broadstuff

...Larry Ellison weighs in, on the WSJ over here:

Ellison spoke for a few minutes about Oracle and his vision for the company before opening the floor to questions. The first one: What is Oracle doing about cloud computing? Ellison smirked and then went off one what might be the funniest ten minutes in analyst-meeting history.

Here’s a slightly-edited excerpt:

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

“We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.”

Couldn't have said it better........this is a classic example of semantic stretch, a term being pushed so far it ceases to have any meaning. The interesting thing is how far its gone so fast, the Wikipedia entry still tries to differentiate between Cloud, Grid, PaaS (a venerable 7 months old now) etc but the term today seems to cover any service you can think of over the net.

Update - Microsoft's Craig Mundie interviewed on MIT Review takes the industry line....but calls it a Composite Platform.

From Silicon Alley Insider:

Forrester Research says the financial sector's troubled firms (Lehman, Merrill, Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie, Freddie) all together equal about 2% of tech spending. Given Forrester sizes the US tech market at $572 billion, that's about $11.4 billion dollars at risk.

That 2% puts things into perspective, though the knock on effects would make it bigger than just the immediately effected business, as SAI goes on to note quote Forrester CEO George Colony:

The biggest risk to the tech market comes, not from the Wall Street collapse, but from a collateral U.S. recession. Forrester expects a mild recession in the U.S. and Europe lasting through Q3 and Q4 of 2008, and Q1 of 2009. While tech spending grew 8% in the U.S. in 2007, we are forecasting tech purchases to be up 5% in 2008, and up 6% in 2009.

SAI notes that the government bailouts are keeping some of those firms and their billions of dollars in tech spending alive. And even in death banks like Lehman and Merill spur Wall Street IT spending. Colony again:

the rigors of mergers and integration could also be drivers of new tech spending. Bank of America, Barclays, and JP Morgan have 36 months of intensive technology integration work ahead -- this will drive professional service, software, and to a lesser extent, hardware spending.

As SAI notes:

Translation: Bank of America took over Merrill, and Barclays bought Lehman's data centers. The work to get technology and enterprise systems like general ledger and human resources under the same umbrella can be a bonanza for tech consulting firms like Accenture (ACN) or HP's (HPQ) EDS.

True, and thats not really a spend that New Tech will see - unless the Enterprise 2.0 movement can persuade these players that there are significant benefits to adopting new technologies during rationalisation.

Sorry, no real conclusions yet, this is just an early datapoint. This is a big thing we are seeing happen, and it will take some time to play out.

Was at a session yesterday for Tech bloggers to meet the Financial Times online team. Two of the other bloggers there have covered it very well already - Patrick Smith at The Wire, and Joanna Geary's live twts at the time (start here and work backwards).

For me there were two very interesting bits of the afternoon - the discussion around the future business models and where the value can be retained by a publisher like the FT, and talking about Alphaville, the online "chatty" bit of the FT offering.

The discussion around value retention was really a discussion around sustainable value add - the view that was emerging yesterday was that - in essence - filtering and adding trysted, believable analysis to a time starved audience was the source of real value. Given that this audience was itself high value, that was the future "sweet spot". I sketched this 2x2 at the time:



(Its a sketch, I want to add nuance to it as I reflect on it, but I think there is something profound - albeit unpalatable to the geek crowd - about it)

The Alphaville offering has fascinated me since it came out, I looked at it for another piece of work we did early this year. As Patrick notes, it has a different feel to the FT proper:

But perhaps the most popular element of Alphaville is the Markets Live blog- an occasional liveblog on market movements that blends real-time share movements, analyst notes, general business news and reader comments.

It’s all written in an irreverent, cheeky but informative manner by Alphaville editor Paul Murphy and senior markets reporter Neil Hume that has proved a hit with readers (you can read old transcripts online).

The blog has its own set of emoticons, such as little tin hats representing dramatic falls in the value of companies that were frequently used last Monday, the worst day of trading since 2001.

