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September 2005 Archives
In Japan, one of the worst weblog ASP providers is Seesa blog, (I am not going to give them any links) mainly because their service is free and is easily gamed with their API. Seesa has been a cesspool of spam blogs and spam blog comments for many months now, and many of us were wondering when they would do something. Seesa also had no "capcha" code (the systems that require a human to read a barely legible image to ensure that a new blog is not automatically generated.)
Well it seems as if Seesa has finally realized that if you do not keep your garden free of weeds, no one will want to enter.
Seesa has annouced that they will be putting into place systems to make spam blog comments/trackbacks and the creation of spam blogs themselves more difficult. They are not doing anything innovative or new- only putting into place the barriers that just about everyone else has in place. I personally think it's too late- who would want to start using Seesa when there are so many other free blog services and Seesa has been such a wasteland of spammers.
The spammers who use automated systems to create spam blogs and spam comments are in a frenzy to use the Seesa system now, before the gate closes in a few days. Good luck, and good riddance!
Lucas Gonze challenges Darren Rowse to prove that he's really making $200K/yr. blogging.
I agree, Rowse's story doesn't pass the smell test.
Adam Kalsey, founder of blog advertising service Pheedo, is moving on to new things...
dan is in tokyo to promote the japanese lang. of "we the media."
More photos here:
OCTOBER 8th!
SUPERDELUXE Tokyo.
TOKYOARTBEAT.COM 1 year anniversary party!!!!
As long as I am not on a business trip in the US, I'll be there!
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, and author of the upcoming book on the Long Tail, took time out to present to a Salesforce.com conference on the topic of the long tail. This is a great overview of the long tail ideas, plus I was impressed at how this Macromedia application was able to present both Chris' slides and his audio from the presentation seamlessly. Very well done.
Some other relevant links:
Wired 12.10: The Long Tail
IT Conversations: Chris Anderson - Economics of the Long Tail
The Long Tail (Chris Anderson's excellent Long Tail weblog)
i wish JAL would bring back their "tsuru" logo from the 1970s. the current one is too stylized and boring.
So the big news this week, for me, was both the restructuring of Microsoft (a phenomenal, phenomenal blog, btw), and the restructuring of Sony. There's a bunch of parallels here on the surface, but at their core, Sony doesn't have a business model that investors can count on, whereas Microsoft's business model of selling software is still working for them.
The Microsoft announcement this week was pretty interesting in that the cracks in their armor are really starting to show. I think there is a lot of denial in the executive suite, and Ballmer, like Idei at Sony, won't be the person to lead the company out of the current mess. The stock has stalled, and while the company is richer than many small nations, money alone won't do anything but buy time. 2006 is a critical year for many reasons, including XBOX360 (which launches in late 05 but will either live or die in 06) and of course Windows Vista. I think everyone has learned to never underestimate Redmond, but it is incredible to see the company struggling while trying to maintain an image of strength.
Sony on the other hand is bleeding badly. 10,000 employees to be cut (out of 151,400 worldwide), 4000 in Japan. I was expecting, no hoping, for actually more radical cuts than that. I think Sony needs to cut a lot more than 1/15th of it's workforce to become competitive.
I'm ABSOLUTELY ELATED to see that Qualia is getting the AXE. I always HATED Qualia both as a brand and as an idea when I was a Sony employee. The products were awful. It was everything that Sony should not have been doing: going after a small niche of customers instead of the mass market, targeting the rich expecing them to pay more when they are often more price/quality conscious, relying on the brand when the product quality wasn't there. Remember all the product recalls for those multi-thousand-dollar Qualia products? No? Good- because that means you were smart enough to stay away from those idiotic products.
In any case, the Bloomberg article is blunt and effective. There was no announcement of new products. Only cuts and those cuts were seen as less than is necessary.
Stringer is off to a bad start. He should have come in with stronger cuts, maybe even something radical like the sale of the game unit or the movie unit. A new CEO gets a few months in which s/he has the leeway to make radical moves and set an agenda for his/her tenure. This is a poor start.
Good luck Sony- if you were expecting for better management from Stringer than Idei, I don't see it yet.
Paul Baron, of TokyoArtBeat.com and in-duce.net wants to migrate from Gallery to Flickr. If anyone has any advice for him, please contact him or leave a comment on my site.
Worse than Manhattan?
So the Mercury News article on the Skype backstory is out:
But the story behind Skype is also about a scrappy scoop scored by a relative novice at the venture business, Howard Hartenbaum. And it may reflect the danger of Silicon Valley-centric firms becoming too complacent, even while business goes global.On Monday, eBay announced it would pay up to $4.1 billion for Luxembourg-based Skype, which lets users make calls free over the Internet and is growing like a weed, with 54 million users.
