Vizio’s televisions are the second best selling televisions in the United States. Samsung still leads the entire pack and Sony has fallen to third. As an aside, Samsung really has come a long way—does any one else remember when Samsung products were generally junk?
You’ve probably seen Vizio televisions in many big box stores. They have changed the game when it comes to televisions with low cost and decent reliability. Lately, they have made advancements in the style department to make their products not look so budget friendly.
The surge to second place may not be too surprising considering the economy these days. Sony products usually command a premium price. A budget-friendly television company makes a lot more sense for these times.
Iddo Genuth writes "Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne of West Palm Beach, Florida has successfully completed the third round of its Common Extensible Cryogenic Engine (CECE) testing for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). CECE is a new deep throttling engine designed to reduce thrust and allow a spacecraft to land gently on the moon, Mars, or some other non-terrestrial surface." NASA is also set to launch a new satellite on Tuesday — the Orbital Carbon Observatory — that will monitor the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. On the research front, NASA has announced this year's Centennial Challenges. $2 million in prizes are available for a major breakthrough in tether strength (one of the major obstacles for developing a space elevator), and another $2 million is being offered to competitors who are able to beam power to a device climbing a cable at a height of up to one kilometer.
Hewlett Packard isn’t doing so well like ever other consumer electronic company. Profit and sales are down, blah, blah, blah. You know the drill. Anyway, instead of laying off the 20,000 people like the financials indicate, the company is issuing company wide pay cuts starting at the top.
CEO Mark Hurd is giving himself a modest 20 percent pay cut (he earned $42.5 million in total compensation last year, btw) and the pay cuts decrease from there. The Executive Council’s pay checks will be 15 percent lighter soon, other executive’s 10 percent less, 5 percent for exempt employees, and 2.5 for non-exempt drones.
Who knows if this strategy will fix or even solve HP’s money from going down the drain but at least folks still have a job. Getting a pay cut is hella lot better than standing in the soup line. Here’s an idea though, cut the CEO’s total compensation by 80% and give everyone a raise.
In case you didn’t read him quoted in some 1,700 newspapers last week, NBC’s Press:Here has an interview with Chris Kelly, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer this week. The show, which focuses on technology, airs in the Bay Area on Sunday mornings after Meet the Press, and the young show has already been beating Meet the Press in the ratings. You can also watch a clip on the jump or the entire episode online here right now. (I was one of the guest reporters on the show this week.)
Kelly said in no uncertain terms that Facebook does not own your data and content, never did and never will. What’s more: Any reproduction of your data has to be subject to the privacy settings you choose as a Facebook user. You can sense his frustration amid a scandal that was essentially cooked up by Consumerist on the Sunday night of a holiday weekend without even calling Facebook to check if their assumptions on the Terms of Use changes were right.
But this isn’t the first or last time users will be in an uproar over Facebook, despite all of Facebook’s best efforts. Why? There’s never been a Web site—or media property for that matter—that people trusted with so much personal, emotional and intimate information, whether it’s your cell phone number or a video of your child taking his first steps. And with Facebook’s business model still uncertain, that trust makes us legitimately nervous. You think all the search data Google has been collecting on us for all these years is scary? Things you do and upload to Facebook are far, far more personal. For the conspiracy theorists out there, Facebook is going to be the gift that keeps on giving.
I asked Kelly—on this, the third major user uproar the company has faced on privacy that caught it completely by surprise—if the issue was a blind spot for the company or if Facebook was doing something so new in organizing the data of human relationships that it was bound to take all the arrows as these issues of privacy continually emerge. Kelly essentially said its the latter; I think it’s a mixture of both, although Facebook’s privacy sensitivities have clearly come a long way since the News Feed and Beacon debacle days. Give them credit: Each time they learn how to handle the crisis better, and this time they sprung into action quickly and decisively.
Either way, this is not the first or last time a user revolt will spark up around privacy and the site. And that’s one reason Facebook is inviting users to help them craft the language this time around. You can’t blame yourself for violating your rights, right? But as Elizabeth Corcoran of Forbes pointed out on the show, can you really organize a committee of 175 million people?
The clip featuring both of these conversations is below, or go here for the entire episode.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
In case you didnt read him quoted in some 1,700 newspapers last week, NBCs Press:Here has an interview with Chris Kelly, Facebooks Chief Privacy Officer this week. The show, which focuses on technology,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 3:23 pm
Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire. Apart from blogging about life in... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 3:21 pm
Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.
Apart from blogging about life in Tokyo, I also extensively cover Japanese subculture and give talks about this subject at conferences around the world.
The first thing to learn are the definitions of a "3D Woman" (on the left of the screen) and a "2D Woman" (the two ladies on the right of the screen). As you can see, "3D" refers to humans while "2D" refers to 2 dimensional illustrations.
While there are many folks who prefer warm blooded humans, some just prefer the 2 dimensional - so much in fact that they would rather marry one.
A petition will be submitted to the Japanese government upon the collection of one million signatures asking for law to be passed making it legal to marry a 2 dimensional character. The petition is filled under Human Rights and can be seen online here.
The online petition comes with the following blurb:-
We don't have interest in the 3D world. If possible, I want to become the husband of a 2D character.
Does not look like this matter can be solved with today's science and technology so at least make it legal to marry a 2D character.
If this law is passed then I want to marry Asahina Mikuru.
There are currently 41,000 blogs and sites that have covered this news but only 3,170 people have signed the petition...
As for the 2 dimensional ladies on the screen - photo taken at one of the subculture or "otaku" events in Tokyo and you can see all previous event coverage in the Events category.
And for folks wondering about the 3 dimensional lady - her name is Hiromi and you can see more photos that I took of her last year in the Japanese Idols category.
tytso writes "I've recently started exploring ways of configuring Solid State Disks (SSD's) so they work most efficiently in Linux. In particular, Intel's new 80GB X25-M, which has fallen down to a street price of around $400 and thus within my toy budget. It turns out that the Linux Storage Stack isn't set up well to align partitions and filesystems for use with SSD's, RAID systems, and 4k sector disks. There are also some interesting configuration and tuning that we need to do to avoid potential fragmentation problems with the current generation of Intel SSD's. I've figured out ways of addressing some of these issues, but it's clear that more work is needed to make this easy for mere mortals to efficiently use next generation storage devices with Linux."
Reuters - Yahoo Inc Chief Executive Carol Bartz could announce a major management reorganization as early as next week, most likely on Wednesday, according to the blog AllThingsD.
During the Nuremberg Toy Fair I spotted the new version of the uber geek Lego Mindstorms NXT22 and some danish bricks gadgets like the Lego Camcorder, a colorful photo camera and this MP3 player.
The cam and the photo camera seems ready to be marketed but seem that the Lego designers still got a lot of work to do on the MP3 player and its speakers…
Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire. Why is the iPod in grave danger? Because... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 2:56 pm
Hulu didn’t make any friends this week when the NBC-owned site succumbed to the pressure of content owners and had the content pulled from Boxee. Alec Baldwin wasn’t kidding when he said the company was evil. Anyway, thanks to the hacking of some disgruntle geeks, you can now get access back on both Boxee and XBMC.
It seems like this is a dirty, backdoor hack that doesn’t work 100 percent of the time, but it’s better than nothing. Give her a go and let us know how it works.
(TrendHunter.com) There are literally thousands of possible designs for a tattoo, and it seems as though people are always finding new places to put them. The new trend in the world of tattoos is to... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 2:19 pm
mjasay writes "At the Mobile World Congress, Steve Ballmer took aim at Apple's closed iPhone ecosystem with an ironic plea for openness: 'Openness is central because it's the foundation of choice.' Ballmer has apparently forgotten his company's own efforts to vertically integrate hardware and software (Zune, XBox), its history of vertically integrating software (tying SharePoint into Office, IE, SQL Server, Active Directory, etc.), as well as years of illegally tying Windows to Internet Explorer that only the US Justice Department could undo. Indeed, Microsoft's effect on the browser market has pushed Mozilla to get involved in a recent European Commission action against the software giant, with Mozilla's Mitchell Baker recently declaring that 'A number of illegal activities were also involved in creating IE's market dominance,' now requiring government intervention to open up the browser market to fair competition. Putting aside Microsoft's own tainted reputation in the field of openness, is Ballmer right? Should Apple open up its iPhone platform to outside competition, both in terms of hardware and software?"
Five years ago this April, Google filed to list its stock publicly. The founders let potential investors know it wouldnt play by some of Wall Streets rules, including paying them a cash dividend —... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 2:00 pm
Try the following experiment with two young children. To one child, hold a toy out just beyond their grasp and watch them bounce all over the place trying to reach it. With the second child, just hand the toy over to them. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 21 Feb 2009 | 1:25 pm
Working memory (also known as short term memory) is our ability to keep a small amount of information active in our mind. This is useful for information we need to know on-the-fly, such as a phone number or the few items we need to pick up from the grocery store. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 21 Feb 2009 | 1:25 pm
It’s getting close to the Kindle’s February 24th launch date and Amazon has made the official manual available a head of time. There isn’t anything special within that wasn’t previously announced, but don’t let that stop you from pulling up the PDF and pouring over the text anyway. Hopefully it will tide you over until your K2 arrives.
Mike writes "Chicago Mayor Daley has stated that if his Olympic dreams come true, by 2016 there will be a surveillance camera on 'every street corner in Chicago.' Just like in London, elected officials all over America appear to be happily advancing a 'surveillance society' without regard for civil rights or privacy concerns. Ray Orozco, executive director of Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications is quoted as saying, 'We're going to grow the system until we eventually cover one end of the city to the other.'" Chicago has been developing its surveillance network for some time, but it seems they plan to continue increasing the scale.
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we review the action from the Mobile World Congress, find out why many people blacked out their social networking... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 1:00 pm
(TrendHunter.com) Bulbs are silently but steadily leading their revolution against their decades-long ruler: the light. Unhappy with their conventional life and their restricted purpose, they have found... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 12:59 pm
Devin Krauter sits on the end of his bed, using his video game controller to shoot down aliens while taking with other players through a headset, all the while texting on his cell phone and chatting with a visitor.A video game Web site ranks the 17-year-old high school junior among the best players at "Gears of War 2," a game in which soldiers fight their enemies using an assault rifle with a mounted chain saw bayonet. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Feb 2009 | 12:55 pm
(TrendHunter.com) Advertising research has indicated that a high degree of sexism toward women occurs in magazine and television advertising. Has Details Magazine joined the ranks of publications... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 12:39 pm
Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.
Photo of a netted golf practice ground discovered in yet another uncharted evening after-dinner walk.
Golf is a popular and yet expensive sport to play in Japan - I'm guessing that its due to popular demand that one has to pay a bladder and a spleen to get membership to a golf club.
Meiji Golf is a site dedicated to the buying and selling of golf club memberships. They list a price of 65,000,000 yen (about 698,586 USD ) to be a member of the Koganei Country golf club.
Folks who have just laughed at the piffling 65,000,000 yen should check the requirements before laughing - no women or foreigners allowed - only Japanese males over the age of 35.
Folks here are so keen on the sport that you often see them practicing in public.
You may want to read the rest of this article which has more photos and shows how balls get back to the vending machine in my Golf in Japan article.
Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire. Photo of a netted golf practice ground... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 12:21 pm
(TrendHunter.com) I guess concrete is not something one associates with elegance and flexibility; well, since the unique Chain system made its appearance, I probably have to rethink my guesses. The... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 12:19 pm
Hodejo1 writes "On the old Perry Mason TV shows, it was a common sight to see someone burst into the crowded courtroom at a dire moment and confess aloud that they, not the defendant, killed so-and-so. In reality, courts do not allow evidence to enter trial without a chance for the opposing council to view it and for a judge to rule on their admissibility. Yet, in the fifth day of the Pirate Bay trial, lawyers for the prosecution again tried to sneak in surprise evidence while questioning defendants. The judge put his foot down this time, telling lawyers for the state, 'If you have documents which you eventually plan to use, you need to hand them over now.' The prosecution continues to struggle in court. In one humorous moment, prosecutor Håkan Roswall tried to show how 'hip' he was with technology when he questioned defendant Peter Sunde. 'When did you meet [Gottfrid] for the first time IRL?' asked the Prosecutor. 'We do not use the expression IRL,' said Peter, 'We use AFK.' The defendants are not out of the woods yet. Lawyer and technology writer Richard Koman wonders aloud if the Pirate Bay's 'I-dunno' defense is all that much better."
Greg sez, "Last week I started reading Widdershins by Oliver Onions [Ed: a public domain text in the Gutenberg Archive]. The first story stuck in my head and I did an illustration for it. It turned out pretty good so I thought it would be cool to do one illustration for each of the nine stories in the book. I just finished the third illustration and I am curious as to whether other people think I am adding or detracting from the stories. 1. The Beckoning Fair One2. Phantas3. Rooum"
This "future of news" news report from 1981 invites us to imagine sitting down with our morning cup of coffee and getting the news from our computers (it only takes two hours to transmit the day's paper, at $5/hour on the dialup network).
This is pretty much the epitome of what's wrong with corporate futurism: it assumes that things will change in a way that enhances the corporation's ability to get the job done (which, of course, it does), but without changing things in ways that enhance the world's ability to clobber the corporation's bottom line.
Other examples:
* The Internet will enable us to deliver pay-on-demand movies to our viewers' homes (but it won't let them get those movies without paying for them)
* The Internet will enable us to save money on our long-distance trunks (but it won't let callers bypass the tariff-based telephone system altogether)
* The Internet will enable the police to coordinate international investigations (but it won't let criminals coordinate their activities to evade the police)
Add your own to the comment thread, below: entirely notional, valueless prizes will be awarded for especially juicy examples!
The X1 is engineered art, precise to the finest detail and machined in brushed metal. A high-end powerhouse that mocks the bejeweled junk that usually passes for luxury in cellphone-land, it remains hard to recommend thanks to its extravagant price.
At $800 unlocked, with no subsidy options, every virtue is expected, and every vice doubly disappointing.
A slider-phone with a full QWERTY keyboard, the X1 has a 3" touchscreen display, 3.2 megapixel camera, secondary webcam and a 528Mhz Qualcomm CPU with a 256MHz co-processor. Built in is 256MB of RAM, 512MB of Flash storage and a quad-band 3G GSM radio. It has Bluetooth, WiFi, aGPS, FM radio and a 1500 mAh battery. It runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro and weighs 158 grams.
As a piece of hardware it's almost without peer. Photos are crisp and large, the keyboard is well thought-out, and performance is excellent compared to workhorse smartphones. The 800x480 display is particularly amazing. For those who want serious productivity, it's got grunt in abundance: mobile blogging would be a dream on this thing.
On the other hand, it's thick and heavy, and the arc on which the keyboard slides out seems more about form than function.
Its interface, comprising a collection of heavily customizable panels that abstract the phone's functionality in various pretty ways, is equally swanky. Though it's WinMo under the hood, it does a great job of making it as friendly as OS newcomers. In particular, the media player is a colossal improvement over the standard app bunged into vanilla Windows Mobile. You'll still need to pull out the stylus to pick at tiny-texted menus once you're inside many apps, however, so don't expect miracles.
There are quirks. Opera Mobile is included, but didn't work very well -- odd given its reputation for getting a watchable web onto almost anything. Mobile IE is trash. This imperfect web access makes much of the Xperia experience seem oddly disengaged. The selection of third-party panels is slim, too; aside from what's generally available for WinMo, the Xperia ecosystem isn't out of first gear yet.
If you're prepared to live with the warranty-less $600 deal at Amazon, or are dead-sure it's what you want, the X1 will be a fine alternative to the high-end Nokias and other top smartphones. But we're looking forward to a sequel running the freshly-announced Windows Mobile 6.5--and not running nearly a grand after tax and activation--to become a more effective flagship for Microsoft's fleet.
Information Week's Internet Evolution's just published my latest article, "Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform, or Destroy Your Favorite Medium" -- a noodle on the factors that led to the demise of newspapers, the transformation of music, and the potential destruction of big budget movies and mass-market publishing (and what can be done about the last one):
Big-budget movies (BBMs) require a lot of capital and rely on studios controlling the rate and nature of distribution of the finished product. If you're going to recoup your $300 million box-office turd, you need to move a hell of a lot of DVDs, TV licenses, foreign exhibition, Happy Meal toys, and assorted "secondary" revenues.
Let's be realistic here: Nothing anyone does is going to make it harder to get movies when you want them, where you want them, and at whatever price you feel you should pay for them (including free). And the harder you crack down on Internet movie-downloading, the more attractive you make buying pirate DVDs from criminals on the street -- a virtually zero-risk transaction that directly displaces DVD purchases.
What's more, no one has yet successfully crowdsourced a movie that looks and feels like a BBM. There are lots of fabulous 9-minute YouTube Inc. videos, and plenty of lovely and promising machinima flicks, but no one's yet built the kind of purely escapist, high-production-value feature that we flock to the cinema to see every summer.
Now, maybe film studios can do what Magnolia Pictures is doing -- distributing day-and-date releases to satellite, pay-per-view, cinema, DVD, and foreign film outlets -- and recapture a lot of the money that is squirting between the fingers of the tightly clenched release-window fist. But if it's not enough, commercially motivated BBMs might simply die.
Note that movies as a genre won't vanish. There's plenty to love about 9-minute YouTubes and the quirky features that come out of indie production houses. There's never been a time when more moving pictures were being produced and viewed than today. Many of these things are economic propositions, and many are not -- they're a lot more like stage shows than they are like films. They cost less to produce, they reach smaller, more targetted audiences, and they represent an admirable diversity of voice and point of view. But they're not Big, Culturally Relevant Media in the way that a real classic BBM can be.
A Nigerian scammer is accused of posing as the central bank of Ethiopia and bilking Citibank out of $27,000,000:
To carry out the elaborate scheme, prosecutors in New York said on Friday, the man, identified as Paul Gabriel Amos, 37, a Nigerian citizen who lived in Singapore, worked with others to create official-looking documents that instructed Citibank to wire the money in two dozen transactions to accounts that Mr. Amos and the others controlled around the world.
The money came from a Citibank account in New York held by the National Bank of Ethiopia, that country’s central bank. Prosecutors said the conspirators, contacted by Citibank to verify the transactions, posed as Ethiopian bank officials and approved the transfers.
Instructables user Thatkidwithayoyo has a fine formula for making a corsage out of the universal medium of exchange, duct tape:
I didn't want to buy in to the wasteful "buy, wear for a few hours, throw away" corsage culture, so I decided to make a more economical, longer lasting, and greener alternative.
This instructable will teach you how to make duct tape flowers and then use those flowers to make a corsage. The flowers and corsage will last forever and are waterproof, recyclable, hypo-allergenic, and just plain cool! They are also cheaper than a normal corsage and don't require a trip to the florist.
Over on Boing Boing Offworld, our Brandon's found Jumpman, a hypnotically nostalgic and mesmerizingly fun retro-game. The creator, Runhello, sez, "The thought was to kind of take all the things that have become possible in games in the last 29 years-- physics, 45 degree angles, a z axis-- and bring the new technology into an early-80s-style platformer while at the same time changing the platformer's basic nature as little as possible. The hope is to try to make you believe that every 2600-era platformer would have looked like this if only you'd pulled the camera back about 4 feet."
Matt_dk sends in a quote from a story at NASA: "The first gamma-ray burst to be seen in high-resolution from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is one for the record books. The blast had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions and the highest-energy initial emissions ever seen. ... Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Astronomers believe most occur when exotic massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As a star's core collapses into a black hole, jets of material — powered by processes not yet fully understood — blast outward at nearly the speed of light. The jets bore all the way through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star and generate bright afterglows that fade with time. ...Fermi team members calculated that the blast exceeded the power of approximately 9,000 ordinary supernovae, if the energy was emitted equally in all directions."
NASA has postponed the launch of the space shuttle Discovery for a fourth time, but without setting a new target date to send the orbiter to the International Space Station (ISS). The... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 6:11 am
TORONTO, Feb 20 (Reuters) - The Canadian units of General Motors Corp and Chrysler [CBS.UL] are seeking as much as C$10 billion ($8 billion) in aid from the Canadian and Ontario governments as they fight... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 6:08 am
Several sources inside and outside Yahoo told BoomTown that new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz could be ready to announce a major reorganization of its management structure as early as next week, most likely on Wednesday.
