Entrepreneur Watch

Collecting cow farts

OK, you gotta love this one.

The lovely Dvorak Uncensored pointed me to this article in the Telegraph about scientists strapping a big air bag to cows to see how much methane they excrete. Methane is a greenhouse gas, too, you know.

Scientists are examining cow farts and burps in a novel bid to combat global warming.

How does he find this stuff?

According to the article:

The Argentine researchers discovered methane from cows accounts for more than 30 per cent of the country's total greenhouse emissions.

Maybe the global warming problem is worse than we thought...

Telcos: Don't make us offer broadband, but don't do it yourself, either

Law.com has an article that outlines several telcos' practice of suing municipalities to keep them from installing publicly-owned broadband internet services.

Now, stop me if I'm wrong. Aren't these the same telcos that say Network Neutrality must die, that they must be given local monopolies and the right to charge services like YouTube extra fees for using up bandwidth? It seems they're crying that they can't afford to upgrade networks themselves, but they don't want cities to offer it as a public service either.

This is a case of "Do as I do, not as I say." In other words, talk a lot about broadband, but don't do anything about it. At least they're consistent.

The telco argument is that cities have an unfair advantage because they can fund the projects with cheap bonds and do not have to turn a profit.

A Salt Lake City lawyer representing the state responds in the article: "[I]f the private sector had been more responsive, there would not have been a need for the project."

Isn't it about time we consider broadband internet an essential public utility?

Om Malik cites a Pew study that shows broadband growth in the U.S. is slowing, noting that low income groups are cutting back on broadband spending.

The U.S. lags abysmally in establishing high-speed broadband. One study says the average download speed in the U.S. is 1.9 Mbps, compared to Japan at 61.0 Mbps, Korea at 45.6 Mbps and the netherlands at 21.7Mbps. (The ITIF, however, says the U.S. comes in at 4.8 Mbps, beating the U.K and Greece, at least.)

And guess how these countries do it? Public funding.

I know all you libertarians say we need to let the private sector work. The problem is, it sometimes doesn't. When it comes to telcos, that's just about never.

Thanks to Slashdot for pointing me to the Law.com article.

How Steve Jobs Ruined the iPhone

The i Phone 3G goes on sale this week, and you'd think the picture couldn't be brighter. Six million iPhones already in consumers' hands and it still makes the competition look second-rate. As NYT's David Pogue says, "Clumsy touch-screen lookalikes from rival phone makers line the shelves."

Even better, John Markoff and Laura Holson note what may be an even more important development than the 3G version of the iPhone: an abundance of 3rd-party iPhone software ready to jazz up an already jazzy device. This is important because, as Mr. Markoff writes, "Mr. Jobs failed to make his personal computers dominant, in part because software developers did not write as many programs for Mac-based machines as they did for Microsoft Windows PCs."

Jobs did not make that mistake with the iPod (lots of tunes available) and he is not going to make it with the iPhone.

Except for one thing. Jobs has made a second mistake, and it once again has to do with compatibility. The mistake is called AT&T.

I will not buy an iPhone because I will not settle for lousy phone service. And now the iPhone 3G buyers will have to settle for lousy 3G service. As Mr. Pogue writes, 3G gives you fast internet on your phone, but "you don’t get that speed or those features unless you’re in one of AT&T’s 3G network areas — and there aren’t many of them."

There is a reason software developers flocked to Windows PCs. There were more of them. Dozens of companies made the hardware, competed on price and used a single operating system that made them all compatible. They did so even though Windows was a clumsy Mac lookalike. Only one company made the Mac.

If Jobs had made the iPhone software available to all manufacturers and all carriers, he would have established an industry standard by now that no one would have been able to touch. By giving AT&T exclusivity, he has automatically limited his customer base. Not as badly as he did for the Mac, but still limited.

And he left an opening. Every non-AT&T customer has to settle for a clumsy clone. But eventually, even a sloppy imitation will gain more market share than the iPhone. I don't know if it will be Google's Android, but at least it has the right business model.

Just as, a generation ago, Apple had the right design while Microsoft had the right business model. As it is, you have to illegally unlock the iPhone to get it to work on a non-AT&T service. What kind of a business model is that?

The competition has four more years to get its act together. The iPhone is reportedly exclusive to AT&T until 2012. Yes, Apple has a lot of developers creating apps for the iPhone. But just watch how fast they fly to any halfway decent imitator that gets accepted by multiple manufacturers and carriers. If no competitor has established a strong contender by then, the iPhone can still set the standard.

What are the odds?

Ballmer and Icahn team up against Yahoo

So Microsoft has decided that it would reconsider buying all or part of Yahoo if Carl Icahn's slate of directors is elected.

Rob Hof at Business Week thinks that it's not likely to be just talk, but that Steve Ballmer and Icahn have agreed on a price. Since Icahn's only plan if he wins is to sell the company to Microsoft, Microsoft would otherwise have the upper hand in any negotiations. That makes sense to me.

