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February 9, 2006

The new and old Beatnicks celebrate Neal Cassady's birthday

It's a warm Wednesday evening in North Beach San Francisco and it is Neal Cassady's 80th birthday and the remnants of the Beat generation, Jack Kerouac's remaining drinking buddies, are inside a small storefront.

It is also the opening of the Beat Museum, and I'm there with my buddy Paul Hrisko to chat with Neal Cassady's son John, and visit with a slice of San Francisco's history from the late 1950s.

I've become very interested in the Beat generation, the mostly East Coast/New York intellectuals that came to San Francisco, and were chosen by the media to represent the rebellious youth of those times.

From Wikipedia: "The members of the beat generation were new bohemian libertines, who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity. The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style...

. . . Echoes of the Beat Generation run throughout all the forms of alternative/counter culture that have existed since then (e.g. "hippies", "punks", etc). The Beat Generation can be seen as the first modern "subculture"."

The Beat Generation created a literature that was passionate, raw and emotional. This was a time when a poem, Allen Ginsberg's Howl could spark arrest, and trials for obscenity. The poet Czeslaw Milosz said of Ginsberg: "Your blasphemous howl still resounds in a neon desert where the human tribe wanders, sentenced to unreality".

I've become interested in Neal Cassady, who was somewhat of a mysterious character to some degree, because his writings are rare. Yet Neal Cassady became the muse, an influencing force on the writers, poets, and cultural icons of those days. People such as Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and later, Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and many, many more.

What makes him even more interesting is that Neal Cassady was not of their world. He was a working class kid, or rather a skid row kid. When he was six he came under the care of his alcoholic father, a part-time barber and lived with him in Denver's skid row, during depression times that were brutal to families already living on the edge.

I'm reading a book written by Neal Cassady, called the "The First Third." I'm about a third of the way through it, so it was great to get a chance to go to his 80th birthday celebration and chat with his son John.

I asked him about the book. "That was something we found in the corner of his closet, very little of his writing survived. And I'll tell you what happened to his writings, I don't think this story has been published yet..."

Brilliant. This is why I love my job. John looks to be in his 50s, lots of energy, talks a mile a second just as his father, and I'm hearing new stories about a time in America that was in the midst of a cold war and a very rigid post-war Fifties society.

John tells me that most of his father's written work was lost when he parked his car for two weeks at a friends place, then took off for two or so weeks of carousing in the very North Beach neighborhood that we were standing. When he returned to pick up his car it was gone. And so was about 500 pages of his fathers literary work.

Wow, I wonder if they still exist in some garage, attic or gully. We should send out cultural archeologists to try and track down what happened, who stole the car, where it was found, comb the area for clues and the manuscripts. Even if the pages are weathered, magnetic resonance technology can render the ink visible. That would be a very interesting project.

John Cassady goes on to tell about how the term "Beatnicks" was hated by his father and the others. "The bongo playing dressed in black and wearing berets was a complete invention of the media. The closest they got to bongos was one time at a rent party just around the corner...[at a rent party you pay 50 cents for the wine so the hosts can pay the rent]. Jack (Kerouac) was handed some bongos and he noticed the skins needed tightening so he went to the kitchen and lit the gas burner to heat and tighten the skins. He was distracted and he burnt right through the skins."

So more stories followed, and then Wavy Gravy shows up and holds court, and tells his stories, and then it's hot and crowded and I wander outside and chat to many more people.

Then we meet many more characters from the neighborhood, and those times, in a bar just around the corner...but more on that at another time :-)

Later...why I think the Beat generation and the Blogging generation have common ground.

December 28, 2005

Ten things I learned in 2005. . .

. . .in no particular order of importance.
Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

1-Blogging is the most honest form of self-promotion bar none because if you can't walk the talk you won't get the clicks.

2-Content will be king because all those links have to point to something of value--otherwise they are pointless.

3-Every company is part media company--it is both publisher and publication and tells stories all the time.

4-Every startup company should be able to say what it does in 20 seconds--not 20 minutes.

5-The old media is dying much faster than I expected.

6-Attention deficit disorder is affecting all age groups--especially those that spend more time online.

7-The more that I write the more authentic I become online and offline.

8-Blogging represents the next big thing: the two-way communications media technologies that characterize Internet 2.0.

9-I can communicate more with fewer words.

10-I learned a heck of a lot more than ten things...more to come in 2006 :-)

December 18, 2005

Announcing the first AJAX banner ad!

Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

A little while ago I challenged my readers to come up with something different from advertising banners and marketing messages.

I have asked many people, "What else could you do in the space taken up by a banner ad, or a side-column skyscraper ad? Something that is novel and is useful to the readers rather than flashing and annoying marketing messages. Maybe something which demonstrates your thought-leadership or that of your clients."

Well, I've been collecting some excellent suggestions and we've only just begun.

My favorite so far, is from SVW sponsor Tibco, which is to produce an AJAX based "banner ad." It will showcase Tibco's AJAX prowess, but it could also usher in an entirely different type of media component.

As far as I know this will be the the world's first AJAX banner ad!

And it will be the first banner ad that is also an application!

But what should the content of such a new AJAX banner ad be?

We're working on two ideas, which should be ready by the new year. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, and just what do you think would make for great content or application, utilizing this concept.

Also, this is exactly the kind of thing I, and hopefully you, my readers want to be involved in: innovation. This comes from the application of technologies, processes, and insight. And it is a lot more exciting than doing things the old way, imho :-)

- - -
Please see: The new media needs new types of innovation--not more banner ads

December 6, 2005

The latest content versus index wars: European publishers slam the Oodles of Googles

By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

It's the latest round in the battle between content creators versus the index creators. Human versus machine-produced content.

"By HELENA SPONGENBERG, Associated Press Writer
BRUSSELS, Belgium - European publishers warned Tuesday that they cannot keep allowing Internet search engines such as Google Inc. to make money from their content.

