My former boss at the Financial Times Paul Abrahams, heads up the sizeable UK office for Waggener Edstrom--Microsoft's long standing PR firm. Microsoft is WaggEd's largest client, and also it's largest cash cow, a very close relationship now well into its third decade.
Paul Abrahams works very closely with Microsoft and is in Seattle on a regular basis, advising the software giant on many strategic aspects of its operations. I haven't heard from Paul in a while, so it was a delightful surprise when he called me just an hour ago.
What he wanted to tell me was that he had written a column for the UK PR Week trade publication on blogging. "I've mentioned you in it," he said. "But I've basically said, regarding all this stuff about blogs, I just don't get it..."
Fair enough, some do, some don't. However, I asked if it was a good move on his part to advertise such a a lack of understanding of blogs!?
After all, MSFT lost its top blogger Robert Scoble not too long ago, and there was much discussion about whether the software giant understood the value of Mr Scoble's incredible work in presenting the company in a favorable light.
Mr Scoble created many millions of dollars in positive publicity for Microsoft, on a salary of less than $100K. I don't think WaggEd could have done a fraction of that, for 100 times the payment Mr Scoble received.
Maybe WaggEd does understand the value of blogging and wants to shut it down before it cuts into its lucrative earnings from Microsoft?
Either way, I don't think that Paul Abrahams, head of Waggener Edstrom's large UK office, and also a senior member of its nine-strong Leadership team, should be seeking publicity from a journalist blogger (me) about how he doesn't get blogs! And also broadcasting that fact to the entire PR industry, which is desperately trying to "get" blogs and setting up "New Media" practices by the boatload. I guess he knows what he's doing, he is a professional practitioner and in an elite position within the PR industry. But it still puzzles me...!
Is blogging the 21st-century equivalent of citizen band radio, the personal radio technology that became so popular in the late 1970s that it was included in a Coronation Street plotline and spawned a generation of bad Burt Reynolds 'Good Ol' Boy' movies?
Abrahams should be free to expouse his learned opinion (and I don't completely disagree with all of it), but more ironic is that at the guy who runs the global Microsoft business for WaggEd (Frank Shaw) has a good blog of his own called Glass House.
The Web 2.0 trend might lead into a dead-end (like Tom Foremski posted). But after you've ended dead it may give you some reasonable arguments before the Latest Judgment.
Here's a story that seems important to Silicon Valley: the Assembly is about to pass a bill making it illegal to drive and talk on a cellphone without a headset.
The legislation by Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, seeks to impose a fine of $20 for a first offense and $50 for subsequent offenses. However, the infraction would not result in adding a point to motorists' driving records.
Data collected by the California Highway Patrol in 2004 show that 818 of the collisions involving distracted drivers were related to using cell phones in the drivers' hands while only 30 were hands-free.
But does anyone in Silicon Valley talk without a headset? Forget about driving, no one even walks without a Borg implant device in their heads, do they? This is strictly aimed at amateurs.
The governor seems unlikely to sign it anyway. He said:
[Schwarzenegger] said that he wasn't sure if legislation was needed to solve the problem. The governor's office said Tuesday that he has not yet taken a position on Simitian's bill.
Having fun: USAToday says that Web 2.0 is giving Valley entrepreneurs a chance to start companies that are more about people than business. And they're loving it. Andy Halliday started OurStory, a sort of storytelling/scrapbooking site for families.
"I wanted to distill seminal life moments amid a proliferation of media, such as e-mail and digital cameras," says Halliday, 52, who had a long-running career in specialty retailing. "This is something that has heart to it."
And Bill Nguyen, former CEO of Seven Networks, has started LaLa, a CD sharing site. "The other start-ups had a level of (business) logic to them," he said. "This one has a fun, cool vibe," he says. "And I'd like to watch my kid grow up."
With the modest amount of money it takes to get a stand-up going, people are forgoing the hassle of investors.
