Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The (Civilian) Space Race

The roll out of the designs for the next generation Scaled Composites / Virgin spacecraft is a good time to point all the activity going on this sector. Dale Amon has a nice link list of the serious private ventures aiming to attract commercial passengers and cargo. In spite of the hype blip, parts of the Scaled Composites program are apparently still on hold, pending a final resolution of the cause of the deadly explosion at their Mojave facility back in July, so it's good to see not only a growing list of ventures, but a wide variety of approaches.

Hey, I Made The Chron! (And Not Why You'd Think)

It's got nothing to do with venture capital or technology, but rather one of my volunteer activities that I have discussed here before. Today's Tom Stienstra column highlights the Candelabra redwood tree in Butano State Park, (re)discovered by a party including yours truly a few years back. It's now reached by the trail described in the column, which I helped engineer and construct as part of a merry band of Trail Center volunteers.

There's a picture of the Candelabra from discovery day linked from the column - that's me reclining at right. You can tell that's not my weekday working clothes, but you can't see the coating of sweat and poison oak (I'm immune, TG) resulting from crawling through the brush, retracing an abandoned logging road visible on old aerial photos. Contra the credits caption, the photo was actually shot by Dave Croker, the third member of the survey party.

There's another tree photo featuring our intrepid trail builders linked from my earlier post. This is likely not the best season to hike out on the soggy Coastside, but the tree is quite an amazing sight and easily reached by walkers of modest ability and experience once the ground dries up in spring.

Jason Pontin: The Reason For Old Media's Decline

Via AlwaysOn, here's a vid clip of (MIT) Technology Review publisher and editor-in-chief and bubble-era Red Herring editor Jason Pontin opining on the downfall of the traditional media. The pull-quote-as-title in both locations gives you some idea of his villain: "Google - A Gigantic Parasite". He proceeds to a plaint about the freeloading aggregators, Google and Yahoo chief among them, apparently hollowing out business models like some virtual hagfish or larval Alien.

If he stopped there, I could let it pass without comment. Having your business plan and budget turned into so much confetti is not fun, and a bit of kvetching may be in order, if not terribly illuminating. But then Mr. Pontin presses onward, and becomes himself a prime exhibit of why the old media are in such a mess. (Yes, go watch the clip!)

It seems these awful aggregators create nothing. They are just parasitic on other people's work (content, that is). All they offer are these nasty AdSense side bar ads, and by the way, the CPMs from good old display banner ads suck these days, they don't fill the hole in the budget. And those nasty aggregators stole the whole classified ad business away, the horror! (Never mind it was craigslist did the worst damage there.)

Cry me a river. It takes someone totally mired in the old media to miss that 'aggregators' are delivering something is apparently more valued by the market than pre-packaged content. Yahoo hasn't been a passive directory for a long time, and Google never was. They are both creating something that has escaped the comprehension of the old media: personal relevance.

Could it be that the valuing of search over content nuggets, and better results for crummy, but targeted, little text ads compared to those handsome skyscraper banners are part of the same picture? The rest of the world came up with that insight just a few years back. It takes a business that views its grip over the means of physical distribution and the control over juxtaposition of content and advertising as not only its historical role, but practically an entitlement, to miss it.

And this guy runs a technology magazine with honored name of MIT associated. Do you feel better or worse about the analysis likely coming from there after watching the vid? Would it surprise you terribly to find he also writes the odd business column for the NYT? Awesome content, I am sure.

/rant

The BOSS at CES

Glenn Reynolds reports, with a nice pic, a sighting of CMU / Tartan Racing's BOSS autonomous vehicle at CES. It's still sporting its vehicle number from November's Urban Challenge. The CES 'course' appears to be just a bunch of traffic cones, little challenge compared to DARPA's multi-bot suburban road race. And yes (indeed!) GM's PR department seems to be getting their money's worth from supporting the CMU team.

(P.S: I'm back from a self-imposed holiday season blog-break. A resolve helped along by taking on a short term consulting gig with an insane schedule including a delivery on Christmas Day. But that was followed by a nice break at a family get-together in Indiana, including a helping of Hoosier madness in the form of a high school basketball game won by a team including my eldest nephew. Way to go, Ben!)