Silicon Valley Watcher--reporting on the business and culture of innovation

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December 1, 2005

[Copy for top panels - Panel 1 - in extract field]

November 17, 2005

Moderating at Under the Radar. . .startups face the VCs

By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

I haven't been able to post much because of preparation for moderating at the IDB Under the Radar event. I got to moderate all two tracks of the morning session on enterprise mobile apps and the second session of enterprise RFID (radio chip tags).

What was fascinating was how few companies were able to explain what they do. But, let me backup a second and tell you what the event is about.

The Under the Radar series organized by Debbie Landa and Alison Murdock has become almost an institution. It brings startup companies in front of panels of venture capitalist judges. They get rated on their presentation, their business model, and their strategy.

I've been to several of these Under the Radar events and they are always different. This time around there was a lot more energy in the air, a real feeling the valley is back (again...maybe this time, for sure.)

The overall winner of the event was our old friend Zimbra--the AJAX poster child software company.

And overall, the 32 startups presented and interesting mix. But what continues to puzzle me is how few of the startups can say what they do. At least in less than 30 minutes--which is a problem at Under the Radar, because you only get five minutes (moderators are armed with stun guns to enforce the time limit very strictly:-)

I didn't have to reach under the podium and stun anybody--my lot were very well behaved. A mobile apps company called Soonr won the audience vote but the judges preferred Funambol, an open software middleware stackette for the mobile space.

Soonr, I think, deserved a bit more attention. Because when asked what was their business model, they said we have none. Smirks all around, as you can imagine.

But on later reflection, I think Soonr is on the right track. Yes, they lack a business model but, they are focusing on users And this is precisely the right strategy because if you have users you know you have a useful product. If you don't have a useful product, it doesn't matter how clever your business model is.

- - -

The RFID companies on my second panel were a good contrast to the first lot. Interestingly, most of the senior management of those companies had some connection or background in supply chain management.

And supply chain management is one of the big failures of enterprise software markets...so who is to say that RFID will improve this? But at least the people running thse companies knew what a tough problem it is, and were still working at trying to solve it,

- - -

The Under the Radar event was at the Microsoft Silicon Valley center, which is a couple of stone- throws from Google.

This time, in contrast to past visits over the past few years, the MSFT car park was full, and it was early in the morning and there was bustle about the place. It used to be not very busy at all...

Oh, and I spotted Robert Scoble in the cafeteria, MSFT's second most famous employee!

More under the radar stories later in the day...

PS: I will soon start writing a blog for ZDNet, in addition to here, and lately also AlwaysOn.

November 8, 2005

A call for a new Manhattan Project on clean energy--continuing the work of Nobel prize winner Dr Richard Smalley

By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

(My apologies, but I am a little behind on my emails and posts following my Oregon trip...)

When I returned on Monday, I found out that Dr Richard Smalley, the nanotechnology pioneer had died. I found this out by reading Irving Wladawsky-Berger's blog, in which he wrote a long piece about Dr Smalley, a 1996 Nobel prize winner for the shared discovery of a new form of carbon: buckminsterfullerene, better known as buckyballs.

I met Dr Smalley late last year at a large chip conference. He was the lunchtime keynote speaker and on the stage alongside him, sat about 20 distinguished chip industry veterans such as Andy Grove, chairman of Intel. The audience consisted of more than 2000 of the world's top chip experts.

He was talking about energy. He said that the growing need for energy was the number one problem facing humanity. If the energy problem could be solved, by giving everyone the energy they needed, it would solve all the other top ten global problems: hunger, poverty, war, pollution, poor education, lack of clean water...

Dr Smalley impressed me with his eloquence and his directness. He was not afraid to criticize the Bush administration, saying the reelection of the president would not be good for science research.

He called for a new Manhattan project, focused on finding an alternative to oil--which he said was just one month or so away from peak production.

At the press conference

I was sitting with my buddy Mark Osborne, editor of Semiconductor Fabtech, (based in London). Following the speech, Mark and I went to the press conference for Dr Smalley. There were 5 journalists in the room, waiting for him to arrive.

After about ten minutes Dr Smalley walked in and sat on a tall stool. He looked in excellent shape for a man in his early 60s. He looked to be at the top of his form, both physically and intellectually. He sat and answered our questions. The rest of the journalists left after about an hour, leaving just Mark and myself.

We asked more questions, and then more on nanotechnology, and then more on energy. Dr Smalley diligently answered every question, and explained complex issues with patience and thoroughness. And he just sat and talked, and we sat and asked questions. Until finally, we ran out of questions. By that time, it was almost 4pm. Satisfied there were no more questions, Dr Smalley shook our hands and left.

Impressive dedication

Mark and I were amazed at his stamina and his dedication to the subjects of energy and nanotechnology. I learned a tremendous amount about both subjects.

And we were impressed that Dr Smalley did not run out of the room after 20 minutes or so, as is usual in press conferences. He talked until he was satisfied he had exhausted his audience of all questions.

I remember he talked about speaking at conferences on the subject of energy, and how some of the scientists were so inspired by his vision that they would approach him afterwards and ask to become involved in his work.

This was because Dr Smalley had discovered a calling, one to which he devoted a large part of his life. And he communicated that calling through his presence, through his stature as one of the top scientists of our time, and through his passion.

This is what inspired other scientists to approach him and offer their support, and want to join him in his mission. But there was no organization to join, and Dr Smalley said he didn't want to lead one.

I remember thinking that Martin Luther King didn't want to be the leader of his times, he didn't want to be in the front ranks of civil rights marches, facing hails of rocks and men with clubs and dogs.

New leadership

I remember thinking that Dr Smalley had to take on the leadership role directly, because he was the one that raised people's awareness, and communicated his calling to them so strongly that they felt they had to take it up too.

I did not know that he had had a long battle with cancer, and that probably he knew that his battle might be coming to an end. That's why he wanted others to take on the leadership roles.

If you were ever inspired by Dr Smalley's speeches on energy and solving the world's most serious problems, then take any opportunity to carry on his work, in the workplace and in the home place. It is quite probably the most virtuous mission that anybody can become involved in.

- - -

From the Rice University announcement of his death:

"Rick could focus so completely on his goals, and he could inspire his students and his colleagues to a similar focus," said Kathleen Matthews, dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences and the Stewart Memorial Professor of Biochemistry. "He had the ability to persuade others with a rare intensity of thought and spirit. He brought both passion and intellect to his work, and he displayed a degree of dedication and engagement that could motivate others to new levels of achievement."

- - -

Please see SVW: Nobel Prize winner Dr Richard Smalley tells SF chip conference of the urgent need for action on energy issues

- - -

Irving's blog:

Energy - the Single Most Important Problem Facing Humanity

October 26, 2005

The lie of distribution--search engines return very little value to news/blog sites yet hog bandwidth and increase server loads

. . .or is it just me?
By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher.com

Search-and-scrape sites such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and oodles of others claim they bring traffic to web sites. And they do--but at what cost? It was a question I asked myself following a chat with Jim Buckmaster, ceo of craigslist, and its recent complaint that Oodle was scraping its listings way too aggressively and slowing down the entire system.

I took a look at my server stats from mid-October.

The search-and-scrapers sucked out one-third of my bandwidth and provided just 3.7 percent of the traffic!

Microsoft is by far the most egregious of the lot. Over the past three weeks it sucked out 4.6GB or 18 per cent of my bandwidth and returned...275 page views--0.0007 percent of the total!!

It is news/blog/original content sites that are being targeted by these over-zealous bots because they provide fresh content, and without fresh content the search-and scrapers have nothing. And the more often you post fresh content the more attention and visits you get from the bot army.

And lets not talk about the masses of cached pages out there that are hit and viewed but do not show up in the server stats--yet are counted and monetized by the search-and-scrapers.

It is inevitable that content owners will increasingly choose to glue down their content. You can only get it here and you have to come here to get it--will be the mantra.

Why do you think Yahoo is trying to scramble as quickly as it can into producing original content ;-). It knows the writing is on the wall.

Tell me what your AWstats are showing...

October 18, 2005

Media giant Cnet finds the 100 needles in the 14m blog haystack--is your favorite blog a needle?

. . .where is good morning silicon valley, silicon beat and Dan Gillmor?

Cnet recently posted its Top 100 Blogs, giving out much link love to the blogosphere, or at least to some of the uberbloggers.

Cnet asks...

With more than 14 million blogs in existence and another 80,000 being created each day, how is a person supposed to find the ones worth reading?"

Of course, I was delighted that Cnet editors named Silicon Valley Watcher in the Top 100, and in the Top 16 of all Tech Business blogs.

[BTW, this is how link-love spreads--Cnet is very savvy.]

However, with Best 100 lists and other popularity lists attracting and aggregating the blog clicks, it must get tougher every day for new writers to establish themselves. That's why SVW will increasingly feature some of the other, less noisy voices out in the digital ether.

October 17, 2005

Freshly minted Memeorandum.com is not bad...And lessons in how bloggers get media attention

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

Gabe Rivera, founder of memeorandum.com certainly knows how to get my attention. I had just sat down at the far end of the table, at the recent dinner to welcome Microsoft uberblogger Robert Scoble to town.

It was a Saturday evening and the assembled leading lights of the blogosphere were all tired and cranky after a week of Web 2.0, 1.0 and 0.2 events; while Robert Scoble had skipped the conference entirely and was all fresh and friendly and looking well-rested.

Seconds after I had shaken hands with my end of the table, which included Niall Kennedy from Technorati, the stranger sitting opposite, said, "So...you cover Silicon Valley from San Francisco...?"

It took me but a nanosecond to parry that remark and ram it back in my eloquent manner:

Fu*k you, I said, and you think that Silicon Valley ends anywhere?! I sniggered...

I'm driving from San Francisco to San Jose all week long, I explained, that's how SVW gets original stories, scoops, exclusives. [Silicon Valley Watcher had $400m in M&A deals last week that were scoops and published hours and days ahead of anybody else.] Other hacks are sitting at their desks rewriting press releases or Reuters copy--you won't get any scoops doing that.

Anyway, I see Silicon Valley as a blob that has extended from its Palo Alto center and now runs fifty miles in all directions; north across the Golden Gate bridge up to edges of the Sonoma wine country, south to San Jose and further to the surfer town of Santa Cruz, and across the entire length of the East Bay.

Gabe and I get along very well now, and at the recent Slide.com sliding out party, we talked for a long time about some ideas for new types of media business models we could try, but more on that later.

BTW, everybody keeps telling me that Gabe's site is really hot. And all the uberbloggers seem to agree, plus one lady told me it was "life changing."

