Plenty Of Fish: Online Dating King

AdSense Millionaire, alternate name for this blog post

PlentyOfFish.com
Markus Frind, CEO of Plenty Of Fish, Blog

How I Started A Dating Empire by Markus Frind By the end of March my site went viral and started growing 2 to 5% a day and it was off to the races from there...... made a whole $5.63 cents my first month, but that was more then enough for me to realize that I wouldn't go broke running the site and I could make a business out of this with enough traffic. ...... I refused to accept defeat of any kind, and I constantly forced myself to test new things. ...... When 2004 rolled around and word of mouth REALLY kicked in and as they say the rest is history. .... I look back now at how ill prepared I was, I didn't know anything about SEO, Advertising, community and I didn't even know what Venture Capital was. Just goes to show you anyone can do anything.

Plenty Of Fish is my idea of a budding Web 5.0 company. (Defining Web 4.0) The fact that it does not have sexy looking 2.0 software, just something barebones, makes it a bigger candidate for 5.0. I am a fan of the site. I am a user. Finding dates is not easy, online or off. Finding The Person is harder. Creating a relationship is not something an online dating site can do for you. But a site like Plenty Of Fish takes some of the unnecessary frills away. Who you like might not like you, who likes you you might not like. In online dating that can be quite painless. Next. Overtures are plentiful. Rejections come by the truckload. You might get an occasional date, a first date but no second date, an email conversations, a chat, no phone number. Race and class issues do come into play, just like offline. Chemistry and communication issues come into play. And ultimately online dating is not really offline. You are trying to get an offline date. Just that you are trying to get that online. But the stats look good. 800,000 relationships per year. That is good.

The business model is fascinating. I have long dreamed of a free online dating site, a Craig's List style site. And this is it. I am excited aboot Plenty Of Fish the way I am excited about Facebook, the way I am excited about Gmail and Blogger and YouTube.

Markus Frind, you got something going on.



The site could just grow and grow and grow. It could keep performing the same basic functions and just keep adding more and more people all over the world. And it could also keep improving its basic algorithms. The profiles you browse through helps the site determine what kind of profiles to show you.