Liberated from the constraints of investors and pursuing their personal pet projects, executives say they are having a ball. "My biggest regret is that I did not do this earlier," says Andrew Littlefield, a former BEA Systems executive who is founder and CEO of Doppelganger, a virtual lounge for teens.
TiVo lost $6.45 million, or 7 cents per share, compared with a loss of $892,000, or 1 cent per share, a year ago. Those numbers still look good to Wall Street, which expected the DVR maker to lose 14 cents per share. A big part of the loss must be attributed to legal costs, as TiVo pursued and won a patent infringement case against EchoStar. The plan now? Growth, CEO Tom Rogers said:
`We believe the best way to grow our company is to increase our distribution,'' Rogers said. ``Right now we're in a subscriber-building phase and the marketing expenditure that that brings with it.''
Ex-Brocade execs Greg Reyes and Stephanie Jensen yesterday pled not guilty to charges that they illegally backdated stock options without proper accounting. (See SVW stock option coverage) The federal district judge set the trial for next summer and ordered prosecutors to turn over its evidence to the execs' defense team.
Economic bright spot: Silicon Valley is still upbeat about the economy compared to the rest of the Bay Area, the quarterly Bay Area Council survey finds. In Santa Clara, 38 percent of execs said they planned hiring increases, while 13 percent said they planned cutbacks. That hiring number's down from 42 percent last quarter.
Matt Marshall is joining the trend of leading journalists leaving to become independent journalists (I did that 2 years ago...). The San Jose Mercury reporter, writer of SiliconBeat, is leaving his employer at the end of this week.
He will be doing pretty much the same job--reporting on the Silicon Valley venture capital sector. But now he's the boss... :-)
Matt writes:
This will be a place only about private companies, the technology they are pushing — and the shenanigans they face as they launch from a seed idea, get funding (if they need it) and either flame out or join the ranks of sustainable companies. While readership counts, and is valuable for advertising (which pays my bills), quality is paramount: I’d rather have a core of very interested, loyal readers, than a wider, promiscuous one.
No sense in turning away "promiscuous" readers... :-) But I know what you are saying Matt, and you are dead-on. That's why I don't optimize for search engines--let them do that, that's their job. I optimize for the reader.
The fun game yesterday was speculating on the meaning of Google CEO Eric Schmidt's joining Apple's board. After all, Google and Apple are two great tastes that go great together.
First, corporate speak: Steve Jobs (from Apple press release): "Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead.”
Om Malik looks forward to integration between Google's advertising network and Apple's iTunes juggernaut. "Even though Google is being overtly aggressive about online video market, it is trying to leverage its advertising network more than download sales. Is it too hard to imagine - watch the video on Google Video, and download it on iTunes store? Both parties win? iTunes being included as part of Google software pack, or part of Google Toolbar? Google driving music-related searchers to iTunes store?"
Any of these scenarios is possible, even likely, but none of them require a seat on the board.
My initial take - especially after having posted about speculation that Jobs may have stock options problems at Pixar - was that Apple needed someone of Schmidt's stature as a potential CEO successor to Jobs. If you care to revisit the 1980s, you will recall that Apple simply doesn't run on MBAs. Apple requires vision, obsession and near-insane devotion to execution at the top. And ValleyWag points out that Schmidt has experience dealing with demanding personalities. But somehow, none of this really holds much water either.
Schmidt would quietly be Sun's inside man on the negotiations although technically he's be a neutral party since he doesn't actually work for Sun.
The way Dvorak sees it, Sun's server genius, Andreas von Bechtolsheim, a good friend of Schmidt's, may actually be behind the move. He's put Sun back on the map with AMD-centric servers that are fast, cheap and reliable. But Sun no longer has the marketing muscle of the glorious old days. Sun would get Apple's ad budget and Apple would get ... serious servers.
But does Apple still seriously care about the server market? This Sun-Apple business has been bouncing around for 20 years but since Jobs' return, Apple has substantially moved from a desktop manufacturer to a consumer company. When you look at long-term movements and you look at Apple, do you see a Microsoft-style company that wants to be dominant in every area?
