Bjorno.licio.us

Yeah, this long tail — a book. Hope you ain’t disappointed.

I blogged about myself reading “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson some time back and how the internet was helping consumers all over the world “break the space-time continuum“. oohh.. big word.. what it all means is that the long tail might just turn out to be a shopaholic’s paradise if you buy big time over the web.

I break out of my self-imposed blogging freeze to break you this news — Chris Anderson’s exclusive interview by my good friend Bernard! You can check it all out here on the SGEntrepreneurs blog. Chris even mentions Singapore during the short interview and how he admires Lee Hsien Loong’s (Singapore’s Prime Minister) policies on creating a knowledge-based economy in Asia.

I am aware of IDA MDA’s i.JAM initiative and impressed with the efforts of your prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong for his policies of science and technology towards the creation of a knowledge based economy in Asia. The way I see it, the long tail is about reinforcing the diversity of culture and ideas and at the same time, recognizing the fact that you cannot predict a demand. The liberation of voices and ideas will lead to a messy and unpredictable situation in the marketplace. For example, YouTube is a chaotic television and you can see all sorts of content popping up that may not be acceptable for the Singapore government. The question or perhaps, the challenge for Singapore: is the Singapore government prepared to accept the chaotic and unrestricted ideas that emerges once the content creators and distributors are given the tools of production?

Update 2: The post-event analysis is up and readable here.

Update: I found Professor Ramesh Jain from UC Irvine, CA, who might be attending this event too as a presenter of his startup, Event Web. Check out Ramesh Jain’s blog. More on his startup idea here (no website available, it seems). More on the man here.

This event, held Jan 10, will launch an initiative to launch Web 3.0 in Singapore. Frankly, I don;t know how we skipped the evolution cycle because Web 2.0 did not even start in Singapore’s IT and media industries. More on this event at SGEntrepreneurs. I cannot find the actual event site. Looks like this Web3.0 event launch is neither search optimized nor browsable on the website of MDA, the lead agency spearheading this effort. tsk tsk..

And I left a comment on the SGE site which i will reproduce here, in an edited version. As a disclaimer, I am not yet an active practitioner nor entrepreneur in the web industry. But I think I have the right to at least air my opinion on this issue. I am passionate about the Web industry and bullish about the internet medium on business and society and am willing to support any initiative that will propagate its growth. I take issue with the manner of the latest launch by MDA and its affiliated agencies and just prefer to make my thoughts heard in the hope that it lands in the right hands/ ears and we do this initiative right.

“there’s no such thing called “web 3.0″ yet. i am attending this event to see just how the govt defines web 2.0 before we attempt to jump the whole world and create this fictitious web 3.0. Even the website of the event is a joke. its so web 1.0 and they still use antiquated terms of no relevance to the subject matter.

This event almost looks like another initiative by some harried civil servant who pulled together a bunch of kakis from the other ministries to show the whole world they are all collectively putting effort in doing something that meets their KPI/ ROI/ whatever. Yes, a bureaucratic kneejerk reaction is what this looks like.

I rant alot here, i know, but the way the government is trying to launch this fund shows they are simply out of touch in trying to understand what really matters in trying to spur innovation here. those who will create any web3.0 already exist. And i think none of these people are inspired enough by the promise of what this web 3.0 can do to them. I might be jumping the gun before i even attend this event but i will seek to offer some suggestions to improve as as an event precursor.

For starters, dun get government to push it. Get industry leaders, academics, foreign thought leaders from technological hubs in israel, silicon valley to speak at fund launches like this. If the govt has 500 million to spend eventually, they can spend a few million trying to do this right for once by flying the right people down to Singapore to launch this. Get any warm body the innovators, the engineers, the entrepreneurs, will respect, NOT govt officials. Unless this is an internal fund for only civil servants to create startups, no one in the audience is going to listen to some civil servants step up that podium and subsequently gladly oblige to follow the commands. Singapore’s culture may be paternalistic but all kids grow up eventually.

I don;t know whether this fund’s creators actually pondered the root to the lack of innovation here which is why we have no notable web 2.0 enterprises of note. The real problem is the engineers and comp science students in singapore flocking to the more financially stable industries of Finance and Banking. Without real efforts put into university admin and policies that effectively overcome the sociological and psychological bias of our nation’s brightest engineers against non-financial careers, this initiative is dead in the water before it starts. This is the real brain drain a fictional Web 3.0 industry in Singapore will face. And this is a chronic cancer no cure seems imminent at present. We need to make this industry more glamorous and credible. Which does not mean more lame advertising campaigns depicting the computing industry as sexy or anything. It means putting more money into the promising startups we already have, helping them hire good talent from local and especially overseas etc…

More importantly, we need to inspire and fertilize the ground which grows those entrepreneurs, ie. the schools. We need to find what ever minor successes we have in the current generation of web entrepreneurs we have in Singapore and cultivate them as role models through the media. Talk about their struggles, their successes and the route they took to success so others can take note and support can be rallied from society and the industry. Influencing the public is key here anda successful push in the Web industry will help greatly in expanding career options to students in the educational institutions in polys ITEs, and the unis.

