Archives for June 2010

Hardly anyone would disagree that e-mail is the killer app. But for Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of the world's biggest social network, it's a dying means of communication.

She bases that assertion on the behaviour of the nearly 500 million souls who gather on Facebook.

Speaking at the Neilsen Consumer 360 conference in Las Vegas, Ms Sandberg claims: "If you want to know what you'll be doing tomorrow, look at what teens are doing today."

Ms Sandberg, who you can watch on YouTube, claims that only 11% of teens use e-mail, preferring text messaging and social networks.

Even though 90% of e-mail may be spam or other useless twaddle, it is hard to believe it is nearing its sell-by date.

A report by the Radicati Group says that e-mail is still on the rise and projects that e-mail accounts will increase from 2.9 billion today to over 3.8 billion by 2014.

At the same time, social networking is predicted to climb from over 2.1 billion accounts in 2010 to over 3.6 billion by 2014.

Do you agree that platforms like Twitter and Facebook are sounding the death knell for e-mail? And if it were to die off, would you miss it?

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Bob Young is a self-confessed contrarian with a strong desire to change the world by allowing people to share and collaborate. The approach has served him well and has helped turn the Canadian into a multi-millionaire.

From the outset, his software company Red Hat bucked the trend set by the big players like Microsoft which stubbornly guarded every line of code and charged whopping fees to maintain it.

Red Hat's approach was unusual at the time and relied on free software developed by an open-source community. Customers were given the right to change the code any way they liked and Red Hat sold services to make sure it all worked.

In those early 1990s, many businesses feared that open source would not be stable and often opted for the proprietary model being sold by the likes of Microsoft. Today, the Redmond giant has seen its market share erode; Red Hat has become the world's open-source leader.

'Shaggy dog story'

Mr Young started out as a typewriter salesman and went on to found and run a computer-leasing company. That was sold on, but the firm that bought him over ran into financial difficulties and Mr Young became unemployed with three children to support and a large mortgage.

"Mine is a sort of shaggy-dog story and goes something along the lines of 'it doesn't matter what bad things happen to you. What matters is how you react to them.'"

He cleaned out his wife's sewing closet, turned it into an office and started again. He started a business called ACC Corp that distributed free Unix software. Mr Young also published a newsletter for former clients using the Unix operating system. Those subscribers turned him on to a new freeware version of Unix called Linux.

He was later told about Marc Ewing, who had created an enhanced version of Linux called Red Hat. Mr Young sold the software as fast as Mr Ewing could produce it.

In 1993, Red Hat Software was created as the two combined their companies and financed their fledgling business by maxing out a half-dozen credit cards.

It was the perfect marriage of technical nous meeting sales savvy - not unlike that forged by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack in the early days of Apple.

By 2000, the company had captured 25% of the server operating system market, and Red Hat held over 50% of the global market for Linux systems. Today. it is the largest distributor of the Linux operating system.

'Hoarding knowledge'

The road to dominance was not an easy one, especially given that Red Hat was pushing against the established system of paying exorbitant fees to licence software and for service agreements.

The behemoth of the day was Microsoft, which engendered little love due to its hard-nosed business practices.

"My problem wasn't Microsoft. My problem was with this proprietary model where the engineers who were using the technology couldn't make changes to it. This slows technological development.
 
"My background was renting and leasing computers and everyone knew in the hardware business that hardware evolved faster than software.
 
"It wasn't until I got involved in this open-source model that I realised the problem is the hardware guys all shared their knowledge while the software guys were hoarding knowledge. They were not sharing and as a result the software did not evolve forward very quickly."

Mr Young's plan was met with some derision:

"My friends who were propeller-head programmers thought this was a good idea but no serious businessman did, and I think of myself as a serious business guy. They believed that software had to be proprietary. That was the only way you could make money."

But he didn't let that get in the way:

"It was the software engineers telling me that the internet needed to be able to share the tools they are using. They needed to work with each other. They couldn't have a big corporation in the middle of their project of building these things - and when you saw that, you saw open source as the only way to solve this."

