Netizen

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Future Of Display Advertising

The Official Google Blog: What does the future of display advertising look like?: “Display 2015: Smart and Sexy.” ...... Display advertising really is at the heart of what we’re doing at Google these days. 99 percent of our top 1,000 clients are now running campaigns on the Google Display Network. And last year, they increased their spending on display advertising by over 75 percent. .... in five years, there will be five metrics that advertisers commonly regard as more important than the click ... Watch

Google probably feels "stuck" with its traditional revenue source, the ads that show up with search results, the spartan text ads. Unless it goes into mobile, into display, its market value is not going to compete with Apple. This new push for display ads is Google's idea of an iPad. It is a new thing to do. But it is not like Google is going into display ads, something it so avoided when starting out. Google's display ads will be a new, interactive, social kind. Google intends to reinvent display advertising on the web.

With this push Google is looking for its next big growth. This is no one trick pony.

In The News

Wall Street Journal: Digits: Google Wants to Make Online Display Ads ‘Sexy’: “On television, [networks] generally made more money by showing more ads,” said Shishir Mehrotra, a YouTube executive. “Online video will reverse that trend.” .... display advertising would be one of his company’s next $10 billion-plus businesses.

New York Times Backs News-Aggregation Software Company: Ongo describes itself as providing “computer and telecommunications software for use in aggregating and viewing news and syndication feeds.” ..... News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal, has been talking to media companies about creating a cable TV-type business for news, allowing consumers to set up one bill to access digital content from multiple media companies.

New York Time: Bits: By the Numbers: Apple, Microsoft, Dell, H.P.: $49.53 billion — That’s the gap separating Apple and Microsoft .... on the back of strong iPhone sales and rising interest in the iPad. ..... $52.47 billion — That’s the gap between Apple’s value and that of Exxon Mobil ... Dell .. can claim more patents than Apple

Amazon Introduces Kindle for the Web: lets digital book buyers read books on the Web and also offers the ability to embed book samples on blogs or other Web sites, similar to the function offered with video clips on YouTube.

New York Times: Media Decoder: Google Predicts More Social, and Profitable, Display Ads: a Web where the ads are more social, mobile and real-time — and a lot more profitable..... cellphone screens would be the No. 1 screen for viewing the Web by 2015..... “Static banner ads will become a thing of the past.” ..... a “meta media phenomenon.” .... Display advertising will grow to be a $50 billion market. .... companies would have more time to focus on the creative aspects of their marketing campaigns. “The technology should just work”

Gizmodo: The Plans For Steve Jobs' New House: more of a small, private retreat than any towering glass-and-steel tech chapel or totem of wealth. ..... Jobs intends to populate the 6 acres with an assortment of indigenous flora; a simple three-car garage; a modest 5 bedroom home with plenty of windows and decks; a network of lighted stone walkways; and even a private vegetable garden. Everything is neat, tight, pragmatic, and in its place. ..... No chauffeur's cottage, no cook's cottage, and no tennis courts. In fact, when compared something like Larry Ellison's $70 million feudal Japan themed estate located right up the road, Jobs' new digs seem downright monkish—if not Buffettian..... almost Zen ..... At a time when architect and design firms are just starting to apply to Apple's design principles to the building of homes (clean, tight, nothing unnecessary), Steve Jobs has gone and designed the iPhone of houses. ..... the home was clearly built for a man (there's a distinct lack of a woman's touch here) who likes privacy, a natural setting, and working. Especially working...... a person whose life if very internal. He does not want what is going on outside to interfere with what is going on inside

Advertising Lab
The future of Internet advertising and online marketing
DataXu's Blog - Strategies for Digital Media Buying - DataXu
Internet Advertising Blog
Personalization: The Future of Print & New Media

LA Times: Google envisions bright future for online display advertising

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Mike Arrington's Big Day

Tim Armstrong: We Got TechCrunch
Mike Arrington: Why We Sold TechCrunch To AOL, And Where We Go From Here

Image via WikipediaMike Arrington was recently in news for days for what was termed Angelgate. Now he is in news for selling TechCrunch to AOL. Arrington turned TechCrunch into the leading tech blog in the world. That is no small achievement. He has personally remained controversial. He makes it sound like that is the nature of the job. I still don't know how much TechCrunch was sold for, but it might be close to $40 million. Looks like Arrington finally, finally became a dot com millionaire. Quoting from this article below might be relevant at this point.

