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May 31, 2005
iTunes goes to Hollywood
With iTunes 4.8, Apple has quietly added video clip support. Now, any QuickTime movie can be dragged into a playlist in iTunes. This allows easy download, sorting and playback of digital video clips.
But the challenge for Apple is not getting content from the studios, or protecting it, or the technical details of distributing it. Rather, the challenge is to convert iPod and iTunes listeners into viewers.
This also begs the question: How quickly will iTunes replace NetFlix?
It should be obvious to anyone following the progress of downloadable video that the holdups are political and economic, not technical. It has taken a long time to make Hollywood comfortable with digital rights management for downloadable content - and it has been even harder to get consumers to pay for $4 movie downloads over pathetic US "broadband." Services such as CinemaNow have been providing downloadable movies for years, but they have not achieved mainstream penetration. In fact, they seem to be no more than elaborate proofs of concept for DRM technology.
The de facto standard approaches to video distribution, which reportedly make up some 50% of Internet bandwidth use, are of course the ubiquitous file-sharing networks. The current business model for these networks is a non-sustainable "sell ads and run from lawsuits while you can."
So what's in store for iTunes? A natural first step is music videos. These are essentially promotional content, short, small in size, and of relatively low value to the labels, but nonetheless a perfect discrete digital "goodie" that consumers are eager to download and view repeatedly.
But going to the next step, feature-length movies, will take new hardware. This does not necessarily mean a video iPod. It will require hardware of some kind, though, to painlessly get these movies onto TV screens.
There are several approaches to solving the digital home theatre problem, which echo the thin client vs. desktop PC argument of a few years ago:
- Home Theatre PCs - full, desktop-class computers running personal video recorder and audio/video jukebox software
- "Thin clients" - network devices that act as video output peripherals (i.e. Airport Express for Video)
- A video iPod (vPod) that downloads video from iTunes and can also output it to a TV as most digital cameras can today
If you're not familiar with Airport Express, it's a convenient, portable $129 WiFi gadget that lets you set up a WiFi access point anywhere and also acts as a remote audio output for iTunes. If you're running iTunes, you can effortlessly pipe your audio output to any Airport Express, and thus out of your stereo system or TV speakers, anywhere in your home.
It's often said that iTunes is essentially a loss leader to promote iPod sales. I've also been told that Steve Jobs doesn't believe in home-theatre PCs. The Airport Express allows the Mac to remain the "digital hub" for your home entertainment. So it would be consistent with this vision (and Mac rumor sites are conjecturing) that Apple will come up with some sort of WiFi video output device (perhaps based on its implementation of MPEG-4/H.264/AVC video) that can connect to the television and serve as a "video out" for iTunes and QuickTime.
It's interesting to note that such a device almost exists already: Apple's $500 Mac Mini has DVI video output, and many people have found that they can hook one up to their HDTV and watch their QuickTime videos on the big screen. I'll be at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in a couple of weeks, and many of us are hoping that Apple announces at least one of the video solutions listed above. Stay tuned.
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P.S. In the meantime, video iTunes has at least solved one problem that has plagued Mac users for a decade. It has a "full screen" feature for movies. That means you no longer have to pay $29 for QuickTime pro in order to play your movies fullscreen.
May 31, 2005 |
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Bubbler blows up distinctions between websites and blogs
I'm often asked how a blog differs from a website. I usually say that blogs are websites that are organized like journals, generally created with software that lets you make frequent posts and supports things like reader comments and trackbacks, which aren't typically found on business sites. Blogging connotes a lot of other things, of course, like strong opinions, brutal honesty, and an ongoing conversation. SiliconValleyWatcher, for instance, uses Movable Type even though it is organized more like a news website than a traditional blog.
Bubbler, a new service from Palo Alto-based startup Five Across, really blurs that distinction in interesting ways. Founded by graduates of Apple and Adobe, Bubbler is a database-driven service that lets creators toggle between blog and website conventions, does away with ftp'ing files to a server, and even removes the concept of a broken link (except for outside links).
When I talked to Five Across CEO Glenn Reid, he emphasized that divorcing content from presentation was the key to the company’s technology. That’s been an objective of Web technologies for many years now, especially Cascading Style Sheets. But having a goal is one thing and having a system that actually works seamlessly is quite another.
Glenn comes from Apple, and Bubbler’s model is pretty Apple-like. It uses standards like CSS and JavaScript as appropriate, but at the core is proprietary technology that enables the company to deliver a solid user experience. There's no part of the process that Five Across isn't touching - you use its client software and its servers. Bubbler sites run on Five Across servers. While the service sits on TCP/IP and outputs HTML/CSS/JavaScript to a web server, everything in the middle is proprietary Five Across stuff.
This approach is not unusual. Flickr, for instance, takes a closed source, open API approach. How they do what they do is secret; what is open is the method of writing apps that lock into it. Bubbler is also closed-source, and it's not clear how open the APIs will be. It’s hard to argue with the success of the iPod and its tight integration with iTunes. On the other hand, its hard to argue with the success of the Web. But, why argue? There is obviously room for both kinds of companies.
Although Bubbler is intially offered as a hosted service, Five Across' ultimate business model, unlike that of Movable Type creator Six Apart, isn’t to run a hosting service but provide an OEM technology to other companies and networks. Look for ISPs to offer Bubbler to customers as a blog- or web-building tool that blows away anything they currently offer. And look for Bubbler to cut deals with institutions in vertical markets, such as real estate.
Blog or site? The difference is a template
Like Blogger.com, Bubbler offers a bunch of CSS-based templates. But unlike Blogger and other blog tools, the templates don't all look like blogs. Enterprise and small business templates look a lot more like website than blogs. Because Bubbler lets you disable blog standards like date, author, comments, trackbacks and so on, your “postings” can easily look like web “content.” Bubbler makes it easy to upload photos and files - just drag from the desktop to the app.
To put Bubbler through its paces, I took a site operated by my sister in law, Working Aussie Source, and re-created the home page in
Bubbler. I think she’s an interesting and typical case study. She paid someone to build her site but it’s become gainly and out of control. Not knowing any HTML, she’s been unable to update it and certainly unable to redesign it. Using a basic template, I recreated her home page in about an hour. But that took some faking up of blog entries, and I wasn’t able to replicate her basic design. Here's my Bubbler version of Working Aussie Source.
To move past the templates (shown in the screen shot), you have to dive into CSS. Clicking on Customize Template simply opens an HTML file for you to edit and upload to Bubbler. There’s no ftp app to run though; Bubbler handles the uploads. Editing the CSS isn’t that hard unless you’re building elements from scratch - moving elements around is fairly easy. Still, I don’t think that matters much. The creator of Working Aussie Source is not going there - she’ll need a wysiwyg editor for rearranging page elements or many more templates to choose from. Even TypePad, which is no wonder of user interface, allows users to control the positions of different elements and makes it relatively easy to paste in code for AdSense and other JavaScript do-hickies.
Five Across PR told me that the company's low-end market - real estate agents, photographers - would be happy to use templates, especially since Bubbler lets you use your own images in the templates. But I think this is leaving a lot of potential customers on the table. Designers, for instance, insist on total visual control but have no love of maintaining sites, tracking down broken links and threading through JavaScript rollover code. They would be very happy with the amazing way Bubbler makes those issues go away. If Bubbler can combine design control and ease of use, it could become a very interesting product. It will never be for everyone, but it is an exciting breakthrough in web authoring.
May 31, 2005 |
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Tales from Syndicate conference - Tuesday: Sneaking out to catch the Star Wars geeks .......and dinner with the in-crowd
...the final prequel to the climactic pre-finale of the series recounting a week's epic adventures at the Syndicate conference in New York...
Time Out journalists and Star Wars geeks
It's Tuesday in New York city, the first day of the Syndicate conference, and it's almost lunch time. I run into my buddy Dave Galbraith, a co-author of RSS 1.0, co-founder of Moreover and now, the founder of the flickriscious Wists.com (is that enough plugs Dave?). With Dave is Buck Smith, channel dev manager from Moreover.
Buck suggests we skip out and visit the geeks lining up for the opening of the latest Star Wars prequel. We walk about six blocks to where the movie is scheduled but there are no geeks, just a few tents with British flags. There is a guy in a stormtrooper uniform on the corner, but it turns out to be a bunch of journalists from Time Out magazine raising money for charity and charging $5 per Polaroid pose with the stormtrooper.
We're reluctant to pay the $5 (and Dave is Scottish) but they sweeten the deal with “we'll throw in a couple of girls into the shoot.” In that case, fine, I say, and pay $20 for photos all around. But do we need to have the stormtrooper in the picture, I ask?
It's all for a good cause, I'm told. Unfortunately, I can't remember which one.
I suggest they also offer boys, just to be fair.
The 8,000 pound gorilla wants to make an announcement - NOW
I catch the RSS and advertising panel at Syndicate. Here is the writeup:
It got a little bit bizarre when one of the panelists, Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager at Google, announced AdSense for Feeds right in the middle of the panel discussion. He jumped up, ran over to the podium, forcing the moderator to scoot quickly out of the way, gave a ten-minute PowerPoint presentation, then sat down. Panel discussion resumed.
Afterwards, I asked him how it would stop people from grabbing other people's content and creating RSS feeds from it. He said Google would carefully monitor the feeds and the organizations that sign up.
Sounds a bit people-heavy to me - not the Google way, which is if it needs people, we are not interested. That's because it's not scalable if it is not machine-based. You can't scale to keep pace with the internet if you have to rely on adding people to handle these kinds of tasks, IMHO.
Syndicate organizers say nice things about SVW
I meet some of the Syndicate organizers and they are very happy at the turnout and also at the traffic SiliconValleyWatcher sent to their online site. They said most of it was from our readers, which is great news.
And it was the lunch panel organized by one of our sponsors, Nooked, SiliconValleyWatcher, and Jeremy Pepper, featuring A-list blogger Robert Scoble, Forrester's superstar analyst Charlene Li, InfoWorld's Jon Udell, Dave Galbraith, and EVP & Director of Worldwide Operations for Edelman David Dunne, that brought a lot of attention to Syndicate and brought out some of the media big guns.
The Syndicate organizers said they are planning another conference in San Francisco in November and I said we would be happy to help out again, in organizing panels, additional tracks, etc. After all, this is our backyard...
Carnivorous Bloggerati
The place to be Tuesday night was eating steak at Gallagher's Steak House with all the top digerati attending Syndicate, A-list bloggers, various fathers of internet standards, and a few flacks and hacks. It was organized by one of our sponsors, Nooked, and Nooked's flack, Jeremy Pepper.
I arrived a little late. I had stopped first to visit with my old friend Lauren Stein, who lives just a couple of blocks away in Hell's Kitchen. Lauren works as assistant vice president at Financial Dynamics but used to work in San Francisco at Outcast and Ruder Finn.
By the time we got to Gallagher's the Nooked dinner party had taken over at least three very long tables and were hard at work trying to drink their way through Nooked's marketing budget for the year. I remember chatting with Heidi Cohen for a long time, she had some interesting ideas about online marketing strategies.
It was good to see the same old crowd at these things: Marc Cantor holding court on his table, Fergus Burns tucking into his Guinness, Renee Blodgett hoping around in social gadfly mode, XML co-author Tim Bray looking dapper in his hat, and the rest of the gang...
Blog: Is it an online lie detector?
At the dinner, I got into a discussion with Robert Scoble about whether it is possible for a journalist to write unbiased news stories even if that journalist is biased. I said it is possible.
He said he did not think it was possible and that if the news reporter revealed their bias, he would be able to better judge whether that news story was biased.
I said that was too much work, and that the danger was in introducing his (Scoble's) bias into the mix. Because he would adjust for revealed bias, which might not be there. (It is not difficult to write a fair and balanced story yet hold a personal opinion otherwise.)
Robert Scoble said that each time he doesn't tell the truth online, his readers find out. I said that maybe we could construct a type of “Turing test” to see if a truthful blog voice can be picked out from fraudulent scammers.
Would readers be able to spot who was lying and who was truthful, just by reading a blog post? I think it is possible and I would love to try this out. How about it Robert? Let's set up a few tests and see...
Find out what happened on Wednesday:Moderating two celebrity panels at Syndicate
Find out what happened Thursday. A bleary-eyed blogger on Wall Street
Find out what happened Friday. Blogger swagger in the heart of New York city
May 31, 2005 |
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May 30, 2005
News roundup: BitTorrent searches, the evolution of Sims, IBM's blogging launch and more
Even on a holiday, interesting news pops up from the Valley. Here's a roundup of some of the headlines.
Bram Cohen, inventor of BitTorrent, has released a search engine [BBC report] to make it easier for users to find BitTorrent files. Cohne was
profiled in Wired magazine in January...
Sims creator Will Wright is working on Spore, a game in which players determine the evolution of species. The game will be multiplayer but not in the usual sense. The BBC reports:
The aim is to use a central computer to gather players' creations and share them with everyone playing the game. "You end up playing a galaxy of 100,000s of worlds. And because players are creating the worlds, everything will be different," said Mr Wright.
SVW recently published a scoop on IBM's blogging initiative, a story that generated a lot of interest and comments. IBM's stance on blogging was later officially released by IBM blogger James Snell. Here's the policy in a nutshell: You're speaking for yourself, not IBM. ...
The Wall Street Journal asked a stable of media experts what Old Media should do to survive. Here's a smattering of advice. Network news: Tear down the facade of how news is made. Network TV: Broadcast to PCs. Newspapers: Think about stories, not circulation; allow readers to create their own papers. Movies: Forget about DVDs, go online. Music: License P2P networks to sell songs. More at WSJ (Via CyberJournalist
Renee Blodgett has a report on Jeff Hawkins' new thing - computing systems based on the brain's neocortex. ...
May 30, 2005 |
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May 27, 2005
MPEG-4 vs. Microsoft VC-1: why high-definition video software standards are irrelevant
About a year ago, Microsoft made great strides in legitimizing its technology for broadcasting by getting its Windows Media 9 video codec (now grandly titled Video Codec One, or VC-1) accepted by the industry's standards body SMPTE.
And both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray groups, representing the two competing High-Definition DVD hardware formats, have agreed to support Microsoft's codec as well as the MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding standard in their new hi-def players.
This presents an interesting question. The Windows VC-1 and MPEG AVC camps are fighting over which is the "best hi-def codec". But with the future media players supporting both codecs, does it matter which one content producers choose? I think the software doesn't matter anymore.
Everyone's familiar with the names of some codecs because their acronyms are widely used, but here's a little more background: MP3, Apple's AAC, WMA, RA, and OGG are all audio codecs. They all compress analog audio down to less than a tenth of its original size when storing it in digital form, then convert data back to analog so that we can hear it.
To use them on an audio player, such as a computer, you need to pay a fee. The popularity of MP3 is its ubiquity; the popularity of AAC is due to its use in the iTunes music store. The popularity of WMA is that it is the default format for any music ripped on a Windows machine. The popularity of OGG is that it is royalty-free. But they all do their job, and a computer (and many portable music players) can easily play them all.
The modern video codecs are also very similar to each other, and use similar mathematical techniques. They all break the picture into a lot of squares, and then use fancy mathematics (like those used in JPEG pictures) to represent these small squares with the smallest amount of bits. (You can find a technical comparison of the differences here.)
But they are all roughly comparable in quality, and the the VC-1 vs. MPEG AVC battle is a technical stalemate; the differentiating features have much more to do with implementations, price, and of course politics.
Some will still argue that it's essential to have a single software standard, to make sure that a 2005 hi-def DVD video player can play media produced in 2015, just as a 1995-vintage DVD player can still play DVDs made today. But that's also less relevant than ever.
The real thing that is causing the software standards to be irrelevant is powerful hardware. Traditionally, "computerization" of an industry required application-specific computer chips. For instance, automobiles, PDAs, sewing machines, and DVD players all used completely different microchips.
But now, powerful general-purpose computers are getting so tiny that it doesn't make sense in many cases to make hardware that's too specific.
Sure, if you need to mass-produce a cheap, single-function portable video device, you design or purchase the right microchip that implements, say, some version of MPEG-4 or Windows Media. But a home theatre PC or hi-def DVD player doesn't have to be power-efficient or small (in fact, DVD player cases are mostly empty - they're just a small circuit board and an optical drive).
Initially, HD DVD players (or Blu-Ray DVD players) may be expensive. But they don't have to be. In fact, the Mac Mini has a street price of $499 and can play back some HD-resolution content. You could assemble a PC for less and play back hi-def Windows media. And a full-fledged home theatre PC can play back anything you throw at it.
