Category Archives: computers

Information explosion keeps filling the bomb craters with more info!

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The infinite storage capacity of the internet combined with the searchability of that growing information resource makes the current information revolution unprecedented and perhaps even mind-altering.

In the past knowledge (and stupidity) had significant confines in the form of printed pages which would eventually be relegated to dusty old stacks in university libraries, used book stores, computer hard disks, etc.

Now, infinite storage combines with social networking and search to pour billions of items online every day and make them searchable and accessible to anybody.

It’s hard – in fact impossible – to know how this will shake out.   Is it too optimistic to hope  that as the online encyclopedia becomes almost totally comprehensive and accessible we’ll find new ways to merge people and information, and this will bring a sort of new age intellectual Renaissance where we dispense with many of the human limitations that make sweeping human progress so elusive?

Prediction: Google will buy Facebook for about 1.1 billion

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Irrational exuberance in the dot com shopping aisles?

No, it’s a chess game and Google’s winning….again.

I’m really starting to understand what seems like irrational exuberance on the part of Google and the major players. A Google aquisition of Facebook would be consistent with what Robert Scoble suggested is happening: Google is building a moat around it’s advertising business.

Steve Ballmer also suggested this notion in his recent BusinessWeek interview, ironically fretting that Google could monopolize the media business. Yikes, Steve would really run out of chairs then?

I can almost hear Ballmer to Schmidt:
“Hey Cowboy, there’s only enough room in this here internet for ONE monopoly you, you, you dirty monopolistic sonofabitch BASTARDS!”

Schmidt to Ballmer:
“HEY! DROP that chair and step AWAY from the Vista Browser!”

Google, with tons of cash to burn and a staggering market cap, has far less to lose in the high stakes internet poker game than Yahoo, Ebay, or even Microsoft. Microsoft is bigger than Google and theoretically richer, but unlike Google Microsoft has yet to figure out good ways to monetize their (improving) search services and (not improving) content services.

Ballmer’s juggling how to preserve his big ticket MS Office and Vista projects. Yahoo’s worried about plunging valuations and people leaving and the fact that a billion represents a lot more to them than it does to Google.   This is almost certainly complicating the Yahoo Facebook negotiations right now.  Ebay’s pretty fat and happy where they are. Meanwhile, Google can focus in laser-like fashion on keeping Google in the driver’s seat with it’s superb contextual advertising monetization.

The best defense is a good offense, so they are buying up properties to increase their control over the advertising space and keep those hundreds of millions of eyeballs out of the hands of MS and Yahoo.

Will this work? I say probably not for similar reasons it was stupid for Yahoo to buy Broadcast.com years ago. Video is junky and won’t monetize well. It’ll be more of an encumbrance to Google’s core competencies than an asset. But … things change, and in the meantime it’s fun to watch this high stakes game of chess unfold.

It’s a show you won’t see on YouTube.

Got a few *billion* lying around? Buy an internet company!

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Here’s a nice list of internet purchases over the past few years. I’m starting to come to grips with the fact that even if you create a great company the payout is not that spectacular unless it’s the one in a hundred deal like a YouTube, Skype, Broadcast.com, etc. As one of the VC’s down at Mashup Camp pointed out those are the exceptional exceptions to the normal rule of deals worth millions, not billions. Even in those deals only a handful of people make more than a few million.

In a 20 million deal once you’ve paid off the VCs and generously dealt with other key employees I wonder what the average “founder payout” would be?   The average VC funded buyout is about 47 million.   This sounds high, but there are many, many VC fundings that end up dying.    Thus the ‘average value’ of a VC funded company would be way below the average buyout price if I read that number correctly.
As my old pal Rick likes to say “A million dollars isn’t what it used to be!”

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

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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

Blog readers vs writers III – Cicarelli’s fleeting fame

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Even thanks to a highlight by A-list blogger Jeremy of my AOL lawsuit post yesterday it looks like my Cicarelli “test post” is by far the top interest item here at Joe Duck, and it appears this is due to high placement at MSN for the term … Cicarelli.

