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The Economic Gist Via Craigslist
My weekend walks with the dog have turned from quiet reveries into trips through a neighborhood bazaar. Driveway after driveway is packed with garage sales and people selling old DVD players, lamps, old books, anything, everything. Part of this is a natural summer decluttering ritual, but with gas and food prices through the roof, it’s seems like it’s becoming a quick way to make a little extra scratch.
My curiosity was piqued by this anecdotal evidence, so I decided to check with the online gurus of getting rid of your crap, Craigslist, to see if they had any data that showed a similar spike in activity. The numbers speak for themselves. There were a total of 129,653 garage sales posted to Craigslist nationwide in May of 2007. In May 2008 there were 252,561. And while that number dipped during the winter months (too cold to sit outside), it really took off after March.
But people aren’t just hawking their junk on their front lawns; there’s also been a big increase in the number of general “For Sale” postings. There was a total of 888,7291 “For Sale” posts on Craigslist nationwide in June of 2007, that number rose to 17,795,940 in June of 2008. (A Craigslist rep said June is a little lower than other months because it only has 30 days.) That number has been on a pretty steady incline, but it too saw a big jump from February to March.
What are people selling? The top five items for sale on Craigslist are:
- cars/trucks
- furniture
- electronics
- baby/kid stuff
- motorcycles
I also contacted eBay to see if it had similar data, but didn’t hear back.
This data won’t change the world, but it gives us an interesting peek into it — and into our neighbor’s yard.
Bomb Blasts Hit India’s IT City Bangalore
Updated at the bottom: Over the past few years, the quaint and sleepy town of Bangalore has been transformed into a highly compressed version of Silicon Valley, only with worse housing and transportation problems. Some of the bigger technology companies — Texas Instruments, Intel and Qualcomm — have offices there, along with home-grown Indian tech giants like Infosys Technologies. This doesn’t even count the dozens of call center operators and outsourcing companies that make their home in the city.
Despite the breakneck growth, the city in Southern India was viewed as a laid back and progressive place, devoid of the terrorist activity that had pockmarked India’s major destinations such as Delhi and Bombay. Today all that changed, as Bangalore was rocked by a series of bomb blasts. According to reports, two people have been wounded killed and dozens injured after seven nine bombs exploded in quick succession in the city.
It’s not clear who might be behind these terrorist attacks, but one thing is clear, this is going to have an impact on Silicon Valley and U.S. companies. Bangalore has become integral to Silicon Valley’s life, as indicated by the packed flights that go directly into the city. On any given day, I have received an email from a Yahoo or a Google employee who is visiting their operations in India, some that happen to be in Bangalore. On a more personal note, I have dozens of friends who live in the city. Some of them have gone back from Silicon Valley to start their companies or roll out venture funds. I hope they are all well.
Update: Texas Instruments said through a spokeswoman that the bombings don’t change the chip maker’s commitment to the city. She added, “No TI offices were affected, and no TI India employees were affected that we are aware of.”
An Intel spokesman told us that no one from Intel was near or injured in the bombings. Spokesman Chuck Mulloy said the company will pay attention to activities such as the bombings, but it wouldn’t affect Intel’s continued operations in the area. “As I understand the bombings were about 7 miles from our site and everyone is okay,” he said. Intel has about 2,000 employees in Bangalore.
Update: I changed the headline to reflect some of the facts that have emerged. Our friends (and readers) are keeping us posted.
Follow the blasts story on Twitter.
Follow the Bangalore blasts on Summize
For other blast related stories, check out this blog.
Live From f8Con
I am hanging out here at the Facebook developer conference, just generally taking in the sights and sounds. The venue is getting crowded, even though we’ve still got over an hour to go before the Facebook executives take the stage. You can check out my preview on what to expect, and also enjoy some of these photos I grabbed with my iPhone. Apologies in advance for the not-so-great quality.
Update: 1.11 p.m.: The room is filling up, though not as much as I would have thought. Facebook has an army of people, including its senior management team, hanging around.
Update: 1.35 pm: Mark is on stage talking about the year, recaps the year, admits that there have been mistakes. He points out things that are going to be different. Clear sense of mission is what we are all about. I think it was difficult for us to write down what our core mission was. I was traveling through Istanbul, and I got a chance to put down my devices and clear my mind, and think about what what we were doing. Talks about the dinner with a Turkish entrepreneur and points out that is when the light went off.
