Where’s SelfServe by MySpace?

Back in November of ’07, MySpace announced the future launch of “SelfServe by MySpace” which would “allow advertisers to directly purchase, create and analyze the performance of ads throughout the MySpace network.”  It was supposed to be in beta for two months then launched in early ’08.  It didn’t happen and ClickZ reported last month that SelfServe may launch in later summer or early fall.  MySpace is being left in the dust by Facebook Social Ads and LinkedIn DirectAds.  Now Orkut, Hi5, Bebo, Ning and the others need to step up to the targeted advertising plate as well.

LinkedIn quietly launches Research Network and DirectAds…let the monetization begin.

LinkedIn DirectAds
LinkedIn has quietly launched a beta version of a dynamic CPM text advertising platform called LinkedIn DirectAds. No formal announcement of the launch was made on the LinkedIn blog or elsewhere. According to the DIrectAds FAQ, advertisers will be able to dynamically target ads by age, gender, geography, educational institution, industry, and seniority. Minimum order size for an advertisement is $25, with the minimum number of impressions dependant on the targeting audience chosen by the advertiser. The rate that you pay for a CPM (1000 impressions) changes as you add or remove targeting options from your ad. Apparently the product will give click-through rates to advertisers, but billing will be based on CPM. In a unique twist, ads will also include the advertisers name and a link to their LinkedIn profile in hopes of “increasing transparency and visibility into the advertiser.” Much like the Facebook SocialAds platform, advertisers must have a profile on the network to launch an ad, although LinkedIn says they are limiting advertisers by completeness of profile, number of connections, date of profile creation and a number of other factors. I was unable to access the platform through my profile.

The DirectAds platform will bring LinkedIn closer to Facebook’s Social Ads technology, with these two leaving Bebo, MySpace, Plaxo, Friendster and the rest of the social networking world behind for now. I hope to be able to try the LinkedIn platform soon and give a head-to-head comparison. LinkedIn will continue to extract a premium on their advertising, as it seems they will be setting the price per CPM internally. A true market (e.g. Overture/pre-Panama Yahoo) or partial market (e.g. Google quality score) influence on price would likely result in prices lower than they would like, and they are clearly avoiding a CPC model for a reason since they are measuring CTR anyways. I think this slow transfer is very smart on their end especially considering their pre-IPO status, but as an advertiser I wish they would switch to a free market faster. Their ad margins will likely be lower than what they were getting with their rate card (although perhaps not), but the volume of advertisements will definitely spike upwards as you no longer have to go through a traditional advertising salesperson process to launch a targeted ad on their network.

LinkedIn Research Network
Additionally, on Thursday of last week LinkedIn quietly launched the LinkedIn Research Network, a product the company first mentioned back in February. No formal announcement of the actual launch was made on the LinkedIn blog or anywhere else, but the Research Network product page is live and linked to from the Premium Product footer, along with job, corporate, and upgrade links. Also linked is a 2 page product summary PDF. The product page outlines what is essentially a premium version of InMail (pdf). A Research Network subscriber can send send 20 InMails at once, and no monthly or daily limits are mentioned. Previously, LinkedIn BusinessPlus subscribers had the most InMail access and were limited to 10 InMails per month, so this is a dramatic increase in potential InMail volume. In the past advertisers could send targeted InMail blasts through LinkedIn’s advertising platform at $1 – $5 per recipient.

The LinkedIn Research Network is an attempt to move into the expert network industry and will be sold primarily to hedge, private equity and venture funds. According to a recent Integrity Research Associates report, there are roughly 25 expert networks in existence today. Aside from my company KnowledgeBid, every other expert network service operates on a subscription model. LinkedIn is likely gunning for the fat subscription fees that players like the Gerson Lehrman Group are pulling from investors (+$50k for access to one industry vertical of experts for 6 months), but the product they have launched is far more like the resume search/direct email services offered by Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder, Dice, etc. than an expert network. Perhaps down the road LinkedIn will try to facilitate the actual expert matching, but this iteration of the product just enables subscribers to send a large volume of cold emails to potential consultants. Additionally, the product page makes no mention of facilitating consultant payment and the only compliance functionality mentioned is a “research history”. Legal compliance is arguably the largest issue faced by expert networks today, and something that expert network users have come to expert from service providers. It’s possible that LinkedIn is intentionally not involving themselves with payment of experts in an attempt to remove themselves from the chain of liability if their service were to be used to facilitate insider trading or the like.

