Ampers & Dot

Today I want to talk about the first two Ws in www and how the web is surprisingly not all that world wide.

First off, no I’m not talking about broadband penetration. Obviously there are many places in the world that there will be no internet connection (like Vermont, not that long ago…), but I’m talking about the filtered web.

See, here in America, the land of the free and the home of more porn sites than any other country, we have basically unlimited access to all things online. As is becoming internationally apparent with recent news, this online freedom is not even close to universal.

Take Facebook for example; the entire site has been banned in most of the Middle East, I guess you won’t be poking any of your Syrian friends anytime soon…

YouTube is blocked in these countries and Pakistan, a fact that became overwhelmingly apparent this past weekend, when an attempt to block YouTube in P-Stan took out the global site.

And look, I’m aware that this is a much larger issue than what I’m getting at. In the US we see the internet as this open realm of endless possibilities and inhibiting our right to be able to browse video montages from AFV is simply unconstitutional! But of course, other countries don’t have our constitution…

So I’m not going to get into the philosophical or political differences between us and our international friends, this post actually has a much more directly self-serving focus: how to get around international blocks while traveling abroad.

I’ll be heading off to Japan for the next week (yes, I’ll take pictures of fun electronics and cooky vending machines, don’t worry) and I’ve just learned that Hulu won’t work there. What’s an online video junkie to do?!

Enter: the HotSpot Shield.

In theory, the Hotspot Shield creates a private network on a public wifi connection, but what it also does- is hide your computer’s location- thus providing access to non-international sites, internationally (such as Hulu!).

I’ve installed it on my lappy and will give it a go this weekend (after the 32 hours of travel). If I can get it working- I’ll post something for you. If not- I’ll pretend this never happened..

Ok, enjoy- see you in a few weeks! Hopefully, with fun pictures and crazy stories about weird sushi.

Well, it seems the High Def video disc format war is officially over, about two years before I predicted and with a winner that I never would have predicted… Congrats BluRay… I guess.

Wait, let’s back up a second here. DVD format war? What? Huh? What’s this HD-DVD all about? And what’s that- upscaling DVD players are just about as good looking to the naked eye? But now my DVDs aren’t good any more and I would have to rebuy them all on a new format? What is a BluRay? Won’t 1080p eventually become obsolete anyway?

You know what’s weird- all of those are valid questions, which is way I find this all so silly in the first place. I actually should provide a little background as the average consumer out there doesn’t know that this stupid format war was even going on.

Here’s the one sentence version: High Definition TVs are becoming more common, which has created a new standard in video picture quality, which means that old DVDs are slightly below that quality, and in turn means that new formats of High Definition quality video be available to watch on High Definition TVs, but since download speeds aren’t quite ready for HD streaming, companies took it upon themselves to create a new physical medium to deliver this new quality of video, suggesting that consumers be required to repurchase older movies in “true hd”…

Ok, so maybe that should have been more like six sentences…

But yes, I was wrong. First, I was wrong thinking that it would take a much longer time to find a “winner”, but then again, I couldn’t have predicted Michael Bay’s influence of movie studios…

And secondly, I was wrong predicting HD-DVD over bluray. Maybe because I’m an XBOX guy and the 360 has ties with HD-DVD, while Sony’s PS3 sports a nifty bluray player, and maybe because the whole name thing (”HD-DVD” means “High Definition Digital Video Disc”, “Blu-Ray” means nothing to me, but sounds like Blurry, when you notice there is no “e” in Blu), but I really though that HD-DVD was going to win this won.

Fortunately, I wasn’t confident enough to actually purchase an HD-DVD player, but for those who did- I can only offer my condolences (not that I actually know anyone who bought one…), and this list of fun things to do with your now-obsolete machine.

The question in all of this, is: did you notice? Did this format war have any impact on your life, whatsoever? I mean, hell- I still have The Great Muppet Caper on VHS and you know what- the quality looks fine to me!

As downloads are becoming increasingly popular and HD video is becoming streamable, who cares about more physical media?

The way I see it, the physical age is dying- no more discs, tapes, or even thumb-drives. In a few years we’ll be streaming (not downloading) HD video from server farms around the world. Nothing will be localized. And in the time it takes for that to happen- I still won’t give in to buying a BluRay player*

And hey, if you want to pick up a cheap HDDVD player, check out ebay… or go pickup a brand new upscaling dvd player!

*that’s a prediction that will likely come back to haunt me…

Today’s a short one, but I wanted to take a moment to honor a great site in history (and apparently present): Hotornot.com

Disclaimer: I haven’t been to hotornot.com since 2001, including to write this post- could someone please go there, find me some funny links, and email them to me.  Thanks.  Ok, let’s get going.

I read this article on Hot or Not’s recent acquisition for $20M the other day and after my initial reaction of “Hot or not is still around!?”, I got to thinking about the site.  For those unfamiliar, HotorNot.com is a site where people post pictures of themselves for others to rate if they are “hot” or… you guessed it, “not”.  It’s an amazingly simple concept, which took the web by storm in its early years.