How PlentyOfFish Conquered Online Dating Inc. serving up 1.6 billion webpages each month. ..... Plenty of Fish is on track to book revenue of $10 million for 2008, with profit margins in excess of 50 percent. Then, six minutes and 38 seconds after beginning his workday, Frind closes his Web browser and announces, "All done." ...... unknown and undistinguished. He hasn't gone to MIT, Stanford, or any other four-year college for that matter ....... bouncing, aimlessly, from job to job, but he is secretly ambitious. He builds his company by himself and from his apartment. ....... Frind takes it easy, working no more than 20 hours a week during the busiest times and usually no more than 10. Five years later, he is running one of the largest websites on the planet and paying himself more than $5 million a year. ........ Quiet, soft-featured, and ordinary looking, he is the kind of person who can get lost in a roomful of people ......... introverted, smart, and a little awkward. "Markus is one of those engineers who is just more comfortable sitting in front of a computer than he is talking to someone face to face" ......... Frind can be disarmingly frank, delivering vitriolic quips with a self-assured cheerfulness that feels almost mean. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), he says, is "a complete joke," Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is "a cult," and Match is "dying." ........ the 23 hours a day in which he doesn't work ........ most comfortable with the world at arm's length. "He never raises his voice," Kanciar says later. "And he doesn't like conflict." ......... prefers to remain a silent observer of others ...... seems perpetually lost in thought ......... In a way, he's thinking about the company all the time. ........ a lonely childhood ....... graduating from a technical school in 1999 with a two-year degree in computer programming ...... got a job at an online shopping mall. Then, the dot-com bubble burst, and he spent the next two years bouncing from failed start-up to failing start-up. ........ For most of 2002, he was unemployed. ....... When he did have work, it felt like torture. His fellow engineers seemed to be writing deliberately inscrutable code in order to protect their jobs. ............ cleaning up other people's messes taught Frind how to quickly simplify complex code. In his spare time, he started working on a piece of software that was designed to find prime numbers in arithmetic progression. ......... He finished the hobby project in 2002, and, two years later, his program discovered a string of 23 prime numbers, the longest ever. (Frind's record has since been surpassed, but not before it was cited by UCLA mathematician and Fields Medal winner Terence Tao.) ......... would devote a couple of weeks to mastering Microsoft's new tool for building websites, ASP.net, and he would do it by building the hardest kind of website he could think of. .......... Online dating was an inspired choice. Not only does the act of building an intricate web of electronic winks, smiles, and nudges require significant programming skills ...... Hot or Not was acquired for $20 million in cash ......... Working a few hours an evening for two weeks, Frind built a crude dating site, which he named Plenty of Fish. It was desperately simple -- just an unadorned list of plain-text personals ads. But it promised something that no big dating company offered: free. ........... Rather than try to compete directly with Match, the industry leader, he created a website that cost almost nothing to run ......... Even better, he had created a perfect place for paid dating sites to spend their huge advertising budgets. ........ a picture of determination and naiveté. ........ From March to November 2003, his site expanded from 40 members to 10,000. Frind used his home computer as a Web server -- an unusual but cost-effective choice -- and spent his time trying to game Google with the tricks he picked up on the forums. In July, Google introduced a free tool called AdSense, which allowed small companies to automatically sell advertisements and display them on their websites. Frind made just $5 in his first month, but by the end of the year, he was making more than $3,300 a month .......... Frind has few friends in business, no mentors, and no investors. ............. Websites that venture capitalists would have spent tens of millions of dollars building in 1998 can now be started with tens of dollars. ............. has stayed simple, cheap, and lean even as his revenue and profits have grown ....... Plenty of Fish is a designer's nightmare; at once minimalist and inelegant ........ "I don't listen to the users," he says. "The people who suggest things are the vocal minority who have stupid ideas that only apply to their little niches." ........... When a member starts browsing through profiles, the site records his or her preferences and then narrows down its 10 million users to a more manageable group of potential mates. ......... the site creates 800,000 successful relationships a year. .......... almost no staff ....... been able to run a massive database with almost no computer hardware ......... the social news site Digg generates about 250 million page views each month, or roughly one-sixth of Plenty of Fish's monthly traffic, and employs 80 people. Most websites as busy as Frind's use hundreds of servers. Frind has just eight. ............ comes from writing efficient code ....... Frind approaches business in much the same way. "It's a strategy game," he says. "You're trying to take over the world, one country at a time." .......... "I spent every waking minute when I wasn't at my day job reading, studying, and learning. ....... returned to one of his old Internet hangouts, a forum called WebmasterWorld, and posted a brief how-to guide entitled "How I Made a Million in Three Months." It contained a blueprint for the success of Plenty of Fish: Pick a market in which the competition charges money for its service, build a lean operation with a "dead simple" free website, and pay for it using Google AdSense. ............ By 2006, Plenty of Fish was serving 200 million pages each month ....... $10,000 a day through AdSense ........ "He came out of nowhere, and he didn't seem to give a shit" ............ the stunt worked. Frind's site was the talk of the blogosphere, driving gobs of new users to the site. Plenty of Fish's growth accelerated dramatically, hitting one billion page views a month by 2007. .......... He still hadn't figured out how to get e-mail on his cell phone. ........ a guy who works an hour a day, who doesn't travel much, and who doesn't have any hobbies beyond war games .......... an aversion to doing harm can be more valuable than an overeagerness for self-improvement.

How I started A Dating Empire « The Paradigm Shift
Looking To Acquire I’m letting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues slip through my fingers every year by sending people to competitors sites. ..... paid sites are currently consolidating and the growth for the industry is flat ...... I think there is a lot of opportunity right now and a opening to create a major paid site right now.

Special Report: Angel Investing 2009

Defining Web 4.0

Web 1.0

That was/is the static webpage. They are very much around. Offline you had posters and pamphlets. Online you had webpages. Same thing, different medium. (Google Books: Primitive)

Web 2.0

Facebook is the best example of a Web 2.0 application in many ways. (The Unfacebook) It is still a rectangle on a screen like Web 1.0, but it is dynamic, the content constantly changing, there are people involved, large numbers of people. The webpage is now dynamic. Google is a 2.0 company, (Google: Poised To Be The Number One Software Company In The World) but it also has other elements. (Search: Much Is Lacking, The Next Search Engine) Email is a 2.0 application. (Email, Search, News)

Web 3.0

Web 2.0 is dynamic, but it is still 2D. Web 3.0 is 3D. Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 focus on the software. Web 3.0 takes a holistic approach and tackles connectivity, hardware, and just enough software to get you online. Web 3.0 is only complete when all of humanity is online. (Apple's Mobile Space: Sizzling, Dell, HP, Apple, Google And Languages, Into the Nitty Gritty Of WiMax, Not Hardware, Not Software, But Connectivity)

What I have is a 3.0 company. (IC)

A Web 3.0 Manifesto



Web 4.0

This is the most amorphous part right now in this system of classification, but I am going to call it Next Generation Software. I have no idea as to its shape, form or function. Massive collaboration software, massive input software. Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 software, at the end of the day, treated you like individuals. Web 4.0 will be able to handle masses of people, both in creation and consumption.



