It is with great and terrible sadness that I have to tell you that blognation editor Marc Orchant and friend of mine passed away this afternoon.
My heart goes out to Sue and his family. I am thankful that I had the time I had with him this year. I met him face to face for the first time at Gnomedex. Since then I have learned much from him.
Oliver Starr is maintaining a page on Marc and accepting donations on behalf of his family.
THIS IS NOT AN ATTEMPT AT HUMOR
At some time between 7:30 and 8:10 AM on Sunday Morning December 2nd, 2007, Marc Orchant, my fellow author on this blog, as well as one of my closest friends sustained a massive heart attack while working in his home office. At this time Marc is in critical condition at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Critical Cardiac Care Unit, Bed 3. He is not expected to regain consciousness for the next 24 to 48 hours.
I was notified by Marc’s wife, Sue and asked to help notify Marc’s colleagues, friends and other business associates. Marc was scheduled to go to Seattle, WA as well as Ojai, CA this coming week. Obviously he will not be able to attend either event. Those of you that have association with either of Marc’s scheduled appearances at these locations, please notify those that require notice of this turn of events.
According to Sue Orchant, Marc was up early Sunday morning as is his normal custom. Sue told me that he was working in his office from about 7:30 AM until 8:10 when Sue says she heard a strange noise in Marc’s office. When she went to investigate she saw that Marc was not sitting in front of the computer like he normally does and was slumped over between his desk and a small couch that is in the room.
Initially, Sue said, she though he was leaning over doing something to their Golder Retriever but then she realized that he was not conscious. Fortunately, Sue has basic medical knowledge and after verifying that Marc was not choking and had a clear airway she began to perform CPR while their son, Jason, called paramedics.
The ambulance arrived in less than 10 minutes and technicians immediately took over performing CPR and administered treatment with a cardiac defibrillator. Marc was rushed into emergency open heart surgery where an angioplasty was performed to restore circulation in the blocked artery.
Sue went on to tell me that in spite of Marc’s apparent good health, he has severe occlusion in both his other arteries and they too will require treatment soon. That, however is a secondary concern as is the condition of Marc’s heart muscle. The primary concern and the question that cannot be answered until Marc regains consciousness is the nature or extent of any neurological damage as a result of insufficient oxygen reaching Marc’s brain.
While Marc still had what appeared to be normal color when Sue found him she is uncertain as to the exact time that Marc suffered the infarction. It is also unknown if Marc had stopped breathing or been without oxygen for any length of time prior to her discovery of the situation.
Currently Marc’s immediate family as well as his brothers and parents are in or on their way to Albuquerque to be with Marc. Sue has asked me to keep Marc’s colleagues and friends in the technology community updated as information becomes available. Please do not contact Sue for updates. I will publish any information that I have in multiple venues to keep people informed of any changes in Marc’s condition.
For those of you that wish to send flowers, cards, or other gifts, Marc is at:
Presbyterian Hospital
Cardiac Care Unit Bed #3
1100 Central Ave SE
Albuquerque, NM 87106
the hospital switchboard number is 505-841-1234.
My thoughts and prayers go out to Marc and his family in this difficult time. Marc is one of the finest human beings that I have ever had the good fortune to know and I pray that Marc makes a full and speedy recovery.
Done.
I’ve done my absolute best to eliminate any trace of myself on Facebook. It was a total PITA. And I only used it casually. I can only imagine how it long it would take someone like Scoble to manually remove each friend one at a time.
According to Facebook:
Wrong!
I still have all my friends. The only friend I don’t have anymore Facebook is you!
Here’s my parting shot…
I feel so much better now…
I’ve been increasingly irritated with the noise-to-signal ration Facebook creates in my life. I definitely had the “I just threw up in the back of my mouth a little” feeling during the Web 2.0 Summit Zuckerberg love-fest. And now there’s increasing evidence that Facebook Beacon, their ill-considered advertising engine (or is it their privacy invasion engine?) is potentially a new vector for so-called affiliate marketers, spammers, scammers, and other vermin to gain access to unsuspecting users. Worse, it turns out that protecting yourself from this new attack by trying to leave Facebook is no easy task.
