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December 2006 Archives

December 31, 2006

12.31.06: Free Culture Foundation

Received this press release this morning:

The Free Culture Foundation was launched today to promote and protect cultural freedoms. The Foundation provides an accessible, independent introduction to the free culture movement, now a global phenomenon thanks to the Creative Commons licenses, organisations like Open Business and artists like the Beastie Boys.

The Foundation defines 'free culture' in terms of four simple principles: the freedom to use, create, share and learn. In recognition of the controversy surrounding the Creative Commons licenses (apparently they have been criticized by the media industry for tricking artists into giving away their rights and the free software community has criticized them for allowing limitations on re-use), the Foundation's new web site presents a set of essays that discuss precisely what these might mean. Future plans include packaging free art for free software users and commissioning a set of essays to explain the issues.

Rob Myers, digital artist, said "we fill a gap left by the likes of Creative Commons, popularising a coherent set of principles. We don't pretend to have all the answers, but want people to think more about how technology and the law help or hinder our ability to watch films, write novels, share music with friends and learn to paint."

December 22, 2006

12.22.06: Screen shots from P2P TV Venice Project

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Om has screen shots from the still pre-beta Venice Project, a P2P TV start-up created by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

In an interview with Om in October, Friis explained:

Television is the most powerful mass medium, and we are trying to do is marry the best of television with the best of internet. What people love about the television is the story telling. What people don’t like is television that is locked in linear time. We want to try and preserve the best bits of television, and discard bits people don’t care for.

People like the freedom of choice and like freedom from choice. For example, channels are good, because they define the content. Today, the channels are locked in legacy infrastructure, but on broadband the channels are not locked in time.

That’s what the Venice Project is doing. What we have done is created a streaming P2P platform for television. This is a platform, which is good for content owners, for advertisers and of course the viewers. Since there are no borders on the Internet, this is a global platform. Sometimes we think content owners have legal reasons to restrict content locally and the technology allows them to do that.

It's hard to tell about the quality based on the screen shots. We'll take Om's word for it:

The visuals on a Lenovo T60 with a 15.2-inch screen were stunning and crisp. The streams came through without a problem and there was very little jitter. Still, no point hooking it up to a big screen TV… just yet! There isn’t LIVE TV content on the service right now and most of what is there consists of meager offerings streaming off the Venice Project servers. So you can’t truly judge how good this service will be when it comes to “live” broadcasts just yet.

But, Om points out there is a content problem.

Unlike Skype which had “forced viral distribution” built into its business model, this one needs content… a lot of quality content. Large media companies, globally, would like to get their pound of flesh from the Venice Project (now that the Skype boys are all rich, they can pay right!). The technology certainly works, and for content providers - say the Disney and Viacoms of the world - this is a pretty good thing. It frees them up from the carriage providers and gives them a global audience.

So is this a YouTube-killer, as Gizmodo's Jason Chen has it?

Do people care how the data is getting from the host to them? No. That's exactly why peer to peer will definitely win over a centralized, YouTube approach. By cutting down on bandwidth costs (they're mostly from the users), the Venice Project can have much higher quality video. Just like with Skype, what do people care that their call or video is going through Zimbabwe before getting to them? The only thing that's important is that the quality is there, and the content is there. All that the Venice Project needs now is content.

British Queen plans Xmas Podcast

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

I'm enjoying being in London and it is interesting that blogging and the whole "citizen media" movement is largely absent from daily discussions. But that's not surprising since culture moves slowly.

Podcasting, however, is much more popular, and has been enthusiastically adopted by large institutions such as the BBC, and now, the Royal Family.

The Queen, 80 years old, is planning to release a podcast of her Xmas speech. The Queen's speech is very much a core traditional element of the British Xmas experience, delivered mid-afternoon on Christmas day.

The podcast was the Queen's idea, as is the content of her speech. This year the theme will be nurturing the young, and respect for the elderly.

Can dotMobi break the stranglehold of the wireless Telcos?

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

Accessing the Internet from cell phones is possible but the experience is poor. Mobile web browser performance is clunky, few web sites are designed for cell phone access, and the customer bill can be astronomical.

I recently spoke with Alexa Raad, who heads up marketing and business development at dotMobi, a startup whose mission is to make the mobile Internet an everyday reality instead of an expensive curiosity. A key part of its strategy is establishing the domain name extension .mobi to designate web sites that support mobile browsers.

But why should businesses buy a .mobi extension when their web servers already detect the type of browser and can be set up to automatically serve up a mobile version of a web page?

"The extension tells users that the web site supports mobile browsers and conforms to standards that guarantee a fast download and probably has low access costs," says Ms Raad. "Some web pages can cost users as much as $10 to download because they aren't designed for mobile devices or the developers aren't aware of the costs."

The operators of .mobi web sites agree to abide by three mandatory rules: no use of frames on the web sites because these are difficult to render by mobile web browsers; no use of the www prefix in the name of the web site; use of XML in creating web sites. If these rules aren't met, dotMobi has the right to revoke the use of the .mobi extension.

These are very easy conditions to meet, and most regular web sites would already be compliant anyway, because these are best practices for any kind of site. This doesn't mean they would be mobile-friendly.

To produce web sites that load fast on mobile devices, and won't cost users a fortune in data costs, takes much more effort. That's why dotMobi has created free development packages and support forums for developers to cut the cost of creating .mobi sites. Tools include ways to calculate the cost of downloading a web page depending upon the data package of the wireless carrier.

The company is funded by Nokia, Microsoft, Vodafone and other strategic investors. The money is used to create the development tools, plus there is revenue from registering .mobi and common extensions.

"We want to make sure that the user experience with .mobi sites is good. We don't want a few bad apples spoiling the neighborhood, that's why we will cancel registrations if web site owners don't abide by mandatory rules," says Ms Raad.

But the biggest obstacle to the realization of dotMobi's mission are the wireless carriers. They have stuck customers with hundreds of dollars in charges because of complex Internet data packages. Combined with the poor performance of mobile browsers, many early users of the mobile Internet have already been turned off from the experience.

Ms Raad is very much aware of this issue, but hopes that the wireless carriers will come up with inexpensive Internet access packages. "Europe is much further ahead in this area than we are in the US, so I'm hoping that things will change," she says. She adds that wireless carriers are among investors in dotMobi.

Foremski's Take: The wireless carriers aren't going to give up their lucrative gateway position. They make a fortune standing between the mobile Internet and the consumer.

Even if tens of thousands of high quality .mobi web sites spring up, that won't mean much because the wireless carriers can easily substitute their online services, or those of partners.

They won't need to block .mobi sites but they can make them a click or three further away. And on the cramped user interface of mobile devices, that's like sending .mobi sites to Siberia.

There are also other obstacles created by the wireless carriers. A senior executive from a startup mobile search firm told me that video services from major wireless carriers hog much of available wireless data bandwidth, cutting off even the partners of wireless carriers.

The promises of the mobile Internet, at least in the US, won't arrive until there are ways of getting around the wireless carriers. Technologies such as WiMAX, which offers high speed wireless data across large distances, could get around the gateway stranglehold.

Intel (an SVW sponsor) is working on making WiMAX capabilities standard in notebook computers, and others are working on the WiMAX infrastructure. But it will be several years before WiMAX based services are widely available.

In short, the mobile Internet will be a long time coming, blocked by the greed of wireless carriers. These companies are rapidly becoming the largest obstacle to technological progress and the development of Internet economies, IMHO.

- - -

Please also see:

Intel Breakthrough Demonstrates Its First Mobile WiMAX Baseband Chip

An excerpt from the dotMobi Blog: dotMobi

...some of the more recent smart phones (e.g. the Nokia N90 and N70 series) are being shipped with the Web Kit browser that can render normal desktop sites such as Amazon without any problems. However, there are 4 major problems with this approach:

These advanced phones represent a tiny percentage of the phones in use around the world. We should concern ourselves more with the ~2.5 billion other “normal” phones. Yes, these advanced abilities will likely trickle down to other phones, but this will take a long time.
Phones will always be less capable than PCs due to the physical size limitations. You simply can’t fit a big screen and keyboard in a small phone. There will always be a capabilities gap, regardless of how good the phones get.
Just because you can visit a PC site on a phone, it doesn’t mean you necessarily want to. Mobile is different. Mobile browsing is much less about random surfing than it is about targeted, time & location-specific tasks. Experience has shown that you can’t simply miniaturize a site for mobile—to be truly mobile-friendly and useful, a site needs to be designed for mobile, not just squeezed into a smaller space. Some people argue that mobile should be considered another channel entirely, and that it is a mistake to think about it in the same way.
Viewing a PC site on a phone can be very expensive because of all the graphics that need to be downloaded. The cost issue alone is enough to make this unfeasible for many users. Example: the cnn.com homepage would cost as much as €7 to view on a phone based on some data plans in Europe.

Link to: dotMobi Mobile browser advances do not remove the the need for mobile-friendly sites

December 21, 2006

12.21.06: Juniper takes $900m hit, IBM nixes options for directors

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

The stock options tornado keeps on blowing through the Valley and the rest of corporate America, as Reuters reports here

IBM will stop providing stock option grants to its board of directors. Directors will get a raise in cash compensation from $100K to $200K.

Juniper Networks will take a $900 million hit for stock options granted from 1999 to 2003. The charge stems from two grants made to CEO Scott Kriens. Juniper will file its Q2 and Q3 statements in Q1 of 2007. Red Herring offers Kriens' apology:

“As the leader of this company, I would like to express our regret, to everyone who relies on Juniper, for the difficulties this situation has caused for us all,” said Mr. Kriens in a statement.

“In prior years, we should have had better stock option granting processes, controls, and oversight in place, and we did not,” he added. “While we cannot undo the past, we will focus going forward on the filing of our financial statements, further improving the robustness of the company’s stock option-granting procedures, the ongoing cooperation with government agencies, and the continued execution of our business strategy.”

12.21.06: Google updates Blogger

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

"Hey now that Time says that bloggers are the person of the year maybe we at Google should have some whizzy blog software. Hey! What's this with mold and hair all over it?! It says "Blogger." Maybe we can gussy this old thing up."

Yes, after about, what, six or seven years, Google is rolling out a new version of the original blog software, which they've left starving in a forgotten closet for most of these many Web 2.0 years.

InfoWorld reports that the new version will feature user-definable templates, tagging of posts, multiple authors, and faster publication of new posts.

On the Blogger homepage, Google gushes over the new version:

The new version of Blogger is metaphorically bursting with features, from the big guns like drag-and-drop template editing and post labels (which are perfect, by the way, for indexing the 131 historical figures you may have written about), to little polishes like a better-designed Dashboard or that you no longer need to solve a word verification CAPTCHA to post a comment on your own blog.

We’re excited about the new version of Blogger, both for what it can do now (which also includes access control for blogs and better input fields for post dates) and what we’ll add to it in the future, now that we have a new, stable, powerful infrastructure to work with. We’re done with “beta,” but we’re far from done with the new Blogger.

12.21.06: Labels sue AllofMP3.com in US court

US record companies filed suit in New York against Allofmp3.com, the Russian website that sells copyrighted recordings for a fraction of the price charged by legitimate vendors. The Russian company says it's legit because it pays royalties to the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society, reports Out-Law.com for the Register.

"Defendant's entire business amounts to nothing more than a massive infringement of plaintiffs' exclusive rights under the Copyright Act and New York law," says the law suit.

Unlike US and British royalty collecting agencies, the Russian version pays no royalties to artists or record labels. Yet the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society ROMS itself says the site is legal because it licenses it.

"Allofmp3.com's activity is quite legitimate," ROMS general director Oleg Nezus told BBC Russia earlier this year. "The opinion of foreign copyright owners is just that - their opinion."

December 20, 2006

12.20.06: Ericsson buys Redback for $2.1bn

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Ericsson is buying "edge" router maker Redback for $2.1 billion. Not exactly a household name, Redback's technology is seen as key to supporting the growth of Internet video, AP says.

"It's a huge market for the routing technology necessary to build out these networks, and it's really video driving the need for the infrastructure changes," he said in an interview. "I don't view this as an ending, I view it as a perfect match of the key technologies that will be necessary in the future."

Om offers a litte history on the company:

Those of you too young to buy your own drinks may not know Redback, but is was once as highflying as say, Facebook. It was a company which made uber-VCs like Norwest Capital Partners, Telesoft and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers a lot of money… and I mean a lot of money. But that was back in the day2, the late 1990s. But then the bubble popped, and everyone assumed Redback would deflate along with it.
But they didn’t! The broadband boom happened, and suddenly everyone wanted to get a piece of Redback’s multi-service edge routing technology. That’s a fancy way of saying it makes boxes that allow phone companies sell DSL, broadband, telephone, TV and other services over the local loop. In 2005, sales were up 33 percent, and in first nine months of 2006, sales went up another 87 percent to about $197 million.

Ericsson is paying $25 for a share of Redback, an 18% premium on their recent closing price (and Om notes, a 60% premium on their 90-day moving average). That's seen as definitely on the high end but not in the stratosphere.

"The price reflects the future," Ericsson Chief Executive Carl-Henric Svanberg told Reuters. "Redback does not have anything unique which we would not be able to develop on our own over two to three years, but now we get to the market faster and our offering becomes more complete."

But Reuters offers some other benchmarks that show just how steep the price is.

The deal values Redback at 39 times projected 2007 earnings per share before items, according to Reuters Estimates. Rival Juniper trades at 22 times projected 2007 per share profits per share before items.

The deal is one more in a series of consolidations in the network industry. News.com relates:

French equipment maker Alcatel and United States-based Lucent Technologies closed their deal last month. German telecommunications equipment maker Siemens and Nokia are planning to merge parts of their businesses early next year to compete. Last year, Ericsson also bought Marconi, a maker of IP-networking gear for about $2 billion.

Link in to SVW on LinkedIn

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

LinkedIn, the business networking site, has been coming up on my radar screen quite a bit recently, and I like what I'm seeing.

It has taken a while for this site to become useful and interesting because it needed to have a large enough user base. It's a chicken and egg type situation that many other social networking sites face.

I like the way LinkedIn has added features that update members on things such as changes in jobs among contacts, etc.

I'd like to offer my readers, an opportunity to link to me on LinkedIn. Send me an invitation (tom at SiliconValleyWatcher.com) and I promise to accept--especially if you are subscriber to SVW's Rooster newsletter (free!) and/or are an SVW news toolbar user.

BTW, we're adding more features to the toolbar which will include a special alert feature notifying users of new posts and breaking news. The alert feature will be made two-way so that SVW readers will be able to let us know about breaking news in their sectors.

Please note if you are in the PR community and pitch SVW: I get tons of pitches from PR companies and it is very difficult for me to keep up with them all, so I'm going to prioritize my attention.

If you are an SVW newsletter subscriber I promise to look at your pitches first.

SVW Rooster newsletter signups - find out which way the wind blows in Silicon Valley!

And/or:

SVW's Silicon Valley News toolbar is preloaded with RSS feeds from major newspapers and magazines covering Silicon Valley.

