Industry Standard Views & Analysis

TerriblyClever launches iPhone applications targeting universities

Sindya Bhanoo — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:10:08 -0800

A start-up called TerriblyClever is creating iPhone applications specifically for universities and their students.

TerriblyClever piloted its first five applications less then two months ago, in partnership with Stanford University. The set of applications, called iStanford, is available for free on iTunes. It includes a university directory, maps, real-time information about school sports, and a course directory.

So far, about 11,000 people have downloaded iStanford, said Kayvon Beykpour, the co-founder and CEO of the company. Ironically, only about 4000 students, faculty and staff at Stanford have iPhones, he said.

Beykpour is an undergraduate student at Stanford, as are most of the others on TerriblyClever's eight person team.

"We're not salespeople," he said. "We're approaching this as a students and developers. We use these applications ourselves."

The company hopes to create more applications in the near future - including one for campus transportation, with a real-time view of where campus buses are. They also hope to develop more applications for universities throughout the country.

"Every university has similar services and needs directories, maps and ways to add and drop courses," said Aaron Wasserman, Managing Partner of TerriblyClever. "The more schools we get, and the more applications we develop, the better foundation we build for our product."

This semester, Stanford also offered a computer science course in iPhone development, taught by Paul Marcos and Evan Doll of Apple. It's a move on Apple's part to get more bright, young programmers to create innovative applications.

Loopt, another company started by Stanford undergraduates three years ago, uses a cellphone-based GPS system to let users visualize where their friends are at any given moment. The Loopt iPhone application has seen great success. After the application's launch, investment bank Allen & Co. reportedly valued the company at $500 million, according to VentureBeat.

The founders of Loopt took time off from school to work on the product, which turned out to be a good bet. The company has raised more than $13 million from venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates, according to the VentureBeat story.

Next semester, Beykpour will also take time off to work on TerriblyClever.

"I don't think any of us undervalues the opportunities we have at Stanford," Beykpour said. "But when you're working on this idea you're really passionate about, it makes you prioritize things a little bit."

To download iStanford, click here. To see how iStanford works, watch the video below:

iStanford Commercial - Stanford iPhone Apps from Kayvon Beykpour on Vimeo.

(AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

E-Gold directors escape jail time with guilty plea

Jordan Golson — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:11:18 -0800

The three indicted directors of E-Gold have been spared jail time after pleading guilty to violations of money laundering and running an unlicensed money transmitting business. Judge Rosemary Collyer said the men deserved lenient sentences because they did not intend to engage in illegal activity.

Douglas Jackson was sentenced to 300 hours of community service, a $200 fine, and three years supervision including 6 months home restriction with an electronic monitoring anklet. The judge spared him a larger fine because Jackson is deeply in debt. "Dr. Jackson has suffered, will continue to suffer, and may never be successful with E-Gold," said the judge.

The two other defendants, Reid Jackson and Barry Downey were each sentenced to three years of probation, 300 hours of community serice and $2,600 in fines and fees.

The company, which in July plead guilty to criminal charges related to money laundering, will be allowed to continue operation pending licensing by the various states in which it operates.

Boston hospital turns to speech recognition to monitor patients

Sindya Bhanoo — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:48:58 -0800

Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston are using an automated follow-up system developed by Vocantas to gather data on patients' medications. But instead of using the Web or email to interact with patients, the software is turning to an older communications technology: the telephone.

"Chronic disease management is big," said Gary Hannah, Vocantas' president and CEO, in an interview with The Industry Standard. "And the more senior population is comfortable with the phone -- not everybody likes to use the Web."

Vocantas' product is called CallAssure. Brigham and Women's is using it to call patients, collecting data on how they feel after taking medications. The technology helps doctors identify side effects, and, based on a patient's responses to the questions, can ask a doctor or nurse to follow up directly.

Founded in 2003, Vocantas is a 16-person, privately owned company in Ottawa that got its start developing products for utilities. "We started by working with utilities companies, asking people about their bill payment issues," Hannah said. "Then four years ago, people in the healthcare industry out of Boston and Ottawa told us about the issues they were facing."

CallAssure now works with several hospitals in Canada and the United States. The software is customized for each institution, based on information doctors at the hospital want to collect.

Typical CallAssure questions include:

1) Are you taking a new medication since you've gone home?
2) Are you having any symptoms?
3) Are you having problems w/ mobility?
4) Do you have a temperature?

The software can be progammed to respond in various ways, Hannah said. For example, it could alert a doctor to call a patient, or ask a receptionist to schedule an appointment.

Technology firms -- including giants such as Microsoft, Google, Intel and Siemens -- are increasingly attracted to opportunities in the healthcare sector. America's population of elderly is getting larger, and the healthcare system is widely viewed as broken, with many areas needing improvement. The healthcare industry is a $2.5 trillion dollar market in the United States alone, and the healthcare IT market is worth an estimated $50 billion, according to Reuters.

To test out the Vocantas speech recognition software, call 613-271-2912 (Note: It's a Canadian number).

Is Vista Capable? Maybe. Microsoft, not so much.

IDG News Service — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:52:01 -0800

The Vista Capable class-action law suit is the gift that keeps on giving.

In April 2007, two Seattle area consumers, ticked off at buying new machines labeled "Vista Capable" that were anything but, sued Microsoft for using deceptive "bait and switch" tactics in its marketing. It became a class-action suit last February.

Since then, Ballmer & Co. have done everything humanly possible to implicate themselves except lead the police on a high-speed chase while driving a white Bronco with US$10,000, a fake beard, and a shovel in the trunk.

The e-mails that have emerged as evidence have been damning.

Last February, we learned from internal Microsoft e-mails that the company's own execs were teed off by Vista's performance (or lack thereof). Former Windows czar Jim Allchin even worried that changing the labeling requirements would mislead consumers. (Microsoft mislead consumers? Next you'll be telling me that Bill Gates hates churros.)

This week we heard from Hewlett-Packard, which invested beaucoup bucks in machines that could take advantage of the Aero Glass interface -- the one feature of Vista even Microsoft's critics agreed was mega-cool -- to meet the standards for the "Vista Capable" label. And then Microsoft "relaxed" those standards, slapping that label on systems using an old Intel 915 graphics chip set that couldn't possibly keep up, simply because Intel had a backlog of older chips it needed to move. You could see the steam coming off some of HP's e-mails, as Computerworld's Gregg Keizer notes:

"I hope this incident isn't a foretaste of the relationship I will have with Microsoft going forward, but I can tell you that it's left a very bad taste with me and my team," Richard Walker, senior vice president at HP's consumer PC unit, said in a Feb. 1, 2006, message to senior Microsoft executives.

The moral here: Don't turn your back on Redmond, unless you want to be ****** in the ****.

(Kicked in the keister, of course. What did you think I meant?)

Now Ballmer may have to take the stand in his and Microsoft's own defense. That ought to be rich.

So far, Ballmer has employed the Sergeant Schultz "I know nothink" defense. Attorneys for the litigants want to find out what Ballmer didn't know and when he didn't know it. Of particular interest is what Ballmer and Intel honcho Paul Otellini discussed in a phone call back in January 2006, when Intel was chomping at the bit to get Microsoft to change its labeling requirements.

Microsoft is doing everything it can to keep Ballmer out of the witness box, lest he pick up a chair and heave it across the courtroom. At the same time, its coven of highly paid attorneys are trying to drive a wooden stake into the heart of the suit, essentially arguing that a) people who bought Vista Home Edition machines should have known they would suck, despite the label hardware makers glued to the box; and b) Microsoft gained no market advantage by deceiving consumers changing its labeling requirements.

Like OJ, Microsoft might yet win the case -- despite what the evidence suggests. When you can afford to hire Wolfram & Hart as your attorneys, you can fend off anything but the apocalypse. But in the minds of anyone who's read those e-mails, they've already lost. And ultimately that's the bigger battle.

OK, Microsoft fans and foes. What do you think? E-mail your highly nuanced legal arguments to me: cringe@infoworld.com.

