Google's dual-use copyright notice | CNET News.com: "In its early days, the company asked some focus group participants to search for information using its site. But many people, when they went to Google, did nothing for a minute or two. When asked why, these apparent procrastinators said they were waiting for the rest of the site to load. So, the company thought that by putting a copyright notice on its page--something usually found only at the bottom of a fully loaded page--perhaps people would get the hint that the spartan page was fully loaded. " --- perhaps i'm becoming jaded from consulting with overture... but i'm getting close to my google saturation point. the worm will turn on these guys some point, and like everyone else, they will understand the darkside of having had once been a media darling for far too long.
Wozniak's New Company Plans Personal Network: "The new wOzNet technology will create personal wireless communications networks that fill a gap between the geographically limited wireless local area network now available for computers and wider telecommunications networks, like cell-phone systems. " -- Woz, one of my heroes. Great to see him really active in tech again. Sounds like there's something interesting brewing here... but not enough detail to get a good sense of its importance. Definitely one to track.
Outsourcing to usurp more U.S. jobs | CNET News.com: "A study released by the research firm Tuesday states that one out of every 10 jobs at information technology companies and at companies that provide IT services will move to emerging markets. It also forecast that one out of every 20 jobs within internal IT departments will shift overseas by the end of 2004. 'Offshore outsourcing is becoming a tool for improving service delivery and a source of highly qualified talent in greater numbers,' Diane Morello, a research director at Gartner, said in a statement. " --- 10% is a pretty big number, especially given the current job market. Are techies pricing themselves out of a job?
Yahoo! News - Telemarketers Sue Over Do-Not-Call List: "WASHINGTON - Telemarketers expanded their legal challenge to the government's do-not-call list, suing a second federal agency over the call-blocking service for consumers that the industry says will devastate business and cost up to two million jobs. " -- ah, those smart telemarketers, playing the "jobs lost card". obviously there's some truth to it... and obviously, it's a highly charged issue. i'll be interested to see how this plays out.
Cannot find server 10 minutes of searching, and I still can't find a working link to a california voter registration form online... odd, considering there's a recall election coming so soon...
What’s Next for Digital Photography" For the future, Aaland says there are a few new abbreviations that will change photography forever. One is EXIF, which stands for “Exchangeable Image File.” EXIF is more generally known as “metadata”, and it is the standard by which additional information can be encoded into the photo at the moment it’s taken. Date and time stamping, of course, is old stand-by from chemical film, but EXIF allows a far broader range: type of camera, F-stop, shutter speed, ISO (the digital equivalent of film speed), whether a flash was used. And it can go much further: one professional camera already lets you use GPS data from the global positioning system to record exactly where on earth each photo was taken." -- emphasis added. as usual, deeje and i were several years ahead of the market in calling this. unfortunately, as usual, neither of us will likely capitalize on our prognostication. in the future, perhaps this can be resolved by publishing, if not by developing our ideas.
Built-in Wireless(802.11b)5 Built-in Bluetooth™5 High-resolution Color Display (480x320) Built-in Digital Camera (310,000 pixels) Built-in MP3 Player and Voice Recorder2 Built-in QWERTY Layout Keyboard Video recording and playback Compatible with Memory Stick PRO Media2 Extremely Portable (6.2 oz. Including stylus!)
Fast Company | Digital Squared: Living in an iTunes World: "What all technology companies have in common is a desperate need to increase revenue. And enabling the digital acquisition of digital products is a vehicle to that end, as is the creation of a Wi-Fi country. It is in Dell Computer's and Hewlett-Packard's interests to produce personal computers that make it easy to burn your own CDs and DVDs. It is in Intel's interest to build ever-faster chips that enable computers to burn CDs and DVDs more easily. It is in the phone company's interest to get more homes linked to the Internet at very high rates of speed. The interests of all of those key industries are conspiring to create a vast marketplace for the digital acquisition of digital products.
The missing piece, of course, is the content-providing community, which has been battling digital distribution tooth and nail since Napster. ITunes' success should now make every company, from gaming outfits to television networks, warm to the possibility. For recording artists like Bruce Springsteen, every concert can be remixed and sold as an album. For cable-television networks such as A&E and The History Channel, documentaries that have been sitting on a shelf can become profit centers."
