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

Stopped by PlaNetwork and ran into old friends and met some new interesting ones. Attended an interesting session called "Blogs, Blogs, Blogs!" featuring various well-known bloggers. It was especially interesting to hear about where blogging may be heading in the next 12 months.

Mena Trott of Six Apart talked about photoblogging as a future for us in the US...a future that is already there in places like Japan which have already seen a proliferation of fancier cellphones with built-in cameras that are beginning to get used just as much as texting is now being used (as detailed by Howard Rheingold in Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, the awesome book I'm currently reading).  You can see the result of the live post done by Jason Shellen as he spoke to the audience at his blog.

Paul King introduced me to Reid Hoffman (we have several mutual friends in addition to Paul) -- Reid is the man most actively promoting online endeavors arround connecting people in a social/personal and business sense including sites like LinkedIn, Friendster (that theelbster wrote about recently) etc.

A friend, Paul King, recommended a very interesting conference which started this morning organized by Jim Fournier: PlaNetwork: Networking a Sustainable Future.

The Internet has enabled citizens around the world to mobilize with unprecedented speed and precision. We have seen what the Internet can do in this regard: On February 15th, millions of people worldwide spoke out for peace. For the first time we could see and hear our vast numbers from around the world.

...Planetwork will focus on the ways in which information technologies and the Internet can continue to play a key role in accelerating progressive change and establishing how we can harness the tools we have for creating a healthier, more just and civil society.

I've decided to consolidate my blogs into 1 or 2 blogs from the current 3 blogs I've been maintaining. It is much, much easier to blog regularly when you have only one blog (or at most two...unless you're a superblogger like Chris2303) that you're posting to each day.

Otherwise, what invariably happens is that one of my blogs faces neglect. After all, in the world outside of BN, people have only one blog that they post to regularly. I've gone back and forth on this since the beginning but the time has come to simplify!

So I'm merging my Net Present Value blog on nonprofits, the business of nonprofits, health and Third World issues with this blog, Ready Fire Aim focused more on business, interesting stats, Silicon Valley etc. But before I delete Net Present Value I may re-post some of the most important posts on to Ready Fire Aim since there's no easy way to simply merge the content from one blog to another -- now that may be a useful feature for us to have here, eh? :)

This is unusual to see these days. Someone actually taking responsibility for their f**k-up and resigning! Will this put the Jayson Blair debacle to rest? Not sure but according to this New York Times story:

Howell Raines and Gerald M. Boyd, the top-ranking editors of The New York Times, resigned yesterday morning, five weeks after the resignation of a reporter set off a chain of events that exposed fissures in the management and morale of the newsroom.

In a hastily arranged gathering in the newsroom on the third floor, the newspaper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., told staff members that he wanted to "applaud Howell and Gerald for putting the interests of this newspaper, a newspaper we all love, above their own."

A new wireless service run on FM radio networks will now be able to beam all kinds of information to your...wait for it, wrist watch, according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

The service, called MSN Direct, is part of a broader push by Microsoft into portable computing devices outside of its core area of software for desktop and notebook personal computers. The service will work with watches running run Microsoft technology called SPOT, or Smart Personal Objects Technology. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced the SPOT watches at a computer industry convention late last year.

The wireless service will be available in 100 major metropolitan areas in North America. Customers will have two payment choices: a $9.95 monthly fee with the first month free or an annual price of $59. Watchmakers Fossil Inc. and Suunto in the Fall will ship watches that can access the service.

More details on the Palm acquisition of the struggling Handspring, once valued at $9.2 billion but now acquired by Palm for less than $200 million. According to IDC, PDA sales will be flat this year, acbut PDA-phone combo sales are expected to triple to more than 13 million units this year from last year according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Meanwhile, the deal will fill a growing hole in the product lineup at Palm, which has also been severely weakened by the tech slump. According to International Data Corp., Palm was the world's top hand-held computer maker last year, with a 36% market share. But it has little presence in the growing market for "smartphones," which combine hand-held organizers with cellphones, and it has few relationships with the telecom carriers that are the main sellers of such devices. Handspring, with a 7% market share, was No. 3 in the smartphone arena last year behind Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc.

"We're building one of the strongest pure-play mobile-device companies in the world," said Mr. Bradley, CEO of Palm's hardware unit. He said that discussions with Handspring began late last year but didn't heat up until the past few months. The merged entity will have annual revenue of about $1 billion.

...Discussions between the companies were complicated, according to people familiar with the deal, because of a history of bad blood between Ms. Dubinsky and Eric Benhamou, Palm's chairman. Palm was acquired in 1995 by U.S. Robotics, which in turn was bought by 3Com Corp. -- then run by Mr. Benhamou -- in 1997. After Palm's success with the Palm Pilot, Ms. Dubinsky asked Mr. Benhamou to spin off Palm as an independent company, but Mr. Benhamou refused.

