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.