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.

Lawrence Lessig’s Take On The Orphaned Works Act: It Sucks.

(Pic from littletinyfish)

Or, more appropriately, it’s vague. The issue of the US Congress mulling over a reform in the matters of orphaned works–essentially works whose owners cannot be found–was discussed in the recent TWiT episode, and on the surface of it, it did look like a simple proposition to sort out copyright issues. Say, if there’s a drawing/photograph/composition whose owner can’t be traced down, it’s always a risk for another person to use that piece of copyrighted information for his own.

Lawsuits involving copyright infringements are all a plenty in the States, and this new “Orphan Works” ruling would seem to be an easy way out for other people to use orphaned works without the fear of a lawsuit hanging over them. All they have to do is just show that they’ve made a “diligent” effort in trying to track the owner, was unsuccessful, and hence, can exonerate him/herself from using the owner’s intellectual property.

Lawrence Lessig, the man famous for advocating the Creative Commons license, has spoken out against this in his essay for the New York Times, essentially calling it “unfair and unwise” because of the vagueness of the law’s definition of “diligence”, among other things.

An excerpt from the NYT:

The solution before Congress, however, is both unfair and unwise. The bill would excuse copyright infringers from significant damages if they can prove that they made a “diligent effort” to find the copyright owner. A “diligent effort” is defined as one that is “reasonable and appropriate,” as determined by a set of “best practices” maintained by the government.

But precisely what must be done by either the “infringer” or the copyright owner seeking to avoid infringement is not specified upfront. The bill instead would have us rely on a class of copyright experts who would advise or be employed by libraries. These experts would encourage copyright infringement by assuring that the costs of infringement are not too great. The bill makes no distinction between old and new works, or between foreign and domestic works. All work, whether old or new, whether created in America or Ukraine, is governed by the same slippery standard.

[...]

The change is also unwise, because for all this unfairness, it simply wouldn’t do much good. The uncertain standard of the bill doesn’t offer any efficient opportunity for libraries or archives to make older works available, because the cost of a “diligent effort” is not going to be cheap. The only beneficiaries would be the new class of “diligent effort” searchers who would be a drain on library budgets.

[...]

A hired expert shouldn’t be required for an orchestra to know if it can perform a work composed during World War II or for a small museum to know whether it can put a photograph from the New Deal on its Web site. In a digital age, knowing the law should be simple and cheap. Congress should be pushing for rules that encourage clarity, not more work for copyright experts.

It’s another fine example of good intentions gone wrong in keeping copyright law with today’s technology. I can see where Lessig is coming from–there are just too many loopholes that would still leave the owner (be they in the US, or even worse, abroad) open to exploitation. And it would only benefit those middle men, the “researchers” in making more money.

You can dig up the history on the Orphan Works Act here.

Microsoft Photosynth: Making You Go WTF?!

It’s an old video taken from the TED conference last year, but for some reason, this presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas on Photosynth resurfaced on the Digg site today. Not many people knew about it obviously, including myself. But the demo here on how networked images can be viewed is mind-blowing: it’s hard to imagine technology like this exists, and hopefully Microsoft can roll it out in the right way.

Having been in development over the past year, the demo you see is already up and running at Microsoft’s Live Labs for a preview, so you can try it out yourself. It runs on Active X though, which isn’t great if you’re paranoid on security issues.

Somehow, this reminded me of Microsoft Surface that was supposed to come out last year. Where the hell is it? Microsoft, don’t botch up cool tech like this.

Here’s a little bio on the creator:

Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ background is as multidimensional as the visions he helps create. In the 1990s, he authored patents on both video compression and 3D visualization techniques, and in 2001, he made an influential computational discovery that cast doubt on Gutenberg’s role as the father of movable type.

He also created Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), the visualization technology that gives Photosynth its amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities. Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or “fly” in for a (much) closer look.

Simply put, it could utterly transform the way we experience digital images.

Steve Ballmer Gets Egged

Cripes. Nothing seems to be going right for Steve-O is it? If he’s not getting Yahoo!, he’s getting egged. (Note: Microsoft is reportedly aiming to do another bid for Yahoo!, exploring an “alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo!”. So maybe Ballmer might get his day after all.)

Anyway, back to the story of Ballmer getting egged: While giving a talk at a Hungarian university, a guy stood up, yelled “Give back the money of the taxpayers” in a weird accent, and started throwing eggs at him. From Gizmodo:

Steve Ballmer finally gets to join his buddy Bill Gates in the “food target club” after a visit to the Hungarian University of Economy. A guy (grad student? just some dude?) stood up, yelled “Give back the money of the taxpayers” in an accent Ballmer probably couldn’t understand, and started throwing eggs at him.

Our tipster Joco explains:

Microsoft has midterm contracts with the state in Hungary for “way cheaper than from the store” Campus-licences. This costs billions (in HUF, 160HUF=1USD) for the state and makes students stuck in the Microsoft-world, not knowing Linux etc.

It’s not quite as violent as the Bill Gates encounter, but it still doesn’t feel good. You know, when someone eggs you. Ballmer is not a house.

The Most Unhealthiest Drinks Exposed: Starbucks Among Them

(Pic from mzacha)

Picked this story up from the Yahoo! site (yeah, I do occasionally visit the site), which is a summary of a Men’s Health story America’s Most Unhealthiest Drinks. Among the culprits include the Venti Starbucks Peppermint White Chocolate Latte, and the Starbucks 2% Iced Dulce de Leche Latte, which contains a whopping 52g of sugar (about 13 teaspoonfuls of sugar–yikes!).

But that’s not the worse: check out the Baskin Robbin’s Large Heath Bar Shake: 66 teaspoons of sugar, 2,310 calories, and 108g of fat. You can read the full Men’s Health article here.

An excerpt From Yahoo!

Worst “Healthy” Drink

Glaceau VitaminWater (any flavor; 20 oz bottle)
130 calories
33 grams sugar

Vitamins and water might sound like the ultimate nutritional tag team, but what the label doesn’t say is that a bottle of this stuff carries nearly as much sugar and calories as a can of Coke. Makes sense, though, since this so-called functional beverage is produced by our often-sugar-crazy friends at The Coca-Cola Company.

Worst Summer Cocktail
Pina Colada
625 calories
75 g sugars

Made from a blend of sickly-sweet pineapple juice and fat-riddled coconut milk, pina coladas may be this summer’s biggest beach-body saboteurs. In fact, the only redeeming part of this drink is the garnish — that lonely chunk of pineapple hanging from the rim. Try a lime daiquiri or a mojito instead and save up to 400 calories a drink.

The Unhealthiest Drink in America
Baskin Robbin’s Large Heath Bar Shake (32 oz)
2,310 calories
266 g sugar
108 g fat (64 g saturated)

Let’s look at America’s Worst Drink in numbers:

73: The number of ingredients that go into this milkshake.
66: The number of teaspoons of sugar this drink contains.
11: The number of Heath Bars you would have to eat to equal the number of calories found in one Baskin Robbins Large Heath Bar Shake.
8-12: The average number of minutes it takes to consume this drink.
240: The number of minutes you’d need to spend on a treadmill burning it off, running at a moderate pace.

Because Tales Of Heroism And Love Don’t Come Much Better Than This

It’s a disastrous situation in China following the earthquake, but out of the horror, comes hope. This great piece by Edward Wong about a couple trapped in the rubble captures an emotional depth that many writers should envy and take to heart. An exemplary piece of journalism.

An excerpt from the International Herald Tribune:

At the moment of greatest despair, Wang Zhijun tried to kill himself by twisting his neck against the debris.

Breathing had become harder as day turned to night. The chunks of brick and concrete that had buried him and his wife were pressing tighter by the hour, crushing them. Their bodies had gone numb.

Then there was the rain, sharp and cold, lashing at them through the cracks.

“I don’t think I can make it,” he told his wife, Li Wanzhi, his face just inches from hers, their arms wrapped around each other.

She sensed he was giving up. “If God wants to kill us, he would have killed us right away,” she said. “But since we’re still alive, we must be fated to live.”

And they lived. They were pulled from the rubble of their collapsed six-story workers’ dormitory 28 hours after last Monday’s earthquake, spared the end met by at least 32,000 others.

Their tale of survival is also one of a rekindled love, of two people who might have died had they been trapped alone.

They whispered to each other. They talked of their 14-year-old daughter — who would take care of her? They recalled their life together, the shape of it before and the shape of it to come, all the changes they would make if they ever got out alive.

Comically Tragic News Department: Man Spits To His Death

These are the times when you think, dude… WTF. From The Daily Telegraph:

A SWISS man died when he fell from a hotel balcony during a spitting match with a friend, a Swiss newspaper has reported.

The daily Blick said the 29-year-old man took a run-up from inside the room so he could spit further, but lost his balance and plummeted 6.4m to the street below.

He died in hospital.

The man had suggested the contest when he and two friends returned from a disco to their hotel in Cadempino in Switzerland’s Italian-speaking Ticino canton in the early hours.

One of the men went to sleep, but the two others decided to see who could spit furthest from the balcony of their room.

This bizarre death follows another fatal incident in which a Canadian man dies after asking his lover to carve into his chest a heart-shaped symbol of their eternal love. WHY? From Reuters:

A Canadian man who asked his lover to carve a heart-shaped symbol on his chest during a rough sex game almost died when she accidentally pressed too hard and punctured his heart, a newspaper said on Thursday.

The Winnipeg Free Press said the 25-year-old woman had been sentenced to three years’ probation after she pleaded guilty to assaulting the man in February 2007.

The 24-year-old man was initially given little chance of survival but made a full recovery and is backing the woman. Both had been drinking heavily and engaging in rough sex when he asked the woman to carve the symbol, the paper said.

“Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops”-There Goes The OLPC Altruism

Nicholas Negroponte, the man behind the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has come under a lot of flak of late, with many wondering if the initiatives of the project to spread computer literacy throughout the world are being sidetracked for more commercial purposes. The former security director of the project, Ivan Krstić, blew the cover on the OLPC’s hidden agenda in a statement that was picked up by The Register.

Here’s an excerpt of Ivan’s essay from The Register:

The former security director of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit has blasted the project for losing sight of its goals, accusing chairman Nicholas Negroponte of deceiving the public. It’s all about shipping kit, says Ivan Krstić in an incendiary essay.

“I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward,” writes Krstić.

“Nicholas’ new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn’t work.”

“In reality, Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops. He’s told me so. That he might possibly fund a Sugar effort to the side and pay lip service to the notion of its ‘availability’ as an option to purchasing countries is at best a tepid effort to avert a PR disaster.”

Facebook Plans For Facelift

(Pic from Daily Mail)

If it’s one thing I liked about Facebook the first time around, it was its clean, organized layout. And then came the third-party apps that added, loved, and later loathed. I also never bothered to clear them out, so it’s probably my fault that my page looks like a pile of crap. Thankfully, the people at Facebook have decided to take it on themselves to do the cleaning up with an upcoming redesign. Watch for it in the coming weeks.

This from Businessweek:

Facebook’s designers want to cut the clutter. The Palo Alto (Calif.) social networking site is readying an extensive overhaul of its core profile pages in an attempt to bring back the sleek aesthetic that helped fuel its early popularity. Executives say the redesign should hit the Web browsers of Facebook’s 70 million worldwide users in the next few weeks.

The moves come in reaction to Facebook’s becoming “more cluttered and harder for users to parse,” according to Katie Geminder, the site’s director of user experience and design, who oversees the design team working on the project. As such, the redesign represents a major simplification.

Elements currently displayed on one crowded page—personal information, photos, the continually updating news feed, and the “wall”, where users can post comments, for example—will probably be divided between separate pages and accessible through distinct tabs. The new design also collects and sidelines independently developed applications, such as games of Scrabble or the chance for users to rank the “hotness” of their friends.

The Problem With Yahoo!

(Pic from fantichi)

Phew. Okay. So much crap has been happening since Microsoft finally pulled out of the Yahoo! bid, and the week after has been a time for vultures to circle around Yahoo!’s ailing body. Founder Jerry Yang has been given until July 3rd’s shareholder meeting to convince shareholders why he thinks Yahoo! is better off without Microsoft’s big bucks–and from the looks of things, Yang isn’t going to be on solid ground for long.

Jerry Yang’s return to the board after Terry Semel got the boot hasn’t paid off. Most were expecting a Steve Jobs-like effect on the company, but that feel-good sentiment has long faded into memory–compared to its main competitor, Google, Yahoo! has floundered in its bid to innovate and improve itself.

Yang’s plan in hoping that Y!Open will save the company hasn’t convinced too many analysts, not least because of Yahoo!’s history of failure to integrate its acquisitions into making Yahoo! a stronger core product. Flickr and Del.icio.us are two major examples of this failure, with the web services still as disparate and unconnected as they were on the day they were acquired. Architecturally, Yahoo!’s a mess–the groups are here, the mail client is there, newsfeeds are everywhere.

With Google, their services are integrated more seamlessly. If you ask me, there’s too much of a mess to clean within the next 7 weeks before Yang meets up with the board, and my feeling is that he could get ousted.

Vultures have smelled the desperation. Carl Icahn has now entered into the fray, threatening to launch “an attempt at a Yahoo boardroom coup after criticising the company’s decision to reject a $47.5bn Microsoft takeover bid and unveiling his own rival slate of directors,” according to the Guardian. His move has since been rebuffed by Roy Bostock, chairman of Yahoo!, in a strong statement that warned off people like Icahn. This, an excerpt of the letter plucked from The Register:

This was communicated to Microsoft in-person at a meeting in Seattle on May 3rd. With Microsoft’s offer at $33 and Yahoo!’s counter-proposal at $37, Microsoft elected, within hours, to walk away from the negotiating table and informed us that they were “moving on,” having never engaged further on price or any of the key non-price deal terms.

In short, Yahoo!’s board was at every point in this process prepared to enter into a transaction with Microsoft that would maximize stockholder value–and included certainty of value and closing. What Yahoo!’s independent board refused to do was to allow control of this company to be acquired for less than its full value.

Icahn plans to remove several members of Yahoo!’s board and replace them with his own–people who would understandably be more open to another Microsoft bid. This move prompted John C. Dvorak to post a Marketwatch column in which he criticizes Icahn’s cronies, and that Icahn’s move to buy-oust-and-sell Yahoo! will destroy the company.

The Valuation of Blogs Vs Newspapers: No Wonder I’m So Depressed.