While that shift could be pushed out a week or two or rolled out in pieces, Yahoo (YHOO) execs are nervously awaiting the moves by Bartz to put a new regime in place, in order to more easily power through a massive reset of the troubled company.
Interestingly, many top execs are very much in the dark about what Bartz will do, since she manages very close to the vest, mostly moving around Yahoo with only her longtime executive assistant in tow.
Thankfully, she also loves to write detailed memos to the staff and she signaled the “big week” ahead in one Boomtown just obtained (see here) that was sent out today.
That is a code word for reorg, according to many sources I spoke to, coming after Bartz has spent a lot of time visiting many parts of Yahoo and conducting a whirlwind of meetings with execs.
I will be posting my Heidi-Klum-you’re-in-and-out predictions of the fate of various execs later this weekend.
But, broadly, most expect Bartz to severely roll back a variety of previous reorganizations done by former CEO Jerry Yang and former President Sue Decker.
That will mean many top execs will likely be quite out–already Decker’s chief of staff Jeff McCombs has quietly departed the company, several sources said–while others will be elevated.
Most sources I spoke to who have interfaced with Bartz think she will likely go with a more traditional and more accountable structure she employed while rehauling Autodesk (ADSK), the computer-aided design software company she once headed, rather than the matrix-tangled Yahoo.
A change in how Yahoo makes media, which I wrote about today and was approved by Bartz, is a classic globally centered development organization. (By the way, a significant reorg of the media organization, headed by Jeff Dossett, is also set for next week, said sources.)
Thus, most expect Bartz to do a C-level style set-up, with execs like a COO, CTO and also a new, more powerful CMO (who will also head PR), all reporting to her.
In addition, several suggested she might also junk a recent reorg that split the world into four regions. Instead, one exec could head the U.S., where most of Yahoo’s current business is, and one head international efforts.
Whatever happens, it’s clear that “Hurricane Carol”–a nickname she has been given by some employees in admiration–is getting ready to blow right through Yahoo.
Very, very much, since they are so full of significant news–a slow-down of Yahoo’s homepage redesign and also a major limiting of the global rollout of its new advertising platform APT, to name a few.
But they also have a weird but compelling kind of energy that nearly jumps off the page, giving clear insight to how Bartz thinks and operates.
Like the Energizer Bunny, I would say.
Here are two Bartz sent out to Yahoo (YHOO) staff: One from today and one from last week on February 13, both of which discuss just how busy she is keeping herself.
This past week, for example, she spent the weekend with advertisers and partners at the AT&T golf tournament in Pebble Beach, after which Bartz threw some serious love in the direction of U.S. sales head Joanne Bradford and gave the advertising minions under her an A+.
Bartz also cheerily admits with a “whatever” that a “Brand Pride Memo,” which a Yahoo marketing exec asked her to rename in case it leaked–oops!–from last week (see below), was still a list of Yahoo embarrassments.
And she is headed to Europe in April, followed by Asia TBD, although this weekend a husband-free Bartz is catching up on chick flicks–might I suggest, “He’s Just Not That Into You”–and resting up for the “big week” ahead.
That’s Bartz’s coy term for her massive reorganization of management, which is slated, many sources tell me, to be announced Wednesday. (See my post on that here.)
Last week, was much more news worthy, as Bartz did a lot of business unit and product reviews–reportedly scaring the bejeesus out of staff who had to present–because she said they had not been done in a dog’s age at Yahoo.
Stressing a “need for speed” in the decision-making process at Yahoo and a “WOW” experience for users, Bartz seems to be whirling through Yahoo like Mr. Clean’s white tornado.
As BoomTown reported this week (correctly, Tapan!), for example, Metro–the Yahoo homepage redo–was delayed by her “until we feel it will be a great product for our users.”
Bartz then said she had decreed that ads were to be taken out of mail products in emerging markets, which will mean a drop in revenue (probably miniscule), but make for a better customer experience.
Most significantly, she also limited the global rollout of APT, Yahoo’s new advertising system, which was much touted by previous Yahoo management, to just the U.S. and one international country in order to “perfect” it.
This is a polite way of saying it is buggier than an Amazon jungle.
And, my favorite and hers, Bartz wrote that “we are assembling a list of products that we are embarrassed about for various reasons so we can make the important decision as to whether we fix them or discontinue them.”
And speaking of curdling and to keep up the kooky quotient, Bartz also thanked Texas Yahoos for something called “Purple Purple Cowboy wine,” as well as employees in Oshkosh, Wisconsin for cheese curds.
Then, it was off to make Valentines with her ubiquitous assistant Judy Flores, after which she was set to do some major kissing up to ad customers at that golf tournament (not her strong suit, apparently, as it had been former Yahoo CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang’s).
But, experience the full-Carol yourself in the two entire memos below:
February 20:
My week started last Friday down at the AT&T golf tournament where we hosted many of our important U.S. customers and partners. I thought I’d use this week’s note to give you some impressions:
First, I really want to congratulate Joanne Bradford’s team for hosting and running a first-class event. I know many of you in the company have absolutely no idea what happens in our regions or what salespeople do for a living (in fact, my past history has shown me that the way most engineers perceive salespeople is as lightweight, backslapping meeters and greeters). In fact, I’m delighted to report that Yahoo! has an A+ sales team. I watched them in action with customers such as Pepsi–it was clear they had the respect and trust of the customer and represented all of us Yahoos very well. It was very interesting to learn how creative our salespeople are in helping our clients devise interesting and profitable campaigns. I received a lot of compliments about how well-supported these customers and partners felt. Likewise, it was very clear to me that they support Yahoo! in return and very much want us to succeed.
Hey, that doesn’t mean they think we’re perfect! They had several ideas about our products and how we could do better, especially in this tough economic environment. This plays right into our focus on excellence and great products.
Last week I told you we were going to have our first pass at deciding which products embarrass us as a company. Kudos to Allen Olivo and his team for worrying that one of you might leak my email, so instead he called it the “Brand Pride List.” Whatever, the point is still important and we had a great discussion on which products to stop and which to make a lot better. More to follow…
I realize this is a very U.S.-centric message but that’s because I spent three days with U.S. customers. Just wait until I blow through Europe in April–I’ll be sharing all sorts of European goodies with you! And yes, I am going to Asia as well–we just haven’t settled on the date yet.
My husband is out of town this weekend, so I’m looking forward to watching all the “chick flicks” that he refuses to watch with me. I hope you all have a fun weekend. Get well-rested, because next week’s a biggie.
Carol
February 13:
A great illustration of my need for speed.
Had a big staff meeting this week. We spent all day Monday and Tuesday reviewing our strategies and major products on both the audience and advertising sides. It was a great introduction for me and even an eye-opener for the entire team when they realized that many of these strategies and products hadn’t been delved into in a long time (a big thanks to all the presenters who worked so hard):
· We talked a lot about the importance of having a WOW experience for all of our users around the world. As an example, we are delaying the launch of Metro until we feel it will be a great product for our users.
· Similarly, we discovered that we are losing mail share to the competition in many slower-bandwidth, emerging markets so we have made a decision to remove mail ads in those countries to improve the user experience. This will mean a drop in revenue for us but it’s the right thing to do strategically.
· We have also decided to “perfect” APT! in the US and only one international market before we roll it out globally.
· And finally, my favorite–we are assembling a list of products that we are embarrassed about for various reasons so we can make the important decision as to whether we fix them or discontinue them.
What does this have to do with the need for speed? Many of the things I just talked about could have and should have been decided earlier but we haven’t been an organization that has embraced the need for speedy decisions, even when they are the tough ones. We can all be part of changing this and getting back to an organization that is fast on its feet.
On a personal note, thanks to Team Texas Sales for the Purple Cowboy wine and the Care Center Service Desk in Oshkosh for the Wisconsin bag of goodies–my favorite were the cheese curds!
Judy and I went to URLs today and made Valentine’s for our sweeties–everybody remember yours so we can all have a big Yahoo! Valentine’s Day. I’m off to Pebble Beach tomorrow to meet, entertain and play golf with some of our biggest customers. Actually, it’s a great strategy because normally you have to “let” the customer win – fortunately, this is not a problem for me!
Reportedly, LG has released some information to TechRadar that they are going to come out with a cell phone, which boasts a 12MP camera. For those of us who like taking good quality pictures on the go, having a cell phone with a high end camera is a necessity.
Jeremy Newing, LG’s Mobile Head of Marketing in the UK has released some statements, which describe what LG has in store in this phone. In order to start promoting the 12MP phone, Newing begins with an analogy that “when you’re buying a car, if you’ve got two equal cars then you’ll obviously go for the one with the bigger engine.“ Makes sense, who doesn’t want the ability to drive faster? In addition, he goes on to make a statement that is very true, he says “when taking 12MP images, they’ll be using huge amounts of data, and it will be more difficult to do things like send such files.“ As you probably know if you own a fairly new digital camera, these images take up a good amount of memory, so you can imagine how long it would take to send these kids of pictures.
Of course, 12MP could mean nothing if the other features in the phone aren’t good, such as optical zoom, touch features, web browsing, aesthetics, etc. Cell phone cameras with a high MP aren’t very common at this time, but they are steadily becoming more available. For photography enthusiasts, a cell phone camera of high quality is definitely worth in investing. Newing adds in one last statement to put closure on the phone, “However, we obviously can’t afford not to be part of the 12MP cameraphone infrastructure, and we will do that and add differentiation, through things like beauty enhancer and smile shot.“
It will be interesting to see where LG goes with this and how good of a phone it can potentially turn into.
lwbrown writes with this excerpt from Government Computer News about a concept being explored at Oak Ridge National Laboratory: "UNTAME is the product of a long-term program by the division's Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Group to develop futuristic security functionality for increasingly large, complex environments. The cybots differ from traditional software agents in that they form a collective and are aware of the condition and activities of other cybots in the collective. 'You give it a mission and tools to work with, such as mobility and intrusion sensors, and it uses those tools and cooperates with other cybots to accomplish the mission," said Lawrence MacIntyre, one of the project's developers.'"
Australian police have boarded a militant anti-whaling ship involved in a high-seas clash with Japanese whalers and seized its logbooks and other material, according to the ship's captain. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 4:02 am
BEIJING, Feb 21 (Reuters) - China could use its $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to support foreign mergers and acquisitions by Chinese oil and gas companies, the China Daily said on Saturday. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 3:51 am
NASA has delayed the launch of space shuttle Discovery for a fourth time amid valve concerns. After meeting all Friday at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, shuttle managers decided... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 21 Feb 2009 | 3:29 am
Can’t say I saw this coming. Applied Nanodetectors (AND) showed off a modified Nokia handset that can analyze your breath to tell if you have diseases. You read that right. A cell phone that plays doctor.
AND makes a chip that fits within a cell phone. When you breathe into the a sensor on the phone, the chip can determine concentrations of gasses. With this information, AND claims that they can detect things like how sauced you are, if you have diabetes, or even lung cancer.
This kind of data is actually very important. Placing a device (assuming it works as claimed) that can check your health in a phone is probably very interesting to people in the health insurance business. I could see a lot of parents also interested in a stealth breathalyzer when they loan their cars to their kids.
Then again, assuming the chip isn’t used for evil purposes, this could be just plain old helpful for regular folks to check their health. Your cell phone could be like a little “Check Engine” light for you. AND is looking to introduce to this to the Japanese market first. No word on when it will show up in the States.
blackbearnh writes "Scientific data can be both hard to get and expensive, even if your tax dollars paid for it. And if you do pay the big bucks to a publisher for access to a scientific paper, there's no assurance that you'll be able to read it, unless you've spent your life learning to decipher them. That's the argument that John Wilbanks makes in a recent interview on O'Reilly Radar, describing the problems that have led to the creation of the Science Commons project, which he heads. According to Wilbanks, scientific data should be easy to access, in common formats that make it easy to exchange, and free for use in research. He also wants to see standard licensing models for scientific patents, rather than the individually negotiated ones now that make research based on an existing patent so financially risky." Read on for the rest of blackbearnh's thoughts.
This absurd little video is ostensibly to show off the sweet new AMOLED screens gracing the S8300, OmniaHD and others. But I’m thinking it was more of a way for their internal viral team to get to play with a whole bunch of baby animals.
What if that was your job? I mean, I’m not complaining — I’m doing my job sitting here without a shirt, drinking pomegranate tea and eating hot hot hot ramen. But if someone said “take this HD video camera and get lots of cute footage of baby animals, with our phones in the background,” I might be conflicted.
Those lucky (and sadistic) ducks over at iFixit have taken their brand new 17-inch MBP and torn it down with their usual gusto. As expected, the layout and parts are much like its 15-inch cousin but bigger, and of course the much-advertised battery is different. It was removed like any other… not sure why Apple made such a big deal about it. It’s 12820 mAh, which is a grip — for comparison, my G1 has a 1150 mAh battery.
It’s pretty much as advertised, but if you’re planning on swapping out your hard drive or whatnot, this is the best guide you’re going to get.
The new E-30 will be made available in a variety of kits with a 14-42mm lens or the new 14-54mm f2.8-3.5 II prosumer lens. Five different camera and lens bundles will be available.
New features include an in-camera “photoshop”, a 270 degree swiveling live-view LCD, and with certain lenses, the fastest autofocus in the industry. The viewfinder is said to be much larger and brighter than the first generation E1/E300 and the image quality has “improved considerably.”
The Asian lady pictured is strictly for beautification and will not be included in any kits.
AP - A federal appeals court on Friday struck down a California law that sought to ban the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Feb 2009 | 1:38 am
Honeywell is such an old company that in order to survive the changing manufacturing needs of the country, it's been forced to reinvent its product line numerous times. Over the last 103 years, it has sold everything from home thermostats, to Garrett turbochargers, and even cluster bombs and napalm (!).
Now, Honeywell is partnering with Taiwanese company Soyo to launch a new line of LCD televisions. And in order to get the attention in a market saturated with TV manufacturers and decimated by the economic depression, they've decided to come out with the high-end, super-sized (303-pound), 82-inch 1080p Altura LE LCD in the next few months.
Consider us firmly aware, Honeywell, but also slightly confused. Our first reactions come down to this: Soyo, really? And 82-inches, wha? Soyo's previous LCD panels have been panned for their below-average image processing and quite poor black levels and really don't inspire confidence.
As for the size, we find it difficult to believe that anyone would pay a huge premium for size without assurances of excellent picture quality. They haven't mentioned a price, but somehow I don't think this will be any cheaper than $5,000. Currently, the only TVs that are selling well are LCDs from top companies that have significantly reduced their price points. And the only high-end pricey TVs that are showing up on Amazon's top 50 list are the Pioneer Kuros, generally considered the best overall TVs.
Owning an 82-inch screen is an admittedly sexy idea, but the reality is that people are broke and even high rollers are hedging their bets. Plus, you could just pick up a Mitsu Laser TV and enjoy yourself with a cool new technology.
Still, we wouldn't mind checking it out all on someone else's dime. It will feature a 120Hz refresh rate (eh), Full 1080p HD, 178 degree view angle, and a bunch of other HDMI, Component, and VGA ports. Plus, it will have a 120,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio (already surpassed), and come with a potentially cool, but somewhat strange five-year warranty that loses small warranty privileges over the years, like labor and LCD panel repairs.
The Honeywell TVs will also come in four smaller sizes,and will be available everywhere in a few months for an undisclosed price.
The Mac Mini rumors are flying like toasters in System 7 these days, and this one is particularly robust. Although some image analysis on the original picture has shown it to be likely a fake, that hasn’t stopped the rumor mill from churning out video of this crytogadget.
We know the new Mini will be using Nvidia’s Ion platform, but beyond that it’s mostly guesswork. This little box is small, sure, but I’m expecting something even smaller, or with a different form factor. This one looks like it was manufactured by Nestle Toll House. There’s a “giga bite” joke here somewhere, but it’s just not coming to me.
I believe this week we’ve witnessed the birth of crack 2.0. Like Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo, it follows up the original but with more flair and outlandish moves. From the dance of the pretty phones in Barcelona to the hubbub over Hulu,I am not certain if I should bother with this list or just point out who is not on crack at this point. Here we go, try to follow along, huh?
Phone Parade: a.k.a. Ed’s Pants
Window Mobile 6.5 is for suckers
Hubbub over Hulu
Verizon pirates Fave Five
Spanish Hotties
The big show has come and gone and here are the phones that will be in your face for the next year: *cricket sound*, *cricket sound*, *cricket sound*. Seriously? I hate to say this as I am pretty sure (but far too lazy to go back and verify) I say this every year: where is your iPhone killer?
“Even today, people still get excited when they here there’s an iPhone in my pocket, and are constantly asking to “have a go.“
We’ll assume Ed is only talking about his iPhone there…haha. But his point is valid: show us something that isn’t instantly forgettable. I can’t even name a Samsung phone at this point. Same goes for LG. Phone after phone of mildly usable features looks to fit the bill.
It isn’t like the iPhone isn’t without out faults: copy+past, removable battery, video etc. Is it up to Palm Pre to put an end to Apple’s hootenanny? HA! 3 months ago the very notion of Palm slaying the iPhone or even getting close would have been laughable. Who doesn’t love surprises from dark horses?
Windows 5 (oops, I mean 6.5) sure.
Which brings me to Windows Mobile. Grrrr. Word on the bustling Barcelona streets is we won’t see 6.5 until later this year, maybe 2010 according to some. Sweet. 6.5 looks to make some targets bigger for touch phones sans stylus, gives us an odd honeycomb grid slider and changes the home screen. Oh, don’t forget the upgrades to the all-but-unusable Explorer.
Our Vince Pane had this to say, “While this isn’t the total system overhaul that many Windows Mobile users have been hoping for, it may be just enough to keep the OS competitive until Microsoft rolls out Windows Mobile 7.“
This stuff is so far from par, what is MS thinking? Any phone with Active Sync is at least as good as a Windows Mobile phone. And if that isn’t damning them, I don’t know what is.
Hulu points finger
Earlier this week, Hulu pulled its content from the popular Boxee. A letter of apology was posted on Hulu’s blog pointing the finger to their content providers.
This news signals TV networks are going down the same blinded-by-fear path as the RIAA. Pulling from Hulu only means I now have the incentive to go and get it illegally. Read the comments on Hulu’s blog, I am not alone amigos. At least with Hulu, I had to watch your commercial. A guy could get hooked on illegal stuff and never come back, you know.
Fave Five isn’t just for T-Mobile anymore
Was it the name Fave Five? Did someone at Verizon need a punchline that ended with, “you are out of my Fave Five, sucka?“ Was the marketing team just bored?
Ah, the carrier world is not the place for creativity anyhow. Verizon boosted the concept, it says, from newly digested Alltell’s “My Circle.“ I say, nay. Differentiation is for chumps anyhow.
However, the option does not come without some catches. For instance, users will need to have a minimum plan of $59.99 a month for single lines and $89.99 for family lines in order to be eligible
Now this is more convincing! A physical thing, on reasonably high-quality video, rotated and fiddled with. And yet it doesn't quite banish my skepticism completely--there's a little of the absurd about it.
The story given by the poster is obviously bullshit, but that doesn't mean it's not real. It's not as if he's going to be dumb enough to just come out and say something like "Yeah, I'm a pro photographer who takes pictures for Apple's print ads" or what-have-you.
The idea that Apple's legendary secrecy's been cracked is delicious. Commenter TJS's psuedocode algorithm for what should happen next is excellent:
Select strValidity
Case: "Leaked Prototype"
Discover source
Fire source from job
While we haven’t got any more major news about the Mini 10 (like when it’s shipping, officially), Dell has finally put some decent pictures up on their site. The price hasn’t changed, it’s still going to be $499, and we’ll update more as soon as more information becomes available. You’ve got to admit though, they look pretty good. Better then most netbooks out there in fact.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has struck down as unconstitutional a California statute purporting to ban the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. In a 30-page decision (PDF), in Video Software Dealers Association v. Schwarzenegger, the federal appeals court ruled that 'the Act, as a presumptively invalid content based restriction on speech, is subject to strict scrutiny and not the 'variable obscenity' standard from Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629 (1968). Applying strict scrutiny, we hold that the Act violates rights protected by the First Amendment because the State has not demonstrated a compelling interest, has not tailored the restriction to its alleged compelling interest, and there exist less-restrictive means that would further the State's expressed interests. Additionally, we hold that the Act's labeling requirement is unconstitutionally compelled speech under the First Amendment because it does not require the disclosure of purely factual information; but compels the carrying of the State's controversial opinion.'"
