What wowed the crowd at Web 2.0 Expo
The man behind #swineflu and #HowBlackAreYou was the hit at this year's NYC webfest
Baratunde Thurston. Image: O'Reilly Media
This has nothing in particular to do with Apple (AAPL), but it's very 2.0.
We spent much of last week at a conference in New York City called Web 2.0 Expo — a celebration of the "next generation Web" where one of the centers of attention was the giant Twitter screen set directly behind the keynote speakers that showed what the audience was tweeting about whomever was onstage.
The speakers included a typical mix of Web celebrities, including O'Reilly Media's Tim O'Reilly, Digg's Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, author Douglas Rushkoff, Flikr co-founder Caterina Fake and White House chief technology officer Beth Noveck.
But the hit of the conference — judging from the laughter, the applause and the tweets — was Baratunde Thurston, Web & Politics editor at The Onion.
His talk was entitled "There's a #Hashtag for That" and I've discovered that it's a kind of Twitter touchstone. The audience at the Javits Center thought it was knee-slapping hilarious. People who don't quite get what Twitter is for — like my wife — are even more mystified than they were before they watched it.
The video is posted below the fold. We'd love to hear what you think.
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
The man behind the netbook craze
A few years ago rivals mocked Jonney Shih, chairman of Asustek, and his purse-size laptop computers. Millions of netbooks later, Shih is having the last laugh.
Jonney Shih, CEO of Asus, in Taipei.
On a hillside above the Hsing Tian Kong temple in the northern reaches of Taipei, Jonney Shih sits on a wobbly stool next to an ornate low wooden table. Dressed in a taupe suit, white shirt, and silver tie emblazoned with jaguars, Shih, 57, cheerfully waves off three umbrella-wielding employees who try in vain to shield their boss from the hot sun and a swirl of menacing bees.
But Shih, who is waiting to be photographed for this magazine, sits serenely, perspiration-free in the sun, intent on a game of Chinese chess. "In Buddhism you learn to accept everything, to let it flow through you," Shih says. "Then you can slow down and think clearly."
It turns out the ferociously driven Shih is a less-than-model Buddhist. (Buddhists aren't supposed to be thinking about technology while they're meditating — something Shih is known to do.) But his ambition, combined with engineering skills and spot-on business instincts, also makes him the most brilliant technology executive you've never heard of.
He is the largest shareholder and chairman of Asustek (pronounced a-soos-tech), the $21-billion-a-year tech conglomerate that introduced the first netbook three years ago, ushering in a revolution in the stagnant PC industry. When it hit stores in the fall of 2007, Shih's $399 EeePC was derided by rivals as a low-power plaything. But Asustek, or Asus for short, went on to sell millions of the mini-notebooks and soon vaulted to No. 5 in worldwide PC market share. More
Sweet! Is Sugar the future of publishing?
The women-centric collection of sites is shaking up the web — and traditional media.
Lisa Sugar's celebrity blog morphed into an online empire. Photo: Sugar Inc.
The state of affairs in publishing is beyond depressing. Unless, of course, by publishing you mean the shiny new online-only startups who are behaving as if it were boom times for journalism. An example is Sugar Publishing, the 3 1/2-year old blogging company that focuses on young women. Run by the husband-and-wife team Brian and Lisa Sugar, the San Francisco company has 12 sites, 114 people, and boasts an online audience that's approaching that of Time Warner's (TWX) People.com (almost 8 million monthly visitors in October for Sugar versus 12 million for People, says comScore).
It gets better. According to Brian Sugar, his little company will be profitable this quarter as well as all of next year. What's more, only half the company's revenues come from advertising against the work of its journalists — a shocking figure given that traditional media companies get, well, all of their revenues from their scribbling. "Editorial is a marketing expense to drive people to something bigger," he says. More
Where social media's "It Boy" cut his teeth
Before getting into gaming, Farmville's father was a player in the glam world of online tech support.
Before Zynga, there was SupportSoft.
Pickus (not Pincus) discusses his company's new model. Photo: Support.com
Prior to launching the hot social gaming outfit that spawned Farmville and Café World, Mark Pincus founded a trio of companies: Social networking company Tribe.net, downloading service FreeLoader, and SupportSoft, a company that began providing support software for enterprise companies in 2001.
Today, SupportSoft is called Support.com (SPRT) and its current CEO is named Josh Pickus. (The similarity to the name of the company's founder is eerie but purely coincidental.)
The company’s focus has also morphed; the company earlier this year sold its enterprise division to Consona Corporation — a daring move, considering that sales to corporations made up a big chunk of Support.com's revenue in recent years. More
News flash: Schmoozers like to schmooze online, too
Survey finds young executives embrace online social networking tools to market their companies and themselves
A new study on top executives' use of social networking tools shows that sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have made serious inroads in the C-Suite.
According to a survey of chief executive officers and other senior staff, two-thirds of respondents say online networks play an important role in deepening relationships with colleagues and clients. The study of 100 executives, conducted by public relations firm Margolis & Co. and the Young Presidents' Organization, will be released later today.
