In the "better late than never" category, Celera Genomics Group - the for-profit arm of the race to sequence the human genome - has agreed to stop selling genetic information and put its data into the public domain. Without much fanfare (in fact the announcement was made in a regular quarterly earnings concall with investors and analysts) Celera announced that after July 1 it would contribute much of its DNA sequence data to public domain through the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the National Institutes of Health.
The uses and abuses of genetic information are clearly shaping up to be one of the biggest legal and ethical battles of this century. It would be nice to mark this down as a moral victory for forces of free information, but the simple fact is that Celera couldn't make a profitable business of this. That may be due to the nature of the information or the immaturity of the marketplace. I believe we'll have to fight this battle several more times in the years to come.
Guckert made more than two dozen excursions to the White House when there were no scheduled briefings. On many of these days, the Press Office held press gaggles aboard Air Force One—which raises questions about what Guckert was doing at the White House. On other days, the president held photo opportunities.Dan Gillmor)On at least fourteen occasions, Secret Service records show either the entry or exit time missing. Generally, the existing entry or exit times correlate with press conferences; on most of these days, the records show that Guckert checked in but was never processed out.
Text of approved Family Entertainment and Copyright Act here.
EFF discussion of bill here.
MPAA press release on new law here.
The Clearplay DVD playback device, which edits out objectionable material, is now clearly lawful as a result of a provision summarized here:
Title II: Exemption from Infringement for Skipping Audio and Video Content In Motion Pictures - Family Movie Act of 2005 - (Sec. 202) Creates an exemption from copyright infringement for: (1) the making imperceptible, by or at the direction of a private household, of limited portions of audio or video content of a motion picture during a performance in or transmitted to that household for private home viewing from an authorized copy of the motion picture; or (2) the creation or provision of technology that enables such editing, is designed and marketed for such use, creates no fixed copy of the altered version, and makes no changes, deletions or additions to commercial advertisements or promotional announcements that would otherwise be performed or displayed.
Amends the Trademark Act of 1946 to protect from liability for trademark infringement: (1) persons who engage in the above-referenced conduct; and (2) manufacturers of technology that enables such editing if notice is provided that the performance of the movie is altered from the director's or copyright holder's intended performance.
Clearplay device available here.
GoDaddy has surpassed Network Solutions as the largest domain name registrar. Via Internetnews.com
Mike Homer, of Netscape and now Kontiki, and Marc Andreessen, of Netscape and now Opsware, have launched the Open Media Network, a free platform for the storage and distribution of public video and audio content. I spoke to Homer about the new network, which uses Kontiki's video serving system on the back end. The system is a mashup of sorts between Tivo and BitTorrent - it has a well considered interface and employes a secure P2P network for file distribution (it doesn't actually use Tivo or BitTorrent technology). Homer has seeded OMN with public TV content, podcasts, and more, but the service is free for anyone to use, and includes a Force of Many recommendation and filtering system. This is similar to OurMedia.org and Google's recently launched video project, but this has a slicker implementation (well, so far Google does not have an implementation!).
The system is not yet fully functional, but Homer seems dead serious about making it so. So is this just a publicity play for Kontiki? Perhaps, but it's an audacious (and expensive) one if so. And OMN is not without a business model, despite its non profit status - Homer plans to incorporate a payment system and keep a small percentage of the revenues to cover operational costs.
Says Scoble. From a Longhorn blog he points to:
Q: What is Google doing?
A: I can't talk a whole lot about this yet. I can tell you that this is a pilot program for a new AdSense product that Google is looking into. Like all of their tests, it may disappear for a while, or be discontinued altogether.
yone else currently testing this technology?
A: No. Right now LonghornBlogs.com is the only site running this test. That will probably change in the next few days as their other alpha testers bring their systems online, but for now, we're it.
Q: How are you putting ads in the feeds?
A: I can't talk at all about implementation yet, because the system is not finalized. It's just a test to determine how well the current thought process works, the performance bottlenecks, and to discover any barriers to others using it. I CAN tell you that it isn't using Javascript.
Q: When can I start putting ads in MY feeds?
A: IF Google decides to launch this product, you can expect to see a wider public beta in the next few weeks.
Fellow members of the Blogsphere:
I wanted to encourage some of you to come to the "Peripheral Visionaries' IP-Based Communications Policy Summit" in DC on May 4. I'm growing increasingly more concerned that decisions about the future of the Internet and IP-based communications (that is to say, our collective future) are being made by policymakers without enough insight about what is going on outside the Beltway. We, however, will have no one to blame but ourselves if we do not step up and make every effort to participate in the policy debate. For this reason, I'm hosting the "Peripheral Visionaries' Policy Summit". The Summit is an effort to bring some outside-the-sandbox thinking to the inside-the-Beltway policy debate and to allow the technologists and policymakers to share their distinct perspectives. It is essential that the policymakers get a glimpse of the potential that IP technology has to transform the ways in which we communicate, well beyond simply the voice application that rides on an IP network. Frankly, it is also essential for all of us to get a better education on the ways of government and policy development.
We'll have representatives from all the major DC-based trade associations involved on all sides of the communications and Internet policy debates (so the inside-the-beltway policy makers and advocates will be well represented). We need a few more outside-the-Beltway technologists, innovators, thinkers and visionaries like you all to lend your voices at the Summit.
We've tried to bring the policymakers to us, but not enough leave the Beltway. So, we are coming to them.
The policymakers hold their Summits and not enough of us attend. We hold our Summits and not enough of them attend. I fear we're all, on both sides, just a bunch of trees falling in the forest with only ourselves to hear it. They need to hear from us, and, equally, we need to hear from them. Please consider joining us on May 4. It should be mutually edifying and, frankly, a lot of fun.
If you would like to blog the event, please drop me a line.
The Raw Story, going where professional journalists have utterly failed to tread, peers further into the increasingly weird "Jeff Gannon" story. Two Democratic members of Congress apparently had to file a Freedom of Information request with the Secret Service to get logs of Gannon's comings and goings at the White House, and the logs are curious.
More here, including the documents themselves.
See also Salon's coverage.
Well, this makes me all the o buy Wiley's books. How about you?Mercury News: Discord over Jobs biography. John Wiley & Sons, a leading publisher of technology books, said Apple Computer has removed all its titles from the shelves of Apple stores in apparent retaliation for the upcoming publication of a biography of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Pacific Growth Equities analyst Derek Brown sent a note to clients outlining his reaction to Netfix' (ticker: NFLX) earnings results. An extract:
INVESTMENT SUMMARY
- Netflix posted solid Q1 results yesterday, including rev/EPS of $154M/($0.17) vs. our est of $151M/($0.31) and consensus of $152M/($0.21)
- With Q1 trends generally in line, focus will fall on disappointing guidance, which calls for lower ASPs, higher SAC, and a one-quarter delay of profitability
- We are adjusting our ests to reflect competitive pressures mgmt’s outlook, while maintaining our Equal Weight rating.
VALUATION AND RECOMMENDATION
Netflix currently trades at 2005/2006 EV/Sales ratios of 0.7x and 0.5x. While we remain enamored with the opportunity being addressed by Netflix and see some reason for optimism in light of early consumer reaction to the Company’s lower price point, we continue to suggest a measured approach to the stock in light of current competitive dynamics in the online DVD rental category. Accordingly, we maintain an Equal Weight rating on Netflix’s shares and suggest that investors wait for clear signs of traction in the Company’s latest strategic initiatives and/or changes in the competitive landscape before establishing or adding to positions in the name.
