Blame the accountants!! Even in scandal, Dell peddles "world-class" PR

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

Maybe it’s hard to spin the financial fraud and subsequent need to restate results over the last few years that Dell has faced due to an internal audit spurred by an SEC investigation, but Don Carty has to try a little harder than this:

‘”All of us are very proud of Dell. We believe we’re a world-class company, and we’re not terribly proud that we found one element of our company that wasn’t world class,” Carty said. “None of us at Dell like this.”‘

How much of the business is your accounting department? Those fraudulent results were reviewed by banks, investors and insurance companies and affected the perception that Dell was the clear leader in personal computers.

That’s not world class.

Now they lag HP, and as I thought might happen a major financial scandal has enveloped Dell–a major one anyway in seriousness if not with the kind of numbers that will threaten the company’s immediate solvency.

So sure. Claim it’s not really a big deal, and look for a scapegoat. Don’t blame the hard-charging corporate culture led by Mr. Dell and the “made-to-order” cult that the company had succeeded in getting into the business school texts. Don’t blame a mediocre product in an ultra-competitive market for Windows machines. Don’t blame the chronic unrealistic expectations of continued 15% growth for all tech companies on the stock market.

No. Blame the accountants. Without Michael Dell even sitting in on the conference call. That’ll work.

Except there’s one problem:

Carty is Dell’s chief financial office (CFO). The “one element of our company that wasn’t world-class,” according to him, was the one his position oversees.

They are still good at PR down there in Austin, even if they can’t pull down the growth numbers they’re supposed to anymore. They managed to spin business school professors and Tom Friedman, so why won’t they manage to spin their way out of this?

They’ll probably find a way. But I don’t know–here’s what MarketWatch says:

‘However, the company may not be out of the woods in the eyes of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Dell warned that despite the conclusion of the company’s internal review, “the SEC’s investigation is ongoing, and there can be no assurance that there will not be additional issues or matters arising from that investigation.”‘

The lonely madness of the Twitter user

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

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New competitors like Yappd (which so far really isn’t much to speak of at all, by the way) and Pownce are moving fast on Twitter’s market.

After getting a new round of funding in the last month, however, Twitter has started going down again in the last day or two. Sometimes it will work through an app but not through the front page, sometimes nothing loads, it’s all very unpredictable. I am not very pleased about this, as I had started using the service again more.

For now, I’m this close to stopping. But I like Twitter–the bird logos are great for any aviary enthusiast such as myself and the name and constant short sharing of random thoughts, sometimes with people you know and often with others–these are custom designed for someone with my personality.

It could be said that Twitter is a time waster, but that’s not too serious a concern for anyone who could throw off 140 words of the top of his head easily and is using the 140 character text entry field that Twitter allows. It’s very convenient to post to Twitter, and messages have to be short, so normally all I would do would be just pop open a chat window in Gmail or open a widget in Netvibes, type in my quip, and go back to reading my email or checking my feeds.

Once the site stops working, though, the time wasting factor kicks in with a vengeance. I’m checking my profile page to see if it has my latest update. I’m wondering if my hordes of Gmail filters are failing to properly direct tweets from friends when the tweets just aren’t coming in by IM. I log into Facebook to see if tweets are being added to my mini-feed. I go to my web page and it loads slowly as the Twitter updates widget chokes.

None of this should really matter, but for a Twitter addict this can seem a maddening process. The economy of the Twitter message length–the text-messaging-friendly 140 character limit–also imbues those short messages with their own elevated importance in the fevered mind of the Twitter user.

I’ve been using Pownce and Jaiku a bit, and I like them fine, but instead of looking for a real replacement for Twitter I should reach back to my old posts and bring back the idea of being a Qwittr.

Pownce has some really nice features, but what it needs right away is a first-party blog widget and Facebook app, and customized home pages. (Maybe for the pro package at least? Might interest a lot more people.)

It doesn’t seem like many people use Jaiku as their main updates service anymore but it is able to accept RSS feeds from the user’s other sites and that feature seems to have become the key part of Jaiku’s formula–many people, for example, send their Twitter feed to Jaiku so people following them on either get the message, but on the Jaiku feed you might also see the user’s recent Last.fm listens and del.icio.us bookmarks or blog entries. The ongoing stream of the user’s content works much the way a tumbleblog does in practice for many–and an additional feature on Jaiku is the ability to comment and follow others.