AP - Shantanu Narayen, the chief executive of Acrobat software maker Adobe Systems Inc., was awarded compensation valued at $16.4 million in fiscal 2008, although the vast majority of that was in stock options that currently have little value. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Feb 2009 | 12:51 am
With the proposed $2.5 billion merger between TicketMaster and Live Nation looming large, many venue owners and promoters are up in arms, deeming the deal anti-competitive and monopolistic (they may be right - the deal is being examined for possible anti-trust violations). Now ShowClix, a TicketMaster competitor that launched in early 2007, is launching the Fair Ticketing Fund, setting aside up to $5 million to entice venues and promoters away from the pending Live Nation Entertainment goliath. Other ticket vendors are also beginning to offer similar deals, including TicketBiscuit, which launched a $10 million fund last week.
For those who aren’t familiar with the ticketing business, here’s a bit of a primer. TicketMaster has long been contracting venues into exclusive deals, promising some portion of the service fees (also known as convenience or venue fees) the site racks up as an incentive for them to sign on. TicketMaster has become notorious for gouging customers with these fees, and many fear that with the Live Nation deal they’ll only continue to rise higher.
Smaller ticket companies like ShowClix don’t typically charge service fees that are nearly as high as TicketMaster’s so they usually can’t promise the same returns to venues. That’s where the their new funds come in: each is promising venues that they’ll use the new funds to compensate for the income they stand to lose from leaving TicketMaster. In effect, they’re giving venues opposed to the new deal a chance to protest it without doing too much damage to their bank accounts.
However, while ShowClix and TicketBiscuit may be giving away money for now, this is hardly a charity - any venues looking to take advantage of the Fair Ticketing Fund will be signing on with ShowClix under an exclusive year-long deal (which is fairly common in the industry), and TicketBiscuit will also mandate an exclusive deal. Still, it’s nice to see these smaller entities take on TicketMaster - I’m getting tired of “convenience” fees that cost a third as much as the ticket itself.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Could being tied to Sprint hurt the Palm Pre's chances when it launches later this year? Maybe so, given the carrier's economic woes. The Gadget Lab crew discusses the good phone/not-so-good carrier problem in this week's episode.
Plus, we talk about industrial designers' latest fascination: putting bamboo in everything from notebooks to computer mice to bicycle frames. And we review the Casio G-Shock MTG-1500, a rugged watch that's both solar-powered and atomic, and the Asus ET1602 Eee Top -- an inexpensive, all-in-one "kitchen PC."
This week's episode features Gadget Labbers Dylan Tweney, Danny
Dumas and Priya Ganapati, with audio engineering by Michael Lennon.
That firecracker CEO of Nvidia, Jen-Hsun Huang, has revealed that Nvidia will be putting out an “Ion 2″ platform using VIA Nano processors instead of Intel’s Atoms. The pairing isn’t surprising, considering that the Nano processors are supposed to be quite as capable as Atoms, and Nvidia’s relationship with Intel right now isn’t exactly all fun and games. They’ll still have Atom-based Ions, but this is a nice way to get back at Intel a little.
One laptop maker you can count on to take advantage of this is Lenovo, which was already planning a Nano-based 12-inch machine. You can bet they’ll jump on this platform since it’ll be cheap and effective.
In November 2007, Reason magazine's Radley Balko published a long investigative story on Steven Hayne, a doctor who for the last 20 years has done the vast majority of Mississippi's forensic autopsies. Critics say Hayne and his sidekick, "bite mark expert" Michael West, cornered the market by doing ungodly numbers of autopsies, and by telling prosecutors what they wanted to hear -- possibly putting innocent people in prison in the process.
Three months after the article ran, two men in Mississippi -- Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks -- were released from prison after DNA testing exonerated them for raping and killing the daughters of their girlfriends. Both convicted in the early 1990s, the two collectively served more than 30 years in prison. Tests pointed to a third man, who confessed to both crimes. Brooks and Brewer were both convicted based primarily on testimony from West and Hayne, who claimed to have found bite marks on the little girls that could only come from the accused.
Balko has now found another case from about the same time with remarkably similar facts. Only this time, there's an incredible, damning video of Hayne and West's "examination." Jimmie Duncan was accused of raping and killing his girlfriend's daughter, 23-month old Haley Oliveaux. Prosecutors brought her body to Hayne, who claimed to have seen bite marks no other doctor noticed. He then called in West, who did the exam depcited in the video. In the video, West takes a dental mold of Jimmie Duncan's teeth and pushes it into or scrapes it across Haley Oliveaux's body some 50 times.Other forensic experts say the video shows not only medical malpractice, but criminal evidence tampering.
West and Hayne have testified in thousands of cases in Mississippi and Louisiana. Jimmie Duncan was convicted of capital murder for the rape and murder of Haley Oliveaux. He is still on death row in Louisiana.
PC World - What's the most common type of malware on the Internet? Viruses? Botnet code? How about password-stealing worms, designed to victimize online gamers? Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Feb 2009 | 12:20 am
CWmike writes "Criminals behind the widespread Conficker worm have released a new version that could signal a major shift in the way the malware operates. The new variant, dubbed Conficker B++, was spotted three days ago by SRI International researchers, who published details of the new code on Thursday. To the untrained eye, the new variant looks almost identical to the previous version of the worm, Conficker B. But the B++ variant uses new techniques to download software, giving its creators more flexibility in what they can do with infected machines."
The actor's portrayal of manic criminal mastermind The Joker in The Dark Knight caps a career built on introspection and struggle. In exclusive Wired.com audio from a 2004 interview, Ledger discusses his drive to better himself.
LG announced today the LG-GD900 cell phone, which has a very distinguishing feature - a translucent sliding keypad. The phone was designed to make a new fashion statement, and is scheduled to release during the second quarter of 2009. No word on the features yet, but who cares about the features? It’s beautiful!
Comet Lulin will make get close enough for anyone with binoculars and a clear sky to see on the night of Feb. 23. NASA's Swift Gamma-ray Explorer satellite got a great photo during its own close-up with the comet last month.
Gateway (they’re still around?) just introduced two notebook computers which comprise its TC Series.
Their tagline is “Beautiful, powerful and lightweight? You better believe it.“ Is the TC line “beautiful?“ It’s nice looking, but “beautiful” is a bit of a stretch. The back of the 14-inch 16:9 LCD looks nice, with either a red or black shiny finish. The keyboard area has the brushed look. The rest of the PC looks a bit bulky.
How powerful is it? Both models, the TC7306u and the TC7307u, have 2GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core processors and they both run the 64-bit version of MS Windows Vista Home Premium so it can take advantage of the 4GB of RAM installed. A 320GB SATA hard drive is a good size and they both come with eSATA ports if you want to add more storage. Gateway even threw in 802.11b, g, and Draft-N compatibility. The 14-inch display has a resolution of 1366x768 so you can watch up to 720P HD video. It also looks like you will be able to upgrade the laptop from a DVD burner to a Blu-ray drive. This set of specs is not bad.
The TC line is a bit heavy for “lightweight” at 5.3 pounds each. What’s the big difference between models? It seems to be the color and where each will be available. The TC7306u has a black finish and will be at Tiger Direct, and the TC7307u with its burgundy finish will be available at “select retailers.“
They both cost $649.99 base price, so there’s no premium for picking one color over the other. There is no pricing info on the Blu-ray upgrade.
Funny isn’t it? Congress spent most of last year calling for Internet companies to limit user data retention and here it is pushing legislation that would require Internet service providers and the operators of Wi-Fi access points to retain Internet user data for up to two years. Why? To protect children from predators, of course.
Introduced by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, the “Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act,” or Internet Safety Act, states that “a provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.”
Sounds a bit broad, doesn’t? And indeed, privacy advocates say that it applies not just to the Wi-Fi access points of Internet service providers, but to those of libraries, schools, businesses and individuals as well.
To mine. And to yours.
An unsettling thought. Said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology: “[This is] invasive, risky, unnecessary, and likely to be ineffective.”
Perhaps. But it’s for the children. “While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children,” Sen. Cornyn said Thursday. “Keeping our children safe requires cooperation on the local, state, federal, and family level.”
That leaked U2 album is causing all sorts of trouble. The unreleased album, which is due out on March 3, found its way onto BitTorrent and was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. That, apparently, sent music industry lawyers over at the Recording Industry Association of America into a fit. As a result, word is going around that the RIAA asked social music service Last.fm for data about its user’s listening habits to find people with unreleased tracks on their computers. And Last.fm, which is owned by CBS, actually handed the data over to the RIAA. According to a tip we received:
I heard from an irate friend who works at CBS that last.fm recently provided the RIAA with a giant dump of user data to track down people who are scrobbling unreleased tracks. As word spread numerous employees at last.fm were up in arms because the data collected (a) can be used to identify individuals and (b) will likely be shared with 3rd parties that have relationships with the RIAA.
Supposedly, the operations team which handed over the data in the first place weren’t told the true purpose for the transfer or who was getting the data until after the fact, and only when they had to help with some corrupted data. It sounds like it was more of a corporate decision. I’ve contacted both CBS and the RIAA. Most of the Last.fm team is in London, where the weekend has already started. For now Last.fm says: “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA.” (The RIAA declined to comment).
Setting aside what actually happened to the data, and assuming this rumor is true, why would the RIAA target Last.fm? It wasn’t streaming the U2 album, and it is not an illegal download service. But Last.fm has millions of users who are heavy music consumers, and many of them download Last.fm’s Scrobbler software which keeps track of every single song you listen to on your computer, no matter which music player you use. In other words, it captures tracks played from illegal BitTorrent downloads just as easily as from iTunes.
Last.fm members knowingly share what they are listening to with the rest of the Last.fm community, and in return receive social recommendations of music they might like. That is the whole point of the service. And Last.fm’s privacy policy does clearly state:
. . . your record collection (including your skipping history) may be viewed by all other users of Last.fm (who may include other organisations or representatives of other organisations who have registered as Last.fm users) and that they may easily associate this information with your Last.fm username.
But most probably never even considered it a possibility that individually identifiable information about their listening habits (legal, illegal, or otherwise) could be handed over to an organization known for taking consumers to court for file-sharing. What makes this even more egregious is that it appears to be absent any legal precedent (such as a pending lawsuit) for which Last.fm could at least hide behind as an excuse.
Incidents like this highlight how the social Web can sometimes bite back if you are not careful. It also raises the issue of who owns all of this data about you and what they can do with it. (The same issue that caused Facebook to backtrack on recent changes to its data policy). Unfortunately, it’s come down to this: you really shouldn’t share any data on the Web you wouldn’t feel comfortable seeing in a court of law.
(Please contact us at tips [at] techcrunch if you have more information about this).
Update: Some more denials from Last.FMers, including one of the co-founders, Richard Jones, in comments, who says this story is “utter nonsense and totally untrue,” and another one from Russ Garrett, a systems architect.
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PC World - The U.S. government could save billions of dollars by moving to more open-source software, cloud computing and virtualization, a recent study suggests. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 20 Feb 2009 | 10:40 pm
The mystery surrounding President Barack Obama's Blackberry has lasted longer than anyone anticipated. But thanks to the deep-dive veteran journalists over at the New Yorker, we can finally know what's really in there.
A game of Tiny Ninja or perhaps a version of Mario Bros.? No. According to artist Bruce McCall, the President has a dedicated button for everything from a message that lets him know whenever Al Gore is in the viscinity, to a flash alarm that goes off in case Malia and Sasha start jumping on Lincoln's bed.
McCall's amusing interactive 'sketchbook' is of course a joke, but it does flush the imagination with other (real or ridiculous) potential features the NSA might have integrated into the smartphone.
It's crazy how much notoriety the Blackberry has received, but we still don't know much about the details.
At first, we heard that the hacking, monitoring, and records preservation risks of the phone were too great for the leader of the free world to carry around. Then, we heard he was using a modified Blackberry with security approval from the NSA, and that was followed with a report that it was a Window-based smartphone from General Dynamics. Obama's played into the fun of it all by suggesting it turns into a car, for a 'quick getaway.'
The truth is that we'll probably never know the true features of the phone. For example, Presidential limos from previous administrations have been destroyed so that no one figures out a pattern of their security features. This means we'll be speculating for years and we're OK with it.
Earlier today some bloggers, including myself, concluded a blurry photo purporting to be the Mac Mini must be a fake. But almost immediately a video emerged showing off the fabled device, spinning it back and forth to reveal its five USB ports in an effort to convince you.
I'm still skeptical, but being a video editor myself, I know that'd be a pretty difficult editing trick. What are your thoughts?
The recent Mac Mini "spy shot" is so effortless and yawn-inducing that it must be a Photoshop job. But does the inverse of that logic lend the above photo more validity?
NewsFactor - IBM gave the cloud-computing industry a big boost last week when it validated the technology by partnering with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment. And despite -- or even because of -- the current economic recession, research firm IDC expects spending on IT cloud services to grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012 and accounting for nine percent of revenues in five key market segments. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 20 Feb 2009 | 9:56 pm
What’s better than Hulu, the video service that lets you watch your favorite TV shows on your laptop? A service that lets you watch even more TV shows on your laptop–if you’re a cable TV subscriber.
That’s the thinking behind plans some of the big cable TV operators and cable networks are drawing up. But while it’s tempting to describe these offerings-to-be as Hulu 2.0, it’s not nearly that simple.
Both Comcast (CMCSA) and Timer Warner Cable (TWC) want to give their subscribers Web access to more shows than they can currently get–at least legally. But the two companies have competing plans, based on different technologies and philosophies. Here’s the latest info I have on the offerings-to-be, which The Wall Street Journal first wrote about last night:
Comcast, which is referring internally to its plan as “Authentication” (ugh), wants to beef up its Fancast Web site, which is currently an also-ran behind Hulu in the video portal competition. But Time Warner Cable, in conjunction with Cox, is offering a different take, powered by the same technology it used when it offered HBO to some broadband customers in a Wisconsin test last year. The cable provider’s plan, which it has dubbed “Entitlement” (double ugh), doesn’t call for a single portal. Instead, each cable programmer that signs on would distribute its programming via its own site.
Comcast would eventually like to syndicate its Fancast-on-steroids site to other cable providers. But don’t expect to use the souped-up Fancast if you’re a Time Warner Cable customer–the company has no interest in letting someone else control its subscribers’ Web video experience.
Most of the major cable networks have been talking to cable providers about both plans, and most have offered up some degree of enthusiasm, including GE’s (GE) NBC, Viacom (VIA), Time Warner (TWX) Discovery Communications (DISCA) and Scripps Networks Interactive (SNI).
Notable player not involved in discussions, at least so far: Disney (DIS). Which means you shouldn’t expect to get full access to Disney channel or ESPN programming on your laptop for some time to come.
Comcast plans on a trial run of its service this summer; Time Warner Cable had originally planned to launch its trial in the first quarter of 2009, but has pushed back its launch to the much-vaguer “sometime this year.”
But while the strategies and specifics of the plans are different, the underlying philosophies are the same. Both plans are meant to keep customers from defecting to TV services offered by the satellite companies and telcos. (And Time Warner Cable has been specifically warning its programmers of the danger of “cable cutters” by touting a test in Texas where up to three percent of its cable subs have dropped the service in favor of free TV from the Web.) And both plans are meant to impress upon customers that someone, somewhere has to pay for the TV they watch.
Will any of this work? It’s easy to assume that it won’t, since it involves slow-moving cable providers linking up with protective cable programmers to produce compelling Web services. But that’s the sort of thing that all of us geniuses said about Hulu, and that JV between NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox has worked out great, at least from a technology and user perspective. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)
And regardless, the tension between broadband providers, content providers, and consumers who don’t care who pays for their programming as long as they can watch “Heroes” whenever they want wherever they want, is going to make for interesting stories for a long time to come. We’ll be revisiting this one frequently.
Meanwhile here’s a clip reel from HBO’s excellent new “Eastbound & Down” series, which literally kept me from canceling the pay service this week. But as soon as it’s done, so is my subscription. There’s just too much good stuff out there on the Web for me to justify the extra cost. NOTE: This clip has a lot of swearing. If you want even more swearing and a little bit of nudity, there’s a much better clip here.
One of the finest and longest-lasting gadgets you can buy is a decent fountain pen. Like most items of good quality, maintenance and repair can keep them in action for years, if not decades: you can pay an expert, or you can learn to do it yourself.
Ludwig Tan's how-to guide on grinding nibs saved me a bunch of cash getting an old Parker 51 writing smoothly again, and all you need is an Arkansas Stone, fine-grit emery paper and, finally, something only slightly rough, like crocus paper or a brown paper bag. As these are items you likely already have, it's practically free!
There's another article I wished I'd had at hand, though: Wim Geeraets' Nib grinding experiences has more technical detail, such as the best grade papers to use as you proceed.
The long-running Psystar dispute may be settling down as the controversial PC-maker runs out of steam, but don't think that's the end of... the Clone Wars. (sorry)
Powerfully-named German PC company HyperMegaNet UG has started selling its own line of cloned Apples. But good heavens, you say, aren't they scared of Apple? Won't they see the smoking ruins of Psystar and fear the same fate may be in store for them? Ah yes, but you forget: they're German.
I don't mean that in the sense that they're industrious and methodical, but simply that they're part of the European Union, where it's possible that the law permits this piratical behavior. They certainly seem to think so.
An analytics company recently conducted a study that found most free iPhone apps are rarely used after the first day they're downloaded.
In fact, only 20 percent of users use free apps again after the first day they're downloaded, according to Pinch Media, who based its analysis on trends seen in 30 million downloads. And within a month, most users stop using the app altogether.
The problem for developers? Advertising revenue. Advertisers shell out cash not just based on the number of downloads, but also how often each app is used. In other words, if you're hoping to make it big like iShoot developer Ethan Nicholas, just know it's extremely difficult to rake in money with a free iPhone app given the quick drop-off.
I can certainly vouch for the analysis. I'm especially picky about what stays on my iPhone springboard, and I'd say I delete about 90 percent of free apps a day after I download them. What are your thoughts?
FROM APPLETELL - German company HyperMegaNet UG has just released a line of computers that are capable of running Max OS X Leopard. The operating system is available for preinstall on the machines shipped, with Windows Vista and XP as alternatives. MORE »
Human toes may have evolved to be short and stubby to allow hominids to run long distances. By studying the biomechanics of the human foot, scientists concluded that short toes are good for chasing prey.
America's transition to over-the-air digital television signals, which netted the government $19 billion in a wireless spectrum auction, was doomed from the start, thanks to a flawed voucher program and a time frame that left the country stranded between administrations.
Last night, well-known Internet entrepreneur Marc Andreessen appeared on the “Charlie Rose” television interview show, talking about the digital sector and unveiling the news that he is creating a new venture fund.
I had heard rumblings about Andreessen’s funding efforts earlier this week, with sources I talked to nicknaming it “Project A.”
Actually, Andreessen said the new firm is called Andreessen Horowitz (zzzz), because he is doing it with longtime investing partner Ben Horowitz.
“For the first time in my life, I am crossing over into the dark side,” said Andreessen.
Although he gave few specific details about the fund, Andreessen essentially said he was simply putting a structure around his own active angel investing, which has included start-ups like Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn and many more.
His new effort will focus on early-stage investments, he said, noting that “our claim to fame is, we’ve actually, you know, by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, we’ve done it, we’ve been on that side of the table for a long time; we know what it’s like.”
Adding that he and Horowitz had made 36 investments over the last three years of up to $200,000, Andreessen said his new firm will make up to $1 million bets on start-ups.
