. I’ve been lucky in that I do not have to go out and “sell” my product or my readership. I sell my product by focusing on creating as best a product as I can.

You asked if a newspaper would announce a sponsor in the same way I did. Probably not. But a newspaper will go out and “sell” its readers to virtually anybody, and also tailor its content to attract a specific readership that it can then sell.

A newspaper will collect as much data as a spyware cookie about its readers and sell it to advertisers! Newspapers crow about the rich demographics of their readers, where they live, what they buy, etc.

I don’t do that, and I have not done that. I am not trying to convince companies to be sponsors by “selling” my readers the way newspapers and magazines sell. And it would be ludicrous for me to sell my editorial values, since they are the very reason I have my readership.

I have no interest in trying to convince someone of the value of a sponsorship in Silicon Valley Watcher if they don’t already see the value themselves. I’m happy to talk about our plans, our editorial focus, some of the innovative media projects we’d like to try in the future, etc. I do not have any plans to fight it out with say, News.com on the size of our traffic and the numbers of eyeballs. We would lose that fight anyway.

I want Silicon Valley Watcher to attract sponsors because they recognize the value we create, and they know full well that our readers are creating the future on a global scale—these are not passive “consumers” with household incomes of such-and-such amounts.

Somebody can try to guess our traffic via an Alexa ranking; but that is a very inaccurate way to guess any web site traffic and is easy to spam. That’s not to say that I won’t talk about our high numbers of unique visitors. What’s important to us is who is hitting on our web site, not how many.

And the type of web site statistics I pay attention to is when I’m out and about and people, from very senior levels all the way through to newly arrived in Silicon Valley, tell me: “I read you all the time and I share you with my team.” I’ll never get tired of hearing that.

My goal has been to attract a small group of sponsors, that way it’s a steady monthly income, there is no “selling” of ad campaigns, no “selling” our readers and their demographic habits. We can concentrate on producing a high quality product.

But I don’t want just any sponsor, I want companies that are interested in what is developing with blogs, and wikis, and all the blogerific stuff that’s going on. And I'd like to hear how they are using those technologies, and engage them in what the best practices are in this new frontier.

There is a new communications medium being forged; and it’s changing the established media, PR, and marketing sectors like nothing we have ever seen before.

This is old news to an old blogging hand like yourself; but my jaw is still on the floor. And I keep getting that stark, staring, bonkers look from people when I talk abut it. (I’m sure you are used to that, Dan!)

When the Tibco sponsorship announcement was criticized as being a puff piece, I was at first taken aback. After all, wasn’t I following the “Blogger code” by clearly labeling it as a piece about my excitement of gaining our first sponsor and giving my honest opinion about Tibco?

I would think that a “puff” piece or pieces would come before landing a sponsorship :-) In fact, there were no pieces about Tibco in SVW; same for Infineon. And my announcement was clearly not a news story, or feature about Tibco and its markets--it was a happy and very friendly welcome.

But I don’t think that bloggers can rely on assuming things are clearly labeled. I think that we need more labeling or tagging as is the current fashion. Just because I think something is clearly stated and labeled doesn’t mean that everyone sees the implicit labels.

I believe blogging should include more labels/tags. Going forward I want to start to label/tag our entries more clearly and I would hope that this might become a “best practice”. For example, the Tibco announcement I would tag as a “Publisher’s note:” (I’ve gone back and done just that BTW.) We’ll tag a news story as “news” and a scoop as a “scoop” etc.

This is especially important as millions of readers become exposed to blogs for the first time. And many walk away confused about what is it they are reading, should they trust the information, etc.

As journalist bloggers we should seek to communicate as clearly as possible and signpost as much of this brave new world as we can. It is important to show that blogging is not some weird gonzo-like form of journalism; but that it might even be a superset of journalism-- able to accommodate all the familiar forms of journalism such as news, features, interviews-- and the wondrously new forms that arise.

-Tom Foremski, publisher/editor /reporter at SiliconValleyWatcher.com.
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February 25, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag:
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Thanks Dan Gillmor for the mention of our first sponsor Tibco!

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
Dan, that was no puffery about Tibco. I have genuine respect for the company and its people through my contacts with them over the past five years.

Also, you won't find any "puff" pieces on Tibco leading up to the sponsorship. And more importantly, there was no prior pitch at all. They came and asked the Watcher--the product pitched itself.

It doesn't get any sweeter than that!

BTW, the same goes for our second sponsor Infineon Systems, which starts on March 1st. And more on the way. There are only a couple of Founding Sponsor slots open in our orginal goal for six...

However, we have turned down advertisers. We are picky. We see ourselves more as guardians and gatekeepers to our community of readers.

Dan, please feel free to continue coverage of our sponsors as we announce them!

(Didn't they used to say there is no business model for blogging?)
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February 25, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag:
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February 24, 2005

A Yahoo for RSS? Nooked Directory collects corporate RSS in one resource

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher.com

Fergus Burns, CEO of Dublin-based Nooked, gave us a heads-up on tomorrow's launch of the beta for the Nooked Directory. It's essentially a Yahoo! for corporate RSS feeds (Yahoo! as in browsable, searchable listing of resources organized hierarchically).

"An RSS directory focused on corporate feeds is needed to make it easy for people to discover RSS feeds -- at present the only way of discovering RSS feeds is fragmented. For example, the recently launched Microsoft Presspass feeds were originally mentioned on a blog." That would be Scoble's rant -- "if you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired" -- which mentioned in pasing the existence of the MS feeds.

Fergus believes that a central, well-organized database of corporate feeds will be helpful to several audiences -- sales, marketing and communications execs; PR firms and ad agencies; and journalists and analysts.

The site also serves a marketing role for Nooked, which provides RSS generating services to corporations and PR firms, "to make people aware of who has RSS feeds in the corporate space. The directory will also assist
the whole RSS community in demonstrating the types of companies and
organizations that are adopting RSS."

There are about 300 feeds right now, which seems a bit light although Fergus notes that they are adding more every day. I found the hierarchy a bit standard, not particularly tweaked to the content of corporate RSS. For instance, the home page view doesn't list technology as a category (it's under "Business"); it does have Arts & Humanities as a top-level category but has only a handful of feeds there.

Fergus says, "Nooked Directory is beta at the moment - our goal is to get early feedback from the community with the hope that the community starts to submit RSS feeds for consideration, to build the complete RSS directory of corporate feeds."
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February 24, 2005 | Permalink | Tag:
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Was the Tibco post a puff piece for an advertiser?

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher.com

On his blog today, Dan Gillmor suggests that the post about our first sponsor is "advertising, and should be explicitly labeled that way." He compares the situation to a newspaper running a front-page story announcing that a new company is now advertising with the paper. We can all agree this would be unseemly pandering and on the face of it the posting amounts to the same thing.

