A Web Site Born in U.S. Finds Fans in Brazil - New York Times

Just as Freindster seems to have primarily a Filipino audience so to has Orkut (Google's social network) found its legs in Brazil...

Orkut, the invention of a Turkish-born software engineer named Orkut Buyukkokten, never really caught on in the United States, where MySpace rules teenage cyberspace. But it is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon in Brazil.

About 11 million of Orkut's more than 15 million users are registered as living in Brazil — a remarkable figure given that studies have estimated that only about 12 million Brazilians use the Internet from home....

A Web Site Born in U.S. Finds Fans in Brazil - New York Times:

But will Orkut have the same issues of MySpace as it becomes a cultural phenomenon?

"SaferNet's president, Thiago Nunes de Oliveira, a professor of cyberlaw at the Catholic University of Salvador, said the problem had exploded in the last few months. 'In 45 days of work, we identified 5,000 people who were using the Internet, and principally Orkut, to distribute images of explicit sex with children,' he said. And that was aside from the racists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups the organization found."

TV fans, this online service wants to be your buddy

BuddyTV plans to provide live commentary on television shows as they air - sort of like live blogging an event - using reality TV 'stars' (ugh.) Their business model, of course, is ad based.

TV fans, this online service wants to be your buddy

Podcasts....Is anyone really listening?

Hey all,

Just ran accross this interesting article on how :

"only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts..."

This is interesting, considering that companies that use podcasts as a way to remain "sticky" in the minds of consumers doesn't seem to be really effective. I can personally speak to this. I have never heard one podcast in my entire life. I guess the main lesson to be learned is that podcasts = bad marketing

Anyhow, here's the link : http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003921

There are also lots of interesting graphs and pictures for the more visually inclined.

Google buys a search algorithm

This just in: Google buys a search engine algorithm. And you thought being good at math would never make you rich.

ineedhits SEM Blog: Aussie Orion to Slay Google, MSN and Yahoo!

This guys is an Israeli grad student in Australia - not even a company... But his algorithm improves contextually relevant searching, and he filed for a patnet late last year.

BlogBurst syndicates e-material for newspapers

Media Life - Web shorts: "

Interesting blurring of the lines between bloggers and newspaper content...

Count it as one more step in closing the divide between bloggers and mainstream media, the launch of a new syndication service that will deliver commentary from 600 bloggers for use by newspaper publishers. ... BlogBurst will include headlines and articles that newspaper publishers can use in the news or feature sections of their online and print editions. ... According to BlogBurst chief executive Dave Panos, newspapers will use the service for areas where they may not have dedicated staff, such as entertainment, food, local stories, technology, travel and women's issues. ...bloggers get wider distribution for their writing as well as the resulting increase in traffic to their blog sites."

Wangyou Media Raises Funding From CRV — China Web2.0 Review

Wangyou Media Raises Funding From CRV — China Web2.0 Review

For those of you who were also in Managing Growth with M. Preston, you may remember a little company called WangYou based in China that my group presented to the class. It looks like things are finally moving forward.

Their funding and continued growth seems to be proof that User Generated Content combined with an urge to seek 10 minutes of fame is a worldwide phemomenon. Afterall, who wouldn't want to post videos of themselves singing along to the latest tennie-bop tune.

Disney to Offer Some ABC Programs Free on the Web - New York Times

Disney to Offer Some ABC Programs Free on the Web - New York Times

It seems the cavalcade of video over the internet is continuing. Importantly, this batch of content is going to be advertiser supported, with very big names such as P&G already mentioned. Disney execs seem to feel this is important as part of the revenue model mix:

The move by Disney and ABC appears to reflect a conclusion by company executives that consumer are willing to pay for so much on-demand programming and may be willing to accept commercials to see programs thy want.

The question then becomes, what kind of revenues can they see from this advertising? Using an industry standard of $30/CPM might be tempting, but what if internet delivery allows them to know enough about the audience to charge higher rates? Knowing that you are reaching a coveted demographic could raise these CPM's tremendously.

Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?

