The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Google Search: Skipping Social, Going To Location?
Looks like Marissa Mayer is getting busy already. The social butterfly of the Google corporate world has been setting trends for years. Now she attacks location front and center, looks like. (Marissa Mayer: Location, Local) It was not possible for the Android company to have stayed away from location for too long. (Mashable: Google Puts the Emphasis on Location in Search)
Monday, October 18, 2010
Net Neutrality, Clean Tech And Political Fights
Image via WikipediaWired: What Solar Needs: Its Own Karl Rove: Eighty percent of Americans rated solar power favorably, compared to 39 percent for nuclear and 32 percent for oil. Seventy-four percent believe that solar is a “long-term solution for the country’s energy needs.” ..... 94 percent of Americans see solar as important and 80 percent want to see subsidies transferred from fossil fuel to solar...... Unfortunately, the public also said solar is too expensive, will remain an intermittent source of power, and can’t really directly compete with coal or natural gas. Only 41 percent thought solar was affordable, and only 34 percent thought it was reliable..... Seventeen percent said solar would “never” be the largest source of new electricity for whole cities. Most of those polled were largely in the dark about the subsidies provided to oil and gas. Just 19 percent correctly estimated that the fossil fuel industry gets more than $10 billion in subsidies.Freedom is not free. The trucking industry killed trains in this country decades ago, and the country is still reeling from it. The best does not always get done because this is a democracy. The people have to actively make the choice, and if they don't actively opt for the best, they don't get the best. Because this is a democracy.
Net Neutrality Reworded
Image via WikipediaFred Wilson: A Net Neutrality Case Study: Maybe we shouldn't call it Net Neutrality. Maybe we should call it a bill of rights for consumers on the Internet.There are still landowners on the internet - like in the early days of America - who feel like they are the only ones who need to be able to vote. That is blasphemy. Fred Wilson is not new to the debate. But I really like his emphasis this time. Maybe net neutrality is a phrase that is not serving us too well. It makes it sound like there are two equally valid viewpoints. No, there are not. People for segregation and people against segregation were not both equally right. The internet is not a company, it is not a commercial venture. The internet is like the airwaves; it belongs to everybody.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Twitter Is Massively Complex
Image via WikipediaTechCrunch: Why Twitter Is Massively Undervalued Compared To FacebookTwitter should have had more users than Facebook, (Goal: A Billion People On Twitter) but that is not what we see. It is Twitter's fault. It is not like Twitter has ever had problems raising money. If you don't have problems raising money, you don't have problems hiring the engineers you need. Twitter was bogged down focusing on scaling: I always thought that was a bogus argument. Show me the Facebook fail whale.
I have thought long and hard about it, and I think the reason Twitter has not scaled like it should have is because Jack Dorsey went ahead and became Chairperson. What was one person's invention got handed over to a committee to grow and scale. They say in Africa it takes a village to raise a child. Maybe it does. But I don't think that applied to Twitter. It is a DNA thing. The founder CEO will make big bets. People who took over will not dare to. The other founders spent too much time basking in the Twitter glory of 2009.
Facebook should have grown like the big screen web. Twitter should have grown like mobile phones have grown all across the planet. Twitter has largely missed the boat. Why? You gotta ask.
FourSquare has competition, Twitter does not have competition. I don't feel like Twitter has been able to cash on that advantage.
User Friendly Twitter? Get Out Of Town
Twitter needed to try and come pre-loaded on mobile phones. Twitter needed to make sense to people who don't speak English. Twitter needed to make sense to people who are not literate. From the Twitter that I know and experience and get headaches over to that simplicity is a light year.
I know a Harvard graduate who is confounded by the hashtag. It is not her fault. It is Twitter's fault.
TechCrunch: Why Twitter Is Massively Undervalued Compared To Facebook:
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Like Father, Like Son
TechCrunch: Looks Like Top Gun 2 Is Cleared For Takeoff — All Thanks To Larry Ellison’s Son: It has everything you need in a movie: California, drinking, jets, tragedy ..... the son of Oracle founder, ultra-billionaire ...... 27-year-old David Ellison, who was all of 3 when Top Gun came out in 1986 ..... he just happend to raise $350 million dollars from JPMorganChase to co-finance a slate of films with Paramount
Larry Elli Son.
In The News
TechCrunch: Why Twitter Is Massively Undervalued Compared To Facebook: These days they are often mentioned in the same breath. .... Jobs invited Zuckerberg for dinner at his house to talk about Ping two weeks ago .... there would be friendship with significant benefits for both parties if Apple and Facebook could strike a deal
Business And Charity
Image via WikipediaWall Street Journal: World’s Richest Man: ‘Charity Doesn’t Solve Anything’: he could do more to help fight poverty by building businesses than by “being a Santa Claus.” ..... “The only way to fight poverty is with employment” ..... “There is a saying that we should leave a better country to our children. But it’s more important to leave better children to our country.” ..... He has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to his foundation and has funded millions of dollars in joint-venture projects with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
This reminds me of the gay marriage debate. The last scientific figure I read had gays at 1% of the population. As in, one per cent of the people are biologically gay, they do not choose to be gay. That is who they are. Some put that figure to be 10%. I think it probably is 1-2%.
Men and women marrying works. It works for 98% of the population, or those among the 98% who choose to marry. But it does not work for everybody.
I agree that creating jobs is a great way to cure poverty. But the best economists say no matter how hard you try, 5% of the people will stay unemployed. The economy needs a 5% unemployment to stay healthy. Those 5% are not being lazy. There just are not going to be jobs for them.
Some people are going to be poor. Some people are going to end up homeless. There charity comes into the picture.
But what the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation is doing is not charity. Tackling health care in the Global South is not charity. That foundation has challenged many long held prejudices about poverty in the Global South. You make these people healthy, and they go out there and get jobs and work hard and lift themselves out of poverty. You give them family planning options, and they have fewer children. They have not had the option.
People should go get jobs, but you would not argue that for primary education age children, would you?
Private business has its place. The private sector takes care of about 80-90% of the population. The public sector gives employment to the other 10-15%. And then there are the unemployed who deserve unemployment benefits. There are the poor who need charity and social welfare. It is important to also think of that bottom 5% to keep the social peace. That is also important.
Everyone should have access to education, health and credit at all income brackets all over the world. Most people don't, and that is a problem. Between the private sector, the public sector, the informal economy, the NGOs and the charity organizations, all bases should be covered.
There is no one size fits all.
Wall Street Journal: The Rising Threshhold for Being in America’s Top 1%: the threshold for the One Percent Club has more than quadrupled since 1980 ..... A salary of $80,580 in 1980 would be $207,920 in 2008 dollars. But that still is far lower than the $380,354 required to make the 2008 cut-off. ..... In 2008, the top 1% accounted for 22.8% of the nation’s reported income, up from 8.46% in 1980.
Why the Wealthy Are Paying Less of America’s Taxes: the rich are running away with a disproportionate share of the nation’s income but paying ever lower taxes. .... the rich are indeed paying a lower share of the nation’s tax burden. But that’s because the rich are losing income. And while their share of the nation’s earnings is falling, their average tax rate is rising. ..... the top 1% of tax returns paid 38% of all federal individual income taxes ..... The top 1% paid an average income tax rate of 23.27% .... the top 5% of tax-payers earn 34.7% of income and pay 58.7% of taxes.
Friday, October 15, 2010
What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?
Image via CrunchBase
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
Image by Getty Images via @daylifeBefore 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 via CrunchBaseMashable: 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 thetechnology 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 via CrunchBaseComputerWorld: 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
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