Netizen

Friday, January 30, 2009

Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter

43 is my lucky number. Mitch Kapor, a legend in the industry, is now following me on Twitter. This is not like Guy Kawasaki following me. That guy is officially the number one Twitterer in the world, but then he follows as many people as follow him, which is about 50,000. Which means he does not follow anybody. He just makes them feel good. It is like when you first signed up on MySpace, you automatically got one friend, I believe some guy called Tom, a MySpace staffer. Tom was everybody's friend at MySpace. Guy Kawasaki, great guy, a legend in his own right, Guy Kawasaki the Rich Dad Poor Dad guy, is the Tom of Twitter.

But Mitch Kapor. He is not trying to become a celebrity. He was a celebrity before anyone knew who Bill Gates was.

So when I saw he was my follower number 43, I immediately sent him a direct message. I am honored to have you follow me here on Twitter. He is only following 331 people. What that means is that once in a while he will read your twit.

The Hare Rama Hare Krishna people aspire for a Krishna consciousness. I think today on Twitter I have come to acquire a Kapor consciousness. Now on when I twit, I am going to ask a question, not What Would Jesus Do, but How Would Kapor React?

I don't believe this. I kept Twitter at arm's length for the longest time. Then I came in kicking and screaming. Within days I became an addict. (I Get Twitter) I mean, I want to snatch Guy Kawasaki's title away from him, but not by fraud following as many people as might be genuinely following me, but by becoming a genuine celebrity, someone who people want to follow, because they are interested in knowing what you do, what are you thinking about, what you are reading.

I almost want to lock up my account. As in I already got Mitch Kapor, I don't want any more people following me. But instead I decided to immortalize the moment with a blog post.

I do want more followers, more than most. This is PR at its best. If you think about it, this is Reverse Paparazzi. The paparazzi follow you e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. Twits follow themselves everywhere.

We have become our own paparazzi. But this is fun. In a way this is the ultimate mindfood. Suddenly all my news browsing has become a social activity. I am not some loner reading a ton of news. Almost every news item I read these days, I feel the urge to share. I feel the urge to comment and share. I don't have enough followers yet to spark conversations, but I will get there.

I have met so many amazing people here already. For the longest time I thought the tech world was all male and boring. Then I saw all innonate was following. And I found all sorts of outrageously gorgeous women on the New York tech scene who I also decided to follow, one of whom I have kind of sort of become friends with. She has an exciting YouTube channel. By the way innonate is the Organizer of the New York Tech MeetUp, the top tech event in town. He was voted into that position. Used to be my friend the MeetUp CEO Scott was the Oragnizer.

I am honored you are following me now on Twitter, I said. Promptly I pitched. I thought I was done with round 1 fundraising back in June 2008. But I will save the details of the story. I am still a little short. I pitched the Plenty Of Fish: Online Dating King Markus Frind yesterday, but now I believe it that his company is a one person operation. I have not heard from him.

I mean, I could not resist. Mitch and I have exchanged a few emails since. At Twitter those emails are called DMs. They are Direct Messages. They also have that 140 character limit. Whoever came up with that random number? It feels scientific to me. Good enough for one unit of expression, especially if links are allowed.

Mitchell Kapor
Mitchell Kapor: Biography a pioneer of the personal computing revolution and has been at the forefront of information technology for 30 years
Mitch Kapor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mitch Kapor’s Blog
Glue Keynoter: Mitch Kapor
Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner: Mitch Kapor, Foxmarks

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Plenty Of Fish: Online Dating King

AdSense Millionaire, alternate name for this blog post

PlentyOfFish.com
Markus Frind, CEO of Plenty Of Fish, Blog

How I Started A Dating Empire by Markus Frind By the end of March my site went viral and started growing 2 to 5% a day and it was off to the races from there...... made a whole $5.63 cents my first month, but that was more then enough for me to realize that I wouldn't go broke running the site and I could make a business out of this with enough traffic. ...... I refused to accept defeat of any kind, and I constantly forced myself to test new things. ...... When 2004 rolled around and word of mouth REALLY kicked in and as they say the rest is history. .... I look back now at how ill prepared I was, I didn't know anything about SEO, Advertising, community and I didn't even know what Venture Capital was. Just goes to show you anyone can do anything.

