WebGuild

Craigslist v. Ebay: Craigslist Fights Back

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Wed, 14 May 2008 06:34:00 +0000

Ebay sued Craigslist some time ago, suggesting that the site had engaged in anti-competitive practices. Craigslist has decided to fight back with a counter lawsuit.

Writing at the Craigslist blog, Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist, says:

We filed a complaint in California today, charging eBay with unlawful and unfair competition, misappropriation of proprietary information, deceptive passing-off, business interference, false advertising, phishing attacks, free-riding, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and breaches of fiduciary duty.

We respectfully ask the Superior Court in San Francisco to enjoin this conduct and order eBay to (1) make full restitution to craigslist, (2) disgorge their related profits (3) restore to craigslist all shares of the company acquired by means of, or for the purpose of unfair competition, and (4) pay punitive damages for their malicious behavior.

Ouch!

Icahn Eyes Yahoo for Possible Takeover

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Tue, 13 May 2008 20:25:00 +0000

Billionaire takeover strategist Carl Icahn is looking at a possible play to force Yahoo back to the table with Microsoft to sell the company at a big profit. The news today sent Yahoo up about 1.30 and YHOO is still rising in after market trading.

Given that the prevailing stock price of Yahoo is well below Microsoft's top offer of $33 per share, this play has only one key challenge - making sure you can get Microsoft back to the table. Frankly I think that is not much of a hurdle to overcome as I think Microsoft Steve Ballmer's decision to drop the bid was 1) Mostly strategic to force the issue and 2) Will be quicly overcome if Icahn can seat a more sympathetic board of directors.

I'm guessing that Ballmer will have two basic requirements to return to the Yahoo table:
No Google deals and no more Jerry Yang. Although it would be sad to see a founder of Yang's vision leave the company one does not need to feel too sorry for him. A Microsoft merger would value his stock close to 100% higher than the lows of a few months back, netting Yang in the neighborhood of an extra half billion over that low price.

Of course Yang has seen Yahoo trading at over $100 and I think part of his malaise over the deal is a longing for the good old pre-Google days where Yahoo was the high flyer in terms of value and buzz. Sorry Jerry, but despite Yahoo's suberb ongoing work in many aspects of the online experience, those days ... are ... gone.

Most analysts do not feel Yahoo can sustain even the current price levels without the "threat" of a takeover looming, which is propping up a share price that will likely drop to $20 or below if Yahoo had no serious takeover suitors. In fact YHOO was trading at about $18 per share a few months ago just before Microsoft bid which valued the internet empire at about 60% more than the market. Yet Yahoo argued this was not enough and the board, especially in the form of CEO Jerry Yang, went to great lengths to prevent the Microsoft Merger.

Icahn is no stranger to this takeover strategy and the graph above shows how successful it has been for him.

Image Credit: Fortune Magazine
Disclosure: Long on Yahoo

Website With Embarrassing Zuckerberg Details Acquired

noreply@blogger.com (Daya Baran) — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:22:00 +0000

The magazine that published the infamous diary and application of Mark Zuckerberg, one of Facebook's founders, has been purchased for an undisclosed amount. The magazine called 02138, which is named for Harvard’s ZIP code published embarrassing detail about Zuckerberg during the court proceedings between him and Facebook's original founders. The suit was finally settled.

Zuckerberg took o2138 to court to force the website to take down the embarrassing details. However a Federal District Court in Boston denied Facebook’s request to take down the documents.

Manhattan Media bought 02138 from Atlantic Media. The new owners have visions of expanding it into social networking and event sponsorship web site. Manhattan Media is backed by Isis Venture Partners.

The Facebook Files

1) Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard Application (PDF)

2) Mark Zuckerberg's email to Harvard’s Administrative Board (PDF)

3) Mark Zuckerberg's testimony #1 (PDF)

4) Mark Zuckerberg's testimony #2 (PDF)

5) Facebook Statement of cash flows 2005 (PDF)

6) Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss's testimony (PDF)

7) Mark Zuckerberg's online diary (PDF)

8) Statement of damage done to La Jennifer sublet (PDF)

Mobile Market Set For Explosive Growth

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:04:00 +0000

A key theme at this year's Consumer Electronics Show CES 2008 was that mobile computing - especially in the form of mobile smartphones - was set to become the key computing platform, especially in many parts of the developing world where it is expected to be the *only* computing platform for some time as new users flood online in the millions.

Two key reasons for this shift from computing on the desktop with a desktop and computing in hand with a handheld device are simple convenience and cost.

