Archive for September, 2005

MobiTV Hits 500,000 Subscribers

paulballen — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 15:58:27 -0700

USA Today profiles MobiTV, the company that provides dozens of TV
channels to cell phone subscribers. More than 500,000 customers are paying $10
per month to watch TV on a 1-2 inch screen.

Does anyone know how MobiTV markets their service? I've never really seen
it advertised. Do the carriers themselves promote it? And if so, how?

The company also announced MobiRadio (50 satellite radio channels) as a
separate subscription at a conference in San Francisco this week.

Why you have to rank #1 in natural search engine results

paulballen — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 10:06:39 -0700

Jakob Nielsen's latest newsletter
reports on a study that shows that a huge percentage of people click on
the #1 search result and a much smaller number click on #2. Search
engine optimization is extremely important in your internet marketing
strategy. Long term, it is even more important than your pay-per-click
strategy, since natural search delivers 6 times more sales than paid search.

Utah Entrepreneurs Lead a Happy Life

paulballen — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 13:05:50 -0700

Steve Gibson, whose license plate is MENTOR, is a successful business
man who spends most of his time and resources giving back. He has
backed some of the most successful startup companies in Utah. He
teaches entrepreneurship at BYU. And he and his wife founded my
favorite philanthopic organization, the Academy for Creating Enterprise, which trains entrepreneurs in the Philippines. He has faith in people and tries to help them succeed. He is one of my heroes.

He is also an accomplished writer. His recent Deseret News column
reports on research that his BYU students have done surveying
successful Utah entrepreneurs to see what they value and what makes
them tick. The bottom line: the vast majority are happy at work and at
home and feel that their religious faith has helped them in business. 100% of the entrepreneurs surveyed enjoy their work.

Thanks, Steve, for pointing out through research how fulfilling the
life of an entrepreneur can be, at least for those who are in
fast-growing companies. Let's hope that entrepreneurs who are still in
the struggling phases will study, work, and perserve until they too can
achieve business success.

If you an entrepreneur who is unhappy or struggling now, just remember
that things will change, things will improve. As my brother says,
you'll be an overnight success after 10 years of hard work.

MyFamily Hires New CEO

paulballen — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 02:09:52 -0700

This week MyFamily.com announced that Tim Sullivan has been appointed as the company's CEO.
Tim's background includes time with Walt Disney, Ticketmaster-Online
Citysearch, and most recently as CEO at Match.com. From the press
release, he seems ideally suited for the job of growing Ancestry.com
subscriptions worldwide. He has significant international experience.

I am now an observer and not an active participant in the genealogy
industry. I left MyFamily.com in February 2002 and am not at all
involved in day to day operations or company strategy. I am an outsider. So please understand that whenever I blog about MyFamily.com it is based on public information or on my personal opinion.

I love the company and hope it does well. But I also love our original
mission statement for Ancestry.com: to digitize the genealogy records
in all nations and make them accessible over the internet. And I love
our original mission statement for MyFamily.com: to provide a free
family web site for every family in the world.

These statements from 1996 and 1998 respectively may or may not reflect
at all what the company is doing now. But they are still ideas that I
believe in and want to see materialize, whether by MyFamily.com or by
other companies or organizations.

So please don't mistake my blog as anything official from the company!

MyFamily Acquires Heritage Makers

paulballen — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 02:09:06 -0700

MyFamily.com has acquired Heritage Makers
a company with 1,200 distributors who help families print heritage
books. I remember meeting the company founder years ago when it was
called My Family Tales. [Here's an old article about My Family Tales.] I even have some of their early products.

Chris Lee, one of my favorite people from the early days of
MyFamily.com, is now the GM of this business unit. It will be exciting
to how fast this division will grow. It uses a "party-plan direct
selling business" where distributors set up in-home demonstrations. The
Pampered Chef uses this sales model as do dozens of other successful companies. I just found this Party Plan Directory site that lists many others.

Note: I am no longer involved in MyFamily.com, but am still an interested observer of the genealogy industry.