It also functions as a livestream of market gossip - you can be plugged into The City without being in The City. As value based lifestreaming goes, that pretty high. But the most interesting thing to me was their note about the rise in popularity of their 12am Lunch Wrap aggregation of the key stories, and its "one minute manageable content" impact. Filtering & Adding Value in action.....

Update - Andy Piper of IBM puts his thoughts down here... he notes an interesting point I' forgotten re Yammer, the TC50 winner:

several of us opined that a solution like Yammer was “never going to work” for internal communications, and the FT team currently exchange a lot of email and use Skype rather than having an internal social software platform.

Yes, that was interesting, as was the FT's experience (as in a few big corps we've worked with) that Skype had taken over the IM role.

Google has filed a patent for connecting phones to a multiplicity of providers (seen on Techcrunch) and letting those phones then negotiate automatically for the best rate in real time. Picture below:



Great idea as a business to execute, and Planet Mobile badly needs someone to play the "Microsoft" role to create a a unifying "mobile OS" and ecosystem, as none of the current incumbents have shown any will or leadership. For "Mobile Web 2.0" or similar to break out, this is a pre-requisite.

But I'd be astounded if they actually get a patent - the amount of prior art in this space must be huge, I have seen these sorts of diagrams and ideas for price negotiation for going on 10 years - and a lot of it within those Telcos themselves. Google must know this, so either the US patenting process is near valueless, or they are making a point.

Still, this should really rattle the cage of the Planet Mobile oligopoly. I guess its sad that it will be replaced by a Google Monopoly, but it seems clear that no one else has the cojones - or cash? - to step up to the mark.

Except Microsoft - given their tenacious defence of their interests in so many other spheres, its interesting that their approach to mobile has been to play within the industry rather than impose a solution. After all, mobile is the next frontier for the OS as well as the browser.

Maybe this will set the Microhares running.....

Imagine the scene down at the Hope & Anchor, watering hole for the entrepreneurial classes:

"Hey - we just got our follow on funding!"

Awesome, Congratutalions, Yays and w00ts in equal measures, drinks are bought, and the regulars settle down to hear the tale.... The CEO takes the floor:

"Yes, it was simple really - we just told all the VC's that there was no alternative, it was fund us or we all go bust, and that there would be total disaster if they didn't."

At that point a grizzled tech blogger coughs and says "But hold on - you guys spent your previous funding like there was no tomorrow, heck you made Boo.com look parsimonious, and you had already flamed out big time"

Scrape of chairs......but the CEO grins and says:

"Yeah, I know - but they said no worries, let bygones be bygones, its a new deal and we'll start afresh. Heck, they even valued our assets at the inflated book price we put in the year's year end accounts!"

In the corner, an M&A old soak says "OK, cut to the chase" - how much did they give you and how much of a stake will they take"?

The CEO positively crows:

They gave us the whole 7 yards, and they said they didn't want a stake at all - and in fact they'll guarantee our existing stocks and options at book once the money's in our trousers! And no guys on the board to oversee the spend either.

At this point there is an awed hush round the room, not a w00t is heard....it is impossible for anyone to imagine that dreamlike scenario - full funding with no stake, valued at inflated book prices, the execs allowed to keep their jobs, loot and made whole.

"Who are these VC's whose largesse knows no bounds", someone eventually asks.

"Oh, Capitol Capital", says the CEO "New outfit in the game. Head used to be a CEO, has a big backer in the background beating the bushes for bread - they ran rings round the LP's in the funding drive"

"And who are these dumb LP's and that who fund them?", someone asks, already clutching a biz plan to whiz round and get a snout at this magical trough.

"Oh that - they said don't worry, they'll sort it - they have a fund from a large lump of mom and pop investors and pension funds - and get this, they have to keep on paying into it! Said they'll tell em its for their own good, and they also said they'll get enough to sort out anyone here who needs some cash to bail out their dumber moves"

There were smiles all round as all the entrepreneurs started polishing off their business plans to get some of this wondrous largesse.

