Netizen

Friday, October 15, 2010

What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

I am in my 30s. Isn't it a little too late to be asking that question? I take solace in the fact that we live in an era when people will have a few different careers before they retire and go ahead and die. That would be fine except I seem to be having a few different careers at the same time, in parallel: no complaints. I have tried to learn positivity from my man Obama.

Finally I might have found it: a for profit micro finance startup with IPO ambitions. (Microfinance: The Next Big Thing?) And the fact that I am about a year away from my green card feels like no hindrance at all. I will just get someone else to incorporate the company. The conversation is in full swing, the work is on.

Google Car, Google Monorail
Physically Aware Internet
Solar Panels To Roll Out
To Natural User Interface
Offshoring The Wind Harvesting: Google Wind
Etsy, GroupOn, Zynga
Becoming Whole With The Mobile Web

NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 26: Microfinance pioneer...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Before this I have been emailing my 12 line resume - in text format, my machine does not have Microsoft Office on it - to all sorts of people on Craig's List. For the longest time I did not even send cover letters. What is that? The thing is I have never had a job. Don't ask how that came to be, but that is the fact. Then I started sending cover letters, the same standard, half hearted cover letters where I was calling all sorts of jobs my "dream job." The truth is there is no dream job out there. My dream job necessarily has to be self created.

Then I have thought of tech consulting and social media consulting. (An Online Social Media Instructor, Not Your Usual Yoga Guru)

Image via WikipediaThere are more than a dozen coders in India on stand by for me as we speak. I find them projects, they get working, I pay them their hourly rate, take my cut, and we all end up happy: that has been the idea. (Becoming Whole With The Mobile Web)

I just talked to the guy in Kerala last night, and to the dude in Pittsburgh today.

I was going to doodle along for a year like that, doing a few things, but not really doing much, learn some Scala along the way, (Al Wenger Wants To Learn Scala) and get into the mobile web upon getting my green card. I have a mobile app in mind that would grow from the small screen to the big screen.

I have had people ask me if I might have run for president if I had been born in the US. First of all, people, I am utmost flattered. But that question is too theoretical. That is like asking what would life be like if earth had moon's kind of gravity. The mental exercise is not worth it. Microfinance fascinates me, the affordable housing issue in NYC does not.

Image via WikipediaThere are a few things I wanted to do in tech, but then I will keep my serial entrepreneur options open, and perhaps I will get to invest in ideas that I might not get to bring to fruition myself.

Large scale group dynamics is my thing. I am really, really good at it. (Iran) Even when I have expressed Nasdaq headed tech company ambitions, I have thought more in terms having money to pour into microfinance, and less in terms of private jets. But why take that long route? Why not go straight into microfinance? There is no limit to how much money you can raise if you do it right. This is potentially a market in the trillions of dollars.

But make no mistake, the tech part of this startup is central to what it is going to be. This is first and foremost a tech startup. The concept feels like having your cake and eating it too.

This is one brave new century.

Eduardo Saverin: Roommate Does Not Mean Best Friend

Image representing Mark Zuckerberg as depicted...

Image via CrunchBase

Mashable: The Other Facebook Co-founder Speaks Out: Instead of moving out with Zuckerberg to Palo Alto to grow the company though, he decided to work as a finance intern and the two began to have major conflicts over the direction of Facebook. Eventually the company was restructured, leaving Saverin out in the cold. His co-founder title was stripped and his share of Facebook reportedly dropped from 30% to less than 5%, for which he sued Facebook in 2009..... making his net worth somewhere in the range of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion.... Even his Facebook page is bare; it only has two posts. All it says is that he’s a “technology entrepreneur and investor.”

I don't believe companies have co-founders. It is rare for a company to have a co-founder. The title co-founder denotes equal status, and that almost never happens. Paul Allen was not a Microsoft co-founder. Bill Gates was the founder, the indispensable person, the person who saw where the company might be in 20 years. Bob Miner was not an Oracle co-founder. Larry Ellison was the founder. Bob Miner never was able to make peace with the fact that at some point his net worth surpassed a million dollars. That was not a co-founder.