"The new models of Google and others reverse the traditional permission-based copyright model of content trading that we have built up over the years," said Francisco Pinto Balsemao, the head of the European Publishers Council, in prepared remarks for a speech at a Brussels conference."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051206/ap_on_hi_te/europe_internet

Google, Yahoo and the Oodles of this world will shrug and say, that's fine, we'll stop indexing you and I guess you don't want all the traffic we send you.

But maybe the traffic isn't that great? The traffic that news sites get from search engines isn't high quality traffic. It is the web surfer, happy-go-lucky, a click here, and one there, then gone.

News is not consumed through a search box. You cannot search for news because you wouldn't know what to search for. It's new. That's why there are products such as Google News, so you can see what is news.

But advertising on news pages is not very efficient. Conversions are the highest on search pages.

So, if Google and others publish headlines and extracts of news content on their pages, it takes away traffic because that is all the content most people need for news. Fewer visitors means it makes it more difficult for the news organizations to pay their journalists--and that must affect the quality of journalism.

Let's also mention the devastating effect Google et al are having on newspaper/ news sites and their classified ads and small business advertising.

This is a double whammy against the professional media sector, imho.

November 28, 2005

One of the new rules of the new society (when everyone is a publisher)

By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

Dos&Donts.jpg What is socially acceptable to blog about? That's one of the questions I have pondered when everyone can be a publisher, and when most in my social circle are publishers/bloggers.

And the answer is simple: if you are at a private event, among your friends, then everything is off-the-record you do not publish anything that could embarrass anybody, or republish anything that was said/done unless you have an agreement to do otherwise.

That has to become one of the new rules of our new society: Everything in a social setting is off the record unless agreed otherwise.

Because if a person wanted to broadcast to the world, then they themselves would publish it to the world. For example, if I say something to three people, I only wanted to say it to those three people, not the world.

The exception is a press/promotional/public event or announcement. Otherwise, in social situations, everything said is off the record unless otherwise agreed.

November 20, 2005

Updated with more comments! The most important rules for today's workforce bar none

By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

My three rules of today's workforce:

--Carry and use your own cell phone/number for business

The workforce now is mobile and temporary even if you have a salaried job. You need to be in control of the center of communications: you.

--Carry and use your own email address even at work

Otherwise your contacts and the relationships you build can be severed when you leave a job, and that is an investment that you have a right to maintain--as does your employer.

--Carry and use your own health insurance

Because otherwise, you will be stuck in a job that makes you sick just to keep the health insurance.

[I've followed these three rules for years...]

From Mitch Ratcliffe: Ratcliffe Blog

http://www.ratcliffeblog.com/archives/2005/11/new_rules_for_2.html

To Tom's rules, I'd add:
Incorporate and work on contract rather than as an employee.

This allows you to negotiate the same kind of stock compensation while allowing you to keep your business costs, even the ones you can't get compensated for at work, on your own taxes while increasing the flexibility you have as a working person.

Carry and use your own hardware, building tech expenses into your compensation.

This prevents lock-in to a job through access to technology. Sure, you may have to work with a less impressive laptop, but you're also forced to think more like the people who really buy computers, software, services and so forth.

Update #2 thanks to Neville Hobson at NevOn, via David Newberger-The Geek Guy Rants

Create a blog and establish your personal presence in the new marketplace
In this new age of global inter-connectivity, linking and influence, a blog is a prerequisite if you want to build your own credibility, be found easily and connect with others. Forget the static website. Forget the fancy brochure. Do a blog. It works - I speak from personal experience.

Join a business network like LinkedIn or OpenBC
However you actively use these or not, they can help establish your individual credibility and provide avenues of contact with others for mutual benefit.

Anybody have any more?

November 9, 2005

The remaking of IBM: A chat with IBM chief strategist Irving Wladawsky-Berger

By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher.com

It's always good to catch up with Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of IBM's chief strategists and architect of its Linux and open standards policies.

I used to cover IBM when I was working at the Financial Times. It is a fascinating company because it has managed to adapt to the changes in the IT industry with an agility that masks its huge size. It is the world's largest computer company, it is also the largest IT services company, the second largest software company, and one of the largest chipmakers.

And it was the first to recognize and capitalize on the broad industry move to IT services, and outsourcing IT systems.

Now, it is signaling a new direction: becoming a vendor of highly automated business processes. Companies that need to add a business process within their industry will one day be able to buy one off the shelf, so to speak. IBM is collecting best practices within each industry, within each business process, and using applications, middleware, and its integration skills, to create ready-to-go business process modules that can be rapidly slotted into a company's operations.

This means faster time to market, lower IT costs, and having the most efficient business process without having to do it all yourself. It's a compelling vision and one that fits perfectly into the New Rules Enterprise idea that I've been describing here on SVW over the past year.

"Companies want to buy a business process, they don't want to buy applications," Irving explains.

This is also the reason why IBM is not in the applications business and has no plans to acquire a big apps company such as SAP, as some of the leading Silicon Valley analysts (Ray Lane) seem to think it should.

"We don't need to be in the apps business because we can get the apps from others. We pull together the right apps, and the other software and hardware components to create automated, highly optimized business process modules."

But to become a business process vendor requires the adoption of many industry standards within many different industries--a long, slow process. "Once we have the standards in place, such as agreement on document formats and many other categories, we will then have the building blocks that we can use to build the business process modules."

Irving said that the health care industry is a chief focus for IBM, and it is offering free access to its current and future patent portfolio to those companies in the health care sector that adopt industry standards. The goal is to create a common standards platform on which many others, including IBM, can innovate and create far more efficient healthcare systems.

"The Internet was based on common standards, it was more of a standards revolution rather than a technology revolution."

But to remake IBM into a business process vendor will require huge amounts of R&D to figure out how things are done today, how business processes can be best optimized, develop the tools to design and implement automated business processes, and many other related issues.

