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Written by Skype Journal on November 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Earlier today Steve Rubel wrote about a fake news story about Sony recalling its brand new Sony Playstation 3 console, and thus fooling many Diggers into clicking their vote. Actually the problem is much bigger, and not isolated to just Digg, and it represents a growing threat to the whole social media phenomenon.
Niall Kennedy has spent a lot of time investigating many of the issues and has published a must read article today. He looked at some of the questionable posts on Digg, and followed the link trail which let him to a dental plan site, a church and a company probably based in Bangladesh. The link trail is also littered with money, a lot of money.
The dental plan site, that gamed Digg to get higher page rank gets about $40 a referral, Kennedy writes. He explains how the game works… interesting reading!
The bloggers have been dealing with issues of comment and trackback spam, though some tools like Akismet have helped. But the intensity of spam continues to grow. (Akismet has caught about 500,000 pieces of spam in our comment system.) There have been reports about MySpace being used to spread spyware, and spam sites. This problem is not going away any time soon.
Social media sites and search engines need to stay on top of this new form of content creation, continually analyzing data and scrubbing out the dirt. Sites overrun with web spam quickly lose their utility and might be banned from search engines.
Written by Om Malik on November 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Written by Skype Journal on November 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Written by Smith On VoIP - Insights on VoIP Products and Serv on November 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Every so often you meet entrepreneurs and venture capital investors who talk about Alexa ranking of a web-based service, using it as some sort of a yardstick for growth and reach. It is as good general, non-specific indicator, say if the traffic is going up or down, but to make money-decisions based on Alexa rankings is, well living dangerously.
A few weeks ago while taping an episode of Cranky Geeks, John Dvorak pointed out that Alexa toolbar, which is used to calculate Alexa rankings, works only on Internet Explorer 6.0 (or higher) on Windows. Given the proliferation of Firefox and Macs, it would be hard to assume Alexa’s accuracy, since the Alexa toolbar doesn’t really work on those two platforms.
Not that this is exactly news, but I still am amazed is the number of people who use Alexa as a fiscal crutch. What really is more worrisome is the increasing number of outages Alexa is experiencing. This past weekend, when most of us were reading the peanut butter memo, Alexa was experiencing some serious outages – for substantial period of time.
Data collected by Pingdom Gigrib shows that Alexa was down for about 14 hours and 8 minutes in November 2006 (so far), up from three hours and 20 minutes in October and about 80 minutes in September 2006. I wonder how Alexaholic was impacted by these outages?
In comparison, some of the better-known Internet brands had a little or no downtime – MSN was down for just over two hours, You Tube was around 65 minutes, while Google, Amazon, Yahoo and eBay were up a 100% of the time. Since Pingdom’s Gigrib software runs only on Windows platform, one cannot really assume completeness of its data. However, other sources that are also reporting on Alexa outages, so it is safe to say the downtimes were fairly substantial.
Downtime shows that Alexa is not reliable even as a general barometer of a website’s shifting fortunes. Furthermore, it is a sad reflection on Amazon’s web services business that includes S3 and EC2 efforts. (S3 has had issues in recent times as well.) If Amazon can’t keep the Alexa up and running, how seriously can you take their backend?
The point is not to pick on Alexa, but to bring into focus the biggest shortcoming in the post 1990s-web: lack of a good dependable yardstick for ranking websites and web services. As more and more web properties come into existence, it is time for the industry to develop a more dependable, and open source tool to track general traffic trends, and web site rankings.
Last week, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo came together on a standard for crawling websites. Why can’t these three companies and others who offer toolbars include tracking technology in their toolbars and hence offer a fair representation of the web traffic trends.
A non-partisan group could collect the data; much in the way open source projects keeps track of their code. There will be privacy and other related issues, but then these companies are chockfull of smart guys with all the answers.
In closing, if you are a startup that brings up your Alexa ranking in a meeting with us and tout that as your shining achievement, it would be time for my smoke break!
Written by Om Malik on November 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Written by Smith On VoIP - Insights on VoIP Products and Serv on November 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Netpickle and Iconix say they have made peace.
Widget-maker Netpickle has been involved in a legal tussle with anti-phishing company Iconix, which is the former employer of Netpickle co-founders Lance Tokuda and Jia Shen. Now both companies say they have reached a tentative settlement.
Both Netpickle and Iconix confirmed the settlement existed but declined to elaborate on the terms of the settlement. “Barring unforeseen problems, the litigation is done,” said Shen today, in Netpickle’s first public comments on the matter. “We’ve agreed on a constructive path” confirmed Iconix CFO Bob Zager.
In September, a district court judge ruled that Iconix had presented sufficient evidence against Tokuda and Shen to issue a preliminary injunction. The court ruled it likely Tokuda and Shen had begun development of its slideshow widgets in violation of their obligations to Iconix and a similar product being developed internally.
Though coverage by PE Week and Valleywag had focused on the fallout for Netpickle investors, which include Sequoia Capital, Shen maintained the firms “have been extremely supportive. They did their due diligence.” He also confirmed that some of NetPickle’s investment came in notes rather than equity, as we had reported earlier. This would have minimized the damage to the VCs should the company have been forced to close.
