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| "I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
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ACM: Ubiquity - Where the Algorithm Meets the Electronics |
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| Topic: Technology |
10:08 pm EDT, Apr 30, 2002 |
Prabhakar Raghavan, CTO at Verity, Inc., on building a secure foundation for information retrieval. On the Web: a few tens of TBytes. In enterprises: many orders of magnitude more than that. The technical challenges inside companies are very different from those for the Web. The primary factor is what we call "fine-grained security." In summary, fine-grained security is the ability to interlace search with security at the document and individual levels. A huge technical challenge! Another challenge is the diverse types of documents. I'll describe some of the framework for the solution ... Security is every bit as important as searching. This aspect of secure search is the foundation from which we build up deeper functionality ... [What] I think really is the harbinger of the future, is to invoke ideas from social network theory. Prabhakar Raghavan gave the most recent talk in the Dertouzos Lecturer Series, which I attended. In this interview, he's talking about some of the same topics. Worth reading (and thinking about). At the interface between academia and industry, the first few bits and pieces of a solution are starting to come together. At least people are now thinking about the right problems ... Additionally, Raghavan discusses his experiences working at IBM's Almaden laboratory. As I read this section, I was thinking about the future impact of IBM's recent sale of part (most?) of this lab to Hitachi. (See my recent log entry for more details.) ACM: Ubiquity - Where the Algorithm Meets the Electronics |
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washingtonpost.com: Rep. Goodlatte Calls For |
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| Topic: Society |
3:47 am EDT, Apr 25, 2002 |
Legislators and law enforcers will have to fight and win a "war" against online piracy in order for the digital marketplace to have any chance of realizing its full potential. "This war against piracy must be waged on several different fronts, including the commitment of adequate resources to law enforcement, the cooperation of various industry players, and the education of consumers. Only when the war against piracy is effectively waged and won, will businesses and consumers move in significant numbers to the online marketplace. [Copyright piracy] is growing exponentially with billions of unauthorized music downloads per month. Until we can stop the growth of piracy online, it will be difficult to truly create a marketplace that will work for digital online content." More silliness ... Obviously this guy didn't get the memo about cutting back on the "war" metaphors. These statements are so clearly baseless as to be meaningless. Billions per month, and growing exponentially? So in a few months, we'll have 100 trillion downloads per month? I think not. But who cares, any way? Why doesn't anyone recognize the success stories? The Wall Street Journal has a profitable online subscription service. Lexis-Nexis is popular and has been sustainable over a long period of time. The IEEE has a successful online library. Clearly there are no overwhelming technical challenges to running a successful business selling digital online content. Decius: This is the first time I've seen Goodlatte act completely clueless on a tech issue. washingtonpost.com: Rep. Goodlatte Calls For |
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MCI offers unlimited calls |
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| Topic: Economics |
11:39 pm EDT, Apr 16, 2002 |
MCI unveiled a plan Monday that for the first time gives residential customers unlimited local, local toll and long-distance calls for $50 a month. The goal is to gain local market share. MCI is heavily in debt and under SEC investigation. Analysts say the plan is proof of big changes in the way phone companies bill. "We are moving to a flat rate, or subscription-based, all-you-can-eat world." How's this for a trick? Since billable minutes are falling off fast for all the carriers, MCI pondered, "Right now, the market wants to see growth in the number of minutes used. How can we get customers to make more LD calls?" and came up with the reply, "Let's go flat rate!" So they charge each customer a little more than the average one pays already, and figure they break even financially, but they get to say "minutes are up 15% this quarter!" in the next report. One risk (which they must have foreseen) is that only the chattiest of their customers will take them up on the offer, and revenues will still go down even as minutes stabilize or climb up. So long term, it still doesn't pay the bills, but it could make for some nice weasel-words in the next quarterly report ... According to a Knight-Ridder wire story, MCI's plan is a reply to a similar deal just announced by AT&T. MCI's marketing director: "It was important for us to come out as the first nationwide local phone company. We also wanted to step out of the price-driven commodity market of long-distance." Analysts say that if customers respond, then voice service will quickly evolve into an (unprofitable) all-flat-rate business. The above is from JLM. I'll add that research has shown that consumers will pay more in aggregate for flat rate services then for metered services. I won't argue the likely reasons for such a decision, other than to say that this sort of pricing scheme makes the most sense in an environment where most long distance consumers are individuals and not businesses. I'm not sure what the current break down actually is. However, one wonders why they can't simply offer flat rate residential long distance and metered commercial long distance. The market is used to having different prices for local phone services already. MCI offers unlimited calls |
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HBS Publishing: Harvard Business Review - April 2002 HBR Abstract : Wealth Happens |
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| Topic: Society |
3:58 pm EDT, Apr 15, 2002 |
A 5 page article in the April 2002 issue of Harvard Business Review explains it all: The basic inequality in wealth distribution seen in most societies may have little to do with differences in the backgrounds and talents of their citizens. Instead, the disparity appears to be something akin to a law of economic life that emerges naturally as an organizational feature of a network. Bouchaud and Mezard found that if investment returns grow sufficiently volatile, they can completely overwhelm the natural diffusion of wealth generated by transactions. In such a case, an economy can suddenly reach a tipping point, and wealth, instead of being held by a small minority, will condense into the pockets of a mere handful of super-rich robber barons. If we are not yet at the End of History, are we at least approaching the End of Economics? HBS Publishing: Harvard Business Review - April 2002 HBR Abstract : Wealth Happens |