Or do you see a design-centric appliance company that builds consumer lifestyle devices running robust software all tied together with proprietary lock-in and e-commerce opportunities? I see the latter, and while such a company might be an excellent company for Sun's servers, I don't see that they need to be Sun.
Last word to John Battelle: "I don't know what it means.
Tom Foremski here: What to expect from Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO joining the board of Apple Computer? Not much.
It certainly doesn't mean that Mr Schmidt will help bring about a Sun Microsystems and Apple merger, as John Dvorak speculates on MarketWatch. And it doesn't signify an Apple-Google alliance against Microsoft as GigaOm and others, have speculated.
BTW, it would be very unethical to bring in a director onto the board to facilitate an M&A deal.
And as for an anti-MSFT alliance, that isn't the case either. Mr Schmidt has already been there, and got his head handed back to him when he was CEO at Novell. GOOG doesn't need to engage MSFT anyway, the market is taking care of MSFT.
And as for MSFT's bid for iPod glory with its Zune music player? Again, what would Mr Schmidt bring to Apple? Apple has nothing to worry about, Zune will initially be competing against MP3 players from loyal Microsoft music player partners, and iPod would need to slide a long way down the hill to meet the Zune challenge.
All this appointment means is nothing much. CEOs of large companies spend time on the boards of other large companies--that's all there is to this.
A more interesting question might be in examining Mr Schmidt's track record as a CEO at Novell, and at Google. Let me know if you'd like to join me in exploring this question for a future post... :-)
Congrats to Good Morning Silicon Valley...GUBA turns to cash in vid hosting wars...Danny Sullivan shocks SEO community...Office 2.0 is coming mid-October
Congrats to John Paczkowski from the San Jose Mercury's excellent Good Morning Silicon Valley for a finalist nomination in the 7th Online Journalism Awards from the Online News Association (ONA) and the USC Annenberg School for Communication.
I was wondering why it was in the "small" category since it is part of San Jose Mercury, a very large news organization.
It is interesting that no journalist bloggers, independent of mainstream media organizations, were chosen by the ONA judges. Is this the opinion of ONA that other online news sites aren't online news sites because they are published by small/self publishers?
During a time when independent journalists bloggers such as Josh Wolf are standing up and going to jail to defend the rights of our commonly accepted journalistic practices, this sends the wrong message IMHO. Why not nominate Josh Wolf as a special show of recognition and support?
The battle of the video upload sites begins to get a little bit more expensive as Guba tries to rise above the white noise and offers money to users that recruit other users.
Videos embedded in web pages and blogs allow people to click through to GUBA for a free account and the publisher gets paid 25 cents. There is no limit to the number of user-referrals a person can get paid for. To manage this transaction, GUBA will provide a cookie on the PC of each referred user. If the referred user decides to sign-up for a free GUBA account within 30 days of clicking on the users' link, that user will be credited for the sign-up.
Danny Sullivan, a towering figure in the search engine community has left his regular gig as an analyst at SearchEngineWatch, and the SearchEngineWatch Strategies conference series. He said that he was unable to reach an agreement on a new contract with the owners.
Everyone seems to be in shock and awe by the news. But people are down right supportive of Danny and his reasoning. Everyone was simply so accustomed to Danny always being there, always being with SEW, the baby he built up. Most are wishing Danny luck. Many are uncertain what the future brings to the search conference life. People are both excited for Danny but sad that SEW won't continue it's legacy. Some are just angry and mad that this can happen.
I think it is very clear that he can set up under his own media brand in a New York minute. And I'd be happy to provide him with a regular slot on SVW should he need it.
He is already a big media brand in his own right and that was achieved through producing insightful analysis consistently. There aren't that many people that can do that day-in and day-out. I wouldn't worry about Danny Sullivan, he'll land on his feet.
There is lots of speculation about GOOG putting together an online suite of business apps to rival MSFT's Office. But we don't need to wait for Google to mashup its small collection of online apps because others are racing there anyway.