Facebook Etiquette: Five Dos and Don'ts

IDG News Service — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:32:27 -0800

Balancing your work and personal life on social networking tools such as Facebook has become more complex than ever - and the dangers go beyond the well-publicized examples of posting party pictures to your profile.

A more subtle faux pas can affect your online reputation and even future job path, as your friend list on Facebook includes both personal and professional contacts. Information you post can mess up your work relationships and personal ones in one quick swoop.

For example, the immediacy and ease with which you can post a quip on Facebook may get you into trouble if you're teasing your significant other - plus tell work colleagues more than they need or want to know about your relationship. This recent story of a man caught cheating by his wife when she perused his iPhone got us thinking: In this day of gadgetry and near-constant contact via social networking, how can you avoid blunders that will deem you a thoughtless spouse, friend or colleague?

Kirsten Dixson, a reputation management and online identity expert, has some tips to keep you on the appropriate social networking etiquette path. Because Facebook mixes your personal and professional life, she says it requires more careful attention than LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, which keeps a strictly all-business look and feel due to its design.

Here are Dixson's suggestions for managing your Facebook profile and your overall social networking persona, and warnings about places where you can get into trouble with people who matter to you personally and professionally.

1. Choosing your profile picture

Thoughtful: Some people militantly believe that Facebook is all personal while LinkedIn is all professional. If this sounds like you, you might choose a Facebook pic of yourself fishing, hanging out at a party or playing a guitar. But Dixson says you're better off to err on the side of caution here, by keeping your profile picture professional, or at least neutral. Your photo doesn't need to be in a studio with a boring canvas backdrop - it could be outside on your deck or on a mountain side, for instance - but it has to be fairly even-keeled. (This is different than LinkedIn, where photos should be strictly professional, Dixson says).

Thoughtless: According to Dixson, don't post profile pictures that are "too sexy, cartoonish or that might alienate your audience." A look through your friend list can usually reveal the ones she's talking about. The stylized glamour shot, the quick snapshot of slicked up hair or low-cut dresses taken right before heading to a party, or worse, costume-like pics: wet suits and surfboards, bike gear, Halloween outfits -the list goes on.

2. Filling Out Your Biography

Thoughtful: The biographical section of social networks vary. On Facebook, the service provides fields for a variety of interests, both professional and personal. Don't be afraid to post some nuggets that convey who you are, within reason. On Facebook, you can decide with great granularity what information people can view by altering your privacy settings. For instance, you can set it so every visitor to your profile sees that you enjoy golfing, reading and civil war history, but maybe only a certain group of people see your religion, political affiliations and relationships. For Facebook's "About me" section, building on the Twitter doctrine, Dixson says to be short and concise. Don't worry about being clever.

Thoughtless: While there aren't many numbers to back this assertion (because Facebook is a private company, and data can be hard to come by), most social networking and identity experts believe a great many Facebook users never so much as glance at their privacy settings pages. The same probably holds true for other social networks. Remember that social networks plan to monetize their service by ensuring that you share as much information as possible. As such, you should believe that they'll share as much information about you as they can, and make it available to the widest audience.

The default settings for Facebook, for example, make all your profile information available for everyone on the service to see. "Assume from the get go that anything you put in there is viewable on the public internet," Dixson says. "Go in with that line of thinking. Then go in and say, if you don't want to make certain information available to certain people, go turn them off with the privacy settings."

With the information you do share, avoid being vain. Social networks do enable, if not encourage, a bit of narcissism. But don't assume people want to read a novel about your life. Also, be protective of your family. It's fine to list yourself as "married" in the info section, for instance, but don't necessarily feel that you have to put down a link to your significant other. If you have young children, for their protection and privacy, Dixson recommends you don't include their names anywhere in the bio or in pictures of them that you decide to share.

Oh, and a word about age. While you may want to include your birthday on your Facebook profile, so people can message you on the big day, you should exclude the birth year, Dixson says. Your friends and family know how old you are, and there's no reason for your professional ones to know.

3. Posting content, links, and news

Thoughtful: Post content that highlights your personal interests and your professional areas of expertise. A marketing professional might post some interesting links for a relevant trade publication he or she wanted to share, for example. Posting personal picture slideshows is fine - again, within reason. You clearly want to avoid the aforementioned pitfalls of displaying shots of wild revelry. But for all the agony about what's acceptable and what's not, remember that offering contacts a decent glimpse into what makes you you can have business benefits. "It strengthens relationships," Dixson says. "It really helps establish connections. People like to do business with people they know."

Thoughtless: Spamming people is a big no-no, as it can irrevocably ruin your social capital. It's great to be so passionate about things in both your professional life and personal life that you feel compelled to share it with people who are important to you, but remember that people can only take so much time out of their day. Also, don't assume they care about every little thing in your personal life. People know you're proud of your kids, for example, and that speaks to your commitment as a parent. Yet you need to know when to draw the line somewhere in how much they want to hear.

Definitely keep your romantic break-ups and get-togethers in private forums, like e-mails, IMs and (who still uses it anymore?) the phone.

Oh, and this one should be self-explanatory: don't go flapping your gums about your company's affairs.

4. Talking to One vs. Many

Thoughtful: Posing a question to your entire network is OK, provided it's relevant to all of them, or at least won't be viewed as a nuisance. For instance, you might ask, "Getting a new phone. iPhone or BlackBerry?" Such a question will be relevant to a lot of folks who have gone through the same issue. The key is, if you're on the receiving end and want to weigh in on such an issue, be sure to respond to that person only - unless it's been made clear that he or she wants your comments public. This way, you avoid spamming people.

Thoughtless: Know that self-satisfied guy who unrelentingly decides to hit reply-all to every group e-mail that's sent in your company? You don't want to be that guy on social networks. On Facebook, one of the most utilized features is the Wall. It's a fun place to leave publicly displayed messages and a bit of witty banter. However, making specific plans with a person on the Wall, for example, is rude to that person's other profile visitors. Too many times, you see "let's get a drink at 5 today" posted to someone's Wall. Unless you want to include all of that person's friends in on the social engagement, there's no reason not to pose that question in the private messaging section of Facebook (or any social network for that matter; Twitter, for instance, has the direct message function).

5. Watching Your Tone

Thoughtful: It's important to keep a polite and measured tone on social networks; after all, the mainstream ones like Facebook are an extension of our lives in real life (that's not necessarily the case in virtual worlds, but that's a whole other topic). Say things you'd feel comfortable saying in person, and avoid inside jokes that only a few of your contacts would understand.

Thoughtless: With a social network that is fairly open, nobody is really going to be impressed when you post inside jokes that they don't understand; in fact, you run the risk of insulting people if they think you're making some veiled or coded comment about them. Remember, within most social networks, you can set up private groups where those kinds of exchanges will not only be more appropriate, but also encouraged. "It's better to be clear than clever," Dixson says. "Don't expect people to get it. Be very explicit."

Finally, sarcastic humor and anger can be dangerous in social network postings, just as they are in e-mail messages. Think twice before sharing. (For more e-mail etiquette tips, see Ten Things You Should Never Put in E-Mail.)

Survey: IT executives see growth in 2009, but not in all sectors

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:21:45 -0800

The U.S. economy may be in the grip of a recession, but some IT professionals are making plans for larger budgets in 2009, according to a CDW survey.

At its Partner Summit this past week, CDW surveyed 273 IT executives about their IT spending for 2009. considering the current economic conditions, it's natural to expect that IT spending will decline next year. However, CDW found a bright spot in the clouds (literally).

While many respondents said their budgets will shrink drastically, 60 percent indicated their organizations will actually maintain or increase their budgets. Certain verticals look especially strong, including healthcare, energy, and government. Those sectors expecting declines included financial services, manufacturing, retail, and non-profits (see chart below).

The survey also asked about spending on certain technologies. Thirty-four percent of respondents believe that consolidation and virtualization will see growth, 32 percent said that security will grow, and 31 percent focused on storage. This belief is closely tied to what the executives identified as the biggest technology news stories in 2008: 36 percent felt green and energy efficient IT were important, with another 20 percent declaring virtualization the most important news.

