TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

After the Dust Settles: Holograms

Funny - after a monumental election eve, one of the big reactions from the tech meme-sphere is not to the election, but to CNN’s holograms (which I haven’t even seen). Of course, there are some people talking about the real stuff: check out “Say no to tech Tzars” and “Obamanomics” for hologram-free spins on the tech implications of the election.

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Google Blogsearch: the Techmeme sapper

Quickly posting a comment that I made at RWW, on Google’s “techmeme killer” blogsearch:

I always thought Techmeme was running an “acquire me” strategy, or something - by staking out a niche and sitting on it. Otherwise, it didn’t seem to make any sense - Gabe obviously has an awesome technology which he never seemed to take to its logical conclusion. Deploying it in a few silos as he did and then just tweaking it meant that eventually it was going to get passed by someone with more reach/resources/marketing.

I’d say Techmeme needed to take funding and expand into a proper network about 24 months ago. Or, he needed to have gotten acquired somewhere along the way like blogdigger and the others. It will be interesting to see if the memeorandum family will drop off sharply, stagnate, or find a way to muster growth. Just my $0.02, from someone that dabbled in the memetracking space before giving up in frustration (all respect due to Gabe for crafting a great product).

I guess maybe this will finally spur tailrank to shut down. Just checked out tailrank and its down for a “db upgrade.” Hmmm.

blogsearch, google, tailrank, techmeme technorati

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Stubhub Revisted

Looks like the stubhub scam is still in force, much to people’s ongoing frustration. This is complemented by a weirdly apologist article that I saw in the Victoria Times Colonist today - Internet Lets Ticket Buyers Jump the Gun.

Typically, the article misses most of the salient points about the questionable dynamics of internet ticket sales, but it does bring to light one interesting development - TickMaster’s response to StubHub has been not to find a way to defeat ticket scalpers and fairly sell tickets at stated prices, but to build their own “secondary market” StubHub clone - TicketsNow. Is it Tickets Now? Or Ticket Snow? Because consumers are getting snowed by the secondary ticket market, and are being sold a story that somehow this is value-added to them:

“It’s totally accepted,” Blasko said of sanctioned scalping, the majority of which exists on Internet sites. “There are a lot of [fans] out there that depend on it and don’t mind paying those premiums.”

In order to meet demand, official sellers are either forced to work with scalpers or run their own secondary websites, at which they legally sell tickets at inflated prices.

Ticketmaster, the world’s largest ticket seller, has re-routed fans wanting AC/DC tickets in Vancouver to the home page for TicketsNow, a secondary market site that Ticketmaster also owns. Tickets there are priced well above the original $99.50 face value. [from VTC]

I don’t get it. If the market will really bear inflated ticket prices, why aren’t tickets just sold at that price to begin with, kneecapping the whole secondary/scalper industry? Or sold in an auction format right from the get go? Re-read the original stubhub post, and then think twice when next you purchase tickets to something.

concert, scam, stubhub, ticketmaster ticketsnow

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Yahoo and Bain: What’s Really Going On

Kara Swisher throws Yahoo!’s engagement with Bain into the limelight today, with a gleeful, gloating, and ultimately fatuous article. In it, she posits the Office Space scenario - that Bain is Yang’s fall guy who he’s going to ask to justify a bunch of layoffs. Having dealt with similar management consultants personally, I’ve got a little bit of a different slant.

1) They does occasionally recommend things other than lay-offs
2) They are a stalling mechanism for executives that are trying to figure out how to address an issue, but who can’t keep the BOD happy in the meantime
3) Jerry is bringing them in to have a story to sell the board - the story is not whatever the consultants recommend, its that consultants came in, got paid a bunch, and did a lot of analysis
4) That story buys Jerry time
5) Sometimes BOD’s need to hear news from someone other than their company’s executives
6) That story may include layoffs, it may not
7) If it does include layoffs, they may actually happen, or they may not

So - in a nutshell - I’ve seen consultants used as a tool to calm activist boards by ensuring directors that real money is being spent on “real” experts. I’ve seen their recommendations be put into practice - and I’ve seen them go from the board room table to the recycling bin. I’ve seen them be nothing more than a more-credible proxy for executive’s own plans. Swisher seems over-eager to relish in the layoff-induced humbling of Yahoo! before its happened - we’ll see what really goes down.

bain, boomtown, jerry, layoff, swisher, yahoo yang

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IE7 Hanldes Flash Way Better than Firefox3

I’ve been working on a little project that requires loading and manipulating a lot of Flash embeds in HTML pages. Each of these embeds loads and plays a MediaFire hosted MP3. After playing about 10 or so in FireFox, the Flash player stops behaving nicely and just stalls out at “Buffering…” making it impossible to play any more tracks. Fixing it requires a FF re-start. Internet Explorer 7 does not have this problem. Conclusion: I’m switching to IE.

flash ie firefox

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Microsoft is Hamstringing themselves

Microsoft today announced that email, photo, and video programs will not be included out-of-the-box in the next release of Windows. Instead users will have the option to download, install, and sign up for an online account to use the web-connected “Live” equivalents.

Erm. So - with my new laptop PC in front of me, running snappy Windows 7, I pull the SD card out of my camera, plug it into the laptop, and… “open a folder to view files?” Yeessh - is that the killer Windows experience? Apple has excelled at creating “Cool!” Moments ™ where the execution of a simple action (plugging in a digital camera) generates a disproportionately awesome reaction - flying the picture open in a beautiful, fun to use, visually stunning gallery, and automatically downloading, tagging, organizing, and backing them up.