So all engineers are doing is helping make the world a more open place. Facebook’s mission is to make world more open and make it share. (Om says: saving widows and orphans at the same time.) He is talking about the world, connections and Facebook ecosystems.
Giving a recap of the Facebook. Points out that Facebook has 90 million users today, up from 24 million users. Lot of growth from the international markets. We are 2/3rd international. Lot of their users are in English-speaking countries.
Opening up translation tool for application developers so the apps can be developed in other languages Audience is thrilled. Points out there are 400,000 developers and points to a world wide hackathon and how app developers are making new apps right now worldwide. Compares Causes and Al Gore. Funny quip. Zynga vs. Las Vegas. Zynga has more people than rooms in Las Vegas playing poker.
$200 million invested in the ecosystem. Talks about social graph and shows it off and points out massive interconnected graph.
Talking about the Newsfeed and why they redesigned it and what they are trying to do: get people to be more engaged with the content. (Seriously good point and making people increase their Facebook time - Om)
Reward good apps and punish bad apps. Wants to push high-quality, successful apps. Wants to reign in the clutter and deal with the information slow. Making some good points and says learned a lot and that is the next evolution of Facebook platform.
- Engaging and sharing of information.
- Reward developers who help do that and are good Facebook citizens.
- The new feed.
So the new platform’s focus is the WALL and basically quick way to interact with people, and also figure out what is going on with the a special person. The full story - it is new, full-time of feed story so people can surface their content and do a better job of it. Aggregating shorter posts in one place. Lots of cosmetic changes. Demoing the new home page.
Mark really needs to work on his presentation skills - needs to engage us better. I am falling asleep. He needs to watch Steve in action. Still, I am loving this new feed and wondering how much more computing resources they need to make this work. I bet a lot…this is too much stuff for real-time processing.
Now moves on to the world outside of Facebook. Talking about decentralization of the social networks. First step was social platforms, and social apps built on them. Next step will be to decentralize the apps. We are at the beginning of a movement, and a shift in the industry. Compares this with PC and how the move away from vertical stacks. I think the social apps are going to decentralize like that. We want to push that forward.
Wants to focus on news feed, the core platform and communications components. It will be less about facebook.com and more about app connections. New type of sharing, he is getting to Facebook Connect. Our vision of the platform for rest of the web. Partners are now Six Apart and bunch of others.
Basic log-in information, advanced information and also privacy control. So there will a lot more information than just the ID. One thing that’s pretty interesting is that you can allow people to connect via your site as long as they are on Facebook.
Digg coming up to demo the integration. (As predicted ;-) 90 million Facebook users can now join Digg Nation. You can Digg using FC. Nice. Six Apart is next. Created a plugin to use FC and use photos/names to be used in comments. Facebook as yet another authentication service for comments. That is pretty sweet.
More presentations - I am skipping. Thievery Corp has now been totally bastardized and is showing up as background music at tech events. I am trashing my entire digital collection. Need to find a new movement - the new new music. Citysearch sales pitch…yawn…yawn again. Something which looks like a lame rip off of LinkedIn. CitySearch is seriously lame - like L.A.M.E. Don’t bother. It’s like a 65-year-old with a paunch getting hairplugs. Not working! Where is Seesmic? They were in the press release.
New profile is rolling out today and Mark talks about FC which will roll out soon as a beta and develop on that. It is back to “we have got a lot done.” Next year when we come together, we can point to a good number of good social apps using FC in and out of Facebook.
We are done folks - now all sort of corny, cute things being said. Later folks!
Andy Grove Wants 10 Million Plug-In Vehicles in 4 Years
Andy Grove, the former chairman of Intel turned plug-in vehicle advocate, challenged the attendees of the Plug-In 2008 conference on Tuesday to put 10 million plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on the roads in four years. Those plug-ins should be retrofitted from vehicles with poor mileage like SUVs, pickups and minivans, he said.
Grove called on the auto industry, Detroit giants and Silicon Valley startups to form an inter-industry task force to achieve this goal. He said the auto industry has much to learn from the Internet world and thinks that it is critical to foster the same atmosphere of collaborative competition that helped Internet development boom over the last 15 years.
For the full story, and a video of Grove’s presentation, head over to Earth2Tech.
What Cool New Stuff Is Apple Cooking Up?
