Over the Edge tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2011:/over-the-edge//2 2011-05-24T19:18:31Z Dan Rosenbaum's take on tech, parenting, politics, search, and pretty much anything else Movable Type Publishing Platform 4.01 Will Google Buy Sprint? tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2011:/over-the-edge//2.520 2011-05-24T19:15:17Z 2011-05-24T19:18:31Z So I'm going to start a rumor here: I think, before the year is out, that Google is going to try to buy Sprint. The ties between the companies...... So I'm going to start a rumor here: I think, before the year is out, that Google is going to try to buy Sprint. The ties between the companies... Google will later this week unveil a mobile payment system on Sprint. You'll recall also that Google has been pushing for some time for open access to wireless networks -- even to the extent of running prices for everyone else in the last big FCC wireless auction. To date, despite FCC regulations, the open network initiative hasn't amounted to much. What better way to force the issue than to out-and-out buy one of the players -- especially one they're already tied to so tightly?]]> Wuz LinkedIn Robbed? tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2011:/over-the-edge//2.519 2011-05-24T02:07:37Z 2011-05-24T02:13:09Z There's a provocative column by Joe Nocera in today's NYTimes about LinkedIn's IPO last week. Nocera thinks that the investment banks Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch -- which LinkedIn hired to take it public -- essentially stole hundreds of millions of dollars that should have gone to LinkedIn's treasury. provocative column by Joe Nocera in today's NYTimes about LinkedIn's IPO last week. Nocera thinks that the investment banks Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch -- which LinkedIn hired to take it public -- essentially stole hundreds of millions of dollars that should have gone to LinkedIn's treasury. Here's how it works. The investment banks gauge demand for the shares, which are sold by the company's treasury, and set what they believe is a fair-market price. Proceeds of those initial sales go to the company. In LinkedIn's case, Morgan and Merrill set a price for the shares three times, the last and highest being $45. LinkedIn took in $352 million for 7.5 million shares. The investment banks get 7 percent of that. But once the shares are out, they can be -- and are -- traded freely. On its first day, LinkedIn traded as high as $122 per share, closing at $94.25, more than twice the initial price. LinkedIn got none of that money. Who did? The people to whom Morgan and Merrill sold the initial shares. That's usually their best customers, people with connections, or other BFFs. A 100 percent gain in one day is a nice day's work. Nocera says it's a scam. It's the investment banks' job to know what the market sentiment is, he says, and it's their fiduciary duty to price the coming-out shares as close to what they think the market will pay. And at the end of the day (literally), the market was apparently willing to pay $90. LinkedIn should have collected not $352 million but $700 million, Nocera argues. And their investment banks should have been paid $49 million, not a mere $25 million or so. Why would the banks leave $25 million on the table by underpricing? After all, taking a company public is hard work. Maybe they traded some of their own stock and gained more than that. Maybe they were willing to chalk up the $25 million as a cost of doing business to appeal to their best customers. Promotional expense, you know. Is this something that should be -- or can be -- fixed? I'm not so sure. I don't know that it's an investment bank's responsibility to take into account a market gone nuts. Maybe a best effort is all that's truly called for. though how you'd judge that is a mystery for smarter minds than mine. I know I don't want the SEC putting its thumb on the IPO scale. Maybe a Dutch auction, which is how Google went public, is the right anwer. (The Street hated it, but it doesn't seem to have hurt Google's prospects any.) Maybe there should be a rule that a percentage of all first-day sales -- say, 7 percent, same as the banks' take -- be funneled back to the company issuing the shares. It might make for a more orderly coming out, or it might just move the madness to Day 2. This may just be one of those things that Just Isn't Fair. One thing Nocera's inarguably correct about: it looks like hell at a time when the financial business ought not to be resorting to Old Tricks of the Internet Bubble. ]]> Hands-on: Motorola Droid X smartphone is a win for Android - Computerworld tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2010:/over-the-edge//2.518 2010-06-25T20:23:44Z 2010-06-25T20:28:32Z My first article for public consumption in quite a while, and a return to old stomping grounds: A review of the upcoming Droid X mobile phone. Overall a nice piece of hardware. I suspect I'll like Android more as I... review of the upcoming Droid X mobile phone. Overall a nice piece of hardware. I suspect I'll like Android more as I get used to it.]]