If porn can still make money, there’s hope

Pornography, if you believe the media theorists, have been leading the charge in innovation in media. It was the deciding factor between the VHS vs Beta war, the pioneer in creating anonymity on the Web and was one of the first successful business models on the Web. It comes to little wonder, then, that media watchers are looking to the porn industry in monetizing content that’s so easily shared. Or pirated, depending on your point of view.

To set a background at what the porn industry (damn, I’m going to get so much bot-spam for this post) is facing: A study by Envisional, on behalf of NBC Universal, revealed that pornography was the most shared content on BitTorrent at 35.8%, followed closely by movies at 35.2%.

Malaysian Adex To Hold Up In 2009

(Pix from sxc.hu)

There’s always some difficulty in relating the Advertising Expenditure (Adex) that are collapsing in the US and UK to the Malaysian market. In the print industry over there, every other day spells another dip in revenue for major papers, with even more disastrous news expected in 2009.

In Malaysia, however, there’s a different outlook for the 2009 Adex–and one that the print industry would be happy to learn. I was hearing this from this gem of a podcast produced by BFM 89.9, where the host interviewed Andrea Douglas and Sarah Liew of Nielsen Media. As predicted by the Economist, the advertising market in general was expected to rise in 2008 due to the major sporting events, but “some ad-men expect the knife to cut most deeply in 2009.” 

According to Andrea Douglas, the Executive Director of Nielsen Media, the Malaysian Adex of 2008 is expected to come up to about RM6 billion, about 11% more than 2007. “Next year, however, is a little bit of an unknown,” she says. “What’s happening now is that there’s been a decline in advertising growth, but it’s more in the developed markets, and there, they’re in static or negative growth.”

The Ever-Changing Newspaper: Some Hope In Dark Times Ahead

(Pic from sxc.hu)

Ever so often when I go to the Guardian’s Media section, it used to be that I’d always first click onto the Press and Publishing section. It was, after all, directly related to the industry I was in–magazine publishing. It also had some great advice columns by David Hepworth and Dylan Jones, but over the past couple of years, there’s been little to cheer me up in that section.

Every other week in that section seems to be another towards Doomsday, more Eeyore moans about job cuts, sharply declining revenues, newspapers closing down, circulation figures dropping in ridiculous rates. (These days, for my own sanity, I first click around the Digital Media section) 

This week in the Media section featured a couple of postings that I think hints towards the future of newspapers and journalism. First, the bad news: It looks like the recession will hit the UK newspaper industry very badly, with ad revenues ‘will fall by 21% in 2009’, according to reports.

The UK newspaper industry, already reeling from the economic downturn, is heading for an even grimmer 2009 with advertising revenues forecast to fall by 21% next year, according to a report.

These figures reflect the “dramatic downgrading of the state of the UK economy in recent weeks and days, ending talk of a shallow and short recession”, the report stated.

The UK print ad market will be the worst hit of all media sectors in 2009, down 21%, with newspaper display ads down 22% and classifieds down about 19%, according to Enders Analysis. Growth will not return to the print ad market until some time after 2013.

Ice On Mars: It’s Confirmed, With Pictures.

(Pic from NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University)

Ever since the Phoenix landed on Mars, there has been speculation on whether or not there is ice beneath the Mars Lander. It could’ve been salt, but pictures of a sublimating patch proved it to be frozen water. It’s the answer everyone’s been waiting for since the day we created Martians in Sci-Fi.

From Phoenix Mars Mission:

Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it.

“It must be ice,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can’t do that.”

The Collapse of Yahoo!

Three weeks away from the blog, and so much shit has happened in between that I don’t know where to start with this mountain of information staring at me. Oh, BTW, Firefox 3 just rocks my pants off, whatever that means.

Once again, in a week following the strange Yahoogle deal between Yahoo! and Google to essentially let Google Ads run on Yahoo! searches, the knives are out for Jerry Yang more than ever. Dvorak has made a bleeding heart petition for shareholders to lay off Jerry Yang in his latest Marketwatch column, calling out so-called “investors” who want the company to be sold as mere speculators. Here’s an excerpt.

