Lately it seems like there is endless news around messaging, VoIP and video calling. Apple recently announced they’d added FaceTime support for the Mac, and had shipped 19 million FaceTime-enabled iOS devices since June. Google Voice also made headlines last week for an outage, but I think the bigger news associated with that downtime is how fast they’ve been growing. And there’s been a flurry of startup activity around messaging and communication as well, such as the super innovative GroupMe releasing an Android App.

The resounding theme from all these seemingly disparate announcements is that messaging, voice, video, and chatting applications are on fire. Sure, we all use social media, but it sure hasn’t dampened people’s affinity for texting or making a call.

More revealing, all of this innovation seems to be happening at the application layer, far from the AT&Ts of the world, who are missing another wave of innovation which is happening on top of their networks. It’s very evident that Google and Apple are making overtures to become your de facto voice and messaging provider, and the carriers are sitting with their pants down, struggling to plan how they stay relevant.

Why the Carriers Will Become Irrelevant in Voice and Messaging

It’s easy to bash carriers. I recently wrote about the technical reasons why AT&T’s network is so awful which got their higher ups to contact me and whine about what I’d written. Truth is, there are long-standing reasons behind AT&T’s failures—network decisions take many years to unfold, especially since the telco monopolies are, by their very nature, slow to respond to change and innovation.

But forget the past, let’s look at why the carriers are poised to become more and more irrelevant beyond being pipe providers in the future. And let’s do so specifically around voice and messaging, the bread and butter services that they evolved to provide.

Imagine the future of communication on your smartphone: you’re on a video call with your significant other across the world on different networks, you tap your screen, and instantly their phone screen mimics yours as you flip through photos of your trip while continuing your call. Or imagine sending out an MMS to a group, and when each of your friends open it they immediately tap into a live HD audio/video stream which you’re broadcasting to everyone. No delays, no dialing, and no going in and out of different apps—it just works.

All of these amazing use-cases, and more, will be enabled by 4G wireless standards. This is because 4G is 100% IP-based, which is what the internet was founded upon. Today, voice is routed separately from data on mobile networks due to legacy “circuit-switched” architecture. With LTE, the first phase of 4G, voice and video sessions will be packetized and sent over the network from your smartphone just like any other application layer data, which will open a range of new capabilities.

LTE Now; Voice in 2013 – Are You Kidding Me?

But there’s a roadblock to realizing this vision of ubiquity. Right now the carriers can’t agree on what’s happening with respect to voice. In classic fashion, they are stuck in endless consortium meetings arguing about standards instead of moving forward, picking one, testing, and deploying.

Some carriers are behind a voice technology called IPMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), which is 100% IP-based, and others are clinging to VoLGA (voice over LTE via generic access), which splits mobile voice and messaging apart from the IP-based LTE network in a technique called “circuit-switched fallback”.

Guess when they plan to resolve all this? 2013! Per this AT&T slide from a few weeks ago. And it’s easy to envision any resolution extending years past this date, which is crazy considering what’s at stake for the carriers as they struggle so stay relevant in voice communication.

FaceTime best foreshadowed their dwindling relevance, since video calls over WiFi bypass the carrier network entirely. And though FaceTime doesn’t yet work on 3G you can see the writing on the wall. Meanwhile Google Voice still requires you to dial out using your carrier’s network, but Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5 last year foretells this will go away in favor of full VoIP too. Then of course there’s Skype, which now works over 3G, bypassing the voice network of your carrier too.

The Bureaucracy Behind Why The Carriers are Missing Out

Carriers are in the process of transitioning from a telco model, which is closed, to the internet model, which is open. In the old days it was deemed acceptable for them to stew over standards for multiyear periods, but innovation on the internet doesn’t work this way.

Recently at CTIA, Verizon declined to discuss the VoLTE situation because they simply don’t have anything cohesive to communicate. This is embarrassing, considering their LTE network is supposed to be ready by the end of the year. What this means is that voice will be routed over their old network for years to come—fabulous.

This is absurd, and is symbolic of how consortiums and standards bodies work in telecom—anyone who has ever sold to or interacted with a carrier understands the glacial pace at which they move. What the carriers really need to do is get out of bed and resolve how voice will be packetized, then move forward and deploy it. It’s simply embarrassing that they can’t do this, but it’s not surprising, since they still receive so much revenue from voice plans.

The Internet Wins Again – Go Back to Sleep Carriers

The future in mobile communication is being written at the application layer—both by innovative giants like Apple and Google, and smaller startups such as GroupMe and Twilio—not at the infrastructure layer by the AT&Ts and Verizons of the world. The carriers had a chance to provide a better voice and messaging experience with 4G, and to charge a toll for that experience, but they are missing that window.

Apple and Google are closing it fast. Back in June, when iPhone 4 was released, people wondered why Apple made FaceTime an open standard. Here is one important reason why: A closed standard may have caused an overly fragmented market for video-calling, which would definitely benefit the carriers. This is  likely, at least in part, why Steve Jobs decided to open up FaceTime, as any open standards success in video/telephony limits the power of the carriers.

The funny thing is, they seem to be screwing it all up without Steve’s help. There is simply no doubt that the future of voice and messaging is with companies innovating at the application layer, and my guess is there is going to be a ton of investment activity and M&A in this space as new realtime communication tools are developed over the next few years.

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Google Voice and FaceTime – Why the Carriers Are Losing Their Voice

Our post earlier tonight about Google shutting down Facebook’s access to Gmail data exports makes me think two things. First, I’m not sure there’s much data that Facebook doesn’t already have with it’s 600 million users (although 1.3 billion people visit Google sites a week, so they’re not exactly slumming). And second, the data protectionist era has now begun in earnest.

Trade restrictions, tariffs, etc., called protectionism, is always a double edged sword. It has the short term benefit of helping domestic companies stay competitive and profitable, and that also protects jobs. On the downside the consumer is hit with higher prices on whatever industry is being protection. And protected industries tend to lag behind competitively, so when/if the restrictions are lifted they are in a very bad situation.

But here’s the very worst part of protectionism. If you start it, you can expect the other side to start it to. That’s when you get what’s called a trade war, and lots of potential economic gain evaporates.

I’m seeing all the signs of a “data war” beginning now. It’s not among nations, though. The players are the big Internet companies who have lots of user data today, and want more (all of it) tomorrow.

For a long while the webmail companies have generally been lenient about exporting user data via an API to other applications. It’s what the user wants, and most everyone is reciprocal. Or, they’re too small to matter yet. This is a “free data trade” type situation with the best economic consequences.

Well, everyone but Facebook. They’ve just pretty much refused to let users export social graph data, even though they import it like crazy from every source they can get their hands on.

This is a game theory situation. One party isn’t playing ball, but’s reaping the benefits of open data policies by all it’s big competitors. That forces competitors to protect their data as well (Google’s done it in a surgical way to avoid fallout with other non-Facebook companies). But once this ball starts rolling, and it has, it’s pretty hard to stop it.

Expect it to get worse from here.

Ultimately that’s very bad for the companies involved, but it’s also bad for consumers who now have fewer choices with what to do with their…err..Google’s data. In other words, we all lose.

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Data Protectionism Begins In Earnest

Verizon's FiOS footprint may be on an expansion hiatus, but that's not to say the company's abandoning existing users. Nearly 3.5 years after boosting FiOS internet speeds with G-PON, the company is now out testing XG-PON2 -- a newfangled iteration that somehow enables 10Gbps upstream and downstream from its existing fiber network. If you'll recall, we heard just a few weeks back that the outfit was close to being able to serve GigE on its existing platform, and now that this field trial has been successful, we'd say the boundaries are stretched even further. In the test, technicians were able to suck down a 2.3GB movie in four ticks of the second hand, and if you're hoping to see the nerdiest video of the day, a highlight reel of the trial awaits you just past the break.

[Thanks, David]

Continue reading Verizon FiOS field trial introduces XG-PON2 to the lexicon, shows 10Gbps capabilities

Verizon FiOS field trial introduces XG-PON2 to the lexicon, shows 10Gbps capabilities originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 02:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Verizon FiOS field trial introduces XG-PON2 to the lexicon, shows…

All the hoopla over the Wall Street Journal’s so-called Facebook “privacy breach” article, it’s subsequent and curiously-timed MySpace followup, and also the New York Times’ take on the ability of Facebook advertisers to target ads for nursing schools to gay men is unwittingly creating cover for a social networking privacy issue that’s much bigger.  It might be surprising to some, but it turns out that U.S. federal agents have been urged to “friend” people in order to spy on them.

The feds operate such social sting operations aided by the fact that there are very few individuals that actually know every single person in their “friend” list on Facebook.  For instance, it is typical to connect to someone because one thinks they might have met them.  Or, a connection might take place because two people share common interests and want to view each other’s news posts going forward.  But that’s not how the government sees it.

In a memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) discovered that the Feds see Facebook as a psychological crutch for the needy.  Here’s a direct quote from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo: “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of “friends” link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know.”  And it gets worse.

The memo explains that these “tendencies” provide “an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities.”  Translation: spy on unsuspecting people on Facebook and MySpace in order to catch the bad guys.

Such tactics are decidedly creepy (how many completely innocent people are they spying on), but the argument could be made that if you have nothing to hide, then why worry?  Here’s why: many people post items to their profiles that they forget to update or that are not necessarily true, and which they certainly wouldn’t be saying if they knew they were under investigation.  Indeed, a recent study initiated by UK insurance company Direct Line concluded that “people are more likely to be dishonest when chatting using technology, such as Twitter, than they would be face to face.”

Why is it that people might lie more on social media than in person?  According to Psychologist Glenn Wilson, “we sometimes use these means of communication rather than a face-to-face encounter or a full conversation when we want to be untruthful, as it is easier to fib to someone when we don’t have to deal with their reactions or control our own body language.”  This leads to a few common sense conclusions.

First, government officials need to take note that one should not believe everything one reads on the Internet—even if it is generated by a “person of interest.”  Second, as the EFF’s Jennifer Lynch pointed out, “the memo makes no mention of what level of suspicion, if any, an agent must find before conducting such surveillance, leaving every applicant as a potential target.”  In a country that prides itself on freedom of speech, government should not be in the business of creating an atmosphere that could chill expression.

On October 18^th, Congressmen Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Joe Barton (R., Texas) sent Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg a letter in which they expressed their concern about marketing companies that “gathered and transmitted personally identifiable information about Facebook users and those users’ friends.”

To many tech folks, it seems more than a bit hypocritical for government representatives to be going after Silicon Valley companies for using social networking data when the government is doing exactly the same thing itself (and more).  In addition to bureaucrats urging agents to befriend targets, the EFF also discovered that the Department of Homeland Security used “a ‘Social Networking Monitoring Center’ to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration.”  And, recall how Google Maps has been used to track down hoes with “unpermitted” pools in Long Island, NY.  Those Big Brother moves are much more disconcerting than Facebook applications using referrer URLs to better target ads.

Editor’s note: Guest author Sonia Arrison is a senior fellow in technology studies at the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute and has been writing about privacy issues for over a decade. Follow her on Twitter @soniaarrison.

Photo credit: Flickr/nolifebeforecoffee.

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The Real Privacy Scandal On Social Networks: The Feds Are Spying On…

If you were thinking that you'd just watch your favorite Fox shows on Hulu until Cablevision and News Corp worked out their differences, then think again. Not only can you not watch Fox on Cablevision's cable service at the moment, but if you get your internet from said company, you can't watch Fox content on Hulu either. This isn't too terribly surprising considering the networks see Hulu as a supplemental service to their traditional avenues, but that doesn't make cord cutters who don't even subscribe to cable feel any better. The good news is that these disputes don't tend to last long -- they usually never amount to an interruption in service -- so you shouldn't miss too many of your favorite shows before Cablevision gives in and pays Fox $1 per subscriber (vs $0) like the other providers have.

News Corp pulls Hulu from Cablevision customers, escalating carriage dispute originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Oct 2010 16:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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News Corp pulls Hulu from Cablevision customers, escalating carriage…

A lot has changed since illustrator Randall Monroe drew up the original XKCD “Map Of Online Communities” in 2007. In testament to how far we as Internet denizens have come, earlier this week XKCD updated its beloved classic to more accurately reflect the rapidly changing online world of 2010.

From Monroe in 2007:

“I’m waiting for the day when, if you tell someone ‘I’m from the internet’ instead of laughing they just ask, ‘Oh what part?’“

Until that day is here (and it’s coming VERY soon, like tomorrow) here’s a quick state of the Internet union; In 2007 the most prominent digital countries were Myspace, Friendster, AOL, Live Journal and Xanga … In 2010? Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, QQ, Happy Farm and Farmville. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose?

Um, Happy Farm? Yeah that’s right, Chinese MMOPG Happy Farm has 228 million active users, making Farmville at 62 million active users the “second biggest browser based social networking centered farming game in the world.”

Zoom in for  hidden gems like “Social Media Consultant Channel” and “Bieber Bay.” Double zoom in for the island of TechCrunch/Crunch Gear, off the nothern tip of the Tech Blog peninsula.

Original 2007 map for comparison, below.

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We No Longer Live In Actual Countries But Digital Ones

These awards will recognise and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the past year, with the tech community invited to have a say in which finalists should be recognised. Leading lights of the the tech startup and investor scene will be invited to give away the awards to the winners, so you'll have the opportunity to meet your tech heroes and heroines. The initial filtering will be done by referencing our database on European companies on CrunchBase (so make sure you are in it), then by public vote online, with the final Award winners to be determined based both on the popular votes received through website voting and by The Europas Advisory Board. You'll be able to vote shortly.

The Awards Ceremony will take place in London (venue to be announced). We're planning a big party with DJ, bar and food. Award categories will be announced shortly.