> Auto-captioning YouTube tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2010:/over-the-edge//2.517 2010-04-23T19:27:16Z 2010-04-23T19:45:13Z I somehow missed the news that YouTube is now automatically captioning all videos in English. That's awesome news for the accessibility crowd. It's a little problematic for the content industry. Think about it. There's about 20 hours of video uploaded... automatically captioning all videos in English. That's awesome news for the accessibility crowd. It's a little problematic for the content industry. Think about it. There's about 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. For every one of them, Google's now generating text. This text is not created on the fly as the video is played back; it's presumably built as part of each video's preprocessing and is made part of the video's metatext. Which means it's being indexed, which means that the videos are now competing directly with more traditional textual information. It's true that the Google voice-to-text technology is not exactly accurate. (My Google Voice transcripts are generally pretty incomprehensible.) But this is all the more reason that serious content competitors need to be looking more than ever at using YouTube to protect their brands.]]> New Bing Coming tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2010:/over-the-edge//2.515 2010-03-26T20:07:02Z 2010-03-26T20:20:13Z Microsoft's Bing search engine will be rolling out UI changes starting in the next few days. Since its launch about a year ago, Bing has been innovating mostly on its interface, and these changes continue that mission. The emphasis for... rolling out UI changes starting in the next few days. Since its launch about a year ago, Bing has been innovating mostly on its interface, and these changes continue that mission. The emphasis for the update will be on providing more context -- including real-time feeds -- and visual information. What's worrisome about Bing, from a content provider's perspective, is that the search engine will provide so much context that a click-through to the originating site becomes unnecessary. (This, of course, allows Bing and not the publisher to monetize the publisher's content.) Microsoft doesn't see that as much of an issue. From Redmond Channel Partner:
One attendee of the keynote asked [Yusef] Mehdi [Microsoft's SVP of online audience business] if Microsoft’s efforts to render more contextual data within Bing would result in fewer click-throughs to sites. Mehdi responded that he doesn't see cause for concern. "What we have found is there are more click-throughs when you add richer captions," he said.
There's a interesting data point, if he'd be willing to share his numbers. It would also be interesting to discover if rich-content clickthroughs convert on a publisher's site better than clicks based on less-rich content. In other words, do people who click on high-context links bounce more or less than referrals from low-context links? Or are high-context links killing the geese with the golden eggs?]]> Kawasaki on Management tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2010:/over-the-edge//2.514 2010-03-22T14:01:01Z 2010-03-22T18:54:17Z I've been around the Macintosh world since about 1985, so I'm real familiar with Guy Kawasaki. Guy was the software evangelist for the Mac -- the guy who went around persuading software developers to write for this unusual and innovative... Alltop.com. But there's an excellent interview with him in this past Friday's NYTimes, where he dispenses some pretty insightful advice about careers and marketing:
Sales is everything. As long as you’re making sales, you’re still in the game.... They should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations. If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off... Because no one wants to read “War and Peace” e-mails. Who has the time? Ditto with 60 PowerPoint slides for a one-hour meeting. What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you’re always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have so many slides or whatever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, “I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.” ...In the end, success in business comes from the willingness to grind it out. It’s not because of the brilliant idea. It’s because you are willing to work hard.
Most people who graduate from college think they have to make a perfect choice.... They think that their first job is going to determine their career, if not their life. Looking back, that’s absolutely incorrect. By definition you cannot make a mistake in your first job... Let’s say you join a start-up, and it implodes. You would learn more about leadership inside a company that crashes than you would inside the next Google. Specifically, you will learn what not to do. You can’t make a mistake as a college graduate.
Jobs for college graduates should make them gain knowledge in at least one of these three areas: how to make something, how to sell something or how to support something.