With such testimonials I just had to take a look, and I must say, memeorandum.com is not bad, ...not bad at all. Take a look and see for yourself.

http://www.memeorandum.com/

Background:
http://blog.memeorandum.com/

October 12, 2005

Prediction: IBM will reverse its position on blog advertising sooner than later...

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher.com

I'm not too worried about IBM's decision not to advertise on blogs because I'm certain that it can be changed.

Especially since IBM will, sooner than later, realize there is something much bigger going on, and that it has an opportunity to play a large role--maybe even a historic one--in helping to birth the new media.

It would take but a fraction of its massive marketing budget to help the new media sector find business models that work. And those models might look very different from today's models, based on advertising/marketing messages found in newspapers and magazines.

Those traditional messages don't work well in the online world. There is little tolerance for fluff and great value given to substance.

Yes, I would love for IBM and a dozen other companies to advertise on or sponsor Silicon Valley Watcher, and on all the other leading blogs out there. We all have landlords that need to eat.

I would love it even more if IBM and the others left behind the ad banners and advertising hype they use with other media. I'm not sure what they would replace them with, but, that's the interesting part--we all get to figure it out.

For example, what could be done with the online real estate that an advertising banner takes up? I think that space should be treated by companies as a window onto a community, a window of opportunity to provide something of value, even if it is just the time of day.

The blogosphere right now lives on passion and little else. A little of IBM's money spread around would have a tremendous amplifier effect. It would act as a validation of this new medium and draw other companies into advertising or sponsoring parts of the blogosphere.

IBM might even be able to earn a paragraph or two in the history books; that when the media turmoil of the early 21st century started to roil, IBM was one of those that had already stepped in and helped calm the waters, and aided the transformation of the old media sector into the new media sector.

History books...or not? That is the question IBM faces. imho.

Please see: IBM decides no blog ads...

September 29, 2005

The Google Zeitgeist and the walking dead...imho

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Google's transformation, into a technology- enabled media company that publishes ads around software, is incredibly impressive.

Have you used Google Desktop and some of the other apps it has developed? I repeat: what is going on at Google is extremely impressive. And so is the acceleration of its business model.

And that is due to the company's ability to quickly create self-organizing business development teams, all leveraging a shared and scalable computing platform.

Not only that, Google seems to be able to integrate newcomers, be they individuals or companies, at record speed.

Yes, some talent walks out the door in such mashups; but there is much more walking into the company. And Google gets the newcomers integrated and productive faster than any other large organizations that I can see. You can see the results in the suite/catalog of software it has already built.

I think it is game over for a lot of companies now; and I think Microsoft is one of them. Unless it makes Office free right now, this minute, and figures out the business model later if it has to.

The game changed and nobody told Redmond

I think that a lot of people in Silicon Valley understand full well what is happening: that the game has already changed, and that there are new rules in play. People like Ray Lane at Kleiner Perkins, Joe Kraus at JotSpot, and many of the software engineers in the thousands of startups here, all of whom know what I'm talking about.

But I'd still like to spell it out, just in case Redmond is confused. Give away Microsoft Office now so that you can corral the largest populations of users. Even if you don't understand the business model yet. Do it now.

Then re-architecture your software business as fast as you can along the lines of the AJAX-type hybrid new client-and-server software architectures emerging --and sell ads around it. And you might get away with some monthly subscription revenues for some products, for a little bit at least.

Redmond flat earth society

It's probably too late for Microsoft anyway. It continues to state the importance of the PC over PDAs-cell-phones-or-any-lesser-enabled-digital-device. This is quaintly last century, a type of modern flat earther argument--not in the Friedman sense of course--but in the clueless sense.

In some ways, it is touching to see such steadfast loyalty to a cash cow that created a lot value for our global society, but is, quite probably, fading fast. That cow still looks fat; but we know that cows also produce incredible quantities of methane.

[My apologies, dear readers, for the distasteful image this metaphor may have sparked, especially if you are eating while reading.]

Am I unfairly harsh on Microsoft? This is all cheap digital ink. It's Microsoft shareholders who will be the harsh judges; and some valid question from them might be:

How did Microsoft lose the desktop?
How did the senior management let Google, and others too,take away the desktop and the apps?
Why did you invest the billions from the only profitable business group you had, and build many unprofitable businesses and ignore your core franchise?

Those are fair questions, I would think.

...To come: Part II on the Google Zeitgeist. . . [BTW, if David Krane or Ray are reading this, my invite to the Zeitgeist thingie seems to have been eaten up by my spam filter, so if you could resend that would be wonderful...thanks!]

[Read]

September 12, 2005

Heading for New York City and the Impact '05 conference...

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I'm excited to be heading to New York city this week to be a panelist at the Impact Conference held at New York University.

I'll be on panel with Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's political strategist and mastermind of an extremely effective Internet campaign that showed how blogging and other media technologies can be used by politicians to great effect.

I don't think it is an exaggeration if I say that the legacy of Mr Trippi's pioneering work will be seen in every future political election campaign in the US.

A very happy Andy Plesser, the organiser of the conference, tells me that the number of senior level executives attending the conference is phenomenal. I can't wait.

BTW, registrations are still open and will be open the day of the conference (September 15) and if you mention SiliconValleyWatcher you save $100 bucks because we are a media sponsor of the event.

From Impact '05:

Join Leading Journalists, Academics and Bloggers in New York City on September 15

Blogs, video news online, mass text messaging, social networking, RSS feeds and podcasting are challenging the dominance of conventional media and influencing public attitudes and corporate reputations. This unique, one-day conference will explore these issues with leading thinkers and practitioners.

Impact '05 Confirmed Speakers:
:: Ron Alsop, Senior Writer, The Wall Street Journal
:: Len Apcar, Editor in Chief, NYTimes.com
:: Paul Argenti, Professor of Corporate Communications, Tuck School at Dartmouth
:: Cheryl Crispen, Senior Vice President, Communications and Marketing, Mortgage Bankers Association
:: Lewis D’Vorkin, Vice President, Editor-in-Chief, News and Sports, America Online, Inc.
:: Jim Finn, Vice President of Corporate Communications, IBM
:: Tom Foremski, Editor and Publisher, Silicon Valley Watcher
:: Julia Hood, Editor-in-Chief, PR Week
:: Patrick Houston, General Manager, Yahoo! Tech
:: Jim Kennedy, Vice President, Director of Strategic Planning, The Associated Press
:: Brad King, Brad King, Web Editor, Technology Review
:: Kevin Maney, Technology Columnist, USA Today
:: Ed Paisley, Managing Editor, The Deal LLC
:: Jason Pontin, Editor-in-Chief, MIT’s Technology Review
:: Shoba Purushothaman, CEO and Co-Founder, The NewsMarket
:: Ruth Sarfaty, Vice President, Corporate Communications, America Online, Inc.
:: Elizabeth Spiers, Editor-in-Chief, mediabistro.com
:: Joe Trippi, Political Strategist
:: Joan Walsh, Editor-in-Chief, Salon.com

August 24, 2005

It was the most dull of times, it was a fascinating time when one paradigm was dying and the next was not yet born

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

We're a little behind here, but I want to make sure folks are caught up on the running conversaton between Tom and Network World editor John Gallant. In point/counterpoint fashion, (if some of are still around who actually watched 60 Minutes in the 70s, or Saturday Night Live for that matter), here's a recap of the debate.

In Deadly dull IT markets ..." Tom claimed that three things will keep enterprise IT in the doldrums: Maintenance spending is rising, so there is less money for new technologies; the market is controlled by one or two large players which discourages innovation; there is too much FUD in IT markets; and enterprises themselves will wither under the assault of small, nimble companies and the weight of legacy infrastructure.
John responded that Tom was dead wrong, and laid out exactly why he thinks the enterprise is at a most interesting crossroads:

We are at the end of the client/server era of computing. What the next era will be is not clear yet. That presents vast potential and vast risk to enterprises, who have to navigate major changes in the way they build and use computing, network and storage technology, and for the vendors who have made their fortunes on client/server. Some of them will choose the dangerous and self-destructive path of trying to protect the current ways of doing IT, failing to learn the lessons of earlier dinosaurs who fell in market upheavals of yesteryear.

Where we are today is analogous to the end of mainframe and mini-computer eras and the emergence of PCs, networking, the Web - shifts of vast magnitude. We're on the verge of a revolution because enterprises need IT more than ever to compete in a highly price-competitive, fast-shifting marketplace and they need to do IT better, smarter, faster and cheaper. They have to break the bounds of today's systems and they need much more help from the IT industry to make these changes.

The problems that Tom cites are real. But they are symptoms of client/server's demise. They were caused by client/server (just throw cheap bandwidth, storage and servers at any problem!) and they are exactly the kinds of challenges that must be addressed in the new era. What's more, they are exactly the kinds of opportunities that smart entrepreneurs are setting their sights on today.

In Tom's rejoinder he wrote, "Things seem very simple to me: strategy is strategic, not information technology. Information technology supports your business strategy. In the most cost effective, agile way, ideally. And that means open source open platform." And also: "I don't think IT has ever been strategic. Except maybe now, if you count the following approach: Don't take on any commercial proprietary software if you can help it."
So are enterprise IT vendors the walking dead because of open source? John finds the notion unappealing.

"I'll also agree that open source will play a huge role in the future. But I won't agree that everyone will have a plain vanilla open source (yawn) IT architecture that offers no competitive advantage. God forbid that's what the future holds for US businesses, particularly in light of the emergence of powerful global competitors. Saying that Google has built a new business on this low-cost, open source platform misses the point that Google has married that with search technology and a slew of other features and functions - embodied in its own secret sauce IT - that set the company apart. The beauty of open source and commoditization in the hardware arena is that they enable companies to devote more of their IT resources to developing applications that provide a competitive advantage. Just because you are not using off-the-shelf packages doesn't mean you aren't applying IT strategically. In fact, it will be fascinating to see how well New and Old Rules Enterprises take advantage of the power of Web services."

Some of John's readers have some perspective too. But don't let them have the last word. What's your opinion? Is it all about open source? Is client/server dead? And what the web services future look like - deadly dull or wide open?

August 11, 2005

Cisco chief says Silicon Valley public schools are an embarrassment. . .

. . . and names education and healthcare as the two largest issues facing US businesses

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I was on a very interesting panel Wednesday morning at Cisco. With 12 panelists, it could have been a bogged-down-and-dreary-event with much waffling about "virtuality" and how it will boost healthcare and education.