It’s been a long couple of weeks since I last posted up anything, and tonnes of stuff have happened since, most notably Microsoft pulling out of its $44 billion deal to acquire Yahoo!. More recently, however, there’s been a couple of acquisitions of involving Digital Media companies all happening in the past three days, which also indirectly highlights how depressed the valuation of newspapers are. First off is the acquisition of CNET by CBS for $1.8 billion, a deal driven by CBS’s desire to mostly buy its way into online advertising. John Simons, an analyst for CNN Money, questions whether CBS paid too highly for its ticket into the world of lucrative online ad revenue:

With its bold $1.8 billion purchase of CNET, CBS is making a play for ad dollars that are shifting to the Internet. But the company may be paying too much for a network of Web sites that won’t address the conglomerate’s main problem: an over-reliance on advertising dollars as a source of revenue.

CBS management touted various “synergies” that the acquisition will unlock, but on the conference call with investors Thursday, executives offered few specifics. In a release, Moonves pointed out that the CNET deal would give the company exposure to the “fastest-growing advertising sector” – Internet advertising.

The acquisition takes place against a backdrop of slower ad spending. Overall advertising outlays grew at their slowest pace in five years during the last quarter of 2007, and that pace is expected to continue, according to Bernstein Research. Internet advertising grew 27% during all of 2007 to $25.5 billion, according to research firm, International Data Corp. Even so, that $25.5 billion represents only 7% of all U.S. advertising.

Then yesterday, Conde Nast announces its intention to purchase Ars Technica, a technology blog, for a rumoured valuation of $25million–a fact confirmed by the Wired blog yesterday (the purchase, not the price). I’m not sure how Ars Technica would fit into the Conde Nast family just yet, with its editorial staff not being integrated into Wired, as posited by TechCrunch. But Cripes, you think: $25 million for a blog isn’t too shabby is it? I liked one comment on TechCrunch that said: “I still can’t quite wrap my head around the valuations of blogs.”

Malaysia, The Bad: FM wants to impose restrictions on women travelling abroad

Our politicians are truly 1st class and such heroes to progressive society. The Star reports:

Local women intending to travel abroad alone may need family consent in a bid to prevent them from being used as “drug mules” by international syndicates. Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim said a proposal to this effect would be made soon to the Cabinet, following several incidents where women were used to smuggle drugs overseas. Out of 119 cases of Malaysian women hauled up before foreign courts, 90% were linked to drugs, he said.

1st off, how does family consent prevent silly young things from becoming drug mules? What if the girl has no living relatives? And what about the woman’s right as an individual? Also, the reason its girls and not guys are getting caught is because of the assumption that custom agents are less likely to suspect women of being drug carriers and hence not search them. IT DOES NOT actually mean that men are more savvy, intelligent or superior.

It gets better:

“Both ministries (home and foreign) agreed that factors like family, religion, immigration laws and preventive measures need to be considered before a Malaysian woman goes abroad alone,” Rais told reporters after officiating at the Malaysian Silambam Association’s Jelebu branch here yesterday.

Let me state that I think this is such a stupid waste of time. The foreign ministry should be concerned with ensuring that the Malaysians in prison overseas are getting their appropriate legal rights, and try to bring them home to serve out their time in prison here. They also have a ton of things to do for improving the relations of our nation with our neighbors and getting ASEAN working before the world completely bypasses South East Asia. The government need not interfere in the lives of the people to this extent in the 1st place. If they deem it necessary, at least don’t be bigoted about it. Also dear government please please please stop factoring religion into every thing. Its a secular state.

Japanese Filmcrew Busted Shooting Porno In MickeyD’s!

pic: miss mcdonald’s journal

Only in Japan…I really cannot see why anyone would find this sort of thing an erotic turn on.  Special sauce and Upsize jokes abound! Mainichi Daily News reports:

McDonald’s customers suspected something amiss when one guy pulled out his whopper. They knew for sure when he began partaking of fur burger. The upshot was four people trying to make an adult movie in a fast food outlet ended up getting arrested, says Friday (5/2).

Arrested in the case earlier this month for indecent exposure and obstruction of business were Kunikazu Ishii, 52, the director, Nahoko Shimada, 21, an actress and dental nurse, and actors Yuya Ochiai, 29, and Makoto Nishizumi.

Saitama Prefectural Police say the four spent about 30 minutes one afternoon in January this year filming an adult movie in the McDonald’s Higashi Matsuyama Itoyokado outlet in Higashi Matsuyama, Saitama Prefecture. They were allegedly caught after another customer called the police and told cops what was supposedly going on.

“(Shimada) came into the restaurant holding hands with Ochiai. But Ochiai didn’t look the type good enough to pick up a woman like her, so I thought something fishy was going on,” a customer in the store at the time of the incident tells Friday. “It was even more suspicious because there was one young woman surrounded by all those much older guys.”

The group apparently took up a corner counter not easily visible to serving staff and went about their purportedly pornographic proclivities.

Ochiai apparently spent the time with his hands up Shimada’s skirt as he displayed his deft handiwork, Ishii did the filming and Nishizumi acted as a barrier and barked out orders to participants — so the cops say, anyway.

The reporter, Ryann Connell, though digs deeper, and gives us all some insight into the hard circumstances of a burgeoning Japan AV starlet’s life.

“Putting the actress’s wages aside, 10 years ago most cheap adult movies had a budget of about 1 million yen, but now that figure is more likely to be 500,000 yen or, in really bad cases, only around 300,000 yen. If you’ve only got 300,000 yen to work with, there’ll be no room to book a studio or hotel room once you’ve rented the filming equipment and paid the guys’ wages. So that’s probably why they filmed in the fast food restaurant.”

Most adult movie actresses are usually the highest paid workers on each flick. Though that was likely to have been the case with this movie, too, starlet Shimada was hardly likely to have been raking in big bucks (at least in cash terms).

“Women acting in these cheap adult flicks usually get paid around 70,000 yen per movie, but some may only get as little as 20,000 yen. Nearly all the women who act in these kinds of movies have a real job and do it as a sideline. There are nurses, stage actresses and members of the Self-Defense Forces,” the associate tells Friday.

“Shimada’s main job was a dental nurse. She only started appearing in a few adult movies from December last year, so she’s basically a complete amateur. Now she’s been arrested, her chosen part-time profession has ended up costing her quite a lot.”

FYI RM1.00 = JPY 33.00 (approx.)  Still more than most people get.

Hackers Target Firefox and Safari. Is IE Safer? Cripes.

(Pic from Woodsy)

As more users latch on to Firefox and dump IE, it’s not surprising to hear that hackers are increasing their attacks into these alternative browsers. According to a report in the Washington Post, there were more bugs to be patched in Firefox and Safari in April compared to IE, which had none.

Still though, I’d stick to my trusty open-source browser–Firefox 3.0 is on the horizon, and the open-source community is pretty fast at patching these holes compared to Microsoft. Either way, it looks like the love-hate relationship I have with Java Script continues. It’s so necessary, yet can be so evil. Like Mogwais. Except Mogwais aren’t necessary, and this Mogwai-Java analogy sucks.

From The Washington Post:

Many people are switching from Internet Explorer to alternative browsers such as Firefox and Safari. Though that might make them feel more secure, the shift has also opened new doors for bad guys.

Case in point: We have no IE bugs to report this month, but both Firefox and Safari have been hit hard.

So forget the idea that just because you’ve switched to a new browser, you’re magically safer. You may be for a time, but to stay safe with any software, you need to keep current with fixes.

In a somewhat dubious recognition of Firefox’s growing popularity, hackers have focused their attention on it, leading to a rash of newly discovered holes. The folks at Mozilla recently released two Firefox updates in less than six weeks, fixing a total of five critical security vulnerabilities. All five can be exploited by planting a poisoned JavaScript file in a Web site and waiting for you to stumble across it.

Gaff Of The Day: The OGC Logo

Spend $30,000 on a new logo design, unveil it in a grand fashion, and all it takes is one guy to flip the logo sideways to, erm, cock it up.

From The Telegraph:

The logo, for the Office of Government Commerce, was intended to signify a bold commitment to the body’s aim of “improving value for money by driving up standards and capability in procurement”.

Instead, it has generated howls of mirth and what is likely to be a barrage of teasing emails from mandarins in other departments.

According to insiders, the graphic was already proudly etched on mousemats and pens before it was unveiled for employees, who spotted the clanger within seconds.

Staff have apparently now stripped their office of souvenirs bearing the logo, which could appear on eBay within days.

A spokesman for OGC said: “It is true that it caused a few titters among some staff when viewed on its side, but on consideration we concluded that the effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters OGC – and it is not inappropriate to an organisation that’s looking to have a firm grip on Government spend.”

Geddit?

Malaysia: Home of The Zombie Bots

Don’t read much of the papers these days, and it was only thanks to my colleagues that I picked up this interesting piece of news that Malaysia ranks as a Top 5 country when it comes to harboring Spam Zombies. “96% of computers in the country are zombie machines,” according to the survey carried out by Symantec, although I can’t shake off the suspicious nature of this scare-tactic headline.

Little details were revealed on how the survey was carried out (“The survey was carried out between July and December last year, involved Symantec setting up two million decoy e-mail accounts worldwide”) so it could be very well rigged in favour of the company. Still, it’s cause for concern.

So protect yourself and surf safe: Get yourself an AVG programme, thrash IE, and get NoScript. Oh, and to understand how Spam Bots are created, TWiT’s programme with Steve Gibson gives you a great explanation without being too techie.

From The Star:

Malaysia is one of the most prolific distributors of spam and propagators of “spam zombies” in the Asia-Pacific region, revealed a recent survey.

It ranks No 5 as a spam distributor, among 29 countries. Topping this list is the Philippines, followed by Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Laos, according to the survey by security solutions vendor Symantec Corp.

As a propagator of zombie machines, Malaysia is No 7 on the list. Topping it is China, followed by South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam.

These are PCs that have been compromised by hackers and used to launch spam e-mail, or phishing messages that lure computer users to mistakenly reveal personal information such as credit card details or bank account passwords.

Kannan Velayutham, a consultant for enterprise security at Symantec Malaysia, said the survey showed that 96% of computers in the country are zombie machines.

Music 2.0 Tanks.

Ah, monetization–the Big Answer that still eludes Web 2.0 to this day. Following the news that eBay is going to dump Skype, another “2.0″ venture is shutting down within the next couple of weeks, confirming that having tens of thousands of members doesn’t necessarily translate into any form of profit whatsoever.

Gerd Leonard’s idea to free up music while keeping it legal was noble, but it ultimately flopped–it makes me wonder if other sites that run on a similar ad-supported model like RCRDLBL will survive in the long term. As the article in the Register suggests, it was Music 2.0’s goal to be completely legal that proved to be its downfall.

From The Register:

Music’s best-known “futurist” has admitted his latest business idea has flopped and the service will close. Gerd Leonard of “Music 2.0″ fame, who popularised the phrase “music flows like water”, has discovered that on the internet, revenue flows like set cement.

His company Sonific, which allows bloggers to embed a widget that plays music, will suspend its service on May 1. The founder blamed “lack of solid revenue modelling” (Translation 2.0: no income).

As a regular keynote speaker, Gerd has been telling the music business what it em>should do for years [2005 interview here], although his focus has more recently switched to telling the TV business what it should do. So we can hear a fair amount of under-the-desk chuckling at Sonific’s hiccup around the music business this evening. But this would be unfair to a generous and big-hearted guy, because Sonific’s failure should be measured against recent “successes”.

Sonific’s concept was a lovely idea, nicely implemented – and best of all, it was completely legal. And that probably sealed its fate.

“It seems that the industry’s major stakeholders still prefer this turf to remain unlicensed rather than to allow real-life, workable and market-based solutions to emerge by working with new companies such as Sonific. This is not the way forward,” wrote Gerd on the Sonific.com site.

Priest Hops On Balloon Ride, Floats Off To Sea

There are some stories where you’re not sure whether to laugh out loud, or to feel really sad that someone could’ve met their demise in a rather untimely manner. Either way, I’m hoping he’s safe back home real soon.

PS: I laughed first. Then felt really guilty for it. (ah, Catholic Guilt)

From News.com.au:

A CATHOLIC priest who floated away under hundreds of helium balloons in a bid to raise money for his parish is missing off Brazil.

Only pieces of the party balloons have been found by searchers looking for Reverend Adelir Antonio de Carli off the coast of Santa Catarina state, the Associated Press reported.

Mr de Carli, 41, lifted off from the port city of Paranagua yesterday afternoon wearing a helmet, thermal suit and a parachute.

He was reported missing about eight hours later after losing contact with port authority officials, according to the treasurer of his Sao Cristovao parish, Denise Gallas.

Mr de Carli had been trying to break a 19-hour record for flying with balloons to raise money for a spiritual rest-stop for truckers in Paranagua, Brazil’s second-largest port for agricultural products.

A video of Mr de Carli posted on the G1 website of Globo TV showed the smiling 41-year-old priest slipping into a flight suit, being strapped to a seat attached to a huge column green, red, white and yellow balloons, and soaring into the air to the cheers of a crowd.

He soared to an altitude of 6000m then descended to about 2500m for his flight to the city of Dourados, 750km northwest of his parish.But winds pushed him out to sea and Mr de Carli was 50km off the coast when he last contacted Paranagua’s port authority, Ms Gallas said.

Mr de Carli had a GPS device, a satellite phone, a buoyant chair and was an experienced skydiver, she said.

“We are absolutely confident he will be found alive and well, floating somewhere in the ocean,” she said.

Here Comes Everybody: Starbucks Now Listens To Your Ideas

(Pic from lusi)

Thanks to the internets, consumers have never been more empowered to suggest new ideas and trash out crappy ones. Of course, none of this would have happened if corporate cultures don’t change–the CEOs, CFOs and whatever other COs are getting more receptive to the idea of bottom-up feedback and administration rather than the iron-fisted top-down rule that dominated much of the 20th century.

Starbucks–as expensive and crappy as their coffee is–has taken a leap of faith in opening up an online “suggestion” box of sorts using Salesforce. At MyStarbucksidea, registered coffee fans can now suggest new ideas in a forum-like way, while other people can vote on the idea (like digg) and weed out the stupid ideas like bringing in strippers on Tuesdays (that would be my idea). Starbucks, in return, would take a high-vote suggestion and find ways of implementing it.