But here is the difference. SVW is both blog and publication. We reserve the right to act like a blog at times. Landing a serious company as a founding sponsor is a very big deal to us; in the context of what most any other blog is earning on the basis of editorial content, it's a big deal.

So we'll take a page from Hunter S. Thompson and put ourselves in the story when we're a story. I really think this is a story about our success and about the kind of sponsors we are seeking, and to call it advertising is less honest than writing it up the way it is.

You can call it a puff piece but if anything was being puffed it was this site, not Tibco. The post is perfectly clear to all who read it. "We got a sponsor; we're psyched; we actually know and respect this company."

Bottom line: Websites are not newspapers. We're making up business models as we go. Stories about advertisers are not necessarily advertising. We'll always strive to be clear and upfront about any financial relationship.

Links:

• Dan Gillmor: Blogging Sponsorships, Silicon Valley Style

• SVW: Introducing Our First Sponsor

• SVW: Marqui Program: Hot Air?
  

February 24, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Tom Watch
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Become.com beta launched---closest Google challenger IMHO

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
I’m still fighting a cold and trying to recover from a meltdown in my Outlook (switching to Thunderbird to recover files…) but I wanted to quickly mention that Become.com is a company that has risen quite highly on my personal “watch” list.

Become.com launched its beta search engine site yesterday. This is probably the first search company I’ve come across that could very well give Google a run for its money. I met with the founders, Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun a couple of weeks ago and came away very impressed with them and their team.

Mr. Yang and Mr. Yun founded mySimon, the shopping comparison site sold to Cnet in early 2000 for about $700m. It’s a nice round number; but it was not a sale that was in their control. This time around they want to fulfill a number of key objectives that they were not able to complete at mySimon.

Mr. Yun is a contemporary of the Google boys at Stanford U, and has built a reputation as one of the top search engine experts. He has lead the development of a way of creating a page rank that Become.com says is spam proof: it is impervious to all attempts at search engine optimization. "Don’t say that," I said, "you’ll have everyone trying to challenge your claims!"

"That’s fine," they said, confident that their Affinity Index Ranking (AIR) technology consistently produces higher quality search results than from any other search engine. Become.com’s focus is on shopping and related content such as product reviews; but that is probably just a bit of cloaking, since it can clearly be used as a very effective general purpose search engine.

I’ll have more to report on Become.com very soon; in the meantime register for the beta and test it out. Let me know what you think.
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February 24, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag:
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February 23, 2005

For blogs, as with P2P, infrastructure is politics

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher.com
To follow up on Tom's post below, Cory Doctorow recently mentioned to me the Mitch Kapor line, "Infrastructure Is Politics." We were talking about peer to peer but I think this applies to blogs as well, and it perhaps will help Tom understand the intensity of the reaction to blogs. (But let me say at the outset that I could live without anymore articles about someone famous is now blogging, or noting that someone has stopped blogging as if this meant something.)

My point about P2P is that from the early days of Napster people conflated -- and continue to conflate -- the infrastructure that is P2P (e.g., systems that allow PCs to function as both clients and servers, typically simultaneously) with the common applications of the infrastructure (MP3 filesharing). But there are many applications for P2P networks, such as cycle sharing, grid computing, massively distributed processing, video redistribution, etc.

The conflation has reached the point where Hollywood and politicians are ready to sacrifice the many benefits of using this technical idea because of fear and loathing of the filesharers. Hmmm, actually it's more than conflation. This concept is not that difficult and these are not stupid people. Did anyone think that maybe this is about more than just MP3s and video thievery? Well, infrastructure is political, and when you look at the infrastructure you can see just how radical it is, how much control and centralization can be wrested from the media owners with a change in infrastructure.

Here's Larry Lessig on the topic, from an interview that should be running shortly on O'Reilly Network.

ReplayTV spent two years in litigation with content owners who claimed that they were producing a technology that people used to create copyright infringement, and that they should be held responsible for it. Two years of litigation is enough to sap out all the resources of a startup company, and they were eventually forced into bankruptcy. ... If you can pull somebody into court under some vague standard of liability just because the tools are being used by people to create copyright infringement, that's a very good way to block new innovation that might change the way copyright material gets distributed. So it's a strategic opportunity to exercise control over the future of content development and distribution and not so much as a way of protecting copyrights. (emphasis added)

Fast forward to blogs. One of the recurring themes from the New Communication conference was that blogs represent not only new ways of communicating but fundamentally different ways. A premium is placed on speed, individuality, incompleteness, snapshots in time. To put it another way, it's about having conversations not marketing. Or its about PR not advertising. All of these things sound vague and like a bunch of hot air, but I think there is something essentially true. And this is threatening.

What the Internet does is churn through established businesses. That's what technology tends to do (see typesetting) but the Internet spins the churn that much faster. The music business will not survive in its current form. Technology magazines are becoming a dying breed. Small city newspapers will die out (craigslist is estimated to have cost Bay Area newspaper $65 million in classified revenue). So blogs will continue the Internet effect.

Not entirely because the content is better or more relevant or more distributed, but because the infrastructure is fundamentally different, much like P2P can shift the entire distribution of media industries. Blogs and RSS are shifting the distribution of news, marketing information, company releases, commentary, etc. I'm talking about infrastructure here. When Scoble says that if you don't offer RSS you should be fired, well, perhaps he means that if you don't get that RSS is the infrastructure of the future, then you won't find a place in the new communications landscape.

Infrastructure is politics. It's also economics. And communications. It's an unsettled time, things are shifting, it's not exactly clear how or when but it's certain that the change when it becomes obvious to the people now shouting it's all a bunch of crap will be cataclysmic. It's not so much what bloggers are saying today that is important; it's how we're saying it.

February 23, 2005 | Permalink | Tag:
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5000 Hours of White House Tapes Online

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher.com
I was watching "The Trials of Henry Kissinger" last night, which is a pretty compelling argument that Kissinger is one of the great war criminals of all time. So I was quite interested to get a message from Jeff Ubois that the Miller Center for Public Affairs has launched WhiteHouseTapes.org, featuring 5000 hours of tape from Roosevelt through Nixon. The site has some lovely Flash animations of some choice tape excerpts like Johnson giving some very specific instructions to his tailor; Nixon on Rumsfeld ("he's a ruthless little bastard"); and Kennedy ordering some more of those "little blue pills" (he lived in great pain, if you didn't know). To dig deeper you have to be a little more scholar-like and have certain dates in mind.

The Internet Archive has a smaller selection of presidential tapes as well.

Links:

• WhiteHouseTapes.org

• Presidential Recordings on Internet Archive

  
  

February 23, 2005 | Permalink | Tag:
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The growing backlash against “blogging”…

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I occassionally write columns for my former employer, Financial Times. In today's column (most of it's behind a subscription firewall unfortunately) I've tried to spell out as simply as possible, why enterprises need to take "blogging" seriously.

I wrote the column because I am increasingly running into passionate views that its all a bunch of malarkey. Some people become very animated on the subject, and the pushback will sometimes verge on the physical.

