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http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000872.html
http://gigaom.com/2007/05/27/desktop-tower-defense/

According to an interview, the Desktop Tower Defense guy is making $8000 a month from ads alone.

The real question is: can you make a game that is as good, as addictive and as simple as this?

Facebook is not the place for the games existence, IMO. It is a gated community, for starters, so you're limiting the reach of your game, because it is not a "web-based game" - it is a Facebook-based game. Furthermore, it is obviously limiting your friends' ability to be rewarded for your efforts because they don't control the revenue stream surrounding the game.

IMO, the game should exist independently outside of Facebook, and the Facebook-app should be a way to get people interested in that game. In fact, I would say that the reason the players of the game are up in arms is primarily because they are not viewing it as a game in its own right, but because they're viewing it as a Facebook application, which in turn is making them think that your friends are already getting a revenue stream, so why should they have to pay for anything?

Kongregate is an excellent example of a web-based gaming community that seems to thrive. I haven't done a lot of digging into their numbers, but they appear to do quite well. For example, Desktop Tower Defence is estimated to be making around 100K per year (if his current rate of pageviews continues). Of course, that's quite rare, but it demonstrates that true web-based games can be successful. You could also try and get sponsorship from people like Armor Games or Crazy Monkey games (although that's mainly for Flash-based games).

If their gamem is proving to be a hit, and is proving to be successful, then it certainly seems that they should consider taking the plunge and launching a proper web-based version where they can control the methods of earning the money.

Note: I'm not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned, nor do I design games myself.

In my experience with consumer grade broadband, it's not a very slight slowdown.

Qwest, which I am currently on, has no such targeted throttling that I can see. However, the peak-hour slowdown is readily apparent. On my "5M/896k" line,I can download around 500kbps for about 2/3 of the day. But during peak hours, it drags way, way down. around 8 PM, things can slow down to around 100kbps - I've seen it go as low as 50 on particularly bad days.

My point here is that "downloads slowed down fractionally" doesn't really express the full impact of the throttling that typically is imposed. Neither does "Bandwidth getting tight" fully express the level that residential ISP's oversell. If my ISP were to throttle P2P when all available bandwidth was being consumed, using the typical method of restricting P2P to using only the "leftover bandwidth", it would mean stopping it completely during peak times, and then still having congestion.

We've discussed before here on Slashdot how P2P gets targeted, even though streaming video is the real bandwidth hog, and one that ISP's can't throttle or block without massive consumer outrage. The massive peak-time crunches illustrate this - P2P isn't something that just shows up at peak time, it's something most people run overnight or 24/7. P2P only takes up about 20% of the bandwidth; throttling it is far from the cure-all ISP's seem to portray it as.

Thats not exactly true. Bandwidth is a commodity that does not scale up linearly. And the cost of running itms on a day that has the links saturated is the same as the cost on a day where the links are all idle.

Are you saying websites pay the same amount whether they use little bandwidth or a lot? Check out The real cost of bandwidth - network management challenges". A better one is this one, "Wholesale Internet Bandwidth Prices Keep Falling", in it it says of bandwidth "it is sold at a rate of 'per megabit per second per month'". That means the more used the more it costs.

you still failed to refute the the inifnite supply argument

What infinite supply argument?

Falcon

which is why it pissed me off when Verizon used to redirect my browser to their crappy branded search-engine rather than just relaying the DNS error--which i have a Firefox plug-in specifically for handling (by adding convenient google cache and way-back-machine links to the DNS error page).

i know a lot of libertarians see the Free Market as a cure-all for all the world's problems, but critical societal infrastructure like public utilities are too important to just leave to private corporations to commercially exploit however they will. besides being a natural monopoly and a service with inelastic demand (both of which make communications networks particularly susceptible to corruption/exploitation), the public has a strongly vested interest in the fair management & proper upkeep of our societal communications infrastructure.

either we effect industry regulations to protect public interest (as opposed to only catering to corporate interests as things currently stand), or local communities need to petition their municipal governments to set up their own public ISP as many cities are already starting to do. then we can start catching up to South Korea and Japan in terms of FttH deployment and address the disparity in broadband speeds/costs. instead of paying $150/month for 50 Mbps asymmetric "wideband" service, we should be paying $38/month for 1 Gbps fibre connections; that's $3.00 per Mbps versus $0.037 per Mbps symmetric bandwidth.