Of course, for most of the interview, Rose zeroed in on hot topics like Facebook, the social-networking site on whose board Andreessen serves.
The voluble tech star did his job, talking about how Facebook could turn on the spigot and make all sorts of money anytime it wants and about the recent controversy around its Terms of Service kerfuffle.
He also talked about the Andreessen-backed Ning social network service, the Apple (AAPL) iPhone, Twitter, why the New York Times irks him, Google (GOOG), the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle e-book reader and gaming.
Ironically, the Netscape co-founder and his Xbox from Microsoft (MSFT)–eek–”have a very close personal relationship.”
But Andreessen also told Rose a little bit about the new fund he is raising money for, for example, while discussing the economic meltdown.
Talking about the fact that innovation will survive, Andreessen said: “Like with our new fund, if we fund a company today, we’re thinking about a return in seven to 10 years, so we can go through three or four or even five years of economic downturn, as long as, at some point, we come out the other end.”
Here is the video of Andreessen on the show (he starts to talk about the new fund in the interview at around 18:33 minutes, again at 46:55 minutes and at the very end):
HEBRON, Ky., Feb. 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Pomeroy IT Solutions (Nasdaq: PMRY), a technology and services solutions provider, announced today that its Board of Directors has received a letter from David B. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 20 Feb 2009 | 8:15 pm
One of my favorite treats at an Asian grocery store is Ramune. Ramune is a soda with Japanese origins (there's a Taiwanese version as well) that comes in a variety of sugary-sweet flavors. Although, unfortunately, not blood. Bummer.
But the cool thing about Ramune isn't the taste; it's the container. Bottles of the soda are sealed up with a marble. To open them, you have to force the marble down into the bottle, where it gets captured in a small chamber within. Pop it in hard and it makes a fizzy mess; which of course can be part of the appeal of drinking it. While the bottle may appear novel, once again it's in fact an old technology that just happens to feel delightfully modern.
The bottle is a Codd Stopper, invented by soda magnate Hiram Codd (of the Camberwell Coddses, not those low born mother-scratching Devonshire Coddses) and patented in 1873. The idea is that the bottle uses internal pressure from carbonation to force the marble up against the rubber stopper at the lip, sealing your tasty beverage inside. It was kind of a hit, although the quaintly pejorative term codswallop refers to beer that was sold in such bottles. Codd also helped pioneer the return deposit (thus giving d. boon $.05) perhaps because children were prone to smashing empty Codd bottles to get at the marble inside. Kids are dumb.
But while Codd bottles fell out of use in Europe, and never gained much traction in North America, they were crazy popular in Asia, particularly in Japan where, as we have previously established, they know from beverages. Today you can get Shirakiku brand Ramune all over the place--assuming you live in San Francisco like me. Er. You don't? Well, you can still pick it up on Amazon. But if there is an Asian market in your area, save yourself some shipping costs; they'll have it.
It’s true that many amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth, including a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species and the remains of an ancient Roman villa. In this case, however, what users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data.”
FORT COLLINS, Colo., Feb. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Advanced Energy Industries, Inc. (Nasdaq: AEIS) will release fourth quarter and full-year 2008 financial results on Monday, February 23, 2009. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 20 Feb 2009 | 8:00 pm
The science behind beam-powered propulsion has been sorted out, the only challenge is building the aircraft. Aerospace engineer Leik Myrabo figures that will take 20 years.
The »iPoint 3D« allows people to communicate with a 3-D display through simple gestures – without touching it and without 3-D glasses or a data glove. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 20 Feb 2009 | 7:58 pm
InfoWorld - Building on its ETL and integration history, iWay Software brought forth this week a new enterprise information management suite and two add-on products that expand the EIM capabilities. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 20 Feb 2009 | 7:49 pm
With Hulu pulling their content from Boxee, there’s a question as to what will happen to other programs that pull content from Hulu. PlayOn from MediaMall is a Windows program that browses video services from CBS, ESPN, Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube through display devices like the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Gadgetell got a chance to talk to MediaMall to see their reaction and if they feared a similar move by Hulu.
Jeff Lawrence, President & CEO of MediaMall, told us that they pride themselves “in honoring 100% the terms of use associated with all the various content available through the PlayOn browser.“ He also said that PlayOn is just a “sophisticated browser which allows (authorized/paying) consumers to browse and consume Internet Video content in compliance with the terms and conditions of those content providers.“
I have used PlayOn for the past several weeks and think it’s a great addition to both the PS3 and XBox 360. Unlike other programs, you can send video to either device using the same program; there are not separate device-specific versions.
If everything Mr. Lawrence has told us is true, then they should not have any problems with Hulu in the future. Then again, the content providers get to tell Hulu what to do and terms of service can change. Take a look at the terms of use for Hulu: “Hulu may change this Terms of Use at any time and such change shall be effective upon posting the new Terms of Use on the Hulu Site at http://www.hulu.com/terms.“
Mr. Lawrence also said that he hopes that Boxee and Hulu work something out in the future because MediaMall is a fan of their services as well. We’ll see how that goes.
Concerns are beginning to rise about the $7.2 billion provided by the new economic stimulus package to add high-speed Internet access to rural areas. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 20 Feb 2009 | 7:40 pm
One San Francisco-based company is giving users the opportunity to discover startup companies in order to make a sound business investment. YouNoodle’s Web site offers a system that scores a business by the “buzz” surrounding it. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 20 Feb 2009 | 7:39 pm
LDK Solar (LDK) shares are trading sharply lower this morning after ThinkEquity analyst Jonathan Hoopes cut his rating on the stock to Sell from Buy. He cut his target price on the stock to–get this–$4.50, from $45.
The more bearish stance follows an earnings warning from the company earlier this week. Hoopes points out that the company’s $210 million to $220 million inventory write-down raises new concerns about a 2007 controversy involving allegations over inventory accounting issues.
As Hoopes notes, in October 2007, former LDK controller Charley Situ alleged discrepancies in the company’s accounting for “possibly unusable inventory.” In December 2007, he recalls, LDK announced that an investigating committee found no material errors in the company’s state silicon inventory and said that a provision for obsolete or excess silicon feedstock was not required.
Marc Andreessen appeared on Charlie Rose last night. (The entire interview is embedded above). He gave Rose a primer on everything from Facebook and cloud computing to the mobile Web. But he also tells Rose: “I’m creating a fund.” Actually, Andreessen is creating it with his investing partner Ben Horowitz, and it will formalize the angel investing he has been doing on his own for the past several years. It will be called Andreessen Horowitz. From the transcript:
Charlie Rose:
Why are you doing this?
Marc Andreessen:
Because of the nature and the scale of the opportunities. We’re actually been investing ourselves with our own money for three years and we’ve invested in 36 — he and I invested together in 36 deals in three years so about one a month.
Charlie Rose:
Yeah, but I’ve read that you think that the normal investment for you to make, this may have been prefund, what, was about 100,000 to 200,000?
Marc Andreessen:
That’s right, and we’re actually going to preserve and extend that model in the fund. So historically we’ve only invested up to $200,000 total in a deal. We’re going to definitely bring that up in the fund because we’re going to raise more money, be able to put more money in. But it’ll be pretty typical for us to do a $500,000 investment or maybe down to 200,000 or maybe up to a million in a deal to start. And what we’re seeing is a whole generation of startups that actually don’t need very much money to get started, so the cloud computing example, or a mobile application, an iPhone developer doesn’t need very much money to get started.
Andreessen, who sits on Facebook’s board, also says that Facebook could be generating $1 billion in revenues today if it wanted to, and thinks the New York Times should go all digital.
Marc Andreessen:
There’s a lot of confusion out there. Facebook is deliberately not taking a lot of the kind of normal brand advertising that a lot of Web sites will take. So you go to — a company like Yahoo which is another fantastic business and they’ve got these you know banner ads and brand ads all over the place, Facebook has made a strategic decision to not take a lot of that business in favor of building its own sort of more organic business model and it’s still in the process of doing that and if they crack the code on that which I think that we will, then I think it will be very successful and will be very large. The fallback position is to just take normal advertising. And if Facebook just turned on the spigot for normal advertising today, it’d be doing over a billion dollars in revenue. So it’s much more a matter of long term strategy. Companies —
Charlie Rose:
So if you want to make a lot of money instantly, you could.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, oh, very easily. It could sell out the homepage and it would start making just a gigantic amount of money.
The full transcript is below.
Transcript
The Charlie Rose Show Session Two
Guest:
Marc Andreessen
Charlie Rose:
Marc Andreessen is here. He is one of Silicon Valley’s most respected entrepreneurs. He has already founded and sold two companies, each for over a billion dollars. The first was Netscape. It revolutionized web browsing before it was sold to AOL in 1999. His second company, Opsware, was bought by Hewlett Packard.
Charlie Rose:
Mark Andreessen is here. He’s one of Silicon Valley’s most respected entrepreneurs. He’s already founded and sold two companies, each for over a billion dollars. The first was Netescape. It revolutionized web browsing before it was sold to AOL in 1999. His second company, Opsware, was bought by Hewlett Packard in 2007. He has two new ventures, the social networking site, Ning, and a brand new venture capital fund. We want to talk about all of that. I am pleased to have him back on this show. Welcome.
Marc Andreessen:
Thank you.
Charlie Rose:
First just let me talk about something that has — you own 1.6 percent of it. It is Facebook.
Marc Andreessen:
Oh actually I own less than that.
Charlie Rose:
Did you? Oh, no —
Marc Andreessen:
Fortunate enough to be on the Board.
Charlie Rose:
Okay, fair enough, if you’re on the Board, I mean, why did I read that it was 1.6 percent? Somebody then —
Marc Andreessen:
Somebody’s giving me a —
Charlie Rose:
You can’t believe what you read.
Marc Andreessen:
– credit I don’t deserve.
Charlie Rose:
All right, because they said that you had invested at the same time $260 million, is that right or wrong?
Marc Andreessen:
No, no.
Charlie Rose:
None of my business.
Marc Andreessen:
No, I joined the Board later on.
Charlie Rose:
Okay, all right.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, last year.
Charlie Rose:
There is this sort of silly idea, but you want to speak to it, that Facebook is the next Google and Google is the next Microsoft. You’ve heard of that. Does any of it resonate with you?
Marc Andreessen:
I don’t think there are nexts, like so for example there was IBM and then people said here’s the next IBM and there never was the next IBM. I don’t think — Google’s a totally different business than Microsoft.
Charlie Rose:
IBM was not the next IBM.
Marc Andreessen:
IBM was not the next IBM. Microsoft wasn’t the next IBM. Google — Google’s its own company, it’s a fantastic company, it’s its own company with its own model. Facebook is a fantastically successful company with a huge amount of potential. Google is you know just a gigantically successful business you know I think for anybody to voluntarily step up and compare themselves to that I think would be hubris, I think that would be a bit much in general. But Facebook’s got huge potential and frankly I think it deserves to be evaluated on its own.
Charlie Rose:
Well, it is evaluated at $15 billion?
Marc Andreessen:
Well, there was an investment round at $15 billion evaluation which was for preferred stock.
Charlie Rose:
Which was the Microsoft investment?
Marc Andreessen:
Microsoft investment and some other investors. People are getting confused on that by the way because that’s preferred stock and there was an internal assessment, a valuation [spelled phonetically] that people have lots of rumors about that was lower than that which was for common stock. So people are getting the preferred and common confused. And of course this is all abstract, right, because the company’s private. You know someday the company will you know at some point —
Charlie Rose:
And because the company’s not making any money.
Marc Andreessen:
Well, company’s financials likely are private so it gets to keep that to itself but company’s [inaudible] —
[talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
But you’re on the Board of Directors —
[talking simultaneously]
Marc Andreessen:
I am on the Board.
Charlie Rose:
– you can be here and tell us.
Marc Andreessen:
I know. Company’s doing very well. On its internal goals it’s doing very well. It’s passed 175 million active users. Half of those users use it every day. A lot of those users use it 50 times a day. It’s generating I think a substantial amount of revenue. I think it can be doing a lot more revenue in the years to come.
Charlie Rose:
Have you read this story? Fortune has marked on the cover how Facebook has taken over our lives then but is it a real business?
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, sure. So I think people ask us about new companies all the time. They —
Charlie Rose:
They monetize it.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, [unintelligible] they monetize it. But look it’s got 175 million active users. It’s the sixth most populated country in the world right now if you compare it to countries. It’s on its way to 500 million users. I mean, it’s going to be a multibillion dollar success.
Charlie Rose:
So what’s going to be the trick to monetize it?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, okay, so and this is where people are getting confused, is Facebook is deliberately, and this is actually very interesting.
Charlie Rose:
There’s a lot of confusion out there.
Marc Andreessen:
There’s a lot of confusion out there. Facebook is deliberately not taking a lot of the kind of normal brand advertising that a lot of Web sites will take. So you go to — a company like Yahoo which is another fantastic business and they’ve got these you know banner ads and brand ads all over the place, Facebook has made a strategic decision to not take a lot of that business in favor of building its own sort of more organic business model and it’s still in the process of doing that and if they crack the code on that which I think that we will, then I think it will be very successful and will be very large. The fallback position is to just take normal advertising. And if Facebook just turned on the spigot for normal advertising today, it’d be doing over a billion dollars in revenue. So it’s much more a matter of long term strategy. Companies —
Charlie Rose:
So if you want to make a lot of money instantly, you could.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, oh, very easily. It could sell out the homepage and it would start making just a gigantic amount of money. Yeah and so there’s just tremendous potential and it’s just a question exactly how they choose to exploit it. What’s significant about that is that Marc is very determined to build a long term company. And you know there’s as you know there are people in the Valley who like quick hits and like sell companies quickly and then there are people, Andy Grove for example, or Bill Gates, and I think in his own way now, Marc, and obviously the Google guys are other examples of this, who want to build a long term business. And so he’s got his eyes way out on the horizon.
Charlie Rose:
So when one others may have sold out to larger media companies —
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
Mark insisted he would remain independent and develop his own company in his own way.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. And he had those turning parts presented to him. Any successful company in the valley gets acquisition offers and has to decide whether or not to take them. And he’s passed on some very lucrative offers and has a very big vision.
Charlie Rose:
Tell me what the big vision is.
Marc Andreessen:
So the big vision basically is — I mean the way I would articulate it is connect everybody on the planet, right? So I mean 175 million people —
Charlie Rose:
If you don’t think large, what the hell —
Marc Andreessen:
Exactly. 175 million people — 175 million people on the thing now. Adding a huge number of users every day. 6 billion people on the planet. Probably 3 billion of them with modern electricity and maybe telephones. So maybe the total addressable market today is 3 billion people. 175 million to 3 billion is a big challenge. A big opportunity.
Charlie Rose:
Let me remind you that you’re in the business of social networking.
Marc Andreessen:
Of course.
Charlie Rose:
That’s what your Ning is all about.
Marc Andreessen:
Of course, my own company Ning is about to cross 20 million users, and we’re adding 2 million users a month. We’re — and Ning is actually a business that lets you create your own social network, and we’re about to cross a million social networks on Ning that are —
Charlie Rose:
So you want to create a social network with your high school chums, then you can do that.
Marc Andreessen:
You can do that. And there is over a million of those. It’s easy, it’s free. Advertising — there is all kinds of ways. We make money on that, and that’s growing very fast. MySpace is doing very well for News Corps. LinkedIn is another company I’m an angel [?] investor in, you know, got north of 20 million resumes on it now. Everybody uses LinkedIn now to look for jobs and recruit. Which is a very hot topic these days.
Charlie Rose:
I would assume so. So social networking is hear to stay.
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, yeah.
Charlie Rose:
And it’s potential is just beginning.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
If you can connect everybody, then you have a huge opportunity to do a bunch of stuff.
Marc Andreessen:
Here’s the thing. If you can get 50 people or 100 or 150 million people to do something, then over time, you’re going to be able to get everybody to do it.
Charlie Rose:
Low politics —
Marc Andreessen:
Everything. Everybody. So there is huge potential, huge upside.
Charlie Rose:
The Obama campaign —
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
Revolutionized politics, didn’t it?
Marc Andreessen:
Excellent example. The Obama campaign by far, like the most aggressive state of the art uses social networking approaches, right, and philosophies. Now, primarily, that was harnessed in the form of fund raising. Right? It was an engine to be able to generate just gigantic numbers of campaign contributions. So every new campaign is going to use these technologies and these approaches. We have a lot of politicians creating networks on Ning. There will be a whole new wave of social networking in politics, right? And also the Obama campaign was very good for volunteer coordination over this. But there is a whole aspect of this for getting the message out in how the campaign gets covered and how the debates happen and how communication happens, which has yet to come. And that will be in ‘12 or ‘16.
Charlie Rose:
And in fact, I think Obama now speaks — rather than using the radio program, speaks online.
Marc Andreessen:
On YouTube. Right. He puts the video on YouTube and then that spreads out all over the web. In politics that’s amazing. In the rest of the world, that’s how things work today.
Charlie Rose:
Does YouTube make money?
Marc Andreessen:
Google — I mean — I don’t know specifically. That’s a Google thing.
Charlie Rose:
You know.
Marc Andreessen:
Well, if they don’t –
Charlie Rose:
You know.
Marc Andreessen:
I’ll give you the same answer as I do on Facebook. If they’re not making money today, they easily could. These are all under-monetized, under-monetized assets. Give you an example. Every video on YouTube — Viacom. Viacom is suing YouTube, suing goggle for copyright infringement. It’s 180-degree the wrong strategy.
Charlie Rose:
On the part of Viacom?
Marc Andreessen:
On the part of Viacom to sue YouTube. They should be using YouTube as a distribution channel, right? They should let all the videos go on to YouTube, and then ever time there is a Viacom video on YouTube, there should be a buy button. And you’re driving traffic directly pack to the properties, you’re selling DVD’s, you’re selling music, you’re selling video games, you’re selling all the stuff that Viacom sells. These are the distribution vehicles of all time. These are nirvana. Right? It’s like Napster for the music industry.
Charlie Rose:
I should count my lucky day that all my programs are on YouTube.
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, yeah. Of course. Because you want people to see them.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
I mean you want people to see them. So you put them out there. Like I say, there should be a buy button. There should be an advertisement.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
It’s like with Napster with music, right? 20 million people lined up in 1998 and decided they wanted to start using Napster to start listening to music. If there had been a buy the CD but been there, or buy the digital track, it would have been a gigantic source of revenue for the music industry and the music industry would be far healthier today. And so when you get huge numbers of people lining up to do something, in my view, you figure out how to take advantage of that.
Charlie Rose:
In my view, you have a market.
Marc Andreessen:
Right. Yeah. A market. You know, magic markets don’t appear –
Charlie Rose:
No, that’s right.
Marc Andreessen:
– all the time, so you take advantage of them.
Charlie Rose:
Okay. So what about this other part of Facebook, taking over our lives? Not so good.
Marc Andreessen:
Well, obviously I don’t think that that’s the case. So everything on Facebook is put on Facebook, or any of these other sites linked in as put on voluntarily. People have a lot of control who gets to see it and who doesn’t.
Charlie Rose:
You don’t deny that, in fact, some employers go first to Facebook and therefore if they see something they may not like, they may not hire somebody?
Marc Andreessen:
Well, yeah, but if I put photos of myself dancing around at a party down here on the wall and then apply for a job with you –
Charlie Rose:
There are photos around?
Marc Andreessen:
Possibly. I would have to check your hallway. Check your entrance. Check your Facebook pages.
Charlie Rose:
Yes, exactly.
Marc Andreessen:
But –
Charlie Rose:
I’m talking with about you.
Marc Andreessen:
For me? I’m sure there is photos. Who knows what kinds of photos are out there on me. But, yeah. I mean people are going to check. People are going to do Google searches. But I’ll tell you, it’s the other way around also; right? You’re an employee, you get to learn a lot more about the company you’re going to go to work for.
Charlie Rose:
So you find out about them, too.
Marc Andreessen:
Sure.
Charlie Rose:
On Facebook?
Marc Andreessen:
On Facebook, on Google –
Charlie Rose:
But there is always this controversy just erupted, which is the idea of who owns the user’s profile?
