November 28, 2002
Thank you
Thank you
It's been great to return to actually writing and being excited to write. Thank you, on Thanksgiving.
November 27, 2002
In the "The Best Information...
In the "The Best Information is the Most Prosaic Department"....
The Department of Energy has published a report on the "Effect of Income on Appliances in U.S. Households" that includes a whole lot of interesting statistics about the distribution of various household appliances based on geography, socioeconomic characteristics and household income. For example, did you know that the "percent of households with a large screen television increased from about 25 percent for the lowest income bracket to 43 percent for the highest income bracket"?
How about cable or satellite penetration by income?
Now, consider that fewer low-income households have a clothes washer than have cable or satellite connections....
There's a lot more good stuff in this report....
Bandwidth Bust!
Bandwidth Bust!
Dan Gillmor has an interesting posting about a crackdown by police on behalf of Buckeye Cable, which claimed a group of people had appropriated a quarter million dollars worth of bandwidth from its cable modem service. Dan asks the questions:
- What metric led the cable company to claim losses of a quarter million dollars? Something more substantial than a Ouija Board?
- How, precisely, were the modems altered? Did the customers own the modems?
- What's in the service contract to begin with? What kind of limitations do subscribers agree to? Were the current limitations put in place via the usual sneakware method, where a cable provider posts changes in terms of service, or were the customers notified up front?
- The local detective says no other searches and seizures have occurred in the U.S. Could that possibly be a hint that these actions were way, way out of line?
Mouse Stunt
Mouse Stunt
Dealing another blow to rationality is the plan to create a human-mouse hybrid, both from the potential for horrifying outcomes (the spectacle of a human fetus in conceived in a mouse womb has already been suggested) and the over-the-top coverage you get with these stories, whether mice or human clones. These news items are scientific stunts that only hurt the effort to reach a rational national policy on genetic research that pulls us out of the Dark Ages. The current research regime places the U.S. behind almost every country in the world in terms of options within the lab.
Banking and technological change
Banking and technological change
Scott Loftesness points to an interesting Federal Reserve working paper that discusses the impact of information technology on banking over the last several decades.
There's an assertion early in the paper that banks have "given away" the benefits of ATMs to consumers. But in exhange, they've lowered costs (there are now four times as many banking facilities without staff -- ATMs -- than there are staffed banks, though even banks with people have grown an average of 2.1 percent a year) and been able to facilitate a vast expansion of banking products that are possible only because of IT:
Money market mutual funds, an alternative to bank deposits, grew at an average annual rate of 10.8% from 1984-2001. Corporate equity and corporate debt (bonds plus commercial paper), which are alternatives to bank loans, grew at annual rates of 10.0% and 11.3%, respectively, overtaking bank GTA by 2001. Finally, mortgage pools and other asset-backed securities – some of which are assets that were removed from bank balance sheets and some of which are alternatives to bank financing – grew at an annual rate of 13.7% over the interval.
Moblog Live
Moblog Live
Joi Ito has a very cool experiment in moblogging live now on his site. With a camphone and SMS, he's recording his day, which involves several drinks....
Where the Ad Dollars Grow
Where the Ad Dollars Grow
MediaPost reports that Internet advertising is down 18.17 percent year over year, as of the end of the third quarter. B2B magazines are right behind, with a decline of 17.40 percent. But there is a difference in impact for these two figures -- magazines go away without ad revenue (say goodbye, Industry Standard, Upside, etc.) while more ad space is sold at lower CPMs on the Internet. Yes, some sites are going out of business, but keeping a site alive with fewer people is easier than producing a magazine that becomes economically impossible to publish when it falls into the 80-pages per issue range.
Your TiVo swings both ways
Your TiVo swings both ways
Rick Ellis, of AllYourSoaps, points to a Wall Street Journal story that suggests TiVo PVRs can jump to conclusions about sexual orientation or ethnic background. Key quotes:
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
It's worth the read, for sure, but only if you have a subscription to the WSJ - sorry. Anyway, Rick goes on to make some great points about personalization:
They're all dirty
They're all dirty
Don't kid yourself, the banks that didn't keep their email, in violation of SEC compliance policy, are hiding something. Frank Quattrone of Credit Suisse First Boston sent a mail in November 2000 to an analyst asking what investment banking business had been "extracted" in exchange for the research coverage.
