Links that interest me and maybe you
Video whiz and all-around wild and crazy guy Mark Mckay, who won our mesh 2007 video contest and wound up doing a bunch of video for us last year, came out to a recent mesh meetup at the Irish Embassy and has put together a great little highlight reel for us (and if you haven’t got your ticket for mesh or meshU, you’d better get cracking).
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvfOW9hsUx0&hl=en&w=425&h=355]
Thanks a lot to Mark and to Rob Manne and the other folks at Edelman.
Marshall Kirkpatrick has a post at Read/Write Web with some notes from an interview he and some other bloggers did with Neil Young at the JavaOne conference. And why was Neil there? Apparently he’s releasing his entire back catalogue as a Blu-Ray disc, which — thanks to the Java embedded in Blu-Ray — will automagically download new content if there is any when you play the disc. Among other things, Neil in jeans and a T-shirt was probably the only person who could make ponytailed Sun CEO Jonathan Schwarz look stuffy and uptight.
I’m a big fan of Neil’s, and always have been. And not just because my family and his family were neighbours in Toronto about a hundred years ago, or because his cottage is up in northern Ontario (“there is a town in North Ontario” he sings in Helpless) just like my cottage. Neil has always done whatever the hell he wanted to do, regardless of what his record label wanted — anyone remember the album Trans, released in 1982? — and he has a similarly straightforward approach to file-sharing and the dangers thereof, according to Marshall’s post.
“It’s up to the masses to distribute it however they want,” he said. “The laws don’t matter at that point. People sharing music in their bedrooms is the new radio.”
Obviously, he’s not saying that he’s happy people are trading mp3 files of his music rather than buying it. But I think he knows he can’t stop it, and I get the sense that he thinks it’s probably on balance a positive thing — and there will always be people who want the Blu-Ray disc with the whole back catalogue, or the $300 package deal that Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails made $1.6-million or so on awhile back, despite the fact that he was effectively giving the entire album away. You just have to focus on that, and give them the best you can give.
I like Marc Andreessen a lot. I think he writes some deep and thoughtful posts at his blog, and as more than one person has pointed out, his analysis of the Microsoft-Yahoo brouhaha has been second to none (except maybe Kara Swisher at All Things Digital). And his latest post on dual-class shares is likewise deep and thoughtful — and I also happen to think it is wrong. I must admit, he is such a persuasive bugger that he almost had me nodding along in agreement there for awhile. But I wrote about some of the reasons why I think he’s wrong the last time he brought the idea up, and I stand by that post.
Try this: Read through Marc’s excellent argument, but whenever he says “dual-class shares,” insert the word “dictatorship” in there instead, and I think you will see what I mean. In effect, Marc is arguing that dual-class shares are a fantastic way of running a technology company — provided nothing goes wrong. That is, if the ones with the voting control are also majority shareholders, and if they have a long-term vision for the company, and if shareholders go in with their eyes open, and if the founders don’t suddenly become… well, dictators.
I now believe that dual-class stock structures are a great idea for a technology company that is in the process of going public, under the following conditions:
* The key leaders of the company — typically the founders — who will own the controlling Class B shares, are also major economic shareholders in the company. They own a significant portion of the company and are therefore highly incented to maximize the value of the company over time.
* The key leaders of the company who own the controlling Class B shares have a long-term goal of building a major franchise, and the commitment required to execute against that goal.
* The controlling Class B shareholders have a commitment to treat Class A shareholders fairly and equally in all respects other than voting power.
* All public shareholders understand what they are getting into up front — no bait and switch.
This seems to me to be the equivalent of the old saying about how Mussolini was bad, but at least he “made the trains run on time.” In other words, on the whole the complete centralization of power in the hands of a dictator was for the best. I would never compare Larry Page or Sergey Brin — or even Jerry Yang and David Filo — to an evil dictator, but my point is that just as a benevolent dictatorship is seen by some as the best political structure for a country (“best” meaning the most efficient), so dual-class shares might seem like the best share structure for a company, right up until something goes wrong.
As I said in my previous post, dual-class shares are an attempt to get around Darwin’s Law as it applies to the marketplace. Multiple-voting shares protect incompetent, complacent or simply unsuccessful companies that should be taken over and either remade or dismantled. If your company is agile enough and creative enough, it shouldn’t need them. And if you don’t want to bow to the whims of the marketplace, then there’s a simple solution that Marc ignores: Don’t go public.