Congrats to LinkedIn on the product launches. I’m glad to see them competing with Facebook on the advertising technology side of things (let’s see an API guys!) and will certainly be keeping tabs on these products as they mature.

620,000,000 profiles

I’ve recently been doing some analysis focusing on the growth rates of major social networks and resume databases (I’m saving major blogging platforms for another day, although I’m guessing there are ~400M blogs out there). For the purposes of this analysis I calculated the user profile CAGR for each major social network and resume database, assuming 1M profiles in the launch year and ending with the best estimate of user profiles today (May 2008).

The results show that there are nearly 620,000,000 robust user profiles among these services today, a figure that has grown at a 64% CAGR since ’95. Orkut has grown at the highest CAGR (231%) while MySpace claims the largest raw number of profiles (173M). The chart below nicely illustrates the social networking explosion staring in ’03, underlined by the steady growth of resume databases starting in the mid 90s. The exponentially higher growth rates of social networks can be attributed to the viral features that have come to define them. Traditional resume databases are useful but are generally non-viral so they continue to grow steadily. This analysis does not take into account spam and fake profiles and the chart massively simplifies the growth trends by retrospectively applying each company’s CAGR.

• CareerBuilder
• Alexa #8
• Launched 1995
• 24M resumes
• Average 1.85M additions per year
• 28% CAGR

• HotJobs
• Alexa #1 (Y! site)
• Launched 1996
• 30M resumes
• Average 2.5M additions per year
• 33% CAGR

• HI5
• Alexa #76
• Launched 1996
• 98M user profiles
• Average 8.16M additions per year
• 47% CAGR

• Monster
• Alexa #337
• Launched 1999
• 80M resumes
• Average 8.88M additions per year
• 63% CAGR

• MySpace
• Alexa #3
• Launched 2003
• 173M user profiles
• Average 34.6M additions per year
• 180% CAGR

• LinkedIn
• Alexa #54
• Launched 2003
• 22M user profiles
• Average 4.4M additions per year
• 86% CAGR

• Facebook
• Alexa #5
• Launched 2004
• 70M user profiles
• Average 17.5M additions per year
• 189% CAGR

• Orkut
• Alexa #51
• Launched in 2004
• 120M user profiles
• Average 30M additions per year
• 231% CAGR

My picks: The best service providers for startups

A friend of mine…I’ll call him Arnold Babar…is in the early stages of starting a company. Over a few beers the other night, Arnold asked me a few general questions about service providers we’ve used for various aspects of building the KnowledgeBid expert network management platform and other projects. A few came to mind immediately…then I thought of a few later that night…then a few more the next day. I’m putting them all into a post in the hopes that I might save someone else the hours of head + wall collisions it took me to find these guys. I’m only going to include services that I use heavily myself and would recommend to a close personal friend. I’ll add to this as more come to me. My top priorities: 1) cost; 2) functionality / flexibility; 3) quality; 4) reliability.

Best Corporate Telephony / PBX / Fax Service: RingCentral
My previous write-up on RingCentral is here. Super flexible PBX, digital fax delivery, digital voice mail delivery, $19.95/month. Can’t beat it. Mac friendly except for the sound recording / uploading feature.

Best Payment Processing Service: Braintree Payment Solutions
My previous write-up on Braintree is here. The payment processing industry is a total mess. The Braintree guys are straight shooters. Save yourself serious pain and go straight to them.

Best Press Release Services: PRZOOM, The Open Press
The web has antiquated the newswire industry. These two providers are free and get your PR messages on sites other than your own, which is all you really need. PRWeb and the others try to get you to pay, but it’s really not worth it.

Best Conference Call Service: Free Conference
My previous write-ups on the free conference call industry are here. The FCC says these guys can stay in business and so long as you just need them to work for your call tomorrow or next week, you’ll be fine. Call quality is good and reliability is good. I would advise against trying to bake them into your app though…you get what you pay for and who knows how long their loophole will be open.

Best Desktop Sharing Software: Glance
This a simple, functional, reliable piece of software perfect for sharing your desktop for demos. No install needed for your clients, but this means there is no way to see the screen of the person on the other end. It’s $39/month and WebEx has dropped prices in response. There may be some free stuff out there too but I would rather have my demos work and pay a little. Glance is Mac friendly, WebEx is not.