Apple’s second quarter 2008 earnings proved to be a huge blowout, though Wall Street reacted negatively to company’s conservative outlook. Well, they are almost always wrong on Apple - which is clearly a sentiment driven company.
Nevertheless, the highlight of the quarterly earnings was the supercharged Mac sales. The numbers match-up with recent reports that Apple was leaping up the US PC-sales charts. Revenues for the quarter were up 38%, highest since 2005 despite slowing iPod sales and scant iPhone sales.
Peter Oppenheimer, Apple CFO was conservative in his outlook for the September 2008 quarter giving many reasons, including “a future product transition.” Analysts from Technology Business Research think that “Product transition” is Apple-speak for cool new stuff. I concur. So what could be on menu?
TBR believes Apple will refresh its notebooks with the latest Intel Centrino 2 processors, which will improve performance and increase battery life. We think the company will do more than update internals, however. In addition to a redesign, TBR believes Apple will add TV tuners and may introduce a larger screen MacBook. To maintain the necessary product differentiation, Apple will probably use quad-core processors for the new MacBook Pros. iMac desktop PCs are not likely to get a dramatic overhaul, but Apple will probably beef them up.
What that means: Apple is going to do more than fine this coming quarter. Not only iPhone sales will goose up their revenues, the new products could add ore oomph to the company bottom line. The big cloud on Apple: Steve Jobs health.
Nails on a Chalkboard: The Google Chat Notification Sound
There’s a scene in the movie “Dumb and Dumber” in which Jim Carrey asks, “Do you want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?” And then he screeches at the top of his lungs. If that movie was made today you could easily substitute Carrey’s screaming for the notification sound Google Chat makes.
You are feverishly working on deadline, concentrating to craft the perfect sent-
Dunk!…
-ence, when that noise cuts through your mind as your-
Dunk!…
mental train goes careening off its rails.
DUNK!DUNK!DUNK!
Arrrgh. Who is it, and what the @*&#$ do you want?!
Om’s talked about Gmail sucking, but this is a bigger threat to productivity, since at some point it will drive me insane and I’ll take everyone with me.
Does it have to be such an unpleasant, angry, sound? Especially since it repeats the noise until you switch windows and read the damn message? A jackhammer would be less obnoxious. And the only option in the settings menu is to turn the sound off, which really isn’t helpful when someone is trying to urgently reach you.
Why not a few options, Google? I don’t need the sound of puppies making rainbows or bunny rabbits blowing kisses, but there has to be a less harsh noise than the one you dumped into such an important communication tool for the modern worker. Heck, you could even slip in the biddy-biddy sound from 411-GOOG.
DUNK!
GigaOM Network Content to be Featured on BusinessWeek.com
Recently, our company entered its third year. It’s hard to believe that it was just a little over two years ago when Katie, Liz and myself would spend our days sitting in a Starbucks somewhere, trying to figure out what to blog about.
It has been an amazing two years. We have grown as a company: We notched a few wins, survived a few scary moments, found time for some puppy love and had some fun, but most importantly, we’ve focused on the job at hand. My team’s focus — and commitment — manifests itself on a daily basis.
I take a lot of pride in working with talented people who follow the ethics and traditions of journalism and bring them to blogging. We have been able to combine our eclectic mix of news, analysis and point of view into an easy-to-digest format that befits the time-deprived state we all find ourselves in these days. It’s our own brand of immediate media.
Our friends at BusinessWeek seem to like that blend, as they have formed a syndication partnership with us that will see them will feature select content from the GigaOM Network on BusinessWeek.com every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In fact, the first fruits of our collaboration are already online.
Our syndication arrangement with BusinessWeek is our first content partnership, but it won’t be our last. We are going to be very methodical in how we work with our partners, including creating an almost bespoke experience that fits the needs of our editorial and syndication partners. I hope you continue to join us in our journey, for in this third year we plan to expand our horizons — and fulfill some even bigger dreams.
OMG, Women Buy Electronics!
I’m always insulted by the assumption that woman who care about the features (other than color) on their mobile phones or how much memory their hard drives have are geeks. Maybe they simply recognize — much the same way as those with a Y chromosome — that an electronic device has a job to do, and then educate themselves about what a device needs in order to do that job. Of course if those women are also writing code or modding their PC for fun, then I’m going to offer them membership to the geekerati.