Business users are often "on the go" and need to carry their computing with them. Laptops offer some mobility but for most business users a small mobile phone now offers most of what they need and allows them to carry their computer throughout the day. Laptop and desktop computing are certainly not going to stop, but already we see even heavy users shifting to mobile devices and mobile or hybrid platforms like Twitter to carry on their daily business. There will be modest growth in the use of ultra mobile computers like the inexpensive eee PC, but the huge growth is likely to come in the form of mobile smartphones.

Coming up later: Battle for the new smartphone operating systems

Nokia's Google And iPhone Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Daya Baran) — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:24:00 +0000

Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told investors that company would like to act "more like an internet company" than a "traditional manufacturer". Translation - we have a Google Strategy and an iPhone Strategy.

The company has been on a buying bing very much like AOL has been. However instead of buying into new markets like AOL, the company has been making acquisitions that extend its core products in new markets.

Google Strategy
Nokia has bid to acquire car navigation devices and mapping services company Navteq for $8.1 billion to gain digital maps of 69 countries. Google has been making inroad with device manufacturers and carriers to provide Google Maps as the default mapping service on their handsets. Google has an initiative with BMW to provide in car mapping services. Sales of navigation products is expected to triple to $12.8 billion by 2010, according to iSuppli Corp.

Recently Nokia launched a mobile ad network for placing advertisements through text messages and e-mail. The mobile advertising market is dominated by Google and Yahoo. Global sales are estimated to rise to $11.4 billion by 2011 from $2.17 billion currently, according to Informa Telecoms & Media Group. Nokia acquired the technology via the purchase of Enpocket.

iPhone Strategy
In March of this year Nokia debuted its online music retailer in Germany. The company acquired Loudeye to create a mobile music service to counter the iTunes and diversify its offerings. The services enables user to download music directly to their handset. Devices with mobile music players and cameras fueled a 74% increase in profit in the first half of 2007 for the company.

HP Poised to Buy EDS

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Tue, 13 May 2008 08:17:00 +0000

Hewlett Packard and EDS are expected to announce a deal soon where HP will aquire the data services company for about 13 Billion. This deal will make Hewlett Packard the number two global provider of enterprise technology services (IBM is number one). HP, however, is already the world's largest manufacturer of computers with no competition from IBM in that department because IBM sold their entire computer manufacturing business to China's Lenovo some time ago.

The move is likely to allow HP to consolidate several management functions as well as enlarge their services footprint considerably. This will make them more competitive with IBM, which is the ultimate goal of the buyout of EDS.

WorldWide Telescope Launches

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Tue, 13 May 2008 06:57:00 +0000

Microsoft has released the WorldWide Telescope application, a desktop environment for visualizing the cosmos. Most early reports suggest that WorldWide Telescope is one of the finest educational applications ever developed. It was showcased earlier this year at the TED Conference in Monterey but not released to the public, and was then eclipsed by Google's Space viewer - an excellent spinoff from another of the finest educational applications ever created - Google Earth.

Google Friend Connect Launches

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:07:00 +0000

Three major social networking applications have jumped online in the past week. Myspace, Facebook, and Google are all offering new tools to embed social networking in websites.

Google's friend connect looks like the simplest of the three in terms of helping you create a small snip of code which is planted on pages, instantly delivering social functionality. I can't say for sure because I'm in the process of testing each, but Google has a history of delivering high functionality to websites with very simple, non-programmer instructions and tools.

More on each of these as experiments continue...

Overcoming Social Media Objections

noreply@blogger.com (LaSandra Brill) — Mon, 12 May 2008 06:09:00 +0000

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” – Howard Aiken

As Dr. Aiken discovered, knowing which direction to go doesn’t mean much if you can’t get your team to follow. Thankfully, unlike Dr. Aiken we don’t have to convince people to buy in on an idea as crazy as building a computer at a time when phones were considered state of the art. But knowing that doesn’t make our job any easier.

All marketing campaigns come down to getting time, money, or resources and to be done properly, your Social Media Marketing campaign will likely need a little of all three. For many of us, this means approval from one or more decision makers on a marketing campaign that may be fundamentally different from anything they’ve done before.

The people considering your idea are going to have a running list going of positives and negatives. If they’re like most humans, this list won’t be entirely rational and will likely end up coming down to one major factor either way. Whether choosing new cars, new houses, or even new presidential candidates – people can usually narrow down their decision making criteria to one or two factors, positive or negative.