THe only web “successes” we have so far is? I might be ignorant but only HArdwarezone.com came to mind and they were bought for a paltry SG$7 million. how is that going to inspire any potential local web3.0 entrepreneur to start up? I think this is a question begging to be asked. 500 million from the govt coffers might be huge, but it will not displace the importance nor influence of the VC industry which will be begging to ask whether any future valuations of startups in this region deserve funding after the HWZ precedent.”

Follow-up: For those frustrated with the development of Singapore’s web industry, help it grow at the BarCamp SG event on Jan 20.

Rich Skrenta has this amazing article on his blog that proclaims Google as the undisputed leader of the Third Wave of Computing after IBM and Microsoft. According to him, the search industry has sorted itself out such that no other competitors, not even Yahoo or Microsoft, can face up to Google’s dominance in search technology, revenue monetization nor brand perception.

So, has Google really won the war?

No way. I am not going to argue that at this current time, Google search is superior in the 3 areas i pointed out in the last paragraph. But i dispute the fact that Google’s position as the leader in search is dominant to the extent Microsoft and IBM had for the PC and mainframe industries.

Search Market Share

Google’s next step: owning the rest of the page views on the netJust as Microsoft used their platform monopoly to push into vertical apps, expect Google to continue to push into lucrative destination verticals — shopping searches, finance, photos, mail, social media, etc. They are being haphazard about this now but will likely refine their thinking and execution over time. It’s actually not inconceivable that they could eventually own all of the destination page views too. Crazy as it sounds, it’s conceivable that they could actually end up owning the entire net, or most of what counts. — Rich Skrenta

For one, Google does not have dominant market share of the search market. According to the latest (?) Comscore ratings of August 2006, Google’s market share of search is just under 50%, while, dominating Microsoft and Yahoo in head-to-head comparisons (at 12.5% and 28.7% respectively), do not grant it dominance to the extent of Microsoft’s near-monopolistic share over PC software, or even IBM’s share in their heydays. Of course, Rich Skrenta cites Google’s true search market share at 70% based on his own analysis here, which makes for compelling reading as that is closer to my own analytics on this blog and elsewhere too, but its still hard to dispute comScore methodology without deeper analysis. Google has to fear a resurgent and cash-rich Microsoft buying over a Yahoo that is looking vulnerable after recent management revamps and strategic missteps in its bid to become an online media giant at the expense of search.

If Microsoft and Yahoo combines, not only do they form a formidable threat in terms of search market share, they also bring large audiences and strengths in content (through the MSN and Yahoo sites) under the same roof. This effectively kicks the wind out of Google, especially if they intend to diversify into areas other than search, such as social media, photos, mail or finance (as listed y Rich Skrenta). We know how Google fares in those verticals currently, it has already exited the user-dependent Google Answers service while Yahoo Answers roars ahead. While I am a rabid fan of Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail still have overwhelming numbers of users that are unlikely to convert their loyalty in any significant way to Google soon.

Transfer of Brand-Trust

The brand perception of Google might be strong, but it is only limited to search, and not in email as yet, and similarly for other services other than search. How users will translate their trust in the Google search service to other Google-affiliated services is an open question even Googlers must be asking themselves too. As it stands, Google has launched an amazing number of services under its Google Labs, few of which have truly stuck on that metaphorical wall of user-consumer acceptance. While its culture of innovation is laudable here, doubts have crept as to how Google intends to curb its dependence, in terms of revenue, upon search as its sole revenue driver. If we are to take revenue generation as a reliable symtpom of brand equity, Google is only good in search, so far. Period.

All in all, I think its still premature to say Google is the dominant search engine for this Third Age of Computing. It has been the first to get search truly right (first-right-mover advantage) but the jury is still out on the success of Microsoft’s new advertising platform AdCenter and Yahoo’s Project Panama. Furthermore, the search engine marketing industry is not just limited to CPC ads which Google totally rules, but also CPM and CPA ads (Dave McClure made a strong case for CPA here). There’s still a long way for Microsoft, Yahoo or even NewsCorp to muscle in and determine the path for search engines to lead the evolution of its advertising-reliant monetization model. I think 2007 will shed more light on the final destination of the Crown for Search, especially so if Microsoft and Yahoo hook up.