Plenty Of Fish is my idea of a budding Web 5.0 company. (Defining Web 4.0) The fact that it does not have sexy looking 2.0 software, just something barebones, makes it a bigger candidate for 5.0. I am a fan of the site. I am a user. Finding dates is not easy, online or off. Finding The Person is harder. Creating a relationship is not something an online dating site can do for you. But a site like Plenty Of Fish takes some of the unnecessary frills away. Who you like might not like you, who likes you you might not like. In online dating that can be quite painless. Next. Overtures are plentiful. Rejections come by the truckload. You might get an occasional date, a first date but no second date, an email conversations, a chat, no phone number. Race and class issues do come into play, just like offline. Chemistry and communication issues come into play. And ultimately online dating is not really offline. You are trying to get an offline date. Just that you are trying to get that online. But the stats look good. 800,000 relationships per year. That is good.

The business model is fascinating. I have long dreamed of a free online dating site, a Craig's List style site. And this is it. I am excited aboot Plenty Of Fish the way I am excited about Facebook, the way I am excited about Gmail and Blogger and YouTube.

Markus Frind, you got something going on.

The site could just grow and grow and grow. It could keep performing the same basic functions and just keep adding more and more people all over the world. And it could also keep improving its basic algorithms. The profiles you browse through helps the site determine what kind of profiles to show you.