It will be a long haul but Irving says IBM is well equipped for the job. It is acquiring companies that have domain expertise, and it has its former PricewaterhouseCoopers group of 30K business consultants with multi-vertical industry expertise to draw upon, plus the world's largest R&D labs, spending more than $5bn a year on research work.

Please see: SVW--I told IBM they should buy SAP-- Kleiner's Ray Lane says...

Please see: SVW--These are the new dotcoms of the new rules economy...

November 1, 2005

The SEA change: Microsoft "Live" is Microsoft the follower and this time around that strategy won't work...here's why

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher.com

The announcement of Microsoft Live seems a couple of years late. Of course, Microsoft has done well over the years by following others that pioneered markets and then cleaning up because of its scale. But following a company like Google won't work for Microsoft this time, because by the time MSFT figures things out the market has moved on.

I spoke with one of MSFT's lead engineers recently and he was telling me about the fantastic search technology that they have in the labs. That it is better than GOOG's. But the conversation has moved on: it's about Search-Enabled Applications now, it really is a SEA change (and the apps are AJAX).

Rebranding some MSN stuff and adding layers of subscription based services is not going to get MSFT very far.

MSFT can live off the fat of its enterprise market but that won't last forever. And it cannot compete against GOOG's low operational costs--GOOG is much more New Rules Enterprise than MSFT. And it will be MSFT's legacy culture and thinking that will sink the company.

BTW, GOOG does not see itself as a MSFT competitor. The fact that it added a few programmers to help out OpenOffice is not significant.

The New Rules business mantra is: just focus on making sure you execute in your own business--the competition will take care of itself.

GOOG just needs to make sure it is always a step ahead of MSFT (and anybody else)--MSFT will take care of itself. Its legacy burdens will see to that.imho.

Cnet's story on Microsoft Live launch:
Gates: We're entering "live era" of software

The Google Zeitgeist and the walking dead...

The new Dotcoms will eat lunch this time around. Some of the rules of the new rules enterprise

October 31, 2005

"Life is too short to click on an unknown" - No blind links on Blogs says Web Design Guru Jakob Nielsen

By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher.com

Blind Links.jpg Earlier this year I was pestering Jakob Nielsen--the uber web design guru-- to do a study of weblog usability. Jakob was reluctant at the time because he said there was no money to fund such a study. It takes about $200k to do a full study.

Nevertheless, Jakob did just recently publish: Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes:

This is my absolute favorite:

4. Links Don't Say Where They Go Many weblog authors seem to think it's cool to write link anchors like: "some people think" or "there's more here and here." Remember one of the basics of the Web: Life is too short to click on an unknown. Tell people where they're going and what they'll find at the other end of the link.
Generally, you should provide predictive information in either the anchor text itself or the immediately surrounding words.

I'm always very pleased when Silicon Valley Watcher is linked by my readers in their posts. I'm even happier when the link is described as coming from Silicon Valley Watcher :-)

October 26, 2005

A Momentary Publishing Incident in the Blogosphere

...must everything be embedded in the permalink concrete?

Bat Signal.jpg By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher.com

Dan Gillmor and I were involved in what could be described as a momentary publishing incident just a little while ago. We had both published posts on a particular story starting to make the rounds.

I had requested a Dan Gillmor bat signal to be shot into the muddled brown smog of the San Jose sky, because I needed advice from Dan. Dan is like the Pope of this new media world, and I value his advice.

It is not usual for "standalone journalists" to do this; but we had a chat about it , because we both felt it required a second look. It was the way in which the information was leaked to us that looked a bit strange, and warranted a fourth and fifth look.

Because Dan and I were able to swap notes and step through the timeline of the leak, we both felt uncomfortable; and Dan said he was immediately pulling his post down for further review.

I was about to leave and run down to the Peninsula; but I started thinking about the post, and I felt uncomfortable publishing it too, even though it was in a questioning format. So I took it down. I want to chat more about this with Dan and other buddies in the SV hack pack.

This incident of momentary publishing is interesting, because it is unfolding right now as I type. It might provide a lesson for the future practitioners of this artful craft--at least it provided me with an interesting point to write about.

Standalone journalism does not work

And this is also why teamwork in this new journalism is very important. Standalone journalism does not work, you need a team. I have an editor, Mike Faden, old school and very good. He edits for clarity and errant late night great ideas :-)

And I have an illustrator, Chris Dichtel; and I also have a head geek, Nick Aster, when he is able to surface from under the the heavy load of his his green MBA studies. I could do with more people--especially a business manager and a lawyer on the business side, but also people on the editorial side.

Working with other journalists is the best way to keep the juices flowing, and also to swap notes and be able to double check each other. Working in a editorial team is the best way to maintain consistent editorial quality.

In my profession we've been producing news sheets/newspapers for more than 400 years; and in many cases, there is no need to reinvent the wheel in terms of best practices. If we can take what we've learned from the centuries of news journalism, and apply it to this incredible medium without legacy issues standing in the way--then that is a killer combination.

That's my goal in a nutshell: use what we have useful from the traditions of journalism, and then technology-enable-it with tools such as blogging, wikis and a whole slew of what I call two-way media technologies.

Dan's BayoSphere

October 19, 2005

Let's kill the sacred cow of "Community" and reveal the hidden commercialism

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

Tuesday evening I was trying to find my way to a class room in South Hall, a building on the massive, meandering UC Berkeley campus where Quentin Hardy, a senior editor at Forbes is teaching a journalism class.

Quentin invited Dan Gillmor, John Shinal from Dow Jones' CBS MarketWatch, and myself a former mainstream journalist, to speak to his class about the new online media and how it affects our sense and understanding of self.

There were about 30 students and we chatted about a lot of things, and the word "community" kept cropping up, and up and up; not among the students, but from my fellow panelists.