Salesforce.com flying high despite stormy economy

IDG News Service — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:07:29 -0800

The weather might be arctic and the recession biting but Salesforce.com has a warm glow about it after the software-as-a-service pioneer said revenues were up 43 per cent year on year for its third quarter.

Hitting US$276m (£411m) beat analyst estimates and was a coup for Salesforce in a few ways. Firstly, it cemented ambitions to be a $1bn annual revenue company this year, and the San Francisco-based firm will sail by that totemic figure next year -- it now expects about $1.35bn for fiscal 2010. Second, that rate of growth is mightily impressive for a company that floated as far back as 2004. Third, coming on the heels of modest numbers from traditional software behemoths, it confirms the impression that on-demand companies might stand to benefit from the bleak economic outlook that has made capex a toxic prospect for most companies.

As CEO Marc Benioff said, "In times like these, our value proposition of low start up cost, low risk, and fast results is resonating like never before. In the third quarter, we continued to add customers at the same record level we did last quarter, at a time when the traditional enterprise software world was retrenching."

Watch out for more successes among on-demand firms as buying decisions get bent out of shape by the financial breakdown.

YouTube experiments with high-quality video

IDG News Service — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:54:04 -0800

Searching for YouTube videos is fun, but the videos are usually of such a low, compressed quality that sometimes it's hard to actually see what is going on. But YouTube is trying to fix that problem. It already supplies one option: You can set your YouTube account settings to play HD video when available, or you can attach "&fmt=18" to the end of the URL to display videos in a higher 480x260 quality. But now YouTube is supporting an even higher quality 1280x720 video format (identified by "&fmt=22" at the end of a link). The results are a pretty dramatic difference.

The downside is that very few videos support the higher resolution. Most people who upload YouTube videos do so with the video already compressed. If the video wasn't uploaded in a higher resolution video format, then using the new suffix doesn't change anything, and that lower quality remains a vast majority of the YouTube library. Unless YouTube actually starts making an effort to attract HD content, or better advertise the HD content it already has, I'm not sure that this will make much of an impact.

Google SearchWiki addition fails to wow

IDG News Service — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:45:08 -0800

Google isn't content being the most popular Internet search engine -- it continuously tinkers to create a more immersive user experience. Sometimes it fails as PC World outlined in this article. And Google's SearchWiki, a user-edited search results feature unveiled yesterday, in my opinion is Google's latest bad idea since, well, since Lively.

SearchWiki allows you to edit and customize your search results pages. You must be signed into your Google account for it to work. Once signed in, if you search for "fantasy football stats" religiously and think the result should appear in a different order, you can rearrange search results to your liking. You can also delete unhelpful results and even comment on the page's usefulness.

When you rearrange, or re-rank, Google search results you affect only your Google account -- so don't expect your reorganized vision of the Web to impact other users. Comments, however, are universal.

Once you get involved in SearchWiki's features, it becomes frustratingly meta and throws chunks of logic out the window. You can comment on other user's comments. You can add your own URLs to your searches. How does that make sense? If you're searching for something, you shouldn't already know the destination URL, and if you do, why are you searching? And if you're continuously seeking the same exact thing, why not just bookmark the site?

What surprises me the most is that the feature is turned on by default within search results for all Google users (the feature is being phased in by Google and is not yet widely available). It's my guess that most average Googlers will be confused by what this tool does and struggle with why they should use it. Ultimately, it feels as if Google is working against its winning design formula of keeping things uncluttered and aesthetically clean.

There are reports the option to opt-out of SearchWiki by refusing to hit the "Yes, Continue" button on a screen explaining the program. Others, like me, were not given this option and are now seem stuck with it (no word on Google's official blog announcing WikiSearch on how to turn the feature off). At this moment there is no method I can find for turning SearchWiki icons off.

The beauty of Google was its simplicity. A logo, a search bar, and two buttons: Google Search and I'm Feeling Lucky. From there, users could quickly and accurately access billions of pages on the Internet. Adding unnecessary features only complicates the process and perverts the sole reason of Google Search's existence: to search. The concept is so elementary I cannot understand why Google bothers messing with it. At the very least - how come Google doesn't make it easier to configure your Google account to make WikiSearch clutter go away.

Tin foil hat alert: Is the Chinese government spreading "Manchurian chips?"

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:19:30 -0800

We don't often discuss conspiracy theories, but this technology-focused doozy needs to be debunked before it spreads any further. It's Daily Artisan's reprint of an essay written by former FBI "spy" Robert Eringer for the Santa Barbara News-Press. In it, Eringer alleges that the Chinese government has taken advantage of the fact that virtually every computer on the market has parts from China and has fitted each component with a "Trojan Horse on a Chip," or a "Manchurian Chip."

Eringer claims that while the spies-on-a-chip are not currently activated, the Chinese government can activate them at will, effectively gathering information on every U.S. citizen with a PC as well as every U.S. government and military computer system. To back up his story, he cites a classified DARPA report and quotes unnamed intelligence officials and industry experts, including one former intelligence officer who allegedly told him "it's the hottest topic concerning the FBI and the Pentagon."

Sounds creepy, doesn't it? A mysterious foreign power is apparently using its industrial prowess to potentially spy on Americans. It's an outrage!

But before you take a sledgehammer to your PC and revert to a Luddite chip-less existence, consider some of the many facts about the modern computer industry and the U.S. military's technology requirements.

In the consumer PC market, there is a huge hole in Eringer's theory: Many U.S. companies have very strict hardware design and QA processes that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for manufacturers to add some sort of spying device to a processor or motherboard. As any Mac fanboy can tell you, Apple designs everything, from software to components, to their own specifications. Even the Intel chips in the current Mac lines are designed according to Apple's strict specifications, so claiming that chips could have deviated from Apple's specs without anyone noticing is preposterous.

Secondly, the idea that "all" chips are designed or manufactured in China is rubbish. This is especially true of chips that make their way into U.S. military systems, considering the U.S. intelligence has been concerned about the security of chips for years and there are many rules related to design and manufacturing. The NSA has a "Trusted Foundries" program that has one layer of security in place. Add in another certification program, Trusted Designers. DARPA's "Trust in Integrated Circuits" program referenced in Eringer's article would add another layer of security. Lastly, as noted by the IEEE's Tech Talk blog, Trusted Foundries are by definition onshore, not offshore.

The suggestion that the Chinese have somehow managed to outwit multiple levels of industry and government-sponsored oversight to install and remotely activate "Manchurian chips" may appeal to the tin-foil hat crowd, but it should not be taken seriously. There is definitely a concern about the Chinese government gaining access to sensitive data on U.S. networks, but to date, every compromised system has been due to holes in the software or on the networks, not the hardware.

Public domain image by Abraham Del Pozo

MIT's storytelling center to concentrate on future film and television technologies

Sindya Bhanoo — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 08:26:30 -0800

The MIT Media Lab has announced its latest endeavor -- the creation of a Center for Future Storytelling. The center will use new technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, according to an official statement.

The center is being funded by a seven-year, $25 million commitment from Plymouth Rock Studios, a major motion picture and television studio scheduled to open in 2010 south of Boston.

Three researchers from MIT's Media Lab will co-direct the center. They are V. Michael Bove Jr., who studies object-based media and interative television, Cynthia Breazeal, who focuses on robotics, and Ramesh Rasker, who researches imaging, display and performance-capture technologies.

The goal is to create "a sort of living story that can continue to evolve and shape depending on who is listening to it and how they can derive meaning from it," Breazeal said in a taped interview.

The center already has more than a dozen research projects in the works. They include:

Everything Tells A Story: A project that will enable everyday objects to keep running "diaries," of what happened to them. The information could be used for "personal story creation" by individuals.

Tofu: A robot that uses cartoon-animation style movement to work with kids. The researchers describe it as "LEGO Mindstorms meets Muppets." Future versions of Tofu will allow children to design, program and remotely operate their own puppets to tell stories.

