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February 2, 2006

CEO Selina Lo of Ruckus Wireless--a name to watch

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
[It is such a dreary, rainy day here in SF, and I have a touch of the flu, so I've been able to stay-in and catch up with stuff I should have written weeks ago.]

I recently had dinner with Selina Lo, CEO of Ruckus Wireless--a startup developing wireless multimedia IP technology for the home.

Women CEOs are rare in Silicon Valley but I don't think Ms Lo noticed. An organization would have to have a glass ceiling the thickness of a polar ice cap to keep Ms Lo in check--and I don't think that would work for long.

Take a glance at her bio:

Ms. Lo was the former vice president within Nortel Networks' Content Business Unit, which acquired Alteon WebSystems, a public networking equipment supplier, in 2000 for $7.8 billion.
At Alteon, Ms. Lo served as vice president of Marketing from its inception through IPO and the Nortel acquisition.

Prior to Alteon, Ms. Lo was the vice president of marketing at the Centillion Business Unit of Bay Networks which was purchased by Bay Networks in 1994.

Ms. Lo's career also includes several management roles at Network Equipment Technologies and Hewlett Packard. She holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

If you'd like to find out more about Ms Lo, here is a post from the very decent (7clicks/10) corporate blog The Ruckus Room. [BTW, please do NOT send marriage proposals to the company email address--it clogs their servers--contact Ms Lo at Lo.Sers@Gmail.com ]

Ms Lo had just gotten back from CES and so had a travel bag of stories--many of which I cannot share :-(. However, there were plenty of things I can write about.

One of the things Ms Lo noticed about CES was that there were larger numbers of media executives "and they seemed to know what they were talking about, they understood some of the technology. Usually they send their tech guys, but this time they were out there themselves."

That's a good sign, that media companies are realizing that they need to be "technology-enabled." It's phrase I like to use a lot, because I believe that savvy, technology-enabled media companies can be incredibly successful.

Ms Lo's company is trying to do something very simple: to allow people in homes to watch TV, movies, listen to music, surf, communicate, from anywhere in the house and with any applicable screen or device. I think of it as one-click multimedia wireless for the home.

It's a simple thing but tremendously hard--the way simple things always are. But Ruckus seems further along in the game than anybody else I've come across.

Ms Lo says the company is getting noticed by the cable companies, which is good. But waiting for the cable companies is like waiting for Godot--excruciating. There needs to be a disrupting force of some kind to kick them in the pants.

Ms Lo believes that the internet will provide a level playing field and the means for a disrupting force to come in and challenge any fat and happy incumbents. But I don't share her enthusiasm.

In the industry, we used to talk about the "last mile" to the home as a problem. Now, the "last mile" is a big advantage, because it is the best choke-point into the home, imho.

Anyway, you might want to put Ruckus on your radar screen, and there will be more on Ruckus coming up in SVW.

Incidentally, I was pleased to learn that Ms Lo shares a similar day/work schedule to mine, so that she can deal with customers in Asia.

January 23, 2006

The Future Transparency of the Past or why you should get used to living in a glass house...

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I've been wanting to write this piece for a while and with all the chatter over government subpoena of internet useage data, it seems like this is the right time.

Here is an excerpt of my piece on ZDNet, and my apologies for asking you to click over to ZDNet, but they pay on pageviews and do a better job of monetizing my work than I do! So in the interests of keeping SVW as "advertising-lite" as possible, an occasional click or two over on my ZDNet blog IMHO would be much appreciated by my landlord :-)

An excerpt from "The future transparency of the past."

Did you know that Google keeps a copy of every piece of data it ever comes across? That includes every web page (without images), search terms, and useage data such as time of day, IP address, etc. Google's head of engineering told me more than two years ago that all the data gets saved onto onto tapes and is shipped to a storage facility.
What will you do with that data I asked? We don't know was the answer.

I'm sure that Google's data is not personal to a user, but, if you could combine it with other data, such as from third-party cookies, or other databases, it can get personal very easily. You'll be able to triangulate an identifiable user.
Now combine that ever growing store of data at Google, with the masses of location data from cell phone companies, and credit card companies, and health data, etc. And also all the data that corporations are required to save because of Sarbanes-Oxely.

It would be a big mashup of data, but if you had access to it all–it would reveal a person's life in tremendous detail. You would almost be able to follow the daily track of a person through every minute of their day, as they gassed their car, called their spouse, associated with a person that later was put into prison, called a person later revealed to be their lover, what they wrote that day in corporate emails, what they wrote on blogs and with who they linked.

Okay, it would be a massive data mining project–but. . . we will have such capabilities.

- - -
Here is one of the related articles on this topic: Online privacy a fragile shield SUBPOENAS MAKE USERS UNEASY ABOUT WHOM TO TRUST By Michael Bazeley Mercury News

December 20, 2005

The first journalist from a top newspaper to become a full-time blogger

I was the subject of an interview published in PR Week. . .

Interview: Tom Foremski
PR Week USA Dec 12 2005 00:00

In May 2004, Tom Foremski took a huge risk. He left one of the top jobs in tech journalism - Silicon Valley reporter and columnist for the Financial Times - to start a blog about the business and culture of Silicon Valley.

While many journalists blog in addition to their day jobs, Foremski was arguably the first journalist from a major publication to quit to become a full-time blogger. Now, Foremski may be even more influential than when he was with the FT. . .

More influential than the FT would be nice, I'm not there yet :-)

I didn't realize I would become the first full-time journalist blogger. I just saw the handwriting on the walls. And I didn't realize the effect this would have on large Silicon Valley companies.

One of my senior contacts at Intel told me, "When you left the FT to become a blogger, it was a wake up call. We realized we had to take this blogging trend seriously." Others have told me similar stories.

Wow, that's very cool, but I had no idea my online ambitions would have such a broad effect. Or that I would be doing so much public speaking, and be on panels with John Chambers and other highly respected captains of industry, top media execs, VCs, top thoughtleaders etc.

And even share a panel with Joe Trippi, arguably the top political strategist in the US. And, I am often asked to talk about the future of journalism, a very serious subject. Sometimes, it all feels very strange, I'm just a guy with a laptop(!)

Looking over shoulders

For the past 24 years I have worked as a journalist and I would look over people's shoulders and say "that looks interesting, what are you doing? What is that technology? What does it do? How will it change things? How will you grow the business?"

Now, I have journalists looking over my shoulder, and asking those same questions. That is unique place to be, and that is why I always urge my media colleagues to come join me. The sooner the better.

[Seriously, this is a good time to message me if you are ready...]

It has been an incredible year. And over the next few days I will share some of the many (unexpected) things I have learned as a journalist blogger :-)

December 13, 2005

Who will save Plugged In--computer literacy for East Palo Alto kids?

Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher
In the center of Silicon Valley, just across the highway, and just minutes from the pristine streets and academic blissfulness of Palo Alto, is East Palo Alto. It is a ghetto in the traditional sense--poor, urban, mostly African American, and unsafe.

Plugged In, a charity that taught East Palo Alto children computer literacy, has had to lay off its entire staff. Here is more on this situation from my pals at IDBNetwork:

Plugged In was forced to lay off all six full-time staff members -- two of whom have kept working without pay. Losing Plugged In would be a terrible blow to East Palo Alto and to Silicon Valley as a whole.
The organization needs $27,000 by December 31 to keep operating into next year, and $108,000 for the entire year.

There's something seriously wrong with our priorities if non-profits like Plugged In that focus on bringing technology into the community -- right here in Silicon Valley, the center of technology innovation -- aren't being supported by the technology giants that live next door. Plugged In needs and deserves our immediate help.

We encourage you to help them in any way you can. Potential donors can contact Michael Levin at 650.322.1134 ext. 13 or at mlevin@pluggedin.org.

Donations may also be sent to EPA.net, c/o Plugged In, 1836B Bay Road, East Palo Alto, CA 94303.

---

To learn more about Plugged In visit:

http://whatcounts.com/t?ctl=1028297:3160203

December 12, 2005

New rules: The reverse ten-bagger is the model for success

Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

There's no doubt about it, Google's patina of goodwill is dissolving. I'm hearing a fair amount of anti-GOOG chatter all over the place.

Personally, I still like Google. I still feel that I get a whole lot more out of Google than Google gets out of me as an internet user.

In many ways, Google exemplifies what I call one of the new rules of the new economy.

Old Rule: Success is the ten-bagger company--returning to its VCs/investors more than ten times their investment.

New Rule: Success is the reverse ten-bagger--the company that monetizes ten per cent or less of the business opportunities it has.

Otherwise it is not providing enough value to its customers and it will be considered as trying to fleece its users.

December 6, 2005

Read Silicon Valley Watcher blogs on CNET's ZDNet and AlwaysOn!

By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher

I hate to overload my readers here on SVW. I try to spare you from the bit-torrent of writing and posts that I can do, and would do, if I weren't concerned about my readers.

I don't want to stress my readers. If you look in your RSS news reader and see 15 new entries on SVW you might flag it for later reading--and then never make it back.

But two or three posts are welcoming (even if several posts are sometimes disguised as one post), and much less stressful I would think. (I could be wrong, and if I am, please tell me: can you handle more posts or prefer fewer?)

I think I have come up with a partial solution. I will blog here on SVW, and also on ZDNet, joining Dan Farber's squad. [I am also reposting some older SVW entries on Tony Perkin's AlwaysOn.]

I will flag and excerpt my ZDNet posts here on SVW, but, you'll have to go over there to read them. It is all about exclusive content, imho. If you've got it, then you've got a valuable asset.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Foremski/

- - -

My first post on ZDNet is a modest one, it is about the Next Big Thing.

I think I know what it is. You might laugh, maybe even jeer when you find out what it is, but, that is part of the process of the Next Big thing :-)

Here is my first ZDNet post.

- - -

My second post on ZDNet is about Sun Microsystems.

I think Sun might have gotten its mojo back. Alas, HP's is still missing...

Here is my second post on ZDNet.

- - -

Here is the RSS feed for my ZDNet exclusive posts.

October 24, 2005

Many heard the call of the Rooster...the response has been astounding

Barnyard Rooster1.jpg

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher.com

We've had a wonderful response to the Call of the Rooster, an idea to create a debate society in San Francisco to serve "north Silicon Valley"--twenty years on from the founding of the Churchill Club in Palo Alto.

[Please see The Call of the Rooster...]

The rooster club idea seems to have found a large hole in the zeitgeist, and one that seems more than ready to be filled. The response was so good that it might have had something to do with losing our server Friday for a few hours.

Take a look at some of the responses.

Let's hear from the rank and file not heat-seeking PR missiles says Sun's former comms chief Andy Lark

Great idea. Evenings are such a drag. I would also encourage you to only go off the beaten track in terms of speakers and content. I'm tired of the AO crowd and VCs. I'd like to hear more from the people changing the Valley and doing the work. Not the heat-seeking, PR missiles.

http://andylark.blogs.com

Charlene Li, Forrester's super star internet analyst says rooster club can reach out to SF's super smart women, a group that needs more inclusion in the valley.

I think the name is not nearly as important as the outreach to women. It’s pretty depressing to go to events like Syndicate, SuperNova, and Web 2.0 and see such an overwhelming number of men compared to women, in both the attendees and the speakers. There’s no better place to reach out to smart, techie women than in SF and I’d like to make sure that the word gets out to them.

http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli

Bruce Lowry Novell's comms chief says count me in

I completely agree, Tom. As a North Bay type, I particularly like that you added the North Bay. There are some important tech companies up here - Autodesk being the biggest - but also a lot of startups doing interesting things (Mindjet comes immediately to mind). I like the Churchill Club events, but getting down the Peninsula is tough. Doing things in the City would be much better. When Churchill does do gigs in the City, they're always well attended. And, as a nascent corporate blogger, I'm a fan of the blogging component, too. Now if I could only come up with a good Rooster metaphor.
So count me in!

Debbie Landa, CEO of under the radar events firm IDB Networks is a big fan of the rooster

Tom, you know I'm a fan of this. Actually, many of our IBDNetwork members have been asking us to do events in the city again. Our events are definitely different from the Churchill Club, and there is always a need for the dealmaker events, but I'd be into the Rooster Club too.

Cisco's fast tracker Ron Piovesan says a more cutting edge discusion suits San Francisco's style

I like this idea. What is cool, I think, is that Churchill Club focuses on more established names. I think a "Rooster" club in SF would be good if it focused on new ideas, business models and so on (not that you can't find that in established names, mind you.) I think a more cutting edge discussion suits the personality of the city more as well.

Chris Dichtel notes that the rooster is often vane...but points in the right direction

Plus, a rooster is a common adornment on weather vanes, giving you that steady indication of which way the winds are blowing.

And there are a ton of emails to go through...

I'm going to move the rooster discussion to its own place but in the meantime, I'm tagging rooster related posts and will publish your rooster pieces if you'd like to email them to me: tom at siliconvallewatcher.com. I will also update the Call of the Rooster post, adding more metaphors and guiding principles sent in by our readers.

How about: Don't scratch at the door of the future--come into the henhouse and help make the future--join the rooster club! A salon of peers rather than podiums.

Oh, and I just realized that I was born in the Chinese year of the Rooster.

Here is the genesis post: The Call of the Rooster

Emasculate the Rooster but keep the cojones-No unproductive reproductive organ discussions please :-)

October 20, 2005

SVW readers get a discount to Under the Radar November 16! I'll be one of the moderators along with Steve Fox, chief editor at Infoworld and Michael Copeland from Business 2.0

The lovely ladies of IDB Network have organized another Under the Radar event, in which startups parade their pitches in front of jaded judges from the VC community. Can their passion convert some of the Simons into Paulas? (I know at least one on the list that can.)

Just mention Silicon Valley Watcher and you'll get a "friends" discount. Here is a link to the secret discount site ;-)

I'll try to be as disruptive as possible while Steve and Michael will represent the traditional media--good cop/bad cops style--or, maybe not. Either way, it'll be good to see you there, on the Microsoft Silicon Valley campus.

Here is a link to main page, remember the secret discount link is here ;-)

And here is a list of companies and judges:

http://www.ibdnetwork.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=146

MODERATORS AND JUDGES

Michael Copeland, Senior Writer, Business 2.0
Lara Druyan, General Partner, Allegis Capital
Kevin Efrusy, Partner, Accel Partners
Tom Foremski, SiliconValleyWatcher
Steve Fox, Editor-in-Chief, Infoworld
Michael Jung, Principal, JPMorgan Partners
Mitchell Kertzman, Partner, Hummer Winblad
Lisa Lambert, Managing Director, Intel Capital
Gary Little, General Partner, Morgenthaler Ventures
Jeff Nolan, Investment Manager, SAP Ventures
Wes Raffel, Advanced Technology Ventures
Evangelos Simoudis, Partner, Trident Capital

PRESENTING COMPANIES

Abrevity

TrueDemand
Trusted Network Technologies

Zimbra

September 26, 2005

Fixed my RSS feeds...and My Yahoo feed too

. . . the forgotten communications channel--the telephone!
By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

My apologies, but the result of my geeking around with my blog software over the summer was that I accidentally messed up my RSS feeds and didn't realize it for several weeks.

For those that read SVW through their My Yahoo page, it might have seemed as if I had taken a rather generous amount of vacation time.

Not true: I've been filing lots of stories and scoops and exclusive stories as usual, but you had to come to the site to see them! You may have to click on the "add to My Yahoo" button again; but it should be working now.

Standalone journalism sucks

Also, I've suspended the email newsletter, and also the IonRSS.com web site, for a temporary hiatus so that I can rejig them and relaunch in a few weeks time. Sorry about that; but standalone journalism sucks.

Whenever I get a bit of money through my generous and very patient sponsors, I spend it on other journalists and geeks; but when money is too tight to mention those other times, I have to do a lot of things myself.

(Mike Faden always finds an hour or two to look over my shoulder and clean things up; and Chris Dichtel always rustles up a fun and interesting illustration--so I'm never totally "standalone.") But it usually means I have less time to engage in conversations on this site or via email.