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As I commented in an earlier blog, it's entirely possible to design hi-def DVD players that can support new video codecs through software updates alone. People already patch the firmware on their DVD players to unlock new features; a sufficiently general-purpose processor in a DVD player (or a video decompressor chip that can be reprogrammed) could adapt to future Windows or MPEG AVC standards. It's not inconceivable. In fact, people are starting to expect the hardware to do post-processing to the video to tune it to their own HDTVs.
Even if my flights of fancy about upgradeable DVD players turn out false, people have gotten used to $29 DVD players. It's going to be hard for vendors to sell hi-def DVD players with stratospheric prices. And when players become cheap enough, people WILL go out and buy a new one if they need to.
So the fighting between groups supporting different hi-def codec standards may seem important right now. But in the long term, it's only a minor skirmish in the battle for the living room.
May 27, 2005 |
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The further life of a blogger: Moderating two celebrity panels at Syndicate
...Part three of a bloggerific week in NYC
Wednesday May 18 was my big day at the Syndicate conference in New York. I started off moderating an early-morning panel with Michael Terner, CEO of KnowNow, the RSS corporate services company, and Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, the corporate wiki company.
Dr. Paul Kedrosky of the University of California and David Schatsky, senior vp at Jupiter Research, talked about how enterprises are using blogging, wiki and RSS technologies to publish to their employees and business partners. Paul made a good point that corporations are loathe to hire editorial staff because they want to keep headcount low - but they are already publishers of information internally and externally.
Strangely, this is one of the only Syndicate sessions that looks at corporate use of these media technologies, and it is well attended. The time flies by and I have to wrap things up. At the end, a large bunch of people rush the podium for more information. Not a bad panel all in all; only one person escaped early, and I saw only one dozer!
Lunchtime super-panel
My lunchtime panel, which was sponsored by the European RSS corporate services company Nooked (an SVW sponsor), was a lot livelier. Jeremy Pepper of Pop! PR helped organize an excellent panel and we had uber-blogger Robert Scoble of Microsoft; John Udell, formerly of Byte and now of InfoWorld; Charlene Li, Forrester's superstar analyst; David Dunne, EVP, Director Worldwide Operations at PR leader Edelman; and my buddy David Galbraith, co-author of RSS 1.0 and now with his post-MoreOver.com project: Wists.com.
Fergus Burn, CEO of Nooked introduced the panel. I skip the bios and launch the group right into the thick of things on the topic of future scenarios for RSS. They respond with gusto, they are animated, happy to play devil's advocate with each other, and responsive to my interruptions and occasional attempts at humor.
Again, the session flies by and I can barely remember what was said, other than the fact that Robert Scoble reads/scans through 1340-plus RSS feeds. But they have to be full-content feeds, otherwise they get zapped.
Charlene says her heavy travel schedule means she is away from her young children a lot, and so she has created a private blog in which she can communicate with her kids.
At the end of the panel I remember to announce our launch of ionRSS.com:reporting on the business of RSS, edited by RSS guru Richard MacManus.
Is Google stomping on or validating the RSS ad market?
Later in the afternoon I chat with Bill Flitter of Pheedo about Google's announcement of AdSense for Feeds. I joke that this “validates” the market.
The validation argument is a common take by companies in response to the entry of a much larger competitor to their markets. But Bill might have a point, and at least a few months of grace: “Placing ads in RSS feeds is actually a better place to advertise because it gets to more readers, but few advertisers realize this yet. Now with Google validating this market the phones are ringing off the hook.”
Coming soon: Find out what happened the previous day at the conference, and why all the A-list bloggers and Internet pioneers at Syndicate were at the Nooked dinner...
Also read about Thursday and Friday's events.
May 27, 2005 |
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May 25, 2005
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May 25, 2005 |
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May 24, 2005
Video download is patent infringement, and there's a price to pay
I used to keep a patent watch blog that tracked peer-to-peer (P2P) technology patents. Basically, when you start a company, you're expected to patent your technology, either offensively or defensively, whether you think it warrants it or not. So every company that enters a field starts patenting everything it thinks up, and, to take a cynical view, as long as the diagrams in your patent are different than other patents, you'll have a unique invention - enough to safely do what you're already doing without risk of being sued for patent infringement.
But what if your patent covers your entire industry? And what if you never build your technology but simply sell the patent to a licensing company? That's the case with a company called Acacia (just Google "acacia patent"), which has been enforcing its Digital Media Transmission (DMT) patent since 2002. The patent basically covers any kind of video transmission: download, progressive download, over any type of network, as long as there is file storage involved. Legally, Acacia has a patent on pretty much any type of digital download.
Instead of going after the technology creators, however, Acacia has decided to go after people using the technology profitably. This makes perfect business sense.
With big companies, patents are a sort of barter currency, cross-licensed so that each company can continue to do what it was already doing:
Company 1: "We've got the patent on smaller hard disk drive arms".
Company 2: "Fine, we've got the patent on smaller hard disk drive heads. Lets trade."
It all makes sense when the patents are owned by the same companies that create the technology. But it gets weirder when patent-holding companies enter the picture.
The thing about patents is that by merely writing the patent, you've "invented" the technology. You don't have to have it implemented when you draft the patent, although an expert in your industry must be able to build the invention from your patent.
With a patent as seemingly strong as Acacia's, you'd think the company would be rich - and recently, it has been collecting about $2M per fiscal quarter from the patent. According to Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia.com, Acacia has sent out more than 20,000 letters to companies it believes are infringing.
Acacia's website does not list a licensing price. So Acacia can decide how much it should demand as a "streaming tax," depending on peoples' ability to pay.
So how much does it cost? From digital cable companies, Acacia is requesting $2-$2.50 for every subscriber. On the Internet side, it used to request a $5000 fee from educational institutions, but has lowered that to $500 in some cases.
Many companies go ahead and pay these relatively nominal flat fees, which include an "amnesty" for back royalties, instead of litigating. This is because it can cost $500 just to have your lawyer sign a letter and fax it on your behalf.
About 200 licensees have paid up so far, including big names like Bloomberg, Disney, Playboy and Virgin.
Acacia clearly sees great potential in this business model. Recently, the company bought another patent that might seem familiar. If you've ever used a WiFi hotspot, you'll notice that it redirects you first to a PAY NOW web page. Once you've paid, you can start using the web as normal. Well, that's patented. Kinda like one-click purchasing on Amazon, in the sense that many techies will cry "foul!" and others will go, "well, yah, if I had invented that I'd think it was clever and I'd want to make some money off it..."
Already, Acacia has taken several companies to court, notably some adult-industry (streaming or downloadable porn) suppliers as well as regional (smaller) cable companies.
One of the deepest ironies is that Acacia's quarterly reports, in digital media form, are hosted by a non-licensee. Also, StreamingMedia.com, which has created a clearinghouse of information about this patent at http://streamingmedia.com/patent/) has conferences archived on its site as downloadable video. StreamingMedia is not a licensee of the patent - and has never received a letter.
Patents are often cited as a way for the "little guy" to protect him/herself from the big corporation that might steal his ideas. It now appears that corporations such as Acacia are stocking up on patents that they didn't invent and certainly never implemented, so they can charge little guys - who use such inventions.
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This patent prospecting is such a good business it makes California real estate look like Beanie Baby futures. I just started my own patent holding corporation and we've just purchased patents for the video previews feature on digital cameras, and we also just bought a patent for the key fob. Instead of going after camera manufacturers and car manufacturers, we've decided to take the infringement lawsuits directly to the users.
Please submit your address information in the feedback area below so we can send you a bill.
May 24, 2005 |
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| Tag: Digital Video
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BP, Morgan Stanley have "zero tolerance" for bad coverage
BP, following on the heels of Morgan Stanley, has adopted a policy of pulling advertising from publications that give the company bad press, and requiring publications to give BP prepub look-sees if it is mentioned in cover stories, AdWeek reports.
This strikes me as unbelievably stupid and abusive, since magazines are in a very weak position to reject major ad buys from these guys. It's funny that there is so much talk about journalistic ethics, and about how Newsweek must hate America, when corporations are free to abuse the power of the buck.
AdWeek quotes an unnamed publishing exec: "I think it's OK to have systems in place to pull advertisers out, but clearly we don't show them stories ahead of time. ... It's a stupid request. It makes you think these guys are hiding something."
May 24, 2005 |
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[Sponsor Watch] Infineon, IBM, Macronix Researching Phase-Change Memory
On "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," Odo was a shape-shifter, able to rearrange his molecules to inhabit different forms. Now the idea is being applied to computer memory, as Infineon Technologies AG (a SiliconValleyWatcher founding sponsor) has joined up with IBM and Macronix to research phase-change memory, a new technology that stores data in a special material that can change structure, the AP reported Monday.
Research will be conducted at IBM's Watson Research Center in New York and Almaden Research Lab in San Jose. In phase-change, the material changes from an amorphous to a crystalline structure; the technology promises high speed, high density storage. Data could be saved and available even when the computer is turned off.
Link: AP story
May 24, 2005 |
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A bleary-eyed blogger on Wall Street: more thoughts from a week in NYC and the Syndicate conference
The second installment of a journalist-blogger's somewhat patchy recollections of a hectic week in New York.
The trouble with Thursday last week was that my Wednesday was still going strong. The Syndicate conference finished Wednesday, and somehow afterwards I got caught up with a motley crew of RSS company execs and an investment banker or two.
I seem to remember it was all Bill Flitter's fault. Bill is the chief marketing officer of Pheedo, which serves ads on RSS feeds and also offers behavioral marketing services and analytics. Bill is a big fan of SiliconValleyWatcher and so is his friend, Tom O'Neill, managing director at Summit Private Capital Group. Bill invited me to join his merry band for a meal and a drink. Little did I know it would be 5am before my head hit the pillow.
A fun time was had by all - thanks Bill! Also, I must mention Rok Hrastnik, who by midnight had been dubbed “The Rok of Slovenia.” Rok, just 23 years old, is an astounding character and already a seasoned entrepreneur. He is an expert in online marketing techniques as E-commerce Manager at Studio Moderna in Slovenia.
By 10.45am Thursday I was finally awake, and realized I had to be downtown at noon at Financial Dynamics to talk to this large Wall Street PR firm about blogging. Financial Dynamics is where my friend Lauren Stein works as Assistant Vice President. Lauren had asked me to come in and chat to her colleagues about blogging and how companies are looking to use it in marketing/promotional activities.
I have been doing a lot of these types of meetings, sharing what I've learned so far, talking about some of the questions that blogging creates, and discussing how there are so many answers that we don't know yet. That's what makes it interesting. I also pointed out that Silicon Valley companies are not ahead of the rest in using these technologies; this is still very early days for everyone.
I said that blogging doesn't allow for spin. If you can't walk the walk, then however much you talk your talk, you will not be read. Marketing speak doesn't fly in this world. But if you give as much value as much as you can, the world will beat a path to your door. For that reason, blogging is the best form of promotion bar none.
A pleasant walk amid unpleasant memories
I then spend a pleasant afternoon wandering alone along the waterfront parks and observing the rebuilding of the devastated WTC site. I remember how different it looked when I was here just five days after the attack, helping out my colleagues in the Financial Times New York HQ.
The ruins were still smoking and the downtown area was covered in several inches of powdery ash, as people shuffled stunned and silent through the narrow streets. Throughout Manhattan, the fire stations were covered in messages and flowers.
Walking along a street you would suddenly come across candle-lit shrines to the fallen, walls covered in fliers with photos of lost family and friends, asking if anyone had seen them. Those photos and descriptions of the missing personalized the tragedy like nothing else.
Now, the district is sunny, bright, and new, and multiple memorials are there. But the walls of chiseled names don't hold the same emotional impact as did those missing person fliers taped to the walls.
The Flickricious Wists.com
I head over to my buddy David Galbraith's place, just off Wall Street, where I'm staying the night. Dave shows me some of the enhancements he's made to Wists.com, a very clever, slick but simple way to create visual bookmarks of favorite things. Dave has been adding more features such as an easy way to add images to blog posts and publish in just a few clicks. Dave could be onto a winner here and he already has Gawker Media using it and quite a few others sniffing around.
Find out what happened the day before in Part Three: Wednesday--Moderating the mother of all panels at Syndicate (guess how many daily feeds uber-blogger Robert Scoble reads? 1340!)
Find out what happened the next day in Part One:
May 24, 2005 |
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May 23, 2005
A week in the life of a blogger journalist: Blogger swagger in the heart of New York city...
Part One: Friday May 20
Is that Barry Diller over there, someone asks? I look around and see some people walking past our table in Michael's, one of the power centers for the media elite in Manhattan. I don't think I could recognize the media mogul anyway...
It is Friday and I'm having lunch as the guest of Andy Plesser of the PR firm Plesser Holland Associates and his long time friend Nancy Smith, the sharp and savvy managing editor of Smart Money magazine.
It has been an exhausting but fulfilling week. I moderated two panels at the Syndicate conference and made a ton of interesting contacts, gave a presentation at Financial Dynamics, caught up with buddies and now I'm telling Andy and Nancy about my first SiliconValleyWatcher sponsors, that we launched our sister site ionRSS.com, and our plans for the future. “So that's why you walked in with a swagger,” Nancy teases.
I am not conscious of the swagger but appearances can be deceiving - and that is usually fine by me! As a semi-famous blogger journalist with a burn rate that could lead to flame-out, I sometimes enjoy playing the part of what I'd like to be: a successful micro-media mogul.
The poorer I get, the more affluent I like to appear. If I look like a million bucks, I probably could do with a million bucks. I'm wearing my favorite lightweight gray check suit and floating on the heels of my extremely comfortable Ecco dress shoes.
A humble blogger
I think the swagger Nancy noticed was just my “front” in case the management of Michael's spotted the humble humility of a blogger in motion and had me ejected (I think I spotted Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis photo ids by the door ;-)
Andy recounts successes for some of his clients, particularly the Iron Horse Winery in Forestville, (a superb winery, in the town where my children live) and new clients such as the Finnish and Singaporean governments. He also says that his vacation home in Puerto Rico was mentioned that very day in the New York Times.
I tell Andy that he should be careful not to get more publicity than his clients, something other celebrity PR bloggers have discovered to their cost. I wish I'd had my camera. The look on his face would have made for a marvellous flickr post.
This is my first meeting with Nancy and we run through an impressively long list of media topics ranging from the furious pace of M&A activities in the media sector to whether the old media truly gets the new new media.
Andy asks me if I can be part of a conference he is putting together in Silicon Valley next month, and I say no problem. I've been speaking at a lot of conferences this year and also visiting a lot of PR companies to talk to communications professionals about blogging and how companies are trying to use this medium (“you cannot spin” is a key point of mine along with “blogging is the most honest form of promotion bar none.”)
The coffee arrives and so does one of Andy's many blessings, his 20 year old son who is studying at Dartmouth College. However, I have to head off and prepare for my flight back to SFO.
I thank my hosts and stroll out of the restaurant and into the majestic canyons of Manhattan. I soon realize that I am just around the corner from the US HQ of my alma mater, the Financial Times. At which point a slight swagger creeps into my stride :-)
[Find out what happened the day before, in part two: Thursday--A blogger on Wall Street...]
May 23, 2005 |
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May 22, 2005
Verizon Fios: insanely cheap fiber to the home
My friend recently got wired up in Topanga Canyon (part of LA county) with Verizon's new insanely fast fiber Internet. I later saw a driving billboard Verizon truck that said "Fios" on it and then I figured out it was their brand name for this service.
[picture courtesy Jacob Riskin]
The monthly prices are extraordinarily low:
5 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $39 (source: Verizon Fios - Packages & Prices) With friends like that, who needs colocation facilities? Seriously though, I pay several hundred dollars for a 5Mbps downstream/768k upstream package from Time Warner. With the $199 Verizon package, you can get 5Mbps of upstream server bandwidth, which would let you serve almost 40 128k MP3 streams, or over a dozen 300Kbps video streams. This kind of upstream bandwidth is also sufficient for you to hook up your TiVo or PVR to the network and watch it in full quality in some other broadband downstream location. (While DVD bitrates are sometimes 6-8Mbps, the bitrates for PVR video are usually in the 2Mbps range, and DivX/Xvid movies are usually under 1Mbps.) May 22, 2005 |
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| Tag: Tech Watch
Streaming media, as far as I can determine, is a euphemism for "internet audio and video.". Companies don't want to be typecast as audio or video specialists, so they use the term "streaming media". But unfortunately, "streaming" is one of those useless "in" terms. When I told the flight attendant on my way to a New York conference that I was speaking about streaming video, she stared blankly and asked what streaming was.