But marketers and the media still can’t buy into the idea of women as intelligent consumers of electronics unless they’re buying for a kitchen or utility room. The latest culprit is the Wall Street Journal, which ran a story this week with the title “The New Gadget Geeks.” With an air of discovery, it points out that women are likely to buy the iPhone, and trots out tired stats that prove women buy household electronics.
Please. Women hold jobs, listen to music, watch TV, build web pages and talk on the phone. It’s insulting to women to say they can’t recognize features that are important to them in a gadget, and diminishes geek credibility to allow women who can do little more than distinguish between an MP3 player and mobile phone into the nerdette club. Besides, everyone knows it’s your love of science fiction that makes you a true geek, right?
Is Facebook Down?
The best thing that’s happened to Facebook: Apple’s MobileMe outage, the iPhone launch and iPhone activation problems across the board. Why? Because no one seems to be reporting on them being out for most of the morning. I just tried to get in; no luck. There is no update on their blog, either. I got a few responses to my question about Facebook’s status on Twitter, so this is not just a problem for me. Are you having Facebook problems as well?
Update: A Facebook spokeswoman emailed us back. “We did experience some issues with the site for a short time this morning, but it was never completely down. It was stabilized as of 10:10 a.m.” They are still investigating the root cause.
It’s Here - The New 3G iPhone.
For once, the FedEx guy showed up right on time. Here it is — the unboxed pics of the new iPhone 3G. More thoughts to follow later. I guess I am lucky in a way because I didn’t have to deal with lines or deal with the activation process. The activation servers are down, thanks to an incredible rush to buy this phone. Apparently it is getting sold out across the world. If you are at an Apple store and want to send us photos or stream a Qik video, let me know and we can plug you in. My thoughts on the phone will appear over the weekend after I have actually had some time to play around with it. In the meantime, NewTeeVee has a look at the video-related iPhone apps and Earth2Tech has a round-up of apps that can help to save gas.
I Can’t Find MobileMe
At $99 a year, I expect my online service to function all the time. So perhaps that is why I am a little upset that Apple hasn’t been able to launch their MobileMe service properly and are experiencing outages. The fact that the service was supposed to launch at a time of Apple’s choosing, leaves no room for excuses on today’s problems.
It is doubly disappointing because this is a for-pay and not some free service, where you get what you pay for. Many free services occassionaly suffer downtime. Apple’s DotMac service, predecessor to MobileMe was as temperamental as John McEnroe in his heyday. (Related Story: dotMac, time for a makeover.) The only saving grace is that my dot.mac email via the desktop client is working properly. Whew!
But I want to see a letter of apology and a refund for time lost to outage. Infact all paying services should be forced to refund the money for the time the services are down. That way the high cost of returning a couple of dollars is going to eat into their profits, making them work harder.
T.Boone.tv — The Green Oil Baron That’s Just Too Hip
I’m officially a friend of the famed oil baron-turned wind developer T. Boone Pickens…on Facebook and MySpace. I’ve also hopped onto his Twitter feed, joined his Ning-powered social network, and asked for a connection on LinkedIn. Now I’m just waiting to hear his last.fm play list (Johnny Cash meets Dixie Chicks?), follow a life-streaming T.Boone.tv channel (24-7 Pickens!), and read his shared Netflix reviews (”There Will Be Blood” – 4 ½ stars, “LOLmilkshake”).
But seriously, the media blitz of Web 2.0 tools from the 80-year-old corporate raider, who was born before Play-Doh was invented, is unprecedented. Pickens’ PR campaign, estimated at $58 million, pushes his plan to break America’s addiction to oil with a one-two punch of wind power and natural gas-powered vehicles – both commodities from which Pickens stands to significantly gain.
That Pickens will likely make a killing off cleaner power isn’t shocking. This guy runs a $4 billion investment fund, grew oil exploration company Mesa Petroleum into one of the largest independent operators in the U.S. and plans to spend $12 billion on building the world’s largest wind farm. He thinks on a grand scale. Even if natural gas-powered vehicles aren’t necessarily a good long-term bet.
What gives us pause is the fact that despite being older than even McCain he still manages to stay on top of all things hip. His social network site actually looks compelling – I’ve seen many a Ning social network site that doesn’t. And it’s already inspiring people: It has over 11,000 members and counting. We’ve been writing about Pickens on Earth2Tech all week and have had a surge of emails from passionate Pickens supporters looking to help like make Pickens t-shirt lines and contribute to his PR campaign. (To them we say thanks, we love the attention, but please send those offers to the Pickens Plan itself).
