Monthly Archives: November 2007

Las Vegas – Frontier Hotel Demolition Video

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This just in from the “only in Las Vegas” department.  

The New Frontier Hotel near the north end of the Las Vegas Strip   is demolished in a huge explosion preceded by a great fireworks display that mimics the pending destruction.   I think I have this right that the Frontier was the *last remaining* big hotel casinos from the second big surge of activity on the Las Vegas Strip.   First there were the original “rat pack” hotels like the original Tropicana  and original Frontier.    These were gradually replaced by hotels like the Sands, and New Frontier  (but not the current Tropicana?   I was there less than a year ago for Bodies – The Exhibition so I’m sure it’s still standing, but the current one must be a third generation Tropicana.   These in turn have been “replaced” – though not by destruction – by the mega hotels like MGM, Caesar’s Palace, the Mirage, TI, The Venetian, The Wynn, and the Bellagio.

Genomes, Genomes! Step right up and get yaarrrr Genomes! Only $999

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It is *so cool* to be around to see some of the most sweeping changes in human history unfold right before our eyes.    www.23andme.com, the new service that will provide you with your complete genetic blueprint,  brings the potential for a sea change in the way humans will view our relationship to each other and to our own biology and chemistry.  

This company is brought to us thanks to the amazing work of the Genome Project, which fully documented a complete human DNA record.   23andme allows all of us to get a copy of our own genome – at a fraction of the cost for the first set of DNA.

 Hopefully this will also help us along the path to a better philosophical and emotional relationship to the world that spawned all of us from physical and evolutionary processes that we continue to grasp in more fascinating detail.

www.23andMe is also intriguing as it’s the brainchild of  Google founder Sergy Brin’s wife and early Google employee Anne.    One of the exciting things about Google is that the founders and early employees are not only brilliant – they are also young and enthusiastic technological visionaries who, unlike some of their predecessors like Tesla, have *tons* of money to invest in these visionary technological dreams.     

Will I be signing up for a copy?   Maybe, but even though $999 is an amazing deal it’s a lot of pizzas, so I’m going to wait for the first …. ummm … “Genome sale”.

Blodget: Microsoft implying they may be poised to buy Yahoo

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Henry Blodget’s got an interesting take on the recent UBS talk by Microsoft where they suggested a plan to capture “30-40%” of the search market over the next several years.  Although the literal reading of this does not seem to suggest a Yahoo buyout, Blodget is correct that it is simply absurd, even given the normal Microsoft bluster factor, for Microsoft to think they can capture this much of the market in a short time …. unless they buy Yahoo, which as Blodget points out gives them all this, and more, instantly.  

Given Yahoo’s modest capitalization of some 30 billion, and Yahoo’s huge online prospects (they have similar traffic to Google but with far poorer monetization of traffic), it would not be prohibitive for Microsoft to nab them.

I’ve noted before this would be an excellent move for Microsoft.  It still is.

Disclaimer: I’ve got some Yahoo shares.   Not that they are doing me much good right now.    But they’d probably jump in value if Microsoft bought them.   Did this influence me writing about this?   I don’t think so, but since money is the root of all evil you can’t really trust me on Yahoo analyses, disclaimers or not.   Also important is that nobody can predict the market swings with any forward looking reliability.   So there. 

Coffee Calendar

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[crackle-crackle-ssssss=pfffffttt!] … we interrupt the technology ramblings AGAIN to bring you EVEN MORE mildly shameless promotions of friend and family projects ….

My brother-in-law Ricardo Levin Morales is an artist in Minneapolis who has roots deep in the fertile coffee-bearing soil of Puerto Rico.   His Coffee Calendar is a vibrant, thoughtful reflection on the history and culture of coffee over the past few hundred years and would be an excellent gift for any coffee enthusiast.    My wife has been showing the calendar to some coffee shops here in Southern Oregon and the response has been great.
Check out the Coffee Calendar online and if you like it … order a few for Christmas Gifts. 

Pipo Nguyen-Duy is another artist I know with a unique and provocative vision of the world.  Check out some of Pipo’s work here:   Pipo teaches at Oberlin College in Ohio but lives here in Oregon and is the top player at our  Ashland Oregon Table Tennis club.

Oregon Retirement

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[crackle-crackle-ssssss=pfffffttt!] … we interrupt the technology ramblings to bring you mildly shameless promotions of things I have some interest in.  Also, of course, these blog posts help me understand how blogs are ranked for various phrases and words in search engines …

Oregon Retirement is an excellent project by some friends of mine who are very familiar with the Retirement landscape in Oregon and across the country.   I’m going to partner up with them as we create a national site about retirement in the USA.    We’ll be covering both as a site and as a blog many issues relating to retirement and also featuring retirement communities across the country as well as great cities in which to retire.   The site will feature an extensive database of retirement places, a social network, and a blog.  More about this in future posts. 

Google Phone is coming, the gPhone is coming!

