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Intellect or Insanity | הבלוג של יהונתן קלינגר |
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אז למה כשאני מסתכל על הטבלאות בPHPMYADMIN אני רואה ג'יבריש?
אני מצפה לראות את הטקסט בעברית. לא ככה?
4:31
Weather in San Francisco Bay Area is especially nice and is likely to remain that way for a while. It makes perfect sense to sit outside and talk about the hottest topic to hit the Innerwebs: Data portability/interoperability. Whether it is Facebook, MySpace or Google, each has been coming up with ways to control the user. Somehow the noise has gotten ahead of the fact, and I would like to meet smart people about this over the weekend.
A frank conversation with non-conflicted parties that would help me write smarter and conceptually sound posts going forward. I propose: 2.30 PM at Starbucks on Clay & Battery in San Francisco. I will buy coffee and cakes, but please don’t pitch me your company. I want some honesty about this topic.
4:22
Networking has always been a high art in business. Just ask Susan Roane, my mentor and author of the seminal tome, “How to Work a Room.” (I know a handful of VCs and startup kings on Sand Hill Road who have her book tucked into a drawer.) I’ve been showcasing Roane’s lessons for founders in my Found|READ series, “What They Don’t Teach You At Stanford Business School.”
By now it’s time to address the latest, and arguably the most powerful, networking tool in any founders’ arsenal: Twitter. It’s simple. If you’re not “tweeting,” you’re missing half the conversation. Just ask Sarah Lacy. (How different Lacy’s now-infamous SXSW interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg might have been had she been plugged into the tweets flying around the conference room floor!) Don’t know how to use Twitter? No sweat. Here are my 8 Tips for How to Work a Twitter Party.
(Photo credit: News.com. SXSW Tweeters celebrating before the ill-fated Zuckerberg interview.)
First things first: For founders, the goal of Twittering isn’t to tell people what we ate for lunch, but to get technology influencers — like Dave McClure, Mike Arrington or Guy Kawasaki — to read and respond to our Twitter feeds. In Twitter nomenclature, this is called “following.”
1. Don’t be afraid to Tweet above your head. McClure is an Alpha Tweeter. One tweet from Dave is like a TechCrunch link two years ago. But you’re no one, so you’ll have to tweet Dave five times to get him to reciprocate, and do something really interesting for him to “follow” your feed. Reciprocity is also a must. Guy Kawasaki, a top Twitter-er, takes this to the extreme, following every Tweeter who follows him. So do I. Use text message updates to keep tabs on those tweeting you.
2. Watch your Twitter ratios. Spammers have a bad follower-to-following ratio, so don’t randomly follow 20, 200 or 2,000 people without some Twittering under your belt. Similarly if you’re twittering a little too substantively, or have a banal topic, then expect to have a horrible updates-to-follower ratio. (my updates-to-followers ratio is bad because I tweet about FICO scores, a topic so dull that my “ABC News” segment on YouTube only has 12 views.)
3. Leverage what’s going on. If you knew HP would buy EDS a week ago or a month ago, then tweet and claim credit. I’m not joking, people. Do this. Did you walk in on a powerSet 2.0 pitch at Peet’s on University Ave.? Twitter that too.
4. Move your Twitter conversation(s) off-line. Good meet-ups can start with Twitter marketing. Good examples include Startup School or Sarah’s book-signing in San Francisco. Twitter loves Y Combinator and vice versa! Tweet your friends to organize a pre-party (like a breakfast at Fraiche) and voila! One day prior to your event, and the RSVP list on Facebook is 50 percent over capacity.
5. Migrate your real-world conversation to Twitter. At ad-tech, I was with Oren Michels, Scott Rafer, Owen Thomas and others. During post-conference parties, people tweeted back-and-forth other constantly. What does this do? It stimulates more face-to-face conversation! Indeed, working the Twitter party makes the real party you’re at better, bigger and better-documented.
6. Time your tweets. A great man once told me: “Be a vacation in your interactions with people.” He meant: “Don’t tax your conversation partners.” Is reading your Twitter feed a part-time job, or a little beach break that people can take from right inside their cube at work? For maximum impact, release your tweets with the time of day in mind. News-related tweets fly in the morning. Post-lunch tweets should be on the lighter side.
7. Pre-write some of your material. There is nothing wrong with pre-composing a few impromtu tweets. Think improv comedians don’t prepare? So don’t post stream of consciousness to your Twitter. And whatever you do, don’t tweet with a buzz on.
8. Work the Twitter Room for product development. A product manager for pbWiki, Kris, was recently using Twitter to collect ideas for product tweaks. So I chimed in with a tweet requesting that updates to my company’s 400 pbWiki pages be distributed via email, but only to those who’ve actually edited those pages. Hey Dave Weekly (founder of pbWiki), did you know your employees work the Twitter Party for your benefit?
Written by Larry Chiang, founder of duck9.com, which helps college students improve their credit ratings. He is also a frequent contributor to Found|READ.
3:03
עובדי ידע נקלעים לא פעם למצוקה אמיתית כתוצאה מקושי גובר לעמוד בקצב. אם בעבר כל מי שנעדר מהעבודה למשך מספר ימים נתקף פניקה אל מול מאות הודעות דוא"ל ואלפי אייטמים מודגשים בגוגל רידר, היום די בהעדרות של כמה שעות כדי להרגיש לחלוטין לא בעניינים.
