The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘live’

Computers are getting smaller and smaller. One need only look at the proliferation of smartphones for proof of this

Original post: 
Man and machine: chips successfully placed in living cells

We’re here at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas where Twitter co-founder Evan Williams doing a keynote Q&A with Umair Haque. Williams may use the time to talk a bit about Twitter’s upcoming ad platform. Update: It’s actually an “At Platform” called At Anywhere — more here.

Interestingly enough, Twitter saw its first burst of popularity three years ago at this very conference.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

UH: Ev you have something pretty interesting you want to say today?

EW: Yeah, we want to announce something. We wanted to announce our new “At Platform” (undoubtedly to be spelled an @ Platform) – a way to integrate Twitter into any website. “At Anywhere” – basically this allows you to place the Twitter hovercards on any site. We have 13 sites we’re launching with including Amazon, ebay, Yahoo, Digg, Bing, Meebo, Salesforce.

UH: So what can you do with this?

EW: You can easily tweet from any page that is using this. Also, maybe you want talk to authors of posts without going to Twitter itself, you can just hover over their name and tweet them. Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch.

UH: So this helps you contextualize information. But why would sites use this?

EW: A connection to users you didn’t have before – and it keeps people coming back. And it will result in more followers for a site. Also, hopefully more people who are your fans using twitter to talk about you or your content. And you can bring in users’ tweets talking about your site.

UH: So it’s a platform to juice up site’s networks and virility. But it’s an “At Platform” not an “Ad Platform”.

EW: Yeah, it’s about lowering the barrier for information.

UH: What makes 21st century businesses different? Like Twitter? The first principle to me is experimentation. Why are you willing to explore different possibilities?

EW: Experimentation lets you create value. “Whatever you assume when you start out, you’re wrong.” Most of the great businesses of our time have experimented. Like Google.

UH: So it’s about creating value, then figuring it out?

EW: Yes, it’s about creating experience for users and businesses. There is a ton of business use on Twitter today — it’s one of the biggest uses. We want to make that better, easier, faster.

UH: What is Twitter evolving to?

EW: What is Twitter has always been a tough question to answer. We think of it as an information network — different from a social network. It’s about getting info and also sharing. You can take advantage of Twitter without sharing anything about your life. We need to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

UH: So better information, better connections, better choices.

EW: Yes.

UH: Experimentation is about iteration. So how does that happen at Twitter?

EW: We have a bunch of awesome people in the company now. We’ve grown very quickly over the past year. Our employee growth curve is almost like our user growth curve now. We have people on focused teams, like mobile, or internationalization. We’re worried about central thinking and slow processes. So we tell our teams to “go for it.”

UH: So what’s your role?

EW: I don’t get into the nuts and bolts of code, cause things would be a big mess. I spend most of my time thinking about the high level issues. And I think a lot about the company – how do we scale the company, about our culture, etc. How do we define the characteristics we want. I think there is a parallel between the service and the company — openness is huge, transparency.

UH: So openness is very important. Help us trace the arc of openness at Twitter.

EW: Yeah, it means a lot of things. We debated if openness or transparency. “A window is transparent, but a door is open.” The users have taken Twitter and morphed it into what they want it to be. Now developers are doing the same thing. Openness is really a survival technique.

I sit down with new employees when they start and go over 9 assumptions you should have about working at Twitter. One key one is assume there are more smart people outside the company than insides.

UH: What about giving the golden goose away? Why be so open?

EW: That was a big question for us – the deals with Bing and Google. These were the first guys we shared our full stream with. There’s a lot of debate about that. Because we don’t have a business model yet, so why give it away? But we went back to the principle of giving users the most value.

There are 50 million tweets a day, how do we show you the best ones for you? Right now, we don’t do a good enough job of that. But with these partnerships, we have more chances to do that.

UH: Was there a lot of internal debate about this?

EW: Yeah, there was a ton. But we decided it was good. And now we’ve expanded the deals – like with Yahoo. And a few weeks ago we talked about giving this data to thousands of others.

Now third party developers are building a lot of value. Like adding pictures to Twitter.

CoTweet and HootSuite are really interesting too. Twitter.com isn’t a good interface for doing customer support, but those guys are. CoTweet just got acquired by a company that wants to focus on that more.

We’d love to see much more focus on creating these deep experiences that create value.

UH: So experimentation and openness. Other companies want control, like Apple. How open are you guys?

