This, the first of our regional blogs, is authored by the technology and financial journalist Dominic Basulto. Dominic is a New York native, has been a senior editor at Corante since day one and has written for a number of online and offline media companies. Send tips or story ideas to: basulto@gmail.com.
About this weblog
Here we'll report daily on the latest tech and business developments in New York City. Impossible we concede: comprehensive coverage of the city's every story. What we hope you'll find: tips, tidbits and perspectives you won't find elsewhere. As well as unique insights, original interviews and more that should be of interest to New York's vibrant community of technologists and those who track, invest in and report on them.
John Battelle of Searchblog discusses what he calls "traffic of good intent." Look at recent deals in the Internet space, says Battelle -- the types of companies that are most valuable to buyers are companies like Flickr, Bloglines and Ask Jeeves -- companies that have lots of high-quality traffic that is growing rapidly. This is more than just the "eyeballs" argument used during the early days of the Web, says Battelle. In essence, search has changed the competitive dynamic:
"It sure smells like Web 1.0, where it was all about eyeballs. But the shift from eyeballs to intent is important, because thanks to search, intent = revenue, and that can be measured, bargained for, and purchased."
So what's a start-up, independent site to do? Get traffic -- and get it in volume. Maybe this is over-simplifying things, but if you have high-quality traffic, you are valuable:
"My new measure of a company's success is pretty simple - forget the technology, the promises, or the backers. Just look at the traffic. Is it good, and is it growing? Getting good, growing traffic is a really hard thing to do. If a company manages it, it tells you a lot. Pretty simple stuff, but there you have it."
According to Newsday, the NYC Department of Education is looking to "ease" its tough ban on cell phones in schools. Over the summer, there will be a review of the ban, with an eye toward lifting the ban for the next school year.
Currently, cell phones are banned in all city schools -- "meaning students not only are prohibited from using them inside campuses, they're not allowed to carry them in the buildings." Parents and other community members have been putting pressure on New York City to lift the ban for safety reasons, "arguing that they'd need to communicate with their children in the event of another terrorist attack or unforeseen catastrophe..."
Barry Diller's proposed $1.85 billion acquisition of search engine Ask Jeeves is a significant deal -- but not for the reasons you think. Over at Tech Central Station, "Barry Diller's Search for Meaning" looks at the ways that Barry Diller can use his various Internet properties to squeeze value out of Ask Jeeves. To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy, "Ask not what search can do for you... Ask what you can do for search." It's a theme that the Financial Times developed earlier in the week, too. Paid Content teases out a key point that Barry Diller made in the FT interview:
"Many people think one of our considerations [in buying Ask Jeeves] was to help our current business. But they are not traffic starved. We are motivated by being able to help Ask Jeeves grow, using our travel business and all our other businesses."
The Wall Street Journal Online has a fascinating look at persistent search technologies that enable individuals or institutions in need of real-time information (e.g. day traders and hedge funds) to watch the Web on a minute-by-minute basis for market-moving news or a "spike in online chatter."
One of the companies mentioned is New York-based PubSub, which picked up news about the Indonesia earthquakes minutes before the information appeared on the U.S. Geological Service's own Web site. Another is Monitor110, which provides persistent search services to Wall Street investors looking for a competitive advantage.
Before you rush out to buy stocks or make life-changing decisions based on a willowy wisp o' information, keep in mind one important caveat: "Only reckless investors would trade a stock based on information contained in a few blogs or message boards, a domain rife with short-sellers eager to spread rumors."
"The Comdex folks today announced that the Comdex tradeshow is taking another 12 month vacation (making it 24 months) of rest cure, but that it will be back in 2006. I can only presume that the team that runs MediaLive (the owner of the dead Comdex show) must think we are all on Jim Jones' Kool-Aid if they think anyone in the world believes that Comdex will ever run again."
Even if Comdex somehow does manage a miraculous return in 2006, says Meckler, "it probably could fit into the lobby of the local Starbucks about two blocks away from the Las Vegas Convention Center."
Today marks the first Thursday issue of the New York Times without a full Circuits section. Don't worry, there's still an article by tech guru David Pogue on the front page of the Business section about DVD rentals by mail and two pages of gadget-related articles on pages C9 and C10. And, as always, J&R has a full-page spread next to the gadget articles -- apparently, J&R is the only tech sponsor who hasn't abandoned the New York Times.
