The Net is not dying, take a deep breath.

Robert Scoble is a melodramatic guy.  He thinks that because the current crop of social networks might stay closed that the Net itself is in danger.  That's only true if you think the Net as it stands today is broken, which I don't.  It's going through puberty.

He bases his assumption that the sky is falling on the fact that FaceBook is closed to Google, and he thinks Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) bid for Yahoo's (NASDAQ:YHOO) search engine is an attempt to keep FaceBook's data hidden from the Web and accessible only to Microsoft customers.  Somehow this translates to:

"Google is locked out of the Web that soon will be owned by Microsoft. We will never get an open Web back if these two deals happen."

Come on.

This is only true if you think all of the entrepreneurs out there have stopped hacking away at night at something much better than FaceBook or any of today's social networks.  Do you really think innovation will stop because FaceBook remains closed?  Did that help CompuServe or AOL?

"Don’t think this matters? It sure does. Relevancy on Yahoo search will go through the roof when it has access to Facebook data and Google doesn’t. People will see that Yahoo has people search (something I’ve asked Google for for years) and Google doesn’t. That’ll turn the tide in advertising, and all that."

Good, at least somebody will have it until we get to the next-generation Web.  It's not worth hyperventilating about.

And yes, as long as HTTP keeps working the Web will be alive and well.  As long as the roads are fine other people can show up to the party at any time.

Half baked ideas are often hilarious

As I often do, I was googling an idea I had today to see if anyone had had it before me and posted something on the Net about it.  However, I just completely forgot what I was originally surfing for because I stumbled on a site called HalfBakery.com. It appears to be a site where people post ideas for products and businesses, and then other people can comment on them.  There appear to be some serious ones on the site, but what really hooked me was the just plain crazy ideas people post. 

Some of the funnier ones:

• Carrymehome.com:  You don't want to drive and you don't want to wait for a bus because then you'd have to pay attention. Even walking to a taxi is too much effort. Remember when you used to pretend you were asleep so your parents would lift you from the car to your bed? In this most modern of all possible worlds, why should any adult have to forego that childish pleasure? ... With the premium service, you are wafted along on the hands of a half-dozen basketball players (of either sex) dressed in flowing gowns. A bargain version might involve being simply dragged by a large dock worker.
• Hullaballoon: A personal airship both lofted and propelled, at a leisurely pace, by a series of balloons tethered to a conveyor belt which moves along the vertically-oriented perimeter of the longitudinal axis of the craft. Each balloon inflates as it moves from the underside of the ship, up around the prow, reaching peak inflation above the center of the ship. The balloons then deflate as they move around and down the backside.
• Evil Laugh Activated Hand Dryer:  Instead of a button or infrared sensor, people sometimes rub their hands together in the airstream, activate this hand dryer by laughing evilly

Some of the better (seemingly real) ones:

• Panic PIN:  In addition to the regular PIN number, each bank card would have a second PIN number that would indicate the user was in some sort of distress (such as being forced to withdraw money at gunpoint). Use of this alternate PIN would summon the police and perhaps put the ATM's camera in a higher resolution and/or frame rate mode.
• Cream Cheese Rings:  Pre-packaged, preformed, cream cheese rings separated by thin plastic sheets. Just peel and toss on the bagel.
• Receipt Scanner:  The Receipt Scanner is a small upward standing USB device that would receive receipts like a paper shredder, scan the receipt, and use integrated OCR software that would read the receipt and enter the appropriate information, including place of purchase, date, and total, into the user's primary finance program (such as Quicken or MS Money).

If you're the entrepreneurial type like me and you appreciate original ideas it's worth taking a few minutes to check out this site, if only for a chuckle.  The site reminds me of the Hamper and Trivet Catalog... I think it's out of print now but it's worth picking up if you see it.

Amazing uses of Nintendo Wii

If you haven't seen this before, check it out.  Johnny Lee has come up with some incredibly creative ways to use the Nintendo Wii hardware:

I can't help but think the 3D head tracking will play a prominent role in the future of human/computer interaction, all it needs is a killer application.  3D modeling and gaming comes to mind.

Jott - Consumer Voice Recognition

I try a ton of different services aka Web 2.0 applications, most of them get used for a day or two and then dropped.  However, every once in a while I come across one that actually makes it into my regular rotation and I start recommending it to people.  One of my favorite applications that I use all the time is Jott.  If you've never heard of it, you need to get acquainted.  It enables consumers with cell phones to leverage voice recognition at a personal level, and it's very cool.