EW: We’re pretty open – there is some control we need to employ because if we were infinitely open we’d be doing a disservice to users. Openness can work against you still. It has to be managed a lot. Having an open API makes it easier to make apps that will spam users. We send cease and desists everyday to companies making spam tools. We have to exert some control.

UH: I think shepherding is a good way to put it. So you had some interesting use recently – such as the earthquake in Chile.

EW: I got an email recently about the earthquake, thanking us for helping with the situation. This is very gratifying for us because we’ve always held it important for Twitter to reach the weakest signals in the world. We started out with a big focus on SMS – and it’s still really important to us. Because it reaches so many people. We have deals with 65 carriers around the world to send these SMS tweets.

We’re at the beginning. We’re seeing really strong growth in India where SMS is huge. And in the Middle East.

UH: I think this changing the world stuff is the future for entrepreneurs. It gets to the heart of the point about inclusiveness. So – what is an “active user”?

EW: To me it comes back to – is someone getting value out of Twitter? If they don’t have an account it’s hard to know, like people who search Google for tweets. In the beginning we put a lot of focus on telling the world or your friends and family what you’re doing. But now there is something interesting on Twitter for everyone – like the Flaming Lips being on Twitter, you can get updates on the band.

And as more people start getting information on Twitter, they’re more likely to get involved.

UH: Someone has started using Twitter inside the White House, right?

EW: Yeah, it’s really interesting that it’s from in the White House. It’s an official channel, but they’re using it a different type of way. It’s about reducing the walls between people with a lot of influence, and those who they influence. And that’s the most profound promise of the Internet. This is the wave I started on 10 years ago with blogging. It’s about the democracy of information. Anyone can put information on the web — that’s huge.

UH: Tweet Minister in the UK aggregates the tweets from members of parliament. This is re-wiring society in some ways. But we also have a counter-force – like state control of information.

EW: In some regions, yes, this is bad and hurting the web. But the Internet is a tidal wave that you will not be able to keep out. Like in China, who knows how long those firewalls will hold up – but not forever.

UH: Yes, there are many ways to get through the firewalls already. There’s a lot of pressure on them.

Let’s talk about “betterness.” I booked a trip to his five star resort in an exotic land. When I got there, it was a shack. The manager couldn’t do anything — so I put it on Twitter. Within 15 minutes the booking company called me, and in 20 minutes I got a new hotel. In a half an hour my vacation was fixed.

EW: That’s great. Our hope is that this is the norm, not a fluke. We have a bit of a dichotomy, because there is more everyday you want to search for. We don’t just want to maximize that, we hope to make Twitter more useful to you. We want to decrease time you spend on Twitter, not increase it.

Recently we went through a process to define our operating principles. The number one principle is “be a force for good.” Another principle is “pay attention.”

UH: David Pogue did a campaign against hidden charges from the carriers. It’s the same thing with the hotel operator and me. I know you’re a big fan of Warren Buffet – he also believes in creating real value.

EW: Yes, from a business perspective, Twitter needs to fundamentally be about helping people make better decisions. Or the help something happen that normally wouldn’t. Like the donations to Haiti through text message — we weren’t taking the money, but it spread virally through Twitter. People want to help each other out, we need to reduce the friction.

UH: Is that what you want to do with the new At Platform?

EW: Yes, totally. We’ll see what happens, the obvious stuff is more tweeting, but I think it’s a lowering of the friction as well.

UH: You ask yourself, how would i make Walmart better? Why ask yourself that?

EW: Because as we look at how businesses are using Twitter – we want our tool to help businesses get better.

The world is so often a black box where there is no communication. There’s a lack of dialogue and a lack of transparency. The promise of all these technologies is that this goes away. You close the loop.

UH: Outline for us your big picture goals.

EW: Fostering the open exchange of information. To be a force for good. The ease of exchange of information is important. Help out other people with something as small as a retweet. That’s our ambition.

UH: Google is all about archiving the world’s information. Yours is different — creating new information.

It’s all about advantage though – what’s your advantage.

EW: Our advantage will only come if everyone wins. We only do win-win deals. Because any deal where someone is losing is unsustainable. That’s why we haven’t turned on the revenue yet — there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, but none of it is sustainable.

Creating an advantage for other people and not giving them a reason to work around you – that’s key.

UH: Is the Internet making a better media industry?