The big bang of Oracle happened with Larry Ellison and Bob Miner happened to be nearby. Paul Allen happened to be nearby. The big bang of Facebook happened with Mark Zuckerberg. Saverin was not a best friend, not even a friend. Saverin was roommate. He happened to be in geographical proximity. He is the accidental billionaire. The guy did not get the idea. And by that I don't mean to suggest the idea of Facebook did not originate with him. What I mean to suggest is the guy did not "get" it. He never got it, until he realized Facebook was getting really big, and so he sued. His billion should go straight to charity.

The two idiot twins should not have received any money. The justice system is flawed that they ended up with any money.

To some extent Paul Allen was there, he was number two. Bob Miner was with Oracle for years. He did work. These Facebook drama clowns did nothing. The twins were rowing the boat. Saverin had all the wrong ideas about where Facebook needed to go. The guy, if anything, was not even a non founder, he was an anti-founder. If o-n-e of his ideas had been incorporated, Facebook was gone down the tube.

I want the money back.

David Kirkpatrick: "Zuck Is Not An Asshole"
To Make Sense Of The Facebook Movie
I Gave In: Facebook: The Movie
The Social Network: Before Seeing The Movie

CNBC: Facebook Co-Founder Speaks Publicly: What I Learned From Watching “The Social Network”

An Online Social Media Instructor

I am one of the instructors. I think I might be the very first one, definitely one of the early ones. It feels good to be on the ground level. This is a social media startup. The classes will be online. That is not acting cheap. That is not going for the second choice. It actually makes no sense to conduct social media classes in the traditional bricks and mortar setting. You want the instructor online. You want the students online.

I am one of the top 100 people in New York City on Twitter. (@paramendra) I am really into social media. If you are a people person fascinated by technology, social media comes naturally to you, as it does to me. Social media is as much about people as technology. If you have poor people skills that is not to say you are not going to be good at social media, but that is to say you are going to have to work on your people

Image by paramendra via Flickr skills just as hard as you might work on the
technology part. Just setting up a Twitter or a Facebook account is not going to do it.

I have seen people and organizations set up blogs, and all they do is post what used to be press releases. That is not my idea of blogging. There is a great way to tweet and blog, and there is a so so way to tweet and blog, and there are some lousy ways. There are so so Facebook pages, and there are Facebook pages that grip you.

You don't need a million page hits to your blog. You don't need 10,000 followers on Twitter before you can be a social media success. Social media for small businesses is as much about customer service as customer acquisition. Social media is about making intimate conversations with customers possible. If you really, truly care about your customers, intimate conversations are not chores. If they feel like chores, you need to step up on the customer service pedal. Social media does not solve that. You can have a social media presence and still have a lousy customer service. Stale Twitter and Facebook accounts, and stale blogs are not my idea of getting social media.

I responded to a Craig's List ad by Duane Wells, the founder, and that is how I got started with the Social Media Learning Institute. I have every reason to believe he is pretty ambitious with it. And I like that. I wanted to be talking to an entrepreneur at heart before I signed up. We are still talking, we are still chalking out the details. And the guy is in Pittsburgh. We use social media to communicate. We are eating our own dog food.

(Posted at The Social Media Learning Institute posterous)

Google Car, Google Monorail

Offshoring The Wind Harvesting: Google Wind
Smart Cars Should Talk To Each Other
Robert Scoble's Not Google Car
Self Driving Google Car

This company is going offline, it looks like.

A few problems: for this to be feasible for long distance travel of even a few miles you are going to have to make room for the fact that some people might have mood swings and just stop pedaling half way there, causing traffic jams. Having several tracks might be one way to do it. So when one track jams, you switch traffic to another track. Or having central control so that a stuck "car" is centrally moved with electricity even if the person inside has stopped pedaling.

Got to make room for the human element. The human finds ways to throw a wrench into the cog.

Otherwise the monorail looks like a fantastic idea. Fun, environmentally friendly.

Wait. What about the air inside? How do you maintain the temperature and still make room for the fact that the person inside might want to breathe? You don't want someone to use up all the oxygen inside, and then what?

Looks like there are little holes for air. So it can't be too cold outside, right? Or too hot.

I am mighty impressed with the speed of this thing. The zero carbon promise, and the speed: those might be the two big attractions. And the individualistic bend to having your own little cubicle. I am very interested in the technology behind this.