Many of the ideas concerned making lines more efficient, such as one suggestion to form a separate line for those asking for “regular brews”. One suggestion that struck me was this:

“I never understand why extra milk is the only difference between Vanti and grande drinks. It is expected that there should be an extra shot!!!!!! Most of people don’t even know this “secret”.

The idea is now “Under Review,” and it’s great that Starbucks takes criticisms well and tries to be honest and open about changing the way it does its business rather than defending their practices vehemently.

Encyclopedia Britannica Goes Online: Free For “Web Publishers”

Haven’t visited TechCrunch in a while since I’ve been busy caught up in a whole lot of other stories, but this one in particular caught my attention. The Encyclopedia Britannica, a poster-child for the inefficiencies of “print vs. online” and “free vs. paid content” debate has decided to go online, giving full access to “web publishers”, a loose term to describe “bloggers, webmasters, and anyone who writes for the Internet.” Geez, Britannica, that’s A LOT OF PEOPLE.

It’ll be interesting to see how this limited-access model works–it’s not as free as Wikipedia in terms of editorial control and access (normal people have to pay $70 a year to access its content). They’re trying to have some semblance of control, but as TechCrunch alludes, Britannica would benefit by opening up their content and become the New and Trustworthy Wikipedia.

This from TechCrunch:

Encyclopedia Britannica often is used in case studies as a definitive example of how new technology can disrupt a business. Everything was great for the nearly 250 year old privately held company until the Internet came around and a Category Five hurricaned on their parade.

According to Comscore, for every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia (3.8 billion v. 21 million pave views per month). In short, they are a classic example of the Innovator’s Dilemma (see also the Music Industry).

You can purchase the 32 volume Britannica, which has 65,000 articles and 44 million words, for just $1,400. Or you can access it on the web for $70 per year.

And now, you can get access to the online version for free through a new program called Britannica Webshare – provided that you are a “web publisher.” The definition of a web publisher is rather squishy: “This program is intended for people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers. We reserve the right to deny participation to anyone who in our judgment doesn’t qualify.”

Basically, you sign up, tell them about your site URL and a description, and they review it and decide if you’ll get in. I wonder if Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users are eligible? They all certainly “publish with some regularity on the Internet.”

You can try and register yourself as a web-publisher here.

Official: Vista Is Imperfect, Admits Ballmer

It’s taken Microsoft a while to admit to the massive failings of Windows Vista, but Steve Ballmer has finally caved in last week at the Most Valuable Professionals event in Seattle, saying that it’s “a work in progress”, among other things. It’s a big step for such a hard-ass like Ballmer–admission of failure is not something he takes lightly. Wonder how he’ll take it if he loses the Yahoo! bid?

From The Register:

Speaking at the firm’s annual Most Valuable Professionals event in Seattle yesterday, Big Steve told the gathered crowd that the unloved OS was “a work in progress”. According to reports, he also promised that Microsoft would learn from the mistakes it has made with Vista.

“It’s a very important piece of work. We did a lot of things right and have a lot of things we need to learn from,” said Ballmer. “Certainly, you never want to let five years go between releases.”

He acknowledged that “Vista is bigger than XP”, but he wasn’t referring to the popularity of the product. Instead, he was pinpointing one of the major issues many customers saddled with the product have complained about: performance.

“We have to make sure it doesn’t get bigger still and that the performance and the battery and the compatibility we’re driving on the things that we need to drive hard to improve.”

Yesterday’s admission will be seen by many as poorly timed, coming just weeks after service pack one (SP1) for Vista arrived – well, at least for some customers – in a manual form.

In mid-March Microsoft issued a staggering number of reasons as to why plenty of people would not be able to get their mitts on the service pack. Issues included a number of security products that won’t start up or run on updated desktops thanks to “compatibility problems”.

The Cost of Free News: £17m

(Pic from The Guardian)

Publishing is not an easy business to be in, and anyone hoping to get into the black within the first year, or for the next four, can just forget it. It’s not a quick-profit scheme, that’s for sure; if you wanna launch a print publication this year, find yourself someone with deep pockets filled with lotsa, lotsa cash.

The news that Rupert Murdoch’s freesheet The London Paper posted losses is hardly any surprise, but it’s got a long way to go before getting back into black. The good news–if you can call it that–is that the remaining established publications in his stable are posting reduced losses, but the numbers are still staggering.

From The Guardian:

The cost of distributing nearly 1 million free evening newspapers in London was revealed yesterday as it emerged that Rupert Murdoch’s freesheet, the London Paper, lost nearly £17m in its first 10 months of publication.

Filings from other parts of Murdoch’s UK newspaper empire showed that the Times almost halved its losses last year, while the Sun and the News of the World saw turnover slip by £20m amid falling sales. According to accounts filed at Companies House, the London Paper recorded a pre-tax loss of £16.8m in the 10 months from its launch in September 2006 to the end of its financial year in June 2007.

Meanwhile, the latest accounts for Times Newspapers, the owner of the Times and Sunday Times, showed that pre-tax losses almost halved last year from £81.8m to £43.9m as the papers took a reduced hit on the cost of redundancies at its printing operations. The costs associated with laying off staff as News International spends £650m moving its printing operations to three new purpose-built plants were down from £31.3m to £6.3m.

Improved circulation revenues and a reduction in costs also contributed to the improving financial picture, while turnover was up £11.1m or 2.5% to £447.2m.

These results draw a line under a costly period for Times Newspapers in which annual losses increased fivefold from £16.3m in 2002 to more than £80m in 2006, as the company swallowed the cost of changing the Times to a tabloid and News International’s printing upgrade.

At News Group Newspapers, the publisher of the Sun and the News of the World, turnover fell by £20m to £623.3m last year as the papers suffered from falling sales and a price-cutting campaign in Scotland, which has since been extended to London and the south-east, with the result that only about 70% of the Sun’s total sale is now at the full rate of 35p.

Porn Industry Going Soft?

Ah, good ol’ Porn. The Driver of Innovation. The Decider of Formats. The Recession-Proof Industry. You’d think that as more people get depressed from an economic downturn, they’d turn to some sort of comfort, but from the looks of things this year, there is no (*ahem*) hard and fast rule anymore guaranteeing the safety of the industry.

“The porn business has suddenly gone flaccid,” declared Variety last Friday, stating that DVD porn is down between 10% and 30%, depending on which sub-genre you’re looking at. As an aside, there’s another interesting trend picking up that could spell trouble for the industry: Online porn.

Like other old media industries, it seems that porn too could be very well affected with the rise of the internets. Though online porn has web hits to boast, the revenue generated is nowhere near as lucrative compared to the figures garnered from traditional methods. This sounds like a familiar problem.

There’s a lot more to glean from the article, which you can find here. Below’s an extract:

Economists are citing some dire portents of a recession these days, but they’ve missed one indicator I find especially disturbing: The porn business has suddenly gone flaccid.

The drop in porn rentals and sales is worrisome on several fronts: Till now, porn has been a recession-proof business. Further, with the country already in a dispirited mood, the fact that porn has gone limp may indicate a true plunge in consumer confidence.

DVD porn is down between 10% and 30%, depending on which nook and cranny of the business you scrutinize.

[...] Veterans of the porn trade are edgy about the downturn. A generation ago, they recall, when authorities cracked down on “Deep Throat” and closed many of the porn palaces, the country promptly fell into a serious recession. Economists attributed this setback to the ups and downs of energy prices, but porn analysts insist other sorts of fluctuations play a more urgent role in consumer confidence.

More Twitterlicious News: Now It Frees Prisoners.

(Pic from AmberMac)

Ah, the perils of being a print magazine. I’ve just submitted to print a monthly column called WebWatch to NewMan that’s gonna come out in May detailing the rise of Twitter. It was written about three weeks ago and having just copy-proofed it, I can’t help but think how dated the piece is already.

Since then, its popularity has skyrocketed. I’ve got tonnes (okay, two) new friends who’ve just come onboard the microblogging service. John C Dvorak, the curmudgeon who absolutely detested the notion of twittering, is now a strong advocate for it. The Diggnation hosts, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht have an account each. Diggnation has an account. Hell, even No 10 Downing Street has one.

And now I get more stories praising Twitter, the most recent one involving a Berkeley student twittering from an Egyptian prison, and eventually getting himself free–thanks to the almighty Twitter. Will wonders never cease?

From Mercury News:

When Egyptian police scooped up UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck, who was photographing a noisy demonstration, and dumped him in a jail cell last week, they didn’t count on Twitter.

Buck, 29, a former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, used the ubiquitous short messaging service to tap out a single word on his cellular phone: ARRESTED. The message went out to the cell phones and computers of a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project.

The next day, he walked out a free man with an Egyptian attorney hired by UC Berkeley at his side and the U.S. Embassy on the phone.

“They use Twitter sort of like an instant wire service,” he said. “It’s the way they keep in touch with each other. They go to an event and Twitter what’s happening. Twitter net called the university and the American Embassy.

Back home in Berkeley last night he said he’s still worried about his interpreter and friend, Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree, who was arrested with him and is still being held incommunicado by Egyptian authorities. Unlike Buck, he didn’t have the muscle of the U.S. Embassy and UC Berkeley.

A Compelling Summary Of MicroHoo!

The continuing saga of the Microsoft-Yahoo debacle is getting so twisted these days, it’s hard to keep up with what’s going on. As more players (like NewsCorp) , more people (like Frank Quattrone), and Bill Gates’s ego enter into the picture, the story gets more tangled up than a David Lynch film.

And frankly, like most of his films, they’re getting real boring, real fast–even worse, there’s no Naomi Watts to shed her clothes like she did on Mulholland Drive.

If you wanna get a ground-down, readable plot summary on the twists and turns so far (“MicroHoo! For Dummies” if you will), John Dvorak does it pretty well in his Market Watch Column last week. Essentially if the deal does happen, there’s gonna be a massive spill from the mess after the bits and pieces of Yahoo! have been divided between Microsoft and NewsCorp. Who benefits? Hard to say.

Excerpt from MarketWatch:

Trying to follow the Microsoft Corp.-Yahoo Inc. deal wrangling is like fighting an ant invasion where the critters are coming from every angle. Let me try to explain the story so far.

First of all, since the proposed deal has descended into bitter bickering, I cannot see how this merger would benefit Microsoft. Yahoo employees will rebel against their new overlords, causing trouble.

Yahoo is a company too big to swallow, and Microsoft may become like that python found in Florida that swallowed a swamp alligator. Once inside, the gator simply clawed its way out of the python, leaving behind a gruesome mess.

In this case, the gruesome mess will be Microsoft. The end result to investors will be two companies decimated. Microsoft shareholders already sense this.

This sticking point stems from the fact that early in the negotiations Bill Gates stupidly made the blanket comment, as chairman, that Microsoft would not raise the price, period. So now, if Microsoft raises the price, Gates will have this “change of heart” thrown in his face whenever he’s in future negotiations: “Yes well, back in 2008 you said you wouldn’t raise the price, but you did. So what you are saying now is bull.”

Enter News Corp. [...]

Microsoft is going to cut News Corp. into the deal and raise the offer. But Microsoft’s contribution will not change, thus keeping Bill Gates’ promise not to raise the company’s bid. The added money will come from News Corp. Thus, if the offer goes to $35 it will be a maximum of $31 from Microsoft and $4 from News Corp.

Then they divvy up the parts of Yahoo that fit into their particular corporate schemes. Microsoft doesn’t need all of Yahoo anyway. Thus Yahoo gets sliced and diced and maybe some pieces get sold off to other interested parties.

I don’t think anyone actually believed that Microsoft was going to swallow Yahoo whole anyway.

Whatever the case, the EU, above all, will nix the whole thing no matter how hard Microsoft begs them to reconsider while pointing the finger at Google, decrying it as the evil monopolist.

Cop Gets Busted, While High On Drugs, Stealing A Car.

Yups, you read right: The New Straits Times reported today about a policeman, high on drugs, who was arrested after he had dozed off in the car he had broken into. Stranger things have happened I guess–especially if you’re in a corrupt country where the police have no regard for the law and… oh, wait. That’s us.

This from the New Straits Times:

MALACCA: A policeman who was high on drugs was arrested after he had dozed off in the car he had broken into to steal the compact disc player here on Monday.

He then led a raiding party to another policeman, an auxiliary policeman and the son of a policeman, who were part of a gang which stole motorcycles.

Both policemen and the auxiliary police personnel are believed to be attached with the Tanjung Kling police station here. The policeman’s son lives in the staff quarters of the police station.

The first policeman was arrested after be broke into a Mercedes Benz at a hotel car park here.

“He was high on drugs and had dozed off,” said a source. “He then led us to his accomplices.”
All four suspects are being held at the state police contingent in Bukit Baru.

It is learnt that the gang also consists of four civilians who are at large.

They are linked to cases of car break-ins and motorcycle thefts.

Sources disclosed that the gang had been active for 10 years.

This is based on the discovery of cannibalised motorcycles in bushes at Taman Tanah Merah Jaya, Tanjung Kling.

How Journalism Has Changed

Was hit by a wave of good ol’ nostalgia when I came across this piece on the Guardian Student Media Awards, which recently celebrated its 30th year. A lot has changed since it started, but more so in the past decade or so thanks to the Web. I remember the difficulties I had to go through (and the subsequent joy) of having my first published piece in Men’s Review. It was an embarrasing piece of literature (do you remember yours, Marcus?) on Andy Warhol, but it made me want to show the magazine to random bus-travelers with my IC and say to them “I wrote this!”.

Shortly after, I realised the pitfalls of being published–having a byline does not get women calling me up on a Saturday night and saying how brilliant I was and would I like to go out on a date? Nada. Zilch.

Yahoo! Gaining Market Share Against Google?

So every one assumes that Google is king of the online Ad industry, and Yahoo! is a distant second. Well, it’s true, but according to a study published in the New York Times, Yahoo! seems to be doing some good over the past quarter. Ad revenue at Yahoo! grew some 57% in the first quarter, compared to Google, who only registered half that growth rate percentage.

In the long run, I still don’t see a change in the dominance of Google in this market, but it sure makes Jerry Yang’s case for a higher stock valuation more compelling and piss Ballmer off. Of course, that means we’ll all have to wait that much longer for the MicroHoo! saga to end. Yeeesh.

From The New York Times:

If the results of a study by SearchIgnite, a search advertising technology firm, prove representative of the broader search market, something unusual happened in search ads in the first quarter: Google lost share to Yahoo in the United States.

