Trying this thing out. Could it be the missing link to my blogging more often?

I don’t usually post straight-up quotes here, but I’m a fan of Feynman, and thought this was well worth the pixels:

“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”

Richard Feynman
US educator & physicist (1918 – 1988)

I’ve spotlit PeopleJar previously. It’s not Facebook. It’s not LinkedIn. But it is about People connecting to like-minded People on a totally Global scale. What’s more, it’s absolutely-positively viral and conveniently free to you and me. Just got a link to a new video (below), check it out. Under two minutes for a glimpse of something that could be the proverbial next big thing: I’m PeopleJar Trailer from PeopleJar on Vimeo.

Here’s a head-shaking blast (or, ballast) from the past on the heels of today’s SEC’s allegations against Mark Cuban and, concomitantly, the planned departure of Jerry Yang over at Yahoo.

I flipped the switch on my Firefox flux capacitor (um, via Google, not Yahoo) and 0.08 seconds later it was 1999, the year Prince was crowned Nostradamus in loosely predicting how the dotcoms would indeed party – devil-may-care and sideways willy-nilly – till that lunar landing IPO or, far more likely, till Rocko, Joey Knuckles and Starving Students arrived to repo the foosballs, Razors and iMacs and padlock the doors on the way out. Conveniently enough, the article’s dated April 1 (no foolin’):

Thursday, April 1, 1999 Published at 21:23 GMT 22:23 UK
Business: The Company File
Yahoo buys Broadcast.com

Yahoo looks likely to spice up its site with audio and video

One of the most popular sites on the Internet, Yahoo, has bought an online company which broadcasts everything from presidential speeches to lingerie fashion shows. Yahoo, using its own highly valued shares, is paying $5.7bn (£3.2bn)  to acquire Broadcast.com.

Yahoo is the most popular portal site on the Internet, with 50m visitors a month. In simple terms, it is a massive directory of Web sites, akin to a global telephone directory – only this one is considerably larger. Analysts say the buy out of Broadcast.com will enable Yahoo to beef up its text-only services to include audio and video.

Critics say its content has been looking more humdrum compared with what some other sites are offering, and that it has trailed others in offering more varied media. Tim Koogle, chairman of Yahoo, said: “Broadcast.com’s tremendous first-to-market advantage has made it the leading destination on the Web for audio and video broadcasts, and it will provide significant added value to Yahoo’s audience worldwide.”

Yahoo is offering 0.7722 shares of its own stock for one share of Broadcast.com’s stock. Broadcast.com lost $14m on sales of $22m last year.

Smart move

“It will be a pretty neat deal from Yahoo’s perspective,” said Lanny Banker of Salomon Smith Barney. “They are seeking other platforms to distribute content and Broadcast.com is a really tight fit in terms of content, audience and technology.”

Some Internet users cannot easily access the “streaming video” offered on sites like Broadcast.com. To do so, they need broadband or high-speed Internet service. But the number of users who have broadband Internet access is growing fast and makes up a market which analysts say cannot be ignored for long.

Broadcast.com is based in Dallas. An improved use of media is seen as an important way ahead for the Internet. AtHome, which delivers the broadband Internet service enabling consumers to view video online, earlier this year agreed to buy Excite in a deal which will mean more multi-media services on the Internet.

Other Yahoo rivals include Lycos, subject of another takeover bid, and Snap.com, the portal jointly owned by CNET and General Electric, parent company of network television company NBC.

Changing ads

NBC is aggressively gearing up for the growing demand for media enhanced services. Snap recently overhauled its Internet portal to feature video and interactive features. Many advertisers are also seeking ways to place interactive and video promotions on the Internet, which they believe will be vastly more effective than the plain “banner ads” widely used.

As Internet stock prices have soared, acquistions using stock have become easier and more attractive. With its current value approaching $40bn, Yahoo is among the most highly capitalised Internet stocks on the market. Two months ago it bought Geocities, a service that allows people to run home pages online, for $3.7bn. Yahoo shares jumped 11 3/8 to 179 3/4 and Broadcast.com surged 11 13/16 to 130 on the news.

Article available from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/309498.stm

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Wow, the future’s exciting! Where do I sign up?! Say, maybe I can find out more about Broadcast.com on YouTube.com. Be right back. Oh, and if I don’t post anything here for a few days it’s probably because I’m deep-diving webisodes of “Will it Blend” to gauge how easily I can frappe a few twine-tied bricks of worthless stock warrants….

Posted by: Colin Mangham

If I’ve not bent your ear about PeopleJar yet, here’s a sporting tweak. First, let me say that I’ve long been a fan of LinkedIn, and with Facebook I’ve not had such a candy store kid’s jones for a pop culture phenom since maybe the launch of the Nintendo game system (old school, mid ’80s). Wait, no, that’s dating me, slightly. Fast-forward to last year’s release of the 1st-gen iPhone … I would smackdown a grizzly in a cage fight before I’d go without my iPhone for any longer than it takes to Shazam a Foo Fighters riff, especially since I recently discovered mobile Pandora … and UrbanSpoon … and LED Football … and VNC … and Ambiance …

Anyway, it’s not on the shoulders of this blog to open the kimono on the Social Web. If you’re here you’re already marching to the beat of that drum and have likely burned your retinas plenty of late nights pondering the promise of Web 2.0. Next in the spotlight: PeopleJar, with Alex Alexandrov, a posterboy wunderkind if I’ve ever met one, at the helm of a little engine that could and, I think, most certainly will be white hot news by Spring ‘09 (just around the corner, folks).