Inc: The Way I Work: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch: started as a hobby .... was researching Silicon Valley start-ups and decided to post his findings online ..... 9.2 million visitors a month and boasts annual revenue of about $10 million ..... 25 full-time employees ..... still spends much of his time reporting and writing. On most days, he works remotely from his home near Seattle, in a cavelike home office. From morning until night, Arrington sits in darkness in front of his computer—blasting music, working his contacts, and focusing on what he loves best: breaking big stories. ....... We break more big stories than everyone else combined in tech ...... I’d work until I passed out, and wake up eight or nine hours later, which might be 4 p.m. or 3 a.m. Then I’d work again until I passed out. That was my life for four years ...... Negotiating with companies over how news breaks is a big part of what we do. ...... I usually spend about half my day talking to sources, either on the phone or on IM. ..... There are very few people in Silicon Valley—or in tech, in general—whom I don’t know pretty well. Chasing down stories is my favorite part of my job. ....... I truly love entrepreneurs. They’re my rock stars. I’ve always been fascinated by entrepreneurs. ...... . Most of them could go out and get a perfectly reasonable job as an accountant or a lawyer. Instead, they risk everything for almost certain failure. ...... I also use Skype a lot. The video quality is great. When you go full screen, it’s like the other person is in the room. ...... I don’t want to chitchat about your family, because I don’t know you. ...... When I first started TechCrunch, I would post several times a day. ...... By the third day of writing, I got my first comment from somebody who wasn’t my mom. ...... people started subscribing to my RSS feed. Every day, that number would go up—10, 13, 100. That constant feedback is my reward. I still scan for comments on my posts. ....... an event every month ..... I wrote a blog post inviting people to a party—10 people came. I made hamburgers. We drank beer and stayed up until 4 a.m. drinking Scotch by the fire. Two weeks later, I had another party, and 20 people showed up. About 100 people came to the next one, then 200. ....... because I’m introverted—I like being alone— ....... In 2008, somebody spit on me at a conference in Germany. Before that, I had a death-threat incident—I had to hire private security 24/7 to protect me and my parents. ...... I have never been very good at managing. I want to be writing, and it’s hard to be a coach and a player at the same time. Plus, I’m moody. .... We have never had an executive meeting. Instead, we use this program called Yammer to make sure everyone at TechCrunch is on the same page. ...... After dinner, I’m usually back at the computer. That’s when I do thought and opinion pieces. I’ll spend two or three hours on one post. ..... I like working late at night. There are no interruptions. I usually listen to music when I write. I like hard music that is not happy music—Metallica, Eminem, Rage Against the Machine.

You can see the vultures now circling Mashable.

Arrington is a former lawyer. His parents were happier when he was a lawyer than when he quit lawyering and became a blogger. Blogger what? Today there are more bloggers than lawyers and software programmers in America. Blogging can make you money. Ask Arrington. It has made him a millionaire.

9.2 million visitors, wow. This blog - Netizen - gets 30,000 plus visitors monthly. Used to be worse. The best day has been 3,000 visits. On good days I will get 1500 these days. Those numbers are known to go up over time.

