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! ;)
The ZeroOne San Jose & ISEA 2006 Symposium happened this past month in San Jose, CA. Some of the world's top international electronic artists traveled to Silicon Valley to share their latest and greatest exhibits as this arts festival and academic symposium took over the city.
The SVW team was there to film the highlights and take you for a visual ride through the festival. Here are three videos from our week in San Jose, as well as a wrapup from SVW friend Sara Kramer.
I had the pleasure of spending last week at the ZeroOne San Jose electronic arts festival in San Jose, meeting multi-media artists representing all corners of the globe, and soaking in some of the most cutting edge new media I've witnessed to date in the intersection of art and technology. It was easy to be overwhelmed by over 100 artworks on display, the multitude of video projections, audio installations, robots, and interactive art.
From Pia Tikka's Obsession to Morten Schjodt's Switching, I was quite impressed by these artists attempts to transform a passive movie watching experience into "interactive cinema." With biosensors hidden in chairs and remotes handed out to the audience, the viewer was enabled both consciously and subconsiously to act as a participant in "directing" the order that scenes played and looped.
Douglas Edric Stanley's Concrescence and Game Machine + (^3) was my favorite interactive sound installation. Composed of a rubix-cube and complex sensors that can detect the various configurations of the colors on the cube, the audience was able to "play" with the cube, trigger various sound samples, and participate directly in making music. This tool is evidence of amazing new technologies that are currently redefining the way laptop music producers can perform their music in more interesting ways in front of a live audience.
The climax of the festival occured on Friday night when the internationally acclaimed Bay Area based group Survival Research Labs put on an impressive display of their large scale kinetic robot creations. The performance was an intense sensory experience, requiring audience members to wear earplugs to safely allow them to hear the orchestra of booming sounds. The robots created futuristic landscapes complete with a motif of destruction, fire, and explosions!
Earlier in the week someone at Microsoft leaked training videos that were made by the UK creators of "The Office." They were quickly taken down by YouTube but copies are still around in various places.
Moving darn quickly for a computer giant, Big Blue uploaded 3 funny videos done in a similar vein:
I need to buy a new Windows laptop. My last laptop just died when the hard drive went south. I resurrected an iBook G3 running 10.2 for now. And I need Windows because a) I need to run a Windows-only app and b) I can get one for $500. But now when I choose which one to get, I need to check the manufacturer of the battery. I really don't want it to be made by Sony.
That's because Apple just recalled 1.8 million batteries, a week after Dell recalled 4.1 million. Both batteries were made by Sony and they both suffer from the same defect - which contained tiny metal impurities that lead to overheating.
Did you see that picture in the Times of the burnt-out truck? That guy had been running his Dell laptop on his front seat and kept ammo in his glove box. Trouble. Does this make you think twice about your next laptop? Will this bad news turn into a major drag on the PC makers?
Sony says other manufacturers won't have this same problem, but USAToday quotes Roger Kay as saying: "Sony battery impurities are strewn across the land."
Sony fell 2.4 percent to 4,980 yen at 2:43 p.m. in Tokyo, Bloomberg reports. Sony will take a $257 million hit on the problems.
According to Yet-Ming Chiang, materials science and engineering professor at MIT and a founder of A123 [one of the leading companies in the new lithium-ion technology], the cobalt-oxide or related oxide materials typically used in lithium-ion batteries become unstable if overcharged or overheated, which can happen in the case of battery damage or a fault in the manufacturing process that leads to an internal short. The unstable materials release oxygen, oxidizing other materials in the battery, which in turn produces more heat. The cycle continues in a process called "thermal runaway," which in some cases can lead to a violent explosion.
In the new lithium-ion batteries, cobalt oxide is replaced with iron phosphate, a much more stable material. Indeed, a traditional lithium-ion battery will burst into flames in abuse tests, such as being pierced by a nail. But the new materials show little reaction at all.
These new companies likely cannot meet the supply needs of Apple and Dell, but will the Valley demand that Sony and other big guys move to safer technology or will they accept Sony's assurances that this won't happen anymore?
With $9.8 billion in cash and securities, the SEC may start considering Google a mutual fund, Red Herring notes, which means the company might have to start spending that money like crazy - or face much tighter regulations. Google has applied for an exemption but of course isn't saying what they would do if they didn't get it.
Google lists $14.4 billion in assets, including $4 billion in cash and $5.8 billion in marketable securities. AP reports that the Investment Company Act of 1940 requires companies with more than 40% of assets in cash and securities to be regulated under the stricter disclosure and operating rules required of mutual funds. ``Google states that it is not in the business of investing, reinvesting, or trading in securities,'' the company said it a July 20 filing.
A Google spokesman told Red Herring: "Our only comment is that we hope our application will be approved and if necessary will work with the SEC to address any concerns."
How does a company even spend that much money, though? Google focuses on small companies with proprietary technology that probably cost between $8 and $20 million each. A real estate buying spree in Mountain View only dented the bank account by $300 million. RH suggests Google could do a massive expansion of infrastructure - or buy a Prius for everyone in Oakland.
Silicon Valley draws in the smartest people from around the world and that's what makes living and working here so compelling. It is the quality of the conversations here, the engagement with so many different people, which helps create innovation.
While there is no shortage of great ideas, what we do have is a shortage of great teams. SVW has partnered with JobThread to offer a jobs board and help our readers build great teams.
We'll also be writing about the jobs market, what skills are in demand, and trends in the marketplace. If you need a database administrator (very hot right now) or a marcoms/pr specialist with at least 8 years experience (also v. hot) we hope that the Silicon Valley Watcher Jobs board will become a great resource to build your dream teams.
To get things started the first 25 postings are free!
Earlier this year I met with the Maxtor/Seagate data storage folks plus their partner Fabrik, Inc. And got a very early look at a new online service that blurs the line between storing your digital assets out in the cloud, or on local storage.
MyFabrik is a cool application that manages consumer media online or offline. In fact, the data storage costs online are very close to your data storage costs off-line--if you were to buy a Seagate drive.
That's an interesting revenue model. And by offering a nifty media management application, it allows a hard drive maker to add value and pull some revenues from above the (brutal) commodity marketplace of that sector.
This strategy also plays to all types of storage customers: from the hard drive huggers who need the assurance of a physical entity, to the ones that are comfortable with having their stuff in the cloud, and the ones that don't care or even want to know.
Those interested in trying out the new myfabrik online storage and sharing service can register for access to the final public beta release beginning on Monday, August 28. Following the public launch of the final service in September, access to the new myfabrik service is priced beginning at 99 cents/month, which includes 1GB of online storage space. Additional storage space may be purchased incrementally for 49 cents per GB.
I've been trying it out and despite a bug or two, I like it. And I like it more each time I use it. It saves a click or three, and that makes a big difference when posting online.
I've got mine hooked into SVW's Movable Type platform and it provides a really good editing interface, plus you can drag/copy links and text in one click.
MSFT could show us a thing or two in the blogging tools arena, and that would be great. But MSFT has some bigger challenges ahead.
Apple has agreed to pay Creative $100 million to settle a patent dispute that was blowing in Creative's direction (official statement here). The dispute was over the user interface for the iPod. The legal wrangling dates to May, when Creative sued Apple for violating its Zen Patent, according to AppleInsider.
On the same day, Creative also submitted a complaint to the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), seeking an exclusion order to prevent Apple from importing its iPods into the United States. Apple immediately counter-sued Creative, reversing the charges and stating that Creative's digital music players infringed on some of its own iPod patents. In the weeks that followed, Apple tacked on yet another suit, which similarly charged Singapore-based Creative with continuous infringement on three more of its iPod patents.
Things started looking bad for Apple when the ITC voted to investigate Apple's use of Creative's patent. The settlement gives Apple a license to use Creative's patent in all Apple products, and what's more Creative joins Apple's "Made for iPod" program and will announce their own iPod accessories.
"Creative is very fortunate to have been granted this early patent," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "This settlement resolves all of our differences with Creative, including the five lawsuits currently pending between the companies, and removes the uncertainty and distraction of prolonged litigation."
ThinkSecret says the move removes a big distraction for Cupertino that "could have hung over the company for more than a year while the lawsuits were sorted. It also represents a substantial savings over what it could have been ordered to pay had it lost in court."
Meanwhile, Apple has fired five retail employees and is threatening to can dozens more for downloading developer versions of Leopard, ThinkSecret reports. The software had been distributed to developers at WWDC two weeks ago.
"All of us know that we violated our NDA and ethics policy. Therefore, because we had the character to tell the truth and to face the consequences of our actions, we were terminated," said one of the fired employees, who spoke with Think Secret on condition of anonymity. "My only question is, if we all lied and denied it would we still be working at Apple today? Even more so, is that the kind of person that Apple wants working for them?"
ThisnThat: Pinger Beta is open; High Tech Trash; 9 Rules for High Tech strategy; Legal and blogs; Stanford's resources for startups; British troops on LSD
Pinger just came out of private alpha and now anyone can join the beta of this innovative voice messaging service. Send a voicemail to anyone, even to someone's email address...
High Tech Trash: A book written by Lizzie Grossman.
First investigation of the worldwide health and environmental impacts of technology -- investigating not only the problem of electronics recycling (or lack there of), but also the damage being caused by the mining and toxic chemical production necessitated by tech manufacturing. The book doesn't just identify problems, but also details solutions. And it even offers "how-to" advice for consumers who want to properly dispose of electronics.
My friend Tony Seba has just published his book: Winners Take All: The 9 Fundamental Rules of High Tech Strategy.
Rule 1 – Feel the Pain. Then Develop Your Product. Rule 2 – Focus, Win, Grow, Repeat. Rule 3 – Add Value Not Features. Rule 4 – Have a Story. Communicate Clearly. Rule 5 – It’s A Risky World. Sell Confidence! Rule 6 – Convert Champions Not Deals. Rule 7– Choose the Right Partners. Manage Them With Clarity. Rule 8 – Design Products and Services That Are Easy to Adopt. Rule 9 – You’re Doing Well. Congratulations. Now Change or Die.
Steve Yahn and Jake Whitney over at Editor & Publisher have written an interesting article on newspaper legal issues and blogs.
One of the few surviving stanchions of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230 holds that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of Section 230's most ardent proponents, says it "preempts any state laws to the contrary." Paul Alan Levy, a prominent internet authority and attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., declares: "What Congress said back in 1996 was that to encourage the development of the Internet as a means of communication, people who offer interactive computer services should not bear the liability for nasty comments posted by other people.
Stanford University has a ton of resources for entrepreneurs:
Listen to Podcasts of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capitalists, CEOs and other experienced executives, including Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Carol Bartz (Autodesk), Michael Goldberg (Mohr Davidow Ventures) and Joel Peterson (Peterson Partners, Trammell Crow).
The government dropped all obstruction-of-justice charges against Frank Quattrone yesterday, and he doesn't have to admit culpability. All he has to do is stay out of trouble for a year. The Chronicle has Valley insiders going ga-ga over the news. Frank McNamee: "The US economy needs people like Frank Quattrone." Mark Lehmann of JMP Securities: "People are getting excited about the possibility that we may have a chance to revive the tech market."
And the Mercury has VC Bill Burnham: "Out here in Silicon Valley, I don't think there's anybody who is not going to welcome him with open arms, and there's a tremendous amount of sympathy. I think he can do whatever he wants to do.''
If a supposedly strong case against Quattrone ended with such a wimper, what does the future hold for companies currently implicated in the stock options scandal? It's a safe bet that most of the 80 or so companies that face federal probes will never result in anything approaching what Quattrone faced--no criminal charges, grand jury indictments, even a conviction later overturned on appeal. Most of those companies will restate their earnings, and in some cases pay a penalty to settle civil charges from the SEC
Sony will pay $65 million for video-sharing site Grouper, which has about 8 million users, a far cry from YouTube. The point is not traffic but technology, says PaidContent.com. "It’s about Sony realizing they don’t have to invent everything, and trying to prove they can bring in good people and let them do something solid. Secondly, this probably signifies the start of a shakeup in the video sharing space, where other also-rans are struggling to find their footing against the YouTube juggernaut."
If you caught the two seasons of Ricky Gervais' brilliant but hard-to-watch "The Office" (not the American remake) and the "Office" special, you might have had quite enough of David Brent. But not so fast. Gervais' Brent has been reprised on YouTube, as a training video Gervais did for Microsoft three years ago has been leaked to online video sites. Gervais is upset about the leak and Microsoft is investigating, Silicon.com reports.