In regards a Yahoo downgrade, CSFB analyst Jamie Kiggen wrote in email in March, according to the Boston Globe: ''The wait for revenue from these guys has been awfully long.''
In other words, they'd held off downgrading long enough, hoping for ibanking revenue, that it was time to punish Yahoo. But, the report says, he still "called himself a 'revenue kind of guy,' saying he would maintain the hold rating so he wouldn't jeopardize potential revenue, or business, with Yahoo. That despite the fact Credit Suisse had no business with Yahoo at the time."
That same year, Kiggen was named a "third team" Institutional Investor All-America Research team member. He was a runner-up in 2001.
Michael Jackson must be so...
Michael Jackson must be so relieved
The New Scientist reports that face transplants 'possible within a year.'
A face transplant would involve removing the face, facial muscles and subcutaneous fat from the recipient. The donor face from a recently dead person, complete with lips, chin, ears, nose, eight major blood vessels and even some bone, would then be grafted into place.
Not surprisingly, doctors and nurses surveyed about their willingness to have a face transplant were not eager to be donors.
Jobless data not so rosy
Jobless data not so rosy
While the Dow soared on the news of lower unemployment claims than expected, the real story is that joblessness is up from last year and not down.
In October, 194 metropolitan areas recorded higher unemployment rates than a year earlier, 117 areas had lower rates, and 20 areas had rates that were unchanged, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Among the nine metropolitan areas with rates of at least 10.0 percent, six were located in California's agricultural Central Valley and the remainder were along the Mexican border in other states. Thirty areas registered jobless rates below 3.0 percent, with 14 located in the Midwest and 10 in the South. The national unemployment rate in October was 5.3 percent, not seasonally adjusted, up from 5.0 percent a year earlier.
Look at where the largest increases in job loss have happened, in our our major economic centers:
Among the 274 metropolitan areas for which October nonfarm payroll data were available, 159 reported over-the-year declines in employment, 106 reported increases, and 9 had no change. The largest over-the-year employment decreases were posted in Atlanta, Ga. (-61,800), Chicago, Ill. (-56,800), New York, N.Y. (-43,300), Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, Wash. (-38,900), and San Jose, Calif. (-31,900). The largest over-the-year percentage declines in employment were reported in Decatur, Ill. (-4.7 percent), Flint, Mich. (-3.8 percent), San Jose, Calif., and Danville, Va. (-3.2 percent each), and San Francisco, Calif. (-3.0 percent).
Li Ka-shing's Hutchinson Whampoa downgrade?
Li Ka-shing's Hutchinson Whampoa downgrade?
Following my posting about the Time Asia story yesterday, UBS Warburg is hintint it will downgrade the debt of Hutchison Whampoa. Bring it on. Okay, so growth isn't good in the short term? Big deal. Data services are valuable -- you're using them now. Downgrade, shmowngrade.
Almost 10 percent of NTT...
Almost 10 percent of NTT DoCoMo customers have camphones
NTT DoCoMo, which has 35 million subscribers for its data services, said it has sold its three millionth camphone. Who says this is a passing fad? People do want to snap shots and send them, to paraphrase Adam Curry. "Look what I can do, ma...."
You do that hoo doo...
You do that hoo doo like you do
Universal is amending its royalty payment model, opening the books a bit, increasing audit staff size (a defensive move) and holding "workshops for artists and their representatives to help them understand how royalties are paid," according to the New York Times. It's a tiny, microscopic step in the right direction, but as a panacea it pales to the feel-good tactic of keeping the acts stoned all the time.
November 26, 2002
Another view on media spending
Another view on media spending
Masha Geller, editor-in-chief of MediaPost has a different take on ad spending, based on DoubleClick's recent quarter. Some of the juicy bits:
Whenever an online-related announcement bears a headline containing the word “stabilization,” my first feeling is that of disappointed skepticism because "stability" is not a word often used in this industry. Yesterday was no exception, as DoubleClick Inc. announced the results of its Q3 2002 Email Marketing Trend Report, which found that after a significant dip in Q2 performance metrics including open rates and click rates, in addition to high bounce back rates, Q3 metrics have “returned to 2001 levels.”
Semantics aside, DC’s Q3 data revealed that open rates remained consistent quarter-over- quarter at 37.3% (from 37.6% in Q2), while click-though rates increased to 8.5% in Q3 from 7.5% in Q2. Bounce back rates declined from their historic high of 13.6% in Q2 to 13.3% in Q3. The high bounce back rates probably reflect full in-boxes, new size limits for inboxes as well as address changes.