Daily Blog Tips: AOL Just Acquired TechCrunch
Scoble: TechCrunch to keep independent voice, Arrington says
The Huffington Post: AOL Buys TechCrunch
Scripting.com: Congrats to TechCrunch and Mike (Natural Born Blogger)
AllThingsD: AOL-TechCrunch Deal: Pros and Cons
Forbes: How AOL/Techcrunch Can Scale From Here
VentureBeat: Confirmed: AOL acquires TechCrunch, founder Arrington to stay at least 3 years
Wall Street Journal: Exactly What is TechCrunch Worth?
NYConvergence: AOL Acquires TechCrunch
Traffick: So Much for Techcrunch can we expect the most vibrant, obsessively-followed Silicon Valley blog imaginable, to neuter its culture and gradually fade into respectability?
VillageVoice: AOL TechCrunch Deal Is Done, So What Does This Mean for Everyone Else? Arrington's always been a cantankerous guy who isn't one to be kept on a short leash..... larger corporations are finally catching on to the need to Let Bloggers Be Bloggers instead of faceless drones who have to have their publish buttons babysat ..... he built influence by covering every startup that would talk to him
NYMag: Jason Calcanis Celebrates the AOL-TechCrunch Deal by Calling Arrington ‘a Trainwreck’
TechEye: AOL to buy Techcrunch - Needs it TechCrunch is a big and successful website with a loyal fanbase. AOL is trying to expand itself but has had no luck building such sites itself....AOL in the past had acquired Weblogs, the blogging company behind Engadget, and it has been those that have helped AOL compensate for steep loss of traffic.
Arpit Shah: Breaking: AOL to acquire TechCrunch
Geek With Laptop: AOL Buy TechCrunch Blog in $25 Million Purchase “You are going to get more page views out of a TechCrunch user than you would out of an average user of the Internet.” .... is third behind Engadget – another AOL blog, and Gizmodo, which is owned by Gawker Media. With ownership of two out of three, it seems AOL is putting a lot of energy into controlling the tech end of the blogosphere. ..... Arrington has said “It was time for us either to start investing a lot more money in things like technology and marketing – which probably meant raising a venture round – or to simply sell and partner with somebody who could do that,” adding “AOL has a very robust, large blog network that shows they have the software side nailed. So it solves a real problem for us from the technology side.”
Srmana Mitra: Bootstrapping Pays Off For Michael Arrington

Ruby

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Monday, September 27, 2010

Techie, Tech Blogger, Iran Democracy Activist, New Yorker

"A former student asked me a few days ago how I learned Ruby on Rails. The answer was that I simply read a lot of great tutorials."

Techie, tech blogger, Iran democracy activist, New Yorker.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I just changed my Twitter and Facebook profiles to read the above. It used to be: Iran Democracy Activist, Tech Blogger, New Yorker.

And then there are distractions: The Movie Business.

Fundraising to be able to do full time Iran democracy work has not been easy: Selling 5% Of Nobel For 50K. I mean, if the Iranian American founder of eBay will not come along, who will?

Tweet 1, Tweet 2, Tweet 3, Tweet 4.

Not only do I not seem to have the knack for small dollar political donations, I think political work is meant to be public service, and so I am not going to discontinue my Iran work, I am going to do it on the side, part time. Insa-allah.

I have a LinkedIn email from Anu Shukla that has me psyched.

Location is southbay or virtual - exciting early stage opportunity. Will invest in training and ramp up for non Ruby engineering talent that are interested in learning. Competitive salary and stock.

This means, if I can get in, I get to telecommute from NYC, and I can spend the first few weeks learning Ruby. I am up for it. Besides this looks like might be Anu's new stealth startup. Anu is a serial entrepreneur. She is bigger than Sabeer Hotmail Bhatia because Bhatia basically disappeared after Hotmail, whereas Anu kept chugging all along, and with Anu it is like you ain't seen nothing yet. Her best is yet to come.

Image representing Anu Shukla as depicted in C...

Image via CrunchBase
That is the impression I get. Offerpal Media is a bigger promise than the company she sold over a decade ago for was it 200 million dollars?

She is inspiring. I'd be honored to be part of her new stealth startup.