What doesn't make sense to me is why such a merger would be a good idea. In technology, mergers rarely work.

I get so tired of people saying that a company's primary obligation is to its shareholders. Whatever happened to the idea that the focus of a company should be on its products and customers? A merger would make shareholders richer, but would it really be in the best long-term interests of Yahoo? Not likely.

The stock market is a gamble. You should buy stocks in companies you admire and trade on your confidence in their strategy. Anything else is an attempt to rig the game. The idea of buying a bunch of shares in a company and then using that leverage to force a merger just to increase the short-term stock price and make a quick profit is reprehensible to me.

Google on privacy

Google's Marissa Meyer posted an essay on Google's privacy policy a couple days ago. In it, she also notes that Google's policy is to keep the home page at 28 words, so she had to delete the word "Google" after the copyright symbol in order to add a link to the privacy policy. Larry and Sergey made her do it.

(Yahoo's home page is incredibly busy, but its dedicated search page has just 16 words. Does anyone actually go to search.yahoo.com?)

There is so much paranoia over Google's increasing power, that it's worth going through the privacy policy. There's even a page on Wikipedia titled "Criticism of Google." Copyright violations, privacy, PageRank bias, keeping your search queries too long, etc. And, of course, governments could always subpoena data.

Most of the criticism tends to focus on what Google "could" or "might" do with all the data it collects. At least Google spells out its policy in clear terms. You may choose not to believe it, but I'd like to hear of any specific example of a violation of its policy.

It uses the data to deliver ads to you and to "improve" Google's services, including your search results. It provides "aggregated non-personal info" to outsiders to give advertisers (presumably) demographic data without identifying individuals. And it notes that some data is held on servers outside the country, implicitly acknowledging that some data might be more prone to break-ins. (Google employee data was recently stolen from an outside firm that Google used to use to store data.)

Personally, I'm completely comfortable with Google's practices. More companies should follow its example of clearly spelling out their privacy policies -- and of keeping their damn sites easier to use.

Solar Powered Curtains?

Slashdot.org pointed me to this article on an attempt to create solar powered curtains, working with a fabric-like thin-film photovoltaic material.

Interesting idea, and nice to see people thinking differently about solutions to energy needs.

The developer talks about using photovoltaics to turn light into electricity, then LEDs to turn electricity into light for the home (after storing it in a battery.) There's something cirularly ironic about that.

I keep wondering how efficient we can get in making those conversions. The best source of light is the sun itself, and we lose a huge percentage of the energy when we convert it with PV technology. But the higher the efficiency of the conversion, the more interesting the possibilities become.

A Wickipedia article talks about a University of Delaware team that achieved 42.8% efficiency a year ago.

RenewableEngergyWorld.com has an article about thin-film cells from DOE reaching 19.9% efficiency.

I had a conversation with Dr. B.J. Stanbery from Heliovolt yesterday, who speculated about a future with plug-in hybrids or electric cars with roofs covered with PV cells.

Still, I'll bet there will be a lot of issues with durability as we think up such ideas. The best commentary on the solar curtains was made by slashdot when it categorized the item: "from the don't-let-the-cat-climb-them dept."

Trust-busting the Google/Yahoo deal

CNET gives an overview of the issues relating to the DOJ review of the Google/Yahoo deal.

Fine. But can we say, snowball's chance at Burning Man? Those are the odds of DOJ nixing the deal.

I did a lot of reporting on anti-trust issues when Microsoft was being investigated. It comes down to the fact that a monopoly is not illegal of itself. It's only when you use the monopoly to exclude others from getting into the market that it becomes illegal. There is nothing exclusive about this deal. With auctions setting the prices, they cannot use low pricing to drive others out of the business, or jack up prices because of their near monopoly.

Microsoft will support DOJ action. But isn't that rather like a snowball calling a puddle cold?

Microsoft still after Yahoo?

So the Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft is still considering buying Yahoo's search business, this time by finding another partner, like News Corp., which would buy the rest of Yahoo. Here's a link to InternetNews for those of you who don't have a WSJ subscription.

I know Rupert Murdoch is supposed to be a smart guy, but he may just be dumb and ambitious enough to take such a deal. He's still thinking like a tabloid publisher, thinking he can create his own web of sites and keep people bouncing around within them like a silver ball in a pinball machine until they land in an ad hole. No need to visit other sites! We've got the best of the Web right here!

And why didn't he make WSJ free, as he said he would? WSJ is a great pub, but it can never have an exclusive for more than a few hours. Just go to, oh, InternetNews, perhaps.

I know Steve Ballmer, and he's the kind of guy who doesn't give up easily. He's smart and aggressive, and one of the best dealmakers in the world. And he isn't nearly as mean as people make him out to be. I'm sure he's keeping his options open, and probably talking to certain dissident shareholders.