London notes: ... diversity & integration . . . London's Poles . . . media gathering at the Cheshire Cheese . . . SVW goes offline

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

. . . It's good to be back in London after nearly three years away. When I arrive with my son Matthew, the weather is pretty much as I remembered it, mild and gray, and night falls early--by 4.30pm it's nearly dark.

The streets are full of people and their diversity is striking. Women in full burkhas are a common site, along with people of many colors. Lots of mixed couples abound, and many different languages can be heard on the Underground, the main way for getting around town. London is much more multi-cultural and integrated than I'm used to seeing in US cities.

. . . There are also lots of twenty-something Poles, seemingly everywhere. The UK and Ireland have welcomed their new European Union member neighbor by allowing Polish citizens to come over and work. By some estimates there are about 1m Poles working in the UK and Ireland--a smart move that harnesses the energies of the most motivated Polish workers--much to the benefit of the local economy. Other European countries have strict barriers on their entry.

In many London neighborhoods there are Polish delicatessens, and most grocery and supermarkets have Polish food sections catering to the homesick home grown tastes of the new residents. Newspapers and magazines are printed in Polish and Polish language classes are readily found (for English people, for managers and new English spouses of Poles.)

The Poles are not work shy, which has prompted the UK government to institute new policies that seek to encourage long-term unemployed UK workers to compete for some 600,000 job vacancies.

. . . On Tuesday lunchtime I popped into the Cheshire Cheese (rebuilt in 1667), a pub on London's Fleet Street, a street that once well known as the center for nearly all of the UK's national newspaper editorial and printing offices.

Rupert Murdoch broke the power of the print and journalist unions in the early 1980s, moving out of Fleet Street. Other newspaper barons soon followed with moves to less expensive facilities in London's Wapping and Isle of Dogs districts, and further afield. I remember being on the picket lines and taking part in the tumultuous demonstrations.

The Cheshire Cheese has been the venue for an annual Christmas-time gathering of journalists. It was started many years ago by Bill Moores a prominent public relations chief (now retired in Rio de Janeiro) and the tradition has continued under Sourcewire.com, a PR firm.

I walk down a narrow alley and turn into the side door of the Cheshire Cheese. Inside it is dark but warm, a welcome feeling because the weather has become a chilly in the few days since I arrived. I can smell the smoke of a fireplace as I walk down a steep flight of stairs, ducking my head under the low beams.

I turn the corner and there is a large cavernous room where people are sitting at long tables, eating steak and kidney pie and ordering drinks at the bar. I notice some familiar faces who seem pleasantly shocked and surprised by my appearance--it's been about five years since I attended this traditional holiday event.

More people arrive and the next seven hours are spent in excellent company and conversation, catching up and hearing about changes in the UK media sector from former colleagues at many publications.

The journey back to my parent's place, on the outskirts of London, Wanstead is eventful. My tube train stops at St. Paul's, and remains firmly stopped because of "a serious incident at Bethnal Green" a few stops ahead of my eastbound Central line train. I wait 15 minutes before deciding to try my luck with the buses.

I take the long escalators back to the surface of the city. The temperature has fallen further and it is quite chilly as I walk to the bus stop. The sound of sirens from emergency vehicles seems to be everywhere, bouncing off the old buildings.

I wonder what the "serious incident is" naturally thinking it could be terrorist related. St Paul's cathedral looks stunning, lit up from below.

I'm lucky to get on board a very crowded bus heading east, to Ilford. Others, waiting at bus stops along the route are not as lucky, as the driver refuses to let more people in (some sneak in through the exit doors.)

After about ten minutes, I'm lucky to find a seat, and soon start to doze, the effects of a boozy afternoon. But I'm an experienced Londoner, my inner alarm clock always wakes me as we near my exit stop.

. . . I have to use Internet cafes the first few days because my parent's house isn't wired for broadband. I'm shocked that I can't access SVW, I find out my web site host, TotalChoice Hosting, has canceled my account.

I'm angry and frustrated as I try to use their support procedures to try and sort out the problem. It turns out they have moved to a new billing system and canceled my account. I'm hoping that they haven't erased my files--the last thing I want to do is reconstruct my Movable Type installation with some 1300 posts, and comments.

Fortunately, I sort out the problem and my site is back up. But two days later it is canceled again! I'm back at step one trying to get reconnected and back online. Hours later it is done . . . my apologies for the downtime.

- - -

Please also see SVW: London's Hipster markets attract US companies

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/20...

December 15, 2006

12.15.06: Gizmodo: iPhone on Monday

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

At Gizmodo, Brian Lam says he "knows" the iPhone will be announced on Monday. In its entirety, the post says:

I guarantee it. It isn't what I expected at all. And I've already said too much

Just the kind of tease to guarantee traffic galore. Om says it's BS:

Just pointing out that the teaser doesn’t mention Apple. And no, Steve Jobs & Co. are not crazy to release what could be a hot device mere nine days before Christmas. In other words don’t expect an iPhone from Apple. In fact, I am confident enough to bet another 10-pounds on it.

Actually, here are some detailed rumors from Doug Berger at Gadgetell:

Morgan Stanley analyst Rebecca Runkle has added to the mess of rumors by revealing more pricing possibilities. She says the 4GB and 8GB models of the new Apple Phone will cost $599 and $649 respectively and will be wider than the iPod nano, but narrower than the 5G iPod. She also added it will have a 3.5 inch screen and come in multiple colors like the new nano. Her prediction is it will launch in the first half of 2007.

Personally if I were to shell out hundreds for a phone (and I've never had a phone that didn't come free from the cellphone company), I'd go for this one (found on iliketotallyloveit:

12.15.06: Photoshop CS3 beta download

You can download a free beta of the upcoming version of Photoshop at Adobe Labs

The next generation of the professional standard in digital imaging, Adobe Photoshop CS3 delivers new tools and enhancements that enable you to work more productively, edit with unrivaled power, and composite with breakthrough ease and control.

Please note that a beta is, by definition, an unfinished product that may or may not include all the features and functionality that will appear in the final release. And while some may find the quality appropriate for use in a production environment, the beta is not final-release quality and should not be used for critical work.

- Richard Koman

12.15.06: Indictments, guilty pleas on Chinese trade secret thefts

The Chinese government wants to get their hands on military technology being developed in Silicon Valley and apparently the Valley is full of spies to help with those aims.

Tom Abate and John Cote write in today's Chronicle that federal prosecutors indicted one Xiangdong Sheldon Meng for stealing night vision training software from defense contractor Quantum3D for sale to Malaysia, Thailand and China.

"The alleged economic espionage and theft and export of trade secrets such as these -- visual simulation training software that has military application, no less -- has real consequences that could jeopardize our country's military advantages in the world," he said in the statement.
He added in an interview: "We own the night. And there are people who want to take it from us."

Meanwhile US citizen Fei Ye and permanent resident Ming Zhong pled guilty in federal court to stealing civilian chip technology from Transmeta and Sun. They intended to use the designs to start a chipmaking firm with financial backing from the Chinese city of Hang- zhou and the provincial government of Zhejiang. These are the first convictions under the Economic Espionage Act.

The 36-count criminal indictment against Meng alleges that he stole night-vision training software and other simulation tools from Quantum3D, a San Jose defense contractor for whom he worked between 2000 and 2003. The indictment alleges violations of several federal statutes, including the Economic Espionage Act and the Arms Export Control Act -- charges that could lead to hefty fines and lengthy jail terms.

Prosecutions under the Economic Espionage Act are rare, said author and consultant Steven Fink because federal prosecutors are afraid to antagonize foreign governments. The result, he says, has been open season on Valley trade secrets:

"It's about time," Fink said. "It's been 10 years. And what happened to all the other cases that slipped through their fingers? There is virtually no deterrent against people and foreign governments that want to steal our trade secrets."

December 14, 2006

thisNthat before I head to London...

I'm heading out to London later today for my parent's 50th anniversary, with my son Matt. I have to figure out my internet access once I get there so I might be offline for a day or two.

In the meantime, here are a few items:

. . . Jon Swartz, reporter at USA Today just published:

"Young Wealth: Trade Secrets From Teens Who Are Changing American Business" (Rooftop Publishing: $14.95).

Dan Fost over at the SF Chronicle reviews it. My advice to teen entrepeneurs is not to publicize their business models, no good can come from it except copycat competitors. It is best to fly under the radar as any new rules enterprise knows... ;-)

. . . Silicon Valley startups get Sarbanes Oxley relief:

Technet applauds SEC action to ease burden of compliance.

www.technet.org.

But startups want to get acquired so they want to be SOX compliant like the big boys so that they can be integrated faster.

. . . AMD says it's still ahead in electric power consumption

Marty Seyer, Senior VP, Commercial Segment gave a presentation at today's AMD analyst day. http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/InvestorRelations/0,,51_306_14668,00.html - click Marty's picture for the server-specific presentation. AMD says is it is "3% faster in 2P than Intel and ahead by 7% in 4P." (Intel is an SVW sponsor.)

I wonder what level of percentage improvement in server power is significant enough to sway buying decisions? It seems that the biggest savings come from the first decision to replace older power hungry servers with the new generation of power-lite servers from AMD or Intel. After that, the incremental savings between the two energy-saving brands are not that significant...?

. . . The dark side of the chip industry

David Sonnenfeld tells me about a new book he coedited with Ted Smith and David Naguib Pellow:

Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry (Publication Date: August 24, 2006) is the first comprehensive examination of the impacts of electronics manufacturing on workers and local environments across the planet.
From Silicon Valley in California to Silicon Glen in Scotland, from Silicon Island in Taiwan to Silicon Paddy in China, the social, economic, and ecological effects of the international electronics industry are widespread. The production of electronic and computer components contaminates air, land, and water around the globe. As this eye-opening book reveals, the people who suffer the consequences are largely poor, female, immigrant, and minority.

Doubleclick survey finds online ads are very effective

Doubleclick, the online ad network, just announced survey results that prove online ads influence people to buy stuff.

The company clearly hopes that its report will influence online ad buying. But influence is best expressed when it comes from third-parties that do not have a self-interest, which is not the case here.

The DoubleClick Touchpoints IV survey results revealed that influencers consider online advertising a key factor of their shopping process, second only to websites, as a source of further learning about purchase decisions. Nineteen percent of influencers cited web advertising as a source of information when they were researching a purchase, compared to 8 percent among the remainder of the sample.

Both segments cited websites as their top source of research when they are shopping, but influencers clearly rely more on the web than non-influencers, with 40 percent of influencers citing websites for this purpose versus 31 percent of non-influencers.

This part is curious: "influencers consider online advertising a key factor of their shopping process, second only to websites."

Aren't most online ads found on websites? Isn't context important in advertising? Will we get free floating online ads with no website needed?!

The DoubleClick Touchpoints IV survey: http://www.doubleclick.com/knowledge

Feedback for ILikeTotallyLoveIt.com

Hi Tom,
we are students that just started a new web service called
iliketotallyloveit.com. On that site we offer a unique service that allows users to submit cool, hot, beautiful stuff, preferable with a link where it may be bought. If enough people agree that it is hot it will get promoted to the front page and thus exposed to a broad audience, comparable to digg.com. Rather than providing extensive product descriptions our site functions as a community-based popularity contest: which product is loved or not.
Since you guys also feature news and novelties in a different way, but with a similar audience we would be thrilled if you would check our site out and maybe review us on your site.
Thanks for taking the time.
Best,
Malte
www.iliketotallyloveit.com

Malte, thanks for your email. I love the concept, the interface needs a bit of work, but then again so does mine :-)

Also, you might want to approach Wists.com and see if you could do something together. Wists makes it very easy to grab an image of a product and add a comment.

With these types of services, I'd love to see things segmented in terms of types of users. My likes won't be same as that of my kids, and even within any age group, further segmentation would be useful.

Getting people to own their opinions in a public place is sometimes difficult because it can invite ridicule. But anonymous recommendations would mask spammers. It's an issue that many online sites/services face, how to encourage frequent and genuine opinions.

I like your approach and I'd love to know how things develop.

Maybe some of my readers will give you more feedback in the comments section here...

Google's one square-inch business model...

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

Google's ambition is to have a searchbox in front of someone all the time. From that small rectangle of user interface, maybe it measures 1 square inch, Google has built a massive business.

Microsoft owns far more user interface real estate than Google--you'd think it would be ahead of the game.

Microsoft's business model is very profitable and it is based on selling software rather than monetizing a square inch of space in front of someone. It's interesting that MSFT hasn't been able to capitalize on its far larger user interface real estate in the same way Google has, at least so far.

Is this a cultural block? Whatever the reason, it's interesting. Microsoft's position reminds me of my favorite American saying: "You can't get there from here."

Gartner predicts hasta la Vista for future Microsoft OSs

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

Gartner predicts the bleeding obvious: Vista will be the last Windows.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Research firm Gartner Inc. turned soothsayer on Wednesday by predicting that Windows Vista will be the last big release of Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) Windows operating system.

Source: Gartner predicts Vista to be last major Windows - Yahoo! News

Vista runs a web browser, which overlays Vista--paper covers rock...

Bill Gates saw it coming when he crushed Netscape and established Internet Explorer(IE) as market leader. He realized that the browser is the interface-not the OS.

It was the open source community that managed to revive Netscape's role as an alternative to Microsoft. But Microsoft did not give any respect to open source projects, it continually derided Linux for years. It did not see the challenge to IE as credible.

Microsoft could have kept far ahead of the Firefox/Safari/Opera etc, pack by innovating on Internet Explorer when it had the lead. Except MSFT decided to sit on it for about three years until the recent launch of IE7.

The new Internet Explorer 7.0 is good, it supports industry standards such as CSS far better than IE 6, and it has a many good features. If Microsoft had pushed that kind of innovation when it had pole position in the market, it would have taken the open source community a lot longer to catch up and challenge Internet Explorer.

This is the penalty from not innovating from a leadership position. The competitive distance is shortened, and short distances hearten people to challenge the status quo.

If Microsoft had pushed the envelope on IE, it would have cemented its position in owning the most important real estate in the world--the interface into our digital worlds.

December 13, 2006

12.13.06: Google auctions employee options

New York Times:

In a move that will enable its employees to earn more money from stock options — and perhaps motivate them to settle for fewer of them in pay packages as a result — Google said yesterday that it would create a system allowing options to be sold as well as exercised.

Under the program, Google will grant employees a new type of option, called a transferable stock option. The company will work with Morgan Stanley to set up a market that will enable financial institutions and other investors to bid for those options.

Experts briefed on the plan were divided on whether it might provide a useful model for other companies. But the move appears likely to reinforce Google’s reputation for financial innovation. ...Google said the plan was aimed at showing employees the full value of their stock options.

12.13.06: Yahoo, IBM go for enterprise search

AP reports:

IBM Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are teaming up to offer a free data-search tool for businesses, a quirky move challenging Google Inc. and other corporate-search specialists in a blossoming market.
IBM hopes the service, being announced Wednesday, bolsters its overall efforts to improve its dealings with small companies.
More broadly, though, Yahoo and IBM expect their partnership to shake up the field of "enterprise search," in which leading providers such as Google, Autonomy Corp. and Norway-based FAST are seeing forays from business software giants such as Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG.