It reminded me of my dislike for the term "community" because it is charged with an almost sacrosanct cultural meaning, to such an extent that it defies and discourages challenge. It is a revered word/term/concept and it is one that has become broadly appropriated by commercial interests, and deliberately so.

In the blogosphere and the larger mediasphere, community is used in ways that clouds meaning and cloaks commercial enterprise.

During a chat after class, Quentin noted that he heard the word community constantly at the recent Web 2.0 conference, where the $2800 per seat audience applauded "community" business models and services from the $30K per vendor pitches.

I think this sacred cow needs to be slain and we should not use highly charged words or terms unless we mean them to be used that way.

We should use more culture-neutral terms which don't engage society's sensitivities.

Here's my contribution to slaying the cow: I pointed out to the class that commercial interests love online communities, because they are an aggregated blob into which you can more cheaply throw marketing messages.

And let's not forget the "conversations" of the online communities, which are collected and diced and sliced and packaged and sorted and sold. By Technorati, Feedster, and a gazillion others--because it is all out in the open, in the commons.

Commercial interests are acceptable--after all, everyone has a landlord or banker that needs to eat--but cloaking commercial interests behind sacrosanct terms and ideas and concepts is beyond the bounds, imho.

October 5, 2005

Sun Microsystems will help Google build the world's largest computer with Sun's SPARC microprocessors....

. . .imho
By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
Nothing there! Says perplexed tech industry and media on the Sun and Google pact announced earlier this week.

That was the consensus, but they were looking in the wrong place, imho.

Eric Schmidt and Scott McNealy were very likely talking about computer architectures. These are hardware geeks not software. Sun knows how to build highly scalable massively parallel SPARC microprocessor based systems.

Free Google computers

Sun understands 64-bit microprocessor design and the total system design of large IT systems very, very well. Oh, and before I forget, Sun also has a lot of IP in the client/digital gadget side of things...

Within a year we'll see a Google consumer computer announcement, and it'll be free, and cheap to make and made from inexpensive chips because the machine processing power moved into the big computer in the ether(net).

Google and the price of oil

I know for a fact that Google has bought large Intel Itanium systems in the past. And I know it will need massive amounts of computing power over the next couple of years.

Building everything with PC boards is massively inefficient and incredibly electric power hungry. A big Sun system uses far less electric power per microprocessor cycle than that generated by racks of PC servers.

Jet Blue to JFK

I wouldn't be surprised if Mr Schmidt shows up at Sam Palmisano's office in Armonk next to order some IBM POWER systems. Like Sun, IBM has tremendous expertise in the microprocessor PLUS IT system design that Google needs.

And this doesn't mean Itanium systems are being replaced--by SPARC or POWER.

Google is not concerned with either/or, it is concerned about more!

September 27, 2005

Trawling for stories at the CTIA show...

Openwave's David Peterschmidt and how Inktomi saved Yahoo; OQO--caught between a PDA and a notebook is a hard place to be; Gail Redmond, SozoTek's image enhancer; Audio Bar targets the anti-book masses; Lost my Treo brick and found it (sigh); ipsh! text message marketing king.

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
It is CTIA week in San Francisco, and this wireless conference has brought in a lot of mobile technology companies. Mobile is definitely the hottest space right now in tech, and also the most challenging.

You need powerful software that can perform wonders in a device with limited resources. If you are a device maker, you have to have highly integrated chips that sip battery power yet can handle, Swiss-army-knife style, a wide range of communications standards, display and audio demands.

And you have to have great design too. Because for consumers, a cell phone says a lot about its owner, so the way it looks, sounds and the personal information it contains are important.

This point was made well by David Peterschmidt, chief executive of Openwave, when I met with him Monday evening.

Openwave is an interesting company in itself, but Mr Peterschmidt interests me more because he is one of Silicon Valley's legends. He has built many large businesses groups here and he knows more about the inner workings of Silicon Valley, (and where the bodies are buried ;-) than almost anyone else.

To most people, he is probably best known as the former CEO of Inktomi, which he grew from 20 people into the hottest search engine company of its time. Inktomi's search engine technology continues on, but under a different brand: Yahoo.

Inktomi was sold to Yahoo in 2003 and Mr Peterschmidt firmly believes that "if it wasn't for its acquisition of Inktomi's search technology, Yahoo would not have been able to compete against Google so effectively."

Openwave is best known for browser software that enables mobile phone companies to deliver a large number of applications to customers.

This is a key, strategic position in the market. And Openwave is determined to strengthen it further; this week it announced the acquisition of Musiwave for more than $121m, which adds a variety of digital music services capabilities to its portfolio.

OQO-the "pocketable" PC

I ran into Virginia Jamieson from OQO and I got to see a rather nifty mobile device the company just introduced, the OQO 01+.

It is an "enhanced ultra personal computer which comes with 512MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, USB 2.0, internal speaker, improved pen-based digitizer, car/auto charger." Here is more info...

It's described as a PDA with all the functionality of a Windows XP notebook. Which means you don't need to learn a new interface. The OQO is perfectly placed between a PDA and a laptop, yet I don't think that's a good place to be because of the form factor.

It is too large to be a PDA and too small to be a decent notebook. It has all the price ($1900) of a notebook but without the functionality. Yes, the guts are the same, but the keyboard is a thumb keyboard. I can thumb on my Treo 600; but I can't do it for long.

I'd rather have a 12-inch Centrino notebook sans optical drive. And the OQO doesn't even have a camera(!) I'm clearly not the target market...

Here are some enthusiasts though, at Engadget...

SozoTek: Fixing camera phone images

Imaging is a large theme at CTIA; and phones are coming out with ever-larger mega-pixel cameras built in. The image quality, however, is not that great. But SozoTek has an interesting solution.

I spoke with Gail Redmond, the president and CEO of this Texas based company, who said the solution to better camera phone images lies within the carrier network.

