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The Facebook economy：Hacker 主導のWebビスネス展開のスピードとスケールは業界にショックを与える

ishida — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 07:09:20 CST

http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/22/technology/facebook_economy.biz2/index.htm?postversion=2007082307

Facebook economy

The No. 2 social network is fast evolving into a new kind of software platform - and the race is on to figure out how to turn users' every move into dollars for enterprising developers.

今年５月、Social Network Service No2のFacebookはネットワークそのものをディベロッパーに開放、アプリケーション作成を通じて、自由に商売を展開することを認めた。

FacebookのCEO のMark Zuckerbergは”広告収入だけでも１０億ドルに達する市場でハッカーもその分け前を手にする権利がある”と宣言。Facebookのユーザプロファイルとプログラムツールを公開した。(Where the Web 2.0 Stars were born参照　http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/biz2/0708/gallery.web2_0_stars.biz2/2.html)

その上、ディベロッパへのインセンティブを高めるため、さらに、競合他社と差別化するため、重要な顧客データ（ユーザの年齢、興味、友人）を共有することで、より洗練されたアプリケーション開発を可能とした。

ZuckerbergはMySpaceのビジネスモデルを完全に逆転させ、Facebook内にディベロッパーが自らの持ち分（real estate すなわち、capital gain享受が可能なソフトウエア資産）を保有することを認めた。ユーザーのプロフィール内とFacebookに乗っているアプリケーションページ上に、自由に広告を載せて、広告収入、更にサービス、商品販売から収入を得ることを認めた。

現在、Facebook economyと言われる現象が出現、わずか10週間の間に数百のディベロッパーが2500以上のアプリケーションを公開、139百万のダウンロードを実現。いずれFacebookのIPO で環境は一夜にして一変する可能性があるが、現状では全て無料である。