Business products and services continued to have the highest open rates (47.4%), followed by travel (42.5%) and consumer products (41.9%). However, business products and services had the highest bounce back rates in Q3 at 16.5%, although this has declined from 19% in Q2. Retailer and catalog bounce back rates decreased significantly from Q2 dropping from 14.6% to 11.9%.
Surveillance technology? Not yet...
Surveillance technology? Not yet...
(Thanks to Doc for the link) Tom, of Commonplaces, posts this link to a response to a question he raised about what Macromedia Flash is doing when it asks for access to the PC camera and microphone (which it usually won't since the programmer has to want to communicate with you in real-time). It should temporarily alleviate privacy concerns about Flash:
Now, I am not providing this explanation to say your concerns are unfounded. I think a healthy amount of skepticism about any new and potentially invasive technology is a good thing. But what I can tell you, as a long time Flash developer and one who has developed several apps utilitizing the new camera/mic features of FlashMX/6, Macromedia has gone to extensive lengths to make sure this as safe as possible. They have seen too many other companies get lots of bad pr about security(microsoft) and did not want to follow their lead. MM actually spent their time on this *before* it was released, instead of waiting until people cracked it, then releasing a patch, which is so often the path software companies take.
So, if it is the case that Macromedia Flash is not watching us, why do I say this is a "temporary" solution? Because we're human and we love to find things to worry about. Only continuing solid information will eventually eliminate this specific concern.
There is a much larger issue, though, and that is the U.S. government's intention to monitor every message, every damned bit, flowing over the Internet. Listen to our Attorney General crowing about his carte blanche ability to moniter the Internet:
"The Court of Review's action revolutionizes our ability to investigate terrorists and prosecute terrorist acts," said Ashcroft, who announced steps to put the ruling into effect immediately. He said agents and prosecutors in the field now can work together more closely.
Revolutionizes, indeed. As in abandoning basic civil rights for good. Trashing them. That's the meaning of revolution in a republic that has, until now, treasured personal liberty. This attitude by the Bush Administration toward personal and business communications is a wound in the evolving networked economy that must be closed if we are going to realize the full benefits of all these technologies. They cannot open our lives and business to surreptitious surveillance at the whim of a man who once fought for privacy based on his conservative views, but now, sodden with power, seeks to obliterate it.
"We're very excited," an FBI official said.
Is this the bottom for...
Is this the bottom for media?
The holiday ad blitz hasn't materialized, but ad revenues for the third quarter are up from the year before, indicating that this may be the bottom of the media downturn. According to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, ad spending overall increased by 3.8 percent in the third quarter compared to a year ago.
Showing increases were local newspaper display ads (9.5%), network TV (7.9%), network radio (7.3%), Hispanic TV (4.3%), Spot TV (3.2%), Cable TV (3%), National Magazines (2.2%) and Spot Radio (2.1%). Internet reported a 1% drop in ad spending. Syndicated TV fell 8.7% and national newspapers dropped 9.3%.
November 25, 2002
So that's where the mail...
So that's where the mail is going...
Ming the Mechanic points to this Infoworld piece wherein the writer finds that 11.7% of legitimate email is being screened by overly zealous spam filters used by ISPs and offered by software developers.
A Nutty Investor? Hardly.
A Nutty Investor? Hardly.
Time Asia reports on Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing's determined investments in 3G networks through his Hutchinson Whompoa in the face of shrinking capital investment by almost all other telecoms.
Considering what Hutchison 3G is up against, the company will be hard pressed to meet its target break-even date of 2005. According to estimates by Nomura, Hutchison 3G will have to capture a minimum of 6.4 million subscribers in the United Kingdom, or a 13% market share, just to start making a positive return on its investment by 2010. The forecast out of technology consultant Forrester Research is even grimmer, pushing Hutchison 3G's break-even date in the United Kingdom back to 2017.
Why is Li pushing forward at the moment of maximum pessimism? The short answer: because he is able to when no one else can.
AOL Day?
AOL Day?
You thought Christmas was going to be big this December? Hannakuh? No, the press is hyping "AOL Day," when the company is supposed to reveal its ability to survive and thrive in a post-bubble world. I've said it before and I'll say it again: AOL's acquisition of Time Warner was the right move for AOL shareholders and, over time, will present ample returns to Time Warner shareholders who are feeling, well, a little burned. A little burned is not so bad in this day and age. Ultimately, AOL shareholders are preserving the value of the shares they took into the deal and Time Warner shareholders are gaining significant upside when the media market turns around.