Web 5.0



Web 5.0 is face time. This is where the circle becomes full. Because, face it, the internet is, at the end of the day, a communication tool. We try so hard to get people communicating, talking. We try to say, it is okay you are not in each other's immediate presence, you can still talk. That begs the question. What when people are in immediate presence? Starbucks repackaged coffee. You could accuse me of repackaging hello. But my point is Web 5.0 is supreme. Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web 4.0, they are all supposed to lead to Web 5.0. And Web 5.0 is not about technology at all. It is about basic human interaction. It is about meeting in person. Web 5.0 is the ultimate interactive experience. But the Web 5.0 that will sit on top of Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 will be qualitatively different, very much so. Web 5.0 is not an argument against Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. MeetUp is a rudimentary 5.0 company. It also has 2.0 elements. New York City is the ultimate Web 5.0 destination. This is the Amazon forest of humanity. People from every town on earth live here. That is why I have suggested it is poised to become the Silicon City. There is no better place on earth for 5.0, that's why. (Social Networking: Where The Internet Comes Down From The Clouds)

Web 5.0: Face Time

I Get Twitter

Enterprise 2.0 Adam Carson mentioned Confused Of Calcutta a long time ago as someone really passionate about Web 2.0. I took note. Recently I had an email conversation with Confused. We went back and forth. It was nice. Somewhere along the way I realized he is huge on Twitter. As in, he tweets.

Then I read up on him. I came across this list where Google CEO Eric Schmidt is number six and Confused is number 11. I was impressed. He is a CIO with British Telecom which has a presence in over 173 countries.



Somewhere along the way I decided to tweet as well. Open an account, and let it hang. I had no plans to be active. This despite Confused's very recent post where he is all gaga about Twitter.

Yesterday I spent some time talking about how I viewed Twitter now
Thinking about Twitter: a submarine in the ocean of the Web Finding the sea of green: More on Twitter is My Submarine

I had misconceptions. I feared Twitter is about creating an online Leoned Breznev diary towards the end of that guy's life. He would put down mundane details. I ate. I had coffee. I went to sleep. I ate. I drank coffee. Sleep came upon me. I had lunch.

It also felt like a basketball pro is being asked to go to college basketball. As an avid blogger, I thought in terms of full page posts. A phrase or two? That is lowball, I thought. At my blogs I discuss ideas and concepts. Big minds discuss ideas. Twitters must talk about themselves. I ate. I had coffee.

And I am a laptop guy. I spend so much time online, when I am offline, I like to be offline, take in the city, the people, the street scenes, the subway filth. Twitter looked like a mobile concept. You can't experience the internet on a handheld, the way the internet is meant to be experienced.

So I admired Confused more than ever, and aren't young people supposed to get tech fashion first? I am in my mid 30s. Confused is in the mid 50s. I was not enamored about getting fashion sense from Confused.



Then one day I quietly signed on. It will not hurt to get an account. It does not have to stay active. Noone will notice. My second post said I did not think I was so newsworthy as to be twitting. That was my Declaration Of Independence.

But very soon I got it. I think it was only yesterday that I started, and I am already an addict. You tweet. You blog. You email. You search. You face the book. Tweet is fundamental to the internet experience.

My first Direct Message was to Confused. You got me on Twitter, I said. I had not said thank you, I had not said I was excited. I might as well have meant you added to my chores. Welcome, says Confused, in the tone of an evangelist. As far as he was concerned, there were no negative connotations to Twitter. It was all good.

I joined Twitter. Not long after Demi Moore joined Twitter. We both joined the same day. But for some reason she has way many more followers than do I. I am going to think she is a little bit more better looking. Or maybe a lot better looking.

It is nothing to do with star quality. I am Barackface. I have a thing or two going on for me. Hey.

And then the discoveries began. Wait a minute, I might have signed on not yesterday, but the day before. Anyways, it was the same day as Demi. Kevin Rose, the second most followed person on Twitter, brought Demi to my attention. Kevin and I are close like that. That is the Twitter way.

There are so many good reasons to tweet. You blog, you tweet. You send out emails. You add friends and updates on Facebook. It is basic.

If I can tweet once or twice a day, and if I can read a few news items on Google Reader most every day, I am an active blogger without any new blog posts at my new number one blog: Tech N Biz. I have not become lazy as a blogger, I have gone high tech. This way all the personal talk gets zapped by Twitter, all my urge to read the news gets zapped by Google Reader. And so the blog posts are posts that I just have to go ahead with, not chores, as in, oh no, I have not blogged in a while, my blog is going stale, let me go blog.