I have to declare a conflict of interest up front with this post: Leila Boujnane, the CEO of Toronto’s Idee Inc., has been a friend of mine for some time now. She is not just a tireless supporter of technology startups and entrepreneurs in Toronto, but is also smart, funny, relentlessly positive and generally just a pleasure to have around. She and her team at Idee also have one of the least-known Toronto success stories: an image-recognition company that is second to none, and has major customers such as Adobe using its technology.
Today, Idee is taking the image-recognition chops it has built up through corporate image searches and applying them to consumer-level searchs through a beta called TinEye.com. Using either an image from your hard drive or a link to one on the Web (the service also has a Firefox plugin that adds TinEye to the right-click menu), the service can almost instantly produce a list of similar images — even when the image in question has been stretched, shrunk, cropped, flipped, had the colour profile changed, or been otherwise modified.
I saw a demo of the corporate version of this technology a while back and was blown away, and now it is being made available to anyone. Unlike most image-search services, which use the text and keywords associated with a photo or image, Idee uses the digital “fingerprint” of the actual pixels in the image and compares that with others until it finds a match. Other companies have claimed to be able to do this in the past, (including Riya, which then became Like.com, a shopping search engine) but none have impressed me as much as TinEye.
There’s more info on TinEye at the Idee site (including the fact that it is currently crawling almost half a billion images), and there’s also a very helpful video explaining the service that features another friend — Amber MacArthur, video-blogger extraordinaire and host of CommandN. I’ve got a limited number of invitations for the service available: drop your email into a comment or use my contact form (link in the upper right-hand corner of this page) and I’ll hand them out on a first-come, first-serve basis. Congrats to Leila and the rest of Idee.
Google has launched a couple of new features for Google Reader, including the ability to share items with friends even when they aren’t in an RSS feed — through a bookmarklet like the ones that Facebook and about a gazillion other sites have — as well as the ability to add “notes” to the items that you’re sharing from within Reader. I think these baby steps (and they are baby steps) are a nice addition to Google Reader, and a year ago they might have even been groundbreaking, but next to the kind of things that FriendFeed and others are doing with sharing and commenting, they actually look kind of lame.
Don’t get me wrong — sharing things within Reader from a bookmarklet is a nice feature to have, although as Adam Ostrow (who also co-owns the new Readburner site, which is a community built around Reader shared items) notes at Mashable, there have been hacks that allowed you to do pretty much the same thing if you really wanted to. But I don’t really see the point of having the ability to add a note to what you’ve shared. Maybe I’m just missing the point (although I do like the fact that shared items now look different in your Reader items view).
One of the biggest problems with Google Reader is that it’s disconnected from everything. That was a problem with FriendFeed.com too, until the site — founded and run by former Googlers, including Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor — added the ability to post comments back to Twitter while also keeping them within FriendFeed as well. I think that kind of cross-posting ability is a huge plus. One of the other irritants with Google Reader is that it adds people as your friends even if you’ve only emailed them once or twice (Google Chat does the same thing). That’s just dumb. In any case, GReader’s added features are nice, but they’re going to have to step up the pace a bit over at the Googleplex.
As a fan of Techmeme, I try to stick up for the site whenever someone writes about how it’s just an “echo chamber,” or how it’s dominated by the “A-listers” — so it’s nice to see a little empirical data from Yuvi, the 17-year-old data guru behind Statbot. Yuvi and his statistical abilities were recently re-discovered by the now-ubiquitous Louis Gray (who himself is living proof that Techmeme and the so-called “A-list” can be broken into by just about anyone if they are determined enough).
Yuvi tracked the data from Techmeme’s headlines and found that while 30 per cent of those headline links come from what might be called “A-list” blogs, another 30 per cent come from blogs that are probably on the C or even the F-list. It’s easy to complain about that first 30 per cent — and perhaps it’s even valuable to point out that a certain proportion of the blogosphere gets more than its share of attention.
That’s a good thing to remind ourselves of, even just so that we can all keep our eyes open for new and worthwhile blogs, like Corvida’s SheGeeks, or Sarah in Tampa, or the next Louis Gray. But I still think not enough attention gets paid to the other 30 per cent that Yuvi talks about — the blogs that are just being discovered. They are there — all you have to do is look for them. And when you find them, link to them.