Instead, it turned into a very spirited discussion, as the journalists on the panel took on some of the sometimes empty rhetoric of corporate-market-speak from the heads of three large US technology companies: Cisco, NASDAQ and VeriSign, and startup RelayHealth. And in the process, some of the corporate-market-speak at times gave way to a real discussion.

Wendy Kopp, the charismatic founder of Teach for America, made some good observations given that she admitted that she had not a single minute thinking about tech. And Jim Goldman of CNBC rolled with the flow as the panel's moderator, keeping things moving. I know I took away a lot more than I expected from the event. In a first for Cisco, the event was podcast as well as webcast.

[Panelist list is at end of post, along with a link to the podcast.]

The event was to discuss "virtuality" and how this technology would improve healthcare and education.

After ten minutes it became clear that "virtuality" was one of those words that had yet to crystallize around an agreed upon definition; so it virtually disappeared from further use, and the group moved onto a much broader discussion about why public education is so bad, and why the healthcare sector has resisted investments in technology.

Mr Chambers initially presented a rosy view of a healthcare system making use of computer technologies to save lives, and the cost savings they would recover. However, a carrot also comes with a stick, and during a further conversation he warned that large corporations would force changes on healthcare providers.

He said Cisco's healthcare costs had skyrocketed over the past five years - "and we're a relatively young company." It is a burden that cannot be maintained and it requires exposing the healthcare system to direct market forces, instead of the insurance companies. That would then encourage healthcare organizations to invest in IT for the cost savings.

At one point I complained that if Silicon Valley wants to be seen as the premium brand of global innovation, that this is the place where the future is invented, it had better make sure its public schools are showcases, not basket cases.

John Chambers, chief executive of Cisco agreed, saying it was embarrassing that the K through 12 public education system is broken in Silicon Valley.

Mr Chambers has put a lot of work and money into political campaigns around educational issues, such as school vouchers, a sometimes controversial method to prod schools toward higher academic performance.

He admitted that technologies such as distance learning, had not proved themselves as expected. But he said Cisco studies showed they did have value in short 10 to 15 minute online lessons, along with other educational materials.

Panelists:

John Chambers, CEO, Cisco Systems, Inc.
• Bob Greifeld, President & CEO, NASDAQ
• Stratton Sclavos, CEO, VeriSign
• Giovanni Colella, CEO, RelayHealth
• Wendy Kopp, Founder, Teach for America
• Moderator: Jim Goldman, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, CNBC

• Quentin Hardy - Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, Forbes
• Tom Foremski - Silicon Valley Watcher
• Paul Kapustka – Editor, CMP
• Carrie Kirby – Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle
• Mark Boslet – Reporter – Dow Jones
• Aye Furato – Reporter, Nikkei

Also: Listen to the discussion with Cisco's first-ever podcast, featuring John Chambers and other Silicon Valley leaders.

August 10, 2005

Cisco opens NASDAQ virtually in auditorium filled with two thousand employees

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

It's an early start for me Wednesday morning, as I head off from San Francisco to virtually San Jose, for a webcast discussion at Cisco Systems on virtualization technology [it's the older meaning of virtualization, not the server kind.]

For 2,000 Cisco employees, their day will start much earlier than mine, they chose to be present at the first virtual opening of the 34- year old NASDAQ market. That means be in your seats by 6.30am, my webcast discussion doesn't begin until 9.30 am :-)

It should be a fun discussion here is the lineup:

Participants: • John Chambers, President & CEO, Cisco Systems, Inc. • Bob Greifeld, President & CEO, NASDAQ • Stratton Sclavos, CEO, VeriSign • Giovanni Colella, CEO, RelayHealth • Wendy Kopp, Founder, Teach for America • Moderator: Jim Goldman, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, CNBC

Active Media Participants:

• Quentin Hardy - Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, Forbes
• Tom Foremski - Silicon Valley Watcher (formerly a reporter at Financial Times who left to create a Technology Blog, Siliconvalleywatcher.com)
• Paul Kapustska – Editor, CMP (Information Week, Networking Magazine)
• Carrie Kirby – Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle
• Mark Boslet – Reporter – Dow Jones
• Helene Laube – Reporter, Financial Times Deutschland
• Aye Furato – Reporter, Nikkei

I'm flattered to be a part of a such an august gathering. I guess things have progressed quite far for "blogger journalists" if SiliconValleyWatcher is considered part of the local media establishment in Silicon Valley.

Usually, I'm invited to such events to offer a disruptive perspective and spice things up a little. Some see me as a representative of a disruptive technology in the living flesh(!). In this case, the disruptive technology is the blogging publishing platform. It's just one part of a panoply of disruptive media technologies.

And I'd rather be on the disruptive end of things than the receiving end :-)

Except that the disrupted media still have a business model, crumbling though it might be, while online media business models are still in development :-(

Happy 20th Anniversary

The NASDAQ opening is part of Cisco's 20th anniversary celebrations. If only I had invested a couple of $K in Cisco stock when I arrived here 20 years ago. . . Instead, I filed numerous press releases from Cisco (snail mail then) in the circular folder.

What can I say? Routers were very boring subjects to write about in 1985 and remained so for about another decade (or two).

Almost real

For the NASDAQ opening, Cisco has gone to great lengths to recreate the huge video wall of monitors that form the backdrop of the opening bell in New York. Cisco has tiled together 32 monitor screens, not quite the 96 NASDAQ has, but the effect should be virtually the same.

From Cisco:

Using a high-speed, dual-path and highly-secure private IP network, data is routed from NASDAQ's New York MarketSite to Cisco's Silicon Valley virtual MarketSite...

My suggestion would have been to "blue screen" the NASDAQ video wall and have a techie in New York press the "on" switch when John Chambers hits the opening bell/button at this end. That's virtualization and it would save a buck or two.

Cisco Innovation Study

Cisco is releasing parts of its Innovation 2005 Study.
Cisco, because of its size, is responsible for a huge amount of innovation in Silicon Valley. That's because there are more than a thousand startups that would love to be bought by Cisco, and VCs are funding that innovation.

But that might be changing. With all the consolidation among the big tech companies, there is less competition for buying those startups, and valuations are kept fairly reasonable.

And reasonable valuations don't encourage VC investments in the next crop of startups, which means less innovation. Or is my math wrong?

- - - - - - - - - --

Here are the online details:

Webcast: Those interested in attending this industry discussion via Webcast can register at: http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=28103&script=1010&item_id=1112472

Podcast: 24 hours after the event and can be accessed at: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2005/hd_080505.html

Virtual Open:
http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=28103&script=1010&item_id=1111658
Virtual Close:
http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=28103&script=1010&item_id=1113135

Q&A with John Chambers on virtualization.

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2005/hd_081005.html

August 3, 2005

Using the human touch as a cornerstone business strategy: Can Champ Mitchell remake former powerhouse Network Solutions?

. . . transforming a former mining community into web consultants

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I recently interviewed Champ Mitchell, CEO of Network Solutions, a company that once dominated the domain name registration market.

GoDaddy seems to have pretty much taken over this market, in which domain names now sell for as little as $8 per year, making for a $2 profit before expenses ($6 goes to VeriSign to administer the domain name server infrastructure.) During the bubble, people were paying more than $100 to register a domain name for one year.

So how do you revamp a big brand like Network Solutions when your traditional market of selling domain name registrations has become commoditized, and so have all the associated services such as web hosting?

The classic response is to scramble up the value stack and head for higher-margin territory. And that's what Mr Mitchell has been working on, replacing much of the old management and pursuing a strategy that runs counter to the dominant market trends.

Here are the differences between the old rules — the accepted notions about how business is done - and the potential new rules, the emerging business-model innovations of what I call the "new rules enterprise."

Network Solutions is in a market that is focused on small businesses and their need to leverage the proven value of search-based online marketing. It's a potentially massive market for selling domain names, website hosting, website building services, and third-party products such as security, payment processing, and marketing.

Old Rules: Use a self-service model as much as possible. Let customers fill out all the information, educate themselves on what website services they might need. Cross-sell them at every new page view.

Network Solutions: Use human specialists to guide small-business owners through what they need, do not cross-sell or try to up-sell, only offer best solutions.

Old Rules: Minimize any live contact with a customer, use telephone support as sparingly as possible, reward your telephone staff for keeping all calls as short as possible.

Network Solutions: Use the telephone as much as possible, reward your telephone operators for spending more time talking with customers. It takes about an hour of conversation with a Network Solutions telephone consultant to acquire a customer.

Old Rules: Force customers to learn and find their own remedy to a problem through an online knowledge base, and users-helping-users forums.

Network Solutions: Call us anytime and speak with a live person, or speak with your favorite consultant.

Old Rules: Force customers to learn html and educate themselves about web technologies.

Network Solutions: "I have banned html or any techie terms. Small-business people are very smart, and they don't need to be tech savvy to establish an online storefront," says Mr Mitchell.

Old Rules: Sell mostly third-party products because your expertise is in marketing, not in developing software or web services. Use an affiliate program to get swarms of third party marketers to sell for you.

Network Solutions: Own your key products. About 90 per cent of its revenues come from its own products and 10 per cent from third party products.

"With one hour being an average time spent per first customer, we had to make sure the quality of our products was high, and would remain very high quality. And also very simple to use, which is the hardest part by far," Mr Mitchell explains.

Network Solutions owns and funds the development of its web site building products and services.

Here's another advantage of the human contact strategy: Network Solutions hears directly from its customers about what they need, their problems and their issues. It is collecting a treasure trove of invaluable market research. And that gets fed back into the development cycle.

And customers feel they've been treated like royalty, because they are speaking with a human, and they know how expensive that is and how rare.

From mining to web consulting

So, you are wondering, is the human contact with someone in a foreign land? Nope, the people on the telephones are mostly from a former mining community in Pennsylvania and they survived a tough 6 week initial boot camp which filtered out about half of them. Then they headed into further educational courses.

Network Solutions has very tight controls on affiliate marketing - again, to maintain quality control of the customer experience.

- - -

Does Network Solutions have a winning strategy? Is it wise to challenge the old rules, the proven business models in their market?

Rules are made to be challenged and sometimes broken — revealing new routes to profits.

But old rules usually have become accepted notions and are less visible, and less likely to be challenged.

It'll be interesting to watch if Mr Mitchell can execute this new-rules strategy, and if it results in a more profitable business model.

- - - - - - -

Letter from Champ Mitchell on this week's launch of an online storefront.