At its core, Jott is a voice recognition and message-sending system.  You dial the Jott 800 number and it recognizes you from your caller ID.  You then tell it who you want to send a message to ("Myself") and then speak whatever message you want sent to that person "Don't forget to wake up early tomorrow, some *#@!*$&^ scheduled a meeting for 8 am tomorrow."  Jott will then automatically transcribe that text for you and send it to the person you wanted to send it to.  And the voice recognition is very good.  This is very powerful enterprise-grade technology that they've made accessible to the average person, which is way cool.

Most of the time I use it to send emails to myself, but there are a ton of other potential uses for it as well.  Some of the fun things I do with it:

• Send Twitter messages from my phone
• Hook it up to my Sandy account so I can feed Sandy from my phone (Sandy is a virtual secretary service that reminds me of todos and appointments)  (Mmm... lots of Web 2.0 goodness there, no?)
• Spew ideas into it while I'm driving which I then archive in Gmail for further reference.  This thing is worth its weight in gold to me just for this purpose, I used to lose a lot of good idea because I didn't have a pen and paper handy.

One of the very cool technical things they've done with it is set up a way to connect the output of a Jott message to another system using an HTTP post.  So what they've essentially done is provide a voice recognition system that you can use to feed other applications.  That's a huge barrier to entry that they just took down in one fell swoop.  It's really fun to use in development because all of a sudden you have a totally new way to interact with the user.  I've already cooked up some really cool little apps using it, maybe some day I'll put them up publicly.

I love Jott and I use it all the time, but I don't think I've ever mentioned them before.  Just wanted to send some props to them.

Reach out and tap someone on the shoulder

Imagine you're sitting in an interview and your phone suddenly tells you that your friend John went to college with the person you are interviewing with.  Pretty cool huh?

I was just complaining the other day that radical innovation seems to be in short supply these days.  Then today I stumbled across this really cool idea called Mobile FOAF (they're calling it FoafMobile, but that sounds too much like a funny little car to me--maybe because it rhymes with PopeMobile?--so I'm calling it Mobile FOAF instead).  The basic idea is that friends and people you know, who are in close physical proximity to you, can be discovered using Bluetooth-compatible mobile devices.  It's a small world, after all...

The gist of it is that each Bluetooth device has a unique identifying address (like a MAC address), and if you put that address in somebody's FOAF graph you can trace a Bluetooth device back to its owner.  You could query your FOAF graph for anyone you know who has that particular Bluetooth device, and even ask your phone to show you if anyone in the restaurant knows any of your friends.  If so you could pull up their name and picture and go find them to have a cup of coffee.  A magician could have a field day with this stuff.

The writeup I found on Mobile FOAF is actually pretty old (2003), but I'm not sure how something like this would have been useful before SPARQL was ratified this year anyway.  <hint>Hopefully this will get picked up by some enterprising company and taken to market,</hint> because this would certainly be some radical innovation.  If a Bluetooth "beacon" could be baked into wireless routers you wouldn't even need GPS to locate somebody...

Innovate or Die

Umair Haque recently wrote one of the best posts I've read in a while.  He expresses some of the same thoughts I've been having recently:

I haven't been posting a lot lately. Why not? I've been talking to lots of people - about a topic that is perhaps worth discussing here.  There's growing awareness of a disturbing incrementalism gripping Silicon Valley...  What's really going on here? I think the malaise is deep and systemic. Many of you may disagree - but I'm vastly disappointed in the moral and strategic bankruptcy of today's crop of venture investors and so-called revolutionaries.

"Incrementalism."  That's the word I've been searching for.  Don't know if Umair just made that up, but I like it.  And "underwhelmed" pretty much sums up how I feel about the state of technological innovation right now, actually for the past several years.  Sputtering along on fumes.

Not that there's anything wrong with that of course.  When times are good, anyway.

But Umair then goes on to make an astute observation about the ability of these startups light on innovation to survive the economic tsunami we are currently facing:

Today's crop of investors and startups are perhaps even more economically autistic than megacorporations. Too many are willfully blind to today's deepest and most essential strategic truth: that the path to radical value creation isn't cutting more deals (dude, high-five!!) - but in rebuilding a flawed, false global economy: one which actively transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, from the sick to the healthy, from productivity to cronyism.

I would rephrase the second half of that statement to read that the path to radical value creation isn't cutting more deals but in increasing productivity and human capacity.  That's been the role of computing for years now and it's one of the primary reasons developed nations have such a high standard of living.  Projects which don't actually add any value but merely exist because someone thinks they might be able to get acquired or because they think they might be able to sell ads end up as footnotes.