That represents a huge return for investors, who injected only $20 million. The earliest investors garnered far in excess of 100 times their original money. The icing on the cake: It was quick. Skype delivered less than three years after the first investments -- unlike Google, which made its VCs sweat for six painful years before it went public.
MercuryNews.com | 09/15/2005 | Skype hunt: How VCs struck gold in Europe
The person credited with finding Skype and investing first is Howard Hartenbaum of Draper Richards.
Howard will be much more in the limelight after the Skype story spreads, so I thought I'd link to two articles- one that he did for AlwaysOn, and one which is a Q&A on a PR blog.
This Hartenbaum piece on Skype as well as European VCs is from Nov. 2003!
Skype's multinational team helps the Internet telephone company take hold. [alwayson-network.com]
The only things that a young company should care about are: customers, good references, and implementation. There's no need to tell everyone what you are doing. The worst thing that a small company can do is tell the market what they are doing, and then have the large competitors provide the same service or product. There is no benefit for a young company to announce all its great things. They can call and get a great reference - all they need to do is to tell the other companies in the space (customers' space) and that will do more than a press release.Musings from POP! Public Relations: VC2PR:Howard Hartenbaum, Draper Richards
It turns out that Howard has spent time in Japan, is fluent in Japanese, has worked at Honda R&D and for a DirecTV Japan project. I'm sure it is an interesting story to find out how he ended up at Draper Richards.
I'm surprised they're not here already. The Private Equity markets are already congested (at least in Japan). Is there that much to go around?
KKR Announces Plans to Open Offices in Hong Kong and Tokyo (KKR PR)
At the end of last week, we launched Technorati Mobile. It's a simple interface to our Japanese weblog search service, usable by anyone in Japan on the AU, DoCoMo or Vodafone networks. It doesn't have all the functionality of the PC-browser-based service, but it does allow for searching of blogs and does show the "hot queries" from the past 12 hours.
The press picked up our launch announcement:
ケータイからでもブログ検索--テクノラティが携帯電話向け「テクノラティモバイル」 (CNET Japan)
テクノラティ、ブログ検索サービスの携帯版 (k-tai Impress)
携帯から口コミ情報を検索——テクノラティ、携帯向けブログ検索開始 (IT Nikkei)
テクノラティ、携帯電話向け Blog 検索サービスβ版を開始 (japan.internet.com)
kawaii overload...
final mins. of qualifying... 1'46:957
on the way to motegl
Whoo Hooo!
I'll be at Web2.0 this year!!!
Please leave me a comment if you're planning to be there. Would love to say hi.
so cool!
So the blackout in Los Angeles recently took down my hosting provider, so I was without email for a bit and had no access to post to my blog for a bit too. All's well now it seems.
The big news today is that Google has launched a beta blog search engine. There's already a lot of reviews up on the web that you can find, but with respect to Technorati, I wanted to link to a post by Dave Sifry, Technorati's CEO.
Everyone is talking about the eBay acquisition of Skype. $2.6 billion!
eBay has a 80-page document on their investor information pages which goes over this acquisition in detail. It's a good read just to understand how the company is explaining an acquisition of this size.
Folks on Slashdot think that the Skype acquisition is more important for Paypal than for eBay. Either way, it looks like this was an important acquisition to insure growth of eBay and to decrease friction between buyers and sellers in their system.
Bessemer Venture Partners' David Cowan, who writes the Who Has Time for This weblog, tells us that the first VC was Rob Stavis who led the A round. Stavis' multiple? About 150X.
Thompson Financial's Private Equity Week annouces:
The Carlyle Group has agreed to sponsor a management buyout of Gakusei Engokai Co. Ltd. and its subsidiaries from the founding family. No financial terms were disclosed for the deal, which is expected to close by next month. Gakusei Engokai is a Japanese publisher of job placement magazines.
Impress AV Watch has screenshots of the new Sony music application, Connect.
I get the strange feeling that I've seen this interface before somewhere....
I am already tired of the fact that every article I read about Katrina pegs my anger meter. Here's another one.
Navy helicopter pilots who rescued 110 victims of the hurricane are reprimanded instead of being given medals of honor. If being in the military means being unable to save your fellow citizens, WHOM YOU ARE PAID BY THEM TO PROTECT, then what, ON EARTH, are we doing wrong here?
The person who should be down-graded and have his command taken away is "Michael Holdener" air operations chief of the Pensacola Naval Air Station. If there is anyone who has lost perspective on what his job is in our military, it is this Holdener guy.
It is just heartbreaking to read that these pilots wanted to rescue more victims and couldn't and were reprimanded for it. I find it hard to express how wrong this all is. Ferrying supplies vs. saving over 100 victims? How could the former be more important than the latter?