"Our technology dramatically improves the image when you send it from your phone to someone else," she said. The technology sits on the carrier's servers and intercepts images on-the-fly, using sophisticated image enhancement technology developed at Kodak and IBM.

There is no denying the market size and hockey-stick growth projections around mobile phone imaging, and such services might help wireless carriers differentiate their services. But SozoTek is the lone provider of such technologies which means it has to educate the market, and the user.

That's a tough position but Ms Redmond seems tough enough from prior leading positions at Sprint and Telespree, to name a few.

Soccer and Manja at Germany's Audio Bar

German soccer fans are a primary target for Audio Bar, an interesting German startup. Erbil Kurt, who at one time was Deutsche Telecom's youngest-ever board member, has put together an interesting portfolio of images, ring tones and video clips--all designed specifically for small screen mobile phones.

And what I saw was very good. Mr Kurt has personally created most of the ring tones, images and audio himself. And he even traveled to Istanbul so that he could come back with a rare interview with one of Germany's top soccer personalities.

But it is not just soccer fans that interest Mr Kurt. "Did you know that 40m Germans have never bought a book?" he asked me. That's what surveys have revealed; and that is a business opportunity.

That's because it is a market that consumes its stories and information through images. And Japanese manja is the inspiration for several "story book" projects that Audio Bar hopes to sell a chapter at a time.

The demo I saw was very good, and reminded me of the Aha video "Take on me." It worked well in that small screen form factor.

Lost my Treo...

It's ironic that I seem to have misplaced (lost) my cell phone at the cell phone show, or rather during the evening festivities.

But, I can't say I'm sorry to lose my Treo 600--a brick of a phone and one of the least reliable devices I have ever owned. I got one of the first ones, but within a year, I was on my fifth Treo 600.

And it was not because I'm harsh on phones, it was because they would stop working. When I look at annual cell phone shipment unit numbers, I now wonder how many of those units are replacements for shoddy units...

And now I found it! Literally, as I finished the above sentence, my land line rang and my phone was found on the bar at 111 Minna.

ipsh!--marketing through short text messaging

And speaking of 111 Minna, I must mention my hosts ipsh! who threw a fun party at the art gallery.

The company is using SMS--short text messages in innovative ways in marketing and promoting events. And Ellisa Feinstein introduced me to some interesting people there that I'd like to follow up with at a later, and quieter time...

September 23, 2005

Silicon Valley Watcher wins excellence in media award: Best Bay Area Blog

Please excuse a few moments of horn blowing and a little crowing, but Silicon Valley Watcher has won the Best Bay Area Blog Award from the prestigious San Francisco Bay Area Publicity Club!

I met some of the members of the club earlier this year when I spoke at one of the organization's lunchtime events, organized by Ellisa Feinstein and colleagues. Don Clarke from the WSJ was there too, as well as editors from Wired and Cnet. And the Q&A afterwards was one of the best.

Thank you all and my apologies for not being able to accept the "Pubby" in person. I had already promised to be in New York at NYU on a panel with Joe Trippi at the Impact '05 conference. Otherwise I would have loved to have been there.

Here is some info on the awards:

The San Francisco Bay Area Publicity Club, a non-profit network of public relations professionals, announced today the nominees for the 9th Annual Pubby Awards. The "Pubby" award signifies excellence in media in 2005.

Nominees for the Pubby Awards are elected by the Club's Board of Directors and winners are chosen by ballot by current members of the Publicity Club. www.sfpublicityclub.org or by calling (415) 437-4440.

September 20, 2005

More crumbling in the crumbling print business model as New York Times and Philly papers announce hundreds of layoffs...

. . . the sharp end of the disruption process

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

My recent post about the center of the media industry moving to Silicon Valley and nobody told New York drew some attention, especially from the excellent I Want Media web site run by New York based journalist Patrick Phillips.

In the post (fourth item) I said Google, Yahoo, Ebay are technology enabled media companies and they are hiring like crazy while New York's venerable media industry is not.

It was good timing given that the New York Times just announced 500 job cuts, and Knight Ridder said 100 newsroom jobs are going at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. Just the latest crumblings of a crumbling print business model.

It's not much fun being a journalist inside a crumbling business model. You are doing two or three jobs, everyone is in a bad mood, there are no pay raises, and on top of everything else, you are often expected to "blog" for your employer.

I tell my journalist friends that they should come and join me. It is far better to be on the side of the disrupting forces than to be on the sharp receiving end of the disruption.

It's true that I don't yet have much of a business model, but, I know that things can only get better on my side of the equation. Not much chance of things getting better on the print side of the business...

I'm not against print; it is just another distribution channel, as is is online. The problem is that if you have a business built on the old economics of the print advertising model, it can't be supported by today's advertising (print and online) ad revenues.

But if you start off from the lowest cost position (a blogger(s) in a bedroom :-) you will eventually inherit the earth. Because nobody can get in under your cost model (except for a blogger in a bedroom living free at their parent's house and using mom's computer!)

What worries me, however, is that online media business models are still being created and they cannot yet distinguish between good content and bad content. We need that virtuous cycle to be established so that the best content creators are rewarded and can re-invest in producing yet more great content.

Right now, the old media business models are in trouble and the new media business models are not yet in place.

What happens if we continue to lose the former and we are unable to create the latter?

September 12, 2005

Infineon's Media/Analyst conference. . .and hot laps with Mario

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

During my recent lengthy apartment/office move, I took a break and went to the Infineon Technologies media/analyst conference in Sonoma. Infineon, a founding sponsor of this site, attracts a decent-sized crowd to this annual event.

It is held at Infineon Raceway, one of the premier automotive racetracks in the US and just 40 minutes north of San Francisco.

The media and analysts are invited to listen to a few hours of presentations, updates from Bob LeFort, president of Infineon USA, and panel discussions on current issues from Infineon and third-party experts.