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Telecoms Stocks Fall as Hopes Dashed |
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| Topic: Economics |
12:37 pm EDT, Apr 10, 2002 |
The hard hit telecom sector took another battering on Tuesday as Verizon ... warned there would be no growth in revenues ... [From Bloomberg, Reuters: What's more, Verizon said it doesn't expect improvement in revenue growth in the near term. It wasn't more specific.] ... Analysts warned investors to brace themselves for more bad news. "First quarter results are expected to remain depressed across all companies in the telecom sector." SoundView lowered earnings estimates for BellSouth, citing Argentina and Venezuela; stock loses 7% to hit 4 year low. ... Verizon will take a $2.5B charge and does not expect growth; stock down 3%. WorldCom promises to cut capex but still loses over 10%. SBC loses 4.5%, Sprint 3%, Quest 3%, Vodafone 3.5%, Nokia and Alcatel down. BT will cut 18,000 jobs and promises to find a way to pay off $14B in debt. Nortel maxes out its credit line for another $1.9B after banks decline to increase its limit; stock is down 51% this year. Analyst: "Nortel has sufficient resources to survive the downturn; the odds of a Nortel bankruptcy are less than 10%." ... The telecoms sector continued to get slammed as investors worry that the slowdown may have more to do with industry fundamentals than with the economy. ... "People were thinking that the slowdown in the revenues and the lines were recession-related. (But) upon closer [inspection], they're starting to focus in on the likely secular declines in the revenue growth coming out of the basic local services companies. It really shouldn't come as a big surprise. The basic telecommunications service companies are facing some very challenging fundamentals." Telecoms Stocks Fall as Hopes Dashed |
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| Topic: Music |
3:12 am EDT, Apr 9, 2002 |
This essay resounds profoundly with a lot of my recent thoughts on music. Lanier has some really sharp insite here. Read this! Where did the music go? |
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Google's Toughest Search Is for a Business Model |
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| Topic: Economics |
1:34 pm EDT, Apr 8, 2002 |
...[Google] spent nothing to advertise their site and cut very few deals with other sites. ... Silicon Valley's hottest private company, one deluged with 1,000 résumés a day. .... has its share of challenges. ... the leader in searching Web pages, but a tiny force in advertising ... But the bigger question is whether Google has the scale to capture a viable share of the search advertising market. In other words, can Google create a business model even remotely as good as its technology? Analyst: "The days of investing in Web sites we love are over. People rave about Google. But as a business, it will take an awful lot for them to catch up to [competitors]." Founders: if they devote themselves to improving technology, users and advertisers will follow. "We have pride that we are building a service that is really important to the world and really successful for the long term." ... The company is so infatuated with its technical prowess and sense of destiny that it has developed a reputation as being difficult to deal with. "Serge and Larry are very blunt and very cocky. They honestly believe they can do a better job than other people, and they don't have any hesitation in saying that." Google's CEO: "I think you need to win, but you are better off winning softly." ... The biggest challenge is balancing Google's increasing popularity with the needs and demands of the sites for which it provides search technology. ... But Google does not yet appear to have sufficient clout with some of the bigger sites. "At the end of the day, Google is becoming more of a competitor to Microsoft and MSN. We want to work with partners who don't compete with us." "You have to be careful if you start to smoke your own stuff and believe you are the only one who can build a great search engine." Google's Toughest Search Is for a Business Model |
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Spotlight Falls on Adelphia Cable |
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| Topic: Economics |
12:05 pm EST, Apr 3, 2002 |
Talk about a high-performance engine! Adelphia should get out of the communications infrastructure business and start doing PR full time! At 7:11 pm on Tuesday, this story hit the AP wire: A shareholder lawsuit accused Adelphia of misleading stockholders about its financial condition by failing to disclose billions of dollars of off-balance-sheet debt ... accusing the company ... of issuing misleading statements. ... stock dropped from $20.39 on 3/26 to $13.12 on 4/1 to $11.83 on 4/2 ... incurred off-balance-sheet debt of $2.3B ... announced Monday its annual 10-K financial report was being delayed to review accounting for the debt. Understandably, this news must have ruffled feathers at the company. So, after some poor soul no doubt spent a long night at the office, this story hits the wire at 12:47 am Wednesday morning: Cable Company Keeps Small - Town Touch Adelphia may be the sixth-biggest cable television company in the country, but founder John Rigas and family stay close to their roots in rural Coudersport, Pa., where Adelphia began 50 years ago as a $300 venture ... The company has kept its headquarters in Coudersport, about 70 miles north of State College near the New York border, where Rigas, his sons and their families are familiar faces. A town resident said: "The sons grew up here, they went to high school with us Their homes are right here. If we pass on the street, we say hello. ... John Rigas came to my dad's funeral and two of his sons came. That's the kind of community it is." ... gradually built their community antenna association into a larger cable operation ... They named their company "Adelphia," Greek for "brothers." ... branched out into sports properties ... John Rigas reached a handshake deal to buy the Pittsburgh Pirates ... only to have a California businessman outbid him ... family is involved in local affairs ... a member of the Rotary Club ... and the local hospital advisory committee .... It's too bad this strategy won't work for Global Crossing ... but it'd be a hard sell to convince people that a firm with the word "Global" in its name has any of sort of small-town charm. Spotlight Falls on Adelphia Cable |
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| Topic: Current Events |
9:15 pm EDT, Oct 13, 2001 |
"[...] the Edge community can mount a serious conversation about the catastrophic events of the past week that might do some good. " Respondents include Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Freeman Dyson, Richard Dawkins, David Farber, Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff, Bruce Sterling, and many others. This is a very good collection of different views from across the political spectrum. In general, edge.org is a fairly good source for "what the technocracy thinks." Edge 89 |
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