Month: August 2008

According to an article in Information Week, the Apple clone-maker known as Psystar Systems is counter-suing Apple, claiming that the computer company uses illegal tactics to protect its market share in personal computers, including anti-competitive measures that are prohibited by the Sherman Act, a key piece of U.S. anti-trust legislation. Among other things, the clone-maker argues that Apple employs technology that effectively “bricks” Apple clones when the software detects non-standard hardware, and also that the company is able to charge more for its computers because of such tactics.

As the Information Week article notes, in order for Psystar’s case to have any chance of succeeding, the company has to prove that Apple computers are a separate and distinct market of their own. If they are part of the much larger market known as personal computers, then Apple’s behaviour arguably doesn’t matter, because the company only has about 10 per cent market share (depending on whose numbers you look at). But Psystar claims that Apple computers are actually a separate market, thanks in part to the company’s marketing campaigns, which are aimed at creating a mystique and a feeling of superiority around its products.

Continue reading “Psystar wants to force Apple to open up”

I’m with Mike Arrington on this one: I think the news that Tom Anderson was a teenaged “War Games” hacker is pretty darn cool. According to old news stories that TechCrunch came across, as well as reports from a source close to the MySpace co-founder, he was a hacker known as Lord Flathead when he was just 14, and was part of a huge FBI sting operation after he hacked his way into a large mainframe computer used by Chase Manhattan Bank, where he changed passwords and reconfigured accounts to block access by bank officials. Although Anderson wasn’t charged because he was under-age, his computer equipment was apparently seized by the government.

To fully appreciate this news, of course, you have to be a fan of the movie War Games, which is about 20 years old now but is still one of the finest early tech movies. It features Matthew Broderick as a young hacker who breaks into the Pentagon’s war-games system and unknowingly gets the central computer to start a real-life war scenario with the Soviet Union, and it’s a great look at what hacking was like before the Internet, with online text-based chat rooms and modems with rubber couplings that attached to either end of an old rotary phone handset (I remember using a similar one at my first real journalism job).

Continue reading “Anderson: Would you like to play a game?”

I’m a little late on this one because I’m on vacation this week, and my blogging and Twittering metabolism has slowed down, but I wanted to take note of a great post that my friend and fellow mesh organizer Mike McDerment wrote the other day, entitled “7 ways I’ve almost killed FreshBooks.” It’s a list of lessons that Mike has learned during his time as CEO and co-founder of the online invoicing company, and there are some definite pearls of wisdom in there. Among my favourites:

1. Thinking we had to move faster than we did

I remember back in 2005 feeling that if we did not blow our lights out and spend every penny we had on marketing “right now!” someone would obliterate us. I had this impending sense of doom for *years* based on our speed.

Continue reading “Freshbooks: 7 Ways It Almost Died”

Way back in the mists of time, the rise of Netscape and the Web was seen as putting pressure on Microsoft and its Windows monopoly because of what some called the “browser as operating system.” Much of that early promise — or fear — has yet to be realized, but looking at something like Ubiquity, the alpha software from Mozilla Labs, it looks as though it is coming closer. In effect, Ubiquity wants to tie together all of the Web-based software and services like Google Maps, Wikipedia and Twitter by using the browser, so that users can integrate them into things like email, instant messages and Web pages.

In the video below, Aza Raskin of Mozilla — who happens to be the son of legendary Apple designer Jef Raskin and is also the developer of the excellent music app Songza.com — demonstrates some of the ways in which users could tie together different services with Ubiquity, by inserting a Google map and reviews of a restaurant quickly into an email to a friend. The app recognizes simple terms like “map these” (after a number of listings are selected), and different services can be added by simply subscribing to scripts that use Ubiquity’s code.

Continue reading “Mozilla: The browser as operating system”

There’s been a bit of a conversation going on lately — both out in the open, on blogs like Louis Gray’s and Profy and others, as well as behind the scenes on FriendFeed — about the value of embargoes. For anyone who doesn’t know, an embargo is when a PR or marketing company asks a journalist to sit on a press release and not write about it until a certain date. Companies (or their PR firms) ask me for them all the time, and I say no in almost every case. Why? Because I think that embargoes do a lot more for the companies that ask for them than they do for the journalist (or blogger) who agrees to abide by them.

The classic argument in favour of embargoes — as described by Rick Turoczy in a guest post on Centernetworks a while back — is that they “give journalists and bloggers time to research a story” before they write about it. In most cases, to be honest, that is complete crap. In other words, that might be a nice justification for the embargo, but in practice I would argue that it rarely happens. What happens is that everyone who abides by the embargo comes out with a nicely-packaged story that hits all the points from the press release, and they all come out at the same time. How does that really help anyone?