Then, at the conference, after my six hour talk on Windows Media, my friend, also a presenter, told me that he didn't consider "streaming media" an industry. A day later, while speaking to a prospective publisher, the editor wondered if "streaming media" was a good term to use.
I tend to agree. Sure, with enough branding, the abused term "streaming" could take hold. In marketing buzz-speak, it essentially means "putting video on a web page or something."
But the argument against using the term to describe an industry goes something like this: Television is an industry; but "analog broadcasting" isn't. Consumers don't care about how broadcasting is implemented except as far as that affects price points and features. Tech geeks excepted, people generally don't worry whether you'll need an antenna on the roof, or plug something in to your cable box or hub.
Presumably, the promise of streaming media is that it will "deliver your content over the Internet or networks". But then all the work of streaming media, except in brand-new industries such as downloadable music, is simply a replacement for existing technology, i.e. "now we don't have to Fedex high-quality training DVDs to our branch offices, we can spend the same amount of money downloading low quality versions of them and hiring IT staff to hook up T1's to each office..."
The StreamingMedia article IPTV and Streaming: Distinguishing the Differences discusses some of this. Streaming technology, at high bitrates over well-controlled networks, just looks like, um, cable TV. But of course, it's more difficult (currently) to get this working versus traditional cable, and the quality of service can be lower.
We had the same problem a few years ago when I was working in the P2P "industry". Everyone liked to point out that P2P (peer-to-peer networking, i.e. the technology that powered Napster) was a technology and not a business model. Three years later, I still work in what I guess you could call the "P2P" industry, but my customers are in the video entertainment industry.
TThat's the case in many industries. Once a technology works well, the industry is no longer named after the technology. P2P technologies, once working, aren't marketed as P2P. Google uses "artificial intelligence" extensively but no sane marketer would dare call it that.
"Digital video" is a much more marketable moniker that doesn't specify a specific network transport technology, but encompasses all the ramifications of "going digital" with your media.
I'm not sure a rose by the name of "streaming media" will ever smell as sweet.
May 22, 2005 |
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| Tag: Digital Video
A few years ago, the battered industry of Internet video was dominated by the "big three" - Windows, Real, with Apple's QuickTime trailing a distant third. But in 2002 Macromedia, now part of Adobe, came out with its MX series, equipping Flash with the Spark codec, a simple codec based on H.263.
The Spark codec was nothing to write home about in terms of performance - it lagged the other major vendors in raw compression capability - but that didn't matter. What was important was that it worked well, and, notably, allowed the blending of natural video (i.e. from a video camera) and Flash animation into one seamless presentation (a feature that was supposed to be part of MPEG-4 but which never really materialized.) While it took a few years for Flash video to take hold, it has certainly done that now. The "buzz" I am hearing is that more and more video web projects are switching to Flash for their video.
Real has retreated from the Internet codec wars, morphing from a technology company into a sort of subscription services and server infrastructure vendor. Microsoft and Apple are pursuing the broadband/HD route, i.e. "Who has the best high-definition codec?"
Yet in the US and Europe, tens of millions of today's Internet viewers have low-speed "broadband" in the 128-384 kbps range, or use modems. Flash has always been the low-bandwidth leader, by focusing on what kind of good experience you could create on a modem, instead of trying force a depressingly sad excuse for video down the narrow throat of a dialup connection.
I think Macromedia will win the Web video war, for the following reasons:
1) Macromedia has style. Instead of sticking an obnoxious rectangle in the middle of a web page, Flash video blends with its web page surroundings.
Having worked extensively with Flash at my own company, I know many of its limitations. But they don't really matter, because Flash has just enough power to take over Internet video - and perhaps, if the company is clever, mobile phone video as well.
May 22, 2005 |
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| Tag: Digital Video
After all, as Doc Searls pointed out in his closing keynote at Syndicate, print carries huge, gargantuan infrastructure costs - the Times owns and leases more than 5 million square feet of space. By selling access to archives at roughly $3 a pop, the Times Online generated about $1 million in revenue. Pretty small potatoes for a company that creates $3 billion in revenues and $500 million in operating profits. So clearly they need to better and one-price-beats-all is an appealing approach. But how much value can they really extract out of old news (today's news is tomorrow's birdcage liner)? Consider that 2004 circ revenues were over $600 million and that circulation is down at the Times 1.2% from 2003. (Circ earned $87 million from their regional papers, down 1% from '03.) [Annual Report (PDF)] To see how much value the Times ascribes to digital archives compared to circulation, consider this: TimesSelect is a freebie for folks who subscribe to the printed paper. The bottom line is that by charging for the online Times, the value of the printed paper is enhanced. Why join TimesSelect for $50 when you can get the daily paper AND online access. Locking up archives and columns behind a paygate hurts the online advertising business, hurts the Times' visibility online (google doesn't archive pay-only pages), and will generate relatively modest revenue in return; even if they increase revenue 1000%, that's $10 million. By contrast, if the Times can increase circulation 10% (at least in part by the added benefit of free access to the fee-based website), that's $60 million in revenue (not profits.) A newspaper's website is an extension of the paper, not a freestanding business. There are numerous things the website can do to support the printed paper but ultimately that's what it does. That's what the Times is asking of its site whether its really knows that or not (I suspect they do). Ultimately, this is problematic because the costs of running a national printed paper are so high. Unlike Doc, I wouldn't suggest the Times charge for today's news and give the archive away. I would actually suggest that today's paper be available online not today but tomorrow and that the archive be given away for free. Everybody loves to talk about the Times, from the anti-MSM bloggers to Berkeleyites. The Times could encourage this, put itself out there as the source material for people to annotate, explore, deconstruct, etc. They could actually use technology to find ways to organize, display, link to the many ways bloggers interact with the content. They could sell advertising on all of this. They can insert references to Times content in About.com pieces. They could offer a Google Adwords-like feature to website operators (include links to Times articles based on your content). They could develop premium, for-pay content. What they are doing is something different, something ever so Old Media: they are beefing up their circulation numbers. May 19, 2005 |
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| Tag: Media Watch
UPDATE: Check out Richard MacManus' take at ionRSS.com: "[Google] will offer 'Universal RSS support' for the Personalized Homepage within 1-2 months, meaning users will be able to add any RSS feed onto it. Interesting that this comes out at the same time as Microsoft confirming it will integrate RSS across its MSN online services throughout the year." It's part of a new push Google calls "Fusion," which is an initiative to combine the various popular Google tools with web content at a user's fingertips. It's not quite the Google Browsers, but it's getting close! The actual change is supposed to go live some time very soon; and should you decry the loss of the classic Google homepage, you can set your preferences to keep it around. That's just one of three announcements this afternoon at the Googleplex. The second is a better version of "Keyhole" called "Google Earth," which will launch in a couple of weeks with truly astonishing satellite photo technology. And the third, as mentioned recently on SVW, is AdSense for RSS, available now. May 19, 2005 |
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| Tag: Google [GOOG]
I was delighted to find that these guys "get" this whole thing I'm calling media technologies. WaldenVC has been quietly making some very astute investments in digital media companies, leading rounds for ten companies. They've accumulated an interesting portfolio with a lot of diversity. I'm sure there is a ten-bagger in there. Maybe it's Shawn Fanning's new digital music distribution company Snowcap. Shawn, of course, is the founder/creator of Napster, the former scourge of the music industry. Now, everybody is good buddies and Hilary Rosen, his arch-nemesis when she headed the Recording Industry Association of America, is on his board. I know Alex, he's a former hack at Red Herring who joined WaldenVC in 1999, just before the dotbomb. But this is my first time meeting with Steve Eskenazi, general partner. Here's a summary of some of the conversation. Valuations of startups in the online marketing/advertising sectors are going through the ceiling. Usually, private-company valuations tend to be 40 per cent below comparable public valuations, depending on the sector. Now, valuations of private companies are at a premium over the public valuations. [Ouch.] Some startups in the online sector already have very healthy revenues and so they don't need investment capital. But the founders are taking money off the table by selling stakes to VCs. [Interesting to see such liquidity events because no IPO or sale of company was involved] Many young startup companies are seeing fantastic revenues - but they can't collect what they are owed fast enough, so they are burning precious reserves between the time they invoice and when they get paid. The VCs can provide a float. For example, with a $5m monthly revenue it's typical to take 60 days to collect payment from large companies, so it needs a float of $10m, which VCs can provide. Is that the value proposition for VCs these days - provide the float, I ask? Steve says no, it's also the expert management you get. Most of these companies are run by ad/marketing people and they need help growing the company. I say that it all sounds like an expensive way to go, taking VC money and handing over a hunk of company in order to bring in professional management. Of course Steve disagrees. I guess we will have to wait and see what happens. May 18, 2005 |
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| Tag: VC Watch
On Tuesday Google launched its public beta of AdSense for Feeds at the show, saying it would enable content producers to make money and plough that back into generating yet more quality content. Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for AdSense, called this a "virtuous cycle" that would enable the production of larger amounts of high quality content - and lead to a better society. That's a noble goal, and Google's AdSense network, which publishes content-related text ads on third-party sites, has generated more money for small publishers than anything else. Yet the modest revenues earned by most of the 200,000-plus AdSense network sites are under threat because of RSS, which allows people to read content without going to the originating web site. For many web sites using RSS, 50 to 70 percent of their readers subscribe to their RSS feeds and rarely see the web site itself. Since Google AdSense only pays if someone clicks on an ad, Google had to figure out a way to mix ads into the RSS feed and collect the clicks and usage patterns. Others, such as Pheedo, Moreover and Kanoodle have beaten Google to the market, but why rush? Google can own this market because of its scale and reach. Or can it? On the panel, Lincoln Millstein, SVP and Director of Digital Media at Hearst Newspapers, said his company was looking at mixing text ads within its RSS feeds - "But we don't need Google to do that." Millstein went further, saying that Hearst has become marginalized by the aggregators and wouldn't let it happen again. "The big money is being made by the aggregators, but who wants to be one of 1,000 publishers? That's just nickels and cents. We want to play the role of the aggregator." Hearst and other publishers such as IDG (organizer of the conference) are growing increasingly protective of their content, and increasingly hostile to Google or anybody else that is making money from their content and kicking very little, if anything, back to them. It will be interesting to see if the big publishers are better able to monetize their content, or if the value of digital content is in the aggregation services as Moreover and other aggregators argue. My take is that content will be king, this time around. And being a content producer/publisher (with an online cost base) is a very good place to be, because the headline links in Google, or in a news aggregator such as Yahoo Finance, have to lead to original content. And original content is hard to produce and cannot be done by machines. May 18, 2005 |
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| Tag: Google [GOOG]
Media RSS is an extension of RSS that allows feed publishers to include rich metadata describing the media content. "It's meant to be a self-publishing tool to communicate information about your feed," explained Brad Horowitz, Yahoo's director of media search. "Podcasting is a way to include enclosures in RSS. Media RSS is the way to make your podcast findable and discoverable." Watching Yahoo has seemed a confusing endeavor. On one hand it is creating serious Hollywood relationships and setting up shop in Santa Monica; on the other hand it is building open systems and garnering serious open source cred. While this seems like a schizophrenic identity, it's becoming obvious that Yahoo means to play at both ends of the spectrum. Brad said that Yahoo's vision is "My Media" - a middle way between mass media and micro media. In Yahoo's vision, "my" means both the stuff I've selected (as in My Yahoo) and the stuff I'm creating. Yahoo's media plans are to make high-leverage deals with Hollywood, do content deals with small individual creators like Jib-Jab, and provide the tools to allow users to find and create media. Yahoo calls this FUSE - "find, use, share and expand" - and the ultimate dataset is "all human knowledge." (That's a line taken right from Google's playbook, btw.) Brad talked at some length about Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr, which is the poster child for multifaceted sharing of user-created data. By providing open APIs to its closed source system, and not trying to control how people used the system, Flickr built a most unpredictable phenomenon. Yahoo wants to try to apply Flickr's success on a much bigger scale. On the other hand, it keeps Hollywood happy by pushing traffic back to the studios' sites, rather than aggregating their content. For smaller content providers like iFilm, Yahoo media search delivers substantial traffic jumps. The company is very protective of partners' copyrights, and Hollywood execs actually use Yahoo Video Search as an "infringement search tool"; Yahoo removes infringing content as it is reported. That's somewhat at odds with the goal of turning consumers into producers. I asked Brad if they were interested in pulling the studios along to free up more content for users to remix. The answer was no; Yahoo's agenda is mostly to gain studios' confidence. So Yahoo is fighting several battles. It's competing with Apple for the loyalty of the big studios. It competes with Google for search advertising customers. Those business models are pretty well set. What seems like open territory is the so-called "long tail," the promising but unproven potential to make money off the enormous volume of content that average people are creating. Getting there means Yahoo needs to help drive the standards forward, and that it needs to so in a truly open way. May 18, 2005 |
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| Tag: RSS Watch
The Berkeley Blog reports the evening better than I will attempt to do here so I'll pull out a few choice excerpts from their report. But the gist of the argument is that exporting technology is exporting consumerism and destroying local cultures. My argument, which I didn't really get a chance to make (although I fared better than others on the panel), was that by building up tech skills, production skills, and know-how, people in these places will have a chance to control the means of production and will have a voice in deciding what kind of media they want. To sit in Berkeley and sip lattes while bemoaning the MTV-ization of the world is merely to guarantee how it will go down. So, here are some choice excerpts from the Berkeley Blog report: Many of the questions and challenges had an incredibly patronizing undertone of the wealthy (white) do-gooders trying to protect the poor (colored) noble savages from the ravages of western technology, following which the do-gooders would get into their Volvos and drive back to their homes in Berkeley with electricity, clean running water, telephones, and fast Internet connections and write in their blogs on their i-Macs about the horrors of technology for the third world. Both people of color in the room picked up on the tone and commented on it, but nobody responded directly to their comments. It was Berkeley at its most superficial and most stereotypical. Along with the bizarre in-your-face with sophomoric challenge moderating style, it also seemed like such an unproductive dichotomy to draw, like a bourgeois church club in 1820's Manchester England resolving that England should spare India the pollution and working conditions (and power) of the satanic mills of the industrial revolutions. It was disappointing that the discussion was so unproductive and superficial, because there are serious issues worth working on nearby. Technology and western culture are coming to the developing world, and anyone who has lived or traveled extensively in the developing world is aware of the deep hunger for both. The more interesting and actionable question is how can we empower people in the developing world to be producers of culture, and users of technology for their own benefit, as opposed to being just consumers of monopoly culture, and objects of technology. That's a discussion that I'd like to engage in with some of Berkeley's many technologically literate and socially conscious residents, but it wasn't to be had during tonight's the Berkeley CyberSalon, which is too bad. May 17, 2005 |
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| Tag: Tech Watch
Monday, the New York Times announced [press release] that columnists and Op-Ed essays would no longer be available for free online but would be part of a $50 offering called TimesSelect. The service includes full access to the Times archive back to 1980. In his keynote speech at Syndicate conference, Martin Nisenholtz (senior VP of digital operations for the Times) floated an idea for an Amazon-like affiliate program, essentially where websites and bloggers would earn a kickback for converting users to TimesSelect customers. "That could be a new revenue stream for people down the tail who can use New York Times information as a way into an affiliate program," he said. And it needn't be NYT only. "There could be an information affiliate program across a variety of content providers." He also talked about the Times' acquisition of About.com on March 18 for $400 million. He noted that 80% of About's traffic comes from web searches while 85% of the Times' traffic comes through the home page. About, then, is a "long tail" product, the kind of site where Adsense ads work particularly well. The Times, of course, is not a long tail business. Nisenholtz sees the two as "highly complementary. ... The New York Times can learn a lot from About," he said. Nisenholtz also emphasized the growth in RSS at the Times. "Something like the top 15% of RSS feeds on My Yahoo come from the Times. We have gotten RSS out there - we've gone from 500,000 page views to 7 million - its the fastest growing distribution channel we have. As more people use RSS, it's becoming the way that a lot of people are accessing the Times' content." As a result of this increasing RSS use, the percentage of Times online visitors accessing the site by the front door will shrink from the current 85%. "This has real ramifications," he said. "The Times as a newspaper considers itself an organizing principle for the world - all newspapers feel that way. There's an editorial sensibility that print publications bring that organizes the world. As we see the content become unbundled from the organizing principle, what's the new organizing principle? The standard answer is the individual, but I'm not sure that the right answer. There's a demand also for a shared sensibility with the rest of the world and serendipity," as well as user-filtered content. An audience member asked Nisenholtz when the Times would start adding hyperlinks to their stories. It's not easy to do, he said, because the editorial management system doesn't support that. The Times' solution is to create a system in which there are 10,000 topic pages under the content. "What will start to happen as we layer in these topic pages is that the content will start to light up. It will be a much more random reading experience." May 17, 2005 |