as things stand, consumers have no influence on how their ISPs are run. that's because individuals have no legal say in corporate policy, and due to broadband networks being natural monopolies, there are no free market forces to pressure ISPs into serving consumer interests. but individuals do have a voice in local government, and thus they would be able to influence how their municipally-managed ISP is run.

this would also bring us a step closer to ubiquitous wireless internet access. once internet access is treated as just another public utility (and a basic part of public infrastructure), the natural next step would be to roll out municipal WiFi/WiMax networks. and when that happens we'll also be able to replace our carrier-crippled cellphones with wireless VoIP handsets that aren't tied to a single (closed) cellular network.

This is not the first time Cogent act like bandits.
http://gigaom.com/2008/03/18/cogent-ceo-peering-breakdown-is-telias-fault/

show me an example of Cogent initiating a de-peering...

http://gigaom.com/2008/03/14/the-telia-cogent-spat-could-ruin-web-for-many/

http://www.backbone-news.com/2008/03/18/cogenttelia-peering-dispute-update/

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=5015857

Would you like some ketchup on that crow before you eat it? ;-)

None of these are proof of Cognet initiating a de-peering. One is a press release from Telia saying Cognent are being pricks, One is from Cognet saying Telia are being pricks, and the other is a forum where people are discussing whether or not it is Telia or Cognet that are being pricks.

show me an example of Cogent initiating a de-peering...

http://gigaom.com/2008/03/14/the-telia-cogent-spat-could-ruin-web-for-many/

http://www.backbone-news.com/2008/03/18/cogenttelia-peering-dispute-update/

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=5015857

Would you like some ketchup on that crow before you eat it? ;-)

GigaOm article
http://gigaom.com/2008/10/28/where-to-get-live-election-night-coverage-online/

Google Docs and other similar solutions are GREAT for companies that are too cheap or short sighted to host their own email -- by far the most critical service.

Who do you cry to when email doesn't work with your Google Apps? Don't get me wrong, aside from the 'all your data are belong to us' approach from Google, I love using their free services, and think that Google Apps are great for nonprofit community service or other small organizational type businesses, like Yahoo Groups used to be.

But seriously, an entire university, depending on unproven technology? What do you do when Gmail tells you "oops, we're doing some maintenance, come later dude, um-kay?" and the University rector wants access to her email?

Haven't you heard of recent cloud computing failures?

You are f*cking toast.

It uses webkit for layout, but it uses a (sort of) homegrown library for rendering:

http://gigaom.com/2008/09/02/google-open-sources-skia-graphics-engine/
http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/skia/

the BIG SWITCH can be as big as a Cisco CRS-1, with a switching capacity of 92 TERABITS PER SECOND. I think that's enough for switching the whole internet, considering this article, dated 2005: http://gigaom.com/2005/09/08/us-still-the-bandwidth-daddy/

and by the way, the CRS-1 was released 4 years ago. cunt.

Can you explain how decreased usage decreases costs?

I pay for 10Mbit/s. The equipment needed to provide that service does not turn off when I'm not using it. The infrastructure required to support that service has to still be there, in service, awaiting my desires to use it. How does that reduce costs?

You seem to want to justify the practice of overselling your capacity - a business practice that needs to stop. ISPs have been getting away with it for a long time because of the shared nature of Internet resources and networks in general. The recent story where too many people watching sports videos caused some ISPs to think they were being attacked with DDoS is exactly what happens when you oversell your infrastructure. IMO most ISPs have built their networks poorly and cheaply and have to catch up with requirements when they get caught out. When I say poorly and cheaply, read that as centralized and without scaling in mind at the planning stage. Admittedly, virtualization and other new technologies can help improve this, but that is the nature of technology based businesses: you have to upgrade often to stay relevant. It is clear that there is not enough infrastructure to support triple-play and quadruple-play services. An argument that touches on the problems not readily apparent to the North American consumer is here http://innerdaemon.wordpress.com/2007/05/12/while-verizon-fiddles-with-fios-strategy-apple-has-triple-play/