My email inbox is totally out of control, with more than 8K messages to wade through (that's *after* the spam filter--I might need to just set fire to it and start again!)

The forgotten communications channel

So, if there is something you'd like to tell me that is time sensitive, call me on my cell: four one five three three six seven five four seven. It seems that these days hardly anyone uses the phone for business. . . it has almost become a forgotten communications channel :-)

Also, I'm not ignoring your emails on purpose, honest! I'm usually out most of the day, out and about collecting news stories and scoops and exclusive stories so I'm not sitting at my desk much.

And when I am sitting at my desk, I am writing stories and I have to finish those stories before venturing anywhere near my inbox for fear of losing three or more hours at a time.

Plus my recent apartment move and family commitments, and the usual demands of our accelerating red-shift modern lifestyle means that my email inbox has become obese and should probably be put out of its misery. Does anyone have a match?

September 23, 2005

The Friday Wrapper: Woof! Woof! at OracleWorld; SVW scoop on PeopleSoft-Siebel; Java Fund success validates RSS fund; New York media decline continues; Google software could bridge digital divide

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Woof! Woof! Bow Wow Wow and Berlin wow Oracle World geeks

Thanks Larry, for a fun evening at the Oracle "Appreciation Event" Wednesday evening down at Pier 32 in San Francisco. Oracle bussed thousands of Oracle users to the show, fed them and let them drink their fill.

On the main stage Fountains of Wayne and locals Counting Crows played. But the place to be was in the Green Room where Bow Wow Wow and Berlin played killer sets and all the geeks held their camera phones high in the air. . . it used to be cigarette lighters in the old days!

Bow Wow Wow were surprisingly wow, a tight, tight rocking band. And as for Berlin and their lead singer Terri Nunn? A stunning performance and a stunning stage presence. She's the Stevie Nicks of 90s electronica with a touch of "Heart" and with a band that has distilled the essence of that genre perfectly, (including the dark mascara.)

{See: TerriNunn.com]

But there was a least one complaint earlier in the evening. "Last year this place was full of sushi," a database administrator at a large educational company told me.

This year it was quiche bits, and other bland foods designed for mass feedings. Larry's using the sushi money to buy more companies.

. . .
SVW scoop on PeopleSoft-Siebel merger talks!

Scoop! Silicon Valley Watcher scooped the rest of the world Tuesday, with being the first to post the news that PeopleSoft and Siebel tried to merge but couldn't agree on the leadership. That's straight from Ray Lane, former Oracle president and currently a partner at Silicon Valley's top VC firm Kleiner Perkins.

Did large egos get in the way of shareholder duties? If Peoplesoft and Siebel could have overcome their cultural barriers and merged it would have created the second largest applications company in the world.

That would likely have made it a more expensive buy for Larry, and a better sell for PeopleSoft and Siebel shareholders...and it might have provided other options too.

Oh, and BTW, Ray Lane said a KP China fund is on the way...

See our original post of Ray Lane's comments.

. . .

Java Fund success bodes well for $100m RSS Partners VC fund

Earlier this year I wrote about the launch of a new VC fund focused on funding companies using RSS--really simple syndication technologies. I said it reminded me of the 1996 Kleiner Perkins $100m Java Fund headed by Ted Schlein. [
See: We're off to the races...the first RSS focused VC fund is announced ]
However, I think my enthusiasm was misread somewhat and I caught a bit of flack in the VC community. There were several that said RSS investing was a bad idea, and that the Java Fund was a failure.

My enthusiasm was for the subject matter--$100m means there will be some great RSS stories to write. Whether the RSS fund succeeds or not is a secondary interest.

The other night at dinner with KP partner Ray Lane, I asked him about the Java Fund. He said that in response to the online chatter about the failure of the Java Fund, KP had released the ROI on the Java fund and said that it was very successful.

. . .

It's a shame that the center of the media industry moved and nobody told New York
. . .here's a forwarding address: Number One, Media World Ave., Silicon Valley, California.

It is a provocative notion, but a fair one I think :-) When I raised it earlier this week, some of New York's media watchers picked up on the post (such as I want Media.)

Dominic Basulto at Corante even suggested that the "Silicon Valley Internet media elite" is trying to start a "beef" with New York's midtown elite. His link likened it to the infamous, and ultimately tragic, West Coast versus East Coast Gangster Rap rivalries (just because I have a "Geek Life" tattoo doesn't make me Tupac.)

Well, first of all, thank you Dominic for describing a humble journalist blogger such as myself as being part of Silicon Valley's media elite. Second, now that you mention it, sure, why not? Bring it on, as they used to say. So whatchya got New York City? Is that a ticker-tape parade or pink slips?

I'm just kidding. I think it's terrible that New York's midtown media companies are facing such hard times. For example, New York Times this week said it would cut 500 jobs. And Knight Ridder said 100 newsroom jobs are going in Philadelphia.

We are talking about people here, people! This is not something to jeer about; I know how tough it must be for you New York media elites to make those tough decisions about people's livelihoods.

And you face the daily challenges of managing a swiftly shrinking business. Believe me, we in Silicon Valley understand, five years of dotbomb fallout has been brutal.

But, I just want you to know that we are here for you. If you still have an expense account, hop a Jet Blue and we'll give you a good old California group hug and we'll wipe away those tears.

And let me remind you of some words from a very clever man that might put a smile back on your face. Oscar Wilde said that when you're in the gutter, you can look down -- or you can look up at the stars.

(You could also look over to Silicon Valley and see the new media stars: Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Craigslist and more...but that would only upset you and there is no sense in that.)

Here is Corante:

Is New York still the center of the known media universe? Posted by Dominic Basulto
It may lack the intensity of the West Coast/East Coast hip-hop rap rivalries of the 1990's, but it looks like Silicon Valley's Internet media elite could be trying to start a beef with New York's midtown media elite. Tom Foremski of SiliconValleyWatcher weighs in on the current state of the media industry after a recent visit to New York City:

"It's a shame that the center of the media industry has moved to Silicon Valley and nobody told New York :-) I should write Mayor Bloomberg a letter about that. It would point out that many Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Ebay, are in fact media companies. They are technology enabled media companies. They publish digital rather than paper pages but they carry content and advertising just like a newspaper or magazine paper page.

And our media industry is growing like gangbusters while New York's is not. Our media industry is hiring like crazy (Yahoo has 700 new positions to fill, Google a similar number) while New York's media industry continues to cut jobs and budgets..."

. . .

Open up your WiFi and help bridge that digital divide . . . Google makes it safe

Google has released a nifty utility that protects users of public WiFi hotspots from others that might want to steal their digital identities or conduct other mischief. The Google application encrypts your wireless broadcasts with 128-bit encryption--it's a steel vault around every airborne packet.

But it is much more than a nifty utility. Potentially, I think this could be a killer piece of technology. Because now, I don't need to lock up my WiFi network. I can hang the antenna out the window as was once very common in San Francisco, and share the cloud.

This is the way we bridge the digital divide ladies and gentlemen. This is how ubiquitous WiFi comes into being 5 years sooner, imho.

[See: http://wifi.google.com/download.html]

September 13, 2005

The enterprise software market is dead, dead, dead....

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

A few weeks ago I was engaged in a debate with John Gallant, Editorial Director of Network World, via our respective blogs, about my assertion that enterprise software markets have become dead boring.

I'd like to change my argument. Enterprise software markets are not dead boring. They are just dead.

Larry Ellison has killed the enterprise applications software industry. It's dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. The Siebel acquisition was the final blow, the stake in the heart.

The losers include the print media, as yet another large tech advertiser disappears.

The other loser is innovation in the enterprise software industry itself. With such a small number of big companies at the top (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, IBM) there won't be much of a bidding war for promising startups. Valuations will be "reasonable" -- and "reasonable" never fires up the blood of a venture capitalist.

VCs need promising "ten-baggers" -- the one-in-ten winners that cover the bets on the nine losers. But with IPO markets gone, and the top companies controlling valuations, there is no decent exit strategy for investors.

That means innovation won't be funded. And the big software makers won't be innovating much, as per usual.

Larry gets all the maintenance revenues, and corporate customers have to lump it.

Here comes the cavalry?

Or, can the software-as-a-service generation of software companies-- such as Salesforce.com and RightNow Technologies--lead a cavalry charge to provide enterprises with choice and Oracle with significant competition?

That remains to be seen. One question is whether those applications can be be scaled up to carry large enterprises. We'll be watching with some interest. After all, that's one of the few areas of the enterprise software industry that is still worth watching.

August 23, 2005

If Silicon Valley is to become the Las Vegas of Innovation it has to improve the local public schools

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Following my participation in the recent Cisco panel on education and healthcare, I was inspired to spill some digital ink. I proposed helping schools use simple, inexpensive collaborative technologies to access the resources all around them, as well as within the school system, to create an environment of educational excellence.

Since then, lots of our readers have jumped in by sending in ideas and even offering technology and time, to improve the sorry state of Bay Area/Silicon Valley public schools.

There are tremendous capital, material and intellectual resources within a 30 minute car ride of any public school here. We just need to connect them up with a Craig's List type of online community built around every school.

Let's help the schools use open software and hardware, blogging software, wikis, and social networking software--all of which we have in abundance--and let's see if these technologies are game-changing technologies (as they appear to be.)

Silicon Valley survival

If Silicon Valley is going to survive and prosper, it has to become the premium brand of innovation. Otherwise it will lose ground to centers of innovation in the US and around the world.

Silicon Valley has to follow the Las Vegas strategy.

When Indian casinos appeared within a couple of hours' drive from any large population center, Las Vegas didn't die. It scrambled up the value stack.

It built grander structures and dreamlike scenarios of pirate ships battling. Amid the cannon smoke the Eiffel Tower can be seen, and the skyline of New York City...and Camelot is in the distance.

Silicon Valley needs to scramble up the value stack and become the premium brand of innovation, by building ever grander structures of imagination and dreaming big, big dreams of better worlds.

Silicon Valley cannot become the premium brand of innovation, and it cannot claim that the future is invented here, if it continues to tolerate such atrocious public schools. This is not the future ...(right?).

Because otherwise the world will see that maybe the technology-driven future is all about ignorance in the local public schools, and ignorance of the problem by elite local business communities. That could lead to substantial and lengthy pushback....and that's not good for markets...(right?).

That's why the future is clear: every Bay Area/Silicon Valley school, public or private, becomes a showcase of educational excellence. And it is all made possible because of the power of Silicon Valley's innovation and innovators.

August 19, 2005

The coming era of the media engineer and media entrepreneur

. . . software engineer era ending

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher
There are tens of millions of programmers entering the world's job markets annually. Paradoxically, this global expansion of the geek population means the end of the era of the software engineer/coder as the most important profession in Silicon Valley - and in other centers of innovation.

Why? Because it is a common commodity. Software, servers and algorithms are cheap and are going to get cheaper. That's why Internet 2.0, this next phase of the internet (lower-case "i" please) will become the era of the "media engineer" - tech-savvy content producers, including journalists.

There are very few of them and the global pool grows slowly. [It's easier teaching geek to creative people than the other way around.]

It's all about the content

Google, for example, uses servers and software and algorithms to produce content - they publish pages of machine-harvested links. Yes, it's not easy to do well, but it's not that difficult for others to do reasonably well.

What counts, at the end of the day, is that Google's links have to point to something of value, to content that has not been machine-harvested or machine-aggregated. Producing content such as news stories, features, and reviews, is not cheap. It is produced by media professionals, not machines. And increasingly, it will be produced by tech-savvy media professionals.

That is why finally, content will be king, imho. (I bought ContentWillBeKing.com about a year ago!)

This is now the era of the media engineer and media entrepreneur because the future is all about technology-enabled media companies.

[Oh, and BTW, every future company is a technology-enabled media company :-). . .]

Also see: Journalists need to learn to speak some geek

August 18, 2005

A Gallant attempt at making IT interesting...

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Just in time for Thoughtleader Thursday, John Gallant, editorial director of Network World, in Boston, takes on my recent post about deadly dull IT markets.

In his column, Mr Gallant says some very kind words about SVW (making me blush), and he argues passionately that information technology is strategic and even exciting.

From NetworkWorld Weblogs: Agreeing to disagree on the future of enterprise IT.

I had met with Mr Gallant and Geoffrey Moore when they were doing the rounds recently to raise interest in their forthcoming Vortex IT conference. Mr Moore has a new book due out early next year.

Mr Moore continues to believe that information technology is strategic. "It just has to be" he said, "otherwise our living standards are in jeopardy." I asked if it was his personal living standards he was worried about, but in fact not, it was all our living standards.

[BTW, I think Mr Moore is dead-on right, all our personal living standards will decline. It is because information technology has helped accelerate the natural processes within capitalism that constantly seek to trade and thus redistribute wealth globally.]

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.

Apple and its iPod are often used as an example of a successful technology driven business.

But is there anything information-technology-strategic about Apple's iPod? Or even anything exciting about the technology? There are a hundred makers of MP3 players. A player is just a hard drive and a chip.

Selling music online? Heck, I can do that right here with a link.

What *was* strategic about the Apple iPod business was Steve Jobs' brilliant strategy to marry the hardware device with the web service with the desktop. And that kind of strategy is very difficult to copy, (which makes it even more strategic ;-)

I sometimes wonder what was strategic about the SABRE airplane reservations system, the poster child of the IT-is-strategic movement? It seems to me that American Airlines, the owner, had simply increased its opportunities to offer quotes on the search pages. Strategic placement of quotes on the page is a great strategy -- supported by IT.

IT strategy now

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.

This has become so common in Silicon Valley. I cannot tell you how many big (Google) and smaller (Become.com) companies tell me, we use Linux, MySQL, etc. We are huge open source open platform users, we have virtually no commercial software. That's the kind of IT strategy I'm seeing.

- - - -
Here you go gentlemen, let me help you in your quest with a free advertisement for the Vortex conference:

But please be aware gentle readers, it is invitation only but if you register by September 23 you can get a preferred rate.

VORTEX 2005: October 24-26, The Palace Hotel San Francisco, CA Join John Gallant, Geoffrey Moore and key stakeholders in enterprise IT -- including IT industry executives, up-and-coming technology disruptors and investors-to reset and renew the agenda for the $1 trillion enterprise IT market.

Click here for more information about VORTEX

http://www.networkworld.com/

http://www.networkworld.com/weblogs/vortex/2005/009795.html

July 27, 2005

Deadly dull enterprise IT markets--Geoffrey Moore and John Gallant hope Vortex conference will spice things up

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I'm in Hotel Monaco, chatting with uber Silicon Valley consultant Geoffrey Moore, (Crossing the Chasm, etc), John Gallant editorial director of Network World, and Bob Angus, president of A&R Partners.

They are preparing for the Vortex conference in San Francisco in October, and a Churchill Club event this Wednesday evening: Creating Competitive Advantage Through Information Technology.

We're talking about the IT enterprise market, a topic that is very dull because nothing much is going on. But Mr Gallant and Mr Moore are determined to get the market moving and make enterprise IT interesting again.

"The IT market is mired in a morass and that needs to change. At the Vortex conference we will be bringing the main constituents together, the vendors and the customers. It will be a frank exchange of ideas," Mr Gallant promised, and no PowerPoints allowed. Tough questions and one-on-one interviews, and large amounts of audience participation are also promised.

Mr Moore will keynote Vortex and talk about core versus context, a concept he expands in his forthcoming book out in January, "Dealing with Darwin."

I'm a huge fan of Mr Moore's work and his thinking and ideas have made an enormous impact on how businesses understand themselves.

"My clients often don't have the time to reflect on their business, they are distracted by making the quarter's numbers, and daily operations. I get to reflect on their business and think about their IT strategy and what is core IT to their business." Mr Moore said.

Stuck in a Sargasso sea of morass

The trouble is that enterprises often aren't able to think about how to use IT strategically, because they are stuck dealing with a huge amount of complexity. Mergers and older IT architectures such as client/server, have created layers and islands of IT systems within corporations. Most of it can't be junked but must be made to work together, a long, tedious process.