The report shows that spending by search advertisers on Yahoo grew a robust 57 percent while spending on Google grew only at about half that rate. That meant Google’s total share of search ad dollars declined slightly to 70.4 percent, while Yahoo’s rose to 24.2 percent. Microsoft’s declined slightly to 5.4 percent.

“It was unusual and unexpected,” said Roger Barnette, president of SearchIgnite.

[...]

For its part, Yahoo’s earnings report will be closely watched to see whether Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer or Yahoo’s own Jerry Yang is right. Mr. Ballmer has argued that Microsoft’s takeover offer is even more generous now than on January 31, when it was first made, in part because Yahoo’s business has deteriorated further. Mr. Yang has said that’s not so, and has insisted that Microsoft’s offer undervalues Yahoo.

In mid-March, Mr. Yang told investors that Yahoo would meet its first quarter projections, which call for net revenue to grow at between 8 percent and 17 percent. Analysts say if Yahoo’s growth comes in at the low end of the range, the results will disappoint investors and will reduce any negotiating leverage Yahoo has with Microsoft. Conversely, if Yahoo’s growth is toward high end of the range, or higher, it will help Mr. Yang make the case that Microsoft should pay more.

Another Reason To Ditch IE. As If We Didn’t Have Enough Already.

If you’re one who gets paranoid about safety while surfing the Web, here’s something that would freak you out. Turns out that there was a cookie-stealing exploit that was exposed (and subsequently fixed) if you used Internet Explorer while using Google’s Spreadsheet. If you don’t know what a cookie is, then hell, you’re in deep shit. Just get Firefox, add in the NoScript plug-in and save your identity from being infiltrated.

Who knows what other security vulnerabilities are out there, eh?

From The Register:

Security researchers have unpicked a flaw in Google spreadsheets that allows cookie stealing. The cross-site scripting vulnerability enables attackers to use stolen cookies to access any Google service a user has registered, including accessing a victim’s Google mail account.

Google has now plugged the vulnerability, discovered by security researcher Billy Rios. In a blog posting, Rios explains a caching flaw by Google, alongside problems in how browsers handle content-type headers, created a cookie stealing risk. A Google cookie is valid across all its sub domains, a convenience factor that greatly enhances the potential for mischief.

This particular XSS vulnerability on Google’s domain takes advantage of how IE determines the content type of the HTTP response being returned by the server. Other browsers have problems in handling content-type headers properly, but this vulnerability is limited to IE.

Pirates Bay Sue IFPI. ARRRRRRRR.

In a time when everyone’s running scared of the RIAA, the IFPI and god-knows-what other music entity for downloading music through torrents, Sweden-based Pirates Bay have gone on the offensive. Yep, you read right, mateys–they’re planning to sue the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) for blocking access to its website. Man, you gotta love them Pirates.

Picked up from The Register:

In February the IFPI went to court to get Danish ISP Tele2 to block access to the website accusing it of aiding and abetting copyright infringement.

A blog post from one of Pirate Bay’s administrators, Brokep, suggests the organisation will seek damages for the blocking should Tele2 win the ongoing court case. Tele2 is appealing the court’s verdict, but the DNS block remains in place until the case is resolved.

Brokep said the money raised would be used to set up a fund to help aspiring Danish artists.

The amount demanded is not revealed but Brokep writes: “We will demand an amount of cash that we feel will be reasonable (Not counting like Ifpi themselves, we actually understand economy a bit more [sic]).”

On 1 April the IFPI demanded $2.5m from Pirate Bay in damages for compensation for downloads of 24 albums, nine films and four games.

Korea: The Future Is Now.

Picked up an interesting piece on the digital revolution in Korea from The Guardian, which paints a clear picture of how the publishing landscape is going to be when a country becomes fully wired (with fast connections of course).

From The Guardian:

South Korea is rapidly fulfilling its promise to be the foremost digital nation on the planet. Print media outlets are all but vanishing – and the country’s internet is poised to overtake TV as an advertising medium.

“In 1990, there were 8,700 book stores selling magazines, etc. But now there are only about 1,800 stores,” says Young-Chull Kim, president of Kaya Media Corporation which specialises in publishing western-style magazines, such as Esquire, under licence in Korea.

According to the Korea Magazine Association, Koreans spend roughly 1 trillion won on the country’s 2,550 magazines annually. This is dropping year-on-year, as publishers lose readers to the ever faster web.

The Korea Internet Corporations Association says the internet is not only encroaching on traditional newspaper/magazine ad coverage, broadcast advertising coverage is also under threat. Daewoo Securities’ latest report predicts that the number of online advertisements will increase by about 37% this year and, if this trend continues, online ads will outnumber television advertisements by early next year.

NewsCorp Shares Drop, Cites MySpace and Dow Jones For Slowing Down

Media companies don’t get any bigger than Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp., who for me, have been an exemplary media conglomerate that embraces (sort of) the new wave of media before other slow-moving juggernauts. Even so, however, their share price took a dip today as analysts doubt that MySpace will meet their targets (no surprise there), and the newly acquired Dow Jones would require additional investment.

From The LA Times:

Shares of media company News Corp., controlled by Rupert Murdoch, fell the most in five years after Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. and UBS analysts cut their outlook for the stock, citing concerns that growth will slow.

Profit growth is likely to slow because the MySpace social-networking website will fail to meet targets, Nathanson wrote. Dow Jones & Co., acquired in December, will require additional investment and might be slow to turn around because of weak newspaper advertising, he wrote.

“We are wary of News Corp.’s relative positioning in this intensely competitive business that features established players including Google and Yahoo,” Morris said.

Class A shares of the New York company fell 86 cents to $18.14.

Banksy Strikes Against Big Brother (not the TV show)

Despite being under the watchful eyes of London’s CCTVs, rogue grafitti artist Banksy still managed to show the two fingers to the authorities by spraying up a massive three-storey high piece.

From the Daily Mail:

Banksy pulled off an audacious stunt to produce what is believed to be his biggest work yet in central London.

The secretive graffiti artist managed to erect three storeys of scaffolding behind a security fence despite being watched by a CCTV camera.

Then, during darkness and hidden behind a sheet of polythene, he painted this comment on ‘Big Brother’ society.

Yesterday the scaffolding gang returned to remove all evidence – again without the camera operator stopping them.

The work, above a Post Office yard in Newman Street near Oxford Circus, shows a small boy, watched by a security guard, painting the words: ‘One nation under CCTV.’

Andrew Newman, 35, a businessman from Dulwich, who works locally, said: ‘It was only on Sunday morning that the Post Offices guys realised what had happened.’

Do No Evil? Google Employs Quattrone as Advisor on Takeover Saga.

The blog hasn’t been updated for a while, so expect me to post up a few exciting things that have happened over the past week. There’s been a lot of dugg and random stuff to report, so I’ll kick start with the latest news in the Yahoo-Microsoft takeover, where Google recently took on Frank Quattrone as an adviser on the potential merger, or *ahem*: takeover battle.

This from the Guardian:

Google has turned to one of the technology world’s most controversial figures – once arrested and put on trial – for advice in the takeover battle between Microsoft and Yahoo.

Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, has reportedly called in the newly formed investment group Qatalyst – headed by Silicon Valley banker Frank Quattrone. Quattrone, who has long associations with Google, is best known as the high-profile investment banker with Credit Suisse who was involved in some of the biggest stockmarket flotations of the 1990s internet boom – including Amazon and Netscape. He has been dogged by controversy amid allegations that he was involved in boosting shares of companies he was advising.

He was arrested in 2003 for obstruction of justice and was eventually convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison. That conviction was overturned after an appeal and last year the final charges against him were dropped on condition that he does not break the law for a year.

His company, which was formed last month, will provide guidance to Google on the prospects for Microsoft’s $42bn (£21bn) bid to buy Yahoo. With Yahoo resisting the approach, the deal is becoming increasingly complex.

According to reports this week, the battle could even set the internet’s biggest companies against one another – with Microsoft and News Corp potentially joining forces to take on an alliance of Yahoo, Google and AOL.

Seems to me that the good ol’ days of Do No Evil is long gone now. Machiavellian tactics is the order of the day. Personally, I still don’t think this takeover bid will do anyone good, except for Google–what does Microsoft wish to achieve in such a hostile move?

These two were supposed to work against a common competitor, Google, but it’s more likely that if they do merge, they’ll be busy bickering amongst themselves first–they’ll be their own worse enemy. And in such a vitriolic atmosphere, I won’t be surprised if the brains behind Yahoo! leave because of the clashing corporate cultures–a problem highlighted many times before.

The Final Word On The Sufiah Yusof Saga: Eff Off.

Well, I thought I’d forget about posting another long and unnecessarily draggy story on the subject of Sufiah, but I’ll make an exception to this case. Mainly because in an interview posted up on the Star, Sufiah has finally had her say. And what did she say? Well, basically she says to leave her alone, and that she’s happy doing what she does.

Take that, you condescending Malaysian government people who want to offer “financial help”. Personally, I think she has more guts to stand up for herself than most people expected her to. She’s not some damsel in distress, nor is she someone to be pitied upon, or some helpless victim of the sex trade. She is woman. And she does whatever the fuck she wants.

This, from The Star:

Maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof, who is now working as a prostitute, claims she is living the life she wants without any regrets.

She does not think being an escort is sleazy and terrible and says her clients treat her like a princess in an interview with British tabloid News of the World.

“People think escorting is sleazy and terrible but I don’t see it like that,” she said in a no-holds-barred interview that was published with pictures of her in skimpy attire and sexy poses.

“I left that night feeling totally elated having an amazing time with £250 (RM1,600) in my purse,” said Sufiah.

She has built a base of regular clients and saw between five and 10 men each week.

“I don’t believe my education had been wasted – in fact, I usually take problem sheets with me to solve before appointments,” she said.

Sufiah claimed she could earn more than £1,000 (RM6,400) a night by having dinner and staying over with a client.

“Now, I wonder if I could go back to a normal relationship, where you watch EastEnders and have boring sex. I’ve gotten used to being treated like a princess,” she said.

She also does not want much to do with her parents. Describing the relationship as estranged, she said she was in contact with them occasionally but “couldn’t speculate what they will think of my new life.”

“I have never felt so confident about my body and I’ve had some of the best sex of my life,” she said.

I just love that final quote.

Microsoft-Yahoo! Deal Off The Table?

(Pic from jnatiuk)

The latest developments to come out of the World’s Biggest Tech Takeover saga: Turns out that the $44.6 billion plan for MicroHoo may be off the table, due to the economic recession hitting and Jerry Yang’s continuing refusal to buckle in to the pressure of accepting Microsoft’s bid.

This from Bloomberg:

Microsoft Corp. is considering cutting its $44.6 billion offer for Yahoo! Inc. as a worsening U.S. economy threatens Yahoo’s business, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

The companies haven’t made progress on negotiations since Yahoo rejected the bid in February, and there are signs that Yahoo’s business has declined, one of the people said. They asked not be named because the talks are private.

The prospect of a lower bid increases the pressure on Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang, who has sought alternatives to the buyout. Since Microsoft made the offer, U.S. consumer spending has slowed. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said this week that the U.S. may be in a recession, spurred by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market.

“It’s only a question of time before Microsoft takes them over,” said Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York. He expects Yahoo stock to perform in line with peers. “It’s just unfortunate that Yahoo has dragged it out so long, because they are probably going to miss a few dollars that they could have obtained if they had negotiated immediately.”

Only In America: 11-Year-Olds Getting Bikini Waxed? Creepy.

(Pic From The Sun)

Picked this rather disturbing feature article from Phillymag about the rising trend of ‘tweens going for a variety of luxury spa treatments, including manicures, pedicures, eyebrow plucking and bikini waxing. And no, I don’t see the point of pre-pubescent girls getting bikini waxed either, and more puzzling is that it’s their mothers who are encouraging their daughters to go get ‘em.

It’s a disturbing, but fair commentary on how these young girls are getting sexualised before their age. What next? Boob jobs and liposuction at 13? Yeesh. Such are the societal problems of the rich. America is just going nuts.

From Phillymag:

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a tidal wave of this rising luxury-class culture — you’ve seen it in these pages, manifested in reports of $80,000 “push presents,” lavish condo buildings sprouting up like beanstalks, and weekends spent stockpiling couture with on-call personal ­shoppers.

But just when we thought this consumerist takeover couldn’t get any worse, here comes the trend’s newest tributary: The kids of the pampered are being taken along for the ride, without a backward glance at the childhood left behind.

There you have it — the new norm for young, privileged, growing girls. It’s not just designer clothes, luxury cars, and the best-of-the-best in schools, lessons and tutors: It’s narcissism, and it’s inherited from — no, encouraged by — Mom.

Mom, who not only lifts, tans and waxes herself into oblivion, but who has now turned her attentions to her daughter, hauling her from spa to spa before the school pictures, the big dance, or, well, just because — for facial after blowout after wax.

After a handful of appointments, the transformation from little girl to prepubescent supermodel is complete, thanks to beauty treatments that not long ago were reserved for big girls — with little consideration that the same beauty treatments meant to fix “imperfections” will probably screw the kids up down the road.

Lauren Albert, spa director at Rescue Rittenhouse Spa, says mothers frequently bring in their daughters between the ages of 10 and 14 for various waxes, nail services and facials; she’s booked more than one Sweet Sixteen spa extravaganza.

Some moms even present their naked-faced ’tweens to Nives Riddle, Rescue’s award-winning and Vogue photo-shooting makeup artist, for early lessons in makeup application — you know, lest they learn the tricks of eyeliner by haphazardly painting it on Elvira-style a few times.

Moms are also setting up pre-bat mitzvah spa treatment series for their daughters. “It’s not just to get them ready for their big party,” says Albert. “It’s like, ‘Okay, you’re becoming a woman now, here are the things you’ll need to do as a woman.’”

Except, of course, they’re not women.

Malaysia: Home of The Internets Through Your Powerlines

Sometimes I’m just oblivious to some awesome things happening in my own backyard. As reported by Computerworld last week, Malaysia’s broadband penetration rate could skyrocket after the announcement that local company Velchip signed on to three partnership agreements to facilitate the world’s biggest Broadband over Powerline project.

Not sure whether we’ll beat Sweden’s 40GB/s world record, but it sure beats Jaring’s dial-up service. Hell, it sure will beat my current crappy Maxis Broadband service that keeps dropping out constantly.

From Computerworld:

Broadband over Powerline (BPL) provider Velchip Sdn Bhd has formalised three major partnerships to advance the world’s biggest BPL project that was announced earlier this month.