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Put November 19, London In Your Diary – It’s Europas Time

Remember three years ago, when Microsoft paid a quarter-billion dollars for 1.6% of Facebook and the exclusive right to run banner ads across Facebook.com? Tell the truth, how many of you thought that was a killer business decision? I can’t say I did at the time. But as that deal is about to expire in 2011, Facebook’s status as a revenue juggernaut is rarely questioned any more.

In fact, I have been mulling over data from both companies, and I’m ready to declare in public my belief that Facebook will be bigger in five years than Google is right now, barring some drastic action or accident. Futhermore, Facebook will grow without needing to cut into Google’s core business of text ads, which are still 99% of Google’s profits. Even if every single Facebook user performs just as many searches with Google as ever—including Google Instant, mobile search, and YouTube—Facebook will inexorably grow as big as Google is today and maybe bigger, because Madison Avenue’s brands are less interested in targeting than they are in broadcasting to vast mother-loving buckets of demographically correct eyeballs, and Facebook has become the perfect platform for that.

What do I mean by bigger? Facebook already has more page views than Google. People already spend more time spent on Facebook than Google. I’m referring to the life blood of any business: revenues.

Google’s 2010 revenues will be $28 billion, give or take a billion. The goal of this writeup is to illustrate the ways that Facebook’s annual revenues could grow from $2 billion to more than $30 billion in five years a diverse set of revenue streams that have one thing in common: people. Facebook’s future revenue streams, like their applications, are naturally social, and engage consumers with social intent, not just a widget or “social layer.” We repeat: social is not a layer you add; it is core to monetization.

Facebook has figured out its business model, and wants to keep it out of the public eye as long as possible. Facebook’s alleged revenue has grown from $275 million in 2008 to $635 million in 2009 to a rumored $2
billion this year, which is much higher than the also-impressive $1.2 billion number circulating earlier this year. Let’s pause and reflect for a moment. Facebook is allegedly already earning double the
revenues Google reported when it filed to go public.

When we do the archaeological dig of Google’s actual revenues during its private years, we discover similar pattern to Facebook’s: $86 million in 2001, $440 million in 2002, and $1.4 billion in 2003 . . . and so on. Note, however, this divergence:  Google Web Sites earned more than twice the revenue in 2009 as the gross evenue brought in through Google Network Web Sites, even though in 2004 they were roughly the same. The value of properties Google owns has been much greater and faster growing than all of the external Web sites with whom Google shares revenue. This will almost certainly be even more true of Facebook, given the private nature of much of its content. For many consumers, Facebook is the Web.

Facebook’s second-mover advantage affords the company the luxury of offering both types of Internet money-making product: Advertising and Commerce.  As a result, instead of an open Web-like ecosystem, Facebook could choose to partner with a few friends—Microsoft, Amazon, Zynga, perhaps even Apple—and also lock out Google and anyone else, big or small, who Facebook deems not a friend, to best serve its revenue goals.

So, how does Facebook ride Advertising and Commerce into a future of more revenues than Google? By creating a virtuous cycle of cross-promotion: targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions feed into the next series of even-better-targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions, naturally.

Facebook Advertising does not directly compete with the text advertisements of Google’s AdWords and AdSense. Instead Facebook is siphoning from Madison Avenue TV ad spend dollars. Television advertising represented $60 billion in 2009, or roughly one out of every two dollars spent on advertising in the U.S.; the main challenge marketers have with the Internet till recently has been that there aren’t too many places where they can reach almost everybody with one single ad spend. Facebook fixes that problem. Specifically, Sheryl Sandberg went on record in August saying that some brands have increased their spending twentyfold in the past year:

Two years ago the big brands were experimenting with us.  They started buying with us a year ago. Now, they’re going big.

She took this observation even further in a recent BusinessWeek article, “Facebook Sells Your Friends“:

Davide Grasso, Nike’s chief marketing officer, says Facebook “is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. It’s an integral part of what we do now.”

…

In 2008 [Sheryl Sandberg] left Google for the experience of running a startup—and because she believed Facebook was the better bet to win in brand advertising, which accounts for 90 percent of the $600 billion ad market. “We are in a much bigger market than Google, and we have much, much more runway,” says Sandberg.

She’s not the only one who believes how huge this market opportunity is. Just in the last week, TechCrunc quoted Paul Buchheit in his belief that people are significantly undervaluing Facebook compared with Google, and interviewed Peter Thiel about his conviction that Facebook is undervalued at $30 billion. Of course, these are all self-interested insiders.  I scratched my head at this week’s declarations of undervaluation, until I took the perspective of Mad Men.

Facebook Ads employ demographic characteristics (Age/ Sex / Location and Interests), which corporate brand managers and television ad buyers have been accustomed to purchasing for half a century. By contrast, Google AdWords target on the intent revealed by search queries, a practice that has seemed odd and new to Madison Avenue for the past decade and frankly has many of them worried for their jobs.

But it’s not just Madison Avenue. I keep thinking about putting BusinessWeek’s $600 billion ad market in context; Google seems to be having as hard a time getting into brand advertising as Microsoft had getting into search. By contrast, Facebook is making this look easy. Yahoo just paid $1 per like, and buying fans is only going to get more expensive as the lifetime value of a “fan” is better understood.

Five years from now, could enough brand managers and television ad buyers be so impressed with their returns from Facebook campaigns that they collectively increase their spending on Facebook fivefold to $10 billion annually? Heck yes, even if that entire budget comes out of the current $60+ billion annual TV ad budget (and remember, that is just in the U.S.).  Especially if the entire budget comes out of that, because Facebook is more targeted, has better analytics, and engages its audience directly and interactively through conversations—aka chat and photos.

Plus, Facebook is getting stronger at developing products for advertisers, and once they set their mind on adding algorithmic search and/or an AdWords or AdSense competitor, I’m sure some of the over 100 ex-Google engineers who are now at Facebook will volunteer for the job. Could that also represent a multi-billion dollar advertising stream by siphoning some market share from Google for searches placed within Facebook? Perhaps, though I note again that they don’t even have to go there to reach $30 billion in annual revenues.

Five years from now, billions of dollars of advertising will be spent to direct consumers from one part of Facebook . . . to another part of Facebook, where we’ll be offered real items to buy for ourselves or others (birthday alarm, anyone?), premium services to subscribe to, virtual goods to procure and play with, and deals-of-the-moment available for immediate purchase (or we’ll miss out forever!).

This is where the manyfold revenue streams of Facebook Credits become apparent, and they all have in common this observation: if you give Facebook users a few free Credits with the block of Credits they buy (at Target, online, and soon anywhere), they will spend all of those Credits and then want to purchase more. Rather than a straightforward discount, the new math of Facebook Credits means that consumers will never quite be sure if they’re getting a discount or cash back or more for less. Kind of like frequent flier miles where we’re never quite sure what the conversion rate is. Or eBay auctions where we “win” the ability to spend money.

Facebook Credits are poised to be this generation’s American Express: an “affordable luxury” lifestyle brand and credit card with reward programs, frequent flier miles, and other incentives built right in so that the more you use it, the more you earn.  ”Facebook Platinum”, anyone? I would have thought they’d need a better brand name than “Facebook Credits” but then again, I would have thought they’d need a better brand name than “Facebook”.

Off the top of my head I can think of five potential billion-dollar revenue streams that dovetail into Facebook Credits—Games, Groupon/Pages & Places, Amazon/Commerce, Inbox, and Photos—and if you really pushed me I could probably think of more, like Banking.  (Remember when Peter Thiel thought part of PayPal’s business model was to capture the float? Well, guess who’s bringing sexyback…)

Games. Facebook is running the real mafia wars, taking 30% while letting the game developers do the heavy lifting. (Hello, Disney, EA, and Zynga!).  Can worldwide virtual goods and other in-game payments represent $10 billion annually floating through Facebook in 5 years? You betcha; more so if “social gambling” Zynga-style becomes more en vogue (that is: legal authorities say it’s okay). Facebook’s 30% cut of that? A cool $3 billion.

Groupon / Pages and Places. This one’s simple: Facebook should just copy 2010′s Flavor of the Year, Groupon, and make it self-service for every Facebook Page and Facebook Place.  Early bird got the worm; Facebook will get the gold. (All that glitters is not Gilt.) Imagine if any Facebook Page or Facebook Place could make Groupon-like deals with its fans any time it wants. Now there would be an actual reason to pay Facebook money for ads that can augment the fan base of a Page or Place!

Holy carp, Batman, they’ve been teaching us to fish all along:  Suddenly consumers have a reason to LIKE Facebook Pages and Facebook Places!! LIKE something, get a deal: it’s that simple.  Groupon’s Gap promotion grossed $11 million in a single summer day in 2010; imagine, five years from now, millions of Facebook Pages and Facebook Places offering regular but expiring deals to their fans every single day.  Wild guess: in aggregate an average of $100 million in deals sold every day worldwide, or $36.5 billion of deals sold every year. At a 30% cut that’s a solid $10 billion straight into Facebook’s pocket per year. In the words of Keanu Reeves, Whoa.

Amazon / Commerce. Amazon was so smart to partner with Facebook: my informal survey of 5000 Facebook friends found many of them willing to make their purchases (and share them!) from within Facebook in exchange for extra Credits.  The details remain to be determined for consumer rewards: will it be like Discover (1% cashback on purchases) or like Visa (earn points! get entered in drawings!) or something else entirely? We’ll see.

If Amazon helps Facebook figure out how to make malls-with-walls and consequently make real shopping money, I have no doubt other e-tailers will follow. If PayPal’s 2009 revenue was $2.8 billion with 87 million active accounts, it’s not a stretch to predict that five years from now Facebook too will have 100 million to 150 million active Credits accounts (at least!) bringing in $5 billion in revenue from this business unit alone. Commerce is the grease that accelerates everything, so it seems like it’s just a matter of time before Facebook can acquire PayPal (for its volume, its risk management, and its fraud detection expertise) and fold it in together representing let’s say $12 billion in annual revenue five years from now, creating a true new currency for the world economy.

Inbox. Hotmail Plus, Yahoo! Mail Plus, and Gmail Storage all charge $20/year for premium features. So could Facebook Inbox if it became more mail-like, which is within grasp since Facebooker Paul Buchheit is the creator of Gmail, and he’s highly influential even if he’s not building the new system himself. Bonus points for throwing in an Address Book and Skype-slaying social phone features like Social Voice for free to anyone who purchases Facebook Inbox Pro.  50 million pro accounts at $20/year is a cool $1 billion Inbox product. Nice.

Photos. Fred Wilson may have mocked photos, but they represent big money now that Facebook is by far the world’s largest photo site. And the Facebook Photos product suite is about to be vastly be improved—now with high resolution!—thanks to the addition of the smart, energetic Divvyshot team during Lockdown.  Partners could be literally everyone in this space—Snapfish and Shutterfly and Kodak and Walmart, and a plethora of smaller companies like Zazzle and Picaboo! Five years from now could Facebook help sell 100 million picture books and photo schwag a year, extracting $10 per item from partners?  Easily. $1 billion annually without even thinking hard.

And Photos are just a harbinger of more social applications to come.  Bret Taylor has already hinted at ten other revenue streams. Because he thinks like a startup.

One of the biggest differences between a startup like Facebook and a big company like Google is that at a startup, everyone gets asked all the time how the product plans to make money. This imposes a discipline on the product and the people who develop it. At a big company, every boat does not necessarily have to sit on its own bottom—and this can lead to a “monoculture mindset” that stunts new lines of business and ultimately leaves the corporate ecosystem vulnerable to external forces.

The most famous example of this in our industry is Microsoft’s inability to come to terms with the Web.  When Windows and Office were making money hand over fist, text ads were as small as mouse balls. In some ways, Google is even more extreme, because for the most part no one at Google has appeared to lose sleep over where revenue growth will come from, for a decade. Those entrepreneurial muscles have atrophied, and future revenue potential does not appear to be the driver of any new Google product except Android and Google Instant, and even they follow the simple rule that mo’ searches mean mo’ money, because every search makes Google a dime.

So yes, Google will continue to grow its base of text ads, and other revenue streams like mobile, display, and YouTube should help with starting the growth engine that the recession slowed.

Getting back to Facebook, if I add my rough numbers for Facebook’s TV ad siphoning ($10 billion) + Games ($3 billion) + Places & Pages deals ($10 billion) + Credits & PayPal ($12 billion) + Photos ($1 billion) + Inbox ($1 billion) + Some of Bret Taylor’s other ten applications (???) = over $30 billion (actually, closer to $40 billion)  in annual revenues five years from now. Which is more than Google has in annual revenues today.

Is this analysis sloppy, hasty, laden with assumptions, and likely incorrect? Sure. But does it illustrate the possibilities of a very powerful Facebook five years from now? Yes. Yes it does. The main message that I want to send with this note is: This is not a game, because this is a very big market. The stakes are very real.

This is not about the revenue streams Facebook has; it’s about the revenue streams they’re about to have. Take to heart the hockey lesson from Wayne Gretszky’s father: “skate
where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.“

Remember a better time back in 2004 when Jason Kottke boldly predicted that Google would become “the biggest and most important company in the world in 5-8 years” by selling access to the world’s biggest, best, and most cleverly utilized map of the web?  Kottke was right except for one detail: the most improtant company in the world is Apple, not Google. In any case, I am going to make a similar prediction:

Facebook is going to become the biggest and most important company in the world in 5-8 years by selling access to the world’s biggest, best, and most cleverly utilized map of the closed Web that’s been shared among friends.

If Google agrees and wants to avoid that future, what should Google do with its $35 billion in cash and its Google Me team? Unfortunately, Google can’t friend Facebook. Maybe they should friend the Quora community? I’ve found that illuminating.

Talking on Quora with a woman who interned for Google and then Facebook (and now works for Quora), I was struck by her words:

I’m afraid another failed social effort might mean the beginning of a serious decline [for Google]. This is both a function of external perception and internal sentiment. Users will only have so much patience for Google’s experimentation, and things like pulling the plug on Wave can’t be good for the company brand.  Plus, Google needs to be able to sustain employee morale, especially given the highly publicized talent wars of late… I also think Facebook needs some competition.

