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

I'm glad we contributed our share. According to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

According to preliminary data from Internet tracking firm comScore Networks Inc., online retail spending for the 2003 holiday season -- the period from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31 -- surged 30% to a total of $12.5 billion, from $9.7 billion in the same period last year. The figures exclude sales from travel and auction sites.

During the holiday season, consumers spent an average of $200 million a day on online purchases, according to comScore.

SF-based Salesforce.com plans to raise $115 million in an IPO according to its filing with the SEC according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Salesforce makes software for tracking customer accounts and automating the sales process. Unlike most business-software makers, the company, founded in 1999, doesn't sell its software as a product. Rather, it manages the technology in its own data centers. Subscribers pay a monthly subscription fee, and connect to their data through the Internet. In its filing, Salesforce claims 8,000 customers and more than 110,000 paying subscribers.

Wal-Mart is using its size to undercut competitors in the online music sales business according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required). Of course, there are slim or no margins in online music sales and Apple's success belies the fact that it is only using the sales as a way to sell more iPods.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced it has begun offering music downloads on a trial basis at walmart.com, selling songs for 88 cents apiece.

Look out Amazon which launched a similar service recently. According to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Users can search for Microsoft-related books, for example, on the service, called Google Print, by typing "Microsoft site:print.google.com" into the search-query box. It will pull up excerpts for Microsoft-related books, just like other Web pages that Google's software turns up when it "crawls" the Web. Those book excerpts will be interspersed with other search results in the future, said Susan Wojcicki, Google's director of product management.

The closely held Mountain View, Calif., company wants to provide more-useful information to its users, as well as to its publishers and advertisers, Ms. Wojcicki said. The service is free to publishers and advertisers, and Google said it has no business relationships with any of the parties listed on those book-excerpt pages. The company, which had to receive permission from publishers or business partners to host and display copyrighted book information, declined to say how many publishers it has crafted agreements with.

The fast-growing paid listings search market attracts a new competitor according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Kanoodle's Mr. Keating calls his site "probably the biggest search engine you've never heard of." He said Kanoodle provided paid-search listings for about one billion searches last month, up from 300 million a year earlier, and has about 17,000 advertisers -- about a tenth the size of Google's and Yahoo's advertiser stables. He added that the site has increased revenue for 17 straight quarters.

Been over a week since I last posted to either of my blogs. Been reading some interesting things just as often but it has been hard finding time on top of that to link or comment on those things.At least I have added to my blogroll some of the new tech/business blogs I've come across.

Since both my significant other and I work at Internet companies we've done almost all our shopping online, even purchasing our seven-foot tall Christmas tree on Williams Sonoma.com that shipped it straight from a North Carolina farm via Fedex Ground. It arrived a couple of days ago on our front steps. Talk about convenience... :)

Now if only we'd ordered a better stand than the one we picked up at Home Depot. Our existing one is too big for this "small" tree. Happy Holidays!

eBay is diversifying its business by selling data (lots of it!) on the fair market values of certain items, and thus taking on various publications, most notably the Kelly Blue Book which provides used car prices according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Auction listings on eBay last quarter totaled 235 million, more than triple the 68.5 million auctions it listed in the same period three years ago. The company says it doesn't expect its new business to be a big moneymaker anytime soon, though commercial licenses for the data start at about $10,000 a year. Instead, the company is hoping broad use of its auction data will give it a marketing boost.

"It's an incredibly intriguing asset to have eBay better known as the definitive source for prices," says Jeff Jordan, an eBay senior vice president. "It's the best pure market reflection of the meeting of supply and demand."

Great to see so many About Me pages springing up for the fascinating personalities behind so many thousands of interesting blogs populating BN. Mine is one of the less interesting ones:

Mihail S. Lari is an Internet entrepreneur* who serves on the board of directors of several national nonprofit organizations. Named after a character in Bertolt Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, Mihail moved to Silicon Valley at the height of the dotcom boom and still lives in the Bay Area. He is an occasional writer who has been blogging since 2002. His last book The Dual City: Karachi During the Raj was published by Oxford University Press in 1997.

*affiliated with the company behind Blogging Network.

Consumers are expected to spend $12.2 billion online between Thanksgiving and Christmas, an increase of 42% over last year (Forrester Research) according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required)which also details the fact that pure online plays are losing to offline companies with an Internet presence.

And traditional retailers are reaping enormous benefits from the surge in online spending. This year, about 75% of online sales are expected to go to "multichannel" retailers, meaning real-world stores and catalogs that also sell via Web sites, according to Forrester. Retailers doing the vast majority of their business on the Web account for the remaining 25%. Just three years ago, when the dot-com collapse had begun, sales were more evenly divided, with Web-only retailers ringing up about 46% of total online sales.