Representatives of Velchip’s holding company, Masers International– Rahman and company president Wan Sarkawi Tuanku Jaapar Al-Yahya — signed three main agreements in Kuala Lumpur, to be later witnessed by Malaysian Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Ahmad Badawi.

Badawi was reported to applaud the Malaysian company’s efforts to enhance economic growth and Internet literacy in developing countries as well as improve bilateral ties between Malaysia and Indonesia.

“This project will offer 60 million users unlimited high speed Internet connection of 224Mbps (megabits per second) at a cost of only around RM5 (US$1.58) per user per month, which is the fastest and cheapest in the world,” he said.

BPL modems use existing electrical power lines to deliver high speed Internet access and data transmission.

MSNBC: up to 200,000 banking jobs may be lost

pic courtesy wikimedia

MSNBC excerpt:

Analysts at the financial research firm Celent LLC said in a report Tuesday that it expects the U.S. commercial banking industry — essentially, all companies that lend or collect deposits — to lose 200,000 of its 2 million jobs over the next 12 to 18 months.

Octavio Marenzi, the head of Celent’s financial consultancy unit, said more layoffs are inevitable as the subprime crisis hits other parts of the banking industry and spreads beyond mortgages to mortgage-related products, such as home-equity loans, and other types of lending, such as credit cards.

Many banks that have reported huge losses have so far not announced significant layoffs outside the mortgage area, Challenger added. Just Tuesday, Swiss bank UBS AG — which has a big portion of its staff in the United States — said it lost more than $12 billion in the first quarter.

The investment bank Bear Stearns Cos. has 14,000 staffers, and JPMorgan Chase & Co., the company buying the investment bank, has not yet announced how much of that staff it intends to keep. Meanwhile, Citigroup Inc. officially announced in January it was cutting 4,200 jobs globally, mostly in its investment banking business, but said there are more layoffs to come.

Although its a US centric report, this will inevitably have repercussions on us as well.  10 months ago, some of the best salaries on offer for financial service professionals were in banks.  10 MONTHS ago! They also don’t come much bigger than the banks mentioned here…UBS, Citigroup, JP Morgan etc etc.  Its gonna be a challenging 2008 and 2009.

Sufiah Yusof: The Outpouring Begins. But Where Is She In All This?

The Sufiah Yusof story is just made for sensational headlines–good Muslim girl gone wrong, prodigy turned hooker, etc. The ex-husband has something to say about it, and now, in a typical reaction to media hype, The Malaysian Higher Education Ministry has offered to help her out.

It bugs me. Is there really a need for the minister to go out to the Press for this? Where’s Sufiah in all of this? I’d just wish that the Ministry would just seek and help her out without tooting their righteous horn and help her out quietly. It’s obvious that the girl has deeper problems than just “financially”, and the last thing she needs is more publicity on the matter. (I know, I know, it’s ironic I’m posting this, etc.–I just wanted to make a point for people to stop.)

Or I’m just cranky.

From Bernama:

The fate of maths genius Sufiah Yusof, 23, who created world news by entering Oxford University at age 13 and now selling her body for a living has also drawn concern from the Higher Education Ministry.

Its minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin said he would ask the Malaysian Student Department (MSD) in London to look into the matter and what drove the gifted girl to resort to prostitution.

“Based on the MSD’s report, we will find a way to help her, and see whether it’s really because of her financial problem or there are other reasons,” he told reporters here Wednesday.

Mohamed Khaled said the early report received indicated that her action was not due to her wanting to finance her studies as she had left her studies some time ago, but could be due to her family problems.

Sufiah’s mother is Malaysian-born Halimaton Yusof from Muar, Johor while her father Farooq Yusof, is originally from Pakistan. He is now in jail for sexually assaulting two 15-year-old girls whom he had home tutored in maths.

Because We Can Know Where The G-Spot Is. Finally.

(Pic from Scol22)

Thought this was another one of those ridiculous April Fools’ joke, especially with a name like Professor Phanuel Dartey, which rhymes and sounds like “Phoney Farty.” And then I googled his name, and turns out he’s legit. Yikes.

Oh, about the story: turns out that the UK Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Centre (Man, I’d really hate to have a biz card with that) is offering collagen injections to a woman’s G-Spot, making it bigger, and thus easier to be, ahem, spotted. To answer your question: No, a torchlight still would not help. And it does not glow in the dark, either.

From The Telegraph:

A collagen injection which is designed to enhance women’s pleasure around the G-spot is being launched in the UK.

The G-Shot, which is given under local anaesthetic and takes about half an hour, is being hailed as the latest lunchtime procedure.

A specially designed speculum is used to help direct the injection into the G-spot, with effects lasting around four months.

The £800 jab temporarily enlarges the G-spot to the size of a 10p in width and a quarter of an inch in height.

This makes the G-spot easier to locate and highly sensitive, which it is claimed could enhance sexual arousal and gratification.

Prof Dartey said the jab was now being used worldwide and he has treated about five women so far at his clinic. “Obviously the British are a bit conservative but the results are fantastic,” he said.

Prof Dartey said US studies have suggested that 87 per cent of women who had the jab reported enhanced sexual arousal and gratification. This included more orgasms that last longer, multiple orgasms and a heightened libido.

The State of Newspapers: Dire, But Not Dead.

(Pic from Visual Editors)

The latest TWiT episode brought up the interesting topic of the death of newspapers. It’s a tough call, and I’m with Molly Wood on the subject when she says that you shouldn’t underestimate the survivability of newspapers, who have survived more than 300 years, and several calls for the medium to keel over and die.

Like I’ve previously said before in my old posts (I’m sure I must have said it somewhere), proclaiming the death of a medium is really just sensationalist hype, and you’d be better off not believing it. Just like Television was supposed to kill Radio, the internet isn’t going to kill the newspapers.

Say what you will, but newspapers are an extremely robust medium–they are mobile mediums, easy to distribute, and accessible by all for the cheap price of a few cents. Not so with the internet. You can’t lug around a freaking laptop–even if it’s a MacBook Air–just so you can download and read the daily news. It’s just not convenient to read The Star on the crapper.

Anyway, that’s just one of my contentions on this subject, sparked off by this great piece written by Eric Alterman for The New Yorker. It’s a long-assed piece, so I’m gonna just extract out a few interesting notes:

Soldier Jumps On Grenade–Nominated for Highest Honour

Stories like these don’t happen all that often, so it’s good to hear that action heroes do exist in the real world–and more importantly, survived the freaking grenade. Amazing stuff.

From the BBC:

A Royal Marine who threw himself onto an exploding grenade to save the lives of his patrol has been put forward for the UK’s highest military honour.

Lance Corporal Matt Croucher, 24, a reservist from Birmingham, survived because his rucksack and body armour took the force of the blast.

He was part of a reconnaissance troop in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in February, when the incident happened.

The Ministry of Defence said he could be considered for the Victoria Cross.

He suffered only minor injuries and a bloodied nose. Cripes. It kinda makes me wonder whether he was wearing this Dragonskin body armour thing that I saw on Futureweapons (Okay, so the ex-Marine host is an asshole, but just watch the clip towards the end).

Bad Monday News: Math prodigy now a Hooker

Some days, you wake up with a smile on your face, and other days, well, sad news like this happens and it makes you wonder wtf is going on in Sufiah Yusof’s life. According to news reports scattered among the English newspapers (and later picked up by the Star today), Sufiah Yusof, who at 13 was admitted to Oxford University to study mathematics, is now a prostitute.

An excerpt from The Daily Telegraph:

Sufiah Yusof was just 13 years old when she was admitted to the prestigious university to study mathematics.

But 10 years on, Miss Yusof now earns £130 an hour working as a prostitute from her flat in Salford, Manchester, according to the News of the World.

The newspaper claims it sent an undercover reporter to the 23-year-old’s home, where Miss Yusof, who allegedly works under the name Shilpa Lee, described the services she reportedly offered.

On her website, she is alleged to have described herself as a “very pretty size 8, 32D bust and 5′5” tall – available for bookings every day from 11am to 8pm.” The website has since been shut down.

Furthermore, according to The Star, “her father was jailed for sexually assaulting two 15-year-old girls as he home-tutored them in Maths,” which may offer some explanation on her current situation. I feel sorry for the girl–but she’s still only 23, and there’s a bright future ahead of her yet.

Don’t Call It MicroHoo! Yet: Jerry Yang’s Still Clingin’ On

So the saga continues. News of the Yahoo-Microsoft takeover is starting to peter off as the weeks go by since the headline shocker of “Largest Web Takeover”, but occasionally I do find some bits and pieces that are worth following up on. This was picked up by the Guardian yesterday, where Yahoo! announced financial plans showing that Microsoft’s “unsolicited acquisition proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo”.

Its stock rose up nearly 5% after news broke out–looks like Jerry Yang is one determined guy who wants to keep the company from falling into Microsoft’s hands, and he just might do it yet. But then again, it’s Yahoo, which has played second fiddle to Google for so long now in terms of innovation.

That makes many wonder if they have they have the right resources to carry out Yang’s goals in “developing Yahoo.com, My Yahoo, search and mail to be more ‘open, social and relevant’ to users,” as well as developing a new advertising platform and improving Panama.

Here’s an excerpt:

Yahoo’s share price rose nearly 5% today after the internet company released details of a three-year plan that it claims proves that Microsoft’s takeover offer “substantially undervalues” its business.

The internet content company has put forward a financial plan saying it expected to “roughly” double operating cash flow to $3.7bn and generate $8.8bn (£4.36bn) in revenue by 2010.

Yahoo also said that it would meet City expectations for its first quarter, a key concern for analysts who had speculated that if the company missed its targets Microsoft might drop its $31-a-share offer and come back with a lower bid.

The company’s share price on New York’s Nasdaq exchange had risen by 4.45% to $27, at 13.33pm UK time, following today’s announcement.

Yahoo said the plan was presented to its board of directors in December, before Microsoft’s bid. The company added that it “supports the unanimous determination by the company’s board of directors that Microsoft’s … unsolicited acquisition proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo”.

Malaysia: The Bad.

Following the excellent news that Malaysian scientists are developing a cheaper version of aerogel, this Newsweek piece on foreign labour came up, describing many foreign workers as captives working for pittance–aka slave labour. It’s not a great boost for our country’s image (and many foreigners will now have a stereotyped image of Malaysia being a cruel hub of slave labour), and I hope the Opposition/New State governments brings this issue up.

Of course, many Malaysians have suspected this happening widespread with little or loose control on the way foreign labour is handled by private “job placement” companies. I hope this story sticks into the conscience of the people whenever they consider hiring foreign labour from dodgy agents for dirt-cheap prices.

Some of the world’s leading computer makers don’t want you to know about Local Technic Industry. It’s a typical Malaysian company, one of many small makers of the cast-aluminum bodies for hard-disk drives used in just about every name-brand machine on the market. But that’s precisely the problem: it’s a typical Malaysian company. About 60 percent of Local Technic’s 160 employees are from outside Malaysia—and a company executive says he pities those guest workers.

“They have been fooled hook, line and sinker,” he says, asking not to be named because others in the business wouldn’t like his talking to the press. “They have been taken for a ride.” It’s not Local Technic’s fault, he insists: sleazy labor brokers outside the country tricked the workers into paying huge placement fees for jobs that yield a net income close to zero. “They say they were promised 3,000 ringgits [$950] a month,” the manager says. “How can we pay that? If we did, we would be bankrupt in no time.”

So why don’t those foreign employees just quit? Because they can’t, even if they find out they’ve been cheated by the very brokers who brought them there. Malaysian law requires guest workers to sign multiple-year contracts and surrender their passports to their employers. Those who run away but stay in Malaysia are automatically classed as illegal aliens, subject to arrest, imprisonment and caning before being expelled from the country.

REM Takes The Digital Plunge on iLike

Following the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead in offering their music for free online, REM is supposedly the next “digital breakthrough artist” by giving–or, rather streaming–their songs online via iLike. Reports Anders Bylund from Ars Techica:

The grandfathers of alternative rock will have their new album, Accelerate, on store shelves in two weeks. But one week ahead of the physical release, Accelerate will be available for free streaming in its entirety through iLike, the online music service best known for its Facebook-based incarnation. You could stream lead single “Supernatural Superserious” from remhq.com since early February, and the band invited fans to mash up the video at will.

Sure, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails may have gone a few steps further into the digital future, but they’re free agents.

I’m not sure whether this really warrants the hype–I remember OutKast streaming their entire album “Idlewild” on MySpace, and the folks on Last.fm have a fair bit of music streaming as well–okay, a helluva lot. Downloading it for free like Radiohead’s and NIN’s latest album–now that warrants some news.

UTM scientist invents cheaper way to produce Aerogel!

pic courtesy astrophys-assist.com

IHT reports that prof. Halimaton Hamdan has successfully created a way cheaper way to produce aerogel – the stuff they use at the bottom of space shuttles because they make excellent heat insulators and are freggin light. Wow!

SKUDAI, Malaysia: A Malaysian scientist says she has discovered a cheap way to turn discarded rice husks into a high-tech material that could reduce electricity bills, protect buildings from bomb blasts and make airplanes and tennis rackets lighter.

Halimaton Hamdan, a University of Cambridge-trained chemistry professor, says her process cuts the cost of producing aerogel by 80 percent, making it so affordable that it could become a commonplace material with widespread use.

Halimaton Hamdan, a University of Cambridge-trained chemistry professor, says her process cuts the cost of producing aerogel by 80 percent, making it so affordable that it could become a commonplace material with widespread use.

[...]

Bravo Prof Hamdan! Bravo! This is so much better than sending some bloke into space so he can tell us how much he misses teh tarik and roti canai. This is what earns a country respect.

The Star is Whipped By Digital Media–Editor Wants Change?

Okay, so maybe the political biasness at The Star could finally tone down a little. I was taken aback a little when Oon highlighted Wong Chun Wai’s column called “Denial syndrome must end“, where amongst other things, he called for the mainstream media to have “A serious and honest soul searching to truly feel the pulse of Malaysians. The mainstream newspapers have to learn, quickly, or face being abandoned by their readers.”

Well, it’s about time you stood up. The GE ‘08 was revolutionary in more ways than one, especially in the way it highlighted the importance of digital media in delivering the news. The reported 500,000 visitors to Malaysiakini.com on poll night was a big blow to the credibility and efficiency of mainstream newspapers and television.