Giving us slightly more hope that we’re actually going to pull back from the abyss that would be a next-gen DVD
format war, more manufacturers are joining Sony and Toshiba’s peace talks over how to fuse
Blu-ray and
HD-DVD into a single standard. Now
that fellow heavyweights Matsushita and Philips are in there it sounds like Sony and Toshiba are finally getting past
all the fronting and posturing and starting to hammer out the serious details of a unified format, and are even
beginning to brief the big movie studios about the details of a possible new format. There are a lot of reasons why
things might not work (besides all the ego stuff, there are technical reasons for why
combining Blu-ray and HD-DVD would prove difficult), but we can’t
help but be optimistic, you know? Everyone forgets that back in 1995 there were two competing formats for the original
DVD, but Sony and Toshiba managed sort things out back then, so it’s not like they’ve never figured out how to
compromise before (though you’d think they would have learned from the past).
Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat, has announced plans to become the world's first "solar city," meeting essentially all of its electricity needs through solar power:
"The proposed ambitious plan would create the state capital as a first solar city in India where the major necessities of power will be fulfilled through non-conventional sources of energy. At present, Gandhinagar, the base of major state government establishments, is consuming over four megawatt power every day. With implementation of proposed plan the dependency of the state capital from the electricity power would be reduced to the negligible levels, said S B Patil, deputy director [of the Gujarat Energy Development Agency]
(via our allies at TriplePundit
(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 11:31 AM)
Still trying to find something in English to properly confirm all the details about this, but apparently a French
court has ruled that adding anti-copying mechanisms to a DVD violates the rights consumers have to make private copies
of media that they’ve bought and paid for. Reportedly the court has given the company that released the film in
question one month to provide the guy who sued them with an unprotected DVD; it’s not entirely clear whether this
ruling applies to every DVD sold in France or just that one copy of Mulholland Drive this guy was trying to dub.
Either way, expect the film industry to throw its entire weight behind getting this ruling overturned.
[Via BoingBoing]
Interesting law review article:
Suppose you turn on your laptop while sitting at the kitchen table at home and respond OK to a prompt about accessing a nearby wireless Internet access point owned and operated by a neighbor. What potential liability may ensue from accessing someone else's wireless access point? How about intercepting wireless connection signals? What about setting up an open or unsecured wireless access point in your house or business? Attorneys can expect to grapple with these issues and other related questions as the popularity of wireless technology continues to increase.This paper explores several theories of liability involving both the accessing and operating of wireless Internet, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, wiretap laws, as well as trespass to chattels and other areas of common law. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of key policy considerations.
Om says Verizon should walk and likely spur a proxy fight. I say he's right.
Start with the fact that Verizon now owns a huge chunk of MCI via the Carlos Slim sale, and then add in that MCI will have to cough up 250 Million smackers for breaking up the deal they agreed to and Verizon can play a waiting game, while taunting Qwest.
I say Verizon should buy Bell South, the company that has the most to really offer Verizon--full control of the east and then the southeast. After that they can figure out with SBC what to do with the QWEST pest. In my view Verizon after Verizon and Bell South merge, the combined entity can sell off their stake in Cingular to SBC, buy out Vodafone for the same money leaving the USA with three RBOC's with national reach and Sprint being largely a data company with a wireless sister, Sprint PCS.
What will then happen will be a page taken out of the cable operators. Territory or system swaps. SBC and Verizon can look at the map and swap assets that are inside the other's core territory. Phone service returns to some semblance of order on a local level, the cable operators become their target and they can begin really rolling the trucks for FTTP.
QWEST, who was before SBC went after AT&T, the most network ready, remains the most network entrenched of the RBOC's behind SBC/AT&T. That means Verizon sets its sights on Sprint and gets the national network and smarts it lacks, or what it would have gotten from MCI, but acquires a few more key markts, the whole Latin American gateway market in Miami, the growing Carolina's tech sector, Atlanta which consistently is growing farther and wider and the rapidly growing Nashville area, all of which alone are worth the price of buying Bell South.
While all of this is speculation, in my mind it makes total sense. Verizon can even sell back to Qwest for cash the Carlos Slim stock, at a hefty premium after they are done being the spoiler shareholder just by being irritating.
In doing all this, Verizon eliminates Vodafone (Verizon Wireless via SBC buying out Cingular stake), widens their reach (BellSouth and Sprint), expands their market size (BellSouth) and gets a more advanced networking company (SPRINT). This is an investment banker's dream, and what's more, a large chunk of it gets fueled by other people's money.
I like a controversy, because that’s when we learn things.
In the ongoing debate I think we’ve lost sight of the original issue: separation of connectivity from applications. I’m a great proponent of this. Monopolies and markets above this in the stack concern me a lot less.
Skype’s network is proprietary, closed, and — yes — potentially downright dangerous in the long term. But I believe in dealing with reality as we find it, rather than an ideal world we wish we could conjure up. Pedant’s note: the Skype API opens the client UI, not the Skype network.
So far Skype isn’t particularly wedded to connectivity provision (with one exception). That means we don’t have to seek permission to use something else. Skype is a child of the Stupid Network, and self-centered as it may be we should be happy about this precocious toddler.
Enough of the B movie argument. Time of the main billing.
Being proprietary is no sin as long as the user is happy.
I admire Microsoft, and think most people whinge too much about Bill & co’s gazilions. People have forgotten how much word processors and operating systems used to cost, and how painful it was shopping for them. In the old days of the 80s and early 90s, Microsoft took expensive software and made cheaper mass-market versions. That’s a good thing.
When you buy MS Office, you’re not just buying a word processor. You’re buying the assurance that you can exchange editable documents with virtually any other business user. That’s a huge thing. With Windows, you’re buying the value of being able to employ almost anyone and know you don’t have to send them on a training course to understand what left-click and right-click might do. Microsoft’s officers and shareholders have only received a tiny sliver of the (without exaggeration) several trillions of dollars of value their standards have created.
The pattern is quite well-established. Beyond the obvious Word and Windows, SQL Server and Great Plains are more recent examples of how Microsoft has attempted to nibble away at the underbelly of my former-former employer, Oracle, by lowering prices and increasing volume. Microsoft’s products are great value for money.
I also admire Oracle. Proprietary? You betcha. But people haven’t been unloading their treasure onto Larry for nothing. Oracle does something very useful, and people are getting more value out of it than the price they pay, otherwise the revenue flow would stop. Open source alternatives, depite the hope and hype, have only nibbled at the fringes of the business. Oracle provide you with an assurance that your data will continue to be accessible for years to come, through many upgrade cycles of hardware, storage and OS. A vague hope that some voluntary collective (or tiny corporation with an experimental business model) will keep up the good work isn’t very reassuring in comparison.
I admire Skype. Predicable? Yessir - that’s me! It is successful because it solves the user’s problem. And that problem is a lot more than getting someone’s current IP address and creating a session and duplex audio channel. When you access Skype, it just works. (Err… ah. Except I’m currently Skypeless because it refuses to install the latest upgrade. Err. Um. No matter. Ignore the man behind the curtain.)
With Skype, there is no cognitive effort about having to purchase or provision the software. You can recommend it to friends without having to worry about them acquiring an incompatible version. Skype spreads because it does what the users want. It’s a cliche to say that people buy solutions to problems, not technology. Skype’s success suggests that those proffering alternatives failed to understand and solve the user’s problem. Some humility might be in order, not indignation.
That means there was a branding or marketing problem that had to be solved. And probably a usability one. Oh, and a compatibility one. And a nationalisation one. And a commercial one. Get the picture?
SIP does (almost) exactly what it says on the tin: it initiates (and tears down) sessions. No more, no less. The standard says nothing about the semantics of those sessions, or about stuff outside of the session protocol.