You'll be able to see some of them at the up coming Office 2.0 Conference October 11 to 12, in San Francisco at the St. Regis. It looks very promising from what I've seen so far. It will be officially announced next week and it has a stellar speaker list, with many people that I know and respect. I'll be attending and I'm hoping to get a special rate for SVW readers--so check back here in a few days.
New York Times censors its own news story in Britain
William Jolitz over on The Start-up File has a good take on NYT using ad server technology to block a news article from its British audience because of British laws. He argues that courts could force other publishers to do the same.
Back when the Internet started, it was like the "wild west" - nobody really knew what you could or couldn't do. Which laws governed a transaction - where it was viewed, or where it was served, or both.
I myself did a legal paper on the subject - "Jurisdiction and the Information Superhighway", which examined a porn case that overreached across the US. At the time, the argument against self-censorship like the NY Times has chosen to do was that there would be a great cost in negotiating the rules for each readers jurisdiction, so by default the serving jurisdiction should be the only one that mattered.
Things have changed...
Now publishing (as well as other businesses) potentially can be compelled by a judge to use the same technology to require that local jurisdictions all be treated the same, in place of the serving jurisdiction. All it takes is a follow-on case where this technique is used to rewrite recent case law, and then suddenly everyone has to track and deal with local jurisdictions!
NYT moves us forward (backward)...
Truly, the NY Times has pioneered a masterpiece of regulation, and discovered new ways of limiting the use of the Internet.
SVW: Interesting take on this issue. I've no doubt that we will have a Balkanization of the Internet in many and varied ways simply because we have the technology to do this. The Internet is not something that cannot be controlled, as popular understanding would suggest. It is something that is extremely easy to control and to track...
Every Web 2.0 company is offering a variant on the Swiss-army-knife-of-collaborative/social-media-technologies. Each one offers pretty much all the same things: sharing, blogging, sharing anything, any and many types of communications, collaborative apps--and mashing together whatever services you need online. And the ones that don't, have plans to add such features.
Yesterday, my colleague Richard Koman took a look at the Web 2.0 companies picked out by the San Francisco Chronicle. Other mainstream publications are doing similar things.
IMHO, this is a "Web 2.Uh Oh" trend because it leads nowhere; this is not the Northwest passage to the next boom. (This is so one-point-five ... :-)
I've been saying this for more than a year, but now with so many of these things coming out of alpha for the fall season, it is a good time to draw attention to how dead-end most of these ventures are.
For instance, what would it take for a GOOG or a YHOO or a MSFT to reverse engineerany one of the Web 2.0 companies? About a week to launch the alpha and a month to launch the beta-- plus they have the scale already built-in to monetize the heck out of them from day 14...
How many video hosting and editing sites are there? North of 200... How many similar sites are there that fall into any Web 2.0 category? Somebody will do the math...
I don't need to know the exact number to know that there are far too many of them. These types of companies only succeed if they become de facto platforms for large enough communities.
Communities are not created by press release, they are not announced, they are grown. With so many community-creator-platforms out there, we will have some large communities created on some of the technology platforms--but that will be for a small fraction of the total number of ambitious ventures.
Ask me (not email) and I'll tell you where the real action will be, where the next boom will be :-)
AOL will debut today its new music service, AP reports, with 2.5 million audio tracks and thousands of music video for sale at the magic price point of 99 cents per song, $1.99 per video. (Aren't music videos actually advertising? Would you pay twice as much for a song that has the detriment of having a video track?)
The more interesting pricing option is a monthly fee of $9.95 for unlimited downloads, $14.95 for the ability to transfer to portable players. Does that include iPod?
The way I understand the eBay-Google "click to talk" deal is that it may provide an extension of Google ads for the kinds of businesses that arent' really running sophisticated ecommerce sites. That's still most of the businesses in the world. It brings those businesses into the online world if they can advertise on Google and have the click-through be a real-world phone call.
The AP story emphasizes eBay's attempts to get small service providers as well as small products vendors onto the site, and by including Google search results (on the non-US eBay sites), they are improving the value of eBay to auction bidders.
