The Web Not Yet Ready For The Video Format

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Los Angeles Times: Google TV Plan Is Causing Jitters In Hollywood: Many worry that Silicon Valley will upend the entertainment industry just like the Internet ravaged the music and newspaper industries. .... Google revolutionized the way people access information. Now it wants to transform how people get entertainment. .... enabling viewers to watch TV shows and movies unshackled from the broadcast networks or cable channels on which they air ....entertainment industry executives fear Google TV will encourage consumers to ditch their $70 monthly cable and satellite subscriptions in favor of watching video free via the Internet. ... Google doesn't yet know how it will make money on Google TV ....for the movie studios and television networks to use the limitless storage capacity of the Web to make their libraries of programs available whenever someone wants to watch .... Google touted the software as presenting a new opportunity to make more money from TV shows distributed online.... In demonstrations with network executives, Google TV confused one network's shows for a rival's. On another occasion, it listed the several ways a popular prime-time show could be watched online and on TV — except on the network's own website.

It's not just business models that seem to be struggling. The very first bottleneck is speed. Even with broadband it takes several seconds to load a static webpage. That is too slow. We need speeds that are 100X, perhaps 1000X.

There has been immense downward pressure on the prices of hardware and software. Software has become free for the most part. Hardware prices have come down drastically. But the ISP busines is so archaic, there the prices have been sticky. Capitalism is dysfunctional in the ISP business. Speeds don't go up, prices stay where they are. That is some major dysfunction.

I urge my president to please look into this.

Hulu Still Struggling With Business Model
Saavn's Great Business Model For Movies

In The News

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TechCrunch: Confirmed: Facebook Rolling Out A New Slimmer, Sexier Like Button

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• Networks Proving A Tough Sell For Google TV (Surprise!) (wired.com)
• Google TV Is a Tough Sell (online.wsj.com)
• Tech's TV takeover: Why Hollywood should embrace Silicon Valley, not fight it (zdnet.com)
• Google Desperately Trying To Woo Networks To Support Google TV (GOOG) (businessinsider.com)
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• Are You Ready For Google TV? (realestateradiousa.com)

The Web Lifestyle And Company Cultures

Image via CrunchBaseThese three articles below are great reads on the web lifestyle and the company cultures of Google and Facebook.

BBC: Cult Of Less: Living Out Of A Hard Drive: Chris Yurista, a Washington, DC resident who lives out of a backpack, claims digital technology has replaced the need for his home and his possessions ..... Mr Sutton sold or gave away most of his assets, apart from his iPad, Kindle, laptop and a few other items ..... a "few" articles of clothing and bed sheets for a mattress that was left in his newly rented apartment. ..... credits his external hard drives and online services like iTunes, Hulu, Flickr, Facebook, Skype and Google Maps for allowing him to lead a minimalist life. ..... the internet has replaced my need for an address ...... Yurista has taken to the streets with a backpack full of designer clothing, a laptop, an external hard drive, a small piano keyboard and a bicycle - an armful of goods that totals over $3,000 (£1,890) in value ...... spends much of his time basking in the glow emanating from his Macbook, earns a significant income at his full-time job as a travel agent and believes his new life on the digital grid is less cluttered than his old life on the physical one. ...... he no longer has to worry about dusting, organising and cleaning his possessions ...... his new intangible goods can continue to live on indefinitely with little maintenance. ...... replaced his bed with friends' couches, paper bills with online banking ...... "you never know where you will sleep". ...... And like a house fire that rips through a family's prized possessions, when someone loses their digital goods to a computer crash, they can be devastated. ...... some people have gone as far as to threaten suicide over their lost digital possessions and data. ..... He says if a complete map of our brains was uploaded to a computer and a conscious, digital replica of ourselves was created, we could, in theory, continue to live forever on a hard drive along with our MP3s and e-books.
GigaOm: The Early Facebook Employee Exodus:Employees who leave are often emboldened by their work on such an influential and widely used product, and want to start their own companies. Others are burned out. Still others feel stifled by the company’s management structure......And just last week Ruchi Sanghvi, the company’s first female engineer who wrote the blog post announcing the then-radical Facebook news feed back in 2006 (and in doing so became the target of subsequent user outrage), left as well. ....... Others are getting engaged and married (sometimes to each other) and starting to have kids. They’re far removed from the early days of Facebook Proms ...... One frustration of early employees is that they’ve had limited upward mobility as Facebook has matured. With the exception of VP of Product Chris Cox, Mark Zuckerberg’s management team consists of outside hires, a good number of them from Google. ...... receiving avid investor interest in their new projects ..... Some leave to found startups that are related to Facebook, but aren’t priorities internally ..... examples of Facebook employees leaving to work at Google and Twitter ...... Facebook has chosen a distinctive method of regenerating the young startup mojo that it may be losing in this early employee exodus: buying young startups. ..... efreshes the company’s stable of 4-year stock option vesting cycles, along with delivering a fresh dose of entrepreneurial chutzpah.
GigaOm: Google Is From Mars and Facebook Is From Venus:The search company is like graduate school, filled with big brains working on complicated problems, while the social network doesn’t think as much about the deep implications of things; it just does them......Google is more technically focused, in that staffers there “value working on hard problems, and doing them right… things are often done because they are technically hard or impressive [and] on most projects, the engineers make the calls.” ....... when projects are undertaken at the search company, “the code is usually solid, and the systems are designed for scale from the very beginning. There are many experts around and review processes set up for systems designs.” ..... engineers and technical specs rule the day at Google ..... Zuck [CEO Mark Zuckerberg] spends a lot of time looking at product mocks, and is involved pretty deeply with the site’s look and feel