For example, one essential ingredient of a personal communications system is a means of limiting inbound calls on your attention. For this we have buddy lists and protocols for asking to join other peoples’ lists. Skype unifies the semantics of this: you know exactly what the other person’s experience will be, and you know it will work. (Anyone responding “XMPP/Jabber” will be given a good slap and asked to re-read this section: the absence of a unifying client means the semantics are not well-defined at the user level because you don’t know how the message will be consumed and presented at the other end; only the syntax and semantics of the machine-to-machine protocol. Machines != people.)
Skype has merely embraced and extended SIP inside a proprietary wrapper in order to solve a wider bunch of user problems. So does being a Skypehead make you the new Bellhead? Yes, but with the vital consideration that the end-to-end principle isn’t violated by Skype. Will be be getting the bill for Skype in five or ten years from now, just like we pay $60 to Bill G. when we buy a $300 PC in Wal-Mart. Possibly. But you’ll have banked a lot more value in the interim.
I wish I’d bought Microsoft stock early on, but my mind was poisoned against it by the horrors of FAR PASCAL pointers and the ugliness of Windows compared to the elegance of Unix. I’d now be a richer man if I’d seen the bigger picture.
I’m glad I worked for Oracle and got plenty of stock grants. I did very nicely out of it, thank you.
If Skype does an IPO, I’ll be calling my broker.
Posted by Martin at 02:07 PMGoogle (ticker: GOOG) blew away consensus revenue and earnings estimates, driving the stock up almost 10% in late trading. Details, plus three key take-aways:
Q1 Results
(all percentage changes and comparisons are year on year, unless stated otherwise)
3 Key Take-Aways
- Google's own search site grew revenues 116%, and the operating leverage in that business is dramatic.
- Google's traffic acquisition costs grew by less than the revenues on partner sites: 57% versus 75% . That means that Google is taking a greater proportion of its partners' revenues.
GOOG chart below.
At present, there are two ETFs that offer US investors an opportunity to invest in China - iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 Index Fund (ticker: FXI), and Golden Dragon Halter USX China Portfolio Index Fund (ticker: PGJ). Here is a quick performance update:
FXI and PGJ - Year-to-Date (YTD) Stock Market Performances:
(FXI in green, PGJ in brown)
But the two have moved almost in tandem over the last month and a half:
Comment: More on China ETFs FXI and PGJ here.
Based on data from Neilsen Bookscan, which aggregates point-of-sale data from about 70% of US bookstores, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and many smaller chains and leading independent bookstores, computer book sales, which have been falling by about 20% a year since 2001, have stabilized, and started to climb again. O'Reilly's internal market research group has built a MySQL data mart containing the Bookscan data since early 2003, and uses it for visualization and trend analysis. In this posting, I draw a few conclusions based on a year-on-year comparison of 2004 and 2005. Apart from giving us some interesting technology trend indicators (C# is gaining on Java, python is gaining on perl, InDesign is eating Quark's lunch), the data may also give us some intriguing insight into other economic factors. For example, might the increase in sales of books on QuickBooks and Excel indicate a rise in small business activity?
Direct and Related Links for 'Critical Firefox and Mozilla Flaws'
Direct and Related Links for 'Diebold Misled State Voting Officials'
Rojo Networks, Inc., has publicly released its RSS feed reader. The free, web-based service is being promoted as the only feed reader with social networking capabilities and tagging.
“Millions of people, from bloggers in pajamas to professional journalists and news outlets, are dynamically creating a flow of information that is unprecedented in the history of publishing,” said CEO of Rojo Networks Chris Alden. “We created Rojo to solve the ‘information overload’ problem that so many news and information consumers suffer from today…Our goal with Rojo’s community features, tags, search, link analysis, and wizard is to make the brave new world of blogs and RSS feeds accessible and appealing to technophiles and new consumers alike”.
The payments made to bloggers from leading weblog networks Weblogsinc and Gawker Media have been exposed in a new article from OJR.
Nick Denton’s Gawker Media runs on a “Complex system of compensation based on traffic, with a bonus is “banked” on good months and can’t be taken out in one month…leaving it to drop as the traffic drops in future months. traffic bonuses are weighted according to a multiplier depending on the subject matter of the blog.”
Jason Calacanis of Weblogsinc is reported to have dropped the 50/50 model and has instead adopted a flat fee structure for bloggers ranging from $100 to $3,000 per month, and is now signing multiple bloggers per blog to accomodate part time workers.
Faultline report published on The Reg indicating that the US Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences has ruled that InterTrust's DRM patents have precedence over Macrovision's. At least, in the US, because that's based on "first invention." However, overseas the nod usually goes to application filing date. There, Macrovision claims to have the edge, though I don't think they've gotten an official court ruling anywhere yet. InterTrust seems to believe it owns the international patents as well.
At stake is the MPEG LA licensing group patent pool and the potential very large pot of royalties that will emerge from it as DRM starts to become an issue on mobile phones.
Previous maunderings on the issue of mobile IP and its impacts on near-term business prospects here. Previous commentary on the InterTrust debacle over there.
A newly formed, union-backed anti-Wal-Mart group, which draws support from environmentalists, political activists, and women's rights groups, launched its first media campaign Wednesday to call for the world's largest retailer to reform its business practices. In its campaign called Wal-Mart Watch, Five Stones, formed in December 2004 along with its larger umbrella The Center for Community and Corporate Ethics, took out an ad in Wednesday's New York Times. The ad accuses Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of low pay and meager employee benefits that force their workers to rely on Medicaid, food stamps, and federal housing to survive.
Wal-Mart accused the group of engaging in a partisan attack, and questioned the group's information. (MSNBC)
Revenues up 93% year over year. Cash from operations was $516 million in the quarter. Crashing on the final, no really, final edit of the manuscript. So here is the story from Reuters.
House OKs Family Copyright Bill. A bill targeting camcorders in theaters and letting home users edit objectionable scenes from movies passed the House. The president is expected to give it the green light. By Katie Dean. [Wired News: DAT’s Entertainment]
Niklas's keynote presentation from Voice on the Net Canada 2005 is now available for download.
...is the title of a new book by Britain's Astronomer Royal, and president-elect of the Royal Society of London, Martin Rees. As the Guardian reports,
Martin Rees has a simple message for those seeking solace in the stars. The end is nigh: humanity has only a 50-50 chance of surviving the 21st century. According to the Astronomer Royal, nuclear war, biological terrorism, ecological mayhem or asteroid collisions could take us out in less than 100 years....
I haven't done a rigorous content analysis, but it seems to me that there are a growing number of serious attempts to chart the future that include a scenario for the self-destruction of the human species within several generations. In fact, our own Ten Year Forecast has taken such a turn.
Osprey is a peer-to-peer enabled content distribution system. A metadata management system for software and document collections enables local and distributed searching of materials. Items are available for download directly via URL or indirectly via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol.
Two components exist: the Osprey web application and permaseed (permanent seed). The web application includes metadata management for finding and exploring available content, as well as a BitTorrent tracker. The latter is a BitTorrent server application, which links content on a server to a BitTorrent swarm. Permaseed addresses the typical transience of BitTorrent file distribution by providing a daemonized service that functions more like a server than a BitTorrent client.
According to a nice, long Wall Street Journal feature, we tech journalists are no better than Armstrong Williams when it comes to doing it for cash.
In November, Child magazine's Technology Editor James Oppenheim appeared on a local television show in Austin, Texas, and reviewed educational gadgets and toys. He praised "My ABC's Picture Book," a personalized photo album from Eastman Kodak Co. ... There was one detail the audience didn't know: Kodak paid Mr. Oppenheim to mention the photo album, according to the company and Mr. Oppenheim.