So while there’s already a lot of critics of his way too-simple-plan of swapping in wind to power the grid and switching natural gas over to vehicles, his execution has been spot on. Launch a massive media blitz, hire the right people that can connect with a younger demographic and see if you can change U.S. energy policy for the benefit of the nation and your own pocketbook. Now, about the T.Boone.tv. video channel, we were only half-kidding.
MobileBeat 2008: Discounts & Ticket Giveaway
Our friends at VentureBeat are hosting their first conference, MobileBeat 2008 on July 24 at Plug and Play Tech Center at 440 N. Wolfe Rd., Sunnyvale, CA 94085. The conference is looking at opportunities created by the changing mobile landscape. MobileBeat 2008 speakers include Rich Miner, of Google’s Android project and Matt Murphy, of Kleiner Perkins’ iFund.
They have just released the short list of 30 start-ups making a presenting at their conference, and I am looking forward to talking to them at the even. I am also conducting a panel on Mobile vs the Web, which should be ton of fun. I am doing some homework for it and looking for suggestions on the panel. So go ahead and send me your questions.
If you come-up with the right questions, you could be one of the three people who will get a free entry ticket to the event. So start thinking. And if you think that is all too much - relax VentureBeat is offering GigaOM readers a 10% discount - $45 per ticket - all you have to do is enter the code, GOMB08.
Happy Birthday to Us. Thanks All, for Everything
Structure 08 is over and folks are already asking us about Structure 09. I’m happy to report that our first official GigaOM conference not only sold out but got a big thumbs-up from attendees. I want to thank a lot of people for making this event a success: The speakers; the sponsors; the attendees; the fine folks at Marketing Alchemist (especially Erin and Stacey); Alistair Croll, our magnificent MC; and of course, the GigaTeam. In particular a big shout out to Surj Patel, Joey Wan, Chancey, Mike & Nick! They worked extremely hard to make my dream into an idea, and then a reality. Here is a list of our live blogging from today.
I have some other good news. We are two years old today (though I got outed by Valleywag a bit earlier than June 25) — so below is a little video that shows how we were then and and how we are now. The lessons I’ve earned in these first two years will turn into a really long post someday.
I am planning to take some time off tomorrow, so no posting! Good night all!
Our Live Coverage of Structure 08 Conference
We’re live in San Francisco today at Structure 08, GigaOM’s cloud computing conference. GigaOM old-timers Katie Fehrenbacher and Liz Gannes have prime seats to give you photo, video and blog updates throughout the day. If you want to pretend like you’re here with us, check out our live-streaming video, which will feature all the main stage speeches and panels, as well as interviews with attendees, conducted by our favorite GigaOM office personalities, Carolyn Pritchard and Chris Albrecht.
- Nick Carr: Welcome to the Ethical Infrastructure
- Jonathan Yarmis, AMR Research
- Mendel Rosenblum, VMware Cofounder
- Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO
- Working the Clouds: NextGen Infrastructure for New Entrepreneurs
- CTO Infinera — Video Swamping Net, Optical Can Help
- The Race to the Next Database: Overclocking and Analytics Augment Your Data Layer
- Making Money on the Stack
- Salesforce Founder Parker Harris
- Panel: Harnessing Explosive Growth
- Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos
- Buddy Miller, Level
- Anagran Founder Lawrence Roberts Fights P2P
- Zach Nelson, NetSuite
- Data Center Power Guru Jonathan Koomey
- Panel: Eyes Wide Shut: Why is the VC Community Keeping Its Wallet Shut to Infrastructure
- Our Video Stream Archive
Domo Arigato Lady Roboto
For all those times when smooching a Slave Princess Leia action figure just doesn’t cut it, Sega is rolling out a line of 15-inch robot girlfriends that will kiss on command.
The Eternal Maiden Actualization (EMA) will enter into “love mode” and plant one on your face when you lean in for a tiny plastic kiss. EMA will also dance, hand out business cards, and serve as a battery-operated reminder to everyone who owns one that they are lonely, lonely people.
EMA will go on sale in September, and Sega Toys, which makes the doll robot hopes to sell 10,000 of them in its first year.