EW: I think there’s a huge shift going on – but it’s an ecosystem where everything is involved. This user-generated content just makes things richer. Blogging and traditional media work together. Twitter compliments traditional media. I was talking last night to some guys from CNN – it’s helped them change what they do. It’s a win-win.

UH: How will the At Platform speak to that?

EW: Hopefully these guys will us it to get the new out there.

UH: What makes you tick?

EW: There are two types of entrepreneurs. What drives me is creating things that didn’t exist before. Your product or service should be at the end of the sentence: “wouldn’t it be awesome if…”

It’s creating new stuff versus extracting from old stuff. There are people who look at money as the goal versus the teams. I create businesses to make new things. It’s a fuel for creating more things in the world. I’ve been lucky to stumble upon things that have helped change the world.

UH: Why focus on these things though?

EW: Largely luck. But maybe it’s what interests me. Twitter was a side project of Odeo – my cofounders came up with it. Blogging was a side project too at one point.

UH: If something is awesome, people will use it.

EW: Yes.

Also, helping others succeed is a sub principle of ours.

UH: Tell us one or two more of them.

EW: Be a force for good, pay attention — make things happen is another one. There’s also building a culture of trust.

UH: What are your big lessons to other entrepreneurs?

EW: Create something you want to exist in the world. Another is focus. Many people are trying to do a lot of things when they should be doing one thing. You may be wrong with whatever you’re trying out, but you’ll try other things.

A lot of the great companies are now coming from outside Silicon Valley. You don’t have to be there.

That’s a wrap.

Mark Cuban and Bud Mayo have been pushing the current generation of 3D long before the current generation of 3D had even been pitched as the next big thing to consumers by TV manufacturers. Cuban and Mayo (sounds like a delicious sandwich) aren’t trying to get you to watch 3D television in your home, though. They actually want you to leave the house

Read more here:
Final Four to be shown in 3D theaters

Xbox LIVE was previously known to censor or even ban gamers who indicate or even hint they were of an untraditional sexually orientation. This could either be from listing it in user profile or using a slang term in a tag

Read more: 
Xbox LIVE Terms of Use reverses policy on sexual orientation/identification

The story here is that someone secretly affixed a GPS tracker on a Google Street View camera car and you can follow the car’s progress using Google Maps while it’s photographing the streets of Berlin.

Here is the original: 
Google Street View camera car tagged with GPS sensor, stalked around Berlin

AOL announced its first quarterly earnings today as a newly public company. Fourth quarter revenues dropped 8% to $471.6 million, and turned a profit of $1.4 million (see the slides below). Notes from CEO Tim Armstrong’s first conference call are below. He laid out AOL’s strategy, warned that sales would probably be dampened this quarter as a result of reducing a third of its workforce and noted that “AOL is not a quarterly project.”  He emphasized Aol’s content strategy, with the build out of AOL’s new content management system Seed and acquisition of StudioNow on the video front.  Armstrong went into some detail about AOL’s nichebuster strategy, noting that “fragmentation is our friend.”  He also said that AOl will pursue new paid subscription services in the future.

The sales team is now given incentives to sell more premium ads on site than across AOL’s ad network.  AOL plans on closing money-losing international operations, which will result in a $125 million hit to revenues, but Europe alone lost $50 million so its income statement will look healthier after the exit. Display advertising is forecast to remain flat, but the mix will shift from network to premium ads on AOL’s owned properties.

Here are my live notes:

Tim Armstrong:

We have an aggressive strategy, starts and ends with execution,

We have gone through major cost reduction, reducing one third of workforce
built and designed Seed, our new content management system
cleaned up Mail (fewer ads)
adding to management team,
recent acquisition of StudioNow
a new middle market sales team
redesigned sales process,
reignited AOl’s brand with agencies,
completed spinout from Time Warner.

Most important thing, we put the heartbeat and will to win back into AOL

Strategy we are going after
1. in content, building content platforms for journalists on the web, matching technology with content can capture large audiences.
2. In advertising want to help brand advertisers transition to the Web
3. Communications, working on new platform
4. Paid services, we will be testing services and subscriptions in 2010

Some major items on the checklist

• scale content production and content partnerships
• launch anew brand platform
• scale the number of local communities
• stop decline of communications products and launch new ones
• launch paid services

It is difficult to remove a third of workforce without some impact, may see some dampening on ad sales, AOl is not a quarterly project.

Q&A

Q: What are new lines of business AOL is launching?