Update - I see Fred Wilson has written a similar, albeit more serious piece over here today

Technorati has released its 5th State of the (Blog)Nation report this week. We of course are fascinated by The Money and how it cascades down the Long Tail, (see initial post here) and the main piece on that will be in Day 4 of the report, tomorrow. Day 3 had an interesting table on expenditure on blogging:



What is somewhat interesting is the huge difference in average spend between European and the US & Asian blogs - $2k vs sub $1k. This is all the more intriguing given the extremely low median spend of European blogs. The implication (given that spend is clearly a strong poisson or power law distribution) is that a small number of Euroblogs are spending a fortune compared to both the US and Asian Pro-Blogger and the average euroblogger's pittance.

The piece of value left out here, however, is the time element. The study also shows that 2/3 of bloggers spend c 4 hours+ a week at it, so over a year thats c 200 hours (assuming that one does not blog on vacation), which, at say $50 an hour (c $350 a day, c $70k pa) is an input of c $10k pa. 45% of bloggers do double this, ie a labour input of c $20k pa. Of course, I could be massively overestimating the market value of bloggers, so assume $35k pa and its $5k and $10k respectively - still a far larger input than any of the above material investments.

The reason for this - as TechCrunch notes, success in blogging is not about beautifully crafted writing or erudite knowledge - the quality is nearly all in the quantity:

Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog). The majority of the Top 100 blogs tracked by Technorati post five or more times per day, and a full 43 percent post more than 10 times per day. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the 5,000 blogs ranked lower than 600 post two to four times a day, which is still a serious commitment

Lying down a bit with the stats here allows me to calculate that the average blog post takes roughly an hour therefore, probably a bit less.......(this one, if you are interested, took 29 minutes in which 1 cup of coffee was also produced and consumed)

Every so often the real world intrudes into Geekland - about once a week over the last 2 weeks something about the Credit Crunch surfaces on Techmeme. This week its BoomTown noting that Yahoo is probably soon to swing its axe. (Update - Valleywag via Techmeme said today they will bring in Bain & Co*). Underlying this article is the assumption that online Ad revenues may fall:

according to several sources at Yahoo, for example, top execs are telling some employees that the company is considering options to get itself sized right for an expected slowdown in the advertising market.

Let us repeat that in caps:

OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS, ONLINE AD REVENUES MAY ACTUALLY FALL

Yes, long term they will grow, but most trends go in fits and starts. And the biggst financial crisis since 1929 will have an impact on advertising, its an early cut spend in many sectors.

A few weeks ago we made a similar aside to the startups at Seedcamp when we saw that nearly all their plans had Ad revenue underpinning it. Our research into the Online Ad market was already pointing to a slowdown in Online Ad growth versus previous assumptions, but the events of the last 2 weels change that picture substantially - we now believe there is a very real chance it may actually drop - y'know, like in 2001.

We would also make another prediction now - that the amount of funding propping up FreeConomic models will start to dry up, simply because as we move into more straightened circumstances the chance of a liquidity event will reduce, and the runway needed to fly such kites will lengthen. Its no accident Marc Andreessen felt he had to get his war chest before nuclear winter set in. The Web 2.0 kids probably don't recall what San Fran's South of Market area was like in 2002 - a wino wasteland. There is an increasing possibility that it will look the same by 2010.

Enough of the doom 'n gloom, I hear you say - what should we do?

So here are some thoughts based on surviving (or not) the first time round:

- Find real customers with real money. "Free" obscures things - if all this Web 2.0 gear is so good, why does it have to be given away for free? (Answer - because Google subsidises their stuff with Ad revenues. Get off that pitch)

- Get the burn rate right down

Chase the cash and keep the costs down - not exactly rocket science then (though you'd be surprised how many tech Co's build what they want rather than what customers will buy).

But wait, there's some nuance here. Real customers are people who derive sufficient value from your services to give you money. If you can't work out how they get that value from you, you ain't got a service that will survive.

A second thing is to choose your market. Everyone says go after big markets, but in Hard Times there are some more nuances:

- Find customers in industries where there is a large surplus (and that usually excludes very competitive markets), and/or


- Find customers in industries where there is rapid growth.

Trying to flog stuff in declining markets with low profitability is a hiding to nothing.