If Chun Wai and the rest of the newspapers does what he says, i.e., “end their communal slant as they should take into account that the votes for the Opposition came from all races,” this could signal the start for a free, fair and credible mainstream media. Well, okay, so maybe that’s a little bit of a stretch for the next decade or so.

Alternative media, as quick and informative as it is, can lack those elements. The nature of blogging is in itself a personal passion, causing the news reported to not necessarily be”free, fair, and credible.” You can’t rely on RPK–as entertaining as he is, or as Oon would describe him as “full of shit”–to deliver accurate news and credible sources.

Here’s an excerpt of Chun Wai’s piece.

The winds of change have swept through not only the political landscape but also the media environment. It’s time for media practitioners to do some serious soul-searching to stay relevant and accurately feel the pulse of the nation.

The websites of mainstream newspapers had an even tougher time, being overly cautious on accuracy, particularly on results, and not wanting to rely too much on unconfirmed news.

In the end, the alternative media scored better as it did not have to worry too much about accuracy. An example was the newsflash on the purported 14 unopened ballot boxes in Lembah Pantai, implying there would be rigging. The report turned out to be false.

But this election was a wake-up call to the nation, not just to the leadership, but also the media. A serious and honest soul searching is required to truly feel the pulse of Malaysians. The mainstream newspapers have to learn, quickly, or face being abandoned by their readers.

Ziff Davis Files for Chapter 11: Cripes.

This came in a little late, thanks to the new job that I’ve settled into that’s pretty much sucked out the social and blogging life outta me. Anyway, as reported on March 5 by the Associated Press, Ziff Davis filed for bankruptcy. As Dvorak must have said: Cripes.

Ziff Davis Media Inc., publisher of technology and video game magazines, filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday and cited a decrease in revenue from print advertising and subscriptions as contributing to its decline.

But the company said it expected to reorganize quickly and exit court protection by midsummer.

New York-based Ziff Davis said in a court filing that it had about $500 million in liabilities and $313 million worth of assets, as of the end of December. It filed for Chapter 11 protection to restructure debt that had become burdensome.

“We feel like we’re in a position poised for wonderful growth,” Ziff Davis Chief Executive Jason Young said Wednesday. “We just needed to solve this issue.”

The company is the publisher of PC Magazine and Electronic Gaming Monthly and Web versions of those magazines.

Ziff Davis reached an agreement with senior creditors, to whom it owes $225 million. Under the deal, the senior creditors will be owed $57.5 million and at least 88.8 percent of the common stock in the company once it emerges.

The company was unable to reach an agreement with more junior creditors, and is looking to use the court process to resolve that. Another 11.2 percent of the reorganized company’s stock is available for distribution to those debt holders under the company’s current proposal, but those creditors are likely to seek more equity in court.

Have to say that the news took me by surprise, seeing that Ziff Davis are doing a great job at making the transition from print to online media with its multitude of video podcasts and articles posted online. But it looks like a company that “reaches 26 million consumers through 16 Web sites, three magazines and direct marketing,” still isn’t good enough.

It’s not over for ZD yet, but then again, Chapter 11 is never good news.

Realpolitik In The New Opposition: Is Kit Siang Our Kissinger?

Just a few days after the political tsunami, the knives are out for the opposition, none more so eager than The Star. I really can’t be bothered with reading the paper these days as it continues on its anti-opposition propaganda, especially after its shameless biased coverage of the pre-election run up.

Hence, I’m relying on blogs these days to get my analysis of the political situation that’s developing, especially in Perak. Oon Yeoh today posted an interesting take on Kit Siang’s outburst regarding the appointment of PAS’ Mohamad Nizar Jamaludin to lead the state. According to Oon, you shouldn’t take Kit Siang’s opposition on face value, but rather, it’s part of a grander game of political chess going on.

Here’s the post, and you can follow up on the saga on his blog:

According to sources, DAP and PKR were dismayed by the decision to give the Perak MB position to PAS (DAP has the most number of state seats followed by PKR. PAS had the least).

Such a situation could have turned out very badly for DAP with MCA ready to pounce and condemn it for giving in too easily for PAS.

Kit Siang objected vehemently – earning the scorn of bloggers and online commentators last night – but the seasoned politician knew exactly what he was doing.

What does he do this morning? He apologizes to the Sultan and the Regent of Perak. All DAP state reps will be attending the ceremony after all.

The Opposition coalition proceeds and MCA is without any ammunition to attack DAP.

No one can claim that they did not put up a fight. No one can claim they gave in easily. What can Ong Ka Chuan say now?

This, folks, is political chess. This is realpolitik. This is why Kit Siang is the master politician.

B2 Spirit Crashes in Guam

pic courtesy ABC news

Excerpt from USA today:

HAGATNA, Guam — A board of military officers will investigate Saturday’s crash of a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, which forced two pilots to eject to safety before the aricraft fell from the sky shortly after takeoff at Guam’s Andersen Air Force Base.

Yigo resident Albert Saboy, a heavy equipment operator who sometimes works on Andersen, was at his home near the base when he heard an explosion of the bomber crash.

“I heard a loud bang, saw some smoke and a co-worker called me and told me what happened,” he said. “My co-worker was driving the water truck with the air-con on and windows up, he could still feel the burst.”

According to Saboy, his co-worker said the bomber exploded a second time about 30 minutes after it crashed. Other residents also reported hearing two explosions.

Jeanne Ward, another witness, was on base visiting her husband for lunch when the bomber crashed. Ward said she didn’t see the aircraft hit the ground because she was inside a building, but immediately noticed a rising plume of thick black smoke behind the base’s air control tower.

The Air Force has 21 B-2 bombers. Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base is their long-term home. The four B-2s currently deployed in Guam, were scheduled to return to Missouri now that six B-52s from the 96th Bomb Wing at Barksdale Air Force Base, La., have arrived to replace them.

B-2s have been rotating through Guam since 2004, along with B-1 and B-52 bombers.

An Air Force fact sheet lists the price of a B-2 at $1.2 billion, but a report from the Government Accountability Office estimates that each plane can cost up to $2.2 billion.

Crickey… at 2.2B, one of these could buy around 20 F15s! This is easily the most expensive aircraft to crash. Since the USAF have a reported 21 planes (now 20) thats like losing 5% of their B2 fleet!

Facebook Dips, Everyone Goes All Hooey.

The knives are out for Facebook. The naysayers–often people who’ve never signed up for social networking and carp on about the uselessness of such things–are starting to harp on the fact that social networking is on the decline after Nielsen Online posted that Facebook has suffered its first fall in UK users, with a 5% drop between December and January.

This translates into a dip of some 400,000 UK users month on month, following an impressive 17 consecutive months of growth. While the Register is reporting these figures as the start of the end for Facebook, calling the slide as “very bad news for Facebook,” Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen Online, is asking everyone to take a chill pill.

“One month of falling audiences doesn’t spell the decline of Facebook or social networking,” said Burmaster on The Guardian. “However, most of the leading social networks are less popular in the UK than they were a year ago. It was inevitable that early growth rates couldn’t be sustained and the larger networks have been plateauing over the last few months.” To put this dip in context, The Guardian added, Facebook’s audience is still a massive 712% higher than in January 2007 and 9% bigger than at the end of October.

Following the recent news that FB has made it easier to erase your personal data (notice your friend count dropping lately?), I can see how The Register, and other analysts like Lance Ulanoff is forecasting the end of Facebook. But that’s not the case–FB clearly couldn’t sustain such a hectic growth rate, and this is just a sign that it’s taking the foot off the pedal for now and going on cruise mode.

The Tipping Point Suxxorz?

Guy Kawasaki’s blog last month picked up an interesting feature written by Clive Thompson about Duncan Watts debunking Malcolm Gladwell’s popularization of the Tipping Point theory in regards to the power of “key influencers” in affecting a trend in society. It’s a long-assed article from Fastcompany that spans some 9 pages (a testament to how uncomfortable the web is for long-form journalism) but the point is well-made.

PR and Marketing people won’t be happy to hear that a hit happens more randomly than was previously thought–it’s harder to predict and affect a sweeping trend now, whereas before they could seed certain influencers to kick-start a movement.

I think that it’s more of a mix of the two theories–it’s hard to disprove Gladwell’s theory (after all, even in my circle of friends, there are those with more influence than others), but Watts’s point shows that marketing folks shouldn’t be too reliant on these key people to make a big hit; there are a lot more factors at play here than meets the eye.

The story’s excerpt:

In the past few years, Watts–a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo–has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis.

He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend.

And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

All patriots: we vote on the 8th!

It’s time to exercise our duty and right. All eligible Malaysians go to the polls on the 8th of March, a Saturday. Get to know the candidates running in your constituency. Try to find out where they stand on issues relevant to you and the nation and above all, make an informed decision when casting that ballot!

Update: Joon Ian pointed me out to Malaysiakini’s undi.info website that keeps you updated on the elections and who’s contesting. Sure beats reading all the biased crap in the mainstream press.

Will Lenovo X300 kick Air?

(Pic from Gizmodo, link below)

WSJ’s Walt Mossberg, whom I’ve always regarded as an Apple Fanboy, has recently leaked out pictures of the upcoming ultraportable from Lenovo to Gizmodo. Placed cheekily enough on top of a manila envelope, the X300 is rumoured to trounce the MacBook Air in many ways if all the specs are true: floating around is news of “the inclusion of a removable battery, three USB ports, WiFi, an integrated Ethernet jack and optional GPS / WWAN to boot. Heck, users will even be able to order this 3.12-pound critter with Windows XP if they so choose.”

Furthermore, looking at the comments section, it’s going to be just 0.2-inch thicker, but what you could get is “WWAN and WiMAX connectivity, GPS and an expansion bay, which will accept either a DVD drive, secondary battery or ExpressCard slot,” according to trustedreviews.com

Of course, no way is it as sexy as the MacBook Air–you don’t buy ThinkPads for the way it looks, but for its functionality. It’s less of a rich-boy’s plaything and more for biz-on-the-go.

No More Sex and Drugs In Amsterdam?

It’s been well-known that Amsterdam is where repressed Asians dream of going, if only just to window shop and smoke a joint without fear of death. That certainty, however, looks set to disappear in the near future if city councilors get their way in clearing the streets.

I don’t think it’s a good move–the clean-up will merely force business onto the streets into even more shady practices. Singapore’s recent proposal to “curb [HIV] infections by making it a crime for those who engage in such unsafe practices” like going to Batam for a stag weekend isn’t going to stop people from visiting brothels either–it’ll just make tracking the activity more difficult.

Bible as Manga Comic, Jesus Is A Samurai. Archbishop says: “Way Cool!”

One of the cool things about Christianity is how it takes things in its stride. I won’t compare it to other religions, but suffice it to say that instead of hearing an outrage of “Blasphemy!” and “Sacrilege!”, there’s enough room in a 2000-year-old religious institution to understand and adapt to something as radical as a Manga Bible.

Developed by Manga artist Ajinbayo Akinsiku, “The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation” is something like the Picture Bible I used to read as a kid, only much cooler. Jesus, says the creator, “is a samurai stranger who’s come to town, in silhouette. He’s a hard guy, seeking revolution and revolt, a tough guy. ”

I mean, the only reason why I sorta understood the whole Bible was through the comic version of it, so I’m happy to see that someone was bold enough to revamp and re-present the Bible in such a refreshing way for the new generation. Even better still was the Archbishop of Cantebury (so he’s not Catholic–meh.) giving it the thumbs up, saying in a blurb for the Bible: “It will convey the shock and freshness of the Bible in a unique way.”

The End of Polaroid

A piece of sad news heard over the weekend: the Polaroid instant film will cease to be produced by 2009. I’ll miss the film–I think it’s one of the most soulful methods of capturing a moment in ways that digital cameras can’t. I’ll miss the harsh lighting, the waiting to develop moments, the fascination people have whenever someone whips out a Polaroid Instant Camera.

But I get the feeling this isn’t the last we’ll see of it–it’s bound to comeback as a form of nostalgic art, like Lomography is. From the Sunday Herald:

THE DIGITAL age has claimed another victim. First it was the VHS recorder, then the humble transistor radio. Now it’s the turn of the Polaroid camera.

Yesterday, the company behind the iconic instant camera announced it was to stop making the film used by Polaroid enthusiasts, because there is no longer a market for it.

Three factories will close in Massachusetts, Mexico and the Netherlands, resulting in 450 job losses. The company stopped making the cameras for commercial use in 2006 and halted production of the consumer models last year.

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“We’re trying to re-invent Polaroid so it lives on for the next 30 to 40 years,” said Tom Beaudoin, the firm’s president.

This reinvention means developing Polaroid-branded digital cameras, and portable printers for mobile phone images.

Polaroid film, which has been around since the late-1940s, became a big hit with people who wanted instant results from their camera, and in 1994 its popularity peaked with sales reaching $2.3bn.

However, these figures dropped dramatically to $752 million in 2003 as customers moved to digital cameras.

Polaroid, which was bought out by Petters Group Worldwide three years ago after filing for bankruptcy, will make enough instant film to last into 2009.

It plans to license the technology to third-party companies, leaving Fujifilm as the only remaining supplier of instant film in the United States.

The blame for Polaroid’s demise has been laid squarely at the door of digital photography because consumers can achieve the same quick results with the added bonus of being able to edit the images and print them at home.

Cop Caught Having A Joint. At His Own Ganja “Plantation”.

I swear this could be the Dude from The Big Lebowski in real life. Reported in the Star:

An auxiliary police constable was caught smoking ganja while watering his marijuana plant at his security post at the Sultan Abu Bakar Dam in Cameron Highlands.

Cameron Highlands OCPD Deputy Supt Yahaya Othman said the man was busy fussing over his 90cm-high plant when the police caught him at 5pm on in Ringlet.

“At the time, he was also smoking a joint he had just rolled for himself,” he said, adding that the police managed to ambush the man following a public tip-off.

The 28-year-old man, who has worked as a security guard at the post for the past eight years, had apparently been growing the plant for over two months.

“He grew it close to his security post, near some bushes,” said DSP Yahaya.

The story got me interested into digging more pot-related stories, and one story in particular caught my attention. It’s by some marijuana-advocate who says that by criminalizing pot, the US government actually loses $42billion dollars a year on lost tax revenues and rehabilitation costs.

MicroHoo’s Just Ridiculous.

