Category: Uncategorized

Like many people, I expected Apple’s results for the latest quarter to be good — after all, sales of the iPhone seem to be humming along (despite some early skepticism about the market’s response), and Mac sales also seem to keep climbing. But I must admit that I didn’t expect the company to blow the doors off. Profit up 67 per cent, revenue up almost 30 per cent — for a company with annual sales of almost $25-billion, that is an incredible performance. Analysts were expecting 85 cents a share in profit and Apple made $1.01. The company’s share price has more than doubled since the beginning of the year, but I would hazard a guess that it is going to go up some more.

The vision of social media as a vast, harmonious collective that both generates and consumes “user-generated content” is mostly a straw man set up by Web 2.0 critics so they can demolish it (yes, I’m looking at you, Nick Carr), but there’s no question that social media is built on the idea that there’s plenty of talent out there that traditional media isn’t letting you see.

But what if people don’t want to see some unknown singer or musician, no matter how talented they are? What if they really just want to see “celebrities,” regardless of whether they’re talented or not?

That’s the somewhat disturbing implication (to me at least) of ManiaTV’s decision to forego the “user-generated content” and go back to the site’s original model, which was distributing video that featured recognizable names and faces, including Canadian-born Tom Green (who later left the site to go solo from his living room, and recently signed a TV distribution deal).

According to Mania, the site’s user-generated content didn’t really drive much traffic. What people have really been coming to see, CEO Peter Hoskins says, are the “celebrities” — and that’s what advertisers wanted to be associated with as well (he likened user-generated content to “dumpster-diving for gold.”)

“People liked good quality entertainment and advertisers liked quality branded entertainment. Advertisers wanted to distance themselves as far as they possibly could from the user-generated content.”

This is one of the knocks against YouTube and similar sites, that advertisers won’t want to have their message appear alongside a clip of some kid hurting himself on a skateboard. The argument in favour has always been that such sites get so much traffic that advertisers would effectively have to put their ads there or risk missing a key demographic.

So was it just that ManiaTV’s content wasn’t any good, or are people not really that interested in user-generated content? There’s no question that plenty of content on YouTube gets viewed by millions of people, but perhaps they are the exception. What I find depressing is that people would prefer to watch “celebrities” like Tom Green and Dave Navarro instead of some more talented unknown.

Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal’s personal tech columnist, usually writes columns that are scrupulously fair, in which he takes issue with the flaws of a device (which he invariably gets before anyone else) but in a relatively diplomatic fashion — balanced by comments about the positive aspects of whatever it is that he’s reviewing. Not today though. Today, Walt seems to be mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it any more.

Maybe Walt is catching on to the spirit of the blogosphere, but his blog post at All Things D — which is about how cellular providers lock in their customers — is everything his WSJ columns aren’t: opinionated, even angry. But rightly so. His point is a simple one: Why are mobile carriers able to lock down their devices and prevent people from using them on other networks? As Walt notes, your PC doesn’t work with just one Internet service provider. The car company doesn’t prevent you from driving on certain roads. And yet, for some reason we have become complacent about the way that cellular contracts restrict our choices. And all because, as Walt puts it:

“A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now.”

Walt goes on to compare the cellular companies to the old Soviet ministries, who tried to coerce markets into operating the way they wanted them to, instead of adapting to the way that they functioned. And he also draws a straight line connecting their current behaviour with the way the early phone companies such as AT&T ran things, with phones that only connected using their network.

When it comes to the technology part of his argument, I’m not sure Walt is on such firm ground. While the U.S. choosing to allow multiple standards may have been wrong in the long run, mandating a single standard (as Europe did) would undoubtedly have caused a hue-and-cry about state control, even though it resulted in a market that increased consumer choice.

Mossberg also correctly notes, however, that the phone subsidies the carriers use to justify their customer lock-down practices are a sham — or rather, a circular argument. Phones are expensive (and therefore require subsidies) in part because consumers can’t buy and use them freely across different networks.