Nexi: A project to create a social robot, or a "synthetic performer." The project combines mobility, dexterity, and most remarkably, sociality. The robot's expressive face is capable of multiple human facial expressions. A video of Nexi can be viewed below.

Programmable Movies: A research project to turn movies into a customized experience based on certain parameters like emotions, place or time. The idea is to let users piece together different images using metadata encoded in the images.

MIT's Media Lab was started more than 20 years ago to develop innovative technologies for human expression and interactivity. To read about other projects at the Center for Storytelling, click here.

To see Nexi, the social robot, speak and emote, watch the video below:

Briefly: MA court rules online law student can take the bar exam

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:11:05 -0800

In what can only be viewed as a victory for online universities, Massachusetts state supreme court ordered the state's Board of Bar Examiners to allow Ross Mitchell, a graduate of Concord Law School, an online university, to take the State Bar.

Mitchell already has a license to practice law in California, but the Massachusetts bar has historically only allowed individuals who have graduated from an American Bar Association-accredited law school to take the state's Bar exam.

Source: Wicked Local

Linden Lab's finances: "Our situation is very good"

Ian Lamont — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:35:12 -0800

Linden Lab, the parent company of Second Life, is faring very well financially despite the recent downturn in the economy, according to a senior executive at the company.

Ginsu Yoon, Linden Lab's VP of Business Affairs, told The Industry Standard last week that the company has been able to hire approximately 100 new employees in the last year, and has not raised any new financing. Yoon added that Second Life has had its "highest numbers ever" in terms of active users, in-world hours, and revenue.

"We're a larger company now," Yoon said. "I think we grew probably 100 employees over the last year. I think we started the year with somewhere in the high 100s, close to 200, and now we're close to 300."

When asked whether revenue or additional investment had enabled the wave of new hires, Yoon said, "We have not raised any financing since the last time it was publicly reported. In terms of profitability, I don't want to go beyond what our fact sheet says. Our situation is very good."

As for concerns about the current economic crisis, Yoon suggested that Second Life was an attractive entertainment option for many people concerned about keeping personal expenditures down.

"There are all sorts of theories about why online gaming or other online activities have more recession-proof characteristics [such as] it drives more entertainment value, high-usage value for your dollar. And if you compare the cost of 10 or 20 dollars spent in a month, and compare that to the number of movies, you only get four hours watching two movies. As you know, you can be in Second Life for hours and hours without paying anything."

However, he was cautious about future trends. "I wouldn't, with one month of data in the current financial crisis, I wouldn't go so far as to say 'oh yeah, it's a recession-proof business.'"

Sources cited, referenced, or consulted: Ginsu Yoon, Lindenlab.com, Secondlife.com, New World Notes (nwn.blogs.com), Chris Ulbrich/Lewis PR.

Photo: Ian Lamont

Linden Lab focusing on higher-end systems for Second Life

Ian Lamont — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:29:04 -0800

A senior Linden Lab executive has indicated that Second Life's client software is being developed to take advantage of more powerful computers, but did not rule out future efforts involving low-end systems.

Ginsu Yoon, Linden Lab's VP of business affairs, told The Industry Standard in an interview last week that the "core part" of the Second Life experience were best shown on higher-end computing platforms.

"I know that there's a lot of theory in the industry that what you really ought to be focusing on is the light-weight experiences, Web-inventable experiences, you can run it on any machine, you can run it on mobile devices, or wi-fi networks," Yoon said. However, he said that virtual worlds was headed toward a richer experience requiring more powerful computers. "If you don't show the capabilities that are possible on the high end, I think that you don't really get an opportunity to develop toward where the world is going," he explained.

Yoon was responding to a question of whether Linden Lab was considering low-powered laptop computers called netbooks as platform for Second Life. Yoon acknowledged the increasing market share of laptops, and said that the rise of laptops -- and wireless networks -- had slowed Second Life's adoption. Users with less-powerful laptops and slower wireless connections often report difficulties using Second Life.

"There is a continued movement toward mobility," Yoon said. "And I think netbooks are a much smaller factor than, for example, iPhones, and more powerful handheld devices. ... Those things are certainly things that we are interested in the future. But it's not sort of the core of where we think we develop toward the leading edge."

Yoon dismissed the idea of the Second Life client being dropped in favor of browser-based access. "I know that the common refrain in the industry is 'Oh, it's got to be in a browser, everything has got to be in a browser,' he said. "But there are plenty of experiences that are in a browser, that are supposed to be in a 3D world, and that doesn't do it."

However, Yoon expressed interest in new types of input devices. "your interaction with the computing environment is not always going to be about a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse," he said. "You will have more natural interactions, in terms of gestural interface and the kinds of things that lend themselves very well to interacting in a 3d environment." Yoon predicted "Minority Report-type interfaces" using 3D cameras to translate the movements of users' hands in a virtual world, as well as brainwave devices to control avatars' movements in-world.

Sources cited, referenced, or consulted: Ginsu Yoon, Lindenlab.com, Secondlife.com, New World Notes (nwn.blogs.com), Chris Ulbrich/Lewis PR.

Interview with Linden Lab's Ginsu Yoon

Ian Lamont — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:11:41 -0800

Last week, the Industry Standard interviewed Linden Lab Business Affairs Vice President Ginsu Yoon at Linden Lab's San Francisco office. Yoon discussed the company's enterprise plans, including the Second Life Grid and a new turnkey service designed by Rivers Run Red that lets companies hold virtual meetings in Second Life (look for a special report about this service on the Standard later this month). The executive also touched upon Linden Lab's financial health, the challenges posed by the rise of laptop computers and other mobile devices, and the "heightened rhetoric" surrounding the company's enterprise plans.

The Industry Standard: What is different now about Second Life and the enterprise space now compared to the way it was two years ago?

Yoon: I think over the last two years more general market familiarity with the concept of virtual worlds. There are certainly within our own active user base and our revenue base an increasing proportion of enterprise and educational users.

Ironically, we don't actually have a perfect read on how many of our users are actually buying from enterprises or using it for educational purposes. Because a lot of the data that you need for that has to be relayed from the appropriate billing systems set up for enterprise use. As you probably know, most of our users use their individual credit cards. We don't have the kinds of purchasing systems that enterprises are used to. So we have to take a look as the data as best as we can and tie it back to surveys, and tie it back to spot sampling. From that kind of analysis, over the last year or so, it seems that our enterprise-focused user base, maybe enterprise and education together, are in approximately the 20 percent range. Which is probably obviously a fairly significant portion of the overall usage of Second Life or the overall revenue. And it's also faster growing than probably other categories.

Second Life as always been a place -- from our point of view as the company that operates it -- we go where the customers tell us to go. Obviously we don't have the direction in terms of content and structure of the management of the in-world experience. We're doing more and more of that these days. But that's because we've learned from the user base what they want in a consumer experience. And similarly, we've learned from the user base that they want more enterprise-friendly use. So, I think that that's been the change.

Also, We're a larger company now. I think we grew probably 100 employees over the last year. I think we started the year with somewhere in the high 100s, close to 200, and now we're close to 300. We just didn't have the bandwidth a year ago, certainly not two years ago to attack more market segments.

Industry Standard: Now I remember reading about a year ago that Linden Lab was profitable at that time. Has the new expansion come because you've been growing revenue or more because of investments to help support that?

Yoon: We have not raised any financing since the last time it was publicly reported. In terms of profitability, I don't want to go beyond what our fact sheet says. Our situation is very good.

Industry Standard: Even with the downturn in the economy?

Yoon: The downturn has only been for a month or two. It's too early to say, and I certainly don't want to overly characterize our user base. But I can say in the last month we have had our highest numbers ever in terms of hours of usage, in terms of active users, and I believe in terms of revenue. So we had a very strong month. Now there are all sorts of theories about why, particularly coming out of the gaming press, there are all sorts of theories about why online gaming or other online activities have more recession-proof characteristics, because it drives more entertainment value, high-usage value for your dollar. And if you compare the cost of 10 or 20 dollars spent in a month, and compare that to the number of movies, you only get four hours watching two movies. As you know, you can be in Second Life for hours and hours without paying anything.

