Netizen

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Android Is Taking Over As Expected

A printed circuit board inside a mobile phone

New York Times: Bits: The iPhone Has a Real Fight on Its Hands: “Make no mistake: Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.” ..... Phones powered by Google’s Android operating system are now the most popular among smartphones in the United States

It is not possible Apple is surprised by this. This has been a tussle not between rival technologies but rival philosophies, and open was bound to win. It was only a matter of time.

Android is not going to kill the iPhone, it is just going to walk away with the lion's share of the market. That is not death, that is diminution.

Android taking the lead is not news, Apple acting surprised would be. Save the headlines for Apple's reaction.

Newsweek: Android Invasion: Android now has leapt past Apple to become the biggest smart-phone platform in the United States, the third-biggest worldwide, and by far the fastest growing..... 11 million lines of code, the whole program takes up only 200 megabytes of space, about as much as 40 MP3 songs. .... reshaping the fortunes of the world’s biggest tech companies..... Apple’s momentum has stalled ..... by 2014 Android will have 25 percent market share in smart phones, more than double Apple’s 11 percent share ...... The mobile revolution may be the biggest wave ever to hit the world of computing. Just as mainframes gave way to minicomputers, which in turn gave way to personal computers, the PC now is being displaced by smart phones and tablets...... By next year 5 billion mobile phones will be in service, out of a total world population of about 7 billion .... smart phones represent a kind of “exobrain” that augments our regular brain ...... what happens when most of the residents of planet Earth carry a device that gives them instant access to pretty much all of the world’s information? The implications–for politics, for education, for global economics–are dizzying..... will so profoundly change the lives of people in the deepest rural parts of the emerging market ..... the biggest technology market that has ever existed. .... By 2013 the mobile Internet ecosystem–money spent on access fees, online commerce, paid services, and advertising–will be worth more than half a trillion dollars per year .... By collecting location information from mobile phones, for example, Nokia can make traffic predictions. .... a small computer that happens to make phone calls ..... Android-based phones already generate enough new advertising revenue to cover the cost of the software’s development .... 1 billion Android phones in the world and notes that if Google could get just $10 from each user per year ..... Rubin worked at Apple from 1989 to 1992 ..... He was hanging out on a beach in the Cayman Islands when he came up with the idea of creating an open-source operating system for mobile phones. ..... a compatibility test suite, a list of things a phone must have in order to carry the Android brand and to run Google applications like Google Maps ..... the lawsuits demonstrate that rivals recognize Android has become a serious threat..... Gingerbread .... Honeycomb

Android was not an in home innovation by Google. It was bought innovation, but Google still gets credit. Google spotted Android. There is a badge for that.

If the future of the web is mobile, as many say and I agree that to be true for the next five year period, definitely, then Android is in a sweet spot. Google as a company is still on the cutting edge. It does not need a Facebook envy.

Blog Carnival: Android
The Android Architecture
Android Netbook
Donut Android: Android 2.0
Android
Taking The Number 2 Spot On Google Search For Donut Android
Hitting Number 4 For Google Search Results on Cupcake Android
Donut Android: Windows 95, Android 2009?
Cupcake Android Delay Reason: Donut Android
Google Analytics Says I Am Paul Krugman Friend, Cupcake Android Expert
Cupcake: Android 1.5

Monday, October 04, 2010

To Make Sense Of The Facebook Movie

Image representing David Kirkpatrick as depict...

Image by www.dld-conference.com via CrunchBaseTo make sense of the Facebook movie, you necessarily have to read these two articles.

The Daily Beast: David Kirkpatrick: What's True in the Facebook Movie
Vanity Fair: David Kirkpatrick: With a Little Help From His Friends

The movie is well made, but it is a fictionalized account of what happened. The movie has major omissions.

A venture like Facebook can only be done justice in a book, or two, or three.

Alexa Hirschfeld: CNN 2010 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs

CNN Money: the most innovative, ground-breaking, game-changing female entrepreneurs in the U.S.--business builders who might be Fortune Most Powerful Women someday. .... media pioneers and bioengineers and a variety of innovators in between.

I met Alexa for the first time during Social Media Week. (Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever) That was back in February. She sat on a Neha Chauhan (Women In Tech-Media Event At JP Morgan: Internet Week) panel that I declared the best panel of the week of all that I went to. I also met Alexa briefly during a NY Tech MeetUp after party a few months ago when she was floating around the room looking for a VentureBeat writer. She talked about a blog post of mine: Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea. It is now so very good to see Alexa on CNN listed among the "2010 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs."

It is good to be mentioned on CNN, but I disapprove of the condescending tone in parts of the article.