Some of the coverage is reasonable, like this SmartMoney piece. For a completely fact filled but meaningless analysis of the situation at AOL Time Warner, click here. You'll be treated to Kaufman Brothers analyst Paul Kim's comments, which include the idiotic statement that "If you are AOL you have very few venues to differentiate" and the deep musing that "AOL's incredible advantage is that it has a significant portion of the market and people are habitual." So, bascially he's saying that if you are AOL, you get to see the audience every day, but you can't change anything?
The press is going to treat a company with revenues that are higher than at the time of the merger, which has not seen a decrease in online membership, just a slowing in new members, and that has huge media assets to experiment with as rich media evolves as LIVING OR DYING on the announcements made Dec. 3rd. We're building to an incredible anti-climax that the press will call a "failure." And, yet, nothing much will have changed. The overall economy will still be bad and the merged company will still be struggling, as all merged companies do, to understand its new portfolio of assets and the opportunities they represent. Dec. 3 will not be a day of epiphany, so anyone going in expecting that is a fool.
Googlefighting some business buzzwords
Googlefighting some business buzzwords
Smart Network vs. Stupid Network
Every contest was a walk for the winner. See what your score is....
Set-top sales on the wane;...
Set-top sales on the wane; PVR features on the rise
In-Stat/MDR reports that for the first time since they were introduced in 1996, digital set-top boxes are experiencing falling revenue, with shipments forecasted to drop by 30 percent in 2002:
Worldwide digital cable set top box unit shipments are forecasted to drop 30% in 2002, from 14.4 million unit shipments in 2001, to just over 10.1 million in 2002.
However, the slumping market has not significantly affected the introduction of new products. "Even with a shrinking market and increasing competition from new manufacturers, most leading cable set top box manufacturers are continuing to develop new digital cable set top box products," says Mike Paxton, a Senior Analyst with In-Stat/MDR. "Two of these new types of boxes, the PVR-enabled cable set top box and the high- definition cable set top box, are experiencing strong demand as some cable operators continue to expand the availability of advanced interactive cable services."
TiVo no invitation to disaster...
TiVo no invitation to disaster for advertisers
Forrester Research and the Association of National Advertisers report that they found in a survey of 112 marketers that 68 percent of advertisers feel unprepared to deal with ad-skipping technology and that 75 percent will cut ad budgets in response to adoption of personal video recorder (PVRs).
Advertising is changing and it is a mistake to conclude that video on demand advertising will make up the difference, since VOD isn't a sure thing. Evolving the way advertising interacts with programming is more important.
Jeremy on enterprise IM
Jeremy on enterprise IM
Riffing on my posting this morning, Jeremy Allaire has some good thoughts on the development trajectory of corporate IM. The notion of an IM "switch," in the packet-routing sense, is one that represents a huge opportunity in corporate IM.
About bloody Time
About bloody Time
AOL and Time Inc., which AOL Time Warner owns, are about to get around to doing a deal that put Time behind the firewall at AOL, so only members can see it. This is called "member services" at AOL, but it narrows the ad base, making the question one of an inherent conflict between the interests of the publication and of the online service.
Here is the solution, and it is one that can be applied across the AOL TW content portfolio, including movies and TV: Let AOL members have full access to capture and annotate content and share it with other AOL members, but keep the resulting user-made content inside AOL (tie the content to a client that plays the user-generated content, so only members can view/annotate it). You still have the member services incentive to join AOL to access the content in new ways while retaining Time's public access via the Net to drive advertising revenues.
What happens when you blog...
What happens when you blog a Fox executive? Blox
Jonathan Peterson deconstructs the comments of Fox CEO Peter Chernin in a Comdex keynote. Great stuff. Thanks for the link to David Weinberger, who adds his own astute comments.
It all comes down to the notion that programming is scarce or, at least, needs to retain the appearance of scarcity to sustain its value. In fact, if you make connections and let value flow, the investment in programming made today can be much more profitable than it is in the broadcast model.
Fair Disclosure slaps on the...
Fair Disclosure slaps on the wrist
Motorola and Raytheon allowed certain analysts and, by extension, groups of investors, to have access to information about the company before the rest of the market. This is a violation of Reg FD.