Like Hank Williams (no, not *that* Hank Williams) I too am fascinated by all of the recent talk in the blogosphere about how Twitter needs to be decentralized and/or disintermediated for the good of the Twitter-verse. In a post written for his own blog (creatively titled “Why Does Everything Suck?”) and cross-posted at Silicon Alley Insider, the New York-based entrepreneur says that if some of the critics of the company have their way, Twitter could find itself effectively disemboweled before it has had a chance to even become a business:
“It is entirely possible that before Twitter makes its first penny, it will become too important to exist in its current form, and the community will feel it has to be replaced by an open source, distributed framework. This should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who decides open their API.”
Why do people want to disintermediate Twitter? Dave Winer says it’s because he doesn’t like the idea of that stream of content disappearing somehow when the service is down (or when Twitter goes under), and compares the service to the Web pages that were created during the early days of the Web. Marc Canter, another cantankerous early Web guy, says Twitter needs to be decentralized and standardized because it’s as important as the DNS system behind the Internet.
Now I’m as big a fan of Twitter as the next guy — and maybe more so. But is this social network for the attention-deficit crowd, which 90 per cent of the world has never heard of, really as important as the DNS system, and so important that it can’t be left in the hands of one company? I think that’s more than a leap of logic — it’s like a double-backflip half-gainer of logic. It has to be flattering that people see Twitter as so crucial that it needs that kind of protection, but it still seems kind of… well, loopy.
It’s not that I’m not in favour of distributed apps, because I am. And if there’s a way to create a system that Twitter also plugs into, then that might be not a bad way to proceed — because as Steve O’Hear notes, anything that comes next has to respect what came before. Fred Stutzman says he doesn’t think it will work. Cindy Aleo-Carreira at Profy says that the disintermediation move is one of the downsides of the “build it and then figure out a business later” model. I think she has a point. I’d love to hear what Ev Williams thinks.
Not long after Radiohead offered their new album In Rainbows through their website for whatever fans wanted to pay, Nine Inch Nails’ frontman Trent Reznor took a similar approach with a new album he produced by hip-hop artist Saul Williams. The response was relatively lacklustre, however, with less than 20 per cent of those who downloaded the tracks paying even $5 for them, and from some of the interviews he gave about the experiment, it sounded as though Reznor wasn’t all that happy with the way things turned out.
The singer/songwriter hasn’t pulled back from experimenting with Web releases, however — in fact, just the opposite. In March, he released a new instrumental album called Ghosts I-IV as a combination download and physical product; fans could opt for a series of offerings, all the way from mp3 tracks at $5 to a deluxe package for $300, which included signed cover art. Even though nine of the tracks were released for free through the BitTorrent network, more than 2,500 bought the deluxe version and Reznor said he made $1.6-million.
In gratitude, the NIN frontman has released his latest album, In Slip, as a free download. A message on the download site says “As a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new Nine Inch Nails album one hundred percent free.” The album can also be streamed through iLike (something R.E.M. also did with their latest album). Radiohead, meanwhile, said recently that the “pay what you want” release of In Rainbows — which Reznor criticized as “insincere” and a “bait-and-switch tactic” — was “a one-off” and won’t be repeated.
Update:
My friend David Usher, a musician who writes a blog about social media at CloudID, says Radiohead and Trent Reznor have the resources to do whatever they want with their music, but that doesn’t really help up and coming artists find a new business model.
There’s a fascinating piece in the New York Times looking at IDG — the world’s largest publisher of tech-related magazines — and how it has been transformed from a print entity into what has increasingly become an online-only entity:
“In 2002, 86 percent of the revenue from I.D.G.’s publications came from print and 14 percent online. These days, 52 percent of the revenue is from online ads, while 48 percent is from the print side.”
That’s a remarkable shift. In some cases, magazines continue to be printed but come together primarily online, and in other cases — such as InfoWorld — the print magazine has been closed completely and the publication is solely online. And the business is better:
“Today, I.D.G. says, the InfoWorld Web site is generating ad revenue of $1.6 million a month with operating profit margins of 37 percent. A year earlier, when it had both print and online versions, InfoWorld had a slight operating loss on monthly revenue of $1.5 million.”
