Monthly Archives: March 2007

Viacom “Austin Powers” to Google: We want ONE BILLION DOLLARS!

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Viacom has sued Google/YouTube for copyright infringement, filing papers today and asking for a billion bucks in damages. The Viacom Press release summarizes their point of view. In short Viacom says of YouTube:

Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.

Here’s the Reuters Story

Mark Cuban warned about this type of legal challenge overwhelming the YouTube deal several months ago.  Here’s his take on the latest news.   It seems possible Google may wind up regretting their purchase of YouTube, proving to be a hornets nest of potential litigation that seems to be increasingly expensive. This while it remains unclear how well YouTube content can be monetized, to the extent there is much left after all this litigation. Google allocated about 400 million of the 1.65 billion purchase price to settle these claims but if the Viacom lawsuit it any indication it may get more expensive than that.

Ultimately I’m guessing it’ll be judges reaction to the new ethos surrounding IP law. Onliners big and small routinely disregard many longstanding content distribution rules so judges may decide that the legal issues have become so universally murky that they’ll start ruling in favor of the new media distributors like YouTube/Google, though I’m guessing the first sets of judgements will seek to penalize them in the name of respecting existing copyright laws. The swirl of legal challenges to YouTube content may be a case where Google’s freewheeling, usually innovative approaches come back to bite them, but it’s too early to know.

Stock Spam Messages: SEC study suggests you should follow their bogus advice for profit?

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The SEC is cracking down on stock price manipulations where spammers send out millions of email messages implying a stock is going to rise. Presumably the spammers have bought calls on the stock or own shares and then reap benefits if the price goes up from the fake interest created by the bogus emails.

But this raises a darn interesting question. If these manipulations really are working to inflate the price of certain stocks artificially – and they appear to be working – then the best course of action for Joe average investor may be to…wait for it…. BUY those darn spam STOCKS!

Some caveats would obviously apply here – you’d want to make sure you are 1) Not doing anything illegal yourself, so you’d never send out the spams or hype the stock yourself. 2) Buy early in the process before the price spike happens. Heavy internet users probably are the first to get the spam, though you can also check this interesting site, Spamnation, for details about the latest spam scams.

I’m testing this hypothesis without buying anything by following some of the stocks listed at Spamnation. Heres the COB.F chart which suggests the spam may have worked wonders on the price.

However CAU, with less spam and more recent activity, is up only a penny today and appears to have been falling recently, suggesting the spam did not work or didn’t work yet.

If, as the SEC crackdown suggests, stock spam scams are artificially inflating the prices of stocks, it may actually be to your advantage to *follow* the bogus advice even though it’s a bunch of illegal lies and deceptions.

Isn’t that … funny?

Brain scans yield key first step to … reading your mind.

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A provocative experiment in Germany raises questions about the future of keeping our thoughts private and even free will itself.   Researchers have been able to predict, with modest accuracy, the *intention* of a person to complete a mental task.     Predicting physical actions with brain activity has been done before but this appears to be the first example of predicting mental activity from brain activity as measured by MRI.

Here’s the story

The implications are significant both philisophically and in practical terms.    What exactly is “free will”?   If our decisions are effectively made *before* we actively process the information then what exactly is in control of our thoughts and actions?      If your future “decisions” are simply a product of a bunch of your past thoughts and behaviors then you may be a lot more predictable than you think.

From a practical side this could make for a marketing dream world (or nightmare world?), where persuaders in advertising or politics would tailor the message to your specific brain activity, or even try to “short circuit” activity in their favor.

Hmmm – I suddenly feel compelled to vote Ray Kurzweil for president …

To Twitter or not to Twitter

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Thanks to Pete Cashmore for answering my question about wazzup with Twitter, the new and skyrocketing-in-popularity social networking tool that really does not seem to make much sense … unless … you want to throw out little tidbits to friends and to the world every so often and see what others are doing or thinking about. Pete calls this “talking about your cat” and I think he’s hit the nail on the head. Most of us, as humans, like some attention, and bloggers are usually hungry to interact with as many people as possible, superficiality be damned. Enter Twitter, which allows you to follow friends or the Twitterers at large who are throwing out a little piece of their life every so often. Unlike long, often boring or repetitive blog postings the twitter stuff is a quick look into the lives of others, and that’s always a fun thing even if they are having a boring life/day/twitter posting.