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A Ridiculously Good Blog Search Engine

Image via CrunchBaseI have said Google does not need social envy, instead what it needs is a ridiculously good blog search engine and ridiculously good Twitter search results. (Google Does Not Need Social Envy) What would a ridiculously good blog search engine look like?

First, it can not look like the regular Google search engine. It has to be inherently a personal experience. I should not need a separate blogroll. The blog search engine should be so good at managing my blogroll, it should be that good.

Just like Gmail took the concept of email to a whole new level, the Google blog search engine should take the concept of a blogroll to a whole new level. Following blogs on Blogger is not it. Google Reader is not it. All three have to be integrated to offer a more seamless, much more beautiful of an experience.

Blogging is a social activity. Blogs are not just information. Perhaps Google should go ahead and buy Disqus and integrate it firmly into Blogger.

And there has to be an autosearch feature. The engine is constantly searching for blog posts on topics of interest to me and serving them in beautiful ways.

Good old search where you type in words into that blank box, that is so, well, Google. That is the starting point of the current Google blog search engine, and that is so bogus.

ReadWriteWeb: Google CEO Suggests You Change Your Name to Escape His Permanent Record:teenagers should be entitled to change their names upon reaching adulthood in order to separate themselves from the Google record of their youthful indiscretions ..... the dominance of search will give way to recommendation technology ..... requires a lot of targeting and artificial intelligence ..... the CEO of history's greatest privacy-killing machine.
Wall Street Journal: Google and the Search for the Future: Where once everything seemed to go the company's way, along came Apple's iPhone, launching a new wave of Web growth on a platform that largely bypassed the browser and Google's search box..... 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily ..... a doubling in just three months ...... coming soon is Chrome OS, which Google hopes will do in tablets and netbooks what Android is doing in smartphones, i.e., give Google a commanding share of the future and leave, in this case, Microsoft in the dust...... how to preserve Google's franchise in Web advertising, the source of almost all its profits, when "search" is outmoded..... more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type ...... "The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically" ..... "The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them." ..... "As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that's basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time." ...... the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future. ..... make sure its every move is "good for consumers" and "fair" to competitors. ....... regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right ...... Schmidt awards Facebook his highest accolade, calling it a "company of consequence." ..... Google captured the search wave and shows every sign of positioning itself successfully for the mobile wave. As for the waves after that, your guess may be as good as Mr. Schmidt's.

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Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost

Image via WikipediaChecking in is not the starting point of your Facebook experience, and that is why Facebook is not a threat to FourSquare in the location space. If Facebook is smart, it will just help its users more closely integrate FourSquare into their Facebook experience. One thing I would like is to have the option to have a much greater control over who I share my check-ins with.