Continue reading “Embargoes: Thanks but no thanks”

At the risk of causing an inter-office brouhaha, I can’t resist commenting on the piece that my Globe and Mail colleague Christie Blatchford wrote for the paper today, about her dislike of this whole “blogging” phenomenon, and how it is ruining journalism (at least I think that’s her point). Ms. Blatchford has carved out a reputation at both of Canada’s national newspapers for being a crusty, “things were better back in my day” kind of columnist, so this is very much in that spirit — but it’s more than that. You can tell by reading it that Blatch really believes that something special about journalism is dying.

It’s more than just not having time to blog after writing newspaper stories, although that’s part of her complaint, and it’s more than just the fact that blogs are filled (she believes) with meanderings and ephemera of little value. There are two key portions of her rant, as far as I’m concerned. The first is where says that:

Continue reading “Blatchford pines for the monologue”

I don’t like to delve too deeply into economic theory and that sort of thing on this blog — I leave that to my friend Paul Kedrosky and his gang — but this video, which Paul wrote a post on recently, was so fascinating that I watched the whole thing, and it’s over an hour long. Michael Heller, a lawyer and professor at Columbia who used to work at the World Bank, isn’t exactly the world’s most thrilling speaker, but his talk about what he calls the “tragedy of the anti-commons” and how it has led to a “gridlock economy” in many specific markets — including pharmaceuticals, the cellular telecom business and the airline industry — is really thought-provoking. My favourite part is when he talks about going to Moscow after the fall of communism to advise the Russian government on how to create a market economy as quickly as possible.

Jason Goldberg, founder of aggregation service Socialmedian — and the controversial former CEO of Jobster — set off a bit of a hand grenade via Twitter today, when he posted a message saying that his company was looking to raise some money. The full text of his message (which he later deleted, but which is still available on FriendFeed) was:

“socialmedian is raising some more angel investment now. $25k-$100/investor, up to $500k. Interested parties can contact me directly.”

Within minutes, the eagle-eyed Michael Arrington — a former securities lawyer specializing in IPOs, and therefore intimately familiar with the rules — had put up a post on TechCrunch about the message, saying Goldberg was effectively soliciting investment without filing a registration statement and issuing a prospectus, something that is prohibited by the Securities Act (specifically, Section 5). As Mike points out:

Continue reading “Twitter: A micro-financing vehicle?”

I have to agree with Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion, whose post I came across on Twitter: this video by Electronic Arts and Tiger Woods — a response to a YouTube video posted by a fan of the EA Tiger Woods golf game about a seemingly impossible shot — is a great idea, and a great ad for the game as well. Kudos to whoever came up with it.

Boy, does Google know the way to a blogger’s heart or what? According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is setting up an 8,000 square-foot blogging playground at the Democratic National Convention (and at the subsequent Republican convention), complete with food, massages, smoothies, a candy buffet and couches to nap on — all for the measly sum of $100 for access to the “Big Tent.” The money quote in this particular story goes to Micah Sifry of TechPresident.com, who says that there isn’t really much news out of the partisan conventions once the vice-presidential candidates are picked, but “it’s a target-rich environment for bloggers.” Especially the candy-fueled kind. Simon Owens has more on the Big Tent at the MediaShift blog.

Update:

It doesn’t sound like Muxtape is coming back anytime soon, judging by the statement that Portfolio magazine got from the RIAA (hat tip to MG Siegler at VentureBeat for the link), which said that the record industry group had “repeatedly tried to work with them to have illegal content taken down” and that the site “has not obtained authorization from our member companies to host or stream copies of their sound recordings.”

Original post:

Muxtape, one of a host of popular online music-sharing apps that have sprung up over the past few months, has shut down, but claims that it isn’t gone for good. The website says that it will be “unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA,” while the Muxtape blog says that “no artists or labels have complained” and maintains that “the site is not closed indefinitely.” Will the site be able to strike a deal with the record industry’s lobby group/enforcer? Many music-sharing services have tried and failed to do so in the past.

The issues are laid out fairly well in a recent Valleywag post about the startup, which is run by Justin Ouellette, formerly of Vimeo, and financed by Vimeo co-founder Jakob Lodwick. The fact that Muxtape allows you to share your music with others is a legal grey area (depending on whom you talk to), but the ability to download those songs quickly and easily is likely what has the RIAA’s knickers in a twist. According to Valleywag, Ouellette has talked about changing the format of the songs streamed through Muxtape.com to make it harder to capture them.

Continue reading “Muxtape: What’s our lawyer’s number again?”