Martha Stewart and her broker socialite Peter Bacanovic were both indicted based on the following evidence that proved that Bacanovic and Stewart had both lied about having an existing understanding to sell the stock when it hit a fixed price according to this Reuters story:

"On or about Dec. 21, 2001, Peter Bacanovic printed a 'worksheet' that listed each of the stocks held by Martha Stewart," the nine-count indictment said. "Bacanovic made no notes on the worksheet regarding any purported decision to sell Stewart's ImClone shares at $60 per share."

It was sometime after Stewart's Dec. 27 sale that Bacanovic added the notation "(at) 60" next to the entry for ImClone, the government said, adding the ink was blue ballpoint but "scientifically distinguishable from the ink used elsewhere on the worksheet."

With low-priced ISPs such as United Online growing at a 50% rate each year, AOL (and the other leaders, MSN and Earthlink) is losing subscribers -- in fact it has lost over 1 million customers ince late last year --according to this Washington Post story:

With roughly 26 million customers in the United States, America Online remains the nation's largest provider of Internet access. But over the past two quarters, the company has lost more than 700,000 dial-up subscribers. Squali said First Albany is now projecting that America Online will lose hundreds of thousands of additional dial-up subscribers this quarter and more than 1 million subscribers in 2003.

The expected interest rate cut in a few weeks may not have the required effect according to some analysts in this Reuters story on Forbes.com:

The decision-making Federal Open Market Committee meets in three weeks to set policy, and comments earlier this week by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan signaled the FOMC may decide to cut rates to offset falling prices.

...Analysts, however, say that at best, a rate cut might have zero effect on the market and, at worst, could be deleterious to recent gains.

"It will be extremely disappointing to the market for the simple reason that the recent strength across the board had been derived from acknowledgment that the economy is starting to get some traction," said Ned Riley, chief investment strategist at State Street Global Advisors, which manages $110 billion.

Earthlink continues its efforts to help its 5 million subscribers have a better online experience by releasing the Pop-Up Blocker app for suppressing the irritating pop-up ads (basically stopping rich media ads) that interrupt your surfing etc. according to this InternetNews.com story:

Pop-Up Blocker has two levels of pop-up blocking. 'Full' stops all pop-ups. 'Normal' allows users to enable pop-up windows on all 'clicked' hyperlinks like calendars or charts and conduct business on secure Web sites, such as online banking or e- commerce transactions, while still continuing to block superfluous pop-up ads.

EarthLink has garnered a bevy of attention for its anti-spam efforts, including a recent $16 million judgment against Howard Carmack, the so-called "Buffalo Spammer." New York's attorney general, Elliot Spitzer, later credited EarthLink with aiding the investigation of Carmack that led to his arrest last month.

Unbelievable. She was worth billions (or at least one billion plus when Martha Stewart Omnimedia went public...and then several hundred millions more recently) but she risked it all for a measley $228,000 in comparison. According to this Bloomberg story:

Martha Stewart, who built a media and homemaking empire that made her a symbol of gracious living, was indicted on criminal charges for her sale of ImClone Systems Inc. stock, ABC News reported.

Stewart, chief executive officer of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., sold some 4,000 ImClone shares for about $228,000 on Dec. 27, 2001, a day before U.S. regulators rejected the company's cancer drug application.

Palm announced today it is acquiring Handspring, the struggling handheld company that was founded by ex-Palm executives Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins, for $169 million in Palm stock according to this News.com story. Handspring has been increasingly focused on its phone-PDA combo called Treo and has been under attack from slowing sales due to a maturing market for handhelds and a slew of entrants into the handheld and PDA-phone markets such as Sony (whose Clie line of handhelds I simply love).

The deal is expected to close this fall, after the spinoff of PalmSource. Palm Solutions Group, the company's hardware arm, will then merge operations with Handspring, creating a new hardware company with a new name.

...In the company that forms from the union of Handspring and the Palm Solutions Group, that group's CEO, Todd Bradley, will become chief executive of the new company. Hawkins will be named chief technology officer, and Dubinsky will sit on the new company's board of directors.

If you've heard of the new venture from Sky Dayton (of Earthlink fame), Boingo Wireless, you'll be happy to hear that the company is still around. It has over 1300 location now available on its network including my cafe here in Los Gatos, Great Bear Coffee, where I'm sitting right now blogging away.

This WiFi hotspot was actually set up by Surf and Sip and that's exactly how Boingo's business model hopes it'll be...it will provide a unified service that will eventually allow you to access any of the different WiFi networks out there.

While you can get cheaper plans via Surf and Sip, Boingo offers a variety of plans for you to choose from...but which are priced higher than the individual Wireless ISPs' own plans since Boingo needs to make money as well as pay these WISPs for using their infrastructure.

Unlimited monthly usage is $49.95. A cheaper service at $24.95 a month includes 10 Connect Days (24 hours). There's also a pay-as-you-go plan.

Happy WiFi'ing!

