Ready, Fire, Aim! - Mihail's Public Blog

AD:TECH has these interesting stats on texting...although I wonder what percentage of these messages never make it to their destination. I find that at least 5-10% of my text messages never arrive. Is that because of the quality of the cellular networks or the fact that the networks are now deluged with text messages and unable to handle the vast numbers?

Text messaging is on the rise in the US , with a reported 2.4 billion messages being sent every month (compared to 1 billion per day in Europe) -- and 80% of US text messaging comes from 12-30 year-olds.

Hysterically funny David Brooks' op-ed column in the New York Times (registration required) on the changing voter loyalties in the Democratic primaries:

So New Hampshire voters who had dismissed Kerry as a pathetic, unelectable loser days before took a new look at him after Iowa and figured that if he could win an election, he must be electable (which is sort of definitional), and concluded he is a triumphantly electable winner. Now Kerry is riding this great wave of electability, and he has a huge seething army of fanatical Kerry supporters who will follow him to the death, unless, of course, he stumbles — in which case they will abandon him faster than you can say "electability."

In which case, John, don't let the door hit you on the way out.  

There's a reason the US' credibility amongst Iraqis continues to deteriorate. I suppose Halliburton wasn't  interested in this job. An amusing Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

At Yale University, Jay Hallen majored in political science, rarely watched financial news stations and didn't follow the stock market.

All of which made the 24-year-old an unlikely pick for the difficult task of rebuilding Iraq's shuttered stock exchange. But Mr. Hallen, a private-sector development officer for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, was given the job immediately after arriving in Baghdad in September.

...[An investment company head] Mr. Elias's faith in Mr. Hallen, however, began to evaporate when the market's opening was delayed without explanation, first to the middle of this month and then into February. "Maybe someone older and more experienced could have gotten this done on time," Mr. Elias says.

Amazon hits its first annual profit of $35.3M on sales of $5.26B according to this Wall Street Journal story helped by its free shipping program (for purchases over $25 -- that's the only time I use Amazon myself to buy books):

Amazon said its net income for the fourth quarter jumped to $73.2 million, or 17 cents a share, from $2.7 million, or a penny a share, a year earlier. The strong U.S. holiday season helped put Amazon into the black for the full year, for which it had net income of $35.3 million, or eight cents a share, compared with a net loss of $149.1 million, or 39 cents a share, for 2002.

...Fourth-quarter sales at Amazon rose 36% to $1.95 billion from $1.43 billion a year ago, while full-year sales rose 34% to $5.26 billion from $3.93 billion in 2002.

According to this AP story on the WSJ site (subscription required):

Americans can sign up beginning Wednesday to receive free cyber alerts and computer advice from the Homeland Security Department to help protect themselves on the Internet.

The new National Cyber Alert System, expected to be announced Wednesday, is an ambitious program to develop a trusted warning system by the government to help home users and technology experts. It will send e-mails about major virus outbreaks and other Internet attacks as they occur, along with detailed instructions to help computer users protect themselves.

Amusing advice on how to survive an Ikea experience. Thanks to webspiffy.

Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week Matthew Baldwin shows you how to survive the five treacherous worlds of IKEA. Don’t forget your REKYL!

Interesting Op-ed in the New York Times about how the media and a few Christian leaders are perpetuating the stereotype that the God of Islam is somehow different from the God of Christianity or Judaism:

Sunday is one of the most important holidays in Islam: Id al-Adha, the feast celebrating Abraham's faith and willingness to sacrifice his son to God. It would also be a good occasion for the American news media to dispense with Allah and commit themselves to God.

Here's what I mean: Abraham, the ur-monotheist, represents the shared history, and shared God, of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Many Christians and Jews are aware of this common past, but seem to have a tough time internalizing it. Lt. Gen. William Boykin, a deputy under secretary of defense, made headlines last year suggesting that Allah is not "a real God" and that Muslims worship an idol. Last month in Israel, Pat Robertson said that today's world conflicts concern "whether Hubal, the moon god of Mecca known as Allah, is supreme, or whether the Judeo-Christian Jehovah, God of the Bible, is supreme."

Never mind that Hubal was actually a pre-Islamic pagan god that Muhammad rejected. Mr. Robertson's comments, like those of General Boykin, illuminate a widespread misconception — one that the news media has inadvertently helped to promote. So here's a suggestion: when journalists write about Muslims, or translate from Arabic, Urdu, Farsi or other languages, they should translate "Allah" as "God," too. A minor point? Perhaps not.