Worth checking out is a new podcast from Denise Howell of the popular law-related blog Bag and Baggage. Denise coined the term "blawg" and helped pioneer podcasting for lawyers.
(Full disclosure: Denise is also a contributor at Corante's newest blog, Between Lawyers).
The Neighborhood Project is an "experiment in collective knowledge" that first went live in San Francisco, with plans to roll it out to other cities later. We assume that New York has to be high on the list of cities for future roll-out, given its rich concentration of diverse neighborhoods. From The Neighborhood Project's Website:
"The Neighborhood Project is creating a map of city neighborhoods based on the collective opinions of internet users. Addresses and neighborhood data are translated into latitude and longitude values, and then drawn on the map. The address and neighborhood data are collected from housing posts on craigslist, and from people filling out the form below. The coordinates are generated using the free geocoder.us. The map is from the TIGER/Line US Census data."
Craig Newmark of Craigslist gives it a thumbs up, calling it "a rather notable effort using craigslist data."
"Arianna Huffington, the conservative-turned-liberal author, pundit, California gubernatorial candidate, and bona fide blogger, is adding "media entrepreneur" to her list of titles with a new online publishing venture, the Huffington Report."
Business 2.0 speculates that "the Huffington Report appears to be a culture and politics webzine in the classic mold of Salon or Slate. It will have breaking news, a media commentary section called "Eat the Press," and its most interesting innovation, a group blog manned by the cultural and media elite..."
Rafat Ali of Paid Content has already done some behind-the-scenes sleuthing on the matter and came up with the following:
"HuffingtonReport.com is registered by Jonah Peretti, the director of R&D at Eyebeam, an experimental art and technology non-profit based in NYC (and Eyebeam recently granted a fellowship to uber-blogger Jason Kottke). Is Eyebeam funding it, and is Kottke involved in this?"
Newsday says tomorrow is "D-Day for the Dolans," with two major decisions expected that will have significant impact on the future of the Dolan family and the Cablevision empire:
"In one decision Thursday, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is to announce whether Cablevision, the Jets or longshot energy concern TransGas will get to develop a 13-acre site on the West Side of Manhattan. Thursday also is the day an agreement expires between Charles Dolan, 78, and the board of directors to keep alive the Voom high-definition satellite TV service."
Oh, and if that wasn't enough, Cablevision is also mulling over whether to seek a merger with bankrupt cable operator Adelphia Communications.
Speaking at a media conference in New York, Gordon Crovitz, president of electronic publishing at Dow Jones, predicted that more Web sites will start charging subscription fees for online content. Crovtiz implored other publishers to follow the lead of the mighty Wall Street Journal:
"Charging for news that appears in print -- and then giving it away over the Web -- is an unsustainable business model... It would be good for the industry for more publishers to follow suit. Publishers in all mediums have tended to devalue their brands. I am very confident that other publishers will find ways to generate online subscription revenues."
The Village Voice reviews the new "Accumulations" exhibition by Emily Jacir at the Meatpacking District's Alexander and Bonin gallery. One of the works in the exhibition is "Inbox," a series of 40 paintings on wood that the Voice calls a "brave and beautiful tour through the artist's e-mail correspondence."
E-mail messages from the artist's inbox are hand-painted in oil on panels of wood in such a way as to "skewer the formality of digital correspondence via an unapologetically handwritten approximation of the typeface that exists when these works are on-screen." The details of the e-mail paintings include "wryly appropriate advertisements tacked on by Internet providers."
The physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island have been accelerating gold nuclei (atoms stripped of their surrounding clouds of electrons) to 99.995% of the speed of light using a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and then smashing these nuclei together, head-on. The result? "A sort of tiny, short-lived black hole - very, very tiny and very, very short-lived. It lasts less than one-10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of a second." At the time of collision, the temperature is in excess of one trillion degrees.
This may sound like a bunch of really smart kids slamming together their toys at really high speeds and really high temperatures and seeing what happens. To others, it also sounds like a scary little experiment with black holes and anti-matter and bizarre gravitational effects: "Before Brookhaven began its gold collision experiments in 2000, it issued assurances that the experiment could not accidentally create a black hole that would destroy the earth..."