Hurd asked to explain option sales

Mark Hurd exercised $1.37 million in options less than two weeks before HP disclosed its spying tactics in a SEC filing and congressional investigators want to know why. The sale does not appear to be part of a prescheduled program, AP reports. Indeed, seven other executives cashed out during that period, part of a three-week window where option holders are allowed to exercise their options.

The congressmen asked Hurd to explain the reason for the transaction, seeking an answer on "whether executives are cashing in ('bullet dodging') while in possession of potentially damaging material facts that shareholders do not know."
Dingell and Stupak also asked in the letter to "please inform us whether any other HP officers or directors engaged in similar transactions during this period."

Silicon Valley legend and hard-drive pioneer Al Shugart dies at 76

By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Al Shugart--the man who founded Seagate Technology, convinced his pet dog to run for public office, and favored Hawaiian shirts over business suits--has died at age 76.
The California native passed away at a hospital from heart failure Tuesday, a Seagate representative said.

Al Shugart
Shugart played an integral role in the development of the hard-drive industry. He was part of the original team of engineers at IBM that developed the first hard-drive storage system, which came out 50 years ago this year.
He then held several different positions in the industry before founding Seagate in 1979. The company went on to become a dominant force in the hard-drive industry. It is, in fact, the largest hard-drive manufacturer, and it is consistently profitable. Shugart left the company in 1998.

Source: Al Shugart, hard-drive pioneer, dies at 76 | CNET News.com

I met with Al Shugart a few years back during a family vacation in Santa Cruz. I rarely do this, but I asked him to autograph his business (retirement) card.

Silicon Valley used to be full off hard drive makers spawned from the PC revolution. Over the years, some 90 plus hard drive makers have consolidated into just a handful. Seagate recently acquired Maxtor and is the largest following a reorganization engineered by Silver Lake Partners which led to its relocation in the Cayman Islands.

- - -

Seagate Technology
PO Box 309 GT Ugland House South
Church Street
George Town,
Cayman Islands

Alan Shugart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alan Shugart (b. 1930 in Los Angeles) is a leading engineer/executive in the ... He was the founder of Shugart Associates in 1973, later acquired by Xerox. ...

The Revolutionaries: Al Shugart

In 1951, the day after finishing college, Al Shugart joined IBM and ten years later ... In 1969, Shugart left Big Blue for Memorex and then launched Shugart ...

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12.13.06: Epicenter of Web 2.0 boom: 625 Second

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

The boom is back in SoMa, the Journal's Pui-Wing Tam wrote yesterday, and the epicenter is 625 Second St. in the heart of the old dot-com streets.

On a recent Friday, one new tenant on the third floor, online software firm BuzzLogic was meeting with a venture capitalist. Nearby, Jill Gilbert, CEO of a start-up that compiles online and printed retirement home guides, held a yoga class with five employees. ... One start-up, LicketyShip, a same-day delivery service, has a punching bag by its cubicles and a place for people to sleep in the building if they're too busy to go home ...

Ummm ....

The master tenant of sorts on the third floor is LookSmart, which took a 10-year lease on the space in 1999 and whose stock hit $350 in early 2000. In 2001, the stock price was $2 but that was the time to buy as its now more than doubled to $5. With all that space and so few employees, LookSmart CEO John Simonelli decided to sublease to startups.

I know it sounds bubble-ish, but we thought, why not have a space to help incubate new companies?

Bubble-ish? Yeah. Despite the protestations of an employee at SpotDJ that "companies have pretty sane business ideas," the companies at 625 have disturbingly familiar wing-and-a-prayer business plans:

Online video editing and sharing outfit Cuts Inc says the company will earn revenue from Internet advertising on its Web site. Cuts' neighbor, start-up SpotDJ, whose software lets consumers pretend to be DJs, also says it plans to make money from ads. Ditto the Helium Report, which provides online guides for luxury destinations and products.

Time to open a hot new restaurant around the corner? Well, maybe not.

In media, the medium defines the DRM

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

I was over at CNET on Tuesday being interviewed on video, about mobile video. I spoke about the trends, digital rights management (DRM), the role of wireless carriers, media producers, and content owners.

DRM is pivotal in the digital media world, it protects content. Whoever owns the dominant DRM will rule the world because DRM is the gatekeeper, it protects and collects. It protects the content and it is how the content is monetised, transformed into individually targeted media services.

Because of the strategic importance of the DRM, lots of companies want to own it. Yet no content owner wants one company to establish a dominant DRM because they could lose substantial controls.

That's why we face a future DRM hell as these things battle themselves to a conclusion, imho.

After the interview, I started thinking about our old analog media technologies, and their marvelously effective DRM features, all built into the physics of the medium. Analog protected against piracy and enabled profitable media business models--a perfect DRM. In media, the medium defines the DRM.

Consider conventional TV broadcast signals. Analog TV technology could be described as a very effective streaming video technology. It transmits massive amounts of video information through hundreds of channels simultaneously and wirelessly.

Each analog TV channel represents a wireless broadband system that can support any number of users, from ten to ten million--with no loss of performance from increased user load.

Analog TV has a broadcast range of more than a hundred miles. Try doing that with digital distribution technologies such as cellular networks, or WiMAX, all of which seem terribly constrained in range and capacity.

Despite the ease of distribution, and the lack of controls over who could access video content, piracy was never much of an issue in the analog TV world. TV content could be copied through video tapes but it was not feasible to distribute it much beyond individual or family circles. The DRM was built into the physical nature of the medium.

Digital DRM gets hacked all the time. Digital media can be pirated and distributed widely in a click or two.

The nature of digital technology has no inherent DRM capabilities. It is used in the media industry precisely because content owners want an easy way to produce perfect copies of their content. Exactly what they don't want their customers doing with the same content and technology.

December 12, 2006

New: Ajax13 rounds out online suite with new Powerpoint app

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley WatcherHisham El-Emam tells me that his team at Ajax13 has just added ajaxPresents, a Powerpoint-like online application. The company's suite also includes ajaxWrite, ajaxSketch, ajaxXLS, and ajaxTunes.

You need Firefox but Internet Explorer support will be added in the new year. Hish is from Germany where much of the work on the technology behind Ajax13 was done as part of a state funded educational project a few years back.

http://us.ajax13.com/en/about.jsp

Founded in early 2006, Ajax 13 Inc. is a software development company that introduces web-based applications written using the AJAX based methodology. Ajax 13 Inc. was founded by Hisham El-Emam, it's CTO, and Georg Wüstefeld to pursue the software-as-a-service vision that is gaining more and more momentum in both the enterprise and the small business / home office marketplaces. Ajax 13 Inc. is headquartered in San Diego, CA.

diggrz_events : kultur shock sensation

By Maria Mouk

Snow falls on the Northern peaks, and cool weather glides across the Bay- strapping me into the comfort of boots and bindings. If you have an open schedule- mountains in Tahoe are open and powdered, so hit the slopes early in the week, as I wish I was. Discount lift ticketsare available from Snowbomb for various resorts.

audium If you're remaining on all 2- and last week's sound stimuli- was missed or unimpressive, glance at the Audium schedule and make it a point to take a trip. Exploring the language of space in music,and the interaction between compositional needs and technological innovation, led to the creation of AUDIUM, variously described as a theatre of sound-sculptured space or a sound-space continuum.

Located in San Francisco, AUDIUM is a total environment, designed from floor to ceiling as an integrated concept. The theatre, open since 1975, consists of a foyer, a sound labyrinth and a main performance space.

It is a building within a building, conceived directly for this art form. Listeners sit in concentric circles, enveloped by 169 speakers in sloping walls, floating floor, and a suspended ceiling. Sounds travel above, around, below, and on multidimensional planes in space.

Exact control of sound movement, direction, speed and intensity is realized through a custom-designed electronic console, responsive to a "tape performer." Live, spatial performance of tape compositions allows each performance to be unique. Listeners are immersed in a kinetic sound realm wherein speakers and environment become the new electronic orchestra.

Now back to time that ticks; this week offers plenty to holiday cheer about- even if you realize that green and red clash.

Tuesday:

Join the San Francisco URBAN ALLIANCE FOR SUSTAINABILITY for their Holiday party at 111 Minna. A conscious celebration with drinks, food, and entertainment including DJ Alex Theory, Live music from Estas, insight from Darian Heyman of Craigslist Foundation, spoken word by Trathen Heckman of Daily Acts, and sustenance from Juicy Lucy.

The SFUAS is a local network of green businesses and community members who aim to create dynamic models of sustainability within the urban environment.

Wednesday: Be fashionably loud

Invisible Hero Industries presents performance, music, and fashion at RX Gallery with the WINTER GREEN FASHION SHOW. Come at 9:00pm for a Runway show featuring the designs of Type-A Clothing, K-Tuff, Joe Curv Jewelry, and handbag stylings of M.I.A, and K-Tuff

Performances throughout the night provided by the lovely ladies of The SOLID GOLDIGGERS BURLESQUE. Musical stylings for the evening made possible by Pompi-End Up/System Omar-Popscene Sleazemore-Lights Down Low Ollie Vaughn-Progress SF Live Turn tableist performance by Phleck and Gordo-Hit and Run MC performance by A-RON BACARDI featuring Dj Sheik -Hit and Run. $1 PBR's and $2 shots! 21+ $5 B4 11pm $10 after.

Seems like I'm lacking an ear or eyeful , as I keep pointing out the bright and shiny - but visual work space- Dimension 7 doesnt always host events. Wednesday also brings Futuresound Styleclash.

An experience in new music and fashion, D7 will host a designer soiree, fashion photoshoot, and runway shows, all set to a live music soundtrack taped for the fashion reality show = The Hot E*. 7 pm till late.

Thursday:

STIRR's Winter Wonderland at the exploratorium will bring together Gabriel Venture and Partners to put together a startup holiday inspiration conversation. STIRR's goal is to catalyze entrepreneurial activity in the SF Bay Area and beyond.

The event includes a live catered buffet dinner, swing band, dj, an amazing space (the entire exploratorium is available to explore) under special lighting, and of course tons of companies and enterpreneurs.Gabriel has invested in over $22k of prizes including A Toshiba 42" Plasma T - 2 Bose Sound-Dock digital music system- A Cannon PowerShot SD630 6.0 mega pixel camera- A 4GB iPod nano- and Over 100 ipod friendly table prizes.There will be raffles, contest prizes, a mixer or two, and gift bags to keep at the end of the evening.

Event is semi formal, so this is your chance to doll up. Buy tickets in advance. Sponsorship opportunities available.

If you're feeling more like jeans-end of week, head to the Japanese Puppet Animation! The Exquisite World of Kihachiro Kawamoto show, starting at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Kihachiro Kawamoto, born in 1925, is regarded as the master of Japanese puppet animation.

In the 1960s he studied under Czech animation legend Jiri Trnka, and his work has been honored in retrospectives worldwide. Do not miss this opportunity: The films are not in distribution in the US, and the prints will be returned to Japan following the screenings.

December 11, 2006

TSMC's $10bn monster triple chip fabs and the 15 year old girl

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

I just got out of a meeting with Charles Byers, one of my favorite chip industry execs. Mr Byers is Director of Worldwide Brand Management at TSMC, the world's largest chipmaker but one that doesn't build a single chip for itself.

TSMC is a chip foundry, it makes chips for others. Foundries enable hundreds of chip company startups to be formed because they don't need to have their own chip production facilities. Small teams of designers at what are called "fabless" chip companies, get access to cutting edge chip manufacturing production lines.

With chip fabs costing about $3.5bn a piece, foundries provide a way to share manufacturing costs. There would be very little innovation going on, very few consumer gadgets made without foundries. And each new gizmo would cost thousands of dollars.

Meeting with Mr Byers always provides a good insight into the global chip business because of TSMC's incredible size. Its relationships with thousands of customers show what types of chips are being designed and for which markets.

Here are some trends: Chips for consumer applications have become about 50 per cent of TSMC's business. About three years ago, the chip industry was equally divided between consumer, computer industry, and the communications industry. It's always good to have a broad range of customers to iron out boom and busts in different sectors.

Although there are cross-over products that fit into several categories, the trend shows that the chip industry has increasingly more of its eggs in one basket: a basket owned by the fickle consumer.

"Do you know the demographic that best represents the consumer chip market?" Mr Byers asks. "The 15 year old girl. She has a couple of iPods, digital camera, computer, cell phone, and a couple of games consoles."

But why is it a girl? Boys have those things too, I ask. "Girls have better access to their father's money," he replies. My daughter is 12, I'd better watch out!

The potential volatility of consumer markets is one challenge, another one facing TSMC is in its ability to run its production lines as close to full capacity as possible--and run them all day, all night, all the time. That's because the massive fixed cost of fabs means that you lose a huge amount of money if you don't run your lines at near full tilt.

An additional benefit of full production lines is that you are faster in being able to tune-up your production machinery to produce high percentages of working chips. With chip feature sizes measured in atoms, the tiniest slipup in the many hundreds of manufacturing steps, produces a dud chip. You can't even use it for a doorstop :-)

This is why TSMC is now building what it terms "Giga Fabs." These cost about $10bn each. Each Giga Fab is essentially three fabs in one. But why?

A Giga Fab provides savings of about half a billion dollars in building costs, says Mr Byers. But the much greater benefit is in being able to qualify three fabs at once for volume production.

That means faster time to market on high-end advanced chip designs. And in the chip foundry business, that's exactly where the profit margins are at their most lucrative.

12.11.06: iTunes sales stagnant

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Considering that the average iPod has some hundreds of tracks on its little hard or flash drive, the fact that the ration of iTunes sales to iPods is 22, as of September 2006, according to the New York Times, reveals that something is not as advertised in the world of online music sales.

Apple single-handedly created the online music business, according to the Gospel of Steve. But since iTunes sales are flat - they have inched up from 20 to 22 - it's apparent that people rapidly lose interest in shelling out bucks for the same stuff that can be stolen online or legitimately ripped off of their own CDs or those borrowed from the library or friends.

“IPods are not sitting around generating dozens and dozens of transactions every quarter,” said Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst for Forrester Research. “People buy a certain number of songs, and then they stop.”

That's not necessarily horrible news for Apple since the real profits are in hardware as Furd Log briefly notes. "It's the RIAA who should be worrying," the blogger says and I agree.

December 10, 2006

Should Semel go? Is Yahoo a media company? Is that a good thing to be? (Yes, Yes, No.)

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

So GigaOm posted this piece on Thursday, based on Yahoo employee Jonathan's Strauss' verbatim transcript of Terry Semel's post-reorg talk to employees. Read it at either of those blogs. The essence is this: Reports of Yahoo's - and Semel's - demise are greatly exaggerated.

Strauss' post is combatively positive. He says he and many other yahoos are hugely inspired and excited by the reorg.

As someone who has witnessed many of Yahoo!'s dysfunctions first-hand, I am frankly surprised at how right on they got it with this re-org. The changes that were announced this week and the ones that will come over the next few months are pretty much exactly what I think needs to be done to enable Yahoo! to realize its full potential.

Strauss defends Semel as a leader of "resilience, defiance, and strength." He adds that Yahoo needs not a geek who wrote some cool code when he was 25 but "the guy who spent 25 years climbing the corporate ladder all the way from the bottom to become arguably the most respected leader in one of the most cut-throat businesses in the world."