So it's been a very strong month. But I wouldn't, with one month of data in the current financial crisis, I wouldn't go so far to say 'oh yeah, it's a recession-proof business.'

Industry Standard: Now you mentioned 20% before. Of the population, or the hours?

Yoon: The revenue base. And I think there's some correlation in that with the active user base and to the hours of usage. Honestly, that wasn't the number that was important to me in my mind about launching an initiative around this business. Again, you launch a business based on the revenue characteristics.

Industry Standard: When you say launch the business, you mean ...

Yoon: Internal launch. We always had some experimentation with different infrastructure deployments. Certainly, different customer segments, so I would say that one that we've looked at for significantly longer than just the last few months, but I would say in the last few months (muddled).

Industry Standard: The Second Life Grid. When did this really start to get off the ground?

Yoon: Second Life Grid just in terms of the name and the branding, the best way to look at that is the domain registration date for secondlifegrid.net. I think that was probably more than a year ago. You can take a look at that fairly easily. And at that time, I can remember us thinking "hey we do want to have some technology infrastructure branding so that people understand that it's not merely the community experience, it's all of what we've created, but really the technology underpinning." We had that thought about the branding and we registered the website in the space of a week or something like that.

That's probably the most accurate historical guideline you'll find today of when we started thinking about that.

Industry Standard: How many staff at Linden are devoted to this (the grid)?

Yoon: Although we are a significantly larger company, we're not one that's really large enough to really segment out into divisions or into a separate business unit. Obviously there's a significant part, the great mass of the technology underpinnings are the same system in many ways, certainly the same software code base. So I couldn't put an exact number on it because there's a lot of overlap. In terms of dedicated staff, and this is exclusive of all the common technology space, it’s like a small startup within a startup. It's not maybe great news for other people trying to do the same thing, but we essentially have as many bodies as some who are doing similar things (muddled).

Industry Standard: Can you give me the one line or two line description of what the Second Life grid is?

Yoon: The Second Life grid is the technology tools and services platform that allows the simulation of Second Life and other immersive and virtual experiences.

Industry Standard: Who are your customers?

Yoon: At the Second Life Grid? I think that it is targeted at primarily anyone who is not interested in the experience of the Second Life community.

You know, obviously there's a lot of heightened rhetoric around business users coming over and taking over the world. In my mind it's very similar to the kind of rhetoric you see any time an early adopter technology goes from a very small and tight community to a larger set of use cases, and that's sort of 'big, bad businesses come in.' From the early adopter point of view, they say, 'that ruins it for what we have.'

I think that a more sober perspective is to look at practically any of the examples that we are talking about. There are a couple of technologies, most commonly the world wide web. You know, you had a lot of experimentation, a lot of early adopters, a lot of really wide variety of use cases. And then you saw this become more and more a part of regular consumer, regular daily life, and eventually regular business essential operations.

That's the same kind of evolution that people expect to see in any kind of technology that has broad applicability. But you will always have that rhetoric about how the world is changing, it's different than the early use. I try not to get caught up in the rhetoric.

Industry Standard: Can you quantify how many people or how many businesses are using the Second Life Grid?

Yoon: One of the things that we know we need to improve to service this segment is to really standardize and make corporate-friendly billing and account management practices. Because we don't have those things fully in place, it's really hard for me to count the exact number of businesses. We made a guess among our billing base, and that's as good as a number I have right now. I don't have the kind of data that I would have if we, or I should say that we will have, when we finish deploying these kinds of systems.

It's always been a criticism of Second Life or Linden Lab the company, that we don't know how to handle the enterprise customer. I'll take that criticism as fact. In terms of what people can see. But it's not like we don't understand the enterprise business. We have been a consumer oriented company, as I said, we've been a small focused company, but we as we continue to have success, as we continue to grow, as we continue to get better data about our user base, and where the growth is, and as we are larger company and able to operate multiple lines of business. We are going to do the things that we know have to be done.

It's not like people in this company don't have a background in the enterprise. This is actually the first company I've been at that's been a consumer focused company. All of my previous experience is around enterprise communications equipment sales. It's very different. But I am not the only one. There are lots of people in the company who understand that business, that just hasn't been our business. We're now, we are going to be more showing and telling next year of what we are capable of doing.

Industry Standard: You mentioned one of the things you wanted to tackle was billing for the enterprise.

Yoon: Billing, account names, account management. There's a whole host of things. There's a whole host of things that an enterprise would expect in terms of security and deployment options. Just in terms of collateral around the technology. Customer service, basically every point of the business.

Industry Standard: Of the technologies that you are working on right now, that your developers are working on right now -- not the ones that are in production, but the things that are on the horizon – what excites you the most, where do you see the most opportunity?

Yoon: It's kind of interesting question. I have a general level of excitement and enthusiasm for the whole thing. But that's not the answer that you are looking for.

I guess the way I look at it, there is just this set of commonly known things. A lot of them are not sexy. Who wants to talk about "ooo, account management!" or "they're going to let me do a corporate purchase order, rather than my personal credit card!" But that's not the stuff that you really write about. But the way I look at it is there is just this whole set of things, we know what they are and we just have to knock them down. I get excited when we knock any one of them down. I don't really care what it is. But none of them are like, "oh, there's going to be an imaginary flame thrower for enterprise users." It's pretty straightforward, actually.

To be honest, that is again returning to my enterprise roots. It's kind of good to know this range of things that are very specific customer-driven requirements, that you know if satisfy those things, if your offering is productive enough, then you really have a shot at making customer sales.

It's kind of nice feeling, and it's very different from the feeling of a mass consumer play, where there's a lot that you won't know, a lot that you can't know, whether it will catch on fire. No individual consumer knows. There's so much that just goes on that's out in the zeitgeist.

There's something incredibly engaging and exciting about being on that side of the business too, and I am also on that side of the business. But if you ask me what's sort of different and new in the enterprise space, part of the reason it's interesting is because you know what you have to do.

Industry Standard: Comparing Second Life as it appeals to early adopters vs. consumers, compared to people who are coming in on the enterprise side, what needs to make it so it's more for them? Just from the user perspective. Like an office worker who is told by her manager, 'we're having a meeting in Second Life. We're going to do something in there.'

Yoon: A lot of things are the same. Our basic issues about the stability and scalability and the performance of the system. That's item no. 1 for both the consumer and the enterprise perspective. That's really why so much of the common underpinning of our technology and the development of our workforce is deployed in those areas.

So, outside of those basics? The next thing that is very big and very common across any user group is to improve the usability of the system, just in terms of the ease of adoption, the fit to a broader base of user configurations on the terminal end. You know, you want more people to be able to run Second Life on their computers and have a shorter period of training or adoption, and learning time, to be able to become a more devoted user.

Again, same thing. Those two things, just two, but there's a million subtexts in those things, those two things are by far the overwhelming bulk of this company's work right now. Then, where it does start to diverge? It's about having the kind of account management and billing systems, customer support, documentation, you know those departments are different for a consumer and an enterprise. But that's pretty much a layer at the top.

Industry Standard: For the second point that you brought up, ease of use, what is this company doing to change that or make it better?

Yoon: I think that there are things that we can do to make it better, in terms of the user experience. Ad that has to do with the user interface, that has to do with the experience that you first have when you log in, that is more directed toward what you are interested in when you first found out about Second Life. So imagine that interest in that first user experience? It's actually quite a difficult task. We've been trying to do it for years, but I think we have some better ideas about how to do that for 2009.

Beyond that first experience, the general usability of the experience, in terms of finding the things that you want to do, discovering the things that make the experience engaging for you, that typically has to do with the content that you are looking for, hooking up with your friends or your colleagues, depending on what you use, that are going to be most beneficial to your experience -- those are all pretty common problems on the Web. There are things that people have tried that have been successful and unsuccessful, and you know, I think we have as learned a view as any about what to do in those areas.