Mike Arrington Is A Sexist Pig: Say PeeeeG!
The Highlight Of My Internet Week
Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising
I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

I might even be open to moving to the other coast. But for now I should stay put. I think I like the idea of staying put in NYC and visiting the Bay Area often enough. That would be a swell arrangement.

Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails: Download
Ruby on Rails Guides
Ruby on Rails - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ruby on Rails Documentation
Top 12 Ruby on Rails Tutorials
Ruby on rails: up and running - Google Books Result
Ruby on Rails Tutorials - Tutorialized
Dribbble: Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett | the Ruby on Rails Podcast
rails's rails at master - GitHub
Ruby on Rails Tutorial
Tutorial
Ruby on Rails Guides: Getting Started with Rails
Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example | by Michael Hartl
Ruby on Rails: the Ultimate Beginner's Tutorial
Ruby on Rails programming tutorials2 - Meshplex
Ruby on Rails Tutorial

Languages: English, Hindi, Nepali, Maithili (very good). Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Tharu, Urdu (good). Bengali, Sanskrit (so so).

Paul Graham: What Happens At Y Combinator: a portrait of YC is in some ways the complement of a portrait of the average startup .... an event called Demo Day, at which the startups present to an audience that now includes most of the world's top startup investors. ..... the details people omit in more public talks tend to be the most interesting parts of their stories ...... you hear just how screwed up most of these successful startups were on the way up. ...... Startups modify or even replace their ideas much more than outsiders realize. ..... Usually we advise startups to launch fast and iterate. .... real users, whose often surprising reactions to your product teach you what you should have been building. ..... Since there are a large number of points on the perimeter of most existing technologies at which one could push outward to create a quantum blister, what to build first is one of the most important questions we talk about. ...... The larval product should also have a larval business model. ..... Most things that happen to newly launched startups are bad. But paradoxically, these disasters are precisely the reason to launch fast: they all represent problems you're going to need to solve eventually, and the only way even to find out what they are is to launch. In practice they vary from technological bottlenecks to threats of lawsuits, but the most common problem is that users don't like the product enough. ...... the search space is huge ..... Some startups are immediately attractive, and they'll find it easy to raise money. Others are ugly ducklings, who will grow into swans in time ...... because raising money is like choosing an angle of attack for a plane. If you try to climb too steeply you just stall. ....... Once you start to get hard commitments from investors, more investors want in. ....... We still talk regularly with founders from the first YC batch in the summer of 2005. ....... Occasionally investors will say "I'm in" at Demo Day, but most of the convincing happens in subsequent meetings. ....... Getting a startup set up correctly is a nontrivial problem. ...... mediating disputes between founders. ..... Now, 5 years later, the YC alumni network is probably the most powerful network in the startup world. ..... Starting a startup was a very lonely undertaking when we did it ourselves in Boston in 1995. One of the goals of YC's batch model was to fix that, by giving founders the colleagues one would otherwise lack as companies with just 2 or 3 people. ....... even the most ardent boosters of other cities wouldn't claim they're at parity with the Bay Area. All other things being equal, Silicon Valley is the best place to start a startup. ...... Founders from other places are almost always surprised when they get here by the breadth and depth of support for startups. The Bay Area is for startups what LA is for the film industry. ....... The kind of horror stories you hear about investors dicking over startups rarely happen to those we fund. We almost never see broken termsheets. ....... "One of my goals since my last job was to stop working with mediocrity and find/surround myself with people smarter than I. YC definitely provided the quality of people I needed to be around." ...... The only person who's funded more is Ron Conway, and he may not have had such close interactions with all of them. ...... the intensity of YC.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Scoble Chimes In On Angelgate

Image via Wikipedia

Robert Scoble: The secret hell of tech industry angel investors: when the story broke, I thought it was just Mike being bombastic and trying to make something out of a dinner that he wasn’t invited to..... Mike stumbled into a story that has a ton of undercurrents. ..... The angel investor world is getting HYPER competitive .... Entrepreneurs are seeing access to lots of capital. ..... 10 people just are not going to have enough market power to do anything really naughty although it’s good to nip this problem in the bud, which is why I now support Arrington’s stance.