Then yesterday I learned to hit reply and join conversations. Suddenly I feel like an insider.

I have rediscovered pals like Scott and Upendra from the New York tech scene.

Democracy For Nepal used to be my primary blog. Then Barackface became my primary blog. Now I am trying to get Tech N Biz to become my primary blog. Twitter and Google Reader have been a huge help in bringing about that shift. Confused Of Calcutta got me on Twitter, Enterprise 2.0 got me on Google Reader. Enterprise 2.0 got me to Confused Of Calcutta. Confused Of Calcutta got me on Twitter where I met Demi. Demi Moore. And also the Digg guy Kevin Rose. But then Confused has a star quality of his own. I mean, to be on that list.

Talk about star quality, with his goatee, I think Confused looks like a rock star.

Indra Nooyi: Power Woman

She is a woman, she is also Indian. That is a double whammy, as far as I am concerned.

She has been on the list for a few years now, but now she is number one. That is amazing.



I thought the least I could do to celebrate was put out a blog post. How about that?

She is an inspiration. I have heard her name before, but today is the first time I am reading up on her.

In The News

50 Most Powerful Women in Business Fortune .... 1 Indra Nooyi PepsiCo

Indra Nooyi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Indra Nooyi - The 2008 TIME 100 - TIME sharp strategic mind, tremendous market insight ....... PepsiCo's international business grew 22% last year, and she is showing the way for American companies trying to do well overseas. (These days, that's everybody.) Indra, 52, was also way ahead of her competitors in moving the company toward healthier products. ....... She welcomes hearing from people who disagree with her, but she is single-minded about following the path she believes is best for her company and its shareholders.

50 Most Powerful Women in Business 2006: Indra Nooyi | FORTUNE
#5 Indra K. Nooyi - Forbes.com
America's Best Leaders: Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo CEO - US News and ...
Indra Nooyi's Graduation Remarks
Two Lessons From Indra Nooyi's Success - Sepia Mutiny you can get ahead in the American corporate environment without sacrificing who you are culturally. ....... the difficulty some women face in dating and/or marrying men who are less powerful or successful than they are ........ Have you had your snack? Ok, go play. Momma has to go acquire a multinational or two and pacify the Indian media regarding the recent pesticide allegations. ...... you don’t have to sell yourself out and tell everyone your name is “Bob” if it’s really Balwinder ...... getting her first job in the U.S. after completing her Master’s at Yale ....... determined girl, who while studying in Connecticut, worked as a receptionist from midnight to sunrise to earn money and struggled to put together US$50 to buy herself a western suit for her first job interview out of Yale ....... She lives with her husband and two daughters in Fairfax county, Connecticut ..... Nooyi attends PepsiCo board meetings in a sari ..... There’s no reason to be defensive about being a vegetarian, or preferring mango lassi to martinis, or cricket to baseball… and on and on.
Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo CEO on Mentors, Meritocracy and Maternity ... some work/life balance issues and the hard realities women face when they reduce time spent in the office ....... “If women don’t help other women then who will?” asked Indra
Duke varsity to honour Indra Nooyi, Oprah Winfrey

Yahoo: The Original Dot Com

Before there was Google, there was Yahoo. Before there was MSN, there was Yahoo. The starry-eyed Google founders did make a serious attempt to sell off to Yahoo back in the days. But Yahoo was not interested. Yahoo already had a search box, and search was thought of only one of many things netizens wish to do. The action was elsewhere. Search was nowhere close to a central function that it is thought of today. Back then AltaVista was the search king, and Yahoo was good enough.

A few years after Google tried to get sold off to Yahoo, Sergei Brin would go on dates, and he noticed there were not too many second dates. I don't know if this story is true, but Larry Page said it somewhere. This was in 2000 when dot coms were crashing left and right, especially dot coms that did not have any revenue whatsoever, like Google at the time.

Bill Gates did make an attempt to buy Google. Buy it "at any price," he ordered his lieutenants. This was perhaps a year or two before they went public, or maybe even right after. This time around the Google founders knew better than to sell.

But search just kept getting bigger and bigger. Google became the sexy company, always in news. In a scramble Microsoft made an attempt to buy Yahoo. What actually happened after that offer was made is murky story. Jerry Yang has been hammered with the story that he refused an offer he should not have refused, especially with where Yahoo stands today in the market. Jerry says he did mean to take it, but when he went for it, Microsoft was no longer interested. Then they came back saying they just want Yahoo's search business. Yahoo minus its search would not be a Yahoo no more. A portal like Yahoo without a search engine?