Some of New York's largest companies are facing "an embarrassment of riches as cash on their balance sheets swells to record levels," says Crain's New York. At the end of 2004, in fact, 20 of the largest nonfinancial companies in the New York metro area (e.g. PepsiCo, Pfizer, Time Warner, KeySpan) had a combined total of more than $80 billion in cash.
According to analysts, there are two ways of looking at things. Either these companies are reporting record profit levels at a time when there's simply "a dearth of attractively priced assets to buy" or -- and here's the glass-half-empty scenario -- these companies are building up "rainy-day" funds in expectation of a recession in 2006 or 2007.
The Wall Street Journal Online reviews WikiCities.com, a for-profit, ad-supported venture from Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia. Using WikiCities.com, "groups of Web users can create their own free Web sites and fill them with, well, nearly anything." There are currently about 200 different Wiki Cities. In the middle of the article, there's an interesting comparison between WikiCities.com and About.com (which features expert-written information on hundreds of topics), recently acquired by the New York Times Company for $410 million.
Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine comments: "It's just starting so it's hard to tell whether this will work as well as Wikipedia. I think that wikis work best when they try to gather the ongoing wisdom of the crowds on lasting topics; they work when they hit a critical mass of interest, people, contributions, and time... WikiCities is a third model: A portal where people can create free, ad-supported special-interest wikis. On the one hand, I wonder whether people won't just do that on their own sites, in their own communities. On the other hand, perhaps special-interest wikis need a portal to gather that critical mass of contributors."
Information Week has a wrap-up of last week's "Wireless on Wall Street" summit, including a discussion of Wi-Fi security concerns. Some financial services firms, like Wachovia and AXA Financial, "see promise in the emerging 802.11i security specification for wireless networks." However, "it's still unclear if the financial-services industry is ready for widespread adoption of wireless, given broader security concerns..."
Mitch Ratcliffe nominates "The Long Tail" (coined by Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson) as the "most abused phrase of the year." People are over-simplifying the meaning of the term or abusing it in wrong-headed ways to explain just about any phenomenon, says Ratcliffe.
Sarah Boxer of the New York Times finds that many content sites on the Web are simply recycling content from other sites in an effort to get noticed by other, more important sites. Generating original content is not so important -- what's important is only contributing a bare minimum of original observation so as to make it onto the Internet A-list. As a result, there are lists of lists, reviews of reviews, and museums of museums. As if that weren’t enough, there are also reviewers who review the reviews of others.
As a result, “the traditional objects of culture - books, movies, art - are becoming ever more distant,” says Boxer. “In their place are reviews of reviews, museums of museums and many, many lists… The review is being replaced by a shopping list… The more lists you're on, the more you're wanted… The Web is not really a web after all. It is a list of lists.”
In this week's New Yorker, there's an amusing look at the slowest morning commutes into New York, as determined by the outcome of a race sponsored by Ford Motor Company. The three most congested early-morning routes were the L.I.E., the Holland Tunnel, and the George Washington Bridge. (Hat tip: Kottke)
In the wake of the New York Times article about a housing bubble in the making, this was bound to happen -- the sudden appearance of a cottage industry of "housing bubble blogs" and other naysayers looking for the New York real estate market to collapse. Curbed points to two blogs that popped up on its radar: Housing Bubble and Home Bubble. Curbed also provides a comprehensive list of its bubble coverage, with a caveat to its readers: "Of course there's a bubble; you can't do anything about it; go ahead, keep buying; see you in hell!"
We like what Curbed is doing -- opening up the corporate kimono, emphasizing transparency, and telling readers both sides of the story... Anyway, if you're worried about a possible housing bubble in the New York real estate market, check out an interesting post from Housing Bubble called Will Your Editor Get Priced Out of the New York Market?. It's from Jay Taylor, the editor of J. Taylor's Gold and Technology Stocks newsletter.
In this week's New York Magazine, professional hedge fund manager James J. Cramer explains that it's not too late to make some fast cash from the run-up in oil prices: "You can be your own OPEC! Okay, maybe that’s a little glib, but it sure beats the notion that I hear every day: that the rising price of oil is a no-win situation for American investors. You can, even after the tremendous run that crude has had, make a fortune owning a portfolio of oil and oil-related stocks..."