Best Domain Registrar: One and One
One and One is clean, easy to use, without constant upselling, ads and pop-ups. GoDaddy is a nightmare IMO.

Best Hosting Service: M5 Hosting
Previous mention here. These guys were referred to us by a friend and they have done a great job so far. Stay the hell away from MediaTemple.

Best Blog Platform: WordPress.com, WordPress.org
The best blogging and simple content management system out there, IMO. Open source so there are an amazing number of plug-ins, style sheets, and high quality WordPress designers out there so you can really make anything. WordPress.com is a free, hosted blogging platform (example here) while you need to host WordPress.org on your own server (example here, here, and here).

Best Corporate Email Solution: Google Apps for Your Domain
Face it, yourcompanyname@gmail.com is JV. Google Apps makes it free and easy to have Google tools under your own domain.

Best Bug Tracker: Mantis
We’re coming up on our 300th mantis ticket and so far, so good. Free, open source bug tracking & project management. We tried some of the more trendy solutions out there and were very disappointed.

Best Stock Photography: Stockxpert
High quality stock photography on a pay-as-you-go model. Many other players out there have high subscription fees which sucks when you only need 1 or 2 pictures. Examples here and here.

Best Professional Voice Recording: VoiceVector
These guys and gals are based in Alaska but you wouldn’t know it. $1o for your first 12 words and $8 for each additional group of 12 or fewer words in a single recording. Quick, easy, high quality, and they give you your recording in lots of formats. For example call here.

Best Screencast Solution: Camtasia
The web video world is like the credit card processing world…it’s a total mess. Camtasia makes it easy to record a screencast, polish it up, and host it so anyone can watch it. Example here. They have a free demo period. Tip: don’t try to cut and splice within a single recording – just go all the way through.

Best Competitive / Industry Monitor: Google Alerts
Previous write-up here. Cut down on your unnecessary news reading and get productive.

_______________________

I’d love to hear comments on these and other solid services out there. I’m actively looking for these:

Best Headset for Blackberry 8703e

Best Low Volume SMS Solution

Best Free CRM

Best Password / Login Manager

Efficiency through Google alerts

One of the reasons my posting has slowed over the last month or so is because I have drastically cut down on my news consumption and a good amount of my posting was derivative of the random stuff I read on the web. I still check my Netvibes page every day or two, but in the past I spent at least an hour a day staying current on various tech, econ, VC, law and entrepreneur blogs and news sources. A major factor in my slimmed down news diet has been thanks to Google alerts. I’ve set up alerts for a variety of keywords that I’m interested in monitoring (my company name, competitive company names, friends’ company names, my name, etc.) and get emails from Google alerts when new material is on the web that includes those keywords. I didn’t realize it at the time, but a big driver behind my news consumption was the fear that I would “miss something” relevant to my life. Google Alerts is far more efficient in monitoring the web that I could ever be, and now I can spend my time on more important things without worry that I may be out of the loop.

Tiffany v. eBay trial slated to begin November 13th

I got fed up with the 2 week delay on the SDNY Pacer system and called Judge Sullivan’s office today to find out what’s going on with the Tiffany v. eBay case. Trial is slated to begin on November 13th. The latest round of settlement conferences were a result of the case being switched from Judge Karas to Judge Sullivan last spring.

Considering the timeline thus far, I’m not holding my breath.

YouTube and the Napster trajectory, Part II

Back in May, I compared the pending Viacom suit against Google/YouTube to the trajectory seen in the infamous Napster litigation.

Recent developments: Google has introduced “YouTube Video Identification” to help rights holders monitor infringing content. Predictably, Viacom has stated that this is an inadequate step and they are still being harmed by YouTube.

Thus far, the Napster  trajectory has been followed.  To continue on the same path, Viacom will ask for an injunction against YouTube alleging irreparable harm and will ask the court to order Napster-esq 100% compliance…which is what caused Napster to shut down before the case made it into a courtroom. Only time will tell whether the injunction will be granted, what level of compliance is deemed adequate, and what level of compliance YouTube can maintain.

