My Tribe Blog

Celebrating Lil' Pinot's Birthday at the Larkspur Creek Inn

p-air — Thu, 31 May 2007 06:19:30 GMT

Last night, Lil' Pinot and I enjoyed a wonderful dinner at the Larkspur Creek Inn. What a cool little four star restaurant that I had never really heard of, though I've since learned that it's been a renowned spot for San Franciscans since the turn of the century, where they would come out to enjoy the wonderful country atmosphere and food. Lil' Pinot's Alaskan Halibut was delicious and while I ordered an ordinary dish in the pot roast, it too was very well prepared. The waitress at one point casually asked us if we were there for a special occasion, and we let it slip out that it was Lil' Pinot's birthday but that she wasn't a desert fan. Well, that didn't seem to stop them from doing a very sweet thing in making sure that Lil' Pinot's day was immortalized. The picture above tells the story, all written in a yummy chocolate sauce which I gladly indulged in so Lil' Pinot could enjoy it vicariously :)

Kitesurfing season gets started with a bang!

p-air — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 06:03:34 GMT

Well all signs for the weekend were that after a week of getting teased for wind, things would finally come together. As my buddies and I began to assess the wind meters we began to get prematurely concerned that we might get skunked again. First we watched the meters, then we chased the wind to an area known as the Brickyard in San Rafael. Nothin' doing, the winds were too light there though they had once looked promising. Crissy Field was slow in building and all fogged in. After a little patience, we suddenly saw the move in our pagers indicate that the wind had kicked up to 17 kts at Crissy...time to bust a move. Crissy was still fogged in when we got there, but by the time we were rigged and ready to go at 2:30pm, it was like the gods smiled upon us and parted the fog to let the sun shine through. Precious. Perfect winds, sun and a nice swell under the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, not much more we could have asked for. The crew was out "en masse" and a good time was had by all. After 1.5 hours of riding, then packing up our stuff, the fog suddenly returned and closed the playground just as quickly as it had opened things up. Nice. Sunday I made the move to Sherman Island in the Delta where I managed to get in three sessions, and though I'm really out of shape as the season gets started here and only managed an hour ride each time out, it was as perfect of a 70+ degree day as we could have hoped for this early in the season. The wind was steady and all I can say is that I'm still buzzing (and aching ;) from the smoothness of the conditions on this second day of the weekend. All in all, a great start to what we hope will be an awesome season.

Snowboarding Sugar Bowl yesterday

p-air — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 03:29:21 GMT

After hearing all of the stories on how much snow Tahoe got this past week, I decided that it was time to investigate. Lil' Pinot was already boasting of her girl's trip to Aspen, which had the auspicious start of dealing with a delayed flight followed by a canceled one leading to a 4 hour van ride to the resort, but that's for another time...where was I...oh yeah, so "Tahoe this Friday" became my mantra this week. As the day approached, a few friends who were going with me began to bail, when it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't seen a very dear buddy who lives up there. And so, on Thurs evening put a call into the only guy in the world I know who can on less than 10 hours notice rearrange his schedule for a big day on the mountain. My buddy Mario is with whom I spent a season 6 years ago snowboarding most of the 100 days I had that season. He's a few years younger but really pushes me to ride my best. And so, the amigos were reunited yesterday for 4.5 hours (non-stop from 10:00a to 2:30p) of remembering what we were like that epic season (2000/'01). By the end of that season, we were both laying out 360s and more (he actually pulled off a front flip) off of 25-30 foot cliffs on powder days. We used to describe fresh pow days as having a tough day at the office (when riding is all you're doing for a season, that becomes your office :) because we would throw our biggest tricks on those days. Well, yesterday was more about remembering than throwing down. We had a great time finding the goods at Sugar Bowl getting turns in untouched pow (had to know your way around to find these). Even the areas that had already been ridden were still nice with easy to move snow as there was a crisp cold in the air, though the sun was keeping our bodies perfectly tempered. This was only my second bona fide day of pure snowboarding for the season, and his fifth (though he got 3 of those in the past week), so our stamina wasn't what it used to be, but we still rode hard and extreme (as in the terrain rather than the tricks). It was good to know that even though I got tired faster, I could still hang with Mario on the big stuff. Anyway, it's my understanding it was beautiful up there today and should be like that tomorrow, albeit a bit warmer for some perfect spring conditions. Hope you get some.

Lovin' Blurb!

p-air — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 02:14:26 GMT

For the past 4 months, Lil' Pinot and I have been handling the biz dev activity for Blurb. In case you haven't heard about it, it's an on-demand photobook service. The quality and price and really nice and they get lots of creative professionals and creative enthusiasts using Blurb for creating books of their work as portfolios. These are much cheaper than more traditional portfolios but of high quality and providing options on book size. I believe there's an artist experimenting by trying to selling a compilation of his work in book form, (cheaper than the real thing ;). Anyway, a few weeks ago a good buddy of mine took a bunch of pictures of Lil' Pinot and I snowkiting in Skyline Ridge, Utah. (http://direwolff.wordpress.com/2007/02/08/lil-pinot-p-air-gettin-some-at-skyline-ridge-utah/ ). Well, he turned them into a book of our snowkiting adventure, complete with shots of the area, other kiters, that really told a story. He wrote captions as well as a page of text where appropriate describing the area or the adventure. It blew away some friends of mine who saw the book a few days ago. After seeing the third book that someone I know has created, I'm convinced of how totally cool this capability is for any one to have. There are lots of family books getting created as well. Tribe already offers the services of QOOP for soft-cover books and other great stuff (ie. posters, shirts, mugs, etc.), of which I have a few :) But, where you're intent is to create a coffee table book of high-end production value, Blurb should be included in your investigations. I realize I'm biased here, but having only recently gotten the book, I'm still all googly-eyed over it :)