According to Cramer, here's five stocks worth holding: ConocoPhillips (an integrated oil major), EnCana (a Canadian oil play), Valero (a refiner), Cimarex (a wildcatter) and Halliburton.
Are blogs like Defamer, Gawker and FishBowlNY putting an end to the one-page gossip column in newspapers across America? According to long-time gossip columnist Liz Smith of the New York Daily News, "It's really hard now to get a scoop. With the whole world writing gossip, where is the place for the professional gossip?"
A gossip columnist from the Washington Post also points out that today's Internet gossip sites and blogs are meaner and cruder than the newspaper gossip columns: "The Internet and blogs have returned gossip to its earliest human roots--the kind of gossip that the priests told you was a venal sin... You can make it up. You can speculate wildly. You can accuse people of the most taboo practices, all in this sort of merry way."
According to FishBowlNY's Guide to Blog Snobbery, though, even gossip columnists who refuse to admit that they know anything about blogs check in daily, if not hourly, for some hot scoops.
Last week, the Online News Association launched Meetup groups in cities across the U.S., including New York, Seattle, Minneapolis and Washington, DC. The New York group is headed up by Vin Crosbie of Digital Deliverance.
Briefly noted on Crain's New York: "Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. has emerged as the likely winner of the auction for Instinet Group Inc., and a deal could be announced this week... Terms couldn't be learned, but Instinet has a market value of about $2 billion." Definitely worth watching over the next few days as Q1 2005 rolls to a close.
Two stories on blogs in two days for Joe Williams and the New York Daily News... Today's article takes a closer look at blogger rights in the workplace. Obviously, discussing sensitive internal corporate matters, taking potshots at the boss, or posting photos of dubious taste are things to avoid on a personal blog -- any of these actions could get you fired if someone finds out. The bottom line: be cautious and use common sense:
"While blogging can seem like a private diary between the blogger and a few close friends and family, it's important to remember that it is a form of publishing that anyone can stumble upon... You wouldn't say nasty things about your boss to his face, and it's probably not appropriate to do it on your blog either."
Blogs are causing a stir in the New York City public school system, says the New York Daily News. However, it's not the kids, it's the teachers who are taking the first tentative steps into the deep end of the blogpool: "Teachers all over New York are talking out of school - confessing their most shocking and sincere feelings about the city's struggling classrooms on popular Internet blogs." For now, most of the teachers are anonymous, but that could change once teachers start using their blogs for discussing lesson plans rather than "just dishing on co-workers and unruly students."
On Friday, a New York Times article analyzed whether or not there's a "real estate bubble" in the making, using the obvious comparison to the dot-com speculative frenzy of the 1990's. Whereas books like Dow 36,000 once added to the froth in the marketplace and TV shows extolled "can't miss" Internet stocks, now there's real estate blogs and TV shows about "can't miss" home improvement opportunities. In short, people are flipping housing properties the way that they once flipped Internet stocks. Not only that -- they're doing the equivalent of buying "on margin" -- putting no money down on properties that they have no intention of ever using.
Internet sites like Curbed.com, says the New York Times, are doing their part to fuel the speculative frenzy: "Real estate bulletin boards and blogs like Curbed.com and Real Estate Pimp have taken the place of financial chat rooms like Tokyo Joe's."
To which Curbed responds: "Knowing we've officially done our little part to one day bring down the global real estate market, we can now pass on from this life..." (Oh, and check out the cute little "Mr. Housing Bubble" graphic on the Curbed site, too.)
Apparently, Meckler contacted Paid Content about the Jupiter Research rumors: "These have been going on since Gartner announced the Meta deal. We have no deal going on -- however we are always for sale as a company -- that is the fiduciary obligation of a CEO for a public company. We also owe to stockholders to listen to any offer..."
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) just signed a deal to develop a state-of-the-art building automation system (BAS) to "protect its priceless art collection from environmental damage by maintaining perfect environmental conditions." The new monitoring and control system will link all the mechanical and electrical equipment within the museum and enable facility managers to have a dashboard view of all the building's systems. That means that all the security, heating, venting and air-conditioning, lighting control, and fire detection/suppression systems at MoMA will now be able to talk to each other in real-time.
