Google makes its first UK acquisition

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According to Good Morning Silicon Valley, Google’s made its first UK acquisition — a visual search startup founded by two Oxford students who developed an Android App that claims to enable you to identify a work of art by snapping it with your phone’s camera. [Grouse: doesn’t work on my T-mobile Pulse — but then nothing involving that wretched device’s camera seems to work. Growl!]

Plink is just four months removed from the public launch of its only product: PlinkArt, an Android app that lets users find out more information about a piece of art just by taking a picture of it. That single app, however, was impressive enough to win the $100,000 top prize in the Education/Reference category in last year’s Android Developer Challenge and it put the company on Google’s shopping list. Plink’s founders, Oxford PhD students Mark Cummins and James Philbin, will have to get acclimated [acclimatised? – ed.] to the sunshine in Santa Monica, where they’ll join the team working on Google Goggles, the company’s in-house visual search app. Said the founders in a blog post, “The visual search engines of today can do some pretty cool things, but they still have a long long way to go. We’re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers, but for everything you see around you.”

New business model: start a company with the aim of being acquired by the Big G. Time was, Microsoft was the desired shopper. How things change.

Tom Watson’s digital pledges

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Tom Watson is one of the few MPs who really seems to understand the Net. He’s standing for re-election and has posted his draft digital pledges on his blog — and also issued a Twitter request to his followers to suggest ways in which they can be improved. Here’s the draft:

1. I will support and campaign for more transparency in the public and private sector.

2. I will oppose measures that unjustly deny people’s access to the Internet.

3. Whilst noting the acknowledged limitations, I believe people have the right to free speech on the Internet.

4. I will support all measures that allow people access to their personal data held by others. I further support restoration of control over how personal data is gathered, managed and shared to the individual.

5. I will use my role as an MP to support international free expression movements.

6. The Internet shall be built and operated openly and without discrimination.

7. I will support all measures to bring non-personal public data into the public domain.

8. I will support all proposals that lead to greater numbers joining the digital world and oppose measures that reduce it.

9. I believe that copyright and software patent laws should be reformed to reflect the needs of citizens in the Internet age.

They look pretty good to me. Personally, I’d extend #9 to include a pledge that henceforth lawmaking on intellectual property will be evidence-based rather than decided by conversations on luxury yachts.

On this day…

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… 65 years ago, FDR, the 32nd president of the United States, died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Georgia at the age of 63 and was succeeded by Harry Truman. Strange: I always thought FDR was much older than that. But then I’m getting to the stage where not just policemen, but judges on the UK Supreme Court are beginning to look like youngsters to me. (I write with feeling, because I ran into one of them a few weeks ago at the funeral of a mutual friend.)

Papa Ratzi: CEO of the Vatican Corporation Inc.

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The thing that comes across time and again when watching the Catholic church’s attempt to deflect and neutralise the scandal of priestly child abuse is that members of the church hierarchy always put the interests of the Vatican Corporation above those of victims. In that sense, Papa Ratzi, CEO of said corporation, is just doing business as usual. All of which made me appreciate this nice, sharp NYTimes column by Maureen Dowd, who is herself a Catholic.

To circumscribe women, Saudi Arabia took Islam’s moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Muhammad; the Catholic Church took its moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Jesus. In the New Testament, Jesus is surrounded by strong women and never advocates that any woman — whether she’s his mother or a prostitute — be treated as a second-class citizen.

Negating women is at the heart of the church’s hideous — and criminal — indifference to the welfare of boys and girls in its priests’ care. Lisa Miller writes in Newsweek’s cover story about the danger of continuing to marginalize women in a disgraced church that has Mary at the center of its founding story:

“In the Roman Catholic corporation, the senior executives live and work, as they have for a thousand years, eschewing not just marriage, but intimacy with women … not to mention any chance to familiarize themselves with the earthy, primal messiness of families and children.” No wonder that, having closed themselves off from women and everything maternal, they treated children as collateral damage, a necessary sacrifice to save face for Mother Church.

And the sins of the fathers just keep coming. On Friday, The Associated Press broke the latest story pointing the finger of blame directly at Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, quoting from a letter written in Latin in which he resisted pleas to defrock a California priest who had sexually molested children.

As the longtime Vatican enforcer, the archconservative Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — moved avidly to persecute dissenters. But with molesters, he was plodding and even merciful.

One of the great things — actually, just about the only good thing — about having been brought up in a devout Irish Catholic family was that it provided one with a useful lifetime immunity to religion.

Twitter as a predictor of movie popularity

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Fascinating paper by Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman. Abstract reads:

In recent years, social media has become ubiquitous and important for social networking and content sharing. And yet, the content that is generated from these websites remains largely untapped. In this paper, we demonstrate how social media content can be used to predict real-world outcomes. In particular, we use the chatter from Twitter.com to forecast box-office revenues for movies. We show that a simple model built from the rate at which tweets are created about particular topics can outperform market-based predictors. We further demonstrate how sentiments extracted from Twitter can be further utilized to improve the forecasting power of social media.

PDF of paper available here.

Quote of the day

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“They laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now”.

Bob Monkhouse, quoted by Robert Harris in roday’s Observer magazine.

Mandy’s Dangerous Downloaders Act

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This morning’s Observer column.

The trouble is that in Westminster (or on Capitol Hill) nobody speaks for the future or for the wider needs of society. So we wind up with biased legislation framed in a rearview mirror. The fact that the internet makes it easy to copy and remix does indeed pose a challenge for IP regimes framed in the era of print. But that should be a spur for rethinking the regime, not for switching off the net – because that’s what we will have to do in order to stop what’s now going on.

The dangerous downloaders act won’t stop file-sharing, but it will certainly inhibit online creativity. This government has legislated in haste; it will be for the next one to repent at leisure.

Online business models: the nub of it

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If you’re thinking of sustainable business models for the future then it comes down to something very simple. Either (i) you arrange that your online revenues exceed the costs of creating content; or (ii) you reduce your costs to the point where they’re lower than revenues.

There: that wasn’t hard, was it?

The thought was prompted by a typically insightful post by Clay Shirky. “About 15 years ago”, he writes,

the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now.

To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, “It is not free, and is not going to be,” Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users “just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online”, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.”

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

Yep. Shirky’s post was prompted by an inquiry from TV executives about how they would make money in the future.

Some video still has to be complex to be valuable, but the logic of the old media ecoystem, where video had to be complex simply to be video, is broken. Expensive bits of video made in complex ways now compete with cheap bits made in simple ways. “Charlie Bit My Finger” [a YouTube video which, to date, has had over 176 million viewers] was made by amateurs, in one take, with a lousy camera. No professionals were involved in selecting or editing or distributing it. Not one dime changed hands anywhere between creator, host, and viewers. A world where that is the kind of thing that just happens from time to time is a world where complexity is neither an absolute requirement nor an automatic advantage.

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Much of the problem with the current debate about all this is that people who have prospered (or been conditioned in) the old ecosystem just cannot imagine things being radically different from the way they used to be. And of course they are (understandably) distressed by the thought that some of the good/great things enabled by the old ecosystem might disappear (which they will). But that’s creative destruction for you.

LATER: We all (me included) use the term “content” too casually. The old publishing industries think that content is what they produce, which is why the concept of user-generated content is — to them — an oxymoron. But — as Jeff Jarvis points out here — ‘content’ is what everyone produces all the time: as email messages, tweets and, yea, even blog posts.