I concur.

Mark Zuckerberg told Michael Arrington that to make insanely great social products, “you have to design [social into products] from the ground up.” I wholeheartedly agree! My question is, why does everyone think that Facebook has won the social networking game and that no one else should even try to make a better social network? They only have a 600 million person head start; that’s less than a tenth of the planet, people.

Doesn’t anyone with resources even want to build a better social network anymore? It sure doesn’t seem like it. Google is developing an abstract social layer; Twitter calls itself an information and content network; LinkedIn is a professional network with sprinkles of social pixie dust; MySpace is a discovery channel; Yahoo is a mumble mumble; and the last great hope, Apple Ping, is a faux-ial network, unwittingly proving Zuckerberg’s main point to Arrington with how much it blows:

As 2010 draws to a close, only a movie and an open source project (Diaspora) have the chutzpah to call themselves a social network. The future of social networking may very well depend on those of us without resources to invent an alternative to Facebook, to create more choice for consumers. Does anyone have the brains, the heart, and the courage to travel down this yellow brick road? Maybe this article ill offer a smart but scrappy entrepreneurial engineer in a garage somewhere the inspiration she or he needs to build a better social network. I just gave you thirty billion reasons why I believe this market is the market to go after if you want to make a fortune, have fun, and change the world. And I will do anything in my power to help you. I know a venture capitalist ready and eager to put $25 million to work to get this party started. And heck, I might even consider coming out of retirement for this opportunity. Call me. Or better yet, Google Me.

Editor’s note: Guest author Adam Rifkin is a Silicon Valley veteran who organizes a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers called 106 Miles. His last guest post was about his frustrations with Gmail.

Image credit: Mister Sweaters; Photo credit: Erick Tseng.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

How Facebook Can Become Bigger In Five Years Than Google Is Today

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Matthew Scherb, an attorney at the San Francisco office of Winston & Strawn LLP. He litigates complex copyright, trademark, and Internet-related disputes.

In 2000, the now-defunct iCraveTV allowed its users to watch live television over the Internet.  It retransmitted broadcast television without obtaining permission from or paying broadcasters, framed the retransmission with paid advertisements, and users watched while paying nothing.  A federal court in Pennsylvania found iCraveTV was likely on the hook for copyright infringement.  iCraveTV shut down, and the court’s decision appears to have had a blanket chilling effect on Internet-based television.  No one came along to take iCraveTV’s place.

Fast forward to 2010: Seattle-based ivi has arrived.  Like iCraveTV, ivi lets you watch live television on the Internet.  Also like iCraveTV, ivi has not sought permission from or paid broadcasters.  Unlike iCraveTV, there is no paid advertising: ivi draws revenue from a flat monthly fee.  For a premium, ivi offers DVR “time sifting” features such as pause, rewind, and fast forward.  ivi currently streams programs from New York and Seattle affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and a few other networks.  So, next Thursday you could watch an episode of The Office as it airs on WNBC (an NBC station in New York) or, next month catch Major League Baseball’s World Series on KCPQ (a Fox station in Seattle).  You might cheer the return of Internet television.  You might be glad to see a potential competitor to your cable or satellite provider.  But does ivi’s retransmission of broadcast television run afoul of copyright law?  Will it face the same fate as iCraveTV?

We may soon find out.

In mid-September, broadcasters and copyright owners (including the major networks and Major League Baseball) sent ivi a cease-and-desist letter.  They accused ivi of copyright infringement and demanded that ivi stop streaming their television programs.  Fearing a lawsuit from its accusers, ivi preemptively filed a lawsuit in Seattle federal court on Monday, September 20.  ivi seeks an order declaring that its Internet television service is legal.  In quick response, the broadcaster and copyright owners filed their own lawsuit against ivi in New York federal court on September 28.  If ivi wins or obtains a favorable settlement in these cases before it runs out of money, it can proceed with a stamp of approval from a federal judge or from its accusers.  A loss could torpedo its ambitions.

ivi has pegged its legal hopes on a rarely-invoked but potentially powerful exception to copyright liability: the “passive carrier exemption.”  The exemption makes it lawful to retransmit a transmission intended for the public so long as the retransmitter lacks control over the content of the original transmission or over the recipients of the retransmission. ivi believes that by retransmitting freely-available, over-the-air broadcasts and offering basic DVR-like services, it is nothing more than a passive carrier and exempt from copyright liability.

The iCraveTV case never dealt with the passive carrier exemption.  Because iCraveTV framed its retransmissions with advertisements, it probably could not have claimed the passive carrier exemption in any event: by adding advertisements, it was arguably modifying and exercising control over the original broadcast transmission.

Major court decisions involving the passive carrier exemption are, like the iCraveTV case, also a decade old.  They offer mixed signals.

In 1999, the same New York federal court now hearing the broadcasters’ and copyright owners’ lawsuit against ivi denied the exemption to a company called Media Dial-Up.  Media Dial-Up retransmitted radio broadcasts via telephone to its customers who paid a fee for access.  Even though Media Dial-Up did not control the content of the radio broadcasts or limit reception to particular individuals, the court refused to classify Media Dial-Up as a “carrier.”  ”In an era of rapid technological change,” the court wrote, “possibilities for the capture and retransmission of copyrighted material over the Internet . . . are enormous.”  If Media Dial-Up could be a passive carrier, it “would threaten considerable mischief.”  The court called this “common sense.”

Just two years later, in 2001, a Massachusetts court reached the opposite result.  It applied the exemption to Insight, a company that facilitated retransmission of Boston-area television broadcasts, including National Football League games, to Bell Canada for a fee.  It noted that Congress had intended courts to give “carrier” an “expansive” definition.

Will ivi distinguish itself from iCraveTV and Media Dial-Up and align itself with Insight?

If it can, ivi will have succeeded in making the passive carrier exception a powerful shield for itself and others, perhaps other Internet retransmitters such as Ustream or Justin.tv looking to offer new services or cable and satellite retransmitters looking to make the leap to the Internet.

As for television broadcasters, though they may prefer to control the market for Internet television themselves, they may actually benefit financially from having their broadcasts retransmitted on the Internet and other media.  They will reach more eyeballs and could presumably demand higher advertising fees.

Stay tuned for the court’s decisions and also keep an eye on Congress, which can revoke or modify the passive carrier exception.  Congress created special, compulsory licensing regimes for cable and satellite retransmitters as those technologies matured.  Cable and satellite retransmitters do not infringe copyright when they retransmit a television broadcast, but they must pay a royalty fixed by statute.  Congress could choose to impose a similar regime on Internet retransmitters.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

After Ten Years, Round Two Of The Legal Battle Over Internet TV Is…

Mike Elgan criticizes Google for being condescending in a recent column on one of the dead tree IT rags. His first point is that Google PR exec Gabriel Stricker started off a recent press conference with a quip about how fast paced Google innovation is:

He said that the reason Google holds events like this one was that “we hear from a lot of you that with the kind of breakneck pace of innovation that we go through at Google, it’s nice for us to kind of let you catch your breath.” He went on to tell the audience that they would “hear from our Search rocket scientists in a second who will hold your hand through the latest and greatest of what we’re up to.”

So Google is so awesome that the company has to pause so the rest of the world can catch its breath? And we’re all so stupid that Google geniuses have to “hold our hands” as they explain things?

He backs up his point with recent comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt on what users want Google to build, and on privacy issues.

So first off this looks to me like an example of media mass manipulation I wrote about recently. At first blush, knowing how the whole press game works, Elgan is pissed off at Google for something or other and wrote this post.

But even if it really is something that’s been nagging him for some time, I just don’t see it. Google is far less arrogant than they were even a few years ago. And even I, possibly the most sensitive and defensive person you’ll ever meet, don’t see Elgan’s examples as condescending in any way.

Remember when Google blackballed CNET in 2005 for posting information about Schmidt?

That was a year after they went public, when companies are typically at their peak of arrogance. And boy was that a condescending thing to do.

More recently I’ve seen a Google that’s been humbled by droves of engineers leaving for Facebook and Twitter, a Google humbled by China, and a Google generally terrified of an upcoming decade where they may not be the center of attention on the Internet.

The Google I’ve seen recently is a humble Google. A Google that appreciates press more and that seems more willing to consider change. Most of the arrogance I see is across town at Facebook, which is exactly what I’d expect from a company on the rise.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Google Arrogance? I’ve Never Seen Them So Humble

The countdown is officially on for the big Facebook location backlash. How long will it be? One week? Two weeks? We all know it’s coming, it’s just a matter of when. And that’s too bad because I think Places is actually pretty great — potentially.

The ACLU wasted little time yesterday trying to start such a backlash (their post on the matter came what, a whole 30 seconds after the press conference ended?). Evelyn already did a nice job deconstructing many of their arguments and showing why a few were ridiculous. All I can add is to say that thank god the ACLU doesn’t design consumer apps — it would be like Facebook’s current nightmare of settings multiplied by a billion. We’d have settings for individual minutes in individual days for when individual users could see individual profiles. It would be the the least social social network ever.

Today, the EFF followed up the ACLU’s post by citing things like pleaserobme.com as an illustration of how sensitive location information can be. Not cited is the fact that most people have jobs which they are at from 9 to 5 everyday, so they’re not likely to be home then, leaving their houses susceptible to robbery.

My point is that plenty of people right now are out there on the hunt for a way to show that Facebook Places is the devil. It’s an easy angle. You take something that already a very sensitive topic: Facebook privacy — and combine it with another sensitive topic: location privacy. Boom. Match made in hell.

I thought Facebook’s presentation (and video) about Places yesterday was great because it focused on the positive. The talk was about serendipitous meetups and friends nearby, not people being stalked or worse. It seems like Facebook fully understands that location has the potential to be the bridge between social networking and actually being social. I’m just surprised it has taken them this long to launch a product.

But clearly they wanted to be careful. And they’re still being careful. Places is about as bare-bones as a location service can be. It is just check-ins. And that’s undoubtedly why they’re paying homage to Foursquare in the Places logo. Without Foursquare, Places would not exist.

But after only one day of using Places I’m seeing the potential here. I’m seeing friends checking-in who I’ve never seen use Foursquare. I’ve seen some friends check-in who I’m fairly positive have no idea what Foursquare is. Earlier, I was in a park near my apartment and I checked-in and saw that 30-some other people that I wasn’t friends with were checked-in there as well.

To some people, that’s creepy (it has been a feature on Foursquare for a while and that’s basically what Loopt was for a while). But to me, I think that’s potentially really interesting for when it comes to meeting people. And the fact that so many had checked-in on day one of the service is impressive.

That’s the power of Facebook’s social graph. It’s a graph that none of the current location players can touch even if you added all of their users together and multiplied them by twenty. Facebook is going to bring location to the mainstream by virtue of their size alone.

But the flip side is that because Facebook has such a large social graph that’s already established, a lot of current users are going to feel this new layer as something being forced upon them. And again, creepy. Of course there’s the option not to use it, but I can certainly see how the friend tagging thing is troubling to a lot of people (particularly because of the somewhat confusing three states).

But it’s also potentially a great tool. Imagine if you’re with a group of friends and only one of you has to check everyone in. That’s the cure for check-in fatigue right there. And when you think about it, this functionality isn’t much different than the tweets we’ve all sent that state something like “at the park with @____ @_____ @_____ and @_______”.

But the real key of Facebook Places is as a platform. Though it is still in the process of being turned on, it’s going to be great to be able to load up one app and see where people from Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, etc have all checked-in. And even better will be when you can check-in on Facebook Places and push it out to these services (so far, only Gowalla has committed to working on this as far as I know).

These services are all going to have to focus on building great utilities on top of this platform because the check-in will finally be completely commoditized. And that’s a good thing. I hope the Places API becomes the Facebook Connect for check-ins so the real innovation can begin. We need to remove the “ugh, another service I have to check-in to” factor.

That’s undoubtedly what Facebook is hoping for too. It’s a potential new branch of the Platform.

While location obviously has risks associated with it, it’s the upside that has all of these startups and now bigger players interested in the space. It’s easy to forget about this upside and instead worry about how everyone is going to be stalking one another. You know, the same things people used to say about the Internet itself back in the day.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Stalkers. Creeps. Weirdos. Terror. Welcome To Location, Facebook

In 1997 Wired Magazine declared the browser dead. “Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don’t we?” said Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf.

They were wrong, of course. The browser is still the killer app of killer apps. It’s the single most important way that we interact with the Internet. From Wikipedia to webmail to YouTube, it’s the universal virtual machine that has made pc operating systems irrelevant. If all you have is a browser, you’ll be just fine.

Fast forward to today and Wired is once again saying the browser is dead. “Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display,” says Chris Anderson.

And about that 1997 article: They weren’t wrong, they were prescient. “The point was altogether prescient,” Anderson says now of that article. Overheard on the TechCrunch Yammer stream: “Possibly the greatest explanation for being dead fucking wrong that I’ve ever seen.”

Wired is still wrong. Way wrong.

The new article is based on a foundation of data supplied by Cisco that shows web traffic, as taking a smaller piece of total Internet traffic. The chart itself is misleading, as BoingBoing pointed out. But even taken at face value, it’s still wrong.

Wired’s argument, based on the data, is that the browser is dead and apps, like iPhone apps, are taking over. “This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.”

Um, ok. But the data doesn’t show this at all. Sure, video traffic is expanding. Which makes sense because it’s a heavy load. But most of it is also being transported via Flash and HTML right through a web browser. And most app data is counted under “web” in Wired’s graph, meaning its all lumped together with normal browser data.

In other words, Wired took a misleading graph and then drew all kinds of conclusions based on it that don’t even make sense in their make believe world. It’s like they showed a picture of a banana and said it explains the rising cost of gasoline.

In fact, the only thing Wired’s chart really shows is that video files are really big, and people like to watch them in browsers.