Kind of surprised this hasn’t gotten more coverage in the Digg-obsessed blogosphere (other than this and this): Katie Couric, the not-so-critically acclaimed CBS News anchor, has uploaded a video to YouTube in which she asks the Digg community for questions they want her to ask when she’s at the upcoming political conventions. Flashing her Digg T-shirt, Couric comes across (at least to me) as playing along with something she doesn’t really feel committed to — likely true, since I doubt it was her idea — but at the same time cheerfully willing to take a flyer on the idea. Plus, I have to say she looks kind of cute in that Digg T-shirt. But the last laugh could be on me: the video, which got a bump from Digg founder Kevin Rose, has over 3,000 Diggs already, and many of the questions (in fact, most of them) are about serious political issues.

The company behind the I Can Has Cheezburger site, the leading purveyor of “lolcats” photos and related merchandise — as well as the always excellent Failblog.org and several other similar properties — has launched a new site called Engrish Funny, which features… yes, you guessed it: funny pictures. In this case, they are photos of T-shirts, store signs and retail products from Asian countries with mangled English printed on them (if this strikes you as familiar territory, it’s probably because engrish.net has been around for quite awhile).

As with I Can Has Cheezburger, however, which wasn’t the first to come up with LOLcats (that dubious honour goes to the popular 4chan network), the company known as Pet Holdings says it is hoping to put its own “spin” on the Engrish phenomenon. Pet Holdings’ other properties include I Has a Hot Dog (like LOLcats, but for dogs), the political site Pundit Kitchen (like LOLcats but with politicians), Totally Looks Like (celebrities and their lookalikes) and GraphJam.

According to co-founder Ben Huh, who talked with Mike Arrington on video in the TechCrunch founder’s backyard recently (embedded below), the company plans to launch some other sites soon, and also wants to work with some major media partners. The interesting part of the video for me, however, was when Huh started talking about pageviews and revenue. According to the Pet Holdings CEO, the sites get a total of about 3.3 million pageviews a day, and about 5 million unique visitors a month, with the majority of those going to I Can Has Cheezburger and the Failblog (in recent interviews, Huh has said that I Can Has Cheezburger gets about 1.4 million or 1.5 million or 2.2 million pageviews a day).

Continue reading “I can has bizness model?”

After a year or so of invite-only alpha testing, NewsCred launched as a public beta service this morning. The site, founded by Shafqat Islam and Iraj Islam, is trying to create a kind of outsourced reputation system for news websites and blogs, in which users vote on the credibility and accuracy of specific news stories or blog posts, and those votes are combined with the site’s own algorithms to generate a credibility profile. It’s an interesting effort, and one that I think will likely appeal to many news and blog readers, since we’ve probably all read things and snorted in derision at the unbalanced or inaccurate take someone has taken — both in professional media and on blogs. But is NewsCred the solution?

In a sense, Newscred is trying to take the Digg or Slashdot model a step further. When people Digg a story or link, they are often simply voting on whether they like the topic, or the photo, or in some cases whether they like the person who Dugg the link. Newscred.com wants people to explicitly vote on the credibility of the site itself, (or at least the author of the story or post). As more than one person has already pointed out however, credibility is a difficult thing to measure, and it’s not clear whether it’s the kind of thing that a site like NewsCred is going to be able to outsource or generate through an algorithm. If someone clicks the “discredit” button, is it because they don’t like the author? Or because they simply disagree with them, if it’s a blog?

Continue reading “NewsCred launches public beta”

After listening to a couple of the new tracks from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s first collaboration in 30 years — which you can do through the widget embedded below — I’m not sure whether I like it or not, but I am sure of one thing: figuring out how to experiment with the different distribution and marketing models the Web allows isn’t confined to young folks like Radiohead and Trent Reznor. The former frontman for the Talking Heads (one of my favourite bands of all time) and the former keyboard player for Roxy Music — whose real name, Wikipedia informs me, is Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno — have a combined age of about a hundred, but they have still put together a pretty good online package for this album, I think.

The album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, can be streamed through the associated website, and the widget player can be embedded anywhere — an option I’m surprised more bands don’t take advantage of. The songs can be streamed for free (and one can be downloaded free of charge), and the rest can be bought through the site in a variety of formats, including what Byrne calls “a limited edition deluxe package designed by Sagmeister Inc.” All formats can be downloaded immediately, the site says, while physical CD versions will be shipped in the fall. The digital-only package is $8.99 for 329kbps mp3 files with no DRM controls, and also includes a 17-page lyric booklet.

The release is also one of the first big releases involving Topspin Media, the technical support system for artists that former Yahoo Music executive (and former Winamp exec) Ian Rogers and some partners formed earlier this year. He has a post about it on the Topspin blog.