technology

It seems like a small thing, but day after day I can’t help thinking that there is a distinct pattern to the business model of things such as the Associated Press going more and more down the route of using open syndication rather than traditional distribution partners. Wikipedia vs. Brittanica Writer Branded Blogs vs. Media Brands Tags vs. Taxonomies Slashdot vs. Peer Review Metacritic vs. Critic What all these things do is place ordinary people or individual nuggets of information as nodes in a non-hierarchical web rather than a series of disconnected pyramid hierarchies. The way the web looks to the end user, the way it looks to publishers and the way it works in terms of money flow are starting to look the same as the underlying technology – a non hierarchical web. And the really interesting thing about webs, is that is how the real word works –…

Clearly Apple is doing much better having brought back the visionary CEO that they originally fired. And he was fired for exhibiting all the things that he is now lauded for: creating a culture based upon vision and uncompromising design. The opposite of this is what is taught at business schools – i.e. to create a culture of products based upon understanding the market, rather than vision and innovation. Apple is a great vindication of ballsyness rather than MBAness. Jobs is our generation’s Frank Lloyd Wright. That Apple is doing well is also a great vindication of everyday people over faceless corporations. When companies buy laptops they buy boring thing like Dells on the assumption that they are reliable, not Apple’s which look too flashy. What Apple owners know is that their product is plain better. So Jobs is a star and Fiorina out to pasture. Perhaps there is a…

What happens when you have a product that is designed for the masses but remains with the minority? Nobody could ever figure out how to program a video recorder, but Tivo the king of DVRs fixed that – and so much more. Tivo created a really simple user experience, right down to the design of the remote. One click recording and wishlists and automated suggested recording. Surely a DVR like this is must have at a time when people are shelling out 5 times what they used to for their TV experience just to hang a flat screen TV on the wall? And Tivo is not new, it predates plasma screens and DVDs, by all accounts, DVRs should be ubiquitous. The problem can’t just be that DVRs are a threat to traditional business models. MP3 players are now commonplace having first appeared well after. I suspect that the main problem…

Given that: 1. All cellphone OS’s suck. 2. Most non PDA cellphone hardware design seems to have stayed the same, apart from the addition of a camera lens, for the last 2 years. 3. Unlike computers, for most people, cellphones are a luxury device where good hardware design is a premium. 4. Apple proved that people would pay for their software and hardware design value-add, in a luxury market, with the iPod. 5. Cellphones & MP3 players make sense and may converge, making a hedge against this a good move for the iPod. 6. The market for cellphone hardware is big but the incumbents are stumbling. 7. Even buying ringtones on cellphones is a $3 billion market (much bigger than the current music download market). 8. The form factor of the iPod mini is the same as a phone, and Apple pretty well invented the PDA (but just got the…

Designing a site in XHTML/CSS is elegant and good according to many of those who preach web design. But there is a problem: CSS itself is badly designed, not just at the detail level, but in its overall concept. Essentially, CSS is inside out – you don’t want to flow style into content, but to flow content into style (a template). Any blogger or developer of a database driven site knows this. But what about structure? No matter how hard you try to put all of your style and structure into CSS you still end up with some style in an XHTML document. Style and structure are not mutually exclusive, which is why HTML table elements just won’t die. CSS is based on a broken metaphor one which separates style, structure and content. People have naturally gravitated towards separating style from content through template based web design and there is…

Backed by Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal, Yelp! is a service that allows you to find, share and manage recommendations for local services from people that you know. Most online local services sites are not that useful, basically just an online version of the Yellow Pages. In fact, until this year, Dex, one of the major suppliers of local listings, did not even have search. Google and Yahoo have embryonic local services sites but Yelp adds persistence and reach to the word of mouth process, which is the way most people find local businesses. It’s a marketplace worth more than the entire online advertising market at $14Bn in the US and $40Bn worldwide and so is starting to attract a great deal of interest. Add Yelp to Yahoo and Google local, Citysearch and Craigslist and an interesting space is shaping up. www.yelp.com Disclaimer – I worked on Yelp.

Let me repitch one simple thing that I believe would make the web more useful – ubiquitous use of one-line-bios. It’s something I have been banging on about for years, and is now built into Typepad but hasn’t taken off. So here’s the pitch (someone who is better at spreading memes, help me out if you feel like it): Back in the days, lots of people were looking at online syndication, news syndication in particular, and they set up large groups to look at it (NewsML ICE etc.). – and RSS, which actually has nothing to do with syndication, blew them all away (as Jason Kottke has pointed out, RSS is basically a hypertext link and headline that points to something – there is no movement of content and hence no syndication) . All you really need to create the same functionality as traditional syndication on the web is a…

Chatango have just launched Chatango mini, a fully embeddable IM client that sits directly in the browser and has configurable size and look and feel. Click on ‘get your own Chatango’ in my version in the right hand side bar.

In the English speaking world Ebay looks unstoppable, but check out Alibaba.com and sister site Taobao.com, the Chinese Ebay. A Chinese owned, English language site, Alibaba.com is the biggest supplier portal on the Internet – import/export for the wired age. While Ariba, the poster child of the once fashionable B2B space, has retrenched into enterprise procurement, the main action is going offshore. Alibaba, which is in the top 100 high traffic sites with hockey stick growth is an example of how the Internet fits into the outsourced economy. Alibaba raised $82 million in VC money last month. How many Silicon Valley Internet companies raised that amount recently?

Om Malik on Vonage’s Circuit city deal “By its presence in Circuit City, Vonage is now a mass market product, not some tech curiosity. With 300,000 new customers from the deal likely in the first year, Vonage could have over a million customers before the first snow falls in New Jersey.” When the first snow falls in New Jersey? Wouldn’t that be when hell freezes over?

Need To Know 2004-03-05 “Who can be bothered to keep up with the SCO story these days? Only those who like a laugh.”

Clay Shirky on VoIP The first bit, in true Clay style, is spot on, however there are two later points that are surely not correct. “The incumbent local phone companies –Verizon, SBC, BellSouth and Qwest — have various degrees of interest in VoIP, but are loathe to embrace it quickly or completely, because doing so means admitting to everyone — shareholders, regulators, customers — that both monopoly control and artificially high voice revenues are going away.” This is much the same as what happened with Netflix and Blockbuster. Netflix gets rid of late fees, and without late fees Blockbuster loses money, so Blockbuster is the incumbent that cannot adopt a more efficient model without actually losing money, something shareholders wouldn’t allow. Local phone operators are similarly challenged by VoIP, but like the music Industry they can use lawyers to prolong the inevitable. Later on Clay writes: “VoIP isn’t a service,…