Direct and Related Links for 'The First Casualty'
The first casualty in the online DVD rental war has been recorded: Blockbuster Inc. on Wednesday posted a quarterly operating profit well below analysts’ estimates even before $1.5 billion in one-time charges, as it faced falling movie rental demand and higher costs to counter competition. The video rental chain, whose shares fell to an all-time low, also forecast a significant slide in fourth-quarter profit with weakness continuing into 2005, and announced the resignation of President…The fact that Americans pay more for prescription drugs than do Canadians or most Europeans has been prominent in the news lately. Both Kerry and Bush now promise to do something to reduce the gap. Virtually absent from the public discussion of the issue has been an even more troubling aspect of the way in which prescription drugs are currently distributed: the inability of the residents of developing countries to obtain life-saving drugs at prices they can afford. This post provides a few details concerning the seriousness of that problem. The next post will outline – and solicit reactions to – a few ways in which the problem might be solved or at least mitigated.
Bush Campaign Acknowledges Ad Was DoctoredWashington | October 28Reuters - President Bush's campaign acknowledged on Thursday that a television ad depicting soldiers listening to Bush speak had been doctored so that some of the faces of the soldiers appear more than once.
NW Venture Voice has a post by Martin Tobias on his visit to India:
- The Indian economy is firing on all cylinders. Auto sales, pharma sales, real-estate, outsourcing and IT jobs are up double digits YonY.
- India's growth is accelerating even as China comes on line.
- Indian companies are moving up the value chain, especially in IT. There is a consolidation going on at the top of the IT outsourcing business by Wipro, Infosys leaving the middle market and small players looking to product development for growth. Look for Indian companies to get into original branded software product development in a big way (look out America).
- The bio/pharma sector is probably hotter than the IT sector. A partner in a leading executive recruiting firm said he has triple the number of searches going on in bio/pharma versus IT.
- The VCs that only visit Bangalore and think the India story is only about BPO are missing the mark.
- The Indian government is serious about divesting state owned enterprises (the old bedrock). Twelve new ones are being offered in the next three months.The most interesting one to me was the fact that every day in the Economic Times of India was another article on an Indian IT company moving up into product development. And details of all the government programs to support this. While the culture of development is significantly different from the culture of a call center, it is probably just a matter of time. The recruiter I was talking to said most of his "C" level hires are returnes from America and Europe. Salaries go MUCH farther in India. India produces more computer engineers than America. It is only a matter of time before this combination of American trained management and inexpensive raw talent starts to deliver really cool products.
While I didn't spend alot of time looking for investments or talking with potential partner companies, it was clear to me that there is WAY more going on in India than most people are considering. I advise every start-up I work with to consider what their strategy to leverage India and China is. It can be as simple as outsourcing QA/testing or call center. It can be as complex as outsourcing all development and selling into the local markets. Whatever the strategy, the CEO who doesn't leverage the growth and market efficiencies going on in India/China does so at his peril.
: In a deal that could give a boost to local search marketing, Google has acquired Keyhole Corp., which sells online satellite maps.
Keyhole offers users aerial photographs of specific addresses, and also allows them to search for nearby conveniences, such as bank teller machines or hotels. Unlike every other Google offering to date, Keyhole is a paid-only service that currently costs consumers $29.95 a year--down from the pre-deal fee of $69.95 a year.
The emerging markets and third world are the real opportunity for fixed wireless technologies.NextNet Wireless has proved it with successful projects in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Now the company has teamed up with Bangladeshi ISP, Access Telecom, to launch a wireless broadband service for business and residential users. Access Telecom was the first ISP in Bangladesh to introduce broadband services, commencing operation in 2000. Once again, Access Telecom is the first to deliver commercial NLOS plug-and-play broadband services operating over licensed 3.5GHz wireless spectrum.
Direct and Related Links for 'If you use KYOCERA cell phones, READ THIS!'
This morning Kyocera Corp. announced that several models of their cell phones had batteries that could explode. THEIR MESSAGE IS: STOP USING THESE PHONES IMMEDIATELY!!! The models involved (as far as has been announced) are: the 3200 series, The Blade, The Rave, The Slider, and The Phantom. These models may have batteries that were counterfeit and supplied to Kyocera by a (presumably) former supplier….Fundrace: Now this is what I call geolocation search. Search for contributors in your area to either Democrats or Republicans. All based on public records. Powerful stuff.
Hat tip: Metafilter.
Just off the phone with John Hanke, former CEO of Keyhole, now GM of the Keyhole unit of Google. We spoke about the implications of Keyhole's acquisition. A few things stand out.
First and foremost, Keyhole is in the Holy Crap That's A Lot of Data business - that alone is reason for Google to be interested. Their database stands at 12 terabytes and growing. It covers more than 50 percent of the earth's population, and includes satellite imagery, mapping data, topographic overlays, and, pay attention here, geolocation-based content tags. In fact, in his presentation at Web 2.0, Hanke showed an application, which he called geoblogging, which allows folks to fly around Keyhole's data and annotate various things they see. "They identify a spot, then talk about it, upload pictures they took there, whatever," Hanke told me. "That then becomes an icon, a point in the Keyhole database" that others can view and comment upon. (Want to check it out? Head here.)
The idea is to bring the Force of the Many and the Architecture of Participation(caveat, PDF download) to a visualization of the earth. Jaw dropping yet? But wait, there's more. Hanke also showed the overlay of real time traffic information from third party sources, like the CalTrans traffic feed. Mapping data to geography will allow for multitudes of such applications. Imagine Google scaling Keyhole to all web surfers for free, and then opening up the APIs for all to develop on.
Yowza.
Hanke told me that when he started Keyhole he and his team had a dream of building a revolutionary product that "touched millions and millions of people." Reality intervened as the bubble burst and resources became dear. But with Google now in the picture, that dream is once again alive, Hanke says. "We could have remained an independent company," he told me. "But the power of the Google brand, the infrastructure..." Not to mention, Hanke added, Google's mission, which fits nicely with Keyhole's.
Will Google let Hanke realize his dream, and keep doing all the cools things Keyhole was attempting to do? I asked Hanke if it'd be a fair assumption to make that he'd only sell his company to someone who shared his passions and his dreams. His response? Yup, that's a fair assumption.
NB: Gary notes in his post that there are other players in this field, notably TerraFly. Take note, Yahoo....
Hat tip: Jeremy for blogging the conference, thanks.
TiVo has been in the news recently with a couple of plans to make their service less useful than it could be: first, TiVos will now auto-delete pay-per-view and video-on-demand movies, and second, TiVo is making sure that you can't use a TiVo to view NFL games outside the specified market area. TiVo's lawyer explains.
