Tech News Stop - Sharing by Wasim Akhtar

::::StrayBoots CEO Discusses Making $12 Per Game, And Itâ€™s Only On SMS!::::

<div class="custm_img_blk"><img src="http://www.techgig.com/files/photo_1336960452_temp.jpg" border="0" width="200" height="150" align="left" /></div>Very rarely do we see gaming startups launch on the rather limited platform of SMS. Mobile games are all about the graphics, the functionality, and the ability to leverage the very best of technology through an app. But StrayBoots, a real-world scavenger hunt via text, has managed to generate $200,000 in revenue over the past 12 months, with nearly 50,000 paying customers.Oh, and did I mention that it’s all through SMS?The margins must be incredible, considering that CEO Avi Millman explained that each two- to three-hour scavenger hunt costs the user between $6 and $12 and it’s currently only available on one phone per game.The company also has deals in place with Time Out, Serious Eats, MyCityWay, and Leisure Pass North America, wherein the partnerships will create co-branded nightlife and food games that are to be promoted by both parties.It works rather simply: just go to the StrayBoots website and choose a city and a game category, like restaurants or museums. You’ll then be emailed a code for your game, and once you’re in the specified starting point, just text the code in to StrayBoots. You can go at whatever pace you’d like, and play on a team, against a team, or by yourself.The game currently supports walking tours in the following cities: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Washington D.C., Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Portland, San Diego, and the U.K.iOS and Android apps are in the works.

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::::Googleâ€™s head of news: Newspapers are the new Yahoo::::

<div class="custm_img_blk"><img src="http://www.techgig.com/files/photo_1336960302_temp.png" border="0" align="left" /></div><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">Google has a somewhat tense relationship with the traditional newspaper industry, since publishers like News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch still believe it is <span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">depriving them of revenue by “stealing” their content and aggregating it at Google News. So you might think that Google’s head of news products, Richard Gingras, would try to smooth over any ruffled feathers when talking about the future of news. He did the opposite in a recent talk at Harvard, however — <span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">comparing newspapers to old-fashioned internet portals like Yahoo, and suggesting that unless media companies can adapt to the Web rather than fighting it, they are likely doomed.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">We weren’t at the Gingras event, which was hosted by the Nieman Foundation, but Matt Stempeck of MIT’s Center for Civic Media was there, and he <span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">live-blogged the entire thing on the Center’s website (his original notes <span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">are posted here). Although these are not direct quotes, we’ve taken the liberty of highlighting some of the comments that Gingras made on a number of important topics, from the tradeoff inherent in paywalls to the distraction of iPad apps and the dangers of innovating too slowly.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px"><span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">On how newspapers got to where they are:<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">We look back at the 40 golden years of newspaper profitability as if things had been structured that way forever. But these four decades were triggered by an earlier media disruption: television. The rise of television advertising caused a contraction in the newspaper business, where major metropolitan markets went from supporting 4-5 newspapers to 1-2 papers. The limited number of remaining companies allowed monopolitistic pricing. This wealth was created by disruption, and what disruption gives, it taketh away.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">Gingras says that the previous dominance that newspapers enjoyed was due primarily to geography, and to some degree demographic targeting. Now, thanks to the Web, he says we are seeing “a disaggregation of content flows as well as advertising.” <span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">Like media theorist Clay Shirky, the Google executive argues that one of the big problems for newspapers is that they always depended on “cross-subsidization” of topics — so the classified ads and the lifestyle section paid for the foreign reporting. Now, he says “we have blogs focusing on these niches alone, with a much keener sense of commercialization.”<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px"><span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">On whether journalism is better or worse:<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">The pace of technological change will not abate, and to think of our current time as a transition between two eras, rather than a continuum of change, is a mistake. There has been tremendous disruption in journalism, but there are upsides: everyone has a printing press, there are no gatekeepers [or at least new gatekeepers], and journalism can and will be better than in the past.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px"><span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">On the iPad as the savior of journalism:<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">[The iPad is] a fatal distraction for media companies. Too many publishers looked at the tablet as the road home to their magazine format, subscription model, and expensive full-page ads. The format of a single device does not change the fundamental ecosystem underneath it, and this shiny tablet has taken media companies’ eyes off of the ball.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">Jason Pontin, publisher of MIT’s <span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">Technology Review, made a similar point in a recent post in which he described how unsatisfying the magazine’s apps were, and <span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">how he is giving up the “walled garden” approach and moving towards a Web-native model.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px"><span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">On how newspapers are like the old Web portals:<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">Gingras doesn’t believe the vertical model of a newspaper makes sense going forward. He compares the metropolitan newspapers’ all-things to all-people product to content portals for specific communities. This strategy doesn’t make sense given the possibilities. Yahoo!’s initial success was as a portal. But portals have disappeared online as consumers have learned to navigate the web on their own and found the niche sites they love.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px"><span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">On whether paywalls are the answer:<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">Some publishers say, “They bought it before, they’ll buy it again,” or “We need to get people back into the habit of paying for news.” But consumers never did pay the true costs. The Wall Street Journal pulls their paywall off because it publishes information that is perceived to have high value and is written for business audiences, whose subscriptions are paid for by their employers. News companies must disambiguate their content and business models and devolve from the generalist approach, which is hemmoraging both readers and revenue.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">The whole interview is worth reading, because Gingras doesn’t just criticize newspapers and other traditional media for being old and slow — he has some concrete tips for how they can benefit from the disruption the Web has caused, including a suggestion that newspapers consider <span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">building on a single story or topic page, Wikipedia-style, instead of just publishing story after story on a subject with different URLs and different information (he provided<span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">some other thoughts at a recent Google-sponsored journalism event).<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">For Gingras, the bottom line is that if newspapers can’t adapt to changing market conditions and business models, they will become classic victims of author Clay Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma.” As he put it:<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">When the net blossomed in the 90′s, why didn’t newspapers respond? Because classified ads were a cash-cow and CEOs were responsible to Wall Street, so few had the courage to see Craigslist as a threat and blow up their cash-cow. And that is the Innovator’s Dilemma. The giants won’t eat their young. The Ben Huh’s have the advantage of a very fresh slate.