あるベンチャーは50個のFacebook アプリケーションの立ち上げ用に12百万ドルを用意。

この記事では具体的に商売展開のアドバイス、先進事例と参考ツール紹介等を次の４項目で展開
１。広告の販売
２。スポンサー募集
３。サービス販売
４。プロダクト販売

By Lindsay Blakely and Michael V. Copeland, Business 2.0 Magazine
August 23 2007: 7:31 AM EDT
(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Talk about a killer app. Two years ago Jia Shen and Lance Tokuda wrote, just for fun, a goofy Web application for MySpace that could turn anyone's photos into live-action slide shows. It succeeded - horribly. Within days of its launch, hordes of users at the then-superhot social network discovered the app, added it to their profiles, and communicated it to their friends. It spread like a case of Ebola at the Super Bowl. Within a month Shen and Tokuda had 100,000 users, and traffic was doubling every 24 hours.
The servers - those digital canaries in the mine shaft - crashed, and crashed again. "It was crazy," Shen says. "We were down 17 of the first 30 days." Then it got worse. With traffic peaking at 1.5 million users, server costs topped $20,000 a month. And there was no way to monetize their creation.
Still, they soldiered on for more than a year, keeping afloat with tens of thousands of dollars in loans while hoping to figure out a way to turn their enormous fan base into a brilliant business. It never happened - at least not on MySpace.
This spring, however, Shen and Tokuda spent a few days porting their MySpace hit over to Facebook. The upstart social network began as a hangout for high school and college students and last September allowed anyone to join.
Eight months later, Facebook did something MySpace still hasn't done: It opened up its network to developers and made it easy for them to make money from their applications. Which is exactly what Shen and Tokuda did when they rewrote their app and let it loose on Facebook.
Two months later, the duo had generated more than $200,000 in ad revenue. By late July they had 14 other apps up and running, with more than 22 million users. "When we started, we had no idea what we were doing," Shen says. "Now we have a whole suite of applications, and that's where our power is."
It's an increasingly common tale as the Facebook economy picks up steam. In just 10 weeks, hundreds of developers launched more than 2,500 new applications, triggering 139 million downloads. While a possible Facebook IPO or acquisition could change things overnight, for the moment it's a free-for-all.
The apps have names like FoodFight, Zombies, (fluff)Friends, and Fortune Cookie, and they let users indulge in everything from scrawling graffiti and sending virtual cocktails to buying music, brokering loans, and joining charitable causes - usually without leaving their Facebook homepages. Some apps have attracted hundreds of thousands of users, and a select few have pulled in millions.
One venture capital firm, Sand Hill Road-based Bay Partners, has set aside more than $12 million to bootstrap 50 new Facebook applications. "The current apps only scratch the surface of what is possible," says Salil Deshpande, a partner at the firm. "We're looking for much more sophisticated applications that can make money."
Developers like Shen have already proven how to use Facebook - and other social networks - to pull in a mass audience. But figuring out how to profit from those viral applications is another matter. So far, most of the revenue from Facebook apps comes from fairly primitive forms of advertising, such as Google (Charts, Fortune 500) AdSense. Yet a few developers are building applications to sell real and virtual goods. And others think they'll be able to charge major brands for access to the highly targeted Facebook crowds they've started to assemble. "We intend to build a giant company on top of these social operating systems," says Slide CEO Max Levchin, who's already made one fortune as a co-founder of PayPal. His startup specializes in photo slide shows that pull in more than 129 million users a month. "It's an opportunity for all of us to build the next Electronic Arts, Intuit, or Adobe."
The Facebook economy was born one afternoon in May, when the insouciant boy hero of social networking, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, told a crowd of developers in San Francisco what they had been dying to hear: that hackers deserve a real piece of the action in a market with ad revenue alone approaching $1 billion.
"Right now, social networks are closed platforms," Zuckerberg told the assembled entrepreneurs. "Today we are going to end that." That day Facebook began allowing programmers like Shen to build as many apps for Facebook's 32 million users as they could dream up - and to pocket whatever money they made doing it, with Facebook providing access to both the audience and the programming tools needed to draw them in.
Programmers talk about Zuckerberg and Facebook in the same terms they once used to describe Bill Gates and Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500), so great are the power that social networks wield and the perceived stranglehold Facebook has on its growing audience. MySpace, by far the largest of these networks, with more than 100 million users, was the first to see them as software platforms, allowing users to customize their profiles by adding simple apps. But when it came to sharing revenue, MySpace held its cards close to its chest: it would quietly permit developers to make money only when their users left the MySpace network.
Zuckerberg has turned the MySpace business model upside down: Not only is he giving developers their own real estate within Facebook - both inside users' profile pages and on piggybacked application pages - but he's allowing them to make money from their apps any way they can, from ad sales to direct purchases of services and merchandise. For example, download iLike, an app that lets you sample and purchase music, and the developer gets a 5 percent kickback if you end up buying songs from iTunes or Amazon.com (Charts, Fortune 500).
To incentivize developers, Facebook is also breaking ranks with rivals by sharing crucial data - such as a user's age, interests, and friends - that enables more sophisticated applications. Zuckerberg also set up a speedy approval process that allows most programmers to load their apps into the network in a matter of days.
Josh Kopelman, a Philadelphia-based venture capitalist and investor in such startups as LinkedIn and Yapta, sees more users coming Facebook's way (ComScore reports Facebook grew 270 percent last year, while MySpace grew 72 percent) - and even more developers. "If you were a venture-backed Web startup," Kopelman says, "and had to decide whether to focus on a site that welcomed you in and let you keep 100 percent of the revenue you generate, vs. a site with a vague policy that doesn't let you generate any revenue, it's not even a decision. It's an IQ test."
The real IQ test, of course, is figuring out how to create an app that takes off and makes money. So what defines a killer Facebook app? Senior platform manager Dave Morin says the stickiest applications are those that tap into the "social graph." That's Zuckerberg's oft-quoted term for the web of connections between users and their friends. "Most apps are only interesting if there is much more content below that widget," Morin says. "It needs to take you someplace different, do something more."
Morin's favorite example is (fluff)Friends, which lets the user place a cartoon image of a penguin, pig, squirrel, radish, or other cute object on his or her profile page. People can pet it, buy a habitat for it (with fake dollars), even buy a real T-shirt (with real dollars) bearing the virtual pet's image. That's all pretty standard stuff these days.
But this app's clever twist, Morin says, is the way it gets you to reach out to your friends. First you adopt a pet and invite your friends to pet or feed it. Then you pet their pets, or see all the pets that your friends have adopted within Facebook - all while racking up virtual currency to engage in more (fluff)Friend silliness. "I call it interaction capital," Morin says. "The more users interact with the application, the more virtual credit they get." And if they sell a lot of T-shirts or advertising, that's more cash in the (fluff)Friends creators' pockets. The app cleared 1 million downloads after just seven weeks and now adds more than 10,000 new users a day.
There's a science to achieving perfect viral alchemy, and it's getting more sophisticated by the day. One place every Facebook developer frequents is Appaholic.com. Created by San Francisco-based programmer Jesse Farmer, Appaholic breaks down Facebook applications by popularity, growth rate, and even "virality," as measured by growth in a single day. On a recent day, Farmer ticked off the leading app in each category: Top Friends, a Slide application that lets you rank your friends; Griddle, a word game; and What's My Chinese Name?
Appaholic has developers glued to the site's analytic tools, looking for secrets that reveal what makes one app soar and another tank. When a new feature suddenly boosts an application's number of users, "you quickly see other developers rolling out similar features," says Paul McKellar, the San Francisco-based programmer behind the hit app SocialMoth, with more than 400,000 users. "You have to, if you want to keep up."
In the short time since the new Facebook platform went live, Farmer has already spotted a few telltale patterns. One attribute that's death to an app, he says, is complexity. Facebook and all its homegrown applications are relatively simple; those who create something that requires too much thought or explanation quickly run into trouble.
Farmer learned the hard way: Bookshelf, an application he helped develop, lets you list, share, and search your books, movies, music, and games. It went nowhere. "We were decimated by applications that didn't do nearly as much, that were far simpler, like iRead," Farmer says. "Within a week they were 10 times our size. Any application that is more complicated than the most complicated feature in the core of Facebook will be penalized."
Applications that augment or mimic existing features on Facebook - such as the wall (a space for writing messages) or a poke (a way for friends to say a quick hello) - are also more likely to take off. And those that stumble on even the smallest bug are likely to become roadkill. Matches, a flirting application, fell into a hole when a time-out bug, a Facebook glitch, stopped the app in its tracks. In the week it took to fix it, Matches lost about 100,000 users and ceded the category to a rival called Crushes. The lesson, Farmer says, is "users don't care why it doesn't work or whose fault it is. They will leave and probably not come back."
Armed with those sorts of insights, some startups are positioning themselves as Facebook app factories. "Netscape browsed the Web, Yahoo organized it, Google searched it, and now Facebook has made it social," says Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia, a small shop in Mill Valley, Calif., that's already turned out such Facebook hits as FoodFight (throw a virtual lobster at your buddy) and Happyhour (send that buddy a cocktail). How does he plan to cash in on all those widgets?
At the moment, advertising opportunities are unproven - which is why Goldstein is leaning toward sponsorship as a simpler path to profits. FoodFight, Goldstein says, is an ideal mechanism for food companies to market themselves. Instead of throwing a chicken drumstick at a friend, a user could throw, say, a drumstick sponsored by Tyson Foods. "I had an ad agency representing a buffalo wings chain approach us with an $80,000 ad buy," Goldstein says. "It's starting to happen."
Shen and Tokuda's outfit, meanwhile, has become a lot more than a slide show. The company, now called RockYou, has more than $10 million in venture funding, more than a dozen developers, and one of the largest portfolios of applications. Its 15 apps include Horoscopes, Emote (icons for your status box), and Glitter Text (sparkly fonts). This time around, the revenue model is getting as much attention as the code. In late July the startup launched its own advertising network: RockYou is offering its user base and Facebook pages as a way for advertisers and other developers to reach more users. "We don't know which approach is going to work best yet," Shen says, "so we're trying them all."
So is San Francisco-based Slide, which has 12 Facebook apps and a growing audience to offer advertisers. Slide is also launching an ad network that will let advertisers brand its apps. CEO Levchin thinks that because users volunteer their ages, interests, locations, and other specific personal information, Facebook has the potential to be the best ad platform on the Web. "Until recently, Facebook had all of this ad inventory to itself," Levchin says. "Now it's saying, 'Go nuts. Sell it any way you want.'"
Not everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid. Andrew Chen, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, thinks the revenue opportunity is still unproven. "The question is whether large-brand advertisers will feel like it's a good idea to buy space on still relatively small pieces of real estate," Chen says. "I would imagine they'd want to deal directly with Facebook." The company, after all, already generates an estimated $150 million in ad revenue on its own.
Developers face other risks: Should Facebook go public or get acquired - as has been widely rumored - new circumstances could force Zuckerberg to give up his share-the-love revenue model and keep more of it in-house. The company might also rip a page from the Gates playbook and launch its own versions of the most popular applications. Or Zuckerberg could kick everyone out and go home.
As a hedge, developers aren't limiting themselves to one platform. Bebo, LinkedIn, MySpace, and several other large social networks have signaled in recent months that they will likely follow Zuckerberg's footsteps. "They will all open up," says Charlene Li, a marketing analyst at Forrester Research. "It's inevitable." MySpace, for its part, is said to be working on substantial changes to its platform. While company officials declined to respond to specific questions about its plans, they did say their goal is to work more closely with outside developers.
Anticipating that day, Palo Alto-based Box.net, which sells online storage and sharing, recently created a Facebook app for its service and a subscription package for Facebook users. But that doesn't mean the startup won't be showing up on other networks when their doors open. While the networks all have different software protocols, the apps are small, and the time and effort required to retool one for, say, LinkedIn or MySpace doesn't scare developers. "Facebook has done the best job opening up," says Box.net CEO Aaron Levie. "But we are not about building a business on any particular platform."
For folks like McKellar, though, simply owning a few Facebook apps is just fine. He has yet to make any real money from SocialMoth, but he's willing to fork out $500 a month in server costs just to hold on to his audience in the hope that he'll figure out a revenue model soon enough. "I go where the users are, and where they make it easy for me," McKellar says. "Right now, that's Facebook."
Four ways to make money
1: Sell ads
The play
Just about any Facebook app can get into the ad game, but only those with the biggest audiences will earn serious money. Several easy-to-use ad networks are already delivering the ads for a cut of overall sales.(See "Tools," below.)
The front-runners
Graffiti (5.9 million users). This highly viral drawing tool spread quickly because of its simplicity and originality.
iLike (5.4 million users). Users can set up their music and video libraries in mere minutes.
The Simpsons Photos, Quotes, and Trivia (60,000 users). Pearls of wisdom from the first family of Springfield.
The payoff
Apps currently generate less than $1 for every 1,000 pageviews. But that amount will likely increase as demographic targeting becomes more refined and the ad models move from simply racking up pageviews to measuring users' engagement.
Tricks of the trade
1. Establish your base. Hold off on serving ads until you have at least 10,000 users. Bombarding users with too much advertising can scare them away and hurt your growth in the long run.
2. Test different ad networks. Putting up ads is a simple cut-and-paste operation, so you can afford to be choosy and pick the network that gives you the best deal.
3. Don't clutter up app pages. "This is definitely a challenge for developers," says Mark Kantor, one of three developers behind Graffiti. "The most important thing is to preserve user experience."
4. Renegotiate as you grow. Demand a bigger cut of the revenue share as your traffic jumps. Says Kantor, "It might be better to go with a small ad network if you think you'll stand out."
Tools
Dozens of ad networks are cropping up to serve the Facebook developers. Here are a few.
1. Lookery (lookery.com). This new Facebook-specific ad network aims to offer developers demographic profiles of their user bases. More targeted advertising could soon fetch a higher price.
2. Userplane (userplane.com). AOL-owned Userplane pays per minute of exposure rather than just per pageview, so it's good for applications like games that keep users highly engaged.
3. Google AdSense. Not new, but many developers consider it the best means of supplying relevant ads.
2: Attract sponsors
The play
Advertisers are already sponsoring apps. Besides being widely used, your application needs to offer companies a natural way to interact with their customers.
The front-runners
Likeness (2.9 million users). Offers quizzes that generate top-10 lists - an ideal branding vehicle - and matches them with those of friends with similar preferences.
FoodFight (2 million users). Virtual lunch money buys you food to throw at friends. Next up on its menu: chicken wings from a major food chain.
HotLists (1.6 million users). This app lets users define their personas by posting brands' logos, cleverly dubbed "stylepix," on their profiles.
The payoff
Building direct relationships with brands takes more time and effort, but it means higher-quality advertising and more control over how your users interact with it. Expect to earn multiple-dollar CPMs instead of the pocket change you'd get from the ad networks.
Tricks of the trade
1. Don't pitch big brands without big numbers. You'll need a large traffic base - at least a few million users - before top brands will pay attention.
2. Know who's looking at your pages and why. Analyze your user demographics so you can pitch your audience effectively to sponsors.(See "Tools," below.)
3. Let your users do the work. Incorporate brands that your users identify with, and they'll willingly spread the word.
4. Don't overdo it. Too much brand presence will scare away Facebook's sometimes advertising-averse audience.
Tools
Where to find help analyzing your traffic and users.
1. Google Analytics. Embedding Analytics into your apps is easy, and it churns out useful stats about where users are coming from.
2. Gigya (gigya.com). This startup tracks metrics like app stickiness and user adoption rates.
3. Appaholic (appaholic.com). This site tracks traffic growth by the hour, day, or week - critical when launching a new ad campaign.
3: Sell services
The play
As apps become more about utility and less about fun, opportunities will arise to sell digital services of lasting value to users. Eventually, they'll make purchases without leaving their profiles.
The front-runners
Files (43,000 users). Offered by Box.net, this online file-storage service turns a Facebook profile into a repository for members' digital media.
Picnik (206,000 users). A Facebook version of Photoshop.(Hello, Adobe?) Basic tools are free; advanced features are offered for an additional fee.
The payoff
If you're selling a real service, then you can have your cake and eat it too- try selling subscriptions and ads to double-dip on your traffic.
Tricks of the trade
1. Start with a free version. And make switching to a paid offering an easy process. Don't force users to leave Facebook to sign up.
2. Set logical limits. Decide carefully what you'll give for free and what you won't. And even the freebies must be valuable enough for customers to be willing to spend their time.
3. Research your price points. Box.net already had storage plans for businesses and professionals. But when it moved onto Facebook, the company rethought its pricing models and created a $25-per-year plan that's comparable to the cost of an external flash drive - the way most college students store important files.
4. Be tactful and timely. Box.net alerts its users when they're nearing their file or storage size limits, politely reminding them about its for-pay premium service.
Tools
Where to find a platform to process payments.
1. PayPal. A starter plan will cost you 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction.
2. Google Checkout. The standard processing fee is 2 percent plus 20 cents per transaction.
3. Facebook. The company is rumored to be launching its own payment platform soon.
4: Sell products
The play
As Facebook increasingly becomes the center of people's digital lives, it's also becoming a venue for selling things - digital and otherwise - to its fast-growing audience.
The front-runners
Amazing Giftbox (127,000 users). Sends virtual Amazon merchandise.
Band Tracker (29,000 users). Searches upcoming concerts and links to ticket vendors.
Visual CD Rack (20,000 users). Lets users browse and buy music from a virtual CD rack.
The payoff
Most developers are going the affiliate route, offering product wish lists and then sending users to sites like Amazon.com or iTunes. Others, however, are directly selling such items as ringtones and T-shirts.
Tricks of the trade
1. Be a middleman. iLike makes its music-sampling apps simple and hands off sales to iTunes or Amazon via affiliate partnerships. Those directly selling hard goods need to prepare for the complexity of payment and delivery.
2. Keep it simple. Facebook has not yet become a place where people are likely to buy, say, a digital camera. But users are starting to purchase items that don't break the bank and extend Facebook's utility. XLR8 Mobile, for instance, is looking to sell ringtones and wallpaper on Facebook via custom storefront widgets. "We don't want to bring people to the store," says XLR8 Mobile CEO Perry Tell. "We prefer to bring the store to the people."
3. Give it away. Going viral is always the goal. One great way to get there is by offering free samples. Whether it's a digital download of a song or the image of an item, give your customers a taste of what they'll get before asking them to commit.
4. Don't rule out the odd. "Sometimes wacky, unusual, off-the-beaten-path stuff sells huge," Tell says. "Everyone is looking for the next Crazy Frog, so you must be willing to try lots of things."
Tools
1. Clearspring Technologies. This analytics service tracks exactly who's downloading an app and what they're buying through it. It also suggests when to double down on an item or sales approach that is working or, conversely, kill off those that aren't.
2. Garage Sale. Developers can use this Facebook shopping cart system run by Buy.com, which takes a 5 percent cut of sales.
3. Facebook Marketplace. The largest classified-ads community on the network, it's a good place to monitor buying trends.
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Andreessenの人気がベンチャー関係者の間で急上昇：OpswareをHPへ$1.6billionで売却, Ning(SNS)に本腰 After Selling Opsware, Andreess

ishida — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:46:49 CDT

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2007/08/andreessen

After Selling Opsware, Andreessen Turns to His Third Startup, Ning
By Adario Strange Email 08.01.07 | 2:00 AM

NingはFacebookに対抗できるか？

When Hewlett-Packard acquired Opsware for $1.6 billion in cash last week, it changed the reputation of serial entrepreneur and web pioneer Marc Andreessen forever.