So what's the perfect environment for a Picasso? According to MoMA, it's 72 degrees Fahrenheit and 50% humidity.
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal test drives two full-featured ultralight laptops: the Sony Vaio T250 and the Fujitsu LifeBook P7010. So which one does Mossberg advise the business traveler on the go to choose? "If the extra features and lower price matter a lot, go with the Fujitsu. But if lower weight, thinner size and better battery life are your key considerations, the Sony is the better choice."
Just a day after we linked to Tom Watson's post about AdSense NonSense, the Wall Street Journal publishes an article ("Automated Ads Serve Up Nonsense") pointing out the glitches in Google's contextual advertising service. "Behold the bloopers of hyper-automation" -- like links to "Dead Bodies, New and Used" and "Great Deals on Sewage." The bottom line, says the WSJ, is that "such ads highlight how search-engine advertising is still immature, and not always the super-targeted media it is touted to be."
In the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz was writing about the film Los Angeles -- but his comments could easily be adapted for the blogging world:
"It dawned on me that we're entering a new era. Warhol's dictum is being turned inside out. Soon it will simultaneously be "In the future only 15 people will be famous" and "In the future everyone will be famous to 15 people."
C-list and B-list bloggers of the world, rejoice -- In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people.
We've added a "podcasting" category here at Corante New York, but until now, we've been a bit slow on the uptake to cover New York City podcasters. We hope to increase our podcast coverage around here soon.
Anyway, fiddling around on Google turned up an interesting use of podcasting technology by Kamen Entertainment Group called Marina's Podcast -- "the first website offering a new free subscription service that automatically downloads new fitness programs by Nationally acclaimed fitness motivator and recording artist MARINA right into your MP3 player."
From the Marina's Podcast web site: "MARINA"s Podcast website premiers with 3 - 10 minute Cardio Aerobic workout Podcasts (enough for a 1/2 hour workout of walking, running and aerobics), a Body Sculpting Podcast workout (stretching, body sculpting and circuit training), and a "Confessions of a Food-A-Holic" Podcast... New workouts will be added every few days, so you can add to your library of MARINA"s High-nrg Fitness Podcasts, then mix and match them. Your workout routines will always be fresh and entertaining."
Barry Diller's $1.96 billion bid for Ask Jeeves is too low -- at least, that's the opinion of an Ask Jeeves shareholder who's suing the company. The lawsuit could jeopardize IAC's acquisition of the company. According to the New York Post, Ask Jeeves shareholder Richard Wiltsie filed suit in a Delaware court complaining that the company's board of directors "agreed to the deal without fulfilling their most basic obligation to conduct a full and fair sale process to get the best price."
FM radio is under siege, thanks to technological innovation and the corporate suits who are willing to sacrifice artistic originality for bottom-line profitability:
"MP3 players, satellite radio and the trend toward M&As in the radio business have degraded traditional FM radio and possibly driven away an entire generation of listeners... In the past, listeners relied on DJs to expose them to new types of music, and play what they thought was the very best stuff. Now, with station consolidation, fewer choices and centrally-dictated playlists ("McMusic"), music is too uniform and bland to be of much interest. Little wonder that Internet radio and P2P music sites are filling that void..."
The evolution of media just took another step forward this week, with the announcement that three big-time newspaper publishers -- Gannett, Knight-Ridder and the Tribune Company -- are combining forces to acquire a 75% stake in Topix.net, a Web site that monitors more than 10,000 online news sources. Financial terms of the deal were not divulged. This deal comes on the heels of recent Internet-related acquisitions announced by the Washington Post, the New York Times and Dow Jones.
Online grocery shopping has been a life-altering experience for Jean Chatzky of the New York Daily News:
"There have only been a few times in my life when I've stumbled across a technological innovation (I am, quite often, late to the party) and thought: This is going to change my life... This online grocery stuff is pretty incredible and I'm not the only one who thinks so. FreshDirect has a list of 100,000 active consumers in New York City. Peopod, which works through Stop & Shops and Shop Rites in this area, has another 150,000."