Yappd I cannot say very good things about. I just heard about it and decided to try it, and have just found that it does not allow perma-links for individual notes. This is not a good feature, and its lack of widgets and overall Twitter-copy feel did not seem to cover much new territory. Maybe it will add some new features and take off but for now it’s definitely back in the pack.

Yappd doesn’t even allow their vaunted add-a-picture feature for web-based updates, only via email or SMS. Overall it doesn’t seem like a fully developed offering. The pictures are supposed to be their big differentiator, but then recently people like Dave Winer have started using Twitter as a “coral reef” for Flickr photos anyway, so not much at all makes Yappd stand out at the end of the day now. I’ve been looking at some of the debate about whether the market spewing out such lackluster lookalikes is a sign of a financial bubble in the web 2.0 space, and I personally still think it is.

But the latest tulip over-valuation has to come some time, cyclically speaking. The new social and economic phenomenon symbolized by Twitter, however, is generating much discussion on the future of media and telecommunications and gaining broader notice.

My take on all the talk about how shortening the message to 140 characters makes one concise is a very skeptical one, however. People who congratulate themselves for all their great writing just become more appreciative of each of their own words. Yes, in some ways Twitter seems to symbolize the isolation and narcissism that gnaws at the guts of so many titans of tech culture and their copious followers and wannabes.  And it symbolizes a backlash against blogging, yes, the same way tumbleblogging does–for many seem to be relieved of the pressure of producing so many words or managing that sidebar.  And it can symbolize the lonely challenge of the pioneer–many tech early adopters have jumped on Twitter but haven’t yet had many of their friends join in.

Those are all fascinating angles, but I think what Twitter symbolizes is the re-learning of basic PC tasks going on with the techie set because of the popularity of mobile devices from iPhones to Blackberries, Treos and other cell phones to PSPs. Twitter scales blogging back ten years, just as most of those devices take the user interface back about that long.

Why web 2.0 is a bubble, and why the deflation will be gradual

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

I think I went a bit too hard on Mahalo in my earlier post. Not that I take back anything I said–I can’t make any sense out of their business plan.

I’ll take a wait-and-see approach though. And if I think that taking on Google sounds grotesquely grandiose, I think the “human-powered search” idea might still carve out a profitable niche.

And singling out Mahalo doesn’t really get to the point exactly. A lot of the trendy new companies have no visible business plan. So many web 2.0 startups are flooding into the market, and though the bubble will probably get as big as the bubble 1.0 eventually it will take a long time and it won’t deflate nearly as quickly because this bubble has few companies twisting in the wind of the public markets. Most of them are owned privately and, seeing Google and Facebook as models, plan a long gestation period during which they are funded by private equity. The problem is that few of these companies will ever be profitable and eventually the people providing the funding will bail out. But these decisions will be made in boardrooms on a case by case basis, not at shareholder meetings or bankruptcy courts, so the deflation period might be so slow that one day five years from now everyone might look around and say, what happened to all those second rate startups?

Those venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road used to be seen as the colossus of the private equity market. Now the power of hedge funds and private equity buyout groups puts them in the shade–to the point that the notable startup funder of the moment isn’t even in the Silicon Valley–it’s called Union Square Ventures but it’s in New York.

So it seems to me that these private equities, flush with cash from other investments, are funding way more Internet startups–especially in social networking and search–than makes sense. But their deep pockets and lack of need to respond to shareholder demands or file quarterly reports means that a lot of these sucker’s bets won’t be called for a while.

Netvibes rocks

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

If you’re looking for a page to start your travels on the Internets each time you log on, try Netvibes.com. It takes a while to customize, but when you do you get your favorite RSS feeds and widgets all recently updated on one page, plus special apps for Gmail, del.icio.us and Twitter.

Pageflakes has a slightly prettier look (which makes it slower) and makes it easy for anyone to set up a customized public page (Netvibes “Universes” are still for the big organizations) and Google Reader is faster for full article reading, but as a start page Netvibes is the site of the moment.

