Mark Cuban: Companies that Live by Free Stuff will Die by Free Stuff
The always clever, almost always insightful, and sometimes good dancer Mark Cuban has a great post today about “Freemium” companies. Cuban suggests:
Its not that they can’t make money offering free. They can , have and will. The problem is that they know that its literally impossible to be the king of the mountain forever. But that won’t stop them from trying. And that is exactly what will kill them.
Their better choice would be to run the company as profitably as possible, focusing only on those things that generate revenue and put cash in the bank. More importantly, when you see your BlackSwan company appear and you know they will kick your ass, rather than ramping up to try to compete, get out. Sell. Or maximize cash and pay your shareholders every penny you have.
Like every company in the free space, your lifecycle has come to its conclusion. Don’t fight it. Admit it. Profit from it.
I think Cuban is right on, though I think he’d also agree that most companies won’t take his advice, especially Google which stands to gain (but also lose) the most from maintaining their massive search revenue and general online dominance.
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/07/05/the-freemium-company-lifecycle-challenge/
ABC Search Affiliate Browser Hijack using abcjmp.com advertising
Update: The malware seems to be hitting affiliates other than the ABCSearch, making a bit stronger their claim of innocence in matters relating to browser hijacking.
Still, it would seem to me that these problems would disappear if every affiliate relationship was defined by a *real, verified person* and then ad companies were required to identify (to authorities AND to the hijack victim) the recipient of any advertising revenue generated by the hijack. This would put the pressure on the hijackers, not the victims.
NOTE: It’s not yet clear to me the indirect role that ABCSEARCH plays in this frustrating equation of a browser hijacking redirecting to ABC advertisers. It would seem they could police this activity better (as I think Google does with their adsense program).
I’m now struggling to remove a browser hijack routine where a spam affiiliate of ABCSEARCH is forwarding me to unwanted websites. I’m furious with ABCSEARCH for failing to provide me with *any* helpful information, most importantly the identification of the affiliate who is the recipient of this fake search traffic. ABC benefits from unwanted advertising and to some extent from this illegal activity and therefore is reluctant to lift the veil of secrecy that helps protect purveyors of unwanted advertising. That is outrageous of them.
(I’m on a Vaio Desktop running Windows XP)
I found the info (below)indicating many others have had similar problems with the ABC advertising network. Obviously they don’t directly support spammers but they *indirectly* support them by making it difficult to track down the offenders, some of whom are actually selling programs online that use a combination of infecting the computers with a browser hijack and ABC search ads.
When I figure out how to remove this ABCJMP ABCSEARCH spamming malware routine I’ll post it here. In the meantime please let me know if you have the same problem.
|
What is abcjmp.com Abcjmp.com is owned and operated by ABCSearch.com, the world’s largest privately held pay per click advertising network. Advertisers come to ABCSearch to distribute their ads across our broad network of search partners and content sites. Abcjmp.com is used as our network referral ID to identify and qualify traffic sent by our traffic partners. Why am I seeing abcjmp.com on my computer? Because ABCSearch is comprised up of a network of thousands of traffic partners, one of these partners may have included you into their distribution network. If you have received any advertisements that contain the url abcjmp.com, it is important to understand that ABCSearch.com and the advertiser are not directly responsible for the advertisement you received through our partner distribution that contains the advertisement with abcjmp.com in the domain name. For Help Thank you, |
Future of Education Part II
In the coming years people are likely to experience the most profound transformation in all of history. The event is often called “The singularity” because it’s very hard to know what will happen after the the ongoing fast rise in machine intelligence fully surpasses human capabilities. Computers are very likely to become conscious and “recursively self improving”, allowing them to reinvent themselves as frequently as they choose in various forms.
Some interesting *current* developments along these lines are:
Singularity University in Silicon Valley – sponsored by Google and other tech leaders this school will teach about the sweeping changes coming as machine intelligence surpasses that of humans.
Synapse Project: This project was announced earlier this year is funded by the US Military’s DARPA division, which represents the best funded attempt to date to build a functional brain. The SyNAPSE initial goal is to design a working version of a mammalian brain. The approach differs from Blue Brain in that it’s largely based on finding a working “software solution” rather than using techniques to duplicate the brain’s hardware.
Future of Education Part I
My dad (a retired Education Professor from NY State) asked for my view on technology and education in 200 words so I thought I’d post it here too. Feel free to chime in with your views – I’d love to hear them and will pass along to dad, who is presenting education insights to his group:
Over the last 30 years it has been painful for me to watch how technology with all its wonderful educational potential has crept more than lept into the classroom. Even today, where most teachers are comfortable with technology in the classroom, students often remain more expert than teachers with computers.
