Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Roving Eye: Carlson Curves Updated, Troubled Metro WiFi, Tasty Media Bits

The Pace of Genomics Learning. Rob Carlson revisits and updates his charts on gene sequencing learning curves. Carlson is commendably modest about this effort: "I have cautioned both the private sector and governments from attempting to use this data to forecast trends." However, that's overlooking a collateral benefit of well-defined learning curves such as Moore's Law: They serve as a synchronizing vision among current and potential creators and users of a technology. Users start working on applications in advance of economic feasibility, with a fair amount of comfort that time will fix that problem. Innovators and infrastructure creators on the sell side proceed with greater confidence that new demand will appear to reward their efforts in reducing costs. Carlson uses a 'Thousand Dollar Genome' as a way to think about the possible consequences and limits of demand. While that's undoubtedly useful, it has some risk of falling into the 'Who needs an IBM machine in their home?' trap from the computing world. Make the technology cheap enough, and all sorts of uses pop up that defy the original idea of how it should be packaged. (Note Carlson also has some interesting but less well established curves for gene synthesis. Well worth watching for futurists and would-be biotech investors.

WiFi not so fine. A lot of the Bay Area's attempts to turn 802.11 into a metro access solution are shutting down. WiFi's ubiquity and consequent low costs got a lot of people, from engineers to investors to city councils, excited about the possibility of bending it to a use for which it was never designed. While I've seen some ingenuous attempts at things like meshing and remote management, the crux of the matter seems to be operations, which is often overlooked by those who've never run a network. Earthlink, at any rate, has been finding out the hard way that running an outdoor WiFi access network is a bit tougher than remotely managing racks of modems in Telco central offices. (Via Jeff Nolan.)

California ablaze. It's a tragedy for those caught up in the wildfires, but it can also make for some stunning photography.

You say you'd prefer a somewhat damper location? In the Navy.... Those waves are breaking over the equivalent of a six story building.

The Science of Scotch. The New York Academy of Sciences hosts a podcast with the brew master of Laphroig, one of my favorite tipples. Turns out the flavor is due in part to ancient seaweed. Here's some music to go with your wee drop.

The Roving Eye: Not-So-Open Socialness, About That SUV We Rented, The Bus That Never Comes

Reality Check Time. While I admire some of the technologies being proposed as part of the project, the portability of social data espoused by its evangelists is starting to run into issues. It's not clear how many users, beyond the evangelists, think they have a problem. What's clear is that this information and its use is regarded as an asset by companies providing social networking capability, and will be treated as such: See Facebook's cutting off live access from Google Friends. For that matter, a social graph without identity information attached to its leaves is pretty worthless. And if you haven't noticed that Web companies tend to regard identities and their authenticators as valuable assets, you just haven't been paying attention for the last decade or so. Good luck with that, as they say.

We just went for a ride in the desert and look what happened! It's hard to believe anyone survived this. I'm guessing the first pass missed and gave the occupants time to "rapidly exit". Hanging out near live firing ranges is maybe not a good idea.

Smart, but poignant. A bus stop where none ever does, and those waiting forget why they're there. A subtle use of the persistence of past long term memories in Alzheimer's patients. It hits home - my wife and I each have a parent who is afflicted.

Too bad they couldn't both win. I've been an off-and-on watcher of professional golf through the years - a little more 'on' while I've been recuperating. But I've never seen anything to match the US Open battle between Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate for high drama. The wounded master up against a veteran journeyman playing the game of his life. Tiger's string of unreal eagle and birdie shots on Saturday. And the gentlemanly rivalry between two players who showed their respect and friendship throughout. Well played!

The Roving Eye: Yahoo Bleeds, Credit Meets Nicotine, The Underbelly of Higher Ed

Once is an accident, twice is coincidence... Jeff Weiner. Jeremy Zawodny. JR Conlin.. All apparently headed to startups or funders thereof. (Update: Usama Fayyad as well.) Come on, purple and yellow, don't just lie there, do something! Even other people's startups have figured out how to leverage your under-worked community assets.

Forex for Dummies as well as the rest of us. Here's a well-done tutorial on the ups and downs of the dollar, from a group of Bay Area money managers.

This is your brain on credit. A fascinating study suggests that paying with credit rather than cash partially disengages the cost function. (HT: Maggie's Farm.) So there's a scientific basis for the recommendation of some of my favorite personal finance books to dump the credit cards. I'd also say, from personal experience, that running a rigorous household budget may have the same effect, assuming you pay off your cards each month - and you do, right? Whether it's cash, debit or credit, it all gets marked off against a balance, the only thing that varies is when. Most people can figure out that pain delayed is still pain, but...

This is your brain on cigs. The latest American Scientist brings a piece on another study, a combined behavioral and MRI look at differences between nicotine addicts and others in a stock market simulation. Seems the addicts lose the ability to process what the experimenters call 'fictive signals' - what those of us with an economic bent would call opportunity costs. Do you suppose these two groups of researchers should be comparing notes?