"The last things CIOs want is somebody trying to sell them more IT because the integration challenge outweighs the ROI," says Mr Moore.

Yet the IT vendors such as HP, IBM, EMC, etc talk about adaptive computing, utility computing, virtualisation, etc. "Companies are telling the vendors, 'we don't understand how adding another layer of complexity will help us,'" says Mr Gallant.

Flogging a flagging horse

So, how do you jump start the enterprise market when dealing with legacy IT is such a massive burden?

I wish them the best of luck in their goal it is not a job I would like to do, but, then again, I don't have an attachment to the subject matter. Mr Gallant's Network World publication is aimed at enterprise IT users. And Mr Moore has his book publishing empire and his Chasm Group consulting firm, firmly focused on advising on IT strategy.

I think they have a long, hard slog ahead because:

-Maintenance spending is rising, there is less money for new technologies.
(See SVW "There's lots of gold in maintenance deals...Accenture study")

-The IT enterprise market sectors are controlled by one or two large players which discourages innovation and new products. (see SVW "Giant sucking sounds.")

-There is too much FUD in IT markets such as security, which lengthens buy cycles. (See SVW, "FUD in IT markets..."
)
-And the enterprise market will dwindle further because many of the enterprises themselves, will become extinct. They will suffocate under the load of legacy IT systems and other legacy factors. What I call the New Rules Enterprise will emerge. (See SVW,"These are the new dotcoms...and they will eat lunch this time around."
)

I think that the conversation has moved on, what will distinguish companies is their strategy around business process innovation. A corporation's IT strategy is not core, it is context, it is determined by the meta level strategy, imho.

Also, IT strategy can be duplicated, business process innovation is harder to duplicate. Look at iPod, for example.

[More on this topic in Thoughtleader Thursday...]

July 14, 2005

Letters to the Editor: Throwing a cat amongst the pigeons. . . the blogosphere reaction to "The Selling of the Blogosphere...." the first in a series

. . .it's like Doc Searls snowball effect

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Walled Garden.jpg My recent piece about companies such as Technorati collecting data on bloggers and their conversations and selling that to marketing and PR organisations created quite a stir.

I am not against such practices, BTW, I report on the business of Silicon Valley, and much of that business is media technology business these days, Google, Yahoo, etc. And I'm interested in the business models of the second generation media companies and their ecology--which includes companies such as Technorati. The development of successful business models by Technorati and others, will define the look and feel of our future society.

And the selling of the blogosphere, without significant kickbacks in terms of services or value, will lead to the Internet becoming much more private.

We will have an era of the walled garden, the fort, the trusted private networks, the gated communities. There will always be a public face, but the rest of the 90 per cent of people's time online and in real interactions will not be public. imho.

Fractured and separated communities coexisting on servers but not physically, or on culture/ideas/opinion--is something I think about as a possible future scenario. Our current technologies can easily support the creation of millions of private and impenetrable online communities.

It would be good to have a Technorati type service to help a fractured society learn things about itself as a whole.

Here are some reader reactions,(thanks to all, especially Sam Whitmore of the excellent Media Survey.)

From Doc Searls weblog [Doc is on the board of Technorati--he is a master of the art of blogging. I had the fortune to share a panel with Doc earlier this year--and felt like I had robbed the guy, because I walked away far richer from the experience. I learnt a tremendous amount from Doc that day and am still learning.)

The Doc Searls Weblog:

It's interesting to see the ripple effect of The selling of the Blogosphere—Technorati's big push into monetizing its treasure trove of data collected about millions of blogs, by Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher.

Also, hear from the moderator of the panel and Ron from Cisco writes...so click on through...it's all good!

Hey Tom, Liked the post this morning on your recent blogging seminar. I think Technorati's offer is a little overkill. Yes, there are many blogs, but only a few worth reading. Very few have any significant influence on either the blogging or non-blogging communities. Know what is going on among the few key blogs, and you pretty much know what is going on in the outer reaches of the blogosphere.
Ron Piovesa, Cisco Systems

I agree Ron, things will shake out in good time, and it will be plain to see which blogs/online sites are the ones that matter within an industry/community. That won't require algorithms... :-)

This is from Shannon, a partner at the Horn Group, who did a wonderful job as moderator for the panel (I took some notes.)

Shannon Latta

http://horngroup.blogs.com/

Tom. I’ve been meaning to write you for a few days now to thank you for participating in the panel last week. The panel was one of many great sessions (both on the clock and after hours) at our annual company offsite – it’s taken me a few days to recover. Nonetheless – thank you!

Your post is packed with good observations and musings. Peter’s Technorati pitch did come on strong, especially for an audience of agency people. But I sought him out as a panelist to include the perspective of a search and measurement company so it was fitting to a degree. He was also the dominant presenter in terms of speaking style and delivery, so it came on even stronger.

In your SVW pitch you nailed the issue that I thought most powerful in our panel – giving up control of the corporate message. You’ll recall that Peter’s response to that question was “control is so 20th century.” As agencies continue to establish our role in these new mediums where everyone is publisher and publication, the notion of message control has huge implications. It’s changing the way we communicate, pitch or engage (call it what you want) with media, clients, companies and bloggers. Finally, we’re talking together to uncover the real stories underneath the prescribed stories. It makes me think of rule number one in the good years of Burning Man – participate! You said it: “Participate in, rather than seek control of, the blogosphere.”

I wasn’t able to formulate my entire opinion about the panel until I got feedback from our employees in the room – and apparently it was a hit. The right mix of panelists, we answered a few big questions and sparked some bigger ones, and everyone took something away – so I’m pleased. Most of all we’re participating, rather than gawking from the sidelines. Good stuff!

Shannon Latta
Horn Group, Inc.

June 29, 2005

Forbes Radio wants to interview me and probably you too...bring your checkbook

I was thrilled to see an email from a producer of the "Forbes Radio" channel on American Airlines inviting me to be interviewed for the program. There was a description about the program spotlighting the world's most innovative organizations and forward-thinking leaders, and a long list of top companies that had been "distinguished guests" on the show.

The Forbes Radio channel claims a captive audience of as many as 4.2 million travelers. And the three-minute interview would be put together by a crack team of professionals capturing the exact message I want to convey. Excellent. But, I can't afford the half-price offer of $4,995.

[Er, shouldn't it be the other way around if money is to be exchanged?! Does editorial integrity take flight when you are 8 miles high?]

June 27, 2005

Running out of bandwidth...the good, the bad and the ugly (support)

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Running out of bandwidth is something I have to watch out for, since our traffic continues to jump higher - especially when we have scoops and exclusive stories.

But running out of bandwidth can be a frustrating experience, as we found recently with our web hosting service TotalChoice Hosting. There was no phone number to call, just a "live" chat channel and the opportunity to email support "tickets."

SiliconValleyWatcher was off line for about 6 hours as traffic surged above our monthly quota. And I couldn't open up the pipes because there was no way to buy more bandwidth online. I found that I would have to wait until the next morning and email the sales department!!!

Nobody to call in times of trouble, plus hours spent sorting out problems. That's why I will be changing hosting providers. When your business is offline, you had better get somebody on the line pronto.

Fanatical support sounds fine to me

I'm thinking of changing to RackSpace. I interviewed one of their top executives a few months ago, but never got to write the company's interesting story.

This San Antonio, Texas web hosting provider says it has fanatical support. It is so fanatical about support that it has even trademarked the term "Fanatical Support." This company awards its top-performing support people with a straitjacket — plus other perks, such as limo rides to top restaurants. This and other activities constantly motivate their support staff.

Next time I get kicked offline by my service provider, I'm sure RackSpace will answer my call PDQ. And that's what you need in a crisis situation: Support staff competing for the straitjacket award! I'll take it.

My good buddy Om Malik, of Business 2.0 and the very popular GigaOm.com broadband blog, reported excellent support from RackSpace when they called him up a few months ago and told him his server had died. The RackSpace people worked through the night recovering his data and set him up on a new server by the morning.

[PS: I'm a few days behind on my emails--my apologies to all. I've been off-line with my kids.]

http://www.rackspace.com/aboutus/leadership.php

June 23, 2005

Pillar Data Systems: Larry Ellison's $150m data storage company emerges from stealth mode

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Stealth Storage.jpg It took four years and $150m of Larry Ellison's money for Pillar Data Systems to emerge from stealth mode with a data storage solution that could be disruptive to EMC, IBM, Network Appliance and others.

I spoke with Michael Workman, CEO of San Jose-based Pillar, about the long trudge ahead, the company's technology and its strategy. It is a market dominated by giants, and by an industry trend that favors providing broad solutions rather than focused IT systems.

The Pillar approach attacks IT costs through using one platform to manage and store all three tiers of data, from high availability Tier 1 data, to archived Tier 3 data that normally would end up on tape.

In the Pillar approach, everything is stored on inexpensive high performance commodity serial ATA hard drives, but on different sectors of the disk. Slower sectors hold Tier 3 data while the fastest sectors towards the outside edges of the disk are reserved for Tier 1 data.

The goal is to provide storage systems with Tier 1 to 3 capabilities for about the total cost of ownership of Tier 3 systems. This is accomplished by using inexpensive hardware within a single fail-safe platform.

The secret sauce

The heart of Pillar is a sophisticated software application of 2.5m lines of code providing essential data admin functions through a very simple user interface.

What takes sixty clicks to set up in an EMC system can take just 6 clicks on a Pillar system. And with headcount being the largest item in IT budgets, needing fewer admins is a key selling point.

Mr Workman has 20 years in the data storage industry, with 15 years at IBM and a dozen patents. He leads a veteran management team of former executives at Network Appliance, Conner, IBM, and Quantum.

Pillar Systems are in place at companies such as LeapFrog Enterprises, I/Pro and Thacher Proffit.

But building a market in the enterprise sector is tough work and expensive.

"Corporations typically take four to six months to qualify IT systems. And we must also make sure that we have a large customer support organization in place to support them," Mr Workman said.

In addition, Pillar has built a huge testing facility, costing more than $25m and comtaining 150 systems. Then there is the considerable expense of marketing Pillar within an IT market dominated by just a few large players, each able to offer more than just data storage systems.

$150m doesn't go too far in such a market, but Mr Workman said the company has Mr Ellison's wealth behind it and a long term multi-year road map. Funding is all from Mr Ellison's Tako Ventures, with no current plans for other investors.

Foremski's Take: The enterprise IT market today is all about scale and large vendors providing complete data solutions. Pillar needs partnerships with larger vendors and systems integrators to make its voice heard.

The company's software application, which sets up and manages a wide range of data storage requirements, is where the value of Pillar systems is clear. It is also a considerable barrier to competitors.

Requiring fewer IT admins is a message that attracts CIOs, and the lower hardware/maintenance costs are a nice bonus. But CIOs are also very conservative, and evaluation and implementation cycles can be lengthy. Maintaining a large sales/suport team during such times accelerates expenses.

Now that Pillar is out of stealth mode and into marketing mode, the burn rate is accelerating. Mr Ellison has deep pockets and understands the dynamics of the enterprise world, which should help Pillar.

Mr Ellison also brings attention to Pillar, which will save on some marketing costs. However, he is also a sometimes controversial figure, which may reflect on the way his companies are perceived by potential customers. A broader investment base would help mitigate any "Larry effect" and also bring in other cheer leaders.

June 21, 2005

Tech companies concerned about possible US laws on radio tag chips

. . . should RFID technology be restricted?
By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I try to check in with our sponsors at regular intervals but lately we've been swamped with exclusive stories and scoops to write, and we've been neglecting our stalwart supporters. However, it is all thanks to our sponsors, Infineon Technologies, Tibco Software, and Nooked, that we can bring you this unique coverage of Silicon Valley, the world's capital of innovation.

A few weeks ago I visited with Infineon, one of our first sponsors, to chat about what they are watching. I met with Christoph Liedtke, who heads media relations and his assistant, Mansi Agarwal, at the HQ of Infineon's US operations in San Jose.

Top of Infineon's watch list is possible legislation that could limit the use of RFID chips, tiny semiconductors used to tag shipments and eventually most commercial products. Concerns about user privacy has led to some US and Californian lawmakers to support calls for greater controls and limits on the use of the technology.

Can tech firms stop RFID backlash?

Infineon is one of many large global technology companies keen to see faster adoption of RFID chips. Other supporters include IBM, Microsoft, and leading Silicon Valley companies such as Oracle, Sun, HP, Cisco and others. And why not? The use of RFID is forecast to boost IT spending overall, as retailers and others install and build out the significant infrastructure needed.

RFID supporters argue that the technology itself should not be restricted or regulated by government. How RFID-generated information is used is a societal issue not a technology issue.

Technology companies however, are generally lousy about figuring out how to lobby governments and how to fight what they see as bad legislation. Large companies such as Intel and Texas Instruments have over the years developed their Washington offices and have figured out how the Beltway functions. But they are a rarity, and it is an expensive conversation to join — Washington lobbyists sell their services for a high price.

Trade organizations such as the Semiconductor Industry Association are reasonably effective at making their presence felt in Washington but, again, it takes time to establish the right connections and be heard.

Many young tech companies don't have the means — or often the awareness — that they need to be involved in the political debates.

Things become even more complex when US states pass laws, making it tough to become involved in public discourse in many different states.

Community PR trend

radio tower.bmp Most corporate communications is tailored to reach potential customers or investors—the trend in the PR industry is to create specialist firms that target messages to the public and legislators.

463 Communications is one such company, partially funded by Next Fifteen, the publicly traded European PR giant, which owns Text 100 and Bite PR--two of the leading Silicon Valley PR firms. Tim Dyson, CEO of Next Fifteen, is chairman of 463.

Sean Garrett, a partner at 463, says "This sector is still fairly small but is bound to grow as tech companies mature and realize that they could be directly impacted by some legislation, and they need to make sure they can communicate their message to politicians and the public."

At Infineon, the challenge is keeping track of pending RFID legislation and trying to determine where it might lead, and how to gain the ear of sympathetic legislators. Christoph Liedtke used to work as a speech writer within the German political establishment and is aware of the need for companies to be involved in politcal debates. But US politics is a different animal.

I would have offered some advice if I had it, but my understanding of US and Californian politics is tiny, probably matching that of most citizens of Silicon Valley.

- - - -

Some recent articles on RFID issues:

I.B.M. Expands Efforts to Promote Radio Tags to Track Goods
New York Times, 06/14/05

AP: U.S. to Scale Back Passport Standards

News and features on RFID from UsingRFID.com (UK), 06/14/05

The RFID Weblog by Anita Campbell.

Tim Dyson's blog and his recent post on Apple turning to Intel for microprocessors

The 463 blog, an interesting peek into some of the key legislative issues facing its clients.

June 14, 2005

Retrobox.com: green riches in the muck and junk of the digital age

. . .and a call for an environmental tax credit

By Tom Foremski and Nick Aster for SiliconValleyWatcher

Bloggers have to eat, and if it is possible to combine good food with good conversation, so much the better. Which is why my colleague Nick Aster and I headed over to the Town Hall on Tuesday for lunch with Stampp Corbin, CEO and co-founder of Retrobox.com, a very ambitious and profitable computer recycling company.

There is money to be made in handlng the muck and junk of the digital age, and Mr Corbin is happy to spread the word because his company has a business model that works incredibly well.

But it is not just about finding a safe way to dump a computer monitor (8lbs of toxic materials in each) it is also about data security, creating an asset trail, and the regulatory compliance demanded in various industries.

"Data security is a big deal and one that some companies forget," says Mr Corbin. "Fortune 1000 companies will spend tens of milions of dollars on firewalls to protect a server - and the next day that server is replaced and sold on Ebay along with its now unprotected data."

Wiping data is one part of the business model; reselling the equipment is another. "We resell, reuse as much equipment as we can, we get 50,000 hits per day on our site without advertising, and we give back 75 percent of the revenues to our clients. Often, we will hand back a check for more than it cost the company to contract our services."