Do my eyes deceive me or...

p-air — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 06:51:08 GMT

...has Tribe become cool again?! F**ken A! It's really nice to see some of the ideas of the team finally getting to see the light of day. Congrats to the team that remained there and worked through what was probably the most difficult period in any start-up's life, when the wrong management takes over. Fortunately, they've persevered and come out the other end with what I think is the dawning of an awesome new beginning. Wow, now I may just need to start blogging here again too :-) Special shout out to the "Back to the Future" logo!!! Yeah baby!!!

KickTheOilHabit.org

p-air — Fri, 19 May 2006 01:07:43 GMT

A friend of mine sent me this link recommending the video on the landing page, and so after seeing it I'm recommending this to those of you who happen to catch this blog post, so you can also experience it. Check out: http://www.KickTheOilHabit.org Some times it's the simple ideas that are worth the most, and while this isn't solving the big picture, it may be a good achievable first step towards beginning to reverese the natural course of things.

When politicians have too much time and too little knowledge on their hands, things get weird

p-air — Sun, 14 May 2006 02:43:57 GMT

From the department of misguided laws and regulations that never needed to get the time of day, we bring you Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick (R-Pa) latest attempt to bring his vision of the perfect world to the rest of our country (does any one know why it's always the Pennsylvania representatives that seem to behave with such disdain for tolerance of any sort?). Follow the action here, http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fi-myspace12may12,1,5165050.story?coll=la-news-a_section , to see why he's seeking a bill to block access to MySpace...and this guy calls himself an American, blasted! And of course, my favorite line if not for its idiocy and hypocricy comes in the form of: "The social networking sites have become, in a sense, a happy hunting ground for child predators," said Fitzpatrick, a father of six children, including three teen girls. His legislation, called the Deleting Online Predators Act, "is essentially a bill to protect children from the Internet." (Someone had better tell him that it wasn't so long ago that the House of Representatives' pages program used to be the happy hunting ground for child predators not so long ago ;-) And how does Rep. Fitzpatrick propose to achieve his goal of protecting the children, you ask? By prohibiting "anyone under 18 from accessing ["social networking" websites] on school or library computers". Will the people of Pennsylvania (a state that I have much affinity with and a great respect for its people) *PLEASE* stop voting for idiots!!! Arrrrgggghhhh!!!! :-)

NSA sleuthing and the importance of social networks

p-air — Sat, 13 May 2006 16:57:28 GMT

Ran into an interesting article this morning on how the NSA is using its access to Americans' telephone calls (are these the "lugs" so often referred to in "Law & Order"?), courtesy of our friendly phone companies, to map social networks. Here's the article, http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70888-0.html?tw=wn_technology_1 , while short, it gets the basic point across. So imagine that we could find out through people's phone records (oh yeah, and cell phones too), everyone they called. As the article suggests, knowing what was discussed is far less important than who's talking to who. Building implicit social networks is something that many services have been trying to do, but for a start-up the challenge is far greater than for the NSA and it's "we have ways of making you talk" methods for getting the phone call records from the telcos. Companies like Spoke (http://www.spoke.com ) do this for corporations where they let their employees' e-mails get processed for just such type of relationships. Others like ZoomInfo (http://www.zoominfo.com ) work on putting together implicit bios on people from sucking in the various press releases, news articles, and Web site company bios about them. With services like LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com ) or one that I recall Alacra (http://www.alacra.com ) offering that mapped executives' corporate affiliations and board seats, you can really start getting a good sense for the corporate relationship landscape. Of course none of this does anything to address mapping the "masses", and certainly nothing quite like the phone logs. OK, so where am I going with this? Something about this feels like a more invasive privacy violation than someone getting a hold of my credit card information and purchase history. Explicit links are one thing, but when we get to implicit it raises several other issues. These are currently being raised and debated in the context of AttentionTrust.org, but also need to be looked at in this latest NSA context. At what point will people's information be held to a higher standard, to a *private* standard. Has the idea of *privacy* really lost all meaning under the directive of the war on terror (someone please explain how one can be at war with "a state of intense fear"...and they say that English is our country's national language, but I digress ;-). Now if we take a counter position here for a moment, the extent of the abuses that we've been experiencing in corporations and government (some times being one and the same) lately, which I do believe have greatly surpassed those of previous decades (part of our culture of breaking world records I guess) both in scope and in damage, this really starts to support the idea that we need a way to understand who knows whom both in government and in corporations. If to at least stem the payola abuses between corporate lobbyists and government officials. The Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay fiasco certainly points to how lobbyists and charities were even used in quite an elaborate scheme. But when you go below the surface and start to see who knew who, you really get a good picture for how incestuous and insular the group involved in these fraudulent activities were. You also get a good picture of how and why those involved were involved and how they knew each other. So the question of privacy here really comes with a double-edged sword, of which both sides are strongly defendable. What also occurs to me is that those often making the laws are the ones who violate them the most aggregiously and for whom these laws really need apply. Call it the cost of going into "public" life. The NSA knowing my social network won't really do much for them given that I have no inclination for power nor for any nefarious activities. But them knowing Tom DeLay's social network could unearth more crimes than we could prosecute him for in his lifetime. The funny thing is that he has already shown the power to have judges and evidence removed from his case, so will any of these NSA actions really ever affect him? Given that government officials are held to higher standards (by their own doing and arrogance most often) and corporate chieftains of public companies are now making significant sums of money and positioning themselves as part of the public trust, then it's probably right that these folks be subjected to the social network mapping exercise, while leaving the "hoi polloi" to go about its private business privately. Or at worse case, people should only have this sort of intrusion occur if they're suspected of committing a crime, but not as a matter or policy as it appears to be happening with these NSA exercises. It's really very interesting to see that in our country where the cries of privacy and freedom are loudly pronounced and bandied around like they're part of the common sense of living here, we now live in a place that 's closely reminiscent of what we were told was happening in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. It was all the rage to talk about how the Soviets were spying on their own and no one was free to say anything against the government for fear of retribution. They weren't free was the mantra espoused in this country at the time. Well, who's not free now? ;-) If you follow the progression of these violations you can start to see how the current investigations into government "whistle blowers" tied to mapping of their social networks could start to get a lot of people in trouble for doing the right thing...and yes, then we could never say anything derogatory against our government either...but I digress ;-) With that I'll end my rant :-) Peace!