Apparently, there is a shadowy organization that secretly hires journalists to write about cool gear and broadcast about events like CES on behalf of specific manufacturers. If anyone out there knows how to get in touch with this organization, I am willing to go under cover.
How Companies Pay TV Experts for On-Air Product Mentions [WSJ]
In an Ohio sting operation at a strip bar, a 22-year-old student intern with the United States Marshals Service was given a fake identity so she could work undercover at the club. But instead of giving her a fabricated identity, the police gave her the identity of another woman living in another Ohio city. And they didn't tell the other woman.
Oddly enough, this is legal. According to Ohio's identity theft law, the police are allowed to do it. More specifically, the crime cannot be prosecuted if:
The person or entity using the personal identifying information is a law enforcement agency, authorized fraud personnel, or a representative of or attorney for a law enforcement agency or authorized fraud personnel and is using the personal identifying information in a bona fide investigation, an information security evaluation, a pretext calling evaluation, or a similar matter.
I have to admit that I'm stunned. I naively assumed that the police would have a list of Social Security numbers that would never be given to real people, numbers that could be used for purposes such as this. Or at least that they would use identities of people from other parts of the country after asking for permission. (I'm sure people would volunteer to help out the police.) It never occurred to me that they would steal the identity of random citizens. What could they be thinking?
Those of you using Mozilla or Firefox need to read this important security notice. The condensed version do not all popups on sites you don't 100% trust! [ZDNet]
Intermix Media (ticker: MIX), which provides online games and greeting cards, filed notification with the SEC on April 12th that it was being investigated by the NY Attorney General's office for illegal spyware. Full text, a comment and a question:
The Company has recently been advised by the Internet Bureau of the Office of the New York Attorney General (the “NY AG”) that it is considering commencing an action against the Company for unlawful and deceptive acts and practices associated with distribution of toolbar, redirect and contextual ad serving applications (“downloads”). The NY AG asserts that the Company and/or third parties distributed downloads that were installed by users without sufficient notice or consent and in a manner that made it difficult to locate and remove the programs. The NY AG, in the event of litigation, would be seeking disgorgement of profits, civil penalties and other remedies. While the Company respectfully disagrees with the assertions of the NY AG, the Company is committed to resolving the matter as soon as practicable. The Company’s download applications and business, part of its Network segment, were created by past leadership. The Company has been in the process of scaling down its download business, which does not represent a material component of the Company’s fiscal year 2006 forecasts contained in the Company’s current report on Form 8-K filed concurrently herewith. The Company’s estimate of the financial impact of the NY AG matter is included in the Company’s forecasts, although no assurance can be given that the financial impact of the matter will be confined to the Company’s expectations.
Quick comment:
Here's the extract from MIX's most recent 10-K (June 2004) discussing its "download" business:
In fiscal year 2004, we introduced download applications that are distributed by Flowgo.com and bundled with third party free applications, such as the Kazaa Media Desktop. One application is a customizable toolbar that attaches to Internet Explorer® and contains functionality for paid user actions such as Web search, travel, shopping and games. Another application redirects misspelled searches and timed-out searches to a search page that helps the user find the desired destination. As of March 31, 2004, we have revenue sharing arrangements with 16 third-party distributors of our applications. We earn advertising revenues from Overture Services, Inc. when customers use our applications. Revenues from Overture Services, Inc. were approximately 12% of fiscal year 2004 network segment revenues.
Question:
The quote states clearly that Intermix monetizes its download (spyware?) business though pay-per-click ads from Overture. Does that mean Yahoo! (owner of Overture) carries litigation risk?
MIX chart below.
A Swiss judge is investigating possible bribery charges involving a $50 million contract to renovate the headquarters of a Geneva-based United Nations agency, according to government documents and Swiss and American officials....nks, Manon!)Investigators said the judge was trying to determine if Mr. Wilson had bribed a senior official at the United Nations agency to win the renovation contract. Edward Kwakwa, the agency's legal counsel, said Khamis Suedi, a top official at the intellectual property agency, acknowledged having received 325,000 Swiss francs, about $270,000, from Mr. Wilson, but said the money was from a private business venture that had no connection to the agency's construction contract. In an interview, Mr. Suedi said he had had nothing to do with the awarding of the contract.
Direct and Related Links for 'Amazon considers DVD rental partnership'
A new report released today from the Open Net Initiative indicates that blog filtering and censorship is on the increase in China.
The comprehensive study found that major Chinese blog providers either prevent posts with certain politically sensitive keywords or edit the posts to remove them.
The report also looks at recent blogging history in the country, including reports that in March 2004, the state closed three popular, domestic blog providers, reportedly because a blogger posted a controversial letter regarding the Tiananmen Square incident and the SARS outbreak. Subsequently, all three providers were allowed to re-open, but implemented filtering mechanisms to control content posted to their blogs.
The report also indicated wide spread blocking of blogs hosted on Google’s Blogspot domain.
Long NYTimes piece today by Jon Pareles on the vague category "world music" and how it's flourishing in the digital realm after being essentially abandoned by the Cartel. This heading encompasses a huge variety of non-American-pop sounds, including pop from other countries, club music from Europe, new-agey stuff, gospel, drumming, and on and on.
Of course, the best place to get this material isn't in the big box retailers or even local music stores. It's online. Everything from Indian DJs uploading hourlong mixes of their latest club spins to officious institutions like the Smithsonian, which is now offering smithsonianglobalsound.org, a slick and professional presentation including annotations and royalties flowing to musicians around the world.
Pareles does a nice job of turning a paragraph or two on many of the major non-US influences in this area. So if you want to know about Brazilian pop or Congolese soukous you can read a bit. I just wish he had put in a few more URLs. The links are tantalizing but mostly slanted towards commercial services like emusic.
We won big this week. First, there is a genuinely substantive policy discussion going on within WIPO about its obligations to be more than an IP-factory and instead explore its capacity as a positive force for the social and economic development of its member states. Not only was the majority of the meeting spent discussing the excellent Friends of Development proposal, but the good guys secured two more meetings to focus on reforming WIPO, defeating those who wanted to limit the process to a single additional meeting. Second, WIPO agreed to open the next two events to the 17 non-accredited non-government organizations (NGOs) that fought hard to attend this first meeting.nks, Donna!)The Chair's summary of the proceedings and the next steps in the process have been reproduced for your convenience after the jump. WIPO has now ended its first Inter-Sessional Intergovernmental Meeting (IIM) on the Development Agenda. The next meeting will be June 20-22, where delegates will consider comments on the proposals from the 14 Friends of Development, the US, the UK, Mexico, and any other proposals put forward. The third meeting will be sometime in July. That meeting will finalize the report to the WIPO General Assembly.
In the Q&A session, I asked Mr. Moss directly why the decision was made to use a remotely readable chip rather than one that can only be read by physical contact. Technically, this decision is nearly indefensible, unless one wants to be able to read passports without notifying their owners -- which, officially at least, is not a goal of the U.S. government's program. Mr. Moss gave a pretty weak answer, which amounted to an assertion that it would have been too difficult to agree on a standard for contact-based reading of passports. This wasn't very convincing, since the smart-card standard could be applied to passports nearly as-is -- the only change necessary would be to specify exactly where on the passport the smart-card contacts would be. The standardization and security problems associated with contactless cards seem to be much more serious.After the panel, I discussed this issue with Kenn Cukier of The Economist, who has followed the development of this technology for a while and has a good perspective on how we reached the current state. It seems that the decision to use contactless technology was made without fully understanding its consequences, relying on technical assurances from people who had products to sell. Now that the problems with that decision have become obvious, it's late in the process and would be expensive and embarrassing to back out. In short, this looks like another flawed technology procurement program.