On the Google side, which is more interesting, it's an expansion of the advertising model - using VoIP calling to bring in a new level of business as advertisers. But will users really click to call? Do Mom and Pop yet have headsets permanently plugged into their computers? Do they really want to call?
Blinkx has modest ambitions, it wants to be the Google-for-video-search engine. It is on the right road, it just signed a big deal with Lycos, the 15th largest web site operator.
I spoke earlier today with a very excited Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CTO of blinkx. "This is our largest deal so far. We'll get to share in the advertising, and since we rely on viral marketing, we'll be able to get our name out to a much larger audience."
Blinkx uses voice recognition technology, plus tags, and user generated meta data to index videos. And with all the YouTube generated frenzy around online video, there are a lot of large and small companies that'll be needing video search capabilities.
I love the "video wall" on Blinkx's home page, you just scroll across and up pop videos and TV news reports from around the world.
Intel (an SVW sponsor) announces its latest Xeon microprocessor, codenamed Tulsa Tuesday. It is an impressive chip and CNET's News.com has a good overview:
Next week I'll be interviewing Henri Richard, AMD's Chief Sales and Marketing Officer.
AMD's response to Tulsa (fair point on the last point):
- AMD firmly believes that customers are entitled to both high performance and low power consumption; the competition's 4P offerings on the market really only offer one . - AMD has a product strategy while the competition has products (ie- platform stability, single common architecture, and customer centric innovation, vs. 13 different platforms, little investment protection, and increasing complexity). - Three things buyers look for in their servers: Performance, Performance-per-watt and performance per watt per dollar. The recent claims from the competition specific to their new 4P offering do not address all three. - With all the talk about new microarchitectures being introduced in the market, it's interesting to note that the latest 4P processors introduced by the competition are based on an antiquated NetBurst architecture that will soon be "end of lifed."
Sony says battery problem fixed... but is it safe to fly with them?
Sony sent SVW the following statement saying all is now well. However, the issue of airplane safety with these batteries is still up in the air. I'm told there will be an official ruling on this very soon.
UPDATE: Statement Regarding Status of Battery Recall Including Information for Consumers Who May be Impacted
Yesterday the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Apple Computer announced a voluntary recall of lithium ion battery packs used in certain Apple notebook computers originally manufactured by Sony. This follows a similar recall announced by Dell Computer last week.
At this time, Sony and the CPSC anticipate no further recalls of battery packs using these particular battery cells because incidents resulted from variations in the system configurations of notebook computers produced by specific manufacturers. Sony has introduced a number of additional safeguards into its battery manufacturing process to address this condition and to provide a greater level of safety and security. We believe the issue has been addressed to the satisfaction of our customers.
Sony is committed to the safety of consumers and is working with the two computer manufacturers to ensure that the batteries are replaced in a timely fashion.
We encourage consumers who may be impacted by this recall to contact their notebook manufacturer or visit the following web sites for additional information:
In today's Chronicle, Dan Fost and Ellen Lee offer snapshots of what they think are the Web 2.0 startups on the move. What strikes most is that most of these apps leave me cold.
The one that perked my interest was popURLs, a competitor to NetVibes, which I looked at here. I guess I'm just a shut-in but I don't see myself spending a lot of time sharing music with friends online or watching their photos go by.
And with so many Web 2.0 offerings, how would you ever get all the people you care about to standardize on one solution? That said, I will try to spend some time with these and other W2 sites in coming days and offer some better perspective. Here's the Chron's top picks (and my comments):
StumbleUpon - rate and recommend websites as you stumble around the Net. How is it better than delicious?
Meebo - check all your instant messages without having to run four different clients. Useful, but not exciting.
imeem - Social networking. Lucaso says its built-in IM makes it great.
Slide - set photos from any website to slide by your screen all the time.
Dabble - Kind of delicious/Digg for online video, it makes sense.
Pandora - This is what Cory Doctorow was talking about eight years ago or so. Collaborative filtering to make an online radio station you really want to listen to. Problem back then was Cory was talking about P2P downloading of MP3s. A non-starter.