Interestingly, the YouTube Video Identification technology is extremely similar to the Proactive Fraud Protection service created by eBay in response to the Tiffany & Co suit they are battling (or have settled on the sly). Both systems are “tools” that IP rights holders can use. Neither system puts any responsibilities on eBay or YouTube to proactively filter content or identify improper material. Tiffany & Co. and Viacom argue that the service providers are profiting from the infringing material and should carry the burden of monitoring it. YouTube and eBay argue that there is no way for them to tell what is a real Tiffany’s ring or Friends video clip.

RingCentral

If you find this writeup helpful,  you can use this number as a RingCentral referral code: 8005764104.  I’ll get some free minutes if you use it.  Also hit this link for $10 off  RingCentral and this one for 10% off.

I’ve been playing around with a service called RingCentral over the last few days. RingCentral subscribers get dedicated 800 or local numbers with set minutes per month for set prices. Packages start at $15 for 100 minutes. Nothing crazy, right? Well, check out the functionality they offer on top of the number.  Not only can you route your RingCentral number to any other number (like a cell phone), you can:

• route outgoing calls through your RingCentral number so it shows up on recipient caller ID
• receive faxes via email
• send faxes directly from email
• receive voicemail audio files via email
• configure virtual a PBX switchboard (5 extensions for the $15 packages)
• configure separate voicemail boxes for virtual extensions
• drop a pre-configured click-to-call widget onto a website

Additionally, you can load rules on top of the number based on time and caller ID, so can easily do things like route calls directly to voicemail after business hours or block calls from specific callers. I’ve had the number for a bit more than a week and haven’t yet to received a spam fax and have been blown away by their customer service. I had an extensive chat with a salesperson who talked me through the product and have called tech support several times since I signed up to figure out features. I reached helpful people on the phone extremely quickly. This is more than I can say for eFax: terrible customer support and tons of spam. It was even an ordeal to cancel my account with them. Leave a comment if you’re thinking about signing up with RingCentral and I’ll give you a referral code (edit:  see bottom of this writeup for a code). Thus far I highly recommend the service.

GrandCentral (who I’ve written about before) offers similar services but is targeted towards personal use and has been closed to new users since they were acquired by Goooooogle. Interestingly, according to GigaOm, their pricing plan was nearly identical to what RingCentral currently offers ($15/100 minutes/month). However, GrandCentral recently changed ~400 subscriber numbers, which is illustrative of the dangers involved in using a service like this – the number you get is not technically yours. GrandCentral stated that they had to change the numbers because a “pre-acquisition underlying carrier stopped providing services to certain areas”. It’s unclear which providers are underneath GrandCentral, but I’m pretty sure Ingenio is under RingCentral.

RingCentral has an interesting background to say the least. They were founded in 1991, were part of Motorola from ’98 – ’99, and raised a $6.25m A round in January ’07 from Khosla and Sequoia. There are no typos in that sentence. They went 16 years from founding to Series A, with a corporate acquisition in between. So Sequoia and Khlosa put $6m into a 16 year old RingCentral in January and Google bought nearly identical GrandCentral for ~$50m in June. I’ve already written about my theory on the GrandCentral aquisition. Maybe I’m right on that, maybe I’m wrong. Either way there is some interesting stuff going on in this space. Of course I could be way off and GrandCentral could have been bought so every GPhone user has a GNumber…

Google v. Yelp: Future of local = trackable calls

I posted a while back about the backstory to Google’s acquisition of Grand Central being the need to create a artificial clickstream for non-PPC advertising.  Another move was made in that space today.  TechCrunch is reporting that local advertiser Marchex purchased VoiceStar for $28m.  This stuff is so straightforward to do and makes so much sense, it may be that in the near future most local ads have advertisement specific phone numbers.  The only downside is that the advertiser has lots of phone numbers floating around in the ether, but the upside for them could be tremendous.  The challenges presented are the same as always for local:  innumerable small business owners to reach out to who are very set in their ways and are very busy.

It’s surprising to me that Yelp.com is not in the PPC space yet.  Google’s announcement earlier this week that they’re going to pay Joe Citizen $10 per local business profile formally threw down the gauntlet with Yelp, and we know Google is getting Grand Central ready…

New look, new platform, same blog

So I finally made the switch over to WordPress from Blogger. Blogger served me well, but WordPress has features and flexibility that Blogger doesn’t have. It’s a lot easier to change the design and it generally functions much smoother. Blogger is actually a bit better with embedding videos, widgets, etc. but WordPress ironically has built in analytics that run on Urchin…which was bought by Google…who owns Blogger. Maybe someday Google will integrate all of the stuff they’ve bought and reclaim control of the internet. I’ll be here for the time being though. The conversion was generally painless, but I need to go back through my posts at some point and brush things up a bit. Also, it maybe worth noting that the tag links associated my posts go to “global” WordPress tags. The “categories” tags on the right side filter the stuff on this blog by tag.  Not sure if anyone clicks those.