The browser isn’t dead. Web pages aren’t dead. HTML works really, really well. Check out Facebook’s iPad “app,” for example. You don’t download it from an app store, you just point your browser to touch.facebook.com. Not only does it work really well, Steve Jobs doesn’t get to have a veto right over people using it. It’s no wonder that we’re seeing a surge of traffic from the iPad to our site, via a browser.

Apps are great on mobile phones with small screens. But they are a pain to install and keep synchronized. Eventually having less local software will make sense on phones, too. All you really need is that browser virtual machine and you can pull everything else from the cloud. This is obvious. Only a bunch of hipster tech journalists checking email on their iPads all day* would think otherwise, and then make up a bunch of data to support their argument.

*Wired, not us.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

When Wrong, Call Yourself Prescient Instead

Ericsson, which provides technology and services to telecom operators around the globe, estimates we’ve hit another milestone in the Internet becoming increasingly mobile. The company claims, based on estimates based on industry information, that the 5 billionth mobile subscription was accounted for on Thursday, July 8.

The 5 billion mark was hit largely thanks to a surge in mobile subscriptions in emerging markets like China and India, the company says. In the year 2000, about 720 million people had mobile subscriptions, less than the amount of users China alone has today, still according to Ericsson.

Mobile broadband subscriptions are growing at similar pace and are expected to amount to more than 3.4 billion by 2015 (from 360 million in 2009).

Furthermore, Ericsson estimates, 2 million mobile subscriptions are added on a daily basis, and the number of 3G subscriptions has now exceeded 500 million worldwide. The company also posits we’ll be at no less than 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020.

(Photo via Ericsson)

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Ericsson Estimates 5 Billion Mobile Subscriptions Worldwide, Growing…

As soon as everyone got to actually see the unreleased Google Desktop application in action, they wanted to have it.

The only problem is this isn’t just about waiting until Google finishes it off and ships it. There’s a real possibility that Google will never release a Skype-like soft phone for the desktop – they clearly want to build these types of applications in the browser. But the experts we’ve spoken with, including Skype execs, say browser technology just isn’t ready to run high quality VoIP calls at scale. Even with advancements in HTML5, it’s still at least a year away, say people who know:

And sometime after that, we will see web applications leveraging Skype as a service, too.

A couple of things have to happen first, though. There are two reasons Skype has to run on a client today. The first is audio/video encoding at the client level that ensure high quality calls with low latency and minimal configuration. There’s a reason calls on Skype tend to sound good. The second is the p2p architecture of Skype, which also affects latency and cost.

It’s relatively straightforward for Skype to allow third parties to build both functions into their apps via a SDK, which is why we’ll see desktop applications integrate Skype as a service first.

But the real win is when you can initiate skype voice and video calls via web applications. It’s not clear that we’re anywhere near that being possible with today’s browsers, say experts we’ve spoken with. There will likely always need to be some desktop software to assist with at least audio/video encoding. But it’s possible this could be done via browser plugins, or even in Flash.

So when we see Google Voice exec Vincent Paquet say that their product effort is focused on a browser version feels like decisions are being made based more on internal Google politics than reality:

We designed Google Voice to be endpoint-agnostic and we certainly want it to be accessible from any type of endpoint, not just phones,” Paquet told eWEEK June 21. “The direction in which we are going to keep working is to use the Web, which is probably the best UI there is in the world, to give you more control and personalization over your communications.

Google could of course just build Google Voice directly into Chrome. In January we wrote about a Google Voice Chrome extension that lets users do just about everything except make or receive a call through their computer. It wouldn’t be hard for them to add in the soft phone code as well, particularly since we’ve seen it demo’d so well already.

In the meantime, though, and for everyone that may not want to switch to Chrome, we think a Google Voice Desktop application makes a lot of sense. For Google. And for Google’s users.

So we wholeheartedly endorse this petition which popped up two days ago to show support for a Google Voice Desktop application. I’ve signed it, and I command you to sign it too. Right now. And then get all your friends to sign it. Because as much fun as it is for me to have an illicit copy running happily on my computer, I want to share the love. And sadly my lawyers seem quite insistent that I don’t distribute it broadly on the Internet.

Sign here: GiveUsGVDesktop.com

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Get Your Virtual Pen Out And Sign The Google Voice Desktop Petition

Mobile applications discovery and sharing service provider Appsfire has just launched a new product called AppTrends, which essentially delivers near real-time rankings of iPhone apps based on the chatter on Twitter.

Rankings – currently limited to the top 20 apps on the website – are based on what Appsfire determines are noteworthy items in the App Store virtually in real-time. Appsfire crawls Twitter for links to iPhone apps, regardless of whether the iTunes URLs are shortened or not, and determines which apps are hot and which are not based on their popularity on the micro-sharing service.

To do so, Appsfire looks at the number of mentions of applications, all while filtering out bots, repeat tweets from the same users, updates from seemingly fake accounts and activity tweets such as leaderboard or points sharing. In addition, the startup looks at the influence of users talking about certain iPhone apps (based on Klout) to keep its rankings as relevant, clean and trustworthy as possible.

The company tells us it’s capable of also determining sentiment through automated analysis, but intentionally does not use that data for the rankings because it claims the large majority of tweets about apps are positive of tone, according to one month’s worth of research.

AppTrends gets updated on an hourly basis, and you can view evolution for the apps in the top list for the past hour, 12 hours or full day.

All in all, for power users this could be very useful, given how the rankings coming from Apple are relatively similar from day to day – with AppTrends users can spot up and coming apps more rapidly and this stay ahead of the curve when it comes to downloading and testing new apps. For non-power users, the added value is less clear.

If you’re an app developer or publisher, you can also use the service to track what’s being said on Twitter about your app – provided you made the top 20 list – in real-time via a sidebar.

Appsfire intends to go from a top 20 to a top 100 list in the near future, and also offer localized rankings per country/store. Also in the works: lists per vertical, access to rankings from the past and notification services for developers.

Coinciding with the launch of the new service, Appsfire has announced that a new investor joined the group of angels backing the company and brought an extension to its seed funding round. The new investor’s name is Lerer Ventures, the New York-based investment firm that has backed startups like (Twitter shareholder) Betaworks, GDGT and just recently, Seeing Interactive.

The icing on the cake: Appsfire has persuaded Jyri Engeström (formerly at Google after selling his startup Jaiku to the Internet giant) to join its board of advisors.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Appsfire Introduces Live Rankings For iPhone Apps, Scores More Cash

“Can Tim Armstrong make AOL king of content by 2010?” – Blog headline

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” – Macbeth

There’s something about the idea of “New York Internet Week” that I’ve always found inherently funny; like “Saudi Arabia Bring Your Daughter To Work Day”, or Greenland being called Greenland.

Ironically for a city that’s always been so adept at branding itself, New York has always struggled to articulate its place in the worldwide web, and Internet Week is the clearest manifestation of that identity crisis. Name an industry that the Internet is disrupting: newspapers, publishing, advertising, banking – and you’ll find its heart in Manhattan. Despite the best efforts of Mayor Bloomberg and, uh, Dennis Crowley to paint New York as the place to do business in Web 3.0, the fact is that billions of advertising and investment dollars continue to flood west, never to return. And yet New York, bless it, continues to try to stay relevant – for one week a year at least – to the industry that’s bleeding it dry.

Witness the Webbies – the awards ceremony that congratulates New York based celebrities who have learned to tweet – witness the awkward panels filled with mismatched home-grown personalities (“Julia Alison meets Jeff Jarvis“) and witness (if you can’t avoid it) the week-long parties where thousands of identically unique hipsters cram into lofts to drink booze sponsored by one or all of the east coast’s four successful start-ups.

Even when they invite west coasters to get involved, the effort manages to come off more weird than wired: I was flown to town, on the kind of handsomely subsidised meal ticket only New York can offer, to moderate a panel on “Internet dating in a web 2.0 world” for an audience of feature writers from women’s magazines. This despite the fact that asking me to help navigate the minefield of online dating is like asking Rudolf Hess to give guided tours of Dachau. Nice try, New York.

And yet. While it’s easy for me to mock New York Media’s bewilderment over the Internet (see!), there was a marked change in atmosphere during this year’s Internet Week, compared to last year’s. A definite uptick in confidence, not all of which can be put down to the fact that Dennis made it on to the front cover of UK Wired. No, the change in attitude in New York towards the Internet can more fully be attributed to one word: content.

New York is a content town and, thanks in large part to AOL and Yahoo, content is once again king. Speaking at Disrupt last month, AOL’s Tim Armstrong boasted that AOL “is planning on being the largest high quality content producer for digital media”. Yahoo is taking a similar – if less clearly defined – approach, purchasing Associated Content for somewhere in the region of $100m and now, if rumours are true, eying up the Huffington Post. For the New York media crowd, this is great news – great news for journalists who are being laid off left right and centre, great news for newspapers and publishers who smell lucrative content syndication deals and great news for pro blog networks who might finally see an exit. If content really is king, then New York is its ready-made kingdom.

And yet. And yet.

The way that the likes of Tim Armstrong use phrase “content is king” conjures up a noble image. An image of professional journalists and highly-skilled writers, possibly wearing crowns, slaving over hot typewriters to produce 1000 words of crisp copy for an eager online audience; or perhaps of sharply-written web video, a la College Humor’s original programming, or the New York Times’ daily video podcasts. For ‘content’, New York media folks read a web 3.0 of professionally produced news, analysis, entertainment – the antithesis of web 2.0′s user generated horse-shit. No wonder they’re salivating.

But that’s a very east coast – with its proud history of newspapers and publishing – interpretation of the word. Over on the west cost (and note: I’m using that term in its laziest sense to cover all Internet companies including those who, by accident of birth, have offices back east), “content” means the precise dictionary definition of the term: “something contained, as in a receptacle”; generic filler to pack inside an empty box to make it attractive to advertisers. Low-paid, illiterate swill, commissioned by the ton to provide SEO ad inventory. Just consider Associated Content and how it describes its goals post- Yahoo acquisition…

“Associated Content is now a part of Yahoo! – the world’s largest online company, with more than 600 million unique visitors a month. Yahoo! plans to leverage our content to extend its leadership and build upon their global properties to deliver personally relevant content in a scalable and efficient manner.

I mean, kudos to the company for not using the words ‘writing’ or ‘journalism’ to describe what their crowd-sourced hacks do, but it’s still hard to imagine a more mercenary way to describe the craft of writing. These are not writers, or journalists; these are self-confessed generators of content in the much the same way that horses are self-confessed generators of glue.

At least the Huffington Post employs real writers – assuming your definition of ‘employs’ doesn’t require there to be payment or any meaningful editorial support and if your definition of ‘writers’ includes the authors of stories like “Sex Tapes Of The Past Decade: A Look At The Noughties’ Naughtiest” and “Indonesia’s First Celebrity Sex Tape Scandal” and “Kendra Wilkinson’s Sex Tape RELEASED, NSFW Preview” – all examples from the past few weeks.

Even the web editions of respected offline brands are going the same way. The editorial focus of Forbes Online – a mish-mash of celebrity slideshows and tacky lists of ‘Americas best paying blue-collar jobs‘ and ‘hottest summer convertibles‘ – couldn’t be more different from its print counterpart which still has ambitions to be a serious news magazine. (Truth is, today’s Forbes Online is a pale shadow of even its own glory days: this is the online publication which saw Adam Penenberg break the Stephen Glass story).

Of course, the relationship between editorial content and advertising has always been strained, in a cant-live-with-it-cant-live-without-it way. But in traditional media – for the most part – the lines were respected: editorial staff did their job, advertising staff did their job and somehow the relationship chugged along.

In new media, however, editorial content exists to serve only one purpose; as a hook on which to hang advertising. When an Internet company commissions content, their measure of success is quantitative not qualitative: does the block of words pack in enough high-buzz keywords to rope in a hundred thousand or so Google searchers? And can it be spread out over enough pages to provide half a dozen ad impressions for each of those users? If so, great: now they just need the users to click on one of those ads and GTFO, which probably explains why so much online content peters out within 30 seconds of the headline.

Jeff Levick, president of global advertising at AOL, sums up the company’s editorial policy thus: “we have insights into our audience, and can produce content they want, which leads to engagement, which leads to what advertisers want. Therein we see the critical difference between the old media attitude towards content and the new media alternative.

The old model favoured originality: break a story that no-one else has covered or write a fresh new take on the world and the audience would come, bringing with them advertising and sales. Under the new model, originality and exclusivity are the kiss of death. SEO-driven advertising depends on knowing what people are already looking for, and delivering content that satisfies that desire; nothing more nothing less.  SEO-driven content is the opposite of journalism and creativity, just like New York’s interpretation of the phrase ‘content is king’ is the opposite of Silicon Valley’s.

It’s a depressing truth, but an important one for anyone in New York media – or elsewhere – gets too excited about the idea of a content revival. Before Harry Potter, no-one knew they were looking for books about wizards; before the Washington Post broke their most famous story, no-one knew they were searching for information about a robbery at the Watergate building, or the subsequent money trail to the White House. Put simply: if Ben Bradlee were an editor at one of today’s Internet companies, instead of the Washington Post in the 1970s, he’d almost certainly have spiked the first Watergate exclusive in favour of a slideshow of cats who look like Nixon.

“We know there’s a market for that shit. I’ve seen the numbers!”

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

NSFW: Content Is King! Rest In Peace, Content

This guest post was written by SGN founder and Executive Chairman Shervin Pishevar. Pishevar served as SGN’s CEO until January, when he handed off the role to former EA and LucasArts exec Randy Breen. Prior to founding SGN, Pishevar was the founding president and COO of Webs and cofounder of Hotprints and Hyperoffice. He is also an active angel investor.

