Category Archives: companies

Recycling Computer Parts

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Recycling old computers and monitors, especially the toxic stuff, is a problem that is going to get bigger and bigger.     A recent report suggests we are not handling this problem very well, and I know from my local recycling experiences this is seems to be case here in rural Oregon.    Of the 2 million *tons* of old computer parts (mostly PCs and Monitors I assume) most find their way into landfills.    Some 300,000 to 400,000 tons of parts are processed through “recycling” facilities, but the latest scandal suggests that most of this material is then send overseas where it may be contaminating other countries.

I have not followed up on this story, so it is possible that it’s like some other environmental red herrings where the economic benefits to the other countries are so great and the risks so trivial we won’t be doing anybody any favors by closing down the business, but obviously this type of situation looks ominous.

Technology and toxics is yet another topic where reason must prevail over scare tactics so we can develop clear, clean and economical solutions to complex environmental problems.  For example compact flourescent bulbs, when broken, leave trace amounts of mercury.   I learned this a few weeks *after* I swept up a broken bulb on our porch, completely oblivious to the fact this was – technically – toxic waste.   Does this mean we should not use compact flourescents which offer huge energy savings?   No, it but it suggests we need new technologies and different rules for how to handle mercury cleanup to avoid making a nation of lawbreakers.  Perhaps a Gov’t approved “mercury cleanup kit” so schools and businesses won’t need to start closing when somebody drops a bulb.

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”.

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.

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. 

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.   

Print Media Future – so dim, you won’t need to wear shades.

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Two articles today suggest how tough it’s becoming to turn a buck in the print media world.   Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine and founder of eWeek, notes in “Whither Mags”, that major print efforts require a huge capital outlay before they can even hope to be profitable, and that the current high risk associated with print publications means we probably won’t see nearly as many new big magazine efforts.   

Even more ominous is the New York Times report today showing circulation declines almost across the board for US Newspapers.  The  NYT Article “More Readers Trading Newspapers for Websites” has a great graphic showing how circulation has fallen at most newspapers since last year with an average drop of 2.4%.    Given the relatively thin profit margins at many papers and the fact many costs are fixed this does not bode well at all for the future of newspapers.   The future of news?   That is a far more complex question and I think the answer is not knowable at this time.    Blogs are picking up some of the journalistic slack, but I’m not convinced they can pick up all of it. 

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!

Open Social challenge – Guilt by Open-Social-Association ?

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Don Dodge has an excellent post today where he suggests the Open Social hype machine has spun out of control.    I don’t really agree with him because I think Open Social is a sincere effort by Google to create the truly open social networking many have been wanting for some time.    At the same time I would say there are a lot of challenges with Open Social, and it certainly was an aggressive move to kick Microsoft in the Face-book and take the winds out of the Microsoft Facebook partnership deal.    Google is remarkably good at being sincere, innovative, brilliant, and ruthless all at the same time.  In fact it’s become a hallmark of their success though they never seem to acknowledge the ruthlessness of some of their decisions – it’s kind of a collective delusion at Google that what’s good for the Google is good for the gander.   This is often true, but not always.

Back to Don’s interesting point:   What happens if a friend of yours – on whose profile you appear as a “friend”, goes over to a porn site which is using Open Social networking.   Does your smiling mug and name wind up appearing next to objectionable material?   Yikes – you could lose your job, wife, and family all in one fell Open Social swoop and you never even did anything !     

Although I can’t say be sure I’m confident this problem has been solved.  Probably via some form of content controls or content ratings for sites that are allowed to participate.  Will there be bugs in this?  Of course, as Don notes Plaxo already had a problem with their Open Social implementation, but on balance I think it’s still reasonable to see this as a social networking sea change, albeit one that will take some time to shake out.

Open Handset Alliance

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Today Google and partners announced the Open Handset Alliance, a group of phone related businesses and technology providers that are committing to develop phones and software with an “open architecture”.   

Although showcasing an actual Google Phone would have been more dramatic, this approach will likely shake up the cell phone world in a variety of ways, especially if this approach gains quick traction in the developer community.   On November 12th Google will make available a free package, the “Android SDK”  which is  a  software kit for phone application developers.   If the Google mapping applications used by the iPhone and the Treo are an indication of the kinds of new phone functionality we can expect from this Google’s expressed goal of trying to create something like a “magic phone” could actually become a reality.  Google asked kids what they’d want in a “magic phone”.    I think this was a neat way of helping adults innovate and think out of the box during the software design phase.

Google Phone, Android, and the Google Mobile OS

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More details about the Google Phone are shaking out, with a press conference expected Monday to announce the big plans.   NYT has a great profile of Andy Rubin, Google’s gPhone Meister who started Android to develop a better mobile device and was then aquired by Google.

It now appears that the mobile Operating system will be available on some phones in development by Google partners shortly, but it’ll be the middle of next year before we see an actual Google phone.    Andy Rubin’s role does appear to indicate that Google will put out it’s own hardware device though, which will be something of a full circle for the company.    Few may remember that Google’s initial business model called for major deployments of a rack mounted search server called a “Google Appliance” that would search internal enterprise networks for documents.   I’m guessing, but I think Eric Schmidt would initially have scoffed at the idea that Google would rapidly become an advertising empire more than a technology and hardware empire, and that revenues would come 99% from advertising with almost nothing from the search appliance business.

Now, with the Google Phone, they may just do it all.