This little Cicarelli experiment is suggesting to me that the gap between readers and blog writers is much wider than I’d thought, and it may change my approach to blogging.   Perhaps throwing in junk topic posts every so often is a good way to shake up search prominence even for non-junk topics.   Hard to test that but it seems to be happening – presumably as people who come for Cicarelli stay to read about …. Web 2.0 or Global health and welfare?!

But alas at Technorati we see that Cirarelli is down to search term number 9. I fear her fame, and mine, shall be as fleeting as a teenager’s search preferences.

Posts that contain Cicarelli per day for the last 30 days.
Technorati Chart
Get your own chart!

AOL lawsuit over data release and, more importantly, storage of search database of intentions

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Over at TechCrunch there’s a discussion about the lawsuit against AOL for releasing search data and also challenging their right to store the search histories of AOL users. I’m surprised this took so long because Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc have been storing all of our searches for some time and probably are using that data to adjust the search experience including refinement to advertising and organic results.

It frustrates me (or I should really say it pisses the heck out of me) that 1) Search engines think they should have rights to my search info with no obligation to tell me what they do with my info and 2) there is a lack of concern in the online community about this. John Battelle has been one of the few voices pointing out that this issue is big and getting much bigger, that these privacy issues need a lot more clarification, and that search companies are sneakily dodging many key issues with search and privacy.

Contrary to many comments I read from other onliners, the Government viewing my data is low on my list of privacy concerns because I doubt they’ll choose to or be able to effectively process the information in sinister ways. However it bothers me a LOT that my search “fingerprint” is getting used without my consent, understanding, or permission in an effort by Google, Yahoo, et al to sell me things and adjust my search and internet experiences.

If they want to do that they need to let me know the process they use to do it. If they think sharing that process violates their need for commercial secrecy then…do NOT use my stuff. I never gave you permission, and you should not assume you have my permission. In fact few people even know that Google and Yahoo and MSN store every single one of their searches – Google, Yahoo, MSN cannot reasonably claim they have implied permission for the search storage identified to individual computer level when very few people are even aware they are doing it!

Kahlon UPDATE – this appears to be my error and I really apologize.

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I ranted about Kahlon but it appears they DID return my money and I’m really sorry.
Kahlon – I recommend ’em!

I got a call from Kahlon and they are confident they did credit me….checking into it now but I want to revise this post immediately because it looks like I may have been wrong…

——— earlier post ——-
Kahlon makes memory for computers and generally gets good reviews for quality and price.

Don’t backup your drive – do something more productive instead and absorb the risk.

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Guy Kawalski is being WAY too hard on himself after losing his hard drive and failing to back it up. He cites the book “Why Smart People do Dumb Things” which suggests these ridiculous reasons for things like…failing to back up your hard drive:  Hubris, Arrogance, Narcissism, Unconscious need to fail. (!)

Guy! I certainly agree you are a really smart fellow, but you REALLY had to stretch to fit those silly criteria to a hard drive. These authors obviously are spending way too much time on the new age couch and too little down at the local hardware store where you’d learn that the reason you didn’t do it was simply….laziness plus a correct assessment of negative ROI.

Backup time is not *directly* productive, it’s insurance against problems. Thus you must balance your problem against the 2,000 people who did NOT backup and did NOT have a problem. They, collectively, saved a YEAR of time assuming, very modestly, only one hour of “work” needed to backup. Collectively the “no backups” saved an entire YEAR of time. You probably only spent a few days recovering stuff. Over a lifetime of such decisions you can expect a great ROI by maintaining the level of risk you *correctly chose* when you didn’t backup the drive.

Conclusion – do NOT backup due to poor ROI. There are some things that offer good insurance value for the time/money. Backing up in the normal fashion is not one of them for most users (banks excluded).

OF COURSE critical info should be backed up, and it would sure be nice to have better backup systems that were easy and automatic. But as long as it takes over an hour and the MTBF on your hard drive is tens of thousands of hours, I say you are smart to follow the Nike antimatter mantra: “Just don’t do it”.

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