So what's missing out there Stowe?

p-air — Tue, 02 May 2006 23:12:46 GMT

Flew to LA today for the AlwaysOn OnHollywood conference at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. The hotel sits in a pretty seedy part of Hollywood as was described by someone, but I like to think of it as the character filled more edgy side of Hollywood. The Chinese Theatre is straight out of my hotel room window and its a veritable carnival out there w/some gal dancing on her own non-stop, musicians down a block or so from her, tourists by the dozens, all sorts of interesting costumed characters (wait, I see a Goofy handing out pamphlets of some sort), all-in-all a pretty crazy scene out there. While having lunch, I noticed Stowe Boyd blogging away down the hotel bar from me and went over to introduce myself. Super nice guy and he's apparently become a paid model recently. He pulled this off by auctioning his t-shirt-wear space to the highest bidders and is now booked w/logo'd t-shirts for the next 240 days. Too funny. He had very fond words for Tribe (wishing it was doing better), and more specifically for Mark Pincus. After eating lunch I caught up w/him again and asked him the question, "so Stowe, what's missing out there, or what have you seen that's interesting, new and unique?". He paused and explained per one of his previous posts (which I'll refer to here after I find it on his site), that there are lots of clusters of so-called Web 2.0 applications. It feels like as soon as someone does something interesting several others rush to do the same stuff with incrememental differences. But it does seem like there's lots of other stuff out there that no one has yet taken a crack at. The example he gave was accounting systems. I loved it. Given that accounting systems do often require several people to interact w/them, enabling a distributed Web accessible accounting system does seem to make sense. Sure there are security issues, but no better no worse than what Salesforce.com has to deal with. Perhaps even with a synching component if the company deemed a need to back-up its content locally as well as having it sit in the cloud. I thought this simple example was actually very insightful given how many small companies out there deal with accountants on a retainer basis and need them to regularly look over their bookkeeping entries. It would save both the accountants and the small companies time. For the accountants they could simply review reports electronically at will. For the companies, they'd save time in not having to print everything out or e-mail reports to the accountants. I'm always amazed by what interesting information can get unearthed some times from asking the simple questions. Now time to get started working a hosted accounting system before a cluster emerges there too :-)

Bush on Plame...but what about the tax payers?

p-air — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 03:53:43 GMT

With all the hubbub about Bush leaking Valerie Plame's CIA role to the public, the speculation over how he's allowed to release classified material and so there should be nothing wrong with what he did, it occurred to me that this all begs some basic questions. For one, if he did nothing wrong, then why didn't he come clean...ah, I mean why didn't he just tell the public ("come clean" sounds like I'm suggesting that he was dirty or something, right? ;-)? Afterall, given how long the investigations into this matter have been going on, at great expense to the American tax payers (that's us folks), if he had simply divulged the fact that he authorized this release of information then this matter would have been addressed and resolved years ago. As always, I suspect every one involved knows that this was not all that clean of a matter. So the next question is how dirty of a matter was it and what punishment should be doled out given that fact? The President's effective denial to all branches of government (since no one appears to have known about this until Libby's recent statements) for as long as he declined to divulge his involvement, suggests that at the very least there's a matter of lying to the American people (yeah, I know you liberals out there are chuckling at my seeming naivete on this matter, "why he's been lying to us since the day he took office" ;-) and to Congress. Doesn't that mean something any more, or is only when one denies receiving felatio in the oval office? In the words of conservative movement in America, "I think it's time someone be held accountable"! Both Bush & Cheney have done nothing but obstruct justice in this matter and it's time that they take responsibility for their actions, not simply by admitting their guilt and complicity, but by also being removed (or stepping down, I'm not fussy here) from office. OK now, who's with me?!...close your eyes, click your heels three times and repeat after me, "there's no place like home, there's no place like home"...I can dream can't I? :-)

SURPRISE!!!...not!

p-air — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 22:38:35 GMT

Not this should come as a surprise to any one in their right mind, but just in case you missed it... --- Libby Traces Approval of Disclosure Back to Bush WASHINGTON -- President Bush personally authorized leaking long-classified information to a reporter in the summer of 2003 to buttress administration claims, now discredited, that Saddam Hussein was attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction for Iraq, according to a court filing by prosecutors in the case against former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-040606libby_lat,0,3687566.story?coll=la-home-headlines --- They've taken our country to the lowest depths imaginable. What's amazing to this day is how their supporters can still consider Bill Clinton's infidelity a greater crime than this, the war, and the other 100 or so lies that have been perpetrated over the past 6 yrs. Crazy!

