Round Three

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From Jason Calcanis:

And so ends the second chapter of search and begins the third.

Chapter one was inception up until the launch of Google.

Chapter two was Google’s rise and Yahoo’s death.

Chapter three will be the two-horse race of Microsoft and Google, with
the inevitable emergence of a third and fourth player.

That’s the silver lining for startups in all of this. As Google and
Microsoft lock into a dog fight for revenue and market share, leaving
the Yahoo carcass on the side of the road, the bevy of crafty startups
will get their chance to take the third, fourth and fifth positions in
this very important race.

The lesson for all startups–and BDC’s (big dumb companies)–is that
innovation is all you have. Once you stop innovating you lose your
talent and you lose the race. Never. Stop. Innovating. Never. Never.
Never.

Yup. Yahoo blew it.

Man U and Man Non-U

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Or the need for an etiquette guide in the Premiership. Lovely column by Marina Hyde.

Then of course there is the recalibration necessitated by City’s becoming nouveau riche, as they make previous League arrivistes Chelsea look like a club that hasn’t had to buy its own furniture. And of even more pressing concern to those of us who insist on things being done properly are the new teams, those Premier League debutantes being presented at the court of the Big Four, and whose failure to know which knife to use to stab their manager in the back after a disastrous start would be excruciating in the extreme.

The solution is clear: the FA must produce a Premier League etiquette guide. Might I suggest a variation of the classic Frost Report sketch on class, which starred John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett – but which might with only a little effort be adapted as an instructional video starring Ferguson, Mark Hughes, and perhaps Burnley's Owen Coyle, wearing respectively the bowler hat, pork pie hat, and cloth cap.

Ferguson I look down on him [indicates Hughes] because I am a big club.

Hughes I look up to him [Ferguson] because he is a big club; but I look down on him [Coyle].

Coyle I know my place. I look up to them both. But I don't look up to him [Hughes] as much as I look up to him [Ferguson], because he has got innate breeding…

And so it goes on. Lovely stuff.

Spam, spam, spam

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According to the latest report (pdf format) from MessageLabs, 90.4% of all email is spam. The percentage is unchanged from last month. Other highlights from the report:

• Viruses – One in 269.4 emails in June contained malware (an increase of 0.06% since May)
• Phishing – One in 280.4 emails comprised a phishing attack (unchanged since May)
• Malicious websites – 1,919 new sites blocked per day (an increase of 67.0 % since May)
• 58.8% of all web-based malware intercepted was new in June, an increase of 24.6% since May
• The Cutwail Botnet bounces back
• 83.2% of all spam was sent via botnets in June
• Image spam continues, accounting for 8-10% of all spam in June
• Instant Messaging malware increases – 1 in 78 IM-based hyperlinks point to malicious websites

Tech Review reports that a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has come up with a potentially more efficient approach to identifying spam. The researchers analyzed 25 million e-mails and discovered several characteristics that could be gleaned from a single packet of data and used to efficiently identify junk mail. For example, legitimate email tends to come from computers that have a lot of ports open for communication, whereas bots tend to keep open only the SMTP port. They also found that geographical mapping of IP addresses helps. Spam, it turns out, tends to travel farther than legitimate email.

How the other half/two-thirds/seven-eighths… live

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Thoughtful blog post by Bill Thomson after a week in Deepest Norfolk (which is a truly beautiful place, but a black hole for communications).

Finding myself intermittently online this week was a mild inconvenience for me, and I managed to get connected when I needed to so that urgent business could be dealt with. However slow, unreliable connections are a fact of life for millions of people in the UK, and most of the world’s internet-using population, and experiencing it again myself made me realise that the real benefits of the online revolution will only come when net access is seamless, pervasive and guaranteed…

Is PageRank now skewed to big brands?

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We all know about the chaos that follows upon the regular tweaks in the Google PageRank algorithm. (John Batelle’s book
has some chilling stories about the impact these changes can have on small online businesses.) But here’s a new allegation:

Since the beginning of this year, increasing numbers of big brands are appearing in the top ten search results on competitive generic search queries. They are elbowing out of the way thousands of lesser sites in the process. No-one is quite sure why this has happened, but some suspect that changes to Google’s algorithm made in February dubbed the ‘Vince update’ (after the Google engineer that made them) are responsible. This has benefited big brands to the detriment of smaller players.

[Source.]

And Google’s response? See below.