Google is search king. The competition is not arithmetic where if MSN search and Yahoo search were to get together they would eat away Google's market share. Challening Google search is an innovation challenge. But at this point Google's search business is so capital intensive, it is hard to imagine a startup that will come at it from behind.

Google might not get challenged by another search startup, more likely it will get challenged by a startup that finds another central internet application. Facebook comes to mind. Facebook is not search, it is not email, it is not shopping, it is a new application. I am not saying Facebook will grow bigger than Google. Search will stay a central application online. And I expect Google to keep innovating in that search space.



The next sexy company might not even be a dot com. It might not be a 2D company, a rectangle on a screen. Maybe all the key internet applications have already been found. Now you can just keep making it better and better and better. But perhaps there is no fundamental discovery to be made. I'd love to be proven wrong.

Jerry's two big career mistakes. He should have bought Google. He should have sold off to Microsoft. Ha.

In The News

Microsoft and Yahoo: Deal or no deal? Fortune

Laptop Modem Demand to Drive Early WiMAX Device Shipments Teleclick.ca As Mobile WiMAX devices begin to hit the market, the bulk of early product shipments will be external USB modems and WiMAX cards built into portable computers ....... In-Stat expects annual WiMAX device shipments to break the 10 million mark in 2010
WiMAX: The next-gen net connectivity Merinews higher quality and almost no wiring. WiMAX has already found it space in Indian market ans is growing rapidly. ..... Presently, WiMAX technology is being used by Tata Communications Internet Services Ltd ( TCISL ) at several Metro cities to its broadband customers. Customers also have enthusiastic response towards its performance as they are not facing problem of interruption in service due to cable cut/damage problem.
When a Rock Star CEO Leaves the Stage Washington Post Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 but was ousted in a power struggle in 1985. ..... In late 1997, Jobs returned. ...... hitting nearly $200 per share in December 2007, from about $3 in 1997, adjusted for splits and dividends
Quantum, Runcom Technologies Team to Develop Low Cost WiMAX Handsets TMCnet

Quantum Telecom has entered into an exclusive agreement with Runcom Technologies for the development, manufacturing and selling of ultra low cost (ULC) WiMAX (News - Alert) fixed and mobile handsets. ....... Recently, Runcom signed a framework agreement with ChinaTel for WiMAX deployment in 29 major cities across China, covering area of 300 million people.

Sprint’s WiMAX Deployments – Uphill Battle Gerson Lehrman Group, New York
Possible DTV Delay Roils Mobile Operators PC World Faster wireless broadband in the U.S. may be held hostage to the already lengthy transition to digital TV if the deadline for shutting down analog broadcasts is pushed back ........ TV stations are required to move all their programming to digital channels after Feb. 17 as part of a process in which valuable frequencies in the 700MHz band will be turned over to mobile broadband providers. ....... The nation's two biggest mobile operators, Verizon Wireless and AT&T, both plan to use 700MHz spectrum for the next generation of mobile broadband, based on LTE (Long-Term Evolution) technology. ...... AT&T is using HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), which can deliver as much as 48Mb per second in the same size band ....... Before Sprint Nextel launched its first commercial WiMax network in Baltimore at the end of September 2008, it spent months building and testing the networks in its initial target cities. Sprint WiMax networks in two of those cities, Chicago and Washington, D.C., still aren't open for business.
Wireless: The Outlook Gets Murkier for Clearwire BusinessWeek Last May some of the biggest names in the technology and media business, including Intel (INTC), Google (GOOG), Sprint (S), and Comcast (CMCSA), teamed up to invest $3.2 billion in the startup Clearwire (CLWR). ...... founded by entrepreneur Craig McCaw had high hopes of shaking up the wireless industry ...... Billions more in losses are projected for the coming years as Clearwire invests heavily to roll out its network. ......... the credit crunch could crimp Clearwire's ambitions. ....... The company needs to raise an additional $2 billion to $2.3 billion to reach its target of offering wireless broadband service in most of the top 100 U.S. markets by the end of 2010.
Recession Comes to the PC Makers The fastest-growing segment of the market is so-called netbooks—stripped-down notebooks that cost $300 to $500 and deliver far less profit than standard notebooks. ........ Microsoft is said to get about $13 per copy for the Windows version that goes in netbooks, vs. more than $50 for those that go into standard PCs. ...... Acer operates with a super-lean Taiwanese cost structure that allows it to price its products aggressively. Apple seems content to stick with making ever-more-powerful PCs for premium prices. ..... Big Blue sidestepped the tumult by selling its PC business to Lenovo four years ago.
IBM: Outsourcing at Home the U.S. economic downturn has already claimed more than 60,000 tech jobs in the past three months alone ........ With 200,000 service employees worldwide and nearly 80,000 in India, IBM ....... Dubuque and Iowa offered IBM an enticing package of incentives worth $55 million over 10 years. They include a loan of $11.7 million that will be forgiven if IBM fulfills its hiring pledge.
Broadband Bill Disappoints Nearly Everyone $6 billion is not going to get you to ubiquitous broadband ...... pegged the cost of creating universal broadband in the tens of billions of dollars ........ $44 billion over three years. ...... "advanced" broadband will be defined as service of 45 megabits per second or higher, while "basic" broadband will be considered 5 Mbps
Comstar Soft Launches WiMAX Network in Moscow WELT ONLINE, Germany