The 2010 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs are not necessarily building the next Starbucks (SBUX) or Netflix (NFLX) or Apple (AAPL).

When was the last time Patricia Sellers created a company? (FoodSpotting Is The Next FourSquare)

Alexa is one of the younger names on the list.

Alexa Hirschfeld, Founder, Paperless Post, New York, NY

How My Grandfather Became Mayor The First Time
ANTA Convention: Emotional Bath

Alexa Hirschfeld - LinkedIn
Alexa Hirschfeld | Facebook
Think Evite, for the Elites: Editors' Blog: Wmagazine.com
Online Stationery Company Gains a Fashionable Following - NYTimes.com

Google TV: Much Talk

I go to Tumblr like some people go to their TV sets. I don't own a TV, never have. I follow about 90 techies on Tumblr. Other than that this blog of mine feeds directly into my Tumblr blog, I mostly just reblog at Tumblr. Following me on Tumblr is as good as following 90 people. I perform an editorial function mostly.

And today there is enormous buzz on Tumblr around Google TV. I have more questions than answers on the topic. I don't fully get it. I have not read up on it much. But the buzz is unavoidable.

I just want faster brodband when it comes to online video. My idea of a TV-internet merger is one where the TV simply disappears. But Google seems to think different.

By the way it was on Tumblr that I came across the Eminem video above. It is a work of art.

Official Google Blog: Here comes Google TV

Microsoft: Android Cry Baby

Image by Photography King ♛ via Flickr

TechCrunch: Microsoft’s Ballmer: Android Isn’t Really Free — You Have To Pay Us For Patents: this is all political nonsense and a pathetic play by Microsoft...... The software giant hasn’t been successful in mobile phones, so they’re attempting to ride on Google’s coattails with some software patents. ..... Microsoft is giving phone makers a choice: pay us to use our software, or pay us to use Google’s software. Or pay your lawyers to fight us in court. (Motorola is apparently choosing the latter — no doubt at Google’s urging.)

Microsoft has been left in the dust. It is nowhere on the smartphone stage. It is missing in action on the tablet stage. It was never nowhere on the data software stage. Bing is a joke. And Google is busy cannibalizing Windows - hello Chrome OS, hello Android - and Office - hello Google Apps. So Microsofties actually held a party in Redmond - not making this up - where they ritually buried the iPhone. That has to be a joke.

Now they are out to use legal shenanigans to hurt Android. Android is free. It is meant to be free. So is Windows. Put out a free, minimalist Windows if you want to keep competing. That is the message. Now the innovation is in taking things out and keeping the bare minimum, not in adding yet another feature no one wants and that gives everyone headaches.

But then what is an Economics major CEO gonna do?

TechCrunch

If Web 1.0’s Kryptonite Was the Bust, Web 2.0 Kryptonite Was the Grind: the CEO and founder of the media company I work for were on stage looking awkward and white, but dancing none the less. ..... One word has summed both of these guys for a while now: Tired...... and for me, mostly ended last week when TechCrunch was sold. But the recession didn’t crash this one– exhaustion did. Building media companies– which is what most Web 2.0 businesses are– is a grind. .... We make startups sound easier and more glamorous than they are..... the Industry Standard– the magazine that chronicled the 1990s bubble and held weekly rooftop parties ... A few million dollars is life changing for most people

Opening Weekend: The Social Network Tops Box Office With $23 Million In Ticket Sales

Should Entrepreneurs Bet It All On The Billion Dollar Exit, Or Cash Out Small?: entrepreneurs are almost always wrong. They really don’t understand their customers; they learn by trial and error..... all the Groupon clones. .... If you’re a founder and own 50% of your startup, a $30 million acquisition can be life-changing. With a $15 million payout, you go from poverty to riches. You’re set for life

Sunday, October 03, 2010

Steve Jobs Should Never Have Been Fired

Steve Jobs, portrait by italian artist Grazian...

Image via Wikipedia

New York Times: What Steve Jobs Learned in the Wilderness: But the Jobs of the mid-1980s probably never could have made Apple what it is today if he hadn’t embarked on a torment-filled business odyssey. ..... The Steve Jobs who returned to Apple was a much more capable leader — precisely because he had been badly banged up. He had spent 12 tumultuous, painful years failing to find a way to make the new company profitable. .... In this period, Mr. Jobs did not do much delegating. ...... Apple acquired the company in 1997 and used Next’s software as the basis for the new operating system, Mac OS X...... He didn’t invent the media player, the smartphone or the tablet, but he understood that no one else had yet come up with the equivalent of a Mac. ..... “He’s the same Steve in his passion for excellence, but a new Steve in his understanding of how to empower a large company to realize his vision.”