I get home after a long day and there’s an email from the founders of Nowmov waiting for me in my inbox. I had recently invested in the angel round in Nowmov along with Ron Conway, Ashton Kutcher and others. Ashton had helped seed the idea of Nowmov and introduced me to the team. Their vision: to use the collective intelligence of the masses to watch the most popular videos and content on the Internet in real-time. When I met the incredible team behind them (YCombinator and former Apple engineers) I wrote the check on the spot. The idea of creating customizable channels programmed by the hearts and souls of humanity moved me. Little did I know, just how moved I would be until that little email was sitting in my inbox waiting for me to click on it.

The email was a link to Posterous where the Nowmov founders had created a forum for the investors to get updated and get feedback. I remember thinking ‘this is really neat.’ I saw a comment from another awesome angel, Andrea Zurek, a good friend and early googler who now is part of XG angels (ex-googlers). I responded right after saying,”I wish all startups communicated this way with their investors and advisors!” Then I clicked on Nowmov to help give further feedback to the founders. Immediately, the NowMov channels highest ranking video popped up showing me what video humanity was most loving that very second.

The video was titled “Paparazzi” and in it is a kid sitting at a grand piano on stage that looks like a school auditorium. My first thought was, ‘heh, he looks a lot like my son, Cyrus, who’s 12. On the piano he is playing the cords to the widely popular song Paparazzi. Behind him on the raised stage is a bunch of teenage girls about the same age of the piano player. They all look kind of bored in the beginning. After about 30 seconds, I am thinking, ‘heh, nice piano playing but I’ve seen better.” The girls in the background look like they are thinking the same thing.

But then at :33 seconds this boy opened his mouth. And out flowed a voice that immediately hits your heart. You can see the ripple effect across the faces of the girls. Theirs eyes widen. They turn to each other in shock and smile. You can see as he continues to flex his vocal skills they continue to be shocked and smile in wonderment. In their faces you see reflected the reactions of the whole word. A superstar is born before our very eyes. This boy has the potential to be his generation’s Elton John or Billy Joel. His name is Greyson Chance. It’s a name we will all know.

I immediately shoot an email to my friend, Guy Oseary, the superstar manager to Madonna and many more top stars. The title of the email said, “You must sign him today!!! He’s a superstar!!” Sixty seconds later my iPhone rings and it’s Guy. “I just met with him!”, Guy said. Guy was already on top of it and meeting with him and his mother all day. Meanwhile, over 40 other competing agents were trying to get to them. But when you could have Guy Oseary as your manager why would go anywhere else? The video quickly to over 4 million views in one day, after Ellen then featured it, and has now crossed 20 million views. The next day he performed on Ellen live! (Note: Guy and Greyson just announced that they have officially joined forces!)

I’ve watching this video many times. It’s playing as I write these words and tears of inspiration flow as I watch the transformation in the audience from boredom to wonderment in 30 seconds. The video captures a moment in time where this boy transforms before our eyes like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. One minute he was an unknown somewhere in the world practicing in his living room countless hours to an audience of none and the next he is performing for the entire world.
This is the modern mythology of our planet; that anyone can pull out that magic sword and transform himself into King Arthur; The dream that anyone in the world with talent can and should be discoverable. We live in a world where true talent can be discoverable without barriers. Our generation must take it all way & democratize merit for all. In a world like this we don’t even need shows like American Idol. The collective hearts, minds and passions of humanity will discover that talent together and shine a passionate light on them.

The more access the world can have to resources to develop their natural talents the better. At the same time we must develop ever more channels for that talent to shine and be discoverable. Platforms like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter are now helping fund independent talent through crowdsourcing funding. My son Cyrus is about to fund his trip to train at the Shaolin Temple and my daughter Darya is going to raise funding for her iPillow invention using IndieGoGo! They are so excited! The Bake Sales of the past are now digital. And once the talent is developed and trained we have new services like NowMov to discover them and share our discoveries on Facebook and Twitter. As an angel investor, I have learned that investing in people always trumps everything else. So a future where people and talent are ever more discoverable is exciting time to be alive.

There are countless others in so many fields who are waiting to be discovered. He might be coding away in a tiny apartment in Moscow. She might be writing the next great novel in Buenos Aires. He’s composing the next great classical sonata in Karachi. He might be designing the next great wave of architecture in Tehran. She might be painting her way to the next Picasso. He’s discovering a cure for a cancer in Kenya.
The better we can incubate the world’s talent and the better we can broadcast those talents to each other the faster we can progress and inspire each other forward. Or as the lyrics to the Paparazzi song say:

We are the crowd
We’re a co-coming
Ready for those flashing lights
Baby, there’s no other superstar…

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Democratizing Talent: Guy Oseary, Greyson Chance, NowMov, IndieGoGo…

It’s Sunday afternoon in San Francisco, and while my American friends are out in the sun, celebrating some holiday or other – is this one Memorial Day or Labor Day or Arbor Day? – I’m confined to my hotel room, finishing the final edits of my book manuscript.

Specifically I’m editing a chapter that begins with me being thrown out of a Starbucks in Chicago for swearing on my cellphone. It was a strange – not unhilarious – episode, and one that caused me to consider the contrasting American and British attitudes towards profanity…

“The concept of ‘appropriateness’ is much more real to Americans than it is to Brits, despite us being the ones who are supposed to be stuffy and formal. I’ve noticed it a lot with swearing: while Brits of both genders will be quite happy, among friends, to use the word ‘fuck’ – as a verb, a noun and adjective or an adverb – a surprising number of Americans blanche at the idea. Rather they’d talk about ‘dropping the F bomb’ as if four letters were capable of levelling Nagasaki.”

And so it was this past week at TechCrunch Disrupt when Yahoo’s Carol Bartz now-infamously told Mike Arrington to “fuck off”. The remark was clearly something Bartz had prepared in advance, and at a British conference it would have been about as notable as a speaker wearing jeans rather than a suit. But in America the idea that a CEO – a female CEO no less – might resort to comedy foul language is headline news. Literally.

The swearing had the desired effect of course; becoming the meme of the conference – full of sound and fury, signifying nothing – and distracting from the real story: that the CEO of the third most visited site on the web was unable to concisely describe what her company actually does.

Mike highlighted this ridiculousness in a follow up post, putting the swearing controversy into perspective and focussing on the  difference between Bartz’ answer to the question “what is Yahoo?” and Tim Armstrong’s much snappier response for AOL. While Bartz rambled, Armstrong simply said “AOL is planning on being the largest high quality content producer for digital media”.

In Bartz’s defence, Armstrong’s answer was just as meaningless, skirting what AOL is and instead describing what he hopes it will one day become. Armstrong’s answer was accurate in the same way that I could accurately answer the question “Who is Paul Carr?” by saying “Paul Carr aims to be the multi-millionaire author of a slew of best-selling books, written between bouts of pornographic sex with Scarlet Johansson.” If wishing could make it so, Tim.

The truth is, while we may criticise her for her on-stage performance, “what is Yahoo?” is simply not a question that Carol Bartz is able to answer right now. No-one asks Google what it is, even though it does a million different things, because it does one thing – search – better than anyone else in the world. No-one asks Facebook what it does, because it does one thing – connecting friends – better than anyone else in the world. Yahoo doesn’t have that one thing – so while it might be everything, it’s also nothing.

So what should Yahoo’s one thing be?

Not search, obviously. That ship sailed long ago. It also shouldn’t be a portal, or a destination, or any other meaningless construction. Yes, a lot of people have Yahoo as their home page, but those people – by and large – simply don’t know any better. Carol can enthuse as much as she likes about her highly-personalised homepage widgets, but the next generation of Internet users won’t care. Facebook – or whatever comes next – will be their homepage; their content destination and everything in between. There’s nothing more personalised than friendships.

How about mobile? The company recently announced a partnership with Nokia, which sounds exciting but really only serves to underline how non-core mobile is to Yahoo’s competences. Also ‘mobile’ isn’t a service, or a product – rather it’s a way to deliver services or products.

Chat? Flickr? Blogging? Forums? No, no, no. Facebook has won that fight: Flickr might be the photo sharing choice of tool for the technorati, but for the vast majority of Internet users – particularly the young Internet users who Yahoo needs to lock in to guarantee its future – a photo simply doesn’t exist unless it’s uploaded to Facebook. Likewise chat, blogging, forums and all other aspects of user generated content are all ground that Yahoo has already lost, and can’t possibly win back.

What does that leave?

Ask any commentator, or entrepreneur or Investor and they’ll tell you that the hot business to be in right now is curation. There’s simply too much information – much of it user generated – flooding on to the web, and users are crying out for someone to sift and package it all in an intelligent and trustworthy way. That’s what Gilt Groupe or Groupon do for businesses, that’s what services like Quora do for information, that’s what our Twitter friends do for everything else. But while Gilt and Quora and even Twitter are still veritable newborns, Yahoo has been curating content – using real-life, professional human beings to sift through information – since the antediluvian days when Jerry Yang and David Filo posted their first link on “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web“

The days of employing humans to curate links are over but  there remains one area in which Yahoo’s legacy of curation, audience, trusted brand and significant human resources could come together to do something better than anyone else in the world…

News.

Seriously.

Yahoo’s news product is excellent. Like Google, Yahoo offers a first-rate news aggregator – but unlike Google, the company actually has its own journalists contributing reporting to the mix. The result is a hybrid between aggregation, curation and traditional journalism, which makes Yahoo News arguably the most balanced online news source there is. Moreover, the company has spent years perfecting the use of online video for both news reporting and analysis. Take a few minutes to watch Yahoo Finance or Yahoo Sports and you’ll see some of the best (in terms of both production quality and content) programming available online; easily a match for the best that traditional broadcasting can offer.

And yet right now news and video languish in Yahoo’s overall portfolio; just one more thing that the company offers.

If Yahoo is seriously looking for the one thing that it could be the best in the world at, then news – specifically multi-media news – is a serious contender. CNN might have been the last generation’s “Most Trusted Name In News” but they just don’t have the innate understanding of the web that a company like Yahoo does. For most traditional broadcast or print news outlets, the concept of mixing together original reporting with aggregated content from other sources and the curational wisdom of the online crowds is utterly beyond their comprehension. The closest CNN has got to content aggregation is The Situation Room, while, when it comes to interactivity, even the mighty taxpayer-funded BBC hadn’t got much beyond reading out the occasional viewer email on screen.

Yahoo on the other hand understand innately how people use the web – they have billions of users whose behaviour they track; they know curation and aggregation; they’ve proved they know news and they certainly know video. By combining these resources, and then delivering the results through their hugely visible platform (yes, including mobile), they could blow CNN – and everyone else – out of the water.

At dinner the other night, I joked with a friend (who happens to work at Yahoo) that we might one day see a Yahoo journalist asking a question in the Whitehouse. That need not be a joke. Yahoo has the resources to hire hundreds of journalists – real journalists, not just the hungry children who churn out posts for Associated Content – and set them to work covering serious stories. Then it can integrate that coverage even more tightly with its news aggregation product, and at the same time expand the company’s flagship finance and sports video programming into politics, global affairs, entertainment and everything else that’s going on in the world. Mix in user-generated curation, courtesy of their billions of annual visitors, and you have the makings of a very large and very trusted online news and content network.

Put another way, Tim Armstrong may say that “AOL is planning on being the largest high quality content producer for digital media”, but Yahoo is in a position to actually make that happen.

But of course that’s just one idea. There are a dozen other possible roads that Bartz could take Yahoo, and thanks to the company’s sheer size she can still afford to take the time to explore them all. The critical thing is that she stops trying (and failing) to explain the dozens of things Yahoo does now, and instead settles on the one thing that Yahoo is going to do next. If she can do that then Yahoo might still be thriving in three years time.

If not then it’s — what’s the word, Carol?

Fucked.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

NSFW: Never Mind The Bollocks – Why Carol Bartz Can’t Say What…

From Silicon Valley to New York, from India to South Africa one question keeps popping up in the mind of Web and mobile Web entrepreneurs: What the hell is going on in Indonesia?

Having matured from its early 2000s Internet obsession with Friendster, it seems Indonesia has become something of a Web force, embracing everything from Facebook to Foursquare catching people off guard with some uncommon swarms. We wrote about an obscure Indonesian awards show taking over Twitter back in March, and on May 6, Indonesians flocking to see Iron Man 2 won their first Super Swarm badge on FourSquare—something US Web addicts usually only earn at large events like SXSW.

I’d like to say I hunted down some impressive Internet entrepreneurs during my current trip to Indonesia to ask them exactly what was going on here, but really they found me. (Just another sign of their Web savvy.) I had dinner with some of them in Jakarta last week, and they’re photographed above. They include (from left to right) Leontinus Alpha Edison of Tokopedia, an ecommerce platform; Eduardus Christmas of still-in-progress Evolitera; Rama Mamuaya, creator of the local blog DailySocial; Selina Limman of Urbanesia.com, a local review site; Satya Witoelar of Koprol.com, a location-based social network just acquired by Yahoo and Andrew Darwis of Kaskus, a forum and classifieds portal.

I grilled them on some basic questions to bring you a Web-in-Indonesia primer. But before we get to those, here’s what impressed me the most about this small-but-tightly-knit community: It’s incredibly collegial. Plenty of research has shown that the biggest reason Silicon Valley beat Boston as a venture capital and startup hot spot was because culturally it was open, trading employees, funding, mentorship and ideas among competitors. It’s not uncommon to see Web competitors in the Valley having dinner together and generally discussing business challenges, before they go back to the office for some late night coding to bury one another in the market.

This is something many emerging markets struggle with as they put up walls, try to enforce NDAs and are generally cagey about their ideas. But the Indonesian crew is so small that they’ve found each other—mostly via Twitter—and banded together, openly discussing challenges posed by uncertain waters of raising money and offers to get acquired.

Since Indonesia has had little hype, the community seems to have grown organically—like the early days of the Valley and very unlike Web communities in Israel, India and China. Friday night I had dinner with two leading companies Kaskus and Tokopedia—both essentially community sites that have elements of eBay and Craigslist. Edison of Tokopedia was talking about how many ideas they get from reading the forums on Kaskus. “Wait, do you guys consider yourselves direct competitors?” I asked. Both laughed and said yes, sort of, but Darwis explained, “The market is so small, we’re better off helping each other.”