The early stage investment world is seeing major churn, but I would like a much larger geographical spread, not just on the continent, but globally. It will happen.

Angelgate Rolls On

Image via Wikipedia

TechCrunch: Ron Conway Drops A Nuclear Bomb On The Super Angels [Email]:The world of startups would be a better place if you spent less time complaining about deal structures, terms, vc’s, and valuations etc and the cars you drive, and just helped entrepenuers build their companies..... These startups are binary …they succeed or fail so why waste time on deal structures, terms, vc’s, and valuations etc and just help entrepenuers build their companies..... I am tired of seeing you and engaging in idle chit chat and not sharing my true feelings. ..... .where no one was there to speak up for the interests of the entrepenuers.

Mike Arrington's mischievous post on super angels apparently has been gathering momentum. The first few VCs to speak up said Arrington was merely selling newspapers. Ron Conway, on the other hand, is blowing wind Arrington's way. Stop colluding, he says. This might just be a warm-fuzz thrown Arrington's way since the dude has been profuse in his past praises of Conway, deserved for the most part. Or perhaps the conversation is not over. More people will chime in over the next few days.

My take home word from Conway's email: binary.

Super Angels, The Churning VC Game, And Catch Up Tech

In The News

Bloomberg: ARM Rises as Oracle’s Ellison Says Company May Buy a Chipmaker:Ellison, 66, said at Oracle’s annual meeting in San Francisco yesterday that “you’re going to see us buying chip companies” to add to its resources in computer hardware.

TechCrunch: “WiFi On Steroids” Is A Go. Now Google (Or Someone) Just Has To Build It. Please Do. Fast.:the FCC’s 700Mhz spectrum auction .... “white space” ..... White space is the name given to the vacant airwaves between television channels, airwaves which are increasingly open as people move to cable and other methods of getting television. These airwaves have the potential to carry wireless data at speeds and distances that would make today’s WiFi seem antiquated. That’s why the white space has earned the nickname “WiFi 2.0″ or “WiFi on steroids”. ...... gives technology companies a way to innovate outside of the realm of wireless carriers or broadband providers ..... white space WiFi blankets cities and people can use WiFi phones instead of the the ones tied to carriers.

Google Public Policy Blog: FCC vote on white spaces lays promising foundation for “Wi-Fi on steroids”: y sets the stage for the next generation of wireless technologies to emerge .... will put better and faster wireless broadband connections in the hands of the public. ...... the beginning, and not the end, of crafting forward-looking spectrum policy
Nature: Relativity comes down to Earth: time speeds up if you climb just one rung up a ladder, and slows down if you travel at just 36 kilometres per hour

Time: Feeling Alone Together: How Loneliness Spreads: For some people, feelings of isolation are sharpest during times that are in fact defined by togetherness — celebrations or the holidays .... or perhaps especially in a crowd — it's possible to feel unbearably alone...... happiness, obesity and quitting smoking — can propagate like a wave throughout a network of people..... The effect was strongest among those in close relationships ..... one lonely person could influence whether his friend's friend's friend felt lonely. ..... it really is a fundamental human motivational state very much like hunger, thirst or pain." ..... loneliness is more like an indicator of the social health of our species on the whole — a temperature reading, if you will, of how well- or not so well-integrated we are as a population....... we are, by nature, a social species; we feed off our interactions with one another and thrive when we are inspired, challenged and supported by one another ....... passed on through feelings of mistrust and negativity..... lonely individuals think negatively about other people People may be spreading their negative feelings simply by frowning or making other unpleasant facial expressions, making hurtful remarks or even adopting uninviting body postures. . ... Over time, lonely people find themselves banished to the periphery of their social networks ...... It's not necessarily the number of connections people have that matters but the quality of them. Communities that encourage regular interaction among its members

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Larry's Antics

My reading of the situation is and has been for a few years now that Larry Ellison believes his industry - data software - is going through what he calls a consolidation phase, and hence his relentless buying spree. His promise to the customer has been you will get simpler, integrated software. And now, after buying Sun, he is doing what his best friend Steve Jobs has been doing for a long time now: software hardware integration.

