Category Archives: blogs

Brightcove darkens. More companies to follow.

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Update:   Here’s the word from Brightcove 

Brightcove, a formerly “promising” video distribution startup has given up it’s lackluster battle to compete with YouTube in consumer video, though *it will remain open as a distribution point for high quality video.    (High quality video?  Isn’t that an oxymoron in modern media parlance?).

ReadWriteWeb has an unsatisfactory summary of this event, failing to note that the key challenge for anything related to online video is this:   Video-related advertising doesn’t work.    More importantly it’s not clear it will *ever* work.   I’ve always been skeptical of how video would monetize, and still think YouTube may never justify it’s capitalization except as one more brick in Google’s massive wall of online dominance.

In fact it’s time to consider this interesting possibility – pay per click advertising may be a “one hit wonder”.     I’m not prepared to make this case yet but it’s not really clear that online advertising techniques outside of PPC are working well for advertisers, and even PPC is showing signs of reaching some cost limits in term of advertiser ROI.     Success for advertising agencies (Google is number one, with half the online ad take)  should not be confused with success of the advertising itself.    Clearly PPC is working for many, but part of what is happening is that offline advertising is finally recognized for what it is, which is an “emperor without any clothes”.      I’d argue that as a general rule (ie more than 50% of the time) offline advertising campaigns have negative ROI.    Watching in the Travel industry how negative ROI is spun by ad salesfolks as positive ROI and how failure is analyzed as “success” has been a real eye opener, and I think these mathematical misperceptions are pervasive in the industry. 

Another powerful force is the impact of “free” social network marketing.  Word of mouth has always trumped paid advertising, and social networking is ushering in a new era where consumers not only control what they buy, they are working to control the ads they are exposed to and are talking a lot about products independently and without advertising intervention.    Facebook’s recent “beacon” fiasco tried to spin this backwards and has had very questionable results.

Pay per click has brought much better ROI measurement to mom and pops as well as large companies whose agencies are having increasing difficulty spinning failed “branding” campaigns as a big success.  

Brightcove is not an exception: look for more failures in the video space and elsewhere as the 2.0 bubble slowly deflates into a balance with rational business practices.

Life Sentence: Immortality

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Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel are not crackpots.  

Kurzweil, among other things, was a major pioneer in speech recognition software and electronic musical instruments, from which he made a fortune.   Kurzweil still works in the music field on SONY projects, but his passion is … immortality, and he’s working hard towards that end.

Thiel has made a king’s fortune in online projects like EBAY and PayPal, but he’s got more innovative things up his sleeve.   Like Kurzweil, Theil’s looking to help fund the holy grail of humanity – immortality.

Even a few decades ago reasonable people would have considered much of the talk about a technological singularity and massive superintelligent computers to be fanciful at best and insanity at worst, but the inexorable march of technology is bringing us to within about a decade – probably two at the most – of human quality artificial intelligence.   The processing power of the human brain will be reached soon, and unless there is something more to our human intellect than one can reasonably assume we are going to be chatting intelligently with our computers fairly soon.  After that milestone is reached it is likely that it won’t be long before “recursive self improvement” by these intelligent computers will create artificial intelligences far superior to our current human intellects.  Not to worry though, because it also appears likely that improvements in medicine, brain research, and nanotechnology will allow us to enhance our bodies and intellects such that we’ll live much longer and be much smarter.

Kurzweil, in the book “The Singularity is Near”, argues that the historical exponential growth of technology shows no signs of slowing down – in fact he’s convinced the growth is speeding up.   At the current rates of increase we’ll see the same improvements over the next decades that we have seen in the past hundred years.  For Kurzweil these improvements will lead to a utopian future of no poverty, massively improved intellects, and eventually immortality as we download our brains into machines.

Sounds cool to me Ray, I’m IN!

Conde Nast on Kurzweil

More at kurzweilai.net

OK it’s official – you can say “Graph” for Social Networking and still be cool

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Tim Berners-lee has referred to the “Global Graph” in a recent blog post over at TBL.   There have recently been several blog posts suggesting that the word ‘Graph’ is too confusing or inappropriate as a way to describe concepts surrounding social networking, but now the the big Tim BL is on board, now it’s all about the graph baby!

