Archive for October, 2007
Posted by: in Technology
 It took Google’s shares 52 weeks to move from $400 to $500. It took another 46 weeks to get from $500 to $600.
The next hundred bucks? A shade over three weeks, by the look of things. The stock was less than a dime away from $700 at one point on Tuesday.
Sure, those $100 hurdles get easier to jump the bigger you get (the latest one "only" represents a 17 per cent rise.) However, this now officially ranks as Wall Street’s biggest bout of Google-phoria in a couple of years: the stock has climbed by 40 per cent in less than three months.
You can put this one down to a classic blend of hope and reality. The reality is that Google is pulling even further ahead of its rivals. Who would have predicted that a couple of years ago, when Microsoft and Yahoo set out in hot pursuit with their own search plans? The hope comes from Google’s new mobile strategy, which is expected to be unveiled within weeks.
A familiar pattern is evident here. Google’s core business just gets better and better, but Google’s promising new businesses remain just that - all promise. The entire mobile advertising market is worth barely $1bn a year. As with social networking, there are valid concerns about whether users will take to advertising in this medium, and in what form. This is best seen as a long-term bet. But when you have the twin-engine cash machine of AdWords and AdSense to get you through the short term, will anybody care?
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 Larry Sanger is still predicting big things for Citizendium, the expert-moderated alternative to the "open" encyclopedia Wikipedia that he launched a year ago (we wrote about the launch here, and the implications of the Citizendium v Wikipedia battle here.)
Given the scale of his ambition, the results so far are decidedly modest: 3,300 articles, growing at the rate of 14 a day, compared to more than 2m on the English-language version of Wikipedia. Still, Sanger, who was in at the beginning of Wikipedia, is unabashed, as his update today demonstrates:
At some point, possibly very soon, the Citizendium will grow explosively–say, quadruple the number of its active contributors, or even grow by an order of magnitude. And it will experience that growth over the course of a month or two, and its growth will continue to accelerate from that higher rate.
Comments like that make it sound like Sanger is succumbing to wishful thinking in his efforts to hit back at old nemesis Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. Still, he has a point in one regard. Projects like this are deeply viral, and many of the experts he wants to attract will only jump in once they feel a tipping point has been reached.
As Wikipedia’s extraordinary expansion continues, I for one hope Sanger gets the formula right. It’s way too early in the development of the internet to hand so much influence over what passes for human knowledge to a single, still largely experimental website like Wikipedia.
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Posted by: in Technology
Another day, another 3 per cent on Baidu’s share price. The Chinese search engine is now deemed to be worth more than $12bn, which is double what the stock market thought it was worth as recently as August. Not to be left behind, portals like Sohu and Sina are on a run of their own, with gains respectively of 160 and 130 per cent this year.
For Baidu, if you’re keeping score, that puts the company on a multiple of more than 30 times next year’s revenues, and 94 times 2008 earnings.
With nearly a year to go until the Beijing Olympics, what’s the chance that this bubble will keep inflating at least that long? No surprise that the Olympics were on the lips of a senior Sohu executive when the company reported earnings today, and are contributing to a general belief that this rally is bullet-proof.
The long-run potential for the companies that end up dominating the Chinese internet sector may indeed be huge, but the US internet bubble showed how hard it is for investors to discount that back to a realistic valuation for today’s nascent internet giants - why should this be any different?
Of course, it doesn’t hurt Baidu’s cause if its market share is being inflated in unusual ways (see this report on how internet users who try to visit Google end up on Baidu.) As Sergey Brin groused last week: "Obviously that makes it very hard to do business, when your customers are redirected to a competitor."
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Posted by: in Technology
The pain from the long dotcom hangover is finally starting to recede into the past, at least when it comes to venture capital returns. About time, too. But it is still far too soon to tell whether historic long-term profits from VC investment will hold up.
The story is told in the chart below. The thick broken line at the bottom shows five-year venture capital returns in the US. As write-offs from the dotcom disaster have receded and profitable exits are being found for the the companies that survived, this line has finally crept back into positive territory (the latest figures were put out today by the NVCA.)
The most encouraging part of this chart is the thin broken line in the middle: despite the boom and bust, 20-year returns from start-up financing have stayed remarkably solid, at around 16 per cent a year.