I skip the gym for a month or two and the whole world changes. We were already not allowed to use cellphones in most areas of this fancy health club I belong to in the 'burbs. But this week I walked in to find that cellphones are now also banned in the locker rooms. Huh? Can we still use 'em underwater? Probably not. Seems like this is a policy showing up everywhere.

Why this new rule? Because members have complained that they're at risk of being photographed surreptitiously by a cameraphone-wielding pervert. Uh, have most of the members looked at themselves recently? We need to get much more buffed up before we'll be getting broadcast on the Internet -- we're no Paris. Hilton or France. ;)

Glad we bought a 4.0 megapixel digital camera since 3.2 will soon be so passe with even phones having 2.0 megapixel resolutions now. Sheesh. It call keeps getting better so fast. You blink and  you've missed a whole generation of gadgets. According to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Casio has brought out camera phones with a resolution of two megapixels, only slightly inferior to a digital camera. Phone carriers are still charging too much for sending this kind of data over their networks, but prices will come down, and speeds will get faster. Camera phones will become a visual aid to ordinary phone conversations or text messages: "This is what I look like now." Or, "Should I buy this dress?" Or, "This is who I am dating. Is he a hunk or am I inebriated?" But it won't stop there.

Yes, there are downsides. Security and privacy are serious issues, and they need to be addressed. Companies and government departments fear the loss of secrets or sensitive information, so much so they're pressuring manufacturers to offer units with the camera disabled, or with it removed altogether. Verizon Wireless Inc., for example, is working with Samsung to create a disabled-camera version of Samsung's i700 phone.

Had a very enjoyable lunch yesterday with the CTO of LinkedIn, Eric Ly at a Thai restaurant in Mountain View.

LinkedIn is the best implementation of a business networking site, and it was very interesting to talk about our two companies business models including many similarities. LinkedIn is part of the hot segment called "social networking" that's seen the rise of Friendster and Blogging Network. Sequoia has just funded LinkedIn which makes tremendous sense since they're also the VC fund behind Plaxo and Google etc.

I met Eric a couple of years ago at a party at John Doerr's associate's home in Menlo Park, I think it was. One of those unassuming ranch homes on a tree-lined tree with a pool in the backyard. Eric joined up with Reid Hoffman, earlier this year to help start LinkedIn. They're planning some great things (more on this later) for the service which continues to grow and now has a patent edge over its competitors (more on that story from Matt Marshall in the San Jose Mercury News today).

And then today I was interviewed by a wonderful reporter who's doing a story on blogging and Blogging Network's business model. Maybe we'll see this reporter blogging on the site soon!

Thanks to Trendscape, according to this Reuters story:

Forget puttin' on the Ritz. Try puttin' on the Mandarin Oriental.

New York's new Mandarin Oriental 250-room hotel offers a suite with a $12,595 nightly pricetag, beating out the Ritz-Carlton by almost $100 as the costliest overnight lodging in the Big Apple.

Thanks to Stowe Boyd's blog that points to an interesting article by Valdis Krebs on quantifying the number of results that show up when you Google someone's name.

OK, OK, I know you can’t wait. Go to www.google.com and enter your name within double quotes. If you spell your name several ways put each of them in double quotes separated by an OR. I put the following string into the Google search box: “Valdis Krebs” OR “Valdis E. Krebs”. Once you have all of the spellings of your name entered and separated by OR, click the “Google Search” button. Quickly you will see another page listing all of the web pages that contain your name. At the top of the page will be a blue line. At the far right of the blue line Google will report how many total pages it found with your name on it. The total pages found is your Google number. If you have a very common name, such as “John Smith” you will get many false positives – your Google number will be overstated. Retrieve your runaway ego. Also, if you have a name shared by well known people – Barry Bonds – your results will be inflated. You can eliminate the hits for your famous name twin by asking Google to specifically not return pages with specific terms like “baseball” or “home run”. You do this by putting a dash in front of the term: –“home run”.

There are numerous acrimonious situations at startups thanks to later rounds of financing which have given those investors complete control over companies, and instead of ensuring that they think of the company first rather than their limited partners, those VCs are now coming in conflict with earlier investors and founders according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Indeed, at a time when many in the industry say the worst is behind them, the VentureOne study shows that, in 2002 and through the first four months of 2003, so-called down-rounds -- investments with harsh terms that lower the previous value placed on a company -- continued at a significant pace.

The VentureOne "Deal Terms Report" found that 42% of respondents saw their company's valuation decline in the most-recent financing from the prior round, on par with 41% reporting up-rounds. Companies raising a third or later financing were hit hardest, with over 50% experiencing a down-round. Those deals often came with onerous, preferential terms that gave the most-recent investors priority over earlier investors, or antidilution clauses guaranteeing investors a return of their capital at the expense of founders and employees.