קריאה פסיבית של כל העדכונים האחרונים אינה מספיקה, כמובן. אם בעבר פוסט איכותי פעם ביומיים עשה את העבודה לכל מי שמעוניין לשמר ולשפר את המוניטין והנוכחות המקוונים שלו, הרי שהיום קצב עדכון שכזה נראה כמו נצח.
הדטרמיניזם של השירותים החדשים כופה על המשתמשים בהם להאיץ את קצב ייצור התכנים. מי שלא מגיב, מבלג, מטווטר, מפלקר, מפייסבק, מפרנדפיד, מדגג, מרסס, מדלשס ועוד כהנה פעלים בלתי אפשריים נתפש כאויב אומת הגיקים. לא מכבר האלפא-בלוגר רוברט סקובל איים לחשוף אלפא-בלוגרים שאינם פעילים די הצורך לטעמו על פי FriendFeed.
ריבוי ערוצי המידע והשירותים הוליד אגרגטורים חברתיים כמו lifestream.fm, Mybloglog, FriendFeed ו-Plaxo, שנרכשה השבוע על ידי Comcast. שירותים כאלה מבטיחים לאפשר לנו לעקוב אחר עדכונים מכל השירותים בהם מעדכנים האנשים שאנחנו עוקבים אחריהם. כך, אם הם פירסמו פוסט מעניין בבלוג, שיתפו ידיעה חשובה ברסס, העלו תמונות לפליקר, כתבו משהו בטוויטר או סימנו וידאו שאהבו ב-YouTube, כל העדכונים האלה יופיעו במקום אחד.
בפועל, כמו שעידן כותב, במקום להקל עלינו שירותים כאלה רק תורמים לרעש הלבן. אם אני עוקב אחרי שרה לייסי בטוויטר, אני רוצה לקבל עדכונים על כתבות חדשות או מידע מהתעשיה ולא מעניין אותי שהיא בדרך לשדה תעופה כזה או אחר. ואם אני עוקב אחרי סטיב רובל ב-FriendFeed, אני רוצה לקבל ממנו לינקים מעניינים על טכנולוגיה ולא על מסע הבחירות בארה"ב.
בעיה נוספת של מזרימי החיים למיניהם היא תרומתם להמשך הפרגמנטציה של השיח. למעשה, FriendFeed לא מרכז את כל העדכונים במקום אחד אלא מציג קישורים מנותקים מהקשר - אנחנו לא רואים את התגובות להם, את הרקע וכו'. נוסף על כך, FriendFeed תורם להמשך הקיטוע באמצעות הוספת מנגנון תגובות משלו. באופן שבו מי שבאמת רוצה להיות בעניינים חייב להיכנס גם ל-FriendFeed וגם לטוויטר, לפייסבוק, לבלוגים ועוד. בעיה נוספת היא שכפול המידע - חבר ב-FriendFeed מפנה ללינק מסוים, שמופיע לאחר מכן בפיד של חבר אחר, ושוב אצל חבר שלישי וחוזר חלילה.
בעיית הרעש הלבן הולידה למרבה האבסורד memetracker ל-FriendFeed. אבסורד מאחר ששירותים כמו FriendFeed היו אמורים מלכתחילה לוודא שנקבל עדכונים רלוונטיים מאנשים שעל דעתם אנחנו סומכים. מגוון שירותים נוספים מנסים לתקוף את בעיית הסינון מזוויות שונות. למשל, AideRSS מציע תוסף לפיירפוקס שמסנן את הפידים של גוגל רידר.
רוב המסננים האלה הם בסיסיים למדי ומבוססים על דירוג פופולריות - כלומר, כמה אנשים שאנחנו עוקבים אחריהם או בכלל שיתפו פריט מסוים בנושא מסוים במבחר שירותים חברתיים. אפשר לצפות שבעתיד ישתכללו הכלים האלה וילמדו גם אותנו כדי להציע לנו מידע שעשוי לעניין אותנו ולא רק על פי מה שפופולרי בקהילה. קשה להאמין שבעתיד הנראה לעין כלים כאלה יהיו מדויקים מספיק כדי לפתור את בעיית עומס המידע.
לסיום, פוסט חובה ב-RRW המסכם את ההתפתחויות האחרונות ומציע כמה תובנות מעניינות.
0:23
Microsoft will hold its fourth Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Road Show at its campus in Mountain View, Calif., next Thursday, May 22. The event, which will showcase examples of all kinds of cool things the Redmond giant is working on, including an Xbox-based programming game for kids to program a virtual robot, is free to the public. But space is limited, so go here to register and enter the RSVP code “RoadShow08.”
I have this notion to write a series of columns from time to time under the title "Reality Check" -- columns intended to explain how the world of Information Technology actually functions. Because like any other entrenched, complex, and often closeted industry, things in IT don't really work the way many people think they do. I'm guessing the Vatican is a bit like that, too. So I'll be looking at various IT players and their roles and trying to put them into perspective, much as I did recently with a column or two about the role of computer consultants. This week the topic is Gartner Inc., or rather all the Gartner-like operations that give advice about technology to America's largest businesses: what do these guys actually DO?
Not much of real value I'm afraid -- at least of value in my view.
While Gartner is the biggest of these outfits, I need to say that my comments apply equally to Gartner's main competitors, Forrester Research, International Data Corp. (IDC), and the Yankee Group.