Bill Gates left the scene, but Larry never stopped competing. Larry want to do what Jobs did. He wants to surpass Microsoft in market value, and he is on his way.

New York Times: Oracle Growth Plans Worry Rivals and Customers: its larger ambitions — to supply just about all the technology, software and hardware, that businesses might need .... sales of $26.8 billion last year and hints of an annual revenue goal of $100 billion ... acquired a staggering 66 companies .... They bought every company we deal with. ...... Oracle’s sales representatives have earned a fearsome reputation as hard-line negotiators determined to squeeze customers. ...... complete systems rather than requiring customers to cobble together the parts. ...... Fusion ..... data center conquest plans clear ..... 60 percent of the food coming from within 100 miles of the city. .... paid $1,800 to attend the conference and runs her own software consulting business in Portland, Ore ..... a signal that Oracle intends to get aggressive and pursue growth

In The News

eWeek: Java Creator James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle: “For the privilege of working for Oracle, they wanted me to take a big pay cut,” Gosling said. .... “In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down,” he said. ..... All of our authority to decide anything evaporated.” ..... “My job seemed to be to get up on stage and be a public presence for Java for Oracle. I’m from the wrong Myers-Briggs quadrant for that,” he said. .... Gosling already had the sense that Oracle was “ethically challenged” .... they believed “Oracle would be more savage, IBM would make more layoffs.” .... Gosling says he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in nearly all the decisions affecting Java ..... Gosling paints the picture of Ellison being like a sports magnate from his sister city, Al “Just Win Baby” Davis, owner of the Oakland Raiders, who continually hires coaches and drafts talent only to run the show himself. ...... although Gosling said he never had direct dealings with Ellison, “He’s the kind of person that just gives me the creeps,” he said. “All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone.” ....... Java is bigger than any single vendor.”

ArsTechnica: Oracle surprises with new Sparc chip launch: Now christened the Sparc T3, the new processor will power a collection of Solaris-based T-series servers for Oracle, and will ship in 30 days.

The Washington Post: Huffington Snags NY Times Star

Wired: Writer for iPad Aims For Focus, Beauty, Simplicity:When you put the application in “Focus Mode,” it doesn’t even have spellcheck or cut-and-paste. Instead, it’s all about textual production — writing this phrase, this sentence, this word at this moment. As the creators note, “the idea is to activate it when you get stuck, blinding out everything else.”

New York Times: Google Campaign to Build Up Its Display Ads:More than 90 percent of Google’s revenue comes from text ads, and analysts say that Google’s stock is down about 17 percent this year because investors are waiting for the company’s second act.

For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again: Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older .... more than a third of people not yet retired plan to work beyond age 65, compared with just 12 percent in 1995. .... “That’s what I spent my whole life in pursuit of, was security,” Ms. Reid said. “Until the last few years, I felt very secure in my job.” ..... was let go from her $80,000-a-year job. ..... Her husband worries that she isolates herself and that she does not socialize enough. ..... “A job is more than a job, you know,” Mr. Mielock said. “It’s where you fit in society.” .... how to age-proof their résumés and deflect questions about being overqualified. ..... For now, she stitches together an income by gardening for neighbors, helping fellow church members with their computers, and participating in Internet surveys for as little as $5 apiece.

Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs: a hypomanic episode..... symptoms include grandiosity, an elevated and expansive mood, racing thoughts and little need for sleep.... He can work 96 hours in a row. .... a thin line separates the temperament of a promising entrepreneur from a person who could use, as they say in psychiatry, a little help. ..... just crazy enough .... “If you’re manic, you think you’re Jesus. If you’re hypomanic, you think you are God’s gift to technology investing.” ..... Instead of recklessness, the entrepreneur loves risk. Instead of delusions, the entrepreneur imagines a product that sounds so compelling that it inspires people to bet their careers, or a lot of money, on something that doesn’t exist and may never sell. ..... Next Zuckerberg Syndrome — the urge to find another Mark Zuckerberg before he starts another Facebook. ...... He does not socialize. He no longer reads books, nor does he watch TV or movies. He works from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m., seven days a week. ....... Jobs is also routinely described as a despot and control freak with a terrifying temper .... He is a gifted software engineer but a terrible driver. (“I hit things,” he says.) He’s perfectly at ease negotiating with V.C.’s, but has had just one girlfriend .... “I want to build the game layer on top of the world.”

The Long View of China’s Currency: The renminbi itself rose 21 percent against the dollar from 2005 to 2008, and the trade deficit continued to widen. .... A stronger renminbi will help China’s people — many of whom are hungry for better living standards, to judge by the recent labor strikes — buy more goods and services, and it will also help the rest of world produce more...... economies, like battleships, tend to turn slowly ..... But exports probably matter more for American jobs anyway, given that low-end toy manufacturing in Guangdong Province isn’t moving to Alabama or Michigan. ...... $10 billion of gross domestic product equals about 80,000 jobs on average. So every extra $10 billion of goods sold to China is like its own little stimulus program. ...... not all the items on the United States’ forbidden list are truly matters of national security.

TechCrunch: Zynga Moves 1 Petabyte Of Data Daily; Adds 1,000 Servers A Week:social gaming giant Zynga is one of the fastest growing tech companies of all time .... 10 percent of the world’s internet population (approximately 215 million monthly users) has played a Zynga game. .... more than 1,200 full time employees and includes 13 game studios.

CNet: Google News turns 8 amid news industry in flux:the site is currently driving 1 billion page views to news publishers' Web sites per month and Google currently operates 72 separate editions of Google News in 30 different languages....Google, raised in the church of data ..... the rise in "news spam," SEO-bait articles often written by low-paid freelancers that are designed mostly to surface within Google, rather than inform, educate, or entertain readers with coherent writing..... "content mills" like Associated Content and Demand Media are churning out short news-related pieces of content by the thousands in hopes of driving traffic to their sites

Google Blog: Google News turns eight
TechCrunch: Now that the Recession Officially Ended….Whatever Happened to that Other Shoe?
Business Insider: The Next Shoe Drops At The New York Times: Now Circulation Revenue Is Starting To Decline

$400 Million, $140 Billion And 2020

Image via CrunchBase

Wall Street Journal: A New Digital Battlefield: The entire business of selling episodes of TV shows through services like Apple's and Amazon's is expected to generate only $407 million in 2010 ..... U.S. consumers and advertisers will spend about $143 billion on traditional TV advertising and subscriptions in 2010

I expect these two numbers to have changed places by 2020. Everything is going online. TV is not going to be a separate medium for too long. The internet will eat up and digest the TV. But we are going to have to move to universal 100 MB plus broadband for that to happen.

Wall Street Journal: Web Start-Up Values Soar:In an echo of the 1990s dot-com boom, some investors also are giving lofty valuations to Web firms that have no revenue and that barely have a product out..... Quora ...... Blippy ...... Foursquare .... last year, when Twitter Inc. was valued at $1 billion during a round of funding, up from $95 million in mid-2008 when it raised a previous round of funding .... Many investors won't recoup their investments ...... SecondMarket, which operates an exchange where investors can trade the stocks of closely held start-ups ...... "There's a big disconnect between the public market and the private market" ..... Deal-of-the-day site Groupon Inc., for instance, was founded in 2008 and quickly brought in consumers eager to tap its discounts. By April when it received a $135 million investment from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies Ltd. and venture firm Battery Ventures, Groupon was valued at about $1.35 billion.