"Who has time to read them?" "I've read some of them and they are rubbish." "They are written for and by people in their pajamas." "Tell CEOs not to blog!" ---are typical remarks I come across.

My advice is: Don't be distracted by the content of blogs.

Blogging is just one application of a new class of media technologies that is like nothing we have seen so far. It enables a direct and honest form of communication of ideas and information that can create communities on-the-fly, and reach readers you did not know were your readers. And it offers a direct feedback mechanism that is public and (mostly) accountable. And much, much more...

FT: Blogging technology opens doors for enterprises
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February 23, 2005 | Permalink | Tag:
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February 22, 2005

Publisher's note: Introducing our first sponsor--Tibco Software, one of the largest Silicon Valley software companies

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

We are very pleased to announce Tibco as the first of an elite group of Founding Sponsors of SiliconValleyWatcher. There will be others announced over the coming weeks, but Tibco stands out because it was one of the first to understand what we are trying to achieve: the delivery of a high-quality online business news magazine about Silicon Valley, featuring top journalists and enabled by the latest media technologies.

Tibco is a model company: the first Silicon Valley company--and only the third in the US after Disney and Qualcomm--to have achieved compliance with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This is immensely difficult and it is an impressive achievement.

Tibco earns its money the hard way--helping large enterprises integrate their IT systems into a real-time environment. That is what is called heavy lifting around here, and the competition is IBM.

Vivek Ranadive, the CEO, is one of Silicon Valley’s top managers. He and his teams have worked hard to position Tibco as a leader in this space. This also meant reducing a large Reuter’s ownership stake in Tibco, which acted as an overhang and dragged on Tibco’s share price. And it has meant orchestrating a string of judicious acquisitions to bolster its market position.

The Predictive Enterprise...

Mr. Ranadive understands the value in creating thought leadership positions around innovative concepts. He is currently working on a new book about the “Predictive Enterprise,” a sequel to his “Power of Now” book published in 1999 about the value of real-time business information.

The Predictive Enterprise is a fascinating concept that combines real-time business information with business analytics, creating the ability to forecast customer behaviors, and also spot potential stresses on the enterprise IT infrastructure. It’s the key to guaranteeing adequate service level agreements, as one of many examples of its application. And several large businesses are already putting the concepts to work in innovative ways.

We’re are very pleased Tibco recognizes our early attempts at innovation through its generous sponsorship.

We’ll be announcing other Founding Sponsors over the coming weeks and describing how we'll create a two-way conversation with them about how some of these emerging, and very powerful, media technologies will be implemented. Their graphic icons will become familiar elements on our pages, with links to their latest news.

Take a look at Tibco.com and a recording of Vivek on CNBC's Kudlow and Cramer...

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February 22, 2005 | Permalink | Tag:
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Carol Dukes, one of the savviest business leaders on this planet...plus find out what triggered the dotcom bust

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
I have been making a pest of myself lately, haranguing my long-time friend Carol Dukes in London. It was her fault anyway.

In early December she innocently sent me a note asking for my new address and telling me what she had been up to over the past four years since we’d last met.

As I wrote a reply and told her about my media venture plans, it suddenly struck me that Carol would be the perfect person to help me build these ventures! Because Carol is one of the savviest business executives I’ve ever met--and I’ve met a lot--and is one of Europe’s top media executives. And that’s before you count the many gender-related accolades she has received.

Carol doesn’t need any gender-defined accolades, her record stands for itself. She has created and operated large online media groups for print and TV companies, and also took part in the dotcom races as co-founder of ThinkNatural.com--a leading natural health and beauty retailer that made it through the dotbomb fallout. Lately, she’s been doing consulting work for large European media groups.

Over the holidays I sent in some killer pitches to Carol, they were sooo good--I would not have been able to resist them myself. I would have been heading for the airport right away.

In a nutshell, I tried to explain that something really exciting is happening here in Silicon Valley, and despite reports she may have heard that I’ve lost it completely, this blogging stuff is the tip of an enormous game-changing iceberg.

There are some astounding opportunities to build some rock solid online businesses, without being encumbered with legacy costs and culture. And Carol is at the top of her form, with almost two decades of experience in media businesses and building several very large online groups.

A Perfect Storm is in the making

It’s the start of Internet 2.0 now, this time online gets done right: we have tons of highly reliable and cheap Internet infrastructure in place, lots of web apps and monitoring tools, etc, and, very importantly, as a society we have made the cultural shift to being comfortable in an online environment.

Now it’s time for innovation--business innovation that is, to take advantage of the business opportunities thrown up by the formation of this perfect storm.

(It’s going to be stormy for a lot of smug established companies...remember, dotcoms each lunch this time!)

Carol ignored my pitches for several weeks. I seriously suspected that maybe they hadn’t gotten delivered to her, because she hadn't shown up on my doorstep and was banging my door down. (Did I tell you how good the pitches were?)

She told me she had to carefully consider things before replying, and that she agreed that blogging was interesting and it had a place in the publishing world, especially in verticals, trade publishing, and the like. But she wasn't sure there was much beyond that. She said she would come out in mid-March for a working vacation of sorts and see for herself what all the fuss is about. Plus she offered to advise me on my biz-dev plans.

Excellent, I thought, once Carol is out here, I'll introduce her to a few of my favorite people, and I’m sure I can show her that these media technologies are more than just about blogging. And with her natural entrepreneurial talents, she will see the opportunities for herself.

Predicting the dotcom collapse

BTW, in 1997, Carol told me exactly when the dotcom bubble would start deflating, and she was dead right. She didn’t tell me the date it would happen, but she told me what the circumstances would be that would signal the beginning of the end.

She said it would be when a large new economy company acquired a large old economy company.

I thought, wow, that is brilliant. That makes perfect sense, because the investor philosophies of both sets of shareholders are so opposite to each other that they would move in opposite directions. And the loss of shareholder confidence in such a large entity would naturally shake investor confidence in all other dotcoms.

Yes, indeed...it was Steve Chase that lit the fuse of the dotbomb.

Some of Carol's bio:
· 1983 First class honours, Oxford.
· 1984-90 Joined IVS Enterprises. Director of IVS cable services in 1987.
· 1990 Completed MBA at London Business School, joined Gemini Consulting.
· 1993 Joined EMAP as Corporate Planner.
· 1995 Director of new media within EMAP Computing.
· 1997 Set up and co-managed EMAP Online.
· 1998 Established Carlton Online.
· July 1999 Co-founded ThinkNatural.
· 2000 Named 'Entrepreneur of the Year' and 'AltaVista digital business person of the year'.

dc1119

February 22, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Tom Watch
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February 21, 2005

The Internet train wreck part 2: This is where you can see it...

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
In the earlier post I asked:

“There is no doubting that the Internet is a powerful technology, and therefore it must be a disruptive technology. But where is the disruption in the tech sector? Intel, HP, IBM, Cisco, and all the other well-established tech companies are still here, after the Internet revolution.”