[Liz will add more information later. She is currently in transit, and filed this report from her trusted Blackberry- Om]
Written by Liz Gannes on November 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Now that the average cell phone user is coming to terms with text messaging (last I checked around 36% have texted in the U.S.) startups and carriers are hoping that more people will start using mobile email and mobile IM. We’re not talking about you, Silicon Valley Blackberry addicts, but people using low-end, even free phones that don’t have unlimited data plans.
Berggi, a startup based in Houston, is one of these that are trying to “make dumb phones smart,” as they put it, and is announcing their service today, which they plan to have up and running on Thanksgiving.
The company raised $3 million from investors like Adara Venture Partners, and offers a downloadable application that bundles email, IM and texting capabilties, which costs $9.99 per month. Your phone needs to be data-enabled, to use the service, and the regular data fees from your carrier (per usage or on a plan) apply. At present Berggi doesn’t work over Verizon or Nextel networks.
I tried to test out the service last night and this morning, but there were connection problems, so I can’t verify if the service is easy to use or designed well. We’ll try it out later and let you know what we think.
A business based on offering mobile IM and mobile email on average phones is riding a significant trend, and services like Flurry, Renzoo, and Oz Communications offer various solutions. But we’re not sure Berggi’s current business model is the right approach. How many in their target market of average phone users will be willing to download a little-known application on their phone and then pay $10 a month for this service? We’re talking about the users who are getting a free phone and probably aren’t willing to pay for an unlimited data plan.
Other companies like OZ Communications are selling phone and server software to the carriers to offer mobile messaging on phones. This is an easier market to make money in. OZ’s CEO Skuli Mogensen says “the major thing about mobile IM and email is discover-ability and usability. The majority of our solutions are pre-loaded/embedded on the device. . . Consumers do not want to read manuals, they want to be able to click and go, and many find downloading services difficult.”
Like Berggi, Flurry also offers a direct-to-consumer mobile messaging service, but its mobile email service is free — free might not always be good for the bottom line, but good for bringing in users. All of these direct-to-consumer services will need a lot of marketing money for anyone to discover the application. But if these services are actually significantly better and cheaper than what the carrier offers, then they might have a chance to spread virally.
Next year Berggi says they will white label their service through well-known brands — that is actually a pretty good idea. If you’re bored on Thanksgiving, download the app and tell us what you think.
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on November 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Connected consoles might be the theme this year, but as the Wii and PS3 go on sale, their promised online services, including web browsing, aren’t fully up and running yet. Because the Xbox has been out a good long year, Xbox Live has the most features and services out of the three — except for web browsing. With the console wars in full roar, here’s a brief cheat sheet to which online capabilities are available for the consoles.
Connection via
Expected Online Services:
Web browsing:
Yes, via Opera (availability TBD)
PS3 ONLINE
Connection via:
Online Services:
The PlayStation Network Platform, with matchmaking, and score ranking; upload and download services; friends list; text and voice-driven chat and messaging; subscription services and pay-to-download area.
Web browsing:
Yes, browser comes installed with the system.
XBOX 360 ONLINE
Connection via:
Online Services:
Xbox Live, with content delivery, friend network, multimedia messaging, video/audio chat, microcurrency, reputation system, Live Marketplace for downloading video, games, etc.
Web browsing:
No, but Microsoft is currently taking a user survey to determine desirability of that and other potential features.
Costs:
Two-tiered service, Silver (free), Gold ($29.99 ESRP for 3 months, $59.99 ESRP for 12 months)
Written by Wagner James Au on November 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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The 3G networks are going into service worldwide with a regularity, and now even newer telephony markets are getting into the act.
According to RBC Capital Markets, there are 130 WCDMA networks (85 million subscribers) worldwide, of which 73 have been upgraded to HSDPA. In comparison, the data on 3G Today shows that as of September 2006, there were 44.4 million EVDO subscribers worldwide. These numbers are going to increase sharply when US market starts to sizzle. We covered the state of the US market yesterday, comparing the EVDO and HSDPA markets.
Written by Om Malik on November 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Wow.
Google shares cracked through the $500 barrier for the first time today, hitting a high of $505.72 in mid-morning trading. Google's market capitalization is $153.5-billion. According to Bloomberg, there are six other companies trade above $500, including Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Washington Post Co.
So what does $500 mean other than being a really, really big number? For one, it provides Google with the "currency" to make a major acquisition, although the biggest deal made by Google so far is the recent $1.6-billion purchase of YouTube. For some perspective, Google's market cap is larger than eBay ($47-billion), Yahoo ($36.7-billion), IAC/Interactive Corp. ($10-billion) combined. $500 also makes a lot of smart institutional investors, who shunned Google's $85 a share IPO, look pretty silly. (Can anyone believe Google was forced to drop its IPO pricing to $85 to $95 from its original goal of $108 to $135?!) I guess The only downside about $500 is it's an expensive stock to purchase, which could see Google to do 10:1 or 5:1 stock split.
Written by Mark Evans on November 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Written by Russell Shaw on November 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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