Entrepreneurs: Save Money with Free Legal Docs

paulballen — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:09:56 -0700

Many entrepreneurs can't afford to pay $200-300 per hour for legal
help, especially with simple things like incorporating and simple
contracts. There are many online libraries of legal docs, including
some that exist and generate revenue because of Google AdSense.

Today I found a consulting agreement on www.lectlaw.com and used part of it for a new contract. Lectlaw.com has 40,000 pages indexed by Google. If you run this query:

site:lectlaw.com consulting

it returns an okay consulting contract.

Use the same syntax to find other types of legal forms and documents.

I have visited many other legal sites before, but I can't remember the
URLs. If you are an entrepreneur that finds free legal docs to save
money, tell me which sites you have found most helpful.

I'll add the best sites to the Bootstrapping Section of
StrategyTree.com, a wiki for entrepreneurs where we hope to collect
thousands of good ideas from entrepreneurs about how to create business
success.

FundingUniverse.com

paulballen — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 14:06:21 -0700

We are making serious progress with our FundingUniverse.com
business. Soon we'll announce some new capital, new leadership, and
some significant partnerships that will help this company move forward.
I love how the internet can create so much visibility for a new
business idea. What used to take years in business formation now takes
months.

If you know any angel investors or VCs, please encourage them to signup for FundingUniverse.com (it's free) and look at some of the 543 business plans that have been posted there in the last few months.

I'll be on a panel at the National Association of Seed and Venture
Capital conference in Philadelphia next week, primarily to demonstrate
the new DealFlow Suite (TM) which we make available to organized angel
investor groups around the country.

It's nice to start getting both traction and trajectory with this business.

Best Practices in Email

paulballen — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 13:10:21 -0700

I'm always amazed when I see studies that show that the majority of marketers are not doing things right.

Most companies don't understand search engine marketing; most don't use
web analytics well. But the numbers reported by Silverpop surprised me,
because email marketing has been around for so long. I thought more
retailers would be using it effectively.

Most marketers don't use common email features such as
personalization, dynamic content and advanced layout/design, according
to Phase II of Silverpop's "2005 Retail Email Marketing Study," which
compared message content and creative design of 175 major retailers'
email campaigns, writes
ClickZ. Personalization, among the easiest tactics, was used in fewer
than 5 percent of emails; and 27 percent of messages did not have a
specific call to action.

Also, only 25
percent of messages included a discount offer; and fewer than 20
percent of messages sought to persuade recipients to buy an item for an
event or holiday.

First question to ask yourself? Am I using personalization in my
emails? It is "among the easiest tactics." I once saw personalization
(of both the subject line and email content) increase response rates by
400%. So personalize!

Shop.org Takeaways

paulballen — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 10:52:34 -0700

Last week Shop.org held their annual
conference in Las Vegas. This week it's the Electronic Retailing
Association, same place. If you haven't been to an internet conference
recently, it's amazing how big things are getting and how fast things
are moving.

I visited every exhibitor at the Shop.org event last and met at least a
dozen companies that I hadn't heard of before that are doing
interesting things in online marketing, comparison shopping, search,
and web analytics.

Here are a few impressions:

Omniture Site Catalyst version 12 is awesome. You can
import cost of sales and call center data so you can get more complete
ROI reporting. The new client software features an OLAP engine which
enables unprecedented data mining.
I asked Yahoo's search people if they allowed XML data feeds to
be uploaded to Yahoo like Google's Froogle. They told me about their
Product Listings feature that allows you to upload your product catalog
to Yahoo Shopping and pay per click when visitors search for your
products and click on your ads. This isn't as good as Froogle's free
upload, but Yahoo Shopping gets far more traffic than Froogle, so any
good merchant will include this in their online marketing strategy.
RSS can be a great way to get your information to consumers
(since most online merchants say their biggest concern is whether their
emails are getting delivered) but only 2% of adults use RSS today,
while 5% of consumers age 12-21 use it.
According
to eMarketer, 56.3% of US households will have broadband by 2008
Broadband
users spend 40-50% more money online than dial-up users
3/4ths
of consumers browse online, then shop offline
Pay-per-call
will grow from $162 million in 2004 to $3.38 billion in 2009. Even local
businesses without web sites can use pay-per-call.
70% of consumers use the internet to
search for local stores and merchants, while 62% of consumers use the yellow
pages. (BIG WOW)

Gotta run. I'll update this post later with at least a dozen more thoughts/impressions.