In any case, it’s nice to see Mossberg not pull any punches for once. Welcome to the blogosphere, Walt.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about blogs as businesses, featuring comments from Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, Lisa Stone of BlogHer, Jon Callaghan of True Ventures (which is an investor in Om Malik’s GigaOm.com), Nick Denton of Gawker, John Battelle of Federated Media and Brian Sugar of PopSugar.com — the latter being one of the most successful blog networks, but not one that gets mentioned much because it’s mostly aimed at women.

Although there isn’t a huge amount in the story that we haven’t read in previous profiles of Mike and other professional bloggers (including one in BusinessWeek, which featured the infamous photo of Mike lighting a cigar with $100 bills), there are a few tidbits, including the fact that TechCrunch now has a full-time staff of eight, it and various related blogs get 1.2 million visitors a month and the company makes about $240,000 in revenue per month. According to Mike, he has also walked away from four venture capital deals because:

“Every time we almost did a round (of financing), we grew so fast the terms didn’t make sense anymore.”

Nick Denton Of Gawker.com, meanwhile, does his typical modest-mouse routine, in which he argues that blogs really aren’t that great and while a few people might be scratching out a living he doesn’t see it amounting to much:

“A few self-sustaining blog media businesses do seem to have emerged… but they’re still minuscule by the standards of traditional media. And none have weathered a downturn. So it would be unwise to sound too triumphant.”

But my favourite quote of all goes to Brian Sugar, who has turned a blog he started with his wife into a network of 11 covering everything from fashion to health, with a staff of 56 people and five million visitors a month. Sequoia has invested $10-million and NBC has put in $5-million. Does Sugar want to sell? No. Why? “This may be a weird answer,” he said, “but I’m having way too much fun.”

A few weeks ago, Snocap — the music 2.0 service that Shawn “Napster” Fanning co-founded after recovering from the wounds inflicted on him by the record industry — went down in flames, letting go 60 per cent of its staff and hanging a “for sale” sign on the door. Valleywag noted at the time that this came not long after the failure of a joint venture with CDBaby.

In the Valleywag post, CDBaby CEO Derek Silvers was quoted as saying that he would have more to say about the collapse of the deal at some point in the future — and that point arrived this weekend, when he wrote a long post describing what happened. To put it mildly, it sounds like a complete and utter train wreck.

Not only does it sound like Snocap couldn’t make up its mind what its business model was going to be, but according to Silvers’ description the company changed the terms of its deal with CDBaby.com after more than two years of negotiations, and effectively tried to do an end-run around the company in order to get artists to sell their songs through Snocap’s widgets on MySpace.

All the while, he describes a painfully dysfunctional relationship in which CDBaby had little control and Snocap couldn’t get its act together. No doubt there is another side to the tale, and perhaps Snocap or Fanning will be prepared to tell it at some point.

But the most damning part of Silvers’ post is the part about how much revenue the company saw from its deal with Snocap: a total of just $12,000 over eight months. And in just three weeks of having a “download mp3” button on its own stores — without even advertising it — CDBaby sold more than $110,000 worth of music. Ouch.

(On an unrelated note, CDBaby has one of the best “your order has been shipped” emails I’ve ever come across).

I have to give the team at Flock a lot of credit. The browser — which is built on Mozilla code, but has all kinds of added social features — has been through hell and back over the past couple of years. First, the initial release was weak, and got dumped on by just about everyone. Then Performancing released an excellent blogging plugin for Firefox (now called ScribeFire), and my friend Paul Kedrosky said Flock was, well… fucked.

Since integration with blogs was one of the big features that Flock brought to the table, there seemed to be a good chance that Paul was right. But Flock kept on plugging away. Not long after that, Firefox announced that it was going to add social features through something called The Coop, and I wondered whether Paul was even more right than before. But The Coop didn’t really fly (sorry) and Flock kept on adding features and plugging away. Now, the company has come out with version 1.0 of the browser, and I have to say that it is pretty interesting. It’s not perfect, of course, but it has a bunch of cool features.

Not everyone is going to want a browser with all sorts of add-ons, including a media bar — which displays Flickr photos and other stuff — and a “People” sidebar with links to your Facebook and Flickr and YouTube friends and their content. Some may find all the different tools and windows confusing. But for the social-media junkie (yes I’m looking at you, Fred) it brings together a number of different social threads in an interesting way.