In the belly of the beast. Adjunct 'Professor X' at Unknown College pens an Atlantic piece on the woes of teaching English lit and comp to those of marginal academic abilities. This all sounds very familiar. About 25 years ago I spent some time as an adjunct, in computer science, at a community college in Flint, Michigan, motivated by a need to keep the wolf away from the door as well as sampling the teaching option before plunging into the commercial world. Two weeks into the first term I was bemoaning the fact that I could see myself easily flunking half the students, based on their complete inability to handle systematic problem solving, let alone actual programming. My fellow slave laborers opined that it was normal, and the best thing I could do is persuade them to drop the course while they could still get a refund. Yeah, I been there. 

Glenn Reynolds has talked about a current bubble in higher education, and if you count back the years, my experience was at the height of the fad for retraining autoworkers. There is one other factor in common: Some of my students were driven into the classroom to escape the consequences of a local economy wrecked by a combination of auto company management incompetence and auto union arrogance. And a lot of today's lower echelon students are driven there because their high school diplomas mean little as a credential, due to...

The Roving Eye: Arrrrr Is For Robot, Following the Genomics Learning Curve, More Public Finance Follies

Talk like a pirate day for bots? Just as plenty of alternative uses have been found for formerly mil-only spy sats, so the applications for robots keep expanding. Here a report that a US Navy underwater droid trial resulted in finding new artifacts near a Revolutionary era ship wreck. Development budget hurting? Try turning your AUV loose in certain Caribbean and Florida waters, maybe.

Tick. Reports of an inaugural meeting of would-be hobbyist biological engineers. Today Cambridge, MA - tomorrow, ?

Tick. Biologist Richard Lenski at my alma mater, Michigan State has a long-running experiment to follow evolutionary trends in thousands of generations of fast-reproducing E. coli. Seems he's now made the first observation of a two-step mutational change that gave his bacteria the ability to utilize a different nutrient. If you don't know enough to engineer what you want, get nature to do it for you.

GOOG + Open Office = LUV? Should Google embrace Open Office? It's hard to see what they'd have to lose by doing so. My own experiments with Google Docs showed it can hit scaling limits due to bandwidth and/or server scheduling pretty quickly. Sometimes you just need a locally-hosted interface or computational engine. Microsoft has long been engaged in gilding the --- something nastier than a lily --- on Office. Each generation has a little more feature creep, cuts off more backward compatibility, and fails to address long-standing usability problems. Apple's shown there's a need for a light and usable alternative. Google could simply exploit this opportunity in a more mainstream fashion than Jobs & Co. ever will, and could create a smooth transition from/back to their SaaS offering. I'd say go for it!

The land of negative ROI. In what world does every dollar sunk into capex guarantee you will lose more operationally? That would be government-run mass transit in the US. Long viewed as a combination of make-work spoils program and welfare for the riders, every buck 'invested' means a larger system that can't cover its opex, let along depreciation and additional capex. Out here in the Bay Area, we have a heavy rail system running at near capacity due to the gas price rise, and it still can't cover its costs. Something smells rotten.

Fleecing NYC of a half billion bucks. That's apparently the amount of unfunded public pension liability covered up by an actuary who just happened to be an employee of the city, and therefore a beneficiary of the programs he was supposed to be vetting. Someone who did this in private industry would be in jail for fraud. Why isn't he? And people are running for office based on the idea of government controlling more of the economy.

The Roving Eye: Power Sources, The Future of Tanning, Amazing Mazes

Aluminum smelters and data centers. Are alike in needed abundant and reliable electrical power. So the Columbia River valley is growing a crop of server farms. The Economist article notes that virtualization technology can be applied to migrate processing to where the juice is cheaper, as well as optimize the number of servers powered up to handle the given workload. Indeed, virtualization management startups are being reflagged as 'green' as fast as the PPT decks and web sites can be rewritten. Remapping the network connections, storage and other resources used by virtualized processes could sink any savings into a sea of management overhead if not optimized as well.

RIP, Robert Asprin. John Scalzi reports the passing of the well-known fantasy author. His Thieves' World was one of the more enjoyable multi-author sword and sorcery creations. Some few us also remember him as "Yang the Nauseating" in days gone by. I can think of far worse ways to go than on a couch, reading an SF novel.

All that time video-gaming was not wasted. At least if you want to join the Army or Marines and use the real thing. Designers of weapons and other interactive systems can now take facility with game controllers, computers, and networks for granted. We've come a long ways from the days when we tracked down (still abundant) naive users to try out our latest designs.