YouTube, the next eBay

p-air — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 17:58:41 GMT

The metaphor I'm drawing on in the title goes as follows, eBay started out as a marketplace for individuals to be able to find quick liquidity in goods they wanted to sell. The auction model was innovative and it built a large audience of buyers quickly. This natually lead to actual merchants seeing eBay as a source for audience and prospective customers. Today, I believe something like 80% of eBay's revenue comes from professional merchants selling goods on the site. They built it for organic use and the professionals came in and took over. With YouTube's announcement today, we're seeing the whole thing happen again, but this time with videos. Here's a link to the press release: --- G4 and YouTube Form Strategic Alliance, Beginning With Exclusive World Premiere of G4 'Star Trek 2.0' Short http://sev.prnewswire.com/entertainment/20060404/LATU07104042006-1.html --- Effectively, what's happening is that because YouTube has developed an innovative site for the upload and viewing of videos. As a result they drew a large audience for the user created videos quickly (yes, and some professional videos (ie. SNL skits) that shouldn't have been there ;-). This has gotten the attention of studios who are looking for all sorts of ways to promote their TV shows and movies online. With this deal w/G4 for the new "Star Trek 2.0", we begin to see the emergence of a business model for YouTube that could really go a long way for them. We can also now expect to see much more professional content being uploaded to YouTube as the studios see this as a perfect promotional oppty for their properties. For YouTube, it's where the money is. --- UPDATE - 4/17/06 Article in USATODAY: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-04-17-youtube-marketers_x.htm "Nike, Warner Bros., MTV2 and Dimension Films are among the firms seeding the site with commercial clips. Now, along with consumer-made videos of newborn babies, weddings and teens pulling pranks, is a short of soccer star Ronaldinho in his new Nike sneakers." Looks like the advertisers came on quickly.

The Facebook news put some Cheerios in the blogosphere's breakfast

p-air — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:01:02 GMT

It's always fun to read the blogosphere's endless speculations on stories that are not usually as they seem, but I guess there's no harm in speculating. So with that, I figured I'd throw a few out of my own on this Facebook matter which is garnering so much attention (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2006/tc20060327_215976.htm ). IF the news is accurate (though I highly doubt it) that Facebook passed on an offer to be acquired for $750M, and IF it has set an asking price of $2B (all BIG "IF"s that I continue to question, especially after reading Paidcontent.org report that Tribe received a round of financing recently which was only a year late in being reported (http://www.paidcontent.org/pc/arch/2006_02_24.shtml ;-)...doh!), then I don't believe that Facebook is on the block at all. From what I know of the company, they are currently profitable on cashflow, there's some additional speculation that they have received another round of financing (http://www.paidcontent.org/pc/arch/2006_03_28.shtml#054295 ...though I note that this was written by Rafat who also reported on the Tribe funding...wrong again? hmm...), so they don't really *need* to be acquired right now. Any one in a position not to need it can set whatever asking number they want, however unreachable, because it's simply stating the obvious, "what's the number at which I'd be willing to part with this business?". For Facebook, that number appears to be $2B. It's not that they actually need to be shopping the deal, but since they don't need the exit right away, they can set an unrealistic number knowing that if someone steps up it's worth selling at that price. There's also a subtle difference not well understood by many of the pundits I've read who have discussed Facebook's relative value to MySpace. MySpace is still about pseudonymity. In other words, surely you can put your real name and contact info, but most people don't completely do this or prefer to use an alias of some sort. As well, their e-mail address is generally of vanilla variety (Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, {name your free e-mail service here}) which are easily disposable. Facebook on the other hand, I'd liken much more to LinkedIn. It's really a directory of real people with their real names and real e-mail addresses. There's some level of authentication that has occurred with their registrations. Sure, kids graduate fm college, but many retain their e-mail for life even as a secondary one. That means that a Facebook contributed e-mail address has lasting value. Get'em early and you get'em for life ;-)...wonder if they learned that from Apple? Directories have inherently greater value than pseudononyous services because the lead generation potential comes with better and more accurate information. It's less about people pretending to be people they're not, and more about higher value information on the members. That's monetizable value. Now, this is by no means a justification for the numbers being bandied around, but I wouldn't be comparing Facebook to MySpace, as these are used for different purposes by different groups of people much like you wouldn't add LinkedIn or Tribe to this grouping either. And that's my $0.02 contribution to the blogosphere punditry :-)

Too funny not to share

p-air — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 04:27:15 GMT

A friend sent this picture to me earlier this evening and while I knew it wouldn't be "pc" to share it, I couldn't stop laughing and figured even if only two other people laughed, I would have done my part today to spread some joy and cheer :-)