You can see Facebook updates and photos with a click, scroll through Flickr photos, drag and drop your own photos on a friend in your People sidebar to share them, post something to a blog and even use your sidebar as a notebook for future blog posts, dragging and dropping images and text to it. Mike Arrington is right that Flock should be able to upload images to a blog server rather than just to Flickr or Facebook, but that shouldn’t be too hard to do. And apart from that, Flock 1.0 is pretty sweet. Karoli likes it too.

Never one to miss an opportunity to be contrarian — although Andrew “I Hate The Internet” Keen has stolen much of his Prophet of Doom act — Nick Carr has a post about the New York Times’ subscription service, TimesSelect, in which he dismisses criticism of the venture as the misguided rantings of “free content” ideologues like Jeff Jarvis.

Carr refers to a Financial Times piece about a study by Matthew Gentzkow, in which the economist looked at the competition between the Washington Post print edition and Web edition. As the FT column describes it, Gentzkow analyzed the readership data from both the print edition and the website and came to some conclusions about how much one cannibalized the other. Says the FT:

“[Gentzkow] found that people who had access to fast internet connections were, other things being equal, less likely to read the print edition. He found reasons to believe this was specifically because of access to washingtonpost.com, not to the Internet in general.”

What are the reasons he found to believe this? I read (or tried to read) the entire paper online, and I still don’t know, in part because of sentences like this one:

“Both reduced-form OLS regressions and a structural model without heterogeneity suggest that the print and online editions of the Post are strong complements.”

And that was in the early part of the paper, where Gentzkow was summarizing his findings — before he got to the part with the long calculus-type formulas and algorithms. At one point, the economist says that according to his research on the levels of substitution between the two products:

“Removing the [news website] from the market entirely would increase readership of [the newsaper] by 27,000 readers per day, or 1.5 per cent.”

He therefore concludes that the Post has lost $5.5-million in newspaper revenue as a result of providing its news online for free. Does that make any sense? It might to an economist, but I would argue his thesis fails the reasonability test. If the washingtonpost.com website were to disappear or be locked behind a pay wall tomorrow, does anyone really think that 27,000 people would suddenly go out and start reading the paper edition?

Gentzkow clearly does. I think they would be more likely to just go elsewhere for their news, such as Google News or Yahoo News or MSNBC or CNN. It might be tempting — and make for a much simpler business case — to argue that a product like the Post competes primarily with its own website, and vice versa, but I don’t think that is the way things work.

A pay wall for the Post or the Times or any other paper simply blocks people out who then go elsewhere (my friend Rob Hyndman has more on that angle). That’s not a religious view, as Nick would like to portray it — in fact, I would argue that it’s a lot more “rational” than Gentzkow’s analysis. And I’m pleased to see that Fred Wilson appears to agree with me.

Another great idea from Flickr, which just recently announced that it would be adding geotagging and other features: the integration of photo-editing tools, in this case from Web-based editing service Picnik. Mike Arrington says he prefers Fotoflexer, which I’ve never tried, but regardless I think Picnik is a great addition.

I’ve often wanted to trim or crop or otherwise modify a photo of mine while I’m browsing them, but can’t be bothered to download it and then open it with Photoshop, etc. I’ve tried some online tools that allow you to import photos from Flickr into their service — which they can do once you grant them access to your account — but it’s still not as intuitive as using those tools right on the site.

I wonder how the Flickr announcement will affect some of those other services such as Flauntr.com and Preloadr.com.

Google announced something kind of cool: a Facebook app for Google News, which allows you to choose categories or feeds based on your own keywords, and then share those stories with others and see what stories your friends have shared. Okay, it’s not a cure for cancer, but I think it’s a pretty useful app as far as Facebook apps are concerned — although that’s not exactly a high bar to clear.

I share stories I come across through either a del.icio.us feed (which is on my blog in the sidebar) and/or my Google Reader shared items (which are also in the sidebar), but lots of people don’t use those things, and may never use them. Google’s Facebook app gives them another way to see what stories their friends think are interesting, and to share their own picks from the headlines.

It will be interesting to see whether Google — which is about as data-obsessed as its possible for a company to be — will come up with any cool numbers based on what people have shared.