How PlentyOfFish Conquered Online Dating Inc. serving up 1.6 billion webpages each month. ..... Plenty of Fish is on track to book revenue of $10 million for 2008, with profit margins in excess of 50 percent. Then, six minutes and 38 seconds after beginning his workday, Frind closes his Web browser and announces, "All done." ...... unknown and undistinguished. He hasn't gone to MIT, Stanford, or any other four-year college for that matter ....... bouncing, aimlessly, from job to job, but he is secretly ambitious. He builds his company by himself and from his apartment. ....... Frind takes it easy, working no more than 20 hours a week during the busiest times and usually no more than 10. Five years later, he is running one of the largest websites on the planet and paying himself more than $5 million a year. ........ Quiet, soft-featured, and ordinary looking, he is the kind of person who can get lost in a roomful of people ......... introverted, smart, and a little awkward. "Markus is one of those engineers who is just more comfortable sitting in front of a computer than he is talking to someone face to face" ......... Frind can be disarmingly frank, delivering vitriolic quips with a self-assured cheerfulness that feels almost mean. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), he says, is "a complete joke," Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is "a cult," and Match is "dying." ........ the 23 hours a day in which he doesn't work ........ most comfortable with the world at arm's length. "He never raises his voice," Kanciar says later. "And he doesn't like conflict." ......... prefers to remain a silent observer of others ...... seems perpetually lost in thought ......... In a way, he's thinking about the company all the time. ........ a lonely childhood ....... graduating from a technical school in 1999 with a two-year degree in computer programming ...... got a job at an online shopping mall. Then, the dot-com bubble burst, and he spent the next two years bouncing from failed start-up to failing start-up. ........ For most of 2002, he was unemployed. ....... When he did have work, it felt like torture. His fellow engineers seemed to be writing deliberately inscrutable code in order to protect their jobs. ............ cleaning up other people's messes taught Frind how to quickly simplify complex code. In his spare time, he started working on a piece of software that was designed to find prime numbers in arithmetic progression. ......... He finished the hobby project in 2002, and, two years later, his program discovered a string of 23 prime numbers, the longest ever. (Frind's record has since been surpassed, but not before it was cited by UCLA mathematician and Fields Medal winner Terence Tao.) ......... would devote a couple of weeks to mastering Microsoft's new tool for building websites, ASP.net, and he would do it by building the hardest kind of website he could think of. .......... Online dating was an inspired choice. Not only does the act of building an intricate web of electronic winks, smiles, and nudges require significant programming skills ...... Hot or Not was acquired for $20 million in cash ......... Working a few hours an evening for two weeks, Frind built a crude dating site, which he named Plenty of Fish. It was desperately simple -- just an unadorned list of plain-text personals ads. But it promised something that no big dating company offered: free. ........... Rather than try to compete directly with Match, the industry leader, he created a website that cost almost nothing to run ......... Even better, he had created a perfect place for paid dating sites to spend their huge advertising budgets. ........ a picture of determination and naiveté. ........ From March to November 2003, his site expanded from 40 members to 10,000. Frind used his home computer as a Web server -- an unusual but cost-effective choice -- and spent his time trying to game Google with the tricks he picked up on the forums. In July, Google introduced a free tool called AdSense, which allowed small companies to automatically sell advertisements and display them on their websites. Frind made just $5 in his first month, but by the end of the year, he was making more than $3,300 a month .......... Frind has few friends in business, no mentors, and no investors. ............. Websites that venture capitalists would have spent tens of millions of dollars building in 1998 can now be started with tens of dollars. ............. has stayed simple, cheap, and lean even as his revenue and profits have grown ....... Plenty of Fish is a designer's nightmare; at once minimalist and inelegant ........ "I don't listen to the users," he says. "The people who suggest things are the vocal minority who have stupid ideas that only apply to their little niches." ........... When a member starts browsing through profiles, the site records his or her preferences and then narrows down its 10 million users to a more manageable group of potential mates. ......... the site creates 800,000 successful relationships a year. .......... almost no staff ....... been able to run a massive database with almost no computer hardware ......... the social news site Digg generates about 250 million page views each month, or roughly one-sixth of Plenty of Fish's monthly traffic, and employs 80 people. Most websites as busy as Frind's use hundreds of servers. Frind has just eight. ............ comes from writing efficient code ....... Frind approaches business in much the same way. "It's a strategy game," he says. "You're trying to take over the world, one country at a time." .......... "I spent every waking minute when I wasn't at my day job reading, studying, and learning. ....... returned to one of his old Internet hangouts, a forum called WebmasterWorld, and posted a brief how-to guide entitled "How I Made a Million in Three Months." It contained a blueprint for the success of Plenty of Fish: Pick a market in which the competition charges money for its service, build a lean operation with a "dead simple" free website, and pay for it using Google AdSense. ............ By 2006, Plenty of Fish was serving 200 million pages each month ....... $10,000 a day through AdSense ........ "He came out of nowhere, and he didn't seem to give a shit" ............ the stunt worked. Frind's site was the talk of the blogosphere, driving gobs of new users to the site. Plenty of Fish's growth accelerated dramatically, hitting one billion page views a month by 2007. .......... He still hadn't figured out how to get e-mail on his cell phone. ........ a guy who works an hour a day, who doesn't travel much, and who doesn't have any hobbies beyond war games .......... an aversion to doing harm can be more valuable than an overeagerness for self-improvement.

How I started A Dating Empire « The Paradigm Shift
Looking To Acquire I’m letting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues slip through my fingers every year by sending people to competitors sites. ..... paid sites are currently consolidating and the growth for the industry is flat ...... I think there is a lot of opportunity right now and a opening to create a major paid site right now.