/ROOT Markets, a bet on a future that data companies haven't yet figured out

p-air — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 03:19:48 GMT

I previously wrote about the challenges facing ROOT Markets in the following post (http://people.tribe.net/p-air/blog&topicId=0899f078-aef3-473e-ba38-eba9a91cb5ed ). Having recently attended the SDForum's Search SIG (special interest group), I was able to give some more thought to the issues of attention raised by the panel which included Seth Goldstein (ROOT Markets founder and co-founder of the AttentionTrust), Dave Sifry (Technorati founder), Mike Arrington (of TechCrunch fame and Edgeio founder), Gabe Rivera (Memeorandum founder) and Steve Gilmour (writer, pundit, co-founder of the AttentionTrust). In order to understand what's being done around enabling people to track and manage their online attention, it's worth perusing the AttentionTrust site at http://www.attentiontrust.org , where you can learn about the Attention Recorder. What's really interesting here is that in today's world, there are many large data companies that track a lot of information about consumers, whether it be the credit card companies tracking transactions, or companies like Axiom that track our demographics and geographical locations, or be it companies like TRW and others that track our credit. In none of these cases, do consumers opt-in to participate, but that doesn't stop these companies from having information on us from which they generate substantial sums. While we're able to some times see the information they've kept on us, more frequently we're not, nor are we able to participate in its ownership. Now this is the world that we have lived in, but it is not the world we *will* be living in soon. The Web has changed everything, to the extent that large numbers of people are beginning to move more and more of their activities online. Whether it be their financial activities (ie. bill payment, fund transfers, stock transactions, etc.), or shopping (ie. books, toys, electronics, clothes, flowers, etc.), or read the news, or order their Fast-Trak, go to driving school, rent a cabin in Yosemite, make travel plans, order pizza, research and arrange an appointment with a real-estate agent, choose and buy a car, etc... More and more of our transactional activities are being made possible online. The economies of scale make this direction worthwhile for both the providers of these services who can now reduce their physical world dependencies and high costs, and it's worthwhile for consumers since they can now interact with the service providers more conveniently and at any time. So where is the new data frontier for the old data providers. Afterall, their previous tracking of data was towards selling it to other institutions who needed to know credit information, or in more frequent cases, companies that wanted access to marketing lists for direct mail offers. With so much activity moving online, knowing an individual's clickstream could become the next panacea. Well, most consumers never really understood the depth to which data about them was being collected and sold. But much has been made about this over the past 10 years, and while most people see no way out of it, they're at least aware of this. So with a proposition that states that people can not only share in the ownership of their own data, but can actually do useful things with it, you have to believe that AttentionTrust has fired a shot across the bows of the data collectors and aggregators that may take them a little while to realize, but could materially change the economics of the next generation of data. If by knowing more about what people give their attention to, it helps determine their intentions, and they are willing to be participants and beneficiaries of the resulting activities, offers, and incentives that will be derived from such a system, then there is indeed a very large opportunity being created here that will empower consumers, merchants and service providers. This also could disintermediate the data aggregators of yesteryear, who have honestly behaved very badly at the expense of ordinary people. I have written about ChoiceStream in the past (http://people.tribe.net/p-air/blog&topicId=75e090c9-eb34-4bfb-aa0b-26f6757c8e39 ) as one example, but they're not the only ones. This is indeed the dawning of an age that returns control of our information and our intentions back to us. My advice is that you keep an eye on both the AttentionTrust.org and /ROOT Markets (http://www.root.net/ ), as these two groups are starting what Mark Pincus (http://markpincus.blogspot.com/2004/07/revolution-of-ants.html ) frequently refers to as a revolution of the ants. That's us people!!!...and it's a good thing.

"Embattled U.S. Rep. DeLay wins Texas primary" -- Reuters

p-air — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 08:15:37 GMT

You gotta be kidding me!!! Are the people in the Houston district of Texas, where DeLay seems to be winning, out of their minds?!!! It's truly a sad state of affairs when DeLay can still win a primary after all of the attrocities and violations of human trust he has committed. Here's a piece by Bill Moyers that should put any one reading it at wits end with what's happening in our country these days...that is except if you're from Texas ;-) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-moyers/delay-abramoff-and-the-_b_16534.html and here's Reuters piece that's got me in a tizzy... ---- Embattled U.S. Rep. DeLay wins Texas primary HOUSTON (Reuters) - Embattled U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay won handily in the Republican primary for his congressional seat on Tuesday, taking 61 percent of the votes against three opponents. The race had been seen as a barometer of his political strength since he resigned as House majority leader following indictment in Texas on campaign finance charges and his friendlobbyist Jack Abramoff was indicted in a Washington corruption scandal. DeLay skipped his election night party to attend a fund-raiser in Washington put on by lobbyists. With 86 percent of the votes counted, DeLay led his closest opponent Tom Campbell by 61 percent to 30 percent. In a statement, DeLay said voters in his Houston area district had rejected the "politics of personal destruction" to support him. http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-03-08T055845Z_01_B266295_RTRUKOC_0_US-TEXAS.xml --- Some one pinch me to tell me that it's all but a dream.