Craig Silverstein

Paramendra Bhagat: Dolphin

Microsoft, Google, Facebook: NY Tech MeetUp Has Arrived
Money For Yahoo And Money For Google
Search: Much Is Lacking
Google Books: Primitive
Google Audio, Google Office
Google Video
Google: Free, Wireless Internet Access, Pay Per View Video
Yahoo Phone, Google Office, Google Finance
Google's To Do List Keeps Growing
In Defense Of Google Digitizing Books
Google's Corporate Transparency
Google And Languages
Google Again
Google Video Has Hit The Docks
Google And Browsers And More
Google: Poised To Be The Number One Software Company In The World








On The Web

Craig Silverstein's Home Page
Google's man behind the curtain - CNET News the search company is poised to raise $2.7 billion in one of the hottest tech initial public offerings since 2000. ....... The company recently renewed an exclusive PageRank license from Stanford that's valid through 2011. ....... understanding language is kind of the last frontier in artificial intelligence ..... In terms of timing, I typically say about 200 to 300 years. ...... Our algorithms do scale, and if, you know, the size of the Web doubles, and the machines double, then we are keeping pace. ...... I used to know everyone in the company, and now I do not, and it makes me sad.
Craig Silverstein grew a decade with Google When he started work, Silverstein figured he would last four or five years at Google before burning out. Or perhaps the company would evolve to the point where he wouldn't feel welcome anymore. ....... or be a stay-at-home dad. But he still believes that search needs significant improvement and that it might take 100 years to realize.
Video results for Craig Silverstein
Craig Silverstein lost in admiration for Google’s unexpected ... Only one man has been with Google since the beginning, apart from Larry Page and Sergey Brin ...... for Mr Silverstein, from the inside, it was not until Playboy published a big story about Google in early 1999 that he realised how things might go. ....... “I always imagined we were going to be an 80 to 100-person company,” Mr Silverstein, 35, told The Times. Google has about 19,000 staff around the world.
UNC Media Advisory -- Google Technology Director Craig Silverstein..
First Impression: Meeting Google´s Craig Silverstein - Ralf's... Google´s director of technology and first employee of Google - or Google´s man behind the curtain

In The News

Expect lower temperatures, bigger ball at Times Square celebration CNN
61-Second Minute Takes World into 2009 DailyTech
One Microsoft Way's top 10 of 2008 Ars Technica
Windows 7 Leaked To The Internet InformationWeek
Facebook faces ire of 85000 mums Straits Times
Next from Apple: A Large-Screen iPod Touch? PC World
New Year's Eve to be cold, windy in NYC United Press International
FCC's Martin Drops Porn Filtering Idea BusinessWeek
iWork may become a Web Application at Macworld? SlashGear
Interview: Pytey of the iPhone Dev Team Washington Post

US STOCKS-Wall St closes out worst year since Depression Reuters
Russia Says It Will Halt Delivery of Natural Gas to Ukraine Washington Post
Citigroup CEO Pandit, Chairman Bischoff Forgo Bonuses Bloomberg
Jobless claims data paint bleak picture for 2009 The Associated Press
Dell Turnaround Hits Bump With Reorganization Woes CNNMoney.com
Merrill Lynch Settles Discrimination Suit New York Times
Slovaks adopt euro Reuters
Montana Investors Lost $18 Million With Madoff, Regulator Says Bloomberg






8

Apple's Mobile Space: Sizzling

Granted Apple did not invent the mobile space or the digital music space like it invented the Personal Computer space, but it has done a very good job of reinventing. You could argue Microsoft was not first with word processing, spreadsheets and operating systems, but it did a slam dunk job of defining and totally taking over that space, the PC software space.