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::::Big data: The quick and the dead::::

<div class="custm_img_blk"><img src="http://www.techgig.com/files/photo_1336960203_temp.jpg" border="0" align="left" /></div><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">The IT hype machine has everyone jumping on the big data bandwagon. Consultants are making millions helping companies search for nuggets of insight in loosely related data and the hardware industry is enjoying a mini-boom as more data than ever is being saved and more storage and computing power is being sold to process it.<h2 style="margin-top: 27px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">Why bigger doesn’t always means better</h2><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">At the center of much of the discussion is Hadoop. This confusing collection of distributed computing technology may be open source, but it’s neither cheap nor friendly despite the cute elephant logo. In fact, Hadoop and big data seem like the dream ticket for the vendors of big storage and big iron, many of whom have made expensive acquisitions to get into this lucrative market.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">But before we start saving every scrap of data in the enterprise for fear that we will miss a nugget of insight, shouldn’t we focus on what we already have? Surely, the real goal is to enable more people in the company to do more with their existing data before adding new data of undetermined relevance and quality? Perhaps it makes more sense to get off the big data bandwagon and focus on empowering the business user to use the data that they’ve already got more effectively — not feed the elephant and its ecosystem of hangers on.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">Often, the big data discussion is framed by the implied premise that bigger is better and that adding more data will naturally produce insights. Should you buy into the hype? Big data projects come with big investments in complex computing systems and the specialized skills to make them go. Worse, they are burdened by notoriously long deployment schedules and poor performance.<h2 style="margin-top: 27px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">You don’t need more dead data</h2><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">Maybe some huge enterprises and government departments do need big data, but what about the rest of us? Can collecting more data help? Perhaps, but you must first answer: Am I getting useful, <span style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent">timely answers from the data I already have. Do I have disciplines in place to operationalize insights and measure their impact on the business? Sadly, if the answer is no, you are not alone. According to a recent study by Freeform Dynamics, only 15 percent of enterprises feel they fully exploit traditional database information for decision making.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">It seems that most of the data already stored for analysis is going underutilized. To the point, Bill Inmon, father of the data warehouse, claims that 95 percent of data in a warehouse is “dormant.” Will adding terabytes or petabytes of unstructured data to your already underutilized data warehouse change this? Probably not. In fact, there’s a good chance that it will make dormant data, dead data.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">What companies need is not dormant or dead data. They need data that helps them gain operational insights to make their existing business run better. They need data that empowers their business users to be more creative and productive. They need live “quick” data not dormant or dead data.  If this makes sense to you, how do you get there?<h2 style="margin-top: 27px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">End big, but start small</h2><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">First, take stock of what you already have: Not just data but also knowledge and skills. Select a project where you can demonstrate incremental improvement with existing resources. If you need to hire, think business analyst, not technologist, because a dollar spent answering a business question is an investment; one spent on specialized IT skills to support the process is sunk cost.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">Second, consider more agile off-the-shelf tools that will allow you to think big, but start small and scale fast. Think friendlier tools, accessible to your existing staff.  This approach will deliver more business insight today and many such tools scale well unless tested against the most extreme big data problems. The solution should allow intuitive use by the business manager with extensibility to support more complex mining by an experienced analyst. Knowledge of the underlying data structure or processing platform should not be necessary.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">The analytics engine should run on standard servers with no proprietary hardware or specialized configurations, database schemas or tuning required to achieve the required performance. And because loading data into the analytics database can become your most time consuming effort, connections to your data sources should be based on industry standards and designed to greatly simplify data load from multiple formats.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">Finally, adopt an agile, iterative approach – don’t go big bang on big data. Successful analytics initiatives are based on an ongoing dialog with the data meaning that a set of questions is asked the answers to which set up the next round of discovery. With each cycle more is understood about what data present, what is relevant, what needs to be added and how much history is worthwhile to add. Rapid time-to-answer is the most critical factor in harvesting the value from your data—big or small.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">Maybe big data analytics will someday become a must-have for every business, but don’t be persuaded that this is the case now just because management consultants and major vendors are throwing millions of dollars at “What are you missing by not using big data analytics?” messaging. In all likelihood, you’re not missing anything and your time and money are better spent putting your existing data in the hands of more business users and giving them the tools to do deeper and faster analytics now.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border-width: 0px; padding: 0px">One thing that evolution shows us is that small, agile species tend to do better than large, specialized species. Maybe we should apply the same thinking to our data?