Andreessen was the golden boy of the internet's early days, but Microsoft eventually pummeled his first company, Netscape Communications, into a decidedly secondary market position. When he launched Loudcloud in 1999 without any immediate or obvious payoff potential, Andreessen's critics had a field day.

But during the dot-com meltdown of 2000 and after, Loudcloud refocused its business, renamed itself Opsware, and concentrated on lining up customers. The company's data-center-automation software, which helps administrators configure and manage servers and the applications running on them, is now used by more than 350 corporate and government customers, Andreessen wrote in a blog post about the acquisition.

"I don't think anyone else -- large or small -- has a comparable product lineup for modern systems," Andreessen told Wired News. He declined to state how much his share of the Opsware acquisition amounted to.

Netscape and Opsware were both founded to help optimize the delivery of content rather than controlling the pipes or the content pumped through those pipes. That focus on facilitation has colored much of Andreessen's entrepreneurial career, and for his third act, Andreessen is bringing a similar philosophy to the world of social networking.

Andreessen and business partner Gina Bianchini launched Ning in 2005 as a platform to allow anyone to create their own social network. Bianchini says Ning means "peace" in Chinese, but considering the space she and Andreessen have targeted, peace will be the last thing they're likely to get in the coming months.

Ning's goal is to offer social-networking tools for those with little to no coding skill, but the site was initially suitable only for those with at least a modicum of PHP programming knowledge. However, Ning's responsive tech support and nurturing community have helped the site grow into a formidable web presence with more than 80,000 users, enabling the company to land $44 million in new funding just two weeks before the Opsware announcement.

But with that new funding comes the added pressure of delivering a return on investment (previously, Ning was funded primarily by Andreessen). Silicon Valley venture-capital investors typically look for a minimum of 15-fold ROI, meaning Ning will have to sell for at least $600 million to be considered a successful investment -- a disturbingly high bar to meet for a company that still hasn't captured the attention of most web users after two years in operation.

And then there's the issue of market competition from other social-networking players. Translation: What about Facebook?

Contrary to Andreessen's optimism, some tech veterans aren't so sure Ning can withstand the Facebook juggernaut. According to veteran tech entrepreneur Jeff Pulver, "The reality is that Facebook ... has moved up the food chain and is no longer competing with anyone who is a social network. It won't be enough for the other platforms to open themselves up with APIs. Facebook has the first-mover advantage and the support of the developer community.... This is something that is not happening anywhere else."

Andreessen bristles at comparisons with Facebook. "(Ning) is a fully programmable platform, not just a way to inject features from the outside into someone else's network -- like Facebook -- but rather your own network completely customized and programmed to work however you want it to work," he said.

Also, Facebook applications remain wedded to the Facebook platform, whereas with Ning, developers can take what they've developed using Ning's resources and move it to their own servers without any involvement from Ning at all. That openness and flexibility may prove an attractive alternative, once the bloom fades from Facebook's rose.

Whether Ning's more open platform will be worth $600 million when it's time to settle up is an open question. But considering Andreessen's track record, it wouldn't be wise to bet against him.

Appleが昨年の時点でなぜ規格が固まっていない802.11nを取り込んだか　A Mac take on 802.11n

ishida — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 03:27:16 CDT

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9008600
A Mac take on 802.11n
Glenn Fleishman
アップルが昨年、初期の規格の802.11nをインテルCore 2 Duoに組み込んだことと、100Mbit/secの無線規格採用したことについて。
どうも，チップのパートナーから将来の規格変更対応について、大きなコミットメントを得ているようだ。高速のものは600Mbit/sec ,raw speedでも200-300 Mbit/secということになるようだ。
5 GHzで利用可能な23チャンネルのうち、アップルは室内で４チャンネル、室外で５チャンネルをサポート。
b, gの機器と共用すると実効は2.5GHz帯で50Mbit/sec程度ということになるという。

January 19, 2007 (MacCentral) Anyone with a yen for disassembling computers -- which turns out to be a disturbingly large number of people -- discovered last year that Apple had jumped the gun on wireless standards by including Atheros and Broadcom 802.11n, or "N," chips into some Intel Core 2 Duo models.

This stole some of Apple's thunder last week at Macworld Expo when it formally announced its adoption of 802.11n and the wireless networking standard's 100M bit/sec. throughput. But what was more surprising was the company's willingness to commit to a standard that's a year from completion.

The N chips that Apple put in last year's machines were based on a much earlier draft of N. That early version, Draft 1.0, has been substantially overhauled, and Draft 2.0 is slated for approval in March. There's some concern that chips based on Draft 1.0 won't achieve the full potential of 802.11n when it's approved in early 2008.

It's likely Apple received remarkable assurances about future-proofing from its chip partners, and it's certain we will see many firmware upgrades over time as N develops. And it's also possible that a network with N devices that all shipped in mid-2007 will outperform a set of 2006-era N devices.

Let N = faster!

The idea behind N is stated in its charter: Enhancements for Higher Throughput. When 802.11g shipped with its "54M bit/sec." rated speed, many were disappointed to find that they were lucky to get 20-25M bit/sec. of real throughput once networking overhead was removed.

The most basic flavor of N shipped by Apple and others has a raw data rate of roughly 300M bit/sec. and net throughput of 100M bit/sec. This allows N to slightly exceed 100M bit/sec. Ethernet, still a standard in many offices. While the ratio of 100:300 seems far worse than 25:54, the number to focus on is the real throughput, not the raw data rate. (Tests of early gear by PC World and other labs reveal lots of incompatibilities among equipment, but have seen 100M bit/sec. throughput with similar equipment in the best cases.)

To make N work with handsets and gadgets, like the iPhone or a Wi-Fi-equipped camera, the IEEE task group had a grand compromise that allows even faster flavors without breaking compatibility. Faster N devices may hit 600M bit/sec. in raw speed and perhaps 200 to 300M bit/sec. in throughput, and will be used in corporations and cost substantially more than consumer equipment. But just like N is backward-compatible with all older 802.11 versions at their fastest speeds, so, too, will variations on N work together at the lowest common denominator.

Note: Steve Jobs declared 802.11a dead in 2003. It only caught on in companies and for long-range point-to-point connections.

N-thing up my sleeve, and presto

N achieves speeds far above A, B, and G through three techniques: It's more efficient, it has more radios, and it can use more spectrum.

Efficiency is easy to explain: A, B, and G used more overhead in packaging data to go out over radio waves. Streamlining that added double-digit percentage speed improvements on its own.

As noted in Macworld's first look at the new AirPort Extreme Base Station, 802.11n uses multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) antenna arrays. The spec requires a minimum of two receiving and two transmitting antennas; it also requires at least two radios. Each radio can send a separate stream of data using the antennas to create and steer a beam.

This allows the same spectrum to be used: Double the radios produces, at most, double the raw bandwidth. The other antenna advantage is that more energy is focused, producing a signal that can be received further away; more sensitivity in receiving signals means a device can "hear" data at greater distances.

N has a final trick up its sleeve, which is using more spectrum than A, B and G. In most countries in the world, a swath of the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrum is reserved for unlicensed use -- that is, the use of equipment that's certified by a national regulator, but which works on frequencies that everyone shares, and no one has a unique right to. (Cellular companies have paid hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide for the exclusive rights to their frequencies, by contrast.)

Avoiding interference

In the 2.4 GHz band, G (and the older B) use 22 MHz wide channels that allow 54M bit/sec. of raw data to pass; the same is true for A in the 5 GHz band. The N spec will optionally allow 40 MHz wide channels (legal in the U.S. and some other countries), which roughly double that bandwidth.

There's a fly in the ointment, however. N is designed to avoid interference. In fact, a big delay in finalizing N at the IEEE has been differing proposals and the reconciliation of those ideas for keeping N from stepping on older networks.

So while N is backward-compatible with A, B, and G, it should drop down out of its double-wide channel mode if the base station or N adapter detects other, older networks that it's stepping on.

This is one reason why 5 GHz suddenly becomes interesting. The 2.4 GHz band has 11 channels available in the U.S., but they're staggered and overlap. Only channels 1, 6 and 11 provide the least overlap and can be used at the same time in the same space.

In 5 GHz, there are as many as 23 channels for use in the U.S., and generally fewer elsewhere in the world. Most of those are restricted to indoor use, and a handful for outdoor. Apple is supporting four indoor and five outdoor channels. (The other 14 channels have additional burdens related to the use of military radar in those bands; one wireless expert suggested Apple or its wireless chip partners hadn't added the necessary support yet.)

If you're building an all N network, you might therefore decide that 5 GHz is a better place to build your "home" with fewer users and more channels to choose from in setting up your network. Signals in 5 GHz travel less far than comparable 2.4 GHz signals, which is normally a problem -- but good when you're trying to limit interference from other networks.

If you're mixing older B and G gear with newer N equipment, or live in an apartment building or an area with citywide Wi-Fi, you might find your N speeds average more like 50M bit/sec. than 100M bit/sec. in the 2.4 GHz band.

The last word

With gear shipping based on a draft of a standard, it might seem premature to purchase equipment. If you're choosing to go all Apple, there's no doubt you'll get the highest possible speeds and compatibility. For mix-and-match networks, wait until second quarter 2007 for the greatest odds of compatibility.

Glenn Fleishman is a frequent Macworld contributor and blogs about wireless networking at WiFiNetworking News.