Special Report: Angel Investing 2009

Defining Web 4.0

Web 1.0

That was/is the static webpage. They are very much around. Offline you had posters and pamphlets. Online you had webpages. Same thing, different medium. (Google Books: Primitive)

Web 2.0

Facebook is the best example of a Web 2.0 application in many ways. (The Unfacebook) It is still a rectangle on a screen like Web 1.0, but it is dynamic, the content constantly changing, there are people involved, large numbers of people. The webpage is now dynamic. Google is a 2.0 company, (Google: Poised To Be The Number One Software Company In The World) but it also has other elements. (Search: Much Is Lacking, The Next Search Engine) Email is a 2.0 application. (Email, Search, News)

Web 3.0

Web 2.0 is dynamic, but it is still 2D. Web 3.0 is 3D. Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 focus on the software. Web 3.0 takes a holistic approach and tackles connectivity, hardware, and just enough software to get you online. Web 3.0 is only complete when all of humanity is online. (Apple's Mobile Space: Sizzling, Dell, HP, Apple, Google And Languages, Into the Nitty Gritty Of WiMax, Not Hardware, Not Software, But Connectivity)

What I have is a 3.0 company. (IC)

A Web 3.0 Manifesto

Web 4.0

This is the most amorphous part right now in this system of classification, but I am going to call it Next Generation Software. I have no idea as to its shape, form or function. Massive collaboration software, massive input software. Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 software, at the end of the day, treated you like individuals. Web 4.0 will be able to handle masses of people, both in creation and consumption.

Web 5.0

Web 5.0 is face time. This is where the circle becomes full. Because, face it, the internet is, at the end of the day, a communication tool. We try so hard to get people communicating, talking. We try to say, it is okay you are not in each other's immediate presence, you can still talk. That begs the question. What when people are in immediate presence? Starbucks repackaged coffee. You could accuse me of repackaging hello. But my point is Web 5.0 is supreme. Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web 4.0, they are all supposed to lead to Web 5.0. And Web 5.0 is not about technology at all. It is about basic human interaction. It is about meeting in person. Web 5.0 is the ultimate interactive experience. But the Web 5.0 that will sit on top of Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 will be qualitatively different, very much so. Web 5.0 is not an argument against Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. MeetUp is a rudimentary 5.0 company. It also has 2.0 elements. New York City is the ultimate Web 5.0 destination. This is the Amazon forest of humanity. People from every town on earth live here. That is why I have suggested it is poised to become the Silicon City. There is no better place on earth for 5.0, that's why. (Social Networking: Where The Internet Comes Down From The Clouds)

Web 5.0: Face Time

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

I Get Twitter

Enterprise 2.0 Adam Carson mentioned Confused Of Calcutta a long time ago as someone really passionate about Web 2.0. I took note. Recently I had an email conversation with Confused. We went back and forth. It was nice. Somewhere along the way I realized he is huge on Twitter. As in, he tweets.

Then I read up on him. I came across this list where Google CEO Eric Schmidt is number six and Confused is number 11. I was impressed. He is a CIO with British Telecom which has a presence in over 173 countries.

Somewhere along the way I decided to tweet as well. Open an account, and let it hang. I had no plans to be active. This despite Confused's very recent post where he is all gaga about Twitter.

Yesterday I spent some time talking about how I viewed Twitter now
Thinking about Twitter: a submarine in the ocean of the Web Finding the sea of green: More on Twitter is My Submarine

I had misconceptions. I feared Twitter is about creating an online Leoned Breznev diary towards the end of that guy's life. He would put down mundane details. I ate. I had coffee. I went to sleep. I ate. I drank coffee. Sleep came upon me. I had lunch.

It also felt like a basketball pro is being asked to go to college basketball. As an avid blogger, I thought in terms of full page posts. A phrase or two? That is lowball, I thought. At my blogs I discuss ideas and concepts. Big minds discuss ideas. Twitters must talk about themselves. I ate. I had coffee.

And I am a laptop guy. I spend so much time online, when I am offline, I like to be offline, take in the city, the people, the street scenes, the subway filth. Twitter looked like a mobile concept. You can't experience the internet on a handheld, the way the internet is meant to be experienced.

So I admired Confused more than ever, and aren't young people supposed to get tech fashion first? I am in my mid 30s. Confused is in the mid 50s. I was not enamored about getting fashion sense from Confused.

