There is an interesting discussion on the blogosphere about the business prospects of Twitter, the microblogging service. Another discussion is brewing over whether Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, should go public. Behind both of these is the presumption that the highest form of organization is a company valued at billions of dollars. The Internet now creates so much leverage for certain activities, that it is possible to create services that are incredibly useful, widespread and economically self-sust... lire la suite
There is an interesting discussion on the blogosphere about the business prospects of Twitter, the microblogging service. Another discussion is brewing over whether Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, should go public. Twitter isn’t trying to be either. It is a venture-backed startup, presumably trying to make a lot of money. But Twitter has two ideas, neither of which naturally create a big enterprise. Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist who invested in Twitter, compares it to Facebook. I don’t see that. Facebook from the start was a broad service with many features and natural ways to induce users to spend a lot of time in its environment, while disclosing lots of data about themselves. So it had the potential to be a powerful advertising medium. Twitter has none of those features. Firefox is a bigger idea than Twitter. And making a browser is much harder, so its business fundamentally more defensible. So Henry Blodget is right when he writes that the Mozilla Foundation could well get takers for a public offering of its for-profit arm. (Firefox mainly profits from ads on the Google search on its default home page.) And the foundation might want to consider such a sale as a great way to fund good works. But as a Firefox user, I’m hoping the foundation won’t go that course. One of the best features of the Firefox user experience is that I ldon’t have to fight my software to undo all sorts of settings designed to make money. Contrast that to AOL Instant Messenger: Every time I download a new upgrade, it automatically reverts to opening the ad-filled AIM Today page on each log on. But we should understand that for many ideas enabled by the Internet, small is the new big.
newVideoPlayer("Adelson_pitch.flv", 463, 387,""); Early in her 8-minute interview with Digg CEO Jay Adelson, BoomTown's Kara Swisher asks Adelson about the future of the company. She casually mentions acquisition rumors. "Oh that's what you want to know, I see," Adelson says. Had this been Wallstrip, we'd see an image of a turtle pulling his head into his shell flash on screen. Swisher changes the topic. But later, in the part we've excerpted above, Swisher gets Adelson to talk anyway. She asks him how he would fix a big media company. Perpetual rumors suggest his answer is to have them buy Digg. So when Adelson starts to explain his ideas, remember that everybody's selling something. This is how Adelson sells Digg.
CNET was at its sharpest when dueling with rival ZDNet, the online publisher of once-formidable tech publisher Ziff-Davis. Since it merged with ZDNet and became a conglomerate of online brands — hence the "CNET Networks" name — it has devolved into soft, bureaucratic mediocrity, a trend only accelerated by the departure of cofounder Shelby Bonnie in 2006. If buying CNET was Smith's one big idea, we'll gladly lend him another: Shuffle current CNET CEO Neil Ashe out the door as soon as possible.
Fun starts at around 1:09 We’ve posted about a disk drive hacked to play the Imperial March and a scanner playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on Neatorama. Now, listen to this: "Big Ideas (don’t get any)" by James Houston re-mixed Radiohead’s song "Nude," played on old computer hardwares! Radiohead held an online contest to remix "Nude" from [...]
This morning on NBC’s Meet the Press, host David Gregory asserted that the Republican Party “used to be the party of big ideas.” Gregory then asked his guest Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), “What’s the big idea Senator McCain is campaigning on?” Jindal responded, “I think there’s several,” but couldn’t provide an answer. Gregory asked [...]
Quelle beau et heureux mariage ! Venez celebrer l’extension de Twitter 1.7.2 pour votre navigateur Firefox ! Selon moi, le fait de re-actualiser sa page de Twitter incessamment sous Firefox pour voir les nouveaux messages est devenu une tache trop archaique, cet automatisme finirait bien par muter en une espece de [...]
I think that’s brilliant. Why? Because I’ve watched at NEC and Microsoft and other big companies as people who aren’t at the headquarters get marginalized and forgotten. Worse, many times great ideas get shot down if they didn’t come from someone working at the headquarters. Amelio told me that they see great ideas come from everyone around the world, so why would they pick one place to have their headquarters? He works out of several offices and does lots of video conferencing. They’ve arranged Lenovo around several innovation hubs/research labs.
"Not once did we consider asking Washington to bail out the Sun," proclaimed the conservative New York newspaper in a deathbed editorial this morning that cited the importance of adhering to its highminded free-market "principles." But it turns out that they did almost precisely that kind of! See, some of the Sun's capitalist backers had a bunch of money invested in the private equity firm Cerberus, which controls the auto financing firms Chrysler Financial and GMAC. (And also, owns Chrysler itself, which was also a bad idea.) Auto financing firms are sitting on truckloads of car loans gone bad in no small part because people can't get home equity loans to pay them off like they used to, which is (a major reason) why the whole auto industry has gone to shit. So...guess which struggling private equity firm was about to get some major R-O-L-A-I-D-S from that big communist bailout bill all those ideological comrades of the Sun just voted down? Read More: Big Gay Barney Frank Apologizes For "Offending" Republicans , 5 Lessons About What Happened To The Economy You Didn't Learn From CNBC , What The "Subprime Poetry Crisis" Means For The Overheated Metapor Market , Guess We Were Right to Rent Instead of Buy After All