--- this is going to be huge. broadband, wi-fi, digital products, real-time acqusition... where is the opportunity for a startup in this mess? how do you get in the middle of it all, in a way that provides values to consumers and/or service providers, without getting crushed? what's unique?
"It's basically an experiential browser, built on a very specific conceptual framework," Wisniewski said. "The thing you need to realize is that software is not neutral--it structures our thinking. A good example is PowerPoint (Microsoft's presentation program) and this crazy idea it's created that any concept can be represented by a series of bullet points."
Sounds cool, site was slammed, couldn't get to it.
AP Wire | 07/21/2003 | FBI investigates University of Phoenix in trade secret case: "The FBI is investigating allegations that the nation's largest for-profit university stole trade secrets from its former software provider and gave privileged access to a competing software company.
Chariot Software Group alleges that top-level administrators at The University of Phoenix, a subsidiary of Phoenix-based Apollo Group Inc., supplied passwords for Chariot's software to another company, which then mimicked Chariot's designs and used their servers to maintain the university's online testing system." --- UGH! UOP, you're making a freaking killing. Do you have any idea how much it'll cost you (and all of your alumni) if you shave a few bucks off your R&D budget by stealing?! Say it ain't so!
Overture to a patent war? | CNET News.com: "'We'll add...to our technology assets Overture's impressive intellectual property portfolio of both algorithmic and sponsored search patents,' he said. 'These are some of the key reasons we have opted to acquire Overture. We believe that the advertising industry is in its earliest days of a great future.' "
Well, the $ was the obvious draw... but now the truth is starting to become available to outsiders. It's not just the Overture patents... it's also all the patents we acquired when we bought AV & Fast. The next portal arms race has begun.
"The death knell is sounding for the Netscape browser, industry observers said, following America Online's decision Tuesday to lay off about 50 Netscape software developers and end development work on the Mozilla browser technology."
And my question... who cares? NSCP was dead when AOL bought them. Safari will ultimately meet with the same fate, or worse, won't be able to maintain compatibility, should MSFT decide to start innovating again.
Microsoft warns of critical Windows flaw | CNET News.com: "'It should be emphasized that this vulnerability poses an enormous threat, and appropriate patches provided by Microsoft should be immediately applied,' the group said in an advisory posted to its Web site. The group said that programs designed to exploit the vulnerability will likely be available on the Internet soon.
The flaw is in a component of the operating system that allows other computers to request the Windows system perform an action or service. The component, known as the remote procedure call (RPC) process, facilitates such activities such as sharing files and allowing others to use the computer's printer.
By sending too much data to the RPC process, an attacker can cause the system to grant full access to the system. "
Buffer overloads AGAIN? Feels like the 80's again...
Guy's now writing for Forbes, which is great, as he seems to have gone dark. I'll have to dig around and see if I can find his blog.
"Guy Kawasaki, the latest addition to our columnist lineup, is an entrepreneur, an author and the chief executive of Garage Technology Ventures, a boutique investment bank for tech firms. Guy will provide expert answers to all your questions about starting a business. "
Looks like Deeje's work at MACR has borne fruit. Interesting that they too are deploying a Macrovision based solution. Hope they learned from Intuit's $100M+ mistake.
deeje.com: "Matthew Emmert discusses the phenom of 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' on Fool.com:
Deeje writes in his blog on 7/15/03 about Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Ironically, I just bought and crashed through the book this past weekend. (A little easy reading after Deming, Senge and the like.)
I took a lot out of it, primarily that as an independent contractor, I need to be a lot more progressive in my thinking about minimizing my taxes through whatever legal options are available and appropriate -- self employment taxes are just rediculous. I also need to look for cash flow generating assets... or some other way to get the $ I've managed to save to work significantly harder for me than they currently are. Well worth the $15.