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| Tag: Media Watch
Originally published on ionRSS.com "The biggest request I've received from FeedDemon users is the ability to synchronize feeds between different computers. I had done limited integration with NewsGator and Bloglines but really limited. I realized I would need to partner with someone, because synchronization really has to be server-based." Nick said he wasn't really familiar with NewsGator's strategy until he read Greg Reinacker's post on NewsGator's platform roadmap. He remembers telling his wife that on the basis of that blog entry, he was "really impressed" with NewsGator. It was only a few days later that Nick received email from Greg suggesting they talk about acquisition. "If I hadn't read that post, I probably would have turned it down." Nick noted the NewsGator wasn't the first offer he's had - but it's the first that allows FeedDemon to grow as a product, rather than being stripped down for parts to be added to someone else's. Nick showed me a pre-alpha version of a version of FeedDemon that is integrated with NewsGator. The integrated version lets you move back and forth between FeedDemon, NewsGator's Outlook plug-in and NewsGator's web-based aggregator. All three apps know which feeds you're subscribed to and which posts are read and unread. In this scenario, FeedDemon is a UI on top of NewsGator. You're reading feeds in FeedDemon but they're coming through NewsGator, a scenario that allows for the cross-app awareness of subscriptions and read entries. While Nick concedes he's not really an enterprise kinda guy, he's excited about the chance to build FeedDemon into the app he wants it to be, and NewsGator's server-side approach makes that possible. Indeed the deal means "FeedDemon will be around for a long time," he said. In the more distant future, Nick said that RSS aggregators will let you discover feeds and items you're not already subscribed to, and inform you about items that people are discussing. May 17, 2005 |
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| Tag: RSS Watch
Reported originally on ionRSS.com Newsgator confirmed today that it has acquired Bradbury Software [Business 2.0], the creators of the popular Windows-based FeedDemon RSS aggregator. FeedDemon is a desktop application, so it's complimentary to Newsgator's existing Outlook-based product line and its enterprise server edition. Newsgator is positioning itself as "the leading RSS aggregation platform company" these days - and the FeedDemon acquisition firmly entrenches it on the Windows platform. Recently I had an email conversation with Charlie Wood, VP of enterprise solutions at Newsgator. According to Charlie's research and discussions with companies, the biggest barriers to enterprise-wide adoption of RSS are "client software deployment and management, single sign-on, and user training." Charlie said that enterprise-size companies may be looking for an RSS aggregation service to scale up to tens of thousands of users. Such companies want RSS to be "deployed and managed inside the corporate datacenter, integrate with their existing AAA systems [authentication, authorization and accounting], and require zero training for users." May 16, 2005 |
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| Tag: RSS Watch
I like this company - and there's nothing in our contract that forces me to say that. I like the culture, and I like the people. Tibco is very much old school Silicon Valley, calm, collegiate, an engineering culture. This time, we're talking about Vivek's book project on the "Predictive Enterprise" a concept that describes Tibco's approach, and technologies that allow large companies to foresee business swings and take appropriate action. Predictive technologies can flag forthcoming drops in inventories for example, so companies can scale back manufacturing. The cherry on the cake is that the predictive technologies are linked tightly to a company's supporting IT infrastructure. This means more efficient IT management because loads on IT resources become predictable. This enables telcos, for example, to meet service level agreements they have with large customers. Vivek and I also chat about the valley and the executive changes going on. I ask him where he thinks the next generation of Silicon Valley business leaders will come from. He says Silicon Valley still has the same group of roughly 200 movers and shakers it has had for many years. And he doesn't know where the next generation of business leaders will come from. I can't point to more than a handful myself. In the long term, that could be a problem. May 16, 2005 |
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| Tag: Silicon Valley
With today's limited preview release of a breakthrough health management program, startup SimoSoftware is really proving the "NewRules enterprise." The product, SimoHealth, is a hybrid software combining a desktop client application with an online component. It's also the first client application built on top of the open source Firefox browser. Download a free preview version from the SimoHealth website (Windows only) Created by a pair of former AOL executives and with a programming staff of five, SimoHealth is a personal health management app that is interesting both for how it tackles complex health transactions and how the software was built. The company was born because Lash found himself "completely bogged down in trying to get the best care and managing expenses" for his son Simon, who suffers from developmental apraxia. "I realized there were no tools out there to help families manage their healthcare and advocate for the best care," Todd told me when I visited him at his Oakland home. He took the idea to Marty Fisher, former AOL president of technology and development. "Marty's reaction was, 'Oh, my god, this is huge. I can't believe this hasn't been done.' " Todd, Marty and Marty's son Todd Fisher, a software architect, joined forces to cofound SimoSoftware, named after young Simon Lash. Markets don't get much hotter than the elephant-in-the-python aging babyboomer market, and it seems like the health sector is getting lousy with ex-AOLers. Just last month, Steve Case launched Revolution [site | Wash. Post story], a venture firm investing in health-related businesses. And WebMD [site] has brought in longtime AOL product marketing chief David Gang as COO and co-chief exec. As SimoSoftware president Todd Lash says, "The market for healthcare is essentially everybody. People in their 40s and 50s are worrying about their kids and their parents." And there other pressures besides the ravages of time. "Consumer-driven healthcare" is the industry buzzword for pushing costs onto consumers. "But there are no tools to help consumers manage their healthcare," Lash says. Enter SimoHealth. SimoHealth really is a breakthrough product in this space. It offers what I think is an unparalled ability to break down and track complex medical transactions that goes far beyond the checkbook approach of apps from major players. A medical transaction is a complex affair. "The transaction may take 90 days to transpire - if there are no problems," Lash says. "If there are problems, it could take six months." SimoHealth tackles this by allowing users to enter data from both the provider invoice and insurance company's explanation of benefits, matching payments, copays and deductible against basic plan information, and alerting users when a bill should be paid and when it's still waiting for insurance payments. What's really cool from a product development view is that SimoHealth is developed right on top of Firefox, which means that the client app is inherently also a browser. Users can click on web resources or (in the future) download their "continuity of care" records (much like downloading an online bank statement) and the online information will display directly in the app. SimoHealth calls for a hybrid approach because health information is sensitive data, which should be kept locally, yet there's a need to access online information, both in the form of websites and, soon, XML files that contain patient data. The current app uses the open source database Firebird to handle local data. In the early going, developers struggled to create a UI that would allow seamless integration of patient data with online resources. In the end, they decided to consider the first nine months of work a prototype and to build the actual app on Firefox. That decision offered numerous advantages, said Fisher, COO of SimoSoftware and the former president of technology and development at AOL. "The architecture allows us to embed networking capabilities seamlessly into the product. We were able to easily customize the look and feel of the browser to make it look like our own application. It's much easier to develop in JavaScript than in C/C++. We had faster development time and more internal component usability." In other words, the browser, not the operating system, is the platform. A crucial part of the story is the open source aspect. "We were tapping into a lot of people around the world for help. We were in the IRC channels talking to Mozilla folks. There is a large number of people available to help you. You get scale by using open source," Fisher said. That's a huge contrast with the old-style development models at AOL, said Fisher, who managed 3,500 people there. "One of the tragedies of AOL was that they refused to move forward from silo-built software. SimoHealth was built by five engineers. At AOL it would have been 40." Larger companies naturally have bigger management footprints than virtual startups. But the NewRules company is showing that very small teams can write better products with more features, faster and with less complexity than the big guys. To Fisher, this open source approach looks like a major new model in software development. "Outsourcing is one solution to reducing development costs but it's not necessarily the best solution. This just works." May 15, 2005 |
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| Tag: New Rules
Here's the topic: On my flight out I was speaking to someone on the airplane, and they asked what i was going to be lecturing on. I said "streaming media" and they said "what's streaming". But when I said "video on the Internet" it was much clearer. I had always suspected that "streaming" was a weak word, and indeed, not only does it fail to conjure up anything for the uninitiated, even the experts argue on what it means (i.e. is a partially downloaded file that you preview immediately "streaming"? or is it "download"?) May 15, 2005 |
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| Tag: Digital Video
15 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $49
30 Mbps down /5 Mbps up = $199
I'm still trying to figure out how to use my friend as my new ISP. He's in a canyon about 10 miles from me, so wireless won't work. Maybe he'll let me put my servers in his tool shed...
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Streaming media is not a real industry
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Flash Über Alles
2) Macromedia players work. Macromedia puts Flash through a much slower quality test procedure than other products, and only incorporates features when they are very mature. Case in point: The company didn't add any video capabilities until a majority of viewers would be able to enjoy them.
3) Macromedia understands that content creators want to push their brand, not the Flash brand. Flash doesn't pop up and ask you to go Pro (QuickTime), ask you to subscribe (Real) or even worse, minimize to the bottom corner of Internet Explorer (Windows Media) or pop out into its own browser.
4) Macromedia (now Adobe) is not threatening - people aren't worried about the consequences of using Macromedia technology as they are with technology from Apple, Real, or Microsoft. People are less concerned that by using Flash, they'll somehow violate some alliance their parent company has made with the other technology giants. This Switzerland-like neutrality serves Macromedia well on the Web, and hopefully will get the company into more industries as well.
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May 19, 2005
Perspective: TimesSelect is all about the print model, not digital media
I've had a few days to chew over the Times' announcement that they'll be charging $50 a year for TimesSelect, which offers access to the archive back to 1980 as well as to op-ed and columnists. Here's my off the wall assessment: This is not a move to make the online nytimes.com profitable so much as it is an effort to shore up circulation figures for the print paper.
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Google Personalized Home Page Launches
It's evidently a cold day in hell, as Google's venerably simplistic home page will be supplanted (not forcibly replaced, mind you) by the new "Personalized Homepage". Here's a sneak preview.
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May 18, 2005
One of San Francisco's last venture capital firms quietly bets on the next generation of media tech companies
I've often discussed how best to fund development of new media technologies - and I've said that I believe many new companies will use private funding, rather than venture capital. So it was interesting to talk recently with Alex Gove and Steve Eskenazi from WaldenVC, one of the last VC firms in San Francisco.
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Live from Syndicate: Red sky in the morning - Hearst News puts Google and news aggregators on notice
The "RSS and Advertising" panel at Syndicate was fascinating because this has become such a hot topic issue. Internet guru Dave Winer has recently been advocating ad-free RSS feeds and urging boycotts of publishers that pollute their feeds with ads. Google, Yahoo, Moreover and others are paying no attention - on the contrary, they are rubbing their hands with glee at the fat cash cow they see in mixing ads into RSS feeds.
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Yahoo unveils Media RSS spec and elaborates on its schizophrenic strategy
Yesterday at the Syndicate conference in New York, Yahoo unveiled its Media RSS 1.0 spec and announced support from OurMedia, a nonprofit site that allows users to upload and share multimedia creations, and from blog tools like FeedBurner and blogdigger.
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May 17, 2005
Latte sippers face off with technologists working in the third world
I participated in a truly mind-boggling panel Sunday in which I joined awesome people like Lee Felsenstein and Greg Brown to discuss whether bringing technology to the developing world was a "boon or bane". Lee, inventor of the Osborne, the first portable PC, and of the pedal-powered PC intended for use in Laos, went first. He had barely introduced the pedal-powered PC concept when the moderator, one Sylvia, who appeared to be channeling Sally Jesse Raphael or some such TV host, accused him of using child labor (kids pedal the bike to power the PC in powerless rural Laos), pulled in her teenage son to opine whether he would like to pedal for internet access, and generally was rude and dismissive of most everyone on the panel.
Next up was Greg Brown, an extremely personable entrepreneur who was involved in bringing satellite TV to Africa. Once again, he got part-way through his talk when Sylvia started berating him, this time about bringing MTV to the developing countries, and what a terrible thing it was. Greg seemed more comfortable challenging Sylvia than Lee was, and he pointed out that while cultures can lose local identity when you bring technology in, they also need the ability to voice their own concerns to the wider world, which broadcast gives. Unfortunately, no one wanted to discuss the empowering part of offering choice and the possibility of talking back to the Western World using the West's own technology, the moderator and the audience just wanted to blame Greg for importing the wasteland of current American popular culture to the developing world.
Last up was Richard Koman, who had been part of the Internet Archive's Bookmobile in Uganda project, and who talked about the reception the bookmobile got in Uganda (and painted a far less encouraging picture than Brewster Kahle has when I have heard him describe it). Richard got interrupted as well, in his case by questions from the audience like "Why didn't you use African books?" (they did have a few primers written in African languages, but Ugandans wanted English books, and African books published in English are generally copyrighted) and "Why didn't you go to Oakland" (the need is much greater in Uganda).
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NYT exec Nisenholtz discusses the Gray Lady's premium content move, About acquisition and growth in RSS
Sitting in the front row, Marc Canter asked whether this meant the Times would be a "publisher or a pimp" - that is, would the Times be "hustling me to make money off of me." Suffice to say, Nisenholtz didn't care for that characterization; he said several times that the Amazon model seems like a strong way for the Times to go but that the idea was not fully baked.
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A chat with FeedDemon developer Nick Bradbury about his company's acquisition by NewsGator
At the Syndicate conference this morning, I sat down with Nick Bradbury to talk about NewsGator's acquisition of his company, Bradbury Software, which makes the popular FeedDemon desktop RSS aggregator. I asked him why he made this deal.
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May 16, 2005
Enterprise RSS-oriented Newsgator acquires maker of FeedDemon, popular Windows-based desktop reader
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Predictive technologies help companies and systems cope with swings in business, says Tibco CEO
I try to visit my founding sponsors on a regular basis to catch up with what's going on, and to chat about the industry. So recently I went down to Palo Alto for a meeting with Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadive and his right hand man Ram Menon, senior vice president, Worldwide Marketing. Tibco has been a stalwart supporter of SiliconValleyWatcher from the beginning.
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May 15, 2005
SimoHealth, a breakthrough health management app built on Firefox, launches
Built on Firefox, SimoHealth is equal parts client app and browser
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Streaming Media East - Conference
SVW's Damien Stolarz is delivering an all-day Windows Media tutorial on May 16 in New York at Streaming Media East (http://www.streamingmedia.com/east/workshops.asp). Microsoft's Windows Media is possibly the most complete streaming media toolset available today. Windows Media provides interoperability across a wide variety of devices, which is essential when the streaming landscape encompasses PCs, handhelds, mobile phones, and high-definition TVs. Microsoft's Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies are gradually gaining trust with the major movie studios, and the next-generation DVDs are all slated to support Microsoft's video codecs. This workshop begins with a panoramic view of the Windows Media tools, and then zooms in on how to do specific tasks such as multi-bitrate encoding, server setup and capacity planning, Web casting, and using the digital rights management tools. The workshop will be packed with lots of practical tips and techniques to satisfy a wide range of audience skill levels.
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May 13, 2005
IBM is preparing to launch a massive corporate wide blogging initiative as it seeks to extend its expertise online
Updated
IBM is planning to introduce what could be the largest corporate blogging initiative so far, in a bid to encourage any of its 320,000 staff to become more active in online tech communities.
The world's largest computer company has prepared a broad range of programs and online materials that staff can access to find out how they can start to blog. The move would help establish IBM's "thought leadership" in global IT markets.
The IT industry continues to suffer from lower levels of corporate spending following the boom years of the late 1990s. IBM's most recent quarterly financial report missed Wall Street expectations and led to announced layoffs of 15,000, with more than 13,000 of those lost jobs in Europe.
The company said that the blogging initiative was not related to its recent cost cutting measures and had been planned for several months.
IBM employees will be guided on what is appropriate blogging content. There have been a small number of incidents in which bloggers have lost their jobs because they published inappropriate content.
IBM used wiki, a simple technology that allows groups to collaborate on projects and share knowledge, to help produce the guidelines for its corporate bloggers.
Wikis are not as sophisticated as IBM's Notes collaborative software, but they are making some inroads into corporate departments where they sometimes displace the use of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for small applications.
IBM's position in key IT markets could benefit by having more of its tech gurus participating in online communities and discussion groups.
"We're not telling our people what to say, we could never do that. It's a natural extension of the work IBM has been doing for many decades, in establishing its expertise in key areas," Jim Finn, senior communications executive at IBM told SiliconValleyWatcher.
Mr Finn was head of corporate communications at Oracle before leaving late last year. He is part of a senior group of IBM executives charged with defining and rolling out the blogging initiative.