Secure Computing and Siebel Systems actually will pay fines of $250,000 for violating Reg FD.
Toothless SEC = meaningless disclosure enforcement.
Andrews: Unwired reality
Andrews: Unwired reality
Seattle Times columnist Paul Andrews points out that Comdex, riddled as it was with visions of wireless, was a lousy place to try and find an 802.11 signal.
I don't think the responsibility to install wireless access points lies with Comdex, but rather with the city of Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Convention Center. If they want to be premiere venues, they should slap in wireless right now. The whole sick plastic town should go wireless, so that it is convenient to be there and stay connected; I'd even go back to Vegas if that were the case.
Freak Show
Freak Show 
The New York Times Magazine has a profile of, judging from the photo, a slimmed down Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. Says reporter Steve Bodow:
Ballmer loves this scheduling system. The assemblage of tiny grids is both a necessary practicality of the way he must now go about his job -- with the far-flung Microsoft products and markets, there is simply no way he can be the old-fashioned be-everywhere boss he would otherwise like to be -- and a symbol of the new personality he would like to present, for himself and, in a sense, for the entire company: older, wiser, calmer. Also: transparent. Gone are the days when Microsoft didn't mind being seen as a secretive evil empire.
I think the reporter, who is a staff writer for "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," is very naive. Ballmer and Bill G., for that matter, have been very "open" about a lot of things, including their personal schedules (it lets them demonstrate their software -- where else can you find out that the VP of Marketing will get only 12 hours with the CEO each year than in Microsoft Excel?). The writer also talks about how Microsoft fought "the biggest antitrust case in a century," apparently forgetting that Ma Bell was broken up and IBM came within a hair's breadth of the same fate.
The whole article comes off as fluff for anyone who actually spends time around Microsoft. It's still Darwinian, it's still intense, and bold.
Boldly blogging
Boldly blogging
The Reverse Cowgirl, emerging media star, has a great approach to the cross-media persona she's building. Fun to watch her VH-1 producer playing along in the comments section, too.
Corporate IM blasted
Corporate IM blasted
ZD Net's Randall Black says corporate IM services make no sense. I understand why he thinks this is the case, because he looks at all the issues but doesn't see what the tools can actually do in the long run. Let's take the major points, shall we:
Because there is no interoperability in sight for AOL, MSN, and Yahoo, employees typically run all three clients to be able to communicate with contacts that are spread out across these networks.
First off, it is the opportunity to resolve this incompatibility that creates the major market opportunity. While each of the players will cordone off their networks, someone is going to bring all the systems together using Jabber or Jabber-based translator applications that allow AOL, MSN and Yahoo! client to join unified chats, use rich messaging and so fort. One of these players could blow the market open by offering this functionality, because then, instead of closed markets the battle becomes one of "share of experience." Feature-rich applications that solve bigger corporate problems, such as record-keeping related to customer communications, optimizing customer support and reducing travel related to work, can be worth a lot more than $30 a month.
AOL, MSN and Yahoo want you to pay from $24 to $30 per seat, per year, to have some additional features added to the clients. These features are geared to solving problems of employees using these clients to talk to customers. The problem is that customers are distributed across all three networks, making this a very expensive proposition.
Per above, this is the opportunity. Black also suggests that the specialized needs of specific vertical markets prevents one tool from doing it all. This is foderol of the highest order -- the basic functionality needed flows across market boundaries and can be shaped to each user interface as needed to address the specific needs of, say, a broker-dealer (where NASD and SEC compliance records are critical).
So who uses instant messaging to talk to clients anyway? Today it’s mostly brokers in the financial services industry that have a few “special” clients that must have real time access to their brokers. I suspect if I was trading thousands of dollars of stocks daily, I too may want to have real time access to my broker, but that is only one market.
Yes, it is only one market. And it is irrational to conceive of one market as the crucible of viability for corporate IM. It would be a waste of money to put brokers online for just anyone to tap on the virtual shoulder, but it does make sense to have IM for high-worth customers. Likewise, if you set up an IM plug-in that let, say, a Nordstrom personal shopper, service their best customers from the customer's desktop, so that when they need new shirts the shopper picks what is best and sends them along locally or via overnight delivery. Or, in the banking business, you could have a robust business in managing personal finances, especially debt consolidation, through IM, so that a debt service manager becomes part of the customer's life when they sign up ("You did put aside the $50 for the gas bill, right?" the service manager would message on the appropriate day of the month -- it could be automated and become a real-time conversation only if there was a problem).