It's a quick read. Worth the time.]]> TVLand tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2010:/over-the-edge//2.513 2010-03-22T13:45:50Z 2010-03-22T13:50:01Z Film crews are not uncommon in my neighborhood. "Gossip Girl," in particular, has been coming around a few times a year. But this week, the nabe's parking will be disrupted for two productions: the CBS drama "The Good Wife" (which... Film crews are not uncommon in my neighborhood. "Gossip Girl," in particular, has been coming around a few times a year. But this week, the nabe's parking will be disrupted for two productions: the CBS drama "The Good Wife" (which is set in, ummm, Chicago) and the FX show "Damages." Visualizing Tufte tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2010:/over-the-edge//2.512 2010-03-19T14:01:23Z 2010-03-19T14:02:51Z I spent the day yesterday in a ballroom listening to data visualization guru Edward Tufte. Given my increasingly hummingbird-like attention span, a full day of concentrated focus was as welcome as it was unusual. A good time, and well worth... I spent the day yesterday in a ballroom listening to data visualization guru Edward Tufte. Given my increasingly hummingbird-like attention span, a full day of concentrated focus was as welcome as it was unusual. A good time, and well worth the money. Perhaps the coolest things of the day were when he produced a copy of the first English translation of Euclid's Elements -- the book where he laid out the basics of geometry -- dating from 1582. And the other was his showing a first edition first printing of Galileo's 1610 observations of the moons of Jupiter and sunspots (and, oh by the way, the heliocentric model of the solar system). But what I found most provocative... But what I found most provocative in Tufte's talk was his rejection of the "rule of seven" in graphic design. You almost certainly know the rule: that people can't easily deal with series of things longer than seven: digits in a phone number, choices on a navigational menu, names of children (watch out, Kate Gosselin!). Tufte likes information density, says we deal with it every day, and insists that "we don't get dumber when we go to work." He derides focus groups, and his exemplar for successful density is NYTimes.com, with its 400-plus links. Yet that flies in the face of any number of usability tests -- the one-on-one type; I agree that focus groups are useless -- that I've seen and run. Seven may be a limit on the low side, but having too many choices simply freaks people out and makes it impossible for them to see choices that are staring them in the face. What makes the Times's site work isn't so much the density as the intelligence of the clustering: This is always There, and That's always Down Over Here, and Everything makes Sense. It is that clustering coupled with a rigorously clean design (which is the other of Tufte's main threads) that makes the Times's site a success. The same thing is true of the National Gallery site that Tufte consulted on: many choices intelligently arranged. And that's the other thing. Steal From The Best, Tufte says (along with many others). But he never quite got to the next step: test what you steal. The Times site has changed over the years. So has Apple's online store. The changes are because the Times and Apple never rest; they're always looking for a Better Way. The danger of stealing from the best is that "the best" keep changing. You'd better, too. I was also struck by his saying repeatedly, "Do what it takes" to get your data to tell the story you need to tell. Data is good, and in most cases masses of data are better. If your visualization doesn't make your point, don't toss out data: rethink your graphic. Obviously, PowerPoint is going to be much too low-powered to handle anything interesting. But in example after example, the best visualizations become art. And art -- at least for me -- is hard. Visualization is not for sissies. It's not fast, it requires thought, there's no template and there's no standard tool. Sounds an awful lot like work. Boo hiss. Not all of Tufte's examples, I think, were fair. He told one story of a colonel briefing (or trying to brief) the Joint Chiefs one Monday morning about Iraq. His data were a couple of weeks old and not particularly compelling, though he though he had done a fine job. But the brass asked him to compare his timeliness and thoroughness with that morning's coverage of the Washington Redskins in the WAPost. The post had play-by-play graphics, and statistics, and narrative -- an entire and exhaustive package generated, set in type, printed and distributed in the matter of a couple of hours. Why couldn't the colonel do something like that on a matter of national security? My first reaction was that the colonel couldn't do it because the scope of the tasks being compared were not comparable. Football is a somewhat more limited conflict than war. The statistics are clearly proscribed -- not to mention provided by the team and the league. It's a wee tad harder covering a war than it is covering an NFL game. But my second thought was, that's because I know how to cover an NFL game and not a war. It may well be entirely reasonable that the US Armed Forces has the