I never like to buy the first generation of any tech product, so I’ll wait for EMA 2.0, which replicates the girlfriend experience even more by giving you a kiss, then pausing and looking at you. You ask her what’s wrong, she says, “Nothing.” You ask if it was something you did but she just sits there, crosses her robot arms and says, “It’s fine.” You say obviously she’s not fine, to which she responds with, “I’m fine. Whatever. Nothing’s wrong. Let’s just go.” And you say no, let’s talk about it, and she says, “We’re late, let’s just go this party and we can talk about it later,” ruining your whole evening as you try to figure out what exactly you said and — oh. Wait.
Whoops. Kinda drifted off there for a second.
(Image courtesy of Sega press release via CrunchGear.)
Most Online Videos Are 3-Day Wonders
The 10 hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube could be a problem for Google’s infrastructure. Video files are fat and people don’t want to wait long once they press play, which means keeping them requires a trade-off between fast access and cheap storage. A range of companies are trying to address these sorts of storage problems through compression, caching and even Flash memory in the data center.
But since you can’t cache everything, the recent study from Tubemogul, which shows that online videos get the most views in the first three days (with the peak demand occurring on Day Three), can help set caching policies. Dropping a video from the cache after 11 days would mean only half of the video’s viewers would be tormented with a slightly slower upload time.
Travels With Louis
It’s awesome when technology invades real life to make it better, like the way email makes letter-writing and photo-sharing easier. Louis Vuitton has manged to do that with a walking tour MP3 download that travelers to Hong Kong, Beijing or Shanghai can purchase for $17. Before gasping at the price, realize that New York tourists pay from $12 to $50 for the pleasures of a tour. The MP3 tours don’t require you to show up on time, and your guides are sexy-sounding Chinese actresses, rather than a bored NYU student. It’s pricey, but well done.
Structure 08 Tickets: Almost Sold Out
It’s time to exhale: Our first Structure 08 conference, slated to be held on June 25th in San Francisco, is almost sold out. With a week to go we have just 25 tickets left, and I have to tell you that despite the long sleepless nights ahead, I’m pretty jazzed about the event.
Amongst ticket buyers, we’ve seen a lot of venture capitalists that are clearly looking at the infrastructure space with some interest, possibly for investments. Also attending will be a lot of people from large corporations as they try to make sense of this whole evolution. Despite how central this issue has become to my writing lately, the mix of people is surprising even to me.
And yes, I’m totally biased, but the line-up of speakers and panelists for the conference would give anyone a serious IQ turbo boost. I recently spent some one-on-one time with speakers such as Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris and Aster Data Systems’ Mayank Bawa, and was amazed by their depth of knowledge. Here’s a quick rundown of the keynotes, panels and workshops:
Keynotes: Werner Vogels (CTO, Amazon.com), Jim Crowe (CEO & President, Level 3 Communications), Greg Papadopoulous (CTO, Sun Microsystems)
Fireside Chats: Parker Harris (Co-founder, Salesforce.com), Dr. Mendel Rosenblum (Co-founder, VMware)
Mini-Notes: Debra Chrapaty (Microsoft), Dr. Larry Roberts (Founder, Anagran), Jonathan Yarmis (AMR Research), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), & Dr. Jonathan Koomey (Lawrence Berkeley National Labs) Drew Perkins (Co-Founder, Infinera)
Panels:
- Working the Clouds: NextGen Infrastructure for New Entrepreneurs
- The New New Stack: Re-examining the Internet Platform Chain
- The Race to the Next Database: Overclocking and Analytics Augment Your Data Layer
- Harnessing Explosive Growth: Infrastructure Strategies and Tactics
- Infrastructure On Demand: Should You Build Your Future on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)?
- Eyes Wide Shut: Why is the VC Community Keeping Its Wallet Shut to Infrastructure?
Workshops:
- Google App Engine: Learn how to harness the power of Google’s global infrastructure for your idea
- Microsoft Data Center Secrets: Get insights from Microsoft’s infrastructure team on building out large deployments.
- Fenwick & West Venture Capital and Seed Financing: Interact with entrepreneurs and prominent angels focused on raising money for infrastructure ideas.
I want to take a moment to thank our media partners, who have helped spread the word. And of course, none of this would be possible without the generous support of our sponsors. There are many of them, and we thank them all:
If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our
upcoming conference, Structure 08.