VeriSign Completes Sale of Network Solutions Unit to Pivotal Private Equity. November 25, 2003

July 6, 2005

I want a portable wiki -- a WalkAbout Wiki (with TagAbout GPS technology...)

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

There has been a lot of talk about mobile applications and geo-location projects lately, and that reminds me of a product I have longed for: a portable wiki, or WalkAbout Wiki.

Wikis are very simple but very effective software applications that can organize information out of chaos, and also build themselves into simple applications.

I get most of my ideas when I'm walking around San Francisco and I want one place where I can jot everything down, throw it all into one big repository, business and personal, and then retrieve it through tags, search, and simple organization of projects via a wiki interface. It would hold my notes, my midnight musings, my personal and public stuff, photos, videos, audio. Some of it would live in the cloud, some on the client.

The WalkAbout Wiki would be cheap—under $200 for the basic model. It would be notebook sized, with a near full sized keyboard, a decent size screen and very robust.

It is so robust you can play frisbee with it, let your dog bring it back and send it spinning back out again, and it still keeps working, dog slobber and all.

WalkAbout companion...

It would also let me record messages, or events photo, video or audio. The Walkabout Wiki would naturally, have a built in Skype-like phone service, broadband, and bluetooth. It would have open source Office-like applications, which would be a mixture of client side and server side - but I shouldn't really know or care. All I need to know is that I have access to my applications, to a degree, even if an Internet connection is not available.

When a Walkabout Wiki walks into a hotspot, or hops a bluetooth connection, things sync up and I don't need to know. Everything is always backed up and I can roll things back to any point in time on my device.

The largest application of such a device would be as a knowledge store of a person's life. For example, HP Labs has played around with the concept of recording every moment of a person's life. Search technology could be used to bring back names, photos, anything from anytime in the past, that is contextually relevant to now, my now.

That would be a cool device, I'd buy one. And Walt would probably like one too :-)

Tagging GPS locations

But wait, I also want a global positioning sensor in my WalkAbout Wiki so that I can attach notes to a specific location, a restaurant review, a note about a person, where a photo was taken, a conversation I had in that spot. I could get a $10 coupon from walking into a store as part of a promotion, I could play a treasure hunt with friends.

The WalkAbout Wiki, with the TagAbout application, would share some of my tags with the public, some with friends, and I could read other people's tags at a GPS location. Billboards too, would have associated tags with promotional messages and video. This would overlay the Internet onto the real world, a concept that HP Labs and IBM have played with. HP proposed wired "beacons" attached to billboards, but with wireless connections and a GPS location, you don't need an infrastructure of wiring "beacons" to billboards.

There would be a ton of other applications that would arise from a WalkAbout Wiki platform, but probably not much money in making the device itself - unless it's a proprietary approach that links the hardware to the services, the cell phone model.

Could IBM do it again?

An open-platform open-sourced WalkAbout Wiki would create a larger community and a more vital ecosystem than one modeled on the proprietary cell phone business model.

But, how would we get an open WalkAbout Wiki platform? The only reason that we got an open platform PC model was that IBM was in a rush and had to use open-sourced components and software.

The PC platform is too expensive for a WalkAbout Wiki type of device. Maybe IBM can do it again? And this time on purpose, using its muscle to set an open platform. After all, IBM is the leading evangelist for open source software, and it has the chip technology, a lot of it already in the consumer space.

An IBM POWER microprocessor chip integrated with graphics and communications could easily power a WalkAbout Wiki. Or maybe a chip like Broadcoms Alphamosaic chip plus an ARM RISC processor (both are British designs BTW) would fit the BOM (bill of materials) quite nicely. And Intel's StrongArm based XScale chips could also provide a decent hardware platform for a WalkAbout Wiki.

We'll get there one way or another, the hardware layer is less important these days anyway. And there is a ton of open source software, from operating systems to full-fledged applications, and it's only going to get better.

Fencing the commons

The choke point however, in this open digital utopia, is in the gateways to the Internet. Municipalities have been challenged by the commercial sector from providing public wireless Internet. That is an attempt to attach a commercial gateway to every Internet access point, wired or wireless. That's not good. We need public access to a public infrastructure.

I've nothing against "toll roads" on the Internet, a faster service for more money, but I'm against having to take a "toll road" to get onto the Internet from anywhere-- that's an alarming trend.

Here is more on public Internet access at the SFLan project, which is run by Internet Archive. Join in and grow the network, find out if you have roof top line of sight with another SFLan node.

Also, here is something that could very nearly be a WalkAbout Wiki, the Pepper Pad.

June 29, 2005

AMD lawsuit against Intel shows how marketing in the PC world works

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

The lawsuit filed this week by Advanced Micro Devices against Intel, claiming illegal anti-competitive business practices, is interesting because it reveals the millions of dollars paid to PC makers and retailers by chip suppliers. The money is for shelf space in stores, co-marketing campaigns, and rebates on chips.

AMD claims that Intel uses such payments to disuade PC makers and retailers from buying and using AMD microprocessors.

The complaint alleges many specific cases in which leading PC makers and PC retailers received millions of dollars from Intel in rebates as long as they did not make or sell PCs with AMD chips.

In some cases, companies that announced plans to introduce AMD-based PCs are alleged to have been enticed by Intel's gold to drop, or not promote, the AMD-based computers.

From the complaint paragraph 49:

Intel also purchased HP's exclusivity for its most popular notebook line. HP captured 15% of the US retail market last Christmas with an Intel-powered 14 1" display notebook (the "DV 1000") with a popular power saving feature called Quick Play. When AMD sought to convince HP to carry a similar AMD-powered notebook, HP declined. It explained that Intel has paid between $3 and $4m to lock up this product line for at least one year.

The other way to look at this is that PC makers and retailers could be using the "threat" of AMD as a way to get higher rebates and more marketing dollars out of Intel...

I'm planning to announce a business line of AMD Opteron based PCs--if Intel is listening :-)

Here is the complaint.

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/DownloadableAssets/AMD-Intel_Full_Complaint.pdf

Here is: An Open Letter from Hector Ruiz, AMD Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer.

June 22, 2005

Mercora—a good evening spoiled by endless presentations...[updated]

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I went along to a dinner hosted by Mercora Wednesday. The event sounded interesting - it promised to discuss the impending MGM versus Grokster court case on file sharing.

Mercora, which offers music search and sharing services, lined up a good collection of music industry lawyers and others to discuss and promote the issue of legal file sharing.

Unfortunately, Mercora did not know when to stop. An attentive group of key journalists dutifully listened and scribbled notes. Then the salad arrived, and we listened and scribbled notes. Then the entree arrived and was dispatched, then it was time for desert and coffee, but the CEO stood up and said, now, let me show you the demo...

At which point I decided the time was better spent with my son and I left. And I hope others did so too. Giving up an evening to meet with company executives is asking a lot, but for Mercora to monopolize all of the evening is too much.

I don't mind giving up, say, half of the evening to listen to your pitches. But give me the second half to chat with my peers, and to get to know you and others there. Maybe I'll pick up an exclusive story/angle from chatting with others.

Please don't invite me to give up time with my family, or just myself, to hear your pitches all evening long. Your PR team probably told you it was a bad idea to do that - but who listens to them?

And you know what? Your pitch, that file sharing will boost music markets, is fake. Because you make your money anyway from enabling music sharing (living high on the bountiful riches from ad clicks...). Yet you are essentially saying to content creators/providers "give it away and you will end up selling more music and making more money."

You are not taking the risk of giving away content, but you are telling content owners they should. There is no leadership high ground to be had here.

Much has been said, rightly, about the stupidity of the music/movie industry in slapping down digital technologies that could aid them. But Mercora has only its self interest at stake in encouraging/enabling support for widespread song sharing.

Why don't you buy up a record label or two and give the content away as a demonstration of where your wallet meets your pitch?

- - - - - -
Interestingly, Perk, a musician Mercora shipped in from Los Angeles to perform two songs during the evening, said he admonished his friends for burning copies of his CDs for others. "How am I supposed to make money if you do that?" Despite long days performing, promoting and booking his own shows, (standalone musician) Perk said he makes most of his money selling tank tops for young women. And he has a generous patron, his wife, with a job.

Without music content, Mercora has a nice interface to nothing. Where is Mercora's value-add? Mercora's software enables Perk's music to be heard widely for free, while promising him pie-in-the-sky when he gets thousands of listeners...

I think I'd rather be a content creator/owner, like Perk, during this next phase of the internet, because content will be king this time around, while servers and software become commoditized.

(BTW, I bought the domain ContentWillBeKing.com a year ago. Why not? It was $8 on GoDaddy...own a piece of the English language online and a piece of the future for $8—priceless.)

- - - -

An excellent write up of the MGM-Grokster case and its implications at Eweek:
Preparing for the Grokster Watershed

Updated:
Mercora apologised for keeping me away from my son, and pointed out that it does pay for music, it is the same rate as a radio station pays to play music.

June 21, 2005

Eric Schmidt speaks up on GooPay, denies Google wants to compete with PayPal

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

AP reports that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has denied that Google is launching a competitor to PayPal, even as he confirmed that Google is in fact readying some manner of payment system.

"The payment services we are working on are a natural evolution of Google's existing online products and advertising programs which today connect millions of consumers and advertisers," he said. That's not much to go on but I would guess that Google's payment system would allow them to manage a cost-per-sale advertising model, in which they can integrate advertising placements, clickthroughs, sellthroughs, and user behavior.

In any case, Schmidt went to pains to disabuse the notion that GooPay would be a PayPal killer. "We do not intend to offer a person-to-person, stored-value payments system," he told AP. It's pretty unusual for Google to break its silence on unannounced initiatives. Perhaps they were concerned about the rumormill unnecessarily punishing eBay's stock?

WSJ: Google Readying PayPal Competitor

June 15, 2005

Blogs of freedom: Reporters Without Borders picks top free speech blogs around the world

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Freedom Blog Awards.bmp In countries where the press in under the direct control of the government, blogs provide the equivalent of a free press. That's why Reporters Without Borders asked Internet users around the world to pick the best blogs defending independence and freedom. Now the results are in. The winners hail from Maylasia, the US, Afghanistan, Europe and Iran.

Most notable of these bloggers is Mojtaba Saminejad, an Iranian blogger who was sentenced this month to a two-year sentence in Iranian prison because of his writings. Other winners were:

Screenshots (Malaysia) written by Jeff Ooi, who was threatened with imprisonment in 2004 for comments "insulting Islam."
Shared Pain (Afghanistan), commentary on Afghanistan's social and political turmoil.
Al Jinane (Morocco), Tarik Essaadi tries to "understand the complexity of the world."
ICT lex (Italy), a blog on Internet law and new technology.
Press Think, Jay Rosen's thoughtful blog on media old and new.
Netzpolitik (Germany), blog dealing with open source, Internet rights and free expression.