Not surprisingly, business-oriented networking site LinkedIn is proving to be the most popular social network among the respondents. Some 75% of those surveyed say they use LinkedIn; Facebook attracts about 62% of this high-powered crowd (the respondents can list more than one site) and Twitter pulls in about 42% of those surveyed.
Simon Preston, chairman of YPO-WPO International, notes that executives who join a global professional association such as Young Presidents' Organization are already hip to the benefits of networking. And given that the members are, by definition, young, it stands to reason they'd embrace high-tech networking, too. More
Lessons from the land of cheap broadband
What happens when telcos practically give it away ($13 for 100 megs!)?
NiQ Lai, chief financial officer of Hong Kong's City Telecom (CTEL), stopped by FORTUNE's San Francisco offices this week while on an investor tour. I had one question for him: Short of moving to Hong Kong, how can I get some of what he's selling?
I pay $25 to AT&T (T) every month for DSL that tops out at 1.5 megabits per second downstream, and 384Kbps for uploads. It's not always as fast as advertised. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. Cable offers faster speeds in my neighborhood, but the service also costs more, so I just try to remember the days of dial-up modems and convince myself that DSL is good enough.
But if we had a US version of City Telecom, I'd switch in a heartbeat – which is precisely what the residents of Hong Kong have been doing lately.
City Telecom's 400,000 customers pay $13 a month for 100 megabit synchronous broadband. And they get a money-back guarantee: If they don't clock 80% of the promised speed, the company pays them twice their monthly fee.
"We have a big hairy audacious goal," says Lai, referring to the term popularized by "Good to Great" author Jim Collins. "We want to be the largest IP service provider in Hong Kong by 2016. And three years into our strategy, we're well on our way to doing it."
If you live within coverage area of Verizon's FiOS service (VZ), you pay as much as $150 a month for up to 50 megs downstream and 20 upstream.
How can City Telecom possibly offer service that's more than twice as fast at less than 10% of the price?
Next big tech rivalry: HP vs. Cisco
It’s official. Silicon Valley has a new mega-rivalry: Hewlett-Packard vs. Cisco.
Until this week, the two juggernauts had competed at the edges of their product portfolios. Now the gloves are off. That’s the subtext to HP’s (HPQ) announcement Wednesday that it will buy networking equipment maker 3Com (COMS) for $2.7 billion in cash.
With 3Com in his arsenal, HP CEO Mark Hurd will be able to more effectively attack one of Cisco’s (CSCO) most profitable businesses: supplying companies with gear that manages and secures data traffic. Maybe this aggressive move from HP was inevitable after Cisco decided to get into the server business. Maybe HP actually started this a long time ago with its ProCurve product. Either way, it’s war now. More
Internet TV: When, dammit?
Hulu touts about TV anytime, anywhere. But hooking your TV to the Net? Crazy talk!
Funny pages: Hulu offers web video, but doesn't encourage Net TV. Image: Hulu
I had an epiphany early last year when I visited Hulu for an article David Kirkpatrick and I were writing about the unexpectedly successful young venture.
Watching TV shows on Hulu was such a pleasant experience with Hulu that the company should encourage users to connect their PCs to televisions. Technologically it's not a difficult thing to do, but it's not terribly convenient. A PC needs to be near the TV, the remote-control experience isn't good, and so on. I remember Hulu executives smiling kindly at my suggestion but not offering much in the way of feedback.
With hindsight, I see how naive I was. More
The race to own the mobile Internet (at least the annoying ads)
Deal for AdMob accelerates scramble for a whopping $416 million in revenue.
As was trumpeted across the Internet Monday, Google (GOOG) is buying mobile display advertising startup AdMob for $750 million in (increasingly) precious Google stock. Wall Street digested the news and sent Google stock up almost $11.
Citi analyst Mark Mahaney says the deal “makes sense, because Google is moving aggressively to take advantage of the strong growth opportunity in mobile, which is fueled by smartphones.” Sandeep Aggarwal at Collins Stewart likes the deal, arguing “mobile advertising will be a $4 billion revenue opportunity by 2012-2013.”
Over my dead BlackBerry. More
Touch technology: A round-up
Touch technology help non-tech industries improve business, efficiency, and their bottom lines.
The SMART Table brings touch to masses and classes. Photo: SmartTech
We all oohed and aahed when Apple's (AAPL) iPhone came out because of how cool it was, especially its multi-touch capability that let us flick through photos and "pinch" and expand photos and websites.
Now, with Microsoft (MSFT) Windows 7 specially formatted for touch capabilities, and everyone from manufacturers to hotels touting their tough capabilities, we know human contact with computer screens is more than a gimmick — it’s here to stay.
Touch is already a big business — estimates indicate that sales will be more than $3.66 billion for this year and will catapult 145% to almost $10 billion in the next five years.
Only half of that revenue is coming from consumer electronics (i.e. cell phones, digital frames, etc.) — the rest is from retail, hospitality and more. What many people forget is that this 30-year-old technology has been integrated in non-tech industries for years — mainly as a way to improve efficiency, but never as a centerpiece.
So, we decided to take a look at the best of the rest and highlight the most innovative, business-savvy ways other industries are implementing touch technology — and helping improve their bottom line. More