Tickle, formerly Emode, is the first to announce fees for some features of its social networking site according to this CNET News.com story on the New York Times site:

Tickle stressed that its basic social networking service, an August addition to its pre-existing matchmaking system and personality quizzes, will remain free. As of Tuesday, the only thing that will require a paid subscription is the ability to contact people separated from a member by more than four links away in the social network.

...Premium subscriptions to the Tickle social network, which boasts more than 1 million members, according to the company, will cost $19.95 for one month, $39.95 for three months, and $59.95 for six months.

Just great. The deficit is spiralling totally out of control. According to this Los Angeles Times story on the San Francisco Chronicle site. See previouis post on the great Moveon.org ad:

Federal budget deficits are expected to total $2.4 trillion over the coming decade, the Congressional Budget Office said Monday, almost $1 trillion more than the agency estimated only six months ago.

If Congress heeds President Bush's call and makes the tax cuts of the past three years permanent, that total could jump to more than $5 trillion, according to CBO figures, a development that would make it extremely difficult for Bush to keep his pledge to cut the deficit in half by the end of a second term.

The winning ad among a thousand entries to Moveon.org (seen here on the "Bush in 30 Seconds" website) was rejected by CBS but is already showing on other channels according to this San Francisco Chronicle story:

MoveOn.org, the politically left-leaning Internet-based advocacy group whose Super Bowl commercial criticizing the nation's deficit was rejected by CBS, is separately attacking President Bush in ads running in four states.

The rejected ad had been selected the winner by a panel of judges in a competition staged by MoveOn.org. The ad, by Charlie Fisher of Denver, is called "Child's Pay,'' and shows children washing dishes in a restaurant, cleaning an office building, hauling trash and standing on an assembly line - with the tagline, "Guess who's going to pay off President Bush's $1 trillion deficit?''

In an effort to get more public support for its programs, NASA has made significantly more information public according to this New York Times story (registration required). And there's a lessening desire amongst us to actually go to Mars when we can increasingly simulate the experience so well via the images sent back by robots and machines. Yet another reason why George W. Bush's expensive Mars proposal may be getting less support than the White House had expected.

Since the rover Spirit landed on Mars three weeks ago, 32 million people have visited the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Web site, dwarfing the numbers of any other space event, including last year's space shuttle accident. The agency recorded four billion hits, one for each item called up on the site, as the visitors browsed through hundreds of pictures considering what rock to zoom in on. That was well over the number of hits recorded in the entire previous year.

..."There has been an enduring idea that one day everyone would fly in space," said Howard McCurdy, author of "Space and the American Imagination" (Smithsonian, 1997). "But now young people are saying maybe we all go into space but we go mentally, virtually, electronically — we don't go with our bodies. As the technology gets better, the virtual reality could get quite profound."

According to this San Francisco Chronicle story on how the demise of Silicon Valley is overly exaggerated but that it faces some significant challenges:

But competition is growing stiffer from international locations. "Not just from places with low-cost technical skill like India and China, but also from new centers of innovation like Taiwan, Israel and Finland," Saxenian says.

The gap is narrowing between the rest of the world and Silicon Valley. And this is not merely because U.S. companies, including some of the valley's top dogs, are shifting engineering and scientific jobs to lower-wage countries. Immigrants who have succeeded in Silicon Valley are returning home to form companies and sometimes grab work from American rivals.

Online grocery delivery is causing problems for many who don't live on the right street for delivery according to this New York Times story (registration required):

Before FreshDirect's delivery staff of 200 opens a neighborhood, Mr. Ackerman said, there must be sufficient demand to offset the delivery costs. Demand is measured by counting the number of advance registrations from an area.

...Still, many Lower East Siders feel left out. "FreshDirect is this cool thing that other people in the city are trying," Mr. Steele said. "You want to be able to talk about it at a cocktail party. They're cutting us out of cocktail conversation."

According to this Wired News story, companies such as HP and LG (pitching its $10K plasma screens to their target audience, people who like to watch movies) are big around Park City. Ben Affleck showed up (even with J. Lo gone) to pose with HP products related to a Project Greenlight announcment. More news from Sundance from this BN blogger on the growth of digital technologies and BloggingSundance.com.

Sundance is the Super Bowl of film festivals, at least in terms of advertising. During the 11 days of the Sundance Film Festival, held each January, this tiny ski town grows thick with corporate logos -- on banners, tote bags, vans, ski hats and, of course, on movie screens.

