Archive for April, 2009
Cheaper Macs – Still Overpriced and Irrelevant April 30th, 2009
AppleInsider is reporting that Apple is going to be releasing some cheaper Macs, maybe. How many people think that this really matters? Here is the only question you need to answer: will Apple release a full computer (screen, keyboard, etc) for an equivalent price to that of a PC? The answer is no, and this is why [from DailyTech]:
“Macs have gone from an average price of $1,432 and $1,574, for desktops and laptops respectively in June ‘06 to $1,543 and $1,515 respectively in June ‘08. While much lower to start, PCs are now even lower in average sale price. The average PC notebook went from $877 to $700.”
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TimeWarner Boots AOL – Go Crash And Burn Elsewhere April 30th, 2009
How sad it is to see the end of the First Great Boom, this time in the form of a general collapse of AOL. With its most recent earnings coming in (year over year), down a stunning 23%, it is headed out the door. What public company would want such a stupendously underperforming asset such as AOL? What company, such as Time Warner, with all of their own headaches, would keep a non-core asset failing so egregiously.
Now, it has become clear that AOL is on the way out of the Time Warner fold. TechCrunch has quotes to make you giggle. We here at the TG office were kicking this over, and we kept returning to the original terms of that AOL Time Warner deal. Go look it up. Now, how pathetic is this?
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The WolframAlpha Hype – What It Means April 29th, 2009
I spent yesterday lamenting the rise of theoretical Google and iPhone killers, now it is a reality check. Following the demonstration of the WA yesterday, I was expecting a deluge of negative press. I was expecting a wild ride of people saying that it was in fact, the next Cuil. I was proved wrong. Head over to TechMeme, the press is surprisingly lukewarm. I was wildly excited. In all honesty, after the Cuil fiasco, lukewarm at this stage is incredible.
Now, people are tripping over their heels to claim that this is “no google killer,” fair enough. But, as Twitter gave us “the message service we didn’t know that we needed,” I have a sneaking suspicion that WolframAlpha will give us the answer engine we didn’t know that we needed. Note that this is not a pure search engine. Recall that that was in fact what Cuil claimed to be. This is something different, new, and possibly extraordinary.
So, until they let us into the WolframAlpha Alpha, we will wait. But trust us, the moment we know anything, you will haer it loud and clear. Long live competiton.
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When Are We Getting The Zune Phone? April 28th, 2009
There are a batch of new rumors about a brand new “iPhone” killer, this time coming from Microsoft. People are giving it a pass, tired of rumors claiming to wipe the Jesus phone off of the market. This has now become so repetitious that it has now become akin to people claiming to be working to kill off Google. We all recall Cuil.
However, nearly the whole world cared little for the Zune. You recall. However, if you were (and I was) one of the few, the proud, the Zune team, you remember what an actually intuitive user interface looks like. So, as a current iPhone user, when is the behemoth Microsoft going to let that design team out of the box, and let them take Windows mobile, Mobile Zune. If they did, I promise that they would double the competitiveness of the WinMo platform.
Why let Apple, Palm, and Google have all the phone fun? Take your a-team, Micro-hoo, and go to war.
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How Mighty The Fallen – What Happens To Giants April 24th, 2009
The data for this post comes from an excellent piece on Technologizer.
There is an interesting story today on the internet, about the old vanguard of the internet. Things move so quickly on the internet, is it possible to be a major player ten years down the line? With the Web 2.0 disaster bubble now mostly past us, it is strange to think about are falling or fallen giants of just the past several years. Let’s take that time machine back just a little bit farther.
The year is 1999, and AOL is the big dog in the chicken coop. With a then stunning 46 million visitors in April alone. The internet was new, the bubble was in full swing, and the ripped t shirt nerd turned god coders were still the masters of the universe. AOL was running the show. Seems almost like a joke now. Fast forward, and they are the number four property with a doubled traffic level.
The saddest part of the top old properties are the smoking ruins. You have to flameout with passion to still be smouldering ten years later. Lycos, Go, GeoCities, Excite, Blue Mountain Arts, AltaVista, Xoom, and Snap are all old top web locations that have either died or shrunk to mere single palm tree islands in the ocean of the internet.
It is almost terrifying to see this. What new wild-eyed internet entrepreneur wants to think that in ten years, nearly all of the major players will be different. If he strikes gold perhaps he will make it big, but in ten years, will he be a nothing? Fast is good, but are we moving too quickly?
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You Are Worth One Dollar [To Facebook] April 20th, 2009
Excellent news, you now have a value. And it’s not actually the one in the title, because no one is sure how to calculate it. But according to a recent post on ValleyWag [I miss their glory days], FB managed to drag in $250-300 million, a 70% year over year gain. Happily, after we deduct some hype cash, and bounce the number to 200 million, and then divide by a probably under reported 200 million active users, we have, viola, one dollar per user per year. Its just such a neat and clean metric.