The next morning, though, the two crews were called to a meeting with Commander Holdener, who said he told them that while helping civilians was laudable, the lengthy rescue effort was an unacceptable diversion from their main mission of delivering supplies. With only two helicopters available at Pensacola to deliver supplies, the base did not have enough to allow pilots to go on prolonged search and rescue operations."We all want to be the guys who rescue people," Commander Holdener said. "But they were told we have other missions we have to do right now and that is not the priority."
The order to halt civilian relief efforts angered some helicopter crews. Lieutenant Udkow, who associates say was especially vocal about voicing his disagreement to superiors, was taken out of the squadron's flying rotation temporarily and assigned to oversee a temporary kennel established at Pensacola to hold pets of service members evacuated from the hurricane-damaged areas, two members of the unit said. Lieutenant Udkow denied that he had complained and said he did not view the kennel assignment as punishment.
Dozens of military aircraft are now conducting search and rescue missions over the affected areas. But privately some members of the Pensacola unit say the base's two available transport helicopters should have been allowed to do more to help civilian victims in the days after the storm hit, when large numbers of military helicopters had not reached the affected areas.
I'm flabbergasted. Stunned. Sickened. YET AGAIN!
Navy Pilots Who Rescued Victims Are Reprimanded - New York Times
Every day, more reasons to despair at MY government.
Daily Kos: Olbermann Just Destroyed Bush and the GOP (Updated with Transcript)
Continue reading Chertoff: "Louisiana is a city...".
So the news today is that LinkShare is being bought by Rakuten. While I think on paper (and as a story for Rakuten investors) it makes sense for Rakuten, it uncovers issues with Rakuten's strategy.
Why does a top-3 Internet portal in Japan not have their own affiliate marketing business (they do, but it's not international) and have to purchase one (for almost half a billion dollars no less) from overseas at a high valuation? When ValueCommerce (a Japanese affiliate marketing service) was purchased by Yahoo! Japan earlier this year, Rakuten lost it's chance to buy the last remaining, Japanese, free-standing affiiate marketing service.
And the LinkShare folks "will closely support Rakuten's U.S expansion and exploration of potential acquisitions. "
Huh?
I'm unclear as to what portion of Rakuten's Internet services they expect to be competitive outside of Japan. Explain, please.
The China Post - Japan's Rakuten to buy U.S. Internet advertiser LinkShare
I don't really have anything else to say other than I hope many, many more first-person survival stories will be published. This is much better than any news story.
I was very worried because I had heard that they were not letting people evacuate with their animals. But these guys said that had changed, and so I put my computer and a few papers in my backpack, loaded the dogs, let the birds go, and put Oot the sugar glider with food and water in Kalypso's room to await my return, much like Napoleon leaving for Elba I suppose. We drove in the boat all over the city looking for people. It was so surreal with the helicopters and all the boats up and down Canal Street amidst all the devastation. Towards dusk on Friday I arrived at I-10 and Banks Street, not far from my house. There they packed all of us pet owners from Mid City into a cargo truck and drove us away. They promised they would take us to Baton Rouge, and from there it would be relatively easy for me to get a cab or bus and meet the family in Jackson.
But then everything went to hell. They instead locked up the truck and drove us to the refugee camp on I-10 and Causeway and dropped us off. Many refused to get out of the van but they were forced. The van drove away as quickly as it could, as the drivers appeared to be terrified, and we were suddenly in the middle of 20,000 people. I would estimate that 98% of them were African Americans and the most impoverished people in the state. It was like something out of a Kafka novel. Nobody knew how to get out. People said they had been there 5 days, and that on that day only 3 buses had shown up. I saw murdered bodies, and elderly people who had died because they had been left in the sun with no water for such a long time. I’ve traveled quite a bit, and I have never seen the despair and tragedy that I saw at this refugee camp. It was the saddest think I have ever seen in my life. I am still so upset that there were not hundreds of buses immediately sent to get these people to shelters.
Michael Homan: One of the Millions of Hurricane Katrina Stories
Technorati Tags: Katrina
Like most, I'm a jumble of emotions and opinions with respect to Hurricane Katrina. I'm sad, angry, frustrated, furious, and just a little bit hopeful as well.
I spent a good part of this weekend watch the news coverage on TV (I dont get any tv at my apt, so I had to go to a friends' house) and read up a lot on Katrina (mostly the discussions on Katrina at Metafilter.)
If anything good has come out of this terrible human tragedy, it's that the lies of the government have been exposed to Americans on American soil. I hope and pray that there is some critical thinking about how this was handled and how we must revolutionize our government. How can anyone think this Bush administration is doing a good job?