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::::Where To Now For Yahoo? Thompson Out, Loeb & Co In::::

<img src="http://www.techgig.com/files/photo_1336960003_temp.jpg" border="0" alt="Image" width="300" height="200" align="left" />Over the weekend, Yahoo!'s embattled CEO Scott Thompson finally did the honorable thing andstood down. Ex-President of News Corp's Fox Interactive Media division, Ross Levinsohn, has been named interim Chief Executive Officer. Hedge fund shareholder Daniel Loeb - whose firm Third Point owned 5.8% of Yahoo - and his three cronies have effectively won their long-running battle for seats on the Yahoo! board. The board also has a new chairman: Fred Amoroso, the ex-CEO of digital entertainment company Rovi. Amoroso only joined Yahoo's board in February and is said to be "one of Silicon Valley's most enthusiastic proponents of patent warfare."<div class="asset-body" style="clear: both; text-align: left; padding: 0px; margin: 0px">So now that Daniel Loeb has gotten his way, what can we expect from Yahoo in the coming months? Clearly more patents, if Amoroso's appointment is anything to go by. But Loeb had an agenda, too...</div><div id="more" class="asset-more" style="clear: both; text-align: left; padding: 0px; margin: 0px">Loeb ran a website called Value Yahoo, which at time of writing is down with a server error. The website promoted the views of Loeb and three other board-seeking Yahoo! shareholders: Harry Wilson (who specializes in corporate restructurings and turnarounds), Michael Wolf (ex-President and COO of MTV Networks) and Jeff Zucker (the one who didn't get appointed; he was ex-President and CEO of NBC Universal). Collectively, these four men called themselves "The Shareholder Slate."<img src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/files/value_yahoo_logo.jpg" border="0" />The Shareholder Slate is only interested in one thing: increasing Yahoo!'s share price in order to make a buck. Loeb and co talk about "increasing value," but they are referring to monetary value. This isn't about creating "societal value," as Henry Blodget described Mark Zuckerberg's mission at Facebook.<h2 style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.2em; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px">Loeb & Co's Vision For Yahoo!</h2>Plainly put, Loeb and his partners want to optimize Yahoo!'s assets. Their main complaint with Thompson was that he didn't do enough with Yahoo!'s Asian interests. In particular Yahoo! currently owns 42 percent of Alibaba, a Chinese B2B e-commerce company. Alibaba connects Chinese manufacturers to companies around the world looking for suppliers. According to Loeb and co, Alibaba is worth $35 billion and has "significant growth potential." Specifically, they think it will help drive Yahoo!'s share price upwards: "a 20 percent increase in the value of Alibaba would drive almost $2.00 in value per Yahoo! share."On its Agenda page, Loeb and co outlined their desire to implement "significant organizational changes to strategically allocate capital and talent toward Yahoo!’s greatest strengths and brightest opportunities." Its list of 9 initiatives is wide-ranging - and rather vague. For example, they want Yahoo! to grow in the video and mobile segments; which would be in the strategic plan of just about any media company you could name these days.<h2 style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.2em; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px">How Did Scott Thompson's Strategic Plan Differ From Loeb's?</h2>At his first earnings call last month, Yahoo! CEO Scott Thompson talked about reducing Yahoo's size and becoming more focused on its core business. He remarked that Yahoo! would be "doing away with everything that does not contribute to its core business of profit-driving ads and e-commerce." He went on to say that Yahoo will get smaller by consolidating its various platforms and jettisoning 50 properties. Yahoo! has already cut 2,000 jobs in order to reduce costs and streamline the business.<img src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/files/yahoo_ceo_thompson_0.jpg" border="0" />So it seems like Thompson had a narrower strategic focus and was more intent on cost-cutting. He also wanted to find new revenue by aggressively licensing Yahoo's intellectual property, a plan he put into place in March by suing Facebook for alleged patent violations.Patents aren't mentioned at all on Loeb's website, however new chairman Fred Amoroso will likely push for more legal maneuvers. What can we expect of new interim CEO Ross Levinsohn? Even though he has a proven track record as a leader in Internet corporations, it's likely his role will be focused on steadying the ship while Amaroso and Loeb agree on the new strategic direction for Yahoo. Loeb has been plotting for many months to steer the Yahoo ship into higher stock price waters; now it looks like he will get an opportunity to do that.<h2 style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.2em; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px">Where To Now For Yahoo?</h2>I'm not entirely convinced that Daniel Loeb's motivations are good for Yahoo! long term. They seem more focused on making money for Wall Street shareholders, than returning Yahoo to its roots of being a true innovative force on the Web.However, the Value Yahoo website and its suggested solutions for Yahoo! do at least demonstrate the passion needed to turn Yahoo! around. The Yahoo! board has gone through five CEOs in recent times, so it really is desperate times. Let's see if Loeb and co can turn the beleaguered company around - for the benefit of shareholders, employees and Internet fans in general.</div> 