That means that at their current level of expense and overhead they should be profitable by, say, 2012. Not to knock the team over there, to extract that much revenue from a free product is never easy. Even Google is beginning to struggle a little bit.
There was also, back to the ValleyWag post, some loosening in the quality of the ads accepted by F B. We have reported on this recently, and so can attest that they seem to be dead on. Once again, small surprise. When the high moral standards block the revenues, and you are adrift in the red, the morals drop by the wayside and the floodgates open.
But still, in my experience, the average user spends about 20 hours a week on FB, is 1000 hours over an entire damn year only worth one dollar in revenue?
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Oprah Will Not Kill Twitter April 19th, 2009
Good news, Twitter is safe from becoming the next MySpace of the internet. With the recent joining of Oprah to the service there has been plenty of speculation that perhaps this marks the turning point of the beginning of the end of the service. Oprah will bring in the technology-stunted who will clamor and cover the service with banal (read: normal) discussions, drowning out the fun, quirky, and techy world of Twitter as we know it.
Let’s think about this, who do you follow? People who are interesting. You do not follow people that are not. If you want to fly under the radar, you can protect your updates. You can block annoying users. Twitter has all the tools to build your own select community, safe from annoying me-toos and the like.
Now, if Twitter removes any piece of this puzzle, it is game over. In fact, it should try and go even farther to provide privacy and update controls to its users. But, even if Oprah brings tides and waves of new recruits they will most likely link to each other, and not to us. After all, if they shared interests with us, they would have joined before. Perhaps they can just use the #oprahsheep hashtag to find similar minds.
Not that I am excited about seeing this new wave of users, the opposite really. If Twitter had stayed techy I would have been a happy camper. But, we have what we have, and in this day of Suggested Users and million follower accounts, perhaps there is no avoiding some dilution. Dilution and death are far apart, as much as we want to confuse them.
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Office 2010 – Will OpenOffice Ever Catch Up? April 18th, 2009
Firefox is often held up as the prime example of the power of the open source movement, a distributed network of people collaborating (albeit in a guided way) taking on the Microsoft behemoth. Few people discuss OpenOffice with such regar. In fact, many people have never even touched OO.
I am a current user of OO, update regularly and will some time get around throwing them some dollars. However, I think that that time is nigh for myself and others to return to the MS Office fold. We are falling behind. When Office 2007 came out, I was intrigued by its new ribbon system, it seemed so intuitive and clean. Obviously Microsoft was pushing the envelope here. I love that. My OO install looked and worked (it still does!) like a inbred clone of Office 2003 with some features turned off, I grumbled a little bit. I was torn.
But, when I rang up the price tag to get what I wanted from Microsoft, I just could not bring myself to cough up hundreds of dollars for something that I was surviving without. However, that is now over. Miscrosoft is now talking actively about Office 2010 (take a look here), and I came to a realization: OO is slowing me down.
We all now that speed of work and life is only becoming more and more important, wasting time is almost heresy in my books. And when I noticed that OO is simply archaic, slow, and with an annoyingly bad spell checker. I cannot wait around for them to improve the system; the great 3.0 release was largely a flop for me.
Free is good, and open source is great, but I do not have the spare time to lost. Office 2010 will be installed on my computer when it comes out.
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Review: iWoz April 17th, 2009
Good news, you do not need to be able to write to become wealthy, famous, or Steve Wozniak. I always am wary of books that were coauthoured/ghost written by third parties. I dont give a rats tail about them, I want to hear from the mouth of the devil, if you will. This time around, I was praying that at some the writing doctor would assert more control. God awful, is this book.
The story was brilliant, Woz is genuis, that much is obvious. And he is plain damn fun. After losing 12 million on a huge concert, he remarked that he didn’t care about the money, people had had a blast! That is the kind of guy that you want to have at parties.
It also makes you dislike Jobs a touch. He just doens’t seem to be that useful for anything other than blasting groups of people with his charisma and motivating them to do what he wants. Apple would exist without Jobs, without Woz you just have the disembodied ego of Jobs floating about saying things like “fewer buttons one more thing nano what.” Jobs is worth a billion dollars alone, but Woz is the pale guy in the back who wanders out after three days and hands you a computer. Steve was probably out getting laid that whole time.
Don’t read this book if you are impatient. Woz writes in a very annoying personal tone that is almost too familiar. Sentances are short. Like this. And this. Makes it a bit. Hard, to read. If, you? Catch my drift? And, Woz is big Woz fan. I fear no ego, mine is a problem enough without worrying about other people. But this time it’s past an annoyance.