Mr Finn said that IBM does not see a connection between blogging and layoffs. However, many companies have found that blogging can be extremely effective in evangelising their products and technologies and that this can reduce advertising and marketing costs—a very large line item for most companies. Such savings might offset future job cuts—the traditional way tech companies reduce their costs.
"We are not planning any changes in our advertising and marketing spending," Mr Finn said. IBM is the largest tech advertiser and any shift in its budgets would be further bad news for many print publications. Tech advertising in print publications has been falling at about a 30 percent annual rate for several years.
Leading the IBM troops into the blogosphere will be it's chief strategist, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who will begin writing a blog. He is credited with persuading IBM to become an early advocate for Linux, and to cultivate relationships with the open-source developer community. This resulted in a significant competitive advantage for IBM because it reduced software development costs, and the open-source movement became a thorn in the side of Microsoft, it's largest competitor.
Mr Wladawsky-Berger will author a blog but Mr Finn says readers might find less on tech and more on baseball — an interest that relates to his Cuban heritage.
IBM's blogging initiative includes drawing attention to its staff who are already bloggers and are becoming well recognized within their online communities, such as Catherine Helzerman. She says it has been good for her career. "Blogging has provided me with recognition within the company, and outside," says Ms Helzerman.
She said that Robert Scoble, a leading blogger at competitor Microsoft, recently posted a link on his blog Scobleizer to her site, which boosted her readership.
May 13, 2005 |
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| Tag: Thoughtleaders
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May 12, 2005
Is that Steve Jobs dissing the video iPod on slashdot?
You may recall that SiliconValleyWatcher broke a story a few weeks back that Apple had signed a deal for a production quantity of AlphaMosaic chips, a multimedia chipset readymade for wireless devices, digital cameras, video playback and 3D gaming apps.
Now comes a Slashdot post from As Seen on TV, who claims to be an Apple employee, saying that a video iPod is a totally stupid idea and not at all what Apple plans. The post was so vehement and seemed to indicate such holistic knowledge of Apple strategy that slashdotters soon suspected the poster of being Steve Jobs himself.
First, here's the gist of As Seen on TV's argument:
The iPod is not, repeat not, gonna say it one more time, not meant to be a video-playback device. It's not even remotely designed for it. The iPod has a tiny hard drive that's designed for embedded applications, and a 32 MB (I think it is) RAM buffer cache that's optimized for dealing with song-sized chunks of data. That's about 4 MB. Even a half hour of HD content is gonna be half a gigabyte. There's basically no way for the iPod to play that without constantly keeping the hard drive running, and that will burn out the drive very quickly. Seriously, under constant use, the iPod hard drives' life spans are measured in tens of hours.... Remember when I said the problem was part technology and part psychology? People like to listen to music while they do other things. ... Video is an immersive experience. You sit down and you watch it, and you don't do anything else until it's over.
Exceptions? Sure. But Apple isn't a company that makes a habit of marketing to the exceptions. We shoot for a pretty clearly defined target market and let the exceptions buy their gadgets somewhere else. Chiefly because there aren't nearly enough exceptions out there to make it worth going after, financially speaking. We'd never be able to recover what we invest in R&D and design by selling a few hundred thousand units. We have to sell millions of units per quarter, otherwise the business plan just doesn't work.
Fine. But perhaps this is like Bill Clinton's definition of sex. Let's take it on faith that the current form factor of the iPod would not support video. That's hardly the same as saying that it's techically infeasible for a handheld device to be a portable video player. The PSP is already out there playing video. The fact remains is that Apple is buying chips that play well with video, gaming and wireless apps, and that Sony is generating serious buzz with a wifi-connected, video-playing gaming handheld.
The mystery poster says that while portable video makes no sense, iTunes (or iVids) is the right distribution mechanism (after all it is built on QuickTime (and that QT7 has support for anamorphic video). But this statement about intellectual property really seemed to nail Jobs' strategy:
Adding video support was so incredibly trivial, you wouldn't believe it. It's a tiny thing. What's a much bigger thing is the gradual shift, over the past two years, in the way we as a company do business. We are very serious about IP. We've made a name for ourselves as being the one company in the industry that, better than anybody else, understands the need to zealously protect intellectual property. So when we go to (say) Disney and ask them to let us distribute their unimaginably valuable IP over the Internet, we're going to have a little bit more credibility than whatever copycat tries to come along behind us (cough*Napster*cough, cough*Walmart*cough).
Isn't this just arrogant enough to be Jobs himself? It's no doubt a ludicrous thought, but some Slashdotters thought so:
#1: That stuff about watching videos and listening to music is EXACTLY what Jobs said.... #2: Regular employees tend to know a lot about their division and not much about other division. Since you know details about hardware and software, this makes you either an Apple zealot (who has memorized all the hardware configurations and knows how to use every software product), or someone allowed to see the BIG picture, which puts you in upper management. ... #3: You are not afraid of getting fired: Which means if you DO work for Apple you are untouchable. Aside from Steve (who can really only be fired by massive stock holder no-confidence vote) and maybe Philip Schiller (Who like Steve has also been Seen on TV), everyone at Apple is fireable.
Robert Scoble agrees it sounds like Steve but seriously doubts that it is Jobs or any other Apple employee:
This guy sounds a lot like Steve Jobs. I don't believe he's an Apple employee, though. Why? Cause generally the Apple employees I meet are smart and this guy doesn't sound smart at all.Let's look at this again. I wonder if this guy would have voted to fund the original Macintosh. Or, even worse, would have turned down Woz and Jobs when they were trying to get the initial funding for building their first set of computers, which were definitely aimed at alpha geeks.
Robert shows again that he gets it too, when he writes: "As to a video iPod. That idea has already happened. It's called a Sony PSP. I'm seeing people all over the place watching videos on their PSP's. And every plane I've been in lately has people watching videos on portable devices, many with screens not much bigger than exist on a PocketPC."
May 12, 2005 |
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| Tag: Apple [AAPL]
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3D versions of Star Wars movies on the horizon; could 3D be Cinema's savior?
In recent articles at Guardian Unlimited and at Movieweb, Lucas and Star Wars producer Rick McCallum are quoted saying that they'll start converting the Star Wars series of movies to digital 3D in 2007.
They also mention that they're waiting for the cinemas to catch up. Once HD DVD comes on the market, you will have a situation where the resolution and sound quality of home cinema will rival the quality of today's ubiquitous analog cinema. A digital HD DVD experience will be consistent, sharp, with none of the analog glitches and wear that an over-run movie has today.
Apparently, episode 3 of Star Wars (the one being released this month) was originally intended to be shot in 3D. Lucas says that converting a movie to 3D will take only about 5 million dollars. I find this price rather low, as I would imagine it requires 3D modeling of the entire movie, but there must be some well-automated process for doing it. In fact, a company called In-Three Inc. offers a 3d-ization process for any movie, that they can do after-the-fact.
I wonder what else, besides IMAX and 4K digital, cinemas can do to compete with HD DVD besides a large screen and the sentimental smell of rancid butter.
(If you happen to have a pair of those red-blue 3D glasses lying about, click on this thumbnail to pop up a 3-D version of the Darth Vader graphic! --Chris D.)
May 12, 2005 |
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| Tag: Digital Video
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Syndicate conference explores the technologies at the heart of next-generation media
IDG's Syndicate conference this week in New York will explore the business cases for RSS, the syndication technology at the heart of these next generation media technologies such as blogging.
Richard Koman and I will be blogging live from the show, and I will be moderating two panels. I am not boasting but stating a simple fact when I say I have the best two panels at the show bar none. More on this in a bit…
Tom Mahr, one of Syndicate's organizers, tells me conference reservations are going through the roof. We might have to turn people away, the response has been just incredible within the past couple of weeks, he says. More than 30 media have registered.
Take a look at the lineup for my two panels:
[This is from Syndicate, but the comments in square brackets are mine.]
Panel 1: Enterprise Syndication Using RSS
Moderator:
Tom Foremski, Founder, Silicon Valley Watcher.
Speakers:
Ross Mayfield, CEO and Co-Founder, Socialtext.
[Ross is one of the pioneers of corporate uses for wikis. He is also an excellent blogger and a natural journalist. I ran into Ross Tuesday evening and congratulated him on his recent Series B funding and apologized that I didn't get a chance to blog it. That's fine, he smiled, I blogged it myself, he said. Sad but true, I think to myself. We hacks are going by the wayside, who needs us when you can be your own news service ;-) Ross gets a ton of traffic at his blog because he is an excellent writer and doesn’t hoard his ideas.]
David Schatsky, Senior Vice President of Research, Jupiter Research.
[I don't think I've met David but I've seen some his research notes and I'm looking forward to his take on things.]
Michael Terner, President & CEO, KnowNow.
[Michael is the one that invited me to moderate this panel and he is a real survivor, having come through the dotbomb and refocused the company to take early advantage of RSS technologies and applications. KnowNow have recently been working with enterprises and crafting custom RSS newsreaders for each company's employees. Apparently, this saves enterprises a ton of money on email costs, something which surprised me.]
Dr. Paul Kedrosky, Director, William von Liebig Center, University of California at San Diego. I spoke with Paul over the phone and he was saying some interesting things from his work in academia.
Panel 2:
05/18/2005, 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Moderator:
Tom Foremski, Founder, Silicon Valley Watcher.
Speakers:
Robert Scoble, Technical Evangelist Platform Evangelism, Microsoft Research.
[I'm looking forward to meeting this A plus list blogger, author of the hugely popular blog Scobleizer. Robert is nearly as famous as Bill Gates!]
Fergus Burns, CEO, Nooked.
[Fergus asked me to moderate and he also recently became a sponsor of SVW, we are hosting his RSS directory search box (top left corner of home page, give it a click!) I don't have to say nice things about Fergus, but I will. I ran into Fergus earlier in the year, at the very excellent New Communications Forum conference, and we hit it off right away. Fergus is an ex-Microsoft exec who got out five years ago and is running one of the leading European RSS enterprise tech and services companies. He might be soft spoken but he's got that tenacious, stubborn, Microsoft culture, with that determination to win, built into his psyche. And I know for a fact that there is something killer coming out of Nooked very soon. No need to tell you, gentle reader, that you'll be the first to know.]
David Galbraith, Founder, Wists.com.
[One of my good buddies and co-founder of news aggregator MoreOver.com with Nick Denton, now founder of Gawker Media (BTW don't mention "empire" to Nick, as in Gawker... American and others are fine.) Dave is a co-author of RSS 1.0. He and his partner Justine moved to NYC just very recently, from San Francisco and I'm looking forward to catching up with them and crashing on his floor(!)
David Dunne, EVP, Director Worldwide Operations, Interactive Solutions, Edelman.
[I haven't met David, but Jeremy Pepper, who organized this panel rates him. This is high recommendation because Jeremy generally has few good words to say about anybody, and the few he has, he saves up for his mom's birthday.]
Charlene Li, Principal Analyst, Devices, Media, and Marketing, Forrester Research.
[What can I say? Charlene is the "man" when it comes to analysis of the super red-hot online advertising and marketing sectors… Did you see her recent research on internet use displacing TV and how little is spent on online advertising? Wow. Triple wow. Take a look: Cnet News.com Online advertising on upswing.]
See the full Speaker list
May 12, 2005 |
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| Tag: RSS Watch
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Journalist blogger discovers Gmail and his world is rocked
I wake up early, it's nearly 10am, but I can't sleep anymore. I flip on the TV and catch a few minutes of the excellent Deutsche Welle news in English on channel 32. I wander over towards the shower, but make the mistake of popping into my office and checking email for any changes to my meetings that day.
I recently started using Gmail and it rocks. It really rocks. It is by far the best user experience I have had with a software application in a long time. It is well thought out, and as a committed tag-o-nista, I love the fact that you can tag anyway you want. And it is fast. And it is all server-based!
But I must make a plea:
Could you give me a very small, client-side version of Gmail so I can process my emails in the same Gmail interface when I am offline, rather than having to download to my email client? Actually, couldn't you just cache it all anyway, have it download the inbox in the background and then I could run Gmail offline? And then synch up when connected. And while you're at it, could I have an online calendar too please. Oh, I hope it's not too much to ask, but a simple online word processor would be nice too. Actually, never mind - I can just use Gmail's compose e-mail feature for now.
May 12, 2005 |
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| Tag: Tom Watch
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SiliconValleyWatcher launches ionRSS.com edited by noted blogger Richard MacManus
By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher
Next week at the Syndicate Conference, we're launching a new blogsite called ionRSS.com to cover news, technology and the business of RSS, the media technology at the heart of the emerging Internet 2.0.
We're pleased to partner with Richard MacManus, a particularly knowledgable commentator on this subject and well known for his blog the Read/Write Web. The ionRSS.com site will share some posts with SiliconValleyWatcher, with the same focus on high quality editorial content.
We're also excited to offer an ebook called The Elementary RSS Factor [260K PDF] by Rok Hrastnik. It's based on his book "Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS." The book site is linked from ionrss.com. We'll be featuring some of the content from that ebook on ionRSS, too.
Why a business RSS site?
Here's Richard's take on the site:
I will be exploring the myriad business possibilities for RSS, as well as reporting on and analysing the latest RSS trends. RSS is as important to Web 2.0, the current phase of the Web, as HTML was to Web 1.0. Together with XML, RSS is revolutionizing the way information is published and consumed. On ionRSS I will be translating the technical merits and usage scenarios of RSS into business terms. RSS won't get far unless it's practical to use and solves real business problems.
With XML at its base, RSS is a more native platform than HTML for all manner of business information, from news and stocks to system status reports and similar microcontent. It's definitely not just about reading blogs, although many business people already realize its efficiency in scanning large amounts of text-based information. And with the incredibly rapid uptake of podcasting, it's obvious that RSS is really unparalleled for media delivery.
It's also obvious that RSS will undergo more rapid changes. Just this week we've seen controversy over announcements from Google and others that they'll support ad insertions in RSS feeds. As RSS spreads such controversies will continue. Our hope is that ionRSS will be around to cover all of the exciting developments as well as the controversies.
May 12, 2005 |
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| Tag: About SVW
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Come join us tonight for a Rooster Mashup party...
I completely forgot about inviting people to an after work mixer type event we are hosting at Catalyst, tonight, Thursday May 12 @ 7pm.
You are all invited, no host bar (hey, we're bloggers...). It'll be the first in a monthly series of Rooster Mashups--mix up a bunch of people from wherever. It could be interesting and I bet it will. You should come along.
Rooster is the perfect metaphor for blogger because 2005 is the Chinese year of the Rooster and it is certainly the year of the Blogger (as Time magazine will certainly dub 2005).
And just like Roosters crowing away at the top of their lungs, rulers of their patch of farm yard, bloggers do the same same thing. Bloggers crow away, or "Whiner" away about how great they are, and they also, are kings and princes within their patches of the internet.
Mashup is a term that I like because it is becoming a very good way to describe what is happening in the emerging Internet 2.0 world, and in culture.
Stop in if you can. It'll be interesting to see who shows up. Catalyst is in San Francisco on 312 Harriet St, it’s a side street south of Howard, between 6th and 7th Streets.
Come in and say hi.
May 12, 2005 |
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May 11, 2005
Where can you find Flickr and Apple in the same room? At the AJAX Summit of course. An insider report from the press-free zone where the future of webdev is being mapped out.
The O'Reilly/Adaptive Path AJAX Summit, held Monday and Tuesday in San Francisco, was a "geeks only" affair with press allowed in only at the very end of the event. While other media are carrying reports from this press event, SiliconValleyWatcher is pleased to provide inside coverge from one of the leaders in the AJAX community, Jonathan Boutelle. - RK
The O'Reilly/Adaptive Path AJAX Summit (press release, photos) in San Francisco (May 9-10) was a pow-wow of some of the best JavaScript developers and web designers in the world. There was heavy representation from web consultancies like 37 Signals, Uzanto and Adaptive Path, as well as the client-side code wizards from such Web 2.0 companies as Flickr, Technorati, Six Apart and Odeo and consumer heavyweights like Apple, eBay, Yahoo and Macromedia.
The summit was invite-only, although press were allowed in towards the end of the event. This ruffled some feathers.
What the heck is AJAX?
AJAX is shorthand for "Asychronous Javascript and XML." (Read Adaptive Path's defining paper.) The term itself has a pretty loose definition (for example, some of the most well-known AJAX applications do not use XML). A good way for a layman to think about it is "doing things with DHTML that you would normally need something like Flash to accomplish." Things like Google Maps and Gmail are the granddaddy AJAX applications that got people excited about the concept.