The BBC is finally getting a news bureau of its own in New York. According to the New York Daily News, the Brits will be subleasing space from WNET/Channel 13 at 450 West 33rd Street. (BBC currently has 20 or so staffers in New York, spread out in various locations) Not surprisingly, "the move means the BBC and WNET are likely to cooperate on more programs," similar to their collaboration on news programs like "Wide Angle."
From SC Magazine: "Fans of hit Broadway musical Spamalot could end up getting lots of spam after a security glitch exposed names and email addresses of 31,000 visitors to the show's website." We're told that the glitch has since been fixed by New York web designer Mark Stevenson, who helped to build the site.
“No tricks, just trades. Where anonymity, neutrality and unbiased access to liquidity are the rule we live by every day.”
-- Instinet ad
Electronic brokerage firm Instinet is launching a “shot across the bow of traditional Wall Street firms” with a series of display ads in the Wall Street Journal, according to the New York Post. The ads will feature a tagline (“Still think the old way of doing business works?”) as well as headline clippings about all the troubles and scandals plaguing Wall Street brokerage firms.
"So, I'm pleased to report that starting sometime later this month, I will be an Eyebeam R&D Senior Fellow for the next year or so. Eyebeam aims to be a center for art and technology and with recent projects like Fundrace, ForwardTrack, and ReBlog, there's quite a bit of overlap in what Eyebeam and I are interested in. They are not supporting me financially and I won't be officially working on any projects for them, but I will be working in their new R&D space in Chelsea..."
Looking for some VC backing for that socially-conscious venture you've always wanted to launch? Crain's New York reports that NYU's Stern School of Business is accepting proposals through April 11 for its Student Social Venture Fund:
"The fund, which NYU touts as the first student-managed fund at a U.S. business school, will distribute up to $100,000 in grants during its first cycle to organizations that provide aid to students in underserved communities who are undergoing transitions--to middle school, to high school, to college, or to the workforce. The grants will range in size from $5,000 to $50,000 and be used for programmatic, organizational-development and capacity-building support."
Yahoo announced Wednesday that it will soon begin giving users of its free Web e-mail service 1 gigabyte of storage -- the same amount offered by Google's Gmail service.
Gothamist points to Daylo, a Craigslist-eBay hybrid for buying, selling and exchanging services co-founded by two Brooklyn residents. Daylo tries to incorporate the best features of both services, as well as a few bells-and-whistles -- like the opportunity to search by zip code. Gothamist explains:
“Basically it allows you to create a profile and offer services on a recurring basis. They've combined this with a feedback system, so you know which buyers and sellers are good, and which ones are not. You can browse profiles (if you are looking for services) or requests (if you are a service provider,) and everything is organized by zip-code, so it's pretty easy to find people close to where you live or work.”
The Daylo posting caused a mini tempest in a teacup over at Gothamist, with readers calling the blog post a “shameless plug” and an “advertisement” and a few other terms that perhaps shouldn’t appear in a nice, friendly, “can’t-we-all-get-along” place like Corante New York. (Apparently, there are fewer than six degrees of separation between the editors of Gothamist and the co-founders of Daylo, and that rubbed people the wrong way.) But as Gothamist’s Jake Dobkin explained, “It’s just a cool service run by some very cool New Yorkers.” Nothing more, nothing less. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Commenting on the recent addition of Andrew Krucoff to the FishbowlNY masthead, Susan Mernit names the “NY blogger's trifecta” – Elizabeth Spiers, Jake Dobkin and Nick Denton. (Actually, if I were placing a trifecta bet at the blogging horsetrack, I would bet Denton-Spiers-Dobkin, but that’s another matter entirely. Or, better yet, I would bet Denton-Spiers-Dobkin in a box trifecta.)
Corante New York readers who tried to drop by early this morning probably encountered the following message:
“Bandwidth Limit Exceeded: The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit.”
Yes, our audience is growing by leaps and bounds here at Corante, and the inevitable happens – we run out of space to grow. Or, if you like, we’ve outgrown our bandwidth britches here and need to buy a new pair. Please bear with us during this temporary inconvenience. The train will begin moving momentarily.
