I’m not a news breaker (I’ll leave that to guys like Mike Arrington and Om Malik) but I just noticed an announcement that I expect will get a lot of blog time tomorrow. Fon – a wireless startup in Spain – has landed $21.7m from Skype, Google, Sequoia, and Index Ventures. The Skype guys have a post up, Martin Varsavsky from Fon has his thoughts up, and Dan Gillmore – a US advisory board member for Fon has his thoughts up on Bayosphere. This will undoubtably land on the top of Tech.Memorandum on Monday.
Unless you don’t watch TV, don’t read the newspaper, and don’t watch Oprah (or you live under a rock), you have probably heard something about the James Frey / Oprah memoir lying thing. A few days after the rumors of this initially broke – and before Frey publicly admitted he was lying about some of the events in his books, I wrote that James Frey Should Not Be Hung Out To Dry.
Things went round and round, eventually resulting in a public admission by Frey to Oprah that he had lied about details on the characters in his book. Oprah really fried Frey, resulting in an interesting emotional backlash against Oprah on my blog. Somehow the string “James Frey Email” brought up the book review I wrote on Frey’s second book My Friend Leonard on the first page of the corresponding Google search – a week later I had 60+ comments on this post, the vast majority of them defending (and praising Frey) while simultaneously bashing Oprah.
In this midst of this, I got a question from a reader of this blog that asked “I wonder if you still stick by James Frey after his interview and admissions today on Oprah?”
I’ve taken a week to ponder this. Lying is something that I do not condone in any way, but this wasn’t an obvious “yes or no” for me. I found (and continue to find – even with the new information) Frey’s books to be remarkable. I believe I would have felt this way if they were presented as “sort of a memoir with a bunch of stuff changed to make them more powerful” and still would have felt this way if they were presented as “fiction.” Frey’s immediate response (which turned out to be a lie) to assertions that he had stretched the truth bothered me, but as I thought about the books and the author, I realized this behavior was likely self-referential and was symptomatic of the underlying issues that Frey had in the first place. So – I thought about this some more, especially what the difference is between memoir and fiction.
I then read a brilliant opinion piece in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligence titled “Press corps should take lessons from Oprah” which – when commenting on Bush’s State of The Union Address – finished with “If Bush had put all this in a book, Oprah would have called him and his publisher on the carpet. But Bush has only the Washington press corps and the enfeebled Democrats to answer to. As long as he sticks to speeches, he’s free to leave the truth in a million little pieces.”
After thinking about it for a while, I continue to think A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard are brilliant books. Frey was wrong when he lied, but I believe that was part of his underlying pathology as a person and not simply a nefarious plot constructed by him and his publisher, Nan Talese, although his literary manager Kassie Evashevski seems to be really struggling with things.
The more unfortunate thing is the amount of time Oprah has spent on this, versus actually addressing lying as an underlying issue in our society. Jon Stewart is doing a brilliantly entertaining job of highlighting lies told daily (primarily by our government), but the public discourse on “lying” seems to be focused on an addict who has written two magnificent and poignant books instead of on the pervasive deceit of many people in powerful positions in our society.
Other than reading a bunch of blog posts about the Google / China thing, I hadn’t paid much attention to it. Early today, I got an email that fits the proverbial “picture is worth a thousand words” cliche.
I wasn’t able to try this using chinese characters (er – I don’t know chinese and I’m tired and lazy after running a marathon yesterday) so this might be a spoof. But – if not – enough said.
After reading Fooled By Randomness, I found myself becoming increasingly annoyed by the information on My.Yahoo page. I’ve had My.Yahoo as my default home page since 1997 or so and probably have it refresh (deliberately or otherwise) at least 100 times a day (more than 300,000 page views during that time of just the main Yahoo page.) I use it primarily to track news on about 150 public companies that I follow regularly. If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have told you that I couldn’t live without it. I’ve tried to switch to other things (including My.MSN) but no dice – I’m just too used to My.Yahoo.
Recently, I’ve noticed that there are several annoying things to me:
All of these are relatively easy to deal with. I can “hide” the quotes using the little right triangle thing. I can be more self-disciplined. I can be more deliberate about what I look at. Yet, I find that I don’t do these “little” things. In addition, after reading Fooled By Randomness, I have completely bought into the idea that watching stock movements through the day (or week, or month) is hazardous to your health and happiness if you aren’t a professional trader (and then they still might be hazardous to your health), so eliminating the tendency completely is a good thing. I still want to read all the news and information and form my own point of view about what is going on, but without being distracted by the market movements.