"The most efficient vehicle on earth," wow. This is like bicycle on steroids. At 70 kilometers per hour, this is practically a car. And, wow, the view you will get to see along the way. It is like there is nothing between you and the landscape. You are floating through the landscape. I can see this being a big hit in all the tourist spots of the world. This could be a great way to watch wild life in Africa, or to gawk at the snow and ice high up in the Himalayas. There though, you might need to carry oxygen tanks.

This feels like ought to be that layer that needs to be added atop all the cities of the world. You buy your monthly metro pass, and you ride these things as much as you want. It is just like a car, minus the hassle. This might do to big city transportation what microfinance has done to poverty in Bangladesh.

50 miles per hour is a car. I could go cross country with this thing. Perhaps there is a room for a hybrid. Bring the smarts of the smart car to this thing, and make "car pooling" possible. You want 100 of these things to move in one rhythm over long distances.

Image via WikipediaThe aerodynamics of this thing is mighty impressive. You spend most of your biking energy fighting the wind, not pedaling the bike, it seems like.

So two or more of these monorail cars can go faster than one? But then how do you avoid the free rider problem? What if I stop pedaling and simply go along for the ride? Again, but that is the human element. That is not a technology issue. The technology of this thing is just fine.

In a smart grid, the best idea could come from anywhere. And now from the part of the world that brought us Google Maps, we get the Google Monorail. Bravo. This thing takes the best of many forms of, perhaps all forms of transportation. This is like flying a small plane. This is like gliding through air. This is like biking on land. This is like riding a train. Air is like water, this is like water transportation. This is like skiing.

If the 21st is going to be a green century - what are the other choices? - then this monorail has a big future.

No traffic lights. Wow. That is like the town I grew up in.

PSFK: Kyle Cameron: Google Explores A Pedal-Powered Public Monorail System: Shweeb is a transportation project that has come out of Google’s Project 10^100 program, where Google solicits and supports ideas that change the world by helping as many people as possible.

I like it that Google is using its surplus money to think outside the box, the box being software. Clean tech is one of the next big things after web technology. Soon enough web tech is going to become utility, it is going to be fundamental, but it is going to recede into the background. Clean tech is a great sector to bet on. The next industrial revolution is going to be clean.

This monorail is a multi billion dollar idea. It deserves to take off like crazy.

Its next incarnation might be a version that is electric powered and weather proof and has two way radio communication. Then we could dream long distances. As long as that electricity is coming from a wind farm, it is still clean. Could you make it much faster then? Could you make the cars bigger? How about 10 people to a car? Then we could have conversation. But then Google has struggled with social.

You don't have to confiscate people's lands to build this thing, or at least not too much of it. Roads ask for land, lots and lots of land.

Google Under Attack?

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

ComputerWorld: Google, Facebook battle for 'future of the Web': the biggest threat to Google's search standing yet. ..... Now when someone uses Microsoft's Bing search engine to look for a new car or a book, she can see which ones her Facebook friends liked. It will now be easier for searchers to get their friends' opinions before they make purchasing decisions..... the search giant handled 72.15% of all U.S. searches last month..... "Let's face it, Bing has been a big disappointment, but this could act as a differentiator," said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group Research. "People prefer Google to Microsoft, but they prefer Facebook to Google. .... For major Facebook users, I believe 'social search' is attractive, and many are likely to switch to Bing for all searches... Not only does [Google] lose users, but they lose young users."

Microsoft did search. It was not a big deal. Then it revamped it and called it Bing, but it's not Google. There was a major marketing push. But I was not alarmed on behalf of Google. When Microsoft got Yahoo to hand over its search queries to Bing, I predicted that would only result in a net loss for Yahoo with no gain for Bing, and so actually a net gain for Google.

But Bing partnering with Facebook is different. I think this story is being reported wrong. This is not Bing teaming up with Facebook. It is the other way round. This is Facebook teaming up with Bing. This is not Bing finally having found that thing with which to compete with Google Search. This is Facebook coming into search territory. This is big.

This is not to suggest Google will now see a decline. Google will keep growing. And Facebook will grow like crazy. This is the internet going much more mainstream. People are spending time on Facebook without taking their eyes off the many Google products.

This is a significant development. This throws further light on Facebook's ambitions, if that was necessary. But this is not necessarily bad news for Google, not big, bad news. This is absolutely not the end of Google.

But I see no reason why Facebook will not offer the same to Google. I mean, if the idea is to become relevant to as many search queries as possible, Google is a bigger bet than Bing. No?

