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F***edcompany.com put on the auction block - again

One of the better pieces of dotcom bubble history (and fame) is for sale. The maker of FuckedCompany.com is soliciting bids for his website.

The site rose to fame during the dotcom bubble implosion, when a mere mention on the page could deflate the stock price for businesses that are low on revenues vision. Attributing to the site's creditability, posters were often employees that themselves were confronted by investors and senior managers running for the hills.

The site's owner Philip Kaplan made an unsuccessful attempt at selling the service in 2000. The Ebay listing was pulled after pranksters started putting in false bids. He then introduced a subscription based premium service that offered a searchable archive and other features, and promptly starting making a profit.

The site may have bragging rights for assisting the internet bubble, today it reports on layoffs and such across the economy. Kaplan in the mean time also shifted his attention to AdBrite, an online advertising market place.

The site may note bring in as much as it might have in 2000, it still has a strong following and seems to be made for an age in which aggregaters and user generated content are all the hype.

March 31, 2007 at 01:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Viral video pundits take on cable news

Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, the two brothers behind JibJab are at it again. During the 2004 presidential elections, they rose to fame with their "This Land" video portraying Bush and Kerry.

In a new episode they are taking on cable news stations, alleging that the media are to blame for the fact that people can't find Afghanistan on a map but know every intimate detail of Britney Spears' life.

March 30, 2007 at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Intel to step up blogging efforts

Intel is preparing a cautious expansion to its blogging initiatives with the launch of a set of research blogs authored by its research fellows, Tom Waldrop, director of Intel's Global Communications Group said at the Press Club of California's 2007 Media Summit.

Intel currently publishes an "IT @ Intel blog" that is written by 8 pre-selected employees from the chipmaker's product groups. The research blogs will be written by research fellows such as Mark Bohr.

Senior executives however remain missing in action. Intel chief executive Paul Otellini currently writes an internal blog for employees (as do about 300 other employees), but doesn't blog publicly. Waldrop did admit however that he was inspired by the blog of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

Intel however prefers to take a cautious approach: "We want to embrace [blogs] more than we do now. But Intel may never be the most embracing," Waldrop said.

March 30, 2007 at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Oracle scores some Linux wins

Oracle is parading 26 customers for its Linux support offering in front of the world.

The list features some notable names such as BNP Paribas and Yahoo, and should silence the skeptics who speculated that customers would never fall for the company's support offering.

As a quick refresh: Oracle in October unveiled a support offering for Red Hat's Enterprise Linux distribution. Instead of paying Red Hat for support and updates, users can now pay Oracle, which charges less for the same services. The announcement wiped out several hundred millions off Red Hat's market capitalization.

The question that begs answering however remains: will this catch on with the broader public? Oracle no doubt has showered these early customers with gifts and rebates to make them sign up. But would they still be interested in Oracle Linux support without those?

It takes hundreds if not thousands of Linux customers to answer that question.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison last October, talking up Red Hat killer

March 29, 2007 at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

SAP's Agassi shows his true coloursf

You know that an executive left a company with slamming doors when the press release complains about his lack of commitment.

Take the press release that SAP sent out after Shai Agassi gave up his position as president of SAP's Product & Technology Group.

As the company's founder and chairman Hasso Plattner put it:

…it became apparent that Shai was not comfortable committing to a 10-15 year period which was not in keeping with his personal career timeline. Given this, I made the recommendation to the Supervisory Board that we change our plans and now adjust SAP’s executive management team responsibilities.

To put it more bluntly: Agassi wanted to become CEO, but got really upset last month when SAP decided to extend the term of its current chief executive Henning Kagermann until 2009.

Agassi didn't intend on waiting for his employer to assess his skills before they propelled him to the corner office. If it wasn't the fast track to the top, Agassi preferred to spend his days back in the Israeli desert thinking about the environment. After all, he succeeded in Israel, where he failed in the US.

March 29, 2007 at 05:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Yahoo to Google: size does matter after all

Yahoo is preparing to lift storage restrictions from its online email service.

The move by itself isn’t that surprising giving the ever-declining prices of storage.

But it does raise a few eyebrows because the portal in the past has argued that its users don’t need large email inboxes. In response to Gmail's 2.8GB storage limit, Yahoo argued that 99.9 per cent of its users don't even have more than 20MB of messages in their inboxes.

When Google offered 1GB Gmail mail boxes, the company did so because it could, and because it needed a way to differentiate from the competition. Several years later Yahoo and Hotmail are still the largest email providers, each with roughly 250m subscribers. Google is dangling near the bottom at 60m inboxes.

Size doesn't matter.

March 28, 2007 at 03:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The first annual SVS YouTube awards!

In what may be the first YouTube story on the last year and a half not to contain the words "lawsuit" or "copyright," the video sharing mega-site announced the winners of its first ever video awards contest. The contest included such sappy categories as "most inspirational" and "most adorable."