This seems obvious if you’re in the Valley, but I can’t tell you how uncommon it is in most places I’ve been in the last few years. Well done, Jakarta. Don’t lose that—as Boston learned the hard way, it’s a formidable advantage.

Now, some answers to that title question, mostly courtesy of the entrepreneurs photographed above.

How Many Web Users Are in Indonesia? Reports vary from 38 million users to 8% of the population, which would equal more like 20 million. If the previous reports are true, that’s close to Internet usage totals in Brazil and India, far more hyped and targeted markets. But that’s just for accessing Internet over computers. Web mobile is huge and Blackberries are the default device. Data services and cheap and you can buy Blackberry data service by the day on prepaid phones, upping the accessibility even more. Access to Facebook and Twitter are advertised on mobile billboards around the country, which is why the audience seems even larger for these services—most people are only interacting with them on their Blackberries.

Why Is the Indonesian Web Swarmy? Part of this is answered above—it’s a huge market that few players are explicitly targeting, even larger when you factor in the mobile Web. That means that as many people may be logging onto your site from Indonesia as from India or Brazil, but you have probably heard so much about Brazil and India being big emerging markets that the swell doesn’t catch you off guard. Few people know anything about Indonesia—let alone that it has 240 million people, almost as much as the US. So the swells can be surprising.

How Many Web Entrepreneurs Are in Indonesia? This crew estimated between 300 and 1,000 in Jakarta. Mamuaya has personally written about more than 300, and upwards of 1,000 have attended different founder events. Unlike the Valley, most of the “startup people” are founders—most of these companies are still pretty small. (More on entrepreneurs outside Jakarta in a future post.)

Does Anyone Make Money on the Indonesian Web? Most of them do not. There are two problems, they tell me. Indonesians do not want to pay for the Web, so founders are loathe to follow the Chinese model of amassing a large number of micro-payments to build a big company. “There is a big difference between one penny and free here,” Edison of Tokopedia says. So most are following the Valley playbook of build-and-monetize later. That may be a risky strategy: Encouraging the idea that the Web is free, rather than setting expectations from the beginning. But the reticence is also practical: Few people have credit cards and banks don’t have a universal payment system that ecommerce can exploit.

Advertising can actually be lucrative, even at this nascent stage. Part of that is because a lot of big brands are waking up to the Indonesia’s large, untapped market and there aren’t a lot of mass media platforms to advertise over. Kaskus makes $50,000 (US) a month in advertising, more than double what it takes to run the business every month.

Are There Traditional, Early-Stage VCs in Indonesia? As far as I can tell, there is exactly one and it’s not a traditional firm. East Ventures—a Singapore-based angel fund set up by Batara Eto, the founder of mixi.jp, the Japanese social networking site and others. They’re not based here, but have spent time in Jakarta scouting deals and have recently funded Tokopedia and Urbanesia. (Mamuaya reports here that a few more firms are coming or at least considering the move.)

Is Anyone in the West Trying to Buy These Companies? Again, as far as I can tell, there is exactly one suitor, although this one is more traditional: Yahoo. This insight was a lot newsier when I first drafted this post a few days ago. But Koprol aside, Yahoo has approached half-a-dozen small, up-and-coming Indonesian Web startups, this crew said. So far no other deals have been reached. But Yahoo clearly sees something here and likely isn’t done.

What is the Biggest Challenge Indonesian Web Entrepreneurs Face? Surprisingly, no one I asked said capital or exits. The relative lack of big, lucrative coding jobs from the multinationals like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and the lack of venture capital have kept developer wages and costs of building a startup incredibly low. No one seems to feel a real pain for venture capital, because none of these companies are started with an expectation of it. This makes Indonesia absolutely unique among the 11 or so countries I’ve visited in the last two years. Instead, the pain point is finding developers. In Indonesia, developers are considered an entry level position, not a lucrative career path. Most companies have to invest six months or so in training the talent they need, making scaling up a challenge.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

What the Hell Is Going on in Indonesia?

Starting this week, I’m implementing a rule for readers of this column.

The fact is, I express some pretty controversial views here on TechCrunch. Views on subjects like race and prostitution and terrorism and mental illness. Views that you – as a smart, educated TC reader – are perfectly able to process and discuss in a mature way, but views that could easily be misconstrued by the wider internet community, should they be reposted on other blogs, or quoted out of context.

From this point forward, then, I’m banning you from reposting, quoting or even discussing my columns outside of TechCrunch. It’s to protect my privacy more than anything else: I mean, sure, I’ve chosen to share those views online – in an inherently unsecure environment – but still I reserve the right to be shocked and outraged should they find their way from one semi-controllable online environment to another slightly less controllable one.

And I reserve that right to be outraged for one reason alone: I am fucking delusional about how the Internet works.

This week everyone‘s talking about online privacy. Specifically, they’re talking about Facebook and how the company protects user data, especially after it began sharing some of that data with ‘trusted’ third party sites like Pandora, Yelp and Microsoft’s Docs.com (whatever the hell that is). You’ve probably seen The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook animation, which illustrates in stark terms how much more open the service has become in the past five years. Everyone’s weighing in with their opinion: from Jeff Jarvis’ view that Facebook needs to respect the difference between the public and your public to Scooby’s excitement over the prospect that privacy is one step closer to the grave.

Meanwhile, you can’t throw a sheep without hitting some preachy tutorial on how to keep your embarrassing photos hidden online, especially with graduation time rolling around and college partiers trying to reinvent their image for the workplace. A typical story is told in the New York Times by Laura M Holsen who wrote yesterday about how the ‘Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline‘…

“Concerned about her career prospects, [college student Min Liu] asked a friend to take down a photograph of her drinking and wearing a tight dress. When the woman overseeing her internship asked to join her Facebook circle, Ms. Liu agreed, but limited access to her Facebook page. “I want people to take me seriously,” she said.”

Where to begin with poor old Min Liu? Let’s first be charitable and not point out the hilarious contradiction in quietly removing photographs of your college drinking from Facebook and then describing those same photographs in the New York Times. Let’s instead consider her apparently sensible decision to ask friends to remove potentially embarrassing photographs, and to give her new boss “limited access to her Facebook page”. Privacy advocates would nod with approval at a young woman who takes her online privacy seriously, while those same advocates would – and do – call for Facebook to respect her choices and keep her private data private. Scoble on the other hand would tell her to calm down, smoke a bowl and upload the resulting photos to Twitpic.

For my part, I have a different kind advice to those like Ms Liu who want to keep private photographs private. A third way, if you like…

Don’t let them be uploaded the Internet in the first place.

I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve heard whining recently that photographs they uploaded to the web (or in the case of Liu, photographs they presumably were aware were being taken and were heretofore happy to remain online) have now ended up in the public domain.

A couple of weeks back, a friend complained to me that a photograph of her taken at a party had been posted on a blog without her permission. The photograph has attracted mean comments which, she said, was a breach of her privacy. Hmmm. Copyright, yes, privacy no. Until the unkind  commentary started, she was perfectly happy with the photograph being online – blithely assuming that only her friends would care enough to look for it. It was only after the wrong kind of people started Googling her (in her case, the wrong people were snarky bloggers; in Min Liu’s case they were prospective employers) that she suddenly became concerned about privacy.

Likewise every day thousands – millions – of college students upload photographs to Facebook, labouring under the assumption that only their friends will care to look for them. Every day those same students attend parties and pose for digital photographs, knowing full well that they’ll end up online, but again assuming that no-one but their social circle will care to track them down.

Subsequent wailing about privacy settings on Facebook or any other social network is at best a red herring, at worst disingenuous bullshit. “Oh, but my Facebook account is private…. but my Twitter stream is locked!” Oh please. If all it takes to break a privacy system is for one of your friends to copy and repost your “private” photos or tweets then they’re not private at all. The only true privacy is not to post anything on a social network that you wouldn’t want the world to see. It’s like that old advice for sending credit card numbers by email: think of it like a postcard; you wouldn’t send your credit card number that way, so don’t do it by email. Think of photos on Facebook as the colourful side of that postcard. We can blame Mark Zuckerberg all we like for killing privacy, but the truth is all he’s doing is giving us the rope with which to hang it ourselves.

I’ve written before about how as more and more of this stuff becomes public, we’ll all become much more blasé about the youthful indiscretions of others, be they friends, political candidates or prospective employees. But that Utopian future will be a long time coming: it’ll still be a couple of generations before bosses stop making key hiring decisions based on the private life of candidates. So if privacy tools are a red herring, Scoble’s (and my) dream of a world of openness is years away, and there’s no sign that college students are going to stop partying any time soon, then what advice can we give to kids like Liu to ensure they’ll still employable once their intern supervisor stumbles across their “private” Facebook photos?

Actually, it’s much the same advice as grown-ups have been giving college kids for decades: think about your résumé. The only difference between now and ten years ago when I started college is that the advice is now pluralised: now you have to think about your résumés.

Résumé number one is the once we all understand: the work résumé. From day one of college, this is the document that students obsess over – how getting these grades, joining this club, or organising this social event will “look good on my résumé”. Right from the start there’s a lazer-like focus on picking and choosing the activities that will look good on the all-important piece of paper which will guarantee them employment on graduation.

But today, thanks to social media, everyone a second résumé – call it the ‘social résumé’ – and it’s just as important to obsess over what’s going to look good and bad on it. The social résumé is the one that a prospective employer finds when he Googles your name, or when she joins your Facebook friend circle and discovers that you haven’t been quite as careful with privacy settings as you should have. It’s the résumé they find when they stumble across your friend’s Flickr account, or the MySpace page you’d totally forgotten about. It’s like the traditional section at the end of your work résumé where you list your interests “music, reading…” except that, because it’s partly crowd-sourced, it’s much, much harder to edit after the fact.

Harder, but not impossible.

Sure you should go to parties and get drunk – it’s college for Christ’s sake – but you should also train yourself not to pose for photos while you’re doing it. It’s perfectly possible if you take the idea of the social résumé seriously enough: countless of my drunken friends hold down sober jobs simply through their survival instinct of knowing when there’s a camera pointing at them, or only confiding in people who aren’t going to ‘OH:’ their every word. (By contrast my drunken exploits are a matter of public record – but there’s a reason why I’m not looking for a job in teaching or at a bank.)

Sure there are going to be times when that instinct breaks down, or when someone takes a photo without your permission and refuses to keep it private – and in those situations I’m a firm believer that Facebook et al have an obligation to act to defend a person’s reasonable assumption of privacy. But in almost every case where we hear someone griping about privacy online, it’s over something they have either willingly posted on a closed, but essentially public, network themselves – or has allowed one of their friends to post.

In other words, their problem is not that something ended up online, simply that they were unable to keep control of something they willingly shared with at least a portion of the world. And it’s that attitude that needs to change – from one of retroactive bleating about privacy to one of proactive filtering of what we choose to share in the first place.

Blaming Facebook’s flaky approach to privacy for the ills of the exhibitionist generation is just yelling at the stable door, long after the horse has bolted.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

NSFW: Facebook Breached My Privacy, And Other Things That Whiny,…

There are two sides to every story, but this email exchange between Mahalo founder and CEO Jason Calacanis and one of his (now former) employees is a lesson in how not to handle a resignation.

Jason says this was a private exchange and that he was just being honest with Evan. Evan says Jason can’t control his emotions.

If you’re going to trash your employee, do it verbally so that there isn’t a record of it on the Internet later. Or, don’t trash them at all and organize drinks with the team to see them off so that the rest of your employees know you care. Read from the bottom up.

April 20, 2010

Resignation

Jason Calacanis at his finest.

I should note, that instead of responding, he instead removed my email account. Real pro of him. Good thing I forwarded it to myself first

Begin forwarded message:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Evan Culver
Date: Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 10:53 PM
Subject: Re: Resignation
To: jason@calacanis.com

Really?

What is your deal? I will ultimately *have* to come back to Mahalo to pick up my things. Why so rash, what is your rationale? This seems really unprofessional and when other developers and employees see this, it just makes them want to leave ASAP. Is it really that big of a deal that people find better things for them than Mahalo?

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 10:19 PM, wrote:

Evan,

Don’t come back to the office, do not email the team list.

Elliot will send you paperwork tomorrow. Today was your last day.

Good luck being employee 4,367 at a dying company.

Horribly disappointed in you.

J

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

From: Evan Culver
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:48:37 -0700
To: Jason Calacanis; Jacob Burch; Jeff Ammons
Subject: Resignation

Hey guys,

This isn’t an easy email to write, but as the subject suggests, this email is to inform you of my resignation from Mahalo effective in 2 weeks. An amazing opportunity came out of nowhere that I just couldn’t say no to. I’ll be writing code as a UI engineer at and contributing to the open-source project on a full-time basis.

I’ve never worked with such a great team and learned so much in such a short period of time. I owe all of it to the opportunity you’ve given me, Jason and I thank you immensely for that. Jeff and Jacob, you guys are amazingly brave for tackling such a great undertaking. I’m impressed you do it with seemingly such ease. Many people would fail quickly in your shoes and I applaud you for your leadership in such a fast-paced environment and against such great odds.

I certainly won’t be going far (), so I hope to continue a lasting relationship and hope that we all can work together sometime in the future.

Thanks again,

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

How Not To Handle A Resignation Gracefully

Thirty five years ago, give or take, I was presented with my first etch-a-sketch. And it looked a little bit like the iPad. Which makes me qualified to declare the iPad the future of media.

Or at least, that’s the logic of an article in today’s Guardian by Alan Rusbridger, who says that a block of wood that he saw sixteen years ago showed him the future. And that future was the iPad.

“My personal journey to the iPad began around 16 years ago in Aspen, Colorado,” Rusbridger begins. He saw a website showing a newspaper online and was duly impressed. “But the real excitement lay in Aspen, where the Knight Ridder newspaper chain had set up a “laboratory” to study the future of news. It was rumoured that they had built a “tablet” – a portable screen on which people could read newspapers.”