It's a quick and effective way to catch up with what the largest European chipmaker is doing, and the issues and trends that affect its business strategies.

Hot Laps

And then after lunch, Infineon invites everyone to play on the racetrack in a variety of motor sports events, including the opportunity to do "hot laps" with Mario Andretti.

This means sitting next to the seven times world champion race car driver as he barrels at incredible speeds into impossible turns in a racing Porsche GT3 Cup car. Seeing this racing legend work his craft at such close range is very very impressive.

[Last year, Nathan Brookwood, Insight 64 microprocessor analyst, had an interesting experience with Mr Andretti. As they came into a turn, one of the wheels fell off, and rolled right ahead of them(!) Mr Andretti maintained complete control of the car and within a few minutes he was back on the track with all four wheels, and plenty of eager passengers waiting in line.]

Automotive chips--Silicon drivers

My regular contacts at Infineon USA are Christoph Liedke, and his boss Gerhard Zimmermann of the comms team, aided by Mansi Agarwal. I met Christoph and Gerhard several years before Infineon became a sponsor of this site, when I was covering the chip sector for the Financial Times.

To Wall Street and many others, Infineon is viewed somewhat plainly, as Europe's largest chipmaker, spun out of Siemens, the German industrial and engineering conglomerate.

It is one of the world's largest memory chip manufacturers, but this is not always a welcome accolade. That's because memory chip markets have notoriously low margins and follow a brutal business cycle marked by long bust periods and very brief boom periods.

And that is why Infineon is pushing into higher margin chip markets such as automotive chips, a market in which it dominates in Europe but lags in the US. Which is why it bought the the ten year naming rights to Infineon Raceway, formerly known as Sears Point Raceway.

Now in its third year, it has been a very good move for Infineon. The popularity of motor sports in the US has grown tremendously over the past few years. And the venue has hosted NASCAR and many other national and international racing events, helping to associate the Infineon brand with high performance automotive technologies.

Infineon's controversial CEO

Infineon came alive for me when I first interviewed its CEO, Dr Ulrich Schumacher. He was one of Germany's most prominent business leaders and on a meteoric career path -- a business wunderkind.

He was the youngest ever director at Siemens, one of Germany's largest and most respected companies; and when Siemens decided to spin-off Infineon Technologies in April 1999, Dr Schumacher presided over a very successful IPO at the height of Germany's dotcom mania.

Infineon, within Germany, represented the crown jewel of the country's tech boom and it became one of the most widely held tech stocks in Germany.

Dr Schumacher was very much in the public eye and he used that position to push for reforms in German laws that burdened German companies in global markets. And he gladly tackled the hard cultural battles within a society that doesn't tolerate mavericks very well.

What began to fascinate me about Infineon was that it was a new company emerging from a large and well established parent. And it was trying very hard to shed the old business culture and old ways of thinking prominent in the German business community.

Escaping Munich

Dr Schumacher recognized that Infineon must become a global chipmaker, not a German or European chipmaker. He would sometimes hold board meetings in different locations around the world to encourage a global perspective within the company.

I remember asking him what brought him to San Francisco one particular time. He said he had just had a company board meeting in Napa. "I have to have an excuse to get these guys out of Munich some of the time."

He also wanted to separate as much as possible from Siemens, and worked hard to reduce Siemens' stake in the company and its majority control, which he felt sometimes restrained Infineon's abilities to manage its business within very tough chip markets.

Alliances not acquisitions

Dr Schumacher pursued a very savvy business strategy, establishing numerous manufacturing partnerships with other leading chipmakers, such as IBM. This spread the capital investment risk, and it enabled Infineon to co-develop leading manufacturing processes and technologies.

And Infineon was very conservative in its acquisitions, avoiding large deals but happy to help bid up the price of acquisitions targeted by rivals.

The low margins in the memory chip business also forced Infineon to become highly disciplined and cost-efficient in its manufacturing, which it then applied to its other chip products, improving the profit margins on those lines.

Outspoken payback

Mr Schumacher trod on many toes during his tenure at Infineon. And his outspoken opinions and attempts to limit Infineon's exposure to European labor earned him the enmity of German trade unions and many others. He resigned from Infineon in March 2004 during a board meeting.

Dr Schumacher's strategy and culture still continues at Infineon. And the company maintains a strong presence in Silicon Valley with several thousand workers in San Jose and other locations in the US.

It's not just the talent pool in Silicon Valley that Infineon benefits from, but also from the the region's culture of entrepreneurship, risk taking, and innovation. I've seen such associations with Silicon Valley transform companies and they are very important, more important than we sometimes realize.

Where were you?

Infineon's sponsorship of SiliconValleyWatcher shows it is a stalwart supporter of innovative approaches, and keen to explore the opportunities emerging from the use of innovative/disruptive media technologies such as blogging. And it has been willing to experiment with the medium directly, establishing InfineonWatch.com.

But it has not been easy sailing for Christoph Liedke and Gerhard Zimmermann, who have had to step out on a limb with their support of SiliconValleyWatcher. The chip industry has slipped into yet another downturn, and they have smaller budgets and have had to face questions about their support for "blogging" type media publishers.

Obviously, I think Infineon's money is well spent and the association with SiliconValleyWatcher is helping both parties build our brands in mutually positive ways.

Plus, what excites me the most, is that we all get to be part of an amazing phenomenon that is changing the global media sector; and it will lead to some very profound and historic changes in our global society, some of which we cannot yet predict. And we will be able to say to our grandchildren: "I was there." imho.

- - - - - - - -

[Infineon is listed on the DAX 30 index of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: IFX).]

July 15, 2005

Silicon Valley should fight laws controlling innovation, says veteran valley entrepeneur

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Silicon Valley could face additional laws limiting technology innovation unless it gets active in politics and lobbies hard to protect its digital freedoms. That was the view of Joe Kraus, a Silicon Valley veteran and an avid angel investor.