I realized that I was looking for the train wreck in the wrong place. I was looking in the tech sector, but I realized that the Internet was not about a new technology, its technologies based on microprocessor, software, and network technologies were not that new. Yes, the chips used for Internet systems and so on, were more powerful and cheaper than before, but that was because of improvements to technologies that had already been invented--silicon chip technologies that led to microprocessor, memory chip, operating systems, and related technologies. There were no "new" technologies that enabled the Internet.

The Internet became the first "open source" project

What was new about the Internet was that we had a single collection of standards for communicating e-mail and other data between computers, on a highly reliable network. Plus, we had the web browser--a way to read web pages on any PC computer screen.

All these Internet technologies were held in a type of creative commons, no company owned them, they were developed with US government funds and offered openly. And they continue to be developed openly. It's a great example of the Internet as the first open source project. And it’s a government initiated open-source project (is the US government communist, Bill? ;-)

Internet as disruptive media technology

So, with a common foundation of communications technologies, the internet plus the web browser became a fantastic publishing/media platform.

And it is a disruptive technology, but it is a disruptive media technology. The web browser allows for cheap and easy publication of pages of content, and their distribution.

Here is the train wreck

The train wreck is occurring in the printed media sector (and soon—in the older “new” media sector--the online news magazines formed 5 to 10 years ago.)

Layoffs continue to be announced almost every quarter by newspaper groups. My profession has probably suffered the worst of any sector since the dotcom dotbust.

Technology and technology-jobs related advertising--a vital mainstay of newspaper and print magazine revenues for more than 20 years, continues to decline. For example, Dow Jones latest numbers showed a continued decline in tech advertising of more than 27 percent in the most recent quarter, from a year ago--down 24 percent for the full year.

Tech print advertising isn’t coming back and the continued consolidation in the tech industry, such as Symantec and Veritas, continues to take out huge chunks of advertising.

Top Internet companies are media companies

Internet 1.0 and the web, created large technology enabled media companies. Look:

Yahoo—publisher of news and a myriad of other pages of content including ads for selling items in auctions, finding a date, and other newspaper-like services.

Google—publishes pages of content that consist of machine-harvested links and sells advertising on those pages.

Ebay—publishes pages of content by becoming a platform for others to create online catalogs and trade products through a newspaper classifieds-type of marketplace.

Amazon—publishes pages of reader-generated reviews and descriptions of books/products plus it sells almost any product from many other retailers, through its online shopping platform.

AOL-Time Warner—publisher.

Media Tech disruption will accelerate

Internet 1.0 produced media technologies that continue to disrupt print media, and that disruption will accelerate in Internet 2.0 because of the new media technologies such as blogging, wikis, and related technologies/tools/applications.

Internet 2.0 media technologies provide a two-way web, a readable and write-able web, as some call it. (Or if I were Dr Dolittle, a PushMe-PullMe type of web.)

The web browser is still important. But this time around, we get to write on the other side of the glass screen.

Building communities and a better mousetrap

The new media technologies pull together a community of readers as the content seemingly magically finds its readership. Build a better mousetrap, and truly the world does beat a path to your doorstep.

If you produce content of value, readers will find it, share it, and discuss it. If you don’t, they won’t. It’s the democratization of content.

For example, the Google atom bomb entry we published a couple of weeks ago. It was interesting to see it spread. From just about 50 mentions on other blogs/websites on Friday, it grew to 1200 then to 44k then more than 120K over the weekend. We had an astounding number of visitors on a Sunday!

Internet Squared

This combination of two-way publishing technologies results in a new type of communications architecture. Maybe it should be called Internet to the power of 2. It marries an underlying very powerful, incredibly cheap hardware and software communications technology, with a two-way media publishing technology that facilitates the movement and development of ideas on an unprecedented scale--outwards from the publisher and back towards the publisher.

To the extent print newspapers and magazines see the train coming, they can’t move out of the way of the train. That’s because we are still developing the mechanisms to recover the value of publishing human created content online.

The online ad networks and sponsored text ad links are not yet good enough and suffer from several serious issues, such as click fraud and other flaws. And so much of the establishment print media cannot jump to the online model because there is no support for its costly cost base--at least not yet. And it might be too late when it comes.

Also, in Internet 2.0, the effects of the media technologies will have a disruptive effect on almost every type of company.

I’ll tell you why later...but you can probably figure it out.

dc950

February 21, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: New Rules
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If Internet 1.0 was a disruptive technology…where is the train wreck?

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
I was thinking back to the birth of the mass PC market, which began with Apple Computer and grew into the single largest computer industry. PC technologies clearly are a powerful technology and they carry that characteristic of all game-changing, powerful technologies--they are disruptive technologies.

You could see where the disruption happened: among the minicomputer and mainframe computer companies, and in those companies that were stranded on small islands of users, with proprietary computer architectures.

The East Coast Route 128 companies such as Wang, DEC, and others in Silicon Valley, all became disrupted by very cheap and effective PC computing technologies. IBM only made it through by the skin of its teeth and a massive mainframe user base as a buffer.

The other characteristic of a disruptive technology is that its victims often can do very little about it. They can’t get out of its way. They can see that light in the tunnel and they know it’s a train coming towards them--but they can’t change direction fast enough. It becomes a slow-motion train wreck.

There is no doubting that the Internet is a powerful technology, and therefore it must be a disruptive technology. But where is the disruption in the tech sector? Intel, HP, IBM, Cisco and all the other well-established tech companies are still here, post the Internet revolution.

Yes, some names such as Compaq have disappeared, but the M&A is due to the continued play-out of the PC technologies disruptive effect--not the Internet.

And the dotcom dotboms were disrupted by the glut they created--not the Internet. So if the Internet is a disruptive technology, where is the train wreck?

Part II of this essay is here.

dc836

February 21, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: New Rules
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I've got a Cold and I can't load Outlook...my apologies if you sent me emails in the past few days...EOM

February 21, 2005 | Permalink | Tag:
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February 18, 2005

My dinner with Melody and a few others…a report from the Antenna Group Dinner Salon

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
It was a dark and rainy Thursday evening but duty beckoned me out to a jewel in the in the heart of the Tenderloin, the Fleur de Lys restaurant and Melody Haller’s Antenna Group dinner salon.

I was delayed because of losing a tire on 280 earlier, and everyone was already seated at the table, quietly looking at me as I blustered in and apologized for my late arrival. Melody was seated at the head of the table looking very demure and graceful as she gestured to the empty seat next to her.

The people at the table were a mixture of Melody’s PR company clients and a gaggle of top tier journalists. And it was one of Melody’s best dinner salons in a long time--companies with great ideas...and dare I say it: passion and excitement.

I’ve been fed up with some of the stale and tired pitches from the dinosaur class of companies in the valley, and the walking dead private companies.