He admits that, despite believing in the necessity of an open model, he couldn't initially see Red Hat as a viable business proposition. Scott McNealy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, helped him see the light at a Unix conference:

"I wasn't sure there was a real business here until I was in the audience when Scott was expounding on how evil Microsoft was with the monopolies that they owned in desktop operating systems and productivity tools, and he said 'what are your alternatives?'
 
"He was pushing Java and he was saying your alternatives were: you can continue to pay homage to Microsoft, or you can always use this free open-source software, or you can use my Java solution.
 
"The punchline of course being we should all use Java. But what was hugely informative to me was I thought no-one was paying any attention to this open software thing and here is one of the most successful guys in technology dismissing it as unimportant.
 
"I suddenly go 'holy cow!' Not a single major billion-dollar company takes this seriously. I know all these propeller-heads who think it is the right thing to do, this sure looks like an opportunity to me. And so, by being as contrary as I am, Scott got me on the right path."

Business inspiration

Still, Mr Young was a businessman at heart; he had to work out how to make this dream pay its way.

He says that Red Hat was so efficient at pushing out this free software through its website that "these software engineers would send me the equivalent of love letters. They wanted us to succeed so badly."

But love doesn't pay the mortgage or put food on the table - so Business 101 came into play. The company charged for services to help customers maintain the software and provide support.

"The Linux OS was a very sophisticated piece of technology and it was evolving very rapidly. We had a new release out every couple of months and we could clearly see that major corporations could not use our software if they had to deal with this rate of change by themselves.
 
"So we realised we could afford to give away the product and the customers would have to ask us for help to keep it running."

Inspiration came from the legal profession:

"If a lawyer comes up with a new argument that gets his client off and wins a case in front of the Supreme Court, every other lawyer on the planet can use his argument without asking his permission.
 
"So how does a lawyer make money? Well, lawyers obviously make lots of money - there's towers in New York and towers in London full of lawyers because it is a very valuable service."

Over the years, Red Hat's approach more than paid off. When it went public in 1999, its share price tripled to over $52 a share on the day and helped to heat up a then-tepid IPO market. At the time, it was said the Red Hat sell-off achieved the eighth-biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street.

The sale was also seen as an important test of the open-source operating system's appeal, paving the way for other like-minded companies. Mr Young says this all underlines just how far the open-source model has come:

"I am thrilled that it has gone so mainstream. I saw it as a very necessary piece and I'm certainly excited that I had a small influence on it.
 
"I don't care how well you run your proprietary closed tech company, you simply can't move your technology forward as quickly as the people who have access to common standards where they can all work collaboratively on the technology."

The next chapter

Not long after the IPO, Mr Young made way for a new CEO. Today, he runs a self-publishing platform called Lulu along the same lines as he ran Red Hat and with the aim of doing good.

"I started Lulu not to make money, but to make the world a better place.
 
"I want to enable authors right now who are getting rejection slips from publishers and give them a platform that they decide what they publish and when they publish it and who they publish it for.
 
"And if we are successful, we will have made the world a better place both for those authors and for the customers who are reading books that they would not otherwise have had access to."

Last year, Lulu created 400,000 titles and sold over 1.6 million books. The company claims more than 1.8 million users.

Mr Young admits to being an avid reader and that he has thousands of favourite books. Recently on his night-stand was a Lulu book about the Lusitania, an ocean liner that was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915 off the coast of Ireland. It held a personal connection because his great-grandparents were headed to England to see his grandfather, who was in hospital recovering from a wound inflicted in World War I.

"My great-grandparents went over on the Lusitania and were last seen jumping into the Irish Sea, according to the newspaper in my home town.
 
"I look at this book and the author has the passenger list of the last voyage on the back and there are my great-grandparents. What was fascinating was that this was a great example of a book that had relatively little demand. By putting it on a site like Lulu, the author was able to deliver value to people like me who would have had no way to learn this story."