Facebook sees Google as competition, but it does not see Microsoft as competition. That might partly be it. Or maybe even fully.

This just might be the first serious competition Google Search ever faced. Google's best bet is to get Zuck to give them the same deal. That would be a win win for Facebook and Google.

In The News

The Skype Blog: Skype with Facebook integration and group video calling: We’ve integrated the Facebook News Feed and Phonebook into Skype ..... Video calling accounted for approximately 40% of all Skype-to-Skype minutes in the first half of this year

BBC: Google's profits lifted by higher advertising revenues: a 32% rise in profits. .... Our core business grew very well, and our newer businesses - particularly display and mobile - continued to show significant momentum.

Google: Google Announces Third Quarter 2010 Financial Results: Google-owned sites generated revenues of $4.83 billion, or 67% of total revenues ..... Google’s partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.20 billion, or 30% of total revenues ..... Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $3.77 billion, representing 52% of total revenues

Apple Insider: Google announces $1 billion in mobile revenue: Search queries from mobile devices have grown 5 times over the last couple of years, with most of the queries coming from Android phones ..... Carol Bartz believes iAd will "fall apart" as Apple's high level of control drives away advertisers. Adidas is rumored to have canceled a $10 million iAd contract because Apple had exerted too much control over the process.

Reuters: Google trumps Wall Street targets, shares soar: "This is the best performance they've had in three years. We're back to the old Google we know and love" ..... the $2.5 billion run rate in display advertising was a gross number, meaning that some of that revenue is paid to Google's partners. ..... On Wednesday, Facebook and Microsoft unveiled improvements to Microsoft's Bing search engine that incorporate personalized Facebook data, such as restaurant recommendations from a person's friends, into search results. ..... Google has been on an acquisition spree, buying more than 20 companies in 2010, including several companies that were developing social networking technology. ..... YouTube online video site was now "monetizing" over 2 billion views a week, a rise of 50 percent from a year earlier ..... Google's 9-percent rise in extended trading, to $590, would be the biggest single-day gain since November 2008.

Seattle PI: The Microsoft Blog: Ballmer: Google's ability to monetize search 'surprised me': "Google tends to throw a lot more things against the wall."

Fast Company: Facebook Credits Get More Powerful, Hint at Facebook's Money-Minting Future: Facebook has designs on all sorts of Web-dominating strategies for the future..... Facebook gets a 30% skim off every transaction in Credits .... Credits could almost become a de facto world currency .... Facebook's potential expansions--from music downloads to premium photo sharing--all paid for with Facebook's own virtual currency.

The Bing-Facebook Alliance: Six Things You (and Google) Should Know: the new Bing search features that Microsoft and Facebook unveiled today are going to upend the search business..... Launched a store that no one "Liked?" you’re not going to show up in the search results. .... once you introduce a social dimension to search results, you could actually start representing search results—visually—in new ways .... he said that, ultimately, the company would like to work with all players in search.

For Millennials, Brands May Be as Important as Religion, Ethnicity: Millennials--the generation born between 1980 and 1995--relate to brands in deep and complicated ways .... Edelman, the world's largest PR firm. .... Volunteering to try new products and review some of them online is a "core value," according to Edelman .... the majority of those surveyed had recommended products to friends and family via a social network

The Inbox: Like Search Before Google

Image via WikipediaThe inbox continues to be the wild, wild west of the computing experience. Email is still the dominant application. Before Google came along, the feeling was search was done and over with. That is why Yahoo refused to buy Google, despite being given the chance by the Google founders. Yahoo already had a search box. Why bother? AltaVista was king.

It is not possible the inbox is done and over with, even though the last major innovation with the inbox was when Google gave one gigabyte of space, and that too on April Fool's day. You had to see it to believe it.

Is it like when you borrow too many books from the library and do not get around to reading them all? Whose fault is that? Your having only 24 hours in your day is not the tech sector's problem. That perhaps is not even God's problem.

Google did a good job of expanding your inbox. And the search function in Gmail is great. And the newly launched Priority Inbox is great too. But the inbox has a long way to go. Your social graph is made up of concentric circles and your inbox has to reflect that. Not all emails are equally important.

There has to be the option to visually read emails. So you collect all emails from this one person and you visually read 100 of them at once. You should have the option to form word clouds out of those 100 emails with the option to jump over to an individual email from that word cloud, if the desire should take wings.