I remember finding HotorNot.com not long after its creation back around 2000 (oh way back when…) and looking at it between classes at school, with friends, laughing at all the silly people who were insecure enough to need to know if they were indeed as “hot” as they thought.  As you can only imagine, this provided hours of fun…

Well the kicker of all this is that it is delightfully “web 2.0″, as far back as 2000.  That’s right, I’m going to talk seriously about the term web 2.0.  Didn’t see that coming, did you?

The fundamental groundwork for a “web 2.0″ site: user creation and interactivity.  HotorNot: users create pages, viewers vote on them.  HotorNot, which also received HUGE funding and survived the dot-com boom, found the market of profitability in interactivity very early on.  Back then it was strange to have such a large site created entirely by users- this was basically unheard of.  Plus, it was free, pulling in all income from advertising through banners and popups.  Again, a very standard practice today, but HotorNot was way ahead of its time.

The web is moving towards even more interactivity and user creation, which helps me understand how HotorNot can still be kicking funding around eight years later.

So here’s what I want to know: What’s out there now that is ahead of its time?  What sites are out there right now that will survive the next burst? Who will be able to keep a user base, or an operational model, while the others blend together and fade away?  What do you think?

And yes, if I knew the answer to this I’d probably be doing a lot more investing…  In the meantime I’ll keep watching VCs to see where the money goes- and the trends will reveal themselves.  All we have to do is wait.  And to kill time- I think I’m going to go check out hotornot.com

 I want to take a minute to go over all the hooplah that’s hit the web this since I last posted on the Yahoo/Microsoft deal.
Let’s start with some hard facts before moving into complete speculation: Yahoo turned down Microsoft’s $31/share, $44B offer.  They countered with a statement requesting $40/share, valued at a $12B increase.  Yahoo has since fired an additional 1,000 employees.  And as far as I know- those are the only “facts” out there right now.  The rest is just crazy rumors and outrageous claims (potentially made to boost reader commission from Valleywag’s writers’ pay-grade… but that too is just a rumor… that I made up.)

Now that the facts are out of the way- let’s go over the rumors (one that I like, one that I despise).

•  Google wants to buy Yahoo
  • This would help Google completely monopolize the search market, which is basically the bulk of the web these days…
  • Leaving MS in the dust online, letting them own the dying market of desktop applications/OSes
  • Capitalize on the largest webmail client, making all of Yahoo’s users into Google users
  • Stealing the Instant Message market from AOL (the only thing they have left), to take a stab at Facebook in the battle for the social web
  • Flickr + Picassa = awesome online photo sharing.
• Yahoo might merge with AOL (the single dumbest rumor I’ve ever heard- and if this proves true then I’ll write a post every day for two weeks that includes an emoticon)
  • This would be like the last two dinosaurs on earth attempting to mate, only to learn that the plague wiping out their species has already killed off their reproductive organs.
  • This blog post, which I quite literally laughed out loud at.
  • Sure AOL would pick up Yahoo’s email users and Yahoo would pick up AOL’s inexplicable user-base, but for what?
  • One real positive: Instant Messaging would be dominated by the two… oh wait, that’s all possible through web-apps and facebook.
  • That’s all I’ve got.

Ok, now what does this all mean?   Well somehow, Yahoo thinks it is worth $56,000,000,000.00 even though most analysts were surprised it got a $44B bid in the first place.  Microsoft is now rumored to be planning a “hostile takeover” and you know what?  Good for them.  I understand that Yahoo’s board got all excited with all this hype around them- but without MS’s bid in there, Yahoo’s stock would have been sitting in the dumps of tankville.

Here’s what should happen: MS should come back with $33/share and firm handshake agreement not to scrap some of Yahoo’s good assets.  Yahoo should be happy to take it and they’ll actually work together to build an awesome future online.

Here’s what will probably happen: MS will pay more than they want ($35+/share) and just start tossing out excess baggage, which to a behemoth like Microsoft, is a lot.

I’ll leave this topic on a funny note.  This page of tips for “Laid off? So what?” and this one on how to “Bulletproof Yourself Against a Layoff“, both found on Yahoo’s job site, HotJobs…

Hey look! I wrote about something I said I was going to write about… it must be some kind of miracle. Don’t get too comfortable, life’s only getting busier.

So here’s the IT news story of the quarter: on Friday Microsoft offered up $44.6 Billion for Yahoo! (which will no longer have a “!” in behind it, because I think that’s just stupid). Microsoft’s offer comes at $31 a share- a 62% premium above Yahoo’s (then) trade price.

Let me start out by saying: I saw this coming. Ok, now let me be honest by saying: Holy crap that- that was a gigantic lie. As I’ve said before, I like making predictions about tech because it’s always evolving and continuously developing beyond what is actually predictable. Well as much as I think I track tech trends well I missed this one by a mile. I honestly thought this was a two month early April fools joke. Honestly.