Google Desktop 3

p-air — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:20:33 GMT

If this new offering from Google doesn't scare the bejesus out of you, nothing will...especially in light of the government's recent requests to Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Google's new desktop product will index all of your files in your local machine into their servers and make those available to you wherever you are or to several users. Sounds like a wonderful application, especially useful in corporate environments...but then again, isn't that the way all of these privacy violating apps start out for those who don't think through the consequences of their use? Yet another reason why I'm sticking with Copernic, which from my understanding doesn't upload anything to any servers outside of my local machine. I may be a luddite in this respect, but it's my small way of practicing safe computing ;-) Check it: http://news.monstersandcritics.com/business/article_1096314.php/Google_introduces_new_search_tool

A fine bunch of patriots these guys are making...

p-air — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 02:22:49 GMT

Libby, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld (yeah, I know, I'm begging the question by adding Ashcroft & Rumsfeld, but we got other goods on them ;-)...these are the faces of a new generation of so-called patriots who have served our country poorly. While they still have their supporters, hopefully stories like the following one (from the so-called liberal press) will begin to force more people to give some thought to whom they have been ascribing such titles as "patriot". Read on... http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-02-10T002930Z_01_N09246095_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-LEAK.xml

A little surprising to see the arrogance of this Congressional Committee

p-air — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 02:41:52 GMT

How's this for spin... ---- Tech companies won't attend D.C. meeting By FOSTER KLUG ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER WASHINGTON -- Representatives from several powerhouse technology companies say they won't attend a congressional briefing Wednesday meant to shine a spotlight on U.S. Internet businesses operating in China. Critics have been blasting American companies for helping China's communist government enforce censorship and silence dissent in return for access to a potentially lucrative market. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/1700AP_US_China_Internet.html ---- If you read this story, one possible and perhaps likely response to this might be that it's outrageous for such companies as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft to be supporting censorship and other harsh regulations being imposed by the Chinese government in order to do business there. It's an outrage isn't it? Look, even Rep. Chris Smith, Republican chairman of the House International Relations subcommittee on global human rights is quoted in an interview as saying: "This is not benign or neutral," the lawmaker said of companies acceding to China's demands. "They have an obligation not to be promoting dictatorship." Given that I don't actually know the opinions of the other members of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, I'll only direct my comments at Rep. Smith, as I find it reprehensible for him to dare to make such comments when the very country we live in today is now riding dangerously close to similar behavior under the guise of freedom and democracy. Was it not only weeks ago that we found out that our government was spying on its own citizens in the name of terrorism but against our nation's laws?...even with secret courts already in place to maintain the covert nature of these investigations? Was it not only two weeks ago that the Justice Department requested usage information from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft without offering any significant legal justification for these requests? Was it not Google that fought this request?! Is not the U.S. Patriot Act that requires any requests by our government for information on any person in this country must be kept secret and violating this confidentiality is punishable by law? Where does this guy get the *balls* to make his comments? It's arrogant and inappropriate given our own situation. Doesn't China have a right to regulate what its citizens see in the same way that the U.S. is now regulating pornography online using child pornography laws that beg the question? What about our own White House administration prohibiting journalists from publishing pictures of the returning caskets of our fallen soliders based on some false moral indignation? Whatever the *right* thing is, it's applicable to both countries, not just China. In my opinion, the tech companies have put themselves in the position to act as utilities and in so doing are not participating in the political agenda of countries. Having said that, I'm not happy when they disclose American citizens' information here, no more than I like it when Chinese citizens' information is disclosed there, but having said that, our government officials need to behave with greater humility, and develop an appreciation for resolving those issues in our country before throwing stones at another, and rebuking the companies who at least in some cases are doing their best to keep these political interests in check. Google for example, does tell Chinese users when information has been censored so they are aware of it. They were also the ones to push back on our government's information requests. I'd love to see Rep. Smith's list of donors and special interests to get some more insight into his character. From every one I know who has been to China, specifically to their biggest cities (ie. Shanghai, Beijing, etc.), they come back enthralled that these are bustling metropolis' with all of the diversions found in our cities. Who do our elected officials think they are in reproaching how the Chinese goverment runs its country? There's much to be done in our own country and much to do to help the people here gain trust in their government. They should probably focus more on this before going around dictating how other countries ought to regulate their citizens. Enough is enough!!!...do I sound mad?...I'm not, just a little frustrated at seeing culturally incensitive behavior being espoused in the context of morality...again :-) ***2/1/06 UPDATE: We can now welcome two more congressmen to the hypocrite/arrogant hit parade (where the hits just keep on comin' ;-): CA Rep Tom Lantos ---------------------------- "Companies that have blossomed and make billions in this country, a country that reveres freedom of speech, have chosen to ignore that core value in expanding their reach overseas, and to erect a Great Firewall to suit Beijing's purposes," Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, told the caucus. AND OH Rep Tim Ryan ------------------------- Rep. Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat, said the companies were "squandering their leverage and U.S. moral authority" with compromises that allowed them to operate in China's fast-growing market. http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-02-01T222917Z_01_N01294003_RTRUKOC_0_US-CHINA-USA.xml&archived=False