The problem with the whole deal is that it doesn't address the fundamental problem -- making money off advertising. Microsoft makes less money off internet advertising than I do from blogging. And I don't make anything from blogging.

Yahoo isn't much better. Why do you think it wants to do the AdSense deal with Google?

All Microsoft gets is subscribers. It still has to figure out how to make money from them. That means more relevancy and ease of use, areas where it has about as much talent as Lou Costello trying to play Hamlet.

Prediction Markets: Intrade on Obama, Osama, same-sex marriage and Google Lunar X Prize

I felt bad for talking about prediction markets that don't require you to put up real money, so I decided to check out one that does. It's called Intrade, and it operates out of Ireland, because nobody is sure if this kind of market is legal in the U.S.

Which, BTW, is dumb, because the stock market and futures markets are also gambling. A few years ago I came across a guy who was trying to start a prediction market in the U.S. He had apparently convinced the proper authorities that what he was doing is legal, but was having trouble finding investors to back him. I believe he got it started, but I don't know where it is now.

On Intrade, Obama is currently favored to win the presidency. His stock is trading at 64.6, meaning there's a 64.6 percent chance he will win, in current opinion. McCain is at 30.4 percent.

(Comparisons: The NewsFutures market puts the odds of a Democrat winning the election at 65 percent. The Foresight Exchange predicts a Dem win at 66.)

California passing the stupid constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage is at 52.5, up from 50 soon after it started trading on June 7, but down from a peak of 65 on June 27.

Shares of Osama bin Laden being captured by September 30 are just 5.0, but buyers saying he'll be captured by next March 31 are putting the odds at 20 percent.

The odds of someone winning Google's Lunar X prize are currently 25 percent, down from a peak of 80 percent a few months ago.

Intrade also points to a YouTube video of an ABC TV report on its trading system. It's interesting.

Where Is It Now? The Industry Standard

Has anybody else noticed that IDG has re-launched the Industry Standard online?

I came across it the other day. The Industry Standard was one of the really great publications born in the dot-com boom, a weekly competitor to the monthlies like Upside, where I was editor-in-chief for a few years. Founded by John Battelle and edited by Jonathan Weber, it was lively, interesting and covered all the important dot-com companies. It had attitude.

The editorial content on the new Standard doesn't have that old Battelle edge, but seems to have the kind of tech news that you can find all over the internet. It includes an opinion that downloadable movies will displace Blu-ray. News about a new virtual world from Gaia Online. A feature called 'Where Are they Now?' profiling what happened to people at some of the big dot-com flame-outs (most of them seem to be doing uninteresting stuff.)

But the main feature of the site seems to be paying people Standard Dollars for making predictions about events in the technology biz.

The idea of prediction markets is very interesting. It works like a futures commodity market. Instead of trying to prdict the future price of pork bellies by buying and selling those futures, you try (at the Industry Standard) to predict events like the odds of Acrobat coming out of beta by August or Marc Andreessen joining the Facebook board.

The Bush administration got into trouble a few years ago for trying to set up a futures market to predict terrorist events, and had to take it down when people complained it was too morbid.

But it probably would have worked. (Strategy Page is not so shy. The odds are nearly 3:1 that there will NOT be an al quaeda-style attack on the U.S. within the first 18 months of the new president's term. Whew)

When people put their money on the line to make a prediction -- like whether Google stock will go up or down -- their predictions tend to be pretty good. The accuracy of the predictions depends on how good your information is. If you get enough people betting, you accumulate the wisdom of crowds.

I remember reading an article from a British publication warning that Osama bin Laden was planning a terrorist attack -- published before Sept. 11. Crowds would have done a better job picking up on terrorist clues than the CIA.

Hewlett-Packard once ran an internal prediction market where employees could bet on the coming quarterly profits, and they reportedly did a better job than the accountants.

Still, a much more interesting prediction market is at Strategy Page, where you can bet real money to predict things such as whether a Chinese warship or submarine will be lost to a major accident by the end of the year (current odds say no) or whether President Musharref of Pakistan will be assassinated by Islamic Fundamentalists (current odds say yes.)

However, like the stock market or sports betting, you really only make a financial killing when you have inside information. I find it more fun to just see which way the betting goes.

The Industry Standard needs to liven up its bets (as well as its editorial.) But it's hard to come up with good ideas that people will bet on. So far, no one seems to be placing bets at the Industry Standard on whether Jerry Yang will be ousted as CEO of Yahoo.

But you can rest easy. Strategy page predicts that the Beijing Olympics will NOT be canceled after China invades Taiwan.

No word on whether that means China will actually invade Taiwan ...

(ADDENDUM: The only problem with Strategy Page, it turns out after closer inspection, is that you don't bet any real money. Only real rewards make these things accurate.)