Humans and rats battle it out for second place in search

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

I’ve already tried to pour cold water all over Wikia, and I remain a skeptic on Spock. To the point: the machine powered search algorithms used by companies like Google and Technorati actually aggregate human decisions in a much more effective market-style system than small teams of web professionals judging what content is relevant. The search engines said to be community powered are interesting, but the idea that they will be able to give people what they want more effectively is elitism run amok, an attempt to build a new online “mainstream media” establishment when no such thing is needed, and an admirable but forlorn attempt to substitute labor for capital and taste for popularity.

Oh, I forgot, this is some well-intentioned attempt to save the world from SEO spam. What nonsense.

I had held out on writing a sour note that ripped on Mahalo because I like the idea that people believe that someone might seriously challenge Google in search in the next decade. It’s a silly belief, and certainly not an analysis of any sort, but it is amusing and maybe even a bit inspiring.

What a time to start an Internet business. It will take a very long time, warns Mahalo chief Jason Calcanis, before the search engine will really work well. Or make much money. How convenient.

As a practical matter, most searches end in Google results and then Google ads right now.  The site has an unserious florid look and even the established results pages are pretty weak when you click on the directory-style front page.  It is a new site with apparently a good amount of investment–here’s post from May about its launch–and for now people seem inclined to take it seriously.  But after some pretty positive press about his “human-powered” search engine from Read/Write Web, Jason Calcanis gave a conference speech this week that went sour with the attendees. Dave Winer explains on his blog:

‘Yesterday, and in all his previous marketing, he rails against advertising and spam, which ironically, was exactly what he was doing to the environment at this mostly non-commercial conference. What we said (and I wasn’t the only one speaking back to him, I wasn’t even the first) was a response to this. It didn’t come out of thin air. If he had given a similar speech to venture capitalists, if he offered them no way to win, they would have had the same response, but it probably wouldn’t have been as patient or polite. Now, clearly he doesn’t have the same respect for us that he has for VCs. But it seems that to some extent the success of his company depends on winning over the people here at Gnomedex. If it didn’t, he should have stayed home, because his pitch, as delivered, doesn’t work here, because he didn’t offer us anything we want. We get a better deal from Google, believe it or not.

Some of his argument against Google rings true, very few people love them as we did in their early days, but their proposition to web writers and podcasters is basically fair, it’s a win-win. We get flow from them, they get ad revenue. They also offer us a way to put ads on our sites, so we can profit financially from the relationship. Nothing in Jason’s pitch offers us anything like that. No flow, no money. And technically, it’s not a platform, so we can’t build on it.

We’re people, and we’re smart, Jason, just like you, just like your investors. If you come making a pitch, there should be something for us, or it’s not going to be well received.

So there’s a big bug in the concept behind his company and he tries to blow by it with an attack aimed at one person. That might convince really stupid people, but smart folk can see right through it.

Bottom-line, he needs to figure out a way to build the company so that many others can profit from it. Otherwise I don’t think it has a prayer against Google, which we like less and less as a company, but who basically offers an equitable proposition to the users of the Internet, who the Gnomedex crowd represent in a loose kind of way.

His pitch here failed. He can’t blame me for that. A good CEO goes back to the drawing board and figures out what works.’

Yes, a very, very good CEO finds a way to make the “human-powered” search engine idea work. Like, work in a small niche or something.  But a CEO with a bad idea will keep trying to sell his idea as long as its plentiful funding provides a constant prima facie reminder of what a success it is.

I don’t think I write hyperbolically when I say that you’re about as likely to beat Google’s machine-powered search system now with Mahalo or another “human-powered” system as with a “rat-powered” search where rodents sniff out the best-smelling morsels.

How Last.fm creates business for Beatport

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

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I think Last.fm is one of the most important sites of the web 2.0 era. It’s an Internet radio station, you’ve probably heard of it but if you haven’t tried it you should. Probably my favorite background listening when I’m relaxing is the trance tag radio station.

Many people use Last.fm’s soical networking features, and why not–for music fans it’s a great way to meet people online. But I use enough social networking stuff and the reason I go to Last.fm is for the music–because recently it’s become my favorite place to discover new music.