Business has been good, but it could be even better if the government steps in and gives an extra incentive through an environmental tax credit.

"I used to sell IBM mainframes and if you bought a $2m mainframe, you got 10 percent back, that was $200k because of the investment tax credit available. That was a powerful boost to the the tech sector. We need something like that for companies that are responsible in disposing of their computer waste," Mr Corbin says.

Mr Corbin is strongly opposed to the advanced recovery fee system, which would mandate a user paid fee of about $10 per monitor collected by state government. The money would be then doled out to "collectors" - companies authorized to dispose of the equipment.

"This is a very inefficient system, lots of government bureaucracy. It is much better to use a tax credit to encourage proper disposal of equipment."

Mr Corbin says he hopes to persuade lawmakers and others in the tech industry to support an environmental tax credit for digital-age junk rather than waste money administering a new bureaucratic empire.

Rising above the babble through blogging

It makes sense, but getting the message out is a problem. Mr Corbin explains that the cost equipment recycling comes out of the IT budget - but IT decision makers are swamped in marketing babble from tech-sector sales people.

I mentioned that blogs, as long as they are producing something of value, can cut through that noise. It can be the most effective form of self-promotion bar none, if it is done right. And we'd be glad to offer some simple guidelines to get him started.

Also, we want to point to thought leaders such as Stampp Corbin to encourage others to join him. There is green ($), and lots of it, in green business activities.

-----

[Retrobox.com is an example of innovation through a technology-enabled business model. This is something we pay close attention to because it is part of what we call the new rules economy that we believe will dominate this internet 2.0 phase that is emerging. Retrobox.com has many characteristics of a new rules enterprise: It is private; it has a technology-enabled business model; it is a thought leader in its space; it understands the most efficient business processes in its sector; and it has avoided venture capital money to fund its growth. The private investment money it has received was to reward Mr Corbin and his business partners - it was money taken off the table without the need to IPO.]

SiliconValleyWatcher: These are the new dotcoms of the new rules economy...

June 13, 2005

WSJ's Don Clark & Off the Record benefit for Big Brothers Big Sisters...

This is becoming an annual event and one not to be missed (I missed it last year unfortunately...) Come and see hacks and flacks rocking out for a good cause. Just $20 (and you have to RSVP.)

Click here to say "I'll be there"
(Watch for confirmation email from Sibling_Revelry@cpcomm.com in a moment with the party location and details. (Please make sure any email filtering programs that you may be using do not prevent you from receiving that message.)

Details are here:
A benefit for
Big Brothers Big Sisters of
San Francisco and the Peninsula.

Please join us for great food, drink, music and dancing; renew and make new friendships; try your hand at Light Saber dueling with a Jedi; win fantastic door prizes.
Suggested Donation: $20.

Thursday, June 23
5:30-10:30 PM

Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission Street
San Francisco
@ New Montgomery
Easy access to nearby parking.

June 8, 2005

The poor man's crackberry...Yahoo and Sprint launch push email from Seven

The hard working John Kuch over at telco apps company Seven pings us to say that Yahoo and Sprint will be branding Seven's push mobile email solution. . . the first blackberry-like service for consumers.

John claims that...

* Yahoo! Mail for Mobile, powered by SEVEN, is the first push (blackberry-like) mobile email service for consumers.
* With Yahoo! and Microsoft getting into push email this week, mobile email is not just for top execs anymore. Blackberry is no longer the only game in town.
* Consumers can now access their email using a variety of smartphones and everyday cell phones.
* Simple start-up. Consumers can sign up from their mobile phones and get up and running by entering their existing Yahoo! username, password into their phone.
* Cost of the service is $2.99 a month, Blackberry costs $30-$50 a month.
* Do Google, AOL or Earthlink have a push mobile email service?

June 3, 2005

The Valley wrap ... three dot journalism returns (a nod to Herb Caen)

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Jim Finn, the former head of comms at Oracle was in town recently, he's now with IBM. We caught up downtown over dim sum and I got to hear about his new gig. BTW, if Jim ever gets to write a book about his experiences in Silicon Valley, go buy it.

Jim started off at IBM and is happy to be back on the East Coast fulltime and not having to make the punishing weekend commute to be with his family.

Interestingly, Jim and Andy Lark, the former head of comms at Sun Microsystems were recently seen breakfasting together. Both started at Sun and Oracle within weeks of each other, and both announced their departures within weeks of each other. (BTW, Andy has promised me the scoop on his new venture.)

. . .

Micro media mogul Nick Denton (Gawker Media) swung into SF Thursday, and our sleepy fishing village roused itself and a decent crew assembled at the smoky Place Pigalle in Hayes Valley to catch up with the great man.

My good buddies David Galbraith (wists.com) and Om Malik (GigaOm.com) were there, as were a bunch of other local geeks and entrepreneurs. Nick asked me who would be a good gossip columnist for Silicon Valley, I said Chris Nolan, (ChrisNolan.com — politics from left to right) but she won't do it because she prefers writing about politics. I told Nick I had SiliconValleyGawker.com all ready to go for him.

Gossip doesn't interest me much because it's easy to do. I do write some "gossipy" entries but there are some larger, more seminal types of media ventures to be done first, IMHO.

. . .

I bumped into Gaurav Dhillon one of my favorite valley CEOs. Gaurav left Informatica about a year ago and I lost track of him so it was wonderful to reconnect. Gaurav is now living in San Francisco and said he spent much of the past year traveling in Africa and other exotic locales. Now, he says he is ready to get back into the game.

He recently moved into offices on Market St. and is looking at ideas in media. Barely 40 years old, Gaurav says, "I figure I've got at least one more great company in me." He built up Informatica from garage startup to public company and led Informatica through the toughest part of the toughest downturn the valley has ever seen. And he's coming back for more.

. . .

My good buddy Alicia (Lish) Nieva-Woodgate is leaving Mediabolic and is the new head of communications at Opsware, the Marc Andreessen-founded company (used to be known as LoudCloud.)

Opsware has been building up quite a bit of momentum over the past year or so. And its message of IT automation services is a lot easier to tell now that we are all comfortable with such concepts. I remember when LoudCloud launched, it was a difficult story to communicate, even its PR company could not explain what it did.

. . .

James Hong, one of the founders of Hot or Not, the simple, highly popular people rating site, tells me that he has left the company and his co-founder, Jim Young is CEO and running things. http://www.hotornot.com/pages/about.html

Even though the founders of Hot or Not are famous for raking in millions in revenues and working just one day per week, he says running the business was stressful. "If there was the slightest dip in traffic, I'd want to know why," he says.

When did you leave, I asked? "About five months ago, but we don't have any place to announce it." Hey, it's news if you didn't know about it!

James is sporting an athletic build, obviously time well spent in the gym. He says otherwise, "I'm just buying clothes now that fit me." A summer in hot hot New York City beckons.

. . .

Hacks are flocking to blogging as the print business model continues to crumble ... the latest is San Jose Mercury tech journalist Dean Takahashi, ex-Wall Street Journal, ex-Red Herring. Dean is writing about video gaming with colleague Mike "Nooch" Antonucci. Check out http://deanandnooch.blogspot.com

(BTW, Dean, Blogspot took forever to load the page, it is always really slow — let us host it for you for free. Ping me...)

Also, I have to mention my buddy Tom Abate and his blog, mini media. Tom is well known to many as the tech columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, and then biotech columnist. He's still at the Chronicle and very much interested in the emerging media technologies, as are we. Here is his blog: http://minimediaguy.blogspot.com/

(Same thing Tom, I can't get blogspot to load the page, let us host you for free. Ping me...)

. . .

Speaking of hacks, the brain drain at Cnet News.com continues. The latest to leave is Rick Shim, the personal technologies editor. It's his last day today and he heads off to a market research firm.

That's about eight veteran hacks to leave within the past couple or three months. Ouch, that makes life tough for those remaining. It means more work and replacements are tough to get and slow to build their productivity.

Also, Jim Kerstetter from Business Week is now at ZDnet.

. . .

Novell is looking for a new PR agency and the short list seems to be down to Text 100, Horn Group, and at least one other agency. Interestingly, Novell has specified that the agency must have some experience with the use of blogging and blogging technologies.

I think this will become an increasingly common requirement requested by other large tech companies and many agencies will have trouble meeting this requirement.

[warning: blatant pitch ahead!] I smell a potential opportunity for our consulting services group...newrulesmedia consulting—Nick Aster and the team are aggregating a tremendous amount of experience with the use of media technologies.

. . .

Ted Rheingold, the founder of Dogster and Catster, tells me they signed their first sponsor recently and he says working with a sponsor is so much better than working with advertisers. "I am fed up of looking through the server logs and arguing with advertisers over how many hits we served compared with their numbers."

The last time I mentioned Dogster was in the context of searching for aberrant behaviors, or the the madness of crowds. I was trying to determine what is the size of an online population that starts to exhibit spontaneous aberrant social behaviors, which cannot be predicted. Dalton Caldwell, chief technology officer at personal network software company Imeem, said he thought it might be about 10,000 users because that's when he noticed Dogster users started posting in the voice of their dog.

Ted said that my posting was picked up very widely, but, he said that the number is wrong. "That started much earlier, by the time we had 500 users, people started doing that."

Happy Friday!

June 3, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Friday Watch
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June 2, 2005

Silicon Valley startups told: Come to London ... BT wants your business!

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

This week the British have been trying to drum up interest from California companies to locate their European offices in London.

I ran into the dapper Dale Smith, vice consul on trade and investment (think Denzel Washington in a well-tailored blue English blazer) and Rob Hull, bus dev manager at BT Group, formerly giant British Telecom. Mr Smith had recently authored an interesting research note on wireless infrastructure in the UK. Mr Smith noted that London is the world's most unwired city, with 1,200 public hotspots out of about 10,000 across the UK.

I also spoke with Michael Charlton, chief executive of Think London a private promo group. His pitch is that the UK, and London in particular, are especially attractive locations to base California's mobile content/services companies because of the extensive cellular and wi-fi infrastructures. Plus a large and savvy urban population of avid tech adopters.

Think London, along with the government organization UK Trade and Investment, can "fast track" the process of establishing an office in London.

They will also help US companies with making the right business connections. I asked if an old school tie was included in the deal. Mr Charlton said, "A personal introduction is always much better."

BT wants your business, really.

The BT guy explained how companies could buy infrastructure services from BT, such as wireless (although that's actually supplied by Vodaphone) and how BT will partner with mobile content/services companies, handle the billing, etc.

However, should your wireless service become hugely popular, BT reserves the right to "port" the service to its machines and reverse a 20 percent / 80 percent revenue split in its favor(!)

Mr Hull says that this provision is rarely implemented. But then why have it? Seems a discouragement to me...

Maybe a company could go to a BT competitor? I asked Mr Hull.

He seemed flustered and had trouble understanding the question. "What do you mean a competitor, to me?" No, BT.

"Is there any other company that is investing $16 bn in a next generation platform?" I said, isn't there?

It had turned into a rhetorical dialogue and it showed that BT does not have to think about competition, which is not a good thing.

Let's recap the value proposition here: Come to London and establish a mobile content/services business using the services of BT, the 8,000 pound guerrilla, which BTW, has the right to grab your service and the lion's share of the revenues (after you have labored to build up your business!)

That is not an attractive scenario IMHO.

And as for London, I grew up there and it's a tough place to live and work...I'd shoot for Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam or Barcelona.

Find out more about locating in London and the UK, from Janet Coyle UK Trade and Investment in San Francisco. janet.coyle at fco.gov.uk or 415 617 1360.

June 2, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Tech Watch
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May 31, 2005

iTunes goes to Hollywood

By Damien Stolarz for SiliconValleyWatcher

iPod TV.jpg With iTunes 4.8, Apple has quietly added video clip support. Now, any QuickTime movie can be dragged into a playlist in iTunes. This allows easy download, sorting and playback of digital video clips.

But the challenge for Apple is not getting content from the studios, or protecting it, or the technical details of distributing it. Rather, the challenge is to convert iPod and iTunes listeners into viewers.

This also begs the question: How quickly will iTunes replace NetFlix?

It should be obvious to anyone following the progress of downloadable video that the holdups are political and economic, not technical. It has taken a long time to make Hollywood comfortable with digital rights management for downloadable content - and it has been even harder to get consumers to pay for $4 movie downloads over pathetic US "broadband." Services such as CinemaNow have been providing downloadable movies for years, but they have not achieved mainstream penetration. In fact, they seem to be no more than elaborate proofs of concept for DRM technology.

The de facto standard approaches to video distribution, which reportedly make up some 50% of Internet bandwidth use, are of course the ubiquitous file-sharing networks. The current business model for these networks is a non-sustainable "sell ads and run from lawsuits while you can."

So what's in store for iTunes? A natural first step is music videos. These are essentially promotional content, short, small in size, and of relatively low value to the labels, but nonetheless a perfect discrete digital "goodie" that consumers are eager to download and view repeatedly.

But going to the next step, feature-length movies, will take new hardware. This does not necessarily mean a video iPod. It will require hardware of some kind, though, to painlessly get these movies onto TV screens.

There are several approaches to solving the digital home theatre problem, which echo the thin client vs. desktop PC argument of a few years ago:

Home Theatre PCs - full, desktop-class computers running personal video recorder and audio/video jukebox software
"Thin clients" - network devices that act as video output peripherals (i.e. Airport Express for Video)
A video iPod (vPod) that downloads video from iTunes and can also output it to a TV as most digital cameras can today

If you're not familiar with Airport Express, it's a convenient, portable $129 WiFi gadget that lets you set up a WiFi access point anywhere and also acts as a remote audio output for iTunes. If you're running iTunes, you can effortlessly pipe your audio output to any Airport Express, and thus out of your stereo system or TV speakers, anywhere in your home.

It's often said that iTunes is essentially a loss leader to promote iPod sales. I've also been told that Steve Jobs doesn't believe in home-theatre PCs. The Airport Express allows the Mac to remain the "digital hub" for your home entertainment. So it would be consistent with this vision (and Mac rumor sites are conjecturing) that Apple will come up with some sort of WiFi video output device (perhaps based on its implementation of MPEG-4/H.264/AVC video) that can connect to the television and serve as a "video out" for iTunes and QuickTime.

It's interesting to note that such a device almost exists already: Apple's $500 Mac Mini has DVI video output, and many people have found that they can hook one up to their HDTV and watch their QuickTime videos on the big screen. I'll be at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in a couple of weeks, and many of us are hoping that Apple announces at least one of the video solutions listed above. Stay tuned.

---

P.S. In the meantime, video iTunes has at least solved one problem that has plagued Mac users for a decade. It has a "full screen" feature for movies. That means you no longer have to pay $29 for QuickTime pro in order to play your movies fullscreen.

May 31, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Digital Video
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Bubbler blows up distinctions between websites and blogs

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

I'm often asked how a blog differs from a website. I usually say that blogs are websites that are organized like journals, generally created with software that lets you make frequent posts and supports things like reader comments and trackbacks, which aren't typically found on business sites. Blogging connotes a lot of other things, of course, like strong opinions, brutal honesty, and an ongoing conversation. SiliconValleyWatcher, for instance, uses Movable Type even though it is organized more like a news website than a traditional blog.

Bubbler, a new service from Palo Alto-based startup Five Across, really blurs that distinction in interesting ways. Founded by graduates of Apple and Adobe, Bubbler is a database-driven service that lets creators toggle between blog and website conventions, does away with ftp'ing files to a server, and even removes the concept of a broken link (except for outside links).

When I talked to Five Across CEO Glenn Reid, he emphasized that divorcing content from presentation was the key to the company’s technology. That’s been an objective of Web technologies for many years now, especially Cascading Style Sheets. But having a goal is one thing and having a system that actually works seamlessly is quite another.