I have a feeling that the current state of anemic innovation is only sustainable because money has been ridiculously available at all levels of the economy for several years.  There was enough money floating around to keep even the most money-losing businesses afloat based purely on hope.  In our current environment that hope and smile might buy you a Coke.  As I predicted earlier this year in my post about IT spending in a recession, I think that "easy money" has pretty much dried up at this point.  Startups must now innovate--TRULY innovate--or die.  Twitters, social networks, and things created just because they can be need not apply.

I haven't seen much true innovation in the past several years.  Most of what is celebrated in the blogosphere is, frankly, fluff.  Mediocre fluff with rounded edges and odd names.  Where are the radical innovators?  I haven't been posting much lately either because frankly there is very little in the way of exciting ideas out there.  They are few and far between--computing seems to be in a state of suspended animation.  And I have a feeling there is going to be a massacre in this space in the next few years as a result.  If you don't innovate and provide value you die.

There are bright spots, of course--it's not all gloom and doom.  But that list sounds like it would actually make a pretty decent post of its own, and I'll take the opportunity :)

The Next-Generation Web--You ain't seen nothing yet.

The Web is still in its infancy.  It sounds like an absurd claim, except that the person making it is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web in the first place.  I happen to agree with him.

The first incarnation of the Web changed the world, and what we call "Web 2.0" was only an incremental improvement on that.  It made the baby-Web usable for normal people.

I've had the pleasure of speaking with Tim on a few occasions and he is patiently waiting for everyone to get over the love-fest with what they currently know as the Web so we can focus on moving things forward and innovating again.

The end-game here, and what Tim has had in mind from the beginning, amounts to a completely new paradigm in software.  It's about creating an Internet-wide mesh of data which a given software application can use as easily as its own database. 

Fortunately, the Web is hurtling towards adolescence.  SPARQL is the glue that makes this global data mesh usable, and it was just ratified this year.  The Web's voice just cracked.

While advances like service-oriented architecture were steps in the right direction, they were still just an incremental improvement over client-server based architectures.  And as useful as that is, I think an unfortunate side-effect is that an entire generation of programmers was raised with their thinking firmly locked in the old paradigm.  I've tried to evangelize the new paradigm myself, and I can attest that it's like trying to convince people that man can actually fly using airplanes while they turn around and go back to work on pimping out their horse and buggy.

Tim's vision of the Web is the ultimate logical evolution of Web technology.  Fortunately there are some recent developments that indicate that the Web has hit a growth spurt and we may soon see another explosion of innovation based on the Next-Generation Web.

Microsoft just took Yahoo out back and shot it

I wondered about this deal a while back when Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) first announced their intention to acquire Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO).  I thought it was an absurd thing to do for Microsoft.  Now, rumors are starting to circulate that Microsoft might pull out.  And the other interested parties have left the building.

If this happens, Yahoo is pretty much toast.  Most of their top talent has already bolted when this was first floated, and they weren't the most innovative company in the world to begin with.  The only thing they've done recently that I've really liked is Yahoo Pipes (which is one of those geeky tech toys that I have NO idea how they would generate revenue from).  I've used Yahoo Messenger for instant messaging for years, but aside from that I really don't care about the company.  They are, for the most part, irrelevant in this day and age.  On top of that, their best talent left, management bungled the potential acquisition, morale is non-existant, and it generally sounds like a depressing place to be right now.

The ONLY thing they have going for them is that they have a lot of home page eyeballs.  Their My Yahoo! site is pretty popular, and yahoo.com still gets an insane amount of traffic.  They're basically a content producer at this point, and Microsoft wants to own that space badly.  And Microsoft has now managed to severely cripple its biggest competitor in this market.  Now, I obviously don't know if this was the plan all along or not, but I do know that blowing billions of dollars on Yahoo right now would be an absurd waste of money in the current economic environment.  They will never make that money back on the deal if it happens.  If Microsoft was really willing to give up that kind of money they will be extraordinarily fortunate if the deal DOES fall thru, because they were just saved from their own stupidity.

If Microsoft's first offer was serious, Jerry Yang is playing some dangerous poker here.  If I were a shareholder I would seriously consider slapping him upside the head and asking him what he was thinking.  In my opinion he looked a gift horse in the mouth.  Stared it down, in fact.

Was thinking about buying some YHOO puts for just this event the other day, now it looks like I may be too late.  We'll see what happens over the weekend, if the price opens at a decent level I may just have to play in this one.