CEO has to sometimes stand for Chief Excitement Officer. I’m not saying jump around and be “excitable,” but if you sound bored and tired giving your pitch, guess what--I’m bored. And tired. And god knows how you motivate your teams.

This wasn’t true of the people at the Salon. Many of them were still buzzed from DEMO. My favorite was Jigsaw. This is a genius idea to create a highly accurate shared-contacts database for salespeople. It is up to about 350K contacts and growing at 3K/day.

It was an idea developed by three Silicon Valley salespeople who figured out a way to get other salespeople to share their contacts. “If you are a salesperson that has to make 50 dials a day to get your numbers, the biggest problem is getting qualified and accurate leads. Most of the lists you buy are maybe just 40 percent accurate and very expensive,” said Garth Moutlon, co-founder of JigSaw. Users get two contacts in return for one contact they put into the system. And if a contact’s information is found to be old, they lose points. Everyone pays to gain access to the system at $25/month, and all posting of contacts is done anonymously.

Thor Johnson, head of marketing at Eloqua, described a sophisticated way to automate high value online marketing campaigns that can track a user’s browsing behavior and generate a very high-quality phone lead. The software can detect if someone is merely window shopping or is close to making a purchase decision. Mr Johnson said, “We can monitor a user over a six-month period and have somebody call the person at just the right time and close the sale.” Two large clients are Nokia and Sybase.

Jakob Nielsen, the renowned website usability guru, talked about some of the usability studies they have been running at his company, Nielsen Norman Group (nngroup.com and useit.com). He mentioned that the biggest usability problem is that type size is too small. “It might look cool to a 25-year-old website designer but most people over 40 have trouble reading it. And also teenagers, because they have poor posture,” Mr Nielsen said.

I asked if he had conducted any usability studies on blogs. He said there was no money in blogs! However, I pointed out all the great publicity he might receive because of the millions of blogs out there and maybe SVW could help in some way? I might have sparked something, he grinned and told me to call him.

Richard Jones, head of Lusora, has developed a system that enables families to easily monitor their elderly relatives, enabling older people to stay in their own homes rather than in assisted care facilities. “We have a motion sensor with an accelerometer that is worn by the person, and it can detect if they have fallen, where they are in the room, and will send out an alert.”

Lusora is using a version of BlueTooth with a much higher range. It seems to be an elegant solution to a problem that is going to be huge as the Baby Boomer population bulge heads off into the sunset.

dc825

February 18, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Tech Watch
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Cory "Scoop" Johnson, the face of Silicon Valley on financial news channel CNBC quits for hedge fund

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
Cory Johnson, Silicon Valley reporter for CNBC, a familiar figure around the valley and on TV screens nationwide, has joined a hedge fund run by Carlo Cannell. Mr Cannell is considered one of the top US hedge fund managers, consistently producing average annual returns of more than 35 percent.

Cory Johnson is one of my favorite hacks in the Silicon Valley Hack Pack and his tall lanky frame and distinctive style of reporting will be sorely missed by many. Cory has been a big supporter of SiliconValleyWatcher, and says CNBC editors regularly watch the Watcher.

Just before the New Year he gave me an absolutely classic Cory-style endorsement, he said: “Tom I love the blog—you are the man that Chris Nolan could have been!”

[Update: Cory meant "the man" in the colloquial sense of becoming an authority, not in the gender sense, and anyway, I think I still have a long way to go yet...]

For those with short memories, stand-alone journalist Chris Nolan used to write a very popular Silicon Valley column for the San Jose Mercury about five years ago. It was a must read. But a messy dispute with the Merc over a tiny amount of friends and family stock she received led to Chris leaving the newspaper. She went traveling to China and India and then returned to journalism a couple of years ago, writing the political news blog, “ChrisNolan.com- Politics from Left to Right.” Last year I tried to persuade her to come back and write about Silicon Valley but she said she prefers the political beat.

[Update: Please see comments section for full description of Chris's work over the past five years.]

I can’t see Cory lasting more than a few months at the hedge fund because he is a reporter through and through. He has newspaper ink running through his veins (as they used to say when print had a much more viable business model!)

Before CNBC he was the top columnist at The Industry Standard—one of the iconic news magazines of the dotcom boom, stuffed to bursting with hundreds of pages of dotcom advertising. The dotbomb fallout, and parent IDG’s mismanaged efforts to prepare The Industry Standard for an IPO, led to its swift demise. I remember how shocking that was at the time. . .

Prior to The Industry Standard he worked in many other senior reporting/editorial positions covering different sectors, not just tech.

Working at CNBC provided a very good paycheck but the job lacked the editorial freedom he was used to. He wrote all his commentary on CNBC and broke many news stories but tight controls over his reporting was a constant frustration.

Cory, when you get fed up with the hedge fund, come join me on the Watcher--you were born for this medium. I’ll leave the light on.

------
Exlusive interview with trainee assistant hedge fund manager CJ coming up on the Watcher--I'll be asking the tough questions, such as: "Do you think you could get me a date with Maria?" And, "Did you know that you look a lot taller in real life than on TV?"

February 18, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Media Watch
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February 17, 2005

RSA security conference: A cacophony of FUD...could someone please call the investment bankers

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
Where are the investment bankers when you need them? Could somebody please roll up a bunch of these computer security companies? And why isn’t it happening? Are the VCs holding out to get better valuations?

The RSA Security conference is in SF this week and although I tried to avoid it I did get dragged into a few events. The main problem with this sector is that there are way too many security companies. And they try to stand out from each other in two ways: slam the competition, and shout that the sky is falling. That means they are undermining each other’s solutions and the market as a whole, creating confusion and delaying purchase decisions.

Shouldn’t we have some kind of baseline security standard to benchmark against? I bet I could buy every security product out there, and still, someone would come around the next day and tell me I’m vulnerable to some exotic exploit. How do I reliably check those claims?

For example, TriCipher hosted an event at which Becky Bace, demonstrated a new “middle man” phishing attack that she said kills the security token. Now Becky is an interesting person, she used to be at the National Security Agency and is a well recognized and respected member of her community. Her demonstration of the “middleman” phishing 2.0 scheme was interesting, but, as Deb Radcliff, a veteran computer security reporter asked in the Q&A, how credible is it that someone would perform a manual hack like that? She was told that it was possible and that this was a huge vulnerability.

But, is it being done? What are the likeliest attacks? What are the best practices? There is way too much FUD in this industry because there are too many players creating a din.

Here is the promo material on the TriCipher event and Becky:

World renowned industry expert Becky Bace showcases Phishing 2.0, a short but eye opening talk and real time demonstration on one of the latest phishing threats. Hackers are moving from plain old password harvesting to sophisticated attacks that easily defeat all known passwords, tokens and one-time-passwords. Becky expects that such session perversion attacks, which first began to be observed a few months ago, will become a dominant attack vector for phishers.