Glenn comes from Apple, and Bubbler’s model is pretty Apple-like. It uses standards like CSS and JavaScript as appropriate, but at the core is proprietary technology that enables the company to deliver a solid user experience. There's no part of the process that Five Across isn't touching - you use its client software and its servers. Bubbler sites run on Five Across servers. While the service sits on TCP/IP and outputs HTML/CSS/JavaScript to a web server, everything in the middle is proprietary Five Across stuff.

This approach is not unusual. Flickr, for instance, takes a closed source, open API approach. How they do what they do is secret; what is open is the method of writing apps that lock into it. Bubbler is also closed-source, and it's not clear how open the APIs will be. It’s hard to argue with the success of the iPod and its tight integration with iTunes. On the other hand, its hard to argue with the success of the Web. But, why argue? There is obviously room for both kinds of companies.

Although Bubbler is intially offered as a hosted service, Five Across' ultimate business model, unlike that of Movable Type creator Six Apart, isn’t to run a hosting service but provide an OEM technology to other companies and networks. Look for ISPs to offer Bubbler to customers as a blog- or web-building tool that blows away anything they currently offer. And look for Bubbler to cut deals with institutions in vertical markets, such as real estate.

Blog or site? The difference is a template
Like Blogger.com, Bubbler offers a bunch of CSS-based templates. But unlike Blogger and other blog tools, the templates don't all look like blogs. Enterprise and small business templates look a lot more like website than blogs. Because Bubbler lets you disable blog standards like date, author, comments, trackbacks and so on, your “postings” can easily look like web “content.” Bubbler makes it easy to upload photos and files - just drag from the desktop to the app.

To put Bubbler through its paces, I took a site operated by my sister in law, Working Aussie Source, and re-created the home page in
Bubbler. I think she’s an interesting and typical case study. She paid someone to build her site but it’s become gainly and out of control. Not knowing any HTML, she’s been unable to update it and certainly unable to redesign it. Using a basic template, I recreated her home page in about an hour. But that took some faking up of blog entries, and I wasn’t able to replicate her basic design. Here's my Bubbler version of Working Aussie Source.

To move past the templates (shown in the screen shot), you have to dive into CSS. Clicking on Customize Template simply opens an HTML file for you to edit and upload to Bubbler. There’s no ftp app to run though; Bubbler handles the uploads. Editing the CSS isn’t that hard unless you’re building elements from scratch - moving elements around is fairly easy. Still, I don’t think that matters much. The creator of Working Aussie Source is not going there - she’ll need a wysiwyg editor for rearranging page elements or many more templates to choose from. Even TypePad, which is no wonder of user interface, allows users to control the positions of different elements and makes it relatively easy to paste in code for AdSense and other JavaScript do-hickies.

Five Across PR told me that the company's low-end market - real estate agents, photographers - would be happy to use templates, especially since Bubbler lets you use your own images in the templates. But I think this is leaving a lot of potential customers on the table. Designers, for instance, insist on total visual control but have no love of maintaining sites, tracking down broken links and threading through JavaScript rollover code. They would be very happy with the amazing way Bubbler makes those issues go away. If Bubbler can combine design control and ease of use, it could become a very interesting product. It will never be for everyone, but it is an exciting breakthrough in web authoring.

May 25, 2005

Who are the watchers of SVW ?

We know who most of you are--you are the movers and shakers within this capital of global innovation, you are the innovators in startups around the world; you are the VCs and investment bankers that fuel the business cycles; you are the ones in the trenches every day dealing with the insane demands of creating the future.

Queen bees, Venetian princes, financiers, angels, giants, dreamers, workers, paupers, geeks, pundits, scholars, newbies and battle-scarred veterans--please fill out our survey.

You'll be helping in a historic project--creating a real business model for news blogs such as the Watcher. Plus, we don't forget our friends—for a short time, all SVW watchers that survey will get special access to future events, breaking news and mysterious other things..(!) Do it now click here to survey and reserve your spot in history.

May 25, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: About SVW
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May 22, 2005

Verizon Fios: insanely cheap fiber to the home

By Damien Stolarz for SiliconValleyWatcher

fiber cable image.JPG My friend recently got wired up in Topanga Canyon (part of LA county) with Verizon's new insanely fast fiber Internet. I later saw a driving billboard Verizon truck that said "Fios" on it and then I figured out it was their brand name for this service.

[picture courtesy Jacob Riskin]

The monthly prices are extraordinarily low:

5 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $39

15 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $49

30 Mbps down /5 Mbps up = $199

(source: Verizon Fios - Packages & Prices)

With friends like that, who needs colocation facilities? Seriously though, I pay several hundred dollars for a 5Mbps downstream/768k upstream package from Time Warner. With the $199 Verizon package, you can get 5Mbps of upstream server bandwidth, which would let you serve almost 40 128k MP3 streams, or over a dozen 300Kbps video streams. This kind of upstream bandwidth is also sufficient for you to hook up your TiVo or PVR to the network and watch it in full quality in some other broadband downstream location. (While DVD bitrates are sometimes 6-8Mbps, the bitrates for PVR video are usually in the 2Mbps range, and DivX/Xvid movies are usually under 1Mbps.)

I'm still trying to figure out how to use my friend as my new ISP. He's in a canyon about 10 miles from me, so wireless won't work. Maybe he'll let me put my servers in his tool shed...

May 17, 2005

Latte sippers face off with technologists working in the third world

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Latte Sippers.jpg I participated in a truly mind-boggling panel Sunday in which I joined awesome people like Lee Felsenstein and Greg Brown to discuss whether bringing technology to the developing world was a "boon or bane". Lee, inventor of the Osborne, the first portable PC, and of the pedal-powered PC intended for use in Laos, went first. He had barely introduced the pedal-powered PC concept when the moderator, one Sylvia, who appeared to be channeling Sally Jesse Raphael or some such TV host, accused him of using child labor (kids pedal the bike to power the PC in powerless rural Laos), pulled in her teenage son to opine whether he would like to pedal for internet access, and generally was rude and dismissive of most everyone on the panel.

The Berkeley Blog reports the evening better than I will attempt to do here so I'll pull out a few choice excerpts from their report. But the gist of the argument is that exporting technology is exporting consumerism and destroying local cultures. My argument, which I didn't really get a chance to make (although I fared better than others on the panel), was that by building up tech skills, production skills, and know-how, people in these places will have a chance to control the means of production and will have a voice in deciding what kind of media they want. To sit in Berkeley and sip lattes while bemoaning the MTV-ization of the world is merely to guarantee how it will go down.

So, here are some choice excerpts from the Berkeley Blog report:

Next up was Greg Brown, an extremely personable entrepreneur who was involved in bringing satellite TV to Africa. Once again, he got part-way through his talk when Sylvia started berating him, this time about bringing MTV to the developing countries, and what a terrible thing it was. Greg seemed more comfortable challenging Sylvia than Lee was, and he pointed out that while cultures can lose local identity when you bring technology in, they also need the ability to voice their own concerns to the wider world, which broadcast gives. Unfortunately, no one wanted to discuss the empowering part of offering choice and the possibility of talking back to the Western World using the West's own technology, the moderator and the audience just wanted to blame Greg for importing the wasteland of current American popular culture to the developing world.

Last up was Richard Koman, who had been part of the Internet Archive's Bookmobile in Uganda project, and who talked about the reception the bookmobile got in Uganda (and painted a far less encouraging picture than Brewster Kahle has when I have heard him describe it). Richard got interrupted as well, in his case by questions from the audience like "Why didn't you use African books?" (they did have a few primers written in African languages, but Ugandans wanted English books, and African books published in English are generally copyrighted) and "Why didn't you go to Oakland" (the need is much greater in Uganda).

Many of the questions and challenges had an incredibly patronizing undertone of the wealthy (white) do-gooders trying to protect the poor (colored) noble savages from the ravages of western technology, following which the do-gooders would get into their Volvos and drive back to their homes in Berkeley with electricity, clean running water, telephones, and fast Internet connections and write in their blogs on their i-Macs about the horrors of technology for the third world. Both people of color in the room picked up on the tone and commented on it, but nobody responded directly to their comments. It was Berkeley at its most superficial and most stereotypical. Along with the bizarre in-your-face with sophomoric challenge moderating style, it also seemed like such an unproductive dichotomy to draw, like a bourgeois church club in 1820's Manchester England resolving that England should spare India the pollution and working conditions (and power) of the satanic mills of the industrial revolutions.

It was disappointing that the discussion was so unproductive and superficial, because there are serious issues worth working on nearby. Technology and western culture are coming to the developing world, and anyone who has lived or traveled extensively in the developing world is aware of the deep hunger for both. The more interesting and actionable question is how can we empower people in the developing world to be producers of culture, and users of technology for their own benefit, as opposed to being just consumers of monopoly culture, and objects of technology. That's a discussion that I'd like to engage in with some of Berkeley's many technologically literate and socially conscious residents, but it wasn't to be had during tonight's the Berkeley CyberSalon, which is too bad.

May 17, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Tech Watch
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May 15, 2005

SimoHealth, a breakthrough health management app built on Firefox, launches

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

With today's limited preview release of a breakthrough health management program, startup SimoSoftware is really proving the "NewRules enterprise." The product, SimoHealth, is a hybrid software combining a desktop client application with an online component. It's also the first client application built on top of the open source Firefox browser.

Download a free preview version from the SimoHealth website (Windows only)

Created by a pair of former AOL executives and with a programming staff of five, SimoHealth is a personal health management app that is interesting both for how it tackles complex health transactions and how the software was built.

Built on Firefox, SimoHealth is equal parts client app and browser

The company was born because Lash found himself "completely bogged down in trying to get the best care and managing expenses" for his son Simon, who suffers from developmental apraxia. "I realized there were no tools out there to help families manage their healthcare and advocate for the best care," Todd told me when I visited him at his Oakland home. He took the idea to Marty Fisher, former AOL president of technology and development. "Marty's reaction was, 'Oh, my god, this is huge. I can't believe this hasn't been done.' " Todd, Marty and Marty's son Todd Fisher, a software architect, joined forces to cofound SimoSoftware, named after young Simon Lash.

Markets don't get much hotter than the elephant-in-the-python aging babyboomer market, and it seems like the health sector is getting lousy with ex-AOLers. Just last month, Steve Case launched Revolution [site | Wash. Post story], a venture firm investing in health-related businesses. And WebMD [site] has brought in longtime AOL product marketing chief David Gang as COO and co-chief exec. As SimoSoftware president Todd Lash says, "The market for healthcare is essentially everybody. People in their 40s and 50s are worrying about their kids and their parents." And there other pressures besides the ravages of time. "Consumer-driven healthcare" is the industry buzzword for pushing costs onto consumers. "But there are no tools to help consumers manage their healthcare," Lash says. Enter SimoHealth.

SimoHealth really is a breakthrough product in this space. It offers what I think is an unparalled ability to break down and track complex medical transactions that goes far beyond the checkbook approach of apps from major players. A medical transaction is a complex affair. "The transaction may take 90 days to transpire - if there are no problems," Lash says. "If there are problems, it could take six months."

SimoHealth tackles this by allowing users to enter data from both the provider invoice and insurance company's explanation of benefits, matching payments, copays and deductible against basic plan information, and alerting users when a bill should be paid and when it's still waiting for insurance payments.

What's really cool from a product development view is that SimoHealth is developed right on top of Firefox, which means that the client app is inherently also a browser. Users can click on web resources or (in the future) download their "continuity of care" records (much like downloading an online bank statement) and the online information will display directly in the app.

SimoHealth calls for a hybrid approach because health information is sensitive data, which should be kept locally, yet there's a need to access online information, both in the form of websites and, soon, XML files that contain patient data. The current app uses the open source database Firebird to handle local data. In the early going, developers struggled to create a UI that would allow seamless integration of patient data with online resources. In the end, they decided to consider the first nine months of work a prototype and to build the actual app on Firefox.

That decision offered numerous advantages, said Fisher, COO of SimoSoftware and the former president of technology and development at AOL. "The architecture allows us to embed networking capabilities seamlessly into the product. We were able to easily customize the look and feel of the browser to make it look like our own application. It's much easier to develop in JavaScript than in C/C++. We had faster development time and more internal component usability."

In other words, the browser, not the operating system, is the platform.

A crucial part of the story is the open source aspect. "We were tapping into a lot of people around the world for help. We were in the IRC channels talking to Mozilla folks. There is a large number of people available to help you. You get scale by using open source," Fisher said.

That's a huge contrast with the old-style development models at AOL, said Fisher, who managed 3,500 people there. "One of the tragedies of AOL was that they refused to move forward from silo-built software. SimoHealth was built by five engineers. At AOL it would have been 40."

Larger companies naturally have bigger management footprints than virtual startups. But the NewRules company is showing that very small teams can write better products with more features, faster and with less complexity than the big guys. To Fisher, this open source approach looks like a major new model in software development. "Outsourcing is one solution to reducing development costs but it's not necessarily the best solution. This just works."

May 15, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: New Rules
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May 12, 2005

Syndicate conference explores the technologies at the heart of next-generation media

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

IDG's Syndicate conference this week in New York will explore the business cases for RSS, the syndication technology at the heart of these next generation media technologies such as blogging.

Richard Koman and I will be blogging live from the show, and I will be moderating two panels. I am not boasting but stating a simple fact when I say I have the best two panels at the show bar none. More on this in a bit…

Tom Mahr, one of Syndicate's organizers, tells me conference reservations are going through the roof. We might have to turn people away, the response has been just incredible within the past couple of weeks, he says. More than 30 media have registered.

Take a look at the lineup for my two panels:
[This is from Syndicate, but the comments in square brackets are mine.]

Panel 1: Enterprise Syndication Using RSS

Moderator:
Tom Foremski, Founder, Silicon Valley Watcher.

Speakers:
Ross Mayfield, CEO and Co-Founder, Socialtext.
[Ross is one of the pioneers of corporate uses for wikis. He is also an excellent blogger and a natural journalist. I ran into Ross Tuesday evening and congratulated him on his recent Series B funding and apologized that I didn't get a chance to blog it. That's fine, he smiled, I blogged it myself, he said. Sad but true, I think to myself. We hacks are going by the wayside, who needs us when you can be your own news service ;-) Ross gets a ton of traffic at his blog because he is an excellent writer and doesn’t hoard his ideas.]

David Schatsky, Senior Vice President of Research, Jupiter Research.
[I don't think I've met David but I've seen some his research notes and I'm looking forward to his take on things.]

Michael Terner, President & CEO, KnowNow.
[Michael is the one that invited me to moderate this panel and he is a real survivor, having come through the dotbomb and refocused the company to take early advantage of RSS technologies and applications. KnowNow have recently been working with enterprises and crafting custom RSS newsreaders for each company's employees. Apparently, this saves enterprises a ton of money on email costs, something which surprised me.]

Dr. Paul Kedrosky, Director, William von Liebig Center, University of California at San Diego. I spoke with Paul over the phone and he was saying some interesting things from his work in academia.

Panel 2:

05/18/2005, 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Moderator:
Tom Foremski, Founder, Silicon Valley Watcher.

Speakers:
Robert Scoble, Technical Evangelist Platform Evangelism, Microsoft Research.
[I'm looking forward to meeting this A plus list blogger, author of the hugely popular blog Scobleizer. Robert is nearly as famous as Bill Gates!]

Fergus Burns, CEO, Nooked.
[Fergus asked me to moderate and he also recently became a sponsor of SVW, we are hosting his RSS directory search box (top left corner of home page, give it a click!) I don't have to say nice things about Fergus, but I will. I ran into Fergus earlier in the year, at the very excellent New Communications Forum conference, and we hit it off right away. Fergus is an ex-Microsoft exec who got out five years ago and is running one of the leading European RSS enterprise tech and services companies. He might be soft spoken but he's got that tenacious, stubborn, Microsoft culture, with that determination to win, built into his psyche. And I know for a fact that there is something killer coming out of Nooked very soon. No need to tell you, gentle reader, that you'll be the first to know.]