What is it? Maybe it’s easiest to first reference the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn since that’s what most people think of as “people” sites. They’re great. Totally. I’m hooked. But the curiously overlooked niche, the Next Big Thing that’s missing from both — and MySpace, and even Google and Yahoo etc., although those are web-crawling search engines, completely different animals — is a wiki platform to offer a robust and dynamic search engine by the people, for the people (and justice for all).

Better yet, users (notably also people) should be able to create their own search parameters, e.g., skydiver, 5′ 10″, favorite movie is Blade Runner, and even (drum roll) … recently spilled a green tea latte on his white Lacoste shirt at Starbucks on Little Santa Monica Blvd, etc.. Seriously, why shouldn’t we be able to search this way? Well, we can. And will. And that’s the mission (and supporting tech and algorithms) of PeopleJar.

In context, what eBay is to product search and Wikipedia is to information search PeopleJar is to, well, people search. All three are user-generated, guided, developed, enhanced and grown. All three are mass collaboration models that are beautifully amorphous, cloudlike but tentacular, spidering out into countless directions. All three have chameleon brands and hot magma cores.

So Alex and the people behind PeopleJar have set the controls for the heart of the sun with a plan to provide the world’s first universal people search, as well as unify members of disparate portals, enable users to create their own portals and perhaps even provide some additional connective tissue between the Facebook’s, MySpace’s, Classmates.com’s, OneModelPlace’s, etc. Above all, it’s to connect people in totally new ways that are determined, defined and deployed (again, wiki power) by the people themselves.

There are about 2 billion Internet users worldwide, with a multitude of individual interests, and many if not most of them are eager to quickly, easily and positively connect with other like-minded people. The permutations of possible nodes to connect are mind-boggling. To quote the Beijing Olympics one last time before I mothball those NBC-branded memories … One World, One Dream. And definitely worth checking out … www.peoplejar.com.

Posted by: Colin Mangham

Had a conversation over dinner last night about resistance to change as it relates to new technologies, and while we were quick to applaud the renegade early adopters who camp out in tents peppered with Taco Bell wrappers for the latest gadget hot off the Best Buy shelves, the truth remains that most people are quite content doing what they were doing and uninspired to change with the times — unless, of course, the times come in a really cool new color.

When new technologies are introduced to employees in a work setting, they are often resistant. One reason is that such technologies, particularly on a large scale (e.g., in manufacturing operations), typically boast efficiency and productivity gains that precipitate downsizing, thereby posing a threat to job security. That’s fairly obvious, I know, and probably pre-dates even Henry Ford. But the hidden underbelly of this is that many of us feel we’re doing what is necessary and required already, and when a new technology is introduced into the workplace this typically requires some education/training on how to use it, which in turn exceeds the amount of time and effort we’ve become comfortable giving to The Job.

Further, some new communications technologies, including wi-fi Internet available for laptops and recently smartphones (have I three-cheered the iPhone enough yet?), have arrived with a double-edged sword. They enable greater flexibility, yes, and certainly more mobility, both of which are positive features. But these also disallow some times when we might otherwise take a break from work.

As a case example, several years ago we were brought in to consult Boeing on how to market its fledgling Connexion in-flight wi-fi access (which, notably, cost about $500k per plane to integrate the Ku-band antenna). In our topsoil research, it was interesting to find some resistance from business travelers who we initially thought would jump through Ringling Brothers’ flaming hoops for the service. As it turned out, many of them didn’t want that access, as it would in turn make them accessible. They viewed that time in the air as a break from the action, a bubble in which they were untouchable by their boss (and, I suppose, certain nerve-grating co-workers) and could watch a movie or sleep while technically “at work.”

Alas, on December 31, 2006, Boeing fessed up that it had indeed missed its Connexion and said night-night to wi-fi in the sky. But I have to think that it will be commonplace eventually. In the meantime, I’ll just be happy to pocket that $29.95 and catch a few z’s myself….

Posted by: Colin Mangham

I’m addicted to my iPhone to the point of having developed what must, to the uninitiated, resemble a nervous tick, doing something/anything with the device whenever I’ve got at least a few precious seconds to spare. However, when I first caught a glimpse of Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader, I knee-jerked a nuh-uh … no way am I going to fatigue my eyes with yet another LCD screen in my day. So I scoffed at the Kindle a bit, albeit with the brand of light-hearted jabs that make for good cocktail party banter but don’t draw blood.

Then … I finally test-drove one. Early review: fantastic, gotta have it. I was most surprised that the screen does an A-/B+ job of looking like paper. Again, my main concern was that the last thing I need right now is another eye-burning screen in front of me given how much time I’m already staring at my desktop, laptop, smartphone, nav system and plasma.

Still, this Kindle, man, it’s nice. Easy on the eyes, not bright and glossy at all. Actually quite gray, in a good way. As I said, it looks a lot like printed ink on the page. And, suffice it to say, it’s a got a leg up on bound paper in how easily you can advance through the pages … click, click, click.

Don’t get me wrong though, I’m a long-long way from deep-sixing all my Old School books. There’s no Fahrenheit 451 taking place on my lawn anytime soon. But I’ve got to admit, the Kindle’s more than just kinda cool. Now, if they will just drop the price to something akin to trade paperback I might actually begin a new chapter and buy one.

Posted by: Colin Mangham

Well, not quite. But at least to the inner edge of black space, where Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo will soon make rocketeers of some folks whose liquid assets defy gravity. There’s already a lot of chatter online about today’s revealing of the new scale models and artist’s conceptions by Sir Richard and X Prize recipient Burt Rutan at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. So I’m really just chiming in, not endeavoring to break some news, flagpole a Trekkie’s perspective, or dish some insider skinny. But I must say, ain’t it cool?

Posted by: Colin Mangham