June 13, 2005

Monday's News (aka the Asia Report)

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Broadband wireless provider SOMA Networks has landed $35m in venture funding. The round was led by Singapore-based Temasek and Morgan Stanley Venture Partners, with participation from NeoCarta Ventures and Endeavour Investments. This follows $15m in funding secured late last year.

Lots of other Asia connections today ... Intel celebrated its 20th anniversary of doing business in China by launching the $200m Intel Capital China Technology Fund. It will focus on "cellular communications, broadband applications for consumers, and semiconductor design," according to the Intel press release. Intel also announced earnings this quarter of $9.1 - $9.3 billion, a big jump over last quarter's numbers. ...

According to the FT, Microsoft is censoring key words like "democracy" and "freedom" from its Chinese MSN site in an effort to avoid pissing off the Chinese. (Via Silicon.com). This at the same time US trade representatives are trying to get the Chinese to crack down on piracy...

In other MS Asia news, the government of Indonesia claims MS will offer a $1 a seat amnesty program to get the Indonesians in compliance. Micrsoft denies (WebProNews) ...

Nokia and Intel are joining forces to promote mobile WiMax, according to PCMag. In other Nokia news, the cellphone maker is moving forward with a web browser based on the open source Konqueror browser, according to Macworld ...

And in digital music news, MS is rumored to be readying a subscription-based music service. A product manager threw this up the flagpole: "We are actively investigating the subscription model, but we don't have anything to share today. Once we are ready to talk more, we'll let you know." (via WebProNews ... And David Utter of WebPro notes that a new Nokia phone supports Apple's AAC format, which suggest support for the iTunes store.

June 8, 2005

Scoop! Smile for the Google 3D mapping truck

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Google plans to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to create a realistic 3D online version of San Francisco, and eventually other major US cities.

The move would trump Amazon's A9 service, which offers two-dimensional photos of buildings on US city streets.

The trucks would drive along every San Francisco street using the lasers to measure the dimensions of buildings, to create a 3D framework onto which digital photos can be mapped. This would complement the mostly top-down view of San Francisco available through Google's Keyhole satellite photo application.

The goal is to create similar 3D online versions of other cities in the US and overseas.

There have been several test runs of the specially equipped truck along San Francisco streets. One problem is that vehicles and people can block the automated laser and digital photo systems. This could be eliminated with a second pass, but Google wants to achieve results with a single run.

Researchers at Stanford university are working on this and other city related projects. For example,
here is another Google-funded Stanford project.

The Google 3D project would be used to highlight and distinguish the company's push into local business listings—the next big opportunity in online advertising.

June 5, 2005

Drivers not required: Stanford's stealth AI vehicle project could net $2m Pentagon prize

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

stanley vw.jpg I recently rode shotgun in a Volkswagen Touareg SUV. It's a great car. But this one was extra-special because it drove itself.

I was over at Stanford university conducting an exclusive interview with the engineering team that built the autonomous car, capable of avoiding obstacles and negotiating tough terrain in challenging weather conditions - without any need for human direction.

The car, dubbed Stanley, will compete with 19 others for a $2m prize on October 8, in DARPA's Second Grand Challenge race. The winner has to complete a 175-mile course in 10 hours across rugged desert terrain filled with unknown obstacles.

Pamela Mahoney, marketing director at veteran VC firm Mohr Davidow Ventures, has been working with the Stanford team. It is led by professor Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. Pamela said MDV maintains close links with Stanford researchers because of its focus on early funding of startups. (Pamela also worked 10 years in the auto industry, including a spell at Chrysler, before coming to Silicon Valley.)

Itanium powered?

Volkswagen provided some engineers and the car, which bristles with gear and antennas on its roof rack. And the trunk has a rack with seven Pentium M PC boards, plus extra car batteries and various black boxes. Most of it is donated by Intel, yet another enthusiastic supporter.

Interestingly, Intel initially offered its high-end 64-bit Itanium microprocessors. These are power-hungry chips and Intel has been trying to boost the visibility of Itanium users within IT. But for cars, it's overkill, so Sebastian had to politely decline the offer and ask for Pentium M chips designed for laptops, which have low power consumption.

Apart from the computer and sensor gear, the car is a stock model that you could buy from a dealer. This is important, said Cedric Dupont and Mike Montemerlo, members of the Stanford racing team engineering group. It means that their approach is adaptable to many types of vehicles.

Another key aspect is the team's software-heavy approach to the challenge. This also makes the project more portable, and possibly adaptable to controlling other vehicles, ships or machinery.

Sebastian and his team said several times that they are not supporters of the war in Iraq, but that their technology could save lives. "You can imaging such vehicles being used by the military to transport supplies and avoid exposing people to roadside bombs," Sebastian said.

The gear on the car includes lasers, radar, GPS, and many types of sensors. So far, the team has taken the vehicle on secret trips to the Mojave desert. Secret because the mostly university teams competing for the prize are notorious for spying on each other. The Stanford team said they managed to keep their project so quiet that they heard on the grapevine that there was not going to be any Stanford entry.

Stanford's project could do very well. I can vouch that we didn't hit anything or anybody, successfully completed about eight or nine 50 meter circles, and that the car stopped exactly next to an orange cone Sebastian had placed at the start of the demo. I was impressed and a little dizzy.

(We hope to cover the race, which likely to be in Nevada this year because that will remove the need for an environmental impact report. It took 20 biologists to check out last years Grand Challenge in California's Mojave desert.)

A link explaining more:
http://media.vw.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=9583

San Jose Merc: http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/11685903.htm

UPDATE: The Stanford team has made it into the semifinals--only 20 teams will compete in the finals. DARPA press release.

June 3, 2005

The scandal of our local public schools

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

School Sidecar.jpg The Silicon Valley/Bay Area has some of the worst public schools in the country. This is a scandal for a region that prides itself as the global engine of innovation.

It's like having several rusting trucks parked on breeze blocks in your front yard.

Silicon Valley needs to take care of its local schools. Global companies cannot ignore the plight of their communities and we intend to play a significant role in changing the situation.

What if Craig Barrett, Intel's CEO, spent one half hour visiting a school each week? What if Steve Jobs popped into a local high school occasionally? Larry Ellison, get off your boat and into the schools. Meg Whitman, come on down. Carly, you've got time, come and inspire a new generation.

Did you know that Bill Gates, through his foundation, is doing more for our local schools than any of our local leaders?

Can you imagine the effect it would have on our communities if our rock star business leaders stepped up to the plate?

I'm fed up with hearing our local captains of industry harping on about the sorry state of education here in the US, yet not even bothering to poke their noses around the corner in their own communities. We will make sure they don't rest easy.

June 1, 2005

Thursday News Wrap: Top 10 Reasons to Publish Top 10 Lists

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Just when you thought it was safe to watch Letterman again, those Top n lists keep coming around. Today we have PC World's Top 100 Products of 2005, which picks Firefox as #1, Gmail as #2, Tiger as #3. Sounds a lot like the software lineup on my system ...

And here's another Top list, the Online Publisher Association's top 12 traffic drivers: #1 is "entertains, absorbs me" but #9 is "turned on by ads," ahead of "ease of use" (sorry Jakob ... oops, that's a hidden link) and "helps and improves me." FWIW. ...

Newsweek has a piece on video search engines, especially Blinkx. Basically, the networks are willing to play ball with for-free services that can make their products legitimately available online. The lesson from the music industry: When consumers are creating a new sales medium, maybe you should meet them with a storefront instead of a subpoena.

The strategy of the TV industry is not to fight the pirates so much as beat them at their own game—by making their television programming available, for a fee, on legitimate Internet-based video libraries. The key is to offer a service that's so much better than the rogue peer-to-peer networks that customers don't mind paying. "There's this general assumption that people will always steal content if they can, but I don't think that's true," says Chandratillake. "The success of the new Napster and iTunes demonstrates that people are very interested in downloading broadband content online and paying for it, if it's priced right and available easily."

(More later ...)

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May 30, 2005

News roundup: BitTorrent searches, the evolution of Sims, IBM's blogging launch and more

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Even on a holiday, interesting news pops up from the Valley. Here's a roundup of some of the headlines.

Bram Cohen, inventor of BitTorrent, has released a search engine [BBC report] to make it easier for users to find BitTorrent files. Cohne was
profiled in Wired magazine in January...

Sims creator Will Wright is working on Spore, a game in which players determine the evolution of species. The game will be multiplayer but not in the usual sense. The BBC reports:

The aim is to use a central computer to gather players' creations and share them with everyone playing the game. "You end up playing a galaxy of 100,000s of worlds. And because players are creating the worlds, everything will be different," said Mr Wright.

SVW recently published a scoop on IBM's blogging initiative, a story that generated a lot of interest and comments. IBM's stance on blogging was later officially released by IBM blogger James Snell. Here's the policy in a nutshell: You're speaking for yourself, not IBM. ...

The Wall Street Journal asked a stable of media experts what Old Media should do to survive. Here's a smattering of advice. Network news: Tear down the facade of how news is made. Network TV: Broadcast to PCs. Newspapers: Think about stories, not circulation; allow readers to create their own papers. Movies: Forget about DVDs, go online. Music: License P2P networks to sell songs. More at WSJ (Via CyberJournalist

Renee Blodgett has a report on Jeff Hawkins' new thing - computing systems based on the brain's neocortex. ...

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May 23, 2005

A week in the life of a blogger journalist: Blogger swagger in the heart of New York city...

Part One: Friday May 20
By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Is that Barry Diller over there, someone asks? I look around and see some people walking past our table in Michael's, one of the power centers for the media elite in Manhattan. I don't think I could recognize the media mogul anyway...

It is Friday and I'm having lunch as the guest of Andy Plesser of the PR firm Plesser Holland Associates and his long time friend Nancy Smith, the sharp and savvy managing editor of Smart Money magazine.

It has been an exhausting but fulfilling week. I moderated two panels at the Syndicate conference and made a ton of interesting contacts, gave a presentation at Financial Dynamics, caught up with buddies and now I'm telling Andy and Nancy about my first SiliconValleyWatcher sponsors, that we launched our sister site ionRSS.com, and our plans for the future. “So that's why you walked in with a swagger,” Nancy teases.