I am absolutely, crazy furious that Bush was ranching in Texas, Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming, and Rice was shopping on 5th Ave. and catching Broadway plays, 2 days after this monster of a hurricane hit the Gulf region. Then witness Bush's attitude when he first flew over the devastation in Air Force One, and did his first "photo ops." His attitude was so callous and careless as to be more than heartless- it was profoundly ignorant in the face of a disaster on a scale that we have not seen in the US.
That our politicians have failed us is more obvious than ever. That we are 3-4 days away from anarchy in a major American metropolis, is reality.
I want Michael Brown OUT OF FEMA ASAP. That guy doesn't deserve to clean the floors of FEMA, let alone run the place. There are many, many others to be releived of their command, but start with "Brownie." That man should be indicted for criminal negligence and put away for life. His incompetence cost lives- untold human lives.
Other than donate to the Red Cross, I'm at a loss as to what to do. Being in Japan, I'm already disconnected from the US to a large extent.
I'll link to a few pieces that resonated with me:
The Bursting Point - New York Times (I'm not a fan of Brooks per se, but this was very well done.)
The Rebellion of the Talking Heads - Newscasters, sick of official lies and stonewalling, finally start snarling. By Jack Shafer (finally some humanity from the news reporters...)
The New Yorker: Atchafalaya (Long but wonderful 1987 John McPhee on the Army Corps of Engineers vs. Louisinana floodwaters.)
The Thin Line Blew - How a hurricane turned citizens into criminals. By William Saletan
UPDATE: The NYT cites Brendan Loy as the first person to call for an evacuation of New Orleans. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but it is quite eerie to look at Brendan's posts warning of the hurricane and the possible devastation.
A 'Weather Nerd' in Indiana Sent a Warning to the Mayor - New York Times
Brendan is also calling for Michael Brown's firing.
Although it was by no means certain on Saturday and Sunday that Katrina would hit New Orleans, the threat of it doing so was as severe as a hurricane threat can ever be, given the limitations of our current forecasting technology. If Katrina on Saturday and Sunday did not amount to something more than a "typical hurricane situation," then there is NO SUCH THING as something more than a "typical hurricane situation" at 24-48 hours out.)This is completely and utterly outrageous. If the director of FEMA really thought on Saturday and Sunday that Katrina would, if it followed the predicted path, be a "typical hurricane situation," and that "the water would drain away fairly quickly," then he should be fired on the spot for being ignorant and incompetent to the point that he has no business working as a low-level functionary at FEMA, let alone as its director. And if he didn't really think that, but is just saying it in order to spin the political fallout from the hurricane, then he should be fired on the spot for being a dirty, filthy, stinking liar.
Either way, Michael Brown must go. This man has no business running FEMA, especially not at a time like this. My God.
Unbelievable.
Very, very funny. Very!
Plus, as it's a wiki- you can edit it yourself and make it more outrageous or funny.
Every day on my way to work here in Tokyo, I travel past a Lexus dealership that just opened this past weekend. It's at the corner of Kyu-yamate-dori and Roppongi-dori, a busy intersection.
I also used to work for "TMS" or Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Inc., Toyota's US sales and marketing company, headquartered in Torrance, CA. So I've always been a fan of Toyota's vehicles, especially the Land Cruiser series (my father has an FJ60 from 1985 that he still faithfully uses) and the new hybrid-electric Prius.
I've wondered about the launch of Lexus in Japan, and Martin Fackler of the NYT covered many of my thoughts and considerations in his article. I thought it was well done.
Lexus did so well in the US for a myriad of reasons that every business school has gone over with a fine-toothed comb, but suffice it to say that the key pillars of success was the radically improved dealership experience (both in sales, but more importantly in the service) and a price/quality ratio that the European manufacturers still can't touch.
Fackler states the key issues for Lexus in Japan: the dealer experience in Japan is universally worlds better than it is in the US. That cannot be a competitive factor. Toyota is already the market leader at 45% and so the market is saturated with these vehicles- a little new sheetmetal and a slightly larger engine doesn't hide the fact that an Aristo is GS.
I think it's also interesting to note that Honda hasn't brought the Acura brand to Japan, nor has Nissan brought Infinit to Japan. Honda and Nissan are both struggling enough so that they probably don't have the cash ready to fund this kind of venture.
Toyota does need to attempt to grow more in their home market, and Lexus is the best way for them to do that. That said, if it really did cost $2B to bring Lexus to Japan, I think TMC (Toyota Motor Corporation) would have done their shareholders better by investing that in developing nations (China, Brazil, Russia) rather than in Japan. There's little growth left in the Japan market- Lexus is only going to be taking marketshare from the Europeans or from probably their own Toyota dealers.
Toyota to Sell the Lexus in Japanese Home Market - New York Times
The Flickr folks have finally given us a photo uploading client for Panther/Tiger, Macintosh OS 10.3+.
Go get it!