Lunch with Joe is always a treat, not just because he picks up the tab but because I get to pick his brains about all sorts of issues and trends. As a veteran of the first search engine wars, when he co-founded Excite, and now heading a corporate wiki company JotSpot, Joe sees a lot more than many, and he has a lot invested in Silicon Valley innovation through his angel investments.

One of the things on Joe's mind is how cleverly Hollywood managed to control innovation. What do you mean by "control," I asked?

"Hollywood is very good at the political process and it managed to get the digital millennium copyright act passed." This essentially gives Hollywood control over innovation, because it gets to approve appropriate technologies and therefor development.

Silicon Valley companies have traditionally paid scant attention to Washington, and have not learned how to play the lobbying games. While older tech companies like Texas Instruments, Intel, and a few others have large staffs in Washington.D.C, they are still less than equal to a force to be felt.

Joe recently joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that works to protect digital civil liberties. And he founded the 50,000 member strong lobbying group DigitalConsumer.org.

Last month I met with 463 Communications, a PR firm that is helping tech companies become involved in the public political process. It's a small move in the right direction.

What else is Joe wondering about? "There seems to be a giant sucking sound from Google as it pulls in top engineering talent and technologies," he said.

Earlier this year I saw Eric Schmidt on Charlie Rose and he said graduates are told that if they want to change the world they should choose Google because it has the largest scale and is best placed to achieve their goals. "That's a killer pitch," he said. I know, what can you say to that?

I've been wondering if Google and Yahoo will buy up all the cool emerging companies. And isn't this bad for innovation because there are a small number of bidders for young companies?

They essentially control valuations of startups and that means a lower return for investors.

The same is true in enterprise software markets BTW. Lower returns, equals less investment in future ventures.

We chatted about so many things that we forgot to chat about JotSpot, Joe's current tech focus. Fortunately, the always excellent Dan Farber, at ZDNet met with Joe that day too, and wrote about what is new about JotSpot:

JotSpot reorients itself by ZDNet's Dan Farber -- Joe Kraus of Jotspot came by my office today and we chatted for about 30 minutes about how his wiki-based platform and applications are evolving. Joe has ample Web 1.0 experience in building a Web-centric products and company. He was one the co-founders of the pre-Google search engine Excite (which then became part of the highly touted but now extinct [...]

Here is our interview with Joe from earlier this year.

Joe's blog is here: http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/

http://www.jotspot.com/

July 14, 2005

Another day another panel another conversation about my two favorite subjects: Silicon Valley and disruptive media

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

As media and communications and marketing professionals, we are all taking part in something very interesting: the birth of a new media landscape.

We will never again, in our lifetimes, experience/witness/participate in anything of such scale and importance as what is now developing in our industry sectors. imho.

That's one of the things I said Wednesday lunchtime to a very interesting group attending the monthly meeting of the San Francisco Publicity Club.

Was I being too dramatic? I don't think so, I'm certain it will be seen that way by historians :-)

It's another day and I'm on another panel, and I like taking part in things like this. But what's not to like about being in the Waterfront Restaurant at Pier 7 on a gorgeous day, talking with a smart and ambitious group about my favorite subjects: Silicon Valley and disruptive media technologies?!

My fellow panelists were interesting picks. Event organizer Ellisa Feinstein and colleagues picked Don Clark, deputy bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal; Mark Robinson, a senior editor at Wired magazine, and Lindsey Turrentine, an editor at Cnet's gadgets review section. The panel was a nice spectrum representing old to new media organizations.

The Q&A part of such events is the best part, because that's when talk turns to conversation. And I get to hear stories, concerns and issues.

A large subject for this audience of communications professionals, is trying to figure out how to deal with online media, which is fast becoming the dominant form of media expression.

Yet online media can appear as a confusing mish-mash of different forms: Podcasting, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, news readers, news aggregators, and many different online communities. There are different rules, and different processes. And you still have the traditional media to deal with while trying to implement and use these unfamiliar publishing and communications technologies.

And you are often expected to do it all with the same budget, headcount and management. But you can't.

I told the group we were all lucky to be here, at this time, at this important point in the transformation of the media and communications industry. There are many questions, and we only have some of the answers.

That's why we are lucky, because this time, we get a chance to discover/create/develop the future. The software engineer was important for enabling Internet 1.0. In this second major phase in the evolution of the Internet, it is the "media engineer" that will be important.

I define this as a media/communications professional that understands how to create compelling online content/services, and how to use the latest media technologies. In that order, btw.

July 12, 2005

Top blog-happy PR firms

Steve Broback, who's bringing the Blog Business Summit to San Francisco in August, did a brief survey of how often PR firms use the word "blog" on their websites. And the winner is ... Edelman, by a long shot. Here's the list:

Edelman PR Worldwide	77
Manning, Selvage & Lee	53
Horn Group	18
Hill & Knowlton	9
Burson-Marsteller	5
Haas MS&L	5

June 28, 2005

Zoto photo project aims to record more than 4.54m US sites

. . . Route 66 at hyper speed

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

If you have ever wanted an excuse to travel the US and visit places you never knew existed, Zoto has the mission for you: upload a photograph of each spot where a whole-numbered minute of latitude intersects with a whole-numbered minute of longitude.

That's 4.554 million "minute confluence points." So make sure your digital camera has plenty of batteries.

Zoto is an online sharing site similar to Flickr with some interesting twists on Flickr-like features such as tagging.

Flickr developed into a community platform almost by accident, and continues to produce "accidental" communities of users that are drawn together for unpredictable reasons.

Zoto, in contrast, has been designed from the start to be a community platform. It will be interesting to see if aberrant behavior by groups, the "madness of crowds," will show itself in abundance on Zoto.