Forbes.com claim to be tops in business news questioned by NYT
In today's New York Times.
Forbes.com is number one...
Its own ads proclaim that “more people get their business news from Forbes.com than any other source in the world,” saying that its sites drew about 15 million unique visitors in a single month earlier this year. It was a well-heeled crowd, according to Forbes.com, which says that the average household income of its users is $149,601.
However...
There is also the question, given Forbes.com’s user figures, of where those visitors were going. According to comScore, 45 percent of its February traffic went to ForbesAutos.com, a companion Web site heavy on car reviews and photos. About three-quarters of the ForbesAutos.com traffic came from outside the United States.
Since February, comScore said, Forbes.com’s traffic has tumbled. In July, Forbes Web sites drew 7.3 million unique visitors worldwide, almost a million of whom went to ForbesAutos. That put Forbes.com slightly below Dow Jones (whose online properties include The Wall Street Journal’s Web site and MarketWatch), CNNMoney.com (which includes the sites of Fortune and Business 2.0 magazines) and sites affiliated with Reuters, each of which comScore says had some 7.6 million visitors that month.
Does it matter?
James Spanfeller, chief executive of Forbes.com, is not backing away from the contention that Forbes.com is No. 1 in its field.
“Are we leading the pack?” Mr. Spanfeller said in an interview on Friday. “Yes.”
In fact...
Mr. Spanfeller said comScore’s latest figures clashed with the company’s internally generated data, which still showed about 15 million visitors a month, with ForbesAutos.com accounting for about 2 million of those.
Rubbish...
“Forbes.com is not the biggest,” Vivek Shah, president of digital publishing for Time Inc.’s business and finance network, said in an e-mail message on Friday.
His comment was seconded by L. Gordon Crovitz, publisher of The Journal and executive vice president of Dow Jones, who is responsible for Dow Jones’s consumer brands, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch. Both Mr. Shah and Mr. Crovitz pointed to figures from Nielsen/NetRatings, which they say undercut those from Forbes.com.
Tabloid approach...
Some competitors argue that Forbes.com’s popularity derives in part from racy, provocative or wealth-obsessed lifestyle features that have little to do with traditional business news — examples from this year include “The Hottest Billionaire Heiresses,” “Top Topless Beaches” and “America’s Drunkest Cities.”
It's the little people that suffer ...
Forbes’s Web prowess is a big reason Elevation Partners, a private equity firm that counts Bono of U2 as a managing director, agreed on Aug. 4 to buy a minority stake in Forbes’s publishing business. “Forbes has already won the first round” in the battle for Internet supremacy, an Elevation founder, Roger McNamee, said then.
Google's announcement of a suite of comms applications designed for organizations has been touted by Reuters and others, as being a bid for MSFT's core business.
Reuters:
The online search leader said it has created a software platform to run basic business activities -- based on programs it already offers separately. The move marks a stepped up challenge to rival Microsoft Corp. as the software giant prepares to upgrade its Windows and Office franchises.
The free set of Web-based programs for small businesses, universities and nonprofit businesses goes by the mouthful "Google Apps for Your Domain" (http://www.google.com/a).
Later this year, Google said it will offer a "paid, premium" version with the option of being ad-free and more administrative control and compliance features to meet the demands of bigger corporations and government agencies. Pricing for this more advanced version is not yet available, it said.
GOOG's apps offering is no comparison to Vista or Office. It's a mashup of lightweight online products it already has on offer. It won't take any of MSFT's business away.
Most businesses are still server-huggers--they want to run their own email ,and calendar, and other basic services. This is not rocket science there is no need to outsource such a vital part of your business to Google.
Especially when GOOG doesn't care much when its "beta" services go down. After all, it's a beta.
MSFT certainly does face challenges in rolling out Vista and Office, but these are mostly self-generated challenges and have nothing to do with Google apps. That might become the case in a couple of years but not now, or anywhere near now.
What is interesting is that GOOG is planning a subscription supported business model. Just as MSFT and others are trying to move to an advertising supported revenue model for their apps...