Here's what Gartner says it does, straight from their website:
"Gartner offers the combined brainpower of 1,200 research analysts and consultants who advise executives in 75 countries every day. We publish tens of thousands of pages of original research annually and answer 200,000 client questions every year. We can help you make smarter and faster decisions. Our years of relevant experience and institutional knowledge prevent costly and avoidable errors. Be confident that with Gartner, your decisions are the right decisions."
So Gartner and, by association, Gartner's competitors help customers make better IT decisions. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But why do governments and big companies NEED help making IT decisions? Don't most companies hire IT professionals to make those decisions in the first place? Do they really need to spend more than $2 billion per year between these consulting companies just to make better IT decisions?
The truth is that there is no IT "profession." Most of what IT managers know about IT they learn from vendors, consultants, and folks like Gartner. Because they feel isolated, and because the IT vendor/consultant/media system encourages them to worry about such things, IT managers tend to feel they must have their important decisions validated and Gartner is the most popular place to find validation. Yes they wield a lot of power, but it is often the power of discovering the obvious.
It's all about churn. If customers aren't buying stuff they won't worry about buying decisions, so they are always encouraged to buy. If customers don't change their IT infrastructure (or change it too slowly) they might become confident in their own ability to make the right choices, which would threaten the consultant relationship.
How often do these consultants tell their customers that everything is fine and no action is required? Almost never. In fact I'm tempted to say "absolutely never" simply because I haven't heard of such an instance, but I'm playing it safe here.
After all, I'm attacking the very temple of IT.
There are themes at Gartner and its competitors -- ideas that are presented on an almost seasonal basis like adding fins to change a 1956 Chrysler New Yorker into a 1957 Chrysler New Yorker. Two such themes that are popular with such consultants right now are offshoring/outsourcing and getting rid of legacy applications to gain agility, whatever that is.
I've written columns and columns about offshoring and outsourcing and the success of both policies is decidedly mixed, unless perhaps you are outsourcing down the street and offshoring Lake Michigan.
Outsourcing, while a very popular recommendation to improve IT, is treating the symptom and not the problem. The problem is IT applications require lots of ongoing maintenance and that costs labor, meaning REAL MONEY. Rather than make applications more reliable and reduce problems, IT managers seem to prefer shopping for cheaper labor. The problems are still there. It is cheaper to fix them with offshoring and outsourcing, true, but it often takes longer. If the end users -- the people who actually make MONEY for the company (IT doesn't, Lord knows) -- are unable to work from time to time, this is okay because IT is spending less money.
Yeah, right.
Much of this comes down to the decided lack of professionalism in IT, which is after all a very new job classification. There is a huge difference, for example, between someone with an engineering degree and someone in IT who calls himself an engineer. Real engineers are often valued employees. Their opinions matter and they have real responsibilities. Good companies know engineers are important to their business and treat them accordingly. But IT workers are a commodity and are treated as such. Many IT workers are clueless about the technologies they are working with. They aspire to be project managers and are often not very good at that either.
Into this knowledge vacuum come the vendors, who want to sell stuff, and the consultants like Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and the Yankee Group, who need IT managers to feel uncertain about every decision except the decision to buy something, anything. Then look at the number of "research reports" that are commissioned by vendors. Uh-oh.
The five P's of IT are Pride, Prejudice, Politics, Price, and Performance, with the last two being by far the least important. Consultants like Gartner are very useful for minding the pride and politics, their real function being to provide $2 billion worth of IT management CYA per year.
Now that I have alienated an entire industry, let's turn to this week's deal for Hewlett-Packard to buy Electronic Data Systems for more than $12 billion in cash. I'm not here to say this is the worst idea in the history of bad ideas, but I wouldn't do it.
The goal here seems to be size for the sake of size, because it sure isn't size for the sake of profitability. This is a business segment, remember, that IBM has been carefully and quietly leaving for more than a year now only to have HP jump in with both feet by purchasing a competitor less profitable at this stuff than IBM. The result will be a bigger business for HP that returns lower profit margins, which makes no sense to me.
I wonder what would happen to an outfit like HP Services if the company just decided to forget about acquisitions and simply invest $12+ billion in their current operation? Heck, half the people working right now in HP Services probably worked at some point in their careers for EDS (or IBM). What DNA is HP acquiring here that they don't have already?
None.
It just looks better to Wall Street, which loves acquisitions with their associated investment banking fees but doesn't seem to understand in the least the idea of boldly investing in an existing business.
Bill Hewlett would shake his head.
0:02
23:46
נחום. נחום גוגל זה השם המלא, שנחשף כאן לראשונה, אך העובדה כי אמו ואביו הגאים של מנוע החיפוש המוכשר ביקרו בארץ פורסמה לראשונה בגלובס.
נוסף על הגילוי הסנסציוני שיוסי ורדי המציא את גוגל, המקורות המודיעניים של "חורים ברשת" ליקטו קטע נוסף שהוסר בעריכה:"כבר מגיל צעיר ידענו שהוא טוב בחיפוש", מגלה האם, שיפרה, "אמרתי לו: נחום, לך תחפש את אבא. כעבור כמה שניות הוא גרר אותו מהפאב השכונתי, שיכור כמו כלב".