I am not conscious of the swagger but appearances can be deceiving - and that is usually fine by me! As a semi-famous blogger journalist with a burn rate that could lead to flame-out, I sometimes enjoy playing the part of what I'd like to be: a successful micro-media mogul.

The poorer I get, the more affluent I like to appear. If I look like a million bucks, I probably could do with a million bucks. I'm wearing my favorite lightweight gray check suit and floating on the heels of my extremely comfortable Ecco dress shoes.

A humble blogger

I think the swagger Nancy noticed was just my “front” in case the management of Michael's spotted the humble humility of a blogger in motion and had me ejected (I think I spotted Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis photo ids by the door ;-)

Andy recounts successes for some of his clients, particularly the Iron Horse Winery in Forestville, (a superb winery, in the town where my children live) and new clients such as the Finnish and Singaporean governments. He also says that his vacation home in Puerto Rico was mentioned that very day in the New York Times.

I tell Andy that he should be careful not to get more publicity than his clients, something other celebrity PR bloggers have discovered to their cost. I wish I'd had my camera. The look on his face would have made for a marvellous flickr post.

This is my first meeting with Nancy and we run through an impressively long list of media topics ranging from the furious pace of M&A activities in the media sector to whether the old media truly gets the new new media.

Andy asks me if I can be part of a conference he is putting together in Silicon Valley next month, and I say no problem. I've been speaking at a lot of conferences this year and also visiting a lot of PR companies to talk to communications professionals about blogging and how companies are trying to use this medium (“you cannot spin” is a key point of mine along with “blogging is the most honest form of promotion bar none.”)

The coffee arrives and so does one of Andy's many blessings, his 20 year old son who is studying at Dartmouth College. However, I have to head off and prepare for my flight back to SFO.

I thank my hosts and stroll out of the restaurant and into the majestic canyons of Manhattan. I soon realize that I am just around the corner from the US HQ of my alma mater, the Financial Times. At which point a slight swagger creeps into my stride :-)

[Find out what happened the day before, in part two: Thursday--A blogger on Wall Street...]

May 23, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Tom Watch
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May 18, 2005

Yahoo unveils Media RSS spec and elaborates on its schizophrenic strategy

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Yesterday at the Syndicate conference in New York, Yahoo unveiled its Media RSS 1.0 spec and announced support from OurMedia, a nonprofit site that allows users to upload and share multimedia creations, and from blog tools like FeedBurner and blogdigger.

Media RSS is an extension of RSS that allows feed publishers to include rich metadata describing the media content. "It's meant to be a self-publishing tool to communicate information about your feed," explained Brad Horowitz, Yahoo's director of media search. "Podcasting is a way to include enclosures in RSS. Media RSS is the way to make your podcast findable and discoverable."

Watching Yahoo has seemed a confusing endeavor. On one hand it is creating serious Hollywood relationships and setting up shop in Santa Monica; on the other hand it is building open systems and garnering serious open source cred. While this seems like a schizophrenic identity, it's becoming obvious that Yahoo means to play at both ends of the spectrum.

Brad said that Yahoo's vision is "My Media" - a middle way between mass media and micro media. In Yahoo's vision, "my" means both the stuff I've selected (as in My Yahoo) and the stuff I'm creating. Yahoo's media plans are to make high-leverage deals with Hollywood, do content deals with small individual creators like Jib-Jab, and provide the tools to allow users to find and create media. Yahoo calls this FUSE - "find, use, share and expand" - and the ultimate dataset is "all human knowledge." (That's a line taken right from Google's playbook, btw.)

Brad talked at some length about Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr, which is the poster child for multifaceted sharing of user-created data. By providing open APIs to its closed source system, and not trying to control how people used the system, Flickr built a most unpredictable phenomenon. Yahoo wants to try to apply Flickr's success on a much bigger scale.

On the other hand, it keeps Hollywood happy by pushing traffic back to the studios' sites, rather than aggregating their content. For smaller content providers like iFilm, Yahoo media search delivers substantial traffic jumps. The company is very protective of partners' copyrights, and Hollywood execs actually use Yahoo Video Search as an "infringement search tool"; Yahoo removes infringing content as it is reported.

That's somewhat at odds with the goal of turning consumers into producers. I asked Brad if they were interested in pulling the studios along to free up more content for users to remix. The answer was no; Yahoo's agenda is mostly to gain studios' confidence.

So Yahoo is fighting several battles. It's competing with Apple for the loyalty of the big studios. It competes with Google for search advertising customers. Those business models are pretty well set. What seems like open territory is the so-called "long tail," the promising but unproven potential to make money off the enormous volume of content that average people are creating. Getting there means Yahoo needs to help drive the standards forward, and that it needs to so in a truly open way.

May 18, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: RSS Watch
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May 10, 2005

[thoughtleaders] Exclusive--RightNow Technologies CEO Greg Gianforte has become our first management columnist: Serial advice from a serial entrepreneur

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I've met Greg Gianforte several times because my friend Annie Kim used to work at RightNow Technologies before leaving for business school at MIT. As founder and CEO of RightNow, Greg loves to talk about his enterprise "software as a service" company. But if given the chance, he really loves to talk about entrepreneurship and how to build companies.

Greg has a book coming out in September called "Bootstrapping Your Business." His management advice comes from his experience in five startup ventures.

I shared some of Greg's management advice about a month ago, and the feedback was excellent. Greg agreed to contribute more nuggets of wisdom on a regular basis and I promise to deliver them to you in short question/answer format segments.

Greg kicks off our thought leaders series, which will mostly appear on Thursdays, featuring top-notch advice from our Silicon Valley/global business leaders and tech gurus.

Please send questions (tom at foremski dotcom) for Greg. Your name and company affiliation can be withheld from publication if you are more comfortable that way. To get things rolling, I'll start him off with a few questions this Thursday.

Some earlier posts:

Secrets of starting and growing a company

Tales of the newrules enterprise

May 10, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Thoughtleaders
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May 4, 2005

O'Reilly making the most of Make - Makers Media will pursue range of opportunities in realworld remixing

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

O'Reilly's Make magazine is the expression of something that Dale Dougherty has been thinking about for a long time. The creator of the first commercial website, Global Network Navigator (where I first worked for him back in 1994), Dale's passions have frequently led to visionary products that were substantially ahead of the market (and often sold to larger players at a tidy profit for the Sebastopol-based publisher). During my years at O'Reilly, Dale and I discussed many ideas to tackle the "technology enthusiast" market that he held near and dear.

With Make, he has simultaneously defined that market as larger than anyone else imagined and delivered a product that re-establishes O'Reilly's ability to inspire geeklove. The magazine was a hit from its launch last fall around the time of O'Reilly's Etech conference. To date, 21,000 people have subscribed to the magazine, not including single-copy sales, more than double O'Reilly's goal of 10,000 copies.

Now Dougherty is leading a new group at O'Reilly, deemed Maker Media, to pursue the "integrated media play" around Make. "We see opportunities for international licensing, potential for other magazines, events and promotional opportunities, book publishing." (The timing is good for O'Reilly, which has had a hard time recovering from the dot-bomb. While sales of their hard-core tech titles have remained weak, their Missing Manuals and other consumer titles have led a recovery.)

An issue of Make will take you step by step through attaching a disposable camera to a kite for aerial photography, adding a wifi-enabled computer to your car, or breaking into an iPod. Why should this be the hot magazine of the year? "It expresses something that resonates with a lot of people," Dougherty told me. "It's a recognition of the age-old traditions of making things - lots of people used to make things, think about your grandfather's shop.

While it sounds like a by-geeks-for-geeks title, it is proving to appeal to a wide range of people, not all of whom re-read "Learning Perl" in bed. Editor Mark Frauenfelder recently appeared on NPR's Science Friday and the magazine has been written about from mainstream magazines like Forbes.

"There are lots of makers out there but no one takes them seriously. People have become accustomed to buying things, but what do you do with your free time? You could watch TV or you could make things," Dale said.

I asked Dale for his opinion of the PSP hackers who are ripping open Sony's new game machine, installing better wifi antennas and writing software that enables playback of standard digital media, as I covered in my PSP-pod article.

In that article I argued that Sony should turn a blind eye towards hackers rather than trying to shut them down with a firmware upgrade. Dale goes further, though: "Companies should design for hacking. It's convenient to ignore it but why not embrace it? Companies should design products to encourage users to adapt it to suit their purposes." Just like the development of Linux allowed the development of thousands of open source programs, physical devices could essentially come with a development kit that people would use to build on top of the device.

Even if they don't, people will increasingly take matters into their own hands. When Dale's daughter broke the jack off her iPod Mini, Dale tried to have it fixed and was told the only thing to do was to buy a new unit. Figuring he had nothing to lose, he found a hacker site on how to break into the seemingly impervious mini (heat the plastic up with a hair dryer) and replaced the jack himself.

In a world where consumers are trained to seek satisfaction by buying technology but are quickly bored and disillusioned by their purchase, the maker movement holds the promise of making technology fun again.

May 4, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Media Watch
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April 27, 2005

Google is testing ad placements for RSS feeds

By Richard MacManus for SiliconValleyWatcher
In a delicious piece of Web irony, a Microsoft Longhorn blog is the first site to trial Google's Adsense in its RSS feed. Robert McLaws of LonghornBlogs.com says that it's a pilot program and "may disappear for a while, or be discontinued altogether."

RSS feed management company Feedburner, which has been running an RSS advertising service from Overture since late 2004, was quick to announce its piggy-back support of Google's RSS Adsense. Feedburner promises "additional flexibility in determining frequency of ads, ability to prevent ads on short posts and other ad control mechanisms for your feed."

Update, by Richard MacManus: CNET reports that Google has confirmed the test. Also Jason Calacanis from Weblogs Inc, one of the biggest commercial blog networks, has confirmed his company is testing Google adverts in its RSS feeds.

Note also that Robert McLaws from LonghornBlogs.com, the first reported tester, left a comment here on Silicon Valley Watcher questioning whether Feedburner's announcement of support "is legit". My understanding of Feedburner's announcement is that Feedburner will help their users to implement the Google Adsense service into their Feedburner-powered RSS feeds - as well as provide additional flexibility.

Bill Flitter of Pheedo told Silicon Valley Watcher that "Google putting ads in RSS validates further the work we've been doing at Pheedo for the last 18 months. RSS advertising works."

It's no surprise to Bill that Google has entered the market. He remarked that "it will only help our business as advertisers will see it as a serious medium."

While the news is still unconfirmed by Google, it seems apparent that RSS advertising is about to go mainstream. It will be interesting to see how bloggers react to adverts in RSS. Uber-blogger Dave Winer wants a bit of romance in his RSS ads. Others may react negatively to advertising within an 'opt-in' medium such as RSS.