The Internet, of course, is different. You get your Net connection from your cable company or your phone company or a local ISP. But you aren't limited to that provider's content -- you have the whole Internet at your fingertips. In other words, you'll be cutting out the middleman. Your data provider will give you the pipe, but then you'll use that connection to go directly to whatever content you want: TV networks, music stations, Web pages, photos etc.
The channel model will be gone. [Yahoo Search: Grokster]
This page provides selected, categorized and annotated links to free resources about Chinese stocks and the Chinese economy, and other relevant commentary for investors and traders. It's one of a family of resource pages:
China Investment Blogs
billsdue provides news and analysis of Chinese Internet and gaming companies, and offers periodic thoughts on Chinese culture and politics. Referring to himself as an "accidental online media type with an abiding interest in international relations, and strong area expertise in China", Bill Bishop is a co-founder of CBS Marketwatch. He is currently the CEO of Red Mushroom, a Beijing-based online game studio. Posts vary, but can be as many as three per day. He is a good resource for analysis, investment bank research reports, and rumors and sightings of Western executives in China.
China Net Investor provides a news digest about Chinese Internet and technology companies. The focus lies on Chinese Internet, telecom and networking companies but also covers macroeconomic and political news of relevance to them. Posts are very frequent (2 to 5 per day). The blog is written by an anonymous author who uses the pen name "Johannes". He has a masters degree in macroeconomics and describes himself as "a passionate private investor with about 10 years of investment experience".
Walter Hutchens' Blog is described by the editor as “Notes and comments on sundry things, generally related to China's developing markets for stocks and other securities, particularly the laws and regulations purporting to govern them”. The blog is maintained by Prof. Walter Hutchens of the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Prof. Hutchens posts two or three times per week.
The China Stock Blog focuses on Chinese stocks traded on U.S exchanges, as well as financial and market news of relevance to them. It's written by Ezra Marbach, an ex-investment banker who lived in Beijing before returning to New York where he now lives. Posts are frequent - often as many as five each day. The blog focuses on important news developments, covers the earnings results of Chinese companies, and provides frequent extracts from conference calls. Posts are categorized by sector and ticker, so readers can easily view all the posts on a particular stock. Ticker categories are listed down the left hand side of the blog. Combined with its coverage of small and micro-cap Chinese stocks, the China Stock Blog is a good resource for small cap investors.
China Poilitical, Economic and Business News
China Daily is a China news and information site.
People's Daily is a China news and information site.
China Business News
Pacific Epoch provides comprehensive news and rumors dealing with Chinese Internet and technology companies. The site is particularly strong on details of companies raising capital, forming alliances, and completing deals. But the site is quick to publish unsubstantiated rumors.
Market Research
iResearch is a Chinese market research firm. It is a good resource for statistics, trend data and analysis covering the Internet, Internet marketing, and online media.
Equity Research
The China Analyst is Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy's weekly report on the Chinese Internet and technology market. Commentaries are based on data Piper collects daily using staff and consultants in Mainland China and Hong Kong. The report’s goal is to analyze developments in both China and its technology market, and discuss how the two impact both Piper's existing coverage companies and the long-term outlook of the Chinese Internet market. Coverage companies include 51Job (ticker: JOBS), Ctrip.com (ticker: CTRP), Hurray! Holdings (ticker: HRAY), Linktone (ticker: LTON), NetEase (ticker: NTES), Shanda Interactive (ticker: SNDA), Sina.com (ticker: SINA), Sohu.com (ticker: SOHU), and Tom Online (ticker: TOMO).
China Stock Index
Halter USX China Index is comprised of companies whose common stock is publicly traded in the United States and the majority of whose business is conducted within Mainland China.
China Exchange-Traded-Funds (ETFs)
iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 Index Fund (ticker: FXI) is designed to represent the performance of the largest companies in the China equity market that are available to international investors. The Index consists of 25 of the largest and most liquid Chinese companies. All of the securities in the Index trade on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
PowerShares Golden Dragon Halter USX China (ticker: PGJ) is an ETF that mirrors the Halter USX China Index. The Halter USX China Index is comprised of companies whose common stock is publicly traded in the United States and the majority of whose business is conducted within Mainland China.
China Government Agencies
Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Ministry of Commerce
National Bureau of Statistics
State Economic and Trade Commission
How to submit a blog for (no guarantee) consideration in this list
Blogs are chosen entirely on merit. If your blog is accepted and you'd like to link to this page, that's great. But we don't require a link because link swapping compromises editorial integrity. If you think your blog is a candidate for acceptance to this page, please email the following information (be careful to include everything) to ChinaAnalyst@gmail.com:
Please make sure you number your answers to these questions in the
same order that they appear here. If in doubt, include more rather
than less information. It increases your chance of inclusion and the
quality of the write-up if you are included.
Metroland Online: "Dennis Karius, a former host of The Portside on WRPI public radio, recently found out just what sort of a climate of fear the recent media and legal attention to copyright violations has spawned. Earlier this year, he lost his radio show as a result of airing audio that he recorded off his television from C-SPAN." (Via Siva.)
CPTech's Manon Ress has a half-time report from Day 2 of the Development Agenda meetings at WIPO: "It looks to me as if it's getting hotter in Geneva."
Abhi sent me this a couple of days ago, cool stuff:
1) Google Maps exposes a lot of the functionality (intentionally? For a later API?) and this has led to some really cool hacks:
The easiest to use is www.mygmaps.com where you can create your own maps with location markers.There are a few wikis that are really good -
http://libgmail.sourceforge
.net/googlemaps.html AND
They have a few screenshots - The basic idea is that you can feed your own xml file to google maps and create your own locations, paths. There are also more advanced hacks.
2) And then there is a flickr group where members take google satellite images and create memory maps out of them (my school; my house; the theater - all marked out).
Article on REDSKINS case. I concur with IPKat that as troubling as any other aspect of this case is the team's determination to fight so hard to retain a name that identifies a race of people by the color of their skins, for the purpose of a game. In an effort to move licensed merchandise (or secure better stadium deals in new cities), professional teams jettison every aspect of their trademark indicia. Washington's reluctance to migrate away from this term is regrettable.
Remember how the anti-municipal sock puppets and ideologues keep citing the same failures? They're not failures. In fact, they're generally successes. You hear Tacoma, Wash.; Ashland, Ore.; Braintree, Mass.; Marietta, Georgia; and others bandied about as failures that have drained taxpayer inputs and failed to live up to their financial projects. As I discovered when starting down the research path on this two months ago, those networks are successes: the numbers that "prove" their failure are typically cherrypicked from early construction stages or even take numbers that were planning figures and weren't used during the approval stages by voters, city councils, or boards of directors.
The people at Free Press have released a comprehensive report, "Telco Lies and the Truth about Municipal Broadband Networks," (PDF) that includes the first-hand research that the authors of the reports that declare these networks failures never did. The Beacon Hill Institute report last spring, for instance, cites a number of cases using newspaper article, defunct Web sites, and early projects and apparently never actually spoke to the network operators about details. (I take the report apart in a post a few weeks ago.)
All academics will tell you that primary sources are how you do it. If you talk to a primary source and they have publicly available documentation to back up what they say, then you can confirm or reject the contentions of that primary source. You can bring in other primary sources who have opposing views and facts. But if you rely on second or third hand reports, you will invariably produce conclusions that are poorly founded.
The Free Press counters the misinformation that's been provided in two ways: first, by showing the fruit of the poisoned tree, a several-year-old report that gets cited today as if the information is contemporary (and it was bad back then, too); and, second, by using primary sources to show how each of these networks is producing the kinds of financial results that should encourage this sort of local development.