When I put on trance tag radio, it plays songs that others have tagged trance. Some of them don’t belong, but most of the selections do at least somewhat and it’s easy to skip to the next song anyway. And once in a while, I find a new song that I really like.

But this is where Last.fm needs an upgrade. Instead of sending me on a search on Amazon.com for the whole album, I should be able to buy the mp3 right away. They should partner with Apple iTunes or Beatport.com or build their own music store, and sell individual tracks. As of now I just head over to one of those places for the song, sometimes after finding it on Last.fm. (Tabs pose an underrated threat to e-commerce sites, because they put so much information–crucially, from different sources–on the same browser at the same time).

It’s true that other sites like di.fm have something close to that, in terms of Internet radio and a music store. But that site lacks the web 2.0 features and buzz that Last.fm has.

Now, Last.fm has a lot of good music but since so many of their listeners like rock and roll they don’t exactly specialize in electronic music the way a more focused site could–and because of the tagging and things the more listeners in a certain genre the more interesting the radio station for that genre so that means something.

Come to think of it, maybe this calls for all these ideas being thrown together into a new electronic music radio/record store site. Of course, maybe not–the market seems to be flooded already with half-baked Internet startups.

Podcast 7

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

The pacificpelican.us podcast #7 comes to you directly from Haight Street and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Take a slightly psychedelic trip through this hipster mecca–the scene just forty years ago of the famous summer of love. [MPEG video; Webshots video] And as you just might hear me say over the din on the street during the podcast, thanks to everyone that has supported the site or downloaded the podcasts!

PacificPelican.us Podcast #7

Podcast 6 featured on Webshots

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

Webshots, one of the photo sharing sites that I like and have written about, has a video front page that features new content.

I’ve been lucky enough to have my latest entry into the podcast album, pacificpelican.us podcast #6, picked for the video page today!

[Here’s a screenshot to show what the video front page looked like the day this was posted, as Webshots has new video coming in all the time.]

I’ve always noticed a good audience for my pictures and videos on Webshots compared to other sites, and I’m sure that this feature will really add a lot more to the numbers of views! Thanks to Jessica and the whole Webshots staff!

John Edwards's lackluster reply–from a January letter

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

I just received a response in the mail from John Edwards, who apparently signs his signature with a big black marker, about a January letter.

All that time for his staff to think about it didn’t really seem to help, in terms of addressing my actual concerns.  I mentioned the letter previously in an endorsement of Barack Obama [bookmarks],and it certainly wasn’t focused on Iraq [bookmarks,category] as the reply from the Edwards camp acted like.  In fact, in the letter that I wrote I was deriding the renewed bellicosity of John Edwards toward Iran [bookmarks,article] and arguing for less military adventures overseas.

This excerpt from the Edwards form letter I received just about sums up why he is not listening:

‘After withdrawal, we should keep sufficient forces in the region to contain the conflict and ensure that instability in Iraq does not spill over into other countries.’

First of all, the whole point of “withdrawal” is to get out.  “After withdrawal,” maybe it will be time to run our own country and leave this kind of violent aggression in the past?

Second of all, the whole point of the Iraq invasion according to some versions of the neoconservative master plan was that the “creative destruction” of Iraqi democracy would spread to the sullen dictatorships in the area and create a popular movement for change.  Instead it has uncorked the kind of madness that makes those stodgy old regimes look like a less bad solution than previously–including to their own people.  Indeed, governments in Syria and Jordan prize nothing higher than stability, and are worried about the American-caused instability spilling over onto their regimes.

Is it that Edwards and his campaign team just don’t get that, and are just stumbling along believing that something can be salvaged from the failed wars of the Bush administration [bookmarks]?  Or are they forgetting the lessons of Iraq and falling back into the war-loving, war-profiteering consensus that exists among most powerful members of the major political parties and the major media, popular will be damned?

I respect John Edwards and his wife and despise the nasty insults that vile popular conservative commentators have lobbed at them.  But Mr. Edwards certainly peaked politically four years ago and times have changed; it’s time to time to back Obama (unless he gets any squishier about Iraq, Iran and the so-called war on terror) against Hillary in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries and election [bookmarks].