Monthly Archives: September 2007

Argument 2.0

Posted on by

Martin Weller has started something interesting:

I am starting something of an experiment today for the rest of this week.

I am going to construct an article by structuring a debate across four blogs. The article is around the future of content and starts in my next post.

The plan is:

Monday – I post a piece on where I think digital content is going, arguing that it is moving towards being free and widely distributed.

Tuesday – Ray Corrigan is going to post a piece responding to mine which looks at how digital rights may make it a more, not less, controlled future for content.

Wednesday – Patrick McAndrew will focus it on education by bringing in the perspective from open educational resources.

Thursday – Will Woods will look at some of the relevant technologies and how these might impact.

Friday – we’ll draw some conclusions.

It’s an intriguing idea. The only problem is the timescale. Martin’s opening contribution covers a lot of ground and begs many questions. If Ray can respond effectively in 24 hours, then he’s a quicker thinker than I am.

TechBubble 2.0 coming along nicely

Posted on by

According to today’s New York Times,

Some people laughed at Mark E. Zuckerberg when he reportedly turned down a $900 million offer last year for Facebook, the social networking Web site he founded three and a half years ago.

But Microsoft, Google and several funds are considering investments in the fast-growing site, according to people with knowledge of the talks, that could give the start-up a value of more than $10 billion.

While discussions were still in the early stage, these people said that Microsoft was considering an investment of $300 million to $500 million for a 5 percent stake of the company. Google is also said to be interested in an investment.

Facebook’s valuation could go even higher as the two rivals create the kind of competitive bidding situation that has recently driven the acquisition prices of other start-ups into the stratosphere.

Representatives from Facebook, Microsoft and Google all declined to comment on the talks.

Er, that’s $10 billion for an outfit that, according to one analyst quoted in the Times story, brought in $60 million to $96 million in annual revenue, with no real profit.

Later: It’s interesting to see the rationalisations being offered for this valuation — and why Microsoft and Google might want Facebook. Here’s one for example:

“There’s a lot of strategic value beyond the pure financial value in an investment like this,” said Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, who closely watches Web investments. Liew, a former executive at AOL, said social networks like Facebook and MySpace are encroaching on the turf of portals like Microsoft’s MSN to serve as users’ home page.

“There’s not a lot of a zero-sum games, but there’s only one home page,” Liew said. “There’s only one thing that is the first thing you see” when signing on to the Internet. “That’s what I think is the strategic value, and I think Microsoft needs it more than Google.”

The Left list

Posted on by

Oh dear. The Torygraph had the amusing idea of compiling a list of the 100 most influential lefties in Britain.

By the time they get to No. 61, however, they are clearly scraping the barrel.

61. AMARTYA SEN
Economist
Amartya Sen is a noble prize winning economist and activist who introduced the notion that development of third world economies was a necessary precursor to freedom and democracy. His ideas have had global influence but in a UK context he is as important in the corridors of DFID and Downing Street as he is in the office of the key INGOs.

How about that: a Noble Prize!

Keyboard skill

Posted on by

Like many people who write for a living, I’m obsessed with keyboards. I loved the early IBM PC keyboards, which had proper microswitches and made an agreeable clacking sound. But then mass production took hold and the tactile attractiveness of keyboards declined, to the point where most of them had a repulsive mushy feel. Unusually for a company that is supposed to care about design and ergonomics of laptop drive, Apple ignored the keyboard for many years. The ones supplied with successive iMacs were as unsatisfactory as anything produced by the PC industry. And the keyboards on some (though not all) PowerBook models also left much to be desired. (The best, in my experience, was the keyboard on the original G4 Titanium PowerBook). But now, suddenly, someone at Apple decided that things should change. The new wireless keyboard is simply delicious to use. And it’s a marvel of economical compression which fits neatly into my laptop case. The battery holder serves as a wedge that tilts the keyboard at a good angle for typing. And the on-off switch is neatly built into the end. As the man said, sometimes the right thing is the right thing to do.

The $100 laptop, Plan B

Posted on by

The WSJ is reporting a change of tack by Nick Negroponte and his One Laptop Per Child project. (IHT report here.)