Armstrong

One is ion conetnet, Seed is largest cross company prject in a few years, formulation of a product we hope to bring to market over the course of 2010. StudioNow acquisition on video side is similar ro Seed. You will see us bring projects that help us scalle teh conetent on teh Web and loosk different than the contenet you see on eth Web today.  We continue to work with advertisers and ad agencies. new ads platform will have some new features oin it.  In tehlocal area, we continue to launch Patch. The Q for us is how much we scale it in 2010.

The most important new things will be the new ad system, how we launch and grow that in 2010, and the content system, how we produce and aprtner for great content to a tract users to AOL properties

Q: Why does niche at scale stratgey make sense now. Seems like it depends on doing well in search.

Armstrong, niche at scale is actually quality at scale. What uou consider niche, we don’t. Some people may look at Engadget as niche, but that blog won blog of the decade and also was the official blog covering CES. We had a partner in Sprint that saw that as attractive.  It is a scale advertisers find very attractive. A content strategy that people relate to.  We are able to bundle those audiences together and create scale for advertisers. Seed and StudioNow wil help us fuel more properties like an Engadget.

Second Q, are these properties created for search?  Search si an important part of it but if you look at referral traffic, it is other things, Twitter, Facebook, other things, our own properties in recirculation, we look at the mix.  Our strategy around distribution is not reliant on search. It is a part of it. Internally we say fragmentation is our friend

Q: Audience numbers, paid services?

Armstrong: You might see bumps in total uniques, but company is getting healthier underneath as we shift our content strategy. Will shut some properties, open new ones. Will audience grow overall?  I am not sure, but focussed on growing audiences in specific category?

People look at paid services as dialu-p access, there are other paid services, where people bring their own access.  It is an interesting asset as paid services are becoming more viable. We look at services and subscriptions as areas we will be testing this year.

There were a number of deals before that were unprofitable for us. The company was hooked on pageviews. We are now focussing on net revenue.

Q: Technology toolkit

A: first and foremost we have to be clear about which platforms we are betting on. Second is what are clear and differentiated parts of those products. Who is building those products. the product team was disbanded at AOL a couple years ago. We are bringing in product people and engineers. We have had very good success bringing people into the company. Third thing is to open up the platform to external developers. AOL is not necessarily the most open platform. In the process of looking at the infrastructure and relationship with outside

on acquisition,$37M StudioNow, I have said this before, we are out of the Hail Mary business. I think StudioNow is great example of what we would hope to do in the future in M&A. They have great group of people,strong leadership and strong engineers.

On search deal, we have had a great partnership with Google, we continue to be close to them. What we are expecting to get out of search deal is longer-term partnership where we are both aligned. We have along partnership with Google. Marketplace is more competitive. First and foremost if you are looking for us to squeeze more dollars or pennies out every quarter, you are going to be disappointed. Looking for a deal that helps our strategy, a reasonable deal for us and the partner. We are a content focussed company, distribution is almost as important to us as money, we will look for distribution as much as money in the deal.

Q: divestitures, what are non-core?

CFO: likely we will trade some assets away if we can get a good deal and they are non-strategic.

Q: How will brand advertising on the Web grow? Also international shutdowns, more color?
Armstrong: I think there is less apprehension from brand advertisers moving to the Web. The reality is that brand advertising online or offline hasn’t really changed. Brands like to connect themselves to stronger brand experiences. If your P&G or someone like that you want to put yourself with other brands of the same quality. That is what we are about, high quality content and sites that are transitional for high quality brands to go from offline world to online world.

I had an experience last ten, 15 years doing advertising every single day, advertising that was accountable, clickable, fortunately for my last company we got the whole industry thinking that way. If you are a consumer walking down the aisle and there is a generic and branded detergent, our job is to put that brand around quality content to make that consumer believe it os worth it to pay more for that branded detergent.

Q: you have very attractive margins in access and search, display is less, what is overall profit margin you are looking at and what is the key driver of margins in display? How do you drive margins in the display side?

CFO: the good and bad news in display is there is a lot of operating leverage, we’ve seen the downside as we’ve gone through the ad recession. As we come out of that we should be able to drive incremental OEBITDA conversion. We do see benefits on the pricing side, saw it in the 4th quarter. We have a compelling product to sell to advertisers, added more than 150 new advertisers in the fourth quarter

Armstrong: What it comes down to is user engagement, our ability to do high-quality content.