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Cornell University have demonstrated a device that allows one low-powered beam of light to switch another on and off, on silicon, a key component for future “photonic” microcircuits in which light replaces electrons for propagating signals. It is highly desirable to use silicon—the dominant material in the microelectronic industry—as the platform for these photonic chips. The approach developed confines the beam to be switched in a circular resonator, greatly reducing the footprint required on the chip and allowing a very small change in refractive index to shift the material from transparent to opaque."
Marketwatch, the publisher of CBS Marketwatch--the news and financial online site--is up for sale with a $400m price tag, says the New York Times. This follows a good quarterly report on Wednesday. Possible bidders include Viacom, which owns 23 percent;...
: Some more instant thoughts on other potential bidders for MKTW (see stories below):
-- FT (Pearson): Already own part share in MKTW. Would give it a very strong position in U.S., something it has been lacking against WSJ...
-- Yahoo Finance: Even though it is among the most used consumer finance and biz sites, it has somehow lacked respect within the biz-fin media community, since it is, at heart, an aggregation play at best...MKTW would give it a boost. I doubt Yahoo would like to go into a pure media play with MKTW's news operations. Doesn't make sense...
-- NYT: Well, they're building up their tech site, and now business section would be the next step...
-- CBS: No, please don't...
zmcnulty writes "The day has finally come: Over at TechJapan, we've got a translation of a Japanese BB Watch article stating that Sony has announced the Playstation Portable will cost 20,790 yen (about $195 USD) and is to be released on December 12th. Also, the battery life is quoted as being 4 to 6 hours. Not exactly what I'd call fantastic, but at this price, looks like Nintendo is in for some serious competition. Free your doubts about software too, as Sony has announced 21 titles will be released in December as well. Here's the official Japanese PDF press release regarding the PSP's release."
One of the oddities of modern business is that companies often seem to feel compelled to spin off their best performing businesses on the idea that in selling it out, they can get a better return on the standalone business than when it's saddled with other businesses that are dragging it down. That's why AT&T spun off AT&T Wireless a few years back, despite how obvious it was that having a wireless component was going to be a necessity in the future. The whole thing makes you wonder whether or not these types of conglomerate businesses really make sense, if the best they can do is simply sell off their most important pieces. It looks like the trend isn't going to slow down however, as rumors are spreading that HP is now going to sell of their printer business -- the only profitable division they have. Of course, the other way of looking at this, since the spun off division would apparently keep the HP name, is that it's really a ditching of all those other divisions (reinvented under the name Innovative Technologies). Of course, HP went through a similar move a few years back when they spun off their testing unit under the name Agilent, so they have some experience in tossing off side businesses.
One of the more heartening developments in this election has been the outspokenness of scientists who strongly disagree with the Bush Administrations ...
Very cool. Congrats!
From forum.skype.com :: View topic - Version 1.0.0.94 released, Skype API made public via the voip weblog:
I'm glad to announce that the Skype API is finally mature enough to be included in a public build. So as of now we have the API included in the main Skype for Windows.
We just released version 1.0.0.94, you can get it from http://www.skype.com/ go/getskype
This is just the beginning of the API show, quick intro about what's coming up and going on:
* API forum to be made public in the coming days, API info to be posted on the www.skype.com website
* We will be introducing software developer programs (days to weeks from now)
* We will be introducing certification programs (days to weeks from now)
* Licencing - no licence is required to use or develop with the Skype API
* New features for the API - conferencing support and other things that you've been asking for. Support for upcomgin Skype features.
(reg. req.): Philips has launched video-watermarking software that will enable content rights holders and criminal investigators to trace back to the original source pirated material on DVD discs, VHS tapes and digital files released over P2P networks.
The software, called "RepliTrack," is billed as a turn-key video-watermarking solution for forensic tracking purposes.
Comcast's Third Quarter 2004 Results show that the largest cable company in the country is showing no signs of a broadband slowdown. “Our high-speed Internet service led the way, adding over 549,000 subscribers - the highest level of quarterly high-speed Internet additions in the Company's history, ” CEO Brian Roberts said in a statement. The company now expects its total high-speed data aka broadband adds to be around 1.6 million - 1.7 million, up from the previous range of 1.5 million - 1.6 million.
Cox Communications says that during the quarter it added 184,446 high-speed Internet customers, the most Cox high-speed Internet customers ever added in a quarter. Cox ended the quarter with over 2.4 million high-speed Internet customers, representing year-over-year growth of 32%. In addition, the company dded 82,596 Cox Digital Telephone customers, the most Cox Digital Telephone customers ever added in a quarter. Cox ended the quarter with over 1.2 million telephone customers, representing year-over-year growth of 33%.
Now taken together, both these numbers indicate that their low-introductory pricing is working, and the company is managing to key the big bad Bells at an arms' length. Last quarter it seemed that DSL would slow down their growth, but that clearly did not happen. The cable companies need to continue this rampant march, and hopefully build up mass so that they can blunt the FTTx impact on their business. I think next 12-18 months will be all about execution for cable companies and they better get it right.
David Pescovitz:
The Times Online has dug up the spooky secret history of John Kerry's Rocky Mountain retreat, a barn that Teresa Heinz Kerry's former husband imported from Suffolk, Great Britain. The building's former address, Rookery Farm in the village of Elmsett, is known to be haunted by the ghosts of a father and son who hung themselves in the barn in the 19th century after going insane.
The owner of Rookery Farm in Suffolk told The Times that she had detected an unexplained presence in the farmhouse on several occasions since moving there in 1992. Julie Hunn, 47, a legal secretary, who lives at the farmhouse with her husband, Andrew, said: “Sometimes you’ll just get a feeling that there’s somebody there or you’ll see a shadow. It’s happened two or three times since we moved here.”Maybe it's Karl Rove. Link
More from SCC's victory over Lexmark's DMCA claim:
"Nowhere in its deliberations over the DMCA did Congress express an interest in creating liability for the circumvention of technological measures designed to prevent consumers from using consumer goods while leaving the copyrightable content of a work unprotected.""We should make clear that in the future companies like Lexmark cannot use the DMCA in conjunction with copyright law to create monopolies of manufactured goods for themselves just by tweaking the facts of this case[.]"
"Congress gives authors and programmers exclusive rights to their expressive works (for a limited time) so that they will have an incentive to create works that promote progress. Lexmark’s reading of the extent of these rights, however, would clearly stifle rather than promote progress. It would allow authors exclusive control over not only their own expression, but also over whatever functional use they can make of that expression in manufactured goods. Giving authors monopolies over manufactured goods as well as over their creative expressions will clearly not “promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts,” but rather would stifle progress by stamping out competition from manufacturers who may be able to design better or less expensive replacement parts like toner cartridges."
