Slashdot Mirror

If wonder if that's why this deal fell through. (Bubbleshare was subsequently bought by Kaboose for $2.25 million.)
Obviously, News Corp wants an established photo-sharing site that has an established audience and name-recognition, not just a plug-in for MySpace.

If I'm not mistaken

But you are (well, at least the real picture is a bit more muddled)

Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which "causes too much pain for legitmate buyers" while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are "huge problems" with DRM, he says, and "we need more flexible models, such as the ability to "buy an artist out for life" (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.

His short term advice: "People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then."

It seems that the April Fool's 2.0 strategy is to launch the joke a day early.

So, FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace), which can be run on a number of platforms, allows you to mount your Gmail account like a drive. If you copy data to this disk, it uploads it to your Gmail account as a message/attachment. So now you have a ~3GB hosted virtual drive, albeit with pretty slow access speeds... Pretty wild stuff.

Unlimited messagees on Yahoo makes me hope someone is working on a libYmail component, allowing FUSE to do the same with Yahoo Mail. Got a 15 gigs of TV shows/movies/porn which you've been thinking about deleting anyway? Let Yahoo have them!

From this other article:

Users are subject to Yahoo's abuse policies, which requires users to follow "normal email practices" and not engage in activities like using Yahoo mail for basic online storage (a number of services have popped up to help people use Gmail for this purpose). Abusive accounts will not be summarily deleted - users will be notified by Yahoo and/or accounts suspended, but users will still have access to the data.

If you get caught, Yahoo seems to allow you to pull the data back down. If they won't (I'm going to guess they're going to change that policy pretty quick), then oh well, you were going to delete that stuff anyway! :)

Is there a phone that is just a phone? Designed to have a respectable life span for the phone itself and the battery? A phone that isn't also a camera, PDA, and now web surfing device. Just a phone.

I'm excited about cool mobile hand held devices, but sometimes people just need a reliable phone.

Oh, but are there any phone currently that synchronize with gmail and the Google calendar?

The Nokia 6300 ticks all the boxes for core functionalities (including camera) and does it all in a pretty, small package with decent battery life. You can use Gmail for mobile to read your Gmail (go to gmail.com/app on your mobile to download the app) and Goosync to sync with your Google Calandar.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/05/barenaked-lad ies-new-album-free-no-drm-now/

That's not correct. Gates spoke out about the current DRM not the concept.

From the TechCrunch article (http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/14/bill-gates-o n-the-future-of-drm/) (emphasis mine)
Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which "causes too much pain for legitmate buyers" while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are "huge problems" with DRM, he says, and "we need more flexible models, such as the ability to "buy an artist out for life" (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.

His short term advice: "People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then."

He ended by saying "DRM is not where it should be, but you won't get me to say that there should be usage models and different payment models for usage. At the end of the day, incentive systems do make a difference, but we don't have it right with incentives or interoperability."

"No one has done it right, yet" and "DRM is not where it should be" can't be read as saying DRM has to go, but that it must be more sophisticated.

Gates wants DRM, make no mistake about it. His interview was just FUD attempting to harm the online music industry. He should know all about the issues of legality with online sales, so his quote about being legal is either a complete distortion of the truth or a gaping hole in his understanding.

If you hate fanboys, you'll have to admit you're wrong on this, or be labelled a Gates fanboy.

The scary part is the DRM is built into the foundation of Vista - even as installer programs are only allowed to run with full admin priviledges. Which to me sounds like all of Vista's security is about catering to the major media companies. It would be more jawdropping if Gates addressed this.

Zimbra: 6 million Paid Mailboxes.

I guess most of them are not private mailboxes.

So there's definitly are market for this.

Bye egghat.

I see a lot of people here stating that Bill Gates said the same, but they provided no reference. So I went looking.It all leads back to blog entry below. From reading this it sounds like Bill Gates is not against DRM, just the current DRM. His short term suggestion for music. Is to buy a CD and rip it, to avoid all that nasty DRM. That most of that nasty music DRM that you would be avoiding in the short term is Apples, is only a bonus I am sure.

Now it is hard to judge by these quotes that may have transcription problems, but this is in no way denigrating DRM on Bills part. Just current implementations, of which no doubt Vista is getting closer to DRM nirvana. Every time I see Bill Gates speak, he is exactly like a politician, trying to sound out on both sides of issues while ultimately saying nothing.