Henry Blodgett reports that Facebook is in deep doo-doo with both the New York Times and Coca-Cola over their misrepresentations about the opt-in/opt-out nature of Beacon:
The “Beacon” fallout continues. The New York Times’ Louise Story essentially accuses Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg of lying to her about Beacon’s being “opt-in.” Coca-Cola got a similar impression from the company – and, having learned the truth, is holding off on using the program. Meanwhile, Facebook’s spokesman attempts to explain to the NYT’s Louise Story what Zuckerberg really meant – and makes matters worse.
And Dare Obasanjo blows the lid on why Beacon is totally broken and almost certainly unfixable:
Anyway, back to the title of this blog post (Facebook Beacon is Unfixable). The problem with Facebook Beacon is that it is designed in a way that makes it easy for Facebook Beacon affiliates to integrate into their sites at the cost of user’s privacy. From Jay Goldman’s excellent post where he Deconstructed the Facebook Beacon Javascript we learn
Beacon from 10,000 Feet
That basically wraps up our tour of how Beacon does what it does. It’s a fairly long explanation, so here’s a quick summary:
- The partner site page includes the beacon.js file, sets a <meta> tag with a name, and then calls Facebook.publish_action.
- Facebook.publish_action builds a query_params object and then passes it to Facebook._send_request.
- Facebook._send_request dynamically generates an <iframe>which loads the URL http://www.facebook.com/beacon/auth_iframe.php and passes the query_params. At this point, Facebook now knows about the news feed item whether you choose to publish it or not.
When you read this you realize just how insidious the problem actually is. Facebook isn’t simply learning about every action taken by Facebook users on affiliate sites, it is learning about every action taken by every user of these affiliate sites regardless of whether they are Facebook users or not.
At first I assumed that the affiliates sites would call some sort of IsFacebookUser() API and then decide whether to send the action or not. Of course, this is still broken since the affiliate site has told Facebook that you are a user of the site, and depending on the return value of the hypothetical function the affiliate in turn learns that you are a Facebook user.
But no, it is actually worse than that. The affiliate sites are pretty much dumping their entire customer database into Facebook’s lap, FOR FREE and without their customers permission. What. The. F*ck.
Game over. This is more than enough to convince me that Facebook has more downside than upside for me. Look, I freely admit I am not the core demographic for Facebook. I’m a 50-year-old guy who’s been happily married for 25 years (and so doesn’t want to find a date or a new “special friend”), doesn’t play games, could care less about drinking games, zombie bites, and other frippery, and initially believed in the potential this framework offered.
Chatting with Tris Hussey and Sam Sethi on Twitter just now, I learn that jumping ship might not be as easy as I thought.
On Twitter, Sam Sethi says: “… just try and leave. You need to unsubscribe from every group and jump through a few more hoops,” and points here.
Facebook does allow people to ‘deactivate’ their accounts. This means that most of their information becomes invisible to other viewers, but it remains on Facebook’s servers - indefinitely.
This is handy for anyone who changes their mind and wants to rejoin. They can just type their old user name and password in, and they’ll pop straight back up on the site - it will be like they never left.
But not everyone will want to grant Facebook the right to keep all their data indefinitely when they aren’t using it for any obvious purpose. If they do want to delete it permanently, they need to go round the site and delete everything they’ve ever done.
That includes every wall post, every picture, and every group membership. For a heavy Facebook user, that could take hours. Even days. And it could violate the UK’s Data Protection Act.
Summary - leaving Facebook has been made almost impossible and proportionately harder the more you’ve participated. Sorry. That sounds pretty much like my definition of EVIL. When will these people learn that this sh*t doesn’t fly? I agree with Open Garden who says:
and thats why opensocial is a step in the right direction ..
Here’s the final proof I’m right and it’s time to nuke any trace of my casual flirtation with Facebook. Fake Steve Jobs says so (and of course he’s always right… about everything:
See this story on CNET which refers to this story from some Harvard publication. Gist is that the Harvard publication dug up some documents involved in a lawsuit against Facebook. Facebook claims it’s an invasion of Zuckerberg’s privacy and went to court trying to have the documents yanked. As CNET points out this is a little bit odd considering that in recent weeks Facebook has been bagged for publishing info about its users’ online purchases and has defended itself, claiming it has every right to share private info about its users. Oh, the Harvard article also suggested Zuckerberg is kind of a sh*tbag. No idea where they got that idea.