This week, AMD will launch its Personal Internet Communicator (PIC). Priced at $185 (without monitor) and $249 (with a monitor), it is aimed squarely at the next users of computing. First, a look at the details:
InfoWorld: “AMD estimates that more than 200 million households around the world with sufficient incomes to support a PC have yet to purchase a system. These potential users might not even realize they can afford a computer until they are presented with a low-cost product like the PIC, the company said. The PIC is a small form factor desktop designed for simplicity and affordability. A customized version of Microsoft’s Corp.'s Windows operating system and basic application software ships with each system. Most of the software settings are locked in before the system ships in the hopes that users won't break any applications, and service calls can be kept to a minimum. AMD's Geode GX500 embedded processor powers the bare-bones system. It also comes with 128M bytes of DDR (double data rate) SDRAM (synchronous dynamic RAM), a 10G-byte hard drive, four USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports for the USB keyboard and mouse and a monitor.” The PIC machine also includes a modem.
News.com: “[AMD] also specifies a version of Microsoft's Windows CE operating system, fitted with Windows XP-extensions, allowing it to provide consumers with a graphical interface, e-mail, Web browsing, instant messaging and word processing. The PIC machines will also be able to play multimedia files and show PDF and PowerPoint files, AMD said. ‘The performance (of a PIC machine) is very robust,’ said Steve Howard, an AMD spokesman. ‘It boots in 25 seconds, and, once loaded, the browser performance is very snappy and word processing and spreadsheet is equivalent to what you'd see in a PC today.’”
The Wall Street Journal adds: “One key to the AMD effort is the Geode, an inexpensive line of chips purchased from National Semiconductor Corp. The chip in the communicator draws just a watt of power, a fraction of the power consumption of AMD and Intel Corp. chips that use the same software. The other key element was assistance from Microsoft Corp. The software company worked with AMD on an operating system that is based on the Windows CE product line for hand-held computers -- enhanced with elements of the Windows XP software for PCs -- offered at a low price AMD isn't disclosing. The communicator also comes with a word processor, spreadsheet and other simple application programs, licensed from a German company that Mr. Gino Giannott of AMD declined to identify. The devices are designed to be limited in function, so users can't accidentally erase important files or add software that would keep the system from operating normally, he said.”
Here is a look at the wider view on AMD’s strategy:
News.com: “The machine is geared toward families who make the equivalent of between $1,000 and $6,000 annually. Three companies in India and Latin America will be among the first to market versions of the machine, an AMD representative said…AMD will introduce the PIC as part of an effort it calls 50x15, which aims to raise the percentage of the world's population that has Net access to 50 by 2015. Right now, only about 10 percent of the global population can access the Net, the company says. Reaching the next large group of computer and Internet users--people in countries such as China, India and Russia--has become a major focus of many of the big names in computer technology. Most of those companies appear to agree that lower-price personal computers will help them sell more products.”
WSJ: “AMD doesn't plan to market the device itself. Rather, it hopes to take orders from telephone companies and Internet-service providers, which will put their names on the communicator and sell it to customers -- perhaps as part of a bundle with Internet access or telephony. Besides targeting India and China, the company plans to aim at Brazil, Mexico and Russia. ‘We are not interested in being in the system business per se,’ said Gino Giannotti. ‘We are interested in providing an opportunity for people to improve their lives.’”
News.com: “Although it intends to steward the low-price PIC into the market, AMD isn't getting into the business of manufacturing computers. The company drew up the plans for the PIC, but tapped Solectron to build the first run of the machines. The chipmaker plans to go forward by essentially licensing the PIC design to local companies, including telecommunications or Internet service providers, allowing them to use local contract manufacturers and control distribution, marketing and pricing of their PICs. Thus the companies will sell PICs under their own brand names and be free to subsidize the machines' cost to lower the price consumers pay.”
AMDBoard has some pictures and specifications, while Slashdot has a discussion.
Tomorrow: Emerging Market Realities
Researchers at The University of Manchester
and Chernogolovka, Russia have created the first-ever single-atom-thick substance, a fabric they call “graphene”.
The substance is stable, flexible, and highly conductive, and researchers believe it could be used to create computers
made from a single molecule. Professor Andre Geim at The University of Manchester was able to extract a single
plane of graphite crystal, resulting in the new fabric. The hope is that the fabric will be used in the future to
create nanotubes, transistors for microscopic computers, that could result in some seriously small electronic
gadgetry.
Guardian Unlimited has an article on Wikipedia. Having run the editorial division of Encyclopaedia Britannica for several years, I've followed the rise of this open-source encyclopedia was great interest, and wonder how muchit can serve as a model for other large-scale knowledge-creation projects. It has no editors, no fact checkers and anyone can contribute an entry - or delete one. It should have been a recipe for disaster, but instead Wikipedia became one of the internet's most inspiring success stories.... To its fans, it is a fantastic research resource - albeit one that you should use with caution; and an incredible example of what can be achieved by collaboration and cooperation over the internet. To its detractors - mostly those from the traditional world of encyclopedias and librarianship, it is barely worthy of the label "encyclopedia".... The current Encyclopedia Britannica has 44m words of text. Wikipedia already has more than 250m words in it. Britannica's most recent edition has 65,000 entries in print and 75,000 entries online. Wikipedia's English site has some 360,000 entries and is growing every day. [Ed: The Britannica also spends several million dollars a year on editorial salaries, costs, etc.] But numbers mean nothing if the quality is no good. And this is where the arguments start....
NASA is awaiting the pictures from Cassini and expect to start receiving the transmission from the spacecraft at approximately 6:30 pm PST [Reuters]
Oregonian reports that Intel Corp CEO Craig Barrett, got down on his knees in front of more than 6,000 technology managers, and begged forgiveness at the Gartner Group conference. Intel had five projects to be scrapped or delayed; it is sitting on a record inventory that reduced third-quarter profit growth to the slowest pace in five quarters. Stock is down 34 percent year to date, and if that is not all, AMD is really kicking their butt. The bad news ain't over. LCOS chip did not work out really. "Their product road map has some holes," Sangeeth Peruri at New York-based J & W Seligman, which manages $20 billion told the Oregonian. The big fund dumped its shares in the company because "They will struggle to fend off market share loss to AMD for the next four to six quarters." Nothing seems to be working! Comm unit, is losing more money than ever and this includes all the Centrino-stuff. The division's operating loss came in at $251 million in the most-recent quarter up $208 million a year earlier. "We ate crow," Barrett said and later in an offline interview said managers at Intel, the world's largest computer-chip maker, had become too relaxed. Not just the managers, but also the CEO! (How about taking responsibility and saying well I resign. It might be symbolic to employees, that even CEO is not about the law!)
Cory Doctorow:
Marc Perkel sez, "I'm distributing Fahrenheit 9-11 on my web site. I spent $2000 to buy 100mb line for 2 weeks before the election. If you haven't seen it - take a look and pass the link around."
(Thanks, Marc!)
WSJ writes about the lessons learnt in Asia:
Lesson No. 1: Phones need to be sleek and small.
Lesson No. 2: Target the youth market.