If you’re an investor in Yahoo, my guess is that you’ve chosen to invest in a company, its employees and its future. Selling out to Microsoft only assures a pathetic end of this investment.

And you all seem so pleased at the idea that Yang, the founder with nothing but good intentions, would, at the drop of a hat, take his life’s work, the top Web site in the world, a site full of tools used by millions of people, and sell it to Microsoft just because Microsoft wants it.

Oh, and let’s not forget the thousands of people who productively work for Yahoo. Who cares about them?

Did I also mention that Yahoo is an important and famous American institution?

So Yang wants to keep Yahoo as Yahoo. And you are all stunned, indeed flabbergasted by this.

How sick and greedy are you?

While he does have a point in not letting the likes of Carl Icahn take over the company so that Yahoo! can be sold to Microsoft for the “shareholders’ interest”, it’s increasingly unwise to let Jerry Yang continue to run Yahoo! It’s a critical time for the company, when strong leadership and direction is needed–and Yang is obviously not the man to steer the company in the right direction. As one of the comments pointed out, it’s Jerry Yang who hired Terry Semel, the person who made Yahoo! the shambles that it is today, so Yang isn’t the faultless saviour-to-be here.

Compound this with the recent departure of Flickr’s founders, Stewart Butterfield and Catrina Fake, from Yahoo! and you have all the signs of weakening leadership. Butterfield sounds so jaded and confused by what was going on with Yahoo!. He writes in his resignation letter:

“When I joined Yahoo back in 21 it was a sheet-tin concern of great momentum, growth and innovation,” Over the decades, as the company grew and expanded, first into dies and punches, into copper, corrugated steel, synthesized rubber, piping, milling equipment, engines, instruments, weaponry and so on, I still felt at home, because tin was the core of the business.

“By the time of the internet revolution and our expansions into Web Sites, I have been cast adrift. I tried to roll with the times, but nary a sheet of tin has rolled off our own production lines in 30 years!”

“I don’t know what you and the other executives have planned for this company, but I know my ability to contribute has dwindled to near-nothing…”

So 1,000 jobs slashed, a cost-cutting move from UK to Switzerland, and the loss of their top brains, including vice president Bradley Horowitz, who left for Google. Yahoo! sounds like it’s crumbling fast. And there’s hardly word on what the plan is to save the company: Team up with Google? Blah. That’s a pittance.

The latest TWiT episode had me pumping my fist into the air when Wil Harris summed it up: “What Is Yahoo!?” I don’t think the company knows: is it a portal, a social networking site, a search engine, a platform? What does it intend to be? Unlike Google, which has a long-term future idea of “Cloud Computing” or Facebook and MySpace destined to be a “Platform,” no one knows what Yahoo! is or will be.

It’s a pity that Yahoo! is crumbling the way it is. Yang won’t be there for long.

Reuters: Google and Amazon Will Pwn The Internets

So just who are the long-term survivors of the Internet in the near future? Internet analyst Jeffery Lindsay published a 310-page report on speculating the future thrivers and losers, coming out with the conclusion that Google and Amazon will prosper, while Yahoo! will drop our of the game and be acquired.

One of the key reasons for internet companies losing out, he says, is losing their grip on their core competencies–a point that was argued about in Douglas Rushkoff’s excellent book, Get Back In The Box: Innovation from The Inside Out. You can read an interview on him regarding the book here.

From Reuters:

An Internet analyst for a major Wall Street firm argues in a new report that Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc will be long-term winners, while Yahoo and IAC InterActiveCorp fall by the wayside and eBay Inc becomes a merger target.

Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay argues in a 310-page report entitled “U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning” to be published on Tuesday that Google and Amazon are best placed to withstand the current economic downturn.

“We expect two players to continue to perform strongly, Google and Amazon,” Lindsay writes. “Both Google and Amazon.com are still racking up annual growth rates in the 30-40 percent range, with only a relatively modest slowdown in sight.”

Lindsay reiterates his previous positions that Yahoo eventually will be sold to Microsoft Corp and that Barry Diller’s IAC e-commerce conglomerate will go ahead in August with its five-way split-up, as planned.