23:37
However great an idea it might have seemed when it was first conceived, the One Laptop Per Child project has never been something I’ve been able to wrap my head around. I’ve always felt, despite the backers’ good intentions, that it was being shoved down the throats of emerging economies with more dire needs, such as food, clean water and schools. I was dismissed as a naysayer by many, mostly for not grokking how computing can revolutionize nations. But I haven’t changed my mind. This project comes off like a vanity play for the elite, who perhaps can’t grok the meaning of living within minimal means.
That personal opinion aside, OLPC has also had its share of teething problems, as we have chronicled time and again. First it was met with strong opposition from folks like Intel, who went on to create their own rival platforms, mostly to disrupt the whole OLPC movement. At the same time, Moore’s Law brought about the rise of low-cost Internet devices like the ASUS EEE PC, which I think are only going to get cheaper as time goes by.
The biggest blows, however, are proving to be self-inflicted. Today OStatic notes that OLPC’s Open Sugar platform is going to be adopted for new hardware platforms by Sugar Labs, the new effort of OLPC former president Walter Bender and one where he is joined by many of the core Sugar developers.
I can’t help but wonder if there’s a link between Bender’s efforts at Sugar Labs and yesterday’s announcement that Windows XP is going to be available on OLPC machines and that Sugar will be ported over to Windows. (Yeah, right…not with most of the people off doing Sugar Labs.) The availability of Windows XP is different from what the people behind OLPC had set out to do — build a truly open, low-cost connected computing device for kids around the world. The press materials don’t make it clear how much Microsoft is going to pocket.
There are some who might point to the low-cost hardware — $180 a pop — as reason for people to buy OLPCs for kids in emerging economies, but how will these machines compete with low-end computers and Internet devices that will run using Intel’s Atom devices?
I think this is the end of OLPC as we know it, even though I’m sure that almost all of you would disagree with me.
Bonus Reading:
* What you can learn from the sad state of OLPC.
* The unintended consequences of OLPC
23:03
In what is proving to be yet another high-profile Metro Wi-Fi failure, MetroFi, a San Jose-based startup that raised over $15 million from Sevin Rosen and August Capital, is close to shutting down, according to WiFi NetNews and MuniWireless, two blogs that follow the MuniFi industry closely.
MetroFi is trying to sell its citywide Wi-Fi networks in Portland (Oregon), Aurora and Naperville (Illinois) and Santa Clara, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Foster City and Concord (California). MetroFi founder, Chuck Haas, says he is also exploring the sale of MetroFi itself to a third party.
MetroFi had started to offer ad-supported wireless access in many cities, except it couldn’t find any traction. I think with all the noise Google made, even that company has backed away from WiFi-access based on advertising. There were a few others that have found going really tough when it comes to MuniFi. The trials and tribulations of EarthLink are well known by now. Glenn Fleishman blames EarthLink for the current spate of industry problems. And he’s not far off the mark, though I think the sector became a victim of its overambition.
EarthLink was in many ways largely responsible for the mess that all Wi-Fi providers found themselves in last year by offering to build Philadelphia’s network back in 2005 at no cost to the city—in fact, paying the city and the local utility fees. That set the stage for nearly all the RFPs that followed where, if EarthLink were a bidder or the city was aware of the alternatives, the notion was that no city dollars would be spent, even if taxpayer money wasn’t “at risk”—that is, even if a city could save money by switching current line items in their telecom and data budget to a wireless network.
21:45
Remember when CPU processor speeds were the driving force behind new computers? Going from a 500 MHz to 1 GHz then 2 GHz machine meant noticeable improvements. Then chip vendors started adding more cores. But for the style of computing consumers use today, it’s not about the CPU anymore.
It’s all about graphics processors. Thanks to today’s visually intensive style of computing, a good GPU can improve the user experience much better than a fast CPU. In the data center certain tasks are moving from commodity CPU boxes to GPUs, meaning that over the next year or two, more of them will be sold for corporate computing use.
That’s why Intel is pushing graphics chips such as Larrabee, while AMD is set to unveil integrated chipsets that combine CPUs with GPUs, the result of its acquisition of ATI in 2009. All of this was driven home for me during a trip to Nvidia a few weeks ago, where I saw, side-by-side, the difference between a computer with a super-fast CPU and a computer with a slower CPU but a high-end GPU.
Of course, the demo was optimized for graphics-intense programs (I didn’t see any spreadsheets), but the movies, games and transcoding were all impressive, and more akin to the things I use my laptop for nowadays anyhow. And then the Nvidia guys dropped a bomb on me.
All PDF documents now run through the graphics processor, they told me, as does Google Earth and multiple other web applications. The same goes for PowerPoint slides, Word and other parts of Microsoft Office, starting with Office 2007. On Macs, the visual interface on the file system is handled through the GPU, which makes flipping through thousands of photos and movies much easier. On the consumer side, the rise of the such graphical interfaces helps people visually navigate through ever-increasing amounts of information.
Nvidia and AMD probably have the most to gain from this shift in the consumer field, but Intel won’t be sitting out. However, on the enterprise side is where a GPU might offer a lot more value when it comes to rapid information processing. GPUs are good for applications that require a processor to crunch a lot of data in parallel; they’re not good for step-by-step processes that require decision-making at each step.