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. Yeah. So there was confusion, Facebook put out a new release to their so called terms of service. It was sort of legalese. And it caused a lots of confusion. So Mark has announced that they’re actually pulling those –pulling that off the site, referring to the previous version, and they’re going to write a new document which is in English.
Charlie Rose:
Which says?
Marc Andreessen:
Which says users own their content.
Charlie Rose:
But do they keep it though? Does Facebook keep it, even though users own it?
Marc Andreessen:
Well, there is –
Charlie Rose:
Do they keep it after you sign off? They still keep –
Marc Andreessen:
There is a technical definition of keep, and they be there is actually practical like would it ever get used for anything. And so –
Charlie Rose:
So the answer is they do keep it, but it will never be used for anything?
Marc Andreessen:
No. I’m not saying they do or they don’t. I’m just saying because there is a copy –
Charlie Rose:
You know they do. What are you talking witho about?
Marc Andreessen:
I don’t know there is a lot of reason to keep people’s drunken party photos –
Charlie Rose:
But they do.
Marc Andreessen:
I don’t know. Maybe in some cases there are copies. Maybe there aren’t. If it never gets used for anything –
Charlie Rose:
Why don’t they erase it all?
Marc Andreessen:
Why doesn’t Google erase everything in the cache once websites disappear.
Charlie Rose:
I don’t know. That’s a good idea.
Marc Andreessen:
Well, in general, you try to –
Charlie Rose:
That’s a good idea.
Marc Andreessen:
You try to clean it up. Well, you don’t always know what’s active and what’s not. You don’t know when a user is going to come back. You don’t know –
Charlie Rose:
Oh, you being one of the technology geniuses don’t know?
Marc Andreessen:
I’ll tell you what. If a website dropped offline and Google immediately cut it out of their index, everybody would complain because it will just mean if a website just crashed for five minutes, it’s gone –
Charlie Rose:
Yeah, right. Right. So what’s the answer to all this?
Marc Andreessen:
Well, the answer to this is there is, I think, always a middle ground. You have to be very respectful of privacy. You have to provide a lot of controls to let people decide. Have sliders, and let people decide how they want to set it.
Charlie Rose:
Okay.
Marc Andreessen:
Give people the tools.
Charlie Rose:
Back to Ning. How many networks do I want to belong to? There is Linkedin, there is Facebook, there is — on and on and on and on.
Marc Andreessen:
I would say how many things do you care about in your life?
Charlie Rose:
Oh, man.
Marc Andreessen:
How many things are you into?
Charlie Rose:
I don’t want to belong to that many social networks.
Marc Andreessen:
But I mean that’s where it’s going. You’re going to be interconnected. You’re going to be interconnected into a web –
Charlie Rose:
Of tennis players, of whatever in your –
Marc Andreessen:
Exactly. People you grew up with, people — you know, shared –
Charlie Rose:
How many do you belong to?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, dozens.
Charlie Rose:
Dozens. What kind are they? Tell me what they are?
Marc Andreessen:
There are all kinds of things. For music, I like crime fiction, I like –
Charlie Rose:
Just — slow down. Did you create this on Ning, this crime fiction?
Marc Andreessen:
No, no, no. In that case somebody else created it, and so –
Charlie Rose:
And I joined it.
Marc Andreessen:
I’m watching it.
Charlie Rose:
Have you created any of them yourself?
Marc Andreessen:
Well, I’ve created networks — I haven’t created anybody that [inaudible] scale.
Charlie Rose:
[laughter]. [talking simultaneously]
Marc Andreessen:
I haven’t created any that I would tell your audience about.
Charlie Rose:
10 or 11 or –
Marc Andreessen:
Exactly. Exactly. Small. But we use them all. One of the nice things is we see all the new networks being created, so we sign up for a lot of them ourselves.
Charlie Rose:
When we interview people like you, we always have to ask this question. What is the hottest idea there and what’s the next big idea?
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. Well, so I mean I think — maybe this goes off track from your question, but I think the hottest idea is innovation is actually alive and well. I mean there are more — I know. But look, there are a lot of people who are arguing the other side of that.
Charlie Rose:
That innovation is dead?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, there is a lot of people — I mean a lot of people I have been hearing or reading. There is a lot of, you know — well, I mean –
Charlie Rose:
Saying what?
Marc Andreessen:
Innovation is dead or these things can’t be turned into businesses. One or the other.
Charlie Rose:
That’s not innovation. They got this great thing but they can’t monetize it.
Marc Andreessen:
There is even some very successful people out in Silicon valley who are arguing that innovation is dead.
Charlie Rose:
Like whom?
Marc Andreessen:
Two very good friends of mine, Andy Grove and Judy Estron [spelled phonetically].
Charlie Rose:
That’s true. They are saying — you’re right, you’re right.
Marc Andreessen:
There are actually people saying that. So what I’m actually seeing is an endless series of new ideas. We can name all kinds of — cloud computing is a fantastic new idea. It’s –
Charlie Rose:
That’s not a new idea. It’s been out there for –
Marc Andreessen:
Well, I started a company called Loud Cloud in 1999 –
Charlie Rose:
I know you did.
Marc Andreessen:
– which —
Charlie Rose:
10 years ago —
Marc Andreessen:
People didn’t know what we were talking about. But now, it’s a big deal. I mean it’s a legitimate —
Charlie Rose:
It’s been around for a while.
Marc Andreessen:
But at scale, as a big thing — let me tell you what’s happening. So Amazon has this so-called cloud service. And so companies instead of needing their own servers, they can just upload their software code into the Amazon cloud and it will actually return their application or their site on Amazon servers. So you’ve got a whole generation of startups that are basically just a couple of programmers with a couple laptops, and they upload everything into the Amazon cloud. It’s pay by the drink like utility. So all of a sudden, you have this whole new wave of Internet startups getting started for practically no money, right? So there is a level of innovation. Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.
Charlie Rose:
There are more opportunities today than there have ever been.
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, yeah.
Charlie Rose:
Because of all the different kinds of things that are possible?
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. It’s a cascading. It’s a layering effect. Every layer of new technology makes another layer of innovation —
Charlie Rose:
Exactly.
Marc Andreessen:
– possible on top, and that just keeps roll.
Charlie Rose:
All right. Let’s talk about mobile for a second, because you’ve said some interesting things about that, cell phones and mobile. There was a big meeting, I guess, over in Spain, Barcelona or somewhere —
Marc Andreessen:
Yep.
Charlie Rose:
– right? Did you go to that?
Marc Andreessen:
No, I didn’t.
I read about it online.
Charlie Rose:
So did I.
Marc Andreessen:
There we go.
Charlie Rose:
So tell me about it. What came out of that, and so — what can we say about where we are and where we’re going in terms of mobile? And later, this whole idea of another company you have called Quick or something.
Marc Andreessen:
Quick —
Charlie Rose:
Okay So take off.
Marc Andreessen:
So the big thing is mobile has arrived. So you have these technology friends that people talked about, and talked about, and talked about, and talked about, and talked about, and they never quite happen. And then all of a sudden, they happen. And they’re a big deal. The Internet was like that. The Internet took off in ‘94, ‘95. The Internet had much getting built for 25 years up to that point. But it took off in ‘95.
Charlie Rose:
It took off because of you in part, because of the browser?
Marc Andreessen:
Because the technology got right. The technology of the browser. But the browser became possible because the windows interface, the windows and Macintosh user interfaces became mainstream. So the technology comes together, and all of a sudden the market takes off. So in mobile, you’ve now got the 3G networks.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
You’ve got really super sophisticated handsets. You’ve got application developers, you’ve got content, you’ve got all this stuff, and it’s just catalyzed, and it’s just gone boom. And so here in the US, we see it with the iPhone.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
Right? And now the iPhone is a template that every other technology vendor is going to copy, right, or base ideas off of.
Charlie Rose:
Explain that.
Marc Andreessen:
Right. So the iPhone is the first true cell phone that is actually a full computer.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
It has a full operating system. It has the ability to support a large number of applications. It has a software development kit that you can use to build applications. It has a way to distribute applications over the network onto the phone.
Charlie Rose:
It’s a whole business. It’s a new venture, in fact, for people to provide applications for the iPhone.
Marc Andreessen:
Exactly.
Charlie Rose:
It’s a big venture capital business.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. And in fact, actually, there’s thousands of iPhone applications. But –
Charlie Rose:
Exactly.
Marc Andreessen:
– [unintelligible] in the last 12 months.
Charlie Rose:
Exactly.
Marc Andreessen:
And some of them are free, and some of them you charge money for.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
And there’s just enormous diversity of application. So whether you’re a doctor, and you’re reviewing X-rays on the thing, or whether you’re a caterer listening to music, or whether you’re sending — you know, you’re on the FaceBook application or you’re on a Ning application, it can do anything. So it’s a full general purpose computer. And that’s the first time that somebody has actually delivered that product with a fast — with relatively fast AT & T 3G network.
Charlie Rose:
What was so different about the iPhone that made it sort of a game changer?
Marc Andreessen:
I would say two things. One is, it’s the first real operating system. And I say that’s a sort of — sounds like it’s a technical concept. But it’s the first operating system that really makes a lot of applications possible. And there’s a whole bunch of technical details for that, but it’s a real [unintelligible]
Charlie Rose:
A big system within a phone.
Marc Andreessen:
It’s actually unism. It’s actually the same operating system –
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
– that runs banks and airlines.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
Just shrunk down to run in the phone. And that’s part of the brilliance of what Apple did is it’s a real operating system. And then also, they packaged the whole thing together, including the tool kits to build the applications and then the way to actually distribute the applications onto the phone. And that had never been done before. So you could have bought a Microsoft phone or a Rim phone or whatever, and they just — they never had it quite put together right so somebody could build an application, distribute it, sell it and get it down to [unintelligible].
Charlie Rose:
In fact, you have said that iPhones are the demarcation point between operating systems. And the other problem we had is that from were so many different standards.
Marc Andreessen:
Right, right, of course.
Charlie Rose:
In America, unlike Europe, and so they got a — and Japan, they had a huge –
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
[unintelligible] Asia, not Korea.
Marc Andreessen:
For building proprietary systems, they had a big advantage because there was a single network.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
Basically a single kind of network. Now in the US, the networks have also consolidated down.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
So there’s a much smaller number of networks. But now the iPhone is a point, sort of a central point whereas a developer, you can rely on the iPhone being a stable platform for development. And so a lot of developers are doing that. And then the other significant thing is now that the iPhone is successful, it paves the way, much like the MacIntosh paved the way for Windows PCs.
Charlie Rose:
Right, right, right.
Marc Andreessen:
It paves the way for another set of companies, whether it’s Microsoft or Rim or, you know, dozens of others who are startups to create new devices.
Charlie Rose:
By the way, you are one of the people who really do — and I think that this is enormous, to give credit to Bill Gates for developing an operating system that was the standard.
Marc Andreessen:
Yes.
Charlie Rose:
And things happened because of that.
Marc Andreessen:
That’s a big deal.
Charlie Rose:
You know.
Marc Andreessen:
That’s a very big deal. And it’s a very serious commitment for a company. Apple’s had this commitment, Microsoft’s had this commitment. You have to commit — it’s actually a commitment to what’s called backward compatibility. See, if you have to commit to never break anything. So you load up Windows Vista, and you can still run the original Visical [spelled phonetically] from 30 years ago, which was the original killer app on the PC, original spreadsheet. And so that is a long-term institutional commitment that takes a very serious company to be able to do. And then the opportunities, I mean, Netscape was an application that got built on top of that kind of platform. The Macintosh is that, the iPhone is that. And it’s sort of a responsibility for the next set of vendors to do the same thing.
Charlie Rose:
I just read I think this week where Microsoft has an operating system that they’re — a mobile operating system that they’re now going to work with LG and a whole new phone. I mean, other people will be doing that.
Marc Andreessen:
Well, they’re doing a rethink.
Charlie Rose:
Trying to create new operating — what?
Marc Andreessen:
They’re doing a rethink. They’ve had a mobile strategy for years, right, and they’ve had a mobile, Windows Mobile. They’re doing a rethink of it because they’ve seen the iPhone, right? So the iPhone is like –
Charlie Rose:
They’re doing a rethink because they saw Google, too.
Marc Andreessen:
Well, and also — another good reason to do a rethink. The iPhone is liked beam from the future, right? The iPhone, when it landed was like beamed in from five years in the future. And so it has — it itself is fantastic, and it has inspired a level of creative thinking around it that we’re going to see the results from over the next two, three, four years. And there’s lots and lots — I mean Samsung obviously is very serious about this, Nokia is very serious about this. You know, and then there’s a lot of software developers. Ning is very serious about providing the software for this. FaceBook is as well. And Google is as well. And so there’s going to be just a tremendous amount of innovation, and then actually a lot of people using it. It’s going to be a real thing.
Charlie Rose:
What is this idea you have for what is it called quick?
Marc Andreessen:
Quick, yeah.
Charlie Rose:
Quick, is that way you can do live streaming wherever you are?
Marc Andreessen:
Any cell phone with a camera.
Charlie Rose:
Yeah.
Marc Andreessen:
Can be a source of live streaming video straight onto the internet or onto everybody else’s phones.
Charlie Rose:
All right. Just explain to me the potential of this.
Marc Andreessen:
So basically, 3 billion phones in the world. They all have cameras. 3 billion sources of live streaming video.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
Anybody, at any time can pull out of their pocket and can start streaming video live. They could be at a political protest.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
They could be at a — you know –
Charlie Rose:
So we can go live anywhere in the world now –
Marc Andreessen:
– bank robbery.
Charlie Rose:
– at anyplace.
Marc Andreessen:
You could be doing an interview.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
And it goes live. And of course, it goes live which is a big deal, but it also gets recorded, and so it can be streamed. It can be played back later. And so it streams up onto the web. You can embed these videos into your blog –
Charlie Rose:
And what’s the quality of this –
Marc Andreessen:
– your YouTube video.
[talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
–video?
Marc Andreessen:
Well, it depends, there are phones actually that actually don’t have camcorder functions yet and so it actually stitches together a video stream out of individual frames, which is a neat trick by itself. And then now there are cell phones coming out — there are cell phones coming out now that have high def camcorders built in. And so you’re going to have in a couple years it’s going to be fairly common to have a little phone and it’s going to have high def camcorder and it’s going to be streaming high def video over either 3G or the new 4G networks straight onto the Web.
Charlie Rose:
And you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to be able to inject these little devices inside us you know a live stream what’s happening in our body so they’ll tell us exactly how everything is functioning.
Marc Andreessen:
I can’t wait.
Charlie Rose:
I can’t either. No, I’m serious.
Marc Andreessen:
[unintelligible] for healthcare?
Charlie Rose:
Technology is changing medicine more than any other particular thing that I know of or it has the potential to change more than anything else.
Marc Andreessen:
It really should.
Charlie Rose:
I mean imaging and the rest. Imaging is like just the beginning of the potential and you’ve seen it now with the brain in extraordinary ways.
Marc Andreessen:
Yep. Absolutely.
Charlie Rose:
All right, so is this thing working now, this [unintelligible] thing?
Marc Andreessen:
Yep, yeah, this works, so you download it, you install it, you use it, you stream it, people are –
Charlie Rose:
How much does it cost?
Marc Andreessen:
Well, you know they’re working on that.
Charlie Rose:
You’re so evasive.
Marc Andreessen:
They’re working on that. There’s a bunch of you know there’s a bunch of –
[talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
Your reputation is being very candid and outspoken –
Marc Andreessen:
They’re working on that.
Charlie Rose:
Everything is you’re working on it, I can’t tell you.
Marc Andreessen:
They’re working on it.
Charlie Rose:
All right.
Marc Andreessen:
So the thing with these things is that actually makes sense, people actually laugh about this, but it actually makes sense, if you can get the scale, you can figure out a way to build a business around it.
Charlie Rose:
Of course.
Marc Andreessen:
If you can’t get it to scale, it doesn’t matter how many creative ideas, you have to build a business. And so you raise venture capital. You get it to scale and then you build a business around it.
Charlie Rose:
Let’s talk about venture capital. You’re starting a new fund.
Marc Andreessen:
I am starting a — for the first time in my life –
Charlie Rose:
You and — for the first time?
Marc Andreessen:
I’m crossing over into the dark side. I’ve been an entrepreneur three times. I started three companies.
Charlie Rose:
Yeah, and I mean that was — you’ve been the guy who’s out looking for venture capital.
Marc Andreessen:
I’ve always been the guy raising money.
Charlie Rose:
Yeah, and so now you’ve got a bunch of money and you have a partnership or a fund and you’re raising money from all your friends.
Marc Andreessen:
I’m creating a fund. I actually — it’s a friend of mine, friend of mine is a long term colleague, Ben Horowitz and I, who have worked together for 15 years, he and I are going to –
[talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
So what’s your history with him because I’ve read of it?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, he was one of our first guys at Netscape.
Charlie Rose:
That’s what I thought, right.
Marc Andreessen:
So he was one of our key product leaders at Netscape and he’s just coming off of a job at Hewlett Packard. We sold our second company to HP and he was running 3,000 people there and was very successful. So he and I are going to start it. And it’s going to be sort of a — it’s going to invest in a lot of early stage — lot of companies like the ones we’re talking about. And you know our claim to fame is we’ve actually you know by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, we’ve done it, we’ve been on that side of the table for a long time, we know what it’s like.
Charlie Rose:
Why are you doing this?
Marc Andreessen:
Because of the nature and the scale of the opportunities. We’re actually been investing ourselves with our own money for three years and we’ve invested in 36 — he and I invested together in 36 deals in three years so about one a month.
Charlie Rose:
Yeah, but I’ve read that you think that the normal investment for you to make, this may have been prefund, what, was about 100,000 to 200,000?
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, we –
[talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
You’d have to make a lot of small investments.
Marc Andreessen:
Right.
Charlie Rose:
So that if anything goes bad or there’s no –
Marc Andreessen:
That’s right, and we’re actually going to preserve and extend that model in the fund. So historically we’ve only invested up to $200,000 total in a deal. We’re going to definitely bring that up in the fund because we’re going to raise more money, be able to put more money in. But it’ll be pretty typical for us to do a $500,000 investment or maybe down to 200,000 or maybe up to a million in a deal to start. And what we’re seeing is a whole generation of startups that actually don’t need very much money to get started, so the cloud computing example, or a mobile application, an iPhone developer doesn’t need very much money to get started.
Charlie Rose:
What’s not very much money?
Marc Andreessen:
Very much money might be anywhere from 200,000 to say a million and a half.
Charlie Rose:
Really?
Marc Andreessen:
Right.
Charlie Rose:
To get started to –
Marc Andreessen:
To basically to prove that the product can work, right? To basically give you something that you can use, right? And then based on that you then often go raise a traditional venture capital route.
Charlie Rose:
I heard the other day a story of someone who went out to prove a product that did not exist online to see if there was a market –
Marc Andreessen:
Mm-hmm, oh, right exactly actually that’s — I think it’s the same guy, it’s the guy we’ve actually invested in.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
Who actually is raising money himself for his own company now.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
From a venture capitalist.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
Very close to getting that deal done. And so he had this very clever idea which was you can actually launch — he used Google Ad Words, right? So he was buying little ads on Google. He said the great thing with Google Ad Words is you put up an ad and people click and then even if there’s nothing on the other side they didn’t know that and so you can actually test how often they click and so you can test what the response rate is and so the really, really smart marketers are doing this now, you run Google Ad Words campaigns, or the equivalent thing on other systems, and you check the response rate for different words, different value propositions, different markets, different nationalities, different languages, and you see the response rates. And you don’t even have to [unintelligible], you don’t have to have the product. And you basically build the product after the fact and you back into –
Charlie Rose:
So if there’s enough support for the product, then you go make it, right?
Marc Andreessen:
But what I’ve heard is in the old days really smart book authors used to put classified ads like in literary journals and say you know new book you know poetry for sale, $30, and then they would you know if they got like 500 orders they would actually write the book.
Charlie Rose:
Oh, yes, yeah.
Marc Andreessen:
And if they didn’t, they’d return the money. And so you can just basically do a much more sophisticated version of that online. And so this guy, Andrew Chen [spelled phonetically], is the guy I’m thinking of.