Lunch with LoveSac Founder Shawn Nelson

paulballen — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 21:09:49 -0700

So I met Shawn a couple months ago at a rural economic development
summit put on by Senator Bennett. Both of us were breakout speakers. We
decided then to get together for lunch sometime.

Monday I drove to the LoveSac world headquarters. After a few minutes,
Shawn limped out. He told me he tore his ACL wakeboarding and had
recently had surgery. So here's one of my most embarrassing moments
ever: I asked him how they got him down from the mountain.

He looked at my kind of funny and said, "I was wakeboarding." Duh.

It doesn't get any worse than that. What was I thinking?!?

Okay, but the lunch was excellent after that, and we discussed LoveSac,
building companies, online marketing, blogging and more. Shawn is a
great guy. He is building a world class brand, with almost 70 stores,
venture backing, and great ideas. The first, of course, was to create
and own the "oversized bean bag category" but a more recent brilliant
idea is the concept of building customized furniture in your home using
"Sactionals" -- changeable, washable, DuraFoam / Memory-Foam furniture
building blocks. This is awesome stuff. Here's a little news blurb about Sactionals.

This is a great company to watch. Shawn is amazing. (Check out Shawn's blog.)

And they've got some great consumer trends on their side.

At Shop.org's annual Las Vegas meeting yesterday I learned in the
Consumer Trends session that teens are more likely than the average
internet user to shop online, and get this: they are 2.9 times more
likely to buy furniture online than the average internet shopper.

According to Retail Forward ShopperScape, this is how the shopping
habits of the young are different from average online shoppers.
(Legend: 100 means same as average online shoppers.)

Furniture	292
Shoes	208
Everyday personal care products	202
Cosmetics/beauty care	172
Fine jewelry	160
Online music downloads	153
Clothing	142
Home accent pieces/housewares	138
DVDs	125
Consumer electronics	125
Personal computers/computer peripherals	122
Books	111
CDs	101
Computer software	66
Sporting goods	50
Toys	47

Since the whole LoveSac brand and lifestyle appeals to young people
already, LovSac's online opportunities with their Sactionals furniture
lines are huge. (I think both the furniture category and the home
accent pieces/housewares category bode well for LoveSac.) This data is
not promising for software companies.

Microsoft has a nice case study about LoveSac, which focuses on their accounting and information systems.

Google Enters Blog Search Space

paulballen — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 08:51:27 -0700

It was only a matter of time. Today Google launched its Blogsearch
engine at http://blogsearch.google.com. It is fast, but reviewers say
it is not comprehensive enough. It looks like they started indexing my
blog RSS feed a few weeks ago, but my early posts have not been
crawled. When they start spidering all the old blog posts, and have the
most comprehensive index in addition to their fast search, then they
will be the most formidable blog search engine, in my opinion.

I was glad to see 92 hits on the search "paul allen internet
entrepreneur" -- some from my blog and some from links to my blog. You
always like new search engines when they include you. :)

As I mentioned last week, many of the blog search engines haven't found my blog yet.

I have started using Pingomatic, though, so that should help.

If I update the comparison chart I did last week, Google's blog search has the most hits for my sample query "San Francisco
1906", coming in with 3,225.

Search Engine	Alexa Ranking	Search Results on query: San Francisco 1906	My blog indexed
Technorati	1209	1,834	no
Bloglines	1529	32	no
Feedster	4738	1,922	no
Ice Rocket	4761	1,400	no
Blogpulse	11668	1,058	yes
Daypop	21331	75	no
Google BlogSearch	too early	3,225	no

In a few weeks Alexa should start registering blogsearch.google.com's traffic, like they do with other google features:

Alexa chart on Google:

Where do people go on google.com?
(what's
this)

google.com - 80%
images.google.com - 7%
mail.google.com - 6%
news.google.com - 2%
groups-beta.google.com - 1%
gmail.google.com - 1%
maps.google.com - 1%
froogle.google.com - 1%
Other websites - 1%

Most August IPOs (30) in Five Years

paulballen — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 08:09:18 -0700

This morning I woke up with three ideas that I believe could be
developed and sold to one of the major search engines within the next
three years. I started wondering if the best exit strategy for an
internet based startup these days is to position yourself to be
acquired by Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. And maybe even eBay. There is
so much capital in these companies and they all seem to be anxious to
do acquisitions. And the IPO market has seemed so sleepy for so long.