David Galbraith, Founder, Wists.com.
[One of my good buddies and co-founder of news aggregator MoreOver.com with Nick Denton, now founder of Gawker Media (BTW don't mention "empire" to Nick, as in Gawker... American and others are fine.) Dave is a co-author of RSS 1.0. He and his partner Justine moved to NYC just very recently, from San Francisco and I'm looking forward to catching up with them and crashing on his floor(!)

David Dunne, EVP, Director Worldwide Operations, Interactive Solutions, Edelman.
[I haven't met David, but Jeremy Pepper, who organized this panel rates him. This is high recommendation because Jeremy generally has few good words to say about anybody, and the few he has, he saves up for his mom's birthday.]

Charlene Li, Principal Analyst, Devices, Media, and Marketing, Forrester Research.
[What can I say? Charlene is the "man" when it comes to analysis of the super red-hot online advertising and marketing sectors… Did you see her recent research on internet use displacing TV and how little is spent on online advertising? Wow. Triple wow. Take a look: Cnet News.com Online advertising on upswing.]

See the full Speaker list

May 12, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: RSS Watch
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Journalist blogger discovers Gmail and his world is rocked

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I wake up early, it's nearly 10am, but I can't sleep anymore. I flip on the TV and catch a few minutes of the excellent Deutsche Welle news in English on channel 32. I wander over towards the shower, but make the mistake of popping into my office and checking email for any changes to my meetings that day.

I recently started using Gmail and it rocks. It really rocks. It is by far the best user experience I have had with a software application in a long time. It is well thought out, and as a committed tag-o-nista, I love the fact that you can tag anyway you want. And it is fast. And it is all server-based!

But I must make a plea:

Could you give me a very small, client-side version of Gmail so I can process my emails in the same Gmail interface when I am offline, rather than having to download to my email client? Actually, couldn't you just cache it all anyway, have it download the inbox in the background and then I could run Gmail offline? And then synch up when connected. And while you're at it, could I have an online calendar too please. Oh, I hope it's not too much to ask, but a simple online word processor would be nice too. Actually, never mind - I can just use Gmail's compose e-mail feature for now.

May 12, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Tom Watch
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Come join us tonight for a Rooster Mashup party...

I completely forgot about inviting people to an after work mixer type event we are hosting at Catalyst, tonight, Thursday May 12 @ 7pm.

You are all invited, no host bar (hey, we're bloggers...). It'll be the first in a monthly series of Rooster Mashups--mix up a bunch of people from wherever. It could be interesting and I bet it will. You should come along.

Rooster is the perfect metaphor for blogger because 2005 is the Chinese year of the Rooster and it is certainly the year of the Blogger (as Time magazine will certainly dub 2005).

And just like Roosters crowing away at the top of their lungs, rulers of their patch of farm yard, bloggers do the same same thing. Bloggers crow away, or "Whiner" away about how great they are, and they also, are kings and princes within their patches of the internet.

Mashup is a term that I like because it is becoming a very good way to describe what is happening in the emerging Internet 2.0 world, and in culture.

Stop in if you can. It'll be interesting to see who shows up. Catalyst is in San Francisco on 312 Harriet St, it’s a side street south of Howard, between 6th and 7th Streets.

Come in and say hi.

May 12, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: About SVW
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May 11, 2005

Where can you find Flickr and Apple in the same room? At the AJAX Summit of course. An insider report from the press-free zone where the future of webdev is being mapped out.

by Jonathan Boutelle for SiliconValleyWatcher

The O'Reilly/Adaptive Path AJAX Summit, held Monday and Tuesday in San Francisco, was a "geeks only" affair with press allowed in only at the very end of the event. While other media are carrying reports from this press event, SiliconValleyWatcher is pleased to provide inside coverge from one of the leaders in the AJAX community, Jonathan Boutelle. - RK

The O'Reilly/Adaptive Path AJAX Summit (press release, photos) in San Francisco (May 9-10) was a pow-wow of some of the best JavaScript developers and web designers in the world. There was heavy representation from web consultancies like 37 Signals, Uzanto and Adaptive Path, as well as the client-side code wizards from such Web 2.0 companies as Flickr, Technorati, Six Apart and Odeo and consumer heavyweights like Apple, eBay, Yahoo and Macromedia.

The summit was invite-only, although press were allowed in towards the end of the event. This ruffled some feathers.

What the heck is AJAX?
AJAX is shorthand for "Asychronous Javascript and XML." (Read Adaptive Path's defining paper.) The term itself has a pretty loose definition (for example, some of the most well-known AJAX applications do not use XML). A good way for a layman to think about it is "doing things with DHTML that you would normally need something like Flash to accomplish." Things like Google Maps and Gmail are the granddaddy AJAX applications that got people excited about the concept.

AJAX applications do things like fetch data from the server without refreshing the screen, and use animation within a page to provide smooth transitions or reveal hidden fields. These tweaks to conventional web applications can create an experience that feels much remarkably faster and richer than a web page. One participant described the difference as being “like the difference between email and IM”.

Technology and Vendors
The emerging theme from the summit was that AJAX is not rocket science. While building an application like Google Maps is huge technical challenge, adding a little bit of AJAX “spice” to an existing production website can take as little as a few weeks.

Derek Powazek of Technorati, Eric Costello of Flickr, and Dustan Orchard from Odeo showcased the next versions of their sites, which have several improvements that would have been impossible without AJAX techniques. One of the few statements that this (often contentious) group managed to rally around was the idea that "AJAX is only rocket science if you are building rockets."

Technical frameworks for making AJAX development are cropping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Of the many developments, the most compelling is clearly Ruby on Rails. Rails is a rapid web application API that already has remarkable momentum. David Heinemeier Hansson, the amiable Dutch mastermind behind the rails framework, gave a nice overview of how Ruby on Rails makes AJAX websites easy to develop. Other free technical frameworks like SAJAX (simple AJAX) are available, and new frameworks are cropping up every day, so it may take some time for the market to sort through these offerings an settle down on a manageable number of toolkits.

Vendors of proprietary frameworks like jackbe, XUI, and backbase) provide an alternative to the “free” frameworks with an interesting twist: the ability to make a Visual Basic-type data entry application through DHTML. This is not very sexy, and the vendor lock-in problem is a big one. But the market for business applications is huge, and combining the speed of a desktop application with the zero-install of a web application has obvious advantages. Watch these companies closely!

Demos
Ironically, one of the most impressive demos was not from the Web 2.0 companies, but from SABRE, the travel reservations company, which demonstrated an Excel-like data grid holding hundreds of thousands of rows being browsed and sorted in real time. Ian Lamb (poster child for the “build it-flip it” path to post-dot-bomb riches) showed off the Web-based Outlook clone (called oddpost) that he sold to Yahoo last year. Ebay has some impressive-looking AJAX development going on as well. And Adaptive Path demoed their new product (I can’t reveal what it is, as all attendees were sworn to secrecy and given secret decoder rings, but take my word for it: it’s pretty darned cool).

Hype, Potential, and the Risk of Over-Hype
The business momentum provided by the recent excitement over AJAX (including a Wall Street Journal article) has a lot of community members worried that this innovation will be over-hyped, resulting in a lot of inappropriate uses and an inevitable backlash. This is not an idle worry: both Java applets and Macromedia Flash suffered a similar fate after their hype cycles came to an end).

The summit sputtered at the end rather than closing crisply. A great deal of technical information was exchanged by the participants, and a general consensus that AJAX can be used for realistic, tactical improvements to websites (as well as ambitious projects like Google Maps) emerged. The specifics of how to use AJAX to design more effective sites are still
unclear, however, and no clear business case for tactical AJAX-based site improvements emerged from the discussion.

AJAX technology obviously has great promise: three months after being named, AJAX technology is already getting baked into the websites of the Web 2.0 startups and the Web 1.0 giants. This kind of adoption rate is remarkable for a technology that lacks a crisp definition and a mature toolset. It seems clear that we can expect great things from AJAX in the next 12 months.

Links:

Ajaxian Blog
O'Reilly Radar
37 Signals
Flickr
Technorati
Six Apart
Odeo
Apple
eBay
Yahoo
Macromedia
SABRE
Ruby on Rails
XUI
backbase
oddpost Jonathan Boutelle

May 11, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag:
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May 9, 2005

Tech in the Developing World: Boon or Bane?

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

I spent six weeks in the fall of '03 and a few more weeks last summer in Uganda working on a project called the Uganda Digital Bookmobile, in which a van loaded with office technology visited rural schools and printed out public domain books. (It was a spinoff of the Internet Archive's supercool Internet Bookmobile project.)

I'll be talking about it at the next Berkeley Cybersalon, organized by Jeff Ubois. The topic of the talk is "Technology and the Developing World: Boon or Bane?" Lee Felsenstein, inventor of the first portable computer, and Eric Brewer, cofounder of Inktomi, will also be on the panel.

It will take place May 15, 6-8 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley. Here's a full description:

Silicon Valley people love to solve problems, but in the process they often create new ones: it’s a cliché, but when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. While information technology can solve some problems in developing countries – connecting people there with their relatives here, for example – it often supplants and destroys the very cultures these societies have taken centuries, if not millennia, to develop. When is information technology actually helpful in developing countries? Join us for an interactive panel-audience discussion on this topic.
Invited panelists include:
• Lee Felsenstein, who built the first portable computer, the Osborne, and has tried to port the Internet to the jungles of Laos using the pedal power of the bicycle.
• Eric Brewer, cofounder of spider search engine Inktomi and computer science professor at UC Berkeley, who just led a delegation of open source computing advocates to India.
• Richard Koman, who set up an Internet Bookmobile Project in Uganda to download and publish books on the spot, and
• Jessica Mitchell, a Geekcorps technology volunteer who is working with Ghana’s ISPs.
• Claudia Carr, UCB associate professor in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, who has firsthand experience of the way modern technology destroys ancient cultures.
• Iain Boal, social historian of science and technics at UCB’s
Institute of International Studies, edited a book called “Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information,” which sheds some insights on the damage caused by high-tech, for export or not.

Come join us for an engaging discussion in which everyone is encouraged to participate. $10 gets you drinks and something to whet your appetite.

The Hillside Club is half a mile from the Berkeley BART station, and
coming south from Highway 80, take the University Ave. exit, go under
the freeway along the frontage road and make a right at the 4RENT sign, which is Cedar St. Go up two miles and park. If you need a ride, contact whoisylvia@aol.com.

May 9, 2005 | Permalink | Tag:
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May 8, 2005

Digital Rights Management Primer
By Damien Stolarz for SiliconValleyWatcher

Before I tell you the punchline is "software DRM doesn't work," go ahead and read this chapter on DRM from my book Mastering Internet Video.
The chapter is formatted as a movie script and humorously teaches about the promise and perils of digital rights management software and systems.
Here's probably my favorite part of the chapter:
The fundamental difference between encryption techniques and DRM challenges is the trusted parties. In usual encryption scenarios, the end users are assumed trustworthy and a malicious third party is assumed to be the threat that the user needs to defend against. In contrast, DRM assumes that only the devices are trustworthy, and that the users are the potentially malicious interlopers. This is why DRM cannot depend on encryption technology alone--it is only one technical component of a complete DRM solution. Vendors that brag about the strength or complexity of their encryption are saying little about the robustness of their DRM.

Figure 7-23: Encryption assumes trustworthy end users and a malicious third party. DRM assumes that only the devices are trustworthy, and any user is potentially malicious.

May 8, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Digital Video
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May 6, 2005

Veteran VC Tim Draper slams Sarbanes-Oxley as backlash builds in Silicon Valley to burdensome regulations

cd 2031
By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Tim Draper, veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist (Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson), has hit out at the heavy burdens which the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and increased government regulations have placed on U.S. companies.

In an interview in “The Ledger” (an email newsletter published Thursday by his public relations company representative, Launchsquad), Mr. Draper states his suspicion that, when it comes to improving corporate governance, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) “will have the exact opposite effect that it intended.”

Mr. Draper is one of a very few speaking out publicly on this issue. Many CEOs have told me that “these regulations are killing us.” The requirements for compliance with SOX financial regulations are substantial, and can typically cost a company at least $2m extra in expenses. This, and health care costs, have become huge burdens and management distractions for both startups and large companies.

Mr. Draper says in The Ledger Interview that “Sarbanes-Oxley made it so that I have dropped off all my public boards, and so will many others. I suspect that it will have the exact opposite effect that it intended. Many good people will leave public boards.”

Larger companies are able to absorb the extra costs as a smaller percentage of revenues; but they still have to shoulder the extra corporate governance duties.

Intel, for example, has taken on the issue of corporate governance very seriously; chairman Andy Grove has been working on this issue for about two years, and made it his personal crusade. But it is incredibly distracting for top management; and Intel has to compete in a fast moving market, while juggling the timing of multi-billion dollar investments in chip factories.

Executive shame

One senior exec at one of the largest US tech companies told me that the corporate scandals had made him feel ashamed to answer a stranger’s question, while he was on vacation, as to what he did for a living.

He was very conscious that because he ran a public company he might be tarred by the same brush as the tiny criminal minority. He said that he knew his business community was honest; yet it was being punished through SOX, and that things had gone too far.

Despite this very common viewpoint, no Silicon Valley exec has stood up and said anything.

Will others speak out?

Silicon Valley’s business leaders, such as Andy Grove, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, John Chambers, Scott McNealy, Eric Schmidt, Meg Whitman, John Thompson, Gary Bloom and the others, should stand up and say that SOX regulations are not going to work unless changed; and that they are a competitive burden on Silicon Valley companies, and on the business of innovation.

Where's the beef?

Late last year Booz Allen Hamilton published a study on SOX that discovered: [From http://www.strategy-business.com/resilience/rr00014]

Here’s a fact that bucks conventional wisdom: more shareholder value has been wiped out in the past five years as a result of mismanagement and bad execution of strategy than was lost because of all of the recent compliance scandals combined.

This is a key finding of a recent Booz Allen Hamilton survey and analysis of the performance of 1,200 firms with market capitalizations of more than $1 billion for the five-year period from 1999 through 2003.

Consider the 360 worst financial laggards. Eighty-seven percent of the value lost by these firms was attributable to strategic missteps — management ineffectiveness in reacting to competitive pressures or forecasting customer demand — and operational blunders, such as cost overruns and M&A integration problems. Only 13 percent of the value destruction suffered by these companies was caused by regulatory compliance failures or was a result of poor oversight of company operations by corporate boards.

CFOs rushing for the exits

Board members are difficult to recruit, because of greater legal liabilities, and due to their increasingly becoming the targets of shareholder lawsuits.

Chief Financial Officers have also been hard to find; and C-level recruitment firm, Korn/Ferry, told SiliconValleyWatcher that CFO’s are calling up and saying “get me out of here, and into a private company.” There are an unprecedented number of CFO positions open at public companies, Korn/Ferry said.

CFO’s have to sign-off on the corporate accounts; and no one wants to be the test case, either for SOX compliance, or as a target for lawsuits.

See SiliconValleyWatcher post:

[BTW, The Ledger interview reveals Mr. Draper as a huge Arnie fan. But the California governor should be careful. Asked what else would he be doing if he were not a VC, Mr Draper replies, "I would be running for Governor. Or a poet".

May 6, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Tech Watch
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May 4, 2005

Podcasting Turns Pro - Adam Curry joins Sirius

By Richard MacManus for SiliconValleyWatcher

Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. is launching a podcasting show on May 13, hosted by smooth-talking ex-MTV VJ Adam Curry. The four-hour weekday show will feature a selection of amateur podcasts handpicked by Curry.

Sirius subscribers, who pay $12.95 a month for the service, can listen to the show on channel 148, "Talk Central." The announcement by Sirius was made a few days after rival Viacom's Infinity Broadcasting unit announced it will convert a struggling talk radio station in San Francisco to an all-podcast format.

Some commentators, like Om Malik, claim Curry's deal is more broadcasting than podcasting. And while the new Sirius show will feature advertising, it's unclear whether any of the amateur podcasters chosen to feature in the show will be paid. More than likely they won't, which may raise some copyright and licensing issues.