The war for search engine domination is not over because monetization lies at its root, and the best man who figures out how to sell effectively (CPA ads) to an intent-based activity like search, wins.

Singapore has this new initiative with an objective of bridging the digital divide. In a cose parallel to the free-Wifi initiative in Mountain View, Singapore will launch a nationwide Wifi network that provides wireless online access for free over a two-year period. For more, read this GigaOm post or this..

This post was supposed to be a review of my first usage of this service. It was first launched on December 1st but well, I have wireless at home and free wireless in my NUS campus, so I didn’t caretill now.

So i tried signing up for it today, under the iCell network cos I heard icell and QMax have simpler signup procedures than Singtel based on media reports. So i tried doing what anyone else will do for a newbie.

I search for “icell singapore” with Google. No relevant result. Strange..

So i tried “wireless@sg singapore” instead, half-expecting it to direct me to a main site that will offer me direct access to all three providers and a list of locations where I can find the limited locations offering this service. No relevant result too. I reached an IDA web page, which was broken, and referred me to another site before i had to click on another button to reach the proper-signup page i was looking for.

Its not easy so far, I thought.. I didn’t imagine that the providers and the man Wireless@SG program had no dedicated Google presence in our world today. Just how will someone who is less web-savvy than me use this service? And I am not even a computer science student.. I wonder how my dad, mum, or uncle will use this. They will probably start off with a search engine too..

But its fine, I found the highly embedded Wireless@SG site, i thought, so i can finally sign up for my freebies.. But heck no..

Icell requires you to provide compuksory information such as your NRIC no, a personal identification number and your full name, your cell phone number and that totally put me off signing up. Last thing I want is icell spamming my cell phone with SMSes when Singtel, a proper telco, already does so. And why the hell do they always want NRICs? I hate giving that info out and it seems all Singapore websites love doing that. Dun they realise that is a conscious mental barrier for web users when we dun have to provide our NRICs when we sign up for foreign-based services like email, blog account, etc? It makes me ever more conscious that some governmetn agency will track my personal information and tracking habits. This “walled-garden”aproach of differentiating Singapore-based internet services from foreign ones is a needless hassle.

I went over to Singtel’s wireless@SG site. Since I was a Singtel customer, i could sign up easily by just text-messaging them. But i remembered all the personal privacy concerns and red flags from my icell experience and decided not to support this initiative that seemed to be founded on the wrong service development premises. I was also miffed that you cannot find the locations easily that provide the limited version of Wireless@SG services now.

Granted that its only been two weeks since the limited launch, these teething problems may come to pass, but as an early adopter, I am rather put off by my experience thus far. And i hear from my friends that you have to download a program before you can use the Wireless@SG service, that is dumb. I rather use the plug and play free wireless from McDonalds’ anytime over this.

This is another poor example of customer service in Singapore that threatens to derail this wonderful initiative at first. I would think you need to be rather savvy with the computer to use Wireless@SG services, so isn’t this service widening the digital divide ever more?

I get really irritated when mainstream media misinterpret internet media for lack of knowledge or lack of consideration in fair and unbiased explanation of this new form of media to their readers whom they have a responsibility to educate and inform.

The focus of my ire now is David Pogue, a blogger under the NYT blog portfolio that is prominently featured under the New York Times Technology section. The full link is here. The root of his argument was his moaning of the lack of civility on the internet, especially how other responders on Digg, blogs lack “respect for adults” and “how hostile *ordinary* people are to each other online these days..”. He also mentions the ‘kneejerk “everyone else is an idiot” tenor (that) is poisoning the potential the Internet once had.‘ Read the rest of this entry »

Pissed off by crappy cell phone connectivity or your monthly cell phone bills?

Help is on the horizon - in the form of Wifi phones. This vision is already real, if you live in Seattle and are a T-Mobile subscriber.

With these phones, you can call for free or much lower cost over Wifi access hotspots. Read the rest of this entry »

Washington DC always thinks they know best. Even the tech sector. After Gore proudly proclaimed his role in “inventing” the Internet in 1999 on CNN, we have a new Internet guru in the form of Senator Ted Stevens who continues to expand on Gore’s good work and derive new theories to think about the web. Now, the Capitol Hill debate and decisions over Net Neutrality is really getting out of hand.

By the way, Ted is the head of the Senate Commerce Committee who’s supposed to regulate the e-commerce, and by association, the Internet. His knowledge of the Internet, no matter metaphorical or not, is simply astonishing, to say the least.