Gervais is worried the leak will make fans think he was disingenuous about retiring Brent ("integrity" in Brent-speak) but will not be seeking damages from Microsoft. "Unfortunately these things happen but it's Microsoft's responsibility to let us know how it got out," a Gervais spokeswoman said. On the video, Brent advises employees with good ideas to keep them to himself:
I don't think Gates made his billions by putting his hand up in the early days and saying, "Duh, boss, I got a great idea. I'd like to see every home and office with a computer one day." "Oh, great, thanks, Gates. Ka-ching. Now get back to work, you little nerd." So keep your ideas to yourself and make em work for you. Maybe set up a rival company.
Can you believe this? Here is Qwest, actively lobbying for laws that would make it easier to collect private data on its own customers.
Jennifer Mardosz, Qwest's corporate counsel and chief privacy officer, applauded efforts by politicians to force broadband providers to engage in so-called "data retention," which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said will aid in investigations into terrorism and child exploitation. This appears to be the first time a broadband provider has called for data retention laws.
The article continues...
This is an unusual stand for Qwest, which defended its customers' privacy rights when requiring the National Security Agency to obtain a court order to conduct electronic surveillance, according to a USA Today article in May. The Denver-based company has a market capitalization of $16.5 billion and says it has 784,000 wireless customers and 1.7 million DSL (digital subscriber line) customers.
Check this out...
"Imposing broad data retention would be a significant change to U.S. law, especially when it has not been shown that a narrower data preservation approach will not work just as well," said Kate Dean, director of the U.S. Internet Service Provider Association. "The proposal to store enormous amounts of data on subscribers and keep it live for a lengthy period of time raises serious technical, legal and security concerns." (The association's members include AOL, AT&T, BellSouth, EarthLink and Verizon Communications.)
Qwest's enthusiastic endorsement of mandatory data retention could make it politically easier for members of Congress to enact new laws even if other companies remain staunchly opposed.
Mark Glasser over at PBS's MediaShift blog has been writing about Mark Cuban's media project:
Sharesleuth.com , to provide “independent Web-based reporting aimed at exposing securities fraud and corporate chicanery.” Cuban hired St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigative business reporter Christopher Carey to be editor of Sharesleuth.
The revenue model is that Mr Cuban will short the stock of a company that is covered by Sharesleuth and use the proceeds to fund the site. A report by Sharesleuth on Xenthanol, a company founded to produce alcohol from wood waste hit paydirt:
On the day that the Xethanol report was published on Sharesleuth, its stock went down 14% to $5.95 — and that’s way down from the price of $12.65 when Cuban shorted 10,000 shares of Xethanol stock back in May. Yesterday, the stock was at $5.09.
Yes, we do need to find a business model to pay for journalism but this is not it. Journalism cannot be seen to be profiting from specific types of stories. This is completely unethical. Journalism should profit only from the quality and the timeliness of a broad range of news stories, and other reports.
This type of issue is not confined to Mr Cuban's adventures in media. To a lesser extent, it will become an issue at news organizations that pay journalists on the basis of how many pageviews their stories receive. This type of compensation encourages sensationalism and it discourages journalists from working on important stories that benefit society.
I only know of one major news organization that pays some of its writers on the number of pageviews but this model is increasingly used in small media companies such as Gawker Media.
UPDATE: I just realised that Mark Cuban is out in the stratosphere, he doesn't have anyone to tell him "it's a really bad idea, it really is." That is not a good place to be. Look out...
Guba is trying to find the sweet spot for on-demand online movies, cutting prices to $9.99 for a same-day-as-DVD-release, $4.99 for catalog movies, 99 cents for a 24-hour rental and 49 cents for a TV show. "“Nobody knows what the right price is for this stuff online,” Guba CEO Tom McInerney tells Red Herring. “The studios don’t know, even Apple doesn’t know.” Well, I may not be the typical movie viewer, but I could tell Tom to look to Netflix for guidance. Why do I want to buy movies for $10 a pop when I'm renting five a week for $25 a month? How many movies do I want to watch more than once? (Some I can't even watch once.)
99 cents for a movie rental, though: that actually starts to undercut Netflix for rentals. If the selection came anywhere close to what I can get on Netflix, I'm interested. No waiting, no scratched disks? And they don't have postage costs. But when the market appears, how does Guba compete with Apple?
A final thought here: Why do movies have to be flat-rate priced? There are movies people want to see and movies no one wants to see? Why not charge more for immediate access to "good" movies and discount prices for crappy stuff? Based on box-office take or ratings, of course, not actually quality.
ParisTube
In other video news, YouTube announced that it will join the heights of modern culture with the launch of branded advertising channels. First up: The Paris Hilton Channel, sponsored by Warner Bros. "Advertisers will be allowed to customize the channels and create subscriptions so viewers are alerted whenever a new video is added to the channel," reports Reuters. Another bizmod idea is called the Participatory Video Ad, where users rate, share, comment and embed advertising content.
YouTube says many more revenue ideas will be coming out in the coming year. I'm not sure I get participatory ads - at least not from that brief description, but neither of these products sounds like they really tap into the YT zeitgeist, which is user-created content. Money flowing to YT will eventually have to flow to the actual creators out there. To my mind, that means: 1) embedding ads in video (yuk); 2) sponsors paying the new universe of video creators to create video ads; or 3) product placement.
These are traditional models, but they have the virtue of including the creatives in the flow of money, which is crucial; and because they are traditional, Hollywood will know how to structure the deals. Which brings up a new revenue model for someone: agents. YT could play this role, negotiating for its creators, but since they have a vested interest in the deal, an independent agent would be better. (An auction model to place ads in the most popular video of the moment is also possible.) But since few individual videographers would be worthy of an agent's time, perhaps there's a role for someone like FederatedMedia to aggregate top talent and negotiate with YT. Or a confederation of creators who would take that 40% and put in a fund to pay for lawyers' bills and other professional services.
Just some thoughts on some possibilities, since the idea of Paris Hilton as YT's first shot doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in YT as a force for the video revolution.
Plaxo, the "smart address book" company has been peeking into its 10m members' address books around the world, to come up with a list of which country's residents have fatter address books. The Plaxo "Connected Index" showed:
The survey, based on anonymous, aggregated data from over 10 million members, found that Argentina led the Index, with an average of 479 contacts per address book. The Argentinean average is nearly 100 contacts greater than second place Austria whose Plaxo members had an average of 384 colleagues, friends, family, or other contacts in their address book. The United States tied with the Dominican Republic for 29th place, with an average address book size of 293 contacts.
Given the recent scandal over AOL's release of search data, and the departure of AOL's CTO over this issue, I'm not sure Plaxo's release of such data is a good idea. Although there is nothing identifiable in the Plaxo information, it shows that Plaxo user address books are wide open for analysis by Plaxo staff.
When does a Foundation start acting like a bank? Is media a charity case? This loan helped MediaNews buy The San Jose Mercury...
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was among a few dozen banks, insurance companies, mutual funds and other entities that loaned $350 million to MediaNews Group Inc. for its purchase of four newspapers from publisher McClatchy Co.
The Seattle-based Gates Foundation, the world's largest philanthropy with an endowment of about $30 billion, contributed an unspecified amount of money toward the transaction, according to an Aug. 8 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission by MediaNews Group. Others listed as contributors include General Electric Capital Corp. and Blue Shield of California.
Better late than never, The Deal on VC investment in GigaOm and Huffington Post:
Increasingly viewed as an alternative to traditional mainstream media, the blogosphere is variously regarded as more opinionated, faster-moving and less factually reliable than other outlets, including an older generation of online journalism. As Softbank's Eric Hippeau pointed out, the popularity of blogs may hold clues to how news will travel in the future.
' We view this as an investment in a news site,' said Hippeau, whose firm invested alongside Apax Worldwide Partners LP co-founder Alan Patricof. ' we think the news of the future will look like the Huffington Post. It includes breaking news, instant commentary, blogs and community, with a comments section that can be almost like a mini-blog.'
But why sell to investors? SVW will likely raise the same amount of money as GigaOm this year but from sponsors. No need for cuckoos in the nest (on the board :-)
The Chronicle profiles Metro-Fi, which has built a huge Silicon Valley free wireless network, covering most of Santa Clara county. The question is is there a business model in free? Metro-Fi CEO Chuck Haas says there is:
"There is no proven Wi-Fi model yet, but we believe free is the best. Everyone loves free. You don't have to pull out your credit card if you just want to use your laptop," said Haas. "If you're on for an hour at Starbucks, our incremental cost is zero. We may have made only a dime or a quarter off of you, but do that many times and you can see that's a good business model."
... Salesforce.com clears 500,000 subscribers as revenues rose 64% in Q2. The company still took a $1.3 million loss for the quarter. Reports Silicon.com: Ovum analyst David Bradshaw said Oracle, Microsoft and SAP don't "seem to be casting any shadows on Salesforce.com's field" and the software as service model "continues to attract ever more customers, forcing everyone in the CRM market and beyond to take this business model increasingly seriously."
... The day after Integrated Silicon Solutions announced it would not file its quarterly report because of stock options questions, investor Bryant Riley bought up almost 200,000 shares, as the price slipped nine percent. Now, with 12 percent of the company in his hands, the Mercury News reports, Riley is moving to remake the board. Riley wants to get rid of five board members, replace them with himself and two others, and cut the size of the board by two.
... Google insiders have dumped some $7.4 billion since Feb. 2005, Bloomberg's Mark Gilbert notes. Larry Page has realized about $2 billion and Sergey Brin $1.9 billion. Eric Schmidt has only cashed out $650 million. Not a single share has been bought in that time. Gilbert thinks the insider selling has been a major factor in Google's declining share price. Forget about fundamentals, he says. The question is, do Larry and Sergey have enough walking-around money yet?
Everyone complains that they have too many feeds to deal with. It's too easy to subscribe, too hard to keep up. I was just about at the point where I never checked the rss feeds, just looking at the major websites. Last night, I came across Netvibes, based in Paris and London, which last week picked up an additional $15 million in seed funding, with Index Ventures and Accel leading,
I look at a lot of Web 2.0 thingies and a lot of them leave me cold, but I'm a big fan of Netvibes after half an hour of building my home page with it. It shows you just where Ajax is leading us ... to online apps that are just as responsive and intuitive as desktop apps. Netvibes comes with plenty of good mainstream feeds that are easy to load in - you click and drag to where you want them on your page. Clicking on a headline brings up a fantastic interface element - pop-up box with recent headlines from that feed, detail on the link you clicked on and any associated art.
Adding feeds directly is not so much fun (you have to paste in an XML url or load an OPML). But, it's super W2 friendly, with modules for everything from Gmail to Flickr to delicious to digg. You can track ebay auctions, track product prices with Kelkoo, load in your online calendar events.
But the real distinguisher is the Netvibes ecosystem, built on a simple API so third parties can add modules that work with Netvibes. There are close to 300 modules right now.
Reporting the investment news, TechCrunch notes:
"NetVibes toughest challenges are starting now. They have enough traction in a young market to begin to monetize traffic - they just have to find the right way to do it without alienating users. NetVibes will also have to become mainstream which implies dedicated marketing efforts and relevant distribution deals to reach untapped, non-early-adopter audiences."
A few days ago, Pam Pollace, the former head of Intel's corporate communications was replaced as head of Edelman's (Edelman is a sponsor of SVW) global technology practice by Bob Angus. Mr Angus was head of A&R Partners, which was acquired by Edelman in late May.
Ms Pollace has left to work with the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation as communications director. Gordon Moore is one of the co-founders of Intel and the foundation is one of the largest philanthropic foundations in Silicon Valley.
The move is designed to build up the number of Edelman technology clients, especially in Silicon Valley where A&R is based. As Silicon Valley companies become large global entities Edelman hopes to win business because of its global presence. Joining Mr Angus:
Managing Director of Technology in London Jonathan Hargreaves, and Managing Director of Edelman Southeast Asia Bob Grove. Bob Angus, who joined Edelman when the firm acquired A&R Partners in May, will chair the new leadership team.
However, there are fewer large technology companies these days in Silicon Valley because of mergers and acquisitions. Edelman will have to show that it can also be effective representing smaller companies in its bid to build up its Silicon Valley presence.