Lesson No. 3: Teaming up produces results.
Final lesson: Don't make companies bid for new parts of the wireless spectrum to offer 3G.In heavily networked Japan and South Korea, young people such as Ms. Suzuki don't think twice about using their mobile phones to create short movies, watch the Webcam inside their home or download pop songs from the Internet. In South Korea, people can even watch live, streamed television on their phones -- one operator offers eight channels -- and use their phones to make bank transactions or buy movie tickets.
That is a sharp contrast to the U.S. and Europe, where advanced mobile services driven by high-speed Internet connections only now are getting off the ground. "You typically see [phone] innovation in Asia first, and then it makes its way over to North America," says Perry LaForge, head of a Costa Mesa, Calif., telecommunications trade group called CDMA Development Group.
Consumers in the U.S. and Europe may never go wild for advanced "third generation," or 3G, phone technology like the mobile-phone aficionados in South Korea and Japan. Still, industry executives say lessons can be learned from those nations that could speed the adoption of 3G technology in the West.
Cuba Changes Cash Transactions on Island, Rejects U.S. DollarsAnita Snow | Havana | October 25AP - Cuba announced Monday that U.S. dollars will no longer be accepted at businesses and stores on the communist island starting next month in a move that will radically change the way cash transactions have been done here over the past decade.
You all know by know that HBO has encoded it's programing with DRM technology to restrict the recording of the data beyond the initial copy to your DVR or PC Based DVR.
To get a full grip on why this is so bad and why HBO needs to be Boycotted read linked story in full. Even those of you that do not realize the shear idiocy of DRM and the actions of HBO will get clued in. [www.theinquirer.net]
: 
A chart which shows the $112 billion total entertainment spending in U.S., by types..online is a very small sliver for now, and shows the potential. And mobile is trying to take a part of that as well, according to this new Yankee note.
Media and entertainment companies don't view the mobile distribution as a critical channel. As such, they are willing to withhold their content to force carriers into a distribution agreement they deem acceptable. However, this limits the growth of mobile entertainment and is short-sighted on the part of both industries, according to this note...
Civil libertarians and some technologists say the new passports are actually a boon to identity thieves, stalkers and commercial data collectors, since anyone with the proper reader can download a person's biographical information (DOB, sex, passport# etc) - and even their photo - from several feet away!
By Tom Foremski - SiliconValleyWatcher.com Wall Street’s delight with Google’s first quarterly financial report late last week led to a big jump in Google’s share price as analysts boosted their earnings estimates. This seemed a little worrying in that it...
The recording industry's inability to understand technology is certainly leading to some bizarre court cases. The latest is in Australia, where the industry is making Stephen Cooper out to be some sort of criminal mastermind for putting together a directory that linked to sites that offered MP3s for download. They claim that this is worse than just sharing, because Cooper had ads on the page, by which he made money. As if to prove how awful that was, they go on about just how many visitors the page had. Of course, the problem with this entire argument is that Cooper wasn't distributing a single MP3. He was simply pointing to other sites that did. As such, what he offered was no different than Yahoo or Google, both of which point to plenty of sites that offer MP3s for download, and both of which offer ads.
Creative Commons licenses are attached to Web pages. But we also want our licenses to be useful for materials distributed in file formats around the Net.
The first format we've learned to tag is MP3, the popular audio compression format. Other common formats — image, video, text, other audio formats — will follow soon. This is an ongoing process, and we welcome your feedback. (You can also read a more detailed technical explanation of what follows.)
If you just want to get started, try the ccTag app, available for Linux, OS X, and Windows.
Jason proposes an interesting theory below: he argues that the recording industry's war on P2P may be a distraction from an even more mission-critical battle -- gaining control of "me2me."
It looks like David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix would agree with Jason; in a recent piece on the RIAA's strategies, Bernstein writes:
"[The] labels are missing the fact that store-bought CDs, while probably retaining a place in the consumer's world, cannot provide what today's users want: total portability of their music. If users can connect electronically to every song or album they have ever paid for, wherever they may roam, well, the CD just can't match that."
Cory Doctorow:
California's Proposition 69 makes it legal for the cops to collect DNA from innocent people and store it indefinitely, and makes it nearly impossible for you to get your DNA back from the criminal database. So this anti-69 Flash is worth watching for the message, but I'm blogging it because it is, second-by-second, one of the most effective political pieces I've ever seen. Excellent, compact, on-message copywriting and great layout/design/pace.
(Thanks, Cindy!)
As I was reading Fred's post on Digital TV, it reminded me of the recent Jon Stewart/Crossfire phenomenon (see here for more if this is news to you). As I've pointed out lately with regard to print, the same goes for TV: You don't want to make "Must See TV" - you want to make "Must Point To TV". Television will be driven by the conversation, just as will print.
Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH) on trust. Recently added to p2p-politics.
Xeni Jardin:
Updated: An audio excerpt from Eminem's new anti-Bush song "Mosh" can be downloaded here, from The Regular. Quoth the caucasian rap superstar in a Rolling Stone interview, "Bush is definitely not my homie." Link
An anonymous reader points us to two links for listening to Eminem's "Mosh" in its entirety. Real Audio Link, ASX link.
BoingBoing reader David Stein sends a transcript of the song's lyrics: Link
Reader dapulli says, "On wednesday Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1 in the UK gave out the link to the download of this track on national radio. You can listen to him doing so here on thursday about 90 minutes into the show -- Link"
Documentary filmmaker Brian Springer captures the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of politicians and newscasters in the early 1990s. Composed of 100% unauthorized satellite footage, SPIN is a surreal expose of media-constructed reality. Pat Robertson banters about "homos," Al Gore learns how to avoid abortion questions, George Bush talks to Larry King about halcyon — all presuming they're off-camera. [Watch (video/x-pn-realvideo)] [info link] In addition to the streaming version here, very large VCD and DVD quality files of the full film are available for download. Part of the Illegal Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age exhibition. [demandmedia]
Some users of the Vodaphone V602 in Japan
are outfitting their phones with a night-vision device made by Yamada Denshi. The device, meant for military and
defense uses, works with the V602 and allows its users to “see” through clothing with night-vision sensors that pick up
body heat. The device is so popular among pervs in Japan that it prompted an official statement from
Vodaphone. One priceless tidbit: “we would never sell a phone that was enabling someone to see someone
naked.” Well there you go. Naked-watching is not officially endorsed by Vodaphone.
: 
Yahoo and Adobe have tied up...the two will launch integrated services that will feature Adobe products...
To start with, this week Adobe will introduce a co-branded Yahoo Toolbar--which besides Yahoo's usual toolbar features--that will integrate Adobe products such as Create Adobe PDF Online, a web-based PDF creation service.
Over time, the co-branded toolbar will launch additional functionality, such as the ability to quickly and easily convert web-based content into Adobe PDF files, the companies said in a statement...