Fred Wilson: The Impact Of Priority Inbox: I get a lot of email and I can't get to all of it regardless of what email client I use. Other Priority Inbox users might actually read through Everything Else. But I don't and can't. ..... Google has solved a huge problem for me and potentially created a huge problem for emailers.

So how do you get hold of a celebrity like Fred Wilson? You tweet them. You leave a comment at their blog. If it is worth their time to read, they will read. They might even tweet back, or reply to a comment. But don't be counting on it. It is not like you have a right to his time, especially when he also has only 24 hours in a day.

That Thing Between The PC And The Smartphone

Image via WikipediaSteve Jobs, when he unveiled the iPad, claimed that the iPad was that thing between the PC and the smartphone. He famously called the PC the truck and the iPad the car. I disagreed. I did not think, I don't think the iPad is that thing between the PC and the smartphone. It is one of the things in that space, but the definitive device between the PC and the smartphone has not arrived yet. Whatever it is, it will try to render both the PC and the smartphone unnecessary.

Apple Insider: Apple component allocations point to new form factor sub-notebook: Activity within Apple's supply chain throughout the better part of 2010 has shown signs that the Mac maker is gearing up to introduce a new notebook that doesn't fit into any of its existing hardware designs ...... d a new MacBook Air .... "true" multi-touch Macs.

Something that is not as small as the smartphone, but approaches it in weight would be nice. The screen has to be decent size. You should be able to make and receive calls. There has to be the webcam option. Could you fit a camera into it?

But then major advances in the software behind the keyboard have made the tablet more appealing. If you can type away on the tablet like on a netbook, I mean.

And in the mean time Apple's shares keep getting pricier. Steve Jobs is on a roll.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Texting Teens

Image via Wikipedia

Nielsen Wire: U.S. Teen Mobile Report: Calling Yesterday, Texting Today, Using Apps Tomorrow: No one texts more than teens (age 13-17), especially teen females, who send and receive an average of 4,050 texts per month. ..... Texting is currently the centerpiece of mobile teen behavior. 43 percent claim it is their primary reason for getting a cellphone, which explains why QWERTY input is the first thing they look for choosing their devices. ..... All of this texting activity has come at the expense of voice. .... popular apps such as Facebook, Pandora or YouTube.

The teens of today are the adults of tomorrow. Teens are trend setters. The shift from texting to apps is early stage but is pretty telling.

Sculley: Scum

Image by tsevis via Flickr

Cult Of Mac: John Sculley: The Secrets of Steve Jobs’ Success [Exclusive Interview]: In 1983, Steve Jobs wooed Pepsi executive John Sculley to Apple with one of the most famous lines in business: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” ...... Sculley is best known today for forcing Jobs’ resignation after a boardroom battle for control of the company. ...... “It’s impressive how he still sticks to his same first principles years later.” ..... “I don’t see any change in Steve’s first principles — except he’s gotten better and better at it.” ..... “I don’t have any contact with Steve these days,” Sculley said in one of our initial emails setting up the meeting. “He’s still mad he got pushed out of Apple 22 years ago… ...... beautiful design .... At that time, nobody was doing this in Silicon Valley. ...... Apple wasn’t just about computers. It was about designing products and designing marketing and it was about positioning.” ....... ‘How can I possibly ask somebody what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphic based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.’ ...... showing someone a calculator, for example, would not give them any indication as to where the computer was going to go ....... a perfectionist to the end. ..... He felt that the computer was going to change the world and it was going to become what he called “the bicycle for the mind.” ...... He was a person of huge vision.” ...... He’s a minimalist. .... He simplifies complexity.” ..... ability to reach out to find the absolute best, smartest people ..... extremely charismatic and extremely compelling in getting people to join up with him and he got people to believe in his visions even before the products existed .... he personally did all the recruiting for his team. He never delegated that to anybody else. ” ..... At the other level he is working down at the details ..... “bozos.” That was his term for organizations that he didn’t respect. ..... “I can’t remember more than a hundred first names so I only want to be around people that I know personally. ....... Steve would shift between being highly charismatic and motivating and getting them excited to feel like they are part of something insanely great. And on the other hand he would be almost merciless in terms of rejecting their work until he felt it had reached the level of perfection ....... Bill was brilliant too — but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market. ..... . He was not a designer but a great systems thinker. .....