A parody of Google's founders' Brin and Page's blog...or what their blog (if they had one) might look like! :) Thanks to a jill/txt post. An example entry:

November 8, 2003 Free Food!!!
    Posted by: Larry Page

With the start of the hectic social season, I couldn't help be amused by Mark Twain's observations of the San Francisco scene according to Leah Garchik in the San Francisco Chronicle. Of course, we must remember that this was before the excessive use of plastic surgery by socialites. Hmm, doesn't sound like it, does it?! :)

At the start of the winter 1865 holiday season, after attending a number of balls, Twain reported that four out of five ladies were pretty, including Mrs. L.B., "attractively attired in her new and beautiful false teeth''; Miss R.P, whose glance was marked "by the fine contrast between the sparkling vivacity of her natural optic and the steadfast attentiveness of her placid glass eye''; and Miss C.L.B., who blew her nose with grace that "marked her as a cultivated and accomplished woman of the world.''

As to Miss X, on the other hand, she has a "sickly smile,'' "decayed teeth'' and a "dismal pug nose.'' "Everybody knows that she is old; everybody knows she is repaired (you might almost say built) with artificial bones and hair and muscles and things, from the ground up.

Seems like we weren't the only ones who went out and bought a digital camera according to this Wall Street Journal story (subsccription required). We bought this incredibly slim, lightweight but 4.0 megapixel Pentax Optio S4 with a 3x optical zoom (equivalent of 35-105 mm), and 15 fps movie with audio feature -- it is so very sweet! And it doubles as a wireless PDA and phone, too. OK, I was kidding. It doesn't do that yet.

Based on preliminary data from a handful of computer makers and electronics retailers, sales of most things digital were in hot demand, leading some to believe that the strength will carry through to the entire holiday season that kicked off on "Black Friday" and culminates on Christmas Eve.

...The Palo Alto, Calif., computer hardware and software maker [HP] said it saw double digit, year-over-year sales growth of digital cameras, printers and computers. In an interview on CNBC on Monday, Vyomesh Joshi, H-P's vice president of imaging and printing, said sales of digital cameras rose more than 10% while notebook sales increased more than 50%.

The company that created new first-day price records when it went public in 1998 is seeing a rebirth according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Michael Egan, who became rich founding Alamo Rent-a-Car, has a big idea for his next venture. It's an Internet company. It's called theglobe.com. He thinks it's going to make him a fortune.

...Theglobe.com Version 2 has an entirely different business: phone service over the Internet. At its height, the company employed nearly 300 at a sleek lower-Manhattan building. Now, it is dubbed voiceglo and has 40 employees, some sitting in rose-colored cubicles in Fort Lauderdale and 12 others in Vermont. The company isn't doing much advertising, relying instead on word-of-mouth. To minimize the sales force, customers sign up by themselves online.

What happened to the Silicon Valley mantra that execution is more important than patents? The back-and-forth on patents for social networking makes you think otherwise. First Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams bragged they had over a dozen patent applications underway, then Friendster competitors (and early investors), LinkedIn and Tribe.net swooped in and acquired a patent supposed to be the basis of many of the current social networking sites in a story first broken by CNET News.com. According to this New York Times story (registration required):

Friendster, one of the better-known social networking sites and, at nine months, one of the oldest, has been joined by sites like Tickle, Zero Degrees, Spoke and Ryze. Spoke, a networking site for salespeople, has boasted that it has 15 pending patent applications, although the applications have not yet been published, and the company has not disclosed details.

Now come Tribe and LinkedIn, sites started last summer, whose owners paid $700,000 in September to YouthStream Media Networks for United States patent No. 6,175,831, also known as the "six degrees patent," which they consider the seminal social networking patent. It covers an online software platform that allows users to build relationship networks. Andrew Katz, a lawyer with Fox Rothschild who specializes in Internet intellectual property deals, said, "This is probably the pioneer patent out there." Mr. Katz, who said he had no financial interest in either Tribe or LinkedIn, added, "It should be taken very seriously by everybody in the industry because it is in the hands of people who have the means and the business acumen to enforce it properly."

The three national security agencies -- the Justice Department, FBI and Department of Homeland Security -- have conditionally signed off on News Corp.'s purchase of a controlling interest in DirecTV, owned by Hughes, according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required). 

To satisfy national-security concerns, Hughes, a unit of General Motors Corp., agreed that its audit committee would be made up of U.S. citizens. That committee would have the sole authority to oversee a variety of matters involving foreign entities, including their attempt to get information about the DirecTV satellite network or its use by foreigners for electronic surveillance.

Hmm, not sure I understand how this condition will truly ensure national security!