However on the bright side of the education equation there are many remarkable new technologies and approaches to education that will gradually provide students with richer, more interactive, more international, less expensive, and higher quality forms of education.
Many innovations have already made their way into classrooms including games to help with all subjects, Google search to help children find topics, read news, track down information for reports, and more. Academics now routinely use the internet to research and report more effectively. Many then blog their findings and opinions, leading to a rich interactive experience that helps to blur the often unnecessary lines drawn between classroom and real world or between teacher and student.
The most exciting example I have seen of a very innovative approach under development uses broadband internet, specialized projectors, regular video cameras, a special type of wall sized screen, and microsoft surface computing software. The system will allow groups of children from two different classrooms in different countries to interact in real time as if they were looking at each other through a transparent wall. Even the language barrier can be overcome using translation software so students in China or Europe could join with a class in the USA to learn and share cultural insights or any comments.
Social Word of Mouth Marketing
As social networking explodes on the scene I’m wondering about legitimate vs questionable marketing tactics that involve one’s social network. Here at the JoeDuck blog I’ve avoided advertising (though I have taken a few liberties with posts that help rank other sites or promote friends, etc).
At my commercial sites I’m more aggressive with advertising and find it’s very hard to decide what levels of advertising are best suited to all the factors that come into play such as generating revenue, being honest, keeping Google happy, etc. Although I increasingly buy into the idea that “user friendliness” is a good guideline I don’t think it’s the best one from a revenue standpoint. Even Google, which I think built a grand online empire partly on the basis of limiting the advertisements around search, has very gradually increased the aggressiveness of their advertising at some “user centric” expense such as the ads that appear on top of the organic listings. Although Google insists they are clear about identifying advertising the proof is in the perception and many people still do not understand the difference between clicks when Google is getting paid and when they are not.
I don’t object to Google’s current standards which I think are more than reasonable, though it’s always annoying to hear them pretend (or think delusionally) that their only consideration is optimizing the *user experience* without regard to revenues. That would not be good business and arguably would deprive them of revenue they can use to provide the raft of great free services we enjoy from Google like blogger, search, mail, maps, and more.
But the real point here is to find a balance between social networking and marketing. I certainly don’t want to pester people with advertising after they have nicely come to Twitter or the blog to “interact” about politics, technology, or travel. But are there appropriate advertisements that do not offend people?
More importantly, how should one handle paid or unpaid endorsements of businesses? Over at Technology-Report we are now sponsored by Ipswitch Imail Server, an Enterprise email system. What’s really intriguing me is at what point one crosses the line between using and abusing the relationship you have with people to promote your business “allies”. The link I just provided helps them. I think that’s fine but some might say it’s using the blog inappropriately. Adding “nofollow” to the link would tell Google not to consider the link as an endorsement of the company but I’m happy to endorse them – they are smart enough to sponsor our Tech blog so they must be good, right?
I think the best working rule here at the blog is transparency, where people know the money relationships between you and those you talk about. For stocks I use a disclosure blip, for companies an explanation of the relationship. However for websites I’m not as transparent and I think I need to reconsider that and provide more disclosure than I have in the past to help combat the growing “economy of lies” that is far more pervasive than we tend to think.
From bank lending and “promotional offers” with fine print that traps even savvy borrowers to blatant phone credit card ripoffs that prey on the gullible to the Madoff stock scandal to bogus “get rich quick” training programs, the “economy of lies” is everywhere. Online, it becomes even more difficult to check credentials and make sure an offer is real.
Then there are the “somewhat misleading special offers” which I think may be impossible or even undesirable to combat. For example I’m shopping for Las Vegas hotels, flights, and show tickets and notice there are often dozens of offers for the same rooms, each with different rates. Although the conditions vary a bit, basically these are marketing experiments designed to optimize revenues and collect information for the future. Not perfectly “honest”, but not scams. I’ll talk about this more at my Las Vegas Travel blog. Hey, see, there’s a tiny SEO helpful pitch for my own site – is that legitimate?
An interesting idea – though bureaucracy alerts are kind of sounding for me now – might be to create some sort of volunteer disclosure standard that was monitored by a third party. For example no site could endorse more than one product of the same kind. Sites that abided by those rules would be listed and allowed to slap up a logo, those that did not would not. Policing this probably could be done via an online “complaint” system, and the neat part would be to help screen out the huge number of junky sales sites that have no content of value and offer dubious offers.
Still, that option does not really seem workable on a grand scale because too few would participate.
WordCamp at Mission Bay Conference Center, San Francisco UCSF

missionbaywp
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck
Live from San Francisco it’s the WordCamp San Francisco. Tim Ferris is giving an excellent presentation about his blogging adventures. He’s quite the SEO expert as are many people who do not bill themselves as SEO experts. (where those who DO often are NOT).