There are real business problems to solve in the instant messaging space though. It seems that public instant messaging is here to stay, and in a big way. Along with it, come a slew of security problems for corporate networks. Everything from hacker vulnerabilities in the form of buffer overflows, to viruses, to worms, to leakage of confidential information, to legal liability because the guy in the next cubicle is chatting with his girlfriend.
Distributed work is a new animal. Our employers want us on the clock 24/7, so the fact that people are chatting with friends during the day isn't the end of productivity as we know it. As to the security issues, digital identity, which has lots of upside benefits, like the ability to log on from a variety of devices and stay in touch with exactly the information we want, is a big step toward preventing unauthorized access to corporate systems. From there, Black runs down lots of one-product or one-market tools. We need an omnibus approach to IM and archiving, not a series of one-off attacks on narrow markets. Then corporate IM would make a lot of sense and a lot of money.
November 24, 2002
SMS outpacing email among European...
SMS outpacing email among European mobile subscribers
David Weinberger points to a GartnerGroup report that shows that while 41 percent of European adults with mobile services use short messaging (SMS), only 30 percent use email on their phones. The key idea is that SMS is beating email on the phone, and the phone is just one device among many that will connect.
Dr. Weinberger comments:
1. Connectedness will happen. How? The basic answer is: Every way.
2. But it's not as if email and SMS compete. Read Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs to see how no-location technologies ("no-loco tech"?) are letting us engage in new ways. (There's a discussion of the book going on now at the Well.Vue. It's long form and fascinating. Some great stuff, including a recounting by Dave Hughes of what followed from his boast that he could wifi every farm in Wales "by turning every Welsh pub into a wireless ISP." )
3. I'm looking forward to the day when the announcement of a new type of human connection is not immediately followed by the phrase "powerful marketing tool." How about something like: "Over 62% of Americans are using ____ to talk with, inform and entertain one another. It therefore promises to provide an antidote to powerful marketing tools."
Seeing the future of digital...
Seeing the future of digital photography
The Far Eastern Economic Revenue goes where you have to go to see the future of consumer electronics, Akihabara in Tokyo, to explore where digital photography is going. Good summary of the current $8 billion market and key ideas about how these cameras will fit into the digital home and work environment.
For the five Japanese companies that dominate the digital-camera market today--Sony, Fuji Photo Film, Canon, Olympus and Nikon--these are very good times. In recent weeks, the companies announced that demand is outpacing estimates and boosted production targets for the year. While most of corporate Japan was detailing yet another six months of malaise, the big five were basking in terrific numbers in their camera segments. Numbers like these: In value, digital cameras now make up 87% of total camera shipments in Japan and 75% elsewhere.
The article sums up the strategies:
SONY: Hooks its digital cameras into a whole system of devices that use its proprietary memory standard, the Memory Stick, to fit them all together
OLYMPUS: Outsources a lot of production, which keeps the sticker price down, but the lack of control makes it difficult for the company to adjust quickly to market demand
CANON: Excels in the high-end market and is betting digital-camera users will print pictures at home
NIKON: Hopes its brand and reputation in traditional cameras may help it snag a larger market share, but it's still trailing the competition
FUJI: Makes its own colour sensors, digital processors and lenses, and can control its component supplies better than just about anyone. But its brand may not be strong enough to succeed outside Japan
Dedication to the old eats...
Dedication to the old eats away at the new
NTT Communications, the Japanese telecom giant, is bundling nationwide 802.11 connectivity with landline services, to preserve its voice market share. This is further proof that WLAN services are going to be linked from the bottom up, with major carriers trying to find inroads to control access through persistent identity services that provide seamless access to WLAN hot spots.
NTT Com senior executive vice president Shuji Tomita said, "We do not expect relatively large revenue [from WLAN hotspot service alone], but NTT Communications is also providing ADSL wireline access, and the combination of wireline and wireless is very important. We would like to provide portability of access through the wireless and wireline network. Eventually, we would like to provide roaming access through partners."
Read that as "we'll partner with WLAN hotspot providers who want to pay for the hardware, we'll even partner with our customers with wireless LANs in their home, so we can reach their neighbors." Hence:
"'In order to reduce investment, we are promoting roaming services with other WLAN service providers to enlarge our coverage. We have already started a trial roaming service with several providers,'" said Tomita.... NTT Com will also provide special software to corporate and consumer clients to enable roaming and secure access."