--- The truth is that Kiyosaki, and those like him, can make far more money selling you their 'proven methods' than they ever could employing those methods themselves. The only available evidence leads one to believe that Kiyosaki has amassed whatever wealth he has by selling his methods, as opposed to employing them. I read the first book years ago, and liked the message that real estate is a worthwhile investment vehicle. A friend of mine read the same book, and thought Kiyosaki was saying that buying your first home isn't a good investment. Phooey! Then again, I lost interest when I started receiving tons of marketing materials for 'investment seminars' from Kiyosaki's Co. which pushed people into multi-level marketing schemes. Phooey on that, too!"
This is rather discouraging, considering the lack of progress that has been made in the last decade....
"The biggest study so far of resistance to AIDS drugs, to be released on Wednesday at an international AIDS conference in Paris, finds that about 10 percent of all newly infected patients in Europe are infected with drug-resistant strains. The researcher who led the study called the level 'surprisingly high.' Other scientists at the conference agreed that the findings had worldwide public health implications and made the hunt for new classes of AIDS drugs even more critical. "
SAN JOSE, California (AP) -- Peter Kerrigan encouraged friends to move to Silicon Valley throughout the 1980s and '90s, wooing them with tales of lucrative jobs in a burgeoning industry. But he lost his network engineering job at a major telecommunications company in August 2001 and remains unemployed. Now 43, the veteran programmer is urging his 18-year-old nephew to stay in suburban Chicago and is discouraging him from pursuing degrees in computer science or engineering.
"I told him, 'Unless you're planning to do this as a path to technical sales, don't do it,'" said Kerrigan, who lives in Oakland. "He won't be able to have a career designing and building stuff because all those jobs have moved to India."
Like many unemployed programmers, Kerrigan blames the sour labor market on offshore outsourcing -- the migration of tech jobs to relatively low-paid contractors or locally hired employees in India, China, Russia and
Yahoo! News - S. Korea: North Advancing Nuclear Program: "SEOUL, South Korea - South Korea (news - web sites) said Wednesday the communist North has reprocessed a small number of spent nuclear fuel rods, an important step in making weapons. The report came as North Korean envoys warned that the 'black clouds of a nuclear war' are approaching. "
Yahoo! News - Expert: U.S. Knew al-Qaida Might Attack: "WASHINGTON - The United States and the international community sat by for a decade as Afghanistan (news - web sites) became 'a terrorist Disneyland' where attackers were trained and assaults were planned, a terrorism expert testified Wednesday. "
Hard to focus on terrorism when you have interns and cigars to play with all day...
"Wal-Mart Stores has unexpectedly canceled testing for an experimental wireless inventory control system, ending one of the first and most closely watched efforts to bring controversial radio frequency identification technology to store shelves in the United States. "
Wal-Mart lost its nerve, prefering instead to focus on RFID in warehouses. Several UK chains are still pursuing package level tagging tests. Looks like this is still several years out for mass adoption in the consumer goods market.
Summary: Trans-fat = Hydrogenated = Hydrolozied = B A D
It's great to see this information getting out there. I wish this info was available for the dishes served at restuarants as well.
"U.S. Government Requires Trans-Fat Labels on Food Wednesday July 9, 1:13 pm ET By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - All packaged foods sold across America will have to carry labels telling people how much artery-clogging trans-fats they contain under new U.S. government regulations issued on Wednesday.
Trans-fatty acids are a component of fat and found in all animal fats, from meat to butter. They are also made synthetically when food processors harden fat to make it more like butter in a process called hydrogenization.
Found in meat, milk, cookies and fries, trans-fats raise cholesterol, especially 'bad' or LDL cholesterol. 'Trans-fats are bad fats. The less trans-fat you and I eat, the healthier we will be,' Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson told a news conference. He promised more regulation regarding nutrition claims and labeling. 'This is just the beginning of a lot more rules and regulations about this. We are moving now very rapidly,' Thompson said. While food labels warn consumers about saturated fats, which also raise cholesterol, there is currently no way to know for sure whether a food contains trans-fats. The new requirement, which takes effect as of January 2006, comes a year after government advisers at the Institute of Medicine recommended it. It was first proposed in 1999 but HHS and the Food and Drug Administration (News - Websites) re-opened the comment period twice. 'Trans-fats can no longer lurk, hidden, in our food choices,' said Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. Mark McClellan. GROUPS WELCOME NEW MOVE The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which has been pressing for labels, said the move 'will spur companies t"
1. The article is pasted below because, as I went through the archives of my blog yesterday (scrolling, because the new Blogger search functionality is useless...) I noticed that most of my Yahoo! links posted to articles that had EXPIRED. Now that's frustrating.