Matt Mullenweg introduced the event and will speak later. Matt Cutts from Google is up next. Over 700 registrants per WordPress.
Kudos so far to the WordPress gang for a really well run show – smoother than many conferences that cost much more.
Artificial Intelligence Global Luminaries
This great list is from the Accelerating Futures Website from Michael Anissimov
Artificial Intelligence
![]() |
Aubrey de Grey Chief Science Officer, Methuselah Foundation |
![]() |
Barney Pell Search Strategist, Microsoft |
![]() |
Ben Goertzel CSO, Novamente & Director of Research, SIAI |
![]() |
Bill Hibbard Emeritus Senior Scientist, Space Science and Engineering Center |
![]() |
Bruce Klein President, Novamente & Director of Outreach, SIAI |
![]() |
Christine Peterson Co-Founder, Foresight Nanotech Institute |
![]() |
David Hart Director of Open Source Projects, SIAI |
![]() |
Eliezer Yudkowsky Co-Founder and Research Fellow, SIAI |
![]() |
Eric Baum Founder, Baum Research |
![]() |
Hans Moravec Chief Scientist, Seegrid Corporation |
![]() |
Helen Greiner Co-Founder, iRobot Corporation |
![]() |
Hugo de Garis Professor, Wuhan University |
![]() |
J Storrs Hall President, Foresight Nanotech Institute |
![]() |
John Laird Tishman Professor of Engineering, University of Michigan |
![]() |
Jonas Lamis Executive Director, SciVestor Corporation |
![]() |
Jonathan Connell Staff Member, T.J. Watson Research Center, IBM |
![]() |
Joscha Bach Author, Principles of Synthetic Intelligence |
![]() |
Jurgen Schmidhuber Professor of Cognitive Robotics and Computer Science, TU Munich |
![]() |
Marcus Hutter Associate Professor, Australian National University |
![]() |
Marvin Minsky Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT |
![]() |
Matt Bamberger Founder, Intelligent Artifice |
![]() |
Monica Anderson Founder, Syntience Inc. |
![]() |
Moshe Looks AI Researcher, Google Research |
![]() |
Neil Jacobstein Chairman and CEO, Teknowledge |
![]() |
Pei Wang Lecturer, Department of Computer and Information Science, Temple University |
![]() |
Peter Cheeseman Advisor, Singularity Institute |
![]() |
Peter Norvig Director of Research, Google |
![]() |
Peter Thiel Founder, Clarium Capital |
![]() |
Ray Kurzweil Chairman and CEO, Kurzweil Technologies, Inc. |
![]() |
Rodney Brooks Chief Technical Officer, iRobot Corp |
![]() |
Ronald Arkin Regents’ Professor, College of Computing, Georgia Tech |
![]() |
Sam Adams Distinguished Engineer, IBM Research Division |
![]() |
Sebastian Thrun Director, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory |
![]() |
Selmer Bringsjord Chair, Department of Department of Cognitive Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |
![]() |
Stan Franklin Interdisciplinary Research Professor, University of Memphis |
![]() |
Stephen Omohundro Founder and President, Self-Aware Systems |
![]() |
Stephen Reed Principal Developer, Texai |
![]() |
Susan Fonseca Klein Chief Administrative Officer, Singularity Institute |
![]() |
Wendell Wallach Lecturer, Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics |


Google’s Amoral Greatness?
Update: A Googley View of the matter: Google speaketh o Copyrights
Often the weekend brings the best internet philosophy discussions and one is brewing today about whether Google is the good or bad guy in the content equation. The answer in my opinion is that it is pretty nuanced and best seen as a series of inevitabilities rather than points about fairness or best practices or who is doing what for whom.
Over at the Guardian the argument is that Google’s gotten out of hand and is running roughshod over anybody who stands in their profitable path:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/05/google-internet-piracy
…. one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old. This particular 11-year-old has known nothing but success and does not understand the risks, skill and failure involved in the creation of original content, nor the delicate relationships that exist outside its own desires and experience. There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny. And, naturally, it did not exercise Google executives that Street View not only invaded the privacy of millions and made the job of burglars easier …
Meanwhile Mike Arrington disagrees – more accurately lashes out at the Google detractors, suggesting:
Let’s all be clear here. What Porter and Bragg want is a subsidy from Google. A sort of welfare tax on a profitable company so that they can continue to draw the paychecks they’ve become accustomed to. That isn’t going to happen, and all this hand wringing isn’t helping to move their respective industries toward a successful business model. They either need to adapt or die. And they’re choosing a very noisy and annoying death.