Becky is an expert on intrusion detection with over 15 years’ experience in network security, including 12 years at NSA, and she has written several influential books on this and other security-related topics. Becky is CEO of Infidel, Inc. and Venture Consultant for Trident Capital.

February 17, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Tech Watch
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The green border of security and Japanese porn....more tales from the RSA Security conference

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
I ran into a an interesting security company called Green Border at one of the RSA Security conference events. They put a green border around IE and Outlook and this shows that those apps are protected from all types of spyware etc.

I was told that the green border around the apps is there so that it shows users it is working, and that they are safe. Oh, and BTW, it never changes colors, it is always green.

Wow. And will people really buy that? A green border…it is either genius marketing or something else.

Update: I may have been a little bit unfair in the above piece, I spoke with Green Border and they said it was possible to change the color of the border(!)

But, I also found out that there is a bit more to the product. What it does is it isolates the IE web browser and Outlook email within a “vault” and prevents any spyware, cookies, or viruses from escaping and infecting the host machine or network. After each user session, all the cookies, spyware etc, are flushed from the “vault.”

It’s a solution that doesn’t need any updating of a spyware/pests file, or virus scanner. Pests can get into the “vault” but they can’t check out your user habits across Internet sessions. Excellent for enterprises, which have woken up to the fact that the spyware problem is worse than the virus problem.

However, Green Border’s business model means there is no subscription or renewal revenue to be had—once its installed, you are done.

================

I met a couple of security geeks that work for a large, privately-held Adult entertainment company. "We get more attacks per hour than many financial institutions," they were saying. "We buy security products and we also have our own ways of dealing with security."

I said the adult industry doesn't get the credit it should get for developing an astounding array of online marketing techniques that are now taken for granted. All the pop-ups, affiliate marketing etc, all pioneered by the online Adult entertainment companies.

I also said that the Adult companies are often the victims of minor scams by their customers, who can claim the credit card charge on their statements was hijacked and get a charge-back.

They said they didn't have to deal with that issue because they were mostly focused on the Japanese Adult market. And that their Japanese customers are very honest people, and huge consumers of their services, with some of them racking up monthly bills of $10K and more.

February 17, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Tech Watch
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Announcing our first sponsors and....Nick Aster, media tech architect extraordinaire joins SVW!

We are very excited to announce our first two Founding Sponsors! We’ll reveal their names in proper introductions over the next few days. They are large companies yet they quickly spotted and “got” what we are trying to create (without any pitching from us). They understand the importance of what it means to be thought leaders in their markets, and in exploring how to leverage the innovative communications technologies that blogging and blogging-like technologies can provide. They have been among our earliest and staunchest supporters. I will introduce each one of these companies in separate entries over the next few days.

Also, we are very happy to announce that Nick Aster is now part of the team, and will be putting together our “Geek Squad” of media tech gurus.

Nick is a huge IT talent, he set up the publishing infrastructures for Nick Denton’s Gawker Media publishing empire in NYC, launching high traffic sites such as Gawker, Wonkette, and many others.

There are extremely few people that have the many-year veteran experience that Nick has already accumulated in this young field of using blogging software and related technologies, in commercial publishing applications. Nick also worked at Moreover.com the pioneering online news aggregator. (And he lives but a ten minute walk away from SVW HQ in SF!)

Nick will be helping us improve the site, launch new “watch” sections/sites, and other media tech ventures we have in the works. Nick will also be assembling a side business, the “Geek Squad” that will be part of a consulting group that will work with other companies/publishers—offering them a range of services. And also developing some in-house tools and other media tech software.

And hopefully, (as with Candida Kutz, our hard working Geek Goddess) we will be able to occasionally drag him away from toiling at the server farm and get him to write a word or two for our readers.

February 17, 2005 | Permalink | Tag:
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Self-Promotion: Marketing Shift on SVW

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher.com
Jason Dowdell at Marketing Shift posted a lovely appreciation of Tom and this site. Can't buy publicity like that, right?

"I began reading [SVW] a few weeks ago and kind of got hooked. Not sure how it happened but it's now a daily read, probably cause it's chocked full of good content and Tom's a former journalist."

The phrase "former journalist" is interesting; as if you can't do journalism online only on paper. Ah well, not to quibble.

Tom here: Jason, you are making me blush, thank you for your kind words.
(I had an excellent time last week when I ran into Jason at the launch of Become.com...which is a very interesting company, I'll tell you more about them v.soon.)

If we were in Pulp Fiction, I know what Mr Wolf would be saying ;-)

And yes, Richard is right, I'm not a former journalist. I'm a former journalist at the Financial Times. I'm doing more journalism now than ever before...this blogging stuff is a heck of a thing!

February 17, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Tom Watch
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February 15, 2005

Notes from DEMO: Old faces, little hype.

by Jochen Siegle for SiliconValleyWatcher
It’s that time of the year again: DEMOtime in Scottsdale, Arizona. First the old stuff: Lots of very familiar faces are here. Excite co-founder Joe Kraus for example (he still looks like a twenty-something dotcomer.)

DEMO initiator Stewart Alsop regaled us with soporiphic inducing tales about the roots of the event more than 15 yars ago and the "fun” of the good old days. (BTW, Stewart, your on stage chat with DEMO producer Chris Shipley was just dry and not funny at all.)

Spotted at DEMO: Digital graphics pioneer Kai Krause

Jason Calacanis, once publisher of hype-and-hope tech pubs such as Silicon Alley Reporter or Digital Coast Reporter and now a leading blog publisher, is blogging in the front row with three colleagues (one is strikingly beautiful).

Dan Bricklin, the inventor of the spreadsheet (VisiCalc)and now president of Software Garden, pops up to tell us he is still “very excited” about the business opportunities of the “digital revolution.” For example the MP3 player boom. Yawn and double-yawn.

Also, digital graphics pioneer Kai Krause (developer of the famous “power tools”) is here, but refuses to talk about what he is up to. It seems like he’s working on something hot – or maybe not. He is more talkative about the past: For example he claims he received 45,000 business proposals a couple of years ago after being mentioned in just three stories at the three top-tier newspapers in Germany (including my main publication Der Spiegel, and c’t magazine). I (and some DEMO organizers) strongly doubt that number.

Another German with a moving past is at the conference: Stephan Schambach, founder and CEO of the once famous dotcom dotbomb Intershop, used to be an e-commerce software powerhouse. His new venture Demandware just launched......surprise surprise... a web services e-commerce solution for mid-sized online retailers

I admire that Schambach, once the number one poster boy for Germany’s new economy, and of the much hyped and then terribly failed “Neuer Markt” stock exchange, is back in the game.

However, his new venture is based in Massachusetts. He left Intershop and the Silicon Valley area about 18 months ago.