Industry Standard: There's a new generation of hardware coming out called netbooks. Is that something that's not going to happen with Second Life? Or are you changing something to make it happen?

Yoon: It's very similar to the effect of laptop growth. Remember, when this company started in 1999, laptops were not the majority of computer purchases in the U.S., or worldwide. I believe they are now, right? And the change has to do both with the processing power on the computing end, on the terminal end, and the fact that laptops being mobile, are much more often used on a wireless network which is less reliable than a cable network or a wired network. [Linden Lab founder] Philip [Rosedale] always gave me a hard time about that, because the company I worked at previously was one that made wireless equipment for enterprises, and [he's] like, "It's because of companies like yours that spread the laptop religion, and slows the adoption."

And you know, to a certain extent, you continue to see that. There is a continued movement toward mobility. And I think netbooks are a much smaller factor than, for example, iPhones, and more powerful handheld devices.

So I would say that it's probably still the core part of the experience or the highest-end part of the experience of Second Life, the one that really shows to me the capabilities of the environment, on the higher-end computing platform. We certainly do not need to limit that. If you don't show the capabilities that are possible on the high end, I think that you don't really get an opportunity to develop toward where the world is going.

I know that there's a lot of theory in the industry that what you really ought to be focusing on is the light-weight experiences, Web-inventable experiences, you can run it on any machine, you can run it on mobile devices, or wi-fi networks. Those things have their applicability too. Absolutely. By no means do I mean to say that you know, any other way of doing it is dead or has any hope. It would be like saying "there's no such thing as an engaging Linux experience." Well, of course there is. But an engaging Web experience, a 2D experience that runs fast and slick -- fundamentally it doesn't show the top end of the range to what I believe we're developing toward as an industry.

I guess I am in the true believer category that says "there's something here that's different that we're trying to accomplish from what you can currently accomplish in your Web experience, your online experience." It's different. The complexity of those 3d objects adds something to the experience in a way that you're not going to get away with, with a two and a half D experience. That's my view. I am not saying that that's the corporate view, but that's the belief that I've had since I have joined this company.

So, you've always got to be developing toward that core. That said, there are a lot of technologies that are available now to start from that base, and call down the experience and make it available on more platforms. The only question is when they are going to be scalable and how they are going to get to production status. You can imagine pretty easily streaming a view of Second Life, like you stream any kind of video. What you do on your iPhone, or all sorts of mobile devices. That is certainly possible. It's possible to do and even have an interactive view as well. And those things are certainly things that we are interested in the future. But it's not sort of the core of where we think we develop toward the leading edge. It's doable.

I don't know if anybody warned you before you came in, but sometimes you only get to ask one or two questions, so I just keep talking.

It goes back to the earlier questions that you asked about: What has to be done for broader adoption of these kinds of technologies in general?

Some of these things are things that we can do. Some of these things are things that we ... just depend on the general enhancement of the computing ecosystem.

Remember, this company was founded, as many startups are founded, on the idea that you're throwing the football to where you think the receiver is going to be. At that time, there wasn't enough broadband penetration or computing power available at all to run any kind of satisfactory experience in Second Life. But the founders here, the early folks here said "look that's coming at a certain point, so we need to develop toward that point" which was relatively further out.

That technology infrastructure point as come in some. But it's got more to come in as we develop our technology out towards it. There's a great deal of things that need to happen in the general computing infrastructure for Second Life, for immersive environments, for 3D environments, online in general to become really broad consumer experiences.

One example is the input devices. It's sort of laughable to me. We all do it, even myself. People just sort of assume that what exists now is the way things are always going to work. One of the things that is so fundamentally obvious, but people don't want to think towards, or plan towards, is the fact that your interaction with the computing environment is not always going to be about a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. I understand that the majority of computing history we've had a monitor and a keyboard, but although if you think about the evolution of monitors over 20 or 30 years, there's been a significant (muddled) But keyboards had a sea change when they introduced the mouse. And the mouse and touchpads, and variations on a theme. But there's going to continue to be leaps in the kinds of input devices that you have.

You do envision a point where maybe it's not quite so embedded in the human existence of plugging a cable into your head to interact with your computer, but you will have more natural interactions, in terms of gestural interface and the kinds of things that lend themselves very well to interacting in a 3d environment. You know, I am talking about things that you've already seen and heard about outside of our sphere of influence, really, but Minority Report-type interfaces , 3d cameras that capture both color and distance so you can use your hands to move objects on a screen, brainwave devices, I think you may have seen some of those on YouTube. People putting the cap on their heads and thinking "Left! Left" to make their avatar, their cursor go left..

There's experimentation with that stuff out there. It might seem very far off, but we've all been around here long enough to see how fast the computing industry evolves. And those kinds of things are in the five- and ten-year range of the future. We're very, very likely to become part of a mass-computing experience. And those are things to think about in terms of how important is it going to be to have an immersive environment.

Industry Standard: I heard Craig Mundie of Microsoft speak at MIT two months ago. And he said that they had looked at Second Life, and the way they saw it was user-created objects and spaces. He said that their vision seems to be based on 3D constructs of reality and applications off of that. Would you care to comment on that?

Yoon: I am certainly not going to argue, mostly because of ignorance, but I certainly wouldn't argue to whatever the record of Microsoft research has in terms of predicting the future, and being able to productize around it. That's a difficult task for any of us as technologists.

What I would say thought, is that there has been a long-standing debate, a theoretical debate in the field of virtual worlds. And sometimes the name of it has changed over time. But I'd say 25 or 30 years or so, people have been talking about, trying to design a way to operate in this kind of 3D computing environment, immersive computing environment. And there's been a long-standing divide between the augmentationists and the immersionists.

The augmentationists, which I think is what you are describing Craig Mundie as, is someone who talks about having this computing environment to augment your life, really be part of the way of the way you interact with real-world environments. So there's a whiteboard there, and I have computing overlay over here, and it says what I see is somebody else and we're in the virtual space together that way.

That's versus the immersive perspective, or sometimes it's called the synthetic perspective, where there's an entire environment that's completely composed of these user-created or computer-generated objects. Whether they're created by users or by companies is kind of irrelevant. That's the immersionist perspective. It's the idea of the difference between Minority Report and the Matrix. You take two movies, and one you're living in this computing environment where Tom Cruise is running past ads that speak to him. That's augmentationist. Where in the Matrix, you're entirely in an environment that is completely, has no relationship to the real-world environment.

You can't settle this argument by talking about it. You know it has been going on for 25 years. There are two things though, that I could say that I could point out in favor of the immersionist view. One is, look, if you are talking about online environments where users and companies have created the vast majority of the content and all of the content that is in that online environment has value that is determined by people's use of it? They use it with respect to their real lives, but it exists in this online environment.

You know, that's a pretty fair description of the World Wide Web. The Web isn't interesting because "oh, I go on this website and it relates to this desk I am standing next to." No. It's completely about that online environment. Basically, all of the online computing history to date really fits the immersionist version.

What fits the augmentation theory I suppose is the spread of mobile devices and such. But that's kind of a cheap reach right now. You are not really using your mobile devices to you know make a computing environment around you, it's just to connect with people. But maybe that's the technology development in the sort of the immersionist camp.

But the rise of mobile computing vs. the rise of the online Web, they're both very significant, they both have a great deal of economic and social meaning over the last 20 years or so. But I think it's more about the Web, if you talk with meaning in computing over these last couple of decades. So, the evidence is there for the immersionist theory.

And the other evidence that is there, if I can be so self-serving, is Second Life. You don't have any successful experiences -- I know that we are still a small and fairly early adopter environment in the grand scheme of things -- but you don't have anything that is of similar size that has come out of the technology industry that is a comparable augmentation experience. You've done all of these great things coming out of all of these research houses, saying "oh, in the future you are going to walk in your house and your refridgerator is going to grab food and start making dinner and know that you're there," and all of this stuff. You see a lot of great showcases of that, but there's no production environment, nobody's got any users, nobody's got any money.