Viacom やMicrosoft に挑戦することをGoogleのCEOはLuckyだと感じている As Google Challenges Viacom and Microsoft, Its CEO

ishida — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 04:19:18 CDT

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/04/mag_schmidt_qa?currentPage=all

As Google Challenges Viacom and Microsoft, Its CEO Feels Lucky

WiredのGoogle’s CEO, Eric Schmidt へのインタビュー

2000年に友人からGoogleのCEOにならないかと勧められた時は、単なる検索エンジンじゃないかと思った。
Google Appsは旧式のビジネスモデルの複雑さに飽き飽きしている。
Viacom とは、単なるビジネス上の交渉である。
自前の光ファイバーネットワークを持って、その性能を自ら、チューンアップさせたいのだ。
売り上げも社員数も３倍になったが、官僚主義は常に大きな問題だ。最善のモデルは依然として小さなチーム構成で全速力で仕事をすることだ。必要なのは創造性と秩序のバランスがうまくとれた企業でなければならない。

Fred Vogelstein from Wired Magazine Email 04.09.07 | 12:00 AM
As+Google+Challenges+Viacom+and+Microsoft%2C+Its+CEO+Feels+Lucky
Illustration by Pablo Lobato
SEE ALSO:
Extra: Read the text of Fred Vogelstein's hour-long interview with Eric Schmidt.
Epicenter: Read Schmidt, the prequel, a never-before-published interview in Nov. '05

Back in 2000, when a friend suggested he apply to be Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt thought, “Why? It’s only a search engine.” And Everest is only a mountain. Since then, of course, Google has become the most influential corporation in a generation (and Schmidt is now a multibillionaire). Today, Google stands at a crossroad. With more than 10,000 employees, the tension between corporate control and creative chaos has never been higher. We caught up with Schmidt at the Googleplex, where he talked up plans to experiment with video ads on YouTube, dismissed Viacom’s lawsuit as a negotiating ploy, and almost acknowledged that Google Apps poses a threat to Microsoft.

Wired: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently called Google a one-trick pony. Thoughts?

Eric Schmidt: I don’t think it makes sense for me to comment on the words and actions of Steve Ballmer.

Wired: I’ll phrase the question differently. Google gets its revenue essentially from one source -- online ads. One could argue that it’s not diversified enough.

Schmidt: The criticism is valid. We do get the vast majority of our revenue from advertising, which is a business that a lot of other people would like to be in.

But there are some new revenue models on the horizon. The most interesting is probably Google Apps, where we’re already beginning to get some significant enterprise deals.

Wired: Google Apps lets users do word processing, spreadsheets, and email in a Web browser. Then you store all the files in a giant server farm somewhere. Will businesses really be willing to work that way?

Schmidt: Corporations are tired of dealing with the complexity of the old model, and our products are now strong enough to serve business needs reliably.

Wired: Will the success of Google Apps mean market share erosion for Microsoft Office?

Schmidt: It may. Or it may be that consumers will push us to solve completely new problems.

Wired: In March, media giant Viacom sued Google, claiming that YouTube is stealing its video content. What made Viacom decide to go to court?

Schmidt: It’s a business negotiation. We’ve been negotiating with them, and I’m sure at some point we’ll negotiate with them some more.

Wired: Viacom’s argument is that you’re not working hard enough to keep infringing clips off of YouTube.

Schmidt: Well, if they would look at the law, they’d understand that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, there’s a shared responsibility. The law says that the copyright owner monitors -- and then we expeditiously remove -- offending clips. We’ve done that. In fact, YouTube’s traffic has grown since we did. So Viacom’s argument that YouTube is somehow built on stolen content is clearly false.

Wired: How could copyright law in the digital age be clearer?

Schmidt: The balance that was struck in the DMCA has worked pretty well, and I think it may be better for all of us to work within that framework for a while as we develop these new businesses. It’s the unintended consequences of new laws that always get you.

Wired: You thought there was a good chance of litigation when you bought YouTube. The deal set aside $200 million to cover the cost of lawsuits. Why did you make the acquisition if you anticipated so much hassle?

Schmidt: Because we think it’s fantastic. I mean, we really do think that the YouTube phenomenon is sustainable for many, many years. And the argument is simple: People are using videoclips everywhere. They’re sharing them. They’re building communities around them. YouTube’s traffic continues to grow rapidly. Video is something that we think is going to be embedded everywhere. And it makes sense, from Google’s perspective, to be the operator of the largest site that contains all that video.

Obviously, we would like to include licensed, copyrighted content -- legally -- and then make money on it. But YouTube itself can pay off -- and this is where the critics get it wrong -- in simple searches. Because, remember, when you go to YouTube, you do a search. When you go to Google, you do a search. As we integrate those searches, which we’re working on, it will drive a lot of traffic to both places. So the trick, overall, is generating more searches, more uses of Google.

Wired Which generates more pageviews, which generates more ad revenue.

Schmidt: You got it.

Wired: Does that mean we will soon see video ads on YouTube?

Schmidt: Absolutely. Advertisers and their agencies produce a lot of video they don’t use. So, for them, the Internet represents a new creative medium. Now they can do five- or 10-second teasers to drive online viewers to their ads on TV, or they can air outtakes or run shorter versions of the ad itself. These are creative people. We will see the emergence of new categories of ads and new ways of making money.

Wired: Meanwhile, News Corp. and NBC Universal recently announced they’re joining forces to create their own video-distribution channels online. Does that represent serious competition?

Schmidt: No. They are creating an exclusive agent to license that content to anybody. In fact, News Corp. COO Peter Chernin and I had a long conversation about this. Before the announcement, Peter explicitly told me that this was not a competitor to YouTube. To me, it’s another effort to get the content out.

Wired: You recently joined the board of Apple and have talked about potential partnerships between that company and Google. Like what?

Schmidt: Google’s architectural model around broadband and services plays very well to the powerful devices and services Apple is making. We’re a perfect backend to the problems they’re trying to solve. And Apple has very good judgment on user interface and people.

It doesn’t have the data centers, though. What it has is a manufacturing business that’s doing quite well. We can provide great services. The obvious example is the iPhone, which will come with Google Maps installed.

Wired: Let’s talk about those data centers. They’re changing the way the world thinks about computing. Explain.

Schmidt: It’s pretty clear that there’s an architectural shift going on. These occur every 10 or 20 years. The previous architecture was a proprietary network with PCs attached to it. With this new architecture, you’re always online, every device can see every application, and the applications are stored in the cloud. It’s like having banks manage your money rather than you managing your money.

Wired: How many data centers have you guys built?

Schmidt: In the dozens. There are a few very large ones, some of which have been leaked to the press. But in a year or two, the very large ones will be the small ones. That’s where a lot of the capital spending in the company is going.

Wired: Google controls its own fiber-optic network. Why?

Schmidt: We can tune it. One of the neat things about the Internet bubble of the ’90s was that people built all of this fiber, and now it’s essentially free. People are always assuming that we have some master plan involving telecommunications, when in fact, if you view it as solving the supercomputer problem, we just want the thing to be faster.

Wired: How should we think about Google today?

Schmidt: Think of it first as an advertising system. Then as an end-user system -- Google Apps. A third way to think of Google is as a giant supercomputer. And a fourth way is to think of it as a social phenomenon involving the company, the people, the brand, the mission, the values -- all that kind of stuff.

Wired: The company is helping San Francisco and other cities install cheap, public Wi-Fi. Why?

Schmidt: Remember, one of the critical things for Google is for users to have inexpensive or free access to broadband. So, especially if somebody else is going to subsidize that, we think it’s great. If you have 10 percent broadband penetration in San Francisco and we can get it to 50 percent, that produces happier citizens. And we know that those searchers will use our services more. They’re much more likely to become a Google Calendar user or a Gmail user or a Google News user or whatever, because they like the performance.

Wired: Google’s revenue and employee head count have tripled in the last two years. How do you keep from becoming too bureaucratic or too chaotic?

Schmidt: It’s a constant problem. We analyze this every day, and our conclusion is that the best model is still small teams running as fast as they can and tolerating a certain lack of cohesion. Attempting to provide too much order dries out the creativity. What’s needed in a properly functioning corporation is a balance between creativity and order.

But we’ve reined in certain things. For example, we don’t tolerate the kind of “Hey, I want to have my own database and have a good time” behavior that was effective for us in the past.

Wired: Do you and Larry Page and Sergey Brin still divide your duties the same way?

Schmidt: Pretty much. Larry and Sergey spent all day today in the boardroom doing product reviews. I’m interviewing some prospective executives, talking to a couple of partners about potential deals, and the three of us are going onstage in a few minutes to answer employee questions. That’s a typical day.

Our skill sets are just as complementary as they were five years ago. Larry and Sergey have brilliance and technical understanding, and they’re quicker on some things than I am. They’re very clear thinkers. And there is my background in knowing how to grow a corporation. I think the combination has worked well, and it’s not going to change. We’re going to do this for a long time.

Contributing editor Fred Vogelstein wrote about Microsoft's corporate blogging effort in issue 15.04.

Apple TVが開発プラットフォームとして人気急上昇 Apple TV Becoming Hot Development Platform

ishida — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 03:54:16 CDT

http://www.podcastingnews.com/2007/04/09/apple-tv-hacks/
Apple TV Becoming Hot Development Platform
April 9th, 2007

インターネットメディアルータのApple TVが多機能化。具体的には、外部のデベロッパーがRSS supportからgame emulation 更に本格的な Mac computerとしての機能まで既に追加。

Apple TV is quickly becoming a hot platform for development, with developers adding RSS support, game emulation and even turning the Internet media router into a full-fledged Mac computer.

Apple TV RSS

Apple TV RSS Plugin, above, is a basic RSS reader. It currently reads RSS 1.x/2.x feeds, but not Atom.

Here’s how it displays an Engadget post:

Apple TV Engadget

The developers plan to add video podcasting support to the plugin. This would let you access video podcasts directly from the Internet, instead of using your computer.

Another active project is emulation - adding support for classic games to the device. These systems have been tested for compatibility and are working:

* Nintendo
* Sega Genesis
* Super Nintendo
* Nintendo 64

Here’s NES Mario Brothers running on Apple TV:

Apple TV can even be turned into a full-blown Macintosh, making it the cheapest Mac ever. At this point, though, the process is a 13-step hack that involves replacing the device’ kernel.

Home

ishida — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 01:27:38 CST

While comprised mostly of translation of articles, this particular site is intended to store and share information pertinent to venture and startups.

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Thanks

イノベーションに関して地理的条件はいわば運命ともいうべき制約となる When It Comes to Innovation, Geography Is Destiny

ishida — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 01:49:37 CST

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/business/yourmoney/11ping.html?ex=1328850000&en=fe4f19c12749d279&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

When It Comes to Innovation, Geography Is Destiny

By G. PASCAL ZACHARY
Published: February 11, 2007
MP3プレーヤーも、検索エンジンもシリコンバレー以外で先行したものは皆、埋もれてしまった。Singaporeで最初に生まれたMP3プレーヤーもTallinn, Estonia; Reykjavik, Iceland; and Helsinki, Finlandで先行した検索エンジン開発グループも。
IN our celebrity-studded world, where we make a cult of genius and individual achievement, the mind rebels at the notion that geography trumps personality. Yet the inescapable lesson of the iPod, Google, eBay, Netflix and Silicon Valley in general is that where you live often trumps who you are.