For the three weeks prior to MS’s huge bid, all of the big tech bloggers were trying to determine Yahoo’s failing future. Seeing as how just one week ago Yahoo just cut 1000 jobs after its profits were down nearly 25%, it comes as no surprise that the following stories were run: Yahoo Asks Employees to Turn in Computers, At Yahoo even the Layoffs are Botched, and my favorite- Yahoo Shuttle Buses on the Chopping Block?

But it’s been tricky for me to make sense of all of this. If everyone is saying that Yahoo is dead all while it is cutting jobs and losing employees, where the heck did this 62% premium come from? Let’s go through the list!

Reasons Yahoo isn’t worth the money

• It’s a dying company, losing money quarter over quarter
• It can’t keep its employees (layoffs)
• It can’t keep its executives (quittings and poachings)
• It is over spending without returning value (Zimbra was sitting idle until today read on for more)
• It just keeps making failing online services

Reasons why Yahoo is worth the money

• To compete against Google.
• It gets more traffic than Google (due to its large email user base combined with the search function) and could easily be turned for ad revenue.
• Yahoo owns Flickr, the most popular photo sharing site online.
• It has recently acquired numerous smaller companies and open source code projects (Zimbra is a seriously strong application… and strangely, during all of this hoplah, Yahoo has been in recent talks to acquire one of my favorite Cambridge companies, Maven Networks.)
• The acquisition would give Microsoft a casual email client to compete with Google’s gmail.
• Yahoo’s forums and games bring the social aspect of what MS has been trying (and failing) to create with Live.com
• Yahoo’s failed online services (multiple social networks, mp3 services, blog tools, etc) would provide functional code to fan MS’s flame for competing with Google’s open social platform.
• Yahoo Mobile. It actually doesn’t suck and MS could integrate it within Live Search Mobile to make a highly functional device that could compete with Google’s upcoming Android.

Wow, I actually came up with more than I expected there. My original intention was to say that Microsoft overplayed its hand… but huh- with these benefits, a 62% premium doesn’t sound too crazy. Well things are starting to get more interesting, as rumors are beginning to circulate about Google putting a bid in on Yahoo. This is just nuts and I don’t know what sense to make of it. Which is to bad considering the title of this post.

And the biggest part to all of this is the traffic. If 2005-2007 were any predictor of online focus (which of course, they are), 2008 will be even more about targeted traffic advertising through search results. Let’s look at a chart of traffic to see how this makes sense for MS’s failing Live.com (PS - compete.com is awesome)

But to me this all seems somewhat irrelevant. When I see someone on Yahoo mail or searching using Yahoo, my first thought is “wow, I didn’t know people still use that thing”, as if it’s a home phone or something… not yet dead, but just tremendously lacking in the light of better alternatives.

But what do you think? Should Yahoo take it? Is big G going to step in and make this interesting? I obviously need help on this one- chime in and let’s get a discussion going.

In an attempt to continually start every post with a comment on how seldomly I’ve been posting… well you get the point. Excuses: work is especially busy, I’ve been working longer days, I’ve been out of town, I’ve had meetings after work, and been fighting a cold, tired, lazy… etc…

While working with people to help set up blogs, I often say “quality over quantity”. I’d rather see two or three good posts a week than five throw-away posts. I was trying this philosophy out myself and the problem came when I missed a day… or two… or three and it became increasingly difficult to get back in the habbit. So here’s a blogging concept I’m going to try out for a little while (at least until the inevitable failure): quantity with quality, excluding length. I’ll not be focusing on getting as much into each post, but there’s just so much I want to talk about that my goal is to get out shorter posts and more topics.

So let’s try that out. Let me know what you think…

Ok, the Super Bowl is over and here in Boston we’re all pretty bummed. The entire thing just seems surreal and I have three quick arguments about all this: Eli Manning isn’t good. And the Giants defense outplayed the Patriots. Eli Manning isn’t good.

Moving on.

The saving grace of last night’s debacle were, of course, the commercials. It had been two off years in a row, but 2008 turned it around by giving an overall strong performance. In previous years watching a funny commercial during the Super Bowl meant that you would have to keep watching TV to see it again.

Well thanks to the wonders of the web and online video, we can all ignore regular TV and jump right in to watching fun commercials!

Jump on over to NewTeeVee’s site to check out the summary of where to find all the top videos. You can also find them on Hulu, which you all have invites from when I posted them last month… right?

My personal favorites are: the Bridgestone one with the screaming animals, the talking stain, Shaq the jockey, the eTrade baby, and a few others- man it was a pretty good year!

My least favorites: the blatantly racially stereotypical Salesgenie ones, the random one with Carmen Electra, and the horrible Career Builder ones.

And tomorrow… we’re talking Yahoo, Google, MS, and the rest of the ongoing insanity in the tech world this week.