That's as may be. My gripe is with this sentiment - more crucial than whether Semel stays or goes:

I hate to break it to all of you, but the Internet isn't about technology. Cisco is a technology company, Yahoo! is a consumer services company -- the fact that those services are delivered via IP is just a detail. The people who fault Terry for not knowing how IP switching works might as well have criticized Ted Turner for not knowing how to install a cable head-end. Technology savvy can be hired (and I won't defend Yahoo!'s track record on that), but true leadership is something more.s a *huge* step in that direction.

Om says it this way:

A few days ago, Robert Young had noted that “If you strip away all the layers that make up Yahoo, what you’ll find is the Internet’s largest communications and community company.” I personally think of Yahoo as a consumer brand, not a technology company. Yahoo is a media company. It knows how to aggregate content pretty well, and it has the audience & has the ability to monetize it well6.
And that it can offer communications tools is a bonus - and barrier to entry. Hopefully after the reorg, they realize this, and drop all the pretensions about competing over search with Google which says its mission is to organize the world’s information. Yahoo’s mission aggregating all the “relevant information.”

So ... obviously technology, communications and media are bleeding together at pretty rapid clip. It's not entirely clear what the distinct words mean anymore. We're not talking about Cisco here, though. We're talking about Google. Media companies basically spend as little as possible on content, as much as possible on marketing and make money by monetizing (generally through advertising but also through user fees and sleazier models like product placement) the audience they are thus able to coalesce. That is the very definition of Yahoo's model.

A technology company on the other hand starts from a single basic technology, extends and scales as possible, and derives products and services on top of it. That's a pretty accurate recap of everything you've heard Larry and Sergey and even Eric say about Google.

Sure there's overlap and bleeding between the two models, but that's basically the split. Google's advertising business is a leverage of its underlying technology. Yahoo may copycat the model but at core, Yahoo advertising is about putting ads on content.

All of which is just to say I'm in agreement that Yahoo is a media company. But here's the rub. Being a media company is the wrong place to be. Media companies create, license and otherwise aggregate content. But there's far, far many more content producers on the Web than Yahoo will ever pull together. And even though they're being good sports and buying up Web 2.0 companies and investing in user-created content and metadata, trying to bring it all under Yahoo's roof is a dead-end run.

At end of the day, we don't want a walled garden. We don't want the best of the best. Most Yahoo services aren't the best anyway. What you want is great ways to take everything and move through it, find what you need to find, be delighted by what you discover, and have pathways coming in that share what others have found, added to, created. Or so it seems to me.

Google has the leading solution to that problem and it's basically gravy that its solution also involves the spewing of Google branding on practically every blog and search-enabled website out there. YouTube is to some degree an aberration, a content buy in the Flickr model, not the Yahoo/Hollywood model. But that just shows the depth of Yahoo's problems. It's not just that Yahoo is a media company in an age of technology companies but that it's not even competing when the battle comes to its domain.

In what area, exactly, is Yahoo #1? And if there are any such areas, what is Yahoo's exposure to a technological loss of leadership?

No, if Yahoo is to prosper it will need to shift towards becoming a technology company, one that can compete for the best brains in the world, one that makes technologists believe this is a place where they can change the world. And it needs to come up with some tech breakthroughs. And for that, Semel is clearly the wrong man for the job.

One more thing: Yahoo also has to be a place where people are proud to work. And that means: NO MORE COLLABORATION WITH REPRESSIVE REGIMES. Another reason Semel is wrong.

December 9, 2006

Do journalists want a social media news release?

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

[This is from my comments section - from Kevin Murphy US Editor at Computerwire on the subject of the Social Media Press Release which I described in a late night post called Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!

Kevin Murphy asks:

Two innocent questions:
1) Tom -- when was the last time you wrote anything what was based on a press release? 2003? You've moved far far beyond PR now, surely. How will these new types of press release make your job easier?
2) PR people -- are you consulting with working journalists/bloggers while developing these new social media releases? Which journalists/bloggers? What are they saying? What is it they need that regular press releases don't provide?

Kevin, as usual you pinpoint the crux of the matter.

You are asking the right question here, what do I know about press releases? I get pre-briefed all the time, there is usually no need for press releases!

However, the truth is that we all refer to them in the course of our research and background checking. One late night when I wanted to go to bed but I still had a bunch of stuff I needed to check, verify, and quote, I had to look up company news releases and they were useless in addressing my needs.

I realized that there was a huge expense of human energy producing a product that was useless to me. Why not suggest a format that that could save me a click or three, hopefully much more.

Yes, this could be seen as a selfish project. But I know that if it makes me a little bit more productive, you and others will be able to save a few clicks too.

Have I tried working with any of these social media releases? Have they been tested by journalists?

Yes, I've worked with a few, and they have saved me some time. And I know they'll get better at making my job easier.

I also have anecdotal evidence of journalists that have been motivated to provide positive feedback to PR people about receiving press releases in a social media-like format.

Knowing other journalists I have to say that such feedback is rare and therefore has to be treated as significant.

The Social Media News Release is an obvious step in the right direction, it is an obvious application of our Internet technologies. What hasn't been noted is that the Social Media News Release comes with so much more than the old press release.

For example: it's trackability across media and blogs and Internet locations is easy and extremely valuable.

Another aspect of the the Social Media News Release is that it will continue to exist forever, cemented into the permalink archives of the Internet. It becomes a free floating publication in its own right with its own Google pagerank, and a Technorati following.

It could also be set up to collect comments for weeks or years, it's a live document. The collection of such information in such a manner is something that we never had a chance to consider before now.

We can go further, I have several ideas for new types of media entities I'd like to explore.

While lots of people talk about Web 2.0 and some have even tried to define Web 3.0 (blatantly obvious attempts to gain immortal Wikipedia juice, imho ;-) surely, we are barely at Internet 0.2?!

On the subject of the Internet, I am of a Bachman-Turner Overdrive opinion.

December 8, 2006

First Annual Solstice Synchronized Global Orgasm for Peace

Who could not support actions for peace? Just about the time of my birthday too :-)

The intent is that the participants concentrate any thoughts during and after orgasm on peace. The combination of high- energy orgasmic energy combined with mindful intention may have a much greater effect than previous mass meditations and prayers.
The goal is to add so much concentrated and high-energy positive input into the energy field of the Earth that it will reduce the current dangerous levels of aggression and violence throughout the world.
Global Orgasm is an experiment open to everyone in the world.

Here is the science behind it: http://www.globalorgasm.org/demo.html

Link to Global Orgasm - December 22nd, 2006 - Peace through Global Ecstasy

First Look at New Mini Wall Street Journal

From Editor and Publisher magazine:

L. Gordon Crovitz, publisher of the Journal, yanked aside a giant white curtain to reveal a new front page that retains many of the same elements as are in the paper today. There's just less of it.
"Our goal is ambitious," Crovitz told the 50 or so reporters and photographers covering the event, "we are the first to rethink what a newspaper is."

A smaller format newspaper will be a problem--advertisers won't want to pay the same for less.

When I was at the Financial Times, the Technology supplement that was published monthly was redesigned into a tabloid size to save printing costs. Advertisers balked at paying the same price for a full page ad in the new format as in the old. Less is not more when it comes to newspaper ads.

My advice to Dow Jones is get rid of the subscription firewall for the online WSJ for yesterday's news. Take advantage of the free distribution by bloggers and others. That will establish your content as a top news source. Charge for news today not for yesterday's fish wrap.

Link to First Look at New WSJ' At Today's Unveiling

12.8.06: Rumors of Metacafe sale for $200-$700mn

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

TechCrunch and GigaOM are running rumors that video sharing site Metacafe will be sold for some hundreds of millions of dollars, anywhere from $200 million to $700 million. Ynet says the deal is done for $200mn.

Way too much for an also-ran video sharing site? Opinions differ. Mashable says "they'd be stupid to sell for $200 million," given that YouTube went for $1.65 billion.

But VC Fred Destin crunches the numbers and thinks the two to three number sounds spot on.

Metacafe must have about 15M Real Uniques in total, judging by the PV numbers. A UMV is worth somewhere between $50 (YHOO) and $16 (CNET). YouTube was $23 / UMV at the time of acquisition. And Metacafe is not growing so no premium for growth Metacafe has less reach than YouTube in all markets So $250-300M sounds like the right range

Some rumors say Yahoo is the buyer. They must be in talks with everyone. That's always a safe bet. Which brings up the question of whether Yahoo is still spreading peanut butter. A few comments from TechCrunch:

Wow, buying a video sharing service. How Web 2.0 and original thinking on Yahoo’s part. Is the typical Yahoo executive day’s spent just watching what Google’s going to do and then try it out?
Let’s hope Yahoo doesn’t snap it up; that would suggest that all of their peanut butter memos and internal shuffling is just please-the-shareholder window dressing - not actually meaningful change.

12.8.06: HP settles with California for $14.5mn

A few key points from HP's settlement with California:

The bulk of the fine - $13.5 million - goes to an investigatory fund - the Privacy and Piracy Fund - that pays for investigations into consumer privacy violations and intellectual property crimes. That's at least in part in HP's interests, anyway.
HP agrees to implement certain internal controls. InformationWeek reported:

HP will expand its employee and vendor codes to include the company's legal and ethical standards that apply to investigations. The company will also create a Compliance Council within HP that will develop, revise, and oversee policies and procedures for ethics and compliance programs. Finally, HP's annual training requirement will include a more prominent ethics component as well as additional training for employees involved in investigations.
The settlement doesn't affect the criminal prosecutions of Patricia Dunn, Kevin Hunsaker or the contractors, but, the Washington Post reports, California AG Bill Lockyer said he is sympathetic to Dunn's personal health problems. She is undergoing chemotherapy. But no settlement with Dunn is imminent, Lockyer said.

Wish your competitors well...

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

I get to speak with a lot of companies, IBM, HP, Cisco, Intel, Sun, etc. And many much smaller companies. The presentations are good when delivered in such formats, when they are off the record they often change quite a bit, large and small.

During those times I get to hear about what a company's competitors are up to and I often learn more about their competitors than about them.

Sometimes I remind people that they are talking about their competitors more than they are about themselves. This rarely stops them, which is interesting.

My advice is simple: wish your competitors well and concentrate on what is on your plate right now.

Focus on what is important in your business right now. The market will take care of you and your competitors, no need to worry about that...

December 7, 2006

diggrz: Kultur Shock: Santa sauce

[diggrz: an SVW tag for arts, culture, trends, and events in and around Silicon Valley- new from SVW] -

By Maria Mouk for Silicon Valley Watcher

Break out! Week thins out and makes for the weekend wander.

Tonight join me, your friends, and your friends freaks and geeks, at Mighty's 3rd Anniversary. Free admission all night with Open Bar until midnight. On the decks will be your favorite dj's from THE SPACE COWBOYS,TIGERBEAT6, OPEL PRODUCTIONS, EGGS, HOUSE OF LOTUS, MOXIE, THE FRINGE CAMP, GET YR FREAK ON, DEEP END, GUN CLUB, FUNKY COZY, FALSE PROFIT, EVIL BREAKS, bands, performances and much more.

Get some quiet daytime in before pressing your aural limitations at Friday night's Brutal Sound Effects Festival at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Running for its 11th year, this blanket of treble vibrance will numb your toes, and fluid your thoughts- until melody flows out of your inhalations. Special out of town guests will include Los Angeles Free
Music Society pioneer Joseph Hammer, and god-being from Baltimore “James Twig Harper”.” This multi-media concert and film event will feature the following bands:• Psichologico Tramas (Joseph Hammer, Loachfillet, Albert Ortega, Mitchell Brown)• James “Twig” Harper• Skozey Fetisch• Beandip Troubadours (Branpos/Antiear)• XOME• Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet• Core of the Coal Man• Spider Compass Good Crime Band• Ecomorti• and Sound effects presentation by heejay KROB. Only 8 bucks and show starts at 730.

Feeling frisky after getting a mind rock? Throw on your Super Santaman costume and get out early- as the Santas take over SF. SantaCon 2006 starts at 830 in the East Bay, or stumble in by 10am to the Carousel at Pier 39 in San Francisco. Come prepared for barhopping and lots and lots of Santas...

And now its Saturday night- and you find yourself standing at the doors of the RXGallery. Inside awaits you interactive "Device Art" and beats with Kontrol's METOPE, hailing from Berlin with tech-lectro to make you twitch till the AM. The current exhibit at RX is entitled Device Art; and is a year in the planning- featuring over 2 dozen interactive video pieces, optikinetic works; conceptual and performance.

PLug in- Engage- Dissimenate.

Saturday night also offers the Opel Holiday Season Soiree @ Shine. A holiday season party with all the trappings of egg nog, decor, mistletoe, and snazzy outfits. No dress code per se, but we're requesting you dress up a bit: bust out that cocktail dress you've been dying to wear or the styled out get up too nice for work. Performing will be SYd Gris, Smoove, Dutch, ViaJay, Aaron Jae, Nathan Vain, Dulce Vita, Cosmic Selector, and Dex Stakker.

This weekend- 2 trunk shows offer you unique gifting options for the winter days.

Saturday; Pandora's Trunk- at 916 Natoma offers a designer sample sale, art/fashion production performance, rotating indie artists, gourmet food, massage, and free play pinball all under one roof.

Sunday: Younique Boutique features bay area artisans and crafters such as ViaJay and Green Girl, Ruby Pearl: pussy art, jewelry and soaps, Lindy Kehoe: fine art prints and originals, books, Cheryl Kerr: silver and Paua shell jewelry, paintings, Elwyn Crawford: velour cloches, fabric-college head scarves, Sequoia: art prints, glass art, handmade poi for dancing
Dee Dee Russell: glitter and feather clothing, and more Im sure. At Anon Gallery 285 9th street- noon to 7.

Monday evening; join Dave Eggers, writer of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, at the Herbst Theatre for conversation about his most recent book ;What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. Epic in scope and full of adventure, tragedy, and triumph, What is the What depicts the recent history of civil war in Sudan through the eyes of two young men. It is based on the true story of Valentino Achak Deng, a survivor of a 1000-mile exodus and one of Sudan's "Lost Boys." In 2003, Eggers and Deng traveled by cargo plane to southern Sudan where Deng was reunited with his parents, who he was separated from seventeen years earlier during the Second Sudanese Civil War. Deng will be on site as well.

2007 Lurks... so gather inspiration but travel light.

[diggrz refers to the nomadic lifestyle offered by mobile digital technologies and gadgets - creating a "nomadig" culture. The diggrz name is also a tip-of-the-hat to some of the ideas of the Diggers, a democratic group that arose in 1649, out of the English revolution .

The Diggers were a radical group that cultivated and protected common lands, and sought to create egalitarian, self-sustaining communities. The Diggers would have found kindred spirits in today's software engineer culture, and the focus on creating commonly owned technologies through egalitarian open source community projects. - Tom Foremski]

Tag: diggrz

Edelman creates tool to create social media news releases

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

I caused quite a stir earlier this year with my Die! Press Release Die! Die! Die! post. It came about from my frustration with the usefulness of the conventional press release. I offered some characteristics of what a new media press release might have, such as more links, labels/tags to quickly find information, and have links to related news stories, etc.