“Arguably the weakest players have strayed furthest from their original competences and have been operating largely as conglomerates,” the Bernstein analyst says of Yahoo and IAC.

Think Your Work Hours Are Bad? Go To South Korea

(Pic from MeHere)

A couple of weeks back, Forbes analyzed the results of a survey carried out by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on The World’s Hardest Working Countries. Surprisingly, Malaysia is not noted on the list, despite our bitching about how terrible the working hours are. The No. 1 on the list are the South Koreans, who clock in an average working time of 2,357 hours per year, or an astounding 6.5 hours for every single day of their life.

Funnily enough, there’s a notable lack of Asian countries on that list, with Greece listed as No. 2 on the list and the freakin’ Italians are No. 8–“because of their large number of self-employed citizens”, according to the article. I wonder if workers there consider their siesta period as “work hours”.

On the opposite end of the scale are, shockingly enough, NOT the French–who knows, maybe they consider strikes as working hours–but rather the Dutch (insert getting stoned reference here), who clock in an average of 1,391 hours per year.

Here’s an excerpt of the article:

If you thought you worked long hours, consider 39-year-old Lee from South Korea. A civil servant at the ministry of agriculture and fisheries, Lee gets up at 5:30 a.m. every day, gets dressed and makes a two-hour commute into Seoul to start work at 8:30 a.m. After sitting at a computer for most of the day, Lee typically gets out the door at 9 p.m., or even later.

By the time he gets home, it’s just a matter of jumping in the shower and collapsing into bed, before starting the whole routine all over again, about four hours later. This happens six days a week, and throughout almost all of the year, as Lee gets just three days of vacation.

That’s right. Three days.

[…]

Greece comes second in the OECD’s rankings with 2,052 hours worked on average each year, and just behind is a trio of Eastern European nations: Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. The U.S. is also above the OECD average of 32 nations, coming at No. 9, with 1,797 hours worked on average each year.

Ice On Mars!

For you space junkies and extraterrestrial life believers, it’s confirmed: there is indeed ice on Mars. The Mars Phoenix Lander has amazingly landed on a patch of ice directly underneath it, which was exposed thanks to the retrorockets used for Phoenix’s soft landing.

According to Fox news, the pictures taken on Sol 5 (the fifth day on Mars) “shows one of the craft’s three legs sitting on coarse dirt and a large patch of what appears to be ice — possibly 3 feet in diameter — that apparently had been covered by a thin layer of dirt.”

Here’s an excerpt from the story:

Sharp new images received Saturday from the Phoenix lander largely convinced scientists that the spacecraft’s thrusters had uncovered a large patch of ice just below the Martian surface, team members said.

That bodes well for the mission’s main goal of digging for ice that can be tested for evidence of organic compounds that are the chemical building blocks of life.

Team members had said Friday that photos showing the ground beneath the lander suggested the vehicle was resting on splotches of ice. Washington University scientist Ray Arvidson said the spacecraft’s thrusters may have blown away dirt covering the ice when the robot landed one week ago.

“We were worried that it may be 30-, 40-, 50-centimeters deep, which would be a lot of work. Now we are fairly certain that we can easily get down to the ice table,” said Peter Smith, a University of Arizona scientist who is the chief project investigator.

A Tweet from Marsphoenix reveals that “The ice is very solid. It would take months, maybe years for it to sublimate,” and the lander will begin to scrape the ice shortly.

Time’s Up For Web 2.0

(Pic from CJLUC)

Wow. Looks like this week hasn’t been a happy one for the proponents of Web 2.0. The Register called 27 May the day when “you can begin see the true, scary picture of internet economics today,” following the Financial Times’s report on the state of Web 2.0 in a piece called “Web 2.0 fails to produce cash.

Here’s an excerpt of the gloomy report:

Many members of the Web 2.0 generation of internet companies have so far produced little in the way of revenue, despite bringing about some significant changes in online behaviour, according to some of the entrepreneurs and financiers behind the movement.

The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.