Have you heard about Jing? It’s a project being run by the good folks at Techsmith (who make two of my essential Windows tools - SnagIt and Camtasia Studio). Jing is basically a free screen capture tool (still and video) for both Windows and Mac OS but with a number of twists. The new version adds the following features according to the Jing Project blog:
The Jing Project also offers a number of free goodies including a very useful wallpaper that has outlines of the most common screen sizes to aid you in setting up screen shots for your blog, web site, or other projects.
Like a lot of people, I was surprised by the seemingly stupid comment made yesterday by Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, about a next-gen iPhone using 3G coming “next year”. Many bloggers, journalists, and analysts jumped all over his remarks wondering if the guy had taken leave of his senses. After all, wouldn’t such a pronouncement be a serious blow to holiday sales of the iPhone? Why would he do such a thing? PBS commentator and industry observer Robert X. Cringely thinks he may have the answer.
I don’t think Stephenson’s statement was by accident and I don’t think he is out of touch with reality. I think, instead, he was sending a $1 billion message to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
It is no coincidence that Stephenson made his remarks in Silicon Valley, rather than in San Antonio or New York. He came to the turf of his “partner” and delivered a message that will hurt Apple as much as AT&T, a message that says AT&T doesn’t really need Apple despite the iPhone’s success.
It’s one thing to have a private disagreement between companies but quite another to take it public in a way that costs real money.
What I believe is troubling the relationship between AT&T and Apple is the upcoming auction for 700-MHz wireless spectrum and AT&T’s discovery that — as I have predicted for weeks — Apple will be joining Google in bidding. AT&T thought its five-year “exclusive” iPhone agreement with Apple would have precluded such a bid, but that just shows how poorly Randall Stephenson understood Steve Jobs. Steve always hurts his friends to see how much they really love him, so AT&T probably should have expected this kind of corporate body blow.
To his credit, Stephenson took the dispute to the streets this way, showing he isn’t intimidated by Jobs. It was a bold and rare response for big business and was definitely unexpected by Cupertino, which won’t underestimate AT&T again.
Hmmm… is a public spat emerging? With MacWorld – Steve Jobs’ biggest stage – coming in little more than a month, what kind of fireworks might we see?
Update: Fake Steve Jobs weighs in with a hilarious post. May not be work safe depending on where you work.
Earlier today I received an email from the PR firm being employed by mobile email company Berggi. In the message the author attempts to get me to agree to speak with Berggi CEO Babur Ozden about the company’s growth. The subtext here is that in 2006 I authored two posts on MobileCrunch that roundly bashed the company and its investors for utterly failing to understand the US mobile economy and introducing a product that in its then current configuration was bound to fail spectacularly. In my post I promised to issue a public apology if the company managed to defy my predictions and accrue more than a million users by the end of 2007.
Since then the company has made a number of statements that have at best misconstrued the facts and at worst have been outright deceptive. The email which I received (and which I excerpt below) is no exception. Since I felt obligated to respond to this message with some detailed analysis it seemed to me only fair that I share my thoughts with blognation readers and for the benefit of the Berggi CEO who should learn that it isn’t nice to try and trick a blogger into apologizing when in fact that blogger has been right all along.
Hi Oliver,
Despite your prediction last year that Berggi wouldn’t reach 1 million
paying customers, they are nearing the 2 million mark (should top it
by end of December), and continue to grow at about 15,000 users per
day……the partnership will deliver a broad range of consumer
mobile services — including ad-supported mobile applications — for
the Chinese market.Would you have 30 minutes tomorrow afternoon to speak with Babur Ozden
(CEO) to discuss the deal? We will also discuss related news about
Berggi’s global momentum - new investors, new partners, and its
presence in Silicon Valley (its new HQ) and Beijing.Best,
XXX
My Response
XXX,
Let me ask you a question; do you think I am stupid? As in unintelligent, of low IQ, mentally impaired or otherwise incapable of even average reasoning capability?
I only ask because your message is insulting to my intelligence in the extreme.
It is also incredibly disingenuous that you would characterize Berggi’s current situation as defying my prediction when in fact it proves it.
When I evaluated Berggi and predicted that it would not fly I based my prediction on your then current business model which was to charge average consumers with average phones $9.99 per month to access their email from their phones.
I quote from my original post:
“offers a downloadable application that bundles email, IM and texting capabilities, which costs $9.99 per month. Your phone needs to be data-enabled, to use the service, and the regular data fees from your carrier (per usage or on a plan) apply.”