I would quote him, but now few quotes can not embody the endlesss drivel of this book. Its as if someone had taken a very fascinating story from a first person perspective, and run it through a 5th grade stylizer, and then soaked it with Kanye West´s bluster, but with spell check. And a nice cover.
Condensed, here is the whole book: Woz is smart. He invented computers. He likes to engineer things with few circuts and chips. He likes bad music. He did other things past Apple that you will ignore. Woz loves Woz.
There, you just save plus tax.
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What Is A Follower Worth? – Twitter Math April 16th, 2009
Anyone who knows anyone is on Twitter, and some even have a nice following. What is that worth? This is a similar question as what is page view worth, or what is the value of an RSS subscriber? Obviously, there is not a good way to look at a single person and extrapolate, so we’ll take this in groups. The goal is the get a general idea of what your following is worth, and what that actually means. Here’s a tip, you can never sell a following, so get over that.
To begin with, are you famous? That is, do mass people follow you because they know you? As we are dealing only in groups of followers, say 1000 person groups, this is important. @om for example is a noted personality in the technology world, well respected and intelligent. @pud is another example of this. Now, given that that is a tiny fraction of the population on Twitter, we need to disregard them. Let’s talk about normal people, you and me. We’ll get back to this in a second.
Now, lets filter a little bit more. How many more people follow you than you follow? If you are underwater, detract some from the following math. If you are positive, add some. If you have more than twice the followers than whom you follow, add on a little bit more. Simple enough. Now, lets talk about traffic. When you post a link, generally, you will get around a 1% click through rate. The reason that we had to discount the famous folks, people give them extra credit for their links, no matter how banal.
Now, with out one percent click through [based on my observations, this could be different for other people, but 1% seems to be pretty regular], for every 1000 followers you have, you will get 10 hits per posted link. Now, to extract value from your clicked on links, we have to assume that you are linking to your content. Any other link is only good for promoting something that you like (this should be most of your links!) or helping out a friend. That is really your goal on Twitter, but this discussion is on money, so we need to focus on you.
We all now know how great CPM rates are right now, so the following math may sadden you some. Lets work with someone with 5000 followers, you can multiply/divide as needed. Now, lets say the average power user (if you have 1000+ followers you probably are) links to their own content three times daily. This is of course diluted among their other tweets, but its average based on (once again, this is not scientific) my observations. Now, 5000 followers X 1% is 50, thrice daily, is 150 hits per day. Lets be generous, and say that you have a CPM rate of $1. Most small bloggers get a bit less than that, but its fair. That means that your traffic, in monetary terms, is worth $.15 dollars daily.
Obviously, there are much more important numbers here, 150 readers to your blog/website is worth much much more than that. If you are buying traffic to your website, you are probably paying .25/click. So, 150 hits daily (for free) is worth paying 37.5 dollars. Plus our paltry 15 cents, and you are extracting about 38 dollars a day from your twitter friends, at 5000 followers, daily.
We can run that our over a year, 365 X 38 is 13,870, which is a large sum. Realisitically you would never spend that much on CPC ads unless you have spare change, but its an interesting number non the less. Lets take a look back at traffic, at 150 hits a day, you are bringing in 54,750 yearly, making you a major blogger just from Twitter alone. Not bad at all. However, unless you are annoyingly wealthy, you probably don’t spend 30 bucks a day just advertising, so lets be realistic, your Twitter traffic is not worth nearly 14,000 dollars. However, I bet that it is in fact worth 2000 dollars, if you have those 5000 followers. This is how I get there: many bloggers that I know spend 50 to 60 dollars a month promoting their blog. Not a lot of money, but enough to make a traffic difference. Now, that is 600-720 dollars yearly, but the traffic is lower than our Twitter numbers. You will get, back to our earlier CPC math, 1 hit for every 25 cents you pay. So, that money brings in say 2500 visitors a year. Perhaps more, perhaps less.
As Twitter brings in more traffic than that, it should be worth more. 2000 dollars seems reasonable as maintaining a Twitter following is quite a bit of work which brings in an opportunity cost, while advertising is passive. But, given the number differential, this is reasonable. Another factor to consider, many of the people that click on your Twitter links will be recurring traffic, which is great if they comment, but not stellar if you are trying to boost your absolute unique numbers. So, each one of those hits might be worth less to you. This is all quite subjective. But, if we can agree that the traffic from Twitter is worth 2000 a year if you have 5000 followers, then each follower is worth around 40 cents, over a year.
I’m sure that this does not apply to everyone, but it is s a fun rough number. Look at @KevinRose with nearly 500,000 followers. Do that multiplication in your head. It begins to make @jasoncalacanis’s offer to pay hundreds of thousands to be a promoted Twitter-er make sense.
My two cents, or 40 if I am following you.
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