Many in the PR community have been working to create a more useful press release, which is wonderful. I applaud all efforts to make my job easier.

Edelman [an SVW sponsor] just released a tool/template it calls StoryCrafter that helps produce what has come to be known as a "social media news release." Shift PR has produced one too, and so has PRX Builder.

I'm not a big fan of the term "social media" I think "new media" would have been sufficient--and a more neutral term. But as long as everyone agrees on one meaning that is fine.

PR companies are extremely competitive and so the vying over whose social media release tool/template is better than the rest is only just beginning. Will there be one standard for social media releases? Maybe, but not yet. Let's try out these and other formats. I'm sure that a set of best practices will develop and everyone will benefit.

What interests me is if the PRnewswire and Businesswire services will carry social media releases. My understanding is that they charge extra for every link carried in a news release. Since links reduce the need for long press releases, their business model is threatened.

It is clear that the newswires are facing more than one challenge to their business model and are becoming increasingly irrelevant as news distribution platforms. The Internet is so much better at distributing information, it is vastly cheaper, and has far greater reach.

PRNewswire and Businesswire charge a lot of money, money that could be better used in communicating company news through formats such as the social media news release, and technologies such as RSS.

All that is needed is a ruling by the SEC that a company's RSS enabled newsroom and its web sites, satisfy requirements for broad and immediate dissemination of material information. I don't think that we are far from such a ruling, IMHO.

Link to :: Edelman :: EDELMAN INTRODUCES WEB-BASED TOOL FOR PUBLISHING SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS RELEASES

Are all websites made in Silicon Valley?

One of my Dutch readers, Yvo Schaap has compiled an analysis of the characteristics of 10,000 of the top web sites. He uses the data to answer 8 questions such as:

Are all websites made in Silicon Valley?
This is actually more or less true. From all US states California (37% reach) has a significant advantage over any other state, it actually owns 7% off all the identified websites in the top 10,000. Second comes New York in number of websites but Washington has a higher reach (22%).

And:

Is China taking over the web?
Luckily the answer is short: No. The USA owns 44% of all websites, but China is coming second with 9%. That is less than the number of European websites with 16%. But in reach Europe loses from China with respectively 7% against 9%. Conclusion is that Chinese language courses aren’t necessary yet.

Link to YvoSchaap.com - 8 questions about the web you always wanted answers to

DTrace: Sun's potential killer application

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

Wednesday evening I'm at Le Colonial in San Francisco's Tenderloin District having a spirited discussion with one of Sun's young Turks, a bright software engineer called Bryan Cantrill.

We're talking about a technology he and his team have developed called DTrace. Quite simply it is a way to spot performance bottlenecks in today's complex IT systems. If you don't have that kind of capability these days, and he says IBM doesn't, then you need it because finding performance bottlenecks is near impossible without such tools.

DTrace is an open source technology but that is just a checkbox feature (open source arguments are so 2003...) DTrace is also a sales tool. With DTrace, IT departments can pinpoint and optimize their IT processes, which means they are optimizing their business processes, which means immediate bottom line benefits. The ROI argument on such things is a no brainer.

What is interesting about Sun's approach is that here is a way to sell Sun systems. It is a new way to be proprietary and still be a good open source citizen.

But this is not new, Sun has always used software to sell hardware; it wraps metal around software.

These days Sun has a decent story in terms of where it fits into the IT landscape. But that has required a jarring shift in culture, and a big adjustment from years of unbridled growth, to coping with years of lean and progressively leaner times.

Sun isn't anywhere near capturing the stunning margins of its pre-bust glory days but then again neither is anyone else. It's important to remember that the IT enterprise market didn't go away, it's still a massive market, and Sun has managed to hang onto a piece of that ecosystem.

Even if IT budgets don't grow by much these days, the mix of IT budget spending is shifting towards new projects and away from legacy infrastructure maintenance. That's good for Sun and other IT vendors.

The question is whether Sun can continue its cultural adjustment, and accept that its customers have to manage heterogeneous IT environments. DTrace only runs on Solaris (and Mac OS X but that's not an enterprise system). Will DTrace convince them to go homogenous? If it is powerful enough maybe it will.

- - -

Additional info:

Bryan Cantrill's Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/

December 6, 2006

My secret life: talking about media, on panels and elsewhere

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

I do a lot of talking about media, blogging and what it all means. I talk to groups of marketing, PR/comms, journalists, entrepreneurs and executives and I like doing it. I like talking about media even if I haven't been invited to talk about media such as at parties, bus stops and similar ad hoc opportunities. It's difficult to stop me on this subject, I've bent many an ear.

I was recently invited to speak with a large group of Hewlett-Packard people alongside Eve Batey , San Francisco Chronicle's new blogging supremo. It went well, it was the second time we've spoken on a panel together, this time sans Sam Whitmore of the excellent Media Survey.

The event was HP's Horizontal Influencer Summit and Eve and I spoke and answered a lot of interesting questions. I think we made for a good double act.

I left old media for the new media when I left the Financial Times to be the first mainstream reporter to become a full-time journalist blogger--without the safety net of a day job.

Eve went from new media to old media. She used to work in PR at Porter Novelli and at the award winning SFist.com blog site. She was recruited by the legendary San Francisco Chronicle publisher Phil Bronstein to help the newspaper in its blog publishing.

So between us, we have experience in several sides of the mediasphere. And what's interesting is that we provide a consistent view on media developments even though we get there in different ways.

What I tend to find is that talking with media and PR professionals who are active in the new media often means speaking a common language. There is an intuitive understanding of media and communications in this small community that is absent among media professionals and PR people that do not participate in new media, and its conversational forms.

- - -

If you'd like to inquire about speaking opportunities, or anything else about Silicon Valley Watcher you can contact my colleague Kristie Wells, the Diva of Details. kristiewells at gmail.com

Lala music swap site expands into streaming live performances

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

It's Tuesday night and I'm at Bimbo's nightclub in North Beach talking with serial entrepreneur Bill Nguyen about his latest venture Lala.com--a music sharing site with a twist, or rather several twists.

Mr Nguyen is animated, relaxed, and looks like he is having way too much fun. He clearly revels in what he is doing: launching another startup, being a doting father of a two year old, taking time to surf, and being able to indulge his love of music.

"Music is so important, it is how we see ourselves and how we define ourselves to the world," he says. I ask him what music was seminal in his life. He pauses, then laughs and says heavy metal. But these days his musical tastes are omnivorous and his appetite ravenous.

He mentions a band he recently discovered. "You have to listen to them, "Architecture in Helsinki" they are amazing. I've got plenty of other recommendations too."

Finding out about little known Australian bands is one of the perks of his job. Lala is a clever way to monetise the incredibly huge store of music CDs sitting in millions of living rooms.

I, like many people, am bored with my collection of CDs, I'd like to hear music I don't have. Lala lets me swap and sample other people's collections--an astounding 1.8 million titles registered by Lala users.

Through Lala I send my disks to others who find my collection potentially fascinating, and I can do the same--request their CDs. All for just $1, plus 75 cents shipping in prepaid envelopes.

For the price of one new CD I can refresh my collection ten CDs at a time. And 20 per cent of revenues are donated to the Lala created Z Foundation supporting working musicians.

Lala has been branching out into some interesting areas. It recently purchased a radio station, WOXY in Cincinnati, a cult station mentioned in the movie "Rain Man," saving it from closure. This led to the launch of "citizen radio" allowing Lala users to create their own streaming Internet radio shows. This drives CD exchanges because listeners can then send out requests if they hear something they like.

And from there, Lala is moving into streaming live performances, which is why we are talking in Bimbo's. Aimee Mann is about to come on stage and her performance will be captured by Lala.

It's a sweet deal for the venues, says Mr Nguyen because it helps them to attract hot acts. The clubs can tell performers that they have streaming capabilities automatically tied to revenue sharing of music downloads. That's attractive to performers seeking wider distribution and a share of online music revenues.

Lala is also establishing locations where local bands can come in and stream their music through Lala's network.

Soon, Aimee Man comes on, along with several special guests. Special guest John C. Reilly, the prolific movie actor comes on several times and steals the show--and doesn't give it back. Here is another person that is having way too much fun...

- - -

It was also good to connect again with John Kuch, Lala's hard working bus dev and marcoms chief, and also a doting father of a two year old. John, like everyone else at Lala is a huge music enthusiast and constantly discovering new bands. Here is a link to his Lala radio station.

Additional info:

Some of Bill Nguyen's previous ventures: Seven Networks, Onebox.

Lala.com How lala Works

Lala.com About lala

Light Reading finds 61 video hosting sites and wonders why

Phil Harvey, news editor at the always excellent Lightreading has compiled a list of 61 video hosting/sharing sites.

Phil asked me:

Can you lead me to some thoughts as to why there are so many Web video sharing companies being funded now?
I'm keeping a list of them and, frankly, I don't get it. My readers ask me and I haven't got a clue. But my readers are used to that.
Anyway, here's the latest list:
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=112147

My reply:

Phil, at valuations such as that gained by YouTube, the VCs are willing to roll the dice and maybe win a similar deal. Remember, GOOG has competitors that have to compete along similar markets, and time to market is more important now than ever before. Buy it so that you don't have to build it. Yes, most of those funded will fail so that the VCs can get a small number of winners. Too bad for all the people toiling away in the future failures so that a few can win, but that's the VC way.

Great list! Thanks for putting it together.

-Tom

Also, VCs move in herds, not in packs like wolves. Like herd animals they find safety in numbers :-)

12.6.06: Arrington: Kingmaker or sleazy journalist?

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

The San Francisco Chronicle's Dan Fost profiles TechCrunch's Michael Arrington - on the front page of this morning's paper.

The piece lauds Arrington as "Mr. Web 2.0, a kingmaker among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and a figure of controversy in the media world he is disrupting." But the news hook is Arrington's announcement that he is taking a couple months off to pay attention to the business side of things, away from the constant grind of pimping companies with silly names that barely register on the Valley's radar.

He's making money - he's got half a mil in the bank after 18 months of full-time blogging. But when you're on top you're also assailed from everyone from The New York Times to Nick Denton.

Old-school journalists question Arrington's ethics and potential for conflicts of interest. He even engaged in a high-profile dustup with the New York Times at an Online News Association conference in October in which he accused the Times of ethical lapses but later backed down. Blogger and author Nick Carr charged that while Arrington discloses his investments when he writes about companies, he doesn't always disclose those investments when he writes -- sometimes negatively -- about their competitors. Tech gossip blog Valleywag has a field day with each alleged transgression.
Arrington struck back on his blog, writing that his friendships and his activity as an entrepreneur and investor help him get access to inside information. "No one should think TechCrunch is objective or conflict-free," he wrote. "We aren't. We never have been. We never will be."

So, Fost says, Arrington is something of a microcosm of the turmoil in the media business. The medium of "news" is clearly becoming the Internet. But are things like journalistic "ethics" part of the package? And does the definition of ethical journalism need to change?

Blogs like TechCrunch expose a threat to the vaunted mainstream media. Newspapers have seen their financial base eroding as audiences and advertising dollars rush to the Web. And many bloggers, not steeped in the rules set forth in traditional newsrooms and journalism schools, are grabbing eyeballs -- and ads.
Into this environment walks Arrington, already a made man in the valley by virtue of his time as an attorney at Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati, the pre-eminent Silicon Valley law firm, as well as stints at RealNames, a company that died in the dot-com crash, and other smaller entrepreneurial ventures that he led.

He took a year off from work in 2004, living in Southern California with a girlfriend (he is now unattached), surfing and going to movies. He was at a bachelor party in Serbia, of all places, in February 2005, when Keith Teare, his old boss at RealNames, reached him with the idea for a new startup. The company, which eventually was launched in March, is Edgeio, a system for delivering classified ads online. Arrington turned to the Web to research all the new Internet companies that were popping up. He couldn't find a site that covered the scene, so he started TechCrunch in June 2005.

And what about Nick Denton? At Valleywag, Denton is gloating about the a line from Arrington in a sidebar. "Nick Denton is evil." Sez Denton:

Michael Arrington tells the San Francisco Chronicle that his latest hire is a professional writer, who is going to help teach him the craft. Here's another tip: if you're in a good old-fashioned tabloid war, never let them get to you, and never ever let them know they've got to you.

Intel Breakthrough: Demonstrates Its First Mobile WiMAX Baseband Chip

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

Intel (an SVW sponsor) is a strong supporter of WiMAX, the wireless broadband technology that works over a distance of several miles compared with the hundred foot or so range of WiFi. WiMAX offers the possibility of bridging the digital divide by bringing down the cost of providing Internet access.

More importantly, WiMAX could be a way of opening up the "last mile" into consumers' homes, currently guarded by the cable and telco companies. These companies have been bundling Internet access with other services, which raises the costs for many customers interested in just Internet access.

The Intel WiMAX Connection 2300 chipset design was demonstrated during Executive Vice President and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer Sean Maloney's keynote at the 3G World Congress and Mobility Marketplace in Hong Kong.
Maloney showed an Intel® Centrino® Duo mobile technology-based laptop with mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e-2005), Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11n), and high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) 3G capabilities successfully accessing the Internet at broadband speeds over a mobile WiMAX network.

Link to Intel Demonstrates Its First Mobile WiMAX Baseband Chip

This WiMAX chipset could also help boost Intel's revenues. The company's Centrino WiFi chipset for notebook computers was hugely successful and helped support record profit margins for many quarters.

Integrating radio capabilities into chips is not an easy task because analog and digital circuits respond in different ways to the CMOS production process.

This is interesting:

For the first time, Intel incorporated multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) functionality into the baseband chip to enhance the signal quality and throughput of wireless bandwidth. The baseband chip also employs the same software for Intel's WiMAX and Wi-Fi solutions to help ensure unified management for connectivity. Over-the-air provisioning supports easy configuration and enables consumer activation of services, shifting the traditional hands on service provider business model to a direct activation one based purely on consumer purchases of mobile devices.

Making things easier for consumers is key, it appears that they will be able to choose services without needing to know how to configure their notebooks, or be tied to any one service provider. I wonder how the cable and telco companies will respond, especially since WiMAX would enable inexpensive cell phone capabilities.

WiMAX would offer far faster Internet connection speeds, which would encourage new types of applications and services, which would require more Intel based infrastructure equipment investments. WiMAX on consumer notebooks would pull through a potential revenue bonanza for Intel.

Opening up the "last mile" would also help to establish Internet neutrality--vital in creating a fair competitive arena for startups with innovative services and technologies. Clearly, there is quite a lot riding on this Intel product.

But, there is a wait:

Intel plans to focus on validating and testing the product, with plans to sample both card and module forms beginning in late 2007.

Dan Farber's Experimental Blogger Army...

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

05-Dec-2006
ZDNet Unveils the Next-Generation of Business Tech Publishing, Weaving Voice of Bloggers Around News, Product Reviews, Vendor and User Content

In 2003, led by ZDNet veterans Dan Farber and David Berlind, the site launched blogs and later in 2005 original podcasts, adding context and perspective to the day's news in a way that only experts and well-connected insiders could offer. Farber and Berlind quickly amassed a network of more than 30 bloggers that today includes some of the most authoritative and well-respected voices in the IT community.