Armstrong: I would highlight from 2009, we are very happy with how we did, when you layer on a global cost restructuring and a spin-off from Time Warner. We care more about execution than you do. We have a clear strategy we want to deliver on. We are not focussed on quarter over quarter results, but how does AOL become a very valuable property on the Internet. I would like to thank the employees of AOL, everyone worked exceptionally hard, pulling double duty.

Request-AOL Q4 2009 Earnings Presentation

IBM has acquired Chicago-based software firm Initiate Systems. Initiate helps healthcare providers and other government organizations manage and organize data across various sources. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

It appears that the acquisition is aimed at boosting IBM’s healthcare offerings. According to IBM, Initiate’s software us currently in use at more than 2,400 healthcare sites, over 40 health information exchanges and multiple government health systems around the world including CVS/Caremark, Blue Cross Blue Shield, United Healthcare Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Initiate speeds the adoption and exchange of electronic medical records by allowing medical professionals to access to complete medical histories of patients quickly and easily. The software also caters to government organizations to help share data across multiple agencies.

Initiate will be IBM’s 30th acquisition in the information management and analytics segment and Big Blue’s 90th acquisition since 2003. Last year, IBM acquired six companies, including Guardium, RedPill Solutions, SPSS, Ounce Labs, Exeros and Outblaze.

While IBM is kicking of 2010’s shopping spree with Initiate, it should be interesting to see the other buyout Big Blue has up its sleeve.

SlideShare, the “YouTube for presentations,” has been steadily ramping up its offerings for business users. Last year, the startup unveiled two premium services for businesses, LeadShare and AdShare. SlideShare lets anyone share presentations and also serves as a social discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other members who share similar interests. Today, the startup is launching another business-friendly offering, branded channels.

Rashmi Sinha, SlideShare’s co-founder and CEO, says that much of the startup’s community is composed of businesses users, and SlideShare is increasingly becoming a vehicle for businesses to socialize and share their content, from documents to webinars to presentations. Branded channels help users find this content easily and in a more organized manner. Ogilvy, Microsoft, and even the President Obama’s White House have all created branded channels for their content.

SlideShare’s branded channels can be fully customized, with pricing ranging depending on the businesses’ preferred layout. Sinha declined to share the pricing range for the channels. As SlideShare continues to attract business users, the startup has been rolling out premium services to not offer compelling features to users but to also monetize the platform. LeadShare is a self-service tool that businesses can use to capturing leads from documents and presentations and AdShare allows users promote their content via ads on SlideShare’s platform.

Competitor Scribd also offers branded readers. In the past year or so, SlideShare has unveiled a mobile-friendly site, launched a free Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 plug-in that allows for one-click publication of your presentations to the cloud, and support for embedding YouTube videos in SlideShare-hosted presentations. The company is based out of San Francisco and raised over $3 million in capital to date, from VC firm Venrock and a number of prominent angel investors like Dave McClure, Mark Cuban, Saul Klein, Jonathan Abrams, Hal Varian and others.

There’s no doubt that President Obama’s White House has been using technology more than any other previous administration. The President has a Twitter account, is using YouTube in innovative ways and has even developed an iPhone app. The White House is releasing some impressive engagement numbers from this week’s State of the Union address.

The White House had a live stream of the speech that was embeddable on blogs or websites. Nearly 1.3 million people tuned into the WhiteHouse.gov’s live video feed of the speech, which is a ten-fold increase in traffic over the most popular live-streamed event. Unfortunately, the White House doesn’t have any concrete statistics on the number of unique streams of the speech from the new iPhone App, but says that nearly a terabyte of data was served to iPhones with the application during the event.

After the speech, over 50,000 people engaged in a live chat on Facebook. It was just the latest in our Open for Questions series where you can ask questions directly to the officials who work here at the White House. And the President will be holding a live video event next week on CitizenTube to answer questions that people submitted following this week’s address. So far, over 40,000 people have submitted 472,000 votes and 9,926 questions.

On the TV side of things, the President’s speech drew 48 million viewers. Of course, the live stream of the President’s inauguration drew a much greater audience, with 3.8 million viewers on the Ustream live feed. MSNBC reported over 18 million streams and CNN delivered over 25 million streams for the inauguration.

I’m actually very curious what you guys thought of our live stream. It wasn’t perfect but I thought it went well. Do you want to see more of that?

The rest is here:
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