data gathering ability and the established metrics to do this kind of analysis quickly and imaginatively. Upon further review, I rather hope they do. But I'm not sure that comparing it to an NFL graphics package is an especially valid point. It was a long and interesting day, and I'm still processing it. More later. Google UI changes? tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2010:/over-the-edge//2.511 2010-03-17T21:10:42Z 2010-03-17T21:27:11Z But over the last week or so, Google has been going back to SERPs that look more like they did 10 years ago: overwhelmingly textual. The tradeoff is that it's harder than ever to get a "pure" search without personalization. Even if you're logged off and your detailed search history is unavailable, Google will try its hardest to customize the search. really hardcore (which you should be), judge your results not just on traffic, but on traffic that converts. Of course, that requires clients to understand what a valid conversion is, but no one said this job was going to be easy....]]> Google Real-Time Search: some questions tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2009:/over-the-edge//2.509 2009-12-08T02:38:11Z 2009-12-08T03:04:20Z Google today announced its inevitable reach into real-time search, instantly adding results from Twitter, FriendFeed and MySpace. As cool and useful as this may be, I've got a couple of questions about it. How do they assign relevance to tweets?... real-time search, instantly adding results from Twitter, FriendFeed and MySpace. As cool and useful as this may be, I've got a couple of questions about it. How do they assign relevance to tweets? Google's search algorithms are based, in large measure, on the number and quality of backlinks -- relevant links to a given page. How is Google assigning relevance to tweets? By hashmarks? By the number of followers on an account? That's obviously problematic, given the triviality of manipulating it. By the number of relevant followers? Then what determines relevance? Is more weight given to official pronouncements from known or trusted entities? How do the entities get to be known or trusted? And if "official" sites do get preference, isn't that contrary to the whole idea of Twitter? What about a common situation where a reporter for a publication tweets about a story that's about to break on their site or in print? How is that differentiated from an unsubstantiated rumor that some celebrity has died? It's not Google's place to be judging the truth value of tweets or posts, but I worry (as often) that this will only accelerate a race to the bottom. And one more: Tweets are 140 characters long. Google snippets are 156. By presenting tweets on SERPs, Google is preempting one possible means for Twitter to monetize: ads. Why click through to a Twitter page when you get all you need on Google's?]]> Mary Travers, RIP tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2009:/over-the-edge//2.508 2009-09-17T02:41:00Z 2009-09-17T03:14:02Z As part of the New York Choral Society, I was fortunate to have performed with Mary Travers (and Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey) a couple of dozen times in the late '80s and early '90s. I did a week on Broadway, a PBS special that ran forever during Pledge Weeks, a Donahue show, and more than a couple of performances in Carnegie Hall. They are some of my fondest memories. As part of the New York Choral Society, I was fortunate to have performed with Mary Travers (and Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey) a couple of dozen times in the late '80s and early '90s. I did a week on Broadway, a PBS special that ran forever during Pledge Weeks, a Donahue show, and more than a couple of performances in Carnegie Hall. They are some of my fondest memories. Mary Travers was by then well past her ingenue years and well into motherhood and later, grandmotherhood. She relished it. It was easy to see the dynamic of the group; the things that made Peter Paul & Mary work so well, the things about each of them that made the others crazy, and the ways that they adapted to each other as life progressed. But what was also plain about them was the depth of their commitment to each other and their causes. But what was also plain about them was the depth of their commitment to each other and their causes. At this distance of time, it's a little easy to mock the Folk Revival movement as white-bread (and white-skin) JFK-era cure-the-world liberalism. But that forgets the power of the words. PP&M hardly wrote all their music, but without them, it's unlikely that Bob Dylan or Tom Paxton would have gotten quite the wide audience that they did. They sang about freedom and justice in simple words and with simple musical arrangements, at a time when civil rights and voting rights were by no means assured. And for the last couple of decades, when political passion and their style of musical truth-telling were out of fashion? They kept on. They weren't done -- not that they ever really could be done, you understand. There's always going to be injustice. Mary had been ill for some time, and it had been clear that every holiday concert with the NYCS was a gift. I have an opera hat of Noel's, which he pitched