One side benefit for writers and readers alike is that we may see many more full-text RSS feeds in future, because content providers will not see as much need to drive eyeballs to their websites.

Richard Koman Note: Indeed, the focus on web page impressions will likely fade as RSS develops its own metrics models, auditing services and techniques for verifying that feeds have actually been read and not just automatically downloaded.

April 19, 2005

RSS may generate 25% or more of NY Times total website traffic within 3 years

By Richard MacManus for SiliconValleyWatcher

Alex Barnett did the math on the NY Times RSS growth trends highlighted in Silicon Valley Watcher yesterday. Alex estimates that if current growth rates continue, in 3 years RSS click-throughs will represent 27% of total page views for the NY Times website!

I wouldn't be surprised if the NY Times' RSS growth rate increases in comparison to total site growth over the next few years, given that only an estimated 12% of the population use an RSS Reader at this time. If RSS reader take-up increases (which I expect it to) we may well see RSS feeds driving 33% or more of the NY Times's total website traffic by 2008. I suspect that's a conservative estimate.

Makes you realise how strategically important RSS feeds are for news media companies, most of which are scrambling to figure out how best to deliver news online.

April 19, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: RSS Watch
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April 18, 2005

RSS becoming a key driver of traffic for NY Times - Feed-related traffic up more than 300%

By Richard MacManus for SiliconValleyWatcher

The NY Times issued a press release today that claims a massive 342% annual increase in RSS click-throughs. RSS-generated click-throughs totalled 5.9m pageviews in March, representing a 39% increase from February's 4.3 million, the press release said, noting that the Washington and Business feeds were most popular.

The Times offers a variety of RSS feeds - one of the first major newspapers to do so. They publish excerpted RSS feeds, so users have to click through to view the whole story.

It's interesting to look at how the RSS click-throughs for March 2005 compares to the total traffic for that month. The Times reported 5.9 million pageviews from RSS and there were a total of 555 million pageviews for the whole website. So that equates to a little over 1% of the whole site's traffic. A drop in the ocean, in terms of bare figures.

But when you consider that traffic for the whole website only grew by 17% over the past year, whereas the RSS click-throughs grew by 342% in that same period... well you begin to see how RSS is going to be a key driver in growth for the NY Times. Strategically, that's how the NY Times will view this.

I'm sure they're also hoping that in time the volume will increase - which it will, once RSS becomes mainstream.

April 15, 2005

[Friday Watch 3] Ingenio does AOL ... Pissed off journalist looking for love ... Fear and loathing at NAB

Fear and Loathing on the trail to NAB in Las Vegas…

Jochen Siegle and I are off to the desert oasis town of Las Vegas this weekend. Jochen is covering stories for Der Spiegel, and I will be on a panel at the National Association of Broadcasters show - "the world's largest electronic media show."

And my fellow panelists are of a considerable pedigree (how I got into such august company, God knows…!) Senior execs from Sony, Electronic Arts, Disney Interactive, CinemaNow and ... SiliconValleyWatcher! Moderated by Dan Scheinman, head of M&A at Cisco. (See panel details)

In an homage to St. Hunter (S. Thompson), the patron saint of bloggers, we will be renting a convertible and filling up the trunk with plenty of digital devices. We did consider also filling up with the stuff Hunter kept on hand, but we decided it would be rather challenging to source most of them … unless our good readers can help :-)

So, it’s road trip week in the Watcher for the next few days … filing from greasy spoons along the way… Is this the launch of bloggo journalism?

Ingenio is set to announce prime AOL partnership

Ingenio, which has pioneered the pay per call business model concept, will announce next week that AOL will feature its search for local merchant listings search box in a very prominent location.

Mystery journalist looks for love...

Thanks to Craig's List publicist Susan Mactavish Best for this one...

...from a recent Best Of posting on craigslist.

Hi. I'm a journalist. Or a reporter. Whatever word pisses you off more, I'm part of the mainstream media, the liberal media, the so-called liberal media. I am the epitome of all that is wrong with contemporary journalism.

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April 15, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Friday Watch
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April 13, 2005

Tedious Salesforce presentation forced escape to MOMA

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I was late for the Salesforce event, a big launch of something, and Outcast PR had been hammering away at my inbox for weeks. It’s at the Four Seasons and Ulysses King from Outcast greets me in the near empty corridor and I get my badge.

But, there are what seems to be hundreds of badges unclaimed, and outside the conference room there are a dozen mini-trade booths. I soon realize that this is also a “customer” event. Not good, however; it is lunchtime and I missed breakfast.

I follow Ulysses into a packed conference room with about a dozen large round dining tables and I slip into a chair at a table near the front.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, is on stage and selling software. Marc is always selling; whether it is through his spirituality or through his larger than life persona, Marc is always selling.

Pain in the neck

I am sitting with my back towards Marc. It was a bit of a strain to twist my back and neck and look at Marc selling; but I found that if I didn’t, I was quite comfortable. I could hear Marc selling of course; but I didn’t need the visual of Marc up on the podium, as usual looking awkward in a suit and tie.

I ate lunch, sipped a coffee, looked around. Andreas from the Economist was shoulder-tapping distance away, so I tapped and we smiled and nodded. Helene from FT Deutschland caught my eye from three tables away and waved. And the indefatigable Dan Farber, editor in chief of ZDNet, was at the adjoining table, laptop on his lap as usual.

The Salesforce presentation was tedious, tedious, tedious, which is the case every time I am invited to company sales events. Media and customers are different audiences requiring different methods of communication.

I looked at the clock and my heart sank; because there was likely about another hour of Marc selling. I walked outside to feed the parking meter but the day was so nice that I couldn’t face returning. I figured Dan or someone else will very likely file a good piece about the event; no sense in my reinventing the wheel, I’ll just blog it. Thus, I managed to fit in a pleasant walk in the sun and browsed the MOMA store for 20 minutes.

I really, really like this blogging journalism thing!

Here is News.com's Alorie Gilbert on Salesforce.com lifts curtain on new release
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April 11, 2005

Consumer electronics chip markets don't favor the small...

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Wireless networked handheld multimedia devices are clearly in our future, and our scoop last week about Apple choosing Broadcom’s Alphamosaic chip highlighted an issue that faces smaller chip companies--independence.

Alphamosaic, based in the United Kingdom, was acquired by US communications chip giant Broadcom in September for about $125m. Alphamosaic had raised $9m in a round just five months prior to the sale. That was a nice turnaround of capital for the VCs but it was also likely that Alphamosaic did not have much of a choice.

That’s because companies need a lot of intelectual property (IP), in the form of chip functions, to play in the digital consumer electronics market. As more and more functions get integrated onto a chip, the cheaper the consumer product. In the consumer digital space that means you need as much wireless, video, image, audio processing, as you can fit on the chip. Then you need cellular, and room for other, future functions too.

The Alphamosaic chips packs a lot, but probably not enough for a large electronics manufacturer such as Apple. But, by being part of Broadcom, which has all the communications IP, etc, the future offers possibilities of further integration. This brings up the question of whether smaller chip companies can compete long-term in consumer electronics markets by remaining independent. The first ones to land larger dance partners will be in a better position than those without, I would think.

Convergence below, divergence above

Interestingly, as more convergence occurs on the chip—there is increasing divergence occurring in the consumer devices. A PC is used to play a DVD, play games, play music, and view photos. Now each activity has its own product device available, and now some are becoming portable and wirelessly connected.

And with more wirelss conectivity, it’s all moving towards less of a PC centric model than ever before, less need for a PC or Mac in order to use these devices.

Is this the future personal computing platform? Fragmented into applications married to devices, and sharing a common communications platform--instead of the same hardware/software platform.

April 4, 2005

Are bloggers journalists? San Francisco Says Yes

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

San Francisco will tomorrow become the first jurisdiction in the country to declare that bloggers should be treated no differently than traditional media. That's what the San Francisco City Attorney will state at a meeting of the city's Board of Supervisors. The Board is considering an amendment to the city ordinance that would require full disclosure of who is paying for political messages.

The proposed language exempts "news stories, commentaries or editorials distributed through any newspaper, radio station, television station or other recognized news medium" unless the medium is "owned or controlled" by a candidate, political party or committee.

So are blogs a "recognized news medium?" Yes, the City Attorney will say at the Supervisors' meeting tomorrow. What's not clear is whether independent individuals who are paid to do partisan blogging would fall under the press exemption. For instance, would a campaign consultant be able to blog without disclosure? What if he or she were not being paid directly by a campaign, party or committe? What if someone were being paid for technical consulting and was "volunteering" to publish dirt on the opposition? I couldn't reach the City Attorney's office for comment.

The question of whether blogs are media erupted recently in the case of Apple v Does, in which Cupertino-based Apple is trying to compel online news sites to reveal their sources for reporting that revealed technical data about unreleased products. In a preliminary ruling, the judge in the case cast doubt on whether the blogs in question had standing as legitimate news sources.

While the final ruling in that case applied to all media, it's still unclear what standing bloggers have. San Francisco's statement could impact media-related court cases adjudicated in the city.

This story first came to our attention (via the Blog Herald) from a post on Personal Democracy Forum by Michael Bassik, vice president for Internet advertising at Malchow Schlackman Hoppey & Cooper, the self-described "leading political direct mail and online advertising firm in America.

In his post Bassik claimed that the proposed amendment would require "local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate."

"Blogs that mention candidates for local office that receive more than 500 hits will be forced to pay a registration fee and will be subject to website traffic audits," he wrote, citing Chad Jacobs, a lawyer in the City Attorney's office.

That's simply wrong, said Greg Asay, legislative assistant to Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, who sponosred the amendment. He suggested this is a "red herring" being spread by anti-disclosure sources.

Bassik, whom I reached by cell phone in New York, said that the city attorney's announcement represents a "huge victory. Before this, it was not clear whether they were going to include blogs in the press exemption."

Bassik emphasized that while the San Francisco announcement is a first, the public should pay close attention to rules proposed by the FEC on March 24 on when blogs should be considered press, volunteers, or paid consultants. There 60-day comment period on the proposed rules, dating from March 24.

April 1, 2005

Mark Jen, fired Google blogger, helps Plaxo draft a blogging policy

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher
Bloggers with jobs were all a twitter when Mark Jen, the "Google blogger," was fired from his job because he posted some complaints about Google's compensation package, compared to his previous employer Microsoft. Mark has landed at Plaxo, a privately held company that offers electronic address book updating services.