Charlie Rose:
Yeah, what’s his idea?
Marc Andreessen:
So it’s a new kind of — you’re going to hate this — it’s a new — it’s undisclosed — it’s a new kind of viral consumer internet service, by viral, meaning it’s going to — it’s a service like a Facebook or a Twitter that spreads from user to user on its own steam, where he has a –
[talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
Why am I going to hate this?
Marc Andreessen:
Because I’m not going to tell you what the idea is.
Charlie Rose:
[unintelligible]
Marc Andreessen:
Or I’m also not going to tell you how he’s going to make money. But he’s still –
Charlie Rose:
Or how much money he’s made or whatever.
Marc Andreessen:
Or how much money he’s made. He’s getting started. But it’s this approach. He stakes this analytical marketing approach and runs the ad campaign before the product exists.
Charlie Rose:
Tell me about Twitter.
Marc Andreessen:
Twitter.
Charlie Rose:
You’re invested in that, too?
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. Exactly. That’s the kind of company — I’m an angel investor in that, and that’s the kind of company — that’s exactly the kind of thing that we want to do in the funds. So —
Charlie Rose:
Are they making any money?
Marc Andreessen:
Not yet. Not yet. Actually Twitter — I believe Twitter’s current revenue may actually be zero.
Charlie Rose:
Yes, exactly. Explain what Twitter is and why everybody is talking about it.
Marc Andreessen:
So Twitter is a new kind of messaging system, or sort of a combination of an SMS sort of short messages, a little bit like blogging. So basically, people can post either from their PC key board or from their cell phone. They can post these short updates. And it actually limits the updates to 140 characters.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
And when you go to the Twitter home page, it just has a simple question which says what are you doing? And then you type in 140 characters, and it says that. And you been subscribe on Twitter to people you’re following. And they could be people who are friends of yours, or people who don’t know who have public feeds. So for example, you could have a feed on Twitter, if you don’t already, that has a notification of the guests on each show and a link to the video.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
And the thing is growing like wild fire —
Charlie Rose:
I know it is. It’s just amazing.
Marc Andreessen:
Exactly. So it percolated along for about a year, and then it took. The last two or three months, it’s growing vertically. And so — and the uses are nearly infinite. It can be used for news, like you can — there is a whole API —
Charlie Rose:
As long as you can keep it within 140 characters, you got —
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. But 140 characters, you can headline and link to a news article. You can do a headline and a link to a video. You can do a notification — the other thing is like real time reporting —
Charlie Rose:
You can do a synopses and a link to a website?
Marc Andreessen:
Link to a website. A link to a quick video. Exactly. You can do all these things. And you can search on it, right. So you can see what’s happening in real time. So the next time there is a, you know, next time a plane lands in the Hudson, this actually happened with the plane that landed in the Hudson, all these people are doing Twitter. Is there are actually people on the plane with their cell phones doing Twitter updates saying, well, I’m hoping they get the rafts deployed. Oh, good, they got the rafts deployed.
Charlie Rose:
Water coming in the plane, what do I do now?
Marc Andreessen:
Exactly. And so it’s basically — it’s sort of — think about it as sort of a real time electronic nervous system for lots and lots of sort messages to be accept all over the planet for all kinds of people to all kinds of other people for all kinds of uses.
Charlie Rose:
So when did you become an angel for this?
Marc Andreessen:
When it first got started.
Charlie Rose:
Really? Why? Tell me the process in your little mind that made you think that this was a big deal.
Marc Andreessen:
Okay, so two things. One is the entrepreneurial I’m a huge fan of. So the entrepreneur is a guy by the name of Evan Williams. He created blogger, which is one of the big blogging services.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
He created a company called Odeo. This is a good example of what’s happening. He created a company called Odeo for podcasting. He raised 3 1/2 million dollars. Turns out the idea didn’t work. He did something revolutionary. He gave the money back. He went back to the investors, he made them whole, he gave the money back. He had this little side project —
Charlie Rose:
He’ll earn a reputation right there.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. Exactly. He actually made up the difference out of his own pocket and gave the money back. He had a side project that spun out Twitter that he and another guy named Jack Dorsey were working on as a sort of a side project, which was Twitter. It started to take off. So they said, you know what? It’s that, not this. Shut that down, return the money. This. Raise new money for it. All the investors who were in the first company were delighted to come into the second company because he had the reputation for being somebody who either wins or treats you fairly. And then, you know — for those of us in the industry just looking at the dynamics of how he put Twitter together, it was pretty obvious that it was going to work at all, it was going to be viral and it could get big. So, you know, he placed the bet early, relatively small amount of money. I don’t know what he raised in the first round, a couple million dollars or something.
Charlie Rose:
When did you appreciate the idea of [unintelligible] viral?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, viral? I don’t know. Probably — I would say probably post Netscape. We saw it with Netscape a lot, but we didn’t really have the terminology to describe it. But I would say especially PayPal and the PayPal guys who are friends of mine have been very, I think, advanced thinkers on that topic. And especially in 2000, 2001, 2002.
Charlie Rose:
I think Peter is on the board of Facebook.
Marc Andreessen:
Peter Till [spelled phonetically] is on the board of Facebook with me. And so he is — he’s just — they’ve developed a very sort of rigorous way of thinking about this concept, and so I’ve learned from that, and been involved in much of these businesses.
Charlie Rose:
Here is what I have never understood, I want you to explain to me at this mom. Microsoft decides that Netscape has a good idea. We’d like to be in that business.
Marc Andreessen:
Sure, yep.
Charlie Rose:
They go to the University of Illinois where they have the code.
Marc Andreessen:
Yes.
Charlie Rose:
Which you —
Marc Andreessen:
Wrote.
Charlie Rose:
– wrote. You wrote the codes.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
University of Illinois insisted on keeping the code that you —
Marc Andreessen:
We didn’t take it with us.
Charlie Rose:
Was that a voluntary choice by you?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, yeah, that was voluntary.
Charlie Rose:
So you could have taken it with you, but you didn’t.
Marc Andreessen:
We knew it was no good.
Charlie Rose:
Wait a minute. Let me finish the story. So they had it and so Microsoft went and bought the code.
Marc Andreessen:
Mm-hmm.
Charlie Rose:
From the University of Illinois, right?
Marc Andreessen:
Actually indirectly.
Charlie Rose:
Okay. They got it.
Marc Andreessen:
Illinois licensed it to a startup company which then licensed it the Microsoft, and then was surprised when Microsoft decided to actually do something with it.
Charlie Rose:
And what they did was created Explorer?
Marc Andreessen:
Yes.
Charlie Rose:
Right?
Marc Andreessen:
Which is why I now take credit for both, Firefox —
Charlie Rose:
[laughter]
Marc Andreessen:
– and Internet Explorer.
Charlie Rose:
And Mosaic became —
Marc Andreessen:
Mosaic —
Charlie Rose:
Became Firefox.
Marc Andreessen:
No, Mosaic became IE.
Charlie Rose:
IE, right.
Marc Andreessen:
Netscape became Firefox.
Charlie Rose:
Right. Right. Right. That’s right. Because AOL and then —
Marc Andreessen:
As a matter of fact, if you go to the about page on IE, if you go to about IE up in the menu there, you’ll actually see down at the very bottom, developed at the University of Illinois.
Charlie Rose:
Amazing.
Marc Andreessen:
Actual center for computing applications.
Charlie Rose:
You’re a big guy.
Marc Andreessen:
I take credit for that. Exactly.
Charlie Rose:
All right. Let me talk about where this — this whole thing in the world is going in terms of Facebook. Newspapers.
Marc Andreessen:
Yep.
I’ve heard of them.
Charlie Rose:
What is it between you and the New York Times?
Marc Andreessen:
You want to know what really pushed me over the edge?
Charlie Rose:
What?
Marc Andreessen:
Judy Miller.
Charlie Rose:
Really?
Marc Andreessen:
Just —
Charlie Rose:
Explain who Judy Miller is.
Marc Andreessen:
Technology. She’s the national security reporter who covered the run up to the Iraq war and the WMD topic. And I just — I took —
Charlie Rose:
She was wrong on the question of WMD and people thought her sources —
Marc Andreessen:
Completely, completely incorrect. And I would normally cut somebody slack for something like that, but then the folks at Knight Ridder at the time, Knight Ridder, now McClatchy got it completely correct.
Charlie Rose:
Right, they did.
Marc Andreessen:
So I actually got to know a couple of those folks, and I asked them like what was the difference, how did you get it right? They said, oh, we talked to the colonels. The Times had access to all the generals and all the politicians. We talked to the colonels. We talked to the guys that were actually in the field doing the work. They said, we don’t see any of this. We don’t understand what these guys are talking about in Washington. We don’t see any of it. So they said to us was totally obvious. So like at that point –
Charlie Rose:
At that point what?
Marc Andreessen:
At that point, I didn’t know this at the time, like a lot of people, so I read the Times, and I said, hey, you know, war with Iraq, great idea. Right? Existential threat, weapons of mass destruction. He wants to kill us. We have to go kill him first. So, okay. I’ll give somebody one shot at that but not two.
Charlie Rose:
And then?
Marc Andreessen:
And then –
Charlie Rose:
That happening turned you against the New York Times because you created a thing called New York Times death watch.
Marc Andreessen:
In fairness, I’ve actually totally dropped that. I think at this point it’s become unfair.
Charlie Rose:
To the New York Times?
Marc Andreessen:
Well, because –
Charlie Rose:
Your sense of fairness overwhelms me.
Marc Andreessen:
I know. Things — events are playing out.
Charlie Rose:
So you’ve got the New York Times death watch is no longer there.
Marc Andreessen:
That was a blog post that I did. A blog post that I did that I was kind of — it was a little bit tongue in cheek and a little bit serious. But with an underlying point.
Charlie Rose:
Here is where you go — what’s the under underlying point?
Marc Andreessen:
Well, the underlying point is fundamentally, there is a structural change happening in that business, so –
Charlie Rose:
In the newspaper business.
Marc Andreessen:
In the newspaper business. Well, in the entire media business. In all branches of the media industry, but the newspapers are sort of front and center topical. And the reason I bring up Judy Miller is because the typical — there are exceptions to this. There are friends of mine who are trying very hard to grapple with this. But the typical sort of newspaper industry response is, you know, we just got to figure out a way to kind of gut through it, like if we can — if we can get through the advertising recession, if we can downsize the paper, if we can downsize the news room –
Charlie Rose:
I don’t think that’s what their idea is, but go ahead.
[NE] .
Marc Andreessen:
Start returning ads on the front page, if we can just figure out some kind of combination of things, then we can keep printing the paper and delivering it as a physical medium, and this Internet thing will kind off stay off to the side.
Charlie Rose:
No, I think that’s not true. I think they’re trying to survive until the Internet thing pays off. That’s how they’re doing it.
Marc Andreessen:
But this is — this is playing offense versus playing defense. Their revenue today is still, in most cases, 90 percent print.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
10% online.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
That means they spend 90 — I can tell you. I have been involved with a lot of companies, right? Ninety percent — if 90 percent of your revenue is coming from something, 90 percent of your time is being spent on that. So they’re spending 90 percent of their time –
Charlie Rose:
And the future 10 percent –
Marc Andreessen:
Future 10 percent, and spending very little time playing offense. For the most part, they’re Internet divisions have been off to the side, often with different news rooms. I mean just like bizarre separation.
Charlie Rose:
So to play offense for a newspaper for you means what?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, you got to kill the print edition.
Charlie Rose:
You would stop the presses tomorrow?
Marc Andreessen:
You have to kill it.
Charlie Rose:
Stop the presses tomorrow.
Marc Andreessen:
You have to kill it.
Charlie Rose:
Stop the presses tomorrow.
Marc Andreessen:
Stop the presses tomorrow. I’ll tell you what. The stocks would go up. Look at what’s happened to the stocks. This investors are through this. The investors are through the transition. You talk to any smart investor who controls any amount of money, he will tell you that the game is up. Like it’s completely over. And so the investors have completely written off the print operations. There is no value in these stock prices attributable to print anymore at all. It’s gone.
Charlie Rose:
So you would recommend to the owners of the New York Times, stop printing papers.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, absolutely. You have to. You have to –
Charlie Rose:
And take your losses –
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. You have to.
Charlie Rose:
Like a courageous person.
Marc Andreessen:
Chronic pain? Acute pain. How many years — music industry, same thing. How many years of chronic pain do you want to take to avoid taking a year of acute pain?
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
And by the way, the acute pain would be acute. Like this is a big deal. I’m not saying that this –
Charlie Rose:
[talking simultaneously] revenues have gone away, then you’ve got a problem.
Marc Andreessen:
You’ve got a problem. But you have to build for the future. I mean if you’re — if you’re the guy delivering ice to people’s ice boxes, at a certain point, you better go into the refrigerator repair business or you’re going to have an issue. If you’re the village blacksmith and a model T comes along, you better become a mechanic. People’s lives are better when they get news online versus having to wait for the morning paper. It’s a lot more efficient, a lot more real time, a lot less waste. It’s actually — like everything about the airline experience is better. And at some point, you have to — I believe, as a responsible manager, reorient –
Charlie Rose:
Do you read anything on paper?
Marc Andreessen:
Well –
Charlie Rose:
Anything.
Marc Andreessen:
I’m weird. I read everything. So I subscribe — I’m a huge consumer of media.
Charlie Rose:
You’re just like me. I go online. I get it — I touch it, I want this, I want this.
Marc Andreessen:
I tell my friends, I own 6,000 CD’s, like music CD’s. Like I buy CD’s all the time. I love CD’s.
Charlie Rose:
I do too, yes.
Marc Andreessen:
All they need are another million people like me.
Charlie Rose:
I know. I know.
Marc Andreessen:
And there aren’t enough of me. And, you know, DVD’s –
Charlie Rose:
I buy DVD’s, too. I thought I was the only one. I kept beating myself up because I thought there is no one like me, an how stupid. I’m just stupid.
Marc Andreessen:
Exactly. I have a huge collection of DVD’s, and it’s essentially –
Charlie Rose:
Exactly.
Marc Andreessen:
I got on [talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
This is no reason to buy DVD’s?
Marc Andreessen:
So DVD sales are collapsing. DVD sales are caving in. So yeah. We need more of me and you.
Charlie Rose:
All right. Exactly.
Marc Andreessen:
We’re all set.
Charlie Rose:
We’d have a –
[talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
All right. So looking back over the last 15 years.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
All right, what’s been the biggest surprise for you?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, well, so the biggest surprise, by far is that, you know, we started out this internet thing looked like an academic experiment at first and turned into something a bit — you know, a billion and a half people are using today, and it’s changed everybody’s lives. And I don’t think — there’s no way on earth that we ever anticipated that. And I don’t think there’s any way that you could. I think you would have to be a megalomaniac –
Charlie Rose:
Okay. So the power of the internet and the range of the internet and the impact on everything.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, impact on everything. It worked. It actually worked. It actually played out. And so — and it played out through commerce, it’s playing out through media, playing out in politics.
Charlie Rose:
What are the constraints of the internet? I mean, what –
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, boy. Excuse me. I — you know.
Charlie Rose:
Can it get too big or something like that.
Marc Andreessen:
No, no, no. It’s just going to keep getting bigger. It’s actually a so-called network effect, right? So the more people who use is, the more people — the more reason there is to put new things on the internet, right? And it just keeps going. And so every day, think about what’s happening. And old friend of mine used to call this. It’s the magic box. Every day that you’re on the internet, there’s something new to do that you’re going to enjoy or you’re going to like or it’s going to be relevant to you, right? Every day. And that’s going to be true from now for the next 50 years, hundred years, I mean until some, you know, far point in the future when we’re all up in space or something. Every day it gets better and better and better and better and better. Every day, as a consequence, right, it eats different industries.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
It colonizes and then takes over different industries.
Charlie Rose:
Right. Apple [unintelligible] mentioned newspaper industry.
Marc Andreessen:
Newspaper industry or, you know, I — you know, banking. There’s financial services. There’s all kinds of things happening in all of these different sectors, photography, obviously, that are being sort of taken over by the internet, being pulled into the internet, being made eight part of the experience. And it just keeps growing. And observationally, people love it. People love using the internet, you know? And especially, you know, a kid these days. Any kid these days lives on their laptop. You know, their laptops are –
Charlie Rose:
Is that good?
Marc Andreessen:
It’s fantastic.
Charlie Rose:
Now, wait, wait. Is it good?
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. It’s –
Charlie Rose:
You see no downside to that?
Marc Andreessen:
Okay. I grew up –
Charlie Rose:
Living on your internet.
Marc Andreessen:
I grew up in rural Wisconsin.
Charlie Rose:
[unintelligible]. Yes.
Marc Andreessen:
I grew up in rural Wisconsin, okay? No access to information relating to rest of the world except for whatever was in the public library, right, for which I could probably thank Andrew Carnegie or somebody like that way back when.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
But like no connection to current events, no connection to the idea that you can start your own business. No connection to new technology. No connection to anything. I mean, you know. So you take every kid living in a rural community in the US, you take every kid living in the inner city, you take every kid growing up in the developing world, and you give them access to the world, they will be so much better educated. They’ll be so much more aware.
Charlie Rose:
I couldn’t agree more.
[talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
But there is a downside. There is — it may be tiny.
Marc Andreessen:
Okay.
Charlie Rose:
It may be tiny.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
There’s something valuable about what’s going on right here. You and I having a conversation, that’s important. It would not be the same conversation if you were in the next room, and we were doing it with a keyboard, I promise you.
Marc Andreessen:
Yes, but I’m here today because your producer emailed me.
Charlie Rose:
Oh, that’s true.
Marc Andreessen:
And if she had tried to call me, I don’t know whether I would have picked up the phone. And if she had — and if she had had to travel by horse –
Charlie Rose:
Yeah, I know.
Marc Andreessen:
– to talk to me –
Charlie Rose:
Don’t minimize the human value.
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, yeah.
Charlie Rose:
Of personal contact.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, yeah, it’s great.
Charlie Rose:
I don’t want you to do that. But I think the –
Charlie Rose:
If you learn nothing else here, learn that.
Marc Andreessen:
I think the internet is sort of an overlay on top of — on top of –
Charlie Rose:
Let me tell you a small story. The other day, this was like a week ago. I am in a car riding from Miami to Marcos Island to do a thing on biotech. In the middle of the everglades, I take out my computer, on battery now, operating on battery.
Marc Andreessen:
Right.
Charlie Rose:
It’s a two-hour and a half trip. I take my little thing and put it in there so, you know, I can access the internet. I am then on a cell phone talking to someone in New York City, and I’m looking at the BBC and the New York Times just to catch up on the news.
Marc Andreessen:
Right.
Charlie Rose:
I’m saying, how good is this. If you are a news junkie –
Marc Andreessen:
Yep.
Charlie Rose:
– an information connoisseur –
Marc Andreessen:
Yep.
Charlie Rose:
– this is heaven.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
This is heaven.
Marc Andreessen:
Yep, right.
Charlie Rose:
All right. Let me do this finally. People you admire the most. Just list these people in terms of what they have contributed, okay? Just list them for me. Who’s first, who’s second, who’s third and fourth. This is easy. Okay. Marc Andreessen, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Andy Grove.
Marc Andreessen:
I agree.
Charlie Rose:
No, you agree what? Who is the most important?
Marc Andreessen:
Who is the most important out of those?
Charlie Rose:
Yes.
Marc Andreessen:
If you had to pick one I think you’d — if you had to pick — I mean, if you can’t do the ranking, it’s impossible. If you had to pick one, probably Andy Grove.
Charlie Rose:
Really?
Marc Andreessen:
Because the microprocessor, it –
Charlie Rose:
Fueled. It was the brains behind it.
Marc Andreessen:
The silicone needed to exist for the software to be created. And everything that we’ve been able to do in the valley and on the internet, it’s all been based on that. And so, you know, Andy, all right, is a good friend of both of ours. But you know, going back to everything from his origin story through to when they started Intel in the late ’60s, you know, and then they built that company, that company is now a 40-year-old company, and it’s just as vital a 40-year-old company, and it’s just as vital and vibrant as the [unintelligible] and he ran it for you know a good part of that history, most of it.