Another recent favourite was called Googled - it's by Ken Auletta and is a history of the search giant. Again, Mr Young found a personal connection:

"I get to the front of chapter three and it goes into a little bit of the history about how in early 1999 Google had nearly run out of money but for a little angel money they had and a contract with a software company they had in North Carolina called Red Hat.
 
"I go 'holy cow'. I funded the start-up of Google. Why didn't we get shares? Why did we take money from them? It's a fun story and nice to know Red Hat played a little part."

Red Hat moniker

Finally and apropos of nothing, if you want to know how Red Hat got its name, watch this fun video [6.98Mb MOV].

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Well if you work for the august institution that is the New York Times, the answer to that question is most definitely no when it comes to describing the comments posted on the microblogging service Twitter.

And that is the law as laid down by the Grey Lady's standards editor, Phil Corbett.

In a leaked memo obtained by theawl.com, Mr Corbett sets out his reasons for not using the moniker that has become accepted parlance in many a geek's every day chatter:

"Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, 'tweet' has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles."
 
"Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And 'tweet' - as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter - is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections."
 
"Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don't want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords."

Interestingly enough, Mr Corbett also notes that while the word is bandied about by the technically savvy crowd of the day, who knows how long it will be around for.

"Someday, 'tweet' may be as common as 'e-mail'. Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and 'tweet' may fade into oblivion," said Mr Corbett.

Truth be told, Mr Corbett is just not a big fan of the actual word itself.

"Of course, it doesn't help that the word itself seems so inherently silly," he wrote.

So what does Twitter have to say about the whole affair. Here is their official response, posted on Twitter natch from their head PR guy, Sean Garrett:

The link takes you to an article by Neiman Labs that looks at the 50 words that New York Times readers looked up the most. Count how many Twitter used in its reply.

Meanwhile reaction on Twitter to the whole Tweet ban gives food for thought.

@RonSupportsYou Is this NY Times decision crazy?

@AndyStettler Another "titan" thinks he can control the crowd?

There is some support for the move.

@natalidelconte: I gotta say, I support this. I hate that word.

@eric_andersen tweet is "a bit too cutesy?" I'm w/NYT, tweet is "inherently silly"

What do you think? Is it silly? Should it be banned? And what would you replace it with?

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BP is getting blasted from every corner over its efforts to deal with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

One place however where it is being most effective in cleaning up is when it comes to buying a slew of search terms on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing.

The oil giant has shelled out an undisclosed amount of money to purchase relevant phrases like "oil spill" and "oil disaster" to ensure its site dealing with America's biggest environmental catastrophe floats to the top of the search page ahead of millions of other results.

There is nothing sinister about the effort says BP, claiming the move aims to "assist those who are most impacted and help them find the right forms and the right people quickly and effectively."

"In any crisis response situation, one of the first things you do is look at what's happening on Google - it's a pretty cut and dry tactical move," Kent Jarrell, a senior vice president at Washington consulting firm APCO Worldwide who handles crisis management told CNN.

"I do it with all of my clients, because if we aren't buying the terms, somebody else is."

John Simpson over at Consumer Watchdog is worried some users will not be able to differentiate between a sponsored link like BP's and other search results.

"I question the ethics of this because while I think people understand that the ones (results) that go down the right hand column are adverts, I am not sure however that users will understand the difference between the premium ones across the top.

"I am sorry if I am a little bit of a cynic here, but its corporate spin by one of the bigest spinmeisters in the world."

None of the companies would comment on what the move is costing BP but Scott Slatin, who runs the New York-based search engine marketing company Rivington, told ABC he estimated it would be more than $10,000 a day to maintain the various search terms.

"They paid to lock themselves into the first position against the oil spill terms, essentially putting a positive message on top of the news."

Art Brodksy at Public Knowledge, which is a Washington DC-based public interest group working to defend users' rights in the emerging digital culture, is not so sure it is a winning strategy.

"Sponsored links are a fact of life on search engines but a sponsored link probably doesn't means much compared to oil covered birds."