There’s no way to know which factors will be most critical to the people in your audience but if they’re anything like the folks I’ve been working with, here’s a few that come up almost every time.

“The devil we know IS NOT SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING”. This is where many good ideas have gone to die. While it’s true that building a social media project likely won’t be as predictable as a more traditional campaign, there is a healthy amount of data out there already. Besides this blog and my personal blog, success stories and ROI can be found on sites such as Conversations Matter, Groundswell, The Social Organization, and Marshall Kirkpatrick.
“We’re already doing social media marketing. We have a website, and it has a “talk to a sales rep” button – what else is there?” There is a common misconception amongst the uninitiated that if a company is online, it’s “connected”. As much hype as Web 2.0 receives, there are still many people who don’t get what it is, what it’s for, and more importantly where it might help. The only way to correct this is with education. In addition to collaborating on Web 2.0 projects enterprise-wide, I drive adoption through educational blog posts, workshops and webinars. I’ve found that most people, especially in marketing, have a remarkable capacity to learn about the bleeding edge but if they’re making a go/no go decision on your new project, it might be too late. The way to beat this one is early and often.
“OK, even if we do it with social media, how would we know if it worked?” Unlike “direct response” or “click through” marketing, social media campaigns aren’t as easily measured. Oftentimes we’re counting things like “engagement” and “connections” that don’t have a correlation to existing marketing metrics programs. At first blush, this seems like a minor point that will get fixed in time. But if your team is compensated on traditional marketing MBO’s, they might not be as motivated to kick off a social media endeavor. Marketing runs on metrics, but somehow TV and print ads get approved every year – stick to your guns, metrics are important but there are other factors to consider.

These certainly are not the only objections that you’ll run up against in trying to get your social media campaign off the ground, but they seem to be pretty common. Feel free to share objections you’ve come up against and any ideas on how to work through them.

Social Media Strategies Event Wrap-Up

noreply@blogger.com (Reshma Kumar) — Mon, 12 May 2008 03:40:00 +0000

The WebGuild's Social Media Strategies Event on May 7 was very successful and a social affair. Many thanks to the stellar speakers: Sam Lawrence, CMO, Jive Software; Sylvia Marino, Executive Director - Community Operations, Edmunds.com; and Felix Serna, Sr. Director Global eMarketing, Sun Microsystems. They were highly knowledgeable and entertaining, and shared great anecdotes. Thank you as well to all who attended and we look forward to seeing you again. Photos of the event.

Powerset Launches

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Mon, 12 May 2008 03:19:00 +0000

Powerset, one of the most talked about startups in Silicon Valley, launched tonight. I'm guessing they chose late Saturday to make sure the server load would initially be fairly small as there will likely be a surge of activity on Monday.

The initial Powerset search is restricted to Wikipedia pages but it gives insight into the approaches to semantic search that are driving this company.

Barney Pell, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, is considered by many to be Powerset's key strategic advantage. He stepped down from top leadership several months ago in what the company said was restructuring as they got closer to launch, though critics suggested it was because Powerset was failing to deliver.

See for yourself -is Powerset the next Google?

Facebook Borrowing to Scale Up Servers: $100,000,000. Facebook Stock: Priceless?

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Sun, 11 May 2008 07:11:00 +0000

Facebook has announced that it will borrow $100 million to purchase new servers. This report suggests they are scaling up from 10,000 servers to about 60,000. Assuming Facebook Connect is widely adopted (and it probably will be) it does make sense that the server loads may go up dramatically.

So why did they borrow that money rather than just sell more stock? Silicon Alley Insider suggests, I think correctly, that it is because nobody is foolish enough to value Facebook at the whopping $15 billion that earlier deals were *rumored* to have been based upon. In fact Henry Blodget suggests that the Hong Kong deal did *not* value the company at 15 billion. I've noted before that Microsoft was probably not all that concerned about the monster theoretical valuation they gave to Facebook with the $240,000,000 investment - rather they were after foothold and ongoing advertising and partnership agreements.

So, with Facebook poised to lose a lot of money in the coming months to years, what will be their ultimate future? Without some huge breakthrough in their pitiful social networking advertising yields, the answer may not be all that Facebook friendly.

Powerset Part Two

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Sun, 11 May 2008 04:02:00 +0000

Web 2.0 Startup playmaker Mike Arrington was very skeptical of Powerset during the early phases, but he appears to have had a change of heart after attending a demo of the semantic search engine, scheduled to launch soon. Today in TechCrunch Arrington quotes his reaction to a demo last month and writes (with a few qualifications I'm not noting):

.. when I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search...