So Nvidia doesn’t actually want to kill CPUs so much as have its GPUs shoulder some of the load in corporate data centers that are providing transcoding services and running database queries and Monte Carlo simulations. This heterogeneous computing environment will be more expensive than the Google-like x86 server farms, but certain industries have already shown they will pay for specialized processing in certain areas. Financial institutions, for example, that have deployed servers using Sun’s Niagara chips or Azul Systems’ many-core boxes for high-end computing pay more for faster processing.
As the large content vendors and even carriers try to deploy media content in multiple formats for televisions, personal computers and mobile phones over IP networks, they’ll either have to pay more for storing those multiple versions or pay for real-time transcoding, either in the data center or on the network. The increasing delivery of visual media over an IP network and the increasing amount of electronics data stored in corporate databases all represent an opportunity for GPUs that mean the chips might move out of the graphic niche.
If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our
upcoming conference, Structure 08.
21:18
21:10
מאחר ואני מאד מתרגש מעניין הראיון של היו"ר עם סטיב באלמר, מאחר והכתבה עם הראיון מאד מאד ארוכה (חמישה עמודים) ומאחר והבטחתי ליצור רצף של פאדיחות לכבוד היו"ר עד שיחליט לחזור ולנהל את הגלוב, החלטתי לכתוב פוסט שיתעד בזמן אמת את הקריאה שלי בכתבה. הפוסט הוא פוסט פתוח שימשיך ויתעדכן עד שאגיע לעמ' 22 במוסף "7 ימים" של ידיעות אחרונות. מ-ת-ח-י-ל-י-ם.
21:12: אני אוחז בהתרגשות את מוסף "7 ימים". אני משתוקק מזה זמן רב לקרוא טקסט שנכתב על-ידי היו"ר, וראיון עם סטיב באלמר הוא הזדמנות מצוינת. התמונה של באלמר מפחידה, כמו רוב התמונות שלו, מזל שכתוב שם שיש לו שורשים יהודיים. יהודים הם לא באמת מפחידים.
(בתמונה לא נעשה שימוש בילדים מהעשירון העליון)
21:17: העליתי עדכון וראיתי תגובה של הבלונדינית הסודית. לא הבנתי למה היא מתכוונת אבל כתבתי לה שזה רעיון טוב.
21:25: תוך כדי קריאה חשבתי שזה יהיה רעיון טוב להעלות תמונה של השער. אז עשיתי את זה.
21:27: אני בסוף הפיסקה הראשונה. יתכן שהראיון יתבטל ברגע האחרון. מעניין מה יהיה כתוב בפסקה הבאה.
21:29: יאהו… (אם אני הייתי עיתונאי שנוסע במיוחד מישראל לרדמונד לפגוש את באלמר לא הייתי מזכיר את יאהו, הוא אמנם יהודי, אבל עדיין מפחיד).
21:33: "יהיה בסדר, נקיים את הראיון". מזל. אפשר להמשיך לקרוא.
21:35: יובל מתחצף לדוברת. באלמר במצב רוח טוב. יש מצב שיובל יחזור לארץ לנהל את הגלוב.
21:39: אחרי הסמול טוק ההכרחי הראיון מתחיל. נהייתי רעב, אני הולך להביא בורקס.
21:41: "פנטזיונרים בגרוש" (עמ' 18), אני אשמח ליותר פירוט בנושא. יובל בטח היה כותב על זה אחלה פוסט.
21:45: "באחרונה גייטס התעייף גם ממשרת היו"ר של מיקרוסופט ובעוד כמה שבועות יעזוב את החברה לגמרי ויתמקד בעסקי הפילנטרופיה הענפים שלו". אני מאד מקווה שיובל לא יחליט ללכת בעקבות גייטס. מצד שני, יובל? פילנטרופיה? אין מה לדאוג. ממשיכים.
21:50: ר"ש פונה אליי בג'יטולק ומפריע. אתה מפריע ר"ש! תפסיק!
21:54: אם הרווחים המטורפים של מיקרוסופט עולים, איך בכלל בועטים להם בתחת? לדעתי תיזת ה"בועטים בתחת של מיקרוסופט" היא פיקציה שמפמפם באלמר בעצמו כדי שיחשבו שיש להם תחרות.
21:58: "ויסטה…נחשבת למערכת הפעלה בלתי מרשימה…במשימה זו נכשל כישלון חרוץ…" יובל, יובל, עם כל הכבוד לאינטגריטי העיתונאי שלך, החיים יפים, לא חאראם?
22:05: יאהו.
22:09: אני בעמוד 20. עוד אנשים מנסים להפריע בג'יטולק. תפסיקו! יובל ממשיך לנסות לעצבן את באלמר. אני כבר מרים ידיים. הבחור מנסה להתאבד.
22:14: אחלה תובנות בנושא מיתוג ושיווק. באלמר משחק אותה גדי שמשון ושואל את יובל אם הוא משחק פוקר.
22:17: גוגל, פייסבוק, בלה, בלה, בלה.
22:20: באלמר מכחיש, אבל כולנו יודעים שמיקרוסופט היתה משתלטת על העולם אם היא רק היתה יכולה. next.
22:24: זה רשמי - אמא של באלמר יהודייה, ולכן הוא יהודי. בגלל שהוא כל-כך עשיר, אני הייתי שואל אותו על קשריו עם אולמרט.