Now come on… we both know that Berggi’s original model flew just about as well as the airplane in the image that accompanied my original post. To try and get me to retract my original statement is simply disingenuous. Especially based upon how Reuter’s now describes Berggi’s model:
Originally, Berggi planned to charge $9.99 a month for the service, then changed course earlier this year and made its consumer messaging services free, switching to an advertising-supported model. Growth took off with that change.
In the United States, the service runs on AT&T Inc., and Sprint phones, the No. 1 and No. 3 mobile operators, respectively.
Berggi is one of a growing number of start-ups seeking to bypass entrenched mobile network operators by offering consumers software directly over the Web, which they must download and install on their phones.
One big draw: Among Berggi users, text messaging is free. Berggi compresses text files into the data channel of mass market mobile phones, bypassing costly text messaging services.
This is perhaps the most backhanded attempt to get an apology as I’ve ever seen. You should really learn that bloggers do a good job with their diligence. In my case it has been a long time since I’ve made a prediction like the one I made about Berggi and been mistaken and I am careful not to make broad predictions in a cavalier manner.
The fact is that not only did your original $9.99 model fail and fail in spectacular fashion (as I said it would) but your user-base is comprised almost exclusively of people from third world countries.
As published in Alexa, here is Berggi’s composition of users.
Berggi.com users come from these countries:
Chile27.0%
Venezuela10.7%
Argentina10.2%
Mexico7.4%
Peru6.7%
Dominican Republic5.9%
Colombia4.7%
Ecuador3.7%
Puerto Rico3.5%
Brazil3.3%
Costa Rica2.8%
El Salvador2.6%
Guatemala2.5%
Bolivia2.2%
Panama2.0%
Uruguay1.4%
Paraguay1.3%
United States0.8%
Honduras0.5%
Spain0.4%
Cuba0.1%
Nicaragua0.1%
Other countries0.2%
At Berggi’s published rate of $9.99 per month for mobile email it would cost the Chilean consumer 5,151.34 pesos per month! for your service. Do you really expect me to believe that someone from that country would conceivably be willing to pay this amount of money for a service that they can get from a provider like Google or Yahoo! for FREE???
Additionally the US ranks 18th at 0.8% (yes, there’s a zero in front, it is really less than 1%) of Berggi users! (Not exactly stellar is it?) What did I say about getting middle America to adopt this model?
Like I said, how stupid do you think I am?
It seems that my original post really rankled your CEO, Babur Ozden, but the fact remains that my predictions have been exactly on target and the only reason that Berggi is still around is due to a significant change in business model and deals with international carriers that have also made substantial investments.
It is not clear from the various press releases or from available metrics but my suspicion is that in addition to being accurate about the financial model, Berggi has had trouble getting consumers to download the application to their phones too and that most of the “reported” growth has actually come from carrier deals where Berggi is actually pre-installed on handsets and does not accurately reflect on real world downloading or de-novo subscriptions.
This is not even the first time that your CEO has tried to use deceptive remarks to mis-characterize Berggi’s growth as exceeding my predictions. In a piece on Venture Beat earlier this year the reporter contacted me to find out my thoughts on your CEO’s claims that Berggi had proven me wrong author Dan Kaplan wrote: (and I quote)
Until now, the company has offered BerggiMail, a useful but relatively undifferentiated offering that packages e-mail, free SMS texting., and an instant messenger that works with all the major IM services. Berggi’s chief, Babur Ozden, says that BerggiMail has registered 500,000 users around the world since its launch in last November, and is on target to hit one million by the end of the year.
These stats are solid for a downloadable mobile application, but in order to reach them, Berggi had to make its service free. It originally planned to charge $9.99 per month, a business model that commentators like Oliver Starr criticized at the time.
It seems that Babur has a penchant for attempting to mislead journalists in an attempt to make it appear in articles like Berggi is doing better than it really is. He apparently hasn’t yet learned the painful lesson that journalists, and particularly journalists like myself that are also experienced analysts neither make predictions lightly nor do they take what a CEO (and especially a CEO that has mis-characterized factual data in the past in order to try and prove a point) says at face value.
In Babur’s case the numbers - and especially the numbers that would be based upon the model which I accurately predicted would fail - simply do not come remotely close to adding up.
In fact, let’s do that math, shall we? Let’s assume that Berggi has now amassed some 1.5 million users and that those users are all paying the equivalent of USD $9.99 per month.