This year, tech companies are among the most prominent, with HP, Sony, Microsoft and LG Electronics each paying an undisclosed amount to sponsor the festival. Overall, about one-fourth of Sundance's official sponsors come from the tech industry.

I suppose we're going to have to give up on all those monkey applications to college in the future. According to this Harvard University Gazette story:

Nonhuman primates are unable to grasp a fundamental grammatical component used in all human languages, researchers at Harvard University and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland reported recently in the journal Science. Their work provides the clearest example to date of a cognitive bottleneck during the evolution of human language, suggesting a sharp limit to animals' capacity to generate open-ended communication and possible restrictions on other domains of thought.

Here's one more addition called Orkut as of yesterday to the already crowded social networking field according to this News.com story:

"Orkut is an online trusted community Web site designed for friends. The main goal of our service is to make the social life of yourself and your friends more active and stimulating," according to the Web site, which states that the service is "in affiliation with Google."

A Google representative said that the site is the independent project of one of its engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten, who works on user interface design for Google. Buyukkokten, a computer science doctoral candidate at Stanford University before joining Google, created Orkut.com in the past several months by working on it about one day a week--an amount that Google asks all of its engineers to devote to personal projects. Buyukkokten, with the help of a few other engineers, developed Orkut out of his passion for social networking services.

According to this BBC news story:

Thus, members of an online community can affect the results of Google searches - called "Google bombing" - by linking their sites to a chosen one.

Weblogger Adam Mathes is credited with inventing the practice in 2001, when he used it to link the phrase "talentless hack" to a friend's website.

And according to the New York Times story (registration required) the effort to connect the phrase "miserable failure" and George W. Bush's official bio came about as follows:

In late October, Mr. [George] Johnston, a self-described "lefty,'' started a Google bomb to tie Mr. Bush's biography to the phrase "miserable failure," watchwords used by the presidential campaign of Representative Richard A. Gephardt, Democrat of Missouri, to describe Mr. Bush's tenure.

Manipulation of Google results has meant that several other people such as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and filmmaker Michael Moore are now vying for the top spot in the results when you search "miserable failure" into Google according to this New York Times story (registration required):

The unlikely electoral battle is being waged through "Google bombing," or manipulating the Web's search engines to produce, in this case, political commentary. Unlike Web politicking by other means, like hacking into sites to deface or alter their message, Google bombing is a group sport, taking advantage of the Web-indexing innovation that led Google to search-engine supremacy.

...Of course, not everyone was laughing. When as the president's biography went to No. 1 for "miserable failure," some conservatives were convinced that so-called liberal control of the media had now been extended to search engines. A visitor to the comments page of freerepublic.com, a conservative news forum, suggested a boycott of Google and lamented: "How much longer are we going to have to put up with liberal bias in the media! It's bad enough that they have NPR but Google???"

Wallpaper sales after declining for the last 6 years to $1B, are beginning to climb again thanks to boredom with the last two decades of minimalism and some wild new designs that are almost three-dimensional and very intricate according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required).

One, called "Singles" costs $350 per 10' x 13' foot panel for a photo of a life-sized man sitting on a couch or a woman reading a magazine. You can also get your own loved one's photo put on it if you really miss him/her when he/she's not around.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Arts and Crafts movement used the same coarse brown paper from grocery bags to double as wallpaper. The last big look for wallpaper was in the 1960s and 1970s, when brightly colored geometric designs, pop-art motifs and vinyl were the rage. By the 1980s, such loudness led to a retreat into minimalism, and homeowners stripped off wallpaper in favor of bare walls and neutral colors.

The venture capital business saw a turnaround in 2003 according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required) and VCs began to throw money and valuations at entrepreneurs all over again if you were in the hot social networking sector. Did no one learn anything from that dotcom experience we just went thru?

Indeed, some promising companies that weathered the downturn, especially those turning a profit, found themselves with multiple offers, or term sheets. Hungry venture capitalists piled on -- and, in some cases, bid up to bubble-esque levels -- the valuations of companies in a few "hot" sectors, such as security, wireless, and social networking via the Internet. One case in point: Friendster, a Sunnyvale, Calif., networking Web site, whose $13 million investment from Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers pushed its valuation into the $53 million range, according to people familiar with the matter.

Such deals pushed the median valuation of start-up companies to the highest level since 2001: $11.4 million in the third quarter, the most recent data show. That increase followed an eight-year low of $8.7 million in the second quarter, according to Alternative Investor's VentureOne, an industry tracker in San Francisco.