I'm proud to be part of Dan Farber's blogger corp over on CNET's ZDNet IT news site where I publish IMHO (in my humble opinion). The ZDNet blogs have grown from strength to strength, largely because of Dan's leadership.

It is great to work on Dan's team because he exhibits a tireless pursuit of news. I don't think I've ever seen him without cameras and laptops attached. I wouldn't be surprised to one day see him with a SNL Al Franken satellite upload dish on his head because that is how tenacious he is as a journalist to file a news story first.

Dan is everywhere, at many of the events that I go to. And I tend to avoid the obvious daytime news events because there are dozens of other journalists covering them. I go to the evening roundtables, the salons, because the journalists with day jobs are home with their families. That's when I get a chance to come home with exclusive content--except that Dan is often there too.

The ZDNet blog section has just had a new coat of paint, it has been relaunched with a new design-- everyone had to submit new photos of themselves. It is an experiment in media publishing that is well worth watching.

I've no idea if the venture is profitable. I and my fellow ZDNet bloggers are paid based on pageview numbers. The more pageviews the more money.

How much money? Well, I have never cleared the $500 per month base rate and I think that many of my colleagues there are in a similar pay bracket. The Apple guy has been the top performer, $4k per month and sometimes much more. It's pocket money for most since nearly all of the ZDNet bloggers (except me) have days jobs in well paid professional sectors (i.e not journalism!).

The money-for-traffic payments are becoming common at other publishers. Business 2.0 for example, has such a system for its recently launched staff blogger section.

In theory, such a system of reward for content performance could encourage sensationalist headlines and posts. Or encourage posts that goad the Apple community, which reliably responds in large numbers and with a lot of passion. (This is John Dvorak's favorite way to boost traffic on a slow day :-) But so far, that hasn't happened to any obvious degree over on ZDNet.

Although the financial performance of the ZDNet blogger group is not known, I will bet it is far more profitable than ZDNet's dwindling group of salaried journalists. And Dan's blogger elite is far faster in covering breaking news than the salaried journalists.

Look at the coverage on ZDNet on Yahoo's reorganization. The news was released late in the day, about 6pm Pacific Time, which is just about heading home time for the salaried journalists. But the ZDNet bloggers kicked up a storm of coverage, well into the night and early morning.

I like being part of ZDNet's blogging experiment and I think it is well on its way to becoming a Wikipedia section on how old media ccompanies can create a viable new media group.

My two cents on the project is that I could do with some basic support on the production side of things, such as a copy editor to look over my shoulder and correct those things that we become blind to because we have to edit ourselves.

And a production assistant would be great too. Putting in those links, adding images, pointing to other relevant and worthy content is something that adds value and richness to a post but is often difficult to do as a standalone journalist, when it is late at night and the analog world of sleep beckons.

Also, we know from the hundreds of years of producing news: great journalism is created by teams and not by individuals. Just as everything else in the world that is consistently good, is the product of teams... IMHO.

YHOO news analysis: GOOG is setting the pace as Yahoo faces identity and leadership crisis

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

Yahoo's hastily engineered reorganization does away with key leaders within the company:

Chief Operating Officer Dan Rosensweig and Lloyd Braun, the head of Yahoo's media and entertainment group, are leaving the company, Yahoo spokeswoman Joanna Stevens said. John Marcom, senior vice president of International Operations, is also leaving the company "soon," she said.

Two top Yahoo execs to leave in reorg Tech News on ZDNet

Dan Rosensweig has earned a tremendous amount of respect in this industry. He is one of the few top executives that is able to garner so much positive sentiment from other senior execs. My ZDNet colleague Dan Farber at ZDNet worked with him and is one of his staunchest supporters:

Yahoo's Dan Rosensweig heading off for new adventures: My colleague Larry Dignan as well as many others (see TechMeme) have already covered the news about the management shake up and reorganization at Yahoo. I checked in with Dan Rosensweig, the Yahoo COO who resigned as part the reorg. Dan and I go back more than a decade. ...; Posted by Dan Farber in Between the Lines on: Dec 6, 2006 12:52 AM

I worked with John Marcom at the Financial Times and he was easily the most impressive executive in that organization. He had a keen understanding of what was achievable and realistic. When he left the Financial Times and joined Yahoo, that shook my confidence in the remaining management team.

I met with Mr Marcom late last year, he spoke about life at Yahoo, how the growth of the business was exhilarating, it felt like being on top of a galloping horse without a saddle. Clearly, that galloping horse somehow slowed lately and the reason seems to lay within Yahoo rather than in the broader market.

Yahoo's leadership crisis and reorganization is directly related to Google's fast paced growth. YHOO's performance would be considered very good against any other metric, but in comparison with GOOG it seems lackluster.

Google's business model is far more efficient because it has shown that using servers and software provides a far more scalable media business than that of Yahoo, which has pursued a hybrid approach relying on a human-plus-machine business model.

Several times, Yahoo has ventured into producing some of its own content, such as its Yahoo Finance video Internet channel several years ago. And more recently, with Patrick Houston, and other journalists brought in to create original content.

[Please see: Yahoo gets content . . .but can it make content?]

Google prefers to create content with machines. It sends out spiderbot armies to harvest content from the open Internet--content created by people but not by Google's people. Someone else is paying their salaries.

What is very troublesome about all of this is this: If Yahoo has trouble competing against Google then what hope have traditional media companies?

Remember, Google is a media company, it publishes pages of content and advertising.

UPDATED Back story: Did YHOO try to scoop WSJ? The reorganization is not finished...

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

The timing of Yahoo's reorganization announcement signaled something else is going on. The time on the Businesswire release was 5.34pm Tuesday West Coast time. Usually such things are announced early the next day before the markets open, or early afternoon Pacific time, when markets have just closed.

Here's what happened. Yahoo prereleased it because the Wall Street Journal said it would go live with the story. The Wall Street Journal had been prepped by sources and agreed to publish the reorganization story in Wednesday's newspaper. But it wanted an interview with Terry Semel, Yahoo CEO, which he kept missing Tuesday afternoon.

WSJ editors grew increasingly concerned with no show from Terry Semel. They worried that Yahoo might be pre-briefing the rest of the universe and it might lose pole position on the story, so the Wall Street Journal told Yahoo it would go with what it had and publish the story online. Which prompted Yahoo to try to scoop the Wall Street Journal and get its version out first.

All I can say is that things have gotten very strange at Yahoo this year. This reorg is needed but the one that's needed is at the very top, IMHO.

Terry Semel was the right person for the job in May 2001 when he joined as CEO, he isn't now. It is clear to anyone that knows Yahoo, that this reorganization is not the final one.

Has Mr Semel been spending too much time at his home in SoCal? It seems that way because he is very much out of step with the culture of his company and his business.

One more reorg to go...get it done sooner than later.

- - -

Additional info:

Top Ten Candidates To Take Terry Semel's Job At Yahoo Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

[BTW: Susan Decker is my pick.]

Dan Farber writes about his former colleague Dan Rosensweig:

Yahoo’s Dan Rosensweig heading off for new adventures

Lately Yahoo has seen an exodus of senior executives and the pubic airing of an internal memo, dubbed the Peanut Butter Manifesto, which suggested that Yahoo needs a more cohesive vision, clarity of ownership and accountability and decisiveness. The author of the memo, Yahoo senior vice president Brad Garlinghouse, also said that Yahoo needs sell of non-core businesses and lay off 15 to 20 percent of staff. Dan said the leaked memo had nothing to do with the reorganization, which Semel also claimed in a blog post on Yahoo.

December 5, 2006

12.6.06: YHOO's half-measure reorg

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Yahoo is reorganizing and Wall Street has the scent of Terry Semel's blood in its nostrils.

Reuter's Eric Auchard reports that CFO Susan Decker, long seen as a major candidate for Semel's job, will head the profitable online advertising unit. The other unit will focus on marketing and international. With Decker taking the advertising helm, COO Dan Rosensweig is leaving the company.

As for Semel he says he has no plans to leave the company and is energized by the changes. But a key Semel hire, Lloyd Braun, who Semel brought over from ABC to integrate Hollywood content with Yahoo, is also leaving, signalling that Yahoo may be jettisoning the Hollywood approach.

The reorg comes fast on the heels of the Peanut Butter Manifesto, an internal memo that said the company suffers from too many redundant products, too many layers of managment and too few repurcussions for failure. The company, the memo said, spreads itself thin like peanut butter and is afraid to pass on any opportunity.

"This is just the beginning of what Yahoo needs to do," said RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan in New York.
"It may take all of 2007. Change like this is evolutionary, not revolutionary. The new division heads will need time to grasp the enormity of the task at hand."
Rohan argues that Yahoo faces less competition from Google, but, like Google, it must become more nimble in order to grasp emerging opportunities on the Internet, where two- or three-year-old companies frequently set the industry's agenda.
"The competition with Google in search is done. Google won," Rohan said. "But Yahoo has a real audience advantage in everything except Web search," he said of its vast audiences for e-mail, instant messaging, news and other properties.

That's the analyst perspective. For the blogger/reporter perspective, consider Fred Vogelstein, a contributing editor at Wired. His take:

Will these changes shake things up enough so that Yahoo can begin to win back the business it has lost?
I don't know myself, but I can tell you this: A half dozen former execs I have talked to about this in the past few days don't think so. They say that Yahoo's problems run deeper than anything a reorg can fix. They say that Yahoo is an organization that still doesn't know what it wants to be or stand for. Is it a media company or a technology company? Is it a portal or a social network? Is it more interested in hits or in the power of user generated content on the long tail? And is it willing to spend the money necessary to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft who have committed to spending billions on server farms and high priced engineering talent?
Their solution? Terry Semel needs to resign and Yahoo needs to appoint a seasoned, dynamic technology executive to lead it. Why? Because Yahoo has fallen so far behind on Semel's watch and because Google has demonstrated that victory in the fast evolving world of web advertising will go to the team that has the best technology. That means that Semel, who by his own admission is not a technology executive, is the wrong man for the job.

Well, agreed that this reorg is not the be-all-end-all solution to Yahoo's woes. Ultimately, it's just a holding pattern. The board wants to see what Decker can do with ful control of the advertising side. If she can deliver innovative new ways to monetize Yahoo's properties and keep the ad dollars ka-chinging, I bet that they will hand her the CEO job on their knees. But of course she is not a technology-based CEO either. But as a long-time tech analyst she may have the understanding of technology to figure out how to drive the company to where it needs to go.

Google's strength is that it knows it's a technology company and it can deliver all kinds of value and figure out ways to monetize from that base. As Rohan says, Google has won search and that gives them a huge advantage. Yahoo will have to figure out its core. It should be technology but it can't be search. The idea that new forms of advertising can be integrated into a range of properties makes sense. What that will look like, I'm not sure.

Breaking news: Late in the day, Yahoo issues reorg, heads roll...

Dan Rosensweig, chief operating officer is out...

This was released early Tuesday evening. It shows the the pressure Terry Semel, the CEO is under to match Google's much more efficient business model.

Here are excerpts from the release:

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/061205/20061205006257.html?.v=1

Yahoo! Re-Aligns Organization to More Effectively Focus on Key Customer Segments and Capture Future Growth Opportunities

New Structure to Focus on Serving More Sophisticated Demands of Audiences, Advertisers and Publishers Worldwide

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - News), a leading global Internet company, today announced a reorganization of its structure and management to align its operations with its key customer segments -- audiences, advertisers and publishers -- and more effectively leverage Yahoo!'s significant strengths to capture future opportunities for growth.

"We're moving aggressively to deliver the most possible value to our key customers -- audiences, advertisers and publishers -- and seize the major new opportunities we see ahead for the Internet," said Terry Semel, Yahoo! chairman and chief executive officer. "The Internet is continuing to grow and evolve at a rapid pace, and we're reshaping Yahoo! to be a leader in this transformation, just as we did successfully five years ago. Our strategy capitalizes on big emerging trends and leverages our core strengths in search, media, communities and communications. We believe having a more customer-focused organization, supported by robust technology, will speed the development of leading-edge experiences for our most valuable audience segments. In turn, we plan to drive growth and profitability by leveraging our deep audience insights to create a full-fledged advertising network, with a marketplace that meets supply and demand both on Yahoo!'s valuable owned-and-operated network and across the entire Internet."

Yahoo!'s strategy is to create unique user experiences and consumer insights by leveraging its unmatched global user participation, connections and data. The new structure is designed to drive this strategy by aligning the organization with four key objectives:

Expand customer-centric culture and capabilities -- Yahoo! will develop rich experiences for each audience segment and deliver solutions to meet the needs of all advertisers and publishers worldwide. Yahoo! will organize its services around audience segments and advertising customers, rather than around products.
Create leading social media environments -- Yahoo! will leverage its strong positions in community, communications, search, as well as media content across its global network to create leading social media environments, which will encourage every user on the Yahoo! network to participate in the consumption and publishing of information, and knowledge through tagging, reviewing, sharing of images and audio, and other social media activities.
Lead in next-generation advertising platforms -- Yahoo! will extend its industry-leading breadth of offerings to give the most diverse array of advertisers, from large brand marketers to local merchants, every opportunity to connect with audiences on and off Yahoo!.
Drive organizational effectiveness and scale -- Yahoo! will recruit and retain the best industry talent and focus its resources on high-impact, network-wide platforms to help capture the most significant long-term growth opportunities.

Three Operating Groups

Under the new structure, Yahoo! will have two customer-focused groups, each led by a senior, experienced operating executive, and a strengthened technology function headed by the chief technology officer. All three executives will report directly to Terry Semel. These groups are:

Audience Group - This group will be focused on building the largest and most valuable audiences and relationships on and off the Yahoo! network, creating more unique, tailored and engaging experiences for Yahoo!'s valuable users. The group will leverage the success the company has had to date, as the largest global Internet destination, to further enhance its existing products in search, media, communities and communications; build social media environment across Yahoo!; open more opportunities for users to take advantage of Yahoo! tools and services off network and through mobile and digital devices; and pursue growth opportunities in emerging international markets. Yahoo! has launched a search for an experienced executive to serve as head of this group.
Advertiser & Publisher Group - This group will lead the transformation of how advertisers connect with their target customers across the Internet, with the goal of driving more value for more advertisers and publishers than any other company. This group will be created by combining Yahoo!'s broad array of marketing solutions, its industry leading sales teams, and its thousands of high quality distribution partners, to create a full-fledged global advertising network on and off Yahoo!. This is designed to benefit both advertisers and publishers and significantly enhance the company's monetization capabilities, by leveraging the size and scale of Yahoo!'s advertising network. Specifically, this group will provide customer-oriented solutions across all major segments, including large advertisers and agencies, small- and medium-sized businesses, local advertisers, resellers and publishers, as well as develop advertising platforms and marketplaces for the future. It will be headed by Susan Decker, who has served as chief financial officer since 2000. Decker has also been an important contributor to the company's business strategy, has set and managed all aspects of financial and administrative direction, and has recently overseen the Yahoo! Marketplaces business unit, which she will continue to oversee as part of the Advertiser & Publisher Group.
Technology Group -- Yahoo!'s industry-leading technology group, headed by Chief Technology Officer Farzad Nazem, will continue to support the entire organization. In addition to closer engineering integration within product teams, Yahoo! will concentrate key engineering talent and shift investment towards the development of high-impact, scalable, global platforms and infrastructures to help capture the most significant long-term growth opportunities. For example, the group will be chartered with leveraging Yahoo!'s platform investments in community to create the technology platforms for new social media environments. In addition, it will have a mandate to speed the development of innovative, next generation advertising platforms beyond Project Panama to support the expansion of Yahoo!'s global advertising network. Yahoo! also remains committed to developers and its specific focus on advanced product development.