Thus far, WordPress seems great. Also, I highly recommend domain purchasing and management provider One and One. Everyone says that blogging platforms and domain providers are the same, but they really aren’t. Thanks to Joe for perfecting the CSS here and Chad for the One and One heads up a long ways back.  I haven’t seen much of Chad since he started running with the horses in the hills west of San Diego a few years back though.

Let me know what you think. Your comment will show up in my new super sweet “recent comments” section..

The story behind Google’s acquisition of Grand Central: Pay-Per-Call

Google’s purchase of Grand Central has been confirmed. Grand Central has interesting technology that allows for lots of cool phone number control and functionality, like clicking buttons on websites that call phone numbers directly, ringing different phones depending on the incoming callers, and detailed web based call reports.

I guarantee the purpose of this acquisition is to beef up Google local and other non-PPC Google advertising. When someone clicks on an ad in the search results, Google sees the click, logs it, and bills the advertiser for it. This is how they generate +$1B in net income per quarter. Lots of people click those ads, and advertisers are willing to pay for the traffic.

Most other forms of advertising don’t result in web traffic. Radio ads are generally just heard, billboard ads are generally just seen…even local search ads might not even be clicked – they might just result in a direct phone call. This is the biggest challenge Google faces with non-PPC ads: lack of clickstream. A telephony platform like Grand Central, if it can be scaled, will allow Google to route phone numbers and track inbound calls to advertisers of all types…a pay-per-call platform. Google has dabbled with pay-per-call/click-to-call in the past with mixed results, but if local is truly the next frontier, they need to make it work…they must think they can do it with Grand Central’s technology.

Feedburner on Chicago

Today’s Wallstrip interview is with Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo. I recently posted about the Feedburner/Google acquisition rumors and how it would be a big event for Chicago if it were to go through. In his interview, Dick said he is long on Chicago but thinks “it needs to do something about its technology environment.” Interesting…I wonder what he has in mind.

When I tried to embed the Wallstrip video here, but it didn’t work (the embed link went to this dead link: wallstrip.cbsnews.comtheshow). Wallstrip was acquired by CBS on Wednesday, and now there are lots of dead links to Wallstrip out there, all with CBS in them, including the one on Wallstrip investor Fred Wilson’s blog linking to the acquisition announcement. Ironically, in his Wallstrip interview Costolo also said he was long on CBS…

Google + Feedburner = big for Chicago

TechCrunch is confirming a $100M term sheet between Google and Chicago based Feedburner, backed by Chicago based DFJ Portage. If this deal goes through, it will make Feedburner the biggest Chicago tech success in recent years…possibly the biggest since Orbitz? Also, assuming Feedburner stays where they are, it will make Chicago a significant non-Mountainview engineering location for Google.

Either way, Feedburner is great. I “burn my feeds” with them for this site and use their site to monitor my blog traffic. I’m a bit doubtful that Google will make $100M in feed based advertising from them, but history has shown that they don’t seem to care about such things.

If you had $1,800 for every terabyte…

If you had $1,800 for every terabyte of data in existence, you would have roughly 1.4 trillion dollars, which is the approximate total amount of hedge fund capital. If you had $1,800 for every terabyte organized by Google, you could buy a nice apartment in San Francisco.

Hedge fund dollars
$1,400,000,000,000
Terabytes of data in existence
750,000,000 (and this – growth rate)

Terabytes of data organized by Google
500
Terabytes of storage capacity on the GLOW System
200

YouTube and the Napster trajectory

TechCrunch today points to a Business Week article that indicates settlement talks are not underway between YouTube and Viacom and that the Google is going to fight this one out with their ninja trial team. Like Napster tried to do before them, YouTube will be banking on the DMCA in their defense.