There is a dark lining to the silver cloud, however — the story says that IDG’s staff levels are 50-per-cent below where they were when the transformation started:
“By then, the editorial staff was down to its current level of 17 people, about half the number in 2002, and way below the peak of nearly 100 during the technology spending boom of the late 1990s.”
Still, a fascinating tale of one publisher that took the bull by the horns and made the change deliberately. As former editor Stewart Alsop says near the end of the piece: “What’s happening at I.D.G. is a fairly accurate map for every other publishing organization. Get over it, it’s going to happen.”
In the wake of the Microsoft-Yahoo merger collapse, there has been a lot of commentary about how Steve Ballmer’s job as CEO of Microbeast is in danger because the deal didn’t go through. Erick Schonfeld has a post up at TechCrunch that quotes an anonymous source at the software behemoth as saying Ballmer is uneasy — hint: he’s yelling even more now! — and the board is considering pitching him overboard. I’m going to side with my friend Kara Swisher on this one; I think much of that is probably wishful thinking by Microsoft insiders. I don’t think Ballmer is going anywhere — or at least not because of this.
So why did I say that Jerry Yang should be fired? Completely different story, IMO. Microsoft made a gamble that it could bag Yahoo, and that there would be enough synergies to justify the deal (adding Yahoo’s media properties, the ad-keyword business, etc.). You can debate whether that’s true or not, but in my opinion it was a fair bet to make. And when it looked like it was going to get too expensive or go needlessly hostile, Ballmer walked. No harm, no foul. Not to mention, of course, that this still isn’t over yet. The fat lady is just warming up.
Yang, on the other hand — either on his own, or aided and abetted by the Yahoo board — waffled and whiffed and came up with lame proposals for boosting the company’s value, and never produced anything that justified either a much higher share value or a dismissal of the Microsoft deal in favour of something better. There is nothing better, and Yang knows it — and most Yahoo shareholders likely know it too. That’s why he deserves to leave, and Ballmer deserves to stay.
So Microsoft has taken its ball and gone home: the company announced late today that it is withdrawing its bid for Yahoo after the company refused its bumped-up $33 a share offer and stuck firm to its demand for $37 a share. The letter from Steve Ballmer, which my friend Paul Kedrosky also has posted, describes how Yahoo not only refused the offer, but made it obvious that it was prepared to effectively commit corporate hari-kiri in order to make itself as unappealing as possible. Among other things, it planned to sign a keyword-ad deal with Google.
I’m all for fiduciary duty, and in particular the duty of senior executives to scour the globe for a competing offer in order to get the best value for their shares. But Yahoo has had three months and has turned up nothing but an unbelievably lame deal with AOL (or so rumour has it). What possible reason could it have for pushing Microsoft to $37? The existing offer was already 70 per cent higher than the stock was trading at prior to the bid. And the Google deal is just a poison pill by another name.
In my view, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has gone way beyond fiduciary duty and has been effectively blocking this deal in any way possible. I expect to see the stock tank, and deservedly so. If I were a shareholder, I would be calling for Yang’s head. This deal was by far the best opportunity the company had to achieve some value.
Update:
This post appears at Seeking Alpha as well, and there are some good comments from Yahoo shareholders and supporters there.
Update 2 (05/05/08):
According to an email that Nik Cubrilovic sent Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web, Omnidrive isn’t dead yet — he claims a domain change is in the works, and that a new version of the app is on the way that will use Amazon and Google for storage.
Update:
Clay Cook, an early angel investor in Omnidrive, has posted an open letter to founder Nik Cubrilovic in which he describes some of what happened after he invested $100,000. According to an email exchange with Nik that he has also posted, as recently as February the Omnidrive founder said the company was in the process of being sold and that his investment would be doubled in value.
Was Omnidrive simply too big a swing, as Ben Barren argues? Perhaps. There’s no question that the remote storage game was a pretty crowded space even when the company started, with a number of established providers like Mozy, Carbonite and others — and then along came Amazon’s S3, which reduced the cost of such services by an order of magnitude, and Windows Live Drive not long afterward. At some point, Omnidrive obviously became uneconomic. Maybe some day Nik will emerge to tell the full story of what happened to the company.