Charlie Rose:
What a great man, I know.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. And like that technology changed the world. And that was hard. I mean that was difficult I mean –
[talking simultaneously]
‘
Charlie Rose:
Well, he took the risk you talked about.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
I mean, here’s a guy who –
Marc Andreessen:
Well, here’s a good example, right?
Charlie Rose:
Take the story, tell us. Tell us the story.
Marc Andreessen:
Right, so Intel’s main business from like 1969 until the mid-’80s was memory chips, so chips going in computers, store data. Microprocessors were kind of a side business. And then in ‘82 IBM released the IBM PC and then the Intel microprocessor. And then the microprocessor business started to take off. But in 1985 there was this big crash in the PC market and there was just generally the tech industry had been expanding and then just all the sudden started to crash. And the PC wasn’t quite right yet for mainstream adoption, bunch of other things were going on and the Japanese were — that was when the Japanese were just a unbelievably powerful economic force. And Japanese electronics companies were creating memory chips in huge scale, subsidized by the Japanese government, and they were just under pricing Intel on every market and they were basically in the process of crushing Intel out of business. And Andy and his partner, I believe at the time Gordon Moore, famously –
Charlie Rose:
You believe was a partner?
Marc Andreessen:
Well, no, I mean –
[talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
[inaudible] was Gordon Moore.
Marc Andreessen:
No, it was definitely Gordon Moore. [unintelligible] at all to that point, but I think that — or maybe I’m wrong, maybe it was –
[talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
– three of them –
Marc Andreessen:
– three of them, but –
Charlie Rose:
I just thought you doubted that Gordon Moore [inaudible].
[talking simultaneously]
Marc Andreessen:
No, no, no, no, definitely Andy and Gordon so you know they famously essentially killed their main business in order to get out from under the overhang of having –
Charlie Rose:
That plan was killing –
Marc Andreessen:
That plan was killing –
Charlie Rose:
– big revenue stream.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, provide a huge revenue stream, it was some huge percentage of the revenue, you know, well more than half. And they bet the company on the microprocessor at a time when that was not an obvious bet to make because the PC was still very new and unproven as a mass market thing. And you know then the rest of the story’s obvious. Intel became gigantically successful. But you know that’s like a 16-year-old company which in the technology industry right like dog years, 16 years is like a seven-year-old company in the rest of the economy.
Charlie Rose:
[inaudible] the nature of this business with great — I love Andy Grove and I have great respect for Intel, but Nvidia came along with graphic computing, you know with a new [unintelligible] –
Marc Andreessen:
Yep.
Charlie Rose:
You know, now they’re fighting.
Marc Andreessen:
You want to know the irony of that?
Charlie Rose:
Yes.
Marc Andreessen:
The core engineers at Nvidia are the core engineers from Silicon Graphic.
Charlie Rose:
Which is your old — which is Jim Clark?
Marc Andreessen:
My partner, Jim Clark, sold first. Silicon Graphics was a fantastically successful computer company in the late ’80s and early ’90s that actually got put out of business by the PC. The engineers got freed up as a consequence of SGI being put out of business by the PC, went to work in among other things are now companies like Nvidia and ETI that make these graphics chips and pose a significant challenge to Intel. And so the cycle repeats. And the key thing happening there is innovation happened right? And in that case right somebody benefited, somebody got damaged. But the process of damaging right at that point, Silicon Graphics, was a tragedy as far as Silicon Graphics was concerned, but it freed up those brilliant engineers to go on and create the next generation of technology. And a big part of what makes the Valley so vital is that these engineers can actually recycle multiple times through different companies in different ways. And a lot of the best engineers out at Google for example are people who actually were in the previous wave or even the wave before that of technology. And it’s that level of sort of you know turnover in dynamism and spinoffs and startups in venture capital that keeps the whole thing going.
Charlie Rose:
Assess Google for me. I mean, well go ahead I mean it may be obvious but go ahead.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, fantastic company, great business.
Charlie Rose:
What have they done right? A, what is it they have done right in terms of taking a good idea and managing it shrewdly?
Marc Andreessen:
So I’d say two things –
Charlie Rose:
And then using the advantage to get into all kind of other business including cell phones and everything else.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, exactly. So two things, so one is there were a lot of search engines before Google, there were probably 35 different venture-backed search engines before Google. My friend, Bill Joy, has this term he uses where he says, sometimes products have the “it works” feature and as compared to all the other products that actually don’t really work and our industry sometimes produces those products, the Google search engine was the first one that it worked, it really worked, when you did a search on it you got what you expected to see and that was actually not true of the ones before it. So they really nailed the core technology, and you know these are you know Ph.D. students in computer science at Stanford, these were hardcore technologists building this. Then they built the service and by the way you know it was not obvious at the beginning how they were going to make money on it. In fact, there was an early –
[talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
– [inaudible] not advertising.
Marc Andreessen:
Well, at the beginning they didn’t think that advertising was viable because it turned out advertising had actually not been very effective on the previous generation of search engines because nobody wanted to advertise against bad search results. So it turns out when you have good search results it turns out they were able to develop and Overture with another company that Yahoo later bought that you know sort of the idea crystallized. I think Overture might have originally invented it and then Google picked it up and refined it and adapted it, but this idea that you could target a text keyword [unintelligible] and see search results. And so once they unlocked that, a friend of mine from Netscape, [unintelligible], became the head of sales. It’s one of the guys who helped them figure that out. Once they unlocked that then they unlocked a magic business right? And about once every 10 years in tech you just see a magic business and a magic business is one where the market turns out it’s just infinite, it’s just gigantic, and so Cisco was the magic business. Intel was a magic business, Microsoft was magic business. Amazon increasingly looks like it’s a magic business. When you have a magic business, you go for size. And you go for scale. And they’ve just done a fantastic job of scaling that thing up and having it be gigantic and having it generate huge amounts of cash.
Charlie Rose:
Which raises another topic. Amazon, first of all. I mean at the time of the last bubble bursting, that was 2001, was it?
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, right.
Charlie Rose:
You should know.
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, yes. That was 2001. Took my second company public in 2001.
Charlie Rose:
Exactly.
Marc Andreessen:
Which I would not recommend.
Charlie Rose:
I had smart people saying to me — and I’ve known Jeff Basos [spelled phonetically] for a long time.
Marc Andreessen:
Yep.
Charlie Rose:
Smart people saying to me they’re not going to make it.
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, yeah. People had written him off.
Charlie Rose:
They’re not going to make it.
Marc Andreessen:
Absolutely. He remembers that, by the way.
Charlie Rose:
I know he does.
Marc Andreessen:
He has not forgotten. I saw people — I was at conferences where I saw very sophisticated investors walking out of his presentation in that era just shaking their head.
Charlie Rose:
Yeah.
Marc Andreessen:
They thought he was crazy. And he was absolutely correct. Here is where it really made — Andy Grove. He had the fortitude and the foresight to stick with it and stick with it and stick with it, and, you know, he pursued his core long term vision. He did not give up. He ran the company himself, pretty much continuously through that whole period. I think so he had a CEO for a brief period of time. But then he came back in, and he’s run the company himself all the way –
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
– the brilliant founder. And he stuck with it. And along the way, he tried lots of different ideas. Some of them didn’t work. He got criticized for them, and then a lot of them, it turns out, worked really well. Now the thing is just a monster.
Charlie Rose:
So Kindle represents what?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, Kindle is gigantic. I mean it’s several things. It’s a huge business for Amazon. It’s the — it’s representative of the future of publishing.
Charlie Rose:
Do you know how many books the new one — I’m sure you’re getting the new one like I am.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
1500 — 1,500 books, and it’s smaller than the Kindle 1st. I.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
And you can get your newspapers and your magazines.
Marc Andreessen:
Yep.
Charlie Rose:
And you can do all kinds of other things. I don’t know even know yet, because they’re not shipping them until February 24.
Marc Andreessen:
Yep. Yep. Everything. And, you know, by the way, the Kindle is a new form factor, right? So you’ve got the iPhone with sort of the three or four inch screen. You’ve got the laptop or now the net book with a 12 or 14-inch screen. Now you’ve got the Kindle with a sort of 7-inch screen. And so there is going to be a whole market, I believe, for these sort of web pads that are going to be sort of 7-inch screens. The Kindle is one. You can actually buy — there is a bunch of these on the market, but none of them have taken off. The Kindle has.
Charlie Rose:
The Kindle took off because?
Marc Andreessen:
Well –
Charlie Rose:
Cell phone connection, one.
Marc Andreessen:
Well, cell phone connection. They nailed that. Provision. Content. You can buy the book, it’s super light. It uses this electronic ink technology so it’s easy on the eyes. Battery lasts –
Charlie Rose:
And they try to make it feel like a book as much as they could.
Marc Andreessen:
It’s great.
Charlie Rose:
Is the idea of a book, experience of a book.
Marc Andreessen:
Exactly. Right. It’s look like the iPhone. They packaged the whole thing together. But there will be — again, it points to the future. There will be a generation of these kind of pads. And so like let’s suppose some day Apple might make a — think about the iPhone, scale it up so it has a 7-inch screen. Like think about how great that would be.
Charlie Rose:
Do you think they will?
Marc Andreessen:
I think –
Charlie Rose:
Of course they will.
Marc Andreessen:
Put it this way. I will be the first person to buy one.
Charlie Rose:
Of course. I will, too. There any doubt that they’ll do that?
Marc Andreessen:
I don’t know. I mean –
Charlie Rose:
Why do you say I don’t know?
Marc Andreessen:
Until they announce it, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s a very — they’re a very private company. I don’t know. But somebody will figure it outout.
Charlie Rose:
No kidding.
Marc Andreessen:
Somebody will figure it out. I mean the Kindle books and magazines and newspapers, but that form factor and that shape of device and that weight in a couple years is going to be video, going to be music, going to be doing video conferencing, it’s going to be doing telephony, it’s going to be doing web browsing. It’s going to be doing everything. Right? And so that’s the next — one of the fascinating things is that’s the next screen size and the next device I think that’s going to happen.
Charlie Rose:
Thank God I’m only 26. [laughter]
Marc Andreessen:
You have a lot of this to look forward to.
Charlie Rose:
Exactly. There is this also, which I don’t know anything about. This shows you how really stupid I am. Games.
Marc Andreessen:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
You have said — and other people have said, take all the old media, all the people that used to go to old media are spending all their time now — whatever time they used to spend on old media, or whatever — however, you mark a person’s life depended on media, is now going online or to games.
Marc Andreessen:
That’s right.
Charlie Rose:
Do you go to games?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. My XBox and I have a very close personal relationship. We spend a lot of quality time together.
Charlie Rose:
Do you really? Do you hug and kiss her and everything else?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, yeah. She’s a very good friend. I take very good care of her.
Charlie Rose:
So why?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, it’s just tremendously stimulating.
Charlie Rose:
Stimulating?
Marc Andreessen:
It’s a core human experience. Especially dopamine.
Charlie Rose:
Is it really?
Marc Andreessen:
Mm-hmm.
Charlie Rose:
But explain that to me. I’m not doubting you. I’m just asking.
Marc Andreessen:
It’s like playing sports, but it’s for everybody.
Charlie Rose:
Tell me — if you tell me it’s like playing sports, I get it.
Marc Andreessen:
It actually is. It’s competitive. It gets your adrenalin up. It’s a lot of fun. And by the way, all of the new games –
Charlie Rose:
Not a lot of exercise though, is it?
Marc Andreessen:
Well, the Wii.
Charlie Rose:
Tell about the Wii.
Marc Andreessen:
The Wii.
Charlie Rose:
I know about the Wii.
Marc Andreessen:
Innovation, right? Innovation. Nintendo, fantastic company. Like Japan needs 100 times more Nintendos. The rest of the world, we need 100 times more Nintendos. I think they’re a company absolutely to be admired.
Charlie Rose:
People don’t know how well they have done against Play Station –
Marc Andreessen:
Phenomenal.
Charlie Rose:
And XBox, Do T do they?
Marc Andreessen:
People had written them off. People had concluded that they were toast, because the capital cost, the amount of money is that Sony and Microsoft put into the Play Station, the XBox weren’t in Nintendos budget, and Nintendo has outsold them, I don’t know, five to one or something with the Wii. And it’s brilliant. It’s this new motion controller. So it’s this new gizmo and basically, you can play tennis, And you stand in front of the thing and you whack the tennis ball around, or boxing, all these different games.
Charlie Rose:
Then I have to get this.
Marc Andreessen:
It’s fantastic.
Charlie Rose:
You do that?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
What’s your favorite game?
Marc Andreessen:
Gears of War 2. I like that. I like the violent games.
Charlie Rose:
Do you really?
Marc Andreessen:
I like the bloody games.
Charlie Rose:
Why am I surprised?
Marc Andreessen:
Oh, yeah. It’s a lot of fun. And you can play multiplayer. And by the way, it’s all going online. That’s all going online also. So a big part of the XBox experience is XBox live. And then games themselves on the Internet now are a very, very big deal and a very big growth business.
Charlie Rose:
What has been the economic crisis impact on Silicon Valley?
Marc Andreessen:
Ah. So in the meltdown of 2000, 2001, 2002, we were the nose on the dog. So we were if not the cause, we were one of the main catalysts for the stock market crash at that point. This time around, we in the valley are the tail of the dog. So we have been affected at least so far out of I think all the sectors in the economy, and I think there is a couple reasons for that. But the big one is because companies in the valley generally don’t run on credit. We generally run on equity financing as opposed to credit financing, so my company has no debt. If somebody doesn’t want to role over our debt, we don’t have any debt to roll over. So we have been effected least. But there is no question that the big recession that has now developed from the credit crisis is going to have a big impact on us.
Charlie Rose:
What’s that impact going to be?
Marc Andreessen:
Sales are going to fall. For a lot of companies, sales are going to fall. For a lot of –
Charlie Rose:
A lot of people will lose their jobs?
Marc Andreessen:
There will be layoffs. There already are layoffs. There will be a lot of people losing their jobs. Our customers — Silicon Valley is dependent on its customer base. So when companies around the world are cutting their budgets, they’re going to buy less networking equipment and databases and everything else. And when consumers don’t have as much discretionary money, they’re not going to be spending money on much of anything, you know. The kind of stuff we sell. So that will have a big impact. I would make a couple of observations, though, based on that. One is, the innovation will continue, so at some point, the economy will recover again, and when that happens, there is going to be a ton of innovation in the next three, four, five — whatever period of time we’re talking about, years, that is going to be essentially bottled up in these companies that are getting funded today. Like with our new fund, if we fund a company today, we’re thinking about a return in seven to 10 years so we can go through three or four or even five years of economic downturn as long as at some point we come out the other end. And the innovation will happen in the meantime. And that’s what happened last time. Google developed through the bust. Facebook developed through the bust. YouTube developed through the bust.
Charlie Rose:
Because they had money and all they needed to do was keep working?
Marc Andreessen:
Exactly. Observation one. Observation two, we will be a sort of tragic beneficiary of the disruption happening in other markets that the Internet and technology industry is poised to colonize. So to the extent that for example, media companies were financial service institutions or whatever, real estate companies, whatever, are being damaged because the crisis, to the extent that the valley is creating the kinds of companies that are going to be in those markets in a big way, we will tend to benefit, because we will tend to be playing offenses rather playing defense. And worrying about, you know, whether we can pay off our debt or whether we can roll our loans over. And so generally speaking, from the valley, you know — and I say it’s a tragic opportunity. You don’t wish this kind of suffering on anybody. But, you know, if TV is in trouble or radio is in trouble, and it runs into a debt crisis or a newspaper is in trouble and can’t keep it going, there are new companies springing up all over the place that are going to be able to take a lot of those roles. Let me bring up one more thing. I think this is what should happen in banking. So Stanford economist, Paul Roever [spelled phonetically] who is a friend of mine, a genius economist, like a potential Nobel Prize winner, wrote an op-ed the other day, and he said, look. Good banks, bad banks, doesn’t matter. What we need are new banks. And I actually think what we need — and I think the valley can play a role in this, I think there should be a new wave of financial institutions that should be created from scratch today. And they should take the role. So instead of trying to unwind some big bank that’s underwater, and hundreds of billion dollars insolvent, let’s create a whole bunch of new ones. And by the way, let’s have them all be new and online. So instead of having all this infrastructure and all these old systems and these ATM’s and all this stuff, let’s do purely online, purely Internet banks. Purely virtual, much lower cost structure.
Charlie Rose:
So you’re saying the federal government should go out and create these new online banks. Take the money that you’re pouring into these old banks and instead pour it into new banks.
Marc Andreessen:
Help them get started.
Charlie Rose:
Banks fail and then —
Marc Andreessen:
Letting banks fail is the systemic risk issue. I don’t feel qualified to address that.
Charlie Rose:
You’re just saying regardless of what you do with the old banks, do this with the new banks.
Marc Andreessen:
Because it’s going to take — even if you can figure out a way to fix the old banks, it’s going to take a long time. I mean it is a very complicated and involved process. They are deeply broken in very fundamental ways. And create a new bank. I mean a bank is a simple concept. You can create a bank in software. As a concept, it’s a simple concept. So if you have a —
Charlie Rose:
You get deposits and you lend them.
Marc Andreessen:
You get deposits and you want money. It’s not that hard. I’ll give you an example of what’s happening. I’m on the board of eBay. eBay just bought a company called Bill Me Later. Bill Me Later is an adjunct to eBay’s PayPal business, which is a very big payment service. Bill Me Later is a service that lets you, when you pay for something with PayPal, it’s an option that lets you get credit for that specific transaction at the particular moment in time when you’re doing the purchase.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
So instead of being prequalified for a credit line, right, so a bank prequalifies you for a credit card, $5,000 credit limit based on your job today, you lose your job. They don’t figure it out until it’s too late. You try to put a bunch of stuff on your credit card and lose a lot of money for the bank. For bill me later, every transaction is credit scored individually. And so every transaction is scored at the moment it happens, based on all the data that’s in all the networks about all these people. And so it’s a brand-new way to provision credit. It’s completely virtual. It’s a fantastic business. It can go global. It can be gigantic. It can apply to any kind of persons. That’s the kind of new thinking and new approach that innovation can bring. I mean, it could or should be the new source of credit. And so the need to repair an old bank that has this outmoded credit card infrastructure that’s really nod needed any more.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Marc Andreessen:
It’s not clear to me how many hundreds of billions of dollars of society’s resources we should take to try to keep the past sort of in business when there’s a better way to do things.
Charlie Rose:
Are you impressed with beyond how he used it in the political campaign, whether now President Obama is receptive to technology and who he is reaching out to in technology and science in order to make sure that the country as a nation, you know, maximizes its resources in science and technology and the future?
Marc Andreessen:
Yes. He is very smart on those things. He is very in tune with modern technology, much more so than any president we’ve had so far. Clinton was starting to get there at the end of his tenure, but he never really did get to see much.
Charlie Rose:
Embraced to the 21st Century and all that.
Marc Andreessen:
He was starting to get there. But Obama has actually lived it and actually uses the stuff. I mean, he’s actually — he can actually have –
Charlie Rose:
Really? He’s addicted to his library, is he?
Marc Andreessen:
He’s completely addicted to his library. I mean, you know, to the point where he actually still has one. He actually knows and understands this stuff. And he’s surrounded himself by a whole generation of people who know and understand it.
Charlie Rose:
And some people in Silicon Valley [unintelligible] him.
Marc Andreessen:
Of course there’s submit [unintelligible]
[talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
Yeah, right.
Marc Andreessen:
So there’s no question he gets it. And then more broadly, there’s no question that he understands the role of science and technology and innovation in the economy, like for somebody who actually hasn’t worked in the –
Charlie Rose:
I thought innovation was dead.
Marc Andreessen:
It is completely. Toast. Dead man walking. That’s why I’m here today.
Charlie Rose:
One last quick idea, which is that you think that the people who are the most innovative are young because — well, you said something like this.
Marc Andreessen:
I’m thinking when I was young and foolish, I might have said –
Charlie Rose:
But the idea simply is that they don’t know the limitations.