But chances are Facebook will try and offer a FourSquare substitute. I am looking at Twitter here. Facebook "learned" features from Twitter and FriendFeed. It outright bought FriendFeed. Buying FourSquare is not an option. Copying FourSquare is harder than copying Twitter.

This Is Not Happening: King Dennis

FourSquare is inherently a mobile web thing. You could add blogging features to my Gmail account, but Gmail is a different experience. You could argue Facebook has also thrived in the mobile web environment. But it started as a big screen web native. The mobile version is Facebook Lite. There is no FourSquare Lite. I have felt stupid every time I have visited the FourSquare homepage on the big screen web. It feels like sitting in a bus that is not moving.

I have no idea how Facebook will roll out location. It was inevitable that it was going to, but the details have not been obvious to me personally. It is because there is an inherent conflict in what I think Facebook should be doing in the location space, and what I suspect it might end up doing instead in that space. And so I have decided to just wait and watch.

Facebook could not have stayed away from the location space, but it has the option to do it right.

TechCrunch: As Facebook Location Looms, Has Foursquare Entered The Pantheon Of Services?: it seems highly likely the Facebook is going to take a platform approach to location. That is, they’re more likely to federate other location streams (such as Foursquare’s) while they themselves remain fairly cautious with their own location services..... Facebook likely has a deal in place with Localeze to build out a massive place database that they’ll then populate with all this data they’re federating and creating on their own.....I remember very well when it seemed like just about everything I read on the Internet said that Twitter was the dumbest service ever imagined and it would never go anywhere .....they run the risk of becoming the Friendster of location
AllThingsD: What Will Facebook Be Announcing Wednesday? Location, Location, Location!: Facebook will finally be rolling out its own geo-location offering .... a long time coming, as Facebook has noodled on how to incorporate the hot trend

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Hulu Still Struggling With Business Model

Image via Wikipedia

New York Times: Hulu Is Said to Be Ready for an I.P.O.: Hulu, the rapidly growing hub for online television and movies ..... the company currently makes little in the way of profit..... plans to add a $9.99-a-month subscription service soon alongside its core advertising-supported business ....rival video-streaming services like Netflix .... its three-year history .... Hulu aimed to be a counterweight to YouTube and other free video sites..... Demand Media, a publisher of articles and video based on search engine inquiries .... features content from most major TV networks .... Hulu’s powerful content providers have pushed the company to offer a more traditional subscription model, concerned that its ad-supported business is not generating enough revenue

Saavn's Great Business Model For Movies

There is something to be said of subscription models, but having to rely on them too much tells me there has not been as much innovation with business models as there has been with technology.

Hulu has attempted to be an answer to the wild west that is YouTube. Although there has been some convergence as YouTube has done a much better job lately of the platform being able to respect copyright, and letting content creators make some money.

Video use will only grow online. And hopefully business innovation will happen. But mind boggling business innovation has not happened yet. We are still in the early stages.