New Structure Will Increase Accountability, Speed Decision-Making

Semel said, "We're putting the right people in the right places to execute our focused growth strategy. Yahoo! has an extraordinarily skilled and experienced group of senior executives, and we're adding outside senior talent to this already strong team. Our new structure gives us the opportunity to draw more fully on Yahoo!'s deep bench of talent, both at the new group level and down through the organization, while also increasing accountability, reducing bottlenecks and speeding decision-making. We'll also continue to drive sustained innovation by recruiting, developing and retaining the best talent in our industry."

Yahoo!'s senior management team, actively led by Semel and with the continued participation of Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, will work closely together on a daily basis to ensure that the company is aggressively moving its strategy forward, driving long-term growth and fulfilling Yahoo!'s core mission to connect people to their passions, their communities, and the world's knowledge.

The company has a search under way for a new chief financial officer to succeed Decker, who will be assisting in this search. Decker will continue to serve as CFO in the interim. The new CFO and other corporate functions, including corporate development, legal affairs, human resources and corporate communications will report to Semel.

Dan Rosensweig, chief operating officer, has decided to leave Yahoo!, at the end of March, to ensure a smooth transition.

"Since joining Yahoo! almost five years ago, Dan has been a driving force behind Yahoo!'s phenomenal audience and advertising growth, helping shape the development and creation of some of the most adopted and innovative services on the Web today. At the same time, he has helped build some of our most valued partner and client relationships, resulting in our strong advertising success during the last five years," said Semel. "Dan has been closely involved in our efforts to realign Yahoo!'s business for the next phase of growth, and has built a world class team under him. Dan was one of my first executive hires at Yahoo! and I am very appreciative of the friendship, leadership, vision and passion that he has brought to Yahoo!. We will all miss Dan and thank him for all he has done."

The changes in leadership assignments are effective January 1, 2007. The company expects to complete its reorganization by the end of Q1 2007.

CMP buys Sand Hill Group's Software conference for up to $9m

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

CMP, the trade media publisher has acquired Sand Hill Group's Software 2007 conference, one of the top enterprise software conferences. The deal was lead by Eric Faurot, senior vp at CMP, and its chief strategist.

Mr Faurot told Silicon Valley Watcher that CMP is building up its events business and there is an opportunity to create another Comdex-like show. "The IT industry is a one trillion dollar industry yet it does not have a big show."

The Comdex show closed in 2004, a victim of its huge size and the resulting management challenges. It used to attract more than 200,000 people. The Consumer Electronics Show is now the largest tech show but it doesn't serve the needs of IT professionals.

CMP is a US subsidiary of United Business Media, a publicly traded company in the United Kingdom. The deal could be worth as much as $9m provided certain performance levels are achieved. Sand Hill Group received an initial payment of $5.5m and the rest will be paid over a three year period.

CMP owns the Interop conference which has a strong following, and its parent company has been acquiring other shows. It recently acquired The Game Initiative, a game developer conference. And in January 2006 it paid $65m for MediaLive.

- - -

Please see:

United Business Media buys the Software 2007 conference

Sand Hill Group celebrates a good year

Mass media masses at the Googleplex

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

It's that time of the year again when Google opens its doors to the media and offers wine and food and relaxed, off the record conversations with its top people.

I love this event because it is so family-like...it is a place full of familiar faces and I can't imagine the holiday season without it. And I can report that I had some excellent conversations about some topics that are very dear to me: China and the behavior of Yahoo in regards to the jailing of a Chinese journalist; plus the monetisation of Google News. Unfortunately, I cannot report on what Google executives told me.

. . .

I was impressed with Elliot Schrage, chief of GOOG's PR/communications teams. The appointment of Mr Schrage, about a year ago, was fascinating to me because his background is so different from what would be a typical hire by a large Silicon Valley company. Here is someone that had been representing companies such as Nike, dealing with serious ethical and moral issues around child labor, and also dealing with foreign governments.

Clearly, his appointment showed that Google was looking into a future where it would need to navigate a landscape of similar ethical and moral challenges, and it would need experience in foreign government diplomacy.

I was glad to hear that the China issue is well recognized within Google and that the company is trying to understand how best it can behave in an ethical way.

I would say that Google has a fabulous opportunity to create a significant competitive advantage for itself because of the China issue. It can boost its ability to recruit the best and the brightest people. And people are the company, they create the value and the innovation.

Yahoo faces a significant disadvantage in its ability to compete against Google in attracting top talent because of management's disgraceful behavior in China. Who would want to work for a company that Reporters without Borders called a "police informant" for the Chinese government? If Yahoo fails to create an ethical position on this issue, the brain drain out of the company will accelerate.

. . .

I also met the very impressive Susan Wojcicki, VP of product management. She is in charge of monetising Google's products. I asked her to monetise Google News because that action would assign some value to a product that is currently free, but not produced for free.

By trying to monetise Google News GOOG would then be able to share revenues with the news producers--who are all hurting tremendously. San Jose Mercury, for example, this morning announced yet another round of layoffs. Google has the scale to help create badly needed revenue streams for news organizations.

Google News has a very large audience and some of that audience clicks through to the original site. However, driving traffic to a news site doesn't help much because news sites are terrible at monetising their online operations. Many news sites run Google Adsense ads and those pay very little per click, nowhere enough to support the costs of producing news.

How will news organizations survive when their advertising base is rushing into search engine marketing? The simple truth is that selling products or services next to a search engine box is far more effective than next to a news story.

Yet news is what gets people to return to the Internet. We desperately need a value recovery mechanism that rewards high quality news production. We don't have it yet but a company like Google has the brain power and the scale to create one, IMHO.

. . .

There were many familiar faces on the media side and also on the Google side. It was a pleasure running into my former boss at the Financial Times, Richard Waters.

David Krane, one of GOOG's senior comms guy has had another delivery from the crane, a second child. I'm impressed that David took a bunch of time off to bond with his child and that he recognized how such events impact women so much more than is sometimes recognized.

It was also good to connect again with Brian O'Shaughnessy, now heading comms for the entire product group at Google, recently recruited from running the show at Verisign.

Also good to see, John Fourier, co-founder of fast growing media company PodTech, who was wandering around packing various recording devices... Steve Gillmor, famed blogger, told me that he no longer has his Gillmor Gang podcast, but is working on a secret project...His brother, Dan Gillmor was there, I haven't seen him in a while, Dan said he has another book project.

. . .

Related info:

Despicable behavior by Yahoo management - Shi Tao gets ten years

From the London-based The Independent: CHINA Published state secrets Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison after "illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities." His crime was to have emailed details...

Posted in Silicon Valley Watcher on October 30, 2006 03:06 AM

Yahoo and Google and China - it's time to Do Some Good

One of the most powerful images of the 20th Century is "Tank Man" the man that walked out in front of a column of tanks -- a day after the bloody suppression of...

Posted in Silicon Valley Watcher on November 6, 2006 04:05 AM

Congress's dilemma: When Yahoo in China's not Yahoo | csmonitor.com

A House panel will look into tech firms that cooperate with China to restrict access and reveal identities.
www.csmonitor.com/2006/0214/p01s04-usfp.html - 44k - Dec 4, 2006 -

Silicon Valley Watcher

It has taken about ten months, but Google has finally hired a PR boss, Elliot Schrage--as the new VP of global communications and public affairs. ...
www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/11/google_hires_sq.php - 55k -

12.5.06: WSJ cuts back and calls it good news

Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz announces a new, slimmer (that is, cheaper) Journal starting Jan. 2, pushing more company news onto the website and reserving the printed paper for "what it means" stories.

Today perhaps a bit over half of our news space is devoted to exclusive, differentiated information and the rest to essentially what happened the day before. Our goal is to move to 80% exclusive news, with 20% making sure you're aware of the key developments of the previous day. Journal reporters and editors serve a community of interest -- business executives and other leaders with similar concerns -- and look forward to devoting more time and space to keeping you ahead of the news that's essential to you. Expect to see more forward-leaning coverage, with headlines featuring predictive and explanatory words like "will" and "means" and "why."

Crovitz goes on to crow about the growing importance of the website:

As the print Journal moves even more toward exclusive, "what it means" journalism, WSJ.com will be the place to go for "what's happening right now" in business and markets. The digital medium is perfect for breaking news and for delivering great depth, across media.

He is even excited about losing about one-sixth of the news hole as this will make the printed paper easier to handle.

At Slate, Jack Shaffer finds this rich - in the extreme.

It's the rare amputee who describes himself as better off without his two big toes than with them, but that's what Wall Street Journal Publisher L. Gordon Crovitz attempts today ...
Instead of leveling with his readers about the reasons behind his paper's new slim profile—to save money—Crovitz insults their intelligence by claiming the change is for the "convenience" of readers. Calling it an "easier-to-handle size," he repeats the testimony of one reader who, upon seeing a prototype of the smaller Journal, said, "I fly First Class, but when I'm reading the Journal now I knock over my neighbor's orange juice. That won't happen anymore."
People have been flying first class and reading their Wall Street Journals for more than a half century. Suddenly the size is a problem? Doesn't Crovitz understand that he's writing for one of the most business-literate audiences in the nation, and that they roll their eyes when a manufacturer says he shrank the product for the benefit of the customer?

While the Journal's advertising revenues are a rare bright spot in major newspapering, the rest of its numbers show the move is all about economics, The Times' Katie Hafner reports. The Journal's department, Dow Jones Consumer Media, lost money last year. Circulation is down 2% for the six-month period ending in September, compared to the previous period. And the cost savings from the scaleback are of a piece with others: closing the Canadian bureau, relying more on DJ wire stories, and scaling back international editions to tabloids.

“People at The Journal are very concerned about quality,” said E. S. Browning, a reporter who covers the financial markets and is chairman of the union bargaining committee that represents Journal employees.
“Lopping a column off the paper is not a quality move,” he said. “It will be harder to do long-form journalism when there is less space on Page One.”

12.5.06: Requiem for a Photojournalist

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

The big news yesterday was that Yahoo and Reuters are embracing citizen photojournalism in a big way. Today, Dan Gillmor offers a long goodbye for the profession of photojournalism.

How can people who cover breaking news for a living begin to compete? They can’t possibly be everywhere at once. They can compete only on the stories where they are physically present — and, in the immediate future, by being relatively trusted sources.
But the fact remains, there are far more newsworthy situations than pro picture takers. In the past, most of those situations never were captured. Not any longer.
Is it so sad that the professionals will have more trouble making a living this way in coming years? To them, it must be — and I have friends in the business, which makes this painful to write in some ways.
To the rest of us, as long as we get the trustworthy news we need, the trend is more positive.

As for the deal in question, Dan says flat-out: "I’m highly skeptical of business models, typically conceived by Big Media Companies, that tell the rest of us: “You do all the work, and we’ll take all the money we make by exploiting it.” This is not just unethical.. It’s also unsustainable in the long run."

Under the deal, users won't be paid for images appearing on Yahoo and Reuters websites but will be paid if they run in print. Isn't that backwards? Newspapers are rapidly moving operations online. Getting paid for the dying business model is a little funky and it just goes to show that online is still seen as a place where the advertising revenue comes at very little editorial cost.

Nicole Simon notes: "Basically you are giving Reuters a huge amount of material to select from (without them having to pay anything for it) and if you are lucky, your work is taken. Then your work gets used (probably without usable credits) and if it gets reprinted AND it will be reported, first Reuters and Yahoo will receive money.

I am no friend of the old copyright system, I call it outdated and it needs work done. It was invented in the last millenium and could not have forseen the internet. Still, we have to talk about ways to share revenue in a fair way between all parties.

Former journalist and current J-teacher Mark Hamilton argues that Gillmor misses something:

News “shooters” may be ubiquitous, but far fewer will be the citizen photogs willing (or even able) to go in-depth, to string together the compelling series of images, to work the subject to capture the image, or video, that rises above mere showing to telling.
I’m not going to argue that only those shooters with press passes can do this. Evidence abounds on Flickr that there are talented, passionate storytellers out there. So do the best of the videoblogs. I will argue that storytelling takes time and energy and someone has to pay for that.
It’s that type of visual storytelling that I suspect will remain the province of the pros and the dedicated amateurs, even as news, sports, enertainment and even feature photography slowly slides out of the hands of the traditional newsroom.

The fact of the matter, though, is that the bread and butter of the news is news shots. If you're on the scene and can basically point the lens at the action with some semblance of lighting, that's the shot that's needed. Gorgeous, compelling, story-telling photographs are few and far between. We can't live without any photojournalism but as Mark notes, there are some amateurs out there who can compete with the best. For the pros, the market is getting very small.

December 4, 2006

Kultur Shock: Decadent Dec

[diggrz: an SVW tag for arts, culture, trends, and events in and around Silicon Valley- new from SVW] -

By Maria Mouk for Silicon Valley Watcher

Yes, its already December, and with 55F degree temps it can make one forget that this is winter! So roll up your sleeves and check out all the decadent detours December has to offer.

Starting this week; the SFMOMA presents a retrospective on German film director/ screenwriter Werner Hezog in conjunction with Anselm Kiefer, whose art is on view in the galleries. The film series samples the full range of Herzog's work, from fictional features to documentaries and shorts. Beginning with a lineup of six films in November and December, the series continues in January with seven additional screenings.

Trying to find meaning from exerting (or lacking) energy (E)? Want to know what to do with your mass (m)? Or how much energy you really need in your low lit (c=speed of light) space of an office? You might want to Ask a Scientist. This month discussion heads towards Einstein's legendary equation; e=mc2, as we explore energy, mass, matter, antimatter, and those pesky missing pieces of the universe: dark matter and dark energy. Hitoshi Murayama; Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley, and Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, speak at the Canvas Gallery

Tuesday Eve

Tuesday bring in Aimee Mann's 1st Annual Christmas Show at Bimbo's. Think soothing, songwriting which sometimes wrecks songs with literary quality. Surprise special guests are promised.

This Tuesday is also the monthly session of SF's Green Drinks. Held at Varnish Fine Art from 5:30-7:30 p.m, come to discuss or collaborate on business possibilities in the environmental field, and stay for happy hour priced drinks and an art gallery with the current exhibit titled Life Aquatic.