Ok, lets be fair here. The above comments were taken out of context by Jon Stewart. You can check out his hilarious takes via the 2 Youtube videos below:

But lets get serious and understand the context of Ted’s revelatory comments.

(Source: Wired Magazine) Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) explained why he voted against the amendment and gave an amazing primer on how the internet works.

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.

We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people [¿]

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time. [¿]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Seattle Post Intelligencer has a more balanced article trying to balance and explain Ted’s analogy of Internet tubes here.

Summary of it here:

Popping up on Web sites is the “DJ Ted Stevens Techno Remix,” in which audio excerpts from Stevens’ speech are set to an electronic dance beat. More recently, a file appeared on the Internet that added video to the mix.The creator of the song, Paul Holcomb, who helps run an advertising agency based in Atlanta, said the song has been downloaded more than 50,000 times.

“I think, unfortunately at Sen. Stevens’ personal expense, people see the same irony that we saw when we created the file,” Holcomb said. “I thought it was ironic that a person such as him, someone who has such an influential vote, wasn’t able to articulate the nuances at a basic level of how the Internet works.”

A spokesman for Stevens declined to be interviewed. Commerce Committee staff director Lisa Sutherland said in a statement that Stevens has a deep understanding of the technical, legal and economic aspects of new technology.

“Yes, a few bloggers are going after him because he used the word `tubes’ instead of “`pipes’ - but when you look at the body of his work and how he has crafted a bill that will not only serve Alaska, but the nation, I think the final product speaks for itself,” Sutherland said.

For more Youtube mashups and remixes of Ted Steven’s famous speech above, check out this really catchy video mashup of tubes, 1960’s computer mainframes, techno music overlaid on Ted’s speech. Or how about Ted Stevens + Nas + OutKast + Trippy Shite? You can hear his entire speech where he ranted on and on rabidly as if he had a war agenda on his ISP.

But seriously, Ted Steven’s 82. He’s also the guy who tried to spend $223 million for the “bridge to nowhere” that would link Ketchikan, Alaska, and its airport on Gravina Island, population 50.

Whats the wisdom of getting an 82-year-old more familiar with the Industrial Revolution try to grasp the intricacies and sophistication of the Digital Revolution? Yea, his status might indicate intelligence, experience or plain manipulation through his special interest backers, but maybe he should stick to his turf slipping in little amendments for oil drilling in the Alaskan Reserve in defense bills, STFU, and stop his meddling in MY Generation.

Lets play musical chairs today: You sit atop $60 billion worth of businesses selling media content ranging from movies, tv shows, music distributed across an arsenal of channels such as satellite tv, cable, network, radio, cinemas.

But something’s bothering you. Low growth in your existing business model. And ONE, singular new channel called broadband internet that you do not own but show extremely high growth and potential to be the next Holy Grail.

Did i mention your are 75? Yes, you are Rupert Murdoch. Would you chase this elusive Holy Grail and bet billions of dollars (and incumbent business partnerships spanning the globe) to understand the shiny new toy of Internet “chaos” ruled by a bunch of kids scarcely half your age who, when combined, dun really even make half the money you are making now?

Apparently yes, almost $600 million and 3 startups in InterMix (MySpace), IGN.com and Newroo later, the revolution has officially started. What began as garage ventures and stereotyped seat-of-the-pants decision making fuelled by beer-guzzling, pot-smoking, caffeinated college kids has moved mainstream. The battle field is no longer in the suburban garages of San Francisco Bay Area but the mahogany tables, marble-d corridors, posh skyscrapers and suited inhabitants of Manhattan’s Media Capital.

So, ALL HAIL the new Media revolutionaries: Podcasters, Bloggers, Burners, P2P Buccaneers, Mashup Artists, Phonecam Paparazzi and those One-Internet-Minute Fame-Seekers..

The Organizational Disconnect - Corporate Control VS Community Chaos

Coroporate seek control to dominate the monetization process. The MySpace Community has no overaching control structure and yet that is the core of their success. Which existing successful business has a biz model that doesn’t control its customers? How do you build a platform for all these independent participants/ players and still make truckloads of money from it?

A Global Idol and Hosting an Omnipresent audience of Judges

The platform is : (Help) audiences create hits. “Make that happen more quickly, cheaply, and reliably, and you have a philosopher’s stone for media: a Net-fueled word-of-mouth machine.”