It is interesting to me how Apple has so reinvented itself. The creative genius of Steve Jobs has been at play. You could argue Yahoo did not perform a similar second act. Maybe Yang made the big mistake of making someone else the CEO for a few years. Also Yang never declared that Google won the search war like Jobs declared Microsoft won the PC war, that war is over, he said upon taking back the helm at Apple in the late 1990s. But then it is hard to see many directions that Yahoo could go right now. How would it differentiate? Or has it become an old, tired company?

But Apple continues to be at the high end market. It sells its products to people who will buy at any price. It is about cool, not cheap.



Apple's mobile space has been sizzling. It keeps relaunching its hit products. Like there would be Windows 95, then again Windows 98, the iPhone is the god that keeps giving. And with the genius stroke of opening up the platform to outside developers, perhaps learned from Facebook, things really took off, both for Facebook and Apple.

The ecosystem of the computing experience has become so much richer. More is to follow, for sure. The company continues to fascinate, the founder continues to fascinate. And all the while Apple keeps tinkering with the PC space, its original space.

Angelsoft
Cherple
Jezebel
Gizmodo



In The News

For Apple, 2008 Was a Very Good Year PC World Over the past twelve months, the number of Apple-branded products on the street has become so broad and ubiquitous.... a year that easily ranks as one of the most significant in its 31-year-history. ..... all data on a lost or stolen phone to be remotely wiped .... The App Store concept may prove more revolutionary to the smart phone industry than the iPhone itself. ...... In March, iTunes became the No. 1 music retailer in the world, ousting Wal-Mart from the top spot. ...... With Snow Leopard, Apple will focus on performance and code bloat -- aiming to speed things up and reduce the amount of hard drive space the software required. ..... a leaner and significantly faster operating system. .... innovation ruled Apple in 2008 .... Apple has always been an innovative company, but perhaps no more so than in 2008. Even as other companies pull back from exploring new ground because of the economic downturn, Apple continues to be a pioneering company on a variety of fronts. I won't speculate at this point about what's ahead for the company in 2009, but I expect that there will be at least one or two surprises.
What 2009 May Bring for All Things Google
Dell Turnaround Hits Bump With Reorganization Woes CNNMoney.com the 10-month-old restructuring program of the world's second-biggest computer maker is in trouble. ..... Since the beginning of the year, Dell's stock price has fallen 58%. ..... Jarvis was in charge of a corporate image makeover intended to promote the company as an innovator of cutting-edge products, rather than a discount maker of commodity PCs.
Is Hewlett-Packard eyeing stake in Satyam? Economic Times The global market for computer services is estimated to be around $748 billion. .... IBM has over 73,000 professionals in India and Accenture some 37,000.
I woke up this morning and my Zune was gone CNET News
Yahoo, Intel have high hopes for Internet TV CNN Intel concluded that unlike the PC, TVs are social. ..... Another difference from PCs: it must be simple and reliable .... People in the U.S. spend about 5 times more time watching TV than using a computer, Bell said. Globally, it's a factor of 25 ...... advertising-supported television ..... And nobody wanted yet another remote control. .... Few, though, wanted a full-on Web browser, nor a keyboard to clutter up the room.
Has Chrome Pushed Google Over The Evil Edge? eWeek If you have a browser, you wield a great deal of influence over the Internet software market. ...... Imagine if Google could duplicate the ad-serving success of search on Chrome. .... Chrome effectively put Google in Microsoft's league, just on the Web instead of the desktop.
Google's Top Ten Products (More Or Less) Washington Post Google's main search engine tops the list with an estimated 136.6 million unique visitors in the U.S. Then comes Google Maps (36 million), Image Search (31.7 million), and Gmail (10.5 million). ...... YouTube would be second with 70 million unique U.S. visitors, and Blogger would be in the top 5 with 23.5 million .... Book Search visitors are now at 8.4 million vs. 7.4 million for Google News
What 2009 May Bring for All Things Google PC World Android will at best keep pace with Apple's mobile juggernaut in 2009
A Tough Year for Yahoo New York Times the failed merger negotiations with Microsoft and the failed advertising partnership with Google ...... two rounds of layoffs, seemingly endless rounds of reorganizations and a sense that they were riding on a rudderless ship. ..... a peek at one of the company’s high profile product efforts: a version of its popular Yahoo Mail that was rebuilt into a powerful communications hub
Alaska Air Taps Oracle To Build Customer Loyalty InformationWeek
IBM ThinkPad T43 Laptop: $394.99, save $355.01 Cheap Laptop
IBM bares next five tech innovations Inquirer.net SOLAR technology in clothes, “talking” to the Internet and personal “digital shopping assistants:” ...... “thin-film” solar cells, a new type of cost-efficient solar cell that can be 100 times thinner than silicon-wafer cells and produced at a lower cost. ....... your doctor will be able to provide you with a genetic map that tells you what health risks you are likely to face in your lifetime and the specific things you can do to prevent them, based on your specific DNA — all for less than $200. ...... Genetic mapping will radically transform healthcare .... In places like India, where the spoken word is more prominent than the written word in education, government and culture, “talking” to the Web is leapfrogging all other interfaces ...... “voice sites”
Micron Links with Sun to Bolster Lifespan of Flash-Based Storage Trading Markets
You Need AMD In 2009 Motley Fool
Russia prepares to halt gas supplies to Ukraine Reuters
Microsoft: Zune Glitch Caused By Leap Year Clock Bug CNNMoney.com