Steve Jobs OTOH, is posting clearly without reservation what his stance is on DRM. So this is refreshingly different that Gates comments.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/14/bill-gates-on -the-future-of-drm/
"
Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which "causes too much pain for legitmate buyers" while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are "huge problems" with DRM, he says, and "we need more flexible models, such as the ability to "buy an artist out for life" (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.

His short term advice: "People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then."

He ended by saying "DRM is not where it should be, but you won't get me to say that there should be usage models and different payment models for usage. At the end of the day, incentive systems do make a difference, but we don't have it right with incentives or interoperability."
"

it's a hoax - http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/28/google-tv-an- elaborate-prank/

Actually, Bill Gates doesn't like DRM too much. Recently at a bloggers conference in Redmond, he had this to say.

Gates didn't get into what could replace DRM, but he did give some reasonably candid insights suggesting that he thinks DRM is as lame as the rest of us. Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which "causes too much pain for legitmate buyers" while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are "huge problems" with DRM, he says, and "we need more flexible models, such as the ability to "buy an artist out for life" (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.

His short term advice: "People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/14/bill-gates-on -the-future-of-drm/

NineNine - You are giving way too much importance to the amateur vs professional debate and thinking about bloggers in terms of education level and ability to find "real" news. I could go off in a very long article about the power and profit a successful blog can bring the owner and the influence it can wield, but an example would be better. Take a look at TechCrunch sometime http://www.techcrunch.com/about-techcrunch/, although I'm sure you already know about it. It's were the MSM (Main Stream Media) takes a lot of their tech tips from and it's been featured in everything from CBS News to Business Week. It's just a blog run by a very successful business man. Another example see http://searchengineland.com/ It's another blog by Danny Sullevan. It was launched in December and ALREADY it's posts show up on google news. So when you search GOOGLE news his posts show up ABOVE THE MSM as news items. Talk about power. Yes anyone can have a blog, but not everyone can write well enough or wants to devote enough time / energy to attract a following. Blogs in many ways enable the possibility of writers to earn more and reach a wider audience. New publishing and add technology (google adsense, adbright, text link sales) enable writers to directly profit off their readers via targeted advertising without the need to be censored and influenced by middle man organizations that syndicate other people's writing. There will always be a place for some of the MSM, but many of the news papers, televisions news shows are now outdated and with the advance of new technology they're publishing business models will cease to exist. There is increased competition, but with the cost for distribution and exposure skyrocketing downward if people like what you can find an audience six figure salaries funded by advertising dollars are in ready supply. You just have to find an audience and that's the hard part. To relate this to a personal story - I launched a new blog last month. I'm not making any major money off it, but I was already approached for syndication by WebProNews in less then a month after launch. The articles they syndicate show up in Google and Yahoo news. Blogs are here to stay and people are listening, if you like it or not. If you're a write new distribution channels and new technologies are opening more doors then they are closing! Keep writing! That's my take anyways. I'm new to Slashdot (I use other social media and publishing sites). I hope my contributions here are welcomed here.

There's also a post on TechCrunch about this now.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/17/areae-aims-to -merge-mmog-web-20/

Yeah. Look for updates to this over on TechCrunch - here.

That probably explains why Bram Cohen is (probably) parting company with BitTorrent, Inc...

No, just a different article, found here

I would argue that it's common knowledge
that Firefox
doesn't have
anything like
50% of
the browser market,
with most estimates
coming in
at less than
25%.

Or keep it for looking at, just like Spaceship 1.

Some have already started listing the waste

The retina determines resolution, but by moving the eye around the brain ends ups "seeing" a higher resolution. The same as Motion DSP can do with poor camera phone resolution. The 2nd example is really impressive - you actually read the book titles in the processed video.

Sorry I couldn't comment earlier, but it took a while to login.

This information was also reported on TechCrunch on June 8th (and got a heated response from people there as well), and actually does seem to be real, even though it might just end up being a proof of concept.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/08/google-resear ch-prototypes-ambient-audio-contextual-content/

Actually, that's just going in circles, because the original source for the $2 billion estimate is TechCrunch. His estimate was based on the Comscore data which said that Grouper had 542,000 unique visitors in July while YouTube had 16 million. So he was doing basically the same math as the parent - YouTube had about 32 times more visitors, multiply 32 by $65million, you get just over $2 billion.