A future release of Adobe Reader will feature Yahoo Search as the default Internet search...
AP: For Adobe, the products will further bridge the worlds of online and off-line content, as it strives to expand its software tools beyond the off-line desktop publishing space into the powerful realm of the Internet.The partnership, which had been under discussion for several months, is wide-ranging....it will be expanded later...
The prospect for a search engine price war was writ large in Google's quarterly earnings. A competitor seeking chinks in Google's armor will see that the company lacks a war chest for a sustained price war for online ad placements....
Yahoo announced last week on the Yahoo Search Blog that Yahoo Images search ( http://images.search.yahoo.com ) now has over a billion images. Google Image Search, for those of you playing...
Forget how Google's revenue has increased looking back at last year. The real issue is, how did the company manage to make much more profit out of sales between quarters this year?
theodp writes
"Ever wonder what a 95-year copyright term is worth to Disney? Plenty! According to Forbes, the top-ten earning fictional characters of 2003 grossed more than $25 billion - Mickey Mouse ($5.8B), Winnie the Pooh ($5.6B), Frodo ($2.9B), Harry Potter ($2.8B), Nemo ($2.0B), Yu-Gi-Oh ($1.6B), SpongeBob SquarePants ($1.5B), Spider-Man ($1.3B), Wolverine ($900M), and Pikachu ($825M). "
Two separate articles in the NY Times suggest the state of computer animation film making these days. The first, is a discussion about how Steve Jobs took Pixar to the point it is now, though plenty of troubles early on -- and compares it to competitor Dreamworks, who hasn't found the same level of consistent success. The second, is a discussion about the new Tom Hanks movie, Polar Express, that uses a fully digitized Hanks in five separate rolls. The article discusses the complicated process of using the motion capture sensors on both Hanks' body and face at the same time, claiming it goes beyond what others have done in the past. Of course, you have to wonder if this makes him ineligible for an Oscar. Last year, Andy Serkis, the actor who did the same thing to bring to life the Gollum character in Lord of the Rings, campaigned for an Oscar nomination and was more or less told that virtual actors don't count. Will that still apply when the "virtual actor" is Tom Hanks?
Direct and Related Links for 'Intel Switches Off LCOS TV Chip'
TV chip cancellation joins a long list of 2004 canceled projects and missteps. Tom Krazit, IDG News Service Thursday, October 21, 2004 Intel said today it has decided to cancel its project to develop an LCOS (liquid crystal on silicon) chip that would bring down the cost of rear-projection televisions. The project, code-named Cayley, was first discussed at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, where Intel president Paul Otellini told attendees Intel would have a…Direct and Related Links for 'Microsoft to buy another TV station?'
Could it actually happen? Well it is hard to say for sure at this point, but there are some pretty strong indications that Microsoft might decide to purchase Bloomberg Television. Now before you say that it is not that big a deal, you need to look at the bigger picture. They are rocking the game industry on their first try, already run MSNBC on cable TV, offer their own brand of Internet service and now…If previous LinuxWorld events were anything to go by, you'd imagine hackers fortifying the defences against the invading hordes of suits. But in this month's event in London, the suits and sandals achieved a kind of happy equilibrium, with corporate representatives competing to establish their roots in the community, and the hackers in the .ORG village making a notable effort to appear more professional. Even the two desktop environments, KDE and GNOME, put aside their holy war to exhibit under the common banner of freedesktop.org.
Those of you who are out there rejoicing WiMAX, Broadband over Powerline and other such incremental technologies, it is time to pay heed to Morris Chang, the 73-year-old maverick who founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. He tells The New York Times, that
we're all going to see lower growth in the next 10 years," and "Next year "will not be a very high-growth year, but it will be a positive year; beyond that I'm pessimistic. If Moore's law has not slowed down in the lab, it will surely slow down in the marketplace, and that in turn will have an effect on foundries.Interesting point, because unlike others I like to read the fortunes of technology sector in tea-leaves called chips. Silicon is the building block our networked life. If steel was the backbone of industrial age, silicon has been the fuel of our modern post-industrial lives. A slowing chip sector roughly translates into a slower growth for the entire technology food chain. It is also indicative of the fact, that the silicon power has outpaced the imagination. We as consumers of technology have figured out ways to consume the "intelligence" silicon brings to us. We still are only indulging in incremental improvements.
The uptake of VoIP in small communities is going to be a bit of problem because of E911 issues. Even though the industry is working hard to overcome these issues, it is a nagging issue for first responders. Case in point, Northland county in Minnesota.
Few people in the Northland are ditching their home phones yet, but the lure of dirt-cheap or free long-distance calling could turn a technologically challenging issue into a life-and-death situation. Here's the problem: Emergency calls made using new Internet telephone services ring in through a nonemergency line to the St. Louis County 911 center. Lt. Kevin Kivisto, who oversees the county's 911 emergency operations, said Internet emergency calls usually are more difficult to handle than land-line and cell-phone calls because the 911 operator must ask the identity and location of the caller. In a normal 911 call, that information automatically appears on a screen when the operator answers the call. If you can't speak into the phone, emergency responders still know where to find you. "They are going to get answered, but they're not going to get answered first," Kivisto said.
Finis just announced the SwiMP3, a waterproof MP3 player which uses bone conduction to vibrate the sound directly
into your head via your cheek bones (it actually attaches to your goggle straps, but we’ve also seen a prototype for
googles with a bone conduction MP3 player built right in). They don’t much storage capacity, but they say it has enough
space for 30 songs, which sounds like it should clock in somewhere around 128MB.
[Via MacMinute]
Tom Werner's got a cool little service called Gravatar, which lets you display a unique icon next to the posts or comments of authors. Your icon is tied to your email address, so your unique picture can appear at any place that you comment, as long as Gravatar is enabled on the site. If you're interested in trying it out, there's even a Movable Type plugin for implementing the service on your weblog.
Imagine this if you will. Your employer tells you that you shall store all of your work on the network drive and that you are not allowed to backup that data to a CD or put the information on any type of external storage including your computer. Does this scenario make you shake your head in dismay. Well a friend of mine lived under those rules for 3 years until there was a disaster and the IT department destroyed the data for his department along with a faulty backup strategy.
When the head of the company demanded and explanation and got in my friends face over why they did not do individual backups he broke out the company policy paper he had signed not once but three times. The end result was the IT head was fired along with 4-5 of his cronies that had developed this ridiculous policy.
So if you are in the IT department you better look at the policies that you place upon your employees and think about the worst case scenario. We live in the age of Electronics and like people devices die. What would happen to you today if you had a fire in your house and destroyed your media. Banks have safety deposit boxes for a reason and I make a trip monthly to swap out a external hard-drive so in the case of a disaster at home I only will loose a months worth of data. Check out this Story. [Meryl.net]
On Monday, we offhandedly declared Blu-Ray the winner over HD DVD to be the replacement of now standard DVD. Many have said that it's "too early to tell," but given both competitors have announced there will be products with their technology available to consumers before the end of 2005, we here at Gizmodo certainly don't think so. On the contrary, it's almost too late.