22:29: הראיון נגמר. לא לפני שיובל משחק איתו משחק אסוסיאציות א-לה-יאיר לפיד. מאחר ולא כתוב אחרת בשום מקום, כנראה שיובל עדיין חי. גם הסמס מיובל בו כתוב "אתה פסיכופט" מרמז על כך.
זהו. הלייב בלוגינג הראשון בעולם מכתבה מודפסת נגמר. הראיון היה מרתק, והחוויה היתה כיפית.
אתם מוזמנים להצטרף מחר לפאדיחה השנייה - לייב בלוגינג מהראיון של יובל עם סרגיי ברין ב"ממון".
חיי מדף (Shelf Life), יצירה של לאב אבלאן (Love Ablan), שיצרה גיבורי משחקי וידאו ישנים מפירות וירקות עבור תערוכת I Am 8bit, שהציגה יצירות בהשראת המשחקים הללו. יאמי.
• מן הארכיב: ביקור בתערוכת משחקי הווידאו Game On, גלרייה מתערוכת Game On
19:14
Finally, a wireless company makes a smart acquisition. Vodafone has acquired Danish wireless address book company Zyb, whose service I have often used to keep my growing array of mobile phones synchronized, for 31.5 million euros, or roughly $49 million. Zyb had raised around $4.7 million in VC funds, with Nordic Venture Partners the biggest investor. This deal is also another win for Morten Lund, who was an early investor not just in Zyb but in Skype.
Vodafone is making a lot of noise about using Zyb’s social networking abilities for its mobile platform, but this is utter rubbish, and distracts from what Zyb is really good for: backing up your address book — a crucial service these days, given how quickly people switch their phones.
Zyb is the smartest way to keep your contacts up-to-date; it’s even (in some cases) a decent option for syncing your calendars. This will help boost customer satisfaction, thanks to seamless switching between phones. I hope Vodafone keeps it free and doesn’t revert to the carrier philosophy of greed-before customer happiness.
While Zyb’s acquisition by Vodafone dovetails with my long-standing belief that the real social network is the address book on our mobile phones, as things currently stand, Zyb is not the answer to Vodafone’s prayers. The company has its issues: Zyb’s downtime, for example, is worse that my pre-January 2008 track record of going to a gym. The company recently bought social networking company, Imity, but how that works out remains to be seen. Sure, Zyb has some average sharing features that allow you to send messages and photos. But as I said, a great connected address book — nothing more, and nothing less.
P.S.: Does anyone else find something intriguing about two address books companies being snapped up by telcos/broadband providers, specifically Vodafone buying Zyb and Comcast snapping up Plaxo? If this is a trend, who is the next to go, and where? Let the speculation begin.
מישהו מכיר דבר כזה?
בתודה,
רן
17:57
Qualcomm has spent 8.3 million pounds ($16.2 million) buying 40 MHz of L-band spectrum in the U.K., which the company could use for its MediaFLO mobile television or other two-way wireless data services. However, the wireless chipmaker’s overseas shopping spree might end at the borders of continental Europe.
That’s because the EU is encouraging its member countries to adopt the DVB-H standard. Lucky for Qualcomm, those cheeky Brits decided to keep the auction open to a variety of mobile standards. That gives Qualcomm a chance to keep selling pricey intellectual property licenses for its proprietary MediaFLO technology. With all the vendors choosing the open LTE standard, it has to find some way to goose those royalties.
17:25
MySpace this week won a ruling against Samford Wallace and Walter Rines, reinforcing the fact that there’s no love lost between big web sites and spammers. But it’s also a sign of an escalation of the war on spam.
Spammers are finding virgin territory in emerging messaging tools, including SMS and social networks. Ferris Research projects that Americans will receive 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages in 2008, double the number sent in 2006. And Nielsen calls mobile social networking the next big thing, estimating 2.8 million unique mobile MySpace users and 1.8 million mobile Facebook users in December 2007.
According to antispam firm Cloudmark, spammers are already embracing these new technologies: Between 15 percent and 30 percent of friend requests on some of the largest social networks lead to a spammy profile.
“A lot of people in antispam thought that the reason we have such a bad spam problem is that you can’t pin a reputation on the original individual who sent the mail, and that maybe social networks would be able to remediate that,” said Cloudmark researcher Adam O’Donnell. “But one of the main uses of social networks is getting back in touch with someone you have no real connection to, so you need to be able to leave that vector open for someone to friend you.”
This is an increasingly popular approach for spammers, who create an account and try to friend as many people as possible, then wait for people to view their profiles — which contain spam or links to other sites.
With a huge variety of ways to put content online, those sites can be almost anywhere. MessageLabs‘ Matt Sergeant calls Google Docs “the perfect way to spam,” explaining that hyperlinks in an unsolicited message might go to a Google Docs file containing Google Analytics’ tracking code, rather than a spammer’s server.
Spammers aren’t just pushing pharmaceutical sales, either; increasingly, the site recipients visit tries to inject malware that compromises a visitor’s machine. That machine then becomes a tool for denial-of-service attacks and sending spam, and may be used for keyboard logging and financial phishing. “There’s multiple products being pushed over the spam side,” said O’Donnell.
17:24
The New York Times had an article today about the loss of women in the science and technology fields as they hit their 30s and beyond. It cites a report that blames a macho culture intrinsic to those fields. But it’s possible that readers in the tech field missed it as it only ran in the Style section of the paper’s web site rather than the Technology section. Because apparently the loss of female programming and engineering talent has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the latest swimsuits. An article on the Wii Fit however, was deemed worthy of appearing in both sections.