Actually, that's just going in circles, because the original source for the $2 billion estimate is TechCrunch. His estimate was based on the Comscore data which said that Grouper had 542,000 unique visitors in July while YouTube had 16 million. So he was doing basically the same math as the parent - YouTube had about 32 times more visitors, multiply 32 by $65million, you get just over $2 billion.

While there are many "techie" people like greatcelerystalk who know what they want, we have to keep in mind that Amazon is selling to the entire spectrum. My mom, new to computers this year, finds comfort in the Amazon experience. It's an entire shopping mall--just what women love (yes, I am generalizing). So shoppers who know what they are looking for, or are simply buying on price, may not use the recommendations, I would suspect that a significant, if not majority of the population may be enticed to buy something. I admit to having purchased several books that were recommended to me.

Now, the more significant issue revolves around the depth of the information Amazon is amassing on you and me. Sure, you can learn just as much about me from my blog or slashdot journal, but that's my choice. I recognize that Amazon has stated "opt-in" information. But when was the last time you read a EULA or the Privacy Policy page for NewEgg? You can be opted-in to just about anything. Then, personal private data is stored, waiting to be hacked into or. Or better yet, published in the name of research!

Ultimately, this trend will not stop. Twenty years ago, had people known the level of personal information that we would be storing today, they would have had the same reactionary quivering that we feel today. It's simply the unstoppable progression of technology integration into human life.

Of-course there is no way that a company can do something stupid and cause evil (pdf) with data like that.

Google's 6 DVDs full of n-grams are much more interesting than that: they "processed 1,011,582,453,213 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,146,580,664 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,653,070 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times."

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-our -n-gram-are-belong-to-you.html

AOL has released interesting data as well...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/06/aol-proudly-r eleases-massive-amounts-of-user-search-data/

Forget letters... what about numbers replacing whole words! it hurts my brain even thinking about it!

Oh, and lets see, from a business stand point, this is probably a good move my Google. granted, $900M is a ton of money, but with myspace generating over 27.4 billion page views per month (article here), that's a huge income stream for Google. Even if only 1% of those people even click on a link, which is probably an underestimate, thats 274 million ad clicks per month. At a minimum of $0.01/click, that's $2.74M. Also, don't forget that Google does Cost Per Impressions, or per 1000 ad views. Lets assume you use minimums, as I have throughout this post, and you will see that Google generates another $6.85M/ad displayed. Since Google usually puts up about 5 ads per search, you can assume that they are making $34.25M/month at a minimum. Total, they have a revenue of appoximately $37M/month, all at minimums. Now, this doesn't take into account the fact that most advertisers pay more than the minimums since Google uses cost competitive advertising. However, at minimums, it only takes Google a little over 24 months to recover their costs and start making money. Seems pretty smart to me!

Then again, what do I know!

Flickr offers its corporate API to some sites, and refuses to permit it to others. Zooomr was judged to be too much of a potential competitor, so Zooomr users don't get to copy the photos they've uploaded to Flickr.

Flickr ended up, after some rough comments and self-reflection, changing their minds (see the "Update:" at the bottom of the post).

How timesly. TechCrunch just reviewed this:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/10/zango-brings- adware-to-myspace/

"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer." Jean Jacques Rousseau. A lot of charged language has been flying around over the past four days or so with regards to Flickr and what rights their users ought or ought not to have with regards to their content. It started off with a thread in Flickr Central when Google launched their new Picasa photo sharing app and has escalated from there to Digg, TechCrunch and now Slashdot. As I've been involved in the recent debate since it started I wanted to offer up my thoughts on the matter at hand. It's important to note that yesterday I joined Zooomr, a direct competitor to Flickr. I've kept quiet on the posts over the weekend because I wanted to announce that before offering up anything more on the subject than I already have. As one of Flickr's heaviest users I feel that I have a decent understanding of the situation and problem at present. A number of months back Anil Dash wrote a post called "The Interesting Economy." In this post Anil posed the most basic question of all from a Flickr user's perspective, "what's in it for me?" From Anil: "But interestingness in Flickr doesn't pay. At least not yet. Non-pro users are seeing ads around my photos, but Yahoo's not sharing the wealth with me, even though I've created a draw. Flickr's plenty open, they're doing the right thing by any measure of the web as we saw it a year ago, or two years ago. Today, though, openness around value exchange is as important as openness around data exchange." Caterina Fake responded to Anil with the following: "Everyone needs to get paid, businesses need to thrive. I don't begrudge blogs like Anil's their AdSense links, or Flickr displaying ads on free accounts (I may have a bias there). But monetization strategy or no, the culture of generosity is the very backbone of the internet. It is why I have always loved it." At the time, and still today, I agree with Caterina Fake. I have always felt that I've gotten much more out of Flickr than money could ever provide and thus I've felt it more than a fair deal. I don't need to be paid by Flickr. I enjoy the generosity that Caterina speaks of and love the share and share alike spirt of Flickr. And over the past year I've spent hours and hours and hours working away at my flickrstream. Uploading new photos every day, meticulously documenting my images with detailed tags, building friends and making contacts, enjoying and sharing with everyone I meet, and participating actively in many different groups and conversations on the site. But lately I've been having some second thoughts. The central issue around the recent debate is not whether or not you can get your photographs out of Flickr. Slashdot got this really wrong when they wrote, "yet Flickr's API only allows uploading, not exporting." There are several tools that have already been developed to allow exporting out of Flickr. Downloadr and Slickr come to mind immediately. You absolutely can get your photographs out of Flickr your photos are not locked up. Flickr is not the roach motel that others have been making it out to be. What is at issue is not your photos, but the metadata associated with your photos. At present Flickr does