And so, we're declaring Blu-Ray the winner. Sure, the fact we want to call our optical media "Blurry Discs" for the next 10 years or so is a factor, but that's far from the prevailing one—Blu-Ray is not only technically superior to HD DVD, it has a far stronger corporate backing, and has demonstrated the ability to have more content available to push the format. After the jump, we break down the three areas—technical, financial, and commercial—where Blu-Ray has set itself apart from its only competition.
Word from Yahoo this afternoon that they're announcing a size increase, what they're calling an upgrade, to Yahoo Image Search database. According to the company, the database now includes an index of more than 1 billion images. I wouldn't be...
pr1000 writes "Wired is reporting that the State Department is planned on adding RFID chips to new American passports, starting with diplomat's passports in January. Those worried about the privacy concerns of RFID should take notice, as this rollout could set a precedent."
There's been lots of excitement over fiber deployments lately, and the latest is over SBC's announcement of Project LightSpeed, which SBC announced milliseconds after the FCC gave in to their demands. Karl Bode, over at Broadband Reports, notes that this announcement doesn't seem very different from almost every other fiber announcement in the past decade from the Bells -- all of which eventually went away for one reason or another (sometimes without giving back the incentives that were given to them). However, that "hasn't stopped the media from applauding like children watching a clown make balloon animals each time a bell issues another press release." He also challenges the assumption that (as the Bells claimed) they had no incentive to build out fiber without this FCC ruling, noting that cable is still cleaning DSL's clock in the US (though, almost nowhere else) and the cable guys have a credible triple play offering while the telcos are still fumbling around with useless temporary partnerships with satellite providers, rather than coming up with a real triple play solution that comes over a single pipe. Meanwhile, it's also worth noting that the SBC offering is only fiber to the node and then some updated form of DSL to the premise -- meaning it still won't have anywhere near the bandwidth that they could offer. What still should be interesting, though, is to see how wireless technologies play into all of this. For all the talk of triple play offerings, the focus is always on the home, and never on the mobility of people who live in the home.
The Cato Institute held a panel discussion yesterday featuring key negotiators in the discussions on the currently stalled Induce Act -- two from each "side." These are a few of the people who were infamously locked into a room together after Senator Hatch told them to come up with a workable compromise before the Congressional session ended.
For (dis)Content: David Green, MPAA, and Mitch Glazier, RIAA.
For technology/innovation/Betamax: Markham Erickson, NetCoalition, and Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge.
Below are few very rough notes on the opening gambits from each; I couldn't stick around for the whole thing. You can listen to audience Q&A, etc., here. Fascinating stuff:
David Green begins by digging deep into an old bag of tricks -- attempting to induce, if you will, "shock and awe" over how anyone can get the lastest Hollywood product in mere "seconds" via P2P. He then segues into a discussion about how, no matter what, "everyone" agrees that bad actors must be taken out (if not by Induce, then something else, and soon), complains bitterly about the Grokster decision, and ends by arguing that Induce isn't a new and radical change to copyright law. No mention of Betamax, even while addressing this last point.Mitch digs into the same bag, pulls out the chestnut about P2P as conduit to porn. Because you must think of the children. Discusses the various drafts; sounds as though he didn't care which one made it past the goal line. Says it's pretty clear to everyone that there is a bad business model here. These actors are bad and need to be isolated. We don't want to hurt the Yahoos and Googles of the world. But these people do need to be stopped.
Gigi starts with Betamax. Larger principles at stake. If this was just about P2P, she wouldn't be here. She calls Mitch on the porn gambit; says it's cynical and unfortunate that he mentioned porn. [People start to clap; she says, "No clapping."] Everyone here has a PC or another innovation, and it's because the Supreme Court found that the VCR is not an illegal copying tool. Technologies capable of substantial non-infringing uses are okay. This is critical. Led to all kinds of innovation. Critical to this economy. The problem with the Induce act, is that it was so broad that almost anyone would be liable. Cites EFF's "brilliant" mock complaint against Apple. Says under the "reasonable person" standard, of course iPod would fall under that. Says we heard all of this, "We won't go after Apple, we won't go after the iPod." But history shows otherwise. Induce would have punished more than bad actors, and further, more than tech companies. Even CNet was getting nervous. Never mind the promises, "No, no we won't sue you." Again, history shows otherwise.
Says she also hears, "We need to get rid of Grokster." But do we? Argues lawsuits are working. DoJ is helping. HR 4077 may even lower the standard for copyright infringement. Legit services gaining popularity, and album sales are up. Finally, spyware is scaring people away from P2P. People talk about impossibility of "competing with free" -- but you can actually do that.
Stresses again that people shouldn't be fooled that this is about P2P -- it's about who controls the future of technology. The content industry wants this. Or govt. controlling it for them. Broadcast flag -- represents kernel of that debate. Who will control: content or tech?
Gigi closes by reading the end of Grokster opinion out loud -- a lesson for content industry, for everyone. "We live in times when quicksilver changes..." Warns: Be careful what you ask for. Because you may kill the golden goose.
Markham starts by stating that "the entire Internet is a giant copying machine." So everything is a peer-to-peer platform. Legislation must distinguish between architecture and everything else. Betamax is the foundation upon which today's tech industry stands. There's got to be something above and beyond architecture. Betamax is responsible for the great products and services we have. Induce Act undermines Betamax. Proponents said they weren't touching Betamax. But our concern was that you were making cause of action irrelevant. The result is explosive litigation over every new tech that comes down the pike. We had reason to fear. So far, the content industry has sued everything that comes down that pike.
Markham says he disagrees that some in tech companies support Induce. Says they all have substantial concerns. His group worked on creating an alt. draft. Thought: secondary liability is case law, not statute. So put in Sony Betamax-like language. BSA had a thoughtful draft. IEEE did, too. Senator Hatch took all the drafts and told Copyright Office to meld/make it work -- it produced two drafts. Behavior-based and business model approach. Smart approach. But problem is that we needed time to work these things out. Hatch wanted to move this out of committee during the session. Told us to go into a room and work it out.
We tried to do that. Problem -- these discussions quickly devolved into a draft with a technology-specific approach. We had a huge problem with this approach. Who is "good," who is "bad"? This is a losing strategy. Future of the Internet is decentralization. Trying to construct this box will have a tremendous chilling efffect. Look at Internet industry and consumer electronics. The future is portability. Guess what? A lot of that content will be distributed over the Internet. They said, "If you're a good actor, you'll win in court." That doesn't help. Not when you need people to invest.
We need to look at the actions, not the tech itself.