Reporters and editors from The Times's Sunday Business section offer perspective on the week in business and beyond.

Just ask Sim Wong Hoo. About seven years ago, I met Mr. Sim in Singapore, where he was born and was then living. He talked about the rising creativity of Singaporeans and with a flourish, as if to dramatically make his point, he pulled out a prototype of a hand-held music player that he insisted would replace Sony’s famous Walkman.

Mr. Sim’s device was breathtaking, possessing all the elements of what we now know as the MP3 player. Yet today, a Silicon Valley icon, Apple, dominates the market for MP3 players with the iPod. In recognition of its emergence as a music powerhouse, last month Apple dropped the word “computer” from its name.

Some months after my Singapore encounter, I visited the thriving code-writing communities in Tallinn, Estonia; Reykjavik, Iceland; and Helsinki, Finland, three Nordic cities that were being transformed by advances in cellphones, mobile computing and the Internet. Their tight-knit network of engineers seemed poised to create the tools required to make good on a much-hyped prediction: the death of distance. After all, if necessity is the mother of invention, no one had more need than the hardy Estonians, Icelanders and Finns, living on the frozen edge of Europe, when it came to killing distance as a barrier.

Yet these Nordic innovators were blindsided by two Silicon Valley engineers whose tools we experience whenever we “Google” the Web. Their company, Google Inc., posted a quarterly profit of $1 billion on Jan. 31.

Google’s astonishing rise and Apple’s reinvention are reminders that, when it comes to great ideas, location is crucial. “Face-to-face is still very important for exchange of ideas, and nowhere is this exchange more valuable than in Silicon Valley,” says Paul M. Romer, a professor in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford who is known for studying the economics of ideas.

In short, “geography matters,” Professor Romer said. Give birth to an information-technology idea in Silicon Valley and the chances of success seem vastly higher than when it is done in another ZIP code.

No wonder venture capitalists, who finance bright ideas, remain obsessed with finding the next big thing in the 50-mile corridor between San Jose and San Francisco. About one-quarter of all venture investment in the United States goes to Silicon Valley enterprises. And, according to a new report from Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, a regional business group, the percentage has risen, to 27 percent in 2005 from 21 percent in 2000.

Many times in the past, pundits have declared an end to Silicon Valley’s hegemony, and even today there are prognosticators who see growing threats from innovation centers in India and China. Certainly, great technology ideas can come from anywhere, but they keep coming from Silicon Valley because of two related factors: increasing returns and first-mover advantage.

These twin principles, debated in head-scratching terms by professional economists, essentially explain why Intel maintains a lead in high-performance chips, why Apple sustains a large lead in music players and why Google’s search engine remains a crowd pleaser.

On a gut level, we all can understand how these two factors work. Who wouldn’t want to play for a perennial contender? For the same reason that Andy Pettitte signs with the Yankees, the best and the brightest technologists from around the world make their way to northern California.

“All that venture capital attracts a lot of ideas — and the people who are having those ideas,” said Stephen B. Adams, an assistant professor of management at the Franklin P. Perdue School of Business at Salisbury University in Maryland who has studied the rise of Silicon Valley.

Newcomers plug into an existing network of seasoned pros that “isn’t matched anywhere else in the world,” says AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “Regional Advantage,” a book about the competitive edge held by tech centers like Silicon Valley and the Route 128 suburbs near Boston. “That allows people to recombine technical ideas much more quickly here than anywhere else,” Professor Saxenian added.

“In terms of creativity, the Valley remains as far ahead of the rest of the world as ever,” she said. “People in the Valley generate new ideas and test them much more quickly than anywhere else. They aren’t a super race; it’s their environment.”

Silicon Valley is not invincible. The logic of increasing returns and the first-mover advantage can be overdrawn. Other clusters in the United States and around the world will commercialize great ideas, and the Valley will endure down cycles again, as it has in the past. Remember how the Japanese conquered memory-chip manufacturing in the 1980s, until then a staple of the Valley’s business? And, of course, the dot-com bust of five years ago remains a painful reminder of how success breeds hubris and humiliating failure.

Americans naturally harbor many fears about losing their edge, especially with the nation mired in war, the dollar’s value sliding and the health care system strained. Rivals, notably in India and China, see Silicon Valley’s pre-eminent position as a prize that they will inevitably take. Yet they face an elusive foe. Every time Silicon Valley recovers from failure, it seems to grow more durable, almost in the same way a person becomes “immune” to a disease after a brush with it.

Fifty years ago, chips were the engine of Silicon Valley. In the late 1970s came the personal computer and data-storage drives, then software, and more recently the dynamic vortex of the Web, new media and online commerce. (EBay, Netflix and, of course, Google and Yahoo are among the names that come to mind.)

These serial renewals are a marvel.

SIR PETER HALL, the British scholar of urban clusters, asks in “Cities in Civilization,” his history of geography and business innovation: “What makes a particular city, at a particular time, suddenly become immensely creative, exceptionally innovative? Why should this spirit flower for a few years, generally a decade or two at most, and then disappear as suddenly as it came?”

Sir Peter’s words highlight an enduring human mystery. In the case of Silicon Valley, the world rightly waits for the flame of creativity to burn out. That’s fair enough. To each, a season (or maybe a few). Living long and large, Silicon Valley surely will wither like a dead flower someday. My advice, though, is: Don’t hold your breath.

SOX法はシリコンバレーの首を絞めるか？IPO忌避症候群

ishida — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 23:45:29 CST

http://news.com.com/Is+Silicon+Valley+strangled+by+SOX/2100-1014_3-6151059.html

Is Silicon Valley strangled by SOX?

By Caroline McCarthy
http://news.com.com/Is+Silicon+Valley+strangled+by+SOX/2100-1014_3-6151059.html
ベンチャーキャピタリストでNetscapeの創設者の Jim ClarkがShutterflyというウェブでの写真印刷サービスベンチャーの会長辞任を今月明らかにした。
シリコンバレーのような場所では投資家と経営者の区別が困難。SOXの要求する内部管理規定は企業の柔軟性を失わせるという。
ベンチャーの間では、収益性があがっても非公開を選択する傾向がこれで一段と加速すると見る向きがある。

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act might be meant to guard against massive white-collar scandals, but the resignation of a high-profile tech veteran suggests the law may also be restricting efficiency atop Silicon Valley's corporate ladder.
Earlier this month, venture capitalist and Netscape founder Jim Clark announced his departure from the board of directors at photo-printing site Shutterfly, where he served as chairman. In his resignation letter, he cited "the constraints imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley on (his) having any significant role on the board" as one of the primary reasons for departure.
It appears that Clark felt Sarbanes-Oxley--commonly known as SOX--had built an insurmountable wall between his status as a major shareholder and investor at Shutterfly, and his role on the board of directors.
"(Sarbanes-Oxley) dictates that I not Chair any committee due to the size of my holdings, not be on the compensation committee because of the loan I once made to the company, (and) not be on the governance committee," he continued in his resignation letter. "It even dictates that some other board member must carry out the perfunctory duties of the Chairman."
In a place like Silicon Valley, renowned for its entrepreneurial spirit and saturated with start-ups that might be the next Google or eBay, a heavy reliance on venture capital means that the line between investor and director is often blurred. SOX's internal controls, therefore, can completely change the corporate dynamic, and Clark's resignation brought to light the possibility that the tech industry may see more resignations like this one.