For a totally off the chart view of BP's approach, head to Twitter where a fake BP PR account has been garnering a fast following.

The latest posting on the account says "Proud to announce we've partnered with Google to turn the Information Superhighway into a Corporate Bus Route. #bpcares" .

Proof perhaps that BP has a long way to go to win this PR battle.

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Apple tried to put the genie back in the bottle at its sold-out Worldwide Developer Conference, WWDC, when it launched the latest version of its iPhone - the iPhone 4.

The problem for the company was that the technology blog Gizmodo had stolen a lot of Apple's thunder weeks ago when it released a flurry of photos and videos of a prototype of the phone which was left in a bar.

Even though Steve Jobs acknowledged the event indirectly, he refused to utter Gizmodo's name and tried to imply he wasn't bothered by the whole affair by joking with the audience "Stop me if you've seen this before".

In a bid to raise expectations above those set by the blog, he quipped "Believe me, you ain't seen this."

Alas, for most of us who had read Gizmodo's coverage, it seemed like we had.

The event was hyperbole-heavy with Mr Jobs stating that the new slimline iPhone 4 is "the biggest leap we've taken since the original iPhone".

One developer, Alex Sikora of Vokal Interactive, didn't quite see the new version in those terms:

"I am not sure it really is the biggest thing since the (original) iPhone because the iPhone was really big but this is definitely an improvement."

The feature that got everyone talking at the event was FaceTime or video conferencing.

Mr Jobs made a big deal of it by unveiling it as his famous "one more thing" announcement.

He referred to FaceTime as futuristic.

"I grew up with The Jetsons, Star Trek and communicators and dreaming about video calling - and it's real now," Mr Jobs told the 5,000-plus audience.

He seemed like a kid in a candy shop and took great delight in demonstrating the phone's new feature by video-calling his pal Johnny Ive, Apple's senior vice president of industrial design and the creative power behind everything from the iPhone to the iPad.

Clearly analysts were impressed by FaceTime and, at a backstage hands-on event with the iPhone 4, a number said that they thought it had the potential to change how people communicate.

"It's definitely a leap forward," said Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies. "When it ships, it will be the best smartphone on the market."

Charles Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Company agreed. "I think video chat (FaceTime) is going to be something that really differentiates the iPhone from other devices."

Others were a bit more circumspect.

"It's disappointing that FaceTime is only on wi-fi," said Van Baker, vice president of research at Gartner. "Still, I have to say it is a very nice implementation, very simple to use. You make a phone call, you push a button that says FaceTime and suddenly it turns into a video call. This is Apple at its finest - taking something that is relatively complex and making it drop-dead simple."

FaceTime will only work on wi-fi and from one iPhone 4 to another iPhone 4.

Developers certainly seemed to give FaceTime the thumbs-up.

"FaceTime is the feature that will really take the iPhone to the next level for me," said Vincent Ganneau of Haploid.

"Everybody has been talking about face to face chatting for a long time," said Sean Vosen of Vokal.

"This changes everything in terms of what we can provide, what people can do, the reach, the speed and who can use these devices. It has blown me away."

Krishna Panicker of Skype was in agreement. "I can see this as being another ground-breaking moment in terms of how users experience communications. I have seen other companies try this and fail. I remember years ago buying a 3 phone and doing video-calling and they just didn't nail the experience. This is taking it to another level," said Mr Panicker.

Apple by numbers

While the iPhone 4 was the big announcement of WWDC, there was plenty of room for updates on other Apple products.

Mr Jobs rolled out a host of statistics to make your head spin.

On the iPad, he reiterated that over two million had been sold since its April launch and that that amounted to one being sold every three seconds.

He also said that in 65 days, users had downloaded over five million books equalling two and a half books per device.

Next up was the App Store with over 225,000 apps.

For months, there has been a certain level of disquiet about Apple's approval process for apps.

Mr Jobs underlined that 95% of all apps are approved within seven days. Every week 15,000 apps are submitted in over 30 languages. The main reasons why some are rejected are three-fold.

