Category Archives: technology

Current TV filing for $100,000,000 IPO. Initial PE ratio = infinity!

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Today Current TV, with Al Gore a prominent investor, is filing for a big IPO.    But there is a problem.   They lost a lot of money “making” their 64 million in revenues last year.     Will they ever be profitable?  Global warming or not, I’m guessing they will be profitable about the same time that hell freezes over.

I still just don’t get it.  I understand why video clips are fun and a significant development online, but I don’t get those who express *economic* enthusiasm for online videos produced by … you and me.   As I’ve noted before about online video, I don’t understand why people think video sites can make money.   Youtube cost Google 1.6 billion but doesn’t make money.   Podtech had a brilliant, well executed, forward vision of the online video landscape.   They even had the ultimate forward looking blogger spokesmodel Robert Scoble (who has just moved to FastCompany.com and is right now hanging in Davos with the uber-economic-elite).  Despite this Podtech failed to deliver on the promise of monetizing quality content to the larger user base.   I had a chance to talk about this with John Furrier at CES.   John told me he’s still very bullish on video, but Podtech is going to focus more on a model where they’ll be producing company videos for corporate clients, helping them to leverage social media advantages.   We also talked about how hungry many big companies are for those who understand social media and want to leverage that power to their corporate advantage.    This, in my opinion, is where you’ll see most video and podcasast production efforts moving over the next few years.   The money is in leading corporate clients into the uncharted social media waters rather than trying to build website visitation and monetize clips.   The latter is a very dead end in my view.

So, should you invest in Current TV’s IPO?   Sure you should, right after hell freezes over.

LEDs in Contact Lenses? Cool!

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Technology continues to blur the line between our bodies and helpful gadgets.  CNET reports that the University of Washington is experimenting with embedding LEDs into contact lenses, a step in the direction of creating vision correcting contact lenses.  

In his powerful book “The Singularity is Near”, Ray Kurzweil notes how powerfully the technologies involved with Nanotechnology, Robotics, and Genetics will enhance our understanding of the way our human attributes work to create  awareness, intelligence, and consciousness. 

Blodget: US Economy is Screwed

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Market watcher Henry Blodget is not optimistic about the US Economy.   He notes that advertising spending already appears to be threatened by the slowdown, and he seems to think this will hit everybody from mainstream media companies to technology/media stocks like Google.  As the subprime mortgage timebombs keep ticking away I think it makes sense that we are in for worse conditions before we see happy days again.   In fact I expect it will be at least 5 years before housing prices return to the highs of 1-2 years back.   It may be time to hunker down and settle in for a long and cold economic winter.

CES 2008 coverage coming soon

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The Consumer Electronics Show – CES 2008 – the number one technology event in the world, is coming up fast and I’m excited to go as a first time attendee/press dude.    One of the nice tech blogger press perks is I’m getting invited to a lot of cool parties all over Las Vegas.   There is so much activity it’s hard to get a handle on it all. Like Las Vegas, there are far more things available than you could possibly do in a single day.  

The whole city of Las Vegas is basically taken over by geeks, geek wannabes, and even major pop celebrities during the several days of CES excitement.  I just heard that Kevin Costner’s rock band will be performing at one of the award shows.  Thousands of exhibitors and about 140,000 attendees make this the world’s premier tech event, where many companies will showcase and release hardware and software and hope for a good reception, because a good showing at CES can make or break a small company and even some large ones. 

Sunday’s keynote will be by Bill Gates, but I have to admit I’m more excited to attend the Monster Cable retailer awards at the Paris Las Vegas where Mary J. Blige will be performing as part of the party.   Now *that’s* a party!

In addition to my take on the event hundreds of other bloggers and CNET and all the mainstream media will have a lot of good coverage. Even MSNBC’s bombastic Donny Deutsch will be blogging the event for his “Road to CES” specials for his show “The Big Idea” 

Donny Deutsch

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Donny Deutsch has an excellent show called Donny Deutsch “The Big Idea”.  The show is on MSNBC and features interviews with Deutsch and business heavyweights like Bill Gates as well as young entrepreneurs who have had breakthrough ideas that led to successful companies.    It is a lively, intelligent look at clever folks in business like the early Donny Deutsch himself, whose innovative approaches to advertising build a small family business into a billion-dollar advertising empire. 

Here’s an article about Donny in New York Magazine.  It is an excellent piece about Donny Deustch that notes his humble beginnings helping his father the advertising executive, then rising to prominence as the top Madison Avenue advertising executive with a net worth of some $200,000,000 and a billion dollar agency empire.    His strategies have been somewhat unorthodox and he seemed to use bravado, good pay, and outrageous behavior to keep the troops producing, though the article suggests his partners were not happy with their relatively low stakes after the sale of his advertising empire that made Donny Deutsch a megamillionaire.

Donny Deutsch is now hosting a series of shows leading up to CES Las Vegas featuring technology people and ideas.

I’m noticing the poor search engine tuning done for his website here: http://www.cnbc.com/id/22206030/site/14081545/ and his new CES blog here: 

http://www.cnbc.com/id/22274025/site/14081545/ 

So, wouldn’t it be fun to see if I can get ranked in the top spots for the term ” Donny Deutsch ” over the next couple of weeks heading into CES?   Sure it would Mr. Donny Deutsch!     This is my target Deutsch post (not to be confused with the German Postal Empire Deutsche Post).   This page should legitimately rank fairly high since I’m providing a lot of information about Donny Deutsch, but in theory should probably rank *below* Donny’s own blog and TV show website.   Let’s see how Google does with this task given MSNBCs lack of search optimizing for their man, Donny Deutsch.

Hey, here’s a Wikipedia Article about Deutsch and his company, Deutsch Inc.