"Jim Clark is not atypical and not unique," said Steven Kaplan, a professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. "I have friends who've said they won't go on public (companies') boards," he added, noting that venture capitalists like Clark are often the quickest to bolt from their posts.
Jim Clark
Clark declined to further comment on the matter.
Executives and board members have thought of Sarbanes-Oxley as a nuisance, sometimes humorously, since its inception. The law, enacted in July 2002 in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom fiascos, requires better monitoring of auditing and accounting practices and improved boardroom transparency to ensure that a corporate crisis on the scale of Enron's could never take place again.
On the positive side, many shareholders have had their Enron nightmares assuaged; but on the negative side, the governing bodies of public companies have claimed that SOX makes it tough for them to get their jobs done. Most often, they cite the high costs of instituting the infrastructure needed to comply with the act's requirements as well as constraints on how much power can be held by boards of directors and C-level executives. It's a complaint that's heard from just about every kind of public company, but in Silicon Valley, the impact of SOX can be stronger.
An incentive to stay private?
Take the case of veteran investor Tim Draper, whose firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson has a foot in the door at some of tech's biggest recent success stories--Skype, for example, and Chinese search engine Baidu. Openly opposed to SOX, Draper cited the legislation as the reason he dropped off multiple public boards--much like Jim Clark.
Tim Draper
"Public boards before SOX were generally tolerable because the team could talk about R&D, and marketing and finance and sales, before the lawyers and accountants took over," he said in an e-mail. "Sarbanes-Oxley was a knee-jerk reaction to Enron, and the repercussions are far more disastrous than Enron was."
Some may find Draper's views on SOX extreme, but he's certainly not alone in his opinion. Restrictions on public companies' activity can be so stringent for an entrepreneurial culture like Silicon Valley's that some tech insiders think that the average company is better off not going public in the first place.
"Clearly being public today is a greater burden on younger companies and their executives, so it's probably better for everyone that these companies stay private," said blogging entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, former head of Weblogs Inc. and current "Entrepreneur in Action" at investment firm Sequoia Capital. According to Calacanis, SOX doesn't even need to be factored into the equation. "The public really doesn't have the skill set and time to invest and track very young companies like angel investors, VCs and private equity folks do," he said.
"There is a culture in Silicon Valley among these high-tech companies, about how things should be done," observed Jay Lorsch, a professor of human relations at Harvard Business School. "They've done things a little differently than other companies over the years." And Lorsch, like the University of Chicago's Kaplan, admitted that SOX can be a pain for those in high places.
"There's no question that there are people on the executive side of things who are bothered by the requirements of the act, and they will continue to complain, and they're trying to get the SEC to give them some relief," he said, agreeing with Calacanis that the burdens of being a public company hit the Silicon Valley start-up much harder than the Wall Street mainstay. "It's particularly true of people involved in smaller companies who do have a point that the cost to a smaller company of doing all this is obviously a greater proportion of their total revenue or total profits than a larger company."
This sentiment was echoed by Andy Goldfarb, co-founder and executive managing director of the Massachusetts-based venture firm Globespan Capital.
"I think that SOX was designed for different circumstances than we as venture capitalists and start-ups deal with," he said. "I think that it was designed for larger companies, and I think that the burden, both financial and operational, for smaller companies is disproportionate in its cost and management."
Goldfarb added that venture-backed start-ups, like many Silicon Valley companies, may aim for mergers or acquisitions rather than going public with an IPO.
"SOX has hampered our capital markets for start-up companies," he asserted.
I can't believe there would be a lot of people resigning because of Sarbanes-Oxley. They may complain, but I don't think they're going to cut off their noses to spite their faces because of it.
--Jay Lorsch, professor of human relations, Harvard Business School
But there's another side to the coin: yes, SOX might be less than ideal for a Silicon Valley start-up, but plenty of companies are going to have to deal with it anyway because it's not going anywhere. Lorsch said that the Shutterfly resignation was "an extreme case" and doesn't think that Silicon Valley will see many more Jim Clarks.
"I can't believe there would be a lot of people resigning because of Sarbanes-Oxley," he said. "They may complain, but I don't think they're going to cut off their noses to spite their faces because of it." The situation, therefore, could be analogous to some of the Federal Aviation Administration's limits on how much liquid can be contained in a carry-on bag: irritating and inconvenient, yes, but not enough to make the average transatlantic traveler opt to hop on an ocean liner instead.
Pain that's unlikely to go away
Les S. Stone, a Philadelphia-based partner in the finance and performance management division of consulting giant Accenture, asserted that high-ranking members of Silicon Valley and the rest of corporate America should just accept the terms of SOX.
"There are still a lot of people out there that had significant investments in companies (like Enron and WorldCom) that lost their life savings," he said. And though Silicon Valley's corporations may not have been home to the white-collar scandals that shook the country several years ago, they may be in particular need of regulations like SOX.
"Especially in the high-tech industry, there still continues to be a significant number of accounting issues in two areas. One, around stock option accounting. Apple's been all over the news lately. And the other reason, which has been causing a lot of reporting irregularity, is revenue accounting," Stone said. "I think it's here to stay. Compliance is part of everyday life."
In Stone's opinion, corporate America's pre-Enron years were not necessarily as unrestricted as nostalgic executives and board members may make it out to be.
"Internal controls have always been an important part of a company, whether it's the financial organization or where the financial organization has intersections with other parts of the organization, in purchasing or supply-chain or manufacturing," he said. "Theoretically, companies as well as auditors always needed to be concerned about internal controls."
Stone added that while compliance may have been a financial burden for many companies in Sarbanes-Oxley's early days, the cost has been going down over the past year or two, largely because new advancements in software are making it a cheaper and more efficient process. He also observed that keeping up appearances post-Enron may have caused the first few years of SOX compliance to be costlier and more stressful than they will be in the future. "Most companies will admit they probably were doing more than they needed to for SOX, and audit firms were probably auditing more than they needed to because nobody wanted to be the next headline in The Wall Street Journal or a major failure."
And companies can look on the bright side, in Stone's opinion. "Despite the high cost of compliance, (Sarbanes-Oxley) has investor confidence on the upswing." The moral of the story might be a simple one: for Silicon Valley's upper echelon, assuming the privileges of power and keeping a public company afloat means making some concessions here and there.
Then there's the other option: don't go public, and avoid the SOX scrutiny altogether, which Calacanis argued is a better option for most Valley companies anyway.
"Frankly, from where I sit," he said, "it's a much better life being private and profitable."

Steve JobsがiPhoneをMacWorld2007で紹介 Jobs launches long-awaited iPhone

ishida — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 02:10:44 CST

http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6148642.html

CES-2007の出展品、写真一覧Latest Photo Galleries

ishida — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 01:38:47 CST

http://news.com.com/2300-1041_3-6149538-1.html?part=rss&tag=6149538&subj=news

ITマネージャーのための2007年予測Forecast 2007: The Outlook for IT

ishida — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 03:55:51 CST

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9006699&source=rss_news10
Forecast 2007: The Outlook for IT
What you need to know about this year's hot skills, top technologies, and spending trends
ITマネージャーのための2007年予測Forecast 2007: The Outlook for IT
売れるスキル、選択テクノロジー、IT予算の行方など
（元の記事に各項目のリンクが付いています）

Top Story

The Hottest Skills for 2007
With fewer IT openings expected this year, these five premium skills will still be job clinchers.

Top Five Technologies Being Tested This Year
Our survey identified the top technologies queued up for testing in 2007. Here's how five companies are already reaping the benefits.

Navigating a Sea of New Security Threats
New security threats demand new thinking and solid executive backing.

Hope & Headaches
Ready for 2007? Just stay focused on the hot-button issues you'll have to meet head-on -- or sidestep. Columnist Frank Hayes has a few to watch for in the year to come.

Vista Sound-off

Will Vista be a benefit or a
nightmare for IT departments? Columnists Mark Hall and Frank Hayes square off.

Why Vista Is IT's Big Headache
2007 will be the Year of the Great Vista Fiasco, Hall predicts. And despite Apple's efforts, Leopard won't reap the benefits.

Why Vista Is IT's Big Opportunity
Sure, Vista has fiasco potential, but the real story is whether the upgrade will spur IT to start chopping out the operating system dependencies in applications, Hayes counters.

The Year of Spending Carefully

2007 Vital Signs
Computerworld's exclusive Vital Signs 2007 quarterly survey shows flat budgets and slow hiring in the year ahead. IT managers are putting security and data recovery at the top of their priority lists and expect a big impact from Vista.

Flat Budgets Drive a New Austerity
Flat IT budgets will make 2007 a year of conservative spending with a focus on efficiency.

Big Payback From Big-Bang Projects
Tight budget? Hit the ground running in 2007 with these fast-payback, high-impact projects.

Trendspotting

Q&A With Six IT Rock Stars
We asked six information technology luminaries, from Vinton Cerf to Robert Metcalfe, to predict the big IT stories and surprises of 2007.

Provocative Predictions for 2007
IT executives and other industry leaders think big about the changes and advances the new year will bring.

No-brainers
Predicting what will happen in 2007 is far too difficult, so Don Tennant offers his second annual list of what you can be assured will not happen in the new year.

Beyond dual core: 2007 desktop CPU road map
What do AMD and Intel have in store for desktop processors this year? We've got the goods.

The new hotness: Personal tech in 2007
2007 will be an amazing year for personal technology. Call it "The Year of the Super Toy."
Extra: The seven top mobile and wireless trends for 2007

What does 2007 hold for open source?
Yet again, this won't be the year of desktop Linux, says columnist Neil McAllister, but 2007 is shaping up to be a year for settling unfinished business within the open-source community.

Top tech stories you'll see in 2007
From malware run amok to the growth of the Wi-Fi universe, IDG News Service reporter Nancy Weil forecasts 2007's top technology stories.

Vote for the technology that will make the biggest splash in 2007, or e-mail us your own predictions.

Web2.0で買収対象として有望な５社The Best: Web 2.0 Acquisition Bait

ishida — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:51:36 CST

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.01/start.html?pg=11

Web2.0で買収対象として有望な５社
The Best: Web 2.0 Acquisition Bait
Technorati, Digg, FeedBurner, Zillow それにFacebook，共通するのは何か
最も有望なWeb2.0であること。キャッシュも潤沢なことであるし。
What do Technorati, Digg, FeedBurner, Zillow and Facebook have in common? They'd all make excellent trophies for the wannabe Web 2.0 entrepreneur flush with cash. By Christopher Null from Wired magazine.

IAC/InterActiveCorpがAskCityを12月4日からスタートIAC to tie together local info services, CEO says

ishida — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 20:17:30 CST

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061127/bs_nm/media_summit_iac_local_dc

IAC/InterActiveCorpがAskCityを12月4日からスタートIAC to tie together local info services, CEO says

Webビジネスにおいて卓越した先見性をもつBarry DillerのIAC/InterActiveCorpが検索とマップ表示を一体化したAskCityを12月4日からスタート
By Eric Auchard Mon Nov 27, 4:47 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - IAC/InterActiveCorp. (Nasdaq:IACI - news) will unveil next week a new local information service that combines Web search, city guides, maps and event listings, in one of the conglomerate's broadest moves yet to combine its assets, Chairman and CEO Barry Diller said on Monday.
ADVERTISEMENT

The new Web-based city guides, due out on December 4, will be followed later in December by a redesign of IAC's Ask.com search service, a small but fast-growing rival to Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) that Diller said would offer a new paradigm for Web search.

"We are coming out with AskCity, which is our local service," Diller told the Reuters Media Summit in New York. "It is just wildly better than anything else because we are able to bring in all of our assets."

The local information service will provide a more convenient way for Web users to comb through the 10 years of entertainment listings and services stored in its CitySearch service, along with links to maps, events and ticket services.

It combines assets of Ask.com, CitySearch, Evite and TicketMaster, among other IAC properties, Diller said.

"It integrates maps, integrates events, integrates all of these different attributes that we have got in the best thing you will be able to use in a city to do things," he said.

Ask.com is looking to stay several steps ahead of far larger search rivals Google, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) by innovating faster and taking advantage of its stable of Web and e-commerce sites, he said.

Diller said forthcoming changes would include a new home page for Ask.com and a new way of searching the Web.

"We are coming out with the beginnings of, I think, a whole new geography of search itself, of how the front page looks -- the home page, of how you use search," he said. "I have not seen anything that anyone is doing that is anywhere near it."

IAC has focused on growing its existing businesses, in sharp contrast to years of relying on a regular stream of fresh acquisitions to drive growth across the network of companies.