Here is a note about one of the major problems for large ISPs http://gigaom.com/2007/05/07/comcast-smartzone/

Back to the point. The above links and my comments are clearly indicating that ISP do not want you to use LESS bandwidth, they want you to use more but only when connecting to their content services. Blocking and limiting P2P means you will be more likely to use their content services. Triple and quadruple play is a way for them to help ensure that. Read up on net neutrality issues a bit. That little problem is all about ISPs trying to milk their infrastructure for double the money they should get. It will also allow them to make their content cheaper to consume as well as give them a mechanism to sell you special content packages so they get MORE money for what you now enjoy freely for the cost of your connection.

Now, your comment indicates a belief that ISPs are trying to make money by me not using the bandwidth while everything else on the Internet says their stock holders are being told how much content they are going to sell their users. There is a bit of a difference of opinion between you and what seems to be happening in the real world.

Yes, trying to write quickly enough to be useful here means editing and rewrites are often not pragmatic. I'm not sure it was a nonsensical rant, but you are welcome to that opinion.

The $900 million wasn't just for MySpace though, so it's debateable what the value of the MySpace advertising was worth.

"The $900 million deal between News Corp. and Google might seem to be all about MySpace, but in reality its all about other Fox Interactive properties, such as IGN."

http://gigaom.com/2006/08/08/google-myspace/

A few months later MySpace signed a 1 Billion dollar Ad deal with Google.

Actually, no. Google signed a $900 million deal with Fox Media, which has a number of major web sites. IGN, not Myspace, is generating most of the profitable ad displays. What Google is getting from Myspace is incoming search traffic.

Ads on Myspace have very low value. Most of the advertisers are bottom-feeders (we collect statistics on this). Cost per click is very low.

Yes, but Telia-Sonera blocked many Open Standards sites (both pro- and neutral-) from their subscribers during the weeks leading up to the latest OOXML scandal at ISO. That was for all of Telia-Sonera, not just Sweden.

Well, first of all, modules in Drupal are code plugins. The stuff you move from one side of the page to another is a "block". :-)

Drupal is great for getting something out quickly, but yes, for any serious site you are going to be using numerous "contrib" modules (the add-on systems you mention). Drupal's architecture is built around letting add-on modules do the powerful stuff, while core is an engine to enable them to do powerful stuff.

For instance, if you're building a complex site without the CCK and Views modules, you're missing 2/3 of what Drupal has to offer. You can build sites that look and function nothing like "normal Drupal" without touching core code if you know where to "bend" it, and there are a large number of places where Drupal is designed to bend. No, you can't crank out the NYTimes web site in a weekend, but you can't do that with any CMS, and any CMS vendor that claims they can is lying to you. :-)

A small sampling of Drupal sites launched in the last year or two:

http://www.imamuseum.org/
http://artsci.wustl.edu/
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections
http://www.motogp.com/
http://gigaom.com/
http://donna.be/
http://www.fastcompany.com/
http://www.flipkowlier.be/
http://popsci.com/
http://rockband.com/

And several dozen from SonyBMG Music, such as:
http://www.pinkspage.com/
http://www.avrillavigne.com/
http://jenniferlopez.com/
http://britney.com/

You can do very non-Drupaly sites with Drupal if you learn to embrace contrib modules. :-)

(Disclaimer: I worked on several of the sites listed above.)

Triple Play is the way to attack Comcast's marketing. There's a lot of competition to Comcast's own VoIP offering. Comcast blows AT&T marketing spam away with their attempts to pad the monthly bill paid by consumers. We could easily cause a massive amount of revenue damage by getting all customers of Comcast to drop the Comcast VoIP and replace it with a competitor service, such as Vonage.

Comcast is going to be ever more dependent on the $25-$33 for this service in their marginal revenue. If you want to attack Comcast, in spite of their monopoly cable television and internet monopoly, this is what you focus on. That's more than enough to crush Comcast's throttling plans. So focus on spreading the word to get every you know who is stuck with Comcast to sign up to a competitor VoIP plan.

http://gigaom.com/2006/09/20/comcast-has-a-million-voip-customers/

I could see a successful strategy of generating a mass Comcast VoIP boycott costing them around a quarter of a billion dollars in yearly revenue. Also a class action lawsuit on the change of service fees might be doable.