Breaking: Amazon Down! Anyone Know What’s Up?
Funnily enough reports are coming in saying that nothing wrong with Amazon Web Services’ S3 service is working just fine for everyone. Hey maybe they should use it sometime… okay just a bad joke on my part. Looks like the https version of the site is working.
A word from Amazon’s spokesperson:
The Amazon retail site was down for approximately 2 hours earlier today (beginning around 10:25) - and we’re bringing the site back up.
Amazon’s systems are very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems. We work to minimize any disruption and to get the site back as quickly as possible.
Amazon’s web services were not affected nor were our international sites.
What Do Slide, 23andMe & Chemdex Share?
Max Levchin, well known for being a co-founder of both Paypal and Slide, as well as for imitating Tom Cruise on “The GigaOM Show,” has just become the first person to get on the cover of magazine Portfolio. The magazine’s editors recently threw a little dinner for him, James Hong (co-founder of HotorNot) and Linda Avey (co-founder of 23andMe), all of whom are featured in this month’s cover story, “Brilliant Then and Now.”
I was seated next to Linda Avey at dinner, and she and I got into a conversation about Internet 1.0 and how things were during the go-go 1990s. She told me she had worked for Chemdex, a chemicals-focused B2B exchange, that I once wrote about for Forbes.com. (I loved this company, mostly because deep down I am a chemistry geek.) Ironically enough, Chemdex was co-founded by David Perry and Jon Callaghan, who happens to be a partner at True Ventures and sits on the board of the parent company of this blog. Small world, ain’t it?
My conversation with Avery then moved to the growing incidence of heart disease among South Asians. Long story short: Above and beyond diet and lifestyle, there is a gene at work, and Avey wants to work with Apollo Hospitals in India to conduct a study aimed at finding out what that gene is. Of course, there are others who are thinking along those lines, including those who helped fix my problems and get me home. So if any of my readers have contacts with Apollo execs and want to help out, please get in touch with me.
23andMe, based in Mountain View, Calif is backed by Google and NEA and is looking to better understand the genetic data that they collect as part of the DNA testing kits they sell. Of course, at $1,000 a test, it’s too expensive to collect large volumes of data; they need to lower the price to what is essentially an iPod-like price point, say $199 for a test that can be given as a casual gift. This would help the company increase its database and find more patterns in the collected genetic codes, which they could perhaps then offer up to big drug companies for research.
Hopefully I will talk more about this when I visit 23andMe later this summer and learn about their plans. Anyway back to my headline: I couldn’t really come up with one that tied it all together.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Santa Cruz Fire & Web 2.0
Brian Shields, online news manager KRON-TV, got in touch with Liz over on NewTeeVee to point out that they were using web service Cover It Live to do “live blogging” of the big fire in the South Bay. The readers (viewers) have been glued to the updates, he told us. There is a massive fire in the Santa Cruz mountains and some of the smoke from that fire has enveloped parts of Silicon Valley; we can even feel the impact up in San Francisco. There are several Twitter alerts out as well.
Earlier news outlets and citizens had used Twitter and YouTube to cover the fires in Southern California and provide updates when it was difficult for media outlets to do so.
What Is the Future of the Web?
Is Net Neutrality essential for democracy? What role will AI have in the future of the web? What will Web 4.0 look like? On June 11, in an attempt to answer these and other questions, Tim Berners-Lee and other leading web authorities will gather at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., for an old-fashioned debate with a social media twist: The content of the debate will be collaboratively created by web users, who can submit questions and promote them through a user-based ranking system similar to Digg. The most popular questions will form the basis of the debate, which will be webcast live. Viewers will also be able to interact with the panelists by submitting questions and comments in real time. For more details about this interactive event, plus instructions on how to submit and rank questions, go here.
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Technology-News
Kevin Johnson’s Memo on Yahoo & Their Strategy
Kevin Johnson, the president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division, sent out this memo to company employees in which he outlines the Microsoft’s strategy in online advertising. He also refers to the press statement issued in reference to Yahoo. The company is sending mixed messages, both to the outside world and its employees. You can read the memo (below the fold) and decode it for yourself :-)
We have been executing against the core strategy I first presented at our Financial Analyst Meeting in July 2007 to go after the growing opportunity in online services and advertising. Four pillars have formed the basis of our strategy:
1. Consolidate ad platform and win in display
2. Innovate and disrupt in search
3. Deliver end-to-end user experiences across PC, phone, and web
4. Reinvent portal and social media experiences
We have many options that support acceleration of our strategy. As announced earlier today, we are also considering new alternatives for a transaction with Yahoo! which do not involve a full acquisition. At this time, we have not made a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo!, but we reserve the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo!, shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft, or with other third parties.