デジタルビジネスの未来を賭けてメディア業界は大混乱Seeking Executive to Tame the Digital Future

ishida — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 01:13:12 CST

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26frenzy.html?ei=5090&en=3d7512ab2b93ffac&ex=1322197200&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1164697216-7d1B01cBm1YtgwGhXT0qDw
November 26, 2006Media FrenzySeeking Executive to Tame the Digital Futureデジタルビジネスの未来を賭けてメディア業界は大混乱
By RICHARD SIKLOS
　求人；デジタルメディアの天才でメディア大手をアナログからデジタル転換で勝利に導くことができる人　職務内容：コンテンツを他のフォーマット、例えばテレビ、印刷物、フィルムに変換でき、更に収益のあがる形でインターネットに展開できること　資格：出費を最小にして、従来のメディアと無関係のオンラインビスネスを立ち上げるアイデアをもっているひともちろん、以上は冗談だが WANTED Digital media genius to guide a nimble — or at least we like to think we are — media giant through transformation from analog to digital in all its gory glory.
JOB DESCRIPTION To take all the stuff we produce for other formats, like TV or print or film, and figure out how to shovel it onto the Internet in a way that makes money.
QUALIFICATIONS The ideal candidate might also have ideas for ways to make a few dollars online that don’t directly stem from our so-called traditional media businesses. (You know — like that whole user-generated thing that the kids are doing. P.S., loved the video clips about how Mentos and Diet Coke mixed together create a chemical reaction — maybe we can turn it into a prime-time special or a theme park ride financed by these brands?)
COMPENSATION Pretty sweet for as long as you last.
RETIREMENT BENEFITS Well, don’t plan on it.
THE want ad above is a goof, of course, but it roughly sums up the state of play among big media companies’ digital operations.
In the last few weeks, there has been a stampede of change involving the top Internet executives at big media companies. Most significant, Jonathan F. Miller, the chairman and chief executive of AOL, was replaced at that Time Warner division by Randy Falco, a 31-year veteran of NBC Universal; Ross Levinsohn, the wunderkind who helped Rupert Murdoch snag MySpace last year, left the News Corporation two weeks ago and is being replaced by a cousin, Peter Levinsohn, a Fox TV veteran; and Larry Kramer, who built and sold the site MarketWatch, left his job as digital overseer at CBS after the arrival of Quincy Smith, a former investment banker, as his boss.
MTV Networks, meanwhile, recently appointed Mika Salmi, the founder of Atom Entertainment, a Web media company that it acquired, as its latest digital honcho, and NBC Universal has been making all sorts of online moves under the auspices of Beth Comstock, who came from owner General Electric last year to head all things digital there.
Has an archetypal digital genius yet emerged amid all this movement? Not exactly. The screenwriter William Goldman famously said of Hollywood’s hit machinery that “nobody knows anything.” When it comes to the digital machinations of media companies, the new tag line may be that “nobody knows everything.”
In some instances, notably AOL and the News Corporation, the companies in question have decided that their businesses have reached a new phase that would benefit from a different set of skills — in AOL’s case, operations and a heavy focus on ad sales. Elsewhere, including CBS, the digital executives themselves have discovered that the action within a giant media company may not be as much fun as it first seemed.
Michael J. Speck, who runs the media practice at the executive recruiter Heidrick & Struggles, says that roughly three baskets of digital media overseers are in the market. The first is the well-versed old-media executive who both knows how to navigate corporate corridors and run a business but may not be the most Webby person on the squad. Mr. Falco, come on down! (Of course AOL is a bit of an outlier in this discussion because it is such a big business unto itself, let alone as part of Time Warner.)
The second basket contains the Web stars — people like Mr. Salmi and, in a way, Mr. Smith, who has a venture capital background. These stars know how to identify and build Web businesses early.
Then there is the less common “general corporate athlete” (someone like Ms. Comstock), who has a track record of getting things done in a complex company but is neither a seasoned operating executive nor a Web head.
In search of enlightenment, I spoke with three of these former Web gurus — Ross Levinsohn, Mr. Kramer and Jason Hirschhorn, who left Viacom earlier this year after serving as MTV Networks’ first chief digital officer.
Mr. Levinsohn said he was grateful to Mr. Murdoch and his deputy, Peter A. Chernin, for the opportunity, but added that they differed amicably on the next moves to make in the online world and that, ultimately, he was keen to part ways and do something more entrepreneurial.
In Peter Levinsohn, the company is getting an executive with arguably less operational experience than his cousin but someone who has a record of cutting deals to distribute Fox video products on digital services like Amazon, iTunes and AOL. Moreover, people close to the company said Mr. Murdoch would probably invest in whatever Ross Levinsohn did next, though Mr. Levinsohn declined to discuss his plans. “This is not a bad thing for me, or for them,” he said.
In Mr. Kramer’s case, he made a tidy fortune selling MarketWatch and said he had never meant to take a full-time job but had enjoyed “proselytizing” about digital media across CBS and improving its Web sites. The hiring of Mr. Smith, a former Allen & Company investment banker with deep connections in Silicon Valley, came as alarm bells went off throughout media companies when Google swallowed YouTube.
CBS’s emphasis shifted from building assets internally to identifying and becoming involved with the hottest next thing. “If I was 35, I would have stayed,” said Mr. Kramer, who is 56.
Mr. Hirschhorn, who is a couple of decades younger than Mr. Kramer, said he joined Viacom in 2000 after selling a Web design start-up to the company and had never known what it was like to work in a big corporation.
After a few years of working on various online businesses at MTV Networks, it was time for a change. For his part, he yearned to get involved in another start-up or young company. (He says he’s about to take just such a job.) Meanwhile, as is typical of what can happen in these roles, Viacom’s thinking about the position was also changing.
Geoffrey K. Sands, who heads the North American media consulting practice at McKinsey & Company, told me that the tension between old and new in the latest round of digital executive changes might be missing the bigger point.
“There’s a general tendency to focus too much on individuals and make too much of who’s in and who’s out,” Mr. Sands said. “You’re going to need people who are visionary and innovative about the opportunities created by digital media, but I would look less at the individuals and more at the teams they’re putting together.”
Indeed, if the challenges of competing with Internet giants and whiz kids in garages weren’t daunting enough, one of the biggest factors for success in these jobs is organizational: does the anointed guru have the juice to cross over existing divisions and to introduce newfangled businesses that may actually hurt before they help? At NBC, for example, the current lineup of digital and Internet projects — only some of which report wholly to Ms. Comstock — resembles a Tokyo subway map.
In a way, the tenure of a chief digital genius weirdly mirrors the fickle nature of the Web itself: hits can appear very quickly, but only a few stick around for the long haul.

バイオテック企業は従来のタンパク質中心から微小分子の研究で新薬開発をめざす

ishida — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 03:02:27 CST

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=55491&nfid=rssfeeds

Biotechs Expand Into Small Molecules For Drug Discovery

バイオテック企業は従来のタンパク質中心から微小分子の研究で新薬開発をめざす

Article Date: 03 Nov 2006 - 12:00pm (PST)
Biotech companies traditionally focus on large proteins in their quest to find new drugs. But faced with the complex nature of disease, these companies are increasingly turning to small molecules as well. This new push into small-molecule drug design, which researchers hope will deliver better and more effective disease treatments, is explored in a report scheduled for the Oct. 30 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, the ACS's weekly newsmagazine.
Associate Editor Lisa M. Jarvis describes how major biotech companies such as Genentech and Amgen have moved into the small-molecule arena and expanded their chemistry operations in the process, including new partnerships with drug discovery firms. These efforts have increasingly brought together chemists from a wide range of disciplines, including medicinal, computational and process chemistry, Jarvis writes.
Biotech's investment in small-molecule research is starting to pay off in the form of new drugs, she notes. A few companies already have commercialized new small-molecule drugs for the treatment of lung cancer and kidney disease, while drugs for multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's and other diseases are making their way through the pipeline.

ウェブサービスの一大王国を立ち上げたBarry Diller の戦略：ケーブルは過去のものと考えよ Diller's Web: Think Cable of the Past

ishida — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 05:17:09 CST

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/business/media/31jackson.html?ex=1319950800&en=27593672080e10d9&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Diller’s Web: Think Cable of the Past

ウェブサービスの一代王国を立ち上げたBarry Dillerの戦略：ケーブルは過去のものと考えよ

James Estrin/The New York Times

Published: October 31, 2006

Barry Dillerがテレビ、映画業界の大物のMichael Jacksonをprogramming president at the IAC/InterActiveCorpとして採用したとき、投資家にDillerがエンタテインメント業界に戻るつもりではないことを納得させるのに苦労した。
インタービューの中でDillerはMr. Jacksonに今後数年かけて、多くのベンチャーを立ち上げてほしいと考えていることを明らかにした。
Mr. Jacksonの次のプロジェクトで来年、登場予定のものは相変わらず、陽気な雰囲気を持っている。継続的に更新される冷やかしのsatiricalウェブサイトでThe Huffington Postとのジョイントベンチャーである。
Mr. Jacksonのキャリアからすれば、更に多くのものが用意されているはずだ。
ケーブルテレビの世界は保守的になってしまったとDiller to Jacksonは嘆く。
The Huffington Post と組んだのは同社がウェブビジネスを迅速に立ち上げることに長けていると判断したためである。
The Onionという風刺ウェブサイトと出版の社長は、ウェブがユーモア表現にとくに適していることが明らかになったという。
まだビジネスモデルが確立していないものに大きな賭けをするということは、これまでやったことが無い。
代わりに、自分自身のベンチャーを始め、まだ非常に小さな段階で投資することを選択するとMr.Jacksonは言う。
次に注目しているのはニュースで、ニュースのアグリゲーションと編集、更に最上の情報に人々を注目させるようなものと言うが、詳細は明らかにしなかった。