TechMeme still Rulez!

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[Following is this is a revision of a post I did over at WebGuild.org – the Silicon Valley social networking and tech education group] . 

For bloggers, Gabe Rivera’s TechMeme has become a top technology watering hole, ranking and finding great blog posts and tracking the discussions that form around them.

Fred Wilson, a New York Venture Capitalist and great blogger, is lamenting the good old days when he thinks TechMeme had more of the stuff he wants to read – more of the old guard tech bloggers and fewer popular newspaper articles.

Unlike Fred, I’m happy with what I see as a diversification of the early TechMeme post universe. I’ve never been comfortable with the idea that the “old guard” does all the best blogging, and TechMeme does a great job of unearthing new voices for me.    Frankly, I’d like to see even more new voices.   As I’ve noted here before we need a blogging revolution (hmmm – I guess I’m too lazy to lead it?!   I was supposed to get Scoble a list of “great new voices” and have not done that yet, though it’s on “The List”).     My criticism of TechMeme is more along the lines that by design it will become too focused on the insider rumor mill rather than the most significant technology news stories.    But I appreciate the fact that you want “most significant story” to be defined by objective processes rather than a handful of editors.  TechMeme is doing a great job of that so far.

In general I find I prefer the new fresh voices to the old ones.  Fred wrote that he likes new voices too but appears to be tired of TechMeme’s increasing number of legacy media stories about tech issues.  I agree the old schoolf folks often miss the big picture, but they are driving much of the national debate on these issues so I want their take as well as the insiders angle from well-connected bloggers.    I also appreciate that legacy media folks check their spelling, usage, and their facts – a point that should not be lost on many bloggers including this one.    (But the spell checking takes an extra 30 seconds …. I have no time for THAT inconvenience!)

Thanks to TechMeme I find a lot quickly, and I also have the site doing some of the human filtering for me because I know Gabe won’t run lousy blogs.   Are people writing specifically to TechMeme to get links there, as Fred notes?   Sure they are, but this just creates the challenge we get with all news media – a sort of echo chamber where all the insiders are talking about the same stuff.   That challenge is not really TechMeme’s fault – the solution for that is more good bloggers which will diversify the conversations even more and get people talking about things and linking to things they had not though about before.  

[groaning] after I wrote the post above, TechMeme managed to have one of it’s dumbest top stories in some time – a clear indication of how insulated our silly tech community can become from real world issues. 

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. 

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.

News Corp Advertising Network. Under the Radar?

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Facebook’s targeted advertising was criticized heavily last week by bloggers despite Facebook promises to create a better user experience through better targeting of the ads.   I’m guessing users will hardly notice the change, and advertisers will continue to be underwhelmed with the performance of social network advertising although these ads will play an increasingly important role as social networking explodes and the number of page views on social networking sites like Myspace exceeds pageviews on any other site.

I think Myspace now has the top global pageview count which is why the new ad network from News Corp (Myspace’s parent company) is an important development.    It appears they will sneak in under the radar and avoid the heavy criticism levied against Facebook even though presumably they’ll also be working hard to target the ads to the specific Myspace user profiles.

WordPress Rocks!

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I’m a huge fan of WordPress, which is used throughout the world to spread the word about topics as diverse as you can imagine.   WordPress is not only simple to use, but it’s a very robust content managment solution.   It is also free in a great testament to the online virtuousness of WordPress and it’s 18 employees including founder Matt Mullenweg, who the ripe old age of 23 has already become a key figure in the blogging world.

Here’s an interview with Matt from the Blog conference now on in Las Vegas.   Hey -why didn’t I go to this?

I had the pleasure of meeting Matt at a Mashup Camp (or was it Startup Camp?) in Silicon Valley last year.    He’s a brilliant but unassuming fellow and a great example of how insight and innovation can lead to a magnificent achievement.