I am not an Apple person. I have never bought an Apple product, and I think I might stick to that. My smartphone is going to be an Android. I have no plans to get an iPad. I am psyched instead about the Chrome OS netbook. I love Google like some people love Apple. My blogs are on Blogger, not Wordpress.

But Steve Jobs fascinates me, and his story is legend. I am a Steve Jobs fan. Sure. Steve Jobs is no Mozart, not even close. But he strikes me as someone who perhaps really, truly appreciates genius, perhaps the genius of a Mozart, or of an Einstein. His Think Different campaign was modeled after Einstein.

Steve Jobs is not Einstein or Mozart. Einstein and Mozart belong with each other, not Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs belongs to a different club, the club of Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. That club has few members. College dropouts not born into moneyed backgrounds who changed the trajectories of business history. These are by definition people that talent hunters, recruiters can not find for you. These are not people who are meant to be understood until after the fact, until they have done what needs to be done, and the excellence is out there for the world to see.

Steve Jobs in the wilderness reminds me of the scenes in the Mozart movie where the guy is left out to pasture. He is left to die by people who are too insignificant for the age they live in, let alone for the ages.

"Those people should not have that kind of power," Mozart says at one point. That is how I feel about people who fired Steve Jobs. Those dumbfucks should never have had the power to decide if Steve Jobs should even be fired. There I stand with Larry Ellison.

It took a Larry Ellison to get Steve Jobs back at Apple. Larry knows how to throw his weight around, and he threw his weight around on behalf of his new found best friend, Steve Jobs. It is not like the people who fired Steve Jobs finally decided that Jobs had learned his lessons and now he can come back. They were long gone.

When you give dumb people too much power, Steve Jobs gets fired and a company like Apple loses a decade of its life. Corporate monkeys did not know how to respect a Steve Jobs.

The Leo Apotheker Is Human Drama

New York Times: Mark Zuckerberg’s Most Valuable Friend: her regular meetings with the famously introverted Mr. Zuckerberg .... Facebook has successfully navigated one of the more perilous stages in a start-up’s life: a period of hypergrowth. ..... Ms. Sandberg’s close ties to many of the world’s largest advertisers, relationships she first developed as a senior executive at Google. ..... has freed Mr. Zuckerberg to focus on what he likes best: the Facebook Web site and its platform. ..... Mr. Zuckerberg, a 26-year-old engineer and product visionary, is socially awkward and reserved. At 41, Ms. Sandberg is the opposite: polished, personable, chatty and at ease in the limelight. ..... Sandberg, who has a Harvard M.B.A. .... Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, says he considers Ms. Sandberg to be a “superstar.” ...... “A lot of people choose to hire people who look exactly like them,” Mr. Zuckerberg says. “Here we just value balance a lot more. It takes work to build those relationships, but if it does work, you end up with a much better system.” ...... Mr. Zuckerberg met Ms. Sandberg at a Christmas party in 2007, and they immediately took a liking to each other. What followed was an intense, six-week business courtship, during which the two dined together multiple times a week. Because both of them are Silicon Valley celebrities, they typically ate at Ms. Sandberg’s house so they could keep their talks confidential. ....... Sandberg also oversees the seemingly arcane operational details that can help a company run smoothly — especially a company that is growing rapidly...... “She’s good at strategy and dives deep and understands how teams work together.” ..... To this day, Ms. Sandberg looks a bit out of place at Facebook. ...... Their penchant for jeans, T-shirts and hoodies is in sharp contrast to her taste for elegant clothing. ...... She went desk to desk to introduce herself, cracking jokes and asking questions. It had the desired effect. ..... mentoring many younger employees — especial
Image via CrunchBasely women, encouraging many of them not to shy away from important roles simply because they were planning to start families. ..... Although she was still in her 20s, she played pivotal roles, like helping ramp up aid efforts to Africa by opening Treasury’s door to Bono of U2. ..... “I had never heard of him and said to Sheryl that I only meet with people who have a first name and last name,” Mr. Summers recalls...... The two often socialize, and Mr. Zuckerberg, who was captain of his high school fencing team, has taught Ms. Sandberg’s 5-year-old son a few fencing moves.

Saturday, October 02, 2010

Paradise City

"There are not going be that many innovating companies coming from the web."
- Peter Thiel

new york craigslist > manhattan > gigs > computer gigs

Do you have the next Facebook? (Upper West Side)

Date: 2010-10-02, 6:09AM EDT
Reply to: gigs-zedgc-1984693979@craigslist.org

I am looking to provide capital and business guidance for the next great idea. I am a successful entrepreneur and can help take a business to the next level.