But then I came across this article from yesterday's Business Week that says there were 30 IPOs in August,
the most for any August in five years. And it claims the market is just
heating up. Here are some of the tech companies that could go public in
the coming months:

Vonage: the leading VoIP provider, with more than 1 million subscribers in the U.S. (Business Week story)
TellMe: voice recognition for customer service calls. Hoovers estimates $19.2 million in 2004 revenue.
Alibaba: Yahoo paid $1 billion for 40% recently
eBags: expected to sell 1 million bags in 2004
Ritz Interactive: online speciality retailer, just filed S-1 with $20.8 million in 2004 revenue
iRobot (S-1 shows revenue of $94 million in 2004)
Facebook: raised $13 million in May from Accel; has 3.65 million registered users

They also mentioned Skype, but of course, this article was written before the announcement that eBay is buying Skype.

So in addition to being a great time to start a high-tech company (the best time in history,
in fact), it appears that it might once again become a great time to
harvest a high-tech company, with both M&A and the IPO market
looking quite promising.

eBay acquires Skype

paulballen — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 23:09:31 -0700

This is an incredible move. I would never have predicted that eBay
would purchase Skype. But it will be very interesting how they
integrate free VoIP into their auction business, and how much eBay will
be able to accelerate the world-wide adoption of Skype. Especially when
Google, Yahoo and MSN are all getting into this space as fast as
possible. The bottom line is that consumers will win (great services
for free) because of new technology and aggressive competition.

eBay's stock is moving up slightly, while Google is up $8 and nearing its all-time high.

The Power and Speed of "We The People"

paulballen — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 14:10:36 -0700

Last week I blogged about how individuals and communities can solve problems faster and better than government agencies can:

We are Americans. This is a land of liberty and self-government. It's all about
"we the people." We have never hired our central government to take care of all
of our needs. We are a free people and a generous people. Our history is filled
with examples of private individuals caring for one another through private
charity, churches, and organizations. We can solve problems and create
solutions. We the people can do more than we have done to prepare for the next
tragedy that strikes our people.

I hope Americans and our media will stop
blaming the central government for their failures and instead spend more time
and energy donating to and promoting and volunteering in organizations and
churches who do so much good at times like this.

The American Red Cross
was not formed by the U.S. Government. It was founded in 1881 by Clara Barton
and other humanitarians. Funding came from John D. Rockefeller and many
others.

According to Wikipedia, the American Red Cross
responds to 67,000 disasters per years. It's one million volunteers and 30,000
employees assist victims of disasters throughout the United
States.

Churches and non-profit groups abound in this country, and they
are all pitching in, giving aid and comfort to those who have lost loved ones
and property.

Let's all give what aid we can, let's use our energy and
resources to assist the victims, to help them rebuild their lives, and to return
the Gulf Coast areas to their former beauty.

Rather than blaming the
President, the Governor, the Mayor, or anyone else for what has gone wrong, and
rather than expecting our government and military to provide all the relief in
times of crisis (although thank goodness for what the military has done!), let's
hope that God will inspire Clara Bartons everywhere to step forward and support
organizations that give aid and comfort to millions now and in the future.

Little did I know that some Utah web designers had launched Katrinahousing.org a few days earlier. Americans have offered more than 130,000 beds to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

And through KatrinaCaravan.org volunteers are providing free transport for hurricane victims. The two sites have already partnered.

The actions of a few creative people can mobilize thousands more, and
so much good can be done. Please check out these two web sites and help
out if you can -- it's not too late to help provide long-term support
to those displaced by this horrific storm.