ecstatically into the chorus at the end of one of the concerts. It was a prize before, and it's even more of one now. If you never saw them, you really missed something. And if you did, you'll know what a loss Mary Travers's death is. Skype Goes Free. What's Next? Everything tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2009:/over-the-edge//2.507 2009-09-02T03:06:23Z 2009-09-02T03:16:10Z You've probably heard by now that eBay unloaded Skype today to a consortium led by Silver Lake Partners and a bunch of other people including Marc Andreesen for mumblety-billion dollars. Dan Hoffman, CEO of hosted VoIP provider M5 Networks, very... Silver Lake Partners and a bunch of other people including Marc Andreesen for mumblety-billion dollars. Dan Hoffman, CEO of hosted VoIP provider M5 Networks, very intelligently points out that Silver Lake is also invested in Avaya (telecom equipment), and IPC (trading systems). Think those could be strategic partners for Skype? Me too. I'd add to that roster NXP (chips for set-top boxes and mobile phones), Avago (chips for wired infrastructure and computer peripherals), NetScout network management, and Sabre Holdings (Travelocity). I can think of one or two pieces of synergy there, too. I suspect Silver Lake's board meetings are going to be very interesting places for the next five years.]]> Porcine Aviation! Now Software Ships! tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2009:/over-the-edge//2.506 2009-08-28T00:46:47Z 2009-08-28T01:29:41Z In April 2007, I bought an upgrade to the formidable contact manager Now Up-to-Date and Contact. I'd used it off and on for some years and was looking for something a bit more powerful than Apple's Address Book and iCal.... In April 2007, I bought an upgrade to the formidable contact manager Now Up-to-Date and Contact. I'd used it off and on for some years and was looking for something a bit more powerful than Apple's Address Book and iCal. It had gotten old, and wasn't really happy with OS X. What Now was promising with "Nighthawk" sounded interesting enough for me to pony up $40 for an upgrade sight unseen. Besides, the software was supposed to ship that June. Two months wasn't so long to wait. I'm certain that I forgot to ask "June of what year?" Twenty-six months after the shipping version was promised. It took them about three years to produce this product. And I just don't understand how they thought in April 2007 that they were going to ship that June, when it took them more than two additional years! I paid $40 as a pre-release price. The current upgrade price: $50. My reward for waiting all that time: $10. I know software is hard, and I understand that this was a bottom-up rewrite. But three years? This had better be one fricking terrific piece of software, is all I'm saying. ]]> Google and Bing as a threat to content tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2009:/over-the-edge//2.505 2009-08-26T16:32:38Z 2009-08-26T16:46:03Z Bing has now been around long enough for people to start looking for referrers in their server logs. Most people aren't seeing a ton of traffic from Bing so they think it's not a big deal. It's a dangerous and... You want them to click on your URL to see your content and ads. But the search engines would just as soon that their page be the final word. That's why Google is relying less on Description tags and more on page scrapes and microformats for its snippets. It's why Bing has page excerpts pop up next to the URLs on the SERPs. Bing has looked at the heat maps of what people look at in SERPs and is innovating around that upper left quadrant of the window. Google is making more options more easily available to searchers. But what kind of business model would your site have if it only existed to send people away? Right: none. The search engines are ever more in the business of helping people stick around, showing your information on their pages, and building environments where they let people leave only if they really want to -- but would rather have them stick around, thanks.]]> Is Google shrinking? tag:www.danrosenbaum.com,2009:/over-the-edge//2.504 2009-08-14T16:35:59Z 2009-08-14T16:50:45Z There's a remarkably clueless post on ZDNet today, wherein someone who should know better says that Google's index is 25 percent smaller than it used to be. His evidence: when he checks his own name, he found only 102,000 instances,... Google's index is 25 percent smaller than it used to be. His evidence: when he checks his own name, he found only 102,000 instances, down from 135,000 in March. (Bing.com, he says, has 157,000 results.) The technological Onanism of this aside, it's just a dumb observation. The idea of a search engine isn't to provide the most results. It's to provide the most relevant results. Maybe those "missing" 33,000 results weren't especially interesting; it's hard to imagine that 100,000 results on anything, let alone a blogger, would be worth investigating. (And I mean, really -- who keeps track of the number of results for their own name?) Does this have anything to do with Google's "Caffeine" update (about which I'll write more shortly)? Possibly, but unlikely; Caffeine seems to be about speed and resources, not index size.]]>