Then one day I quietly signed on. It will not hurt to get an account. It does not have to stay active. Noone will notice. My second post said I did not think I was so newsworthy as to be twitting. That was my Declaration Of Independence.

But very soon I got it. I think it was only yesterday that I started, and I am already an addict. You tweet. You blog. You email. You search. You face the book. Tweet is fundamental to the internet experience.

My first Direct Message was to Confused. You got me on Twitter, I said. I had not said thank you, I had not said I was excited. I might as well have meant you added to my chores. Welcome, says Confused, in the tone of an evangelist. As far as he was concerned, there were no negative connotations to Twitter. It was all good.

I joined Twitter. Not long after Demi Moore joined Twitter. We both joined the same day. But for some reason she has way many more followers than do I. I am going to think she is a little bit more better looking. Or maybe a lot better looking.

It is nothing to do with star quality. I am Barackface. I have a thing or two going on for me. Hey.

And then the discoveries began. Wait a minute, I might have signed on not yesterday, but the day before. Anyways, it was the same day as Demi. Kevin Rose, the second most followed person on Twitter, brought Demi to my attention. Kevin and I are close like that. That is the Twitter way.

There are so many good reasons to tweet. You blog, you tweet. You send out emails. You add friends and updates on Facebook. It is basic.

If I can tweet once or twice a day, and if I can read a few news items on Google Reader most every day, I am an active blogger without any new blog posts at my new number one blog: Tech N Biz. I have not become lazy as a blogger, I have gone high tech. This way all the personal talk gets zapped by Twitter, all my urge to read the news gets zapped by Google Reader. And so the blog posts are posts that I just have to go ahead with, not chores, as in, oh no, I have not blogged in a while, my blog is going stale, let me go blog.

Then yesterday I learned to hit reply and join conversations. Suddenly I feel like an insider.

I have rediscovered pals like Scott and Upendra from the New York tech scene.

Democracy For Nepal used to be my primary blog. Then Barackface became my primary blog. Now I am trying to get Tech N Biz to become my primary blog. Twitter and Google Reader have been a huge help in bringing about that shift. Confused Of Calcutta got me on Twitter, Enterprise 2.0 got me on Google Reader. Enterprise 2.0 got me to Confused Of Calcutta. Confused Of Calcutta got me on Twitter where I met Demi. Demi Moore. And also the Digg guy Kevin Rose. But then Confused has a star quality of his own. I mean, to be on that list.

Talk about star quality, with his goatee, I think Confused looks like a rock star.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Indra Nooyi: Power Woman

She is a woman, she is also Indian. That is a double whammy, as far as I am concerned.

She has been on the list for a few years now, but now she is number one. That is amazing.

I thought the least I could do to celebrate was put out a blog post. How about that?

She is an inspiration. I have heard her name before, but today is the first time I am reading up on her.

In The News

50 Most Powerful Women in Business Fortune .... 1 Indra Nooyi PepsiCo

Indra Nooyi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Indra Nooyi - The 2008 TIME 100 - TIME sharp strategic mind, tremendous market insight ....... PepsiCo's international business grew 22% last year, and she is showing the way for American companies trying to do well overseas. (These days, that's everybody.) Indra, 52, was also way ahead of her competitors in moving the company toward healthier products. ....... She welcomes hearing from people who disagree with her, but she is single-minded about following the path she believes is best for her company and its shareholders.