Hope for the pasty white? Perhaps for future generations: While I was paying attention to other things, the genetics behind human skin pigmentation were figured out. Seems that crosses between the melanin endowed and those less so 'average down', towards the paleface end. Not to fear, given the worldwide genome pool, a few more generations of 747s, migration and out-marriage, and everyone will come with a decent base tan pre-installed. It will be a more boring but perhaps more peaceful world, and fewer engineers will have to brave carcinoma to lose their hacker's pallor.

Speaking of microloans for mobiles. Here's a report by Kevin Kelly on a talk by Iqbal Quadir, founder of the original loans for village and family mobile phones program in Bangladesh.

Concrete Spaghetti. You think the MacArthur Maze is a mess? Check out these feats of civil engineering in Japan.

An OLPC Autopsy

I haven't written about the One Laptop Per Child project before, since I've picked it as a failure in the making from the get-go. Now that it's wandering around gut shot and waiting to fall down, it may be worth some examination in quest of lessons learned. Unfortunately, many of those lessons are old ones, but some reinforcement at others' expense never hurts.

The project has its own five point mission statement. I'd take that statement, blend with actual behavior, and distill out three de facto design points:

1. Provide networkable computing hardware at a rock bottom price, such that developing countries and their citizens can afford it.
2. Create a visual user interface and storage metaphor that is an alternative to the consensus files & apps form handed down from PARC and the Mac. As a matter of cost reduction and principle, build this entirely on open source.
3. Support a particular type of constructivist learning for children using the machines.

And, by the way, accomplish this with an organization of academics who had never shipped a product, nor tackled any project at scale. Not that I'd have funded a squad of successful Dell and Apple veterans to try it in their place. The problem is reality gaps and internal contradictions in the design statement itself. Those are the entrails worth examining, and I'll do it in more or less the same order as the design points.

The Roving Eye: Someone Poke Fake Steve, Spybots Invade England!, Genetic Nannyism

Reality sets in at Facebook: Low entry barrier, low CPM. Even Fake Steve has noticed that most Facebook apps are fluff. More pointedly, developers are seeing very low effective CPM rates. CPM being a rather obsolete concept, I'd prefer to see data presented in revenue-per-user terms, as here. But it's clear that the open, easy, widely adopted Facebook is struggling to monetize, while the smaller, focused, and closed LinkedIn is claiming much higher effective rates (see interesting discussion here.) I'm still picking Facebook to be the Pointcast story of this decade.

Winning the War with Rhino Snot. Letting the troops (as versus the Pentagon) name your products can have interesting results. This company looks like it's self-supporting, but it would be fun to see its CEO try to get through a VC pitch without cracking a grin. It would definitely earn a place on the 'best name' honor roll.

Better see what's hiding in the closet. Following the precedent of DARPA's robotic Grand Challenge, Great Britain's Ministry of Defense (MoD) is mounting its own competition for automatons, with a twist. This time the robots are for surveillance purposes, meant to spy out snipers, IEDs and armed vehicles and soldiers in a village sized trial area. The task specific element of the challenge ups the ante from DARPA's trials, which were mostly about success in navigation. The MoD's competition also allows cooperating teams of bots, which could be of different types. One team anticipates coordinating a team of flying and earthborne bots. The MoD trial will take place in August.

The best things IBM ever made... were those clicky, battleship-weight PC keyboards. Dan's Data sings the praises of the 'buckling spring' design. (Via Derek Miller). Having spent many hours banging on an awesome converted Selectric used as the console on a IBM 1800 way back when, the PC keyboard was a welcome relief from the mushy action of the VT series and other 'glass TTYs' of the time. Almost worth having to put up with segment registers. The economics of the PC industry and weight requirements for portability put these things into the museum, but I still miss 'em.

What happened to 'Know Thyself'? Our self-appointed guardians in New York and California are on watch, making sure you can't get your genome analyzed at your own expense. Because it raises big concerns: 'What will patients do with this information? " Gee, would you suppose that might be their own business? if you wanted to freeze private investment into this area, you couldn't have picked a better way than this kind of statist fear-mongering. And maybe that's the point.

What Google Should Buy -plus!- Fun With R

The Experiment

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned a survey experiment that I was attempting using a new Google Docs interface, and promised a report on the experience. Here it is, along with some thoughts on implications for Google.

The Docs spreadsheet itself is pretty easy to figure out. (I did not read the documentation - an experienced user shouldn't need it for an entry level program). It takes a bit to get used to the somewhat modal interface required when using a browser to substitute for 'normal' menus in Excel or the like. However, it's fairly easy to find the common operations by just knocking around a bit. It would be nice to have a quick 'what do you want to do' internal search options - without dancing paper clips. I give the initial experience an A-.

The Roving Eye: A Plan for MSFT - or GOOG, NYT Beats Its Sector, Fred And The Future, and More!