There seems to be quite the fuss today over Comcast’s “network management” approach to BitTorrent traffic, which according to an Associated Press story consists of intercepting packets and disrupting the connection between a downloader and the tracker (a nice touch to download the Bible in order to illustrate what Comcast is doing — I wish I’d thought of that). I’m not quite sure why everyone seems so surprised that this is happening though. Cable companies and telcos have been doing this for some time.

Some call it network management, some call it bandwidth or traffic “shaping” and others call it “throttling” (which conjures up a nice mental image of what carriers are doing to their customers). As Michael Geist has pointed out before, Rogers Communications — the largest cable company in Canada — has been doing this for the past couple of years at least. As Michael notes in his post, this behaviour seems particularly egregious considering that the downloading of music is currently permitted (or at least not explicitly banned) under Canadian copyright law, thanks to the Public Copying levy that gets applied to blank CDs and other media.

Rogers admitted to throttling BitTorrent almost two years ago, and argues — as most carriers do — that such services soak up bandwidth and cause their network to run too slowly for other customers (something I have yet to see conclusively demonstrated). But it’s not just Rogers: there’s a list of ISPs that do this kind of thing at AzureusWiki, where you can also find tips on how to turn on encryption to disguise the traffic.

Unfortunately, even if you encrypt the packets, some ISPs will respond by throttling anything encrypted on the assumption that it is probably BitTorrent or other software. As Michael points out in his post, this has caused some university researchers a headache because then their encrypted email slows down as it gets caught in the “bandwidth management” process.

Like those “unlimited” cellphone data plans that turn out not to be unlimited at all, this kind of thing is another example of how the cable companies and telcos try to suck and blow at the same time: they sell you their unlimited or high-speed plans, bragging about all the things you can do with them, and then charge or block you as soon as you try and do any of those things.

As anyone who has read this blog for awhile probably knows, I have been hard on Dave Winer occasionally (and I think with good reason, but I don’t want to get into that right now).

The fact remains, however, that Dave is a pretty smart guy when it comes to things like RSS — let’s not get into whether he “invented” it or not — and he also thinks outside the box when it comes to things like how newspapers and other media present their content, and that is something I’m interested in as well. So I think it’s only fair that I point out when I think he’s doing something interesting.

The thing in this case is his New York Times keyword index. It’s a simple thing, in a lot of ways, since it just scans the newspaper’s index and comes up with the number of times a certain word is used, then ranks them from top to bottom — but it also has a couple of additional features, including the fact that it displays the headline of a story when you hover over the number.

That’s a nice touch. And it’s an interesting companion to Dave’s “river of news” NYT feed (something I tried to recreate with my Twitter feed of Globe and Mail headlines).

I don’t understand why the Times — or other newspapers, for that matter — don’t provide that kind of alternative search or browsing tool themselves. It’s not rocket science (no offence, Dave) and it might even attract users who don’t want to use the linear approach that most papers default to. Why not have a keyword tag cloud too? The Washington Post had a demo of such a feature awhile back as part of its Post Remix lab project, but it never became part of the actual site, which I think is a shame.

I think plenty of readers would be interested in alternative ways of finding stories, just as they now use features such as the “most read” and “most emailed” lists the Times and other papers have. Why not add even more ways of slicing and dicing the news?

Even when you’re expecting a pretty amazing financial performance — as just about everyone (including me) was from Google’s latest quarter — it’s still something to see a company that is firing on pretty well all cylinders and has a commanding share of the market it operates in. I expect that watching Microsoft in its early years was very similar, as it came to dominate the desktop operating-system business and turned into a gigantic cash-manufacturing machine.

I know that there are many things that could happen to derail the Google train: online advertising could go soft, click fraud could become a bigger issue, etc., etc. It’s not as though bigger companies haven’t suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of a curve before. It could happen to Google.

At the moment, however, the company is at the top of its game — it’s in a dominant position in a rapidly-growing market, and despite having $15-billion or so in revenue, it is still growing at double-digit rates every quarter. That means it could very soon be a $30-billion company, and then people who thought $500 a share was too expensive are probably going to feel very foolish.