50 Most Powerful Women in Business 2006: Indra Nooyi | FORTUNE
#5 Indra K. Nooyi - Forbes.com
America's Best Leaders: Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo CEO - US News and ...
Indra Nooyi's Graduation Remarks
Two Lessons From Indra Nooyi's Success - Sepia Mutiny you can get ahead in the American corporate environment without sacrificing who you are culturally. ....... the difficulty some women face in dating and/or marrying men who are less powerful or successful than they are ........ Have you had your snack? Ok, go play. Momma has to go acquire a multinational or two and pacify the Indian media regarding the recent pesticide allegations. ...... you don’t have to sell yourself out and tell everyone your name is “Bob” if it’s really Balwinder ...... getting her first job in the U.S. after completing her Master’s at Yale ....... determined girl, who while studying in Connecticut, worked as a receptionist from midnight to sunrise to earn money and struggled to put together US$50 to buy herself a western suit for her first job interview out of Yale ....... She lives with her husband and two daughters in Fairfax county, Connecticut ..... Nooyi attends PepsiCo board meetings in a sari ..... There’s no reason to be defensive about being a vegetarian, or preferring mango lassi to martinis, or cricket to baseball… and on and on.
Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo CEO on Mentors, Meritocracy and Maternity ... some work/life balance issues and the hard realities women face when they reduce time spent in the office ....... “If women don’t help other women then who will?” asked Indra
Duke varsity to honour Indra Nooyi, Oprah Winfrey

Yahoo: The Original Dot Com

Before there was Google, there was Yahoo. Before there was MSN, there was Yahoo. The starry-eyed Google founders did make a serious attempt to sell off to Yahoo back in the days. But Yahoo was not interested. Yahoo already had a search box, and search was thought of only one of many things netizens wish to do. The action was elsewhere. Search was nowhere close to a central function that it is thought of today. Back then AltaVista was the search king, and Yahoo was good enough.

A few years after Google tried to get sold off to Yahoo, Sergei Brin would go on dates, and he noticed there were not too many second dates. I don't know if this story is true, but Larry Page said it somewhere. This was in 2000 when dot coms were crashing left and right, especially dot coms that did not have any revenue whatsoever, like Google at the time.

Bill Gates did make an attempt to buy Google. Buy it "at any price," he ordered his lieutenants. This was perhaps a year or two before they went public, or maybe even right after. This time around the Google founders knew better than to sell.

But search just kept getting bigger and bigger. Google became the sexy company, always in news. In a scramble Microsoft made an attempt to buy Yahoo. What actually happened after that offer was made is murky story. Jerry Yang has been hammered with the story that he refused an offer he should not have refused, especially with where Yahoo stands today in the market. Jerry says he did mean to take it, but when he went for it, Microsoft was no longer interested. Then they came back saying they just want Yahoo's search business. Yahoo minus its search would not be a Yahoo no more. A portal like Yahoo without a search engine?

Google is search king. The competition is not arithmetic where if MSN search and Yahoo search were to get together they would eat away Google's market share. Challening Google search is an innovation challenge. But at this point Google's search business is so capital intensive, it is hard to imagine a startup that will come at it from behind.

Google might not get challenged by another search startup, more likely it will get challenged by a startup that finds another central internet application. Facebook comes to mind. Facebook is not search, it is not email, it is not shopping, it is a new application. I am not saying Facebook will grow bigger than Google. Search will stay a central application online. And I expect Google to keep innovating in that search space.

The next sexy company might not even be a dot com. It might not be a 2D company, a rectangle on a screen. Maybe all the key internet applications have already been found. Now you can just keep making it better and better and better. But perhaps there is no fundamental discovery to be made. I'd love to be proven wrong.

Jerry's two big career mistakes. He should have bought Google. He should have sold off to Microsoft. Ha.

In The News

Microsoft and Yahoo: Deal or no deal? Fortune

Laptop Modem Demand to Drive Early WiMAX Device Shipments Teleclick.ca As Mobile WiMAX devices begin to hit the market, the bulk of early product shipments will be external USB modems and WiMAX cards built into portable computers ....... In-Stat expects annual WiMAX device shipments to break the 10 million mark in 2010
WiMAX: The next-gen net connectivity Merinews higher quality and almost no wiring. WiMAX has already found it space in Indian market ans is growing rapidly. ..... Presently, WiMAX technology is being used by Tata Communications Internet Services Ltd ( TCISL ) at several Metro cities to its broadband customers. Customers also have enthusiastic response towards its performance as they are not facing problem of interruption in service due to cable cut/damage problem.
When a Rock Star CEO Leaves the Stage Washington Post Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 but was ousted in a power struggle in 1985. ..... In late 1997, Jobs returned. ...... hitting nearly $200 per share in December 2007, from about $3 in 1997, adjusted for splits and dividends
Quantum, Runcom Technologies Team to Develop Low Cost WiMAX Handsets TMCnet