Some truth to this but also pretty harsh given how disruptive Google’s been to the whole show. Mike overlooks that the *single most disruptive act* in internet history was Google’s launch of Adsense, which monetizes content for all websites and more than any other single factor has led to an explosion of the spam, mediocre content, and some excellent content that has accelerated (though I think has not caused) the demise of legacy content providers like newspapers.
I said over at TechCrunch that:
Mike I’m not sure I agree with the analysis but here you’ve pulled together the “Google Goodness” argument about as cleverly and succinctly as it can be done.
I think a bigger perspective on this is far more nuanced. The rise of Google search aggregation has in most cases diminished the average profitability of premium content. It has slightly (but only ever so slightly) *raised* the tiny profitability of non-premium content such as the ocean of mediocre blog posts, stupid pet trick websites, and made for adsense efforts. Something is gained as we move to a very democratic global publishing paradigm but also something significant is lost in this equation. David Brooks of the NYT writes some brilliant stuff we need to hear in these challenged times. He refuses to use Twitter. Like hundreds of other bloggers I write some political stuff too but few of my pieces are as informed as Brooks’ analyses.
However I’m happy to use Twitter and work for free. I may win, but we all may lose something after the blogging and Twittering and Adsense dust settles.
Twitter’s Discovery Engine: The End of Civilization As We Know It.
Sure it’s too early to know how the advent of “Social Media” will revolutionize the internet landscape but it will *certainly* revolutionize the online experience dramatically. It’s been slowly happening for some time – perhaps 2 years or so – but I think we’re now at something of a tipping point where we’ll see widespread mainstream adoption of social media – I predict Twitter will be the big winner in this space though there is plenty of room for Facebook to maintain the huge presence it now has online.
One of the most provocative upcoming items is the Twitter Discovery Engine, which will be Twitter’s attempt to allow users to mine the information from the massive Twitter community. They may not get it right at first but eventually we’ll see that unlike Google search – which is great for static information – Twitter will be able to connect you to a “human expert” about as fast as you can Tweet out a 140 character note or click on their “Follow” button.
This is very important because despite many foolish reports suggesting that Google has “solved” the problem of internet search they have done nothing of the kind. Google’s very good at finding a lot of material about issues that stay the same over the years such as historical events. Yet Google’s regular search generally fails – and miserably – when you are trying to find real time information on current events. Their blog search and news search are better for information that changes regularly or has changed recently, but with a robust Twitter search you’ll soon be able to interact with newsmakers and news events in real time, asking questions and offering your own input.
The internet has always been about people much more than it is about technology. Google is a brilliant company but I’d suggest that Google will be seen in the future as being the *last* of the major internet players to rely primarily on their technological prowess rather than their social architectures. The new game will be the integration of human experience and expertise with the blossoming online information landscape, and this game will dominate until we have very powerful and direct integration of human brains with online information sources – probably in about 10 years. This brain/machine integration has already begun at a rudimentary level with Braingate and mainstream devices like the Emotiv headsets coming soon.
This social media revolution is not just a profound new development in the history of human communication, it is a social evolution of biblical proportions, and the beginning of a redefinition of social interaction that will both enhance and undermine our tribal history of human socializing that goes back tens of thousands of years and tended to favor smaller groups, less democratic social heirarchies, and simpler forms of “friend or foe” interactions. These social mechanisms served our evolutionary needs at the time, but are becoming outmoded as the global population and global interests come together, and fast.
Welcome to the new age new media revolution. It’s going to be neat but be sure to fasten your mental seatbelts because there will be some Twitter turbulence ahead.
To Twitter or just copy Twitter?
In technology there are few more important questions than “What’s going to happen with Twitter”. As with many early adopter issues, only the digerati and a few smart marketers understand how profoundly and importantly Twitter is reshaping the online landscape, giving a voice to millions who want to interact casually and superficially with … millions more.
This spinoff effort will be very interesting to watch as it’s a successful niche website that is establishing a Twitter like interface:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/03/27/a-twitter-spinoff-launches-for-moms/
The challenge here is that if every website you go to has it’s *own* chatting interface you’ll either 1) get ticked off or 2) spend the rest of your life interacting with people at all these sites.
The answer is not individual site chat areas, rather we need to integrate the real Twitter with websites. (or some other chat standard, but Twitter seems to be the right choice given it’s ease of use and exploding subscriber base)
Open ID, Facebook connect and Google Friend Connect and open social and Disqus (for blog questions) and many other applications have the right general idea but nobody seems to be able to integrate all this across the board. We need to be able to seamlessly move from site to site, carrying our identity along with us so we can comment and interact easily.








































Please subscribe to the feed