And now MS is taking a step away from these essential moments, and putting a download/install/signup layer in between users and whatever they seek to accomplish. Surely the antitrust conditions they labour under can’t be that stringent? Or MS so out of touch with the consumer mind that they think feature-stripped OS’s are a good thing? And why take out the experiences that people will be wowed by (i.e.: what happens when you plug in your camera) and invest all sorts of time revamping Paint and Wordpad? What sort of usage do Paint and Wordpad get compared to the number of people with digital cameras?

Then again, Technologizer thinks it is - that it will make W7 a cleaner, stabler, better OS. That it may, but a really great camera body without a lens isn’t much good for taking pictures and Jane/Joe PC just want things to work - like Apple ads have cultured them to expect.

microsoft windows7 windows vista apple paint wordpad

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Does anyone else think Google is over-extending itself?

Knol. OpenSocial. Android. Gears. Chrome.

Google’s got a lot on the go, and a lot of it is floundering. Knol is dying on the vine. OpenSocial is a non-entity, and Gears is rocky - at best part of HTML 5 in some unspecified future.

And, GMail is still in “beta.” Wait, so is Blog Search, Scholar, Google Finance, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. And those are just the options that hang off the front page. Click “Even More” and you’re deeper into the Beta Zone. Meanwhile, Google Labs, which should be their beta ghetto IMHO, looks more and more like where projects go to die - look at the update dates: of 14 projects listed, 11 haven’t been touched since 2006.

And: let’s not get into Google’s habit of letting acquisitions languish until their staff quit en masse.

So - is anyone else alarmed that Google is tackling mobile phones and web browsers while many of their supposed core web properties seem woefully under-invested? What’s going on in their board room? I can’t really believe that Eric S. is sitting there suggesting that the AdSense cash factor gives them the leeway to go completely crazy, but at the same time, as I’ve maundered about before, there doesn’t really seem to be anyone at the helm and Google’s obscure corporate politics and lack of transparency exacerbate the sense of directionless-ness. I suppose on some level tackling the mobile market could be said to contribute to their “index everything” mission, but they’re reaching.

Unsolicited Suggestion: Slow down. Over-extension leaves properties vulnerable to the same meteoric rise of a better mousetrap that allowed Google to take over the search market.

google opensocial android knol chrome gears

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Going Travelling? Try VentureFar.net

Having been traveling through SE Asia for 6 months, I can appreciate the value of good first-hand info about a prospective travel destination. Whenever we happened to be around an internet connection, I found myself scanning prospective activities or destinations on the net looking for blog posts and photos from people who had been there or done that - to set some expectations, eliminate some duds, and collect the “insider info” that decides whether an experience will be a grind or a pleasure.

About mid-May, in the city of Kuching on the Malaysian half of the island of Borneo, I put together a simple automated tool that aggregated search results from Google Blog Search, YouTube, and Flickr onto a single page - I could pass it a travel destination as a URL parameter and get a nice summary output - which streamlined out travel research process.

Now, 3 or 4 months later, I wrapped a bit more UI around it, and rolled it out as a standalone “travel guide” site - VentureFar.net. Its pretty simple, and right now is only displaying canned results (which are updated 4 times a day) for a limited selection of locations - which I’ll expand over time, and supplement by adding a search engine. As to why there isn’t a search interface: Google Blog Search is good but not perfect at filtering out spam, so I’ve actually got a filtering layer that eliminates a lot of trash and promotional jibber jabber from search results - such that when you get down to a destination travel guide on VentureFar, you should see a good selection of first-hand accounts of the destination.

Anyway, take a second to check out VentureFar - a simple, targeted aggregator. If you’re heading somewhere soon, comment back and let me know, and I’ll add it as a canned page.

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If you could go anywhere in the world and meet with any geek, executive, or company, who would it be?

That’s the question posted by the Scobelizer, in relation to the recent meta-flap over the launch of Cuil over the last few days. So here’s my answer:

Microsoft, and their product family leaders.

I would love to understand the inner workings of the monolith - how MS can continue to be ridiculously profitable on core products whose demise has been forecast as long as they have existed, and how MS can miss the mark so often on forays outside of their core - i.e.: WinMo vs. iphone, Live vs. Google, Origami, etc. How does the xBox division differ organizationally from the rest of the company such that they’re able to deliver market-leading products?

Perhaps its boring that I’m not really interested in the latest startup, but I’d take GM over Tesla for an interview any day too. What about you?

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Is Apple Paying for Product Placement in Paperbacks?

I really have to wonder after reading “The Book of the Dead” by Doug Preston and Lincoln Child, which contained this oddly sychophantic paragraph:

She plugged in her laptop and booted it up. At the insistence of her husband, Bill, she had recently switched from a PC to a Mac, and now the boot-up process took a tenth of the time - zero to sixty in 8.9 seconds instead of two and a half plodding minutes. It had been like trading up from a Ford Fiesta to a Mercedes SL. As she watched the Apple logo appear, she thought that at least one thing in her life was going right. [Book of the Dead, p95, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child]

Hrm. Most of the book reads like the enjoyably light, fanciful mystery novel that it is, except for this jarring excerpt which reads like ill-conceived ad copy. Is this fawning, hyperbolic frippery literary filler, the author’s adoration for a product, or a publisher’s profitable side line in selling product placement? I hate to sound like a conspiracy nut, but stumbling across that was so jarring that I can’t help but think “paid.”

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