Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Roving Eye: Email Hypoxia, Content Hubris, DARPA For The Wounded

Google Mail Hacks. Not only is GMail free, but there are hidden features that make it more valuable. Your account can actually be reached two different domains, and you can tweak the address and still have it delivered. These tricks can further improve spam filitering, or give you a handle on content organization or figuring out the 'social spread' of your contact information.

Is Email Causing Hypoxia? Old Friend Linda Stone notices she holds her breath while the e-mail is downloading and takes off from there on the potential physiological impacts of electronic communications. There's a nice discussion of various breath control disciplines in the comments. I'm pretty sure I don't do this - having started with e-mail back in the '80s with a stylin' 300 baud modem, I'd probably have fallen over unconscious long since. And considering some of the messages that arrive in e-mail, one might want to consider disciplines like tactical breathing along with the fluffy bunny versions. HT: Clive Thompson.

Why Is It That Content And Hubris Go Together? Jeff Nolan catches the video-on-demand providers repeating the RIAA's mistake - crippling the customer's experience. With more and more entertainment options available every year, self-sabotaging a competitive position makes no sense. Maybe the ABC folks should call up Sony and ask how it's been working for them?

Microsoft and Yahoo: How The Mighty Have Fallen

The January search engine share rankings from comScore are out, and they make interesting reading in the context of the attempted 'Micro-Hoo' takeover. Google leads the pack at 58.5% share, followed by Yahoo at 22.2% and Microsoft sites at 9.8%.

Compare those numbers with a historical trend chart I put up last April. Since then Google has moved into a clear majority position. Most telling for the intended merger, the combined share of Yahoo and Microsoft are now little more than Yahoo's share alone last spring - a loss of nine or so share point in less than a year.

Those doing post-merger planning at Microsoft (or non-merger planning at Yahoo) had better have some good ideas on how to change the strategic conversation around their Web properties, or all they will simply be perceived as having combined two rapidly wasting assets.

The Roving Eye: 2/21/08

Robot buoys to monitor the spread of oil spills. We could have used some of those in the Bay Area a few months back. Hopefully the Coast Guard will take notice.

What's "Volkswagen" in Hindi? For those who think we can solve the carbon emissions problem in the developed world alone, read 'em and weep. Like Detroit and Toyota before it, Tata knows that increasing prosperity of families and societies will cause demand for more elaborate vehicles to grow, and they are getting in on the ground floor.

Do your hiccups taste fishy? There's a reason for that. Another interesting result from reverse engineering of evolution. Hat tip to Ole Eichhorn.

There are some silly valuations out there right now ($550m for Slide? Gimme a break!), but here's the silliest funded venture I've seen in a while. Take a problem that's wicked for people with decades of experience, where your useful feedback happens in 2-10 years intervals, where many of the deal killer issues are inherently unknowable without executing the plan, and solve it all with AI! Which has been such a great success! (This reminds me of a post I've been meaning to write for a while now...)

The Roving Eye: 2/19/08

Watch out for sneaky fish. They could be spy bots, working for the Navy.

From Rob Carlson, a deeper explanation of Craig Venter & team's synthesis of a complete bacterial genome, and the limits and implications of that achievement.

Don't Be Evil, and don't carry stories about UN corruption.

Politically Incorrect T.J. Rodgers' politically correct solar venture. The publicists for Rodgers and SunPower have been racking up the placements of late. I think the crowing about a "Moore's Law" for solar is premature, we don't have enough of a track record for market growth and reinvestment to go from a conventional cost vs. cumulative units experience curve to a Moore-like improvements vs. time formulation. It'd be nice, though!

Review: Robert Zubrin's 'Energy Victory'

Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil is about ending America's addiction to oil in the short run, and eliminating carbon-additive energy sources in the long run. As you might presume from the title, Zubrin's current motivation revolves around the West's indirect funding of terrorists who would be happy to destroy it. Even if this is not your motivation, I encourage you to check out this book, as the policy proposals are also appropriate for those with primarily environmental goals. And while you're at it, read the chapter that provides a mere gloss on the treachery of the petroleum parasites we are enabling. Those doubting the direct connection between energy policy and terror might take a look at just one recent example of Saudi perfidy.

Zubrin's prescription for the short run is simply stated: Require all passenger vehicles sold in the US to be capable of handling arbitrary mixtures of gasoline, ethanol and methanol, a design called flex-fuel. As he documents, these designs already exist, are reasonably priced, and are currently in mass production in Brazil. The effect would be to force the oil cartel into competition with alternative fuel sources ranging from sugar cane to agricultural and residential waste to cellulose sources to more exotic sources. While transportation is not the only use of petroleum products, it is the largest one which is currently not easily substitutable from other sources, and therefore the greatest driver of our dependence.

The Roving Eye: 2/15/08

The inherent uselessness of the broadcast media, by a practitioner. As I've written before, the mainstream media have evolved to be 'edge amplifiers', emphasizing the outré to get the attention of a bunch of monkeys. As Salerno describes, even if you eliminate the gross political bias, what remains cannot rise above that systemic flaw. Trying to plan a business or a life with the MSM's view of reality as the only input is a recipe for catastrophe.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Tales. Tone perfect satire.