Google's Amazing Hires--Now Include Vinton Cerf

paulballen — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 15:54:18 -0700

The founder of LinkedIn.com recently complained that the cost of a good
engineer in Silicon Valley is skyrocketing because Google's demand for
top talent is creating a shortage for everyone else and wage inflation.
Now Google has hired Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf
who helped develop TCP/IP. He is going to be Google's Chief Internet
Evangelist. (I guess that relegates me to the role of chief unpaid
google evangelist. For an example of my enthusiasm for this company,
check out this "7 Reasons Why Google Will Rule the World" post from February.

I really hoped Google would buy Skype, but now they've launched Google Talk and a silly rumor has it that eBay is in talks to buy Skype for between $2-3 billion. That would be very strange.

Contingent Value Rights

paulballen — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 10:58:27 -0700

When a company is publicly traded and has a high daily trading volume,
the market continually prices the shares, and buyers and sellers can
trade the shares at any time.

But when a company is privately held, there is usually little or no
market for shares, even though the shares have some value. It is
difficult to find buyers of privately held shares, precisely because
there is no ready market for the shares if the buyer decides later to
sell them.

And pricing shares in a privately held company is also extremely
tricky. I have heard of people overpaying wildly for privately held
shares because their value was misrepresented. But I have also heard of
shareholders having to sell shares in a fire-sale, for pennies on the
dollar, because they had to sell and couldn't find a reasonable market
for the shares.

There are a few private equity firms like Millennium Technology Value Partners in NYC who specialize in providing liquidity for holders of generally illiquid assets.

But I have recently come across a financial instrument that I think
could be very useful for holders of illiquid assets who want to create
a fair transaction with a buyer, where the buyer is protected in case
the assets aren't worth as much as was hoped, and the seller is
protected in case the assets are worth more than was assumed.

I think it could be deemed a "Two Way Contingent Value Rights Agreement."

I have found many references to "contingent value rights" such as this
reference in the book "Expontential Functionals of Brownian Motion and
Related Processes" which I found on Google Print (an unbelievably valuable and little known resource) today. The book was published in 2001.

"To give an example very relevant in
corporate finance, we can also mention the so-called contingent value
rights: suppose a firm A wants to acquire a firm B. A is not willing to
pay too high a price for the shares of company B but knows that this
may lead to a failure of the takeover. Hence firm A will offer the
shareholders of company B a share of the new firm AB accompanied by a
contingent-value right on firm AB, maturing at time T (say two years
later). This contingent-value rights is nothing but an Asian put
option. The put provides the classical protection of portfolio
insurance; the Asian feature protects firm A for an exceptionally low
market price of the share AB on day T, as well as the shareholders B in
the case of a very high market price that day. These contingent-value
rights were used when Dow Chemical acquired Marion Laboratory, when the
French firm Rhone-Poulenc acquired the American firm Rorer and more
recently, when the insurance company Axa merged with Union des
Assurances de Paris to form the second largest insurance company in the
world (in the last case, the corresponding contingent value rights are
still trading today).

I can envision a time where illiquid assets can be bought and sold more
easily if sellers and buyers entered into a Two Way Contingent Rights
Agreement, where the future value of the assets (once they are more
liquid and the market determines pricing) leads to a modifying payment
to the buyer or seller so that the original deal turns out to be fair
for both parties.

This would be ideal, for example, to help shareholders of privately
held companies that are venture backed, where an exit is almost certain
to occur through an IPO or acquisition.

A silicon valley friend once told me he thought this was called a
"waverly loan." Has anyone heard of pre-IPO shareholders using a
"waverly loan" or a "contingent value rights agreement" in selling
shares?

Is Your Blog Indexed by the Blog Search Engines?

paulballen — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 15:22:46 -0700

I should have done this a while ago, but I just did some research on 6
of the top blog search engines. They are listed below and sorted by
Alexa Ranking:

Search Engine	Alexa Ranking	Search Results on query: San Francisco 1906	My blog indexed
Technorati	1209	1,834	no
Bloglines	1529	32	no
Feedster	4738	1,922	no
Ice Rocket	4761	1,400	no
Blogpulse	11668	1,058	yes
Daypop	21331	75	no

In August my web site www.infobaseventures.com got 32,000 unique visitors, mostly to my blog at www.infobaseventures.com/blog/

But because my blog posts don't show up on 5 of the top 6 blog search engines, I'm missing out on huge amounts of traffic.