A second report, "Connecting People: The Truth about Municipal Broadband," (PDF) handles the arguments about whether municipal networks improperly take the role of private enterprise in a new and unique way and suck the revenue and development that comes from private infrastructure into a municipal maw. This report also tries to address misinformation about the way in which these networks operator, historical antecedents about municipal utilities, and whether municipalities are incompetent to run operations.
I took the anti-municipal folks to task for their lack of disclosure about membership, funding sources, and indirect lobbying efforts. I was able to pin Verizon at the back of most of those efforts through direct funding of institutes that wrote reports or indirect operation of groups that then themselves backed reports and public opinion articles.
I just took the same approach to looking at the funding, staff, and board members of Free Press. The funding is miniscule compared to the think-tanks involved in the anti-municipal effort: a few hundred thousand dollars a year drives Free Press's work. I was unable to find any smoking guns on the board members or staff: they're mostly academics and journalists with an interest in fighting government and corporate propaganda that distorts the public understanding. But they don't seem to have an ideological bent.
A big chunk of their funding comes from the Media Education Foundation, about half of their annual revenue. That group's mission is distribution of educational videotapes to educational, social, and religious organizations. They're both located in Northampton, Mass. It's pretty easy to find an ideological bias when you look at their board of advisers, which includes Noam Chomsky and the founder and board chairman of the Free Press. Update: Free Press explained that they are a spinoff non-profit from MEF so operated under their auspices during that period. The 2003 non-profit IRS disclosure form shows funding that was part of that separation process as grants flowed through MEF to Free Press until it was a separate organization.
The reports are also co-sponsored by the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union (which publishes Consumer Reports), and the Media Access Project. MAP is about diversity in media and ownership, and works on issues like low-power radio and opening up cable infrastructure to multiple competitive providers. The two consumer groups fight for consumer rights.
I don't find any funding of the Free Press from vested interests: municipalities, private vendors of networking equipment, competitive carriers with incumbents involved in this debate, nor individuals involved in government or contracting related to it. The Media Access Project is opposed to many of the business and legal tactics employed by incumbents to reduce competitor's ability to thrive in the marketplace.
The Economist has an excellent editorial on security trade-offs. You need to subscribe to read the whole thing, but here's my favorite paragraph:
The second point is that all technologies have both good and bad uses. There is currently a debate about whether it is safe to install mobile antennas in underground stations, for example, for fear that terrorists will use mobile phones to detonate bombs. Last year's bombs in Madrid were detonated by mobile phones, but it was the phones' internal alarm-clock function, not a call, that was used as the trigger mechanism. Nobody is suggesting that alarm clocks be outlawed, however; nor does anyone suggest banning telephones, even though kidnappers can use them to make ransom demands. Rather than demonising new technologies, their legitimate uses by good people must always be weighed against their illegitimate uses by bad ones. New technologies are inevitable, but by learning the lessons of history, needless scares need not be.
If your running Google AdSense ads on your site here is a tool Chris Pirillo is recommending.
Personally I guess if these ads were doing well enough to allow me to retire I may have a look at them otherwise my time is much more valuable that parsing log files. [Chris Pirillo]
Apple today announced that Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" will go on sale Friday, April 29, beginning at 6:00 p.m. during special events at Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. Tiger has more than 200 new features and innovations including Dashboard, an updated iChat, a new Automator workflow application, Safari with a built-in RSS reader and Spotlight, Apple's new desktop search technology that lets users instantly find anything stored on their Mac. It is available for $130 for a single user license or as a family pack for $200
You can still pre-order at Amazon with a $35 rebate by clicking here.
James Enck has a few posts on the subject of Skype penetration and one's rather interesting.
I actually think some telco people may really have issues with what the numbers are showing, because the adoption rate is going to impact the carriers in a few ways.
1. There will be more broadband installed
2. Cellular traffic will drop
3. Landline long-distance between family members who are all on line will drop.
As James said, "houston, we have a problem."
The Buzztracker software has been mining Google News (only English-language news sources) for over a year and keeping track of relationships between geographic locations mentioned in articles and draw maps that actually seem to reflect the "buzz" of the day. You can also dig down into the articles from which the maps were generated, add it to your website and get the RSS feed.
Via pixel y dixel < slashdot.
Contagious Media Showdown is an open competition to see who can make the most viral website.
Eyebeam set up a special server, found $ thousands in prize money, and recruited the brightest to make this experiment in contagious media possible.
The workshops and panel include the people behind FundRace, BlackPeopleLoveUs, the Rejection Line, Blogdex, Del.icio.us, the Nike Sweatshop Email, etc.
Sign up before April 30th.
We recently covered Geoffrey Moore's view on The Future Of IT. Ross Mayfield covers, Geoffrey Moore's speech titled The Role of Open Source Computing at the OSBC meet held recently. Excerpts with edits and comments added:
Open source is a non-proprietary product model, a value added services model (contributed,compensated), a community (self-organizing collaborative, repository of knowledge,forum for sharing best practices - these dynamics simply work). Where is open source in the category adoption lifecycle (where the technology adoption lifecycle is an early subset, the innovator/early adopter part). Early main street to mature mainstreet (indefinitely elastic middle period), declining main street to end of life. Linux is out of the chasm because Solaris is being marginalized, which had fought off NT, but can't fight both. Linux Server OS is passing through tornado.
• Linux Client OS is in early adopter phase
• Embedded Linux is in Early market
• Firefox is in the chasm (this is progress, it means you have achieved a constituency in the early market and you need to appeal to new constituencies, some don't want to go there [e.g. plugin madness])
• MySQL is in the Bowling Alley -- a persistent economic entity, which allows people to build out infrastructure on top if it
• JBoss - late market
• Apache - late market
• Enterprise Consulting - main street
• Support Services - main street
The Economic Significance: the Internet was a critical enabler to allow the collaborative behavior to happen.Developed company economies face competition, driving efficiency to sustain the unsustainable lifestyle.
• Strategy 101: Competitive advantage is how you create returns above others.
• Core: any process that contributes directly to sustainable differentiation leading to competitive advantage to target markets.
• Context : All other processes required to fulfill commitments to one or more stakeholders.
Commoditization takes all the earnings of the industry down. Managing core and context is center stage. Core is what you choose to be different about.If you are Dominos, the Pizza is context, 30 minutes is core. What ever you have that is core, however, becomes context over time. We are horrible at managing less differentiated goods. Scarce resources get tied up in context. Context build-up: what once made them great now leads to weakened competitive performance and lower returns on invested capital. Need more healthy processes to extract resources from the context to the core. Open source's most important role is to commodities context processes so people can extract them and re-purpose them for the core.
How Open Source succeeds: As a community - drives competition culture nuts, can't find the enemy. A Collaborative - you give before you receive (all Prisoner Dilemma games have this as the winning strategy).Collaboration cultures go sour when they become self-serving, clubby and self-indulgent. As a Cooperative - have to be disciplined with your scarce resources. Notion that everyone has a veto is a hard way to work in practice. Seek alignment,with patience.
How Open Source fails: Slips into a Control Culture; bureaucracy of standards organizations (we have seen this movie before, but this is now a collaborative exercises that is entrepreneurial - but this is the thing that got us last time), majoring in minors, co-opted by vested interests. Slips into Cultivation Culture: ego inflation and demagoguery, tyranny of political correctness. Geoffrey's style is inimitable, content deeply insightful. Must read for all
The Philly plan suggests non-profit, wholesale model: Philadelphia's business plan for their wireless city-wide network is out. Esme Vos interviewed the CIO of Philadelphia on her site, linked above. The report and the RFP are available for download in PDF form.