AJAX applications do things like fetch data from the server without refreshing the screen, and use animation within a page to provide smooth transitions or reveal hidden fields. These tweaks to conventional web applications can create an experience that feels much remarkably faster and richer than a web page. One participant described the difference as being “like the difference between email and IM”.
Technology and Vendors
The emerging theme from the summit was that AJAX is not rocket science. While building an application like Google Maps is huge technical challenge, adding a little bit of AJAX “spice” to an existing production website can take as little as a few weeks.
Derek Powazek of Technorati, Eric Costello of Flickr, and Dustan Orchard from Odeo showcased the next versions of their sites, which have several improvements that would have been impossible without AJAX techniques. One of the few statements that this (often contentious) group managed to rally around was the idea that "AJAX is only rocket science if you are building rockets."
Technical frameworks for making AJAX development are cropping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Of the many developments, the most compelling is clearly Ruby on Rails. Rails is a rapid web application API that already has remarkable momentum. David Heinemeier Hansson, the amiable Dutch mastermind behind the rails framework, gave a nice overview of how Ruby on Rails makes AJAX websites easy to develop. Other free technical frameworks like SAJAX (simple AJAX) are available, and new frameworks are cropping up every day, so it may take some time for the market to sort through these offerings an settle down on a manageable number of toolkits.
Vendors of proprietary frameworks like jackbe, XUI, and backbase) provide an alternative to the “free” frameworks with an interesting twist: the ability to make a Visual Basic-type data entry application through DHTML. This is not very sexy, and the vendor lock-in problem is a big one. But the market for business applications is huge, and combining the speed of a desktop application with the zero-install of a web application has obvious advantages. Watch these companies closely!
Demos
Ironically, one of the most impressive demos was not from the Web 2.0 companies, but from SABRE, the travel reservations company, which demonstrated an Excel-like data grid holding hundreds of thousands of rows being browsed and sorted in real time. Ian Lamb (poster child for the “build it-flip it” path to post-dot-bomb riches) showed off the Web-based Outlook clone (called oddpost) that he sold to Yahoo last year. Ebay has some impressive-looking AJAX development going on as well. And Adaptive Path demoed their new product (I can’t reveal what it is, as all attendees were sworn to secrecy and given secret decoder rings, but take my word for it: it’s pretty darned cool).
Hype, Potential, and the Risk of Over-Hype
The business momentum provided by the recent excitement over AJAX (including a Wall Street Journal article) has a lot of community members worried that this innovation will be over-hyped, resulting in a lot of inappropriate uses and an inevitable backlash. This is not an idle worry: both Java applets and Macromedia Flash suffered a similar fate after their hype cycles came to an end).
The summit sputtered at the end rather than closing crisply. A great deal of technical information was exchanged by the participants, and a general consensus that AJAX can be used for realistic, tactical improvements to websites (as well as ambitious projects like Google Maps) emerged. The specifics of how to use AJAX to design more effective sites are still
unclear, however, and no clear business case for tactical AJAX-based site improvements emerged from the discussion.
AJAX technology obviously has great promise: three months after being named, AJAX technology is already getting baked into the websites of the Web 2.0 startups and the Web 1.0 giants. This kind of adoption rate is remarkable for a technology that lacks a crisp definition and a mature toolset. It seems clear that we can expect great things from AJAX in the next 12 months.
Links:
- Ajaxian Blog
- O'Reilly Radar
- 37 Signals
- Flickr
- Technorati
- Six Apart
- Odeo
- Apple
- eBay
- Yahoo
- Macromedia
- SABRE
- Ruby on Rails
- XUI
- backbase
- oddpost Jonathan Boutelle
May 11, 2005 |
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Journalism's bright future: Blogging promises a more vibrant mediasphere
[This is a version of an article I wrote for the latest edition of New Communications Forum Blogzine--edited by the talented Jennifer McClure.]
The current debate about who is a journalist is due to the fact that the cost of entry into online journalism/publishing is virtually zero. At the same time, the online publishing business model is growing ever stronger due to a boom in online advertising.
In contrast, established media business models in print, radio and television have a high cost of entry and are growing weaker. Traditionally, this high cost of publishing kept out competition and limited the number of journalists.
Those barriers are no more, and that is a good thing - because each time the cost of publishing has fallen, it has helped to accelerate changes in society.
The revolution will be blogged
The Gutenberg press certainly helped Martin Luther; inexpensive publication of pamphlets helped in the American and French Revolutions; and low-cost newsprint helped in the Russian revolution.
I'm not saying blogging will cause such drastic changes in society. But I believe that the use if two-way [push-pull] media technologies such as blogging and RSS will undoubtedly lead to a more vibrant "mediasphere" - one that will trade in a broad currency of ideas, rather than requiring a lot of currency to broadcast ideas.
This upsets the balance of power in society. Wealthy organizations and individuals have always been able to exercise their free-speech rights to a far greater extent because the costs of publishing and influencing the media, have been high.
Those wealthy special interest groups now face a situation where publishing costs are low and the cost of influencing a fragmented mediasphere has gone through the roof.
PR companies know how to work with an established media in which the journalists are well known and tracked by media watch organizations such as Bacons. It is easy to find out the names of journalists, where they work, what they write about and how to reach them. And stories are "placed" by chatting to reporters, hosting news events and maintaining a symbiotic relationship.
The higher cost of influence
But the cost of reaching large numbers of blogger journalists through such PR channels would be extremely high. There would be too many relationships to establish and maintain.
One solution is to challenge whether bloggers are journalists. If bloggers are deemed not to be journalists, then their influence will be greatly lessened.
This challenge of blogger's rights to journalistic expression can be seen in Apple Computer's recent legal action, which sought to identify the source of leaked confidential papers.
A legal definition of "journalist" was needed because journalists have the right to shield the identity of sources, especially if it is in the "public interest". The "bloggers" in the Apple dispute claimed that journalistic privilege. But if they are shown not be journalists, then they have to reveal their sources.
No get out of jail free card
The judge in the Apple case neatly avoided answering the question of who is a journalist because this was not the key issue. He said that if a law was broken nobody, journalists included, has immunity from the law. He said that Apple could proceed with claims of violation of trade secrets law--a very loose term.
The judge also ruled that there was no "public interest" in revealing the trade secrets of a company. Just because there is a lot of public interest in a story doesn't mean a public interest is being served. He spelled out that the only protection journalists have is against a charge of contempt of court in refusing to reveal sources.
Yet somehow, journalists were running around thinking they had a "get out jail free" card in their back pockets that allowed them to publish anything they came across. And they thought they were working in the "public interest" by breaking news stories on future company products, acquisitions, and competitive plans.
Morrissey…not Bono
As such things happen, we (SiliconValleyWatcher.com) found ourselves in the story. As the Apple court case was unfolding and we were writing about it on our blog/news site, I received information that Apple had signed a contract for a new mobile multimedia chip, likely for the next iPod.
Apple's legal actions, however, did cause a delay in the publishing of our news story. Not because of a concern to protect material assets, (as a journalist/blogger I live a monk-like existence with few material possessions--just my simple icons of Steve Jobs :-), but because I didn't want to spend time with lawyers or in a courtroom. Plus, I didn't relish the prospect of colleagues and friends having to organize "Free the SiliconValleyWatchers" music concerts in Golden Gate park (BTW, if it happens, no Bono please... maybe Morrissey...)
A muzzle on the media
I sat on the story for a while but in the end, I felt I had no choice but to do what I was trained to do as a news reporter: seek out scoops and publish as accurately and as widely as possible.
I figured that if this issue were truly a significant one, then the big guns in the established media world would step in and sort it out. That's because Apple's legal actions would prevent the media from publishing anything about a company that could be defined as a trade secret, a very loosely defined term.
This would effectively muzzle the press, and I felt confident that the media giants would refuse to wear that muzzle.
However, Apple CEO Steve Jobs might just be tempted to try to put the muzzle on. He is sitting on top of the world, and hitting on all cylinders with spectacular performance at Apple and Pixar. If I were Steve Jobs I would have trouble resisting that temptation (clearly Mr Jobs is a much wiser and more evolved person than I :-)
Here comes the cavalry
SiliconValleyWatcher did join a "bloggers" Amicus brief on the Apple suit, along with a gallant band of others determined to stand up for the rights of journalists, online or print. And the cavalry finally arrived: Some of the large California newspapers filed an Amicus brief of their own.
The newspapers' brief referred to all as journalists or online journalists, no distinction was made regarding bloggers. This makes perfect sense because if a newspaper publishes a blog written by one of their journalists, then why would the blog be considered something other than journalism?
Journalism--a definition
I have a simple definition: if it looks like journalism then it is journalism. No legal definition of journalist is necessary because there is no immunity from breaking the law.
And since anyone can be a blogger/journalist and publish a web page as easily as send an email or read a web page, the cost of publishing free speech plummets.
Do we now have the makings for a true democracy of ideas?
Do those with money no longer have the same ability to shout their free speech (significantly) louder than others?
Will this grease the wheels of cultural change in similar ways to past "revolutions"?
Let's see what happens.
May 11, 2005 |
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May 10, 2005
[thoughtleaders] Exclusive--RightNow Technologies CEO Greg Gianforte has become our first management columnist: Serial advice from a serial entrepreneur
I've met Greg Gianforte several times because my friend Annie Kim used to work at RightNow Technologies before leaving for business school at MIT. As founder and CEO of RightNow, Greg loves to talk about his enterprise "software as a service" company. But if given the chance, he really loves to talk about entrepreneurship and how to build companies.
Greg has a book coming out in September called "Bootstrapping Your Business." His management advice comes from his experience in five startup ventures.
I shared some of Greg's management advice about a month ago, and the feedback was excellent. Greg agreed to contribute more nuggets of wisdom on a regular basis and I promise to deliver them to you in short question/answer format segments.
Greg kicks off our thought leaders series, which will mostly appear on Thursdays, featuring top-notch advice from our Silicon Valley/global business leaders and tech gurus.
Please send questions (tom at foremski dotcom) for Greg. Your name and company affiliation can be withheld from publication if you are more comfortable that way. To get things rolling, I'll start him off with a few questions this Thursday.
Some earlier posts:
Secrets of starting and growing a company
Tales of the newrules enterprise
May 10, 2005 |
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May 9, 2005
[ChatterWatch] What people are saying about Google Accelerator
Last week Google released Google Accelerator, a Windows program that speeds up bandwidth connections by precaching websites and sending http requests through Google servers. Initial reaction generally characterized the program as a Trojan Horse that solved a non-problem (do bandwidth connections really need more speed?) while enabling Google to collect lots (more) data on users.
But eWeek reported on Friday that the program was breaking at least a handful of sites, in some cases displaying pages as generated for other users.
"It is an unfortunate problem, but it looks worse than it is," Marissa Mayer, Google director of consumer web, told eWeek. "We are caching those pages on the server side with the user name on them…You see it, but it's important to point out that you are not logged in as that user and you do not have the session cookies needed to perform operations as [that] user."
Mayer blamed the problem on the sites' mis-implementation of their HTTP cache-control headers. Accelerator ignores links in URLs that appear after a question mark, assuming the URL is performing some function rather than pointing to actual content. "It could be that our assumption around the question mark and the way sites comply with the standard is incorrect. If that is the case, then we'll have to redesign the prefetch algorithm," Mayer said.
Beyond the technical glitches, there were some interesting theories about Accelerator. Dudu Mimran sees it as a classic "the network is the computer" play. He wrote on Strategic Board Blog: "Web applications ... were always inferior to desktop applications due to lower response times as well as richness of UI. Microsoft ... have always used this fact as a basic competitive edge ... for deepening their foothold in every computer uses. The gap of response time and application diversity is closing in and Google's effort to make this gap narrower ... creates a situation where users have a new alternative of Google applications vs. locally installed applications."
At O'Reilly Radar, Marc Hedlund thinks Eric Schmidt is starting to look like The Simpsons' Mr. Burns: "My proposed business model for Google Web Accelerator: replace all those Gator -- err, Claria -- ads with Google ads. Turnabout is fair play, after all! Eggscellent."
May 9, 2005 |
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Tech in the Developing World: Boon or Bane?
I spent six weeks in the fall of '03 and a few more weeks last summer in Uganda working on a project called the Uganda Digital Bookmobile, in which a van loaded with office technology visited rural schools and printed out public domain books. (It was a spinoff of the Internet Archive's supercool Internet Bookmobile project.)
I'll be talking about it at the next Berkeley Cybersalon, organized by Jeff Ubois. The topic of the talk is "Technology and the Developing World: Boon or Bane?" Lee Felsenstein, inventor of the first portable computer, and Eric Brewer, cofounder of Inktomi, will also be on the panel.
It will take place May 15, 6-8 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley. Here's a full description:
Silicon Valley people love to solve problems, but in the process they often create new ones: it’s a cliché, but when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. While information technology can solve some problems in developing countries – connecting people there with their relatives here, for example – it often supplants and destroys the very cultures these societies have taken centuries, if not millennia, to develop. When is information technology actually helpful in developing countries? Join us for an interactive panel-audience discussion on this topic.Invited panelists include:
• Lee Felsenstein, who built the first portable computer, the Osborne, and has tried to port the Internet to the jungles of Laos using the pedal power of the bicycle.
• Eric Brewer, cofounder of spider search engine Inktomi and computer science professor at UC Berkeley, who just led a delegation of open source computing advocates to India.
• Richard Koman, who set up an Internet Bookmobile Project in Uganda to download and publish books on the spot, and
• Jessica Mitchell, a Geekcorps technology volunteer who is working with Ghana’s ISPs.
• Claudia Carr, UCB associate professor in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, who has firsthand experience of the way modern technology destroys ancient cultures.
• Iain Boal, social historian of science and technics at UCB’s
Institute of International Studies, edited a book called “Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information,” which sheds some insights on the damage caused by high-tech, for export or not.Come join us for an engaging discussion in which everyone is encouraged to participate. $10 gets you drinks and something to whet your appetite.
The Hillside Club is half a mile from the Berkeley BART station, and
coming south from Highway 80, take the University Ave. exit, go under
the freeway along the frontage road and make a right at the 4RENT sign, which is Cedar St. Go up two miles and park. If you need a ride, contact whoisylvia@aol.com.
May 9, 2005 |
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Blog, the Movie
This is pretty much inside baseball, but Josh Hallett has done the casting on "Blog, the Movie," which I guess is the story of the saints and sinners who built the blogosphere. With Rob Reiner as Dave Winer, Dr. Katz as Steve Rubel, McCauley Culkin as Jason Calcanis, Kevin Spacey as Dan Gillmor and introducing Wonkette as herself. Pretty funny. (via John Paczkowski's always amusing Good Morning, Silicon Valley)
May 9, 2005 |
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Family values come to the rescue of digital media
Here's an interesting case study in how to get a bill through congress. USA TODAY reported about the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, which delivers stricter penalties for digital media pirates while legitimizing services such as Clearplay that edit out the objectionable parts of a movie.
Here's how it works: You buy a Clearplay DVD player (or run Clearplay DVD software on your computer), and you subscribe to Clearplay's edit list. You aren't actually getting an edited DVD from Clearplay; they're merely instructing your DVD player to bleep, mute, or drop scenes and language you don't want you or your children to hear.
It's quite common to have several related, if contradictory, pieces of legislation on a bill. And this bill, as the San Francisco Chronicle noted, was a mixed bag for the MPAA. While it made it a federal crime to record a movie with a camcorder (yikes!), the bill has made Clearplay almost impervious to the lawsuits against it from eight studios and the Directors Guild of America.
In my own pragmatist view of politics, the use of conservative allies to support liberal causes is an brilliant and vastly untapped approach. For instance, late 2002, Jesse Helms saved internet radio (article in Salon.com).
I spoke to Wendy Seltzer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation informally at a recent conference and suggested that they should find more creative ways to enlist conservative allies. I hope I'm paraphrasing her correctly, because I loved her response: She said she supports people's right to edit out the parts they find objectionable, and she would similarly support a different service that only showed you all the naughty parts that Clearplay took out.
(Note to self: I wonder if Clearplay has a "scatological humor" filter, and if so, would it delete some of the Jar Jar Binks scenes from my copy of Episode One?)
So, reader, here's your assignment: If you feel like your rights to digital media are being trampled on, figure out how to make this assault on our liberties relevant to a politically influential voting bloc. There's no love lost between conservative pundits and "Hollywood", so instead of invoking abstract copyright arguments, let's hit these unlawful media restrictions below the beltway and get some pro-consumer legislation passed!