But will that continue to hold good for the next 20 years? The top line shows how ten-year returns, which had been boosted by the bubble, are sinking back towards the norm. The supply and demand equation in venture financing looks very different than it did back in the mid-1990s, with many more funds and many more investors still scrambling to get in. That surely points, eventually, to long-term returns below the historic mean.
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Posted by: in Technology
Hulu, a joint online video venture by NBC and News Corp that has been billed as an alternative to YouTube and other video sharing sites, launched today in private beta. Before the site crashed on us, we managed to get a glimpse at Hulu’s design and some of its features.
Hulu lets users browse an array of studio-approved content, including popular television shows such as The Office, The Simpsons and The Family Guy, copies of which are proving harder and harder to find with any kind of reliability on YouTube. Hulu’s media player includes the usual "share" and "embed" options found on most video sites. It also boasts an impressive video editor that allows users to select only the parts of a video they wish to display in an embedded clip.
An obvious downside is that the site crashed on us after just a few minutes playing around. Assuming that is just a temporary glitch - Hulu would seem to have a bright future ahead of it as a showcase for studios’ online content.
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Posted by: in Technology
It’s official. Google is now generating more in revenues than its three largest competitors combined (don’t even ask about its share of the profits.) To put it another way: just the $1.5bn in extra revenue it added compared to a year before was almost as much as the total produced by Yahoo!
The numbers for the latest quarter make sorry reading, particularly when you consider that a lot of Microsoft’s reported growth online came from its acquisition of aQuantive:
Revenue - $m Growth / (Contraction) - %
Google 4,230 57
Yahoo! 1,768 12
AOL (estimate) 1,250 (37)
Microsoft 670 25
It has become conventional wisdom in online advertising circles to talk about the coming boom in display, as traditional brand advertisers move online. The companies that dominate online display, like Yahoo, also talk hopefully about capturing more of the value from overall internet activity - they reason that if display ads prompt people to carry out internet searches for a product or brand, some of the money that results from the search advertising should rightfully go to display (good luck with proving that one.)
The strongest message from Google’s analyst day this week, though, was that there are many more ways yet to be found that will make search advertising even more powerful. Sure, Google is also diversifying into display and other formats - but for now, search is the main game in town, and likely to stay that way.
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Posted by: in Technology
The line between applications running on a desktop and in a
web browser just got fuzzier
Or maybe it just got bent a little, like a ray of light.
Mozilla, those nice people who brought you the Firefox
browser, have introduced Prism, a way of refracting web applications onto the
desktop so they look like regular programs.
Facebook or Google Mail can therefore show up in your
Windows Start menu and opening them creates a window devoid of the browser
clutter of forward and back buttons.
Mozilla say that unlike Adobe???s AIR, formerly codenamed
Apollo, or Microsoft???s Silverlight , of which Popfly is a demonstration, Prism
is not an attempt to build a proprietary platform that can replace the web.
???We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this
sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development
of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform,???
they say, in a blog note.
Eventually, Prism could have one-click ???Make this a desktop
app??? functionality in Firefox.
Mozilla is also seeking to match the remaining advantages of
desktop programs, with future Firefox features such as offline storage of data
and giving Web apps access to 3D graphics capabilities.
What this all means for users is a more holistic experience.
In future, we may not think about accessing the internet to perform tasks. It
will just be there, in the background, like the electricity powering our
machines.
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Posted by: in Technology
A year after Advanced Micro
Devices’ acquisition of ATI, the Canadian graphics chipmaker, the
merits of the takeover are still unclear to AMD shareholders.
The company has suffered
four consecutive quarters of losses, its shares are down 39 per cent on
their closing price on October 25 2006, the day the ATI acquisition was
finalised. Gross margins are down 10 percentage points, key personnel
have left the company and AMD has seen Intel move ahead of it in
technological advances.
At a price of $5.4bn, the
acquisition was one of the biggest ever takeovers in the semiconductor
industry. It burdened AMD with debt and restructuring charges and
represented its biggest gamble.
In a conversation with us this week, Dirk Meyer, AMD president, said he never saw it that way.
"Gambling implies we didn’t
have another choice. But we really believed that the only good choice
was to expand our product portfolio.
"We are an x86 CPU
[microprocessor] company and, while the PC industry has been driven for
years by it being the premium component in the box, looking forward,
that’s wrong for our customers and for what users care about."
AMD needed a more complete
platform for the consumer market focused around video, media and
graphics performance not CPU performance, he said. "One year on, we
feel this even more so."