“There is going to be a shake-out here in the next year or two” as many Web 2.0 companies disappear, said Roger Lee, a partner at Battery Ventures.

They did, however, end the story with a note of optimism for the future:

Despite the slow start to money-making by Web 2.0 companies, the trend towards more social online behaviour that it embodies is widely claimed by insiders to be of lasting significance.

“The capabilities that are coming with Web 2.0 are very profound,” said Devin Wenig, head of the markets division of Thomson Reuters. “The Valley is usually right, and it’s usually early.”

The notion that Web 2.0 has been a marketing catchphrase developed by Tim O’Reilly has been well-spotted earlier on by cynical columnists like John C. Dvorak in his piece Web 2.0 Baloney. Despite the warnings, however, many VCs have continued to pour in money into Web 2.0 ventures because “Web 2.0” is such an alluring term to describe the social worth of the web. So much so, in fact, that little attention has been made to the question of monetization.

The “M” word has gained more traction of late as news of the billion-dollar Viacom lawsuit against YouTube exposes the weaknesses of YouTube’s business plan that hinges heavily on copyrighted material. Many analysts wondered how YouTube could be valued at the $1.65 billion acquisition price, considering that it only earned $31m last year. More disturbingly is the fact that since being acquired by Google, YouTube still hasn’t developed any new plans to monetize the number of views.

The logic that looms overhead is: If Google can’t find a way, then who can? What will happen of the remaining Web 2.0 ventures: Is Facebook still worth $15billion dollars? How will MySpace monetize itself to turn it into a profitable venture for Rupert Murdoch?

Watch this space.

NASA’s Phoenix Lands On Mars. Kickass pictures returned.

pic source: BBC

The BBC reports:

A Nasa spacecraft has sent back historic first pictures of an unexplored region of Mars.

The Mars Phoenix lander touched down in the far north of the Red Planet, after a 680 million-km (423 million-mile) journey from Earth.

The probe is equipped with a robotic arm to dig for water-ice thought to be buried beneath the surface.

…

The Nasa team monitored each stage of the descent and landing process through radio messages relayed to Earth via the Odyssey satellite in orbit around Mars.

“In my dreams, it couldn’t have gone as perfectly as it did tonight,” said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at JPL.

Nasa found out more about the landing when pictures from the probe reached the Earth.

The first images showed the “Arctic plain” where Phoenix came to rest – a region of Mars that has never been seen up close before.

Other shots confirmed that the probe’s solar arrays had unfurled successfully, and that it had landed safely on its legs.

…

The pictures returned are truly awe inspiring. Thank you NASA.

click for full size.

Additional pictures of Mars and the Phoenix Lander.

Teenager’s Science Project Could Save The World From Plastic

(Pic from mzacha)

It’s a sensational headline, but it’s definitely something worth checking out. Daniel Burd, a 16-year-old from Waterloo, Ontario, discovered a way to break down polymers in plastic bags by determining and isolating the most efficient microorganisms that break the polymers. Through this method, it’s believed that plastic bags, which are thought to resist degradation for up to hundreds of years, can be broken down into just three months. He walked away with a $10,000 prize and a $20,000 scholarship.

More from Mother Jones:

Burd combined ground polyethylene plastic bags, sodium chloride, dirt from a landfill (which theoretically contains the microorganisms that ultimately degrade the plastic) and a yeast mixture in shakers for four weeks at a consistent temperature of about 86 degrees.

At the end of the month, he took a sample of that mixture and combined it with a new one, with the goal of increasing the overall concentration of microbes.

After one more repetition, he put fresh plastic bags in his solution for six weeks. In the end, the plastic degraded nearly 20%. A little more filtering to figure out exactly which microbes were the most effective, and he upped the degradation rate to 32%.

He concludes, “The process of polyethylene degradation developed in this project can be used on an industrial scale for biodegradation of plastic bags. As a result, this would save the lives of millions of wildlife species and save space in landfills.”

The full details of his experiment and the strains of the bacteria identified can be found at The Record, while Daniel’s science paper can be found here.