Google on mobile devices, ready for prime time

p-air — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 01:23:16 GMT

Since the week before Christmas I've been putting my new crackberry 8700c through its paces. Part of this has meant getting on the Web and seeing if there were enough utlitarian applications that actually helped me deal with every day tasks. More importantly, how these apps translated into mobile use. While John Battelle in his book "Search", has coined Google as being the "Database of Intentions", my every day Web searching really doesn't help get clarity on this matter. Sure, I find what I'm looking for, but I'm not giving much thought to intentions during those interactions. However, on a mobile device it's altogether a different story. While today was not the first time that I had this feeling and experience, it was certainly noteworthy. Lil' Pinot & I were out and about having decided that we would go get a couple of board games to play with dinner guests. Scrabble would be in the mix as well as one or two others. After going to two malls in Corte Madera and coming up craps for game stores I decided to pull up my trusty RIM device and go to Google. My first query was "games, Marin". As you imagine, got lots of noise back on the results. Second query was ""games store", Marin". This was getting closer but still the 1st 3 results were a bit off still. Third query was ""games store", Marin, "board games"", which resulted in a top result (as seen poorly in the picture above) of "San Francisco Bay Area Board Game Resources - Spotlight on Games". In clicking through on this result, the listing that came back from the destination site read: "Marin County (north of San Francisco): Gamescape, San Rafael, 1225 Fourth Street", followed by other listings in different parts of the SF Bay Area. The address was hyperlinked to Mapquest (unfortunately, that part didn't work). This blew me away. In 3 queries I got to exactly what I was looking for and it was within 10 minutes of where I was. Here was a simple use of the gneric search engine in a mobile situation where time was of the essence, where I wasn't accessing any of the designated "local" features, but was able to resolve what I was looking for quickly and effectively. While there are a lot of efforts to add a local flair to search, I can frankly say that if you know how to use the engines today, you probably don't see what the issue or the need for further localization is. Content owners are also getting better at making sure that location information makes up part of the sites. Suffice it to say, this was useful and when combined w/Google Local for Mobile which provided me a perfect interactive map, I'm sold that these devices are now ready for prime time. ---- Technorati test: <a href="http://technorati.com/claim/9sn29i85ev">Technorati Profile</a>

Choicepoint settles with the FTC for $15M. 162K people should be saying "are you kidding me?!"

p-air — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 22:22:05 GMT

In case you have been following this story, Choicepoint, who according to their Web site is the "nation's leading provider of identification an credential verification services", sold 162,000 people's information from their database to an identity theft ring...oops! Here's the press release on the settlement between the Federal Trade Commission and Choicepoint: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2006/01/choicepoint.htm For a solid review of the issues here checkout Marc Rotenberg's (Executive Director and President of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)) testimony before the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, Committee on Energy and Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives: http://www.epic.org/privacy/choicepoint/testimony3.15.05.pdf . This testimony is not for the feint at heart. If you're so inclined, you can also access the FTC's complaint and stipulated final judgment here: http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/choicepoint/choicepoint.htm What's insane about the settlement is that at $15M results in less than $100 per illegally sold identity. Already 800 people have suffered identity theft from this fiasco. For any of you that have been a victim of identity theft, do you believe that $100 would relieve the actual cost to get your life back in order as well as the real costs of the fraud committed in your name? Not to mention the anxiety this causes. Leaving this later issue aside, the real costs of identity theft to any single individual are generally significantly more than $100, and while only 800 people have had this happen from this incident, to allow Choicepoint to have violated so many people and breaching the law to such an extent and basically get less than a slap on the hand, is frankly preposterous. The scary part to me, is that with a little more investigation, I just may find out what Choicepoint's campaign contributions to those involved in determing their fate was made last year, which would make me really sick (so I'm not gonna look ;-). While I despise what Choicepoint stands for, I despise even more that it's not about trust since no one has ever willingly given the information they hold on all of us, but it's purely about greed. If nothing else over the next decade, what our populus has be educated on is the need for individuals to have control and ownership over their own information. It may not prevent this type of thing from happening, but at least we can decide the terms under which we provide our information to data vaults. As well, we would also get to benefit in the use of our information in ways that do not happen today....as it should be.

Not for the performance anxious... :-)

p-air — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 02:37:29 GMT

Now how's this for a public toilet in Houston, TX. The picture on the left side is the view from the outside, and the one on the right is obviously from the inside. Crazy... Here's more about it...http://www.impactlab.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7097&mode=&order=0&thold=0

Domestic spying goes beyond the NSA & Shrub's activities...

p-air — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 07:13:15 GMT

Had to curtail my glee and enthusiasm from today's earlier Steeler win after reading the following story from Newsweek... ------------------------------ The Other Big Brother The Pentagon has its own domestic spying program. Even its leaders say the outfit may have gone too far. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965509/site/newsweek/ ------------------------------ This is all reprehensible, and any one stating that U.S. citizens now live in anything less than a police state merits to have their heads examined. If this doesn't infuriate the whole populus, then we're in for a scary ride.