So now I have to figure out how to get indexed by all these engines.
It's probably very simple. Then, I'll report back on how much
additional traffic I receive when my posts can be found on the other
engines.

My advice to other bloggers (including my BusM 457 students!) is to do the same thing--make sure your posts are being indexed.

Parents Using High Tech to Keep Track of Kids

paulballen — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 21:09:08 -0700

Excerpts from Associated Press story:

The Schmidts use a service called Teen Arrive Alive, one of a few companies
that work with Nextel wireless phones and a tracking service from uLocate
Communications Inc. [This lets parents track where their children are driving and how fast.]

Other devices that track on-the-go kids include the Wherifone, a specialized
locator phone that uses the Global Positioning System, and the CarChip, a device
about the size of two nine-volt batteries stacked together that, installed in a
vehicle, monitors speed, distance and driving habits.

Interest in the United States is growing quickly, as it already has in other
countries Ã‚? Canada and the United Kingdom included. Teen Arrive Alive, which
began offering its tracking service in May 2004, now has subscribers in every
state and is particularly popular in the South and the East, company officials
say.

These days, it's just one way technology is helping parents monitor their
kids.

Georgia-based Mealpay.com began two years ago, for instance, as a way for
parents to electronically prepay school lunches. Now Ã‚? at the request of some
parents Ã‚? the service allows them to monitor what kids order in the
cafeteria.

Meanwhile, Boston-based MobileLime allows teens to use a cell phone to buy
items at fast-food restaurants, grocery stores and other participating
retailers. The cell phone is linked to a credit or prepaid card, so parents can
check.

Then there's "alerts" from U.K.-based Langtree SkillsCenter Ltd. Parents are
notified by text message, e-mail or phone whether a student has shown up for
class and can get progress reports (good and bad) on schoolwork. Just starting
up, the company has signed about 10 U.K. schools so far and is expanding to the
United States.

Beginning as early as the introduction of the automobile and telephone,
new technology has let children escape the watchcare of their parents.
They could go places and talk to people without their parents knowing.
How many teens have made major life-changing mistakes because they were
empowered to go places and do things because of an automobile, but they
weren't old enough to use good judgement?

I know some youth will be troubled to think that their parents can use
technology to track their movements, speed, and behavior (online or in
school, for example), but since when do children have the right to go
wherever they want as fast as they want, and do whatever they want?

Especially in a day when courts are holding parents liable for their children's criminal behavior (here's a link about Texas law),
parents have the right to use technology to help them in their parental
role. Of course, parents may also misuse technology and it may
backfire. They may go too far using threats and penalties as they try
to "control" their children's behavior, instead of the better
approaching of loving them, communicating with them, and rewarding them
for their good behavior.

There is great power in text messaging an "i love you" message on a
cell phone, for example. I think we need to mix the parental monitoring
with parental messages of love, if we want this new high tech parenting
to work.

Hire Students to Run Your First Pay Per Click Campaign

paulballen — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 09:22:33 -0700

Memo: Pay Per Click Help Available
To: Business Owners of the World
From: Paul Allen, Instructor of Internet Marketing at Brigham Young University

More than fifty students have enrolled in the Internet Marketing course
at BYU this fall. In an effort to give each student hands on experience
with internet marketing, I am hoping to find businesses who will let us
set up and run their first pay-per-click keyword marketing campaign for
them.

My goal is to have at least a $100 budget for each student or student
team. The money you provide us will all be spent to drive traffic to
your web site from search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Our students will create a list of keywords for you, they will manage
your bids, and they will measure the traffic that you get. If you have
a technical contact that can implement conversion rate tracking on your
web site, then we will also be able to report how many sales or new
registered users we generated for you from this campaign.

Please email me at paulballen "at" yahoo.com if you are interested in
our class setting up your first pay-per-click campaign. Your budget for
this project should range from $100 to $1,000.