In other words, refine the internet model of on-hit-wonders, be more efficient in scouting them plus bundle that with incumbent NewsCorp expertise to transform online one-hit-wonders to offline global celebrities through its media warchest… IN other words, a Global Idol with talent search beginning within MySpace profiles, letting the community of friends filter and decide on the good ones through monitoring page views, downloads, adding them as friends…

Think of all this as an ever-present audience of SimonCowells, Randy Jacksons and Paula Abduls.. Conventional logic: millions deciding beat 3 deciding, especially when the millions are also customers…. (and oh yeah, the MySpace judges can do much more than the mere 35 million text messagers on American Idol)
Imagine the amount of merchandise, the number of reality TV shows showcasing all these web celebrities and all those faces plastered across magazine covers and newspaper articles will result in an endless stream of web celebrities coming through MySpace. Now, thats control.

As a parting note, here’s a paragraph I like:

“As lucrative as those ideas may be, they’re based on an old media conception of audiences as consumers. But MySpace members are something different: They’re participants. The site’s greatest value isn’t connecting people to products, people to information, or eyeballs to advertisers. It’s connecting people to people. The MySpace team is light on information theorists, but DeWolfe happily quotes Metcalfe’s law: “The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.” In other words, MySpace multiplies the value of each member by connecting one to another. It’s a virtual nation of people instant-messaging their friends a link to Gnarls Barkley’s new track and decorating their pages with Family Guy clips. And that’s where MySpace could strike gold: It lets News Corp. host the cultural conversation.”

Full article here

Microsoft's stock plunged below the $25 psychological barrier after their recent release of a record Q3 result for revenues. This is due   increased spending including a project on grid computing (read here) that smacks of a copycat approach to Google's strategies.

So here's a rumor on CNET, WSJ, CNN that to beat Google, MSFT is thinking of buying a stake in Yahoo, or selling MSN to them.

Lets look at March 2006 Comscore rankings of the search engines.

The proposed Yahoo- MSFT move sounds like desperation to me. Yes, the new alliance will give both the content portals a shot in the arm, if search is included, (which is likely from the proposed deal), then they get 41% share, comparable against Google's. Ad networks will surely have to be combined as well in order to leverage off the combined content portals and this will give the new "YahooSoft" portal an unassailable lead in terms of web traffic. But this move doesn't sound likely as it means Microsoft will be sending a signal that its past year of innovation efforts in search and creating its online ad network were futile and it decided to find the shortcut by pairing with Yahoo in order to catch Google fast.

Then again, "Yahoosoft" will seriously undermine Google's efforts at becoming a portal with its Google Ig project. It will accelerate their need to depend on AOL for content and web property to plant its ads now that its search market share no longer forms an advantage over the independent Yahoo or Microsoft engines.

And this will only mean one winner at the end of it all. Time Warner, which had previously seemingly written off hopes of its AOL units a year ago, gets a relatively lower but significant payback for its failed AOL acquisition for reinvesting into new web media properties or consolidating its other business units to fend off criticism from Carl Icahn.

Other Links here: Ars Technica ,

Writely, the online document collaboration service, or what i consider the Web 2.0 version of Microsoft Word, has been acquired by Google. Woo Hoo!!

This is a great boost for all those startups out there counting on Google/ Yahoo as an exit strategy. Since so many startups are dependent on online advertising as their primary revenue model, why not attach themselves organically to the King of Web Advertising Google itself? And as long as the Google-Microsoft war for web dominance continues, Google should be in a buying mood to snap up well-designed web services with sizeable user communities, along with their innovative founding team. Triple Advantages there and frees up their army of engineers on other projects such as the Google Moon Base, that Space Elevator… ok, digressing here…

But wat i am trying to say is it seems Google’s new projects such as Google Base, Google Pages have lacked the punch and excitement to be expected from them. How Google is going to create a company culture that fosters independent innovation and organizational cohesiveness concurrently will be the important dilemma facing its founders and management. It will have to go beyond its 70-20-10 rule and over-reliance on the Page/ Brin/ Mayer gatekeeping practice. Hence I view the founders, of these startups Google are currently buying, operating as contract employees there because these founders’ creative energies will take divergent paths with Google’s corporatization strategy. But who knows, Google might defy convention and maintain its culture of innovation with a rapidly expanding organization just as it innovatively came to dominate and define search today.

A random thought here, but with the increasing popularity of web startups taking the acquisition option by Google, Yahoo, AOL, IAC, Microsoft, EBay, NewsCorp etc, are we witnessing an “arms race” of sorts by these Internet giant to snap up digital turf and as much mindshare of web users?It seems the stigma of the 2001 tech bubble bust has left an indelible mark on the tech industry’s appetite for IPOs. I am rooting for the next successful startup to spurn one of these giants’ advances and IPO successfully.