A fairly major correction to the original post: "yet Flickr's API only allows uploading, not exporting". Flickr's API has *always* allowed exporting. As pointed out by Stewart on TechCrunch you can already buy a DVD backup of your Flickr photos complete with metadata, use one of several open source utilities built on Flickr's open API to download your photos to your local machine, or roll your own if you have the scripting skills. This is all pretty revolutionary, but they did it a few years ago.

[...]to listen to the ambient audio in a room, determine what is being watched on TV and offer web-based supplemental information, services and shopping contextual to each program being watched.

Also this is a good way to compete with Yahoo! Messenger, which was recently upgraded to use the same voice codec as skype.

No real income? What makes you think that?

Facebook doesn't release revneue figures, but as recently as Apr'05 they were valued at around $100mil, which tells me that they have significant revenues.

Facebook generates revenue from banner ads, local sponsored links, and sponsored groups. Considering that 85% of the college population (which, BTW, is a very sought-after demographic) uses Facebook, I'd say their ad revenues could be extremely significant.

2 bn is probably excessive, I wouldn't be able to tell without seeing their P&L, or at least revenue figures.

"I just have to figure out how to make a site that generates a lot of hits with no real income and then sell it off to the highest bidder."

If you're generating a lot of hits and aren't scoring a lot of ad revenue, then you need to hire someone who knows what they are doing in selling ad space. Hits = revenue, expecially when the hits are coming from college kids.

2 billion dollars? 750 million and they turned it down? This is the very cause for the Social Networking Backlash Techcrunch covered like snubster.com and isolatr.com

It looks like Amazon managed to get their storage product out before the rumored Google Drive (TechCrunch article, Slashdot article). I wonder how Amazon's product will compare to Google's, whenever Google's is released. I'm particularly interested in seeing how Amazon and Google will end up competing with each other in terms of price and transfer speeds.

I looked at some of the techcrunch stuff for March:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/

and ran across "Vast".

I think "Vast" has "buy me" written all over it, too. Maybe Google will buy Vast and apply it to other other products... Google could aggregate all KINDS of stuff:

-- reselling movies/videos (original media),
-- computer parts
-- car part (not just cars themselves)
-- second-hand clothing
-- airline tickets

Anyone feel Google might get into the auctioning business? I know they say "do no evil" and maybe crowding into space another biz is in might be akin to doing evil, but if Google feels pressure to "expand or die" (or submit to some other Ferengi Rule of Acquisition: "MORE is GOOD; ALL is BETTER."... But, I suppose they won't try "Once you have the Customer's money, NEVER give it back."

Or, "It never hurts to thank the customer when you (screw them over); that way, you can come back and (screw them again).", heheh

Seriously, tho, has anyone else dug around in techcrunch's site?

The slashdote code base is too old but, there closest competitor uses it! According to this digg has almost the same traffic as slashdot.

Yeah, I really see no difference between the good ol' pico and this newfangled gmail.

Check the Web 2.0 DNA stuff. There's a lot of hype, but some real advances in there as well. two-point-oh is cringe-worthy, but we need some way to label all this newish stuff.

What's the big deal? Simpy has been giving away AdSense cash for a while now. Mike Arrington covered the topic on TechCrunch the other day.