This is the kind of praise that Powerset has had from several key valley players so it is not surprise that even before launch they are already on the sales block hoping for a huge play from Microsoft who is especially flush with cash after the withdrawl of Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo. Although a pricetag of $100,000,000 has been bandied about Arrington is likely correct that this will be considerably too low for a company that - if Powerset lives up to all the hype and all the promise - could become worth more than Google or Microsoft as the next search giant.

Powerset and Microsoft

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:36:00 +0000

It appears that that semantic search startup Powerset, which some were reporting was having major problems getting their search act off the ground, is in talks with Microsoft regarding a Microsoft aquisition.

Powerset, led by software pioneer Bernie Pell, claims to be solving one of the critical problems with web search - the inability of many search routines to pull context out of the query. Many believe that if users could find things using "natural language" rather than keyword searching they would consider switching to the best natural language search. Although Google is now working aggressively in this area it is not clear how much progress they have made. In fact it remains unclear how much progress Powerset has made so far, though Microsoft's interest in them may imply things are moving along and may lead to a rather impressive Powerset payday.

Dan Farber reports

Google Friend Connect For Social Network Data Sharing

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Sat, 10 May 2008 05:50:00 +0000

Myspace and Facebook announced enhanced social network data sharing last week and Google has now jumped in with Friend Connect. My guess is that both Facebook and Google pushed their launch dates to "catch up" with Myspaces announcement, so hopefully all these applications will be well tested and secure as legions of users adopt new open standards.

Mike at Techcrunch has more

Java Has The Flu

noreply@blogger.com (Christopher Keene) — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:32:00 +0000

I attended the JavaOne show this week, after a 4 year gap. What a difference - who knew Java could be so boring? On the other hand, this is what it feels like to go to a show for a technology that has lost half of its market share in the last 4 years (at least when measured by O'Reilly book sales - not a particularly reliable source but better than no source at all). If you don't like that source, check out Andi Gutman's recent post that Java is losing the battle for the modern web.

Let me be clear here - at WaveMaker, we have hitched our wagon to Java and hope very much that JavaOne is showing us the ghost of Java present, not the ghost of Java to come.

Trade shows in general have been eviscerated by the flood of technical information on the web. But even in the new "I'm only here for the Tchotchkes" world of conference attendees, this was a surprisingly desultory affair.

Aisle after aisle was populated almost solely by people in ugly sports shirts wearing a vacant gaze that we all reserve for particularly humiliating situations. In fact, the only booth which seemed to have any mojo was the - you guessed it - schwag booth from Sun.

This morning, I found out what was wrong. I got one of those delightful ALL CAPS emails from JavaOne informing me that we had all been the subject of a viral attack by the dreaded Norovirus. So that was it!

There is something seriously wrong, not just with JavaOne, but with Java. After 10 years, Java remains an extremely complex development environment with nothing even approaching an easy learning curve. Microsoft has gleefully filled this vacuum, driving a vast J2EE to .Net migration at the low end of the market that nobody in the Java world seems willing to acknowledge.

The Sun promise to put Java runtimes everywhere is meaningless if nobody wants to develop for those runtimes. Adobe and Microsoft are doing a far better job making their tools simple enough for mere mortals and focusing on the presentation layer.

The news at the show was that Sun's front end technology, JavaFX, was *still* not ready. The world needs Sun to stand behind one of the 200+ Ajax frameworks already out there, not create yet another one. While we're at it, why can't they just put more effort into an Ajax toolkit they have already "partnered" with, like Dojo?

Here is my prescription for curing the Java Flu:

Fight for the low end: in modern warfare, death may come from above. In technology, death comes from below. Ten years from now, who will have more power over IT - web designers or core developers? If Microsoft and Adobe win the designers today, Java developers will be the Cobol developers of tomorrow.
Make Java easier: something is wrong when very useful but also very complex code frameworks like Spring are considered the "easy" way to do Java development. Java needs to be easy enough for your mother to build her web-based phone list with it. I'm talking Hypercard/Filemaker/Access easy.
Make Java prettier: just put a bullet in JavaFX and adopt something with momentum like Dojo or Ext. If you just can't stomach Javascript, then adopt GWT.
Make Java fun: can't do this without doing the first three items. For an example of one attempt to make Java easy, check out the WaveMaker download.

Remember when people built cool web apps with Java? When was the last time you heard about a cool web app that wasn't written in Rails or PHP? OK, people still build lots of cool stuff in Java, but the love is gone and its just a day job now.