Quantum Telecom has entered into an exclusive agreement with Runcom Technologies for the development, manufacturing and selling of ultra low cost (ULC) WiMAX (News - Alert) fixed and mobile handsets. ....... Recently, Runcom signed a framework agreement with ChinaTel for WiMAX deployment in 29 major cities across China, covering area of 300 million people.

Sprint’s WiMAX Deployments – Uphill Battle Gerson Lehrman Group, New York
Possible DTV Delay Roils Mobile Operators PC World Faster wireless broadband in the U.S. may be held hostage to the already lengthy transition to digital TV if the deadline for shutting down analog broadcasts is pushed back ........ TV stations are required to move all their programming to digital channels after Feb. 17 as part of a process in which valuable frequencies in the 700MHz band will be turned over to mobile broadband providers. ....... The nation's two biggest mobile operators, Verizon Wireless and AT&T, both plan to use 700MHz spectrum for the next generation of mobile broadband, based on LTE (Long-Term Evolution) technology. ...... AT&T is using HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), which can deliver as much as 48Mb per second in the same size band ....... Before Sprint Nextel launched its first commercial WiMax network in Baltimore at the end of September 2008, it spent months building and testing the networks in its initial target cities. Sprint WiMax networks in two of those cities, Chicago and Washington, D.C., still aren't open for business.
Wireless: The Outlook Gets Murkier for Clearwire BusinessWeek Last May some of the biggest names in the technology and media business, including Intel (INTC), Google (GOOG), Sprint (S), and Comcast (CMCSA), teamed up to invest $3.2 billion in the startup Clearwire (CLWR). ...... founded by entrepreneur Craig McCaw had high hopes of shaking up the wireless industry ...... Billions more in losses are projected for the coming years as Clearwire invests heavily to roll out its network. ......... the credit crunch could crimp Clearwire's ambitions. ....... The company needs to raise an additional $2 billion to $2.3 billion to reach its target of offering wireless broadband service in most of the top 100 U.S. markets by the end of 2010.
Recession Comes to the PC Makers The fastest-growing segment of the market is so-called netbooks—stripped-down notebooks that cost $300 to $500 and deliver far less profit than standard notebooks. ........ Microsoft is said to get about $13 per copy for the Windows version that goes in netbooks, vs. more than $50 for those that go into standard PCs. ...... Acer operates with a super-lean Taiwanese cost structure that allows it to price its products aggressively. Apple seems content to stick with making ever-more-powerful PCs for premium prices. ..... Big Blue sidestepped the tumult by selling its PC business to Lenovo four years ago.
IBM: Outsourcing at Home the U.S. economic downturn has already claimed more than 60,000 tech jobs in the past three months alone ........ With 200,000 service employees worldwide and nearly 80,000 in India, IBM ....... Dubuque and Iowa offered IBM an enticing package of incentives worth $55 million over 10 years. They include a loan of $11.7 million that will be forgiven if IBM fulfills its hiring pledge.
Broadband Bill Disappoints Nearly Everyone $6 billion is not going to get you to ubiquitous broadband ...... pegged the cost of creating universal broadband in the tens of billions of dollars ........ $44 billion over three years. ...... "advanced" broadband will be defined as service of 45 megabits per second or higher, while "basic" broadband will be considered 5 Mbps
Comstar Soft Launches WiMAX Network in Moscow WELT ONLINE, Germany