Steve Jobs Should Never Have Been Fired

Proves my point. This guy was too dumb to even have contemplated firing Steve Jobs. You have to at least be in Steve Jobs' league to have the option to make a decision like that. Sculley and other scums cost Apple a full decade and more.

Cult Of Mac: Apple Cracks 10% PC Market Share For First Time in Decades: Apple had 10.4% of U.S. PC shipments in Q3, making it the fourth largest computer maker in the U.S. ..... Lenovo showed the strongest growth among the top five vendors worldwide. ....

Yahoo Under Attack

Image representing Yahoo! as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Wall Street Journal: AOL, Private-Equity Firms Explore Bid for Yahoo: devising a bold plan to marry two big Internet brands facing steep challenges...... The discussions are preliminary and don't include Yahoo. ...... Shares of Yahoo jumped 13% ..... one of the best-performing tech stocks of the day...... A big chunk of Yahoo's current market value comes from its Alibaba stake. ..... Yahoo and AOL discussed a merger in 2008, as Yahoo weighed a $45 billion takeover offer from Microsoft Corp. Microsoft eventually pulled its bid ..... Bartz has improved Yahoo's profitability by cutting costs, but revenue hasn't grown much and the company faces other problems..... more than 600 million people use its home page, email service or other sites every month

This is Tim Armstrong trying to do the Larry Ellison thing. Larry Ellison went after PeopleSoft. I have no dog in this fight. I am just on the sidelines watching the drama. But AOL is not Oracle size. And Yahoo is not PeopleSoft size. Actually AOL and Yahoo are two similar size companies with similar problems/challenges. They both used to be number one, and now perhaps they never are going to get back the throne. Jimmy Carter also retired.

Wait, they are not similar size companies. AOL is a two billion dollar company, Yahoo is a 20 billion dollar company. Tim Armstrong has started to believe his own PR, or maybe he is reading too many of Mike Arrington's blog posts. Arrington has been quite hostile to Carol Bartz over an extended period of time.

Jerry Yang and David Filo, the founders of Yahoo!

Image via WikipediaShould not the talk be of merger? But AOL did try that once. That marriage was a spectacular disaster. Buying or merging is the easy part, integrating is the hard part. Larry Ellison seems to be good at both. But then he starts with the advantage of Oracle's size and muscle. Oracle will still perhaps do the next big thing in its space. AOL and Yahoo are not even trying to do the next big thing. For now they are still figuring out what their space is.

Perhaps Tim Armstrong got too much of a boost from buying TechCrunch. The buzz got to him or something. TechCrunch might be the top tech blog, but in terms of a business it is pretty small. It is actually very small. TechCrunch is an asteroid to Yahoo's Mars.

Nothing Yahoo could have done on its own would have boosted its share price by 13%. That's a big jump. Congrats Carol. Make some more Alibaba moves. Google just went into wind farms.

Bloomberg: Yahoo Said to Hire Goldman to Handle Takeover Approaches: The private-equity funds have weighed raising $10 billion to $12 billion ..... Yahoo also owns 35 percent of Yahoo Japan Corp., operator of the nation’s most visited Web portal. ..... a reverse merger with AOL gaining managerial control .... . Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said in December 2008 that talks about possible deals for AOL were under way with Yahoo, Microsoft and Google Inc. When those talks didn’t lead anywhere, Time Warner opted for a spinoff.

AllThingsD: Yahoo’s Stock Acts Like It’s in Play–Because It Kind of Is, as Predators Circle: assessing the situation aggressively ..... the key players in the growing soap opera are the execs who run Yahoo-affiliated companies in Japan and China. That would be Masayoshi Son of Yahoo Japan and Jack Ma of the Alibaba Group ..... any approach would have to be nonhostile ..... Armstrong, said sources, has not shied away from the idea of Yahoo acquiring AOL and installing him as CEO with Bartz as chairman. ...... Although AOL has also been trying to turn itself around and is in a much less powerful position than Yahoo, Wall Street likes Armstrong’s story for AOL as a modern-day media and media distribution company. ..... “At least he has a narrative that is believable,” said one big investor in both companies. “Bartz has no vision.”

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Friday, October 15, 2010

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Thursday, October 14, 2010

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