I actually think the “macho culture” inherent to these fields has less to do with the lack of women sticking around than the persistent assumption that’s behind the NYTimes confining the article to the Style pages. The assumption is that work-life balance is a female issue. Aside from tales of overt sexual harassment, the main trends that emerge in the report are that women need to “act like a man” to succeed (code for working a lot and not talking about family), and that the hours are not conducive for working mothers.
Women aren’t less capable of doing math and science, but they do tend to be less available when it comes to working long hours after having a child, unless they have a husband with a 9-5 job. Those all-night programming sessions or the week-long visits to foreign fabs to make sure a chip design is implemented correctly are costly to families. For the type of competitive person who ends up in the technology field, deciding between giving 110 percent to solving a technological problem and giving 90 or even 100 percent when junior is sick, is too frustrating. So they back off, because if the game is rigged so you can’t win, smart people pick a new game.
These women aren’t dumb, but their employers might be. The Silicon Valley startup culture demands a person give 110 percent and can be gruelingly inflexible. Academia and research labs are similar. But after a child –or maybe a heart attack — people tend to look at the rigged game and decline to play. So either the culture in technology will be forced to change, or it will continue to feed on canon fodder in the form of youth and single men. Regardless, it’s not just a female problem.
17:24
We are inching close to Structure 08 and are trying hard to round out the speaker list and the agenda. Our friends at Techcrunch wrote nice things about the upcoming conference on their blog today. I have been spending a lot of time researching the topics so we can make the event more fun and informative. The conference will be held on June 25, 2008 at the Mission Bay Center in San Francisco. More details are here. For ticket sales, click here.
15:07
נגיע ישר לעניין - נשבר לי לגמרי מכל עניין הפרישה של היו"ר. באמת נשבר. למעשה, הפרישה של יובל מהגלוב היא בלתי נסבלת בעיני. גלוב בלי יו"ר, הוא לא גלוב! יותר מהכל נשבר לי מזה שאף אחד לא עושה כלום בנידון. כל זה עומד להשתנות!
אני מכריז בזאת על השקתו של מאבק ציבורי ובעיקר אישי (שלי) שיחל היום ויסתיים רק ביום יחזור יובל לפעילות שוטפת במסגרת הגלוב. שלא תהיה טעות - מדובר במאבק חסר פשרות.
האסטרטגיה - לעשות ליובל פאדיחות עד שהוא יחזור.
סנונית ראשונה בעוד מספר שעות. יש למה לחכות.
לכאורה, בתל אביב אסור לחנות עם שני גלגלים על מדרכה ששפתה מסומנת באדום-לבן. בפועל הסימון הזה אומר “כאן החנייה פשוט יקרה יותר מאשר בכחול לבן, ראו קנס, ואולי גם נגרור לכם את האוטו ואז זה יהיה ממש יקר”. איך אני יודע את זה? כי כשעיריית תל אביב באמת לא רוצה שתחנו על מדרכה, היא שותלת שם עמודים.
לא קשה לקשור קשר אסוציאטיבי ספק-פופוליסטי בין מדיניות החנייה של מדינת תל אביב לבין מדיניות איסור העישון של מדינת ישראל, אבל מעטים עושים זאת בצורה אלגנטית ומשעשעת כמו מי שצבע את עמודי מניעת החנייה ברחוב ביל”ו בתל אביב כך שייראו כמו סיגריות שכובו לתוך המדרכה.
ואהודק פרסם לפני שלוש שנים צילומים (1, 2) של עמוד בשינקין שקיבל כנפיים והפך לרקטת קסאם במרכז תל אביב, גם סוג של מחאה.
13:32
13:24
11:04
מארק אנדריסן, ממפתחי Mosaic, מראשי נטסקייפ ובעל זכויות ראשונים במועדון ותיקי האינטרנט, לא מתרשם במיוחד מה-Friend Connect של גוגל. הסטארט אפ הנוכחי של אנדריסן, Ning, מאפשר לכל אחד - לג'ון בון ג'ובי, אל גור או סבתא שלכם - להקים רשת חברתית בקלות. בראיון ל-Wired הוא תהה מדוע חברות שאין להן מותגים חזקים בתחום הרשתות החברתיות יוזמות "אסטרטגיה" חברתית במקום להציע מוצרים משלהן. "במציאות, צרכנים אוהבים מוצרים", הוא אמר.
לדעתו אין בהכרח יתרון בחיבור כל הגולשים לרשת על-חברתית אחת. אנדריסן הזדרז לציין שאין לו שום דבר נגד גוגל, הוא מעריך מאוד את החברה וכמובן שגם Ning תתמוך ב-Friend Connect.
אנדריסן לא מבין או לא רוצה להודות שיש לו סיבות טובות לחשוש מאוד מ-Friend Connect. לכאורה אין סתירה בין השניים והם אף יכולים להשלים - Ning הוא שירות ואילו Friend Connect הוא תשתית. למעשה, Friend Connect מאפשרת לכל אתר להוסיף שכבה חברתית - באמצעות מנגנון הרישום של OpenID, גוגל, יאהו ואחרים, פרוטוקול זיהוי החברים OAuth והיישומים של OpenSocial.