While we're not exactly the most dedicated followers of the cult of YouTube, going through the various winners got us recalling some of the better YouTube videos we've encountered throughout the year while covering various stories for Silicon Valley Sleuth. As such, we've decided to present our own picks for the YouTube video awards...

Most creative: "Super News! –Gates vs. Jobs"
YouTube didn't have a "best video" category, so we'll stick with the "most creative" label for this one.  It starts off as another Mac/PC ad spoof, and turns into so very, very much more. This five-minute gem combines all of our favorite topics: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Apple product hype, Vista-bashing, and a singing Finder. Plus, it coined the epic phrase: "PCs are for fart-huffers and Macs get you laid."

Best Series: Will It Blend?
You can keep your ninjas and your lonelygirls. Nothing whittles away productivity like watching iPods and hockey pucks get reduced to smoking mounds of dust.

Best music video: Basketball accident / "I believe I can fly"
I believe I can fly. I believe I can dangle from a basketball hoop by my tibia...< If ever a cheesy movie soundtrack song and a video of backyard antics gone horribly wrong were meant for each other. This video was a consistent favorite, if only because we've all done something equally stupid and/or painful at some point.

Best commentary: "Turkey vs. Greece"
When most kids get caught making nasty comments on YouTube, their parents take away computer privileges for a week or two. This series of video replies and comment flame-wars brings home the "best commentary" award solely for the fact that it managed get an entire country grounded from YouTube.

Most inspirational: Diet Coke and Mentos
Inspirational? Maybe not in the "I'm going to change the world by hugging one thousand kittens" sense, but this phenomena has without a doubt inspired the purchase of more bottles of diet coke, rolls of mentos, and boxes of ultra-strength laundry detergent than any other viral video to date. Plus it's way better than those creepy old "freshmaker" ads.

March 27, 2007 at 01:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Redshifting: Sun's fancy name for growth market

Sun is shifting focus from the war on market share to the war on market growth.

They have a fancier name for it. During a meeting with reporters last Friday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz refered to the phenomenon as "redshifting", named after a phenomenon in physics where light increases its wavelength while its frequency decreases. The opposite is known as blueshift.

The essence is that companies like Google, Ebay and mobile operators have an insatiable appetite for the latest computer technology, while the average ERP shop is doing just fine with its 2-year-old Dell servers or mainframe.

Growth in the second market is achieved by stealing business from your competitors. In the first you only have to keep up with your customer's new business ideas.

The casual observer can't help but notice that Redshifting looks a lot like an attempt to return to the internet hype days, when dotcoms were scrambling to put in their orders for new Sun servers (and you know what happened when the dotcoms disappeared). By focusing on Web2.0 firms today, Sun is positioning itself to deliver the infrastructure of the internet of tomorrow.

The danger in this strategy lays in the fact that Sun has to balance cutting edge internet servers with revenue generating x86 systems. The company's chief executive Jonathan Schwartz is the first to admit that its "blue" business doesn't just make up the bulk of its revenues, it also subsidizes fancy new products such as Sun's "project black box" and its forthcoming Niagara 2 and Rock processors.

But at some point in the future, Schwartz predicted, sales in the "red market" will overtake those of the blue ones.

While the red areas are driven by increased computing demands, the blue ones just hope to do more with less.

March 27, 2007 at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Infoworld won't ax any more trees

Infoworld, one of the oldest professional IT publications, has abandoned its print format. Starting next month, the publication will be exclusively issued online.

The publication's general manager disclosed the move on a company blog on Sunday. Rumours of the pending move had started to appear earlier. He dismissed print as a "nearly obsolete distribution channel", which can't sit very well with Computer World, a sister publication by Infoworld's parent company IDG that hasn't made any public disclosures on abandoning its paper edition.

Infoworld's time had definitely come. Rumors about the publications decreasing sales and subscriptions have been going around for years. But folding a paper publication isn't as easy and obvious as it may seem.

Publishers have a wealth of data on their paper readers thanks to the 'controlled circulation' model. Advertisers know exactly who reads the publication, what the size is of the budgets that they control and which purchase decisions they make.

Websites often don't know much more than their visitor's IP addresses. While Google adsense and Yahoo's Overture in part have solved that problem by charging per click, paper advertising rates are still a factor 10 to 100 higher than their online equivalents.

March 26, 2007 at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Intel shows off rural WiFi systems

On March 22nd Intel opened the doors to its Berkeley Labs research facility. The lab allows Intel researchers to develop new projects with graduate students and professors from UC Berkeley. Among the areas that the lab focuses on is Technology for Emerging Regions. After the jump, UC Berkeley student researcher Sonesh Surana explains the pitfalls of setting up WiFi internet access in remote parts of the world and how the lab is able to use the technology.

Click To Play

March 24, 2007 at 04:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack