Internet Privacy is Political

Posted on September 30, 2009 | 3 Comments

The simmering debate about Internet privacy is starting to resemble certain political battles.  Opponents think it stinks and supporters think opponents just don’t understand.

In the health care reform debate opponents of various Democratic proposals reject the  euthanasia, socialism and runaway government spending they say are intrinsic to those proposals. Supporters say the opponents are being disingenuous or just don’t get it. The debate about setting a new energy strategy and tackling climate change are similar in character.

The debate about Internet privacy has interesting parallels. An article in the New York Times today cites a study showing that a significant majority of consumers object to online tracking by advertisers. The head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group that favors voluntary, industry-defined privacy guidelines rather than government regulations, responds by citing a history of anti-marketing bias on the part of the study’s author.

The article quotes the lawyer for the the industry’s self-regulation coalition as saying, “The more people understand the practices and how the data is actually being used, that’s when the concerns disappear.” If only people were smarter about this, they would agree with us.

It’s a technocratic viewpoint that can really irritate outsiders with its failure to acknowledge how the average person perceives complex issues. I have technocrat leanings myself but have learned to try to cultivate sympathy for the views of outsiders. If you don’t, you can’t get very far.

The online media and marketing industries have their work cut out for them in educating the public and shaping opinion on this issue. Now they know how policy wonks feel.

Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts on the debate.

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Adobe to Acquire Omniture: First Take

Posted on September 16, 2009 | Leave a comment

Adobe’s announcement that it intends to acquire Web analytics Omniture is intriguing on several fronts.

The brief history of the Web analytics industry has been marked by a flurry of acquisition and consolidation almost from its inception. The analytics function is critical to Web site operators and advertisers. That need, and relatively low barriers to entry need spawned a host of entrants into the space, most of whom were challenged to establish sustainable competitive differentiators. That resulted in a market characterized by price competition and a features arms race and an imperative to consolidate through acquisition. Omniture was a prime actor here, using much of the capital it raised from its 2006 IPO to acquire a string of companies including Visual Sciences, Webside Story, Offermatica, Mercado and Touch Clarity.

One of the ironies of Web analytics in online businesses is that although many companies are swamped with data and often fail to make effective use of the data they already have, there is also much they would like to measure but cannot.  One such area of where measurement (and content optimization) remains a challenge is in highly interactive Web sites, such as those that are built using Adobe’s Flash platform.

That fact seems to be a key pillar of Adobe’s strategic rationale for this acquisition. Adobe suggests that with the integration of Omniture tools content authored with Adobe tools will be easier to instrument, measure and optimize.

But integration alone is rarely sufficient grounds for acquiring another company. The acquisition presents a simplified competitive environment for the company and make increase the efficiency of the combined company’s sales operations. Adobe and Omniture undoubtedly have a very significant customer overlap.

The value of the deal is intriguing as well. As noted in today’s Wall Street Journal, worldwide market for Web analytics is some $600 million today, with omniture accounting for half of that, making the purchase price three times industry revenues, or six time’s company revenues.

My impression of both companies over the years is that their management teams are smart and driven. I expect them to create great value for Web publishers, advertisers and merchants over time.

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Choosing the Right Dose of Twitter

Posted on September 9, 2009 | 1 Comment

Social Media Spectrum

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A Sense of Place

Posted on August 23, 2009 | Leave a comment

What if your home town were a canyon? This past spring a Navajo guide led my family on a hike through the Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. (The New York Times today has an article and nice slide show featuring it.) Our guide had grown up in the canyon and he still has family down there. He said his family has lived in the canyon for 500 years.

It made me wonder what it must be like to call a place like that canyon your ancestral home. Those of us who know something of our ancestry might be able to trace our family back to “the old country,” perhaps some village in Europe or maybe Asia.

My own family has ro0ts in Poland, Russia and Romania. My maternal grandfather came from Czernowitz in Romania (now part of Ukraine). I’ve never been back, but I suspect if I had, with the passage of time, the changing of borders and the destruction and construction of buildings and roads, what I would find would not be recognizable to my grandfather who was born there.

Part of my wife’s family comes from Castinatelli, Italy, which lies about 100 kilometers south of Salerno in the hills. We had the opportunity to visit Castinatelli some years ago. We met my wife’s 97-year-old great aunt who still lived there, walked the cobblestone streets and saw the ancestral family home, made of stone blocks and situated at the edge of a small piazza with well. The house is empty now; the current generation has moved up the hill to more modern digs.

It was a special privilege to walk amid the old country. Even if it wasn’t my own, I felt a connection to it.

My visit to Canyon de Chelly, where Navajo families have lived for 500 years, put the idea of the old country in different perspective for me. There is not much in the way of ancestral buildings down in the canyon. I think the Navajo’s primary tie has been to the land itself, to the 600-foot canyon walls, the river running along canyon floor, the pattern of sunlight and darkness that pass through the canyon as the sun crosses the sky. And apart from an invasion of non-native plants that has occurred over the last 50 years or so, the canyon looks just the way it did 500 years ago.

How powerful, looking upon the same home your ancestors did some 500 years ago, built not by human hands but the forces of nature, in geologic time. How powerful, that sense of place.

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Defining Personal Gain: How Traders Are Different

Posted on August 5, 2009 | 2 Comments
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Image via CrunchBase

The New York Times today carried an a article about government moves to impose restrictions on the practice of “flash trading,” in which deep-pocketed and tech-savvy investment firms deploy millions of dollars of computing power to gain what some say is an unfair advantage in the financial markets.

As interesting as this phenomenon is, what really caught my eye is the reporting. According to the article, “All of the traders spoke on the condition of anonymity, because they did not see any personal gain in speaking publicly.”

Except for people seeking to sway public opinion or would-be experts building their brands, why should anyone ever speak to a journalist on the record? Yet so many do.

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The Dark Lining of Cloud Computing: A Response to Jonathan Zittrain

Posted on July 20, 2009 | Leave a comment

In his New York Times Op-Ed today, Jonathan Zittrain raises valid concerns about the risks to users of cloud-based computing services, including betrayal, lock-in and limited privacy protections. And his recommendations for addressing those weaknesses are sound. “But,” he writes, “the most difficult challenge–both to grasp and to solve–of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate.”

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
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Are Facebook and the iPhone platforms that will cripple innovation with the restrictions they impose on developers? To a degree the limits to innovation Zittrain cites are real; but innovation is but one value offered by those companies, which are as much marketing channels as they are platforms. Low-cost marketing is another. And what Apple and Facebook may limit in the former dimension, they may compensate for–at least in the minds of some developers–in the other.

Zittrain’s idea that the “legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you” is true, but it doesn’t reckon that today many businesses see marketing challenges at least as compelling as technological ones. With consumer technology prices on a relentlessly downward march, business models depend on mass distribution. Low-cost marketing is essential and many are willing to trade away some freedom to innovate for cheaper marketing.

A company that seeks to play a leadership role as a platform provider will need to innovate and foster innovation among its partners and developers, or else it will become irrelevant over time. As Annabelle Gawer and Michael Cusumano wrote in “Platform Leadership,” their study of the platform phenomenon at companies such as Intel, Microsoft and Cisco in the technology industry, “Platform leaders and complementary innovators have great incentives to cooperate … because their combined efforts can increase the potential size of the pie for everyone.” (P.6)

In technology, too, there can be declining returns to innovation. At the dawn of the era of microprocessors, the focus of competition and innovation was on hardware architecture. The fact that in the PC world competition narrowed to a small handful of hardware players may have slowed innovation (this is debatable) but it allowed those players to achieve economies of scale and allowed the rest of the ecosystem to enjoy the benefits of a near-commodity platform. Competition-driven innovation moved up the stack to software.

Competition was fierce on the lower level of the software stack–the operating system–until things settled down, competitors largely fell away and the market consolidated to a handful of players. Competition and innovation once again moved up the stack to applications.

Google’s announcement that it intends to release a general-purpose operating system isn’t so much an attempt to compete in the operating system market but rather to seal the fate of operating systems as a commodity, and shift the focus of innovation to the cloud, where it hopes to become a platform leader. It and the others will only succeed, however, if they foster enough innovation to grow the markets they are playing in.

Should the market leaders act as a drag on innovation, new arrivals will surely emerge with innovations that will lead the market forward.

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If You Need Flanges

Posted on July 17, 2009 | Leave a comment

Folks, I don’t know about this as a business opportunity, but it’s worth considering as a supplier of flanges. Just received it this morning.

Welcome,

If you have access to a computer, and have up to three hours spare time per-week. you can get paid, would you like to work part or full time online, and get paid weekly? If yes,then please read carefully.
_____________________________________________________________________
ABOUT US
______________________________________________________________________
Established in 2001, Dalian Bolong Trade & Product is a specialized manufacturer of forged flanges. Our company located in the beautiful coastal city of Dalian and is only eight kilometers away from Dalian Port. So the advantage of this proximity can cut down on shipping costs for you.
______________________________________________________________________
JOB POSITION
_______________________________________________________________________
We are currently seeking part or full time employees for our ever-growing Accounts Receivable Department. Through extensive demographic research, we have discovered a wealth of untapped human resources that, for one reason or another, need the freedom to work from home. If this sounds like you, please read on, and consider becoming part of our company family.
Note that no form of investment of is needed from you and this job will take only 1-3 hours of your time per week.
______________________________________________________________________
JOB RESPONSIBILITY
_______________________________________________________________________
The position of Accounts Receivable officer entails the following duties: coordinate payments from our clients, receive payments which come in form of certified checks or united states postal money orders, process payments at your local bank, and forward 90% of funds received to the proper branch office, as instructed. The remaining 10% is your wage. Since this position is need-based, you will have plenty of free time while enjoying a good income.
_______________________________________________________________________
REMUNERATION
_______________________________________________________________________
Every assignment in form of payment received from clients, you’re entitled to 10% which excludes the cost of processing western union to any regional office accountant ________________________________________________________________________
INTERESTED APPLICANTS (HOW TO APPLY)
________________________________________________________________________
Interested applicants should reply with full name, full residential address, phone numbers, and email address, so that one of our Human Resource Managers can contact you through email, with an approval letter if the management decides youre a successful candidate. Please specify the best way to contact you in your reply email.
We appreciate your interest in Dalian Bolong Trade & Product Co. Ltd.
Ms Yu, Qianqian
General Manager,
Dalian Bolong Trade & Product Co. Ltd
42-1-1 Fanglin Park, Xinan Rd.,
Ganjingzi, Dalian, Liaoning
China 116033
Tel: (86 411) 8671 9027
Fax: (86 411) 8671 9027

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