Watch Sony announce Ken Hirai of SCEA to become the next head of SCE. SCE needs someone more revolutionary than Hirai however.
Architect of Sony’s PlayStation to Retire Amid Faltering Sales - New York Times
April 2007 Archives
If you are watching the hyper-growth of China as I am, you would have noticed that the NY Times reports "Kleiner Perkins to Expand With Two Offices in China."
What the average reader would not know is who is running that new fund and those two shiny new offices. Pacific Epoch would tell you that "KPCB's new China offices will be led by former Softbank Asia Infrastructure Fund (SAIF) partner Joe Zhou and TDF Capital partners Tina Ju, David Su and Forrest Zhong."
Yesterday, I asked folks who was the first woman of Asian or Pacific-Island heritage to have a #1 song on the Billboard charts. Makiko Itoh guessed correctly: Yvonne Elliman.
So there's a company that wants to get in between you and your dns queries.
That's a very bad idea.
That is like asking trusting some other company to call your bank for you, or trusting some other company to handle your phone calls for you if they make it a bit more convenient for you.
The important question to ask is "what does OpenDNS get for signing up all these people to use their 'dns' service."
How is this different from RealNames?
I trust these guys about as much as I trust Plaxo, which is to say zero.
UPDATE: I now know more about them and have thought a bit more about why my reaction was so strong. Here's what I don't like about OpenDNS: their business model is advertising-based, so their goal is to have lots of ads on web pages. More domain-squatting-type ads is not good for the web or for users. Also, centralization of dns is not a goal that we should be working towards. For dns to be robust, it needs to be decentralized. The goal of OpenDNS would be to have everyone use it's service and then we'd all be at the mercy of OpenDNS (which Blackberry users experienced last week when their centralized service went down.)
I hope it's more clear why I'm not comfortable with this new service.
Congratulations to the Flanders Center and Tokyo Art Beat. Kansai Art Beat is launched!
I didn't know this myself until today but I thought it would make for a cool quiz.
Who is the first woman of Asian or Pacific-Island heritage to have a #1 hit on the Billboard charts? I'll give you one hint: 1970s.
(If you use a search engine to find out don't put the answer in the comments.)
Hot damn!
John Battelle has a fascinating interview with Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith. Smith talks about why the US government should investigate Google's purchase of Doubleclick. Battelle gives additional background around the price that Google paid and the fact that the sale price was not the highest price paid.
why didn't Microsoft match Google's $3.1 billion offer. Smith would not comment on this, but I can report from very good sources that in fact the company did offer to match it, and was willing to pay even more to insure that Google did not corner the online ad market. But for whatever reasons, the private equity firm that owned the majority of DoubleClick's shares decided to go with Google. I have more detail on how that deal went back and forth - it involves a no shop deal between Google and Doubleclick, for example, but I have heard strong assertions that the owners of DoubleClick did not get the highest and best price for their asset.
Battelle's last paragraph of his post is also important to consider:
If the deal does go through, it will create an entirely new landscape for Google's competitors, one that will require, in my mind, that Yahoo, Microsoft, and other large players consider moves that previously were unsavory. To my mind, the most obvious of these moves is a strong partnership or even merger between Yahoo and Microsoft
A merger between Microsoft and Yahoo! would be a gigantic shift in the Internet industry. Fascinating that this acquisition might force such moves.
(Japanese only) Here's a sourceforge project to develop a Mac OS X driver for the new HSDPA service in Japan, EM One.
I'm an old-school Ricoh GR1 fan. It was the best-made and best-designed 35mm wide-angle point-and-shoot film cameras.
Everyone waited for Ricoh's GR-Digital and while it is a popular camera for it's niche, it has significant flaws and DPreview only gave it a "above average."
I'm hoping that the new GX 100 addresses some of the isuses that the GR-Digital has. We'll see.
I did not see this myself but Takahashi-san, famous for his presentation style, was at the same event I was at this past weekend in Taipei. I'm sorry I missed this, but Miyagawa-san of Six Apart was awesome to capture it on video.
Peter has a perspective on the DoubleClick purchase by Google that few have: he was there before DoubleClick was founded.
Everyone always praises the management of a successfully Internet company. There’s a small club of CEOs that have managed to go from startup to create billions of dollars for their investors. You might know one or two or even catch a glimpse of them from time to time if you live in Silicon Valley. But there is an even smaller club of executives that have managed to create billions of dollars for investor twice from the same company. Enter DoubleClick.
Peter Adams Weblog - DoubleClick Sells to Google - Second Time is a Charm
And I totally agree with Jeremy Zawodny's opinion ("why doesn't microsoft just, you know... COMPETE instead of crying about it?") on Microsoft "urging review" of this deal. It's just fascinating to see Redmond try to use the Justice Department's anti-trust division as a weapon when they have been the victim (not enough by my measure) of that same division in recent years.
The holes in the dike are now public.
Dennis & Alex deserved more.
Walt Mossberg calls the Sony VAIO first-run experience "irritating" and "a big hassle." Pre-loading 4GB of Sony movie content on the VAIO is horrendous. Guess who hasn't cared about their customers for many years...
Personal Technology -- Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal.
This video reportedly cost 2 million pounds to produce. Amazing. I love the audio as well as the long shots at Copacabana Beach.
Cool new blog to put in your aggregator.
TED is now giving away 480P HD video of their speakers. Very cool.
I miss Clinton.
There is bad taste, and then there is something beyond bad taste.
This is clearly beyond bad taste.
I don't even know where to start.
Interesting profile of Isaac Mao, a leading blogger in China.
Fascinating.
The New York Times has a long profile on the state of education in China from the perspective of a Chinese Harvard student. The whole article was very interesting but this bit was especially so:
(A scheduling glitch produced the highlight event, I was told — two very different Chinese examples of success on stage together: the polished, Western-educated head of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee, and the jeans-clad Jack Ma, homegrown maverick who reportedly bombed the gaokao twice and founded Alibaba.com, China’s thriving e-commerce company.)
China - Education - Schools - Re-education - Ann Hulbert - New York Times