The Department of Justice (or is it Injustice) is at it again...

p-air — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 05:40:19 GMT

These child porn fears that the DOJ has been polluting our nation with seem analogous to the Intelligent Design scam being perpetrated by the religious right. It's like using a little misdirection, or a disingeneous means of attaining a whole different set of reprehensible goals than what is being espoused. In this latest case it's about the extension of a police state where all dissent can be quashed and privacy lives as a figment of our imagination, not the reality we were taught to believe in (though that's long been gone). Anyway, enough ranting, read it for yourself, government is now coming after our online information... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/19/AR2006011903331.html I wonder if this post is violating some law tied to something that might be harmful to a child? ;-)

Perspectives and business models for Entrepreneurs

p-air — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 18:31:57 GMT

Lately I have been spending a lot of time on the matter of perspectives and how they influence our thinking. But more importantly perspectives also drive behavior. Business process re-engineering consultants when considering ways of changing employees' behavior know to consider how employees view the situation, otherwise said, "tell me how you'll measure me and I'll tell you how I'll act". In that vein, I want to give an example of the impact of perspectives on business models. I also want to end by suggesting that fee-based business models are far from dead on the Net, it's just a matter of perspective ;-) Let's consider a market that as of late has been fairly well understood and concentrate on two of its participants. Blogging applications. Today, one of the dominant players in providing end-users with blogs is Six Apart (http://www.sixapart.com/ ). They offer three products, two of which were developed in-house, Movable-Type & Typepad, and the third came through a recent acquisition, LiveJournal. Movable-Type is a software application which one installs on their own server and generally used by a more sophisticated user needing to better control their environment. Typepad is a hosted solution, but with a number of very elegant capabilities which tends to be choice for those sophisticated bloggers interested in a high quality product but don't want to deal with the hassle of managing a server. Finally, LiveJournal comes in as a slightly lower-end hosted offering starting for free, but with an upsell option to paid accounts with enhanced features and capabilities. It's the perfect starter platform from which to grow into a more sophisticated environment as the blogger gets more comfortable that this is a worthwhile activity. Some people never grow out of the free the service, but that's OK too. It also has some very nice family friendly privacy controls for who can view and access the blog content. So what we see in Six Apart is a tools company. They have focused on providing a quality product for content producers and are willing to lay out a clear value proposition that they believe people should pay for. Even their lower end LiveJournal starter platform on the free side, is merely the hook to get people upgrading to their fee-based versions of this product. Now let's contrast this with Google and their Blogger product (http://www.blogger.com/ ). Blogger, like LiveJournal provides a free service that enables the lower end of the market to enter the blogging activity with little to no barriers. It's feature set is rich, but falls significantly short of those from Six Apart's products. However, for the masses that want to experiment or perhaps remain at an amateur level sharing primarily with their friends and family, their product is adequate. As most of us understand today, Google is a media company, and their business model is derived from advertising. Hence, for Google, Blogger presents yet another fertile environment on which to place advertisements. They have been savvy enough to position this as a shared revenue proposition with those blogging, but the fact remains that the business model here is advertising. The object of their game is to get as many people up and running and creating blogs on which they can place ads. Does Google have to compete on the rich feature set needed for A-list (or even B & C-list) bloggers? Not likely as it's not catering to them. Actually, Google is catering to a user that would not likely have ever paid to access a blogging platform because they weren't making a business of it. They're catering to the masses and there's nothing wrong with that. However, the reasons for the value proposition differences between their platform and Six Apart's also become clear. Of course, in Google's model it was easy for splogs (spam blogs) to find a home especially since it was in Google's interest to have these emerge (more blogs with more ads). It's also easy not to find many must read blogs using that platform. Whereas no self respecting A-list blogger would be caught dead using Blogger because it doesn't meet their needs. So where does that leave us? Back to the idea of perspectives. In other words, when evaluating Six Apart's blogging offerings versus those of Google's one has to consider that given their differing revenue models and the incentives and features are driven from these perspectives the two will head in very different directions. Now from the perspective of a prospective customer, more specifically a dedicated blogger, artist, merchant, or professional content provider of any sort, Six Apart would have to be the primary choice even at the low-end. Because regardless of the current feature set both companies offer, you would know that Six Apart is focused on providing high quality tools for content producers given this is the core of their proposition. Google, would be more of a neat-o service for messing around or getting a few friends to share stuff, kinda like MySpace. To quote the co-founder of Pyra Labs who developed Blogger who more recently co-founderd Odeo, Evan Williams (http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1925 ), at a recent presentation, "it's really the difference between the "Long Tail" of content (professional content providers) and "Personal Expression and Communication" (people sharing w/friends and family)". This is dead on what's happening on MySpace as well. What I like about the Six Apart perspective and corresponding business model is that they've shown that in a world where every one wants *it* free, and if asked will tell you they wouldn't pay for *it*, providing a quality product that truly serves a need and solves somebody's problem, can garner a fee. All of the Six Apart customers I've spoken to, whether it be Movable-Type, Typepad or LiveJournal users, have all said they were very satisfied with the services they were receiving. Can't say the same for all Blogger customers. This also means that Six Apart is not affected by cyclical trends or advertising industry recessions since they garner a stable monthly fee. Even if their revenues were to stop growing, unless attrition out-paces growth, they're not ever likely to receed. Can't say the same thing for Blogger (good thing they're part of Google). So for all you entrepreneurs out there exploring businesses in user-generated content, keep in mind that in applying perspectives, understand that the advertising model isn't the only one out there...it's just the one if you don't think you have an offering valuable enough that any one would pay for it. It may also be a good model if you have some magic formula for generating tens of millions of page views because at eCPM (effective cost per thousand) rates floating in the sub-$1 range off of AdSense you'll need over one billion page views to generate $1M...yikes. Note also, that when people don't pay for it, the quality of the content can suffer and the advertising dollars are of commensurate low quality ;-) Don't forget, you can always introduce an advertising model to a highly valued product, but its not as easy to introduce fee service to a low valued product.