If you've been following the debate about U.S. innovation, you might want to check out an article that I wrote for Tech Central Station: "The Death of Idea Factories... and the Birth of Idea Networks." Business Week recently ran a cover story article about "Outsourcing Innovation," claiming that the same outsourcing trend that swept through the manufacturing sector is set to wipe out the U.S. R&D sector as well. That's serious stuff, if indeed the U.S. is willing to outsource innovation to places like China and India.
The fallacy, of course, is thinking about innovation in terms of factories, manufacturing and "things." In other words, R&D units are not "idea factories" that manufacture innovation and design and other goodies. Hence, the title "The Death of Idea Factories."
In mid-January, Corante interviewed the two co-founders of NYC-based Dodgeball as part of its Future of Wireless series. The Dodgeball service started with a simple premise -- to coordinate social interactions between mobile users -- and has since morphed into a way for cool singles to "flirt and party" using text messages.
Amy Sohn's column on "Mating" in this week's New York Magazine features Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, calling Dodgeball "the hottest social-networking program to emerge in recent months" and an "addictive" technology for New York singles looking to meet up at bars and lounges around the city.
A clever infographic from The Onion takes a tongue-in-cheek look at eight reasons why wireless Internet access is popular with the "needy laptop-toting underclass." If you blog while doing laundry, you need to read this... (Hat tip: Paul Boutin)
In The New Yorker, James Surowiecki takes a closer look at the "cult of the billionaire next door." Hotshot CEOs like Ebbers, Rigas, Lay and Scrushy all were local boys who made it big before seeing their hometown empires crumble away. They were "outsiders and visionaries" who also turned out to be "hucksters":
"They all presided over companies that they essentially built from nothing. They all treated these companies as their own personal property. And they all came to be dominant figures in their home towns... Some of these ponds are smaller than others, but in each instance the soon-to-be-disgraced C.E.O. was the biggest fish around."
Tom Watson shares some of his experiences with Google's AdSense program and walks away unimpressed. So-called contextual advertising rarely delivers as planned -- especially when it comes to making sense of politically-charged blog postings:
"AdSense delivers little value, certainly doesn't pay the bills (as per my buddy Pamela Parker), and is fast becoming a humor meme in the blogosphere for its insane matching algorithms. Say it again folks: good advertising takes the mind of a human."
From Smart Mobs via PC Pro: "Google is inviting open source developers to swarm on its code..." If you know anything about perftools, coredumpers, sparsehashtables and goopy/functionals, you're golden.
After noting that there are "hundreds of blogospheres" and even more sub-communities of weblog users, Anil Dash of Six Apart looks at "some of the common steps of evolution within a blogging community." The first step, of course, is a long and vociferous debate about "What is blogging?"
"Once you see these trends, it becomes much easier to see how there is no one monolithic weblog medium, and that these trends are likely to repeat themselves forever... The other interesting generality about these issues is that they almost all end up not being a big deal. They seem like huge, all-consuming issues of great importance at the time, but they almost always end up being resolved with no clear answer and a vague sense that maybe it wasn't the end of the world after all."
Gothamist provides a list of the five best "old-school" Internet mailing lists that are essential for any New Yorker trying to stay informed about events happening around the city. The usual suspects -- like Daily Candy and Manhattan User's Guide.
Based on an executive survey, research firm Jupiter Research reports that most marketers are still wary of making the transition from search engine marketing to RSS-based marketing. The bottom line: "Most marketers remain skeptical of using RSS as a mechanism to supplement their e-mail marketing newsletter content." According to Jupiter, 45% of marketers have no plans to deploy RSS to supplement e-mail, with only 5% of marketers having current RSS-related marketing plans. That being said, Jupiter notes that "RSS is ideal for media firms and publishers that use e-mail as a broadcast tool."
How much is Ask Jeeves really worth? Barry Diller's IAC/Interactive Corp. offered to buy the company in an all-stock bid worth $1.95 billion. Shareholders are grumbling about the amount, while Wall Street analysts think that Diller once again proved his prowess as a big-time dealmaker. (the deal values Ask Jeeves at about $28 a share, well below the company's 52-week high of $44.66) In fact, one analyst issued a report called "IAC's Big Heist," in reference to the low price offered by IAC.
In general, Internet analysts were upbeat about the potential effect of the deal on Mr. Diller's company -- "it gives his company an entry into the rapidly growing market for advertising on search engines and also provides it with a broad Web site that could tie together its disparate parts, which include the Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, LendingTree, Match.com, and Citysearch."