NC, anyone? Don Park has an idea for getting Microsoft out of the Vista trap: Put out an 'operating system' that's just a sandboxed browser, and sell backend services and upgrades. Buy just what you need, not have the whole glutinous mass thrust down your throat. Just one problem for the strategy, as exposed by commenter Rob Breidecker: "Google should do this as well". No, Google should be doing that instead - they don't have a current revenue stream to protect, and they are building a suite of apps that are perforce stripped down to work in a browser environment.

You go, Pinch!. The entire newspaper sector posted a 9.4% year-on-year decline in revenue last year, but the Times managed to beat that, with a 10.6% drop in Q1. And its publisher wants to tell other media moguls how to run their companies...

A must read for entrepreneurs. This is already widely linked, but just in case you haven't seen it VC Fred Wilson posts a think piece about the shortcomings of M&A as a liquidity path and provokes a fascinating discussion. There are the usual number of just plain naive comments, but it's held together by a great dialog among thoughtful veterans like Robert Seidman, Jeff Jarvis, Marc Hedlund and Fred himself. I intend a longer post in this direction, but for now just read the whole thing.

Azeroth invites you... to a science conference in virtual reality. That would be Worlds of Warcraft, not Second Life, though. All the meeting swag is virtual, and after the poster session they'll storm a city. I like the way those guys party. (Hat tip to Ann Laurie.)

Friday Eye Candy. Here's some fine photography to take you off to the weekend. I remember the old drive-in theatre out past Coyote Point, but it was already deserted what I arrived.

The Roving Eye: Macroeconomic Clicks, Mobile Web - Immobile Carriers, Cable Scams & Warranties Too!

Google as economic indicator. The latest search advertising numbers are out, and while Google continues to bomb their competition, their year on year growth rates are off dramatically for the second month in a row. Henry Blodgett has numbers and relays possible interpretations from Mark Mahaney of Citi: "1. Google's ongoing efforts to improve both lead quality for advertisers and the user experience for searches.
2. A macroeconomic dampening of commercial queries by searchers." While Google's always tweaking the algorithms, I'll take door number 2. Over a decade back, when I was at CompuServe, we carried all of Visa's card swipe traffic over our network. We didn't have to guess how good the Xmas season would be, we knew within a few days of its start, from the overall transaction volume. Likewise Google, now at about 2/3 share in search, doesn't just represent the market; it is the market. It seems perfectly reasonable that economic slowing would show up not only in advertiser spending, but in users not clicking on ads for purchases they are going to postpone. Of course, Google's revenue is sort of like California real estate, where people start whining if they don't get double digit growth.

Mobile Web Bubble. Jeff Nolan shares my conviction that mobile Web is over-hyped and over-invested. It's one of those "it's a wonder it works at all" sort of things, but the experience just isn't rewarding enough to justify the cost for most times and uses. Carriers, as usual, are their own worst enemy when it comes to costs and performance. I pick this one to remain a niche. It's well worth clicking through for the ensuing intelligent discussion among Jeff and his commenters. RTWT. (Here's the report of Mowser's demise that brought on Jeff's reflections: "...the mobile traffic just isn't there. It's not there now, and it won't be.")

Not Comcast This Time! The Instaprof reminds us of one of the bigger consumer hustles out there, overspec'ed and overpriced audio and video cables. I ran into this recently when a Radio Shack clerk tried to talk me into buying you-know-who's gold plated audio patch cord over their house brand. This stuff just fattens up the store's and manufacturer's margins, and likely the clerk's incentives as well. You don't need fancy cables for modern systems. Unless you've got an old turntable in your setup, the signal levels coming out of your components are already high level. Digital standards already include error detection and correction codes to deal with any noise, so fancy copper is even less necessary now. If you've got low level analog signals that need to be protected from noise (satellite dish signals) or high level RF signals that might generate noise, make sure they run in shielded cables. Coax and phono cables are all shielded. Anything more elaborate just fattens someone's margins. I've got 25 year old cables that once starred in my Apple II+ setup, now part of my surround system. They still work great.

Warranty Economics. The Popular Science article linked above also mentions one of the other margin builders, extended warranties. Due to a stint examining the business model of a long dead bubble-era startup, I know a little about the economics of these warranties: On the average, what you pay for the coverage is about twice what the warranty company expects to pay in claims, whether it's electronic gear or automobiles.
When comparison shopping or dickering for a major purchase I always ask about the pricing of the extended warranty. First, it makes the salesman hopeful that he will make some margin on the backend, and so possibly gains some leverage on the item's price. Second, divide the number in two and you've got a rule-of-thumb estimate for repair costs in the out years. Combine that with the reliability rating from Consumer Reports (you checked, right?), and there's a rough indicator of how likely your new purchase is to become a PITA.

Ned for MSFT. This one has already been linked all over the blogosphere, but I'm going to do it too, because it's tone perfect and funny. I'm reminded of this makeover video of a couple years back, which turned out to be an inside job.