I’ve been playing with Twitter for the past day and although I’m not hooked (yet?) I can understand why this is taking off in the digital community so fast. In fact I’ve already made friends with John Edwards, Presidential Candidate dude. That’s pretty neat, right?

Twitter also has another thing going for it – founder Evan Williams also brought Blogger.com to fruition as a Google buyout, and as such was one of those who really helped bring blogging to the mainstream as a simple way to share.

I’m not even sure I understand what Ross Mayfield is saying about Twitter Tipping the Tuna, but it’s a nice alliteration. Perhaps he’s suggesting it’ll be a flash in the pan after initial surge of adoption? That’s possible, but I think Twitter’s got a long life ahead, though not sure if that’s good for the world or just another goofy internet thing to keep uninspired levels of productivity … as high as possible.

San Diego, California

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We are heading down to So. California in a few weeks so I’m pulling together information about what we’ll try to do during our week in the area.     Southern California is one of the world’s top travel destinations so there are literally thousands of attractions.    The challenge there is not finding things to do, rather it’s focusing on the “best” of many great attractions and experiences that are suited to your tastes.

The Travel Channel just had a nice feature on San Diego and I’ve sketched some of their advice below.  I’ll flesh this out and add links later.

With 1.2 Million people San Diego is the USA’s 7th largest city.

Mission San Diego de Alcala

Balboa Park

San Diego Zoo

Sea World, San Diego. You can dine with Shamu. Trainer for a da.

La Hoya. “Beverly Hills on the Beach” Exclusive shopping.

Surfing. South Coast Surf Shop is the place for gear. Surf Diva Surf School is all girls but they also have guys class.

History

Weather

Navy Town USA. Principle port for the Pacific Fleet of US Navy. 1846. Maritime Museum of San Diego, home to HMS Surprise of “Master and Commander” fame, and Star of India 1863, the oldest active sailing ship in the world.

USS Midway operated for 47 years 1992 is the US’s longest serving Aircraft Carrier. at total of 225,000 sailors served on this ship at some point in the history of the USS Midway.

Port of San Diego is huge, and supports both Cruise lines and shipping.

Hotel del Coronado. “Hotel Del”. This lavish hotel, inspired by railroad architecture, 1958 “Some Like it Hot” was filmed here.

Mexico!

Old Town

Bazaar del Mundo in Old Town

Dining: 6400 restaurants in San Diego and surrounding cities. Point Loma Sea Food on San Diego Bay is among the most famous Seafood Restaurants in the world, and arguably one of the finest. Their smoking process and tartar sauces are secret recipes are guarded carefully.

The Marine Room in La Hoya. On the beach since 1941 offering some of the most elegant seafood dining in California.

Casa de Pico is one of the best Hispanic restaurants in the USA, offering famous, and huge, Margaritas. El Agave Tequileria offers a Tequila Museum as well as one of the finest collections of Tequila in the world. 1500 types of Tequila are here and you can sniff and sample El Agave’s spectacular selection in special Tequila glasses.

Fish Tacos: deep fried pollock in corn tortilla with lime and cabbage?. Ralph Rubio may be the guy who brought the Fish Taco to America. He opened Rubios Fresh Mexican Grille, with 150 restaurants all over the country. The very first Rubios is still open in San Diego.

Gaslamp district

East Village Neigborhood.   108 redevelopment projects are underway.  Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres is making this one of the key new hotspots for the city.

Why Myspace News will fail dramatically. It’s an ADD vs PhD thing.

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Today reports are coming in that Myspace will launch a news network. I suppose it has some potential as a giant gossip column/American Idol board, but as a true news outlet Myspace is destined to fail big time. Seems to me that Myspace users and well-informed, thoughtful and analytical news junkies don’t match up well.