So – two days ago – on a whim – I methodically went through my entire stock list and subscribed to the news for each stock via RSS. I’d already done this for most of the newspaper and wire feeds that I follow, but I hadn’t done this for the stock news. For example, for Apple, I went to the Yahoo Finance Page for AAPL and then subscribed to the AAPL News RSS feed in FeedDemon. Yeah – simple idea – but after using it for 48 hours it’s remarkably liberating. I looked at My.Yahoo once each day just to insure I wasn’t missing anything and didn’t notice anything that I hadn’t seen somewhere else.
Now, I’m a high volume feed reader and have always consumed a huge amount of industry and company news on a daily basis, but when I stepped back and thought about the information flow, I realized I was much happier and less distracted this way. The effective result was that I’ve now switched a large number of personal CPM ad impressions from the My.Yahoo site to the feeds I read. Now, I’m still reading content from Yahoo, but I’m consuming it in a radically different (and for me – much more effective – way).
Finally, someone in the AGILEAMY crowd has done a meaningful strategic deal. Google announced that they acquired dMarc Broadcasting today for $102 million cash and up to $1.1 billion of contingent cash payments over the next three years. Thank god someone finally did something more than acquire a few engineers, some technology, or a minor add-on to something they already did, but not so well. I was getting tired of hearing about all the sub $30 million “flip” deals that were “about to happen” and the new, exciting, and trendy prediction that “a crash of Web 2.0 companies is coming.”
Google’s acquisition is bold, smart, and completely logical if you step back and look at their business. As we all know, Google sells advertising. They are now expanding into audio and video. Hmmm. How about if we sell advertising on audio (that would be the radio – yeah – I know – there’s this thing called podcasting.) Google states clearly why they bought dMarc:
“Google is committed to exploring new ways to extend targeted, measurable advertising to other forms of media,” said Tim Armstrong, vice president of Advertising Sales, Google. “We anticipate that this acquisition will bring new ad dollars and accountability to radio by combining Google’s expansive network of advertisers with dMarc’s talented team and innovative radio advertising technology. We look forward to working together to continue to grow and improve the ecosystem of the radio industry.”
Got it – simple and strategic. I have no idea if this was a smart economic deal for Google – I’ll leave that for the financial analysts to prognosticate about.
Now – how about video advertising? Nick Grouf just launched SpotRunner and it appears his timing of this trend is right on the money. While Google, et. al. could “build this”, why not just wade in and keep making aggressive moves now? Oops – SpotRunner says “Beta” on it – eek – Nick – launch already!
Oh – did anyone notice that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought Business Wire today? Ponder that one.
I received a nice note and an invitation from Bill Prado at Green Mountain College to participate in a survey he’s doing on Environmental Uncertainty in Global Business. He asked that I open up the invitation to the survey on my blog for anyone that has “worked with international business matters.” If this is you, feel free to take the survey to help Bill’s research – I just did it and it took around five minutes.
Actually, I didn’t (although I have some ideas, but I’m going to keep them secret for now, just like Google has.) But I did find some fun videos on Google Video this morning.
Time for a run.
I came back from lunch to a bunch of posts on the new Yahoo! Go service. I had 15 minutes before my next meeting – I figured I’d check it out. Hi Terry – nice picture – but I’m a smart user and just want to get started. Clicking on Get Started Now seems like the way to go. Ah – a PC – I figure I’ll start there.
The complete Yahoo! Go Desktop is coming soon but you can add life to your desktop now with Yahoo! Widgets. Fun, stylish widgets that keep what’s important to you one click away.
Huh? Nope – I don’t want Konfabulator (now fondly known as Yahoo! Widgets) – I already decided I didn’t like it when it was called Konfabulator. Oh well – I’ll try the On Your TV thing.
Yahoo! Go TV is coming soon and will be available for all Windows XP PCs. … Notify me when Yahoo! Go TV becomes available.
Well. Ok. How about On Your Mobile.
Yahoo! Go Mobile is available for download today on select Nokia Series 60 handsets.
Er, um, one handset type?
The next thing you know Google is going to be announcing that they are providing a free download of Symantec Norton Antivirus.
Christmas is long gone. New Years Eve is over. The only stuff left is New Years Day, football (especially college), and – well – the last day of Hanukkah. Last night, on the seventh day of Hanukkah, I learned something new. My brother Daniel and his wife Laura introduced me to sufganiyot. I’ve had 40 years of Hanukkah and not once has my mother mentioned to me that jelly doughnuts are an ancient Hanukkah tradition. So – apparently – jelly doughnuts are to Hanukkah as candy canes are to Christmas. We celebrated last night with a box of Krispy Kreme’s.