Urinal Video Game For Beer Monkeys!

pic courtesy: www.funnyhub.com

Reuters reports:

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Two Belgian beer fans have launched a video game named ‘Place to pee’, which allows players to slalom down ski slopes or kill aliens while relieving themselves at urinals.

First off: WOOT?? Beer + Video Games??? OMG – so amazing.

The ‘Place to pee’ booth is designed for two users at a time and offers two games — blowing up aliens in outer space or skiing down a virtual slope. Gamers hit their target by aiming at sensors positioned on either side of the urinal.

A specially designed paper cone allows women to play too, the inventors say.

Their ‘Place to pee’ logo resembles ‘Manneken Pis‘, the little urinating boy fountain that is among Brussels’ top sightseeing attractions.

If theres one thing Belgians do well, (besides hercule poirot) its beer.

Is Google A Safe Bet?

(Pic from Cjcj)

While everyone has been poring over the turn of events between Microsoft and Yahoo!, as well as exposing the weaknesses on both companies in terms of their core competencies and ability to innovate itself into relevance, Victor Keegan from the Guardian chose to look at Google and question its position.

An excerpt from the Guardian:

So why is Google popular and is it dislodge-able? It all comes down to that frightful word “brand”. But Google is unprecedented because it built up its brand without any paid advertising. We did it for them. It became a verb in record time. It became one of the world’s most profitable brands in barely a decade.

[…]

Google is more vulnerable than people think. It is brilliant at displaying the answers most linked to – but not if what you want is buried deep in the search pile. If a nimble startup delivers a more intelligent engine, people will soon change, as they did when they ditched AltaVista for Google a decade ago. Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have all been upstaged in video and networking sites by brand new startups. Why not search as well?

[…]

The company’s “Don’t be Evil” motto is part of its brand despite its failure to stand up to Chinese censorship. If it had, other companies might have followed its lead and eaten into Chinese obduracy. Google is still a one-product company with search-related ads generating nearly all of its profits.

This could change if a better engine emerges or if it becomes the latest victim to Lord Acton’s dictum: “All power tends to corrupt.” If that happened I could retain all the Google products I treasure (maps, documents, Gmail etc) and spend a few seconds changing my default search engine.

Bottom line is, Google’s not perfect, and there are niches that can still be filled–such vulnerability was written about by Robert Scoble on his post about Google’s bots not accessing Facebook’s data, and how that can be exploited by Microsoft. Then yesterday, Malaysian Internet columnist Oon Yeoh wrote a column about Powerset, a newly launched search engine that uses “natural language”, making it a more effective search engine for sites like Wikipedia.

An excerpt from Oon’s column:

Last week, a new kind of search engine was launched. It’s called Powerset and its mission is to provide a better way to search, using “natural language”. That means instead of typing in keywords like “Oon” and “Yeoh”, you type in questions like “Who is Oon Yeoh?”

The service is still in its infancy and it doesn’t even attempt to index the World Wide Web. For now, its search is confined to content on Wikipedia. I know this seems incredibly underwhelming but think about it. There is a real need for a good search engine for Wikipedia.

[…]

Wikipedia is a highly organised, highly structured website. This makes it relatively easy for Powerset to analyse and index the meaning of the content it finds there. To do this for the entire web is a different kettle of fish. It’s an undertaking that seems almost too challenging.

To manage expectations, Powerset’s CEO Barney Pell has said Powerset is not meant to be a Google killer. Instead, it will focus on “high value” websites, such as Wikipedia. There’s speculation that it will next index blogs or news articles.

[…]

Natural language search has the potential to produce more accurate and more interesting results but for most people, keyword search is more than adequate. Thus, Powerset is no replacement for Google. If anything, it complements it.

Perhaps, Google should just buy it up. Perhaps, that’s just what Powerset wants.

The point is, that there are many ways to search the internet being created, and Google is still in a prime position to improve itself, snapping up other start-ups coming into the market that could potentially make it obsolete like AltaVista.

