Category: Technology

The buzz about the iPhone is certainly understandable. It has Jobs at his best behind it. There is no denying that Jobs is the ultimate marketing guru of our times.

But that alone does not justify the fuss. The iPhone is sleek and has plenty of cool. But a really high price point, a real product 6 months away, plus a commitment to Cingular — these are BIG drawbacks among others. The next several months will show how far Apple can translate this buzz into real $. Check out Steve Ballmer’s reaction/response to the iPhone.

On another note, Apple’s increasing consumer bent (no longer Apple Computer but just Apple) more than justifies an eventual synergy (or coming together) with Sony. Pixar to Disney and Apple to Sony?

eBay has started to charge Skype users fro the new year. Not in the least surprising. An exodus of early Skype employees continues. What was eBay thinking when they paid billions for Skype?

Build something cool, give it for free, burn cash until the white knight steps forward with a huge check and the investors (and sometimes the founders too) laugh all the way to the bank. One could argue that this kind of madness does drive innovation while making a handful of founders and investors obscenely rich. Not a bad deal if you are not an eBay shareholder or ….

Btw, when is Google gonna start charging for Youtube? 🙂

Youtube has what sounds like a really cool new feature. See here for more details. If you have a webcam attached, you can simply record directly record to Youtube (along with audio) live video shots from the webcam. The flood gates to more user generated junk has further opened up. Who cares as long as advertisers are around to write the checks!

I clicked on a link in an email to go to a specific site. The site is called AlwaysOn. And here is what I saw 🙂

Brad Garlinghouse’s (a Yahoo senior vice president) internal memo was leaked to the press. It does a lot of damage to the company without a doubt. The outside world has expressed deep concerns about Yahoo in general of late (as reflected in its stock price). This memo just confirms that these concerns are most valid.

The first thing Yahoo should do is to investigate and identify the source of the leak. Its completely stupid to leak this memo. Its hard to believe that Brad did it himself (as some in the blogosphere folks claim).

I noticed that Gmail has made some UI changes particularly when reading and replying to email. Man, and it has become much slower! Bad idea.

Already Gmail is slow when the connection is not superfast. The new changes have made it worse.

I recently attended a conference focused on startups. The topic uppermost on the minds of all and sundry was Google’s 1.65B acquisition of Youtube. It has certainly left most people scratching their heads. Entrepreneurs are busy trying to figure out how Youtube did it. “They have no f….. business model” complained one. “More than half the stuff there is copyrighted stuff” complained another. “What technology do they have? Nothing. What business model do they have? Nothing. Yet every VC I talk to wants to see these! How the heck did these guys get funded?”, lamented another.

There have been experts who have claimed that Youtube was profitable. There have been others who have questioned the math.

Check out this article in the Mercury News. Here is a relevant quote from the article.

“I don’t think we would have spent $1.6 billion to acquire YouTube,” Levinsohn said. But, he added, “If you’re going to run a (sale) process of one of the hottest companies on the Internet, you should do that openly. There’s no advantage to shareholders to do these things in private. You don’t necessarily get the best value in the market. If it were out being shopped, maybe it could have sold for $2 billion.”

Based on this comment one can certainly infer that Fox was never approached by Youtube. Considering that Fox has deep pockets, Fox had recently acquired MySpace, and the fact that Google recently had a huge ad deal with Fox, it would make sense for Youtube to have at least approached Fox?

Sequoia — backers of both Youtube and Google won’t obviously comment on this. But if you are an entrepreneur, you would do well to stop trying to figure out Youtube’s business model or its non-existent technology edge and instead see if you can get the right VC to back your next idea — dotcomm-ish or otherwise. The fact the Sequoia would laugh all the way to the bank was a foregone conclusion (scroll down to see my comment/prediction:-), well at least for the most part.

Upgraded to the new Firefox 2.0. My bookmarks vanished. Then I uninstalled and re-installed it and magically the bookmarks re-appeared.

Didn’t find any dramatic changes in the new version. Good news is that it hasn’t crashed so far. I noticed that when you have multiple tabbed pages open it doesn’t prompt the you when you “kill” the browser window. I thought it previously used to prompt before exiting?

The user experience is far superior to IE 7.0 in my opinion.