I read with great interest a few of articles published at your site about the difficult time innovators have in places like London and how that must change. We, at the London Business School, agree and have initiated an annual competition (and to our knowledge the only competition) to try to change that; to foster innovation in at least one sector.
We started the Global Security Challenge to find and select the most promising security technology startups in the world. The goal is to uncover and promote security innovations in the private sector in order to protect critical infrastructure and make citizens safer.
My team used to work in the security-technology space before getting our MBAs from the London Business School (the British Army, US Army, IBM Global Services, NSC) and this is where we saw how difficult it is for security startups to succeed because of bureaucratic hurdles posed by governments and few large integrators dominating that space.
We are hosting a final event this October in London where we will hold both policy and technology-related panels and award the inaugural winner of the most promising security technology business plan. We are fortunate enough to have several key leaders from venture capital and industry supporting the GSC, such as Siemens, NATO, Pentagon, and Carlyle Group.
Private equity firms buying up software companies or customers?
Here is AMR Research on private equity firms buying up smaller software companies to create large firms capable of competing with an SAP or IBM. But is it good for customers? It looks like the private equity firms are aggregating customer bases rather than creating a broad base of IT products.
At a user conference in 2003, Mike Greenough, then CEO of SSA Global, said that his company had paid an average of $23,500 per customer to acquire 16,000 customers. Three years later, Golden Gate paid approximately $130,000 per customer in order to merge SSA Global with Infor. This might seem expensive, but AMR Research estimates that SSA Global was generating between $40,000 and $50,000 in annual revenue per customer.
Hackers take down national black newspaper of the year
The website of the SF Bay View newspaper was recently attacked by hackers, it is now back up. The newspaper is one of the best in the US and isn't afraid to tackle tough stories on tough issues. It has been named "National Black Newspaper of the year."
Here is a letter from the editor to readers:
No, the Bay View is not dead. Wounded - but still very much alive and kicking.
Yes, our website, www.sfbayview.com, is still down. It had grown popular beyond our wildest dreams - to around 2 million hits a month - but apparently not all the folks who hit us up liked what they read.
There's now good evidence that we've been hacked by a very sophisticated hacker. A few days ago, our server was taken down - and it stayed down for 26 hours. The server rep says they've never been hit so hard, that recovery time in the past has never been more than about three hours.
But help is here. Bay View webmaster Terone Ward put out a call to web savvy people around the world, and a team from South America is now working with him to repair our site and make it as invulnerable as possible. Anyone with helpful suggestions is welcome to email teroneward@sfbayview.com.
At a time when so much is wrong in the world and heroic resistance is on the rise, we're flooded with crucial news and views that nobody else will publish. How frustrating to be limited to the printed Bay View paper! We're deeply grateful, though, to you who have enabled us to keep publishing in print during our ongoing financial crisis.
Apple has completed its investigation into alleged mistreatement of workers at its Chinese iPod plant and found the Chinese company was working employees harder than Apple rules allow. Other than that, there is no child labor or forced labor, the company said. In the official report on the Apple website, the company addressed several accusations.
Apple found no evidence of forced labor or child labor but was unhappy with the worker dormitories. Some of these, Apple said, were too "impersonal." Later, it is stated that "we believe in the importance of a healthy work-life balance." Are such touchy-feely sentiments a little out of place when dealing with the inherently inhumane work of snapping together iPod after iPod?
At Ars Technica, Jacqui Cheng note: "For a company like Apple who has a widespread reputation for being an environmentally and socially conscious company that even the hippest of hippies could love, it's extremely important for them to issue such a high-profile response to such accusations in order to save face with the general public."
Our audit of on-site dormitories found no violations of our Code of Conduct. We were not satisfied, however, with the living conditions of three of the off-site leased dorms that we visited. These buildings were converted by the supplier during a period of rapid growth and have served as interim housing. Two of the dormitories, originally built as factories, now contain a large number of beds and lockers in an open space, and from our perspective, felt too impersonal. The third contained triple-bunks, which in our opinion didn’t provide reasonable personal space.
Apple found that pay met local minimum standards but that the pay structure was too complex:
The pay structure was unnecessarily complex. An employee’s wage was comprised of several elements (base pay, skill bonus, attendance bonus, housing allowance, meal allowance, overtime), making it difficult to understand and communicate to employees. This structure effectively failed to meet our Code of Conduct requirement that how workers are paid must be clearly conveyed.
Employees worked substantially more overtime than Apple policies allow and Apple says workers were allowed to refuse overtime without penalty.
[We] found that the weekly limit was exceeded 35% of the time and employees worked more than six consecutive days 25% of the time. Although our Code of Conduct allows overtime limit exceptions in unusual circumstances, we believe in the importance of a healthy work-life balance and found these percentages to be excessive.
If anything, workers said they wanted more overtime. Lack of overtime was the number one complaint. The other major complaint was inadequate transportation between factory and dorms.
RedHat was a no-show at LinuxWorld, leaving most vendors and attendees scratching their heads, all the more so because Novell had a huge booth near the entrance promoting new SUSE products ... Yahoo is leaving its mark on del.ici.ous with a new homepage featuring thumbnails and "tags to watch" and contextual ads. Steve Rubel finds it dicey to screw around with techies' core web service but notes "there are no contextual ads on del.icio.us tag pages yet. However, I am sure that Yahoo will soon move to monetize these pages since they are prime real estate on certain keywords." The idea of course is that it won't be just for techies for much longer .... Google has updated GoogleTalk with voicemail, file and folder sharing and music status. I guess that's cool but G is so far behind the major chat players, not sure how many people care ...
BizDev 2.0
Flickr's Caterina Fake has a line on the 2.0 way to do business around here. Build it, then negotiate.
Several companies -- probably more than a dozen -- have approached us to provide printing services for Flickr users, and while we were unable to respond to most of them, given the number of similar requests and other things eating up our time, one company, QOOP, just went ahead and applied for a Commercial API key, which was approved almost immediately, and built a fully-fleshed out service. Then after the fact, business development on our side got in touch, worked out a deal -- and the site was built and taking orders while their competitors were still waiting for us to return their emails. QOOP even patrols the discussions on the Flickr boards about their product, and responds and makes adjustments based on what they read there. Now that's customer service, and BizDev 2.0.
Cap'n TechCrunch
The bidding for tickets to tomorrow's TechCrunch August Capital deal is at $310, bid by eBay users ronsheridan (possibly this Ron Sheridan). That's because the RSVP list is locked at 700 people and demand to get into the 2.0 event of the summer is bigger than that. Seems like I've been here before ...
2.0 apps are great but it's not the be-all-end-all, hm? TechCrunch's Michael Arrington set up a Wiki to handle reservations but conceded: "The wiki is overwhelmed and is frustrating people because it is constantly locked. I apologize. I hate wasting people's time and I can imagine how frustrating it must be to sit there and hit "refresh". All of those "refreshes" are also crushing our servers." The Chronicle's Al Saracevic is amused:
To leverage the popularity of the movement, the ticket auction has generated bids over $300 apiece, with all the money generated going to help a charity ... that helps entrepreneurs! Like we need more 2.0 carpetbaggers starting photo sharing sites around here??
Patent system serves pharma not tech says leading open source law professor
By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher
(This story came out of a panel I was moderating at LinuxWorld. It was spirited session with good input from the audience.)
Eben Moglen, founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center, Wednesday called for reform of the US patent system as applied to software, because current laws are designed to protect the interests of pharmaceutical companies rather than technology companies.
Mr Moglen was speaking on a panel at the LinuxWorld trade show in San Francisco. He is one of the top lawyers in the open source movement.
"Software patents don't make much sense in the tech industry because markets move too fast. Yet the software patents put developers on guard that they could be vulnerable to future claims," said Mr Moglen.
He said that tech companies were having to register software patents as a defensive move, and that none could "unilaterally disarm" and stop filing for patents. And with potentially many rights holders in software, negotiating licenses becomes very difficult and harms innovation.
He said that many companies were having to bear the burden of IP laws that have been influenced by pharma, and that it was time for the tech industry to be freed of constraints created to serve the interests of just "the few."
The Software Freedom Law Center provides legal services to corporations and developers using open source software to ensure that their projects will not encounter a possible legal challenge.
Christine Martino, vice president of Hewlett-Packard's open source and Linux business, said HP would support a move for reform of the patent system in the US and internationally. Ms Martino, speaking at the same LinuxWorld panel, said, "As a global company and with global customers, we realize that this is an issue that needs to be addressed everywhere."
Another fellow panelist, Stuart Cohen, CEO of Open Source Development Labs, a sponsor of Linus Torvalds Linux kernel work, said that US patent laws affect other countries even if their own IP laws are weak.
"Developers in other countries know that we live in a flat world, and that means that they could be vulnerable to legal challenges from IP owners in other countries," said Mr Cohen.
As Linux and other open source software grows in popularity, the community of tens of thousands of developers has built a strong legal infrastructure to protect their work from third-party challenge. The key to the success of Linux and open source has been the General Purpose License (GPL), an extremely well crafted legal document that that has so far, managed to repel or discourage any challenge.
However, the latest version of GPL has become controversial and has split the open source community, with Linus Torvalds its leading critic. And large IT vendors such as HP have said that the new GPL must have strong protection for proprietary technologies.
Mr Moglen said that the debates over the new GPL are unlikely to stall an agreement. "I believe in the wisdom of crowds, we have a community of ten thousand that have a say in this." He said he expected an agreement on the wording of the license by spring of 2007. But he also said that there would likely be two versions of the GPL, and that that was okay.
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This was my first time meeting my co-panelists. Eben Moglen certainly likes to talk, (a lot!). Fortunately, it's all good stuff which is why I gave him a fair amount of airspace on the panel :-)
Also, please see: Fortune's Nicholas Varchaver: Who's afraid of Nathan Myhrvold?
The giants of tech, that's who. And they have a nasty name for the former Microsoft honcho: "patent troll."
"Here's my 'secret plan,' " he explains one recent morning aboard his Gulfstream V en route to a meeting with inventors in Austin.
He reels off a list of companies that have made huge sums by licensing patents, such as Lucent (Charts), Texas Instruments (Charts), and IBM (Charts), which generates $1 billion a year on its patents.
"We want to build a portfolio just like those companies have, with licensing approaches broadly like they have ... I want to achieve what IBM has achieved. That's my financial model. This is a play where I take portfolio theory and apply it to something illiquid to deliver a return for my investors. I don't see that as evil. I don't see that as particularly threatening."
. . . Today Myhrvold's reported investors include some of the same companies that most vociferously condemn trolls: Microsoft (Charts), Intel (Charts), Sony (Charts), Apple (Charts), eBay (Charts), and Google (Charts). (Myhrvold will say only that the list "isn't fully accurate." Intel and Google declined comment. Sony, Apple, and eBay didn't respond.)
Joe Beyers, who oversees HP's patents, dismisses IV's invention plans as a "smokescreen to buy time." The real game will be lawsuits, he says.
. . . "We're very familiar with their business model," adds HP's Robison, explaining that Intellectual Ventures approached HP as a potential investor. Robison says he can't say any more than that because he's bound by a nondisclosure agreement. But why, he suggests, would Myhrvold collect all those patents if he weren't planning to start suing eventually?
From HP's perspective, trolls have an unfair advantage. They could shut down a manufacturer. But trolls are immune to countersuits, because they make nothing themselves.
Here's one for the conspiracy theorists. Yesterday Google announced the purchase of Neven Vision, which specialized in photo recognition software which does business both with the cellphone industry (organize your camphone pics) and the federal government (recognize who's going through security with tubes of gel in each hand and white powder on his shoes). So does buy give Google a leg up in the online digital photo service biz? (Yes.) Or a foot in the door into the lucrative federal government contracting biz (possibly).
As far as online photos go, Neven's tech will be integrated into Picasa. Adrian Graham, Picasa product manager, says this on the Google blog: "Unless you take the time to label and organize all your pictures (and I'll freely admit that I don't), chances are it can be pretty hard to find that photo you just know is hidden somewhere deep inside your computer. ... Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about."
Uh huh. Picasa. The thing, is, Neven is a powerhouse in the mobile market with 15 patents. Their technology works without communication to a central server. In March they cut a deal with NTT DoCoMo to run a security application on one DoCoMo-running phone. Scott Schaefer reported at the time on how it works:
When the user initiates an action, the automated authentication process completes correctly and then executes the chosen application, all without any additional action by the user, such as having to manually enter a password. Designed as replacement of access control by password or PIN number, the technology supports i-mode FeliCa, PIM data protection, and device lock function.
