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

This was expected but still sad that the publisher of the Red Herring, a Silicon Valley business technology stalwart has closed its doors according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

RHC Media Inc. has decided to shutter its Red Herring magazine, according to a person familiar with the matter, ending a ten-year period in which Red Herring was a pioneering force in the market for "New Economy" magazines.

RHC had hired investment bank DeSilva & Phillips to find a buyer but after news of the search was reported earlier this week, both advertisers and potential buyers balked, this person said. DeSilva & Phillips will instead try to sell the company's assets, including its subscriber list.

Mortgage brokers have become the equivalent of the high-flying Wall Streeters a couple of decades ago according to this Wall Street Journal story (subcription required):

[A]n unprecedented boom in home-loan refinancings, spurred by interest rates that have dipped to their lowest levels in decades. Of the $2.5 trillion in mortgages taken out last year, roughly 60% was handled by the nation's 120,000 brokers, up from just 20% in 1987, according to David Olson, managing director of Wholesale Access Mortgage Research & Consulting Inc., which conducts extensive industry surveys. Other industry analysts peg brokers' market share at 40%.

Last year, the average mortgage broker made $120,000, while owners of brokerage firms took home $400,000, Mr. Olson calculates. Both figures are double the levels of only two years ago. At least 5%, or some 6,000 brokers, earned $1 million or more.

Submit your own ten second film to this competition. These films are perfect for all of us who suffer from attention deficit which would include all of us who're members of the MTV generation and younger! According to this New York Times story (registration required):

Ten-second films are the brainchild of David Wild, who makes television commercials in Los Angeles and is a judge of the competition. Mr. Wild graduated from film school in 1987 with a collection of short works that he described as Midwestern haiku. He sold them to MTV, which broadcast 57 over the next four years. "I liked that a film could last only 10 seconds but live on in the viewer's mind," he said.

This way cool laptop stand, the iCurve, brings sleek design to the boring world of computer/laptop stands.

Congress has given $25M already and plans to give another $75M (as long as it can be matched by the private sector) to bolster the collection of all things digital for its archives according to this New York Times story (registration required):

In the strongest signal to date of its commitment to preserving the nation's digital legacy, Congress has set aside $100 million for the Library of Congress to carry out a plan for collecting and preserving digital information, including images, CD's, Web pages and electronic journals....

"I don't think we've ever had a single shot of this size in our entire history," said James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress.

What will they think of next? And are these really that good for your posture? According to this New York Times story (registration required) Samsung will soon be making public a new line of monitors meant for the space-challenged:

If desk space is at a minimum, why not hang that computer monitor on the wall? Samsung Electronics has introduced a new line of flat-panel liquid crystal display monitors that are about an inch thick and come with removable base stands. That makes it easy to hang the screen with standard wall-mounting hardware, just as you would a framed picture.

With state governments scrambling to find alternate sources of revenue as they face huge deficits (and no help from the Bush White House), online sales tax is an obvious place. In fact, state governments lost some $19B in revenue due to tax-free ecommerce in 2002 according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required). Amazon is yet to take the plunge but many other retailers have already made the change.

Consumers have long gravitated to online retail sites because they could escape the sales tax charged by stores at the mall. That savings, anywhere from 4% to more than 8% depending on where you live, has helped fuel Web sales of everything from clothes to major appliances.

But that tax break is beginning to fade. Just last week, more than a half-dozen major retailers agreed to start collecting state and local taxes from their Web and catalog customers. The voluntary move was aimed at heading off a bigger and broader clash with cash-strapped governments around the country.

Following in the footsteps of AOL and MSN, Yahoo also announces Bring Your Own Access among other premium services, according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Yahoo Inc., continuing a diversification strategy, said it plans to begin selling a package of premium services in the first half of the year to consumers who arrange their own Internet access.