If you have a business or idea you have been contemplating and are looking for some type of assistance lets connect.

Shoot me an email to start.

Thanks!

Jeff

it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
Compensation: Funding
PostingID: 1984693979

Adoption And Missed Opportunities

Peter Thiel: We Would Be A Lot More Careful About Funding Facebook Today. But…: What he meant is that he would think twice about investing in Facebook again because there are not going be that many innovating companies coming from the web. He thinks that a lot of the current big guys, like Google and Yelp, will be at the forefront of innovation and that there’s not many game-changers emerging that will innovate on the web. He tells Lacy, “Yelp of cellphones will be Yelp, the Google of cellphones will be Google.”

TechCrunch: How Facebook Can Become Bigger In Five Years Than Google Is Today: Facebook will grow without needing to cut into Google’s core business of text ads, which are still 99% of Google’s profits ..... because Madison Avenue’s brands are less interested in targeting than they are in broadcasting to vast mother-loving buckets of demographically correct eyeballs, and Facebook has become the perfect platform for that. ...... Facebook already has more page views than Google. People already spend more time spent on Facebook than Google. ..... For many consumers, Facebook is the Web....... Facebook’s second-mover advantage affords the company the luxury of offering both types of Internet money-making product: Advertising and Commerce..... targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions feed into the next series of even-better-targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions ..... Television advertising represented $60 billion in 2009, or roughly one out of every two dollars spent on advertising in the U.S. ..... Facebook “is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. ..... brand advertising, which accounts for 90 percent of the $600 billion ad market. ..... . Yahoo just paid $1 per like, and buying fans is only going to get more expensive as the lifetime value of a “fan” is better understood. ...... Facebook Credits are poised to be this generation’s American Express .... Facebook is running the real mafia wars, taking 30% while letting the game developers do the heavy lifting. ..... PayPal’s 2009 revenue was $2.8 billion with 87 million active accounts ..... The most famous example of this in our industry is Microsoft’s inability to come to terms with the Web. When Windows and Office were making money hand over fist, text ads were as small as mouse balls. .... in 2004 when Jason Kottke boldly predicted that Google would become “the biggest and most important company in the world in 5-8 years” by selling access to the world’s biggest, best, and most cleverly utilized map of the web

Hunger, Vision, Money
That StartUp Mentality (2)
That StartUp Mentality
Web 5.0 Is Da Bomb

BlindType Reminds Me Of Swype

(Via TechCrunch, Source: BlindType)

The Leo Apotheker Is Human Drama

Image representing Sarah Lacy as depicted in C...

Image via CrunchBaseMy favorite TechCrunch writer - Sarah Lacy - has a piece on my favorite character in tech: Larry Ellison. Coincidence?

This Leo Apotheker - (please do not ask me to pronounce the dude's last name) - move by HP is all human drama, and n-o-t-h-i-n-g to do with technology.

It is like after Bush 2004 burnt into John Kerry's forearm that he was a Mr. Flip Flop, Kerry duly delivered the line afterwards: "I actually voted for the Iraq War before I voted against it."

Losers have a way of falling into the mousetrap neatly laid out for them.

I mean, duh. What was the HP Board thinking? They are like, okay Larry, hit me baby one more time. HP has been primarily a hardware company. Name one HP software product, quick. You can't. Name one HP enterprise software product. I don't think such a thing exists. And they got Thepo. HP's days as an independent company might be numbered.

This Apothepo guy used to run SAP when SAP was actually competing with Oracle. SAP to this day prides itself in being an all software company. They think Larry going into hardware is a mistake. To Larry's credit he thinks SAP's very existence is a mistake. That is not a fight between equals. Ring the bells, end the fight.

(Video via A Slice Of Grice)

Larry's Antics
Larry Ellison's Personal Life
Larry Ellison's 1995 Network Computer Vision
Hurd: From HP To Oracle
Larry Ellison
Rich People's Kids

Wall Street Journal: Larry Ellison ‘Speechless’ Over New CEO of H-P: Larry Ellison, the outspoken CEO of Oracle, said he is having trouble finding words to describe his reaction to H-P naming former SAP chief Leo Apotheker as its new top man–and then found plenty of them. .... SAP, where Apotheker worked for more than 20 years, is Oracle’s largest competitor for business-application programs, and Ellison seldom misses an opportunity to take pot shots at the company. ..... When Oracle and H-P settled the lawsuit regarding Hurd’s hiring, both companies put out statements lauding the other as a valuable partner.