Marc Andreessen:
Because I’m getting older.
Charlie Rose:
If you have gone through –
Marc Andreessen:
Right.
Charlie Rose:
– a crisis.
Marc Andreessen:
Right.
Charlie Rose:
If you’ve got through a meltdown, if you’ve gone through, you know, a complete collapse as happened in 2001, then you are more frightened, you’re more aware of risk and all of that. So therefore you don’t take as many chances, you know? Because how many people have we heard this explanation, if I had known how hard it was to do this, I wouldn’t have started. But I didn’t know, so I kept going, and eureka, it worked.
Marc Andreessen:
Exactly. With age comes experience, and that’s good and bad.
Charlie Rose:
So do you think you’re less innovative than you have been.
Marc Andreessen:
Well, as I say, I’m revising my opinion on this as I get older. Let me tell you, when I talk to a 24-year-old entrepreneur, and I tell him, you know, Well, this is what happened in 1997, this is what happened in 1999, he says, Well, that’s when I was in junior high.
Charlie Rose:
I know.
Marc Andreessen:
So he is completely like, those guys are completely unscarred by the crash. And it’s fantastic. They’re totally optimistic. They’re great.
Charlie Rose:
That’s the hope of the country.
Marc Andreessen:
Yes.
Charlie Rose:
It really is. Thank you for taking this time to visit us here.
Marc Andreessen:
Sure. My pleasure.
Charlie Rose:
Now, what’s the name of this fund you’ve created?
Marc Andreessen:
Andreessen Horowitz.
Charlie Rose:
Oh, my good.
Marc Andreessen:
It could be a venture capital firm –
Charlie Rose:
How innovative and original that is.
Marc Andreessen:
– or a law firm.
Charlie Rose:
How very creative that was to choose that as the name.
Marc Andreessen:
Exactly.
Charlie Rose:
Couldn’t we do better than that?
Marc Andreessen:
Actually, it abbreviates to A to Z, so we get listed first in the Yellow Pages. We might also have a [unintelligible]. We’re not sure yet.
Charlie Rose:
Marc Andreessen, thank you very much.
Marc Andreessen:
Thank you.
Charlie Rose:
Thank you for joining us. See you next time.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
A new application called iShred turns your iPhone into an electric guitar — and it's pretty damn fun even for experienced musicians like myself.
The $5 app, which launched this week, consists of a virtual fret board and a set of six strings. Mind you, this isn't a digital representation of an entire guitar neck: That would be pretty impractical given the iPhone's screen size. There are actually 10 frets, and each one can be programmed to play an entire chord or a single note. You swipe your finger across the touchscreen to strum a chord; tapping on each string plucks individual notes.
At first that might sound pretty lame and limited, but any guitarist knows most rock and roll songs alternate between only a few chords — usually six or seven at most. A lot of the really easy, basic songs I first learned to play (e.g., Oasis's "Wonderwall" or Weezer's "Sweater Song") used only three or four chords. So unless you're a classical guitarist who plays insanely complex stuff, iShred should be enough to entertain your friends and yourself.
The app even includes a collection of songs whose chords are already programmed into the frets — just to get you started on learning the app. (I recommend starting with "Wild Thing.") After you get a hang of it, you can create your own custom fret board and start programming chords or notes into the frets to play your own favorites or compose originals.
Pretty neat — and there's even an "AirPlay" option to share your songs with other users over Wi-Fi. You know what I'd like to see? A concert with a guitarist performing a song or two with this app. That'd be dorky-awesome-to-the-max.
Despite attempts to increase price transparency in the unregulated carbon offset market, prices paid by air travelers to mitigate their contribution to global climate change vary greatly.Many airlines and offset developers sell such carbon offsetting credits to business travelers and tourists to allow people to justify their flying by funding a carbon reduction project elsewhere in the world. And many nations and companies purchase these offsets to help them meet binding international climate goals under a regulated carbon market,However, while prices on the regulated offset market have plunged some 50 percent in recent weeks as the global recession reduces industrial output and subsequent emissions, prices paid by consumers in the unregulated market have lagged behind those reductions. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Feb 2009 | 7:20 pm
UK tabloid The Sun has an article claiming that someone found Atlantis using Google Earth. As someone who’s personally interested in ancient mysteries, paranormal phenomena, and cryptozoology, I’m really happy that a tabloid has this story because it totally gives credence to the idea that Atlantis does, indeed, exist and should definitely silence all the naysayers.
Here's the Wall Street Journal, quoting NPD numbers:
Apple Inc.'s unit sales of computers through U.S. retail channels fell 6% in January from the same month in 2008, the first monthly decline in three years, according to market-research firm NPD Group.
The data suggest that Apple's premium pricing, which helped boost revenue when demand was strong, may be hurting the company now that consumers are being more careful about their spending amid the recession.
That people would argue this would not be the case ... it still baffles me.
Update: Commenter Dssstrkl makes a great point:
How about we consider the fact that MacBook sales went up in January, and it's Mac desktop sales that are down. Big surprise there. The current iMac is over 10 months old, the mac pro is over a year old and the mini hasn't been updated since August 2007! There's a massive pent-up demand for new and modern desktop Macs. Watch the numbers go through the roof when Apple finally gets off it's collective ass and pushs through some new systems.
Google's Android operating system is not just for mobile phones. It is coming to netbooks.
Asus, which kickstarted the netbook market with its Eee PCs, has put a team of engineers to work on developing an Android-based device.
The company could have a netbook with Android OS the end of the year, says Samson Hu, head of the Asus' Eee PC business in an interview with Bloomberg.
Asus already has some experience with Android. The company is working with GPS-based navigation devices maker Garmin to launch a line of new phones, some of which will run Android.
The Android operating system released in October through the HTC T-Mobile G1 phone has already captured the attention of cellphone makers. Handset manufacturers such as Motorola, LG and Samsung are developing cellphones that run Android operating system.
If Asus releases a netbook running Android, it won't be long before other netbook makers such as Acer jump on the bandwagon.
Researchers have known for decades that the brain has a remarkable ability to "reprogram" itself to compensate for problems such as traumatic injury. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Feb 2009 | 6:39 pm
Sprint Nextel has bagged exclusive carrier rights for the Palm Pre until the end of the year, according to CNBC, citing an anonymous source.
The highly anticipated smartphone from Palm is expected to launch by the middle of the year, which would give Sprint a six- to nine-month hold on the phone.
Palm had announced Sprint as the carrier for the Pre when it launched the device at the Consumer Electronics Show last month. But the company has still not officially disclosed how long the phone will be available just on Sprint before it makes its way to other carriers. Palm has not commented about the speculation.
Palm and Sprint have built a symbiotic relationship over the years. The $100 Palm Centro has had a successful run on Sprint. And now Sprint
needs the Pre to lure customers. On Thursday, Sprint announced that it lost 1.3 million customers in the fourth quarter and posted $1.6 billion in losses.
The Pre could help stanch the bleeding and even bring in new users. But Sprint's position as the third place carrier and users' unwillingness to pay cancellation fees to move to Sprint could take a toll on Pre sales, says analyst Jack Gold, president and principal analyst at consulting firm J. Gold Associates.
According to a source familiar with the subject, Sprint has the Palm Pre locked up for all of 2009. The phone everyone is excited to see will be exclusive at Sprint for only six months. What happens on January 1st, 2010 is anyone’s guess as the source refused to comment beyond 2009.
Palm showed off a GSM version of the Pre over in Spain this week. No exclusives outside the US have been announced yet. So Palm will be waiting out the six months with phones ready that can serve every carrier in the US. Woo hoo!
Sprint analysts were seemingly expecting the exclusive to last shorter as the combination of the Sprints 6-month head start and a smaller than expected loss on the Street, surged the stock price 26.9%. Sprint’s customer retention numbers were less than pretty: from Forbes:
For the quarter, total wireless customers declined by 1.3 million, including losses of 1.1 million post-paid customers and 314,000 prepaid users
Ouch! It will be interesting to see if a phone can signal a carriers comeback.
Micro-stock photography is alive and well. Fotolia tells us they have just reached their one millionth registered member and now have 5 million stock images for sale, for as little as 14 cents, and typically a dollar or two. Of those one million registered members, 860,00 are active (defined as having made at least one credit card purchase or uploaded content within the past three months). Fotolia says it is registering new members at a rate of 3,000 per day (86,800 per month)
ComScore also shows some health growth, with 2.3 million unique visitors a month (the vast majority of which are obviously not registered members). Competitor iStockphoto , which was purchased by Getty Images for $50 million in 2006, has about twice as many monthly visitors (5.2 million). But on ts Website, iStockphoto says it only has 4 million images.
Another interesting stat the company shared with me: the number of uploads is very close to the number of paid downloads. People upload 40,000 images and other content every day, and download 50,000 images a day. That download rate translates to 1.5 million paid downloads a month. Fotolia takes 20 to 50 percent of the sales price.
Next up, Fotolia will begin selling stock video (something iStockphoto has been doing for a while). Fotolia already has 20,000 videos uploaded, and plans to roll out the new category generally in March or April.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
FROM APPLETELL - Twitterfon is a small, fast Twitter client that includes support for adding pictures and location info to your Tweets. So far, it’s the closest I’ve come to having the full web experience on my iPod touch. MORE »
There are lasers and then there are lasers. The Spyder II GX is a crazy 200-300mW green laser that can burn through paper, balloons, and skin and generally blind you if you're not careful. How much does all this fun cost? $1,699 including a pair of absolutely essential shades that will keep you from blinding yourself.
Two and half weeks or longer to wait for a critical patch.
In the meantime, exploits for the flaw will no doubt grow in number and cunning–a nightmare since the PDF format and Adobe’s related apps are so widely used. “Right now we believe these files are only being used in a smaller set of targeted attacks,” security group Shadowserver said in an advisory on the matter. “However, these types of attacks are frequently the most damaging and it is only a matter of time before this exploit ends up in every exploit pack on the Internet.”
Shadowserver recommends disabling Javascript in Acrobat and Reader to limit exposure to such attacks. There are, of course, other solutions as well–Foxit for Windows users, Preview for Mac users, and Xpdf for Linux users.
Scientists say they have discovered a new gene that helps protect wheat against fungal disease. "This is the first step to achieving more durable resistance to a devastating disease in wheat," said co-author Dr Cristobal Uauy, of the John Innes Center in Britain. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Feb 2009 | 4:30 pm
I’m not sure if this was moved up in response to leaked copies of U2’s newest album, No Line On The Horizon spreading across the Internet, but the entire the album will be streamed for free at MySpace Music. The player in U2’s MySpace Music page features a single, but if you click on the top album in the sidebar, you can hear the entire thing. MySpace says that the entire album will be streamed from February 20 to March 3, with links to pre-order it.
This is akin to Radiohead offering a free download of their album In Rainbows for a limited time, except without the download. It is good marketing, at it helps the band try to keep control over distribution. Although, that Bittorrent cat is already out of the bag. (The unreleased album leaked out and has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times by fans who just can’t wait for U2’s perfectly planned release schedule.
Update: MySpace says the timing of the streamed release was planned all along. Listening to it now. U2 still rocks (or maybe I’m just old).
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Chile’s Chaiten volcano erupted on Thursday, sending clouds of ash into the air and area security officials have called for an evacuation of nearby towns. Authorities have evacuated 160 people form the area of Chaiten, which lies six miles away from the volcano. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Feb 2009 | 4:20 pm
AP - Devin Krauter sits on the end of his bed, tapping buttons on his video game controller to shoot down alien beasts while chatting with other players through a headset, texting on his cell phone and talking to a visitor.
British researchers say a hospital in Cambridge is having success with a treatment that may cure nut allergies.
Four children with severe peanut allergies participated in a preliminary clinical trial at Addenbrooke's Hospital in which they were given small amounts of peanut flour every day for six months. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Feb 2009 | 4:04 pm
TechCrunch is hosting a Roundtable and Meetup in Paris on Wednesday next week, Feb 25. “TechCrunchTalk: What Next For France 2.0?” will feature an afternoon of panel discussions and some great evening networking with French startups and the investment community. The event will be live video streamed on TechCrunch. Please grab a ticket here. Read on for details:
The TechCrunchTalk event - put on by TechCrunch UK & Europe and TechCrunch France - is aimed at bringing together the Web 2.0 startup and VC community to debate the next phase of the French startup world. It will feature two quick-fire panel discussions with the hottest entrepreneurs and investors selected for their leading views on the market, with topics focused around the following themes:
• What are the strengths of the French tech scene?
• Where and how can it be improved?
• Should French startups concentrate on France, or scale across Europe and the rest of the world?
• Is the VC community doing enough for entrepreneurs?
• What is the VC community looking for from French entrepreneurs?
France is a key nation in Europe but can it build the next Google? French entrepreneurs are renowned for their savvy, smart take on technology - but does France face a brain-drain as French startups seek their fortune in Silicon Valley?
To help us explore these questions we’ll have on hand:
Roundtable Discussion
Salman Malik, co-Founder of Firefly
Steph Bouchet, ex-Joost
Laurent Féral-Pierssens, Silentale.com
Olivier Schuepbach, Wellington Partners
Colette Ballou Lamotte, Ballou PR
(Other panelists will shortly be confirmed)
Roundtable Moderator:
Mike Butcher, TechCrunch UK & Europe
Details: TechCrunchTalk France 2.0 will be on on Wednesday, 25 Feb 2009 3pm-6pm, followed by networking over refreshments till 9pm. It will be held at La Cantine, 12 passage Montmartre, Galerie des Panoramas, 151 rue Montmartre, in Paris, the innovation and co-working place owned by Silicon Sentier. Tickets here..
Please contact our event organiser Petra Johansson on petra [at] twistedtree [dot] co [dot] uk for any enquiries about demo tables or sponsor packages. Press enquiries for press passes to rassami.
The event will be followed by product pitches from three to five companies (products or startups that actually launch at the event will receive extra consideration, but it is not a requirement). If you have a startup ready to launch then and would like to give a demo, send a brief pitch to TechCrunch UK editor Mike Butcher.
Our video streaming partner for the event is Floobs. Floobs Ltd is Helsinki based start-up which is developing Floobs -services for live streaming and a platform for commmunity created LIVE tv-channels.
We’ll be holding a series of TechCrunch events in Europe this Spring and Summer, all focused on bringing together and networking the European tech community. If you wish to be on the mailing list for information about all the up-coming events, sign up on our Amiando account here. And there is lots more information here.
Warsaw
19th March - Central European event for tech startups & VCs
Topic: Re-engineering the Central European tech scene - What’s next? Get Tickets
London
21st April
Topic: A day-long event for UK & other European startups. More details to follow Sign up for further info
Stockholm
27th May - Nordic and the Baltic states event for startups and VCs
Topic: Connecting Northern Europe - Where are the strong and weak links? Sign up for further info
Berlin
10th June – More details to follow
Topic: How does Berlin and Germany become a key node for European Tech? Sign up for further info
Those of you above a certain age might remember a variant of the Game'n'Watch with a transparent screen. The LCD (non-lit) panel was mounted in an acrylic plate so you could play clunky versions of Mario and see what was going on behind it.
This was, of course, useless. At school we'd have to open our notebooks to a blank page and position it carefully behind the screen to be in with even the slightest chance of seeing the game. As a gimmick, though, it was amazing.
LG is hoping for similar "success" with its new GD900, a phone which is partially transparent. In this case, though, the screen has mercifully been spared and the see-thru treatment applied only to the slider keypad. It's skinny, too, at just 13.4mm thick.
Other specs are, ahem, invisible, but we do know that the "sleek and polished silver body" (probably not real silver) will be joined by a matching Bluetooth headset. Hopefully, though, the hideous glass sculptures in the product shot will remain in LGs fevered, computer-generated imagination.
A nationwide study of first grade classrooms finds that while many teachers create positive social environments in the classroom, most provide inadequate instructional support. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Feb 2009 | 3:52 pm
New research suggests that the English navy was evolving revolutionary new tactics right around the time of the Spanish Armada, BBC News reported.Marine archeologists say a cannon recovered from an Elizabethan warship suggests it was carrying powerful cast iron guns, of uniform size, firing standard ammunition.Naval historian Professor Eric Grove of Salford University said the discovery would have been the beginning of a kind of mechanization of war. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Feb 2009 | 3:35 pm
Apart from blogging about life in Tokyo, I also extensively cover Japanese subculture and give talks about this subject at conferences around the world.
The first thing to learn are the definitions of a "3D Woman" (on the left of the screen) and a "2D Woman" (the two ladies on the right of the screen). As you can see, "3D" refers to humans while "2D" refers to 2 dimensional illustrations.
While there are many folks who prefer warm blooded humans, some just prefer the 2 dimensional - so much in fact that they would rather marry one.
A petition will be submitted to the Japanese government upon the collection of one million signatures asking for law to be passed making it legal to marry a 2 dimensional character. The petition is filled under Human Rights and can be seen online here.
The online petition comes with the following blurb:-
Why is the iPod in grave danger? Because you cant stick Lego men on top of it.
Photo of a netted golf practice ground discovered in yet another uncharted evening after-dinner walk.
Golf is a popular and yet expensive sport to play in Japan - I'm guessing that its due to popular demand that one has to pay a bladder and a spleen to get membership to a golf club.
Meiji Golf is a site dedicated to the buying and selling of golf club memberships. They list a price of 65,000,000 yen (about 698,586 USD ) to be a member of the Koganei Country golf club.
Folks who have just laughed at the piffling 65,000,000 yen should check the requirements before laughing - no women or foreigners allowed - only Japanese males over the age of 35.
Folks here are so keen on the sport that you often see them practicing in public.
You may want to read the rest of this article which has more photos and shows how balls get back to the vending machine in my Golf in Japan article.
Sony is reeling these days. They’ve announced a 
In case you didn’t read him quoted in some 1,700 newspapers last week, NBC’s Press:Here has an interview with Chris Kelly, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer this week. The show, which focuses on technology, airs in the Bay Area on Sunday mornings after Meet the Press, and the young show has already been beating Meet the Press in the ratings. You can also watch a clip on the jump or the entire episode online 
Can’t say I saw this coming. Applied Nanodetectors (AND) showed off a modified Nokia handset that can analyze your breath to tell if you have diseases. You read that right. A cell phone that plays doctor.
Olympus will launch five new digital SLRs this year, the first of those being the new 
I believe this week we’ve witnessed the birth of crack 2.0. Like 
In November 2007, Reason magazine's Radley Balko published a long investigative story on Steven Hayne, a doctor who for the last 20 years has done the vast majority of Mississippi's forensic autopsies. Critics say Hayne and his sidekick, "bite mark expert" Michael West, cornered the market by doing ungodly numbers of autopsies, and by telling prosecutors what they wanted to hear -- possibly putting innocent people in prison in the process.
Funny isn’t it? Congress spent most of last year calling for Internet companies to limit user data retention and here it is 
What’s better than Hulu, the video service that lets you watch your favorite TV shows on your laptop? A service that lets you watch even more TV shows on your laptop–if you’re a cable TV subscriber.
The long-running 
UK tabloid The Sun has an article claiming that someone found Atlantis using Google Earth. As someone who’s personally interested in ancient mysteries, paranormal phenomena, and cryptozoology, I’m really happy that a tabloid has this story because it totally gives credence to the idea that Atlantis does, indeed, exist and should definitely silence all the naysayers.
According to a source familiar with the subject, Sprint has the Palm Pre locked up for all of 2009. The phone everyone is excited to see will be exclusive at Sprint for only six months. What happens on January 1st, 2010 is anyone’s guess as the source refused to comment beyond 2009.
There are lasers and then there are lasers. The Spyder II GX is a crazy 200-300mW green laser that can burn through paper, balloons, and skin and generally blind you if you're not careful. How much does all this fun cost? $1,699 including a pair of absolutely essential shades that will keep you from blinding yourself.
There’s 
TechCrunch is hosting a Roundtable and Meetup in Paris on Wednesday next week, Feb 25. “TechCrunchTalk: What Next For France 2.0?” will feature an afternoon of panel discussions and some great evening networking with French startups and the investment community. The event will be live video streamed on TechCrunch. 