A comment before the FCC (PDF) from an old acquaintance, Brett Glass, who now runs a wireless ISP in Laramie, WY. This is a clear and concise statement of why traffic shaping and other packet content aware technologies are used by ISPs, to benefit both their own economics and their customer's interests. The comment is occasioned by complaints by a some misguided 'network neutrality' advocates against Comcast, advocating the outlawing of such technologies. If you've been reading here long, you know I think Comcast has only itself to blame for such attacks. But their fault is not in using such technologies, it's in not clearly disclosing their practices and in taking a step over the line by sabotaging, rather than reducing priority on certain types of sessions. The FCC should be making some rules here, but they should be about proper disclosure - which supports the action of markets - not prohibition of technologies that have legitimate uses. And Comcast should still get a clue.

One of the few rewards of the campaigning season is the target rich environment for humor. This one's funny.

Imad Mughniyeh died in Damascus this week. The world is better off without him. Here's why you should care.

Yahoo Casualties

The Brownian motion of Valley employment has over the years shuffled quite a number of my prior colleagues and acquaintances into the Yahoo ranks. And several of them are leaving there as part of the big RIF. On the list so far:

Joy Mountford

Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar

Susan Mernit

Brad Horowitz. (To be clear, I'm claiming acquaintance on the basis of a couple of casual conversations. He's gone to Google voluntarily, but just ahead of serious butchery in the units he was running, so call it what you will.)

Hard to make a pattern out of just these, but if I add in other news that's filtering out, the axe seems to be falling hardest on staff, corporate level resources, particularly design and R&D, and anyone not immediately attached to a revenue center. Many of these areas developed over the years as attempts to work around innovation bottlenecks in the revenue centers. Cutting them away will save money for sure, but if the bottlenecks (and those responsible) are not blown up at the same time, the fundamental problem of Yahoo (too slow!) will still remain.

Review: Timothy Hornyak's "Loving the Machine"

This book about robots in Japanese culture has been out since late 2006, so I'm coming to it somewhat late. My goal with the book was to fill in background of one of the major non-US innovators in robotics development, both in both cultural and technological terms.

The book succeeds admirably in framing the cultural context for one type of robotics in Japan. While beginning with an OED definition of robots inclusive of non-humanoid 'bots, Hornyak self-admittedly spends almost all of his attention on anthropomorphic devices, which he refers to as 'real robots'. In fact, the swath through humanoid representations is so broad that it includes pure fictions such as Mighty Atom (Astro Boy) and Gundam juxtaposed with actual mechanisms. The device succeeds well, however, in keeping the story moving in the direction of the book's central thesis: The cultural backing for humanoid representations of devices in Japan will mesh with actual social needs to drive robotics development in a more anthropomorphic direction than in the West. Hornyak succeeds in building a solid case for this cultural framing of bots in Japan.

The Roving Eye: 2/12/08

LT G's 'Kaboom' blog is the best milblog writing to come out of Iraq since Neil "Red Six" Prakash rotated out.

Reverse engineering Mother Nature. Very cool, working backwards from current organisms to reconstruct a protein sequence from a common ancestor, and then determining some of the adaptations and environment of that early organism. It's hard to believe there are still evolution deniers out there, just as we're taking big strides in exposing and analyzing its action over time. Via Ole Eichhorn.

Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency is building and testing prototype components for orbital powersat systems. Glad to see someone serious about this, we need to be trying out all the alt.energy approaches that look feasible, for both strategic and environmental reasons.

I got a good prognosis from my first post-op X-Ray yesterday. The price is six more weeks cooped up on a walker. Well worth it for a full recovery.

Microsoft vs. Yahoo: What About the Customers?

Since I was flat on my back in the hospital when the Microsoft move on Yahoo kicked off, I'm a bit behind on this one. With the Yahoo board voting over the weekend to fight the takeover attempt, now is a good point to think about the value proposition or lack thereof.

The VC Angle

Before getting to the bigger picture, I've gotten some queries about my take on the effect of the transaction - if consummated - on the venture capital climate. I score it a wash. In the short run, it would remove one large M&A player from the Valley / 'Web 2.0' scenes. However, Yahoo has really never been that acquisitive, so it would just narrow the list a bit when seeking an exit on compatible ventures. In the long run, almost any large merger can be expected to shake out executive and engineering talent, given time, frustration, and the expiration of stock options. When they leave, the startup-minded Yahoos will carry with them some hard won wisdom on what real users are actually doing out there on the net, and it's talent and experience that drive the venture cycle.

Qui Bono?

Yahoo has three constituencies that can be considered customers in some sense:

1. End users. While few of them are making direct payments for the services used, it's the users that make the whole game work. As I have cynically noted before, both the Yahoo and Microsoft Web constellations are largely destination sites now, having lost most of the search audience to you-know-who. What do they come for? Yahoo's core audience is still largely built around its community and communications functions - groups, mail, messaging and now Flickr.


2. Advertisers. The monetization comes from advertisers, who are there only because of the end users. If there isn't some distinguishing value to Yahoo or Live as an advertising venue vs. Google, they likely have a mild bias towards having fewer players and greater simpliciity.


3. Developers, including merchants. I'm putting them into the same bag because both increase Yahoo's value by building on some portion of its platform.

If a MSFT / YHOO transaction is to create lasting value, it should have solid benefits for at least one of those customer classes. I know the i-bankers are talking about all the expense savings to be found. But in a market as fickle as the Internet, if that's all you've got going, you might as well write 'wasting asset' and move onward. So where might such customer benefits be found?