Author Archives: JoeDuck

Unknown's avatar

About JoeDuck

Internet Travel Guy, Father of 2, small town Oregon life. BS Botany from UW Madison Wisconsin, MS Social Sciences from Southern Oregon. Top interests outside of my family's well being are: Internet Technology, Online Travel, Globalization, China, Table Tennis, Real Estate, The Singularity.

Yahoo Hack Day – you should have been there! I should have been there!

Posted on by
Reply

Yahoo’s Hack Day was so successful I have yet to read anything but positive reports – in fact most are downright glowing with enthusiasm for this mashup fest down at the Yahoo mother ship in Sunnyvale. I wish I could trade my lackluster experience at this year’s Google Party for a back-in-time ticket to Yahoo’s Hack Day.

Gordon over at GetLucky.net, a Yahoo employee, provides what seems to me several key insights about Hack day, but more imporantly about why Yahoo, not Google, is the company to watch.

Of course, until Yahoo Panama gets their *ASS IN GEAR* with a high quality contextual advertising paradigm, Wall street will continue to think that they suck ….

Gordon on Hack Day:
… the stuff that we do better than our competitors may have a chance to shine in the spotlight, in front of the audience that matters most. Much of the mindshare that Google has captured through applications like the GMaps API, etc. has been held because of the nature of convenience. Once a coder builds an application on top of a specific interface, switching to another API requires some real motivation…

emphasis belongs to me, the insights belong to Gordon though I’ve written about this stuff several times as well. Yahoo could wind up “owning” 2.0., which is a cool type of ownership where the big guy facilitates millions of long tail, little guy developments and transactions and publishing enterprises. The big guy shares *most* of the revenue with the little guys but the volume creates huge wealth for the big companies and modest wealth for the smaller ones. Users are rewarded with better content, rich interactive experiences, noninvasive advertising, and encyclopedic information. When 2.0 is done right everybody plays, everybody wins.

Playstation III performance problems?

Posted on by
3

Recent reports indicate that the Playstation III may not be ready for prime time.  At a Tokyo game show testers revealed that game play was sometimes erratic with reboots needed.  SONY stock dropped on this news.

For parents having trouble sorting through all this my son has a Video Game Summary he did for me here.

Is that blog tag spam in your “Rochesters Big and Tall” pants or are you just happy to see me?

Posted on by
Reply

Technorat’s top tags today are very conspicuous.    Look at all the references to Rochester’s Big and Tall”, a retailer serving…..big and tall guys.   Looks like some form of blog spamming or odd tag SEO going on.   

I’m still getting a lot of milage from my test Cicarelli post of last week even though she’s dropped to 12th place. 

And will somebody PLEASE blog about the winners of the Yahoo Hack Day?!   Wait…here it is at Techcrunch That event was so great…..nobody had time to blog it thoroughly except to link to the very clever Beck Video.     Beck and his band – themselves mashup mavens and sometime hackers – gave a killer concert at the Yahoo event that will probably go down as one of the best gatherings of the year.  

Top Searches

  1. Jonny
  2. Pinky
  3. Foley
  4. Mark Foley
  5. Google
  6. So You Call Thi…
  7. Hack Day
  8. Hackday
  9. Teacher
  10. Netvibes
  11. Cicarelli
  12. Video
  13. Yahoo Hack Day
  14. Naomi
  15. Podcast Expo

Top Tags

  1. Bush
  2. rochester big and tall
  3. Republicans
  4. office chair big and tall
  5. rochesters big and tall
  6. web-20
  7. Iraq
  8. youtube
  9. wordpress
  10. Terrorism
  11. man belt big and tall
  12. big and tall merino wool sweater
  13. big and tall clothes for men
  14. War
  15. Comedy

Expedia’s Best Price Guarantee, like a grenade, just needs to be …. close.

Posted on by
3

Generally I like price guarantees which tell you that the company is 1) fairly confident they are usually offering the best pricing on stuff and 2) allow you to relax a bit and book while still surfing around for a better trip.

But Expedia’s “simple” and “Best price” guarantee did make me laugh a bit when I noted in the fine print that the Expedia airline ticket must be at least $6 more to qualify.  Not  a big deal of money (though with a family trip it’s enough to care about), yet somehow the notion of “best price” that is not the “best price” smacks of the kind of bogus pitch everybody is tired of hearing.

Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody had a good faith best price deal with no fine print where “best price” meant simply the best price for a comparable (rather than perfectly, exactly, unlikely-to-be-found-in-exact-same-form thing?

Kawasaki on new trends in marketing

Posted on by
Reply

Here is a nice summary of insights from Guy Kawasaki, clever marketing guru, about what young people are doing online and on phone.    Supports the ideas that the future is highly mobile and must be highly “permission based” in it’s marketing.

Won’t it be interesting if the new age of marketing becomes a lot like 1800 style marketing?   There, you’d go to the hardware store or the grocery and ask the retailer to hand you things.    In the new age this is becoming a trip to trusted niche sites (or Costco.com and Wal-Mart?) for information and shopping and then asking the computer to fetch stuff for you and add to your electronic shopping cart.

Yahoo Hack Day is Rocking!

Posted on by
1

Yahoo Hack Day is already shaping up to be a fantastic event. I really hate to miss this developer campout down in Sunnyvale that is featuring hands-on developer classes today, a yet-to-be-named big time entertainer tonight, and a hack contest tomorrow.   Folks are camping at the heavily Wi-Fi armed Yahoo campus in rooms and the lawn.   Cool.

Some resources for those of us who missed this are over at Jeremy’s blog.

Yahoo! …. I finally bought the company….well…I bought a little piece of Yahoo!.

Posted on by
4

I’ve been watching Yahoo the company and Yahoo the stock for over a year, and finally put my money where my mouth is and picked up 600 shares at 25.31

I feel the stock is really undervalued due to what should soon be a huge wash of new cash that Yahoo will get next spring from the launch of the publisher network to a wider audience.    This is Yahoo’s version of Google’s adsense which nets Google about 43% of their revenues and growing.     This is the long tail money and I think the smart money says the long tail money will eventually be the big money.   In the old days I would have thought “Wall Streeters MUST understand this process and thus the price MUST already reflect this”, but after the internet stock meltdown it was clear that Wall Street did not understand many aspects of the online economy and didn’t care about them much anyway.

Also important to my decision was that Yahoo’s been doing the best 2.0 stuff for some time.    For example today’s Yahoo Hack Day, a special event open to developers from all over, is a brilliant example of how Yahoo! wants to take back their old reputation as the coolest company and may just do it.

They deserve to be treated much better, both by online commenters and by Wall Street, because Yahoo!, far more than Google or MSN, is coming up with both simple and complex developer tools to facilitate the new internet, which is shaping up to be a monstrous, layered, interconnected, cross referenced and community-fied ocean of information where distinctions between websites and even businesses are broken down along the lines of what people need to learn and need to do.    That’s cool.

Action Buy
Symbol YHOO
Description YAHOO INC
Quantity 600
Order Type Market