So, this is another in my series of search engine experiments Mr. Donny Deutsch.  Hope to see you at CES!

Are you biased?

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My friend Marvin dropped in today on his way down to California and we were discussing artificial intelligence.    Like most of my programming pals he’s much more skeptical than I am about how soon we’ll have conscious computing, but they are also far more knowlegeable about the difficulty of programming complex routines, let alone consciousness.    Of course, they are not nearly as pretty as Google uber-Engineer Marissa Mayer who estimated 10-15 years, so I’m going with her estimate.  

I’m still trying to decide if programmers are viewing things too narrowly by generally assuming that the circumstances required for conscious thought are so very profoundly complex that engineering for them will be nearly impossible.   I prefer the idea that simply having brain-equivalent speedy and massive computational power is going to push machines very close to consciousness after (relatively) simple routines are developed that will create conversations within those systems.  

When I noted that many in the AI community are now wildly optimistic about the prospects for strong AI within 10-20 years, Marvin correctly noted that people in the AI community were predicting strong AI a *long* time ago.   This led to the interesting question of “prediction bias”.    How often in history are predictions  reasonably accurate, and how do the time estimates on those accurate predictions hold up?   This would be a fun mini-research project to do sometime though obviously it would itself be subject to a lot of bias depending on how you picked the criteria, the predictors, and the predictions.

Along those bias lines this great Wikipedia article popped up showing a huge number of cognitive biases.    All of us should take a look at these and reflect on how often we fall into these irrational traps.

Will work for free WIFI: The New Journalism?

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Scott Karp has a nice post today about the intersection of journalism and blogging.    I’m glad he notes the weakness of the argument that bloggers cannot be journalists.   Suggesting mainstream journalism is on firm and high ground is especially absurd in this world where yellow journalism generally trumps quality, superficial treatments cripple even the few fine writers at major newspapers, and Fox and CNN TV news parade AnchorModels chosen primarily for looks (women) or bombastic nonsense (men) or both (Anne Coulter).

I’d suggest that a key challenge to conventional journalism is not so much one of quality writing as it is *scalability*. Bloggers work for nothing or peanuts, and there are many more coming in the wings.  Most blogs will continue to suck, but some will be great and this number will increase as more writers get comfortable with the medium.

It will be increasingly difficult for publishers – even cutting edge, well funded ones like Nick at Gawker who is hiring a “journalist” –  to justify paying much for content. I don’t think Gawker’s decision to hire a legacy media journalist reflects a new trend, rather it reflects a fairly atypical reversion to old trends during this transition period.   

Contrast Gawker’s success with the demise of Blognation, which was not even paying people.  Would they have succeeded with a bunch of “real” journalists? No, of course not.    Good writing is cheap and getting cheaper.   That’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s certainly an inevitable thing.

Oink

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Nick Carr over at Rough Type has one of the cleverest techno posts written in some time as he addresses the  little brouhaha over enterprise vs consumer software.    In fact I’d give him the tech blogging Pulitzer Prize simply for this turn of phrase:

Rubberneckers leaping gleefully onto the Techmeme pig pile

More to the point he’s talking about the silliness of the technobabbling echo chamber as well as the silliness of enterprise software folks making mostly foolish distinctions between types of software.   

There is an alarming trend among mostly “old school” developers and programmers and analysts to make a variety of questionable assumptions about technology that are based on failing to recognize how different things have become.  Even new school folks routinely overbuild websites and application environments simply becausae they’ve been taught that is the way you do technology. Worst is the idea that complex software is needed to run complex companies.   WRONG!    It is true that complex software is almost always used by big companies, but this is primarily a function of legacy issues (ie they started their systems back in the day when there were NO simple solutions) and IT turf issues (e.g pretend you are the head of Exxon’s IT division and you are asking for a BIG raise and more options.   Are you more likely to get the promotion by proposing a shift to Google documents across much of the corporate enterprise, or by proposing a highly customized SAP solution only you understand?   Also, it takes a kind of innovative thinking that I think is sometimes missing from the school of old timers.

Setup Flickr to Blog in 30 seconds or less

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Flickr remains my favorite “Web 2.0” thingie and I think it is one of the best applications ever done for a computer.   I’m always thrilled with the simplicity of making simple changes to bring dramatic results.  

For example you can post your flickr pictures to your blog, which is great.    Also great is that the setup routine for doing this is as simple as you can get.    I just added photo capabilities to the new blog I’m writing for the big Travel and History site we are creating from two previous efforts at Online Highways and US History:     blog.u-s-history.com 

This took me about 30 seconds as follows:

1) Log in to Flickr Account

2) Go to “Extend Flickr” section on your Flickr Accounts page
3) Add blog
4) Pick from the list they’ll have of your blogger blogs if you’ve already signed one up.   

done

If you are signing up a blog for the first time you’ll need to give some access permission, but that is not very complicated.

The cool think is that then you can go to flickr and click “blog this” and post pictures at the blog quickly and easily.

And, just like the song says:   If a picture paints a thousand words, then why bother writing 1000 words, which takes a lot more time!

ATT – what are you flinging again?

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Techdirt notes that the USA Today title “ATT Flings cellphone network wide open” is quite a bit of hype given that it’s been open for 3 years.     Although the article itself notes that this is really nothing big and new, it is an indication that many of the wars are now faught on the marketing battlefields and not the technological ones. 

Also yet another sign that titles to grab attention are becoming increasingly misleading, especially in the blog world.   Even the title of this post is – frankly – somewhat misleading, as was my recent suggestion about Andrew Seybold’s competence during a recent PBS interview, for which he just took me to task in his newsletter.  

But hey I’m in elite company – he’s also pissed at Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt for suggesting that physical limitations on the wireless spectrum won’t post insurmountable challenges to the coming internet convergence.