It will be extremely interesting to see how closely YouTube will stick to the Napster trajectory. When Napster was sued by RIAA, RIAA asked the district court for an immediate court ordered injunction barring Napster from facilitating all peer-to-peer swapping of copyright protected material. RIAA argued that Napster was causing the record companies irreparable harm and waiting until the case went to trial would be too heavy of a burden for the companies to bear. The court agreed with RIAA and ordered Napster to block 100% of copyright material from their system. They were able to keep approximately 99% off their system using music “fingerprint” technology (now SnoCap) but weren’t able to maintain 100% compliance. Thus, they broke the terms of the court ordered injunction, were ordered to shut down completely to comply, and were never able to full argue the DMCA in court.

If YouTube follows this same trajectory, Viacom will argue that YouTube is causing them irreparable harm now and ask the court for an injunction. If the court grants the injunction sticks to the 100% threshold used in the Napster injunction, YouTube will then have to keep 100% of Viacom content (Comedy Central, MTV, etc.) off the YouTube system and if Viacom can spot one instance of their content on YouTube after the injunction is granted, the courts will order YouTube to be shut down to comply.

Granted, the 100% threshold in Napster was extremely harsh, and it is very likely that a court would see a far greater “legitimate use” in YouTube than they saw in Napster, but either way, there will be some very interesting drama down the road.

JotSpot/Google screenshots

My recent post about being frustrated by Google’s lack of application integration got me thinking and I remembered that I created a JotSpot account for a side project before Google bought them. Turns out it’s still alive…which is nice to look at, but it’s super frustrating because I’ve wanted to start wikis on several occasions over the last months and have had to use inferior products. The features for this look pretty awesome and perfect for small business. I’ll be interested to see how good the bug tracker is. As pissed as I am at them dragging their heels, I can guarantee I’ll use this product when it (re)launches.

Interesting that it looks like they’ll be charging for the service…very un-Googley. Also strange that there is a spreadsheet app but no sign of a doc app. Maybe this is what they are waiting on.

[I use Blogger, owned by Google, to run blog. Apparently they didn't like me posting these screenshots and they edited them out. Thanks Google!]

Google continues to acquire…and not to integrate.

Google’s had a recent spurt of activity with their potential $3.1 B purchase of DoubleClick, a partnership deal with ClearChannel, and their acquisition of Tonic and announcement of a PowerPoint competitor.

I have been using Google Apps for Your Domain and Google Docs and Spreadsheets a lot lately and I really wish that Google would focus on integrating the +80 products they already have instead of continuing to grow their portfolio. To date the only product they have officially shut down in Google Answers. They bought YouTube but still have Google Video running. I can login to Apps for Your Domain directly but I can’t use that login through Gmail. I have an old JotSpot account and I can see through that account that Google has some awesome features in there, but they haven’t opened up JotSpot since they bought it over 6 months ago and they have no wiki product in Apps for Your Domain or Docs and Spreadsheets…but both of these are supposed to be one-stop-shops for small business information infrastructure.

Grrrr…….

Daily Show on Viacom v. YouTube

This is pretty great.

Mom, they bleep out some swears.

Lichtman, Viacom & YouTube

Douglas Lichtman, IP legal guru and rising professorial star at the University of Chicago Law School, has joined the YouTube fray on the side of Viacom. His recent piece in the LA Times indicates that he is working for Viacom, although I am guessing he isn’t doing it pro bono. Lichtman is a high profile contract consultant for the Gerson Lehrman Group, and I’m sure he bills out at a pretty penny. He is also my patent law professor, and the first class meeting is tomorrow morning. Should be interesting…

Mark Cuban & the DMCA

Mark Cuban, the guy who sold streaming video and audio site Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999 (unclear if Yahoo’s failure to own the space is the fault of Broadcast.com or Yahoo) and later bought the Dallas Mavericks, really has it out for Google and YouTube. Cuban has branded himself a defender of copyright and anti-piracy, both reasonable positions, but he consistently doesn’t give the whole picture to his hordes of fanboys.

Case in point: I came across one of his posts today while researching the DMCA definition of OSP (online service provider). The legislation contains no real definition and courts have historically treated it as open-ended. Cuban thinks that the DMCA shouldn’t apply to websites since they weren’t specifically included within the definition of an OSP in the legislation – specifically, he thinks YouTube isn’t an OSP and shouldn’t be able to get into the DMCA safe harbor. This is an interesting position to take, but Cuban doesn’t mention the fact that if a court were to take this position, it would be go against the majority (if not all) other courts that have been faced the same situation. Hendrickson v. eBay, the flagship DMCA case, does just this and treats eBay as an OSP.