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::::Facebook IPO has halo effect for venture capitalists::::

<div class="custm_img_blk"><img src="http://www.techgig.com/files/photo_1336959884_temp.jpg" border="0" width="250" height="200" align="left" /></div>For the handful of venture capitalists who backed Facebook in its early days, a huge financial payoff is not the only thing they may be celebrating when the company goes public later this week.In a business in which the best investment opportunities flow to a small number of firms with big reputations, the prestige boost that Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital have gained from their Facebook investments dating back to 2005 and 2006 could pay dividends for years to come."The person, often the firm too, gets that patina," said Lisa Edgar, who tracks a range of venture investors in her work evaluating venture-capital firms for fund-of-funds firm Top Tier Capital Partners. "It perpetuates. There's this deal-flow and network effect."The dynamic is straightforward, but powerful. Entrepreneurs see a firm, or an individual partner, that not only made a great call but now has a special relationship with a company that could help their nascent business. That means that the venture capital firm gets first dibs on some of the most promising deals, which vastly increases their odds of success.And their link to Facebook means in some cases an easy introduction, or even a deal down the road, for the venture capitalists' portfolio firms. Take Facebook's $1 billion acquisition last month of photo-sharing service Instagram - just after Greylock funded it.Other venture capitalists also start paying more attention to what the successful firm is doing, and although they would be loath to admit it, they may become more inclined to back those same companies at richer valuations in later rounds of financing.The limited partners who provide the funding for venture capitalists in turn see both the big financial return from the initial investment and the fringe benefits to other portfolio companies, and become more inclined to support the successful venture capital firm in the future.'GIVES THEM CONFIDENCE'Josh James, the former chief executive officer of the software company Omniture, is just the sort of entrepreneur that most any venture capital firm wants to back - he had sold Omniture to Adobe Systems for $1.8 billion in 2009.He had his choice of funders when he was building his new software company, Domo, and went with Benchmark Capital last year in part because of Benchmark Capital partner Matt Cohler's close ties to Facebook.James said he has sealed a deal to hire more than one employee by telling them that likely they eventually would get to present to Cohler, and he has closed several sales because the Facebook connection makes it clear to customers that Domo is up on the latest technology."It gives them confidence," he said.Earlier this year, Domo raised $20 million more from Institutional Venture Partners.At education network Edmodo, which took $15 million in funding from Greylock and Benchmark last year, the Facebook connection "brings credibility to us, too," CEO Nic Borg said.Borg said he believes several education companies developed applications to run on Edmodo's platform that they might not otherwise have done so.At business software company Couchbase, CEO Bob Wiederhold says the upside lies in large part on the introductions that Accel's Kevin Efrusy, an investor in his company since 2010, can make. That includes to Bobby Johnson, director of engineering at Facebook and now an advisory board member at Couchbase."He can help surround the company with good people," Wiederhold said, referring to Efrusy.THE BIG COMEBACKFacebook's earliest backers are sitting on a veritable fortune. Meritech's and Greylock's slices of Facebook will be worth more than $1 billion each.But Accel Partners, which initially invested $12.7 million in Facebook at a $98 million valuation back in 2005, the year after it was founded, is clearly the big winner. Come the IPO, the current stake of Accel and its affiliates will be worth $6.3 billion, assuming a mid-point stock price