Another thing that is often said is to Do Something Hard. In tough times we'd add that its more important to pick a good market first, and just try and Do Something Well

*You know you are Olde Media if you are bringing in one of the Big 3 Strategic houses for rationalisation

....in the heart of our database - we have lost all todays and yesterdays graphics and yesterdays posts until we can rebuild tonight.

Update - rollback complete as of 8 pm.

Last Thursday we were travelling back from British Telecoms R&D labs, and the conversation turned naturally (as it does) to the rise of Machine to Machine (m2m) comms and its impact in the Digital Home - both subjects that we have done client work and given talks on in the past.

Anyway,we hypothesized about the rise of the Digital Butler and other functions in the Digital Home workflow including the Digital Housekeeper - computer based housekeeper that took over a lot of the admin tasks in running a busy home, those myriad of little details that slip between cracks, especially in busy houses infested with children, animals and other chaos inducing agents.

However, as we are shortly to do a presentation on these things, but to non techies, we were wondering how to make this more tangible - And so was born Mrs Fridge the housekeeper. They also say a picture tells a thousand words, and here it is:



Mrs Fridge is an AI, but you can easily interact with her avatar on Facebot, the universal SocBotNet that makes it easy to set up, network and manage your bots. You can keep up to date and communicate with Mrs Fridge on your iPhone while travelling, and keep up with the rest of the household gossip (Mr Roomba is stuck under the hall umbrella stand again). But to communicate with each other however, a short form system that has proved more useful is Critter, a microbotblog service that allows unified comm ingress and egress (seen here as a feed on Facebot) which also allows you to see the ongoing conversations with Jeeves the e-Butler, the Ocado grocery delivery system and that persistent Mr ExpressBooker who keeps on trying to sell rail tickets because Mrs Fridge once did the family holiday booking when Jeeves came over poorly with a virus....

And just so you know this is coming - I noticed today that Cisco and Whirlpool are getting together to:

...develop a complete line of networked home solutions stocked with Internet-ready products and services, which are now only prototypes. Cisco launched its Internet home platform at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week.

Mrs Fridge looks like she's getting an upgrade.....

A wireless and removable Web tablet resides in the refrigerator door. You can use it as a calendar, or to check e-mail, order groceries, or leave notes for other household members. Kiss those magnets and cluttered sticky notes goodbye.

.....at the Consumer Electronics Show. We expect Mrs Fridge will be paying a virtual visit next year when they get the robofeeds sorted out. (We've looked at these tablet services, a fridge door is too small annd the i/o is lousy in our view - its more likely to be a small noteboard sized wall mounted device like todays photodisplays, or just displayed on the kitchen PC)

In all seriousness though, this whole area is non trivial - just working through the udse cases of Mrs Fridge shows the huge gaps in technology today, and what has to be solved to let a system like this work. Take the use case of knowing what food is in the house - the interplay between labelling, sensors, stock control, semantic systems, complex transactions etc is quite considerable. Its for this reason that home automation has tended to start in high value (entertainment) or high importance (health and security) systems.

I'd better go now and set Mr Roomba free......

Other news of the day - you can analyse Facebook profiles to see if people are narcissists. Laura Buffardi, doctoral student in psychology, and associate professor W. Keith Campbell from the University of Georgia note:

Not everyone who uses Facebook is a narcissist. "We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others," said Buffardi.

They gave personality questionnaires to nearly 130 Facebook users, analyzed the content of the pages and had untrained strangers view the pages and rate their impression of the owner's narcissism.

The researchers found that the number of Facebook friends and wallposts that individuals have on their profile pages correlates with narcissism. Buffardi said this is consistent with how narcissists behave in the real-world, with numerous yet shallow relationships. Narcissists are also more likely to choose glamorous, self-promoting pictures for their main profile photos, she said, while others are more likely to use snapshots.

Two immediate thoughts of course:

- It won't just be Facebook - this behaviour is visible on any social network, Twitter is becoming increasingly notorious

- The emerging science of social graphology will be able to (is already able to in fact) analyse a lot more than just narcissism.

A Twitter narcissm index would be very amusing - can't be that hard to do methinks - measure followed, measure posts, scrape blog & analyse memes...... I suspect we all know the answers anyway