Encouraging the unpredictable

That is the best test of a community platform such as Flickr, Del.iscio.us or MySpace.com — that there are thriving communities of users doing different and unexpected things. I like to tag this as a "flickriscious" quality and it is the holy grail of community platforms.

To encourage online communities, Zoto has chosen to sponsor the minute confluence photography project, also known as GeoProject USA and inspired by the successful Degree Confluence Project.

"Google is using trucks equipped with lasers and photo gear to create 3D maps of cities such as San Francisco, [see SVW scoop] so we wanted to do something different," said Dakota Sullivan, Chief Operating Officer at Zoto.

He estimates it will take volunteers two to three years to collect photos of nearly all the 4.554m points — each with four views — which are just one mile apart.

"Then you'll be able to zoom across a virtual USA consisting of a montage of photos in any direction, at hyperspeed. It'll be stunning. And people will come up with applications and uses for something like that," Mr Sullivan said.

Zoto lets digital photographers store tens of thousands of photos on its servers, and publish them to blogs, for family members or the public. It was founded in 2004 with several executives from LookSmart, the Australian search company.

The GeoSmart project should help it attract an interesting crowd of users. All you need to take part is a standard global positioning device, a compass and a digital camera.

M&A deals in hot photo sector

Photo sites and photo sharing are active business sectors because of acquisitions such as Picasa by Google. This year Yahoo bought Flickr, Hewlett-Packard grabbed Snapfish and, in June, Shutterfly acquired Memory Matrix.

Google seems to have the most integrated and ambitious plan for photos, photo sharing, and photographing near every inch of the planet. In October it acquired Keyhole, which has huge numbers of satellite photos that can be integrated into a ground-level view for creating 3D photo montages of cities.

Google also wants communities of users to come up with interesting uses for this type of geo-location photography. And with 3D cities as a focus, this will create opportunities for Google and its partners to overlay commercial services.

Will big always win?

These are early days and Zoto can still carve out a decent sized market. But these are essentially infrastructure battles, which generally play out in terms of scale; whoever gets bigger faster, using open, standard platforms, will eventually win.

Google has scale and it has open standard platforms. I'm sure I don't need to step my readers through the opportunities, from the application of the Google advertising network to the Google Earth project. Contextual advertising has a new meaning.

. . .
From Cnet:
Shutterfly buys out Memory Matrix

HP to acquire Snapfish photo service

Yahoo buys photo-sharing site Flickr

Here is some background from the announcement Zoto will make on Wednesday:

Geo Project USA is inspired by the successful “Degree Confluence Project” (www.Confluence.org). More than 7,000 participants have visited, photographed and written about 5,000 degree confluence points in 166 countries, including 872 of the 1265 degree confluence points in the U.S. “People have been asking me for something like this for a long time,” said Alex Jarrett who founded the Degree Confluence Project in 1996. “Geo Project USA takes our original vision to an extreme level.”

Zoto is a natural home for Geo Project USA. Kord Campbell owned the Oklahoma internet service provider (ISP) where the Degree Confluence Project was originally housed and has been involved in the project ever since, personally contributing several degree confluence visits in Oklahoma and Texas.

Zoto is a Web-based photo hosting, organizing, sharing and publishing site. Zoto was founded in 2004 by Kord Campbell, Rick Dunning and Trey Stout and is privately funded. Zoto is based in Oklahoma City, OK, with a business development office in Berkeley, CA.

Zoto photo project aims to record more than 4.54m US sites

. . . Route 66 at hyper speed

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

That's 4.554 million "minute confluence points." So make sure your digital camera has plenty of batteries.

Zoto is an online sharing site similar to Flickr with some interesting twists on Flickr-like features such as tagging.

Flickr developed into a community platform almost by accident, and continues to produce "accidental" communities of users that are drawn together for unpredictable reasons.

Encouraging the unpredictable

To encourage online communities, Zoto has chosen to sponsor the minute confluence photography project, also known as GeoProject USA and inspired by the successful Degree Confluence Project.

He estimates it will take volunteers two to three years to collect photos of nearly all the 4.554m points — each with four views — which are just one mile apart.

"Then you'll be able to zoom across a virtual USA consisting of a montage of photos in any direction, at hyperspeed. It'll be stunning. And people will come up with applications and uses for something like that," Mr Sullivan said.

The GeoSmart project should help it attract an interesting crowd of users. All you need to take part is a standard global positioning device, a compass and a digital camera.

M&A deals in hot photo sector

Will big always win?

. . .
From Cnet:
Shutterfly buys out Memory Matrix

HP to acquire Snapfish photo service

Yahoo buys photo-sharing site Flickr

Here is some background from the announcement Zoto will make on Wednesday:

June 21, 2005

The British Invasion continues as OutCast is gobbled up by Next Fifteen

...will everyone in San Francisco PR eventually work for Tim Dyson?

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

TDyson Hi Res bw.jpg San Francisco based OutCast Communications has been acquired by Next Fifteen, Europe's largest publicly traded PR company for an initial payment of about $6m and additional performance based payments that could reach $13m over the next five years.

From Next Fifteen:

Under the terms of the acquisition, Next Fifteen will pay initial consideration of £3.3 million ($6 million) for OutCast, which is to be funded out of existing cash and debt facilities and a vendor placing which raised £2.5 million. Further consideration will be paid over the next five years based on the performance of the company, with total consideration capped at £7.2 million ($13 million).

Earlier this year, at least one other company considered buying OutCast. Financial Dynamics, the large New York firm specializing in investor relations and now branching out into other sectors, explored a possible purchase.

Next Fifteen is now by far the largest employer in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley PR sector. It owns Bite PR and Text 100, two of the largest San Francisco PR companies. It also has a significant stake in 463 Communications, a PR firm targeting tech policy issues. The 463 Communications offices are shared with Bite.

Consolidation in PR mirrors the valley

The OutCast acquisition i