Amen.
May 9, 2005 |
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May 8, 2005
Digital Rights Management Primer
Before I tell you the punchline is "software DRM doesn't work," go ahead and read this chapter on DRM from my book Mastering Internet Video.
Here's probably my favorite part of the chapter:
The fundamental difference between encryption techniques and DRM challenges is the trusted parties. In usual encryption scenarios, the end users are assumed trustworthy and a malicious third party is assumed to be the threat that the user needs to defend against. In contrast, DRM assumes that only the devices are trustworthy, and that the users are the potentially malicious interlopers. This is why DRM cannot depend on encryption technology alone--it is only one technical component of a complete DRM solution. Vendors that brag about the strength or complexity of their encryption are saying little about the robustness of their DRM.
May 8, 2005 |
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May 6, 2005
Open-source enterprise applications can be sold just as profitably as proprietary software
Larry Augustin of Medsphere, the open-source electronic health records company, gave a talk last week at the SDForum SIG on open source. It was a great talk, especially for the unfortunate few of us whose entire creative energy revolves around enterprise software. There was lots of audience interaction, and we barely got out of there by 9pm. The thesis of Larry's argument is that open source based companies can operate with profit margins similar to those at typical enterprise software companies that rely on license revenue. And the time is right for open source products at the application layer, which is significant because applications are why customers invest in the whole technology stack in the first place.
There was a general acknowledgment that in most areas open source applications are not challenging existing enterprise software companies yet. But as more open source applications come out with wider distribution and lower cost, they will put pressure on the more expensive software providers from below. It was noted that a few application-level open source companies are already doing quite well, including Compiere, SugarCRM, Asterisk, and Medsphere.
Expanding the open source area, even when it means reducing license revenues, actually expands the total size of the enterprise software market due to the larger number of businesses that can afford lower-cost enterprise software systems.
Enterprise software vendors are like vacuum-tube radio providers, in an era where the transistor radios represented by open source are still of a lower quality. Eventually, transistor radio technology moved upstream in quality, redefining the market. We know how that turned out. Pretty exciting stuff.
Some highlights of the talk:
- The cost of sales at a typical enterprise software company (he used Siebel as an example) equals about 75% of total license revenues
- Therefore, companies that buy enterprise software are essentially paying for the sales cycle
- A successful open source project that has a high volume of downloads, such as SugarCRM, has greatly reduced cost of sales, approaching zero in some models
- Enterprise software companies have very high general & administrative costs, due to their wasteful operations and big profit margins
- Research and development costs are typically lower in open source companies
- Larry did some magic with the numbers, removing license revenue, and showed how the gross margin % remained the same without license revenues
Some critical comments:
- One of the key questions in this assumption is whether the sales cost could be kept down as larger deals are pursued. Large deals would be critical for legitimate enterprise software companies, open source or not. Assuming that an open source product will have a huge distribution and no sales cost is not an accurate expectation. Companies such as RedHat that sell to enterprises (although not in the application space) have high sales costs, similar to standard enterprise companies
- In enterprise software sales, in my experience, price is rarely the primary decision factor. It almost always comes down the features, or the ability of the vendor to sell the features. Only when an open source application can compete head to head with a commercial application and win on merit will there be significant traction. It’s a fair prediction that there will be more and more applications that can do that. JBoss can beat WebLogic now, and JBoss Inc. has an extremely low sales cost. That is the ultimate model, but it takes great software.
May 6, 2005 |
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Veteran VC Tim Draper slams Sarbanes-Oxley as backlash builds in Silicon Valley to burdensome regulations
Tim Draper, veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist (Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson), has hit out at the heavy burdens which the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and increased government regulations have placed on U.S. companies.
In an interview in “The Ledger” (an email newsletter published Thursday by his public relations company representative, Launchsquad), Mr. Draper states his suspicion that, when it comes to improving corporate governance, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) “will have the exact opposite effect that it intended.”
Mr. Draper is one of a very few speaking out publicly on this issue. Many CEOs have told me that “these regulations are killing us.” The requirements for compliance with SOX financial regulations are substantial, and can typically cost a company at least $2m extra in expenses. This, and health care costs, have become huge burdens and management distractions for both startups and large companies.
Mr. Draper says in The Ledger Interview that “Sarbanes-Oxley made it so that I have dropped off all my public boards, and so will many others. I suspect that it will have the exact opposite effect that it intended. Many good people will leave public boards.”
Larger companies are able to absorb the extra costs as a smaller percentage of revenues; but they still have to shoulder the extra corporate governance duties.
Intel, for example, has taken on the issue of corporate governance very seriously; chairman Andy Grove has been working on this issue for about two years, and made it his personal crusade. But it is incredibly distracting for top management; and Intel has to compete in a fast moving market, while juggling the timing of multi-billion dollar investments in chip factories.
Executive shame
One senior exec at one of the largest US tech companies told me that the corporate scandals had made him feel ashamed to answer a stranger’s question, while he was on vacation, as to what he did for a living.
He was very conscious that because he ran a public company he might be tarred by the same brush as the tiny criminal minority. He said that he knew his business community was honest; yet it was being punished through SOX, and that things had gone too far.
Despite this very common viewpoint, no Silicon Valley exec has stood up and said anything.
Will others speak out?
Silicon Valley’s business leaders, such as Andy Grove, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, John Chambers, Scott McNealy, Eric Schmidt, Meg Whitman, John Thompson, Gary Bloom and the others, should stand up and say that SOX regulations are not going to work unless changed; and that they are a competitive burden on Silicon Valley companies, and on the business of innovation.
Where's the beef?
Late last year Booz Allen Hamilton published a study on SOX that discovered: [From http://www.strategy-business.com/resilience/rr00014]
Here’s a fact that bucks conventional wisdom: more shareholder value has been wiped out in the past five years as a result of mismanagement and bad execution of strategy than was lost because of all of the recent compliance scandals combined.
This is a key finding of a recent Booz Allen Hamilton survey and analysis of the performance of 1,200 firms with market capitalizations of more than $1 billion for the five-year period from 1999 through 2003.Consider the 360 worst financial laggards. Eighty-seven percent of the value lost by these firms was attributable to strategic missteps — management ineffectiveness in reacting to competitive pressures or forecasting customer demand — and operational blunders, such as cost overruns and M&A integration problems. Only 13 percent of the value destruction suffered by these companies was caused by regulatory compliance failures or was a result of poor oversight of company operations by corporate boards.
CFOs rushing for the exits
Board members are difficult to recruit, because of greater legal liabilities, and due to their increasingly becoming the targets of shareholder lawsuits.
Chief Financial Officers have also been hard to find; and C-level recruitment firm, Korn/Ferry, told SiliconValleyWatcher that CFO’s are calling up and saying “get me out of here, and into a private company.” There are an unprecedented number of CFO positions open at public companies, Korn/Ferry said.
CFO’s have to sign-off on the corporate accounts; and no one wants to be the test case, either for SOX compliance, or as a target for lawsuits.
See SiliconValleyWatcher post:
[BTW, The Ledger interview reveals Mr. Draper as a huge Arnie fan. But the California governor should be careful. Asked what else would he be doing if he were not a VC, Mr Draper replies, "I would be running for Governor. Or a poet".
May 6, 2005 |
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May 5, 2005
Google releases Accelerator app - beta of course
Google released yesterday the beta version of Google Accelerator, software designed to speed up web browsing. It only runs on Windows. According to the FAQ, the product:
- sends http requests through Google servers, along with standard client information;
- caches the cookies clients send to the websites being visited;
- pre-caches websites on users' hard drives.
In light of marketers' desire to do behavioral marketing, the idea of millions of users providing Google with tracking data is certainly interesting. Compared to the spyware developers, Google's approach is sure to be honorable.
Tracking user paths is hardly a new development. Amazon's Alexa has been doing this for years - and the aggregated information they've collected is undeniably valuable.
Still, users shouldn't think that running Google Accelerator will enhance their privacy. Since information that identifies you personally could potentially be cached on Google servers, your browsing history might be just a subpoena away from the nearest FBI office.
May 5, 2005 |
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Carly Fiorina speaks......for a fee
Carly Fiorina is now on the speaking circuit and you can book her from the Washington Speakers Bureau.
Jack Welch was on Charlie Rose recently and he said good things about Carly. He said the HP board behaved badly in meddling with the company and that "her numbers weren't bad."
Here is an excerpt from Carly's page at the Washington Speakers Bureau.
At HP, she led the successful acquisition and integration of Compaq, completing the largest high-tech merger in history. Under her tenure, HP achieved the highest rate of innovation in its history, substantially improved its cost structure and profitability and doubled its revenues.
Lessons Learned: Winning, losing, risk-taking, decision-making and accountability - they're all part of business and life. As a trailblazer, Fiorina is familiar with them all.
May 5, 2005 |
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GooglySpam - unwanted, untrusted uninfo
In a piece for Media Post's OnlineSpin newsletter, Shelley Palmer of Palmer Advanced Media, is waving a red flag about "GooglySpam" - sites created (and ironically often hosted on Google's own Blogspot service) to monetize on AdWords/AdSense click payments. She writes:
Because the best way to drive traffic is through a relevant search result; and, because keyword advertising pays anywhere from pretty well to very well on click-throughs, a cottage industry has emerged: GooglySpam. GooglySpam is not a real word, it's not even a good word, it just describes a new kind of extremely annoying spam -- fake microsites pretending to be relevant search results.
Microsites are not new, neither are landing pages. But this is a new generation of handcrafted useless Web pages created simply to monetize keyword searches. They are creating a new level of unwanted, mostly for profit, untrustworthy, infomercial-like, eyesoresque, brain-melting pseudo-information... GooglySpam!In his book, "The Selfish Gene," Richard Dawkins describes tipping points that destroy evolutionary stable systems. Is there a point where GooglySpam will kill this most popular, flavor-of-the-month, advertising methodology? Could GooglySpam make search so emotionally unsatisfying that the very foundation of search optimization will be damaged or even destroyed? I don't think there are any psychotropic medications available for Google, but if this trend continues, we're certainly going to need some.
- Richard Koman
May 5, 2005 |
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Press barred from USA Today "Seismic Changes in Digital Entertainment" Churchill meet
...does that mean bloggers too?
From the Churchill Club announcement:
"Wednesday, May 4, 2005
Seismic Changes in Digital Entertainment: USA TODAY's Technology CEO Roundtable (Members Only morning program in San Francisco).... Given the special format of this event, it is not open to members of the press, and there will not be a meal offered nor will there be an audience Q&A session."
How quaintly dictatorial. No press, no lunch, no questions.
Where's Dan Gillmor when we need him... Dan, look, no conversation!!! Do something! Let's send the "Dan signal" up into the San Francisco fog, it might be seen in far away San Jose.
The Churchill Club is supposed to be an open forum except when USA Today hosts a meeting then the press is banned. I'm tempted to show up as a "blogger" and see what happens. But it doesn't look like much of "seismic" line up. Take a look:
The pace of change in digital entertainment is quickening. The iPod changes the way people use music. TiVo has changed television. The Net is altering movies and advertising. Mobile is the new wildcard......Technology Columnist Kevin Maney has assembled a panel of influential figures to dive into the topic of what's next in digital entertainment.
- Blake Ross, Firefox Creator
- Michael Ramsay, Chairman and CEO, TiVo
- Roger McNamee, Co-Founder and General Partner, Integral Capital
- Partners, Silver Lake Partners, Elevation Partners
- Carla Hendra, President, OgilvyOne North America
- Chuck D, Artist-Author-Digital Visionary
- Moderator: Kevin Maney, Technology Columnist/USA TODAY
I wouldn't mind seeing Chuck D; as for the others, Roger is good value, but he's an arbitrager. And Tivo is going nowhere fast; yet it had the chance to become the "Netscape" of the TV sector. If it concentrated on making the Tivo interface the browser for TV, it would be the killer app. (not boxes).
I don't see anybody on the lineup answering the questions raised in the description...
In fact, I'm tempted to make a few phone calls and line up a real line up; I'll let my loyal readers know when ;-) (No USA Today press--just kidding.)
Here is my take on digital entertainment in the home: Comcast won. (It's all about the last mile gateways. IMHO.)
May 5, 2005 |
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May 4, 2005
O'Reilly making the most of Make - Makers Media will pursue range of opportunities in realworld remixing
O'Reilly's Make magazine is the expression of something that Dale Dougherty has been thinking about for a long time. The creator of the first commercial website, Global Network Navigator (where I first worked for him back in 1994), Dale's passions have frequently led to visionary products that were substantially ahead of the market (and often sold to larger players at a tidy profit for the Sebastopol-based publisher). During my years at O'Reilly, Dale and I discussed many ideas to tackle the "technology enthusiast" market that he held near and dear.
With Make, he has simultaneously defined that market as larger than anyone else imagined and delivered a product that re-establishes O'Reilly's ability to inspire geeklove. The magazine was a hit from its launch last fall around the time of O'Reilly's Etech conference. To date, 21,000 people have subscribed to the magazine, not including single-copy sales, more than double O'Reilly's goal of 10,000 copies.
Now Dougherty is leading a new group at O'Reilly, deemed Maker Media, to pursue the "integrated media play" around Make. "We see opportunities for international licensing, potential for other magazines, events and promotional opportunities, book publishing." (The timing is good for O'Reilly, which has had a hard time recovering from the dot-bomb. While sales of their hard-core tech titles have remained weak, their Missing Manuals and other consumer titles have led a recovery.)
An issue of Make will take you step by step through attaching a disposable camera to a kite for aerial photography, adding a wifi-enabled computer to your car, or breaking into an iPod. Why should this be the hot magazine of the year? "It expresses something that resonates with a lot of people," Dougherty told me. "It's a recognition of the age-old traditions of making things - lots of people used to make things, think about your grandfather's shop.
While it sounds like a by-geeks-for-geeks title, it is proving to appeal to a wide range of people, not all of whom re-read "Learning Perl" in bed. Editor Mark Frauenfelder recently appeared on NPR's Science Friday and the magazine has been written about from mainstream magazines like Forbes.
"There are lots of makers out there but no one takes them seriously. People have become accustomed to buying things, but what do you do with your free time? You could watch TV or you could make things," Dale said.
I asked Dale for his opinion of the PSP hackers who are ripping open Sony's new game machine, installing better wifi antennas and writing software that enables playback of standard digital media, as I covered in my PSP-pod article.
In that article I argued that Sony should turn a blind eye towards hackers rather than trying to shut them down with a firmware upgrade. Dale goes further, though: "Companies should design for hacking. It's convenient to ignore it but why not embrace it? Companies should design products to encourage users to adapt it to suit their purposes." Just like the development of Linux allowed the development of thousands of open source programs, physical devices could essentially come with a development kit that people would use to build on top of the device.
Even if they don't, people will increasingly take matters into their own hands. When Dale's daughter broke the jack off her iPod Mini, Dale tried to have it fixed and was told the only thing to do was to buy a new unit. Figuring he had nothing to lose, he found a hacker site on how to break into the seemingly impervious mini (heat the plastic up with a hair dryer) and replaced the jack himself.
In a world where consumers are trained to seek satisfaction by buying technology but are quickly bored and disillusioned by their purchase, the maker movement holds the promise of making technology fun again.
May 4, 2005 |
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Podcasting Turns Pro - Adam Curry joins Sirius
Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. is launching a podcasting show on May 13, hosted by smooth-talking ex-MTV VJ Adam Curry. The four-hour weekday show will feature a selection of amateur podcasts handpicked by Curry.
Sirius subscribers, who pay $12.95 a month for the service, can listen to the show on channel 148, "Talk Central." The announcement by Sirius was made a few days after rival Viacom's Infinity Broadcasting unit announced it will convert a struggling talk radio station in San Francisco to an all-podcast format.
Some commentators, like Om Malik, claim Curry's deal is more broadcasting than podcasting. And while the new Sirius show will feature advertising, it's unclear whether any of the amateur podcasters chosen to feature in the show will be paid. More than likely they won't, which may raise some copyright and licensing issues.
The podcasting phenomonem has gained in popularity over the past year, led by bloggers like Curry and Dave Winer. Curry is the author of iPodderX, the first so-called "podcatcher" (podcast-capable RSS reader), which enabled the mainstreaming of downloadable audio. As with RSS, the history of podcasting and who invented it is debated. However Lucas Gonze wrote recently that "Adam [Curry] really was in the thick of things" and that "he was a key member of the very small group in there hacking, audioblogging, and getting the whole situation off the ground."