We have a lot of criticism, which I am glad to have, as somebody who is early in the industry. You want to have the arrows in your back, because that's where people are aiming from. But we have actually demonstrated that this is something that is possible to build, something that has got some enthusiasm among this user base, and we're going to continue to grow it. So the only answer that I can have is just to try to continue to grow it, continue to evolve it, and like I said, that argument is not going to stop in the next ten years. That's not going to get settled.

And at the end of the day, you're going to have significant elements of both. I do believe quite a lot of the Minority Report vision too. But I just think the evidence is not actually there yet, for the immersionists. So I don't understand why there is so much confidence when someone picks the augmentation side over the immersion side.

Industry Standard: Who is your biggest competitor?

Yoon: Our biggest competitor is you know, I am going to give you a highly unsatisfactory answer to that. We don't really focus on competitors. Our biggest competitor, our biggest obstacle is often ourselves. When you are trying to introduce certain new technologies and experiences, you don't have enough guideposts along the way, and you sort of stumble down some false alleyways every once in a while. Sometimes it's a rough ride.

A lot of times it's easier to chase behind somebody who is doing that stumbling for you. But the guy in front, if they stay in front, they don't spend all of the tie time looking over their shoulder. So I honestly can't say that we really look at one competitor as the biggest or most important one. Obviously, we do keep track of developments in the industry, developments online in general. But you have a better answer to that than I do. Right? It's probably going to be highly dependent on segments and use cases as well.

Industry Standard: Where does Google fit into this whole ecosystem?

Yoon: Google is obviously one of these great computing companies, the great Internet companies of our time. Anywhere that they have ambition and even where they don't have ambition, they are going to experiment, and you have to respect and watch what they're doing. Certainly, we've watched the results of the Lively and again, highly unsatisfactory answer, but it's great to see validation in the space.

I can't help it. But you know what? It's true. But what is also true is there are a lot of people who said "I can't wait till someone who knows what they are doing comes in here. Google is going to do this, Microsoft is going to do this, all of these other great companies are going to do this." And you know, I am sure some of them will, as Google already has. But it's not like they're going to open it up, pull the switch, and it works. This stuff is hard. I think people assume that it's fairly trivial and Linden Lab keeps making mistakes and footfalls just because we don't know how to do this.

I guess the most humble way that I can say this, is nobody knows how to do this. These are things that while a lot of them are similar to many other online experiences, you know, doing the package of things that we are trying to do, there's no known formula for success. If there was, we would have done it! It's not like people don't understand how to follow a formula for success. There isn't one, and Google didn't hit it. They'll keep mixing at it, if they want to, they'll continue to focus, continue to get better and we hope we do too.

Industry Standard: What criticism of Second Life and Linden Lab do you think is getting a bit tired or unfair? It could be internally, or from external sources.

Yoon: I have a hard time calling something unfair. Because again, I am honestly grateful that we're the target of so much intention and criticism. But it is the case that in the grand scheme of online experiences, we're still very new, very small, very early adopters. But we get a disproportionate amount of intention. We have to be grateful about that, quite honestly, because it puts many more eyes on a number of problems, and while at times that's painful, it does (muddled) to problems as soon as is humanly possible.

I guess the thing that I do, it does make me unhappy, where these sorts of criticisms come from, the assumption that we just don't care, or we don't want to make things better. We are intentionally trying to hurt people, to hurt users, to hurt our customers.

Obviously, that kind of criticism can and should be ignored, but still it's hard to believe that that's a rational criticism of any company. Companies don't exist to do that to their own customers. They don't exist to make people unhappy, at least companies that want to be successful. So that does affect those of us, especially those who hear a lot of user input. But again, you have to be grateful for it, you have to take it and try to improve. It is a competitive advantage, right? Honestly. Because people don't end up bringing that kind of passion to other kinds of products and services.

Industry Standard: If I were to come back to you and have this conversation one year from now and ask about Second Life, and what has worked well, and ideally, what would you want to be able to show me in terms of the interface, in terms of the enterprise push, in terms of some of the other development, in terms of the user base? Ideally, what would that look like?

Yoon: I would be pretty disappointed if we didn't have the basics that we talked about satisfying enterprise market needs, right? Again, these aren't unknown, these are not complicated. We do mange our development efforts toward the market demand, and we believe there is good market demand. But this is a certainly a very uncertain time in our economy. But you know, that's sort of like the baseline. But if I haven't hit those things by this time next year, I probably won't be here. You'll probably be interviewing someone else (chuckles). It's so basic, we have to hit those.

In terms of the availability, the stability, the performance. Those are things where there a huge number of metrics. It's hard to pick the targets for those. But I think that you do want to see a palpable difference. I am hoping, and I can be reasonably confident that you will see a palpable difference in those things, including, I hope in the user comments, the customer comments, related to those things.

But the real sort of magic is in the user experience and the user interface. Like I said, there are a lot of things that you can do, and there are a lot of things that are known to be good ideas in the industry in similar industries in general. But there is this element of catching lightening in a bottle. It's not easy to do. We do think that we've got really great design sensibility here, really good product sensibility that will continue to grow. It's very significant for us to bring in a great CEO like Mark Kingdon, to bring in a chief product officer like Tom Hale. These are guys with a lot of product experience in their backgrounds. And you know, obviously those are two very important executive positions, and we hired them to make real improvements in these spaces. But it's not like those things we were talking about before, you set 'em up, you nail them, everybody knows that you do these things, it'll work. There are some things you can definitely improve. You can definitely take out some of the complexity, you can definitely improve some tools, improve some search, some findability, the discovery of the experience, but at the end, that last 10% which makes all of the difference sometimes is just magic, which you've just got to keep iterating toward the (muddled).

Industry Standard: One last question: Will we ever see Second Life in a Web browser?

Yoon: I think that that is something that you know, if the demand requires it, it is something that we develop towards, surely. But I don't think that that's the magic. I know that the common refrain in the industry is "Oh, it's got to be in a browser, everything has got to be in a browser." But there are plenty of experiences that are in a browser, that are supposed to be in a 3D world, and that doesn't do it. Maybe that's necessary, but it's not sufficient? Everybody is aiming toward these little bits, "we've got to get everything together in one package," but you know it's pretty hard to do. It's pretty hard to do for a company of our resources, which is probably the largest in the virtual world space. But it is also harder to do with a company with significantly more resources. There are many very large companies are interested in this space and are doing things, but you just can't solve everything at once. I don't believe that the browser is the magic formula.

Sources cited, referenced, or consulted: Ginsu Yoon, Lindenlab.com, Secondlife.com, New World Notes (nwn.blogs.com), Chris Ulbrich/Lewis PR, Riversrunred.com, Mimi Harris/Rivers Run Red.

Want to telecommute? Point out that the Smart2020 report shows it's greener.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:03:04 -0800

Smart2020, a report just released from The Climate Group for the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, details how small cuts in transportation by using telecommunication could help conserve resources in the tech industry. The report also shares countless ways that the tech industry could reduce emissions and monitor the explosive growth expected over the next 12 years.

Among the many suggestions made in the report to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases, dematerialization (reducing the amount of material objects that need to be produced) has the potential to have a significant impact. Along with switching to online billing and moving to digital media rather than other forms like CDs, the study found that the largest impact could be found by switching to teleworking, saving up to 260 MtCO₂e (Metric Tons Carbon Dioxide Equivalent) each year.

In order to see the maximum savings, however, workers would have to work from home at least three days a week in order to reduce the amount of office space required for in-office workers. Teleconferencing and videoconferencing could also be used to replace between 5 and 20 percent of global business travel.

Of course, many companies are still reluctant to institute teleworking opportunities for their employees; while the WorldatWork Salary Budget Survey indicated that there was a 40 percent increase in the number of employers offering telework as a benefit, the Smart2020 report references a survey from TelCoa that showed that 54 percent of U.S. companies thought that teleworking made employee collaboration more difficult and 46 percent felt it made it harder to manage performance.