It’s possible that a court could look at YouTube and the DMCA and say that they are not an OSP, but this would be a major reversal of past precedents. Granted, the reviewing court may not be bound by the precedent set (Hendrickson was in federal district court in CA), but courts are far more likely to look to non-binding precedents before they dig into legislative history, as Cuban suggests they should.

Sorry for the law nerd rant.

Google Trends

One of my favorite Google applications to mess around with is Google Trends. The service allows users to see search volume for different queries over time, and allows for comparison. Some interesting ones:

Blue: LinkedIn
Red: Plaxo

Blue: “Yahoo Answers“
Red: “Google Answers“

Blue: Harvard
Red: Stanford

Blue: Linux
Green: PHP
Orange: MySQL
Red: Apache

Those Google guys have some cool data.

Reasons to blog

I started this blog for several reasons, the primary of which was to have an outlet for my thoughts. Ben Casnocha had a good post a while back on the benefits of blogging, the focus & research it demands, and the benefit of forcing intellectual engagement. I agree with all of Ben’s points, but I think he misses an obvious one that is clearly part of my motivation and I am willing to bet is a backdrop to Ben’s voluminous posting as well.

It sounds silly and stale, but blogging gives you an “online identity”…not in the sense of a Second Life identity (e.g.: you can be a furry ninja bear-man) but in the way that a web designer’s online portfolio creates an identity that is accessible and available when someone wants to research their work. For those that don’t have concrete evidence of their work product on the web like designers and developers, blogging is like creating a portfolio for your thinking and thought processes. Doing diligence on someone that has a blog is really, really easy. It gives you access to their thoughts over a long span of time, lets you analyze their writing style and thought processes, and shows what they spend most of their time thinking about. The more you blog, the bigger your online record gets, which in turn makes it easier for people to learn about what makes you tick.

Also, the more your blog and the more people read your site, the easier it is for people to find you in the first place. For example, I can see in my site stats from yesterday that six people found my blog by searching on variations of rob, webb, blog, and university of chicago in Google. Before I started blogging, if you Googled my name you would get lots of stuff about the British actor Robert Webb (who, pictured, was the host of Numberwang and Peep Show) and some Rhodesian guy’s homepage. Thanks to this blog, I’m at the top of the results for “rob webb blog” and about to crack the first page for “rob webb.” Thus, in the future when potential employers, coworkers, employees, and investors want to learn about me, it’ll be easy for them to find this blog and sneak a peak into my head.

So, as long as I hold back on posting my thoughts on Iraq, gay marriage, abortion, politics, gun control, school testing, smoking bans, trans fats, Scooter Libby, global warming, religion in schools, and anything else that isolates and polarizes, I’ll be in the clear…

Shift Happens

My good buddy Jake sent me this presentation, which was originally written by Karl Fisch and was adapted by Scott McLeod. When I first watched it, I was thinking how I would love to see a footnoted version…and then I found it. Pretty powerful stuff. I bet this will be viral pretty fast.

I found the 1.5 exabytes of new information each year figure to be especially interesting in light of Schmidt’s 2005 5 million terabytes figure. 1.5 exabytes = 1.5 million terabytes, so we are now up around 6.5 million terabytes in the world, and Google has indexed approximately 500 of these, which puts them back down to .07%, but that’s up from .0034%. It seems to me that Schmit and Co. probably extrapolated their figures from the ’03 Berkeley report where the 1.5 exabyte figure came from, which I referenced in my .0034% post, but there I missed the 1.5 growth number. All 100 pages of the report can be downloaded in .pdf form here.

Google in on the Tiffany v. eBay fray

A little digging revealed that Google entered the Tiffany v. eBay fray as an interested party on the side of eBay. Google attorney Ashok Ramani, partner at San Francisco litigation boutique Keker & Van Nest, applied to practice in New York State on the case (pro hac vice). Court approval of his involvement and admittance to practice law in New York is below. As is shown in the time line below, the case was referred to a magistrate court judge for settlement negotiations on 11/7/06 and the parties had a conference call with the magistrate on 12/20/06. Maybe this is standard puffery to get in good graces with the court? [Edit: turns out it is required] Strangely, the one news source that picked up on the settlement referral was this story in Women’s Wear Daily. This is a bit bizarre in light of the press coverage the case got in 2004 when it was initiated and has received intermittently since. [Edit: not bizarre at all - every civil suit in SDNY that is seeking monetary damages must go through settlement negotiations]. No news sources reported on Ashok Ramani’s involvement in the litigation.