In its broadest form, Philly proposes to create a separate non-profit organization which will conduct fundraising and obtain bank loans. Its finances will be separate from the city by charter. The non-profit will not operate as an ISP, but will handle infrastructure. This is a model that I have suggested in the past is ideal for municipalities because it promotes competition for the customer among many entities without requiring that each entity build their own infrastructure as a cost of entry into the market.
The business plan includes extensive technical and financial details that now must be factored into the very broad and often inaccurate criticisms of Philadelphia's plan. For instance, previous criticism suggested the plan didn't include WiMax in its thinking. Oops. It does. Extensively, in both pre-WiMax and certified WiMax forms.
Much of the criticism suggested that the city was going to give away Wi-Fi to everyone, thought that Wi-Fi receivers inside laptops wouldn't receive signals indoors, and that the number of nodes was unreasonably small. My reading of the report finds these criticisms specifically answered in depth.
Update: Coverage of the announcement
Fathom's keyword price index is up last month. MediaPost:
PRICES FOR PAID SEARCH LISTINGS rebounded in March, rising 9 percent to an average of $1.75 a click, according to the most recent Fathom Online Keyword Price Index, released today.
age cost of keywords--which had fallen during the first two months of the year, after rising steadily from September through the holidays--now exceeds last December's $1.70 by about 3 percent. Matt McMahon, Fathom Online's executive vice president-corporate development, attributed the upswing in keyword pricing to seasonal shifts in ad spending.
WorldChanging has a post by Jeremy Faludi:
Doors of Perception is a biannual conference put on by the Dutch ministry of Education, Culture and Science; it is a collection of designers, technologists, and other creative people from diverse fields. This year it is held in Delhi, and the theme is Infra, meaning infrastructure, but its about a range of ways in which technology and innovative design or ideas can help international development and general worldchanging. The first days most interesting presentation was by Solomon Benjamin, a researcher/consultant from Bangalore...
d how the most innovative places in India, the places where new technology and manufacturing starts, are slums. There is almost no infrastructure, and certainly no help from government; in fact, most activity is underground in order to avoid taxes and general governmental disapproval of things that werent part of their plan. These entrepreneurs have no capital, evolving their own methods of financing; they also have no IP law. And yet whole clusters of interdependent companies sprout up making things that are found nowhere else in the country (computer cable mfr.s were his main example).
And it turns out this phenomenon is not unique to India. He pointed out an example in New York, and I would say the same is true in reverse of Silicon Valley--its explosion of innovative companies created an unplanned, unregulated city-sprawl. Its not a slum, but it does have the highest concentration of Superfund sites in the country. This brings home the point that innovation causes social problems as well as benefits.
Benjamins talk reminded me of a characteristic of many non-industrialized nations that I think will push India ahead in the future: everything here is patched, hacked, and customized. You have to do that, because theres insufficient infrastructure to support the products you use, and because peoples needs are always far beyond what they can buy. As a result, everyone here is a hacker, meaning everyone is an innovator...Having everyone in your country start with a hacker mindset will help you leapfrog from cheap-labor-source to vital-technology-hub.
The barrier to such leapfrogging is infrastructure, and as technology become more self-contained, more mobile, more peer-to-peer, infrastructure becomes less and less necessary.
The Mobile Technology Weblog makes an interesting point:
Ive been doing a little research lately; Ive been bugging people all around me with the question: why do you love SMS?. The top responses Ive been getting are:
you immediately get updated when an SMS arrives)
- Its private
- Its easy (although I think that is a relative statement)
- It always works
Looking at these responses, something hit me: SMS is nothing more then an outrageously expensive, very short, limited capability email!
The big advantage is that every mobile phone in the market can handle SMS. Yet it wont be long until the majority of mobile phones will be able to handle emails and instant messaging aswell.
Looking at the enormous success of the blackberry and at my own serious mobile email addiction, I dont see any reason why SMS should survive. My emails are just as easy to type, can be delivered just as quickly, are just as private, they always work, can be received on my phone (plus a million other devices) and theyre loads cheaper
Joshua Schachter, the guy behind the excellent del.icio.us social bookmarking service, has provided some details of the investors behind his decision to work del.icio.us full-time:
As you may know, I left my job a few weeks ago in order to devote myself full-time to del.icio.us. In order to make that posssible, I accepted an investment from a group of thoughtful and influential investors. The group I chose to work with understands my commitment to maintaining the integrity of the service and the security of your data. They were also willing to take a minority stake, which will keep me in control of the future of del.icio.us.
Union Square Ventures leads the investment group, and the other members are Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O'Reilly, and Bob Young.
I'm very excited about this opportunity to focus on del.icio.us and put together a team to help me grow the service. My first priority is improving reliability and responsiveness, with new features following soon.
Good luck to all. It’s a great tool and will be interesting to see what Joshua comes up with next. Certainly the mailing list, where Joshua made this announcement, is a lively place and a reflection of his receptiveness to users’ ideas.
Here's why, and implications for investors:
Electricity supply low:
Chinese government trying to slow its economy:
Conclusion:
(Make sure to check out Jay Dedman's workshop on Videoblogging Saturday afternoon. -kc.)
The Connecticut Supreme Court has ruled against car rental
company Acme Auto in a case over the company’s practice of charging drivers fees for “excessive speeding”.
See, the rental company had the bright idea to trick out its cars with a GPS device that would keep track of any
instances of speeding, and then charge customers an extra $150 everytime they topped out over 79 mph. The
company did actually notify customers of the fee— although it seems to have been fairly well hidden in the
contract—not that it matters since State Supreme Court said that the fees were illegal regardless of whether or
not drivers were aware of them.
[Via TechDirt]
...Microsoft and Sony move to block Apple's ambitions
Appleâs next moves in the consumer digital space are strikingly obviousâbuild out its iPod family and add high-end models that can display video and offer wireless connectivity of various types.
Appleâs forthcoming multimedia iPod (letâs call it mPod for now) will be based, we understand, on the latest Broadcom Alphamosaic chip. But the specifications of the device itself are far less interesting than what could be done with it from the user perspective, and from the business models Apple can build around it.
In the same way that iTunes, Appleâs online music store, provided a large selection of paid-for music content, Apple now has the opportunity, and formidable task, of persuading movie and TV studios to allow Apple to sell their digital content through online stores.
If Steve Jobs succeeds, Apple will own the keys to the digital entertainment kingdom; because the company that has the dominant digital rights management (DRM) technology becomes an extremely important gatekeeper.
...continuesComments on this Entry:
Muniwireless.com has the details on the conference call: Philly mayor and CIO will announce the details of their metropolitan-scale wireless network's business plan. The next phase should be issuing an RFP and considering vendors and financing.
He's running on his record....Apparently gubernatorial candidate and noted white collar crimebuster Elliot Spitzer bought AdWords for "AIG" on Google (he busted them while on watch as NY Atty Gen), but when I tried it, I got an ad for "shortgoogle.com." Huh.
I have just heard from Singaporean William Chee, now about 21, who set up TurboScout, a search engine that
that saves you time and makes your Web searches easy. With TurboScout you only enter keywords once, then getting and comparing original results from over 90 search engines across 7 categories is as simple as clicking the engine’s name. No more retyping keywords into different search engines.
Of course I’m a bit biased because I love seeing bright ideas come out of a) young folk’s heads, b) Asia, and c) Singapore. But it definitely seems like a good idea, and it works well. There’s even a Firefox extension. Check it out.