When it comes to switching to telework for a greener workplace, we at The Standard are ahead of the curve; all the writing staff here work from home at least part-time, if not full-time.

Image from the Smart2020 report

Money's too tight to mention

IDG News Service — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:34:33 -0800

I'm still reeling from the meltdown in the banking sector, and there are certain to be implications for other sectors although the full effect has yet to be determined. One thing is for sure: the CIO will be told by the CFO -- or perhaps the COO, who most CIOs report to -- to reduce costs wherever possible.

That mandate will certainly mean that CIOs will take a careful look at outsourcing and offshoring -- and they will have to be very careful about what they outsource and offshore. Outsourcing does not make problems go away and a creaking infrastructure will not be helped by outsourcing it. With offshoring you have to be careful about key applications and certainly web applications. If you're looking at a £20m-£50m (US$30 million-$75 million) revenue stream from a website it's OK to outsource, but if it's £200m-£300m you need to build your own team and keep your intellectual property close to your chest.

Offshoring only works if you put in the controls and the structures to make it work. India is fantastic and my company has staff there as well as in eastern Europe, but if you ask the programmers there to build something and your plan is wrong then they will do a brilliant job of fulfilling your plans but it will still be wrong. People say 'Hey, I can get developers in India for £100 a day' but if you save 30 to 40 per cent net you will have done a very good job. If it's a complex application and you don't take all the steps necessary to manage the project and mitigate risk, you can very easily end up with egg on your face.

The problems caused by the state of the economy will be exacerbated by the fact that in the UK there are a lot of companies warming up for large infrastructure upgrades. The cost of running Lotus Notes is killing a lot of companies. Companies like Virgin Atlantic are still going ahead with Notes-to-Exchange migrations because it's seen as worthwhile. Also, there are still a lot of doubts over Windows Vista. Corporates are still very wary because of the desktop footprint, retraining and so on and I can't see large Vista deployments coming in this climate.

On the other hand, I still think virtualisation will be very big because it allows you to spin up new systems very quickly and provide other kinds of flexibility that also enable better utilisation, consolidation and therefore cost savings. Also, projects in unified communications, once it is better understood by the business, will press ahead. IP communications generally will be a huge investment too because where a few years ago everybody thought about voice-over-IP as a separate investment, now IP is the protocol and the transport for everything.

There's still an appetite for investment in the web channel. There's a fear about print advertising but media and retail companies want to invest online, in self-service and so on to streamline costs. Despite the economy, there are still some big bets -- witness the way MySpace Music has shaken up the digital content arena.

There will still be companies that have investment funding from when the going was good and that will be spent, but generally it's going to be a difficult time. Some people think videoconferencing, and in particular immersive telepresence rooms, will take off as firms seek to cut travel budgets and replace face-to-face meetings with something similar but remote. I'm not too sure about that. People have said videoconferencing would take off in past downturns but it hasn't happened. Also, telepresence is expensive and I'm not sure it's as good as some supporters make out.

I think a lot of companies will take a close look at cheaper alternatives to infrastructure components. This could be a challenging time for firms like Microsoft, and Google could do well with products like Docs or Apps that offer to do something similar to Office and Exchange but at lower cost.

It could also be a good time for makers of open-source software and JBoss is very often becoming the application server or middleware component of choice among many companies. I don't think this is Red Hat doing anything spectacularly well with it but many enterprises have just come around to accepting that open-source can do a job in that space. It has just been a question of time and people getting used to accepting something new and that maybe they don't need an expensive, classic enterprise choice like an IBM WebSphere or a BEA WebLogic.

Finally, it might be a good time for some of the lower-cost, often Asian, hardware firms who can come in and squeeze premium-priced brands in the same way that Dell did in the early 1990s. As ever, some of the options that emerge could be very powerful. But do not doubt that this is a very significant time of change and a very difficult one too.

Kara Swisher really did scoop the Yang story, but she still loves Dan Lyons

Jordan Golson — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:39:17 -0800

Kara Swisher -- who, among her many other talents, is an excellent reporter -- broke the Jerry Yang resignation story before anyone else did. In fact, she posted her "exclusive" at 4:50pm PST, Monday -- a full ten minutes before Yahoo issued a press release at 5:00pm PST announcing the departure.

In this business, ten minutes is ten minutes -- and Swisher told me she was working on the story all weekend to get the scoop, and finally went live with it just before Yahoo issued its own press release. 40 minutes later, Kara touted her scoop as "confirmed" -- something just about any news organization would do if they were first on news of this magnitude.

It could have been worse. Swisher could have put "WORLD EXCLUSIVE XXX MUST CREDIT KARA SWISHER XXX WORLD EXCLUSIVE," just like Matt Drudge would have done. (Actually, that would have been awesome!)

After the news broke, Dan Lyons wrote a (now retracted) article slamming Yahoo PR reps as "lying sacks of shit," for allegedly misleading him about Jerry Yang's long-term status as CEO. Swisher wrote Lyons a pretend-angry email (as she is wont to do) dressing him down for not mentioning her exclusive scoop.

Dan responded to her email with a highly amusing, inside baseball-esque post poking fun at Kara:

Kara Swisher: Everybody look at me! Not at Jerry! At me! At me! At me!

I just received an angry email from Kara Swisher of AllThingsD who chides me because in my previous post about Jerry Yang stepping down at Yahoo I did not mention that Kara Swisher actually broke this story today and got an EXCLUSIVE SCOOP on the BIGGEST STORY OF THE DAY!!!!! Just for the record, here is Kara's big scoop, which she posted today at 4:50 p.m. Pacific time. And here is the official press release from Yahoo hitting Business Wire at 5 p.m. Pacific time — a whopping ten minutes later.

Sadly, Dan yanked those posts as well, but not before Kara responded in the comments with another feisty Karagram:

How would a snarktastic wonder like you know what a reporter was? I was teasing you, you twit, as you well know (I would dearly love to mangle emails you sent to me recently about your work, but I am too much of a gentleman!). When you come here, we’ll have a “talk” all right–my people like to call it a “sit-down” though. Love and kisses, Kara.

When I spoke to Swisher today, she seemed bemused at the attention being paid to Dan's posts about her: "I wasn't serious in that email. I think I called him Phyllis!" However, she was disappointed that Lyons pulled down the posts about Yahoo and her "scoop". She and I agree that Newsweek should have known what they were getting into when they hired Dan Lyons and should leave his personal blog alone. It's more interesting than most of the crap that makes it into Newsweek, that's for sure.

NASDAQ Internet Index drops more than 50% in 12 weeks

Sindya Bhanoo — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:15:38 -0800

The NASDAQ Internet Index has declined more than 50% in under three months, faring far worse than the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The index, which is around 62 now, was at 127.2 on August 29, representing a drop of about 51%. In comparison, the Dow dropped about 31% in the same period (see chart, below).

The NASDAQ Internet Index, which goes by the ticker symbol ^QNET, was launched one year ago to track the performance of companies engaged in Internet-related services. Yahoo Finance lists 75 components, including the stocks of industry powerhouses such as Google, Amazon.com and Ebay. These three components are off since late August. AMZN is down 55%, EBAY is down 54%, and GOOG has dropped 42%.

The times are especially bad for Yahoo, which is also part of the index. Its stock is off 54% since late August, and the decline from the beginning of the year is ever worse: YHOO is now worth less than a third of what it was when Microsoft offered to acquire the company in January.

But some financial experts believe that, in general, publicly listed Internet companies are better off than most, despite their relatively high stock prices.

An analysis on the price-to-earnings values for Internet stocks indicates that they are more expensive compared to the Dow, said Mark Phanitsiri, an investor at Sageview Capital, a Silicon Valley investment firm.

"The Internet Index is still over twice the earnings multiple of the Dow," he told The Industry Standard. "Even after all this carnage, investors still have much higher growth expectations from Internet companies than the broad markets."

Percentage decline of Dow Jones Industrial Average vs. Nasdaq Internet Index since August 29, 2008:

Nasdaq Internet Index since August 29, 2008:

Charts: Google Finance

Photo: (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)