...Most consumers now rely on Yahoo for free services, but Yahoo is trying to diversify from that advertising-supported business. Of more than 213 million users, only 2.2 million pay the company for services.

Less than half of the 282,000 tracks of this online music subscription service are now available for downloading and burning (copying)onto a CD. About time. According to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):

Starting Thursday, a legal online music service called Rhapsody, which holds licenses from the big record labels, will begin offering its customers the opportunity to burn songs onto a CD for just 49 cents apiece. Users can burn as many songs, from as many artists, as they like.

...There are some catches in Rhapsody's new offering, available at the Web site of Rhapsody's owner, Listen.com (www.listen.com), a small San Francisco-based company, and at Rhapsody licensee Lycos Music (music.lycos.com). For one thing, you can't get the 49-cent songs unless you subscribe to the service, at $10 a month. For another, the 49-cent price is a promotion good only through March 31.

The "Dude, You're getting a Dell" guy, Benjamin Curtis, only 22 years old, was arrested in NYC for buying marijuana according to this New York Times story (registration required). Sheesh. Don't we have other things to worry about?

...marijuana remains illegal in New York, as Mr. Curtis was reminded Sunday night when he was arrested while wearing a kilt, a black tuxedo jacket and beige knee-length socks.

...Mr. Curtis's agent, Bonnie Shumofsky, said he was declining to be interviewed. She added, however, "There is no such thing as bad P.R."

There's a significant change taking place in how we light up things according to this New York Times story (registration required):

Incandescent bulbs, neon tubes and fluorescent lamps are starting to give way to light-emitting microchips that work longer, use less power and allow designers to use light in ways they never have before.

The chips — 18 million of them — are already on display in the $37 million Nasdaq sign in Times Square. They are in the vibrant facade of the Goodman Theater in Chicago and adorned last year's White House Christmas tree. More notable, the chips are penetrating blue-collar tasks like illuminating traffic lights, brake lights and exit signs.

Marketers find a new way to reach their audience a la Google according to this New York Times story (registration required):

A web site built by MSN for Lexus, the maker of luxury cars, hopes to attract customers by applying the increasingly important dictum of online advertising: make yourself useful.

The site, called Luxury for Living, contains links to Lexus advertisements, but it is dominated by lifestyle information on topics including luxury hotels, high-technology homes and farmers' markets. It also contains links to outside sites like Slate.com and MSNBC.com. Hoping to make users feel relaxed and pampered, the site plays music: piano, jazz or "new luxury," the music from Lexus commercials.

A Paris court has thrown out a second case filed by French activists against Yahoo that it should be held responsible for previous Nazi items' auctions according to this AP story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

Yahoo, of Sunnyvale, Calif., has had a three-year legal tussle in France. An initial case started in 2000, when France's Union of Jewish Students and the International Anti-Racism and Anti-Semitism League sued it for allowing Nazi collectibles, including flags emblazoned with swastikas, to be sold on its auction pages.

The case led to a landmark ruling in France, with a court ordering Yahoo to block Internet surfers in France from auctions selling Nazi memorabilia. French law bars the display or sale of racist material.

...The company banned hate-related items from its auction pages in January 2001, though Third Reich stamps and coins remain acceptable. The move was made as Yahoo began charging users to make auction listings, and the company didn't want to profit from such material.

Billboards were once the competing grounds for every dotcom worth its venture capital but now so many of them lie empty according to this San Francisco Chronicle story:

You're entering the city from the Bay Bridge along Interstate 80, and, suddenly, it hits you. White, white -- everywhere you look, more white. But it's not San Francisco's chilly fog that assails you, but rather signs of a cooling economic climate. Literal signs, I mean. Once serving as a battleground of boomtime San Francisco's overheated outdoor-advertising wars, the 80/101 corridor offered a billboard phalanx of color, flash and ever-morphing promises, all begging for your eyeballs' split-second attention.