Take a look:
Q1 2005 stock market performance:
Search Engine Roundtable continues the discussion about the Internet Operating System and writes about thin clients:
So what is a thin client? It is roughly put software. Or as defined "a client designed to be especially small so that the bulk of the data processing occurs on the server." Imagine being able to buy a bare bones client whose main processing occurs on a local Google dataserver near you. Think of the applications, many years ago several companies envision this as well, while it never got off the ground it the idea was formed. According to what people are saying about Microsoft's new Longhorn, the OS will have a similar function in part to do many of the things a thin client can do. Distributed computing is not just for pet project like Google did in 2003 anymore. From the way I see the CPU according to Google or many others is not as important as the data that is contained on a computer. Or the storage that is takes to catalog the entire web. Who really needs to bother with speed and so on if all you need to do is check email, run business applications, and various other functions. We all don't need a Alienware machine even though some might be inclined to tell you so.
about using Google data processing and storage capabilities? Thin clients will help with NO viruses, NO hard drives, could last for 5-10 years no problem, and if you want something you could easily just subscribe for it. If not, then you don't have to pay for it. Now the smart thing about what Google is doing is that they are planning to sell data processing to the mass market. Why not? It makes sense from Google's standpoint. With more than 100,000 servers, you could do more than index the web. You could also come up with a solution to overcome the challenge of storage.
Imagine what a $100 Google thin client in Mexico would do? Something affordable enough for those on a limited income, but also powerful enough to change the way they use a computer and much less store information. The basis is that someone else will do it for you. Today if I brought an eMachine ($200-$300) down to a Mexican (or any) university for example that anyone could use any way they want, can you guess how long that thing would last before it was zapped by viruses, spyware, scumware, trojans, malfunctioning programs, so on and so on. It would be toast in 2 weeks. Imagine if this happened consistently every time you used a computer. Google's potential solution could change that. Every computer is your computer, you have the ability to access you data from wherever. Not have to worry about CPU or processing speed. Your experience would change the way you live.
Susan Crawford just posted her remarks at last week's Freedom to Connect gathering in Washington. She begins:
A right to connect, or freedom to connect, signals that we need permission -- rights only operate against someone who has the ability to say no. Freedom of speech, all of that -- all operates against the government. A digital bill of rights assumes that someone has the power to cut those rights off.
that we don't need permission. We are more threatened by ourselves and our willingness to look to government for permission than by anything else. Many of the people at the conference had problems with what she said; I agree that we need at least antitrust law, but I also believe government has a positive role (among other things) in preventing data control by the cable/phone giants.
Her essay shows powerful thinking, and is worth much consideration.
As part of Google’s localization push, the search engine will figure from your IP address what country you’re in and configure itself accordingly into a local site, with a local country suffix, and, sometimes, local language options. Fair enough, except for travellers and people who are quite happy with things as they are.
Running Google in Hong Kong, for example, throws up pages on a www.google.com.hk page that, without asking first, look like this:
With literally no English language entries on there, or any way to change the language back from Chinese, on the results page or the preferences page. In fact, I cannot figure out how to change it back at all. So I’m moving over to Clusty, at least for now. Help, anyone?
Here’s a directory of applications designed to run on USB drives, a subject I wrote about in the AWSJ and WSJ.com (subscription required; sorry). This list includes those suggestions kindly sent in by readers from the last posting. Please keep them coming (I haven’t checked to see whether those suggested run without hacks off USB drives, and I have left off some of the more sysadmin type tools the general reader might not have much appetite for.)
Then there are all the applications designed to run on Iomega’s proprietary Active Disk, some of which also come in non-Active Disk versions. There are also some other sites that have collected these kind of applications:
A&W, Chili's Grill & Bar, Dunkin' Donuts, and Rainforest Cafe have already failed. But Subway sandwich stores are popping up all over China. Subway is now the third-largest US fast-food chain in China, behind McDonald's (ticker: MCD) and YUM! Brands' (ticker: YUM) KFC. Read more here from Fortune Magazine.
The company, "Response Unlimited" pays about $150 a month for 6,000 names and $500 a month for 6,000 e-mail addresses. A spokesperson for the Schindlers confirmed that they had agreed to sell the information, but won't say for how much.Link (Thanks, Steve)
Link: Intelliseek's BlogPulse.
BlogPulse announced new features this week, including the daily stats page (upper left corner) and improved search and graphing capabilities. Remember that BlogPulse's search function allows users to search not only for key words but also entire links or URLS to track blog posts.
Has Microsoft killed production of the Xbox in anticipation of the launch of the Xbox 360 later this year? Microsoft revealed last week that there was indeed a shortage of the consoles because of their “surging popularity” (hmmmm…), but now SPOnG is “confirming” that Microsoft has ended production of the orginal Xbox altogether and isn’t planning on making any more. Seems like it’d be a little early for Microsoft to be doing that, especially given that the Xbox 360 isn’t due out for another eight months or so, right? We’re still waiting for Redmond to issue an official statement, but Larry Hryb, Director of Programming for Xbox Live, is squashing the rumor on his blog, saying that “We are NOT pulling the Xbox from stores. Xbox consoles being in short supply since they are popular and stopping production are two VERY different issues.”
RIAA based lost sales on "Units Shipped" NOT cd sold to customer.Link (Thanks, Jas_MHz!)
RIAA lost sales = record stores hold less stock.
Nielsen ratings based on actual sales = sales are up.
=> RIAA deliberaately misleading everyone and courts.
2=> File Swapping has led to increase in sales.
&=> "Lower Sales" only top 100. Add in non RIAA, non "chart" music sales, long tail sales.
Lies, Damns Lies, Statitics & Supreme Perjury.
You could always search for stocks on Google, and some - like GOOG - would show a lame little icon and then click you through to Yahoo Finance or a few other sites in a rather kludgy tabbed interface. Now, you get a stock chart right at the top of the results page, and a bunch of information. In fact, you get so much, you might not really need to click through to Yahoo anymore (if you click on the chart, you still are taken to a framed view of Yahoo Finance). Innaresting. All to be useful to the user, of course. But still....see my musings on this in a past post here.
p>
After seeing my little project go from a small hobby to a large one and
then consume all my waking hours, I've decided to quit my job and work
on del.icio.us full time.
en a lot of thought to how to make this happen, and ultimately
decided that the best way forward is to take on some outside investment.
I've taken this step because it lets me continue to grow del.icio.us
while keeping it independent.
I am excited to finally be able to devote all of my energy to working on
and improving this site, and I'll also be able to acquire some much-needed
infrastructure.
Congrats, Josh!
Back in September of 2004 Google argued for a motion to dismiss the case American Blinds had brought against it on illegal use of trademark terms in the AdWords network. Most of the requests in that motion were denied yesterday, I have learned. The court upheld American Blind's rights to continue its case on claims of trademark infringtement, unfair competition, contributory trademark infringement and contributory dilution. The court did, however, grant Google's motion to throw out American Blinds' claims of "tortious interference with prospective business advantage." I have a copy of the ruling, should anyone care to see it - jbat at battellemedia dot com.
This is related to the Geico case, which is still ongoing, though Google did win a portion of it.
This means the case will continue, and if its findings are materially different from those of Geico, resolution may ultimately occur in the Supreme Court, which is currently busy with Grokster, of course. (More on that in July, when the ruling hits.)
If you own a domain name, you know the benefits of registering it under a private proxy which keeps your name, address and contact information away from the prying eyes of spammers, stalkers or solicitors. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, (NTIA), the telecommunications and Internet arm of the Department of Commerce, has disallowed private registrations for .US domain names. This was made without a hearing or an opportunity for a rebuttal or response from those affected. After giving only two weeks' notice, the NTIA has stated that they would not consider any arguments and that its decision is final. According to a website called The Danger of No Privacy, here is a list of the reasons you want an anonymous domain name registration.
n sign and send to your elected officials. You can find it here.