Mark is taking the lead on drafting a blogging policy for Plaxo, the current draft of which has been released for public comment. "We want community comment," Mark told me in a phone call. "One of the draws of blogging is to connect directly to the community and open lines of communication. If companies want to use our policy or modify it, that's great."

Plaxo's policy supports blogging but takes clear steps to protect the company against communication that might cast the company in a bad light. For instance, the policy says, "We expect and insist that such communication does not substantively demean our environment. This means that constructive criticism — both privately and publicly — is welcome, but harsh or continuous disparagement is frowned upon."

Mark says that he and Plaxo management both realized the need for a formal policy, something he learned the hard way at Google. "After the incident I became aware of the issues involved in blogging in a corporate setting. You need sensitivity to corporate culture and climate."

In the blogosphere, Mark said, information travels in a "very interesting way" -- it can move extremely quickly or be completely forgotten. "Personally, I treat my writing as if my identity is blended into my employer's. I try to remember that it's known who I work for," Mark said. "Even if people don't disclose who they work for, that information isn't hard to come by."

Companies shouldn't be afraid of blogging, though, Mark cautions. It's an extremely powerful way of connecting with customers and partners. "Businesses can aggregate information across blogs and learn what customers are thinking."

April 1, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Mediasphere
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March 24, 2005

Jupiter Research is up for sale with multiple bidders

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Forrester Research said that rival market research company Jupiter Research is up for sale and that competing bids had been submitted.

Brian Kardon, chief strategist and marketing officer at Forrester would not say if Forrester is taking part in the bidding and he said he did not know who was interested in Jupiter. He said Forrester had more than $130m in cash and if it were to make an acquisition it would use cash.

The sale of Jupiter would further consolidate the market research analyst community, which is down to a handful of companies dominated by Gartner, the largest.

Jupiter has carved out a strong brand associated with the Internet, and online marketing and advertising. Forrester says it has analysts in matching positions. However, Jupiter analysts seem to be more visible.

March 24, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Tech Watch
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March 18, 2005

Friday Watch: Despite howls from the deathbed, SEO's days really are numbered; SVW fans out to cover the geek cons; more ...

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

We had another scorcher of a week on the Watcher with coverage of two competing geek conferences. Nick Aster hit the ground running in Austin with this report on the SXSWi conference. And in San Diego, Richard Koman produced a veritable bit torrent of great copy from the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference.

While folks like Odeo's Evan Williams made the SF-Austin-SF-San Diego circuit, the two cons neatly bifurcate geekspace. SXSW is the hipster and chickster web/UI/interaction design space, while ETech boasts a interesting mix of alpha geeks, A-list press (not counting SVW ;)), and unbuttoned biz types. One borg victim (black-clad, earpiece installed in head) paced the hallway near the pressroom yelling into his cell, "You would not believe the movers that are at this conference." And of course it was true.

One alphageek was heard to say, "This is the conference for business people who want to feel like they're at a hacker conference." But at $1250 a pop, all the geeks had speaking gigs and free passes.

. . .

On Mondays I like to start the week off with something “meaty.” And this week it was “soy-based” as the famously vegetarian Steve Jobs pushed ahead with Apple’s legal prosecution and persecution of three news blog sites. They had reported leaked product info.

The court ruling neatly sidestepped what was thought to be the key issue in the case: are bloggers journalists and inheritors of legal protections afforded to journalists? The judge said nobody was exempt from the law including journalists. And he said it many times. Yet much of the coverage of the ruling continued to discuss the blogger-journalist issue.

In any case, look for EFF to file an appeal in the Appelate Court very soon.

. . .

On Thursday I managed to upset some of the search engine optimization (SEO) community-—the hard working folks that try to help web sites land a link on the first page of Google search pages.

The entry explored the idea that the purity of search results would likely become the key differentiator among search engines. And that’s because Google is daily battling a massive effort by the SEO industry to pollute its search directory for commercial gain.

The recently launched shopping search site Become.com claims to have spam-proof page ranking technology at its core and I made the prediction that this would become the dominant factor, or metric, for all search engines.

The SEO-istars raised a banshee howl when they read the following:

“My position on SEO is that the sooner it dies the better-—it will free up a large amount of what is now largely wasted human effort, IMHO.”

Let me clarify things a little. I’m not against basic SEO techniques that prepare a web site for more thorough indexing by visiting googlebots. The wasted effort I’m referring to is the attempts by SEO-istars to dupe the googlebots and raise the perceived importance of a web site in the Google index. And I appreciate the times when SEO is used to correct a poor choice by Google which can list a clearly poor quality web site ahead of well established and respected web sites.

It is the application of SEO techniques to inflate the importance of mediocre sites that is BS.

Is this a harsh position? Yes it is. But what else can I say? I'll gladly step you through it. But, I’m also open to persuasion that there might indeed be legitimate value created in helping to fake the importance of a web site, and how this improves the Internet experience for millions of users.

I know that my contacts in the SEO world have been moving out of SEO or even throwing it in for free, and moving into other more promising online businesses.

Here are some more reasons why I much of SEO activity has little or no effect/value or future:

The last time I checked nobody knew exactly how Google determines web site rankings. Therefore how can SEO-istars do what they claim they can do? Their SEO efforts can be little more than a blind stab in the dark--a scam masquerading as a promise to scam Google’s results.
Even if everything were known about Google’s algorithms and the factors it considers in determining a web site’s importance, the use of that knowledge would flag a corrupted web site. It would be relatively easy to spot blatant SEO efforts to dress up mediocre web sites. Just one reason why Google knows who has been naughty or nice. It is not rocket science for Google to be able to spot the blatant signs of SEO boosting.
Does the current state of SEO technology have the ability to deal with say, rotating algorithms, two or more that are run throughout the day? That would filter out the SEO spam nicely.
Become.com is not a direct target of SEO attempts to dupe its search results, however, it has indexed millions of web sites that have been dressed up with a variety of SEO techniques targeting Google.

If Become.com is able to spot the SEO spam, then Google can spot it too. It's the algorithms that distinguish the two companies search results.
Google could simply trawl the SEO online forums and collect the discussions of the SEO-istars and harvest the addresses of the web sites they mention they are promoting and blacklist them. Better yet, it could analyze those optimized sites to determine a “signature” made up of factors that indicate attempts to dupe. Then it can look for similar signatures on other web sites.
The best way to optimize a web site is to de-optimize competitors that hold higher value page ranks. It should be relatively easy to assassinate a competitor’s page rank by creating cloaked duplicate pages, setting up numerous back links and other factors that Google looks for and punishes with a lower page rank. I’m not saying this is happening, but it could and therefore probably is.

A message for web site owners: Web sites should be optimized for the user not for a searchbot. Invest in making your web site more relevant to its intended users/customers. After all, your goal is to boost revenues and that is done by creating relevant and compelling web sites for customers.

In this emerging Internet 2.0 world transparency is what is valued. Talk the talk and walk the walk and you will be rewarded.

If you do that, the googlebot will award you with a better ranking, but more importantly, your customers will become your evangelists. Value is always recognized and shared on the Internet.
cd2055

Promo 1

December 1, 2005

[Copy for top panels - Panel 1 - in extract field]

November 17, 2005

Moderating at Under the Radar. . .startups face the VCs

November 8, 2005

A call for a new Manhattan Project on clean energy--continuing the work of Nobel prize winner Dr Richard Smalley

October 26, 2005

The lie of distribution--search engines return very little value to news/blog sites yet hog bandwidth and increase server loads

October 18, 2005

Media giant Cnet finds the 100 needles in the 14m blog haystack--is your favorite blog a needle?

October 17, 2005

Freshly minted Memeorandum.com is not bad...And lessons in how bloggers get media attention

October 12, 2005

Prediction: IBM will reverse its position on blog advertising sooner than later...

September 29, 2005

The Google Zeitgeist and the walking dead...imho

September 12, 2005

Heading for New York City and the Impact '05 conference...

August 24, 2005

It was the most dull of times, it was a fascinating time when one paradigm was dying and the next was not yet born

August 11, 2005

Cisco chief says Silicon Valley public schools are an embarrassment. . .

August 10, 2005

Cisco opens NASDAQ virtually in auditorium filled with two thousand employees

August 3, 2005

Using the human touch as a cornerstone business strategy: Can Champ Mitchell remake former powerhouse Network Solutions?

July 6, 2005

I want a portable wiki -- a WalkAbout Wiki (with TagAbout GPS technology...)

June 29, 2005

AMD lawsuit against Intel shows how marketing in the PC world works

June 22, 2005

Mercora—a good evening spoiled by endless presentations...[updated]

June 21, 2005

Eric Schmidt speaks up on GooPay, denies Google wants to compete with PayPal

June 15, 2005

Blogs of freedom: Reporters Without Borders picks top free speech blogs around the world

June 13, 2005

Monday's News (aka the Asia Report)

June 8, 2005

Scoop! Smile for the Google 3D mapping truck

June 5, 2005

Drivers not required: Stanford's stealth AI vehicle project could net $2m Pentagon prize

June 3, 2005

The scandal of our local public schools

June 1, 2005

Thursday News Wrap: Top 10 Reasons to Publish Top 10 Lists

May 30, 2005

News roundup: BitTorrent searches, the evolution of Sims, IBM's blogging launch and more

May 23, 2005

A week in the life of a blogger journalist: Blogger swagger in the heart of New York city...

May 18, 2005

Yahoo unveils Media RSS spec and elaborates on its schizophrenic strategy

May 10, 2005

[thoughtleaders] Exclusive--RightNow Technologies CEO Greg Gianforte has become our first management columnist: Serial advice from a serial entrepreneur

May 4, 2005

O'Reilly making the most of Make - Makers Media will pursue range of opportunities in realworld remixing

April 27, 2005

Google is testing ad placements for RSS feeds

April 19, 2005

RSS may generate 25% or more of NY Times total website traffic within 3 years

April 18, 2005

RSS becoming a key driver of traffic for NY Times - Feed-related traffic up more than 300%

April 15, 2005

[Friday Watch 3] Ingenio does AOL ... Pissed off journalist looking for love ... Fear and loathing at NAB

April 13, 2005

Tedious Salesforce presentation forced escape to MOMA

April 11, 2005

Consumer electronics chip markets don't favor the small...

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Jupiter Research is up for sale with multiple bidders

March 18, 2005

Friday Watch: Despite howls from the deathbed, SEO's days really are numbered; SVW fans out to cover the geek cons; more ...

- The Less talked about feature in New Xeons.

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