In addition, Neven's iScout is a major mobile marketing application. Think that's a business with some application to Google? "Google could easily use this software to improve local search and advertising from cell phones, for example," Schaefer notes.
Schaefer looks for Yahoo to have to respond in kind, possibly by acquiring ActiveSymbols, a division of Logicalis. ActiveSymbols combines recognition software with a proprietary server that recognizes a camphone-snapped image, searches the web for related information and returns results to the phone.
The blogosphere seems ready to assume that Neven can check a photo of any person against the database of all human users and figure out who they are. From there, it's a quick tour through users' search history and email, MySpace friends lists, and real-world locations.
The first part of that is far-fetched I think. Face recognition is surely at the biometrics level, not being able to identify individuals. But the trick is to get users to identify faces to the system. Once instructed, the system should be able to use biometrics to get that person's ID right in the future. (GigaOm reports that the LAPD uses Neven to do facial IDs of gang members; that sounds like it's getting close, but the LAPD's photobase of gang members is a much smaller population than Google users.) Once that's done, the rest lines up quite nicely.
Google now has relationships with DoCoMo and other major mobile players. With Neven, it has pic-to-search capabilities and killer mobile security features, which can open the door to mobile e-commerce. Google has an ad relationship with News Corp and MySpace. If there were a way to connect MySpace networks into phone applications, say - this is where in physical space your friends are right now, where do you want to meet for lunch? - that sounds interesting.
How to get a job
Guy Kawasaki posted Monday about "How to get a job in Silicon Valley but didn't know who to ask." By yesterday, even the legal bloggers were shaking in recognition of his awful truths. The piece is notable not just for his solid job hunting advice but for his antropology of homo siliconis.
The job hunting advice is straight-forward - be enthusiastic, keep your res to one page, show up early - but it's these other little gems that nail the Valley.
Passion for what a company makes or does is the most important factor in getting a job in Silicon Valley. Companies here are built on passion—indeed, perhaps more passion than reality. Hence, they hire passionate people who are already in the Reality Distortion Field. The question is, How do you show your passion?
Passion for what a company makes or does is the most important factor in getting a job in Silicon Valley. Companies here are built on passion—indeed, perhaps more passion than reality. Hence, they hire passionate people who are already in the Reality Distortion Field. The question is, How do you show your passion?
And then ... Guy delivers this little table of the people you're likely to meet around the table at the gang interview. This is so spot on, all you can do is smile and say, wow. Like the marketing guy:
Mr. CPG
Brought in by the wunderkinds to fix marketing even though they think the company's gizmo is so cool that it doesn't need marketing. Can't do a demo of the product but believes that everything is a consumer packaged good. MBA. Worked for five years for Playtex marketing tampons. Leases a Cadillac.
What do you think of Kotler's Four Ps of marketing?
They are still important, but the Internet and online communities have made life much more complex for marketers. I'm glad you're running that function here because I can learn a lot from you.
And of course, Ms. CEO:
Ms. CEO
Proof that ice water can run in people's veins. Tough, talented. Shattered the glass ceiling into a thousand pieces. Sports a trophy husband. Makes the Merrill Streep character in The Devil Wears Prada look like a girl scout. Friends with Carly Fiorina.
Did you see that article in Forbes about me?
"Seen it?" Are you kidding? I have a copy right here. I was going to ask you to autograph it.
Anybody who runs a blog or a web site usually peeks at the search terms that visitors input. It's fascinating stuff because sometimes you can find clues to breaking stories or emerging issues/trends.
And looking at the AOL search term database that was recently released, you can see how people use the search box to make statements, as much as ask questions. The AOL search information is fascinating reading because it represents unguarded thoughts and feelings that could not be collected in any other way.
However, I find it hard to belive that AOL believed it was innocently providing the world with behavioral data and protecting users from being identified. Yes, AOL assigned a numeric code to each user accounts search history, rather than user names. But there is plenty of information in the search terms to identify some of the users.
Now, people will be far more guarded in their use of online services. Surely AOL knew that the data could identify some users. Anybody, even the newest of newbies could look at the search data and see how it could be used to identify people. Yet AOL went ahead and released the information.
Maybe some at AOL wanted to warn others that even if a company says it is not collecting identifiable data on its users, it is not true. People ego surf, they Google their dates, they check up on colleagues and ex-lovers online, they search on phone numbers, etc.
The AOL incident has placed Internet users on notice that their lives are transparent, even in unguarded moments, even when searching for something, anything, even when companies say they are not collecting identifiable data.
One response is to be very careful what you search for. Another response is to poison the database, to create a smokescreen, to use aliases/avatars, to make sure that the data collected online contains only a sliver of the real person.
Yes, it is more work, but you can never know how such information could be used in the future. You can never know if the political climate changes, and some people become persecuted for their past search terms.
And this data never goes away. Google, for example, keeps every search term, keeps a copy of every web site it ever indexed--it never throws away a single byte of data it encounters. And others are doing the same thing, and others have to comply with government regulations in keeping data for many years.
Your every click and keystroke online is being collected by many different organisations, and that means that at some point it will be possible to track it all, and identify most of it. Welcome to the future transparency of your life.
IBM announced that it is extending its support for open source business models in eight key initiatives. I spoke with Dan Frye, who heads up IBM's Linux Technology Center in Portland, Oregon.
"Our experience with Linux and open source has shown how disruptive the business model is, and we want to extend that business model into other open source projects. The disruptive force of open source affects us all, and we want to make sure that we can move rapidly and innovate," said Dan Frye.
o Web Application Servers - Based on Apache open source projects like Geronimo.
o Development Tools - Built on the open source Eclipse Integrated Development Environment.
o Client-side middleware - Supporting the Eclipse Rich Client Platform project for hosting cross-platform applications.
o Data Servers - Building on the open source Apache Derby, with IBM Cloudscape, and free no-license fee IBM DB2 Express-C.
o Systems Management - Including open source Aperi projects.
o Open hardware architectures - Community-driven collaborative innovation with Power.org and Blade.org.
o Grid Computing: Expanded support for Open Grid Services Architecture and the Globus Alliance.
o Business Consulting and Technology Services - Enabling customers to innovate with open source-based solutions and development models.
SVW take: IBM has a vested interest in speeding up the commoditization of large parts of the IT sector because of its huge IT services group. But it also has a lot of proprietary technologies that are in the path of the open-source steamroller, and the trick will be to figure out which ones to defend and which ones to leave behind.
IBM is good at moving up the value chain, it will sell large business groups, such as hard drives, PCs, once profit margins drop to low levels. In the case of the open source communities, it has been contributing a lot of IP and patents. This helps accelerate commoditization trends in IT, and it impacts smaller rivals that don't have the scale of IBM's IT services business groups to provide them with revenues from helping customers integrate open source technologies.
Mr Frye said that large corporations are increasingly using open source in mission critical applications. For such important projects, IBM's IT services can provide customers with an important level of assurance. And IBM can reduce costs by integrating open source solutions instead of commercial applications from rivals, which means more money is available to pay for IBM consulting and services.
It's all part of the industry-wide transition to a services based business model in which companies pay a monthly/yearly fee. This means that it won't really matter to customers if open source technologies are being used, all that matters is that they receive an IT service at an appropriate price and performance level.
To that extent, the more open source technologies IBM can cram into its IT services offerings, the better because it reduces its costs. The open source communities carry the burden of testing and maintenance rather than IBM.
It has to be noted that IBM is considered a good citizen, it contributes more than any other company to open source projects, and it has the most to gain from the success of those projects.
The most compelling content on the Internet, by far, is AOL's release of search terms linked to individual users. This is a glimpse into the human condition that goes way beyond anything else we have seen, beyond Dostoevsky, Dickens, Balzac, Melville or anybody else.
AOL apologized for releasing the data into the public domain--a huge database of 21m search terms with each search term linked to a unique numeric code representing a specific user account, along with the date of each search. The result is a narrative that tells stories that are unguarded, and are sometimes truly disturbing.
Over the past few days, several web sites, such as AOLPsycho.com and AOLStalker.com, have sprung up and hundreds of volunteers have begun to catalog the data and flag some of the more extreme search terms, along with the users who query them. There are sometimes violent and sexually extreme terms and phrases. But also, there are the many mundane search terms, that reflect an ordinary life, occasionally punctuated with extreme drama...
It all makes for incredibly compelling reading. These are the thoughts of people when they feel safe there is nobody looking over their shoulders.
These are real soap operas, tracked over a period of months... from the excitement of first meetings:
"how to get rid of nervousness of meeting a blind date 23 Apr, 12:27"
Then disaster:
"if your spouse has an affair should you contact the other person's spouse and let them know : 07 May, 09:58"
And the same user account asks:
"i had sex with my best friend and now he treats me differently :26 May, 13:58"
Even though AOL used numeric codes for each user, discovering the identity of some users wouldn't be hard--if someone wanted to try. That's because people search on their own names (ego surfing) and also search telephone numbers, social security numbers, . . . and names of (ex)loved ones.
There is a tremendous amount of rage in some of the search terms, a search for revenge when relationships fail that can be disturbing to read. And so are some of the searches for underage sexual images.
Are these the musings of an idle brain, maybe a drunken brain that searches for things it wouldn't under sober circumstances? Are searches for under-age sex, or how to murder someone in a gruesome manner, just fantasies expressed within a search box? Or are they plans waiting to be executed?
Most probably they are fantasies because otherwise we would be awash in blood, dealing with a Sodom and Gomorrah of cinematic proportions every day. Yet our daily experience shows us that the vile fantasies expressed in some AOL searches, are rare in reality.
What the AOL data shows us, is that the search box has become a collector of the only true expression of whatever is happening in our heads--at the very moment of creation, at that specific point in time ...(within the heads of the Internet-enabled population).
Has the search box become a modern age confessional box--yet without the promise of redemption?
The unfortunate thing is that now, everyone will be on guard. All will think twice and thrice about what is typed into the search box. Because it could all come out into the open.
AOL's data shows us something else: Google (and YHOO, MSN, etc) has a treasure trove of search data, all linked to millions of users, much larger than AOL's database. Google saves every piece of data it comes across and puts it all on backup tapes and stores it in a very secure facility inside a mountain. A Google senior executive told me this more than two years ago. When I asked, "what will you do with the data?" I was told, "we don't know."
Google's search data can be seen as a chronicle of the human condition over a period of time, within different societies. Google has a collection of billions of thoughts collected from millions of people at (nearly) the exact moment of thought-creation, all pegged in place and in time.
Google's search term database is eaily the world's largest repository of the unguarded thoughts of the citizens of the rich, developed world. It contains information that could not be gained in any other way.
No survey of people's thinking could uncover such content because people answer questions according to what they believe they should say.
GOOG has the means to gain an incredible insight into the human condition. Can it keep the data safe from being released into the wild? Maybe. .. If it can keep the data from others, it can mine that database to its advantage--an extremely powerful, competitive advantage.
In the aftermath of the AOL leak, people are getting more interested than ever in exactly what search engines are doing with all the information they're collecting. The Times takes a look with a piece today by Saul Hansell, headlined "Advertisers trace paths users leave on the Internet."
Yahoo, it seems, has some complex data modeling in which users are categorized into some 300 groups, based on search history, and then served appropriate ads. Every search company does something similar. As the AOL leak showed, search histories create a portrait of an individual, and targetted searching is an early warning sign of imminent spending, and if you're about to spend money, there are a lot of companies that would like to know about that.
No suprises there. You search, we look at what you search and serve you ads. It gets a little spookier when you realize that cookies allow advertisers to track users across the Web.
“You are no longer targeting people you think will be interested in your product,” said Les Kruger, a senior marketing manager at Cingular. “We know based on your behavior that you are in the market, and we can target you as you bounce around the Internet.”
Tacoda Systems runs its behavior targeting ad software on a network of some 3,500 sites, including the Times. So when you've visited one site, Tacoda can serve you ads related to that subject anywhere you travel on the network. For instance, you visit Cars.com and see car ads when you're on Weather.com.
For its part Google is not impressed with history-based advertising. “Does a user want to see an ad on cars when they are planning their weekend vacation, or do they want to see an ad related to what they are looking at?” asks Google's Tim Anderson.
But there are some impressive anecdotes.