Interesting to see the numbers in the search market in this InternetNews.com story:

In Ask Jeeves (Quote, Company Info) CEO Skip Battle's favorite metaphor, his company is offering Web searchers tea to Google's coffee. While other search sites try to beat Google by brewing a better flavor of coffee, Ask Jeeves has a natty British butler brewing up an alternative.

...According to comScore Media Metrix's qSearch service, Ask Jeeves garnered just 3 percent of the 3.9 billion searches done in April. In contrast, Yahoo! racked up 31 percent and Google 29 percent.

Salesforce.com and its founder have kicked off a new initiative that piggybacks on Salesforce.com's business model according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Now Mr. Benioff, a 13-year Oracle Corp. veteran, hopes to kick the trend into a higher gear with a plan to let other software developers rent out their software using Salesforce.com's computers. These software developers won't have to buy hardware, worry about managing databases or protecting users' security -- as long as they pay Salesforce.com $50 for each person per month who taps into their software over the Internet.

...The first phase of Sforce, similarly, is designed to make Salesforce.com work better with other companies' software. By early next year, Salesforce.com plans to let other companies assemble and offer utility-style services on its computers. Mr. Benioff, who calls the concept "client-service computing," hopes to boost the users Salesforce.com serves from about 90,000 today to one million in 36 months, with 60% of those tapping into programs written by other companies.

With RIM under attack from competitors such as Good, it is releasing new products according to this PDAStreet.com story:

RIM today unveiled two new BlackBerry handhelds, the BlackBerry 7230 and BlackBerry 6230, one of which, the 7230, features a color display. The 7230 has a high-resolution color screen and the 6230 incorporates a high-contrast monochrome screen. Both displays are backlit.

According to the company, the two handhelds run on GSM/GPRS networks and deliver RIM's usually array of applications, including push email, which automatically delivers message to the BlackBerry, as well as a tri-mode mobile phone, SMS, a Web browser and PIM software.

A study based on data from "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-chartered mortgage agencies that rarely handle loans larger than $322,700"--  which means the high-end of the market which has been most impacted is not included -- finds that prices continue to rise albeit a little slower. The highest increase of 7.9% was seen in LA and Miami but only a 2.9% increase in the San Francisco area (based on comparing a house's sale price to its previous sale price). According to the New York Times story (registration required):

California, Florida and the Northeast have attracted the most attention as bubble suspects because prices have risen 50 percent to 75 percent in many places there over the last five years. But other than in San Jose, which is in Silicon Valley, prices continued to rise during the first three months of 2003, despite a worsening of the economic slump that is now more than two years old.

...In the first three months of the year, the median home — the one worth more than half of all houses and less than half — cost $161,500, up 7 percent from early 2002, according to the Realtors' group. With a median price of $509,000, the San Francisco area had the most expensive homes, followed by Orange County, Calif., at $448,000, and Boston, at $414,000. The median price in the New York area was $329,000.

 

The cost of the most successful TV shows continues to rise as the production companies wise up to how lucrative their shows are for the networks -- the three existing Law & Order dramas  plus one new one are being packaged into the biggest television deal ever -- according to this SF Chronicle story:

NBC already pays the highest prices in television for two of its long- running hit shows, "Friends" and "ER" Now the network faces an earlier-than- expected renegotiation of another cornerstone of its top-rated lineup: its successful franchise of three "Law & Order" dramas.

Universal Television, the studio that produces the "Law & Order" shows, is planning to bundle all three into one deal, even though two of the shows have two seasons left on their contracts. Universal wants to have the settlement wrapped up by December. And the total price tag Universal executives are aiming to reach -- more than $550 million a year -- would make the deal the most lucrative agreement in television history.

AOL's Justin Frankel is at it again, this time releasing a new file sharing application via the Nullsoft/AOL website which was later stopped once the company found out according to this New York Times story (registration required):

The new program makes it easy for groups of about 50 people to set up file-sharing networks that are secure and private. In addition to letting users search for and download files, it includes an instant messaging feature that could be seen as competition for AOL Instant Messenger, which provides AOL with a crucial presence on millions of computer screens.

...Mr. Frankel, 24, went to work for AOL when it bought his four-person company, Nullsoft, in 1999 for stock worth $80 million. The author of Winamp, software that helped popularize the MP3 music format on the Internet, Mr. Frankel has seemed intent on retaining his hacker credibility even while working for one of the world's largest media conglomerates.

While the cellphone industry has vehemently opposed this and claimed that there's little real proof this law is heading to the state Senate now where it is also expected to pass according to this San Francisco Chroncile story:

Legislation requiring motorists to use hands-free devices while making cell phone calls beginning Jan. 1, 2005, cleared a huge hurdle Thursday, squeaking out of the Assembly with no votes to spare.

Boosted by a California Highway Patrol study that found cell-phone use a leading cause of accidents involving distracted drivers, the bill passed 41-26 after languishing for more than two years without reaching a floor vote.