Interesting essay on Friendster vs. MySpace and how MySpace is better positioned to evolve and maintain an edge with its youth demographic...

http://www.danah.org/papers/FriendsterMySpaceEssay.html

Lost viral marketing

The ABC TVshow Lost also participates in viral marketing as discussed here:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/artsentertainment/2002730134_lostsites10.html

A few examples of the viral "alternate reality" sites.
http://www.oceanic-air.com/
http://www.thehansofoundation.org/

Adsense Members in Developing Countries

This article goes into the effects of Google's Adsense internationally and how it is enabling members in the developing world to supplement their incomes. I found this interesting since Google pays the same amount to all members regardless of their location and that it is another example of the internet leveling the playing field for all participants.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-03-28-googe-adsense_x.htm?POE=click-refer

Issues w/ online photo businesses

These are the articles I referred to in class. They go into issues on storage and rising file sizes, customer property, and Kodak Easyshare's business stats.

[$$] Lawsuit Is Filed Against Kodak
at The Wall Street Journal Online (Wed, Mar 29)
(original story - ex-employees "side")

Former Eastman Kodak Manager Sues Company
Associated Press (Thu, Mar 30)
(Kodak response)

How yellow a blog can get...

With a significant amount of us going into this industry soon, it might be a good idea to get to know the 'behind the scenes' part of Wall Street in advance.

DealBreaker is an online business tabloid and Wall Street gossip blog. It seeks to cover the personalities and culture that shape the financial industry, offering original commentary, news and entertainment.

http://www.dealbreaker.com/

digital distribution...where is it going?

Just want to take amoment to reflect on the vissitudes of the ditigal music marketplace ...mostly, the relationship between major music publishers, distibutors of digital music and ultimate consumers. While digital distributors (e.g.) i-tunes, yahoo songs, have accounted for more than a billion downloads on either a pay per song or subscription basis, millions of consumers are still accessing and downloading their music via free sites such as limewire, etc. Indeed, there exists a huge population who have not paid for music for several years.

Although the music companies have successfully lobbied for legislation extending existing copyright protection to include ditigal disribution, it seems unlikely that the proliferation of free downloads is destined to slow down anytime soon. As these two major worlds collide, what will be the resultant middlegroud, if any? What, if anything, can regulators do given the confluence of factors affecting their ability to police end users or distributors who are now capable of operating from countries that provide safe havens?

(Two recent articles look at these issues.However at the moment, I am unable to link to blog. I will post as soon as possible)

Importantly, is the music industry, through their efforts to impact the distribution of music to protect thier long term domaine, undermining the market value of the good-will which music companies have spent enormous resources to build up and perpetuate? Is this an act of self expropriation of its assets?

Feedback on www.ExpertBee.com

Hi,
For my maiden post, I'll describe my obsession and what has dominated every waking cycle I have (sad, but true!). The website I run is http://www.ExpertBee.com. It is a place where people post questions or a request for a service, and experts submit bids to provide an answer or a service. So as an example, if you had a tax question, you would post your question with the maximum amount that you would pay for an answer. Experts bid to answer, and you select an expert based on their profile, price, and past feedback from other users. However, if you needed an accountant to do your taxes, you would post a Request For Service, and accountants would bid to become your accountant, with you choosing on the same criteria. We are growing exponentially and we have new site coming out early May. Any and all feedback is welcome!!!

Wayne

Open Source means... $100 laptop project

$100 laptop - Blue e-book

Here's some very interesting possibilities for $100 laptops being developed for developing countries by the famed Nicholas Negroponte (of MIT's Media Lab, and author of "Being Digital")

Obviously, if they can put the computer into a child in Africa's hands for $100, open source software is the only way to go to make the project work. It raises the interesting question: Does open source work now because, as a percentage of the cost of the total system, hardware as come down in absolute terms so much that software has gone up? In other words, if the computer was still $5,000, would anyone worry about $250 for Office?

The Cluetrain Manifesto

Our class speaker, Scott Hall, referred to this book and markets as conversations.

The book, in it's entirety is available here...