NEWS FLASH: YOU just gave $300 to JP Morgan Chase

This was a sad day for America.  The United States Treasury today confirmed that it allowed the Federal Reserve to STEAL $29 billion of OUR money and give it to JP Morgan (NYSE:JPM) as a BRIBE to absorb Bear Stearns (NYSE:BSC).  That's $300 per American.  They announced, in broad daylight, that they are breaking the law and picking your pocket.  Did you get a $600 tax refund?  You're now paying half of it to JP Morgan.

I know this whole Bear Stearns thing is not the most straightforward thing for the average person to follow, especially if you haven't been paying attention to it along the way.  But here's what happened in very simple terms:

1. Bear Stearns made very stupid investments and went bankrupt
2. The Fed forced a Bear Stearns merger with JP Morgan
3. Bear Stearns investment losses still had to be taken by someone--their stupid investments didn't go away.
4. They figured out how to let JP Morgan keep the profits and stick YOU AND I with the  $29 BILLION in losses

I don't think people quite GET this.  JP Morgan keeps the profits, YOU keep the losses.  You like that deal?  I don't.  If I want JP Morgan to have $300 of my money I will go deposit it there, or slip it under the door in an envelope.  An UNELECTED group of people have dipped into the public purse and have taken $300 OUT OF YOUR POCKET.

A coworker recently sent me an article from John Mauldin explaining why this Bear Stearns bailout needed to happen.  BS.  *B.  S.*  This is BLATANTLY picking the pockets of Americans for the benefit of a few.  It is also violating the LAW.  ACCORDING TO THE CONSTITUTION, EVERY SINGLE SPENDING BILL MUST BE APPROPRIATED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.  BY ORDER OF THE CONSTITUTION.  If John Mauldin or anyone else doesn't like that he can go move to China where they can do whatever they want.  Get out now, and take your communist views with you.  Don't let the door hit you on the way out.  Last I checked we still had laws around here and an investment bank going under does NOT constitute legal grounds for breaking them. Especially, ESPECIALLY, laws that are explicitly outlined in the Constitution.

You know what would happen if Bear Stearns didn't get bailed out?  A lot of banks would fail.  Yes, the derivatives market would blow up.  Do you know who that would hurt?  THE BANKS THAT MADE THE STUPID INVESTMENTS IN THE FIRST PLACE.  Boo hoo, cry me a river.  Would it make you sad to see hedge fund managers have to downgrade their Bentleys or sell their yachts?  How about being sad that YOUR KIDS AND MINE ARE GOING TO HAVE TO PAY FOR THIS so that they can keep them??

If the people of this country don't stand up RIGHT NOW and scream LOUDLY, WE are going to eat TRILLIONS in derivative losses that rightfully belong to the banks.  You want a trillion dollar tax increase?  It's either you or the banks, you had better decide whom you care about more.  The way we respond to this particular situation will let them know how much they can get away with and therefore how each subsequent blowup is handled.  People need to go to JAIL for this, specifically the people who signed off on this crime:  George Bush and Hank Paulson.

Now, I WISH I could expect all the people out there to go picket in the streets about this, but I know that people just aren't going to care enough about maintaining a Republic to miss American Idol.  So here are a couple of things you can do from your chair:  first, call the Senate Banking Committee at (202)224-7391 and let them know you want your $300 back.  Then, go sign the petition to impeach Bush over his sign-off on giving away YOUR money without YOUR (and Congressional) approval.  If you care about this country and your standard of living it's the LEAST you can do.

Rough Times for Software Companies

I predicted a while back that the current economic crisis would affect IT spending significantly.  It appears that this is happening pretty quickly--ChangeWave Research recently published an interesting survey from vendors in the software industry.  In an indicator of just how quickly the recession is hitting the software industry, take a look at this chart:

I also want to pick out one more bit of interesting data out of this post:

Finally, in another extremely bearish sign, only 10% say their company's capital budget is increasing for next quarter (2Q) and 26% say its decreasing - a net 14-pts worse than three months ago.

This reinforces my gut feeling that Software as a Service companies may weather this recession much better than most, as the capital outlays to get them up and running are significantly lower than premise-based solutions.  It'll be interesting to see how companies like SalesForce.com (NYSE: CRM) respond to this.

If you work in the software industry and you DON'T want to lose your job, you should consider spending some time communicating to your elected officials that you want some order restored to the financial markets.  Once your customers can get loans to run and expand their businesses again you're much more likely to start getting more orders.  The sooner we can get through to our elected officials to stop drinking Stupid and start regulating like they're supposed to, the sooner normalcy and productivity can return, the sooner CapEx dollars will start flowing again.  A good way to start would be to sign the petition to reverse the Bear Stearns "bailout" and impeach Bush for authorizing it.