Also keep pushing the FCC on ala carte cable channels. The quicker cable television channels are commoditized, the better. And ever channel at ala carte price better damn well add up *exactly* to the package prices. I'm sure both the FCC and FTC would be *very* interested to discover ala carte price gouging.

Translation: It's money.

Demo of bonding 10 wavelengths together, each carrying 10 Gbps:
http://gigaom.com/2006/11/14/100gbe/
The comments after that post include one about NTT testing 111 Gbps over a single wavelength for 160 km. That's more like the article, which sounds like it's describing a single wavelength.

You forgot the word "usability" besides "cool UI" and "big multitouch screen".

It's been publicly acknowledged by Google to be a huge boost in Maps and mobile Search (50x bigger than the next most popular handset, regardless of it being a Nokia or Windows device.

It is with this knowledge that I make my "ridiculous" claim; before the iPhone, you had phones that could (but did not) access the internet, while the iPhone was a networked computer that made phone calls.

And this is different from these others... how exactly?

http://www.vubiq.com/news.php
http://gigaom.com/2008/02/20/60-ghz60-second-hd-movie-downloads/
http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/RF/ogre_project/

Some information on this band can be found here:
http://gigaom.com/2007/03/14/700mhz-explained/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/700_Mhz_wireless_spectrum_auction
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070815-700mhz-auction-whats-really-up-for-grabs-and-why-it-wont-be-monopolized.html

For instance the GSM 750 band (has been in the GSM standards for at least 7 years) is a part of the spectrum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_bands

Apple should buy Sony. Apple should buy Sun. Apple should buy SGI. Apple should buy Alias Research. Apple should buy Nintendo. Apple should buy AMD. Apple should buy PortalPlayer. Apple should buy Pixo. Apple should buy Palm. Apple should buy into the 700 MHz spectrum. Apple should buy Pixar. Apple should buy Disney. Apple should buy Universal. Apple should buy TiVo. Apple should buy YouTube.

Apple has bought 2 years of flash memory, 50 more acres of land in Cupertino, Next, Coverflow, CUPS, Emagic, Nothing Real, Soundjam MP, plus goodness knows what else (feel free to add to this list.)

But Apple buying Adobe?

That'd scare the heck out of a lot of folks. Apple has bought numerous products & smaller companies for code, patents, or teams before but Adobe (+ the former Macromedia) is a peer on the software side. That'd alienate the huge Windows userbase as well as freak out the many Adobe partners.

And to gain what?

Adobe already sells massively to Apple's customers. Sure their apps may lag, but Adobe has a huge set of codebases that has gone through 68000 -> PPC --> MacOS X --> x86, so if getting things up to speed & certified on each new iteration of MacOS X takes a bit that's not unreasonable.

To Mac-ify the apps? Again, why? Sure Apple is famous for doing really good (if not perfect) UIs but Adobe has some serious credibility too. Indeed it's been pretty clear that Apple & Adobe competing directly in some areas has improved both offerings.

Sorry, but I'm guessing Apple has enough on it's plate now. They'd just be complicating an already good, already mutually profitable situation for little reason or much greater profit.

Indeed look at the list above of companies & products folks think Apple should have bought, and in retrospect consider if they really would have been good investments...

via Om Malik's blog tonight http://gigaom.com/2007/10/30/opensocial/ Google's (GOOG) much awaited answer to Facebook ecosystem is finally coming to light. The existence of this Google platform was first reported by TechCrunch and is going to become official tomorrow. Google will announce its new social networking initiative, Open Social on Thursday. Joining Google and its Orkut social network are other partners such as XING, Friendster, hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Newsgator and Ning. OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications on the web. These common APIs mean that developers only have to learn once in order to start building social applications for multiple websites, and any website will be able to implement OpenSocial and host social applications. So, is it FOSS?

They don't make any money from their browsers anyway!

Opera and Mozilla certainly do make money from their browsers. They both get revenue from partnering with search engines.