It's never a great idea for a multibillion corporation to have an irreplaceable leader. But clearly, that is the case for Apple. What would the investment community think of Apple if Jobs were gone? Who is the brilliant lieutenant who will lead the company past Jobs' 70s?
The question is worth raising after Richard Farmer at Merrill Lynch issued a report that raises the possibility that Jobs was involved in options backdating at Pixar - a revelation that could possibly endanger his role at Apple.
"We believe there are not yet enough facts to form a conclusion on whether key executives might have been involved in creating options irregularities at Apple or Pixar, and our default assumption is that Jobs is not likely to have been involved; however, our review of Pixar disclosures does not allow us to rule out the possibility, given Jobs was a member of the board that made options decisions, and our analysis suggests these may contain irregularities.
[The question] "is whether he knowingly participated in creating option irregularities (at either Apple or Pixar) in a way that constitutes serious direct personal misconduct, which could lead the SEC to take legal action against him, including potentially barring his ability to serve as a director, officer, or financial reporting executive of any public company, including Apple."
Options backdating at Pixar seems likely, Farmer says. Five of the seven options grants made between 1997 and 2004 were recorded at the lowest price within months of time they were granted and four of the grants were at the lowest price in the entire fiscal year in which the grant occurred.
The Chronicle looked at Pixar's proxy statements and finds that Pixar's two-person compensation committee didn't meet during those years but Pixar's board handled compensation issues. The board members were Jobs, former Apple CFO Joe Graziano, entertainment lawyer Skip Brittenham and Larry Sonsini, a close advisor of Jobs' who was also involved in Brocade's backdating troubles, which led to prosecution of ex-CEO Greg Reyes.
Backdating is not illegal but failure to properly account for it is. If Jobs approved the backdating and failed to provide the accounting oversight, Apple could still get caught up in the options mess - albeit through the side door.
The San Francisco Chronicle has an article on coolingman.org, created to calculate the carbon/pollution emissions of those going to the annual Burning Man arts and culture festival 2hours out of Reno, Nevada.
Add up your car mileage to get there and back, plus electric generators and anything else, and you get a total in carbon/pollution emissions.
Then, like corporate America, artists will be directed to mitigate their pollution by purchasing greenhouse gas "credits," or "offsets," by investing in alternative energy that doesn't use fossil fuels: solar or wind power, methane capture from landfills and livestock. Tree planting also qualifies.
Burners are asked to pay $5 to $10 per ton of personal pollution to the nonprofit Trust for Conservation Innovation in San Francisco, which parcels the donations among various renewable-energy projects nationwide.
The money collected from 65 Burning Man participants so far -- $1,000 -- will help pay for a wind turbine that powers a casino on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota. It's the first American Indian-owned wind power plant in the nation.
Whoopee! Pay for electricity for a casino...!
IMHO, coolingman.org could be used as a cheap shot at the Burning Man community. It's not as if Burning Man goers have a choice of vehicles to get there, there are no electric cars or other more fuel efficient ways of getting there. Same goes for most other activities that would be done anyway, anywhere else, and that don't have easily available green alternatives.
And buying "offsets" makes it seem as if everything is OK. It can offset actual measures being taken to reduce emmissions at the festival. If a yellow smog sits above Black Rock City is everything cool even if it were *all* offset? Clearly not because Burning Man should be a showcase and an example of doing things the right way.
It is safe to say that the people that go to Burning Man are much more aware of the environment than most other groups that I can think of as a group. The policy of leave no trace, for example, is something which is practiced every year.
Burning Man's Black Rock City becomes one of Nevada's largest cities for one week a year, with more than 30,000 people living on harsh desert plateau on which nothing grows. It comes out of nothing and goes away to nothing.
And in that week it becomes a festival of creativity and abundance. There are several daily newspapers, more than fifty radio stations. If you go, you will see structures, art, and performances that you cannot see anywhere else in the world at the same time.