1. The app doesn't "function as advertised"
2. The use of private APIs
3. They crash

Mr Jobs then unveiled a number of new apps for the App Store including Netflix, Zynga with Farmville and Activision with Guitar Hero.

Mr Jobs noted that the App Store had just crossed the five billion download mark and that to date the company had paid developers one billion dollars.

The new order

In the latest love-hate relationship with search giant Google which is developing rival products like its Android operating system and Google TV among others, Apple announced Bing as a third way for people to search on the iPhone alongside Google and Yahoo.

Mr Jobs referred to Microsoft, its former enemy as having done a "cool" job with Bing.

"That Bing is now a search option is unbelievable," said analyst Michael Gartenburg of the Altimeter Group. "Microsoft is clearly the new Switzerland and Google is the new enemy."

While chunks of the iPhone release might have sounded like a deja vu, the same could also be said for the unveiling of the new operating system which Mr Jobs personally launched back in April.

The big news there was a name change to iOS4 because it will cover the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

The software update will bring multi-tasking to the iPhone, allowing users to run multiple applications and programs simultaneously, and will also let users organise their mass of applications into folders.

Tech fail

In between trying to show off all the latest that the Apple engineers had come up with, the demo demons hit Mr Jobs right slap-bang in the middle of his keynote speech.

As his efforts to dazzle developers with some of the iPhone features failed, Mr Jobs claimed that the cause was the 500-plus wi-fi-hoggers in the audience.

Actually, he said his tech team detected 570 separate wi-fi base stations. Those included mi-fi cards and Sprint's new EVO 4G phone, which can create shareable wi-fi hotspots based on mobile internet.

Putting a cheery face on things, Mr Jobs went for the democratic approach and left it to the audience to decide if people should power down.

"You know you can help me out here. If you're on wi-fi you might want to get off it," Jobs told the crowd as his demo began to go south.

"I think bloggers have a right to blog, but if you want to see the demos, we're not going to be able to do it," said Mr Jobs.

This was clearly not in the script. And for Mr Jobs who prides himself on his keynote presentations as setting the bar for all other execs taking to the stage, it was also embarrassing.

Elephant in the room

While the Apple fanboys and girls lapped up the event and media and bloggers came from around the world to report on it, there was one notable exception from the "hack" crowd - Gizmodo.

The San Jose Mercury News reported that they were not invited.

"We're banned for life, I think,'' said Brian Lam, editorial director of the gadget blog.

"I got no response at all,'' he said when he e-mailed for press accreditation. "I've worked with these people for seven or eight years, and they never failed to write me back. This tells me they're probably not allowed to talk to me any more. It's not personal. But Steve is very angry at Gizmodo."

Heaven help the poor person then that was responsible for keeping the wi-fi going during his keynote.

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A hyperwall that Apple put together for its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco sure beats watching paint dry.

An entranced huddle of bodies gathered around the screens to feast their eyes on a "visualisation" of 50,000 of the most popular apps being downloaded from the App Store. It was all captured on 30 synchronized 24-inch LED cinema displays with the apps being grouped together based on the colour of their icons as they drop.

It all made for a very pretty picture. Well, it was either watching this or a couple of jugglers who seemed to need a wee bit more practice. Sorry, guys.

Here's a $64,000 question for you. Guess how many apps it takes to fill up the displays. Once you have, the answer's at the bottom of the page.

When the displays fill up, they kind of pour out of the bottom of the screens only for the process to start all over again. Very reminiscent of the old video game favourite, Tetris.

How did Apple do this? Here is the technical explanation.

"This hyperwall is powered by 30 Mac Pro towers with Mac OS X Snow Leopard and EVGA NIVIDIA GTX 285 graphics cards. As apps are downloaded from the App Store, their data is coalesced via an XMIL feed every five minutes. Apps are sorted and scheduled using Cocoa and Objective-C. The data is then passed to an OpenCL kernel, which drives the animation. Quartz composer brings all the technologies together and renders the final synchronized output using Quartz Composer Visualizer."

Answer: 10,800

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