Basically, this is repetition of the same mistake made on the Net -- giving away your biggest value add sets consumer tolerance to pay very low. In the market that is emerging, where the carrier will give away broadband services to preserve voice revenues, content becomes the only source of value anyone can exploit. Generally, the telcos will focus on "big media" content, but the really inexpensive and Net-minded way to go is to give people tools for communicating and let them create most of the content on the network.
Video on demand on schedule
Video on demand on schedule
It's not the schedule described by the cable industry in the early 1990s, when Time Warner Cable blew more than a billion dollars on a network in Orlando, Florida, but Yankee Group analysts say that seven million homes will have on-demand programming by year end. The fact is that the back-end systems for VOD are still kludgey and I am skeptical that all seven million of those homes could tap programming simultaneously, if in fact there are that many homes able to use VOD services.
Fact is, these same analyst groups were predicting this kind of market penetration by 1997. At Digital Media, we predicted in October 1995 that "At current rates, it will take until sometime between 2010 and 2015 before 80 percent of American homes are receiving services akin to 1994 predictions (video-on-demand, customized information services and multimegabit data services delivered via fiber)." We're right on that schedule.
The Yankee folks point out that cable systems are the most likely conduits for broadband content, because "DSL providers face three competitive disadvantages:
- Greater cable modem availability: 66 percent of U.S. households are cable-modem–ready compared with 51 percent DSL-ready households.
- Faster cable modem provisioning: Cable modem service is installed in 3–5 business days on average compared with 10–15 business days for DSL.
- Lower cable modem prices: Although the RBOCs aggressively promote DSL and offer discounts to diminish cable’s price advantage, cable modems maintain a $4–$15 monthly price advantage."
Vacancy rates higher than any...
Vacancy rates higher than any time in a decade
Local news reports that vacancy rates in Seattle have increased to the highest level since the beginning of the 1990s. Here's a Seattle Times story from early October, but things are just getting worse.
If you aren't in a...
If you aren't in a niche, you're messaging
Steve Lohr's New York Times piece on Hewlett-Packard's attempt to position itself to compete with Dell in the general PC market while Sony, IBM and others go for niche markets. What's the differentiator for HP? Tools for people to communicate:
[T]he company offered a glimpse of an advanced personal computer it hopes to have on the market by 2004. It was a sleek, black PC with high-quality videoconferencing, enhanced instant-messaging and immediate data-sharing and collaboration capabilities. The project, code-named Agora, is a collection of inventive computing and communications technologies, some of which come from Hewlett-Packard's research laboratories.
We love our computers
We love our computers
CNET reports that a Harris Interactive poll found people value their computers more than other digital devices in the home. Oddly, Harris didn't ask for a comparison between the TV and the computer in terms of perceived value by the 1,500 people surveyed, but concluded the computer is the most important digital device they own.
So, CNET called Dell and got a quote unrelated to the facts of the survey:
"We're seeing a lifestyle shift from almost exclusive television use to a higher percentage of people's lives spent on a computer," said Mark Oldani, director of marketing at Dell.
What the survey seems to be designed to do, besides stating the obvious, is to bolster hopes for a tech Christmas. But there is absolutely nothing in the story about potential sales or promises to buy:
If the respondents follow through on their shopping promise, it will be welcome news to the tech sector, which is bracing for what could be another dismal holiday season. Although a greater number of people are expected to spend more money online than ever before, uncertainty about the economy and the global situation may discourage people from spending with abandon.
Movielink getting bad reviews
Movielink getting bad reviews
The studio-backed Movielink service, which allows lucky consumers to download a movie and play it for up to 24 hours, is getting lousy reviews. Why? All the reasons you'd expect: poor customer service and a 24-hour limit for playing a film (when the typical rental store gives you a week these days and NetFlix lets you rent as many DVDs as you want for as long as you want for $20 a month).
It's pretty clear Movielink hasn't done market research on the real state of things; it's a defensive move that is bound to fail if it does not acknowledge the value available elsewhere.
Are scientists technologically illiterate?
Are scientists technologically illiterate?
Richard Gallagher, the editor of The Scientist, thinks scientists need to be more aware of the broader scientific issues that underpin biotech progress.
Anecdotal evidence aside, no analysis exists (that I could find) that details what scientists know, and don't know, about technologies they employ on a daily basis.