DEMO’s “old face line-up” is to be followed by a special invitation dinner to honor top innovators of the past (yawn): Marc Andreesen is coming, also handheld veterans Ed Colligan and Jeff Hawkins (PalmOne), Les Vadasz (Intel employee number 3 and recent head of Intel Capital), Tivo’s Mike Ramsey and/or Marc Benioff from Salesforce. We are told the boys from the Googleplex might show up as well (but I doubt that they are into nostalgia.)

The bigger question remains: Where are the fresh faces in high-tech? There must be some.

Some of the highlights.

+iUpload is a clever way to upload stuff to blogs and websites.

+“Vlog it!”, a creative and easy application for adding videos to blogs from Serious Magic.

+Photoleap shows a cool digital photo app to send hundreds of high-res picture files, up to 1Gb, all at once by e-mail.

+LiveDeal promises to bring the best of eBay and Craigslist together. I didn’t really "get it" totally but the service sounds interesting (ditto for a lot of the security apps shown Monday.)

+ Motorola's iRadio service streams Mp3 files on cellphones and puts iPod functionality to regular car stereo systems via a piece of Bluetooth hardware

P.S. Most entertaining DEMO act so far: Web-design firm Homestead’s interpretation of Don McLean’s "American Pie". Three guys performed “The day ugly websites died.” Let’s hope they’re right.

BTW, DEMO says it uses a merit process to choose companies presenting at the conference. But, all companies pay at least $10K and some as much as $20K to appear, say former DEMO veterans.

TF

February 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Tech Watch
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February 14, 2005

In praise of the global Geek community…thanks for all the (nearly) free IT

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Valentine’s Day seems a fitting time to celebrate and thank the hardware and software engineers of the world. I use the term Geek with respect. Through your efforts you have worked to bring down the price of IT to virtually nothing.

The chip and process engineers have worked tirelessly to bring down the price of computing through their relentless pursuit of Moore’s Law. Same goes for the communications engineers, who have had to work at an even faster pace. Let’s not forget the hard-drive engineers who also exceeded the speed of Moore’s law to bring us inexpensive data storage (and the iPod).

And a big thanks to the software engineers, especially all of those that have worked to develop a common base of open-source software, and the open-source based software technologies that provide simple, powerful, server-side application development platforms.

For newly formed companies, IT costs are now a fraction of what they used to be. Server hosting and bandwidth costs are a very small budget item. And IT people costs are at least ten times lower than say, five years ago.

And open-source software is only going to get better. If anyone is still on the open-source debate, you are too late. It is over. Open-source, like a slow and steady steamroller is crushing all opponents. If you are a software company and don’t scramble up the stack fast enough, you will be flattened because more open-source software is on the way. With millions of software engineers coming on-line over the next few years in India, China, Poland, Philippines, Ukraine, etc, what will they do with their spare cycles? Some of them will undoubtedly donate their time to open-source projects.

Think of how much value freely available operating systems and applications are already providing humanity as a whole. It really is a global creative commons.

Is there any other such group of people that have made an impact of such potentially long-lasting magnitude? Disaster relief workers, and hundreds of millions of charity volunteers make a huge contribution every day, of course. But such efforts are expensive and not scalable. The Geeks have created and donated software technologies to the world that are free and much more easily scalable—just add more servers (and a couple of admin Geeks…)

It would not surprise me if the open source software movement will one day be recognized as the single most important collective contribution ever made by volunteers towards the world’s common good.

dk0910

February 14, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Tech Watch
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February 13, 2005

News from Demo: With Perspectives, iUpload is making blogging safe for businesses and better for users

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

I just got off the phone with Robin Hopper, CEO of iUpload. He's at Demo in Scottsdale to show off iUpload's latest product, Perspectives, which he'll present Tuesday. iUpload is rooted in the enterprise content management world.

Before starting iUpload, Robin was VP of sales for Ibex Technologies, a leader in the fax-on-demand space. In starting iUpload six years ago, he wanted to pursue the vision of making information available when, where and to whom it's wanted. iUpload started as a content management system for web publishing. In the past 18 months or so, they've clearly identified that their content management expertise could improve the level of control a publisher has over their blogging.

In the current blogging paradigm you have to manually replicate your content in all the different forums you want to post: personal blog, corporate blog, other people's comments, social networking communities, CRM, etc. iUpload offers two critical wins in the business blogging space:

First, said Robin, with the Application Suite, "corporations can give individual blogs to whomever they want, both internal and external people, and they have all kinds of tools they can use to manage that. They can liberate the gems from individuals' blogs onto a corporate blog site, for instance." Those back-end tools is where iUpload leverages its CMS knowledge.

The Perspectives piece allows bloggers to "live in your blog and let the content show up in other communities." When a company signs up a Perspectives sponsor, iUpload provides them with a range of back-end tools to specify what information should be included for their site. Users can choose which Perspectives they want to post to and customize the voice of their posts accordingly.

When the service launches on Tuesday, it will include Perspectives from Tribe, Yahoo, Ebay, Salesforce.com, Plaxo, Technorati and others. The service includes Technorati user-generated tags, as well.

The business model includes charging both sponsors and corporations for the hosted service. Individuals can use the blogging tools for free.

"Currently, a corporate blog isn't really any different from an individual blog," Robin pointed out. "It will have some company information, some individual information, it just happens to have a corporate logo. This contributes to information smog; if you don't know about it you can't subscribe to it." Finding the sites and feeds you want to subscribe to is hit-or-miss and time-consuming. "We let you liberate content from individual blogs." Perspective sponsors have a wide range of tools to approve postings, reuse and provide editorialization on posts, interact with submitters, set approvals for different users.

I asked Robin if sponsors wouldn't be concerned about opening themselves up to more spam by participating in a tool that facilitated the reposting of content across the Net. "All of our sponsors do a lot of heavy lifting on the back end. They have the control to shut people down, decide who's a trusted contributor, who's a spammer." Because in the iUpload system, people have to author content in their blog, "that takes the edge off," Robin said. Anonymity breeds spam; authorship breeds responsibility.

Besides the distribution-oriented Perspectives, there are also authoritative Perspectives, a way to limit access to your blog to a small set of individual readers. In the case of Salesforce.com and Plaxo, you would want to limit access to users of the CRM or CMS system. "We're also turning blogs into extranets."

Robin said that there's a perception that they compete with Six Apart, especially around TypePad as a hosted blogging package. "In reality, we're competing against the IT department thinking they have to roll out their own blogging system." I asked Robin if hosted services are being embraced as a way to move without involving IT. "We've seen a real change. Six years ago, IT would have tried to shut down the discussion. IT embraces us now because they believe they have better things to do. Having been involved in enterprise content management, we've had to figure out the answers to IT's security issues and other legitimate concerns."

In a crowded market for blogging tools in which no one has really threated Six Apart's status as the market leader, iUpload is offering a new level of functionality, but it's not a UI improvement so much as a networking improvement. They offer a way to leverage the blog UI to allow users to play in higher visibility or more targeted communities. By letting companies select their bloggers and exploit their content they are creating a strata of the blogosphere that boasts selectivity, content promotion, and control. Control is not generally seen as a virtue in blogging circles; yet the impending HR morass around blogging and the increasingly long list of employees fired over their blogs suggests that having an approval mechanism might have its virtues on both sides.