Facebook's Facebook Connect

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:02:00 +0000

Facebook is announcing a stronger information sharing feature called "Facebook Connect":

Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows
users to "connect" their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site.
This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more
features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features
available to third party applications today on Facebook.

Facebook lists Trusted authentication, Real identity, Friends Access, and Dynamic Privacy as key features of the new platform. Here are more details at the developer blog.

Although open is very much the key paradigm it is also clear that major social players Myspace and Facebook are working hard to figure out how to make "their" open application "the" open application.

Ads On Google Home Page?

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:28:00 +0000

There are several reports suggesting that Google may soon run display image advertising on the world's most prime online real estate - the Google home page.

Silicon Alley Insider suggests that Google has been leaving a lot of money on the table - as much as 3 billion annually but I am skeptical of that number for several reasons. Importantly I think Blodget is underestimating something Google is certainly worried about - the possibility that display advertising on the home page will diminish Google's reputation to the degree that the long term effect is actually negative.

Google's clean search interface, free from advertising, was one of the many factors in their spectacular success. Yahoo has consistently chosen to present users with a lot more information and monetized items on their home page, and I think this has been one of the reasons people have stuck with Google even as Yahoo's search quality has improved.

Google has so far very masterfully kept their advertising from offending people to the degree that would jeopardize their dominant market position, but this would be a big step in an old direction.

Will you care if Google runs advertising at their home page?

Microsoft's New Plan Same As The Old Plan

noreply@blogger.com (Daya Baran) — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:16:00 +0000

Microsoft's proposed bid for Yahoo was its fastest way to gain the scale necessary to compete against Google for online advertising dollars. Even before pulling the Yahoo offer, the company he had begun laying the groundwork for a strategy to compete with Google in online advertising. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is convinced that online advertising is crucial to its future. So much so that he sees online advertising making up as much as 25% of the company’s business within a few years. Google generates approximately US$ 22 billion versus Microsoft's US$ 3.3 billion from online advertising.

Consumers and businesses increasingly are switching from desktop software like Microsoft's to free online services that do the same things. "We are absolutely committed to be the leading player in that endeavor," Ballmer told employees at a recent gathering.

Google dominates the market, taking in 77% of the revenues from search advertising where as Microsoft has 5% of U.S. search revenue, according to search marketing firm Efficient Frontier.
Acquiring Yahoo would not have given Microsoft the revenue nor the search market share it is seeking for, as Yahoo's strength is in display advertising not search advertising.

Microsoft Seven Times Bigger Than Google In Display Ads
Microsoft's share of the display advertising market is already about 7 times larger than Google's. Although the display market is smaller than search, it's expected to grow faster over the next few years because of a surge in video ads. Market research firm IDC figures that by 2012 the display market will double, to $15.1 billion; revenue from search will reach $17.6 billion.

Microsoft makes money in the display business in two ways. It sells ads on its own popular web sites, such as MSN and Hotmail, and it acts as a broker by placing ads on other companies' web sites and then splitting the revenue with them much like Google's Adsense Program. Smaller web sites use Microsoft because they don't have a salesforce to call on advertisers and ad agencies. And even large players like media giant Viacom have found that letting Microsoft sell some of the space on sites like Comedy Central and MTV can lead to higher revenues. "They can achieve better monetization than we can on our own," says Viacom CEO Phillipe Dauman.

It's All About Display
Microsoft's new pitch is that, in display advertising, the company has the most sophisticated technology of any company. It can help advertisers precisely target display ads and assess the value of ads even when web surfers don't click on them. Microsoft is also making the case that search advertising, Google's gold mine, is overrated. Soon the company, it plans to introduce new ad technology that it says will demonstrate that to advertisers. "We're going to win with this strategy," said Keith Lorizio, Microsoft's advertising manager. More>

Image Source: Forbes

Your Name Should Be Right Here!

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Fri, 09 May 2008 06:47:00 +0000

WebGuild covers technology topics from startups to news to enterprise applications, and we'd love to hear more from you. If you are a tech blogger WebGuild would like to feature some of your technology opinions. If you are in management we'd be interested in hearing more about what you and your company do with online technology.

To submit material or ideas for articles contact WebGuild Blogger Joe Hunkins jhunkins@gmail.com or click here>>.

We also love comments on the posts. A lot of people read WebGuild but only a tiny number leave comments. If you like - or hate - the post feel free to let us know, or add anything you think is relevant to the conversation.