...Being on the buying side of the equation, Comley is more forthcoming. According to a colleague of hers who regularly buys such billboards, prices for the spectaculars now go for between $20,000 and $40,000 per month, but she adds that during the boom, those prices could have easily doubled. "Easily," Comley says. "Stuff went to the highest bidder."

A beta of the new MSN Search was launched today that forgoes banner advertisements and the MSN network navigation column for search results influenced by the clean and fast Google search page according to this CNET News.com story:

MSN says that "more people use MSN Search than any other search service," according to figures from researcher ComScore Media Metrix. But figures from an alternate market research firm, Nielsen/NetRatings, show that Google claims this title, reaching about 37.3 million people in the United States in the month of December. Yahoo Search follows with 36.5 million visitors, and MSN Search is third with 34.3 million.

Illustrating its power, Google was recently named the leading brand in 2002 over names like Apple Computer and Coke, according to marketing company Interbrand.

San Francisco dotcom bust claims new casualty as rents have dropped from almost $80 per square foot in 1999 to less than $30 today, that is if you can find tenants. According to this San Francisco Chronicle story:

Tishman Speyer Properties has put its two-tower office complex at 555 and 575 Market St. in San Francisco on the block after defaulting on a $160 million mortgage, a spokesman said Monday.

...The buildings, which were leased to several dot-coms during the tech boom, are now about 80 percent vacant.

Birthdays are the leading reason people dine out according to this San Francisco Chronicle story on different groups Bay Area restaurants are courting in an effort to deal with the economic downturn:

A 2000 survey by the National Restaurant Association showed that 55 percent of respondents said they went out to dinner on their birthday.

Rafe Needleman writes about Cypak, a company that has the technology to mount its tiny microprocessor on paper or inside a credit card etc. in this Business 2.0 story:

Computer chips keep getting cheaper, so we see them in increasingly unlikely places: embedded in credit cards, playing off-key birthday tunes in greeting cards, and so forth. The era of truly cheap -- i.e., almost free -- chips isn't yet upon us, though, and thus some fantasy applications, like meat packaging that e-mails you from the fridge when the ground chuck is starting to spoil, aren't economically feasible. But there's an interesting Swedish company that's bringing us closer.

Rafe Needleman writes about Cypak, a company that has the technology to mount its tiny microprocessor on paper or inside a credit card etc. in this Business 2.0 story:

Computer chips keep getting cheaper, so we see them in increasingly unlikely places: embedded in credit cards, playing off-key birthday tunes in greeting cards, and so forth. The era of truly cheap -- i.e., almost free -- chips isn't yet upon us, though, and thus some fantasy applications, like meat packaging that e-mails you from the fridge when the ground chuck is starting to spoil, aren't economically feasible. But there's an interesting Swedish company that's bringing us closer.

More problems for McDonald's which is seeing its children's Happy Meals sales falling according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required). Maybe a good thing. My nephew eating chicken McNuggets for lunch can't be all that good for him (I know, I know, it's not that often -- note to my sister who's sure to be reading this ;-).

The Happy Meal -- which consists of an entree (hamburger, cheeseburger or chicken nuggets), fries, small drink and free toy -- is crucial to McDonald's. It accounts for more than 20% of U.S. transactions, or approximately $3.5 billion in annual revenue, according to McDonald's. It also generates sales from the adult who buys a child a Happy Meal. Some restaurants report that average orders with Happy Meals -- whose prices vary according to market but start at $1.99 -- are 50% higher than those without Happy Meals.

No other restaurant chain that primarily serves adults has been so successful at wooing children. The 1976 introduction of the Happy Meal and subsequent arrival of in-restaurant playgrounds gave McDonald's a dominant share of the fast-food market for kids, which remains an insignificant business for competitors like Wendy's International Inc. and Yum Brands Inc., parent of Pizza Hut, KFC and Taco Bell. Even Burger King Corp. is a relative newcomer to the children's market, having launched its Kids Meal in 1990.