LendingTree, an online loan broker, has experimented with aiming ads at some of the 300 categories of users in Yahoo’s new system, like newlyweds and people who have just moved. It had by far the best results advertising to people who had searched for and read information about borrowing money.
“People aren’t in the market for loans all the time,” said Darren Beck, LendingTree’s vice president for online advertising. “These behavioral targeting models seem like the holy grail. We can find people exactly when they want a loan.”
The long tail concept has been back in discussion lately because of the release of the book by Wired Mag Editor Chris Anderson. Web design guru Jakob Nielsen has come up with a drooping tail version that uses a logarithmic analysis of long tail type data. It's a surprisingly effective approach, at least for analyzing web site page views. Wag the Drooping Tail is his conclusion.
The 2.0 meme is all over the front pages today. First and foremost, Microsoft takes a 2.0 approach to future XBox development with the release of a low-end game authoring environment for the XBox 360. Reports the Times:
Programs created with XNA Game Studio Express will not look as good as most packaged titles. But at a time when gamers seem tired of sequels and genre standards, the company says it believes that some kind of independent games business could provide a breath of fresh air. “We thought a lot about ‘The Blair Witch Project,’ ” said Scott Henson, a director for Microsoft’s game developer group, referring to the low-budget horror film that became a surprise hit in 1999.
And, of course, the company hopes the process of making games proves as addictive as playing them. “On the Internet, we’re going from a monologue world to a dialogue world,” Mr. Henson said, referring to sites with user-created content like MySpace and YouTube. “It’s amazing how much participation there is.”
TV 2.0
And Current, the cable network co-founded by Al Gore that broadcasts user-generated content, is suddenly looking good to investors. The magic phrase that causes otherwise hard-boiled business types to moan "ooooo" is - wait for it - "YouTube."
The Chronicle says: "Now carried in 30 million homes, Current will announce a plan next month for online expansion and is planning an international version next year. Madeleine Smithberg, co-creator of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," will start a daily offering this fall that's still under wraps.'
The pitch to creators is basically that getting a bazillion views on YouTube might get you web wuffie but it won't make you any money. Getting on current will pay you some bucks and get you on the big small screen, and that could lead to a call from, say, Honda to direct an ad for their next under-30 campaign.
That's a fine theory, but asks Broadcast & Cable's John Higgins: "Do you ever hear people say, 'Did you see that video on Current?' No. They say, 'Did you see that video on YouTube?' " Ouch. So why not just the YouTube Channel? A creative/marketing deal with say, I dunno, News Corp? I think such a deal is Chad Hurley's for the asking.
As the owner of dynamo MySpace, which in large part powered the YouTube phenom, as the Mercury News notes, News Corp is by far the most savvy at bridging the TV/cable-to-online divide. So much so that they had Google jumping through hoops to land a search and ad-serving deal.
This&That: A lackluster Steve Jobs; Giovanni Rodriguez leaves Eastwick; I'm moderating at LinuxWorld; fun PC facts; UN and Time mention SVW; Zune is not nice; Jobsboard coming on SVW
I ran into a former journalist now a software developer based in Italy who was attending Apple's worldwide developers conference and he said he was shocked by Steve Jobs keynote speech. He said Mr Jobs was having trouble concentrating, was relying on cue cards, and he looked gaunt.
He wondered if Mr Jobs might be sick or affected by medical treatments following his battle with pancreatic cancer. I hope that Mr jobs health is good but I wonder about who could lead Apple if he needed to take a break. I'm not aware of any heirs to the throne.
Apple has not done well under other leaders. When Mr jobs was previously forced out of the company, Apple's fortunes slid further and further under a series of CEOs until he returned and revitalized the company.
Or maybe Mr Jobs has been worn thin by the options investigations, which are also affecting many other Silicon Valley public companies. Here is more from News.com...
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My friend Giovanni Rodriguez recently left Eastwick Communications to start his own venture. He mentioned how scary it is to leave a good job and the risks he is taking. This gave me a perfect opportunity to trot out my favorite pieces of advice:
In Silicon Valley, the biggest risk is in not taking a risk.
Risk is rewarded here. Even if your venture goes down in flames, you are still ahead because others will value that you took a risk. That attitude is a very important factor in Silicon Valley's success: there is a huge tolerance for failure, and massive amounts of failure. Only one in 20 startups succeeds.
In other countries you get to fail only once and then others often will label you a failure--that discourages risks.
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Next week LinuxWorld is in town and I'll be moderating a panel on August 16 at 3pm. From Mike Maney at PageOne, who organized it:
The panelists include Stuart Cohen (CEO of Open Source Development Labs, sponsor of Linus Torvalds), Eben Moglen (founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center and one of the leading voices in the current GPL discussion), and Christine Martino (VP of HP's open source and Linux org).
IBM is gong to be making some big announcements and I spoke with Dan Frye, who heads IBM's Linux Technology Center earlier today for a pre-brief but I can't talk about the announcements until Tuesday.
Dan Frye is based in Portland Oregon, which is starting to be a global center for the open source movement. Intel has its open source labs there, and Mr Frye says that more companies are moving to the area because of the open source community.
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The United Nations is using Silicon Valley Watcher as an example of "Blogs as Journalism" in a UNESCO publication called "The Net for Journalists - A practical guide to the internet for journalists in developing countries" written by Martin Huckerby. I'm flattered! (Hat tip to Tom Abate.)
And Time.com mentioned Silicon Valley Watcher in a report about the jailed video blogger Josh Wolf written by Laura Locke. But Time is very stingy with its links... BTW, another nice piece on Josh is here on News.com.
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It is the 25 year anniversary of the PC. Some fun facts courtesy of Intel (an SVW sponsor).
IBM launched its PC in 1981 using an Intel 8088 microprocessor. The latest Intel microprocessor Core 2 Duo has 10,000 times as many transistors as the 8088.
Eight percent of Internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog. And, 39 percent of Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs – a significant increase since the fall of 2005.
Intel estimates there are nearly 1bn PCs now connected to the Internet.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home," said Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Company, 1977. [SVW: DEC was later acquired by a PC company: Compaq Computer.]
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A Hebrew speaking friend says that Microsoft's Zune MP3 player carries a name that means "you're f@#cked."
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We'll soon have a jobs board on Silicon Valley Watcher! Probably next week...
After Apple announced they would restate all their earnings post-2002, the stock naturally fell but not as much as one might have suspected. Conventional wisdom was that investors were holding out hope that the restatements wouldn't be all that serious. Forget it.
The company anticipates that there will be significant changes in the results of operation for the quarter ended July 1, 2006, compared to the quarter ended June 25, 2005, including significant increases in the Company's revenue and expenses. The Company cannot provide a reasonable estimate of the results because it will likely need to restate its historical financial statments to record non-cash charges for compensation expense related to past stock option grants.
The AP's Michael Liedtke notes that the "irregularities" in the stock options date to 1997 — the same time that Steve Jobs began running the company (again).
Apple has acknowledged its stock option inquiry involves some awards made to Jobs, although the grants were canceled before its chief executive realized any gains.
Some investors nevertheless worry the brewing scandal might distract or, in a worst case scenario, force out Jobs, who is widely viewed as the key to Apple's continuing success. Industry analysts so far seem to believe he will remain on the job and focused on building upon Apple's recent momentum.
More charges against Reyes
p>More trouble for ex-Brocade execs Greg Reyes and Stephanie Jensen. Much more trouble. A day after a judge refused to throw out the backdating charges against them (while acknowledging the charges "could and perhaps should have been more specific"), a federal grand jury returned eight additional counts against the pair, including securities fraud, falsifying records, mail fraud and filing false financial statements that overstated the company's profits, the Mercury reports.
Reyes was also indicted on four additional counts of making false statements to Brocade's auditors, who had probed whether the company routinely rigged prices on stock options to secretly give new employees a head start to potential profits.
Meanwhile Brocade executives including former board member and legal adviser Larry Sonsini agreed to settle a shareholder lawsuit. Auditor KPMG was part of the settlement too.
Under the deal, Brocade's board of directors will appoint either a lead outside director or an independent chairperson, and the company's general counsel will serve as chief compliance officer. Brocade also will pay $525,000 to lawyers representing investors. A settlement hearing is scheduled for Aug. 18.
The UK ban on laptops in planes leaving the UK or transferring through, is going to be a big blow to productivity for business travellers. Flights to the West Coast of California can take 12 hours or more, (equal to one and a half UK business days or one US business day.)
The UK is a major destination for many Silicon Valley executives. And London has been making a big push in Silicon Valley and in southern California to position itself as an ideal place to site European headquarters. Could the laptop ban hurt London's ambitions to attract more companies?
The ban comes in the wake of the discovery by British police of a plot to blow up an airplane.
The laptop ban, however, might enable airlines to offer travellers in-flight rentals of laptops. Users could bring their data and applications on USB flash drives.
MTV is buying SF's Atom Entertainment (Atom Films, Shockwave.com) for the big bucks - $200 million. The Chronicle's Ellen Lee is reporting the acquisition as a sign that the chase is on for media corps to snap up online video sites with an attractive demographic.
Atom has been profitable since 2002, making tens of millions a year, according to CEO Mika Salmi.
"It's a move that brings together two really innovative companies whose sum of their part is going to be pretty significant," sai Allen Weiner of Gartner. Not sure how innovative MTV is these days but they have certainly been going digital.
"We are transforming our company into a television and digital company," MTV CEO Michael Wolf said.
Bad reporter
Wired News has removed three articles from their website written by freelancer Philip Chien, freelance space reporter who has worked for online, print and television news outlets, and recently authored a book on the Columbia space shuttle disaster.
Three stories quoted Robert Ash as a "space historian" and "aeronautical engineer and amateur space historian." But Ash is an aeronautical engineering professor.
Chien's reporting came under scrutiny when he submitted a draft article citing a different source, Ted Collins, along with contact information for Collins, as required by Wired News ever since questions arose last year over another reporter's sources.
An investigation traced the name and Hotmail account provided to a Usenet posting praising Chien's work. Wired News senior editor Kevin Poulsen then compared the IP address of the poster and Chien's computer and discovered they matched. An e-mail sent to Wired News from the Ted Collins account also originated with the same IP address.
Poulsen linked Chien's IP address to at least one other Hotmail account, created under the name Robert Stevens, which Chien had provided to Wired News as contact information for Ash. The name and address were used in additional Usenet posts making positive comments about Chien's work.
Chien has used Robert Stevens as a source in at least three articles published in two newspapers, which we have contacted privately. In each case he used a different description, variously calling him a retired engineer, a NASA engineer and an amateur astronomer.
Justifiable hype
Gartner released its Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle report yesterday and the big three hype sectors are no surprise: Web 2.0, Real World Web and Application Architecture.
Under Web 2.0, Gartner picks "social networking analysis" - using the information and knowledge gathered from people's personal networks to identify target markets - and Ajax as "high impact," Information Week reports.
Real World Web apps are essentially concerned with location awareness. Using GPS and location-aware mobile devices, business applications will create new capabilities for delivering location-based services. For instance, field force management, fleet management, logistics and goods transportation, Gartner said.
Finally, "Event-driven architecture, a form of distributed computing, was expected to reach mainstream adoption in five to 10 years. EDA involves the packaging of discrete functions into modular, encapsulated, shareable components, some of which are triggered by the arrival of one or more event objects, Gartner said."
The place to be Wednesday evening was the GigaOm and Sharpcast launch party. Renee Blodgett did a great job in getting the in-crowd to turn up at club Mighty. I got there late and found the place hopping. The band was too loud for me (the marketing manager's band, not a good idea, if I'd wanted to see a band I'd pay ten bucks) but I had fun hanging outside. Lots of great conversations...
Update: Apologies directly from the Sharpcast guys, from Allen, “We did get the message to turn down, though not until the end of the first set (from on stage you really have no idea how loud it is in the house) - but we did come down in volume considerably at their request and we didn't get any more complaints after that. We certainly weren't going for ear-shattering volumes! Apologies….”
Now I feel like an old codger... :-)
Sharpcast is a cool application, I just signed up for the beta. It gives you access to your photos from any computer or mobile phone and keeps everything synced up automatically. Sounds useful. I wonder how long it will take Yahoo's Flickr to offer such a feature?
Here are some photos courtesy of the indefatigable Dan Farber, senior VP at Cnet/ZDnet and one of the best journalists/editors covering Silicon Valley and beyond.