Friday, October 01, 2010

I Gave In: Facebook: The Movie

Image via WikipediaI was strolling around in Murray Hill, and I happened to walk by the movie theater on 32nd Street and Second Avenue. I walked in, looked around, checked out the movie times. One time slot for The Social Network was sold out.

I walked out. Spent some time in the bookstore next door. I had quietly noted down a time slot that might work. It was close to 7PM.

I walked in again about 15 minutes before that. I bought a ticket. I am glad I did.

This actually is a very well made movie. It is a movie. It is a fictionalized version of what happened, but there are too many parallels.

It is good drama. Kevin Spacey is the executive producer. That adds to the weight, I believe.

Facebook has become too big a cultural phenomenon to have been able to avoid a movie like this made. Too many people who will not pick up a book on the topic want to know what happened.

The dramatizations aside, I did not feel Zuck got demonized or anything like that. The lawsuits were but harassments posssible in murky legal environments.

Mark Zuckerberg did not steal the idea from anyone, those guys should never have received any money. Those were bogus lawsuits. He got blackmailed, and the system allowed that.

The best line of the movie is when Zuck says: "You have a part of my attention."

The guy presented as cofounder was not a cofounder. Zuck wrote all that early code.

A big omission in the movie is Zuck's steady girlfriend of so many long years. She is not shown at all.

And of course the movie totally misses out on the engineering behind the phenomenon called Facebook.

But then movies perhaps are supposed to be drama, and hence the total focus on the lawsuits. Lawsuits make for friction make for drama.

Kevin Spacey, at the HBO post-Emmys party, in 2008

Image via Wikipedia
The movie is well made, it is not accurate, was not meant to be, although most people will believe most details.

Facebook the company has no big reason to dislike the movie, really. There is much dramatization, not much demonization.

The basic movie ingredients are actually in top form. I can see this movie making a lot of money worldwide.

The Social Network: Before Seeing The Movie

Image via WikipediaI have no plans to go see the movie. I stand in solidarity with Mark Zuckerberg on this one. That is not saying I might never see the movie. At some point I will. This is fiction. This is no documentary. This is not a book.

The Facebook story fascinates me. Just like the Google story fascinates me. Just like the Microsoft story fascinates. Larry Ellison fascinates me. If I watch the movie, I think I am going to come out hungry for books on the subject.

This movie is a dramatization. This is Hollywood trying to figure out something it has not been able to figure out. Hollywood has been at war with Silicon Valley. Hollywood has so far not figured out business models that Silicon Valley technologies ask for. But this movie is not Hollywood assaulting the valley. Hollywood is too disorganized to do such a thing. But some organizing takes place at subliminal levels, like when Tea Party white people talk code to rally against Barack Obama's blackness.

At the end of the day, this is just a movie. In the mean time, go read Sree's review.

Sree Srinivasan: Six Things Learned Watching 'The Social Network': I am not a movie critic and, thanks to my 7-year-old twins, I don't get to see a lot of non-animated movies. .... Oscar winner Kevin Spacey is listed as a producer. ..... Parker helps speed up the estrangement between Zuckerberg and Saverin in the movie and also suggests changing the name to just "Facebook." Timberlake is a scene stealer. The pop star appears to had a lot of fun playing a guy out to make lots of money without much regard for morals and rules. .... smartphones confiscated from those attending that screening ...... a lot of people did manage to take phones into the theater, as there were various glowing screens in the darkened theater. A security guard marched up and down the aisles and shined a flashlight on the offenders until they put away their phones.

Redfiff: Aseem Chabbra: How Facebook Came To Be: a curly haired, Jewish American Harvard University undergrad, and a cocky genius Marc Zuckerberg. ..... Harvard authorities caught up with Zuckerberg accusing him of hacking and breaching the university's secure systems and he was placed on probation. ...... Following the probation, as Zuckerberg's name spreads in the hallways and the courtyards at Harvard, he is approached by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss -- twin brothers ...... and their Indian American friend Divya Narendra from Queens, New York .... Zuckerberg stalls the project by sending unsubstantial emails to the three, while developing the prototype of what he eventually called The Facebook. He later drops "The" from the name of the company on advice of his mentor -- Napster co-founder Sean Parker .... Zuckerberg is a programming genius with little business sense. .... intrigues, jealousies and deceptions.

AllThingsD: Kara Swisher: The Facebook Movie: Sorry, Mark–But Critics Like It, They Really Like It! (Plus the Taiwanesed Version!): there is bathroom sex, beatings, peepholes and–say what?–a gay love triangle.

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Wednesday, October 06, 2010

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Monday, October 04, 2010

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Sunday, October 03, 2010

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Saturday, October 02, 2010

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