Anyway, by the time the antitrust case made it to court, Microsoft's decision to bundle IE with Windows had already devastated the browser market. After killing the competition off, IE was able to grab up to 96% share of the browser market. They came quite close to so totally dominating the browser market that they could ignore web standards entirely, as web developers would (and still do) bend over backwards to make their sites work with IE, no matter how buggy or nonstandard its behavior was.

> but then I found http://gigaom.com/2005/07/04/gizmo-project-not-that-open-after-all/ ...

"Some dude said that some dude said that someone heard .."

I have a feeling I'm about to eat crow. Someone just the other day said 'Skype is proprietary, don't buy a skype phone' and I laughed. (Thankfully, I didn't buy a phone yet.) Now, it looks like EBay is looking for a way out of Skype.

As you use SIP, I was wondering if you had any advice towards getting a decent wireless SIP phone and a good provider. I don't want to run a PC with Asterisk on it at home if I don't have to, but there -is- one that's always on that I could use, if necessary. (I'd kind of like to play with it, but time and effort and all that.)

Also, have you tried the Gizmo Project? I was looking at it because it integrates well with Grand Central and is 'open', but then I found http://gigaom.com/2005/07/04/gizmo-project-not-that-open-after-all/ ...

Well, I have been testing a mobile product with a similar spectrum (and as a tester, I will here by post anonymously). I have been testing a product in the 800Mhz spectrum, which is in many ways similar. The great thing about 700Mhz is that you are able to achieve a much higher penetration. You are able to provide true mobile broadband that is as mobile as GSM and other cellular technologies. It's even more mobile than Mobile Wimax (when mobile Wimax is defined in the 2.5Mhz spectrum). This enables you to have high-speed internet connectivity while travelling in a car or in a train. As the penetration of the signal is stronger in 700Mhz, you can have fairly large cells, easing the roll-out.

However, the problem is nobody has yet made any indication of what modulation/technology they will be running in 700Mhz. Flarion (now Qualcomm) has Flash-OFDM[1], which is the product I have been testing allows theoreticaly around 5Mbit downstream with 2,5 or so upstream, and is well-suited for 700Mhz, but I doubt that it will be the standard here. One platform has already been specifically built for 700Mhz, and that is a CDMA-2000 platform by Alcatel-Lucent[2]
However, the 700Mhz license only grants usage of about 60Mhz of spectrum, and according to this article, further 24Mhz will be reserved for public safety, and not included in the auction, so how useful is this service anyway, when you are so limited in your channel bandwidth?

They're gonna charge you for success while spamming you with their shitty revenue models, in other words more spam. All I can see this project doing is giving Second Life an aura of respectability.

its broadcast-attractive physics (like its ability to penetrate walls)

analog television broadcasters to clear the 700 MHz airwaves on Feb. 17, 2009.

building a nationwide wireless network over the 700 MHz spectrum is around $2 billion versus a nationwide 1900MHz PCS that costs approximately $4 Billion.

Let me quote an AT&T (SBC, so yes, this represents the Cingular side) executive for you on data:

From the Financial Times:
"We have to figure out who pays for this bigger and bigger IP network," said Mr Whitacre, who was in New York ahead of AT&T's annual presentation to investors and analysts on Tuesday. "We have to show a return on our investments.?

"I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network, obviously not the piece from the customer to the network, which has already been paid for by the customer in Internet access fees, but for accessing the so-called Internet cloud.". . . . ."They might pass it on to their customers," he says of the fees that he wants to charge the sites.

How does this apply to wireless, and in particular, the iPhone?

Simple. A quote from Ed Whitacre's sucessor (Randall Stepheson, or RS: in the following interview) explains that. From Gigaom :
OM: AT&T is a fearsome company now, with a weight of its legacy. Any first day jitters?

RS: ... The new AT&T is wireless at the core in terms of great new handsets; in terms of enabling true anytime, anywhere mobility that our customers want and in terms of being innovative and service-oriented. If there are any jitters, it's from the excitement running through this company about our prospects.

OM: There are a lot of challenges facing the company. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing AT&T as a company and you personally?