The place to be Tuesday evening was at the excellent San Jose Museum of Art for the opening reception for the ZeroOne arts festival, featuring a lot of interactive tech-based exhibits and performances.
It's an incredibly ambitious program of events and exhibits and it is happening all over downtown San Jose. It's a great setting, warm summer evenings (unlike cold San Francisco evenings) and broad sidewalks, it creates a wonderful atmosphere for the events.
San Jose is not associated with too many cultural events, mostly it hosts business shows and conferences. And the downtown area is largely shunned by most locals, which is a shame because it it could be a great place to hang out and walk and talk--maybe ZeroOne will help revitalize the downtown area.
Lucaso, our arts and culture editor and team will be down there posting some video and other things on SVW, and also on Diggrz.net, our new artz and culture site that is in development.
The ZeroOne festival builds momentum towards the weekend so pop in and take a look and let me know what you've seen. I'll post it up if you do :-)
Here is a collage of my Tuesday evening:
The ZeroOne San Jose Festival will transform San Jose into the North American epicenter for the intersection of art and digital culture by showcasing the world's most innovative contemporary artists. ZeroOne San Jose is artists making art and using technology as a tool to do so. It is not technology for technology's sake. ZeroOne San Jose is a multi-dimensional, startling and brilliant audience event - with exhibits, live cinema, performances, workshops, and youth activities. All are one-of-a-kind, many never-before, only-here experiences. Here are some details about what you will find at ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge.
RSS guru Niall Kennedy announced yesterday that he's leaving Microsoft out of frustration with lack of support for his syndication work at Microsoft Live. His mission was to build a massive syndication platform for all of Microsoft's users.
"The opportunity presented to me was extremely unique and a way to change how the world interacts with syndication technologies such as RSS, RDF, and Atom. The launch of Windows Live and Ray Ozzie's vision of Internet services disruption made me believe Microsoft was serious about the space ..."
But, he says, if Ozzie and MS that opportunity is simply stuck behind Redmond's need to get Vista out the door.
What do you do when the market responds to your 6 month-old online services strategy by reducing your valuation by 1.5 Yahoos? Windows Live is under some heavy change, reorganization, pullback, and general paralysis and unfortunately my ability to perform, hire, and execute was completely frozen as well.
It's a blogosphere story, for sure, and not one you'll see in the Business page at the Seattle P-I, but Microsoft bloggers are smelling blood in the water.
AccMan Pro: "My sense is the accountants are back in charge of running the farm. This is very bad news because they’ve clearly got a bunch of stock analyst brown nosers rather than number savvy innovators. Of course Microsoft has a duty to its shareholders. But in a world where innovation is currently dominated by the small, often independent vendors, the big boys need a new game plan. That has to include putting innovation on the front burner, not extinguish it altogether."
Anonymous MS insider Mini-Microsoft: "A compelling vision would be great right about now. And not a dorky wired-up clipboard that has seemed to have dematerialized. A vision around making money and doing things that, if I told people sucking on a Frappuccino about, they'd say, "Oooh, that's cool. When can I do that?" And if someone is talented and motivated to get things done, how do you unblock them to make it so?
Regarding Niall's comment that it's easier to get VC money for a new startup that get funded inside Microsoft, Joshua Jaffe: "The danger that the increased flow of venture capital money presents to large companies isn't just the increased likelihood that one of these newly funded startups will eventually dent those companies' businesses. An added danger is that the venture capital money is luring some of those large companies' brightest minds away with the promise of startup success. That migration actually increases the likelihood that the small companies can eventually impact the larger companies' businesses."
ZeroOne San Jose & ISEA2006 Symposium: The SVW video mashup
Here's a quick video introduction to the ZeroOne art fest, which is running in downtown San Jose through the week. Brought to you by Lucaso, SVW's Arts and Culture editor:
Consumer Reports found more than $8bn in online fraud, another $7.8bn spent by consumers to repair or replace computers damaged by spyware and viruses. It is amazing that people still use the Internet and find it useful.
The Consumer Reports figures don't factor in the costs of ad click fraud, which could be as high as one click in eight being fraudulent. Consumers pay because of higher marketing costs by retailers.
And also what about the lost time people spend dealing with viruses, spyware, spam etc. There must be several billions dollars in lost productivity that should be added to the damages caused by fraudsters and spammers. That is a very large bill to pay and it is one that people still seem to be willing to pay because of the other benefits.
But, not everybody is going to be willing to continue to take risks on the Internet and that is a problem that the industry needs to tackle. How do you make it safe for users?
AOL, for example, could have created a walled garden, a safe(r) place for users. Instead it decided to open up to the Internet, an example of it again, choosing the wrong business strategy.
Another approach is to create closed platforms as in the cell phone market. The cell phone service provider chooses the phones, the applications, and handles billing. A cell phone service is a more secure place than the wilds of the Internet.
Why not a Google or Yahoo PC? Or one from another company. It could be inexpensive, it could be sold as a service. And it would have consumer applications such as photo editor, word processor, spreadsheet, etc. It would have a browser but it would only communicate with trusted web sites, Google validated sites, for example. GOOG and YHOO and MSFT already have lots of consumer apps and could easily brand such a system set it up to use its services first, and that would be good enough for 90 per cent of tasks.
And if it used technology such as that from Wyse, it could be set up as a thin computing system and it would be highly secure because a central server would determine what applications it would run, and prevent spyware or any other malware from causing damage or exposing users to fraud.
Consumer Reports: $8bn in online fraud plus $7.8bn in costs due to malware
By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher
[Please note this article replaces the earlier one which was a draft and was mistakenly published too soon.]
There has been $8bn of online fraud over the past two years says Consumer Reports in a new investigation that claims one in three Internet users will become a "cybervictim."
In addition, consumers spent $7.8bn on new computers and repairs because of problems caused by viruses and spyware.
Those that fall prey to phishing, in which fraudsters mimic a bank's web site for example, lose an average of $850, a five-fold increase compared with $165 in 2005.
Consumer Reports National Research Center compiled the report from a nationally representative sample of 2,000 households with Internet access.
Here are some findings from Consumer Reports:
Twenty-nine percent of survey respondents said a virus, spyware, or phishing scam caused serious computer problems and/or financial losses in the last two years. And based on survey projections, virus infections prompted an estimated 2.6 million households to replace their computers in the past two years. Additionally, 35% of survey respondents didn’t use software to block or remove spyware. And CR projects that 2.4 million US households with broadband remain unprotected by a firewall.
Spam
The incidence of heavy spam remains as elevated as last year. Survey results indicate that about 795,000 households continued to buy products advertised through spam. Additionally, in 8% of the households surveyed that had children under 18, a child had inadvertently seen pornographic material as a result of spam.
Viruses
The frequency of virus-induced problems is at the same high level as last year. In the latest survey, 39% of respondents reported a virus infection in the past 2 years. Of those, 34% had to reformat their hard drives; 16% permanently lost important data; and 8% had to replace hardware.
Spyware
In the past six months spyware prompted nearly a million U.S. households to replace their computers. Among survey respondents, two of the biggest risk factors for spyware infection were using file-sharing software (like Kazaa) and having minors at home who go online. In homes where children under 18 used the Internet, there was a 28% greater incidence of spyware infection in the past six months than in other homes.
Phishing
Only 8% of respondents submitted personal information in response to conventional phishing e-mails. But the median cost of a phishing incident is up substantially at $850 versus $165 in 2005. New variants on phishing have emerged. “Pharming” infects a computer so that even if you type in a legitimate Web address you’re redirected to a fraudulent site. “Spear phishing” targets email addresses stolen from a company.
Consumer Reports rated commercially available software packages that are designed to protect Internet users from threats. It also created its own computer viruses for the tests. Zone Labs Zone Alarm Internet Security Suite came out top in the tests. Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security also did well. Spybot for antispyware was also highly rated.
Score another MSM takedown for right-wing bloggers. Reuters has pulled two photos of the Israel-Hezbollah War taken by Lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj. Most egregiously, the first photo shows obvious and heavy-handed Photoshop-like cloning of smoke plumes created by Israeli bombing of Hezbollah leaders' residences. Right-wing bloggers, always on the lookout for evidence of left-wing bias in the media immediately flagged the suspicious image.
The doctored photo
The original photo
littlegreenfootballs, which was instrumental in the takedown of Dan Rather, was quick to point out the similarities between the two episodes, namely that the doctoring was so sloppy that even "guys in their pajamas" (to quote Rather) could see it.
It’s so incredibly obvious, it reminds me of the faked CBS memos. Smoke simply does not contain repeating symmetrical patterns like this, and you can see the repetition in both plumes of smoke. There’s really no question about it.
So does this mean that the liberal media is out to spin the war against Israel? Or at least that Reuters photo editors intentionally pass over fraud obvious to amateurs? Perhaps the answer has more to do with economics than politics. MSM-basher Ace of Spades writes:
Reuters has some explaining to do. The whole MSM has some explaining to do. But they will do no explaining, and ask no questions, and embargo the story, because they cannot admit that they have cut foreign budgets to such a degree tthey now rely almost entirely on local stringers of questionable objectivity and integrity for the bulk of their foreign reportage.
If you look at these pages, the bloggers are very conservative. They have an obvious axe to grind. But their near-obsessional dedication to rooting out fraud in the media yields results. Stories like these put the media in a defensive position. They will now overcompensate to show that they are not politically motivated, left-wing, or anti-Israel, even though current coverage is hardly pro-Hezbollah.
The episode shows the short-sightedness of cutting back editorial staff and forcing the most seasoned reporters into early retirement. Since the economic model apparently can't sustain the level of accuracy required, and the bloggers have now established a zero-tolerance policy for errors, there is only one choice. Find a way to include bloggers, "citizen journalists," and a multitude of content providers with varying political agendas - and somehow melt them all together with professional journalists into a mix that has a better self-correction mechanism.
I really think the media cannot just continue to keep cutting reporters, editors and producers and maintain credibility. But the citizen journalism efforts have largely tanked - or shortly will, while YouTube goes crazy. Perhaps Big News will cease to be an industry and will find itself flowing int the digital media ocean.
Today begins ZeroOne San Jose & ISEA 2006 Symposium, a global festival of art from the edge. The city of San Jose will be transformed into an interactive playground with more than 150 international artists participating and plenty of opportunities for YOU to get involved. The festival runs until August 13th, with a daily schedule of events, exhibits, workshops, performances and chats that will make you dizzy.
Here is the list of featured artists and ticket information. Look for video coverage of the event from the SVW team throughout the week.
Restating earnings is never a good thing. Even worse when the SEC is investigating all of Silicon Valley and an internal investigation has already shown that improper options were offered to chief executive. Thus sits Apple Computer and CEO Steve Jobs as its stock plummets today, down 6.4% at the noontime bell.
Following up on an announcement in late June that internal investigators had uncovered "irregularities related to the issuance of certain stock option grants made between 1997 and 2001," Apple yestertoday dropped a bombshell:
[T]he Company will likely need to restate its historical financial statements to record non-cash charges for compensation expense relating to past stock option grants. The Company has not determined the amount of such charges, the resulting tax and accounting impact, or which periods may require restatement. Accordingly, the Company today filed a Form 8-K stating that the financial statements and all earnings and press releases and similar communications issued by the Company relating to periods commencing on September 29, 2002 should therefore not be relied upon.
Apple is delaying its quarterly 10-Q statement until it sorts out the proper accounting and has hired outside counsel to further investigate.
While the June announcement covered 1997 to 2001, yesterday's news broadens the investigation to include the iPod years: 2002 forward to the present. That means, points out BusinessWeek:
Some of the years when Apple showed lean profits—specifically its fiscal years 2002 and 2003—would appear to be at risk of becoming loss-making years. Apple had reported a $65 million profit on sales of $3.2 billion for fiscal 2002 and a $69 million profit on sales of $3.6 billion for 2003. Profits swelled to $276 million in 2004 and $1.3 billion in 2005, propelled by staggering iPod sales and a recovery of the market for its Macintosh personal computers.
All this in the context of a massive SEC sweep of the Valley, which Wednesday led to the arraignment of ex-Brocade CEO Greg Reyes. And Apple announced that a stock option grant of 27.5 million shares to Jobs was problematic, although Jobs later cancelled the deal. So is Steve Jobs liable for Apple's misfeasance here? Could he be forced from the company, or be following Reyes to prison?