Regardless of the outcome of any new discussions, it is important that we continue to move forward to strengthen our online services business. The fact is that we are not where we want to be in this business yet and we’ve been in this position longer than we’d all like. To that end, we will be accelerating elements of our core strategy, and breaking ground in new areas.
On Tuesday, Brian McAndrews is hosting advance08, our annual advertising conference here in Redmond. Over 400 leaders from across the media, technology and advertising landscape will be here for two days to engage in dialogue on industry trends and opportunities. These leaders are some of our closest partners in the digital transformation of the advertising industry, and they recognize the increasingly important role Microsoft plays in this transformation. We are very excited to have these customers and partners on campus.
Brian’s keynote will highlight our unique position in the advertising industry. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come with the aQuantive acquisition in differentiating our advertising platform. This foundation is paying off, with Q3 advertising revenue growth of nearly 40%, a rate that has accelerated over the past two quarters while growth rates at Google, Yahoo and AOL have slowed.
On Wednesday, we will be announcing a major new initiative that our search teams have been driving. We are getting better and better with our core algorithmic search, and at the same time, we are investing to differentiate in vertical experiences and to disrupt the current model. You’ll hear more about our plans Wednesday.
advance08 will underscore our commitment to search and online advertising, and you’ll continue to see announcements demonstrating our progress in this space. Earlier this week, I spoke to leaders across our online services business about our core strategy, the importance of acceleration and a set of actions we are taking, including:
1. Innovate and disrupt in search – We will disclose some elements of our plans with this week’s release of search and sharpen our focus on user experience and business model innovation. The work we have done over the last 4 years on search has established a solid foundation to build upon.
2. Win targeted distribution – With this release of search, we are now ready to throttle up broader distribution initiatives.
3. Reinvent portal and deliver new experiences across PC, phone and web - We are building our new releases of Windows 7, Windows Live wave 3, Windows Mobile 7, Internet Explorer 8, Search and MSN with an eye towards optimizing and unifying experiences and scenarios.
4. Fix our online branding – Our brands are fragmented and confusing today, and we recognize a need to clarify and align our online branding . We are now driving forward to address this opportunity.
5. Win in display advertising - We have an advantage in tools, agency assets/relationships and a team laser-focused on capturing the display ad platform opportunity. As we build from a position of strength, we will increase engineering resources to drive even more innovation.
6. Build on our strengths in Europe – As measured by comScore in March, our online business in Europe is doing well. We have over 3 times the page view volume and nearly 7 times the minutes of usage compared to Yahoo!, and 68% reach to internet users throughout Europe. We will double down on our investments in Europe and expand on this strong position.
7. Expand strategic partnerships – In addition to our organic innovation agenda, we will expand strategic partnerships that increase inventory on our display ad platform, enable new paradigms in search and accelerate growth in key geographies.
8. Pursue small, targeted acquisitions – Looking forward, we will focus on small, targeted acquisitions that support our work in search, complement our value in the ad platform and help us grow scale in key geographies. Recent acquisitions including Rapt and YaData are examples of these types of acquisitions.
The PSD leadership team is actively working on the FY09 budget, including resources and investments to support the actions above. Additional elements of our work will be revealed in the coming weeks, leading to our Financial Analyst Meeting in July where I will share more details on our strategy and business/financial outlook.
As we move forward, I want to remind everyone that we are well positioned to compete. We have some of the industry’s best assets on our side: technical and business talent, global scale, a culture of self-criticism and tenaciousness, a healthy balance sheet and an unparalleled product portfolio. It’s time for us to seize the opportunity.
Thanks again for your continued leadership and focus on our business.
GigaOM Favs: 10 Blogs We Love
Last week, I asked followers on my Twitter stream if they could recommend some new Web 2.0 writers/bloggers I could follow. This prompted me to ask my editorial team about the blogs they love, including the ones that help them with getting the job done on an ongoing basis. What we have put together is