Goodbye to Google's Hello

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Fri, 09 May 2008 04:42:00 +0000

Google Picasa is an excellent photo service, though in my view and those of many others it is not as good as Yahoo's Flickr, which most would say represents the leader and key innovator in the competitive-but-not-lucrative photo sharing, storage, and photo community space.

Part of Picasa was a service called "hello", which allowed photo commenting in real time and as Matt Ingram notes "hello" was actually a great application.

So why will Google close it down on May 15th?

The likely answer is that it's a drain on Google's human resources without presenting a clear path to profitability. In simple terms, hello has probably failed to capture enough interest to make it worth Google's precious time. Perhaps Google could have put more resources and promotion behind the tool, but I think in some ways Google is comfortable having left the online photo business to Flickr and others.

One of Google's many brilliancies is focusing laser-like on those aspects of the business that they do very well and that do very well for them. Search is the key, and it's made Google one of the most successful companies in business history. Contrary to their sterling reputation Google has actually failed to deliver much if any profit in the key online venues of video sharing (despite owning the major player YouTube), photo sharing (despite owning Picasa), and social networking (despite owning Orkut). Google's failure in these venues is conspicuous given their success in search, though this probably mostly just shows how fickle and habit-driven we are as online application consumers.

Papa Johns Raking In The Dough Online

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Fri, 09 May 2008 04:18:00 +0000

Online pizza ordering has become a key component of the massive US pizza business. Papa Johns recently reported that they have now handled over a billion dollars in online pizza sales and it is also reported that over 20 percent of all sales come from online or text messaging.

CNN Reports.

MySpace and Data Portability

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:04:00 +0000

MySpace will be supporting very open data portability standards which will make it easy to share information across different websites with a single login as well as other excellent features. This is separate from the Open Social initiative which will also be supported by Myspace but represents the same type of open, data sharing approach that is becoming a key component of "best practices" for online development and interaction.

Ben Metcalfe is a key player in all this and will certainly be a great steward of the project. He's a very knowlegeable social media consultant and participant, spearheaded work at the BBC's superb website, and most importantly can be trusted to make sure these standards are not co-opted or abused by the major players.

It's very exciting to see the shift from guarded, proprietary approaches to openness. Ironically the general principles of open standards formed the foundation of the early internet but as commercialism, big money, and search optimization started to rule the internet we saw less transparency, less user-centric behavior, and a lot more BS. Open standards represent a step back to a friendlier, more functional, and more personal online experience.

Judge Orders Torrentspy to Pay Motion Picture Association $30,000 .... x 3699

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Hunkins) — Thu, 08 May 2008 06:08:00 +0000

A California judge today ordered Torrentspy to pay the Motion Picture Association of America a total of over $110,000,000. This was a win for Hollywood Studios although technicalities in the case mean it may not be all that significant because Torrentspy destroyed critical evidence which may in part have led to the huge judgement against them.

$30,000 per infringement x 3699 infringing movies is a bill nobody would want in their mailbox, and Torrentspy says they'll fight the verdict.

More from News.com

Postgres Plus Ajax = Web 2.0 Made Easy!

noreply@blogger.com (Christopher Keene) — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:15:00 +0000

WaveMaker announced a partnership last week with Enterprise DB, specifically their blades program. Enterprise DB (based on Postgres) is being bundled with the next release of WaveMaker to beef up the database part of our Ajax development platform.

Now Lewis Cunningham, a Senior Solutions Architect for Enterprise DB, has posted a great WaveMaker product review. He compares WaveMaker to Oracle Forms and Oracle ApEx, with the difference that WaveMaker works with standard Java and the Oracle products only work with Oracle PL/SQL.

Lewis says:

Wavemaker Studio is much more of a GUI IDE than the ApEx application builder. ApEx looks and feels like HTML while Wavemaker looks and feel like a rich, desktop application. Wavemaker Studio just doesn't feel like you're running in a browser.

I will be posting about my progress with Wavemaker as I play with it. I am liking it now that I have it configured and working. I think one of the big things that both Postgres and EnterpriseDB have been missing is a very robust application tool. Wavemaker might just be the tool.

The cool thing about the WaveMaker/EnterpriseDB partnership is that it took exactly one phone call between myself and the Bob Zurek, the CTO of Enterprise DB, to "negotiate" the entire relationship. As I pointed out in the Silverado Rules for Open Source Success, open source is not just good for creating user communities, it rocks for creating vendors ecosystems too!