In The News

New York Times: Dell To Buy Data Storage Company For $1.15 Billion: 3Par
Telegraph: Adobe Chief Shantanu Narayen Believes He Doesn't Need Apple Or The iPad: Apple, the $223bn (£143bn) big-hitter that is the world's second largest company ..... Adobe chief executive Shantanu Narayen began his career at Apple ...... . It's the future of mobile that's at stake here ..... Adobe has cemented its role as a partner to other technology groups in recent years, working with 19 of the world's 20 top mobile phone handset companies, including Motorola, HTC, RIM, Hewlett-Packard WebOS and Google, to bring Flash Player to their mobile devices. ..... Some 23 of the top 25 European companies, as measured by Forbes magazine, use Adobe products, as do 23 of the top 25 global banks and all the top 10 European banking groups. ..... nothing to do with technology and everything to do with business models .... We're mission-critical to the companies we work with." ..... Adobe Systems was this year ranked in the InterBrand survey as one of the top 100 brands in the world for the first time. ..... He grew up in Hyderabad, India ..... he began his career at Apple, then worked as a director of desktop and collaboration products for Silicon Graphics, before co-founding Pictra, a company that pioneered the idea of digital photo-sharing over the internet. ..... his mission is to make Adobe critical to the products of all digital content providers, as technologies converge in the next stage of the internet. Steve Jobs wants that as well, of course. Watching this duo fight it out promises to be fascinating.
Boy Genius Report: Motorola DROID Pro, World Edition And Tablet All Found In Verizon Wireless Systems: Verizon Wireless is gearing up to launch a barrage of Android handsets and devices
VentureBeat: An Atom Bomb Aimed At Intel: Smooth-Stone Raises $48M For Low-Power ARM Server Chips: which consume small amounts of power....data center computers, where energy use has become the biggest expense..... “Our goal is to completely remove power consumption as an issue for the data center. Imagine that change for companies with a large presence on the Internet”
TechCrunch: VCs And Super Angels: The War For The Entrepreneur: Publicly everyone gets along just great...... the disruptive force of a new breed of angel investors ..... Pick the wrong investor and you’ve closed the door on others...... Until very recently there was an established pecking order with venture capitalists. ...... the rise of the cheap startup. ..... Often there’s no need to go past an angel round of funding until it’s time to decide between selling and doing a big marketing push. ..... These angels are fast and nimble and they are hanging out with the entrepreneurs at events, incubators, etc. They are in the fray, while many of the old VCs remain above it all, waiting for the entrepreneurs to come to them, hat in hand. ...... Y Combinator, which has spawned some 200 plus startups in just a few years, could be considered the king of this ecosystem ...... McClure has a $30 million fund. Dixon has a $50 million fund. .... it’s easier for a good idea to attract the cash it needs
TechCrunch: Wireless Is Not Different. You Can’t Be Half-Open:the future of the Internet, the wireless Internet....There is no such thing as being half-open (it’s like being half-pregnant)..... The broad principles should be the same: whenever possible, all bits should be treated equally ..... Google’s and Verizon’s proposed rules ... would prohibit broadband providers on the wired Internet (like DSL, cable, and fiber) from discriminating against any kind of “lawful” Internet content or application over another. They also would prohibit wired broadband providers from taking payments to deliver Internet traffic from one Website faster than anyone else’s. ...... One man’s prioritization is another man’s discrimination.....Net neutrality does not mean that everybody gets to download an unlimited amount of BitTorrent movies onto their cell phones. It simply means that all bits are treated equally, even when they are blocked.
GigaOm: Foursquare’s Future Slowly Takes Shape:Foursquare wants more folks to use its application-programming interface (API), and thus build an ecosystem around Foursquare’s data..... bring a cost-per-action business model to the real world, perhaps either supplanting or complementing traditional forms of advertising. ...... if there is a possibility of retail outlets, such as J.Crew, using Foursquare as a beacon for flash sales. ...... 21st century equivalent of loyalty rewards .... Adding a reward to checking-in turns the somewhat frivolous activity into something more valuable. ..... a growing number of startups that are trying to reinvent what is essentially the coupons business ..... Everyone from Yahoo to Google has viewed local advertising (long the preserve of newspapers and yellow pages) with lustful eyes, with little or no success. ..... By marrying geo-location to behavior targeting and adding commerce on top, one can finally start to see some answers
Fortune: Google's Motives For Abandoning Net Neutrality: Google underestimated the public's desire for true net neutrality over both wireless and wired services ..... Google's PR department, from people I've spoken to, seem to have been taken aback by the reactions. ..... Google has products in development that are going to need even more support, from all carriers. ..... AT&T (T), T-Mobile and Verizon's next generation networks are LTE, which doesn't carry voice separately like traditional 3G networks. The carriers are going to have to use data in the same way that Vonage or Skype currently do, over IP. Packet prioritization is a must in this case. ...... Google will soon be its own ISP as well. ...... So when Google's interests were only in data centers, it was completely beneficial to be net neutral. Now that Google is moving out of the data center into your house with devices and OSes and even wires, the priorities are realigned. It would be realistic to expect their stance on net neutrality to realign as well.

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