When Barry Diller hired longtime television and film executive Michael Jackson as programming president at the IAC/InterActiveCorp, he had to reassure investors that he was not going back into the entertainment business.
Instead, a glimpse at Mr. Jackson’s early efforts in online programming are now coming into view: he is thinking big by going small, investing in and starting targeted content sites built around humor, news and popular culture that remind him of the early efforts in cable television programming.
In an interview, Mr. Diller said he expected Mr. Jackson to carry out perhaps dozens of such ventures during the next few years. “The amount of capital we’ll put in this over time will be hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said. “This is a wonderful area right now to invest in.”
The company recently unveiled a test version of a new daily newsletter and Web site, Very Short List, which carries recommendations of unheralded cultural and entertainment products, including books, CDs and DVDs. And in August, IAC acquired control of the Web site www.collegehumor.com — whose name is fairly self-explanatory, though its appeal depends on which college you attended.
Mr. Jackson’s next project, scheduled for a debut next year, continues in a mirthful vein: a continuously updated satirical Web site that IAC is beginning as a joint venture with The Huffington Post, the assemblage of left-of-center blogs that was founded last year and is edited by the author and pundit Arianna Huffington.
Mr. Jackson’s career suggests that more is in store for him. Before he ran the television business of USA Networks and the Universal Television Group, which were acquired by NBC in 2003, he was the chief executive of Channel 4 in his native Britain.
A clincher for Mr. Jackson was that at the beginning of this year, Trio, a small cable channel for nonfiction programming that he and Mr. Diller had taken a particular interest in, was recast as Sleuth. It shows reruns of the investigative police shows that dominate prime time. “The cable world has become conservative,” Mr. Jackson lamented.
During his interregnum, Mr. Jackson was thinking Webby thoughts. He collaborated with the author and journalist Kurt Andersen and the designers Bonnie Siegler and Emily Oberman to develop a collection of eclectic and carefully “curated” items (books, CDs and so on) boxed together and periodically shipped to subscribers.
That was the origin of Very Short List, which has evolved into a daily newsletter and Web site because Mr. Jackson and Mr. Diller — who financed the venture through IAC and rehired his old colleague in January — deemed the box concept too expensive to succeed at first.
In the case of the planned satire site, Mr. Jackson said he had sought out The Huffington Post as a partner because it appeared to know how to start up a Web business quickly. The Huffington Post ranked 24th in the blogs category of Web sites during the month of September, with 635,000 unique visitors, according to comScore Networks.
Sean Mills, president of The Onion, a satirical Web site and publication, said that the Web had proved to be particularly suited to humor. But “to maintain it over a long period of time is a very difficult thing,” he added, “and something that we are constantly challenged with.”
Where CollegeHumor was concerned, Mr. Jackson conceded that the site might not be for everybody.
“What attracted us to CollegeHumor is it’s a brand,” Mr. Jackson said. “I think those things that have a point of view can be successful on the Web. That’s a model that goes back forever.”
Mr. Diller said that although IAC could afford a big acquisition like the $1 billion said to be sought for Facebook, a social networking site, he was reluctant to do so. “Making very large bets on businesses that don’t yet have a business model is just not our history,” he said. “I’ll leave that to the media imperialists.”
Instead, he and Mr. Jackson said they favored the economics of starting their own ventures and investing in nascent ones. “This is a medium where how much you spend has much less effect on the outcome than ever before,” Mr. Jackson said. “Some of the best content online has been created by amateurs for nothing.”
Mr. Jackson appears to be something of an island unto himself at IAC, whose better known operations, including the Home Shopping Network, Citysearch, Ticketmaster, Match.com, LendingTree and the search engine Ask.com, generate more than $6 billion a year in revenue.
He said his next area of focus might be news — a site that aggregates and edits news and helps point people to the best information available — but he was not ready to talk about specifics.
Whatever he does, his friends expect it to make a splash.
“If there’s something to do online that makes sense,” Mr. Andersen, the author, said, “he’s as well positioned as any 48-year-old guy to figure out what that is.”

Silicon Graphicsで有名なJim ClarkがShutterfly, online photo printing serviceで、辛うじてドットコムバブルを生き延びた

ishida — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 04:35:35 CST

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/technology/30shutterfly.html?ex=1319864400&en=d88d58bf028b3fbe&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss October 30, 2006

A Dot-Com Survivor’s Long Road

Silicon Graphicsで有名なJim ClarkがShutterfly, online photo printing serviceで、辛うじてドットコムバブルを生き延びた

By MIGUEL HELFT SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 29 —

When Jim Clark started Shutterfly, the online photo printing service, in December 1999, a 2-megapixel digital camera could set you back $800, investor enthusiasm for e-commerce was soaring and the words “Internet” and “bust” were rarely used in the same sentence.
For his part, Mr. Clark had something of a Midas reputation when it came to technology investing, having started Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon.
But what was expected to be a sprint at the peak of the dot-com boom turned into a marathon — one in which Shutterfly, at times, appeared to be faltering. Late last month, the company finally crossed a finish line of sorts when it became one of just a few e-commerce companies to go public since the dot-com bust.
While the offering may have enriched Mr. Clark and other early Shutterfly backers, it has been a money-loser so far for most who bought into it. And it has not brightened the decidedly downbeat mood of venture investors, whose fortunes depend on a healthy market for public offerings.
Shutterfly’s shares had a brief run-up after their market debut on Sept. 29, but since then they have dropped to $13.35, or 11 percent below the offering price of $15.
“It’s been an extremely difficult I.P.O. market this entire year,” said Mark G. Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, noting that only 37 venture-backed companies had gone public through the end of the third quarter. “Then you see something like Shutterfly, which a lot of people were excited about, but has not performed as well as we were expecting.”
Mr. Heesen cautioned that “one I.P.O. does not make a trend,” and he noted that eHealth and other companies that have gone public recently had done well. But he said there were no indications of a pickup in the overall market for initial offerings.
Citing restrictions imposed by securities regulators, Shutterfly declined to comment or make Mr. Clark, who is chairman, available for an interview. The company is scheduled to report earnings on Nov. 7.
While seven years is not an unusual amount of time for a venture-backed firm to go from start to public offering, the pace was often much quicker back in 1999. Coming in at the tail end of the boom, Shutterfly had no choice but to take its time — and weather some difficult periods.
“It’s been a long process,” said George Zachary, one of the original investors in Shutterfly. Attracting customers “was slower and consumed more money than we would have liked,” he added.
Mr. Zachary, formerly a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, the second-largest investor in Shutterfly after Mr. Clark, is now a partner at Charles River Ventures and no longer sits on Shutterfly’s board.
Shutterfly has been profitable for three years, but it is facing a digital photography market that is much different from when it started. Mr. Clark promised at the start that Shutterfly would usher in a revolution in digital imaging, and seven years later, there is no question that digital technology has revolutionized the world of photography. But Shutterfly appears to be more a product of the revolution than its standard-bearer.
Shutterfly’s two main competitors in online photo printing, Ofoto and Snapfish, have been acquired by Kodak and Hewlett-Packard, respectively. (The Ofoto service was renamed Kodak EasyShare Gallery.) These deep-pocketed patrons have challenged Shutterfly on price, hurting its profit margins.
Meanwhile, a large new crop of Internet companies is capitalizing on the explosion of digital images taken not just with cameras but also with cellphones. Most of these companies, which include Photobucket, ImageShack, Slide and Flickr, which was acquired by Yahoo last year, emphasize online sharing over printing.
Tapping a younger generation of consumers for whom photography has become a form of online self-expression, often as part of blogs or social networking sites like MySpace, they have, in some cases, dwarfed Shutterfly’s audience.
“The competitive landscape is very crowded,” said Sam Snyder, a research analyst at Renaissance Capital, an independent research firm that runs a mutual fund focusing on initial offerings. Shutterfly “has huge competitors breathing down its neck, undercutting it on price,” he said.
Early last year, the standard price of a 4-by-6 print was around 29 cents. Today, they cost 19 cents at Shutterfly, 15 cents at Kodak and 12 cents at Snapfish, though volume discounts are available.
Shutterfly was founded by Dan Baum and Eva Manolis, who had been engineering managers at Silicon Graphics. After receiving financing from Mr. Clark and Mr. Zachary, another Silicon Graphics alumnus, the fledgling company moved into a modest office suite above a Jenny Craig Weight Loss Center in Menlo Park, Calif.
The humble surroundings apparently did not impress representatives from major photo-printing equipment firms like Fuji and Konica, whom the company was courting. “They didn’t know whether to take us seriously or not,” said Mr. Baum, who is now an executive at Adobe.
Still, Shutterfly managed to obtain the hardware it needed, and by the time it was ready to open its virtual doors it had moved to new headquarters in Redwood City, Calif., where it is still based.
Coincidentally, the company was started the same day as Ofoto, which counted James Barksdale, the former chief executive of Netscape and therefore a business partner of Mr. Clark, among its investors.
“Ofoto and Shutterfly were like two identical petri dishes,” said James Joaquin, the former chief executive of Ofoto. He said that the shorthand for the rivalry between the two companies was “Clark vs. Bark.”
There were many similarities between the two — not just the features on their Web sites but also their enthusiastic embrace of the Internet boom’s get-big-fast mantra. That meant giving stuff away. Ofoto promised 100 free prints to its first million customers, a promotion valued at tens of millions of dollars. For its part, Shutterfly was giving away 85 percent of its prints by mid-2000.
The collapse of the Nasdaq, and the demise of e-commerce pioneers like eToys, Kozmo, Webvan and others, changed all that. “When we got into the postbubble, things really tightened,” Mr. Baum said. “It was tough. Fortunately, we had a real business.”
Still, by early 2001, the company was forced to cut a quarter of its work force, and kept having to go back to investors, including Mr. Clark, for more money. The extra rounds of financing continued even after the company turned its first annual profit in 2003.
By the time it was ready to go public, Shutterfly had received nearly $90 million in financing, and Mr. Clark owned 40.3 percent of the company, according to regulatory filings. Mr. Clark’s share has dropped to 30.4 percent since the public offering. His stake is valued at about $96 million.
Mr. Clark has moved to South Florida, where he has started a real estate development company with Tom Jermoluk, another Shutterfly investor and the former chief executive of the failed broadband company Excite@Home. Forbes recently estimated Mr. Clark’s wealth at $1.1 billion.
Shutterfly, which is now led by Jeffrey T. Housenbold, its fourth chief executive, has said it plans to use some of the proceeds from its $87 million offering to expand its printing and production operations. As 4-by-6 prints have increasingly become a low-margin commodity, the company has focused on selling more lucrative products, like customized calendars, greeting cards, photo books, mugs and mouse pads. The company now calls itself an “Internet-based social expression and personal publishing service.”
“Shutterfly’s specialty is a very robust catalog of photo gifts and merchandise,” said Alan Bullock, an analyst at InfoTrends, a market research firm.
Recent partnerships that Shutterfly announced with Scholastic Media and HIT Entertainment emphasize the merchandise business, Mr. Bullock said. The deals allow customers to place their own pictures — or more likely those of their toddlers — in books alongside well-known characters like Thomas the Tank Engine or Clifford the Big Red Dog. The books start at $35.
Shutterfly said it has sold about 370 million prints since its inception and has stored a billion photos in its online archives. Its sales grew to $83.9 million in 2005, up from $54.5 million the year before, while net income reached $28.9 million. Without a tax benefit of $24.1 million, profit for 2005 would have been $4.8 million. Shutterfly, whose sales peak in the fourth quarter, reported losses of $3.7 million in the first six months of this year.
Shutterfly’s growth rate shows that customers like its products. The bigger challenge for the company may be whether it can stay profitable by staking out a position as the premium brand in a cutthroat market.
“It’s a tough story to sell,” Mr. Synder said.

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