So is podcasting a promising new business for velvet-voiced bloggers? Will podcasting kill the radio star? Or will podcasters simply be the farm team for "real" broadcasters? Is Adam Curry the Casey Kasem of podcasting? All these questions and more will be answered in the upcoming months. Stay tuned!
May 4, 2005 |
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From paradigm shift to mashedup paradigms...Mashup is the latest and greatest Internet 2.0 manifestation
The more I think about the term “mashup” the more I like it as a very fitting descriptor for this emerging Internet 2.0 world.
I first came across the term in clubs &mdash the music mashups. But it’s also happening in video with mashups as live performance, in New York, and in Europe. Some of the mashup video communities were very excited when I noted in a recent entry that Sony’s movie studio is considering releasing some video clips that could be used in video mashups, with different copyrights.
Here are a few Internet mashup observations, but please send us yours too:
- The current fashion of using tags allows content to be mashed together, in contrast to folders which separate content.
- Blogging mashes up the many formats of writing. News style gets mashed up with email style, for instance.
- The distinctions in media communications are being mashed up: online media with online communications of all sorts.
- Trackback unveils a mashup of different types of readers of online content. This is completely different from traditional media, which is always targeted at a specific demographic/type/job.
- Flickriscious communities &mdash Flickriscious is what we call a quality that provides for spontaneous expressions of aberrant behavior by online groups. It is a mashup because it involves people of all types.
- Domain names are mashed up: siliconvalleywatcher.com and I sometimes write mashedup sentences on SVW. Itsasecretcodethatonlyyoucanread. ;-)
May 4, 2005 |
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May 3, 2005
Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD: Why high-def video hardware standards are irrelevant
DVD Video Format Wars?
In the mid 1990s a video codec called MPEG-2 was standardized, and DVDs were standardized. At that time, computers ran at less than 100Mhz and it required a special microchip to decode the MPEG-2 video. Fast forward 10 years and two new high-capacity DVD-disk formats are racing to be the standard for high-definition video:
Blu-Ray and HD DVD.
Major computer and consumer electronic companies have chosen sides in this debate and it has been compared to the VHS/Betamax war of the 1980s over the format of consumer videotapes.
But is it really? Here's why I think hardware standards are less relevant than ever.
DVD+-R
Just a few years ago, DVD-R and DVD+R became available to consumers. The fear was that consumers would not adopt the technology because "they didn't know which standard would win".
But in practice, consumers were just trying to burn DVDs and back up data, music, movies and video. And both disks did this. Sure, you had to be sure to buy the right media for your DVD burner (depending on its sign, + or -), but beyond that it worked.
Within a couple years, poof, you can buy a DVD+-RW that burns and reads everything just fine. Now the double layer versions are coming out to market so you can burn two-sided DVDs just like you buy from the studio.
Differences from VHS/Betamax
There are many key differences between the earlier "war" and today's "war".
One is the form factor, or shape and size of the disks. Once the content industry saw how quickly consumers adopted audio CD's, they kept that disc size for Video CD's (MPEG-1, big in Asia), and DVDs. Now, they're sticking to the same form factor again.
This has several ramifications:
- Any DVD playback device can be designed to play back all earlier forms of disk (i.e. CD, DVD)
- It is quite feasible to make a dual-standard DVD playback device that plays blu-ray AND HD DVD
- DVD players cost $30. At that price point, plastic, aluminum, buttons, and packaging begins to dominate the cost of the device. Building a "new" DVD player with an upgraded laser beam and HD decoding chip is much, much easier than building a whole new device from scratch
- If movies come out on (gasp) two different formats, the hardware will probably quickly converge, as consumers won't want two different HD DVD players.
- The fight won't be completely won in the consumer space. The version of the DVD which can be more easily used and manipulated and burned on PCs could give it more staying power. Thus, there are really two battlegrounds: the living room, and the PC
In short, this is a totally different kind of fight, and much less "bloody" as industry fights go. If in the 1980s all VCRs used the same physical tape size and shape and the fight was simply over the way the information was written to the tape, it would be better comparison. In that case a "dual format" VCR simply had to have TWO different playback heads, and had to pay two technology/patent royalties and thus cost a bit more.
The biggest potential fallout of this war will be slow adoption of the technology for the first year (they're trying to make xmas 2005), which will result in low numbers and slow down manufacturers, perhaps slowing the whole high-definition DVD adpotion by years.
I doubt that that slowdown will happen. I think whether peace talks are successful or not, the immediate declaration of the one and true standard is not necessary for high definition video disks to get to market successfully.
May 3, 2005 |
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May 2, 2005
Foremski's Take: Goodbye PC, and welcome back proprietary hardware platforms to tie up hardware, software and content
It won't be long before the personal computer is a dim memory, because the developing trend is to tie together proprietary hardware, software and content.
That's the best business model out there right now, and you can see it developing in many ways. It's being pioneered by Apple Computer with iPod and iTunes. Comcast and the cable companies are doing very well with their proprietary content/hardware bundles. And the cell phone companies are also sitting pretty with a similar approach.
The PC platform has survived to date because it has been an open platform. That situation will change very quickly, and Microsoft will be a key agent of that change.
On Monday, Microsoft discussed its next generation Xbox game console, code-named Xenon.
As described by Cnet's News.com, Xenon will be the first in a series of PC-like devices that are tied directly to games, music, movies and simple applications through mostly web-based services.
This is the trend. The PC-centric model is disappearing as digital devices designed for specific purposes &mdash such as digital cameras, cell phones, portable digital audio players, and portable digital video players &mdash don't rely on PCs as a content/communications gateway.
Instead, the developing model is to use tightly bundled hardware, software and services to provide secure digital rights management (DRM) and protected access to aggregated content. This protects against unlawful hacks and limits damage to the platform.
Microsoft said that Xenon would be more of a digital entertainment hub than the current Xbox. This would give it a ready platform for its DRM technology and for its MSN online network.
Microsoft has previously proposed inserting special chips into PCs, as part of its Palladium security scheme. But PC makers have balked at the extra cost and users won't like buying PCs with DRM technologies built in.
Those are not issues with the Xbox, which provides Microsoft with a broad platform that it can expand cheaply through hardware promotions.
Microsoft can then earn extra revenues from selling access to that platform and to the millions of users, who tend to fall into the particularly hot demographic of older (18 to 30 year old) games players.
The loser in such a future is Intel, since the platform hardware is less important than the services it channels.
May 2, 2005 |
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A Silicon Valley veteran offers an explanation on top marcoms shuffles at top tech companies
The following is an email from a long-time Silicon Valley communications professional, who prefers not to be named. It is in response to our recent post on changes in top marcomms positions at leading Silicon Valley companies.
Hi Tom,
Hope all's well. Read your blog this morning and couldn't resist offering my two cents on the senior marcomms piece. In my 20 years toiling away in marketing and corporate communications roles, I've seen time and again that whenever an organization is undergoing significant change and faces more than the usual set of business challenges, the tendency is to park many of the problems at the feet of the senior communications person, who is given the job of "fixing up" the company's image.
The naive thinking is that he or she can wave a magic wand and simply make media, analysts, employees, investors, suppliers and any other significant audience think and say nice things about the organization.
Never mind that the senior communications person typically has no direct authority over sales, operations, personnel or senior management. More often than not, the organization has been on a steady decline or in a state of churn over a period of quarters &mdash and the problems are usually more than superficial. Often they're systemic.
Ultimately the only way to fix the image is to first fix the reality, but often times the senior management, board, etc. is too impatient and they want the improved image to precede the fixed company. I can almost hear the CEO/board members at the companies you mention tasking the communications leader to "make everything right out there &mdash and overnight, please, as there's no time to waste!"
It's often a proposition doomed to fail. Even in the best circumstances it can be a thankless assignment. When companies do manage through a turnaround or rough patch, how often does the senior marcomms person appear on the cover of a business magazine, or become the toast of Wall Street? Just some thoughts to consider...
May 2, 2005 |
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- Evolution of Mobile Internet Gadgets - Did you know? 25 Random Things About Intel - Embedded" Computers, Retail Shopping and Growth - The Less talked about feature in New Xeons. |
Comments
Mike on Case Study: Wells Fargo's Effective Brand Management . . . Not!
I have a wells fargo account I just opened. I deposited my payroll check thursday around 3 pm and it is FRIDAY 10 PM and NO MONEY!!! I gave them my whole check to deposit and over 24 hrs later, I am hungry, my stomach is growling. I am getting really depressed. I work hard and LIFE kicks my ASS around ALL DAY!!!
Life is not ROUGH, the DEVILS in it are though.
I wish I could buy something to eat!!!
Honestly, I cant wait till I die and my misery is gone.
Jason Lopez on Vinod Khosla Says Silicon Valley VCs Tried to Save Newspaper Industry In 1996
If Vinod was working with newspaper execs that early on, it would be really fascinating to know what their vision was. The newspaper business was in a crisis before the Internet arrived. There's a lengthy list of business dynamics that reared up in the 1980s and '90s like unions, the advertising paradigm, competition from cable TV, stiffer competition from local TV news, the renaissance of news/talk radio, and even the expansion of morning drive-time in metro areas (and the list could go on).
Alison van Diggelen on Vinod Khosla: How To Succeed In Silicon Valley By Bumbling And Failing...
Tom- enjoyed your post and video of Vinod. I also interviewed him for Fresh Dialogues at the Visionary Awards and he talked further about how he "muddles through and hopes to find the right answer." Also discussed the bubble in clean tech. He said, "Although this economic downturn is not good, it has helped slow down the bubble or pop it."
You can check out the interview and transcript at FreshDialogues http://tinyurl.com/mgau6q
cheers Aliso
Tom Foremski on A Saturday Post: The Internet Devalues Everything It Touches, Anything That Can Be Digitized
Chester: Thanks for the used books example. And yes, rarity is always valuable. And information about rarity can bring down the price of items, such as used books. De Beers approach is to control the rarity of diamonds, which are not as rare as you might think.
Chester White on A Saturday Post: The Internet Devalues Everything It Touches, Anything That Can Be Digitized
The Internet has drastically affected the used book business, too.
Used to be that you could search for years to find that one title you wanted; this happened to me many times. In the old days, some bookseller in Idaho might have had a book that a guy in South Africa desperately needed, but they couldn't find one another.
Now, if it's available from one of the thousands of bookdealers who put their inventory online, you can find it in 10 seconds.
As a result, t
Sharon Barclay on Socialbrite: Helping Non-Profits Master Social Tools For Social Change
What we really need in addition to services like SocialBrite is a Craig's List-type offering for non-profits. I know of many companies that would love to donate time, services, furniture, supplies, equipment, etc, but it's so hard to do effectively that it becomes too much hassle. You've said it before - there's a great opportunity for a technology company to develop and host this - matching the needs of the non-profits with the extra resources of corporations.
Dave Evans on Scobleizer Traffic Plunge - The Real-Time Web Can Be Bad For Your Blog
Agree about the fragmenting, we'll all be using something different next year anyway, no sense worrying about who's using what and how much, we're all out there on the edge trying things out and experimenting. I doubt we'll be using Twitter or FriendFeed in two years anyway.
I'm remain a huge fan of Techmeme (my home page which alternates with feedly and a few others). I do wish they would roll out different channels though.
Tom Foremski on Scobleizer Traffic Plunge - The Real-Time Web Can Be Bad For Your Blog
Robert, thanks for the clarification.
I love the fact that things keep on changing in the this shattered/fragmented media landscape of today. And I don't think they will ever stop changing.
That makes it challenging for both media and PR to tell their stories. Or rather, to get attention for their stories and the subsequent conversations.
Robert Scoble on Scobleizer Traffic Plunge - The Real-Time Web Can Be Bad For Your Blog
Tom: I disagree with your thesis. I specifically made the choice to blog less to focus on Twitter and FriendFeed and I see that that investment has paid off very well for me.
Yes, my blog traffic has gone way down, but my FriendFeed posts are now being found all over the place in Google and are going up and I'm the #1 most followed person there.
On Twitter I still am in the top 10 in terms of organically gained followers, which is quite impressive.
Now I have a distri
Doug Millison on Scobleizer Traffic Plunge - The Real-Time Web Can Be Bad For Your Blog
Didn't he use all those tweets to drive traffic to his blog by linking to media & posts there? If not, why not? Seems to me it could be both/and instead of either/or. Work backwards from good blog posts, highlight them in tweets + link back to blog.
Steve "PodcastSteve" Lubetkin on The Pressure Is On When Every Company Is Now A Media Company...
Tom, great post. We've been pointing out the value of content creation when we speak to audiences of marketers and PR people. The reality of reduced staffing at many local media outlets means more opportunities to generate content for clients.
Press conferences that go uncovered by the media can be vidcast via websites; photos of events can be shared with interested audiences, and of course, powerfully influential blog sites like SVW rise up on the radar of publicists trying to get th
Tom Foremski on Scobleizer Traffic Plunge - The Real-Time Web Can Be Bad For Your Blog
Louis: Thanks for speaking for Robert, I know that you know him well. I used to sit next to Robert at Podtech and I would often say to him, I don't know how you do it because he was able to do it all, and do it all the time. But even an online athlete such as Robert needs to decide where his time produces the most value. It's clear that the real-time web is currently a less valuable use of time than publishing on well established web sites such as his own. That might change. You clearly need
Louis Gray on Scobleizer Traffic Plunge - The Real-Time Web Can Be Bad For Your Blog
Robert hasn't ditched Twitter and FriendFeed in a New York second. He's taking a one week hiatus from both, just like he has taken hiatuses from his blog on previous occasions.
He may have quickly written how he "was addicted" to both and made it sound past tense, but all he has done is moved his current attention to one focus of activity, rather than broadly covering all pieces.
Even today, when he said he was "off FriendFeed", he made a comment on his own posts. So this is t
Tom Foremski on Scobleizer Traffic Plunge - The Real-Time Web Can Be Bad For Your Blog
Louis, you are right, Robert's traffic on the real-time web increased substantially. But it's ephemeral, it doesn't provide the same value as his blog traffic because it doesn't exist within Google in the same way web site content exists, it's not as searchable, as Robert points out. And the loss of that traffic does indeed show a loss of "thought leadership" as others have pointed out. At the moment, one set of traffic numbers related to the real-time web does not equate with "static" web tr
Tom Foremski on Saturday Post: If You Are In The Path Of A Disruptive Technology You Are Toast - Goodbye Newspaper Companies
Jason: I totally agree. The demand for high quality news reporting isn't going away, in fact, it will increase, as we have less of it. It might very well come from the same people that produce it today but not from the same companies. It's the companies and their business models that are being disrupted. News reporting and journalism will survive and prosper.
Jason Lopez on Saturday Post: If You Are In The Path Of A Disruptive Technology You Are Toast - Goodbye Newspaper Companies
I'm not so sure the news is becoming irrelevant. It seems more like paper is. Tom, you are a professional so you know that, as a few prominent bloggers want to believe, there are no high priests of media who sanction the news we will all consume. There are some wacky editors for sure, but the downfall of newspapers isn't because they chose to not cover stories. You rightly point out the toppling of the classified ad model. A newspaper, as currently published, must have wide distribution for c
Louis Gray on Scobleizer Traffic Plunge - The Real-Time Web Can Be Bad For Your Blog
This single data point is correct - Scoble's traffic has decreased.
But, if you consider that he has blogged less than half as often as he did previously, you could argue that each story got more views. And what is his goal anyway? If his goal is to gain visibility and participate as the Web evolves, then the best places to do that are on the blog, on Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed. And nobody does that better than Scoble, myself included.
If this is the only metric you can
Lawrence Greenberg on The Pressure Is On When Every Company Is Now A Media Company...
This is an excellent post.
I launched a blog on my site just a few weeks ago and am already appreciating the challenge involved in providing meaningful content according to a regular editorial calendar.
The fact that these platforms require little or no monetary investment suggests that publishing online is a cinch. Far from it. It represents a significant investment of time, thought and care.
As a communications professional, it's vital that I engage with others in
Michele Weldon on Saturday Post: If You Are In The Path Of A Disruptive Technology You Are Toast - Goodbye Newspaper Companies
You're right, but I am not full frontal negative. The good journalism will survive. The technology alters and disrupts the delivery mode, but not the need for the content. Call me delusional, but I think the audience will seek the solid, quality journalism wherever it arrives.
I commented on my blog about it:
http://micheleweldon.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/change-sure-extinction-no/
Alessandro Machi on Saturday Post: If You Are In The Path Of A Disruptive Technology You Are Toast - Goodbye Newspaper Companies
I guess the YouTube video insert did not work. Here is the link instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kjM9jwra5U