Nothing escapes Dan Hill.
Dell going up/down in flames?
Funny how times change. I remember when Dell was regarded as unstoppable. But NYT reports today…
Three days after its announcement of a vast safety recall, Dell reported little but bad news yesterday: profits down by half, and an informal Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into its accounting.
Speaking from China to Wall Street analysts in a conference call after the earnings announcement, Michael S. Dell, the company’s founder and chairman, said, “We are not satisfied with our performance, and we will do better.”
While the company has told analysts for more than a year that it will do better, it has not been able to follow through. In a changing market, Dell has been unable to gain traction against competitors as it has in the past, when it has cut prices to gain market share.
The chief executive, Kevin B. Rollins, said yesterday that the company had cut prices “too aggressively” in a number of markets to win market share, which hurt its profitability. “We didn’t do a good job of it,” he said.
Analysts remained frustrated. Harry Blount of Lehman Brothers asked Mr. Rollins, “Why should we believe that your actions will be any better than they have been?”
Drawspace.com
I can’t draw to save my life, but if I could this would be a very helpful site.
Dvorak on YouTube
Very perceptive column by John Dvorak about YouTube. He gets it exactly right, IMHO. Sample:
BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) — YouTube, the privately-held video sharing website, now delivers an estimated 100 million videos a day to its users. The site has been online for barely a year.
It’s [sic] growth rate is phenomenal and without precedent, skyrocketing into the public consciousness and becoming commonplace nearly overnight. So what do the journalists, analysts and pundits all do when they witness this moment in history? Kvetch.
Nobody actually wants to understand exactly why this happened in the first place. Instead you hear the following (and typical) Silicon Valley commentary. “How are they going to monetize it?” “It’s the dotcom bust 2.0!” “There must be a video bubble.” “They’re burning through $1.5 million a month. How can they continue?”
It’s weird but almost nobody looks at this tremendous growth curve and asks themselves, “Holy cripes! How did that happen!?!” Instead you get headlines such as “Is YouTube the next Napster?”
Apparently YouTube has stumbled on to something and perhaps we should try and understand that in itself. If and when the company manages to “monetize” (don’t you love that term?) things may change.
And you must assume that with all the marketing brains out there one of them can find a way to make money. I’m more concerned about why this product exploded the way it did. I’ll critique the money-making scheme when it appears.
So let’s look at what caused the growth. And let’s note that this company is hardly the first on the block to let users share video. Google video, in fact, looks a lot like YouTube, but never achieved this growth despite getting a big head start.
Two things seem to be at work. The first is the incredible desire people have to share video clips with each other. That’s now apparent.
What’s not so apparent, unless you actually have tried to use the various video sharing sites, is that nobody — and I mean nobody — made it easy until YouTube.
Right on! (Now there’s an ageing hippy exclamatiion if ever I saw one!) I pay — happily — for my Flickr Pro account. And, like John D, I would pay for YouTube too.
YouTube is like Flickr in the early days — you can see its members still struggling with the technology. But they’re rapidly getting on top of it. Editing movies is HARD. (Believe me, I know: I have the scars to prove it.) In a year’s time there will be even more accomplished videos like this.
The perils of reading
Life is so unfair. First of all, the wrong people have all the money. Secondly, things always happen in the wrong sequence. I have a ton of university work to do. My colleagues are (rightly) clamouring for the delivery of various documents. And then Amazon delivers this.
Hugh Trevor-Roper has always fascinated me. I think his book The Last Days of Hitler is a masterpiece, and I have always enjoyed his malicious, right-wing journalism. T-R was about as politically-incorrect as it was possible to be. So this collection of his letters to Bernard Berenson (beautifully edited by Richard Davenport-Hines) is, for me, as pots of honey were to Winnie the Pooh. But I don’t have the time for it (so I keep telling myself) and so am rationing myself to a few letters at a time, during coffee-breaks from real work. As a result, my caffeine intake has risen alarmingly and I have developed the shakes. Bah!
Flickr gems
I’m perpetually astonished by the originality and talent of Flickr users. See, for example, this.
Thanks to Brian for the link.
The memory man
Following a link about something else, I came on this piece about Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project…
Gordon Bell doesn’t need to remember, but has no chance of forgetting. At the age of 71, he is recording as much of his life as modern technology will allow, storing it all on a vast database: a digital facsimile of a life lived.
If he goes for a walk, a miniature camera that dangles from his neck snaps pictures every minute or so, immediately committing the scene to a memory built not of neurons but ones and noughts. If he wanders into a cafe, sensors note the change in light, the shift of temperature and squirrel the information away. Conversations are recorded and steps logged thanks to a GPS receiver carried with him.
Dr Bell has now stored so much of his life on computer that he is in danger of forgetting how to remember. “I look at it as a surrogate memory,” he says. If he wants to recall something, he switches on and picks his way through days and months of information until he finds what he is after. It was all dreamt up at Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Centre in San Francisco, where Dr Bell works…
Thanks to Wesley Bradley of Activate Design for spotting the broken link to Gordon Bell.
YouTube stats
From Technology Review…
YouTube is the one of the most popular video-sharing sites where amateurs and professionals alike can share and view videos — of a recent trip, of a new dog or even of themselves burping.
According to comScore Media Metrix, YouTube had 16 million unique U.S. visitors in July, a 20 percent increase from 13 million in June. The site did not even have measurable traffic until August 2005, when it had 58,000 unique visitors.
For July, YouTube debuted in the Top 50 at No. 40, up from 58th in June.ComScore also recorded a doubling of traffic to News Corp.-owned MySpace.com’s video site, with 20 million visitors, trailing only Yahoo Inc.’s video site, which had 21 million.
“Consumers clearly view video as one of the most accessible, interesting and entertaining sources of content on the Web,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. ”The trends we’re witnessing indicate that online video is emerging from its infancy and entering the mainstream.”
CBS to stream prime-time shows
From Technology Review…
LOS ANGELES (AP) — CBS Television will begin showing episodes of several new and returning prime-time shows for free on the Internet, becoming the second network to do so.
The unit of CBS Corp. already sells downloads of episodes on Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store and Google Inc.’s video store. In May, it launched an advertising-supported online channel called ”innertube” to stream programming created just for the Web.
The network said Tuesday that starting next month it will begin streaming episodes of a new show, ”Jericho,” as well as returning shows ”CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” ”CSI: Miami,” ”CSI: NY,” ”NCIS,” ”Numbers” and ”Survivor.”The shows will contain fewer ads than when they are shown on TV. The ads also will be shorter _ typically 15 second to 30 seconds — and cannot be skipped, CBS said.The shows will become available the day after they appear on TV. Episodes of ”Jericho” and ”Survivor” will remain available online for the entire season, while episodes of the other shows will be online for four weeks following their initial airing.”
Making our new and returning prime-time series available to our viewers is the next step in innertube’s programming evolution,” Larry Kramer, president of CBS Digital Media, said in a statement.ABC began showing episodes of four prime-time shows, including ”Lost” and ”Desperate Housewives” for free online in May. The network was the first to sell episodes on iTunes last October.
ABC recently hailed the success of its later effort, saying that in May and June, the network’s site showed 16 million video streams. The network is expected to expand its online offerings in the fall.
Travelling light (contd.)
Hmmm… The ‘security’ hysteria gathers pace. This from an item in the Huffington Post…
U.S. authorities are advising women not to wear gel bras on airplanes as information developed in the foiled London plot points to an expanding role for women in smuggling explosives on to an aircraft.
So, no transatlantic flights for breast-cancer patients who have had mastectomies, then?