Kuwait Pledges $500 Million

paulballen — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 05:09:30 -0700

I just learned that Kuwait has offered $500 million in donations
for Katrina disaster relief, following Qatar's pledge of $100 million.
This is the best news I have seen so far, an amazing gesture from US
allies in the Middle East (including the nation we we liberated from
Iraq in 1991.) Other countries are also offering assistance. There is
good in the world. This is a story that all our media should be
reporting.

San Francisco 1906, New Orleans 2005

paulballen — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 04:09:35 -0700

It's hard to think about anything these days but the thousands of
people who perished in the hurricane and floods and the 1.5 million
people who have been displaced whose lives are permanently disrupted.

Today I've been inspired by reading an article written 99 years ago in
the aftermath of the great San Francisco earthquake and fire. This was
the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States up until
that time.

Please read this and pass it along, if you think it can give us some hope and a new perspective.

Source: Great Epochs, Vol. 10, p.163-8. Author: Henry James Forman, "The Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco"

Three-fourths of the city of San
Francisco have been destroyed by earthquake and flames. Three hundred
thousand people have been rendered homeless, and are facing, for the
moment, want and misery. The Federal Government, the States, and the
cities, newspapers, societies, and individuals are urging and
hurrying aid to the sufferers of the greatest calamity of the kind in
American history. No one is blind as to the extent of the disaster.
Yet, from every quarter comes that word of cheer and encouragement, of
sympathy and friendship, that is so helpful in times of distress, so
typical of the American character. Fortunately, says the New York
Journal, "it is certain that the spirit of 'Forty-nine' lives in
California to-day. The same courage that changed a wilderness into a
great State, and a strip of land by the sea's edge into a beautiful
city, will do that work again. And from the ashes and the ruins, the
blasted hopes, the broken fortunes, there will arise another San
Francisco, more beautiful, more worthy of a brave people

Donut Auction to Help Katrina Victims

paulballen — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 23:09:55 -0700

This weeked government rescue efforts and private charity have kicked
into high gear. It seems we have turned the corner in providing relief
for the 1.5 million displaced victims of Hurricane Katrina. Donations
to the Red Cross and to church-based relief efforts are in the
millions. I saw first hand yesterday how generous people are here in
Utah.

One creative way to help the victims was to bid on this eBay auction for the "world's most expensive donut."
The winning bid was $5,200. All proceeds went to the Red Cross, and the winner will
appear on television.

Worldhistory.com lists some of the most destructive hurricanes in history, but nothing seems to even come close to Katrina.

More Good News: The Levee is Repaired

paulballen — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 16:24:46 -0700

The Associated Press reported 15 minutes ago that the levee has been repaired and flood waters are starting to recede.

Another VOD Trial Bites the Dust

paulballen — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 23:09:41 -0700

Disney's MovieBeam experiment apparently hasn't gotten traction yet.
The company has spent at least $70 million trying to market this
video-on-demand service to three cities (including Salt Lake City).
Consumers received a set-top box and access to 100 movies stored on a
local hard drive, with up to 10 new movies per week replacing movies
they no longer wanted. Disney may be trying to sell the service.

I thought there were several problems when I heard about Moviebeam: the
cost of getting set-top boxes into homes, for one, the limited
selection of movies (not true video on demand), and competing against
companies who already have millions of PVRs in homes as well as
broadband internet movie providers (there are at least five).

Want to read something eerily prophetic? I just found a brilliant
prediction from Jim Cramer in September 2003. He said Moviebeam would
be a massive Disney failure and lead to a $100 million write-off. If that doesn't put him up a notch in your book, I don't know what will.

Microsoft vs Skype vs Google

paulballen — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 23:09:03 -0700

Microsoft has purchased internet-calling startup
Teleo, which may enable them to offer features in MSN Messenger similar
to what SkypeOut offers -- the ability to make a phone call from your
computer to an ordinary telephone.

Google Talk doesn't currently have this ability, but the "wisdom of the crowds" predicts that Google will have a significant impact on Skype's business (in addition to a very detrimental impact on Vonage, the leading commercial VoiP player.)