1. 6/18/04 COMPLAINT against eBay Inc. filed by Tiffany (NJ) Inc., Tiffany and Company
2. 6/18/04 SUMMONS ISSUED as to eBay Inc.
3. 7/15/04 AMENDED COMPLAINT filed by Tiffany (NJ) Inc., Tiffany and Company.
4. 10/1/04 ANSWER to Amended Complaint with JURY DEMAND filed by eBay Inc.
5. 8/11/05 MOTION to Amend/Correct Answer to Amended Complaint filed by eBay Inc.
6. 11/3/05 NOTICE OF CASE REASSIGNMENT to Judge Kenneth M. Karas. Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald no longer assigned to the case.
7. 3/31/06 ORDER denying 14 Motion to Amend/Correct Answer.
8. 4/14/06 MOTION for Ashok Ramani to Appear Pro Hac Vice. Document filed by Google, Inc.
9. 5/4/06 STIPULATION AND ORDER; that the trial of this case shall be by the court sitting without a jury.
10. 5/11/06 ORDER granting Motion for Ashok Ramani to Appear Pro Hac Vice.
11. 11/6/06 Trial will begin on 5/14/07. Plntfs’ response to motion in limine must be submitted no later than
12. 11/20/06 Deft’s reply is due no later than 12/15/06.
13. 11/7/06 ORDER REFERRING CASE TO MAGISTRATE JUDGE. Order that case be referred to the Clerk of Court for assignment to a Magistrate Judge for Settlement. Referred to Magistrate Judge James C. Francis.
14. 11/20/06 OPPOSITION BRIEF TO MOTION IN LIMINE filed by Tiffany
15. 12/15/06 REPLY MEMORANDUM OF LAW in Support re: MOTION in Limine filed by eBay Inc.
16. 12/20/06 Minute Entry for proceedings held before Judge James C. Francis : Telephone Conference held on 12/20/2006

Google up to .01% of the world’s information

Marissa Mayer did a phenomenal job of fielding questions after her very informative talk today at the Kellogg Technology Conference. I was able to sneak in a question during the session and asked her if she could ballpark the number of terabytes that Google had indexed to date – her guess was 500. If she is right, then they are up 330 terabytes, or 194%, from 170 where Schmidt thought they were 16 months ago. That’s pretty good! However, if you take all of the numbers from Schmidt’s speech as valid, specifically that 5 million terabytes of data exist, then they have now organized .01% of the world’s information, up from .0034%. Interestingly, Marissa spent not an insignificant portion of her talk focusing on the acquisition of offline data via projects like Google Books, Picasa, etc…

As you can see, I have convinced myself that 500 terabytes, in the scheme of things, isn’t that much. This may be crazy, especially considering I don’t really trust my conceptualization of how much data is in a gigabyte, let alone a terabyte. However, the fact that 1TB servers are commonplace and Apple announced last month that they were shipping 10.5 terabyte servers (for a mere $12,399) makes me think I’m not too far out in left field on this. Pictured to the left is the 200 terabyte GLOW system that the University of Wisconsin physics department has put together. Yes, the information Google has organized is likely a larger percentage of the “useful” information out there. Yes, what you take your definition of “information” to be makes a huge impact on this analysis. Yes, the information Google has indexed may be on the “light” side of the spectrum. And yes, these servers I’m talking about are HUGE. But the fact is, all of the information that Google has indexed could be put onto roughly 48 Apple Xserve RAID servers, or 2.5 of these behemoths.

The question that follows for me: why is Google building all these massive computing centers if all of their information can be stored in the area the size of a large walk in closet? Tthe answer to this was covered also covered by Marissa in her presentation: she mapped out what happens when you run a search on Google and showed how Google searchs hundreds of millions of sites in less than a second. So these data centers are needed to get nearly instant access to an amount of data that could be stored on 48 commercially available computers.

Edit: If google continues at the 194% growth rate, they will hit 5MTB in roughly 28 years…that’s a lot better than 300 years…