But I doubt Google will fail to adapt itself. It’s got such a long-term vision with such people like Vint Cerf on board looking towards Cloud Computing and IPTV (Okay, so I was very taken in by his “Internet 2035” Keynote at the recent WCIT), and its ability to draw innovation from within and integrate new technology are prime reasons for its success today.

Google’s hasn’t lost its grip on its core competency, like Microsoft has, and for that reason, it can constantly afford to try out new ideas that will ensure its safety for years to come. It won’t be a one-product company in the future, like Keegan says.

Are You Gayer than Gaywood? Microsoft Thinks So.

(Pic from The Register)

Microsoft hasn’t been the most accommodating of folks when it comes to dealing with the gay community, especially over the past week or so when The Consumerist received a complaint from XBox Live gamer “thegayergamer” after being kicked out for having a name that was offensive.

I have had a bad morning. Last night when i tried to sign into my xbox live account “thegayergamer” I was told that it had to be changed. I figured that it was just from people reporting it as an offensive name being that the greater Xbox live community isn’t exactly welcome to gay people, i spend a lot of time muting people on Halo3. I assumed that once i called Microsoft they would straighten things out.

I talked to a supervisor there, Roxy, who told me that she didn’t personally find the fact that my gamer tag had gay in the name offensive, but that the greater Xbox community did, so i would have to change it. I hope I’m not the only person who finds this don’t ask, don’t tell policy disgusting… eek

Well, that’s not the end of it. Then, up comes Richard Gaywood (read: Dick Gaywood?), another XBox Live gamer who was kicked out, according to The Register:

A Brit gamer has fallen foul of an Xbox live policy that disallows any apparent references to the Friends of Dorothy in gamertags.

Microsoft recently ruled “theGAYERgamer” well offside, and quickly moved to deal with Reg reader Richard Gaywood’s online moniker, as you can see.

Richard told El Reg that MS could have verified the authenticity of his surname from his Live profile, and sighed: “I can’t decide if I’m amused or annoyed by this. Amused by it all but annoyed at the stupidity, I think.”

We attempted to contact MS for a comment this morning, but our reporter Tristram Hornblower was cut off by the Beast of Redmond’s switchboard after his identity tripped the company’s “probable homosexualist” panic switch.

Talk about kicking a man when he’s down: poor Dick. He probably thought the college years were behind him.

Microsoft To Buy Facebook And Yahoo!? Now There’s A Plan For A Showdown With Google

An interesting post came up on Robert Scoble’s blog yesterday (decided to follow his twitter feed for some reason and found the link there), and he made an interesting prediction about Microsoft’s next move into challenging Google for the search Ad dollars.

In it, Scoble argues that Facebook’s event listings, or whatever data is available within Facebook is closed to Google–the bots can’t get into them, making it a closed system. If Microsoft acquires Yahoo! and Facebook, Yahoo! would obviously have one advantage Google doesn’t: the ability to troll the tonnes of data available within Facebook. It makes for an interesting standoff that would see “Facebook and Microsoft vs. the open public Web.”

Here’s an excerpt from his post:

Now Microsoft/Yahoo search will have access to HUGE SWATHS of Internet info that Google will NOT have access to.

Data and social graph portability is dead on arrival.

Microsoft just bought itself a search strategy that sure looks like a winner to me.

If all this is true there is no way in hell that Facebook will open up now.

It’s Facebook and Microsoft vs. the open public Web.

Can the open public Web fight back? Yes. It’s called FriendFeed. Notice that FriendFeed replaces almost all of Facebook’s killer features with open ones that are open to Google’s search.

So, now, do you see why I’m so interested in FriendFeed? It’s our only hope to compete with Microsoft’s new “buy enough and keep it closed” search strategy.

Don’t think this matters? It sure does. Relevancy on Yahoo search will go through the roof when it has access to Facebook data and Google doesn’t. People will see that Yahoo has people search (something I’ve asked Google for for years) and Google doesn’t. That’ll turn the tide in advertising, and all that.

Brilliant move, if this all comes true.

I’ve SMS’d Mark Zuckerberg and asked him if he’s selling. I doubt he’ll answer. I hope he holds out for more than $20 billion. He just might get it.