RS: Our biggest challenge as a company is to ensure that our customers really understand what the new AT&T is all about. We are the most complete communications and entertainment provider for the way people live-and that starts with wireless. When people recognize that, we win. It's the same on the business side.

My personal challenge is to make sure that the pieces we've assembled-industry-leading wireless, TV, broadband, global operations and local service work together as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

OM: How vital is iPhone to your company? I have never seen AT&T push something so hard that wasn't developed internally. Why is that?

RS: The iPhone is a radically innovative new device and it only makes sense that AT&T and Apple would partner to bring it to market. This device is very important to us, it's important to Apple and it is going to do very well with customers. It also reinforces with consumers that AT&T is the place to turn for the latest in wireless devices and services.

How do I read this? AT&T feels that content providers (Google, Yahoo, AOL, CBS, etc . . .) should pay for each individual customer's access on a per-usage basis. AT&T also feels that wireless devices are the cornerstone of their future in ALL realms of connectivity, including business and entertainment.

It only follows naturally that being able to account for *every single packet* a customer uses is part of that billing strategy. You aren't going to be billed by AT&T on that basis; they're going to bill Google et al, and you'll get a bill from the content provider. Let me quote Whitacre again: They might pass it on to their customers," he says of the fees that he wants to charge the sites. .

Clear as day. If you don't see this coming a mile away, there's something wrong with you.

$15.00ish a month for US subscribers, not sure about EU. But the chinese, etc. do not pay nearly that much... they pay about $0.04 an hour. And the Chinese account for an excess of 5M subscribers. source

Full links and background at the GigaOM article

Full links and background at the GigaOM article

Hopefully, other services will be able to hack the iPhone the way Jaman has worked on AppleTV.

I'd hate to work for that division, unless EA promised to reallocate me within another division when The Sims loses popularity. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket... People inevitably lose interest in a game over time (even World of Warcraft perhaps).

Wow is dying.

Office league slow pitch softball. Look into it.

This seems like a profoundly bad idea for all concerned. I like Yahoo. I don't use them for search, but they seem, at least marginally, to "get it": they've purchased a number of promising web startups like Flickr and Upcoming, and seem to mostly let them do their own thing (contrasted with that other web company). They allow their developers to be pretty transparent. They've created the Yahoo User Interface Library (which is quite helpful), etc...

If Microsoft were running the show, I'm worried that would change. Plus, I think there would be other problems. For Microsoft, what would be the easiest and quickest way for them to completely demoralize the employees who work in their Internet divisions? Buy Yahoo. For Yahoo, what would be the easiest and quickest way to confuse and worry their employees? Sell to Microsoft (although many might not be that confused while they're swimming in their huge piles of money.)

Finally, I'm concerned about Yahoo's services, were Microsoft to purchase them. It sounds like Microsoft has a large number of middle managers and policy makers who like nothing more than to assert their authority with arbitrary decisions. Yahoo seems to value a fair amount of development and language agnosticism (with sites written in PHP, custom languages, etc...) What happens to these sites when Microsoft comes in? "I'm sorry - we're rebuilding that in .NET now."

I don't know - my responses aren't typically those of the knee-jerk Slashdot mentality, but this makes me even me wince.

I have a hunch that Vonage will survive http://gigaom.com/2007/04/08/voip-patent-mess/ this article talks about how Verizon really shoudn't have the patents in the first place, and this might be a good argument in the appeals process.

By that reasoning since Cisco has the name iPhone trademarked http://gigaom.com/2007/01/10/battle-for-iphone-bra nd-cisco-sues-apple/ they should rip the name out from under Apple right?

What a crock....

Lets try and make black look white to fit our pathetic gullible little universe.

The whole do no evil thing is a load of horse shit, google is a corporation run by directors who have been selling off their stock as fast as they can. This is never a good sign of about the intentions of the directors.

If Microsoft was doing everything Google has done and is currently doing everyone would be crying out for the US justice department to do something about them. They control the popularity of sites, they collect data on your searches, the emails you send, the desktop search facility sends back information to google on the contents of your hard disk.