Moderator Adam Thierer says Cato has been largely uninvolved. His own position a tough one -- he's an intellectual schizophrenic over copyright. He struggles. A hard sell on copyright policy. His qs for David and Mitch: What about the Sony precedent? That's a good decision. Made lots of money. Clearly we wouldn't have wanted it to come out another way. Why shoot the middleman at all? Analogy to gun debates. Why not just enforce directly against the infringer?
Qs for the other side -- isn't there any role at all for secondary/contributory liability in copyright law? Aren't some people really inducing? What conduct should be clearly illegal? He says the rule is: don't ban or mandate business models to solve copyright problems. But asks, are there exceptions to the rule?
Later: Coverage from Wired: Toe-to-Toe over Peer-to-Peer.
The idea of placing smart tags in passports has been around for some time, the EEC plans to implement it in 2005, and the US is in the process of planning for it as well. Unclear if global standards have been agreed to. The issue that has come up are the privacy implications for reading passive tags at a distance. Could a group of people passing through a portal have their passports read from their pockets or purses? Could something like a metallicized sleeve prevent reading? Fundamentally, what value does read at a distance, versus a simple optical scan provide? Another issue is the actual data held on the passport itself, will it contain details, or just an encrypted ID number for lookup? This Wired article discusses the key issue of read distance for passive chips. Also comments from a number of privacy groups. Bruce Schneier sees it darkly. Roy Want, principal engineer at Intel Research is quoted regards the difficulty of reading at a distance. Want's group has come up with a number of leading edge ideas which I follow. See an interview regards their current work on ubiquitous computing. Worth following....
Richard Epstein of the Financial Times has a serious-minded trouble-making piece on open source in today's paper. He starts with a diversion, arguing that the submarine aspect of the GPL -- incorporating open-source code into your proprietary app will make...
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Arianna Huffington has collated a list of the 12 worst offenders in outsourcing on her website. Amongst the employers on the big list of badness are Bank of America, Earthlink, GE, Cisco, and Dell. She’s also encouraging folks to go off to an additional website called Outsource Outrage which is attempting to clear up the India or bust trend with various alarming facts and figures. In fact, Outsource Outrage doesn’t have much good news. Information…
Cory Doctorow:
This is so freaking cool: the Dutch Parliament has unanimously declared that most images owned by Dutch public broadcasters should be posted to the Internet and dedicated to the public domain. This is astonishingly great forward-thinking from what has always been one of the best Parliaments in Europe.
He described the problems he encounters in his work: "Technically, there are increasing distribution possibilities. However, [distribution] rules are the obstacles. Even a broadcaster's own production rights forbid online distribution. Programmes made with public funds belong in the public domain."
"Based on my experience in education, you just about have to fall on your knees and beg for images. This is ridiculous," said Ms Broekers-Knol, member of the Upper Chamber, supported by her fellow parliamentary colleagues.
Cory Doctorow:
Windows errors on giant public billlboards are their own cult Internet photo-genre, but this is a great example of the species: an enormous Windows error dialogue-box on the towering billboard across from Toronto's Eaton Centre. It showed up in my RSS feed of images on Flickr tagged with "Toronto."
First it was Project Pronto, then it was Project LightSpeed. Now after publicly dissing FTTH for years, SBC is dreaming of 18 million fiber homes within three years. I am not sure, what changed their mind. Maybe, the FCC gave them the cake, the bakery and the silver as well.
Karl Bode: While the triennial review paved the way in keeping competitors from new fiber builds, the FCC last week went even further, declaring fiber to the node builds within 500 feet of customer premises didn't need to be shared. After the ruling, SBC proclaimed they'd cut the deployment schedule for project lightspeed from five years to three. The bells had been complaining for years that there was no incentive to build fiber networks with regulation in place. No incentive, despite the fact cable dominates North American broadband, and the bells need television services tied to DSL bundles to better compete. No incentive, despite the fact the local and long distance business is stagnant, and the bells are morphing into pure, bandwidth hungry data companies that need fiber to survive.Yesterday, I wrote about Alcatel winning the big dollars. However, there is more information on the whole bake-off. Alcatel won at the expense of Lucent Technologies which was desperately trying to get this business. Others who lost out on this deal: Juniper Networks,and Riverstone. Apparently, Ed Whitacre's heir apparent Randall Stevens made the call on this one. From what I have learned, Riverstone was counting on this big order, and so was Lucent. Tells you far LU has fallen from grace. Cisco Systems losing out on their core business - routers to Alcatel, that surely got to sting. Light Reading has some interesting commentary. Some speculative insight: BellSouth and Bell Canada are about to announce their plans, and the winner will be Alcatel.
: In Microsoft's Q3 earnings, MSN again achieved segment profitability while growing revenues by 10 percent over the year-ago quarter, on "continued strength in its Internet advertising business".
Revenues for MSN unit came in at $540 million, compared to $491 million in the year-ago quarter...while operating income came in at $77 million, up from $57 million in the year-ago quarter...
For its mobile and embedded devices unit, revenues came in at $69 million, compared to $53 million in the year-ago quarter. The unit shrinked its operating losses to $20 million, down from $34 million in the year-ago quarter.
About a year ago, we had a few stories about how Comcast's supposedly "unlimited" broadband plans really weren't unlimited. They have a "fuzzy cap," and will cut off those who go above it. Now, a subscriber to broadband service from Cogeco is discovering they also have a fuzzy cap on bandwidth. The user was cut off after downloading 150gigs this month. Some people respond by saying that these bandwidth hogs deserve to be cut off, but that isn't the point. If the company is promising "unlimited" broadband, and then limit it, that's false advertising. If they want to put a cap in place, that's absolutely their right -- but they shouldn't be advertising that the connection is unlimited. If they have a cap, they should tell users what that cap is.
In March, voters in Californias Mendocino County approved the nations first ban on growing genetically engineered crops. On November 2, residents ...
Knowledge@Wharton has a nice backgrounder on satellite radio business models by XM and Sirius. Worth to read through!
"f XM and Sirius are successful signing up consumers - and so far, that is still a big if - their businesses could be highly profitable. "I think the technology and the model will be profitable," says Fader. "Down the road, subscriptions will be common in radio."
Werbach says the network effect - where the costs of serving an additional customer are low once infrastructure has been built - is likely to work in favor of satellite radio. Both Sirius and XM have already launched their satellites, built networks and signed deals with leading content providers. In addition, satellite radio will gain subscribers as consumers buy new cars. "By installing the receivers in automobiles, it takes much of the decision out of the consumer's hands," says Werbach. "All the consumer has to do is decide whether to subscribe or not."
The automobile strategy should give satellite radio a captive audience and grab new customers. According to Peck, XM has projected that it could reach 20 million subscribers by 2010, largely because of its deals with GM and Honda, which churn out 6 million cars a year. Sirius has deals with Ford and Chrysler, which account for 6 million to 7 million cars a year.