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The Wall Street Journal has (ummm – just figured out?) that Google’s phone ambitions are substantial.  It’s not yet clear if they’ll become their own huge phone company, but I’m guessing they will and that they will do a good job solving some of the nagging problems that have been experienced by .. lets see now … 99.9% of all cell users?    I do not think this necessarily bodes well for Google financially though, and release of hardware and a national cellular network may be part of their “jumping the shark” moment.    Google has thrived as a company that could ramp up as profits rolled in.   Not so with mobile, where they will have to anticipate a lot of profit and incur huge capitalization costs in a “bet” that they can capture enough of this market to turn a big buck.     Clearly Google is already going to influence this market quite a bit by spearheading the open handset alliance and other open architecture initiatives, but it’s not clear their bottom line would have a huge positive impact even when you anticipate the revenue from advertising (currently small but sure to grow) and revenue from subscribers  (currently huge but capital and labor intensive).    

I’m torn between thinking Google clearly will fix many technical challenges with the hardware (I see even cheap phones as iPhone clones with great mapping and data and more), but Google has done a simpy *terrible* job of basic customer service over the years, feeling that if a problem solving thing can’t scale up then they won’t put much energy into that problem.    Typically this has related to advertiser problems with adwords and webmaster problems with websites.  Google has made some improvements as they hired legions of people to deal with customer service, but I cannot see Google handling millions of calls along the lines of “now, which button do I press to dial my sister in Toledo?”.  Google culture is not compatible and will become impatient with the slow, labor and capital intensive mobile landscape.   Maybe they’ll change it into something better.    Maybe they won’t.

In any case they’ll bring some great phone online and as I’ve noted before I’m very excited about that.

Email as the new Social Network

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The New York Times is summarizing some interesting plans from Google and Yahoo to turn their email systems into forms of social networking.    This idea could have a lot of potential, as the Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse points out in the article that Yahoo has a lot of information about an individual’s social relationships – for example who they email regularly – and this info is simply begging to be mined to help users navigate their increasingly complex online worlds. 

Androids bearing gifts

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 The Android SDK is out.   This would be geek speak for saying “let the cell phone games begin”, and perhaps market speak for “Palm’s Dead and Symbian is probably screwed”.

The Androids haven’t just landed though, they are bearing suitcases stuffed with cash for developers who bring neat applications to market.   This is more of the normal Google cleverness at work.   Don’t just make it free,  *pay* people to make it, and make it better than anything that has come before.    Brilliant!

Unselfish of Google?  Hardly. With their lock-grip on online advertising don’t forget who will be the big winner in a world saturated with mobile users surfing around a lot more stumbling upon super relevant geo-targeted pay per click advertising.    For those of you in the back of the class, that winner would be …. Google.  

Over at Om’s blog somebody in the comments suggested that Open Handset seemed like a solution looking for a problem, which seemed very ill informed to me.     It solves two big problems – crappy phones that will soon be like iPhones, but much cheaper, and it will bring more organization and convergence to our harried digital lifestyle by blending mobile and online worlds more effectively than the current players have managed to do.

Maybe I’m missing something but I agree with those who see the Open Handset Alliance approach as a profound sea change in mobile, and something that will shake things up quickly  (though not necessarily the prize money because  $10,000,000 is a drop in the bucket of cash at stake here – over a trillion dollars in the coming decade. )

I’m *already* anxious to get rid of my nasty Palm Treo software (and maybe the whole phone) given that it won’t even synch anymore without me losing all my data.  I envision a mobile future where my phone, PC, GIS, picture, and online needs all merge *seamlessly*, are accessible from all my devices easily and without any extra steps, and where I pay *nothing* for services in exchange for viewing ads or pay something if I want to get rid of the ads.

Open Handset is going to make that happen fast, and I wish them well. 

Rethinking Privacy

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Hey, it’s nice when you agree with the Government’s interpretation of how the future is going to shake out. 

Donald Kerr is the USA’s Dept. of Intelligence Deputy Director and noted correctly:

Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that. 
… Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,”

Wait a minute….maybe the Government is just (finally) coming around to agreeing with me as I’ve been noting for about two years now that online privacy is an oxymoron.  Hey, here’s another online privacy is a mirage post!  

We don’t (actually, cannot) know where many of our pictures and data and writing and comments and email is stored, we don’t know who misquotes us, scrapes our content, has our credit card data and medical records, reads our email, or even know if we own what we write (many reviews sites will claim they own *your* reviews). 

It’s actually *not* as big a deal as one might think.  This is the brave new world of onliners and the benefits of the information explosion easily and dramatically trump the handful of privacy pitfalls.    If this were not the case we’d have seen a *lot* more trouble by now.

CNN Reports

Fred’s Facebook Ad test

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Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson is always up to something interesting, and his current Facebook test is no exception to that rule.   He’s making a modest buy on a 1000 ads / $10 per day mostly just to see how the new Facebook targeting works for his Union Square Partners advertising.     

Unfortunately a VC firm is not likely to get much “business” from Facebook, so maybe I should fork over the pizza per day price for a test on something like motel bookings or air travel?

However I’m pretty confident the money would be wasted.  As I’ve suggested before Social Network advertising, targeted or not, is nothing like Google SERPS advertising and it’s become hard enough to leverage that to any advantage in the travel space.