(Pic from Australian IT)

Get sick, take on a project, and celebrate Chinese New Year–that’s a recipe for abandoning the blog for a week. Not that these are excuses for me being lazier as I really have been busy but… oh screw this. I’m sounding as deluded as Rafa Benitez is for blaming the owners for Liverpoop’s league position.

Anyways, a tonne of news has been happening, including the Micro-hoo/Yacrosoft deal, which is increasingly unlikely to happen because of the Anti-Trust European laws and Jerry Yang’s rebuff of Microsoft’s approach (read his e-mail to Yahoo!’s employees here). Plus, it’s a combination of two losers to challenge the top dog–two wrongs (or two inferior companies in this case) don’t necessarily make a right.

Recession for 2008=More Advertising $$?

(Pic from linusb4 @ sxc.hu)

So, it’s pretty much an accepted fact that we’re gonna go through some sort of recession this year: The only questions that remains are how long and how deep will the recession affect us. The Economist’s issue from Jan 26-Feb 1 gave a great insight to the upcoming recession, and predicts that it won’t be the slump of ‘97-’98, cushioned partially by the “decoupling” effect between the US and the rest of the world, especially emerging markets. (Note: I could be talking out of my ass here, but that’s what I got from reading the article.)

But for those of us involved in media, PR and advertising, there’s one pertinent question that needs to be answered: How will it affect advertising budgets? In this story, The Economist points out that there is hope yet for 2008, with ad budgets actually increasing thanks to the Olympics and Euro 2008. Instead, it says, 2009 will be the year that advertising budgets will be affected deeper.

Another interesting point brought forward was the fact that the recession could actually be a catalyst for an increase in Internet Ad spending, with advertisers slashing budgets for scattershot traditional media like print and TV, and instead concentrating more on the more targeted medium of the ‘net.

IHT provides some details of the Soc Gen debacle

For those who still haven’t heard about this, Jérôme Kerviel, an (ex) employee of French (vive la france, etc etc) bank, Societe General managed to make trades on on European stock indexes using the bank’s money, costing the bank 7.2 BILLION USDs in losses. Details on the actual dealings are very sketchy but IHT has a pretty good article that gives us an idea of what happened:

Kerviel’s fraud, according to the bank, consisted of placing sizeable, real purchases in one portfolio but creating fictitious sales transactions in the second, off-setting portfolio. This gave the impression to risk managers that the risks in the first portfolio were hedged, when in fact they were not. As a result, the bank wound up exposed to massive, one-way bets, or “long” positions. Instead of hedging, which was his job, Kerviel was effectively speculating with the bank’s money.

“Our controls identified from time to time problems with this trader’s portfolio,” Mustier (Jean-Pierre Mustier, chief executive of the bank’s corporate and investment banking arm) said, although he declined to say when the first questions were raised by risk managers, saying that the bank’s auditors were still investigating.

Each time one of Kerviel’s trades was questioned, Mustier said, Kerviel would describe it as a “mistake” and cancel the trade.

“But in fact, he then replaced that trade with another transaction using a different instrument” to avoid detection, Mustier said.

This guy makes Nick Leeson’s 1.4 billion investment adventure (which brought down Barings) look like an expensive Paris Hilton shopping spree. There certainly are many parallels. Apparently nothing has been learnt. This despite the fact of all the banking and various regulatory requirements put into place such as Basel II (you gotta love the Swiss for selling services we never thought we’d ever need) that was supposed to prevent this sort of thing after Barings. Has any of that money spent on audit and controls etc actually changed anything? If you’re one of the good ol’ boys, you still can get away with anything as always.

In Singapore, Nick Leeson got 6 years in prison for his activity. It wouldn’t surprise me if this guy, in Paris gets something similar. For some reason what these guys do isn’t considered theft. Wow. Steal 100 dollars you get caned. Steal 7.2 billion, and you get a web page and a book deal. I bet if his longs actually turned out to be profitable, he would’ve got promoted even – assuming of course that he channeled some of the profits bank into the bank.  Greed and hypocrisy knows no bounds.

And Now, A Word About The Elections (Possibly Feat. Jay Chou)

(Pic from the dynamic duo, taken in sober mood.)

First off, a big huge-ass congrats to Michelle, Sarah and all involved in VotEd, who were featured in NST on Jan 6 (yeah, so I’m a bit slow) for starting up the group, which you can find out more on Facebook. Essentially, if you’re young, on Facebook, and absolutely blur on the issues surrounding the local political scene, join up to get yourself informed on the latest news and blogposts in the run up to the nearing elections.

And no, knowing them personally, they’re not ball-busting chicas who’ll bore you to death with a pessimistic view on Malaysian politics. On the contrary, I think they’re quite the optimists, who believe that the apathetic attitude of Malaysian youth can be turned around to make a difference in the way the country is being run. If it’s one thing this country needs, it’s hope, and they have bagfuls of it.

The Internet Vs The Church of Scientology

VS

(Update: You can witness the gradual shutdown of Scientology sites here. Foshizzle.)

This is breaking all over the Internet. A group that calls themselves “Anonymous” have release a video on youtube (posted after the break) along with a press release declaring war on the Church of Scientology. From their press release:

Anonymous is a collective composed of many Internet users, combined under one name. The group gained fame through popular image-boards and accrued influence both on the Internet and the real world. They have launched offensives against a wide variety of targets, including the social website Habbo Hotel and various White Supremacy entities. Anonymous played a major role in the capture of Canadian pedophile Chris Forcand.

To help coordinate their attack on the Church of Scientology, Anonymous has set up Project Chanology, a wiki which gives users tips and tools to attack the church. The attacks range from denial of service (DoS) attacks on their servers, prank calling their phone lines and looping a fax of a black page.

Holy Cow! Car Found Abandoned with Cow Inside.

It’s not very often that I find many interesting stories in the Malay papers–unless, of course, you count the “holier-than-thou” LOL attitude of some of their columnists–but this picture and story splashed on the front page of Berita Harian was simply unmissable. According to the story, residents of Kampung Pondok Labu, near Kulim, foiled an attempted cow-theft (?!) when they stopped several men driving a Proton Wira with a friggin’ cow inside.

A COW.

You’d think there’d be better ways of storing a cow, huh? But what’s more amazing to this story is that residents claim that this “solves the mystery of several missing livestock, believed to be done by the same thieves, about a month ago.” The conspiracy theorist in me says that it’s the work of Proton’s new viral marketing machine to drive up flagging sales. The tagline: “Proton: Full of Bull,” “Proton: We’ll Go On Till The Cows Come Home,” “Proton: We fit the Bull.” etc. etc.

Here’s an excerpt of the story in BM:

KULIM: Sekumpulan penduduk Kampung Pondok Labu, dekat sini, yang mengadakan rondaan mencegah jenayah, berjaya menggagalkan cubaan beberapa lelaki untuk mencuri seekor lembu di kampung berkenaan, tengah malam kelmarin.

Kejayaan penduduk itu juga dijangka menyelesaikan misteri kehilangan beberapa ekor ternakan terbabit di kampung berkenaan sejak lebih sebulan lalu, yang dipercayai dilakukan kumpulan pencuri sama.

Bagaimanapun, apa yang mengejutkan ialah bagaimana pencuri itu dapat melarikan lembu hanya menggunakan sebuah Proton Wira, kerana tentu sukar untuk mereka memasukkan ternakan berkenaan ke dalam kereta terbabit.

Seorang penduduk berkata, dalam kejadian kira-kira jam 11.30 malam kelmarin, beberapa lelaki yang membuat rondaan cegah jenayah di kampung itu berjaya mengesan kegiatan pencuri terbabit di sebuah kebun kelapa sawit.

Cripes. This Ain’t Good.

(Pic from lusi @ sxc)

News of an approaching recession in the US has been rumoured since last year, and unless the US Elections provides some kick ass results and economic reforms (Come on, Obama!), 2008 could be… uh. Start hoping and praying for a good year ahead.

This breaking from AP: “Asian Markets Extend Losses Amid Worries That US Is Headed for Recession.”

Global stock markets extended their shakeout into a second day Tuesday, plunging amid worries that a possible U.S. recession will cause a worldwide economic slowdown. The dramatic declines were expected to spread to Wall Street, where stock index futures were already down sharply hours before the trading day began.

“Unless we get some positive ’shock effects,’ such as drastic measures from the U.S. government, there is almost no hope for a recovery in stocks,” said Koji Takeuchi, senior economist at Mizuho Research Institute in Tokyo.

Markets have been plunging amid pessimism about the ability of the U.S. government to prevent a recession. The Federal Reserve has indicated it will lower interest rates further, and President Bush has proposed an economic stimulus package that includes $145 billion in tax cuts, but investors around the world are doubtful that the measures will lift the economy quickly.

The U.S. economy has been battered by a slump in the housing market and a credit crisis that has led to billions of dollars of losses among major U.S. banks.

Bill Gates’s Messiah Complex? An Interesting Take on His “Retirement”

Gosh, has it been that fast already? It’s been 2 years since Bill Gates announced his official departure from his post at Microsoft, and his much heralded “Last Speech” at CES 2008 was marked with the sort of reverence reserved for religious figures. He leaves Microsoft in a cloud of heavy criticism–”lost core competency” being the main one, with the disastrous flop of Vista and their ever-losing battle against Google for advertising space coming under heavy fire from the tech community.

But, argues ol’ coot Dvorak, you haven’t seen the last of Gates yet. In fact, it’s this heavy weather that Gates may want after all prior to his departure; leave the company in less-than-healthy circumstances, and then later come back like a saviour some time later in a Messianic cloud of glory. Michael Dell has done it recently, Steve Jobs has done it, and heck, even Starbuck’s Howard Schultz pulled it off last week. And they’ve been both hailed as heroes. So why not take a crack at it? Here’s an excerpt of the column:

I, for one, am not buying any of it. And I actually think I know what Bill is up to: It should be interesting, since his possible plan is not trivial, if it’s going to work.

Let me explain.

Bill would like to extract himself completely from Microsoft, so he can let the company drift. If Ballmer quits, and they don’t promote from within by letting Jeff Raikes or some other trained clone of Gates take over, then the company is doomed to follow the path we’ve already witnessed with Apple.

Then, according to plan, Gates would have no choice but to return to save the company. And while there is no originality here, if he could do this, it would be spectacular. It would even top the Steve Jobs “Return of the Prodigal Son” act, since Microsoft is enormous compared to the early-era Apple.

But Bill is at a dead end at Microsoft. Thus, he takes a page from historian Arnold Toynbee and decides to pull off a classic “withdraw and return” gambit, which could result in great success. Napoleon and Jobs both did it, not that I should be comparing the two (well, maybe).

Gates always seems to be in his element when he’s crushing Borland or kicking Sun or smashing Netscape. At his best, he’s the nerd from hell. So now, after all that, he drifts into becoming the namby-pamby head of a charity, dealing with people begging for money? Are you kidding me? I don’t think so.

Hey Bill, you’re not fooling me.

Of course, no post of Gates’s departure would be complete without his hilarious Final Day video, which, for one week, made him pwn Jobs.

Gizmodo’s Prank: Woz Would Be LOL.

It’s the biggest consumer electronics show in the US, a few thousand display screens, and you have a remote control that can turn any of them off and on at any time. Not many people could resist turning off a couple of screens, and Gizmodo just caved in to the temptation whole-heartedly by pulling off the prank of the year so far.

CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn’t help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn’t stop. (And Panasonic, you’re so lucky that 150-incher didn’t have an active IR port.) It was too much fun, but watching this video, we realize it probably made some people’s jobs harder, and I don’t agree with that (Especially Motorola). We’re sorry.

It’s a prank that Steve Wozniak would’ve been proud of (though he wouldn’t say it out loud), but the CES organisers have decided to take a hardline to ban the prankster from future CES shows. It’s kinda harsh–after all, if Woz could be forgiven, even praised, for his ingenious pranks, why not the staffer from Gizmodo? Sure, interrupting the Motorola PC was a little off, but in the end the show went on and no one died. And I really hate anyone who says that they “love the prank, but was happy the prankster was punished.” Grow some balls, man.

Oh, and the real winner of all this? TV-B-Gone. Great ad, folks.

RIP Sir Edmund Hillary

 

Another legend passes:

A state funeral is to be held for Sir Edmund Hillary, who died this morning from a heart attack, aged 88.

In a statement, his widow, Lady Hillary, indicated the family thought such a funeral appropriate, “recognising the impact [Sir Edmund] has on all New Zealanders”.

Lady Hillary said Sir Edmund died peacefully in Auckland Hospital at 9am today after his heart gave out.

He had been in hospital since Monday but was due out and had been looking forward to coming home.

“He remained in good spirits until the end.”

At the family’s Remuera home this afternoon, step-daughter Susan Hayman also said Sir Edmund was in “high spirits” prior to his death.

LG’s Phone Watch: Ridiculous To Use, Ultra Cool For Geeks

(Pic from Engadget, link below)

The buzz from this year’s CES isn’t coming from the giant TV screens or pumped-up audio equipment, but this little gadget caught by engadget: The LG Phone Watch. Yup, it’s a phone shaped like a watch. It’s true–in the future, you too can be Michael Knight and talk to your watch. It’s the stuff of every geek’s wet dream–well, this, and seeing Jessica Biel using this watch. To call me. MMMMMM…. random fantasies.

Oh, did I mention it’s absolutely ridiculously hard to use? Dialling a number takes 3 times longer than a normal mobile, with a rubbish clicking sound everytime you scroll for the numbers. Imagine texting on this thing–it’s a nightmare. But not, of course, if Jessica Biel’s texting. MMMMM…

On to the video:

2009–Where The Internet’s Money At, Yo.

(Pic from Garon419)

So it’s been a rough week for me–got into a small accident on Friday, so that meant more cash splashed out unnecessarily on top of the Christmas spree. And Everton got knocked out by Oldham, which, in the big picture of the Universe and Life, won’t matter much, but sure as hell didn’t help my spirits. At least this little story in The Guardian perked me up a little:

According to Group M, the combined media planning and buying operation, has predicted that “the UK internet ad spend will overtake TV, which has been the leading advertising medium for half a century, in 2009.” More than that, they also predict that Sweden (that’s home of the Pirate’s Bay, Arrrrrrrr) will take the lead this year in becoming the first country to see advertisers spend more on the internet than on TV ads. Damn, those Swedes are cool.