The podcasting phenomonem has gained in popularity over the past year, led by bloggers like Curry and Dave Winer. Curry is the author of iPodderX, the first so-called "podcatcher" (podcast-capable RSS reader), which enabled the mainstreaming of downloadable audio. As with RSS, the history of podcasting and who invented it is debated. However Lucas Gonze wrote recently that "Adam [Curry] really was in the thick of things" and that "he was a key member of the very small group in there hacking, audioblogging, and getting the whole situation off the ground."

So is podcasting a promising new business for velvet-voiced bloggers? Will podcasting kill the radio star? Or will podcasters simply be the farm team for "real" broadcasters? Is Adam Curry the Casey Kasem of podcasting? All these questions and more will be answered in the upcoming months. Stay tuned!

May 4, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Pod Watch
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From paradigm shift to mashedup paradigms...Mashup is the latest and greatest Internet 2.0 manifestation

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

The more I think about the term “mashup” the more I like it as a very fitting descriptor for this emerging Internet 2.0 world.

I first came across the term in clubs &mdash the music mashups. But it’s also happening in video with mashups as live performance, in New York, and in Europe. Some of the mashup video communities were very excited when I noted in a recent entry that Sony’s movie studio is considering releasing some video clips that could be used in video mashups, with different copyrights.

Here are a few Internet mashup observations, but please send us yours too:

The current fashion of using tags allows content to be mashed together, in contrast to folders which separate content.

Blogging mashes up the many formats of writing. News style gets mashed up with email style, for instance.

The distinctions in media communications are being mashed up: online media with online communications of all sorts.

Trackback unveils a mashup of different types of readers of online content. This is completely different from traditional media, which is always targeted at a specific demographic/type/job.

Flickriscious communities &mdash Flickriscious is what we call a quality that provides for spontaneous expressions of aberrant behavior by online groups. It is a mashup because it involves people of all types.

Domain names are mashed up: siliconvalleywatcher.com and I sometimes write mashedup sentences on SVW. Itsasecretcodethatonlyyoucanread. ;-)

May 4, 2005 | Permalink | Tag: Future Watch
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May 2, 2005

Foremski's Take: Goodbye PC, and welcome back proprietary hardware platforms to tie up hardware, software and content

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

It won't be long before the personal computer is a dim memory, because the developing trend is to tie together proprietary hardware, software and content.

That's the best business model out there right now, and you can see it developing in many ways. It's being pioneered by Apple Computer with iPod and iTunes. Comcast and the cable companies are doing very well with their proprietary content/hardware bundles. And the cell phone companies are also sitting pretty with a similar approach.

The PC platform has survived to date because it has been an open platform. That situation will change very quickly, and Microsoft will be a key agent of that change.

On Monday, Microsoft discussed its next generation Xbox game console, code-named Xenon.

As described by Cnet's News.com, Xenon will be the first in a series of PC-like devices that are tied directly to games, music, movies and simple applications through mostly web-based services.

This is the trend. The PC-centric model is disappearing as digital devices designed for specific purposes &mdash such as digital cameras, cell phones, portable digital audio players, and portable digital video players &mdash don't rely on PCs as a content/communications gateway.

Instead, the developing model is to use tightly bundled hardware, software and services to provide secure digital rights management (DRM) and protected access to aggregated content. This protects against unlawful hacks and limits damage to the platform.

Microsoft said that Xenon would be more of a digital entertainment hub than the current Xbox. This would give it a ready platform for its DRM technology and for its MSN online network.

Microsoft has previously proposed inserting special chips into PCs, as part of its Palladium security scheme. But PC makers have balked at the extra cost and users won't like buying PCs with DRM technologies built in.

Those are not issues with the Xbox, which provides Microsoft with a broad platform that it can expand cheaply through hardware promotions.

Microsoft can then earn extra revenues from selling access to that platform and to the millions of users, who tend to fall into the particularly hot demographic of older (18 to 30 year old) games players.

The loser in such a future is Intel, since the platform hardware is less important than the services it channels.

May 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Tech Watch
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April 27, 2005

Putting the beta back in beta: Yahoo MyWeb's support for Firefox doesn't quite work

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

I intended to put Yahoo's new MyWeb feature, which went into public beta today today, through some basic paces. MyWeb basically consists of two personal productivity features -- personal search history and the ability to save and search local copies of selected sites, and integrated email and IMing of selected content. It's mostly integrated with the Yahoo toolbar, as well.

I downloaded the Firefox extension for Mac and started playing with but despite repeated tests and several conversations with Yahoo PR, the local search history simply didn't work. It did work in Safari, though, so I eventually got a feel for it. Yahoo PR confirmed that there are still some problems with the feature and are working to take care of them in the next development cycle.

At first blush, the personal search looks like copycatting of Google's recently launched personal search function, but it's a project that has been in development for many months. In any case, the point goes to Google's Search History, which displays all of your search terms and organizes visited sites by those terms. Yahoo displays only the sites you visit in chronological order. They do allow you to comment on the sites, and those comments appear whenever the site comes up as a result in a Yahoo search.

The MyWeb function lets you click a button on the toolbar to add a site to your local cache, and the web interface lets you search your MyWeb or the whole web.

Points go to Yahoo for letting users easily turn the search archiving on and off and for making it easy to remove certain sites from your cache. Google takes an attitude of "Don't worry - we do no evil," which is not entirely convincing.

Ultimately, though, I have a hard time seeing MyWeb as a feature a lot of people will embrace. Being able to search the bit of the Web that you actually use, as opposed to the whole thing, is intriguing but intentionally choosing to save certain sites doesn't stack up that well compared to del.icio.us, where you have the whole social dynamic for discovery. One person adding a note to a saved website really pales in comparison to the tagging ecology on sites like del.icio.us.

MyWeb also integrates with email and Yahoo messenger, which seems sort of nice, but in reality, does is that how people really work? If you live in your IM, you'd be more likely to cut and paste the URL into your IM stream.

Update: A reader points out that MyWeb folders do indeed generate their own RSS feeds.

~~Perhaps Yahoo will add some RSS functionality to MyWeb, which would help.~~ I might be more interested in MyWeb-ing sites if it generated an RSS feed of those sites, that I could share with people, or if I could tag or categorize them in certain ways. Actually, Yahoo doesn't have to add it because of the open APIs that allow third-party developers to add functionality. I guess we'll see who picks up on that offer. But as far as this app goes, technical problems aside, I'm a bit underwhelmed.

April 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Yahoo [YHOO]
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April 18, 2005

Of course, you know what RSS is ... so here's an article for your clueless boss

By Nick Aster for SiliconValleyWatcher

Even among the readers of tech publications like SVW there are a lot of people that don't really know what RSS is all about (or at least they won't admit it). Even if you do know all about RSS, no doubt there's someone in your organization is bluffing their way through conversations about it. If so, quietly slip them this article and help them get up to speed.

RSS variously stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. As a reader, all you need to know is that it's a way for you to keep track of new content on numerous websites without having to go view each individual site (such a chore!). Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble claims to consume 500 or more information sources on a daily basis, something no human could do without using an RSS reader.

For publishers and bloggers, RSS allows you to provide a constant stream of content to your readers, without having to send out email alerts, with all of the maintenance and spam filtering that involves. Indeed, Scoble famously asserted, "if you don't have an RSS feed, you should be fired."

RSS is especially associated with blogs because just about every blogging service generates RSS (or the similar Atom format) feeds. RSS existed for several years before blogging really took off, so it's not to much to say that blogs made RSS what it is.

RSS is so great because it frees you from having to deal with slow-performing websites, flashing ads, poor site navigation and other hazards. You can have content sent to you instead, like a well-organized piece of email. Because an RSS reader can alert you to new entries, it's great for following the news or finding out when your competitor has posted something new on their website.

The only hard part is that you need an RSS reader (like a browser for RSS) - or "aggregator" (because the software pulls together various feeds). There are a bunch of different ones out there, but the easiest ones to use are the ones that attach to your email client (like Outlook or Thunderbird). This means that your email client includes a special set of folders for RSS. Each folder will be filled with relevant news that you've specifically tailored for your needs.

I highly recommend Mozilla's Thunderbird for both your email and RSS needs. If you are married to Outlook on Windows, there are both commercial and open source plugins to RSS-ify Outlook. NewsGator is probably the leading commercial product; for something free, check out rsspopper. Mac Users probably have something similar, but I'm afraid you'll have to google around for it.

You can also use web-based readers like Bloglines and My Yahoo, which have their advantages; but I much prefer Thunderbird because I can download everything at once and go.

Once you have your RSS reader set up, you're ready to start subscribing. In an ideal world, the reader would automatically find the feed and you could subscribe to it with a single click. The Firefox browser does actually identify RSS automatically, so if youre' content to read RSS in the context of browser bookmarks, you're all set. That's really too clunky for more than a few feeds, though. (Firefox's Sage bookmarks extension does improve matters somewhat.)

If you use My Yahoo, you may want to install the Yahoo toolbar, which gives you a one-click option to subscribe to RSS.

In other clients, though, you may have to manually find and paste the RSS URL into the app. On SiliconValleyWatcher, scroll about half way down to the Syndicate section in the left sidebar. We actually have several feeds available. To subscribe, click on the link you're interested in, copy the URL and paste that into your reader. Our main feed is at http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/index.xml.

Many websites feature little orange buttons that say "XML" (RSS is a form of XML) or "RSS." Click on those to find the URL. Other sites have aggregator-specific buttons. If you click on an "Add to My Yahoo" button, for instance, a browser window will open that will allow you to add the RSS to your My Yahoo page.

Major publications may offer dozens of different feeds. The New York Times offers a whole page of these babies. So does Moreover. If you're looking for corporate news, check out the Nooked directory.

All it takes is an hour or so before you'll have a long list of RSS feeds ready to go inside your reader. If all went well, you'll be getting what you want delivered to you like a hot pizza. Give it a try!
cd2055

April 18, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: RSS Watch
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April 13, 2005

Searching for riches through short text message searches

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Google this week announced a cell phone based search service using short text messaging, also known as SMS. UpSnap, privately held, is also in this space, offers a free directory assistance (411) mobile SMS service, and says that Google's entry has helped to validate the SMS market, but that only UpSnap! has a working business model.

Tony Philipp, chief executive of UpSnap, said that SMS is growing fast, especially among the 18- to 30-year-old demographic. He also points out that UpSnap has a business model already in place, in which merchants pay for listings and use a free phone call feature, based on UpSnap's VOIP infrastructure, to talk with customers.

Google is famous for keeping services in beta or undeveloped for long periods, so it could be a while before it gets around to monetizing search queries through SMS.

UpSnap says it has done the ground work and established many of the relationships that are needed. I would think that search on phones through SMS should be less brand-driven than on the web, simply because the cell phone user interface is cramped, and it’s difficult to click away to another search service.

UpSnap's business model depends upon the growth of text messaging in the U.S. Text messaging here in the States is a tiny application as compared to its usage in Europe; but it can only get better. It is becoming part of the communications culture among school and college students, growing faster than any other current communications medium. SMS messages have jumped from 2.1 bn messages a month to about 4 bn messages per month over a six- month period, according to trade figures.

SMS doesn’t need a web browser, so it is a lot quicker to fire up and send a local search query. And the UpSnap service is free, which is good, because I've become leery of trying some of these services, having already been bitten by huge connection charges for being experimental. A lot of people know how cell phone companies can nickel and dime them for additional services, and create a big monthly bill. UpSnap should emphasise the word "free" as large as possible.

I would think that specialist search companies such as UpSnap should be able to keep ahead of the large, generic search companies like Google. It'll be interesting to see if large, technology enabled media companies can do as well as smaller, focused teams. I hope it's the latter...
cd1355

April 13, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Search Watch
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April 5, 2005

Scoop! Brit chip designers score coup as Apple picks chips for next gen mobile multimedia device...the m-Pod?

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

A British team of chip designers has won one of the most coveted of customers in the chip industry--Apple Computer. SiliconValleyWatcher has learned that Apple has contracted to use the powerful video, image, and music chips designed by Alphamosaic, in Cambridge, UK, in a future multimedia mobile device.

While the kudos goes to the Alphamosaic teams, the money from the deal goes to Broadcom, the US communication chips leader. Broadcom acquired the 57 person Alphamosaic for about $125m in September 2004.

v-Pod or m-Pod?

The branding for the Apple multimedia product is not yet known. Looking at the public specifications describing the Alphamosaic chips, it is clear that Apple could use it to build a family of mobile hand-held digital devices equipped with wireless communications that would be far more advanced than its current iPod family.

From press release dated September 20, 2004:

Building on the success of the VC01, Alphamosaic is now sampling VC02, the world's most advanced mobile multimedia processor. The VC02 can display video on 3.5 inch color LCDs and capture 8 megapixel images, making it ideal for watching TV, making videos or taking studio-quality photos on a cellphone.

The Apple device could be ready in volume quantities by the end of 2005 or early January 2006 if Apple gets the ball rolling now. CEO Steve Jobs often debuts important new products at the MacWorld show in San Francisco in early January.

Broadcom says the chip uses very small amounts of battery power and "excels in high-quality 3D graphics performance with the capability to support pixel shading and volumetric lighting with low power consumption, making it ideal for use in mobile gaming applications and comparable in performance to home consoles."

Plus it can be integrated with cell phone chips from Broadcom.

Apple could use the chips to produce a multimedia iPod that is also a gaming platform, 8 megapixel digital camera, digital video recorder, and cell phone (with Bluetooth and wireless Ethernet). But that is unlikely because of the interface complexity of a multi-function digital device.

Instead, Apple could use Alphamosaic chips as the common core of a family of iPod devices that could include camera, gaming and wireless connectivity products/features. This would provide a common development platform for applications that run across the family of Alphamosaic-based iPods.
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April 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Tech Watch
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The emperor has no clothes, just a box of cookies

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

A few weeks back, Jupiter Research released a study that found, shockingly, that users are deleting cookies at such high levels that web measurement is in danger of being a pointless exercise. The report, "Measuring Unique Visitors: Addressing the Dramatic Decline in Accuracy of Cookie-Based Measurement" by Eric Peterson, was met with howls of derision and disbelief. Now, Peterson writes on his blog, Nielsen/NetRatings has corraborating research.

The Jupiter report found that:

17 percent of consumers delete cookies weekly, 12 percent monthly, and 10 percent daily -- behavior that "cripples sites’ ability to track users and make critical marketing measurements."

58 percent of users run antispyware software (which deletes cookies), 56% clear cache (which contains cookies), and 52% manually delete cookies -- making for a "grim outlook" for technology that uses cookies to track behavior.

Nielsen/NetTracker found that cookie deletion rates vary from 7% to 50%, according to site; and that deletions of cookies from Google come in at 25%. Operating from the assumption that more technically sophisticated users would be more able and likely to delete cookies, he writes:

If Google, a site used by a fairly generic audience based on their over 40% reach and overall popularity, suffers from cookie deletion at a rate of 25%, what might be going on at a site more geared towards technical sophisticates like PCWorld.com, Financial Times or the CNET family of sites?

The Nielsen study used a direct reporting mechanism by running software on subject's PCs, rather than survey sampling.
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April 5, 2005 | Permalink | Tag:
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March 29, 2005

Web analytics heats up as Google buys Urchin; NetIQ spins out WebTrends for $94m

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Two large deals in the web analytics sector were announced Monday as Google bought San Diego-based Urchin,and NetIQ sold WebTrends to its management for more than $90 million. Google did not disclose the purchase price but industry analysts estimated the deal at about $30m.

[We had the tip that the Google/Urchin deal was in the works but couldn't confirm it in time...]

Eric Peterson, who watches the web analytics sector for Jupiter Research, said that the deals show how hot this space has suddenly become. Peterson noted that tag-based analytics -- in which JavaScript page tags are used to capture information about user behavior -- "are very much in vogue." Venture capital has been flowing into web analytics startups. "There is intense interest in tag-based analytics," he added.