Although some of the small networks like Newsvine are good, and the USA Today project has potential, existing social news networks like DIGG and Netscape are pretty bad for all but tech and quirky news because they generally fail to analyze or treat significant stories with much if any respect. The focus is on stories for those with ADD more than those with PhDs. I get more relevant information from watching a Charlie Rose interview than spending comparable time at DIGG, and the average DIGG user is much sharper than the average Myspacer.

Here comes Metaweb’s Semantic Freebase aka “lots of info”

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Metaweb‘s been working on a semantic search routine called “Freebase” that seeks to provide information from cross connected databases all over the world. NYT Article.

My understanding is that they want a simple, natural language search engine for people which will then access a huge network of data they have assembled from existing sources. Then users will be allowed to tag and add to that data, creating even more detail for the database.

Tim O’Reilly notes that Freebase:

… turns its users loose on not just adding more data items but making connections between them by filling out meta tags that categorize or otherwise connect the data items …

So, why is this better than Wikipedia or DMOZ? It’s got more data sources, will be easier to use, and hopefully won’t suffer from the many insufferable editors and participants that plague other user driven social media like DMOZ and DIGG. However I think you always need to be cautious assuming people will participate in these projects as intensively as appears to be needed here to make this grow and gain popularity. Maybe I was missing the point but I got bored with Del.icio.us after a short time and did not feel it was creating an infrastructure that would be all that helpful to me, though I certainly see how integrating tags into search will be helpful in the long run.

Isn’t everybody getting tired of working for big, for-profit projects by helping them categorize, rank, index, and detect spam? Where’s the project that lets me do whatever I want on my own terms (write, surf, learn) and then automatically integrates that activity into the indexing and distribution processes?

Thinking about the IBM Blue Brain Project … thinking …

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The IBM Blue Brain
project is working to model a human brain using computers. They expect to have a neocortical column, which they think is likely the key building block for conscious thought, modelled by 2008. If they succeed the next step will be to connect these columns and allow them to exchange information. At the point where enough information is exchanged it seems reasonable to assume the machine will probably become conscious, and that will be … cool.

Spam hyped stock study indicates they did go up in value. SEC suspends trading on 35 “spam hyped” stocks for 10 days.

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    The SEC has suspended trading in stocks that were hyped by spam campaigns. Incredibly the spam campaigns appear to have lifted the prices on some of these companies as indicated by the SEC study:http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2007/2007-34.htm

  • On Friday, Dec. 15, 2006, shares in Apparel Manufacturing Associates, Inc. (APPM) closed at $.06, with a trading volume of 3,500 shares. After a weekend spam campaign distributed emails proclaiming, “Huge news expected out on APPM, get in before the wire, We’re taking it all the way to $1.00,” trading volume on Monday, Dec. 18, 2006, hit 484,568 shares with the price spiking to over 19 cents a share. Two days later the price climbed to $.45. By Dec. 27, 2006, the price was back down to $.10 on trading volume of 65,350 shares.
  • On Dec. 19, 2006, trading in Goldmark Industries, Inc. (GDKI), closed at $.17 on trading volume of 126,286 shares. On Dec. 20, 2006, the spam campaign started, with e-mail proclaiming “GDKI IS MAKING EVERYONE BANK!,” and setting a 5-day price target of $2. By Dec. 28, 2006, spam emails boasted of the price spike that had already been achieved — “$.28 (Up 152% in 2 days!!!)” — and promised a 5-day price target of $1. That same day, GDKI closed at $.35 on a volume of more than 5 million shares. By January 9, 2007, the closing share price was back down to $.15.
  • A spam campaign in Healtheuniverse, Inc. (HLUN) stock began on Sept. 4, 2006, with emails incorporating a Healtheuniverse press release proclaiming that HLUN was “focused on being the first to commercialize stem cell applications in the $15 billion worldwide plastic surgery and cosmetic surgery market.” On Sept. 7, 2006, HLUN closed at $.12 per share on trading volume of 3,000 shares. The spam campaign accelerated, and HLUN shares spiked to $.22 per share on Sept. 11, 2006, with over 2.2 million shares trading hands. By Sept. 22, 2006, the closing price had dropped back down to $.11.