Users tend to like Web 2.0 apps. A friend of mine showed me his company's Basecamp setup and I was blown away. He had over 30 employees and outside vendors working on about a dozen different projects, and all of it was managed in Basecamp. For $100/month, he is able to keep much better track of everything than in the past, when he relied on Entourage and a variety of other apps to pull it all together. He has people using Windows, he has people using Macs. He has a slim IT department. His people actually enjoy using Backpack, which also makes his job easier, because he doesn't have to cajole them all the time.

The best of the Web 2.0 apps have a transformative effect for users not because of any technological revolution, but because the apps feel much more like client-side apps. They operate smoothly and feel more fluid. Scoffing at this is akin to saying that user interface improvements are not very important, which is odd coming from someone like Zeldman. Even subtle changes in how an app works at the user end can make a huge difference in how the user feels about the app. The very fact that people refer to Web 2.0 products as apps rather than sites shows this. Sure, dynamic websites have always really been applications. It's just that to most users, they didn't feel that way. Now, because of new coding approaches, the apps feel like apps.

Is this an epic revolution? No. But it is the start of something new, in that a host of small companies with far less startup funding than in the Dot Com era are starting to pop up. They're trying different things. Many of them are trying the same things in slightly different ways. Most of them will not last very long. But this time, the money situation is different. Web 2.0 isn't about huge VC money and absurdly valued IPOs. It's about real businesses following established business practices. Figure out how to make something that people want to use. Figure out how to make money doing it. Go do it.

I can understand why Zeldman is wary of the hype, but just because the VCs are jumping on the bandwagon doesn't mean that Web 2.0 is pure hype. To me it is invigorating to check out my TechCrunch feed and see so many interesting web applications popping up. The future has not yet been commoditized. As a whole, the web development community has learned a great deal about what works and what doesn't, not just from a technology perspective, but from a business persepective. In my opinion, Web 2.0 is much more about applying those lessons than about the breathless hyperbole of VCs. It really is different from the Dot Com era.

You should. Yahoo has refocused itself and is starting to be a serious competitor to Google. Things Yahoo has done recently:

Partnered with Six Apart to pre-install Movable Type on their small business hosting
Purchased Del.icio.us
Launched Yahoo Answers
Launched Yahoo Shoposphere
Launched a new version of Yahoo Maps
Launched Yahoo Blog Search
Launched Yahoo Podcasts
Purchased Konfabulator
Launched Yahoo My Web 2.0
Purchased Flickr.com

Yahoo will also soon be launching a new version of Yahoo Mail which will include AJAX/DHTML tech they got from their purchase of Oddpost, RSS, an API and additional design updates.

You should. Yahoo has refocused itself and is starting to be a serious competitor to Google. Things Yahoo has done recently:

Partnered with Six Apart to pre-install Movable Type on their small business hosting
Purchased Del.icio.us
Launched Yahoo Answers
Launched Yahoo Shoposphere
Launched a new version of Yahoo Maps
Launched Yahoo Blog Search
Launched Yahoo Podcasts
Purchased Konfabulator
Launched Yahoo My Web 2.0
Purchased Flickr.com

Yahoo will also soon be launching a new version of Yahoo Mail which will include AJAX/DHTML tech they got from their purchase of Oddpost, RSS, an API and additional design updates.

You should. Yahoo has refocused itself and is starting to be a serious competitor to Google. Things Yahoo has done recently:

Partnered with Six Apart to pre-install Movable Type on their small business hosting
Purchased Del.icio.us
Launched Yahoo Answers
Launched Yahoo Shoposphere
Launched a new version of Yahoo Maps
Launched Yahoo Blog Search
Launched Yahoo Podcasts
Purchased Konfabulator
Launched Yahoo My Web 2.0
Purchased Flickr.com

Yahoo will also soon be launching a new version of Yahoo Mail which will include AJAX/DHTML tech they got from their purchase of Oddpost, RSS, an API and additional design updates.

Google is about tagging too. Witness Gmail. Labels = tags.

Not only that, but last month Google also quietly added tagging capabilities to search histories.

Digg the Slashdot Killer

Digg Might Just Bury Slashdot

Digg is Almost as Big as Slashdot

Learn More

Digg the Slashdot Killer

Digg Might Just Bury Slashdot

Dig g is (Almost) as Big as Slashdot

Learn More