While Peterson hasn't heard any specifics from either Google or Urchin, he believes there are several possible scenarios for how Google might proceed.

"My gut is that Google will do some version of giving Urchin away to marketers -- it may be just to AdWords customers, it may be to the entire world like Picasa, and they may go even further than that and give away hosted analytics to the world a la Blogger.

--The rest of the web analytics companies have to accept that Google has entered the web analytics market; and that will create pressure.

--Urchin in Google is much, much stronger than Urchin alone; and Urchin alone was not a bad little company.

--It is not completely unimaginable that Google would do this: they would say to their AdWords customers, or anybody in the world, 'We’ll give you tag-based analytics for free; and we’ll let you collect up to a million pageviews per month, and really improve the quality of your online marketing if you are underinvested in web analytics.' "

Google already provides some basic web traffic analytics tools and by providing sophisticated user behaviour information would help defend against Yahoo, Microsoft and other competing ad networks.

This would also likely create pressure on independent web analytics companies Peterson said:

"Our estimate is that web analytics is only 15% penetrated today. That creates tremendous upside; but most businesses aren't going to pay tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of dollars for analytics. They may not even pay $500 for nominal analytics; but free is a great price, it is an absolutely great price. If Google were to do this, and I think this is the least likely of the scenarios, it would create tremendous pressure on the other players (such as ClickTracks, SaneSolutions and WebTrends). Some part of the market would say, 'I could get this for free from Google; and you’re telling me $12,000.' The difference between free and $12,000 is a big difference."

So where Google goes, can Microsoft and Yahoo be far behind?

"That's a really good question. With the flurry of activity in web analytics space ... after yesterday, honestly I wouldn't be surprised. I was pretty surprised, even as an industry analyst, I was pretty surprised by both of those events happening on a single day. So if someone called me tomorrow, and said Microsoft bought company X, I would probably just shrug and say, 'Of course they did.' "

While Google's entry into this space will be tough on some of the existing companies, Peterson said that, overall, "This is great for web analytics as an industry."

"It shines a bright light on the fact that marketers need to use web analytics to improve the quality of their pay-per-click marketing, their algorithmic search results, the quality of the web site, and their checkout processes. Analytics is fundamental to running an online business. Anytime Google does anything, the whole world sits up and takes notice; and now the whole world is going to sit up and take notice of web analytics.
The question of how it impacts the whole market, and how do software sales go in the market, is something we won't know until the end of 2005."

"Don't forget about the WebTrends deal," that's actually a "fairly significant announcement," Peterson said.

"In the Jupiter Research constellation from October 2004, they were very strong from a market suitability standpoint; but needed to do more to show the business value. We believe that one of the things that was holding WebTrends back from demonstrating that value was corporate control from NetIQ, particularly in expanding the size of the services organization and doing more to help analytics customers. In talking to Greg Drew (WebTrends' GM under NetIQ, and president and CEO of the new company), I believe they now have the opportunity to make the decisions that are best for WebTrends customers and their organization; and that is something their competitors will have to take a long, close look at.

"In a space where every deal is so closely contested, autonomy will allow them to be more aggressive, and to make different decisions. They’re a fairly aggressive bunch; and I think this autonomy will allow them to take advantage of that."

Eric Peterson is the author of the book Web Analytics Demystified. The full interview will be available shortly as a podcast.

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March 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Web Analytics
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March 28, 2005

Why the Grokster case is so important to Silicon Valley

Mark Cuban to fund Grokster defense ... Lessig: Hollywood would use courts as "weapon to stifle innovation."

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

The future of media technology is one in which technology remixes media, in which not only creativity but marketing and distribution are technology-based. The open question is not if this will happen, but who will control its development. Thus, we have MGM v Grokster, the movie studios' case against the P2P file-sharing network, in which the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Tuesday.

The case is so important, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban believes, that he is personally funding Grokster's defense effort, at the request of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, he revealed on his blog over the weekend.

"This isn't the big content companies against the technology companies. This is the big content companies, against me. Mark Cuban and my little content company. It's about our ability to use future innovations to compete vs their ability to use the courts to shut down our ability to compete. It's that simple."

At risk in the case is the Sony Betamax decision, the landmark decision that established that companies whose technologies had "substantial noninfringing uses" were not liable for the infringing behavior of some users. In a powerful blow to Hollywood interests, two courts found that Grokster passes the Betamax test in that the system boasts substantial legal filesharing activity. In addition, because Grokster does not control the machines hosting the service, the courts ruled that they couldn't be held responsible for users' behavior.

With the Supreme Court taking the case, technology advocates fear the Betamax decision itself is at risk, and that companies who can't afford a legal battle with music or movie companies simply won't be able to bring technology to market.

Cuban notes that: "It doesn't matter that the RIAA has been wrong about innovations, and their perceived threat to their industry, EVERY SINGLE TIME. It just matters that they can spend more than everyone else on lawyers."

In an interview I did earlier this month, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig argued that Betamax has protected tech companies from having to defend their inventions in the courts. Losing that protection would put a freezing chill over technology innovation.

"[C]ourts are extraordinarily expensive places to adjudicate these questions. And the best example of that is the case of ReplayTV. They produced what looks like a modern version of the VCR and they spent two years in litigation with content owners who claimed that they were producing a technology that people used to create copyright infringement; and that they should be held responsible for it. Two years of litigation is enough to sap out all the resources of a startup company, and they were eventually forced into bankruptcy.

"I think the case stands for the obvious points that the Sony Betamax case was trying to make--if you can pull somebody into court under some vague standard of liability just because the tools are being used by people to create copyright infringement, that's a very good way to block new innovation that might change the way copyright material gets distributed. So it's a strategic opportunity to exercise control over the future of content development and distribution, and not so much as a way of protecting copyrights.

"Now again, in that case, as in the VCR case, as in the peer-to-peer case, it's open for the copyright holder--which, of course, is one of the most powerful lobbies in America--to go to Congress and get them to address the specific problem that they complain about. ... [B]ut if you make the courts the arbiter of whether a technology should be allowed or not, then the courts become a tool, a weapon to be used in the marketplace. And they will stifle new innovation and new creativity, because manufacturers are afraid of losing their money to lawyers."

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March 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag:
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March 17, 2005

The purity of search results challenges Google and offers an opening to rivals

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

The purity of search results, free from commercial influence, is likely the only way a new search engine company can challenge Google and win over its users.

That's because Google is struggling to purify its search results in the face of a large industry that actively tries to manipulate its searches for commercial gain, so that a client website link appears on the highly-desired first page of Google’s keyword search results.

The search engine optimisation (SEO) industry is huge, and continues to grow. There are some good companies in that sector; but there are also a few bad ones that have given SEO a dodgy reputation. Yet thousands of web site owners contine to pay SEO companies large sums of money to trick and influence Google into awarding their web site a first page ranking.

This means that there is a constant battle between Google and the SEO companies over the purity of Google’s search results.

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.

It’s wasted effort because no one can figure out all the nuances of Google’s search algorithms and so there is a “black magic” of sorts involved in SEO.

Web site owners will sometimes find their sites boosted into a much improved ranking—and not know how they did it. Then the next day they can just as quickly get pushed out to page 900 of a Google search, virtually a death sentence for an online retailer relying on search pages.

Google engineers must constantly change their search and indexing technologies to battle the craftiest SEO practitioners.

If a search engine company can maintain the purity of its search results, it will have a good shot at becoming hooked into a viral buzz in which users become evangelists and share their discovery with others. That kind of grass roots viral buzz has always been how search engines grew in popularity.

One new search company that has made it onto my newly created “Hot Watch” list of companies is Become. The recently launched shopping search site Become.com has indexed more than 2.2bn web pages; and it claims to have a spam-proof ranking technology, called Affinity Index Ranking (AIR), that cannot be influenced by SEO actions taken by web site owners.

I recently had lunch with Michael Yang, who along with Yeogirl Yun, co-founded Become. Both have extensive experience with shopping sites, through their prior venture MySimon.com.

The claim about being spam proof was what first caught my eye when I met with them earlier in the year; and I was keen to follow up on this topic at this meeting. “Are you sure it is spam proof?” I asked.

“That’s what Yeogirl tells me,” Mr Yang said. “He told me he had studied the problem, and could not figure out how somebody could do it. He said it would be impossible.”

Yeogirl Yun is the chief technologist at Become.com and has designed four search engines so far. He was also a former classmate of Google co-founder Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

Become.com however has taken some precautions, just in case somebody does figure out how to influence its search results. It has applied for patents for its technologies, including one that patents a potential spamming technique.

“Its an insurance policy,” Mr Yang smiles. “We can sue the spammers for patent violation if we have to. I don’t know if that will work; nobody has tried it and if Yeogirl is right, we won’t need to.”

Become unveiled its AIR web ranking technology earlier this week as part of its ongoing beta test of Become.com. It says AIR is unaffected by SEO techniques.

If that is indeed the case, we can kiss SEO goodbye and get back to building compelling online businesses that are focused on the customer’s needs and not on Google’s searchbot.
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March 17, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Search Watch
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Comments

Tom Foremski on Grant Thornton Study: Scary Numbers On The Decline Of US IPOs

Richard, you could very well be right... But it seems to me that the chances of pushing through so many changes in regulations and creating private markets has a small chance of succeeding given the level of mistrust towards Wall Street. We don't want to be completely out of SOX, but we need a SOX that isn't such a burden on young companies. It would go a long way towards improving the IPO flow. And I'm surprised there was no mention of this issue in the report.

Richard Bartlett on Grant Thornton Study: Scary Numbers On The Decline Of US IPOs

Tom - Think you have called this one wrong. The SEC under Cox tried to reform SOX. It was likened to "catching javelins from Senators." The recommendations are actually quite clever - they seem to be advocating choice which is what we used to have before Regulation NMS homogenized the market (the NYSE was an auction market back then and NASDAQ was a dealer market). We need more choices to support exits.

By the way - a private market option - if it works, does get us out of Saban
Tom Foremski on Schmidt: Don't Bet Against Silicon Valley - Or Its Weather

Albert, you make a good point but is the point of SIlicon Valley really about the weather? I live in San Francisco and my district has unremarkable weather. I've never heard anyone tell me they come out here for the weather. Surely people come here for the opportunities, the chance to do something on a global scale.

Lars on NYTimes Quarterly Results Show Plunging Print And Online Revenues

About the Quarterly Results Show Plunging Print :
is it god or bad when fell 29.6 percent compared to the period a year earlier ?

I cant believe that they mean it very seriously

"sign of an improving economy and that fourth quarter losses should be lower than in the most recent quarter."

I would it call self-caused
:)

Lars

Albert on Schmidt: Don't Bet Against Silicon Valley - Or Its Weather

On that point of the weather, you wouldn't have to worry about Hawaii because it is inconvenient to live so far away from everything else, so the weather is overshadowed by that negative. And if you've ever lived in florida, you'd know that the weather there is utter crap -- always humid with no seasons. Silicon Valley weather is so much better.

Tom Foremski on Are There New Rules For Embargoes?

Laura, often the embargo is determined by the print side. For example, the New York Times newspaper first run is published at midnight or 9pm Pacific time. That's a common embargo time.

Laura Newman on Are There New Rules For Embargoes?

I ditto Diane's comment. I think the issue is really surrounding the emergence of real-time and even uber-short lead times of bloggers and websites that can break the story much quicker than a print outlet can. What's the protocol there?

Jason lopez on Retreevo Study Discovers Vacuous iPhone Users

I've never been able to understand the contradiction of being smart and independent, and yet somehow completely (not just partially) smitten by the dreams and fantasies conjured up in branding. The latter appears to cancel the former. But I may be wrong.

Tom Foremski on GOOG CEO Predicts A Predictable Future Web - Stunning Absence Of Any Real Insights

Ktyson: Yes, exactly. Between the two of us we could come up with way more interesting trends and issues than the man helming the world's largest and most interesting Internet company. What the heck is going on?

Tom Foremski on MediaWatch: More About Embargoes...

Thanks Meredith, some excellent points...

Meredith Obendorfer on MediaWatch: More About Embargoes...

"There is more to be gained from developing an unique editorial stance than there is from pressing the publish button a few minutes earlier than anyone else."

I agree. Sam Whitmore talks a lot about this as well, and the point really speaks to a media organization as a business. In PR, we push our clients to differentiate themselves from their competitors... and media companies really are no different. While breaking news first is certainly one point of differentiation, it certainly s
ktyson on GOOG CEO Predicts A Predictable Future Web - Stunning Absence Of Any Real Insights

What about the spread of 3d environments in more normal work and play spaces online?

What about the growing irrelevance (except as annoyance) of operating systems?

What about the replacement of the os with a universally standardized browser functionality?

What about real AI?

What's Google really thinking? Is this presentation of Schmidt's some sort of disinformation exercise?

pcurve on GOOG CEO Predicts A Predictable Future Web - Stunning Absence Of Any Real Insights

What a joke. His predictions makes Bill Gate's "The Road Ahead" look like the book of Nostradamus.

I will bet that in 5 years, nobody is going to be talking about twitter. (for many different reasons. I have a feeling it's going to be a lot sooner than 5 years) Facebook will be around, but far far fewer people will be using it to the extent they use it today.

A Chinese equivalent of Facebook will be thriving, but nobody in this side of ocean will care about it, because it do
Jimmy N on Are There New Rules For Embargoes?

Mike Arrington is so arrogant. Everyone I talk to doesn't like that guy. Still Arrington walks around like he's a kingmaker. Someone at the web 2.0 conference told me that he treats people like shit and has burned all his bridges.

I recently heard that his partner Jason Calacanis won't even work with him anymore after being his partner for one year. It was also overheard from one of his top writers that they are buying time to increase their personal brand then bailing as fast a
Tom Foremski on CultureWatch: Should Cafes Become Cheap Office Spaces Or Places For Community Interaction?

Kirsten, thanks for the update on the German scene. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't see our digital bohos in McDonalds no matter how good the coffee :)

Tom Foremski on MediaWatch: Mashable Is On A Tear - Continues To Widen Its Lead Over TechCrunch And Others

Yes, compete.com is not an accurate count. I know it is very low when I compare it to my server logs. But I'm assuming the *relative spread* between Mashable and TechCrunch is accurate.

Mike McGrath on MediaWatch: Mashable Is On A Tear - Continues To Widen Its Lead Over TechCrunch And Others

I'm suspect of Compete.com having recently compared their traffic data with what was really going on with a client's server logs. So, I went to Quantcast to double check. When I typed in techcrunch.com it got the curious message that the site owner has hidden the data from Quantcast. Interesting...

Tom Foremski on CultureWatch: Should Cafes Become Cheap Office Spaces Or Places For Community Interaction?

Kirsten, thanks for the update on the German scene. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't see our digital bohos in McDonalds no matter how good the coffee :)

Tom Foremski on Happy Birthday Dear Internet . . . The Internet Devalues Everything It Touches

Controlling immigration to save domestic jobs hasn't been working for a long while. You can just export the factories. And now the Internet does a great job in tunneling through any border barriers.

Yes, increasing our job skills is essential. Learning how to learn is the best skill to have. But you have to keep running ahead of technologies that seek to replace human skills and labor -- but we've been doing that since the beginning of the industrial revolution. So far so good...

Tom Foremski on Happy Birthday Dear Internet . . . The Internet Devalues Everything It Touches

Harry, yes, the Internet is a great if not the greatest competitive lubricant :) But it also means that few businesses are safe from its effects. Yes, you can continue to scramble up the value-add ladder but surely at some point, there are no more rungs. At some point we will reach a stage that not everyone has to be in a productive job for society to do what needs to be done. Do we create jobs for jobs' sakes? It will become a much different economy and society -- we should be thinking about

Silicon Valley Watcher--reporting on the business and culture of disruption. © Tom Foremski 2004 - 2009 Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-noDerivs 2.5. Details of license.