Personally I trust Microsoft more than I trust Google. Microsoft knows they can't get away with anything on the desktop, if they tried anything dishonest, tried to invade the privacy of their users they know they would be caught straight away by all and sundry. You simply can't hide packets across the internet. Google... they want everyone's data on their servers under their control, where they can pretty much do what ever they want to do with it.

It's quite remarkable just how gullible the slashdot crowd can be.

Even though Google is being overtly aggressive about online video market, it is trying to leverage its advertising network more than download sales. Is it too hard to imagine - watch the video on Google Video, and download it on iTunes store? Both parties win? iTunes being included as part of Google software pack, or part of Google Toolbar? Google driving music-related searchers to iTunes store?

Google must be paying handsomely for those searches emanating out of Safari browser (about 3% of the total market) and a soft alliance could help balance the books. In other words, Google gets paid for referring customers to the iTunes music/video store.

Answer : it comes next month from T-Mobile:

Other answer : the mother company (Deutsche Telekom), France Telecom, TeliaSonera, and many others are preparing the launch of similar products.

IMHO, that was a pretty poor editing job.

On the shitcan of history, like the unreadable choice of default font on Slashdot, the Star Wars Galaxies NGE, the changes to Yahoo's stock message boards, and two recent changes to Google Maps, one of which has made broke printing impossible (users are now reduced to taking goddamn screen captures and printing those!), and and another one that auto zooms and recenters, instead of merely re-centering the map, on double-click, making navigation a time-consuming process of setting a desired zoom level, clicking to recenter, slowly loading a bunch of tiles you don't need, then unzooming back out, and loading yet another set of tiles.

In each of these cases, user feedback was nearly universally negative, and yet the "improvements" remain in place.

If this is UI innovation for Web 2.0, give me Web 1.0 back.

...that is the sole reason Mr. Khosla is interested. He is very VERY smart, and has made lots of money for himself and his venture firm (KPCB accounts for a significant percentage of ALL venture profits). KhoslaVentures,http://khoslaventures.com/resources .html> his new gig five and a half degrees apart from KPCB though they share office space, has some of his recent powerpoint presentations including the somewhat controversial ones on Ethanol. But if one goes through it rigorously, it can be seen that it is long on "collecting" other people's observations and short on brilliant insights contributed by Vinod Khosla. If I was to place a bet at this point in time, I bet he walks away having made a few hundred million $$ in 10 years time from this alternative/clean-tech investing. For more fawnish coverage on 'the man', see valley wag Om's http://gigaom.com/ and Matt Marshall's http://siliconbeat.com./

I'm surprised that google felt the need to release this version of its online spreadsheets. To call it rudimentary is an overstatement. There is so little functionality that there is very little to actually test. In comparison, editGrid and irows.com have a comparitvely feature-rich online spreadsheets already. The industry rumor-mill in fact thought a week or so ago that google was going to buy out irows.com.

There really is nothing to gawk at, at google spreadsheets right now. Give it six months before spending time discussing features.

"Only if you don't mind having no privacy and always need a working Internet connection to do any work."

Why do you think they are buying up all the dark fiber and support municipal wifi? Forget Web 2.0, think Google WAN, aka GWeb Beta.

Will SkypeFree KO Vonage IPO?
By Andy Kessler
This is a classic high stakes Wall Street sucker punch.

The buzz on the Street is that the Vonage IPO is on the rocks. They HAVE to raise money or they are in a world of hurt. Their investors don't want to put another penny in and the company seems to still be bleeding cash, $75 million in the first quarter of 2006. Geez, Vonage is begging customers to buy 20% of the deal - not a great sign.

Ebay knows this, why not toy with the mouse before you kill it. What better way to do away with the Vonage IPO and raise their cost of capital then scare investors even more. Every prospective buyer on this deal asking the same questions: what about pricing, why will anyone pay a flat fee per month when skype connects in the US for 2 cents a minute. $25 per month to Vonage is the equivalent of 1250 minutes.

At Skypeout = zero, its infinite minutes. The value of what Vonage provides has just gone from $25 per month to somewhere close to $0, goose egg, nada. Tough to get a return on equity with those kind of numbers.

F-ing brilliant. I'd like to shake the hands of the person that thought this out. Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and UBS now have to work a lot harder to sell this deal. Boo-hoo.
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