The tablet he saw was a block of wood with a printout of a newspaper glued on the front. No, I’m not kidding.

“At present it consists only of an A4 block of wood, with a ‘front page’ stuck on it: the technology for creating Fidler’s ‘Flat Pad’ is, he estimates, still a couple of years off.

And the iPad finally fulfilled that dream. “Here it was – the Aspen block of wood incarnate!” says Rusbridger when his iPad arrived.

The iPad Will Not Fix Your Newspaper

Rusbridger then goes on to talk about how perfect the iPad is to consumer the Internet (no disagreement from me on that point). And he suggests the iPad might be the knight in shining armor who rushes in to save the day for newspapers: “So is the iPad the future of newspapers after all?”

The best I can tell is that the newspaper guys envision people sitting on a train on the way to work reading their iPad. That’s similar to people sitting on a train read the newspaper. And since those two things are similar, voila!, the iPad will save newspapers.

Seriously, that’s as far as the argument goes.

But jumping back to reality…the iPad changes everything, which really means nothing has changed. All the pressures the Internet put on newspapers – crushing the business model, unlimited competition, no need for tree massacres – are just amplified by the iPad.

Now would be the time to embrace the Internet. But the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other are running in the opposite direction with apps that have no hyperlinks and/or require a fee to get access. All those people sitting on trains with their iPads are going to do the same thing that all those people sitting in their offices on their laptops did – get their news from free sources that hyperlink to other free sources.

The etch-a-sketch was very, very cool. But it didn’t give newspapers a competitive advantage and a way to stay alive a little longer. And neither does the iPad.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Just Because I Loved My Etch-A-Sketch Doesn’t Mean The iPad Will…

The New York Times will begin publishing daily on the iPad, offering readers around the world immediate access to most of the daily newspaper’s contents.

The New York Times on the iPad, as the electronic publication is known, contains most of the news and feature articles from the current day’s printed newspaper, classified advertising, reporting that does not appear in the newspaper, and interactive features including the newspaper’s crossword puzzle.

The iPad App (address: http:/www.nytimes.com) is part of a strategy to extend the readership of The Times and to create opportunities for the company in the electronic media industry, said Martin Nisenholtz, president of The New York Times Electronic Media Company.

The company, formed in 1995 to develop products for the rapidly growing field of digital publishing, is a wholly owned subsidiary of The New York Times Company, and also produces the times service on America Online Inc.

Mr. Nisenholtz reports to Russell T. Lewis, the president and general manager of The New York Times, and to Joseph Lelyveld, the newspaper’s executive editor.

The iPad-based Times is the newest of dozens of papers available to a global audience on the Internet’s fastest-growing service, which lets iPad users see electronic publications consisting of text, pictures and, in some cases, video and sound.

A selection of the day’s news, discussion forums and other material from The Times has been available through the @times service since the spring of 1994 on America Online.

The iPad’s global audience means a larger potential readership than that of @times, which is limited to America Online’s subscribers, currently more than four million. The new site also offers new products and services.

“Our iPad App is designed to take full advantage of the evolving capabilities offered by the Internet,” said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The Times. “We see our role on the iPad as being similar to our traditional print role — to act as a thoughtful, unbiased filter and to provide our customers with information they need and can trust.”

The iPad will also offer access to much of what the newspaper has published the previous week and access to feature articles from as far back as 1980.

Mr. Nisenholtz said that initially, at least, no subscription or access fee would be charged for readers in the United States and that the iPad App would generate revenue from advertising. Readers who connect to the iPad App from outside the country will be offered a 30-day trial without charge, but will eventually face a subscription fee.

Advertisers that have already announced participation on the iPad App include Toyota Motor Corporate Services, Chemical Bank and the Northeast real estate concern Douglas Elliman.

Subscribers will have limited access to archives of Times articles and features dating to 1980, and will be able to copy articles to their own iPads for $1.95 each, Mr. Nisenholtz said.

The new service will also offer, for a fee, a customized clipping service that delivers to a subscriber’s electronic mailbox articles gleaned from each day’s editions of the newspaper, based on key words the subscriber selects.

With its entry on the iPad, The Times is hoping to become a primary information provider in the computer age and to cut costs for newsprint, delivery and labor. Companies that have established iPad-based information sites include television networks, computer companies, on-line information services, magazines and even individuals creating electronic newspapers of their own.

“The New York Times name will get people to look at the product once or maybe twice, and the fact that The New York Times has the kind of reach and credibility it does may persuade people to look three or four times,” said John F. Kelsey 3d, president of the Kelsey Group, a consultancy running a conference on iPad Apps next month.

“The market is booming for newspapers on the iPad,” Mr. Kelsey said.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

The New York Times Introduces An iPad App

Never let it be said that I don’t admit when I’m wrong.

I mean, granted, I don’t particularly like being wrong – and I especially don’t like being wrong in the full glare of the public spotlight. But on the vanishingly small number of occasions when – due to some inexplicable glitch in the universe – I happen to be wrong, never let it be said that I don’t admit it.

A case in point… I just stumbled across an excellent post by biographer TJ Stiles, calling me out over my claim that hardback books are a ‘cash cow’ for the publishing industry.”Let’s set the record straight,” said Mr Stiles, “publishers (and authors) make much more money from hardcovers, it’s true. That is one reason why they have always delayed the release of cheaper paperbacks. But to refer to anything in publishing as a ‘cash cow’ is to suggest a level of profitability that simply does not exist in this narrow-margin industry. ‘Life line’ would be a better cliché. Did publishers cut that life line when the paperback was invented? No. Why should they now for the e-book?”

…and you know what? He’s right. The phrase ‘cash cow’ was misleading – it has echoes of fat cat publishers making billions in profits when, in most cases nothing could be further from the truth. ‘Life line’ is a far better phrase. I was wrong and – see! – I have no problem admitting it.

Of course, that’s hardly the admission of the decade: in cases like that, admitting I was wrong doesn’t involve eating a whole lot of humble pie. A more accurate test would be if I were to make a stratospheric misjudgment about a major issue – a misjudgment that turned out to be so embarrassing that I’d rather bury my head in a box on ants than admit to my error. What would I do then?

On Friday I was given the opportunity to find out.

A few months ago, in this very column, I wrote about Rupert Murdoch and how he would never remove his newspapers’ content from Google’s index because he was too obsessed with eyeballs…

The numbers show that most searchers wouldn’t even notice if the Wall Street Journal and every other News Corp publication vanished from their results. What would definitely happen, though, is a huge drop in eyeballs and ad revenue for News Corp, which would certainly cost Murdoch far more than he could hope to recoup from a deal with Bing. Again, anyone familiar with the Sun (and its New York-based cousin, the Post) will know that Rupert will always put his hunger for eyeballs above his insistence that people pay for news – to the point where he is happy to slash cover prices to economically-suicidal levels to win readers.

My point was pretty unambiguous: unless Rupert Murdoch has lost his mind, his obsession with eyeballs meant he would never pull the plug on freely available online content. Rupert Murdoch hasn’t lost his mind, ergo his content would stay free. And then on Friday came this…

Times and Sunday Times websites to charge from June

And you know what, I’m not afraid to say it.

I was wrong.

Rupert Murdoch has lost his mind.

Please understand I don’t make that statement lightly. When it comes to Murdoch, I’ve always been of the Michael Wolff school – doubting the man’s Internet credentials (allegedly he still hasn’t ever used Google) but at the same time respecting his business sense and his willingness to defer to trusted advisors when it comes to his company’s digital strategy. But with this latest decision it’s clear that he has not so much lost his marbles as collected them together into a lead bag and thrown them into the sea.

Moving its content behind a pay-wall will be the death of the Times; one of the world’s most respected newspapers and a British national treasure. Even with a relatively modest subscription cost of £1 ($1.60) a day or £2 for the whole week, it has been shown time and time again that the hassle factor of making even a small payment to access a website will result in a hemorrhaging of readers. Unlike the Financial Times (no relation), only a small fraction of the Times’ online readership do so for business reasons – with most incorporating it into their general news diet. If it’s no longer free they’ll simply get their news elsewhere.

And then there’s the drop in Google juice: News International is yet to announce its search indexing policy for the new site but its safe to say that the pay-wall will mean the vast majority of the paper’s news archive vanishing from search engines.  Times Online currently attracts 20 million unique readers a month, most of whom will disappear overnight once the pay-wall is erected.

No matter which angle you look at Murdoch’s decision, it’s almost impossible to see it as anything other than a sign of madness. But of course that hasn’t stopped some from trying to spot some hint of method in it…

James Harding, editor of The Times, tried to put a brave face on his boss’ decision – much like a mid-ranking officer might try to justify to his men why Douglas Haig has ordered them to go over the top during the Battle of the Somme. According to the BBC, Harding “agreed that NI’s pay-wall strategy was a risk… but [argued that] it’s less of a risk than just throwing away our journalism and giving it away for free.”

Nice try James, but that doesn’t really wash. For a start, complaining that making newspaper content available for free online is somehow devaluing it is just plain stupid. For years newspapers have been giving their paper editions away for free – on airlines and in other high-traffic locations – on the basis that these “bulks” will increase circulation figures and will in turn drive more advertising. Once you factor in printing, distribution and returns, the cover price of a newspaper – and let’s remember that Murdoch is the king of slashing prices to drive competitors out of business – barely covers the medium on which it’s delivered.

Advertising has always been the real revenue driver in print, to the point where Murdoch was quite happy to give his “away for free” with the launch of a free London daily back in 2005 (it went out of business last year due to fierce competition from another free paper from rivals Associated Newspapers). The truth is that – as Jeff Jarvis writes in the Guardian – Murdoch simply hasn’t been able to figure out how to make online advertising work. And it’s that inability that has driven him to his current madness.

There’s a second problem with Harding’s argument: journalists and columnists actually are quite keen on having their product given away free. No matter whether we’re covering Iraq or fashion trends, we writers tend to be egotists at heart, which is one of the reasons we’re prepared to accept the reasonably shitty salaries offered by news organisations rather than going in to, say, PR. Our reward isn’t so much money as the knowledge that our work will be appreciated by a large audience. With print circulation plummeting (the Times has gone from nearly 700,000 daily readers to 500,000 in the past five years), journalists want to write for publications with large online audiences to ensure that their reporting is seen by the masses.

When Sirius hired Howard Stern they had to pay him a hugely inflated salary to reflect the fact that he’d be seeing a large and immediate drop in his listener numbers. Similarly, by hiding its journalism behind a pay-wall, News International will have to pay vastly inflated salaries to attract the best an brightest to its pages. And in an era where newspapers can barely afford to keep the talent they have, that’s just another nail in the coffin.

Really the only possible reasoning – outside of madness – that’s left for Murdoch’s behaviour is that he’s cleverer than all of us. Perhaps if we just watch quietly we’ll soon see the true genius behind his plan. After all, that’s what happened back in the 1980s and 90s when he launched Sky Television – a British-based satellite TV channel. Back then no one in the UK paid for television (we’d been brought up on free to air TV with little or no demand for cable) and there were no signs that they were ready to start – and yet in less than a decade Sky had become one of the country’s biggest broadcasters. The success of Sky was down to the content – Murdoch bought the rights to broadcast premium football (sorry, soccer) games, forcing millions of households to sign up to Sky if they wanted to follow their favourite teams. Perhaps that’s his plan with the Times as well – make the content of his new online editions so unbelievably compelling that subscribers will be forced to sign up in their droves?

Nope, that doesn’t wash either. With Sky, Murdoch was operating in a single market (the UK) with a product (pay per view TV) that had already been proven overseas. With Times Online, Murdoch is competing on a global stage and, unless the Times is about to switch its editorial page over to porn, there’s no example of anyone getting the paid news content model right for a consumer audience so far.

Especially not someone who is so afraid of the Internet that they haven’t even used Google.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

NSFW: The Madness of King Rupert – I Admit, I Was Wrong About…

Hear that, kids? Tony Melone -- Verizon Wireless' Senior VP and CTO -- confirmed to us during a one-on-one meeting after the company's CTIA roundtable discussion that every last one of its data-only LTE WWAN devices (aircards, MiFi-type products and USB data sticks, for example) would also support 3G. Not too surprising given the natural ties between the two technologies, but it's still refreshing to hear that every 4G data-only product that launches (at least initially) on VZW will also be able to hop onto the company's 3G network if you just so happen to break away from an LTE area. Can't say that for a smattering of existing WiMAX products. In related news, Tony also affirmed that Verizon would be "interested" in getting a smartphone on its LTE network that could double as a mobile hotspot, exactly how the Palm Pre Plus does now (but on 3G, obviously). As for pricing when it comes to LTE data rates? Tony wouldn't give us any indication of the carrier's plans, but if it's anything similar to whispers we've heard in the past (not to mention rates already seen through Clearwire), it'll probably be at least marginally more expensive than what you're paying today for third-generation access.

Verizon Wireless: 'all' 4G WWAN devices will support 3G, too originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Verizon Wireless: ‘all’ 4G WWAN devices will support 3G, too

Some weeks, writing this column is easy. All it takes is for an influential person – a politician, a business person, perhaps even a fellow columnist – to say something dumb and I get to spend a thousand words or so explaining precisely why they’re wrong. The “why x is wrong about y” construction is the columnist’s best friend: it’s as old as the hills and even easier to build a house on.

Some weeks though, it’s even easier than that. Someone will say something so breathtakingly wrong – so tracheotomy-cravingly moronic – that I don’t need to explain anything. Simply quoting their words back at them is sufficient to make the point.

Step forward, Jimmy Wales.

Speaking this week at the Guardian’s Guardian Changing Media Summit, Wales – the founder of Wikipedia – uttered the following statement when asked about the future of newspapers…

“I don’t see the added value [of opinion columnists] and question whether a newspaper should be paying large sums of money for them anymore… The best of the political bloggers are easily the equal of the opinion columnists at the New York Times.”