Mr Meyer said the timing of the
acquisition was unfortunate - the microprocessor and graphics
businesses took a downturn for reasons that existed independent of the
acquisition. AMD had problems in its supply chain with its CPUs and
became embroiled in a price war with Intel, while ATI’s next-generation
chips were late and it was beaten to the punch by its rival Nvidia.
He said the departure in the
summer of Dave Orton, ATI’s chief executive, was pretty much as planned
at the time of the acquisition.
New customers are being won
already, he argued. Toshiba had begun using its chips for the first
time in its notebooks because AMD could offer a better integrated
platform with ATI’s graphics chips.
"Fusion" - the full realisation
of the benefits of the merger - is expected in 2009, said Mr Meyer.
This new class of processor that integrates the CPU and the graphics
processing unit (GPU) will combine AMD’s CPU skills with the graphics smarts of ATI’s engineers. By that time, he hopes PCs will be
sold not on the strength of their dual core, quad core or octo-core CPU
capabilities, but on the benefits they offer users in performing
different tasks.
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Posted by: in Technology
Municipal Wi-Fi networks have been suffering from bad
reception of the political and economic kind lately.
San Francisco illustrated the two sides of the problem as
elected officials said they did not like the terms being offered by Earthlink
to set up a network in the city and the internet service provider decided to
walk away from the project as its business model led to unsustainable losses in
other cities.
A major MuniWireless conference is taking place in Silicon
Valley this week and its organisers have issued their annual report on the
state of the industry.
While all indicators a year ago were pointing to dramatic
growth, says Muniwireless, ???a year later, a clearer, and, quite frankly, more
sober picture has emerged.???
It estimates 2007 US spending on networks will be $329.4m,
down from the $450m it predicted for 2007 a year ago, but still up 35 per cent
on actual spending in 2006.
Growth rates of between 33 per cent and 48 per cent are
forecast between now and 2010, down from the 100 per cent year-over-year growth
expectations of a year ago.
The report blames a number of factors: changes in strategies
from a few major cities that delays spending; financial troubles at Earthlink,
the most ambitious provider; uncertainty over the right business model; growing
pains in deployment and negative press reports causing concern among
communities and investors.
However, it highlights a number of more positive factors: counties (compared to cities)
accounting for a larger portion of the market; a survey showing people are more
positive about the future of Muni
wireless and mixed-use networks becoming the norm, where residential, local
government, local business and visitor uses for free or paid access emerge.
Concerns remain though. Survey respondents said
wireless network performance and unclear return-on-investment scenarios were
bigger challenges than a year ago.
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Posted by: in Technology
For all its convenience, wireless in the home always seems
to have trade-offs ??? mysterious signal losses, degradation in quality and
less-than-easy set-up.
This can apply to both Wi-Fi internet connections and other
applications, such as wireless speakers and headphones.
Avnera, a fab-less chip company based in Oregon, has
unveiled a technology today that concentrates on conquering one problem area ???
wireless audio.
It claims six innovations: forward error correction so the
receiver can repair lost data, a dispersion technology that spreads out errors
in time, a small spectrum footprint that allows it to choose from 40 possible
channels, dynamic frequency selection which changes to the optimum channel, two
separate antennae and dynamic power control to increase power if the receiver
is far away.
Avnera has packed all of its features onto a single chip
rather than using several, enabling 30 per cent lower system costs. Its
wireless systems are also plug and play.
Wireless headphones from Acoustic Research at $199 performed
well in a demonstration. The sound was crystal clear until cutting out sharply
from about 50 feet away, although an amplifier unit would have extended the
range. A second product already available is the RocketFish Wireless Rear
Speaker Kit at $99.
Avnera???s management team has previous experience with
Bluetooth and sound software companies. Their solution is a proprietary one but
???there???s lots of examples where in certain markets it hasn???t made sense to use
a standards-based technology,??? says Mats Myrberg, head of product development.
Avnera has been developing its AudioMagic and VoiceMagic
chips since 2004 with this one market in mind.
Wireless products have the highest return rate of any
items in the stores of electronics retailer Best Buy. It is therefore an endorsement of Avnera that Best Buy is its
first customer and is also an investor among regular VCs such as Bessemer,
Redpoint and Intel Capital.
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It took Google’s shares 52 weeks to move from $400 to $500. It took another 46 weeks to get from $500 to $600.
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