Fantastic! Well, I know that the Brits and are thousands of miles away, but it’s a good sign of things to come. Of course, we won’t see anything like this in this country over the next 5 years, if ever. But nevertheless, the wave will come here soon enough. I just hope I’m able to catch it. This, from the Guardian:

Group M forecasts that the UK will be on the brink of passing the milestone at the end of 2008, when the internet will account for 24.8% of UK media spend, just behind the 26% share held by the TV ad sector, according to Group M.

After that, UK internet ad spend will need to grow just another 6% year on year to overtake TV in 2009.

Group M predicts that UK internet revenue is likely to climb by 30.8% this year, to £3.4bn, compared with just 1% year-on-year growth in TV ad spend to around £3.56bn.

In the meantime, to keep you dreaming of all that moolah, here’s a video showing what $207million looks like–which, for geeky trivia’s sake, is what Google’s net profits are in 19 days (they earn $11m per day). Ah, what a time to be a dreamer.

Because E-Paper is so pweeeeeeeeety.

And I’m lazy to blog anymore: Here’s a link to Engadget’s breaking news that LG.Philips’s latest A4 sheet of flexible e-paper is to be seen at CES.

14.3-inches, 1280 x 800 pixels, 16.7m colors, 300 micrometers thick, full 180° viewing angle. It’ll be at CES, but apparently only for Korean models to hold and love.

So is The RIAA Going Nutso or What?

The big story before New Year’s Day–not that it matters much to us folks in Malaysia–is that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America, or Ridiculously Insane Association of Assholes, whichever way you wanna look at it) has started going ballistic by suing Jeffrey Howell, of Scottsdale, Ariz., for owning 2,000 songs ripped from legally purchased CDs.

According to The Washington Post, the “industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer. The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.”

Oil Breaks the $100 Barrier.

(Pic from lusi @ stockxchng)

Yups. We’re all screwed. Start tanking up, people. Tonight. This breaking from the BBC:

Oil has traded at $100 a barrel for the first time.

Violence in Nigeria, Algeria and Pakistan, the weak US dollar and the threat of cold weather have all raised prices after the new year break.

Light sweet crude rose $4.02 to $100 a barrel in New York, prompting a drop in shares and a surge in gold prices.

There are concerns that the high price of oil will stoke inflation at a time when many central banks are trying to cut interest rates to stimulate growth.

But some analysts played down the relevance of passing the $100 mark.

“The entire focus on $100 oil is frivolous,” said Tim Evans at Citigroup Futures Research in New York.

“It is not a magic number. It doesn’t suddenly make this a fundamentally strong market.”

Trading volumes were about half of their usual levels as traders returned from their new year breaks, which may have exaggerated the effect of speculative transactions, analysts said.

“I would imagine the speculators are the biggest drivers today,” said Phil Flynn from Alaron Trading in Chicago.

Pakistan’ Benazir Bhutto killed by suicide bomber

At the time of submitting – news coming in that Benazir Bhutto has been killed by suicide bomber. At least 10 other people also killed at the same time.

read more | digg story

Android Phone For Real?

(pic sourced from Gizmodo, link below)

Despite persistent rumours that that there’s no such thing as a G-Phone, Gizmodo snapped this picture of a “prototype” model in the wild, and now APCMag predicts the Android is gonna be unveiled when the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona kicks off on February 11th. It’s a sketchy prediction at best, just wanting to grab headlines. You probably still won’t see anything resembling a G-Phone (just the OS) on Feb 11 (but journos will still stubbornly ask whenwhenwhenwhen?), but still it’ll be interesting to see how the Open Handset Alliance-created OS will look like. Too many cooks in the kitchen, or utopian concept come true? This from APCMag

You can bet that if Google’s handset partners lift the covers on their Android phones during the Mobile World Congress expo, which kicks off on February 11th in Barcelona – or if Google itself trots out a flock of phones to impress this annual powerhouse gathering of the global mobile industry (the company has booked two stands on the expo floor) – that these will be shiny snazzy models endowed with a very high ‘cool’ factor.

WTF: M’sian referee pulls out gun at footie match

(Picture courtesy of Victorward at sxc)

Gawd. It’s official: our country is no different than those crazy-assed Colombian leagues.

A MALAYSIAN referee took out his gun and fired warning shots in the air after a local soccer match turned unruly following the suspension of a player, according to a local newspaper report.

The referee, who was also a policeman, ran to his patrol car to get his gun after players mobbed him for showing the red-card to one of them, the New Straits Times said.

What a way to end Visit Malaysia Year. w00t!

More Predictions for 2008!

(Picture courtesy of blackfantastix on deviantart)

Gotta love these prediction articles. Check out “2008 Web Predictions” from readwriteweb.com, with some choice ones including:

– 2008 will be slow and cautious, with the first half dominated by recession or fear of recession. (fear of the bubble bursting will come in towards mid-year I feel)

– Microsoft will become more aggresive and buy many popular companies at once (remember Ballmer’s quote). Candidates include SixApart, Technorati. (no doubt, a contributor to the fear of the bubble bursting thanks to it overvaluing its takeovers)

–Google will really start looking vulnerable in 2008. While the ‘one trick pony’ comment by Steve Ballmer drew sarcastic responses, this will begin to look prophetic. While they’ll maintain market share in the search industry, the lack of traction in any other of their other initiatives will start to cause frustration. Plus, they will increasingly be perceived as the ‘evil’ company in many of these new initiatives. (Nah. People will still love Google, mostly because Microsoft sucks. It’s a lesser of two evils, so to speak.)

–Facebook will release a browser. (like, srsly? is there a point, seeing that there’s Flock?)

–Privacy will be a growing concern in the mainstream, but ultimately people won’t really take any action and for the most part, things won’t change. Some companies and groups (think Mozilla) will push for better privacy controls for users, while others (think Facebook) will continue to push the envelope and continue down a slippery slope. Users will eventually push back, but I am hesitant to say that proverbial “straw that breaks the camel’s back” will come in 2008. (Totally agree–privacy is a big issue this year with Google and Facebook, and will be next year as marketers try to harness social data for their own use. I wonder how Facebook’s gonna turn a profit?)

30-year-old woman poses as teenage boy to get it on with a teenage girl

Well, this was the breaking story of the day:

Lorelei Corpuz was good at convincing everyone she was a young man, police said.

For the past 18 months, Corpuz made a teenage girl and the girl’s family believe that she was 17-year-old Mark Villanueva.

Police and prosecutors say that Corpuz is really 30 and has looks that support her ruse.

But early Sunday morning, Corpuz’s con came to an end when she was stopped by a rookie Everett police officer, according to court papers.

The officer approached Corpuz at a gas station because she was wanted out of Marysville on a warrant for driving with a suspended license.

He then asked the teenage girl in the car why she was with the woman, said Everett police Sgt. Robert Goetz.

“She gave us a curious look when he [the officer] said ‘woman,’ ” Goetz said. “She said, ‘That’s my boyfriend.’ ”

Corpuz was arrested and taken to Marysville. Everett police then arrested her and booked her into the Snohomish County Jail for investigation of rape.

read more | digg story

‘Girls Gone Wild’ Founder Ordered to Jail

On the day when Playboy Indonesia’s editor was free to go, this happened to the world of amateur pornography. Will GGW ever go out of the pop-culture lexicon? Nah:

“Just days after narrowly avoiding jail time, the multimillionaire founder of the “Girls Gone Wild” videos was again ordered to jail Wednesday for contempt of court.

Joe Francis, 34, has until noon Thursday to turn himself in to authorities, The News Herald of Panama City reported. A federal judge ordered Francis jailed on Wednesday after lawyers suing him complained that unbeknownst to them he had substantially changed the conditions of an offer they’d agreed to.”

read more | digg story

John Dvorak: “Apple Should Pull the Plug on the iPhone”

 

This is why I love columnists like John Dvorak. He’s not afraid to make a stand, doesn’t mince his words by trying to weasel himself out of it, and most importantly put forward an argument that makes absolute sense in this climate of Apple iPhone overhype madness. There was a loud and heated debate on the latest episode on TWiT that had me clapping and cheering in the car when I was listening to it. Yeah, so Dvorak got a million more hits on his Marketwatch column about the iPhone’s future demise, but hey, the man does make a point. He’s not an Apple hater, just someone who sees bullshit is for what it really is: marketing hype.

The hype over the unreleased iPhone has actually increased over the past month despite the fact that nobody has seen or used the device. This, if nothing else, proves the power of branding and especially the power of brand loyalty.

It’s the loyalists who keep promoting this device as if it is going to be anything other than another phone in a crowded market. And it’s exactly the crowded-market aspect of this that analysts seem to be ignoring.

The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough. These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months.

There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive. Even in the business where it is a clear pioneer, the personal computer, it had to compete with Microsoft and can only sustain a 5% market share.

What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a “reference design” and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.

It should do that immediately before it’s too late. Samsung Electronics Ltd. might be a candidate. Otherwise I’d advise you to cover your eyes. You’re not going to like what you’ll see.

read more | digg story

Amie Street: now in the media spotlight

The new music portal Amie Street has been around since last year, having been much hyped about by Techcrunch since middle of last year. But it’s only now that the site is building up a head of steam, more so over the past week when anti-DRM folks Barenaked Ladies posted their music up for sale at the site. I first heard about Amie Street through a Net@nite episode a couple of months back ago, but was skeptical about all these music portal sites because most of the bands featured are quite crap. Now, however, you’re going to see Amie Street emerge from obscurity, as it recently signed a new deal with Nettwerk Music Group, which is home to Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, and Paul Van Dyk.

What Amie Street does uniquely is two-fold; one is that it sells music in MP3 format, without any DRM attached to it–meaning that you can download, play, and share your music on any player, with anyone; a bold step considering music labels like Sony and Microsoft are constantly trying to beef up their DRM technologies. Secondly, songs sold are priced according to demand–they start off free when first posted up, and as it gets downloaded more, the price goes up incrementally. The Barenaked Ladies’ album didn’t take too long in reaching the highest price point of 98 cents, so watch out for more big artists to offer their songs on the site as time goes on.

Startups like these gives back power to both the consumers and the artists, which have seen their rights as creators and listeners stripped down by the record labels. I won’t say it’s going to be an instant success, but it’s heartening to see them growing up and offering an alternative to iTunes. If Amie Street is going to succeed, however, it’s going to need a whole lot more than Avril and BNL to support them–which, goes without saying, is a pretty fucked up task to undertake. If you’re interested in posting up your own music for sale, it’s easy too, with you taking 70% of the music sales above $5–a pretty decent deal that everyone can take up on.

read more | digg story

Scribd: “The YouTube for documents”

Thanks to Michael Arrington, who maintains the excellent web start-up watchblog techcrunch, I learned about this little ingenious flash-app at scribd that allows you to upload and share documents as you would share videos on YouTube.

Scribd, a site for sharing documents, is coming out of private beta this morning with a fresh Angel investment of $300K on top of their original Y Combinator nest egg of $12,000. Scribd is most easily described as a text version of YouTube. It is a social network that lets you tag, share, and comment on uploaded documents (.doc, .pdf, .txt, .ppt, .xls, .ps, .lit).

Scribd is not just a carbon copy of YouTube. They borrowed a lot of the basic design principles, but also took advantage of the written format by including flexible file formats for download and upload along with some interesting analytics tracking. Documents can be displayed and embedded as html or the under-utilized, and faster-than-a-pdf, Flash paper format.

read more | digg story

Man robs underwear stores believing he was a female elf

My father warned me about those Dungeons & Dragons games when I was 12. I threw my Dungeon Master game manuals out then, regretting my decision for the next 15 years, until I stumbled across this story this morning. So young children, be warned: Fantasy MMORPGs can make you turn into an underwear stealing elf.

A man accused of robbing a Belfast lingerie shop at knifepoint has fallen back on a time honoured defence – namely, his claim that he believed he was a female elf at the time.

Belfast Crown Court was told by the prosecution that 45-year-old Robert Boyd from Broadlands, Carrickfergus had held up the shop, Orchid, while disguised in a wig, hat and sunglasses. He allegedly made off with bras, knickers, stockings and suspender belts.

read more | digg story

Jeff Jarvis on Teaching Journalism

Though I have my arguments against Jeff Jarvis for occasionally hyping up the death of Old Media, you can’t fault him for making the bold predictions that he does about New Media. Okay, so maybe I’m occasionally guilty about jumping to conclusions about his views, but he does put in some strong words about the death of Old Media, as he did in his latest post:

I think that – especially after the last year’s cold reality checks and volcanic change in the newspaper, radio, TV, and magazine businesses – everybody does get that the past cannot be preserved. Everybody knows now that change is inevitable. And everybody – which includes me – is searching for the right moves to make next. Is everybody innovating enough, fast enough? No, but I think everybody realizes they have to.”

Gosh, he makes it sound dire, doesn’t it? There is no doubt that the media landscape is changing tremendously, and especially with last year’s collapsing newspaper industry–not helped by the gun-jumping conclusion New York Times Arthur Sulzberger came to when he said that he doesn’t care whether the NYT will remain in print in five years’ time–there’s every reason for journalists all over the world to worry a little. That fear, however, shouldn’t be heeded, and I agree with Jarvis that there’s no better time to be a journalist than now. His recent article in Media Guardian allays those fears; in fact, journalists are given more tools, more freedom, and more power than any other period. If there is a fear, it stems from being insecure in understanding, and adopting, the modern media tools of photo-sharing, video-sharing, blogging, and a host of other collaborative mediums that the internet enables us to.

Why teach journalism? Aren’t newspapers and news doomed? Why ensnare young people in a dying profession? I respond with an article of faith: journalism is evolving – at long last – and actually growing, and that’s what makes this an exciting time to get into the news business.

Read on more about Jarvis’s take on New Media Journalism here.

How the Japanese turned prisoners into guinea pigs for gruesome experiments

Following the recent statement on which Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that Japan will not apologize again for forcing women to act as sex slaves, I picked up this gruesome, and very sadly, true article on the Daily Mail of how one Japanese WWII scientist cut open on his prisoners while they were still alive, “to improve his knowledge of anatomy.”:

“After more than 60 years of silence, World War II’s most enduring and horrible secret is being nudged into the light of day. Mr Makino was stationed there during the war. What he never told anybody, including his wife, was that during the four months before Japan’s defeat in March 1945, he dissected ten Filipino prisoners of war, including two teenage girls. He cut out their livers, kidneys and wombs while they were still alive. Only when he cut open their hearts did they finally perish.”

read more | digg story