WEB SELLERS BUILD OWN 'UPFRONTS'

Online Video Providers Push Ad Inventory in Advance

Nice piece about the digital video upfronts:

Upfronts -- which in the online world are defined as any time when you’re selling inventory in advance -- are practiced by the major portals AOL, Yahoo and MSN, as well as sites in certain sectors like auto-specialty sites Edmunds.com and kbb.com (Kelley Blue Book). Other video-rich sites, including news purveyors and sites devoted to showing video clips, also find themselves selling large swaths of inventory early in the year. Cinema ad sellers are also jumping in with upfront events.

The Web, much like TV, does have certain inventory that is always in high demand, and much of that is around broadband video. In the 2005 fourth quarter, for example, AOL had sold out its video inventory for In2TV, its classic TV programming, through 2006. Yahoo, MSN and other video-rich sites typically sell out certain sectors, like entertainment, financial services and travel by the end of January. Cinema sells up to 80% of its inventory between October and December and only 10% in the spring.

the whole piece...

Links and Notes from today's Open Source lecture...

Although it might have been a little early in the morning to follow my leaps from NCSA Mosaic to today's web API's, I thought the links might help:

Here's the Open Source guys.

My favorite list of Web API's is here.

And finally, the Mashable weblist, which has some short blurbs about Web 2.0 type companies

-----

After discussing LAMP as a major web enabler, I realized you might want a second opinion. So, I found one that agrees with me.

Several months ago, David Axmark and Monty Widenius of the MySQL team visited us in Sebastopol and they dropped a new term in our laps: LAMP. This term was popular in Germany, they said, to define how MySQL was used in conjunction with Linux, Apache, and either Perl, Python, or PHP. Their explanation of LAMP made a lightbulb go off in my head.


At the O'Reilly Network, our editors have been discussing how to unify and focus our open source coverage. ... The lightbulb that went off in my head was that LAMP represents the open source web platform. Most importantly, LAMP is the platform of choice for the development and deployment of high performance web applications. It is solid and reliable, and if Apache is any indicator, then LAMP sites predominate.

Full article

Shameless Plug: NativeTheory.com

Didn't know what to post so i figured I would use this opportunity to show you guys my record label. Native Theory Records is an electronic music record label focusing primarily on deep tech house. There's lots of stuff you can check out on the site. We currently have two releases which have been featured on a couple of major compilations. You can check out clips of the tracks or even buy a copy in our store. Digital distribution is handled by Beatport.com which you can access via the store. You can also get yourself a first edition Native Theory T-Shirt and be the coolest kid on the block.

In the talent section you can download some mp3's of mixes I have made and in the gallery section you can check out some pictures from some of my travels around the world.

Feel free to let me know what you think of the site or the music....

thanks

Hisham

www.nativetheory.com

Newsweek: The New Wisdom of the Web

The article talks about how collative efforts from internet users have changed the dynamics of web and a lot of new web 2.0 ideas are mainly from collative intelligence. Two great examples are the massive success of MySpace and the strategy of Flickr. It also mentioned about some API we talked about in class today. It is just amazing to see how networking effect has been magnified through the use of internet and other web applications.

Donna

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12015774/site/newsweek/

The New Wisdom of the Web
Why is everyone so happy in Silicon Valley again? A new wave of start-ups are cashing in on the next stage of the Internet. And this time, it's all about ... you.

By Steven Levy and Brad Stone
Newsweek

" What makes the Web alive is, quite simply, us. Our presence, most often conducted at the speed of broadband, is constant and mandatory. Thanks to our activity, the Web has replaced phone books, and is in the process of replacing phones. It's the place that answers our questions in four tenths of a second and ships us funny clips that mix the "Back to the Future" guys with the "Brokeback Mountain" soundtrack. It's the main news source for the non-arthritic population, and a megaphone for those who make their own media. As we keep offloading our activities to the Web and adding previously unmanageable or unthinkable new pursuits, it's fair to say that our everyday exist-ence is a network effect. That has made some splendid opportunities for smart, nimble new companies, and threatened the existence of old ones now afloat in the mainstream. "