Also Tuesday, is the Converting Your Passion into a Real Business Panel & Mixer at Stanford University in Palo Alto. Presented by Women 2.0 (a division of Entrepreneur27) and Stanford BASES, evening will include vloggers, bloggers, and seasoned entrepreneur panelists such as Nick Douglas, Valleywag Immediate Past Editor, Liz Gannes, GigaOM Reporter, Shannon McClenaghan, JimmyJane President, Amy Andersen, LinxDating Founder and CEO, Christopher Surdi, Global Educational Program (GEP) Co-Founder & President, Michael Cerda, Jangl CEO, and Moderator: Ariel Polero CEO of TextMarks. Topics will include; getting started, getting funding, and how to run a successful business. Please register here.

Wednesday Eve

Teched out? Then get decked out! on Wednesday all day. NOOWORKS and GUARDIAN PRESENT: WINTER FASHION FEST 2006. Get your holiday shopping done at the bar. The trunk show at 12 Galaxies will feature the best local designers, artisans and merchants bringing their creations to the savviest shoppers in the middle of a rockin' party! Admission is FREE! DJs, food and drink come together. While you're shopping, bring your receipts totaling $100 to the Guardian's table to receive the fabulously chic DVD of THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA! While supplies last. Not too shabby for a December kick off, huh? Glad you agree.

Tag: diggrz

Jajah is innovating the phone call

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

Jajah is one of those rare startups that managed to put a tingle down my spine. It's best described as a telecommunications company creating new types of phone call services using Internet technologies.

Jajah is not a VOIP company, don't confuse it with Vonage, or Skype. Jajah uses VOIP but this is not about technology it's about spotting a very large business opportunity. And it's also about innovation in its proper sense.

Jajah has developed what it calls "web activated telephony" which is a mouthful compared with the simplicity of its service. You go to its web site, input your phone number, and the number you want to call, and click to connect--that's it. You use your own phone, there is no download, no headsets to use, it's dead simple. And for many users it is free.

I recently met with Roman Scharf, co-founder of Jajah. "We wanted to create a very simple to use telephony service and one that uses the current telephone system and telephones. Skype is popular but only 3 per cent of Internet users use it. You need to install the software, and you have to be at your PC, and use a headset."

Jajah takes advantage of free local calling by establishing local PBX sites in more than 100 countries and using its network to carry the voice traffic between them. The beauty of this approach is that it leverages the existing global telephone network, and more importantly, it has a massive potential market of existing phone owners--much larger than the number of Internet users.

But how defensible is this approach to competition? "There is a lot that we do on the backend that is not easy to do. Also, it would take at least a year to negotiate all the contracts with the telephone companies around the world." A year is a long time for a competitor to establish the back end infrastructure especially since Jajah is well into phase two--negotiating big partnership deals on the front end.

Mr Scharf says that telephone companies are concerned about Skype and Vonage but not about Jajah. "We work with the phone companies and we help them keep customers. In Germany, for example, there is huge churn in phone customers, the phone companies costs of acquiring customers, so that they can sell them all the other services, is huge. Partnering with Jajah allows them to keep hold of their customers."

Jajah is close to announcing some partnerships with large media companies that will expand its reach. It is also exploring business models that could eventually make all voice calls free, to anywhere.

But this is not all. Jajah will soon be unveiling some very inventive phone call products/services. I'm not able to talk abut them yet but I'm impressed with Jajah's creativity. I'm also amazed that nobody has thought to innovate on the basic telephone platform--which has barely changed in function in 125 years.

Jajah is name you will be seeing a lot because I'm certain that you'll be using its co-branded services in many places--online and offline.

- - -

Additional info:

JAJAH Mobile and Roman at ScobleShow
Thursday, October 19. 2006
Robert Scoble recently launched his new video blog project called ScobleShow. He dropped by our office in Mountain View at the end of September and taped an interview with one of our co-founders, Roman Scharf. Roman also does a brief demonstration of Jajah Mobile with special guest Guy Kawasaki.

Headquarters:
JAJAH Inc.
2513 Charleston Road
Suite 102
Mountain View, CA 94043
European Office:
JAJAH Technologies S.A.
11A, Boulevard Joseph II
1840 Luxemburg
Development Center:
JAJAH Ltd.
48 Ha'amal St.
Ra'anana, Israel

JAJAH - web-activated telephony

12.4.06: Gannett radically remaking newspapers into something bloggy

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

The feeling is palpable this year that the newspaper just might not make it after all. Ink on paper, distributed through city kiosks, change boxes and home delivery, is the technology that worked for 300 years but that tradition makes it all the more susceptible to the cruelty of the digital age. Newspapering is slow (today's news tomorrow), impersonal (inverted pyramid with references to the author reduced to "a reporter" or boldy "this reporter"), expensive (those presses run in the $10 million range, delivery requires a fleet of trucks, reporters, production people and press operators are unionized with stultifying effect) and anachronistic (it's a mass market business, delivering only text and low-res imagery in a multimedia time.)

Newspapers have websites of course with audio and video, and reporters blog, but the cost structures continue to be unwieldly and papers are singularly unable to turn their benefits into online advertising dollars. Thus they have outsourced - at a high cost - advertising sales to Google and Yahoo. With hard costs fixed, some companies like the Tribune Co. have acted to gut the newsroom.

But as Foremski points out, if newspapers fail to figure out the new media business model before they gut themselves out of any relevance, we're all be worse off. While few newspapers still do it, papers are the institution best-positioned to do investigatory reporting, to follow the money, work leads, build contacts and have enough visibility to attract leaks and smoking gun documents.

And so to Fort Myers, Fla., where, The Washington Post reports, Gannett is pushing the envelope on digital newspapering in an attempt to build relevance in the digital age.

Darkness falls on a chilly Winn-Dixie parking lot in a dodgy part of North Fort Myers just before Thanksgiving. Chuck Myron sits in his little gray Nissan and types on an IBM ThinkPad laptop plugged into the car's cigarette lighter. The glow of the screen illuminates his face.
Myron, 27, is a reporter for the Fort Myers News-Press and one of its fleet of mobile journalists, or "mojos." The mojos have high-tech tools -- ThinkPads, digital audio recorders, digital still and video cameras -- but no desk, no chair, no nameplate, no land line, no office. They spend their time on the road looking for stories, filing several a day for the newspaper's Web site, and often for the print edition, too. Their guiding principle: A constantly updated stream of intensely local, fresh Web content -- regardless of its traditional news value -- is key to building online and newspaper readership.

Gannett, of course, reinvented newspapers in the early 80s with USA Today and the company's philosophy is "news you can use." But this is radical even for the leading-edge Gannett. That's just how badly broken the old system is.

The chain's papers are redirecting their newsrooms to focus on the Web first, paper second. Papers are slashing national and foreign coverage and beefing up "hyper-local," street-by-street news. They are creating reader-searchable databases on traffic flows and school class sizes. Web sites are fed with reader-generated content, such as pictures of their kids with Santa. In short, Gannett -- at its 90 papers, including USA Today -- is trying everything it can think of to create Web sites that will attract more readers.

"We're trying a lot of things. Some will work; others won't," said Kate Marymont, 53, the energetic News-Press executive editor for the past six years and a Gannett lifer. "It's like play."

What if you were creating a news organization today? Would you hire J-school grads or youngsters who lived and breathed blogs, digcams, text messaging and video? Would you open a Washington bureau or decide that there's no point in replicating the work of the major media? Would you invest in investigative reporting or focus on the super-local?

For the News-Press the direction is clear. Their ideas are cutting-edge for the newspaper business but have mostly been thought of and tried by bloggers and startups. Gannett is the biggest operation to make blogging, Digg-like voting, and user contributions the core of the news operation. Here are some of the paper's innovations:

The creation of 14 full- and part-time mojos. By the end of next year, the paper's 30 other news reporters also will be mojos to one extent or another. The News-Press is nonunion.
"Crowdsourcing" or enlisting expert readers to review documents and work on investigations. For instance, the News-Press enlisted retired engineers, accountants and government insiders to look at docs and data to uncover why new sewer and water hookups were so expensive. The resulting investigative report resulted in fees lowered by 30 percent and an official ousted.

The News-Press and other Gannett papers also are building searchable online databases on as many topics as they can think of, in part to "enable people to do digging themselves and maybe find conclusions we won't," said Michael Maness, Gannett's vice president of strategic planning. "It's having thousands of investigative reporters instead of three."
A managing editor for audience building who monitors traffic data and steers editorial towards the most popular topics.
Online message boards that sounds like Craigslist.

And most radically of all:

Next spring, the paper plans to run a large story on a topic it would not identify. It did, however, say that the reporter on the article will accompany News-Press ad salespeople on trips to advertisers as the paper seeks a sponsor for the article. The logic: The reporter understands the project and can explain it best to potential advertisers. Though the reporter will be in sales meetings, he or she will not be part of the sales pitch. Nevertheless, the practice violates one of journalism's fundamentals -- maintaining a leakproof wall between the news and business sides of a newspaper.

Sand Hill Group celebrates a good year

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

I popped into the Four Seasons Sunday evening for Sand Hill Group's holiday celebration. I've been a big fan of M.R. Rangaswami, co-founder of the Sand Hill Group because of his success in making enterprise software interesting again.

M.R's software conference has become one of those rare conferences that gets better every year. The next Software 2007 conference is on May 8 and 9 in Santa Clara. And his web site, Sandhill.com is the best source of news and insights into the enterprise software market.

A bonus was bumping into Terry Garnett, of Garnett & Helfrich Capital--the venture buyout firm. Also, it was a pleasure talking with Eric Faurot, senior vp at CMP, the veteran trade media company. Mr Faurot is piloting an interesting media expansion strategy that will be worth watching.

And Joshua Sun, an attorney at Fenwick & West, provided a fascinating conversation about the M&A activities in Silicon Valley. All in all, a decent way to spend a Sunday evening if you have to work...

- - -

Please see:

Lunch with the Swami of the enterprise software sector...

Exclusive interview: Terry Garnett explains his firm's VC buyout strategy...

December 1, 2006

12.1.06: Subpoenas for AMD, Nvidia

The Justice Dept. is looking into possible antitrust violations by AMD and Nvidia, News.com reports. Both companies have made major acquisitions in the graphic chip field. AMD bought ATI Technologies for $5.4 billion in October and Nvidia announced its intent to acquire PortalPlayer, which provides video chips for Apple's iPods, in November.

The U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division has issued subpoenas to the companies, both of which said they intend to cooperate. Last month, AMD was sued by intellectual-property company Opti over potential copyright infringement in its Opteron processors.

- Richard Koman

12.1.06: Yahoo smiles as Google folds Answers

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Michael Arrington notes that the folding of Google Answers was a big win for Yahoo and for the Web 2.0 model. But it's also a milestone for Google in that it shows they're willing to kill off projects operating under the wrong concept.

Google Answers launched in 2002, at a time when the desire for cheap user generated content wasn’t valued much because the advertising market was in a slump - monetizing page views was much harder than it is today. They adopted a for-pay model, where experts received a fee for answering questions, and Google took a 25% cut. ...
This is a case study in why all this “Web 2.0 stuff” actually has legs when applied properly. Google went for a direct revenue stream, a business model that made sense in 2002. Yahoo, launching much later, launched a free product and used the ideals of community participation to remove friction from the process and get out of the way of users. This incentivized use and has created a massive number of page views that Yahoo is now monetizing. The network effect kicked in big time.

Finally, the move shows that Google wants to see performance out of its projects - 20 percenters or not - and is willing to pull the plug on stuff that just doesn't work. Perhaps not a great sign for Google Video.

December 2006 Archives

December 31, 2006

12.31.06: Free Culture Foundation

December 22, 2006

12.22.06: Screen shots from P2P TV Venice Project

British Queen plans Xmas Podcast

Can dotMobi break the stranglehold of the wireless Telcos?

December 21, 2006

12.21.06: Juniper takes $900m hit, IBM nixes options for directors

12.21.06: Google updates Blogger

12.21.06: Labels sue AllofMP3.com in US court

December 20, 2006

12.20.06: Ericsson buys Redback for $2.1bn

Link in to SVW on LinkedIn

London notes: ... diversity & integration . . . London's Poles . . . media gathering at the Cheshire Cheese . . . SVW goes offline

December 15, 2006

12.15.06: Gizmodo: iPhone on Monday

12.15.06: Photoshop CS3 beta download

12.15.06: Indictments, guilty pleas on Chinese trade secret thefts

December 14, 2006

thisNthat before I head to London...

Doubleclick survey finds online ads are very effective

Feedback for ILikeTotallyLoveIt.com

Google's one square-inch business model...

Gartner predicts hasta la Vista for future Microsoft OSs

December 13, 2006

12.13.06: Google auctions employee options

12.13.06: Yahoo, IBM go for enterprise search

Hurd asked to explain option sales

Silicon Valley legend and hard-drive pioneer Al Shugart dies at 76

Alan Shugart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Revolutionaries: Al Shugart

Find out which way the wind blows in Silicon Valley - SVW's Rooster newsletter

12.13.06: Epicenter of Web 2.0 boom: 625 Second

In media, the medium defines the DRM

December 12, 2006

New: Ajax13 rounds out online suite with new Powerpoint app

diggrz_events : kultur shock sensation

December 11, 2006

TSMC's $10bn monster triple chip fabs and the 15 year old girl

12.11.06: iTunes sales stagnant

December 10, 2006

Should Semel go? Is Yahoo a media company? Is that a good thing to be? (Yes, Yes, No.)

December 9, 2006

Do journalists want a social media news release?

December 8, 2006

First Annual Solstice Synchronized Global Orgasm for Peace

First Look at New Mini Wall Street Journal

12.8.06: Rumors of Metacafe sale for $200-$700mn

12.8.06: HP settles with California for $14.5mn

Wish your competitors well...

December 7, 2006

diggrz: Kultur Shock: Santa sauce

Edelman creates tool to create social media news releases

Are all websites made in Silicon Valley?

DTrace: Sun's potential killer application

December 6, 2006

My secret life: talking about media, on panels and elsewhere

Lala music swap site expands into streaming live performances

Light Reading finds 61 video hosting sites and wonders why

12.6.06: Arrington: Kingmaker or sleazy journalist?

Intel Breakthrough: Demonstrates Its First Mobile WiMAX Baseband Chip

Dan Farber's Experimental Blogger Army...

YHOO news analysis: GOOG is setting the pace as Yahoo faces identity and leadership crisis

UPDATED Back story: Did YHOO try to scoop WSJ? The reorganization is not finished...

December 5, 2006

12.6.06: YHOO's half-measure reorg

Breaking news: Late in the day, Yahoo issues reorg, heads roll...

CMP buys Sand Hill Group's Software conference for up to $9m

Mass media masses at the Googleplex

Despicable behavior by Yahoo management - Shi Tao gets ten years

Yahoo and Google and China - it's time to Do Some Good

Silicon Valley Watcher

It has taken about ten months, but Google has finally hired a PR boss, Elliot Schrage--as the new VP of global communications and public affairs. ...www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/11/google_hires_sq.php - 55k -

12.5.06: WSJ cuts back and calls it good news

12.5.06: Requiem for a Photojournalist

December 4, 2006

Kultur Shock: Decadent Dec

Tuesday Eve

Wednesday Eve

It has taken about ten months, but Google has finally hired a PR boss, Elliot Schrage--as the new VP of global communications and public affairs. ...
www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/11/google_hires_sq.php - 55k -