of $31.50. It plans to sell a portion of that stake worth about $1.2 billion, according to the IPO prospectus.Accel won in more than one way. It had been struggling in the wake of the dot-com bust that began in 2000, and the firm's fund that in 2005 first started investing in Facebook and other companies turned Accel's reputation around. Its latest funds, including last year's Accel XI, have been heavily oversubscribed by investors.The deal was also a career-maker for Accel's Efrusy, who was not even a partner when he made the case for a big investment in Facebook at what was considered a very high valuation at the time. Efrusy went on to back social-discount company Groupon early on, in 2009, well before its IPO raised $700 million last year.For Greylock Partners' David Sze and Meritech Capital's Paul Madera, both of whom jumped into Facebook as part of a $27.5 million round in 2006 that valued the company at $500 million, the deal was not their first big success.Sze was an early investor in LinkedIn, which raised $352.8 million in an IPO last year, and Madera backed enterprise-software giant Salesforce.com before it went public in 2004.Cohler invested sweat equity by leaving a job at LinkedIn in early 2005 to become Facebook's seventh employee before becoming a venture capitalist. At his new employer, Benchmark Capital, which does not invest in Facebook, he led a $7 million investment last year in Instagram.Despite their extraordinary success, none of the early Facebook investors appears ready to rest on the laurels."You have to be humble about whether you can do it again, and that's what keeps you hungry," said Greylock's Sze."If you look at the cycle, every four to six years another company of (Facebook's) caliber gets created," said Chi-Hua Chien, currently a partner at Kleiner Perkins and a former associate at Accel who first brought Facebook to the Accel team's attention. He rattled off a list of names including: Amazon, in 1994; Google, in 1998; and Facebook, in 2004.The outsized importance of the occasional monster deals means that venture capital firms sometimes find it worthwhile to get in - even late in the game.Andreessen Horowitz, a high-profile new firm, drew some snickers when it bought Facebook shares in 2010 at a very high valuation. But that investment stands to show a tidy profit, and with partner Marc Andreessen sitting on the Facebook board, it is not hard to see the benefit for the firm.

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Analog Clocks

Analog Clocks:
Old JavaScript never die, they just get rewritten. In between writing new scripts and tutorials, I occasionally revisit old scripts and look into what needs to be done to update them. Some time after first writing them I revisited both my original analog clock script and also the more recently written multi-clock version to see what needed to be done to modernise them. In the case of the multi-clock version it already has most of the code enclosed within objects to minimise interference from other scripts and completely unobtrusive and so I made just a few minor tweaks to the code to make it slightly shorter without changing the way it works at all. The original script underwent somewhat bigger changes as I reworked the code based on some of what is in the multi-clock version to remove the need for the body script and to make it unobtrusive. There is no point in my also amending it to enclose the code in an object because that would just make it the same as the multi-clock version. If you write your own scripts you will need to revisit them occasionally to bring the code more up to date. The biggest problem when you have lots of scripts is to prioritise which ones to update first.
Analog Clocks

Specifying Appropriate NetBeans JDK Source Release

Specifying Appropriate NetBeans JDK Source Release: NetBeans uses its projects' settings for javac.source (and javac.target) in more ways than simply enforcing javac's use of the -source and -target.
Preview Text:

NetBeans uses its projects' settings for javac.source (and javac.target) in more ways than simply enforcing javac's use of the -source and -target. In this post, I look at some...