a blog by Ian Kennedy
While filling up on gas on the way to Tahoe the other weekend, I noticed that they had managed to pipe in CNBC business news into the little LCD monitor on the gas pump. Caught up on the latest market news while I topped up the tank.
Ubiquitous sound bite TV and cell phone browsing fills up every spare moment of down time in the quest for the fully productive lifestyle.
There is a very interesting theory about why IBM shed their vaunted ThinkPad & PC hardware division to China’s Lenovo. Attributed to the Petrov Group, in a Business 2.0 article, the theory is that IBM would use it’s partnership (IBM still owns a percentage of Lenovo) to enter the China market with a low cost, Linux-based PC platform.
As Petrov puts it, China “is a command economy and is price sensitive.” It is also projected to surpass the United States as the biggest PC market by 2010. In fact, in that year, the Chinese are expected to buy 180 million PCs, while the developed world will buy 150 million. If IBM, through its new partner Lenovo, could establish cheap Linux desktops as an acceptable alternative to Windows machines in China alone, it would cut Microsoft’s cash flow from a much-needed growth market. At the same time, it would teach a new generation of IT managers in China that since Windows isn’t a necessity, Microsoft products aren’t needed on servers either. (Subtext: Buy IBM.)
If this is indeed the scenario that folks in Armonk have dreamed up, it’s absolutely brilliant.
Washington Post’s columnist Joel Achenbach is up and running on TypePad for his Achenblog. column.
We’re all having a chuckle as he dives into the world of blogs. In this entry he writes about the levels of authorship that we provide and suggests some greater levels of authorship rights that we’ll be sure to look into for a future release:
. . .there’s “junior author” and “author” and “owner,” but I think there’s an even higher level than that, an uber-owner, with a sign-on that allows you to rearrange everything on our site AND go over to the Times site and insert mistakes. There’s probably a level yet higher — someone who can, for example, go into the Library of Congress website, into the American Memory section, and fiddle around with the original texts of sacred American documents, such as the Declaration of Independence.
According to a story in The Guardian, The Economist reports that if you added up the value of all the frequent flier miles outstanding, they would add up to $700 billion, surpassing the value of any other floating currency in the world.
Who hasn’t thought that there should be a free market in Frequent Flier Points? Heck, why stop there, there should be an open market to trade my Safeway sandwich points (the cashier reminds me cheerily every time, “Mr. Kennedy, you’re only five sandwiches away from a free lunch!!”).
Now that stock market quotes have become more or less commoditized, Reuters could set their sites on this new market (they should before eBay, PayPal, or American Express lock up this market). Matching deals between the family that just relocated from New Jersey with too many Continental Airlines miles with someone with enough Hawaiian Air miles for the family trip to the Islands may not be as lucrative as feeding quotes for the Bank of Japan but the new economy is all about making up for thin margins with scale.
They’re already trading online gaming currencies – it’s only a matter of time before you can trade your Second Life dollars in for a meatspace trip to Disneyland.
Once this stuff becomes legal tender, I can’t wait to pay my first tax bill in Chuck-E-Cheese tokens!
I took my father in law out to visit a motorcycle distributor where he was hoping to get a distributor for the high end wheels made by Dymag, a company he owns. While it’s always interesting to step into a new industry and learn a bit about it, one of the more juicy bits of gossip that I learned was the nasty rumor that the Harley-Davidson is not really as American-built as some would like to believe. Not only are the wheels on most models made by an overseas company called “Inky” but the buyer we met also assured us that if you look carefully on the engines, you’ll see that they’re made in Japan!
He couldn’t remember which Japanese company makes the Harley engines which is a shame. According to him, all the engines are shipped to the US where they are assembled along with all the other parts which are sourced overseas. Makes me wonder if it’s all done under cover of darkness by a secret guild of factory workers sworn to secrecy.
If this is indeed true, it would be quite a scandal for the company that, when faced with cheaper imports from Japan, unsuccessfully tried to trademark the unique sound of their V-Twin engine.
Dear Middlesex School Class of ’84,
Last time around, a fair amount of people wrote in but only a few took advantage of the “comment” link below this post to put their updates online. According to a recent report out by the folks over at Pew, some 12% of Americans have posted comments on weblogs so I’m looking forward to seeing a few more of you jumping in and posting your news in the comments section below.
You know you’re not in New Jersey anymore when even the roadsigns greet you with excitement. Since we’ve been here Izumi and I have marveled how nice people are out here. The checkers at our local supermarket take time to talk to the kids and compare notes on the best way to cook the things we’ve purchased. Fellow shoppers politely pardon themselves as they glide by us in the aisles, idle chatter comes much more easily than it did back East.
Is it the weather or are people just happy to be here?
I missed this the first time around but John Battelle’s description of how Overture and Ad Sense have flipped the old publisher-advertiser business relationship around makes sense. He polishes the idea a bit further in the latest issue of the MIT Technology Review:
Imagine that we start with the idea of PPC—that advertisers pay publishers only if their ads are acted upon by readers. Next, imagine that, instead of buying into PPC networks or specific sites, advertisers release their ads onto the Internet.
Because an Internet-based ad is already a little piece of software, it can be tagged with information about its target audience, how much the advertiser is willing to spend to reach that audience (and how much each click will cost), what kind of websites are acceptable or forbidden (such as porn sites), and any number of other attributes. Most important, each ad could communicate with a “home” application that tracks its progress and status.
Once these tagged ads are let loose, publishers could simply copy and paste them into their own websites. Through connections to their home sites, the ads would report which publishers have pasted them where, how many clicks they’ve received, and how much money is left in the advertiser’s bank account. The ad propagates until it runs out of money. If it is working, the advertiser simply fills up the tank with more money.
Why is this model better than the current one? Because publishers know their audiences best. There’s no incentive for publishers to place ads that don’t perform or that offend their readers.
A New Idea For Publishing, January 2005
For more on the original conversation, see Ross Mayfield’s post on the Cost per Influence.