2. MSFT is a) now paying a dividend and b) now giving stock GRANTS instead of OPTIONS. this solves a serious number of challenges for them, but fundamentally changes the software compensation paradigm that's existed since before i got in the industry... at least for a mature company like MSFT.
i wonder, however, how it will effect MSFT's review process and organizational culture, and how it effects the employee's tax situation.
i can feel the first tri of my mba kicking in here, as it is all about organizational behavior & development...
Ballmer breaks Silicon valley taboo Tuesday July 8, 7:55 pm ET By Richard Waters and Tom Foremski in San Francisco
For the second time this year, Microsoft has shown signs of encroaching corporate middle age - and delivered a wake-up call to the rest of the technology industry in the process. First came a decision to pay a dividend to its shareholders. As well as signalling that its early years of go-go growth were over, the move put pressure on other tech companies to justify why they did not pay dividends as well.
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On Tuesday, it delivered an even bigger challenge by responding to the clamour for the practice of listing stock options as expenses that followed various accounting scandals in corporate America.
Most executives in Silicon Valley believe stock options to be a core of their industry's risk-and-reward culture. For the world's biggest software maker to end its use of them is akin to breaching a taboo.
As part of the shift toward issuing ordinary shares to its employees instead of options, the company said it would begin to account for the benefits as an expense against profits. By also doing so with the options it has issued in the past, Microsoft has broken ranks with the tech industry's resistance to this accounting practice.
Deducting the costs of options in the past would have wiped nearly $9bn from Microsoft's operating profits over the past three years.
No wonder other companies were quick to brush off the development.
Intel said companies would "adopt a range of different compensation packages and that is the way it should be", adding that the leading chipmaker would not abandon options.
Yet Microsoft's dominance of the software business will inevitably make its compensation practices a model for others - a fact that other tech executives have explicity acknowledged in the past, and which Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, alluded to on Tuesday.
The change is also likely to add indirectly to Microsoft's steadily mounting cash pile, which stood at $46bn at the end of March.
The company said that the number of shares issued to employees would be lower than the number of options it has handed out in the past, though it refused to give further details.
As a result, it will need to buy back fewer shares to prevent dilution to its earnings per share. Microsoft has spent $17bn in buy backs in its last three fiscal years.
For the company's employees, meanwhile, the change in policy should ease some of the pain that can come from an extended bear market, though it may also reduce the chances of becoming seriously rich.
"Underwater" stock options - those that carry an exercise price above the current share price - will become a thing of the past.
This was the main factor that prompted Microsoft to end the use of options, according to the company. At least 632m options - or 79 per cent of all those outstanding - are currently underwater, according to the company's last annual report. Some carry excercise prices as high as $119, compared to a current share price of $27.70.
While the new stock awards will be less volatile than the option benefits, there will be fewer of them. By Mr Ballmer's calculation, the average employee might be 10-15 per cent worse off if the company's share price rises - although he did not provide details of this calculation.
But while huge profits earned by employees during Microsoft's first two decades as a public company seem a thing of the past it does not necessarily mean the death of the option in Silicon Valley.
Willie Tejada, vice- president of business development at Netli, a young internet technology company, said: "The stock option packages in start-ups will have potentially a much greater value and will increase in value at a faster rate than say Microsoft's shares."
As Apple becomes more and more turnkey (in order to provide a comprehensive, integrated system), it is becoming more and more of an island. The only way this works is if Apple's software is equal to or better than any other solution on the market... while providing some level of compatibility with alternative apps. Can Apple really provide ongoing best-of-breed software??
Analysis of online business and technology trends, including: Search and Directory, Digital Media, Social Networking, RSS, and E-commerce. Written by buzzhit!'sTony Gentile.
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