Blockbuster Nears Bankruptcy:a milestone in consumers' shift away from brick-and-mortar video stores to films delivered by mail and the Internet

Netflix, Studio Reach Streaming Deal
A New Digital Battlefield:TV shows are emerging as a new front in the war over digital media between Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc., amid their ongoing battles over electronic books and online music..... Several executives said those rentals could be a step toward a world where people see less advertising or stop paying for cable subscriptions—two principal sources of revenue...... Apple accounts for 57% of transactions in Internet video-on-demand movies, on a number-of-sales basis, and 53% of the TV shows market ...... The entire business of selling episodes of TV shows through services like Apple's and Amazon's is expected to generate only $407 million in 2010 ..... U.S. consumers and advertisers will spend about $143 billion on traditional TV advertising and subscriptions in 2010

Super Angels, The Churning VC Game, And Catch Up Tech

Michael Arrington, famous blogger, and Tariq K...

Image via WikipediaThere's web services - aka dot coms - and then there's clean tech, bio tech, nano. Dot coms have become much less pricey. Anyone can rent server space with Amazon. Pretty much anyone can write code.

"You can learn the basics of Ruby in two days," a techie told me a few days back. "And it is all on Google, all the material is free."

Clean tech, bio tech and nano are still capital intensive.

But the biggest returns are in what I am going to call catch up tech. This is the world of microfinance and global infrastructure projects. An annual 10% return is the floor when it comes to these opportunities. If the wise guys - and they were guys - on Wall Street had known to pump excess capital a few years back into catch up tech rather than housing, we might have skipped the pain of the past few years. You pump up housing value, and you sell mortgage based securities to each other. That was like setting the house on fire starting from the basement.

Mike Arrington, TechCrunch: So A Blogger Walks Into A Bar…
Master Of 500 Hats: Fire in The Valley, Fire in My Belly... and Yes, Mike, I Have Stopped Beating My Wife.
Fred Wilson: Collusion
Quora: Who are the Super Angels that Michael Arrington is talking about in his 9/21/10 Techcrunch post, "So a Blogger Walks into a Bar..."?
Silicon Alley Insider: Hooray For Mike Arrington

Monday, September 20, 2010

Gmail Bug

Hollywood, Silicon Valley, DC, Wall Street, American Hinterland

Image representing Mark Zuckerberg as depicted...

Image via CrunchBase

TechCrunch: Zuckerberg, ‘The Social Network’ And The Rise Of The Terror Nerd: With The Social Network, Hollywood has made an artful attempt at taking the inferiority, fear and awe that it feels towards Silicon Valley and projecting it onto the cold, calculating (and fictional) Zuckerberg; “Creation myths need a devil,” spoken by Rashida Jones’ Marylin Delpy, is the most resonant line in the film..... people who understand how to code and build websites have power ..... Sorkin himself told New York Magazine, “I am not a fan of the Internet.” ..... Mark Zuckerberg is the perfect scapegoat for the whole damn thing, being someone who stole Hollywood’s cultural influence and built a half a billion strong distribution network it could only dream of, delivering a brutal blow to its business model as a side note.

NY Mag, NY Times, All Things D, CNet.

9/11 was Hollywood not doing its job. The Gulf Oil Spill was Hollywood not doing its job. When the political pundits were saying because the Cold War has ended and history has ended, it was Hollywood's job to point out otherwise. America always has had to violently tussle with chunks of autocracies. The fact that most of the Arab world was not democratic should have had alarm bells ringing, but did not.

America as a population should not have had to go through the trauma of a Gulf Oil Spill to start thinking seriously in terms of a zero emissions future. That emotional jolting should instead have and should come from Hollywood.

By that measure this Facebook movie is a stark failure. It does not even begin to fathom what it takes to build an epoch changing company. To say it is just fiction is not a good excuse.

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Wednesday, September 29, 2010

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Monday, September 20, 2010

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