There is no commerce--except for coffee and ice that can be bought in center camp. There is nothing that is "sponsored by Microsoft" or any commercial message at all. Just being away from the constant commercial tugs at your mind is incredibly refreshing.
Most that go there, are working in groups throughout the year on ambitious projects, theme camps, and welding/building incredible structures.
These activities teach teamwork, they teach how to collaborate, how to deal with difficult people. And to work without any payment or even named credit--but contributing sweat, time, and money towards a common group goal.
Although it attracts people from around the world, Burning Man is very much a San Francisco Bay Area/Southern California festival.
And as such, the people that go there are living in an area that has great sway on technology, culture and the arts worldwide. Thus the influence of the Burning Man awareness of how we damage the environment becomes translated on a global scale.
Cooling Man could be used as a cheap shot to point to the carbon-release of activities that make Burning Man happen--without recognizing the positive effects on the environment that this community creates through their daily practice of awareness.
I keep running into great, web-based, media editing and sharing applications. And it makes sense: its more fun to share the process of creative collaboration than to edit by yourself! But I wonder how many of these will be around in a year? Or pehaps they will become more localized and we'll see more apps with less users.
Splice is a new online music editing applicaiton and social media sharing site. From Splice:
"Splice gives anyone, anywhere the ability to collaborate on music right through a web browser. Users can upload or record sounds, make songs, listen to other user's songs, make remixes, make friends and a whole lot more."
I also recently signed up for imeem. imeem is another social media sharing site where users gather around(you guessed it) a meme. What's great about imeem is they also have built in IM and a more powerful software download available.
Deep in the betterprop cut... The clef of your dreams... Whadda ya mean I don't need the code?... New kids on the block(from ole parents)... N a bit of psycedelic sheep!
Betterpropoganda is a hot site and an even hotter podcast! August's mix features a killer live cut by DJ Olive. Yea... and Sept is only a few days away!
Alright, this is a little freaky but totally makes sense. Take a quick music quiz and find the partner of your dreams based on your musical "personality." Is there a Gogol Bordello--Django Reindhardt--Bassnectar--Seu Jorge--Dangermouse--eDit-- sweetheart out there for me? Ahh... a sound match.
Back in the day(uh, yea, like last year), ZigZag and I were wondering why the hell there wasn't a site like this already. (You mean we really have to learn code?) Now, Piczo is here... and forget about coding your mainspace page(well... you used a profile generator anyways, didn't you?) Piczo is drag and drop, ajax friendly and hot, hot, hot...Ooooo.... and the kiddies are luving it!
Speaking of kiddies, good ole SixApart's got a new one called Vox. They're taking web publishing to another level with their latest web app in invitation-only beta right now. Imagine typepad, youtube, flickr, music sharing and (fill in the blank) social network in one UI.
Ok, and if its time to dust off the ole screen saver and load up some thing a bit more psychedelic and interactive, check out electric sheep. This screen saver lets everyone round the world vote on which sheep gets to sleep and which get to dance. BBBAAAAHHHHHHdddd ass!
Some sites view the information as an academic treasure trove, a way to learn more about how people use online search. In his blog for tech site ZDnet.com, Tom Foremski called the data "a glimpse into the human condition that goes way beyond anything we have seen, beyond Dostoevsky, Dickens, Balzac, Melville, or anybody else."
Recently, I've been helping out at IODA, a hip music company in the SOMA area of San Francisco. IODA(i.e. Independent Online Distribution Alliance) distributes indie(and not so indie) music across the web to a host of service providers... itunes, rhapsody, etc.
Their catalog is massive and growing (about 2,500 labels and close to 200,000 tracks) and they've recently begun a promotional service that allows bloggers/podcasters to use their music in trade for including a sales link to the artists' commerce site.
Promonet allows you to preview tracks, download artist's information, and generate HTML code for your blog/podcast. It's a great way to use licensed music in exchange for promoting your favorite artists(always a good thing!).
I created this podcast using Promonet. Enjoy!
Oh... and if you sign up for Promonet, tell them Lucaso sent you! ;)
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