Go to work on a snooze

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You might think that this handsome somnolent couple are a couple of offenders tagged by law enforcement authorities, but in fact they are examples of the new wave of cash-rich, time-poor yuppies who worry that lack of sleep impairs their performance at work. Their headbands are, in fact, Zeo sleep-pattern monitors, developed by a Massachussetts-based start-up. Here’s how it works:

1. You wear the gizmo in bed. It monitors your brain-waves (if you have any). The resulting data are beamed to a bedside receiver.

2. Upon waking, instead of making a nice cup of tea, you “review your sleep data”. The bedside device gives you a “personal sleep score – your ZQ” – and displays a graph of your Light, Deep and REM sleep over the course of the night. The bedside display will also tell you how last night’s sleep compares to previous nights.

3. Now comes the interesting bit. You upload the data from your bedside device to your PC (the illustration shows a Mac, so maybe it’s an eucumenical technology). This process enables you to compile your “Zeo Sleep Journal”, helps you to identify the “7 Sleep Stealers” (interestingly, a trademarked phrase) and to “spot any connections between your daily lifestyle choices and your nightly sleep and find out for yourself some of the cause and effect patterns in your sleep”.

4. This is where you start “a guided self-discovery process for your sleep. This personalized sleep coaching program asks you to set goals for your sleep and then provides you with customized strategies to help you to achieve these goals”. Apparently you can get “a series of personalized e-mails that incorporate effective sleep tips and advice, customized to your sleep data, lifestyle and goals” together with a “customized action plan to deal with each of the 7 Sleep Stealers as they relate to you and your sleep” and “goal-oriented assignments that are realistic and achievable, and will not require you to drastically rearrange your lifestyle or even your sleep style”.

That’s the stuff. Can’t imagine how we got by without this. A snip at $399.00.

Two thoughts:

1. Heidegger’s observation that technology is “the art of arranging the world so that we don’t have to experience it”.
2. For those of a technophobic disposition, a nightcap of the sort distilled by Messrs Jameson is a most effective aid to sound sleep, and does not require the wearing of any headbands.

The iPad cometh

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OK, time to set aside that $800 you’d been keeping for a neat gadget for Xmas. Here’s what Good Morning Silicon Valley thinks.

Rumors of a large format, touchscreen tablet from Apple — long the stuff of fanboy fever dreams — are starting to congeal into something with a little more substance. A couple of weeks ago, supply-chain scuttlebutt had the tablet arriving in October with an $800 price tag and, according to VentureBeat, powered by a processor developed in-house by the team Apple acquired in buying PA Semi last year. Friday, the AppleInsider blog reported that the 10-inch tablet, after two years of development and multiple iterations, had received the Steve Jobs seal of approval. “Jobs, who’s been overseeing the project from his home, office and hospital beds, has finally achieved that much-sought aura of satisfaction,” said the blog. “He’s since cemented the device in the company’s 2010 roadmap, where it’s being positioned for a first quarter launch, according to people well-respected by AppleInsider for their striking accuracy in Apple’s internal affairs.”

Why is this more plausible that all the other rumours about the iPad? Well, simply that it’s based on stories about a deal with the record companies to enable them to go back to their old anti-customer practice of selling albums rather than tracks. The idea is that they need a bigger screen in order to add ‘value’ with fancy booklets to go with the album.

It won’t work, of course, but who cares? What we need is a decent, well-designed tablet, and if this is the only way to get it, well, so be it.

Amazon and the memory hole — contd.

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Jeff Bezos may be hoping that his apology for the way copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were deleted from customers’ Kindles would have got him off the hook. Maybe it will. But it ain’t over yet.

A growing number of civil libertarians and customer advocates wants Amazon to fundamentally alter its method for selling Kindle books, lest it be forced to one day change or recall books, perhaps by a judge ruling in a defamation case — or by a government deciding a particular work is politically damaging or embarrassing.

“As long as Amazon maintains control of the device it will have this ability to remove books and that means they will be tempted to use it or they will be forced to it,” said Holmes Wilson, campaigns manager of the Free Software Foundation.

The foundation, based in Boston, is soliciting signatures from librarians, publishers and major authors and public intellectuals. This week it plans to present a petition to Amazon asking it to give up control over the books people load on their Kindles, and to reconsider its use of the software called digital rights management, or D.R.M. The software allows the company to maintain strict control over the copies of electronic books on its reader and also prevents other companies from selling material for the device.

Two years after Amazon first introduced the Kindle and lighted a fire under the e-books market, there is increasing awareness of how traditional libraries of paper and ink differ from those made of bits and bytes. The D.R.M. in Amazon’s Kindle books, backed up by license agreements with copyright holders, prevents customers from copying or reselling Kindle books — the legal right of “first sale” that is guaranteed to owners of regular books…