כך, הגולשים יכולים לשתף ביניהם תכנים, סרטונים, מוזיקה ואפילו חידוני תנ"ך. כל זאת מבלי להקים מחדש רשת חברתית עבור כל אתר ובעזרת החברים הקיימים מפייסבוק, LinkedIN, HI5 ו-Orkut. גוגל מושכת ל-Ning את השטיח מתחת לרגליים וקול הביטול של אנדריסן אולי מסתיר את האכזבה שבידיעה כי חברת האינטרנט החזקה בעולם נכנסה למגרש שלו.
מוזר שאנדריסן לא מבין את חשיבות הגודל ברשת חברתית, אשר ככל שהיא גדלה מספקת ערך מוסף לחבריה. מעבר לכך, המונח הנחמד "ניידות מידע" הוא מושג מכובס לגנים הנעולים של העתיד - אף אחד מהשחקנים המרכזיים לא התחייב לשחרר באמת את המידע האישי של המשתמשים. המטרה של כל אחד מהם היא לנכס לעצמו כמות רבה ככל שניתן של פרופילי גולשים.
7:27
Don’t blame me for getting caught up in the whole hoopla around media-buying-media…we media types are known for being narcissists. Blame me for not being able to blog about the new beta of Adobe Flash Player 10, which has built-in P2P features and is able to save files to the local drives. I was reminded by Hank Williams about the new release, and its big impact on the world of video in particular and other web apps in general.As some of you might remember, I wrote about Adobe’s P2P ambitions that revolved around buying a company called Amicima.
Through LinkedIn, we were able to find that amicima co-founder Mathew Kaufman has been working as Senior Computer Scientist for Adobe since October 2006. His co-founder, Michael Thornburgh, is also said to be at Adobe. Both of them have vast experience in networking and P2P technologies. The two of them worked at Tycho Networks, and later at DSL.net, after that company acquired Tycho.
I have been following this closely, and my sources say that this is a solid technology with the potential to seriously disrupt the CDN market, especially those companies that rely on clients. I wonder, for example, what will happen to RedSwoosh, which is owned by Akamai, or to other, similar providers of P2P-based client services. I think one shouldn’t get caught up in the CDN-killer aspect of this technology.
From what I have learnt, there are some elements of this technology that make it necessary to have a server infrastructure for situations where traversing NAT’s/Firewalls isn’t possible. It also needs a centralized registrar is also needed that maintains the ID’s of all the P2P clients (nodes) connected to a service. In other words, a CDN operator work with Adobe, charging for traffic that goes through their proxies as and when needed by the Flash 10. By the way Adobe has an arrangement with Kontiki, a CDN operator of sorts.
Williams’ post digs deeper into this in a thoughtful, intelligent way. “[I]s the innovation that will be unleashed by making P2P technology an assumed part of the web protocol stack?” he wonders. (I think that’s why it’s important that we start harping about upload speeds on our broadband connections.)
The reason we should pay attention to this product is Adobe’s distribution strength. The company can easily upgrade its Flash clients and instantly become owner of one of the largest P2P services. What that means is that now anyone can contemplate a Joost-like service that works within a browser. Using AIR to extend those P2P abilities to the desktop would be fairly easy as well. Ironically, both Joost and Jaman have spent considerable time, money and attention doing this.
The early version of Flash is rather simple, but it does offer a way to lower bandwidth costs while still delivering high-quality video. In addition, companies like Tokbox (our story) and Woome (NTV story) can add more functionality, such as cheaper, live video-voice service, without spending too much money.
It’s clear that Adobe is not going to become a huge P2P service overnight. But this release does portend to an interesting future.
PS: If anyone wants to share their thoughts, please leave a comment or drop me an email.
1:01
0:43
Neither Om nor I are shy about talking infrastructure, but the High Scalability blog has gone totally geek and parsed the details of how Facebook plans to scale its new Jabber chat service to 70 million members using a hella lot of servers and Erlang. As Sandy Jen over at Meebo can tell you, chat is a challenge to scale because it requires a constantly open connection to the servers and low latency. That’s a recipe for a lot of hardware and some flexible architecture. Good thing Facebook has $100 million to spend, but bad news for the firm if the money spigot closes.
If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our
upcoming conference, Structure 08.
0:30
This is hilarious. Google ignores MySpace. Facebook blocks Google’s Friend Connect.
Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.
They all think they are open. Google and Facebook trying to out anti-open each other.
23:59
There is a big brouhaha today over Cox Communications blocking BitTorrent traffic, leading to outrage over what amounts to interference with the open Internet. The brouhaha is the result of a research study by Max Planck Institute, which found Cox, Comcast and (Singapore’s) StarHub to be anti-BitTorrent. There are some issues with this study, however — I, for one, (unlike DSL Reports) find it hard to swallow that there are no infringing phone companies.
Why is everyone surprised? I’m sure not. Cox admitted shaping traffic when we asked them about it back in October 2007, though they didn’t single out BitTorrent.
The publicity-hungry not-for-profits organizations do, however, bring up the issue of an open Internet, which is worthy of our attention — and anger — as consumers. But we need to focus our ire on the people who have helped create this mess — not ask them to get us out of it, as the Free Press proposes by suggesting that the FCC should intervene. FreePress Policy Director Ben Scott said:
“Consumers have no reason left to tru