The high-profile “One Laptop Per Child” effort to bridge the digital divide between the developed and developing worlds is setting its sights closer to home.

After months of debate, the program is set to announce today that it will sell its affordable “XO” laptops, custom-built for the developing world, in North America. But there is a twist: Buyers here must purchase two computers — one for themselves and one for a child in the developing world, for a combined cost of $399, some of which is tax-deductible.

The nonprofit program also is talking to more than a dozen governors and numerous school districts about bulk orders, according to Walter Bender, president for software and content for the One Laptop per Child Foundation, of Cambridge, Mass. Offering the computers in the U.S., he says, will help finance overseas deployments and raise awareness about the project among U.S. students and teachers…

This is great news for several reasons. It shows courage and flexibility on the part of Nicholas Negroponte and his team. It’s been clear for some time that their original strategy — of getting governments in developing countries to sign up for bulk orders of a million+ was never going to work when it came to the crunch. Most of these governments couldn’t run a bath, never mind execute a coherent, bold ICT strategy. So there was an urgent need for a Plan B.

Now we know what it is. My hunch is that the ‘buy two, donate one’ might just take off in a big way. First of all, it enables many people in the developed world to get their hands on what is a very neat device. Secondly, it ties neatly into the philanthropic instincts of many technophiles. I’d happily buy some machines on the basis proposed — not least because I’m convinced that there are useful things Ndiyo can do with the laptops. The only snag is that the purchase offer is only open to US and Canadian residents. (Thinks… time to lean on some of my American friends.)

Aside: I love people who are big enough to change their minds in public. I’ve never shared the British media’s hysterical contempt for “U-Turns”. Often a U-turn is the only rational thing to do. Consistency — as Oscar Wilde said — is a puerile obsession. And, as Keynes famously retorted to a journalist who accused him of an about-face: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”

Will he or won’t he?

Posted on by

From Stryker McGuire’s blog…

He won’t. Which is to say British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will not call a snap election for the autumn after less than four months in office despite the current swirl of rumors and speculation. Hedge: nothing in politics is certain — but I really don’t think a precipitious election makes sense. More importantly, Brown’s inner circle, and Brown himself, don’t think it makes sense…

Dash it!

Posted on by

Hmmm… First it was the apostrophe. Now it’s the hyphen that is under threat…

The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 words, many of them two-word compound nouns. Fig-leaf is now fig leaf, pot-belly is now pot belly, pigeon-hole has finally achieved one word status as pigeonhole and leap-frog is feeling whole again as leapfrog…

Thanks to James Miller, who notices these things.

Ad Blocking and the future

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column…

I have seen the future, and it’s scary. Well, scary for some, anyway. I installed Adblock Plus from adblockplus.org. This is a plug-in – ie, a small program that adds some specified capability to an internet browser. Its purpose is to strip out all the ads that today litter many web pages. I installed the Firefox version and, believe me, it does what it says on the tin…

Stephen Fry ‘s blog

Posted on by

I heard that Jeeves, er Stephen Fry, had a blog and tried to reach it the other day, only to find that its hosting server had been blown over by the demand. I forgot to go back until I read Martin Weller’s comments on it.

So I tried again and was transfixed by the first post, which is a startlingly erudite essay on a syndrome familiar to all geeks — the tendency to believe that sometime, somewhere someone will invent the Gadget that will help us sort out our lives. Stephen Fry is rich enough to buy anything the moment it appears on the market, and by God he has.

“I have”, he writes,

“over the past twenty years been passionately addicted to all manner of digital devices, Mac-friendly or not; I have gorged myself on electronic gismos, computer accessories, toys, gadgets and what-have-yous of all descriptions, but most especially what are now known as SmartPhones. PDAs, Wireless PIMs, call them what you will. My motto is:

I have never seen a SmartPhone I haven’t bought.”

He’s VERY knowledgeable about this stuff. In fact he reminds me of Douglas Adams, who was as excited about the Macintosh as I was when it appeared. I remember once visiting him in his house in — I think — Islington and being overcome with envy after being taken round a lovely airy attic room stuffed full of Apple gear. Stephen Fry’s place in Norfolk must be much the same.