A Slap in the Facebook?

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Facebook’s recent announcement of their new advertising platform – one that is better targeted to the information they have about Facebook users – has not been greeted very favorably by several bloggers who are basically suggesting this is a “sell out” of Facebookers.    Matt Ingram has a clever post noting how *annoying* this type of advertising might get and also how annoying it is that Facebook thinks you can really meet a person’s targeted information needs running ads for national brands.    Valleywag and even CNET were more blunt about this, saying that Facebook just “bastardized” it’s user base.    

Yikes – I don’t want to be a Mark Zuckerberg User Base Bastard!  

The idea that my use of Facebook means I “owe” Facebook something went out with the massive monetization of the web.  My eyeballs have value to Facebook that, as of last week’s launch of Open Social and the MS Facebook deal, appears to far exceed Facebook’s value to to me.  Unlike Matt I do like Coca Cola but I’m eventually going to go with the social network that gives me a piece of their action.  Is it greedy to ask for that? Maybe, but only about 1/1,000,000,000 as greedy as Facebook or Google. I can live with that level of greed, and I can live without Facebook, or Google, or any single online environment.  There are hundreds more where you came from, and don’t forget that you big internet players, or if I have anything to say about it you’ll become … small internet players. 

My initial reaction to the Facebook revolutionary-never-been-seen-on-earth advertising news was basically in the “so what?” category because I think this type of targeting in social network websites is overrated, and Facebook’s Coca Cola partnership is an indication I am right.   Are they seriously telling Coca Cola they are profiling for pop drinking? Youth?  Caffeine addiction?  Obesity?   That’ll allow them to filter out, what, 14 people from the  50,000,000 users of Facebook?   “Mr Coke we’ll only be running those ads on our the super targeted Coke drinking Facebooker user base of 49,999,986”. 

Hyper targeting of online advertising works extremely well when peole are searching for information about a topic, especially information related to purchasing a product.   Google’s built an empire with the profits from this approach which uses targeted pay per click advertising called Adwords (at Google search) and Adsense (at other publishing websites).    However intuition and some indications from current advertising failures suggest that Social Networking is not very fertile ground for high value advertising.    There are exceptions to this – at a recent conference I talked to a marketer of a very targeted national educational service who said Myspace offered him great ROI and a huge number of leads.   There, the demographic matchups seemed to overcome the tendency of people to simply ignore advertising while socializing.   

Those late night guys have … writers?

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Like most people I find myself unsympathetic to the plight of those poor, underpaid, overworked Hollywood writers.    Also confess I’m ignorant about the issues involved and might even wind up agreeing that the writers are the cornerstone of Hollywood content, and therefore may deserve fatter paychecks and tons of internet royalties.

But this raises the key problem.   Hollywood writing stinks. 

You are telling me it takes a legion of clever writers to put out a few hours of the late night network talk show drivel that passes as “entertainment?”.  Apparently so because they are immediately switching to reruns.  Reruns of late night talk shows.    (better stock up on barf bags before I tune in).  

Even with the most robust satellite network you can hardly escape the constant onslaught of Britney, Paris, and Lindsay party jokes mixed in with silly monologues featuring a few clever shots at Hilary or Rudy G.   This is writing?

Is this going to affect Charlie Rose or McNeil Lehrer?    Now THOSE are writers who deserve a raise.   Or how about the writers at the New York Times, Washington Post, or the legions of hard working and *really* underpaid journalists struggling under the weight of blogOspheric news mania?  THOSE writers deserve raises as well as they keep the fires of quality journalism burning even as, um… those of us who don’t have any of them journalism degrees keep on jabbering away as if we were real live journalists.

But don’t take my word for it.   Here’s a quote about the implications of this strike from the President of the Writer’s Guild East:

“Losing Stewart and Colbert is something like losing Cronkite during the Vietnam War. ”

Excuse me, but now I definitely have to go find those barf bags…. 

David Carr has a good summary of the event, and the lack of much interest.   Hey, I say give HIM a raise instead!