Original post:
According to Josh Catone over at Read/Write Web, the “cloud storage” company formerly known as Omnidrive is no more. The domain now goes to a hosting provider’s standard “parked page” message, and users who have commented at RWW say they have been getting error messages for months when trying to access their accounts on the system. The first signs of trouble started showing up about six months ago, when RWW reported that the CTO had left the company.
At the time, CEO and founder Nik Cubrilovic responded that everything was fine at Omnidrive, and that the company was not only profitable but had gotten a new round of financing. The departed CTO told a different story, however — alleging that he was hired to build out a team and told there was financing, but never saw any money, and that he and the entire engineering team quit because they hadn’t been paid. The whole thing had an uncomfortable similarity to the Blognation debacle, involving Sam Sethi and some non-existent financing.
Don’t ask me why, but I like to read Kanye West’s blog. I don’t really like his music all that much (note to Kanye: please don’t hate me) but his blog is hilarious — a totally idiosyncratic mix of thoughts about pretty much anything, from high-tech gadgets and cars to clothing and architecture. I don’t know how much of what he calls KanyeUniverseCity.com is actually produced by him, but the overall effect is a little like Boing Boing, but with a crazy hip-hop mogul running the show.
We all know that Kanye can get a little… well, hot under the collar sometimes. But he totally lost it in one recent post, after an Entertainment Weekly reviewer gave the opening show of his new Glow in the Dark tour a B+. Now, you might think that a B+ is pretty good. It’s almost an A, right? Well that, my friends, is why you are not Kanye West. Here’s what Kanye had to say (I’ve cleaned it up a little):
“Ya’ll rated my album sh***y and now ya’ll come to the show and give it a B+. What’s a B+ mean? I’m an extremist. It’s either pass or fail! A+ or F-! You know what, f*** you and the whole f***ing staff!!!
You don’t know sh** about passion and art. You’ll never gain credibility at this rate. You’re f***ing trash! I make art. You can’t rate this. I’m a real person. I’m not a pop star. I don’t care about anything but making great art. Never come 2 one of my shows ever again.”
Never let it be said that Kanye doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. After all, he isn’t a pop star — he’s a real person! And he doesn’t care about anything but making great art. And in the RSS feed version of the above post, he had an additional thought for the Entertainment Weekly writer that I guess he decided to leave out of the final version: “Chris Willman, kill yourself!” the pop star said. Now that’s great art.
With all due respect to my friend Kara Swisher over at All Things D, the news that Facebook apps are mostly designed for fun and games isn’t (I would respectfully submit) going to set the world on fire by any means. I think it’s great that Nathan from Flowing Data produced the chart that he did, and it looks really sharp and everything, but I don’t think it tells us a whole lot. Is it really a surprise that the vast majority of Facebook’s 23,000 applications are designed to be time-wasters or (at most) goofy brain-teasers like Super Pokes and Zombies and whatnot?
I know that this is supposed to show that Facebook is primarily a giant playground for overgrown toddlers, and therefore either a) a big joke, and/or b) not a real business, and/or c) not worth anything even close to $15-billion. I mean, let’s get serious — is anyone going to argue that a real business could be based on playing games, or that such a business could be worth billions of dollars? After all, nothing like that has ever happened before, right? It’s just not possible.
Just because most of the apps are aimed at fun doesn’t mean the platform itself doesn’t have value — potentially lots of value (although maybe not $15-billion). And don’t marketers and businesses use fun in various forms to sell things? I’m pretty sure they do.
Although Craigslist originally said that it couldn’t respond to the allegations made in eBay’s lawsuit against the company, it seems that Craig and/or Jim couldn’t help themselves: the Craigslist blog has a post up entitled “Kettles and Pots” which notes that many of the things eBay is accusing Craigslist of doing are things that eBay has either also done with its own shares, or has previously argued should be done with Craigslist shares. For example, the Craigslist blog argues that eBay has:
Of course, as at least one commenter on the post has noted, eBay is a large public company with freely-tradeable shares and a broad public ownership. Craigslist is the opposite: a private company with only two major shareholders and a board consisting of… wait for it… those same two major shareholders. Even if the things it implemented were identical in every way, those facts would be enough to change the picture, since there are protections for minority shareholders even in private companies. I think Craig and Jim are going to have to do better than that. For more thoughts on the eBay lawsuit, read my previous post.