Unlikely, says American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu. As reported in AppleInsider, Wu pointed out to clients that Jobs wouldn't have been involved in the backdating decisions. "The reason being the compensation committee at Apple is run by an independent board that is not comprised of employees of Apple."
By contrast, Reyes, on the advice of Larry Sonsini (also an adviser to Apple), was set up as a "committee of one," which seems to have exposed him to his current criminal liability.
I just got out of a meeting with Jellyfish, a shopping engine with a unique business model that bypasses the pay-per-click based economy of most commercial sites. If the Jellyfish approach works, it could go a long way to cutting down on the deluge of advertising and spamming.
It also addresses some aspects of the "attention economy" that Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls, and others have been discussing.
"The Internet experience is becoming diminished by all the efforts to gain pay-per-click revenue. We have a value per action model that is based on final sale, and I think over the next five years the Internet will move to that kind of sales-based model," says Mark McGuire, co-founder and president of Jellyfish.
"We share 50 percent of our revenues with shoppers," says Mr McGuire "Shoppers see a list of prices from retailers, their final cost and how much rebate they will get from us." (On a $180 digital camera shoppers can get a rebate of about $5.)
Retailers only pay Jellyfish when a sale is made, which makes it risk-free for the more than 1,000 retailers on the site. An advantage of this type of reward system is that it cannot be gamed as in the pay-per-click model where an auction and search engine placement determine retailer costs.
Jellyfish relies on uploads of data from the retailers rather than crawling sites, such as Become.com, Froogle, and other sites. This type of data is cleaner and easy to organise. And the behavioral data it collects is used to provide repeat visitors with a more targeted shopping experience. And they share in the value of that behavioral data through rebates from Jellyfish.
I asked if the revenue split is after expenses. "No, it is top line revenue. That's why we chose the name Jellyfish, we want to be completely transparent. You get half of what we receive and we will pay it out as cash as soon as it reaches $10."
This is a fascinating business model because it rewards customer loyalty plus the behavioral data collected could result in exposure to fewer, but highly targeted ads; and the customer shares in the sales commissions--that's a double value to users.
I'd love to try out this type of approach in helping to monetise journalism. For example, if a type of Jellyfish version of Google AdSense were used, the producer of a news story with Jellyfish ads next to it could share in the final sales revenues.
Those revenues should be much better than the pay-per-click revenues AdSense shares with web sites, and it could also result in fewer ads needed to support the costs of content production.
Jellyfish launched as a beta in June, and Mr McGuire says there are some interesting initiatives coming out in the next few months, that will try to build on the "value per action" business model.
Google is paying the non-profit AP news service for rights to publish its content. The size of the deal and other details have not been disclosed.
This could help many other content producers to strike similar deals. However, because the terms are unknown, Google has a key advantage in negotiating similar content deals.
Google has been coming under pressure to pay content producers and it is being sued by AFP (Agence France-Presse). Its defense is that it is protected by "fair use" laws and that it sends traffic to the content owner's web sites.
However, financially challenged and hard-pressed newspapers, and other publishers, aren't very good at selling online advertising. This means Google's claim of sending traffic to a news organisations offers them little in compensation because they cannot monetize the increase in traffic well.
Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch managed to extract a few nuggets of information from various clues and sources. He says the deal is not a pay per click model but is related to a new service Google is planning.
The 24-year-old freelance videographer and blogger (www.joshwolf.net was not responding to repeated attempts as I write this) went to jail yesterday for refusing to turn over to a federal grand jury unpublished video of a 2005 clash between demonstrators and SF police. Prosecutors were investigating the arson of a police car, they said.
At first glance, the case seemed to me as "slam dunk" as the judge, US District Judge William Alsup, said it was. According to the Chronicle, he said:
"Every person, from the president of the United States down to you and me, has to give information to the grand jury if the grand jury wants it."
High-flown words and an accurate statement of law, but then one wonders, isn't the burning of a SF cop car a local matter? It is - and it's one that apparently the SF DA didn't bother to investigate. So how did Josh Wolf wind up in federal court?
The government's argument is that the SFPD receives federal terrorism dollars from Washington, therefore crimes against the police are crimes against the United States
That's a very shaky argument. It essentially says that the Justice Dept. can step in at any time and say that any crime against any local agency that receives any federal funds - and the Dept. of Homeland Security has been littering the country with antiterrorism funds (there are, for instance, over 8,000 target sites in Indiana, 40% more than in New York).
But since the case is in federal court, Wolf has to make the case that he qualifies as a journalist and that federal law would protect him if he is. "We're not going to have Mr. Wolf or any reporters covering protests. Confidential sources are not going to come forward. They (journalists) are going to be viewed as investigative arms of the government," his lawyer said.
But this is mostly nonsense. The video is of events on public streets. No confidential sources were involved. As much as Wolf might wish for a federal shield law it doesn't exist.
Even so, there is a big problem with the jailing of Josh Wolf. The Justice Dept. shouldn't be permitted to make local crimes federal issues. Conservatives should be screaming states' rights over this.
This is a very scary premise that is being used all over the country by the feds. Did the event happen on a highway, well that’s Federal Land? Did it happen in a library that gets federal funding? Under this math, where aren’t federal dollars spent? I really don’t like this abuse of jurisdiction, especailly when the definition of terrorist is very different that what the average American would say.
Josh Wolf is in prison because he has violated the law as it stands. Laws that he thinks are unjust. So much so that he’s willing to screw up his whole life just to say in the loudest voice that he can that our federal law enforcement has gotten off track. What would I do in the situation, I don’t know. But Josh has made his decision and I respect it immensely.
Wolf will surely appeal the case - indeed he asked the judge to delay his incarceration until it could be brought to the Ninth Circuit - but the judge declined.
I met with Logitech on Tuesday to see their Fall lineup of mice, keyboards, speakers, headphones, and webcams. I cannot write about the specs and the prices of the products just yet - they are under embargo. But I can say that I was impressed by company's consistent ability to each year come up with many new products, and innovations, in categories that you might think were already well served.
There are a couple of flagship products coming from Logitech that are going to be well worth taking a look at. In particular, a high-end mouse with new types of controls, and also a high-end webcam that is bound to be a hit. Logitech manages to hit the sweet spot in pricing, too.
And every year I ask the same question: why don't you make a compact keyboard? I have used notebook computers as my main and only system for more than ten years because I like the form factor. My notebook sits tethered to the same power socket for much of the time, occasionally I take it with me. But it is the form factor that I love, (plus being able to use two screens) and it puzzles me why Logitech and others don't make compact keyboards without the numeric keypad.
Logitech says that people want the numeric keypad and that's why they make keyboards that would take up half my desk space. But surely they are missing the fact that many more people are now using their notebook computers as their main system and that this shows they are choosing a compact keyboard?
- - -
BTW kudos to Logitech for helping to continue the work of the inventor of the mouse, (and much, much more) Doug Engelbart. Here is an account of my meeting with Doug Engelbart a year ago:
Introducing a couple of new bloggers, this time from Wall Street roots, (I guess the East Coast has started noticing the influence of blogging!). I've always said that blogging is by far and away the most honest form of self-promotion out there, because if you can't walk your talk online, it becomes readily apparent.
Check out Tom Berquist with one of the first CFO blogs, and also insider Wall Street perspectives from Roger Ehrenberg:
Tom Berquist, the former star Wall Street software analyst, now CFO of Ingres, the open source enterprise database company has launched one of the first CFO blogs. Most companies are extremely concerned about SEC disclosure rules so who better to blog than the CFO?!
Here is Tom's blog called "On the Line" and an extract:
Everything that I know about the software industry: client/server applications, perpetual license models, complex on-site implementations, call center based support models, proprietary technology advantages, available financing, endless IPO exits—is under attack. Yet I fundamentally believe that organizations need innovative software now more than ever—consolidation is not the answer (sorry Oracle), rather, faster innovation and more rapid deployment of new technologies is the answer (sorry Microsoft).
So why did I go to Ingres? It turns out that Ingres is a perfect test case for the new software business model—open source licensing, web demand creation, service and support offerings, subscription revenue accounting, and community development and support. We are not the only test case for the new software business model. In fact, two well known companies that share our business model include Red Hat and Salesforce.com. However, we are dramatically different from traditional software vendors such as Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM’s software group. I’ll be discussing our business model in more detail in future posts.
Also, Roger Ehrenberg, president of Monitor110, launched Information Arbitrage, providing excellent insights into the the shadow and light of Wall Street. His reasons for jumping into blogging...
After spending 17 years on Wall Street I decided to take a different path, throwing myself into the world of entrepreneurship at the intersection of Wall Street and the internet. I have spent the last two years immersing myself in the tools, technologies and approaches for extracting and analyzing information taken from the web, specifically with an eye towards better understanding the future of data and its applications to investment.
Having lived in this world for some time, and having a lot of things to say, it began to feel strange that I was not personally participating as a contributor to the bubbling online dialogue. It is much the same mind-set that I had in the investment business – how can I be in the investment business without actually being an investor, and feeling the same ups, downs, fears and concerns as whose with whom I work?
Starting a blog and actually creating content seemed like a logical way to accomplish several goals: developing deeper empathy and understanding of the millions of individuals making up the collective brain of the internet; gaining a clearer sense of the power and limitations of the online medium; and creating an insider perspective of where this tectonic shift in global communications could lead and how this knowledge could be applied to the business of investment.
Here is Convergence Redux a great post on the culture cash gap between hedge fund and private equity managers and Carlyle's plans!
This is where culture and cash really get into it. You have a bunch of senior people with huge egos with the same company name on the business card. They each have giant bank accounts and the trappings of financial success. But one set of guys gets a few million bucks a year and then a big wad of cash 5-7 years later, while the other set of guys get $25 million a year, every year, right now. How do you reconcile this fundamental structural difference between private equity and hedge funds? Insanely hard if not impossible.
When I started blogging, this was useful advice from my good buddy Om Malik of GigaOm: "Dude, you write too long!" It remains good advice to new bloggers.
I tend to write long, but my posts are getting shorter over time. I do cut out a lot, even though it is tough to do, especially if there is a nifty turn of phrase in the copy :-)
As the SEC and other law enforcement agencies investigate whether executives and companies committed crimes by backdating stock options, the list of Silicon Valley companies under investigation looks like a client list of one firm: Wilson Sonsini.
Actually, that's something of an overstatement: Sonsini represents just under half of the Valley companies under investigation, according to a
NY Times profile of Larry Sonsini, described as the Valley's "most feared and sought-after
lawyer," (reporter Gary Rivlin), "the most powerful person in Silicon
Valley," (investment banker Sanford Robertson), a better deal-maker than lawyer, and a great lawyer.
While Sonsini was untouched during the dot-bomb meltdown and accounting scandals of a few years back, the current spreading scandal may be enough to tarnish Sonsini's untouchable reputation, Rivlin suggests. Specifically, what liability if any does Sonsini have for his advice to ex-Brodade CEO Gregory Reynes? Wilson Sonsini served as outside counsel to Brocade and Sonsini sat on Brocade's board until last year.
Prosecutors have accused [Reyes]
of defrauding not only investors but also its board by doctoring
documents, including board minutes. ... [P]rosecutors, questioned at a news
conference, said that they had not ruled out the possibility that Mr.
Sonsini could be charged at a later date."
Reyes says Sonsini urged the board to make Reyes a "committee of one" to dole out options as he wished in 1999. The next he heard from the board, he claims, was after a disgruntled former employee threatened to file a whistleblower suit in 2004 alleging improprieties related to options.
After an investigation, Reyes says Sonsini persuaded him to resign because the evidence pointing to him was "overwhelming and conclusive." Only after Reyes had seen the evidence and, unimpressed, tried to rescind his resignation did Sonsini reveal that Brocade's outside auditor had refused to certify Brocade's financials with Reyes as CEO, says Reyes. His argument: that members of the board overstated his role in order to deflect the auditor's attention from themselves.
Sonsini offered the Times this non-denial denial: ""I'm not so sure the committee-of-one didn't exist before
becoming counsel to Brocade."
At Spot-On, Chris Nolan sees the Brocade investigation as signs that the SEC is dealing proactively with Bubble 2.0 even as it prosecutes on 1.0.
The U.S. government - finally! - means business when it comes to how Silicon Valley conducts its affairs. For Bubble 2.0 the valley is going to have to join the real world, you know the one with real, regulator oversight, non-partisan legal advice and objective accounting? That real world, the one in which the rest of American businesses are located.