This is shameful, for two reasons. First, if we are going to advocate the indisputably desirable goal of increased technological knowledge among the citizenry, we have a duty to look to our own laurels first. And second, if there is a problem with technical literacy among biologists, the consequences are far weightier than for the general public. My suspicion is that many in the research community are technologically challenged. If correct, practical implications abound.
One concern is purchasing decisions. How many instruments and systems are wastefully overspecified or distressingly underspecified because the purchasing process was based on insufficient technical knowledge? Worse, how many white elephants, or at least white boxes, are left to gather dust in the corner? And how much further might lab dollars go by rejigging existing equipment or by purchasing a refurbished older model rather than the latest gizmo?
There's another dimension to over- and under-specified technology, one driven by ignorance of more than science and engineering principles. Technologists tend to forget the policy and philosophical questions that should shape the specifications of tools and therapies. A very good book about the wider question of how our changing perception of human-ness is the recently released The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker. He's covered much of this territory before, but in this book puts our growing understanding of how the mind works into the context of public policy. He's not write about a lot of specifics of public policy and philosophy, but it raises good questions. In the midst of change, questions are the most powerful tool we have.
Pinker's book is being reviewed across the Web. Steven Johnson dissects the review of Pinker in The New Yorker by Louis Menand.
This all comes into sharp focus when the government gives a scientist permission to create a new form of bacteria from scratch. It's not unethical, in my opinion, to do this, but it gives rise to all sorts of future questions about whether, having been created, new life forms are property, whether there is liability for the inventor if it kills people, and so on and on. There are no simple answers, just a lot of questions that we have to be asking in anticipation of the unexpected.
November 22, 2002
Communication in a nutshell
Communication in a nutshell
Jerry Michalski summarizes the situation today neatly and, as usual, in a paragraph full of meaning and levels:
All the communication technologies we use -- telephones, newspapers, radio, IM, e-mail, mailing lists, TV, books -- are mired in historical cruft that keeps us from seeing clearly what to build next. It is useful to go to first principles, then reexamine whatever communication task you have at hand. So let me suggest the following basic dimensions of communication: timing, audience, mode, length, persistence, production level, identity and permission.
The list with explanations and more on my wiki here.
If you lose your parking...
If you lose your parking ticket you pay for the whole day
John Robb points out a Wall Street Journal article that contrasts Merrill Lynch, which kept its email records, and was fined $100 million, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which deleted email in violation of SEC regulations, but got off with only $1.6 million in fines each.
This is blatant disregard for rules that, when I was working for an investment bank, was grounds for termination. If a whole firm ignores the SEC requirements to retain all emails to customers and the outside world, along with internal messages, as Goldman and Morgan Stanley did, the firm should pay the maximum fine associated with what might have been covered up. Yes, I know it is a violation of due process -- so, we should be raising the fines for failing to keep complete records for compliance purposes. Under Bush, however, this is highly unlikely.
The heartbreak of slow wireless...
The heartbreak of slow wireless communications got you down?
Doc points to this handy new product for wireless guru wannabes everywhere. Just spritz the WiFi Speed Spray on and spruce up your connectivity. As Art Linkletter says, "This shit really works." Good old Art.
The right idea, but for...
The right idea, but for a closed world
CNET reports: Sprint to update corporate IM. The telecom giant on Monday is expected to introduce technology that lets businesses use instant messaging to access data contained within corporate applications.
Getting data to connect, not just accessing it, is the big trick. I was moderating a panel on bioinformatics on Tuesday when David Martin of Eos Biotechnology said the big issue in creating new drugs is making different companies and research labs' data compatible so that it is convenient to search for combination of genotypes and gene expression patterns. It is essentially an open source problem.
Accessing corporate data on a closed IM system prevents exposing new services to customers and partners, even open markets for information. But this is a step in the right direction.
One million Japanese sign on...
One million Japanese sign on for mobile video mail
J-Phone, a Japanese mobile carrier says its Sha-mail service, which lets people send and receive video mail from a mobile handset, has reached one million subscribers after just nine months.
Yes, people talking to other people.
Xbox Live selling out
Xbox Live selling out
In the people talking vein: CNET reports on the $50 Xbox Live starter kit selling out in a week. Maybe Microsoft underestimated demand, but that would only prove the point that has become the topic of the day. People want to talk, even when gaming.
People + communication tools = network usage. Want to increase revenue, find a way to let people connect and create their own content -- themselves.