At the end of day it looks like iUpload is starting to carve some much-needed pathways among bloggers, companies and major online communities.

Links: Perspectives Press Release | Demo

February 13, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Top Stories
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A HP-Sun combination starts making sense...

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
If Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems were to merge, it would make a lot more sense these days than a year ago. And the fit doesn’t look too bad either…take a look:

+HP would get Sun’s range of SPARC systems and an impressive future technology roadmap for SPARC microprocessors. IBM has been doing very well with its proprietary 64-bit Power microprocessor architecture. Margins on proprietary hardware are four to five times better than on industry standard systems. Itanium was supposed to be HP’s “Power” play but its slow market build has been further slowed by AMD’s 32/64-bit Opteron.

+HP would gain from Sun’s large accounts in financial services and telecoms. These sectors are huge IT spenders.

+Sun needs a much stronger services arm, such as HP’s.

+HP would gain Sun’s middleware, v.important against IBM’s WebSphere middleware. (BTW a HP-SUN-BEA-EDS combination would be interesting…)

+Both companies could consolidate their computer labs.

+The HP printer group could be spun off more easily, if necessary. Ditto HP PC group…

+Sun’s Java technologies have consumer electronics and mobile phone applications and momentum.

+A lot of the leadership/exec issues have gone away (Carly.)

Also, Intel, with its strong HP relationship would get an inside channel into Sun which would be bad news for AMD's Opteron. Sun has been a large obstacle to Intel's Itanium efforts--it's probably too late to do anything about that--but there would be potential client-side product opportunities for Intel's other chips.

But who would run an HP-Sun? Zander was made for that job, but he's busy at Motorola. Gary Bloom might be looking for a new gig soon. Who else? There doesn't seem to be much exec talent coming up through the ranks in the enterprise space, or is it just my perception? A HPQ and SUNW combination would require a star CEO, someone with considerable presence on and off stage. What about Ballmer? That would be interesting...

Hold on, I'm forgetting Sean Maloney at Intel--he's a real firecracker. Andy Grove's favorite son (metaphorically) and he has the toughest job at Intel--making the comms group profitable. He's the guy Intel uses to fix tough problems. He is Silicon Valley's Mr Wolf (for Pulp Fiction fans....)

Sean is in his 40s and he's already proved himself many times over at Intel. Paul Otellini is taking over from Craig Barrett this year, which means no room at the top for probably the next five to eight years. What’s a boy to do?

February 13, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Tech Watch
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Jupiter analyst: What Technorati can offer Google

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

The day before the Bloglines-Ask Jeeves deal was formally announced, I talked to Jupiter analyst Eric Peterson. Eric said it made a lot of sense for large search engine companies to start gobbling up RSS aggregators.

"It really seems like Google would want to add something like Technorati that uses the relevance mechanism for searching," Eric told me. "When people search they're looking for both widley linked to and new stuff. There's a great opportunity for Google to apply the news.google.com technology to the blogosphere. RSS search would fit well into Gmail's threaded conversation mode.

Google lets you search the Web; Google desktop lets you search your information on your hard disk. Why not search my RSS subscriptions? Or search all the blogs linked to by people I subscribe to? "That's what Google would do well," Eric said. "Microsoft could do that as well. Yahoo already has their rss reader. If you win eyeballs, you win loyalty.

Back in December Eric had reported on Mark Fletcher's emerging business model ("Adsense on steroids ... the idea that any article or feed I'm interested in will be littered with content that can be mined and transformed into relevant pay-per-click advertising".)

It now looks like AskJeeves is not interested in the "Adsense on steroids" approach and has said that "in some scenarios Bloglines would not have to generate revenue." But speaking of Google, would you put it past them to try that model?

Ultimately, it may be a good thing for the corporate adoption of blogs for the big boys to play in this space, because the lack of qualitative information about blogs is a problem. Eric says: "While there is some high-profile corporate blogging out there (GM and Sun), by and large Fortune 500 corps are not blogging, and because the activity is so difficult to quantify it's hard for analysts to offer much guidance...What's the value of the chief executive blogging? It's hard to quantify. What's the adoption of our syndicated content? Who's linking to us? Is what they're saying positive or negative?"

If you're asked these questions by your boss, your answer is always going to be qualitative, anecdotal, seat of the pants stuff. The quantitative measurements/tools just aren't there yet.

For instance, how do you measure how many RSS subscribers you have? Really the only way to do it is via Feedburner, which works for individuals and small organizations, but "by the time a big organization figures out how to do RSS through their CMS, they're not going to run those feeds through Feedburner. ... It is very difficult to know who's linking to you ... it's a simple problem to solve when you look at, nobody's looking at it."

At a more basic level, RSS won't achieve serious uptake until subscribing is a one-button affair. For starters, no average user would know what to make of those XML buttons, or what to do when the browser asks what application it should open the .rdf file in, or simply displays raw XML code.

Eric thinks this is an opening for the browser makers. "It gives them a chance to solve a problem and create a relationship. It requires a concerted effort of browser makers thinking about how do we solve this problem. There's no way that it's hard. Microsoft has to figure out how RSS is critical to their browser and how they can leverage a simple and pleasing user experience within their browser. "
TF12:14

February 13, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Tech Watch
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February 12, 2005

This is how to kill pagerank spam…and the entire SEO industry

by Tom Foremski and Candida Kutz for SiliconValleyWatcher
How often does your googlebot come around? Once every two to three months? Throws you off your pagerank, and then you wonder why? Was it the inbound links? The outbound links were changed… and the meta tags…. yet still you were knocked back but, …you’ll do better next quarter.

So, how often does the googlebot come and knock on our door? Once every three months? Nope, many times-a-day. The secret is:

writeablogandreachyourcustomersthegooglebotlovesfreshcontent

February 12, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag:
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February 11, 2005

Silicon Valley blogger shock admission: "I don’t read blogs…"

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
I sometimes joke that I don’t read blogs, not even my own, because I’m too busy running around interviewing and meeting with an incredible array of people, so that we can publish original content: scoops, interviews, columns—exclusive content that you can only get here.

Scoops and exclusive content build readership better than anything else. And you can’t just buy a scoop, you have to get it by good old-fashioned journalism which means hitting the streets. We’ve been having quite a good run of scoops and exclusives lately, and our readership has grown tremendously.

And it is our readers that we have to thank, because they are our distribution system, they are our evangelists, they share our content with their peers.

This is one of the many incredible things about blogging—your readers control your distribution. If you offer something of value, your audience will find you and promote you and distribute you. It is a democratization of content. Value will rise to the top and BS will/should sink to the bottom.

dk0850

February 11, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Media Watch