Airspan Selected for WiMAX Network in Okinawa, Japan CNNMoney.com
wireless broadband CNET News
Telcos look to benefit from broadband funding CNET News

There’s Gold in Them iPhones Washington Post The mobile-computing space looks a bit like the early days of personal computers, when different operating systems were competing to be king.

5 predictions for 2009 CNet
Web 2.0 entrepreneur
counts his blessings
For Zune, a rocky
start to new year
Macintosh at 25: Still the innovation leader On January 24, 1984, the Macintosh came into the world, starting the second major revolution in the personal computer industry. Steve Jobs and team took some lessons from Xerox PARC and created the first user-friendly, mass market computer.
China lifts roadblock for 3G phones
Daily Tidbits: Amazon isn't alone in its success
Dell regroups around four customer segments
A computer revolution through a child's eyes
Networking predictions for the new year money will be as tight as a Minnesota Senate race next year
Gawker Media sells Consumerist blog
HP upgrading Home Server lineup, Apple may follow suit
What's in store at CES 2009 Thin TVs will be big. .... a new line of ultrathin laptops from Dell
12-inch Eee PC spotted
Quad-core MacBook Pro on the way?
What good are Steve Jobs and Bill Gates without Josh Silver?
2009: Netbook or notebook?
Microsoft outlines pay-per-use PC vision
Music moguls’ latest strategy: Zig then zag
Universal Music seeing ’tens of millions’ from YouTube
Lifestreaming in Obamaland Citizens and paparazzi armed with camera phones and a variety of other multimedia devices will chronicle every movement he makes in public and post it online. ..... The forthcoming Obama White House will be treated like a reality TV show or West Wing, broadcast 24x7 on the Internet.



A Backlash Grows in Bangalore Over Tech Revolution BusinessWeek fewer than 5% of Bangaloreans have ever been inside an airplane ..... The software industry, he says, has turned the city into a glorified sweatshop. "Where is the innovation?" ....... with growing tax revenues, the city has been able to add bus lines and is building a subway system
Bringing Broadband to the Urban Poor
Tesco: 'Wal-Mart's Worst Nightmare' Tesco will continue to grow at an average of 11% annually through 2012, enabling it to overtake France's Carrefour (CARR.PA) to become the world's second-largest retailer by 2012. ......... unrivaled ability to manage vast reams of data and translate that knowledge into sales ....... the best and broadest range of house brands from any retailer. ...... runs the world's largest and most successful online grocery operation and is Britain's biggest private-sector employer, with 280,000 staff
Ten Stories that Defined Broadband in 2008 more than 400 million broadband users around the planet .... In sharp comparison to the U.S., WiMAX technologies are taking off in emerging telecom economies such as India, a trend that is predicted to gather momentum in 2009 and 2010.
GigaOM Network: On Twitter, Followers Aren't Really Friends
GigaOM Network: Cisco's Misguided Foray Into the Living Room
GigaOM Network: Apple's Got a War Chest of Cash
Gazprom Stokes European Energy Worries
Slovakia Joins Decade-Old Euro Zone
Britain's GDP Will Decline at Fastest Pace Since the 1940s expects the UK’s gross domestic product to decline by 2.9 per cent in real terms over the next year ..... Business investment – forecast to collapse by more than 15 per cent in 2009 ..... “Despite the public declarations by the government that the banks ought to be lending more it is clear that the primary concern of many of our largest banks is to shore up their balance sheets and, for those on the end of the government bail-outs, to pay back their Treasury paymasters.” ...... “With few incentives for banks to behave otherwise, credit availability to businesses may become even worse during 2009.”
More and More Africans Risk Sea Crossing to EU Right wing interior minister Roberto Maroni said on national radio that the migrants will be swiftly thrown out. ...... a significant proportion were also fleeing conflict zones, such as Somalia and Eritrea. .... Malta recently passed a law to automatically detain illegal migrants for 18 months ..... since 1988 at least 9,400 people have died at sea trying to get to Europe