Those words could stand alone as a monument to Wales’ wrongness – a warning for future generations on why we must never heed the advice of a man who calls himself ‘Jimbo’. But the very fact that Wales was invited to opine about the future of news at a major conference despite having no identifiable qualifications to do so compels me to elaborate. If people take his opinion on newspapers seriously enough to ask him to speak on the subject then there’s a terrifying possibility that they’ll take him seriously enough to act on his advice.

And who could blame them? Newspaper owners are terrified – destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked – and desperately seeking any advice on how to cauterize their bottom line. The cause of their madness is, of course, the Internet and so it’s logical – after a fashion – that they should turn to Wales for answers. After all, he’s The Man From The Internet: surely he has all the answers?

Yeeeeah. Not so much.

For the benefit of those poor befuddled newspapermen, let’s take a few minutes – and a thousand words or so – to break down all the reasons why you shouldn’t listen to Jimmy Wales when he tells you how to run a newspaper.

For a start, let’s consider what Wales actually does for a living. Or rather what he doesn’t do. He doesn’t own, operate or edit a newspaper. He doesn’t employ any journalists, has never sold an advertisement and he doesn’t have a single customer who pays to read the content he relies on volunteers to produce. For those reasons, his lack of understanding of the “added value” that high profile personalities bring to newspapers is understandable – forgivable even. Or at least it would be were it not for the fact that Wikipedia uses Wales’ own high profile personality to encourage its users to donate money in order to ensure its survival.

“A message from Jimmy Wales” reads the banner at the top of Wikipedia entries during the site’s regular donation drives. These banners link to a personal appeal for support, written by Jimbo and complete with an above-the-fold photo of his face. Jimmy Wales is the first encyclopedia editor since Alain T. Britannica to build a cult of personality around the gig. Why? Because he knows that personality creates familiarity, which in turn creates loyalty, which in turn creates value. Except, apparently, when it comes to newspapers.

Which takes us to the real nub of Jimmy Wales’ wrongness. No one would argue that the newspaper industry – in print form – is screwed. Speaking at the same Guardian conference, media commentator and Murdoch fanboy Michael Wolff summed the situation up nicely when he said “Every big-city newspaper in the U.S. is either in bankruptcy or will be in bankruptcy in the foreseeable future – that’s 12 months. The newspaper industry in the U.S. is over”.

The future of news is online, but that future brings with it the total commoditisation of facts and the death of straight reporting as a way to drive reader loyalty. Newspapers aren’t just competing with other newspapers, but also with Twitter and Facebook and blogs and thousands of other channels through which facts can be disseminated. If one paper puts its news behind a pay wall, the chances are that same news will be available elsewhere for free. Even with high quality investigative reporting, if the story is big enough then someone will simply rewrite it – perfectly legally – and post it on a blog, where it will then be reblogged and retweeted and aggregated. (The aggregators themselves encourage this: Gabe Rivera told me recently that the best way for a blogger to get content on Techmeme is to paraphrase something that previously appeared behind a pay-wall).

The battle to force people to pay for general news, then, is lost. Likewise, thanks to micro-aggregators like Techmeme and macro-aggregators like Google News, the fight to maintain reader loyalty through news reporting is finished too. Sure, some people may still cling to the BBC or the New York Times out of habit, but the trend towards decentralisation – with readers choosing their news source on a story-by-story basis – is inexorable.

There remains, however, one reason to remain loyal to a single newspaper – or at least to visit that newspaper’s online edition every day. And that’s for its editorial voice: the unique tone with which a publication interprets the basic facts of a news story and helps us form an opinion on it. Which, of course, is where columnists come in.

Columnists – and other opinion-driven journalists – are the heart and soul of a news organisation: they’re what makes us tune in to Fox News (Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly) or MSNBC (Keith Olbermann). They’re why we buy the Wall Street Journal (Peggy Noonan) or The New York Times (Maureen Dowd). Newspapers know this of course, which is why when Murdoch desperately (and misguidedly) wanted to protect hard-copy sales of his flagship UK tabloid, The Sun, he removed his big name columnists from the web and confined them to print.

Wales may claim that the best political bloggers are better than their mainstream rivals but he’s wrong about that too. For a start, professional columnists carry with them the weight of their entire publication. Maureen Dowd’s opinion pieces are so powerful because they are packed with insight and fact, much of which stems from the access she enjoys as an internationally recognised columnist. The vast majority of independent political bloggers can only dream of that kind of access and are instead forced to rely on second-hand reporting for the basis of their writing. But even if a political blogger does manage to deliver the goods, it’s only a matter of time before they’re snapped up by the mainstream media. I don’t care what crap they spout while they’re struggling to make it, every political blogger in the world would kill their own puppy to write for a nationally – or internationally – recognised publication. The first thing Nate Silver did when FiveThirtyEight went stellar? Take a gig at the New Republic.

This symbiosis – columnistists clamouring to write for newspapers, and newspapers needing great columnists to define their voice – is where the real key to the survival of newspapers lies. Rival papers, and bloggers and Twitterers may summarise and rewrite your news scoops, depriving you or readers, but they can’t do the same with your columnists. Personality is simply not reproducible – there’s only one Maureen Dowd and there will only ever be one Glenn Beck (inshallah) so if readers want to hear what they have to say, they have to go to the source. Moreover, while news ages rapidly, opinion doesn’t. A story published online by the New York Times is dated the moment it appears and people begin tweeting out the key facts, but a well-crafted opinion column has an infinite shelf life.

For all of these reasons, only the most imbecilicly terrified newspaper editor would heed Jimmy Wales’ advice and fire their most valuable assets. For all the others, there’s actually a compelling argument to do precisely the opposite. It’s comment and opinion, not news, that really adds value to newspapers in the Internet age – and as such the really smart editors will get rid of all their costly reporters and use the money instead to fill their pages with nothing but highly paid opinion columnists. Only then can newspapers be assured of their survival.

I know it sounds scary, newspaper owners, but you’ll just have to trust me on this one. After all, I’m The Man From The Internet and I have all the answers.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

NSFW: Jimmy Wales Wants Me Dead (The Neutrality Of This Article Is…

Didn’t I just write that the online video publishing market is heating up quickly? Here’s another testament to that notion: KIT digital this morning announced that it has agreed to acquire privately-held competitor Multicast Media for net consideration of approximately $18 million.

The acquisition sum is comprised of $4.9 million in cash and 1.3 million shares of KIT digital common stock, plus the assumption of approximately $4.6 million in long-term liabilities.

KIT digital plans to close the acquisition by the end of this month.

This is KIT digital’s sixth strategic acquisition, following the purchases of Narrowstep, Visual Connection, Morpheum, Kamera, The Feedroom and Nunet (the latter two brands were retired by KIT digital late 2009).

Multicast specializes in live event broadcasting, Internet video management and targeted multimedia communications for about 1,000 organizations ranging from government, non-profit organizations to Fortune 500 companies. In 2009, Multicast claims to have delivered broadcasts for some 50,000 live events and served more than 250 million video streams to a worldwide audience.

The company is said to derive an estimated $12 million in annualized recurring licensing fees for its IP video management software, with additional revenues related to professional services.

From what we can gather, Multicast has never publicly talked about how much funding it raised and when, although it is listed as a portfolio company of Northbrook, Illinois based MK Capital.

KIT digital will be integrating Media Suite’s live and content delivery solutions onto its VX-one platform, and expects to host Multicast’s clients operating on a unified platform by the third quarter of 2010. Several Multicast executives will be transitioning to KIT digital’s global management team and the company’s offices in Atlanta, Georgia will continue to be staffed by 90+ Multicast employees.

Concurrent with the Multicast acquisition, KIT digital announced that it has acquired or agreed to acquire nearly 4 million of its outstanding in-the-money warrants over the course of the first quarter, using the proceeds from its recent $15 million public equity offering.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

KIT digital Buys Rival Multicast For Approx. $18 Million

When I was at school, I almost never took sick days. This wasn’t because I enjoyed going to school – I really, really didn’t. Rather it was because I knew exactly what would happen if I dared to skip even a day of classes.

A duck would somehow get into the school dining hall.

Or an explosion would destroy the chemistry lab.

Or two of my teachers would be caught having sex.

Or someone would die.

The specific incident isn’t important; the point is that I could guarantee that the one day I decided to skip school would be the day that something extraordinary would happen. Something that all of my friends would be talking about for the rest of the year while I was left to sit and sulk at having missed out.

It’s a curse that has followed me through life: I could go to parties six days a week and you can be sure that the seventh is the one where the knife fight happens. The conference I skip is the only one where the wifi doesn’t suck ass. The episode of Quantum Leap I miss is the one where Sam Beckett briefly makes it back home. And so apparently it is with my gig at TechCrunch.

Regular readers may have noticed that I didn’t file a column last week. This was because for the past ten days or so I’ve been completely out of circulation: racing to finally submit the very, very delayed manuscript for my new book. I finally dragged myself over the finish line on Tuesday and since then I’ve basically been recovering: catching up on things like sleeping, eating and experiencing daylight. During that time I’ve barely glanced at the Internet – or at least not at any technology news. All hell could have broken loose in the past few days and I wouldn’t have had a clue.

And so, of course, it did. Knowing that I was out of action for a few days, the tech world took the opportunity to go absolutely ape-shit mental.

It’s as if every kooky, ridiculous or hilarious story – the stuff of which columnists’ wet dreams are made – waited until I closed Techmeme for the last time ten days ago before it broke. The last piece of news I saw before I disconnected was the launch of Google Buzz. “Meh,” I thought, “if that the best this week has to offer, I can definitely take some time off.”

I mean, at a push, I might have been able to churn out a column about how desperate Google’s new product launches have started to look. How they have started to look like an over-keen salesman at a Turkish Bazaar. “You don’t like Wave? Ok, ok, wait Sir, I have this.. you like Buzz? I do you good price.”

But the precise moment I shut down my browser, the whole thing went to shit: it turned out that, unless you chose otherwise, Buzz would automatically display the names of the people you emailed most frequently.

I mean – come on. This is Google – a company that sparked an international incident recently when it accused China of hacking its Gmail service to identify dissidents – and now it’s actively doing the spies’ work for them? 1300 words would have flowed like water as I speculated whether Google is trying to prove to China that anything communism can do, capitalism can do better. You want to expose a few dissidents? Fuck that – we’ll expose all of them.

And why stop there? You only wanted us to remove photos of tanks in Tienanmen Square from image search. Pah! We’re going to remove all pictures of tanks, and all squares. In fact we’re going to delete anything that’s even in the shape of a square. See you later, Spongebob! Take that, Commies!

A few days later, Apple took up the ‘you have got to be kidding me’ mantle by banning thousands of apps which contained even mild sexual content. Had I written a column about that, I’d probably have taken the controversial position that, actually, I agree with Apple: sexy apps should have been banned a long time ago. Not for their sexual content, you understand, but because they’re all really, really crappy.

I mean, seriously, who would pay a dollar for a few photos of women in bikinis when you could just open Safari and have access to billions of photos of women without bikinis – for free! Hell, I could have fallen back on the old columnist’s standby of quoting Bill Hicks on how easily sex sells in America…

“Will there be titties?’
‘Uh… sure?’
BOOM! A check falls in my lap.
‘What are these titties gonna do?’
‘Uh… jiggle?’
BOOM! Another check falls in my lap.
‘Jiggling titties! Who’d have thunk it! You’ve answered our prayers out here in Hollywoooood. We can’t write enough checks for you, boy!’

But wait! It gets better. The story of Apple’s new found prudishness broke on the exact same day that we discovered that the Sex.com domain name was being auctioned off and that YouTube announced plans to livestream Tiger Woods’ press conference in which he would promise never, ever to have sex with anyone ever again.

Once again, the column writes itself: clearly we’re seeing the start of an online war against sex. In fact we’re seeing the dawn of Web 3.0: the Puritan Web. Say goodbye to sex.com and say hello to chasteglances.org. Forget Viagra spam and look forward to thousands of emails promising to help you “drive her wild with your extra-long… engagement.”

I finally resurfaced late last night, fired up my laptop and started catching up with everything I’d missed. As I paged through all these stories – Google’s epic privacy failures, the war on sex – I cursed my bad luck. Any one of them would have made a great column – but all falling together? It was like Christmas.

And yet of course, in my absence, my esteemed TC colleagues had jumped on them all – like Tiger Woods on a roomful of cocktail waitresses – leaving me with nothing fresh to add. I felt like an obituary writer who decided to go on vacation during that week in 1997 when Princess Diana and Mother Theresa both died.

But then, just when I was about to give up, I noticed one last story. One that knocked all of the others into a cocked hat but that, as far as I could see, hadn’t been covered by anyone else on TechCrunch…

On Friday, a school in Philadelphia admitted using webcams built into students’ laptops to videotape and photograph them in their own bedrooms.

I mean, just think about that for a moment: teachers using webcams to watch children in their bedrooms. Which bit of that story isn’t incredible? That they installed that software in the first place? That kids and parents weren’t told about it? That it was actually used? That the teacher then admitted to a student that it had been used? Or that even now the school is framing this as an unfortunate overstepping of an otherwise perfectly acceptable technological mark? Then there’s the fourth amendment angle, the scary paedophilia angle, the Big Brother angle…. I mean, even a arthritic monkey with half a typewriter could make a column out of that stuff.

Unfortunately it was at this point – about five minutes ago – that I realised the time. I’ve spent so long catching up with everything I missed from the past week or so that six hours have passed. It’s dawn in San Francisco, a matter of minutes before my deadline, and I still haven’t written a word, let alone 1300. That’s the other annoying thing about skipping a week: it takes you another week just to catch up.

Ah well. I guess no column from me again this week.

Sorry everyone.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

NSFW: Playing catch-up… Or ceci n’est pas une column