"Sophisticated criminals have begun to use the unsecured Wi-Fi networks of unsuspecting consumers and businesses to help cover their tracks in cyberspace. In the wired world, it was often difficult for lawbreakers to make themselves untraceable on the Internet. In the wireless world, with scores of open Wi-Fi networks in some neighborhoods, it could hardly be easier."
The article goes behind the scenes with, among others, a New Jersey official at the Department of Homeland Security, who explains how easy it is for cybercriminals to tap into the Wi-Fi networks of unsuspecting neighbors. Moreover, the wireless networks at coffee shops, college campuses, and hotel lobbies are also exposed, say wireless security experts.
In The New York Times Magazine, Christine Rosen writes that "ego-casting technologies" like cellphones and TiVo "have put us out of touch with the manners and mores of public life." After explaining how private cellphone conversations sometimes "makes our daily commute a living hell for our fellow citizens on the bus or a danger to other drivers on the road," Rosen wraps up with an appeal for a bit more consideration of others:
"As a society, we need to approach our personal technologies with a greater awareness of how the pursuit of personal convenience can contribute to collective ills... Rather than turning on, tuning in and dropping out, we might perhaps do better, individually and socially, to occasionally simply turn our machines off."
For a rebuttal of Rosen's arguments, check out Douglas Kern's essay at Tech Central Station, "iPod, Therefore i Am."
Self-service photo centers at convenience stores and camera shops are turning into places to socialize for customers, most of them women, who like the leisure of editing their photos in a cafe-like atmosphere. Some shops are so intent to tap into the high-margin digital printing experience that they are providing all kinds of perks for busy customers, like coloring books for children.
And it's not only the shops that like the kiosks - companies like Eastman Kodak are eager to regain their dominance in the film industry by promoting digital printing kiosks. According to Kodak, kiosk printing increased by 356% in 2004. What's interesting is that "even with the proliferation of home printers designed specifically for photos, many camera owners are content to go out..."
With the departures of Michael Eisner from Disney and Hank Greenberg from insurance giant AIG, it looks like the end of an era, says Terry Keenan in the New York Post: "The reign of the imperial executive is officially over. R.I.P., celebrity CEO." Oh, and don't forget about Bernie Ebbers, the folks at Enron, the CEO of Boeing, and a whole raft of other top-level executives who now find themselves out of a job. In February alone, there were more than 100 high-level management changes, says the New York Post -- the highest number in more than four years.
From NewYorkology: the NYC Photobloggers event at the Apple store in SoHo is Wednesday, March 23 at 6pm. Among the sponsors and participants: Gothamist, Flickr and Fotolog.
Status-conscious New Yorkers are finding out that it's sometimes possible to obtain a cellphone number with a 212 area code. Once they do, they'll stop at nothing to obtain one: "In part because of the cachet of a 212 number, some people fight hard to obtain one, either by converting a land-line number or nabbing one of the few recycled 212 numbers that have slipped back into the wireless pool..."
The details are just coming in, but it looks like Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp is putting together a $2 billion acquisition bid for Ask Jeeves. The rationale for acquiring Ask Jeeves, the fourth-largest search engine company, is clear: "Advertising spending on search sites is rapidly growing and Mr. Diller's company appears to be trying to tap into a market dominated by Google and Yahoo."
The BBC notes that both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are reporting that a formal announcement could take place as early as Monday.
Recently opened in New York: an off-off-Broadway political drama based on the real-life blog of a 25-year-old woman in Baghdad. Check out "Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq" at the West End Theater on the Upper West Side through March 27... "For better or worse, it inaugurates an entirely new (and seemingly inevitable) theatrical genre - the blog play," says Jason Zinoman of The New York Times.
As seen on the Gawker web site... a flashing banner ad for The Captain's Blog: Drink Captain Morgan's Puerto Rican rum and "blog with the captain." This is genius - check out the "blog party starter kit."
Blogger Jason Kottke is winding down his micropatron campaign at 12 noon today. Give what you can. If not out of altrusim, then out of pure self-interest -- kottke.org is awarding gifts to a limited number of donors who give $30 or more.