But ultimately, Faber says XM and Sirius will have to get by without depending on automakers to market their receivers. "Right now the model depends on people buying new cars, but ultimately the businesses will have to stand on their own," says Fader. "In a couple of years, I see satellite radio growth divorced from the auto market."
Wow. "Announcing: Audio.Weblogs.Com. It shows the newest podcasts, in reverse chronologic order, the same way weblogs.com shows the most recently updated weblogs. Now you can sample the work of the podcast community before installing an iPodder app. Podcasters, you can ping via XML-RPC, the same way you ping weblogs.com (all the major weblog apps are compatible) or through a Web form. There's even an RSS feed that contains the most recent 100 podcasts, and if your desktop aggregator is enclosure-aware, you'll even get all the podcasts (but watch out it can add up to quite a bit of disk space). " - Dave Winer.
Madisonian Theory dons the little red hood to explore the levels of copyright use/abuse in three recent opinions. Great stuff:
Too Much Copyright: "The conventional 'copyfight' wisdom is that excessive emphasis on copyright's property-like character can lead to quashing, instead of promoting, innovation and creativity.Too much copyright (and badly understood copyright) has other pernicious effects. Today's example: the recent opinion of the Supreme Court of Arkansas in Arkansas Democrat-Gazette v. Brantley...The Arkansas Supreme Court...effectively [allowed] the newspaper (or any litigant) to hold up the civil litigation process – not a copyright case, but any case – on the ground that the evidence is covered by some copyright interest."
Too Little Copyright: "Sometimes, though, a little copyright goes a long way. Take Grosso v. Miramax (pdf link to the court's opinion), where the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that a screenwriter who sent an unsolicited script to Miramax could sue Miramax for breach of an implied contract – a state law claim – after portions of the script turned up in Rounders. This is so, it turns out, even though the Ninth Circuit ruled that the screenwriter's copyright law was rightly rejected on summary judgment."
Just Right: "Once in a while, and perhaps more often than academics sometimes concede, the court gets it right. Take Compaq Computer Corp. v. Ergonome Inc. (pdf link to the opinion), in which the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld a jury finding of fair use....For all of you out there teaching and using ergonomic principles to stay healthy at the keyboard, fear not: copyright won’t stand in your way."
David Galbraith writes about Yelp:
Backed by Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal, Yelp! is a service that allows you to find, share and manage recommendations for local services from people that you know.Most online local services sites are not that useful, basically just an online version of the Yellow Pages. In fact, until this year, Dex, one of the major suppliers of local listings, did not even have search.
Google and Yahoo have embryonic local services sites but Yelp adds persistence and reach to the word of mouth process, which is the way most people find local businesses. It's a marketplace worth more than the entire online advertising market at $14Bn in the US and $40Bn worldwide and so is starting to attract a great deal of interest.
Add Yelp to Yahoo and Google local, Citysearch and Craigslist and an interesting space is shaping up.
Good piece on how Google and Yahoo differ in their approach to local search.
I think that there is a significant difference from when one wants to search for a research paper on World War II, and when one searches for an Italian restaurant in D.C.
In the former, you want a pretty wide swathe to ensure that you aren't missing something or you are trying to expand your investigation. In the latter, you want to know what Italian restaurants are out there, where they are, how much they cost, and whether they are right for you. Locally, precision is key.
US military accuses Reuters of lying. Reuters had a camera crew on hand to see people digging a man, a woman, and four children out of a house in Falluja, and have video footage of this up on their site. The US military denies this ever happened, and have released a statement saying that "intelligence sources indicate a known Zarqawi propagandist is passing false reports to the media." Incredible...
Motorola's V710 problems, as noted by Russell, and a whole scores of others are pretty real and are causing the company major headaches. The company fessed up to this in its conference call. Moto said that the alignment of the camera module is
off center causing a recall and replacement of the phones in the channel. An
announcement of this issue should come through in the next few days, Legg Mason analyst Timm Bechter says, and points out that the company has a history of botching up products. Verizon is pissed to say the least and is looking else where, and chances are it could be looking at Nokia. "As has often been the case for Motorola, designing appealing products has been its strongpoint, while delivering those products on time and without problems has been more of an issue. We remind investors of a similar issue with one of the triplets last season, where the antenna blocked a portion of the camera's view, and of the Motorola T720, which never made it through full testing with Verizon Wireless due to late delivery and was instead launched below Verizon's traditionally stringent testing procedures, with many problems." I am hearing that Motorola Razor might be delayed because of quality issues. Timm doesn't point out that the Moto UI just simply sucks! I wonder what Albert Lin of American Technology Research have to say about this?
SBC Communications, finally, is getting its FTTP groove on. The company has started to formalize and pick vendors for its mega-billion dollar rollout. The big winner of this bonanza is Alcatel, which has built a sizeable portfolio of FTTP/C products.
To drive fiber deeper into the SBC network, Alcatel will provide SBC with its remote 7330 IP DSLAM solution, which is capable of supporting wire speed triple play services and multiple variations of DSL for SBC's Fiber to the Neighborhood architecture. In addition, Alcatel provides its 7340 Fiber to the Premise (FTTP) solutions. Alcatel is the world's leading supplier of broadband access solutions, with more than 50 million lines of DSL shipped. SBC has selected Alcatel's 7750 Service Router and 7450 Ethernet Services SwitchThis is a serious blow to Tellabs-AFC combine, which has been working with Verizon. Alcatel gets around $1.7 billion of the total spend. If Alcatel is providing routers, looks like Juniper and Cisco also missed out on the goodies. My sources are telling me there are some other winners. From what I have heard, 2Wire is going to be the primary vendor for residential Gateways & set-top-boxes. Wow! But wait, the news isn't over as yet. Looks like BellSouth is about to announce its vendors, and Alcatel and 2Wire are the likely winners there as well. Stay tuned!
: RealNetworks's Q3 losses widened as litigation costs in its antitrust case against Microsoft continued to weigh on its bottom line.
It reported a net loss of $7 million, compared with a loss of $3.7 million a year earlier. Revenue rose to $68.3 million from $51.8 million, helped by online music and video game sales...
CEO Rob Glaser reiterated that RealNetworks was still aiming to achieve profitability, excluding legal expenses, by the end of 2004.
Sub Services and Online music: Real now has over 1.55 million paying subscribers, up from over 1.4 million at the end of the second quarter of 2004. Paying subscribers to music service Rhapsody and premium radio services increased to over 625,000 from over 550,000 at the end of the second quarter of 2004. One year ago, Real's music services had more than 250,000 subscribers.
CBS MKTW: "The company blamed the expected shortfall on $700,000 of "incremental revenue" from its Harmony service that is unlikely to be repeated in the fourth quarter. The company also said it will not renew underperforming video content contracts, but new subs