... Remember, the government regulates white collar crime by example. That's why they're stepping in now - they can see Bubble 2.0 as clearly as the rest of us. And while much of what Silicon Valley will say in response to the investigations, the investigators, the scandals, the indictment and the possible convictions may well be true - it doesn't matter. This is how regulation is enforced and laws are interpreted.
Jay Rosen, over at Press Think - Ghost of democracy in the media machine is proposing a hybrid form of professional and citizen media. And Craig Newmark of Craigslist is offering $10k from his foundation to test the idea.
In simplest terms, a way to fund high-quality, original reporting, in any medium, through donations to a non-profit called NewAssignment.Net.
The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion; it employs professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards so the work holds up. There are accountability and reputation systems built in that should make the system reliable. The betting is that (some) people will donate to works they can see are going to be great because the open source methods allow for that glimpse ahead.
In this sense it’s not like donating to your local NPR station, because your local NPR station says, “thank you very much, our professionals will take it from here.” And they do that very well. New Assignment says: here’s the story so far. We’ve collected a lot of good information. Add your knowledge and make it better. Add money and make it happen. Work with us if you know things we don’t.
There is more about this on the site, tons and tons more. I think this approach would work only for select stories that would benefit from a large number of people helping in researching the story.
This is not a solution for creating news on a daily, hourly, minute schedule. This is overly complex, it is news editing by committee, and the funders will likely always have agendas.
Also, the business model issue is not addressed.
Craig Newmark's support for this project is interesting. I'm a big fan of Mr Newmark and regularly bump into him at events in San Francisco but I'm puzzled why he often appears as a commentator on the topics of mainstream media and citizens journalism. As far as I know, he appears to have no special credentials or expertise to comment on these topics, anymore than anyone.
Mr Newmark is a software engineer and his site, Craigslist, is an excellent online classified ads site without the journalism. How does this make him into an expert on "the media?" He is certainly an expert on classified ads.
Intel's recent launch of its Core 2 Duo microprocessors seems to have contributed to a big inventory buildup of older Intel microprocessors and chipsets as customers wait for the new chips. According to Rosemary Farrell, analyst at iSuppli, the market research company, there is a massive chip inventory glut of $2bn, and most of it belongs to Intel.
Intel’s excess inventories of these parts carried over from the first quarter. However, the problem worsened in the second quarter when Intel instituted price cuts to clear out lingering inventory in advance of its new product launches. This triggered a price war with rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).
“With more reductions expected from Intel and AMD, customers have been placing smaller, more-frequent orders than normal in order to delay volume buys until they can get the best pricing,” Farrell said. “Because of this, inventory will remain in Intel and AMD’s hands for a longer period than usual.”
For Intel, this means additional weight is being added to its already-bloated stockpiles. Inventory is expected to begin to decline in the third quarter as sales of its new microprocessors and chipsets take off. However, the company’s surplus will linger into 2007, iSuppli predicts.
Many PC customers are likely waiting for computers with the Core microprocessors, offering higher performance and less power consumption. The back-to-school season should be interesting to watch. Everytime chip prices fall, it always boosts markets because computing devices become more affordable. This is how the digital divide will be chipped away.
Two years ago, on a sunny afternoon walking along Geary Street in San Francisco, I was thinking: where was the disruption from the Internet? The Internet is an incredibly powerful technology, surely more powerful than the PC, yet where was its disruptive effect?
PC technologies caused a lot of disruption, and forced so many tech companies out of business. But where was the same carnage caused by Internet technologies?
Surely, this was a more powerful technology than microprocessors and PCs? Yet the same tech companies were still there, HP, Intel, Cisco, etc. Yes, some had disappeared but that was more to do with mergers and acquisitions that are common in maturing sectors.
And the dotcom dotbomb startup failures were a creation of those times, so they don't count in accounting for disruption. Where were the established industry sectors, whose business models were being taken apart?
As I walked and pondered this, I had a realization that almost made faint, it literally made me feel weak at the knees. I realized that I was looking for the disruption in the tech sector, but I was looking in the wrong place.
I realized that the disruption was happening in the media sector. Year after year media companies were continuing to layoff thousands of people, advertising revenues were falling 30 percent every quarter, and things continued to get worse.
This was were business models were under attack, this was where an entire industry was being forced to change to a new economic reality, this was where we can see the Internet as a truly disruptive technology: you can see the train wreck happening in front of you but you cannot get out of the way.
The disruption is happening in the media sector because the Internet is a media technology, it enables publishing and distribution. Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, etc, are all media companies, they publish pages of content and advertising.
This realization has become important in my thinking and analysis of trends. And now, with this next stage, what I call Internet 2.0 (not web 2.0 because it is more than just web) the disruptive effect will be even larger.
It will affect more companies because we now have a two-way media technology. During Internet 1.0 we were able to publish outwards to any computer with a browser. This time, our media technologies such as blogging, etc, enable us to publish back inwards from any computer screen with a browser. We get to play on either side of the glass computer screen.
And this time around, every company is a media company to a greater or lesser degree. Because every company tells stories, it publishes to its customers, to its staff, to its new hires. We now have two-way media technologies and those that can adapt and master those technologies, and become technology-enabled media companies, will survive.
Because every company is a media company, the disruptive effects of Internet 2.0--a media technology on steroids--will be so much greater than from Internet 1.0. And we've only just begun.
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Comments
Sandy Kotch on Startups In LA... Building The West Coast Corridor Of Innovation - 1400 miles Long
I love the feeling of innovation for 1400 miles- that is the West Coast! Having moved from San Francisco to Santa Monica in the late 90s and being in start-up modes with companies for a majority of that time, it is great to confirm my true feelings all along - that we are in the innovative crux: California! Couldn't agree more that the creative energy in LA is bound to drive the technology here, it is a great place to be - although often expensive to do business!
Tom Foremski on Social Media Is Not About Conversations... It's About Something Much More Amazing
David: I don't think the problem is finding a new term for a stilted conversation, but that 'conversation' is misleading when applied to social media because it's about something that is much more exciting and amazing. Conversation is a red herring when it comes to understanding this next phase of the Internet...
David Shantz on Social Media Is Not About Conversations... It's About Something Much More Amazing
I beleive that the nomenclatures may be what's failing us.
None of our current lexicon really fits exactly:
A CONVERSATION is really an exchange of ideas, with each response being dependant on the other and with the overall context...
A DISCOURSE is more of a formal debate.
PUBLICATION is as you say, to make content available publicly (but seems not to have enough emphasis on exhange)
Perhaps we need a new word.
"Publicly sharing an idea that is
Doug Millison on Social Media Is Not About Conversations... It's About Something Much More Amazing
I enjoyed reading this. McLuhan is worth re-reading, especially his book THE MECHANICAL BRIDE. Digital media are bringing us back to something like the manuscript era, where readers were usually writers who compiled their own books. Now we're creating & compiling our own "books" -- sometimes we call them "blogs" -- by mixing text & image & sound/music online. My "prose+comics scrapbook" format makes this explicit & ushers in a new, interactive scribal epoque, as we let readers become co-cr
Bud Gibson on Social Media Is Not About Conversations... It's About Something Much More Amazing
I agree with your bounds on what constitutes non-conversation, but somewhere in between is conversation. Ten to fifteen comments is often quite interactive. There are also side conversations that can happen in those large comment streams you mention. I've particularly seen this in some buzz threads.
Another small point of contention: you're using a term, publishing, which is increasingly becoming archaic. I tend to think of it as having been replaced by three distinct activities:
Seth Grimes on Social Media Is Not About Conversations... It's About Something Much More Amazing
Personally, I think "conversation" works quite nicely, but I'd guess I'd define "conversation" more expansively than you do. Actually, I kind of like the WordNet definition: "the use of speech for informal exchange of views or ideas or information etc." (http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=conversation), which fits what we're doing on/with social media.
In any case, I wouldn't get hung up on conversation/publication. Isn't the point that social media supports both back-and-f
Dave Kellogg on Social Media Is Not About Conversations... It's About Something Much More Amazing
I love the McLuhan quote.
If you read the comment streams on blogs, it's usually not a conversation.
It's usually what an old boss of mine used to call "parallel independent conversations" which is very much in line with the notion of two-way publishing.
Chris Dymond on Social Media Is Not About Conversations... It's About Something Much More Amazing
Question for me is: is it sufficient and to the greatest benefit for legal frameworks to simply consider social media as publishing, or should they adapt to consider a new category - something like a 'permanent conversation'?
In other words should it hold people accountable in the same way it does when the act of publishing and hence the motivations of the publisher are clear? Seems to me that the normative effect of maintaining that legal stance will be to force a change in behaviou
Andrew on Farmville valued $1B More Than Twitter By The Smart Money
The Microsoft deal with Facebook included an advertising deal--the $240M was for a share of the company and for the ad deal.
Thus, saying they bought at a valuation of $15B is significantly inaccurate.
Tom Foremski on Tech Giants Struggle With Copy And Paste...
George, sarcasm sometimes gets lost in translation, my apologies.
Daphne on Analysis: Could $GOOG Face Problems Outside Of China For Its Opposition To Chinese Government?
The Chinese governement has this stigma attached to it, basically don't mess with them. If google is mad enough to take them on, I wouldn't put it past them buying google and sacking the moron who made the decision.
George on Tech Giants Struggle With Copy And Paste...
And that significant lead will result from...adding something Apple has already added?
And that make sense to you?
Steve "@PodcastSteve" Lubetkin on Dirty Little Secrets: Social Media Is Terrible At Promoting Products
Tom, you and I are of the same mind on this. I am so tired of reading blogs or listening to podcasts or watching video embeds about social media people using social media to talk about social media. I really want to hear about specific business uses of social media. As I've said frequently, we need to remember that these tools are just communications channels, and we'll all be better off when we reach that day when it will sound really silly to hear a news headline like "Tom Foremski used Twi
Tom Nocera on Analysis: Financial Times Says GOOG Has Detailed Plans To Close China Search
An excellent analysis, Tom Foremski. I think there could be a great long term benefit for Google by its foray into China. By the timing of its very prominent presence there, coming during the great boom in Internet usage and awareness, Google's retreat, may become a kind of catalyst in the long term memories of tech savvy Chinese...the leaders of tomorrow. I forecast a triumphant return for Google one day, and it will be without the curse of censorship which only helps governments to contro
Jonathan Mendez on Why Ad Networks And Exchanges Will Never Help Publishers
Great post. I believe publishers can have advertising supported businesses. In fact I don't think that's debatable. First though they need better tools to leverage their audience data and their own ad matching systems. Essentially they need to build a new improved display channel. New pub controlled networks could then emerge that would crush the performance of what exists today. Then all the margin eating middle men would vanish and both ends of the transaction get yet more value from the m
Tom Foremski on Is the Future Of News Dependent On The Generosity Of Billionaire Philanthropists?
Eric, What's wrong with making a reasonable profit as a news organization? I agree with you that there is a race to the bottom going on because the econopmics of online news continue to worsen.
At some point, we have to figure out how to reward news organizations doing a good job otherwise we are in serious trouble as a society. That's what I would like to see Mr Hellman's money go towards -- figuring out a solution to one of the most difficult problems we have.
There's not
Tom Foremski on Techmeme's Gabe Rivera Is More Editor Than Aggregator...
Gabe: You should get a press pass and if you don't, you should ban SXSW stories from Techmeme. (SXSW gets very noisy, you'd be doing us all a big favor :)
Gabe on Techmeme's Gabe Rivera Is More Editor Than Aggregator...
Tom, two points:
1. You are a strange man.
2. Press passes cost $299? You sure? In any case I wasn't offered one. Please reread my tome on this matter: http://twitter.com/gaberivera/status/10238453895
Eric Westby on Is the Future Of News Dependent On The Generosity Of Billionaire Philanthropists?
Money is neither noble or ignoble. It is value-neutral.
You seem convinced that this project will be exclusively funded by the ultra-rich; obviously BANP's hope is that the community will step up and slowly allow the organization to be weaned off Hellman's seed money. I wish them luck -- but to be honest, the track record for local endeavors of this type isn't great so far. Still, I respect them for removing the profit motive, which can be corrosive and lead to a "race to the bottom"
Tom Foremski on Techmeme's Gabe Rivera Is More Editor Than Aggregator...
Danny: I agree... But press passes aren't free this year. They cost $299. Gabe can afford $299.