Further let’s assume that on January one there were 500,000 such users on Berggi and that to get to that 1.5 million user mark Berggi is adding 100,000 new paying users per month.
I’ve taken the liberty of creating a little chart to demonstrate what Berggi’s income statement should look like:
Wow! $125,874,000.00 in top-line revenue in what would not even be Berggi’s second full year in business? I can’t verify this since the company was private at the time but not even Google had those kind of numbers. In fact, I don’t know if there has ever been a company that generated revenue like that in so short a time period.
If this was even the barest approximation of the truth not only would Babur be on the cover of every business magazine in the country but Berggi would be a household name (and you’d have deals with T-Mobile and Verizon in addition to AT$T and Sprint).
What’s more, if you were generating revenue like this there would have been no need for the investment that you took from Avanzit and Adara earlier this year - and any CEO that would give up equity in a company spinning off this much cash would be certifiable.
So… let me offer a suggestion; Berggi needs to apologize to me. I was right and in spite of your multiple attempts to demonstrate otherwise, it is patently evident that no amount of misleading remarks will change the fact that to stay alive Berggi has had to dramatically change its model, make deals with carriers, raise significant additional capital and expand almost entirely outside the US.
I’d also like an apology for insulting my intelligence. As I said earlier I don’t appreciate it when someone tries to make me look foolish when in fact I have been right all along.
Oh, and to answer your original question as to would I like to speak with Babur? Honestly, not particularly. He’s more then demonstrated his propensity for creatively misconstruing the facts and I don’t really have the time or inclination to have a discussion with someone that takes that approach. Particularly when it is so evident from the factual information that is readily available what the truth of the situation really is.
Incidentally, I realize that your goal in this was to get me to a) apologize for being incorrect in my prediction (which I was not) and b) to do so publicly on my blog as I had previously promised (in the event that I was wrong- which as stated now multiple times, I was not). In considering that this was your goal and feeling somewhat badly that it hasn’t gone as expected I do think it’s fair that I give you some coverage so I think I’ll repost this analysis since I’ve now devoted far more time to proving my point than would have been required had the real facts been acknowledged by your CEO.
In parting let me offer one last bit of advice; don’t insult the intelligence or credibility of a journalist lightly and never do so when the public record makes it clear that your assertions are factually false. It won’t ever turn out positively for you - as I’m sure is clear from this exercise.
Oh, and one last thing; have a nice day.
Oliver Starr, Global Mobile Editor
http://usmobile.blognation.com
http://blognation.com
PS: please forward a copy of this email to Babur Ozden, I don’t have his email address or I would have done so myself.
Here are a few interesting items that came across the transom today for the Mac users out there.
Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet reports that Office 2008 for the Mac (due in January) will include a feature that exports PowerPoint presentations to the iPhone or iPod. Using an AV cable, you’ll be able to connect your mobile device directly to a projector to deliver your presentation. That’s going to be popular I suspect.
Elinor Mills at C|Net (and others) report that a new version of Google Desktop for the Mac will be released tomorrow that allows Google Gadgets to be added to the Mac OS X Dashboard where they’ll reportedly coexist peacefully with Apple Widgets. That’s interesting as there are a lot of useful Google Gadgets but I’m curious how many folks feel the need for the extra disk grinding Google Desktop requires when Spotlight in Leopard (aka Mac OS X 10.5) is so good.
AppleInsider reports that an open source implementation of Java 6 for the Mac is in development (a preview release is already available) in response to Apple’s decision to ship Leopard with Java 5. This decision has not been well-received in the Java community as you might expect and some fear that adoption of the Mac in traditional early adopter markets (education and scientific research) as well as potential growth markets (the enterprise) may suffer.
Panic Software and The IconFactory have teamed up for the release of CandyBar 3 for the Mac which should address two of the biggest complaints about Leopard – the bland and arguably ugly new folder designs and the 3D Dock. The new release of CandyBar – for Leopard only – integrates the formerly separate Pixadex icon manager, uses QuickLook to allow you to see the contents of an icon Container file with a press of the space bar and all the icon swapping and Dock and folder skinning you could ever ask for.
Rich Mogull at TidBITS provides a good overview of the RTSP vulnerability in current versions of QuickTime (that affect both Mac and Windows users) and offers some suggestions on how to protect yourself from this serious security hole until Apple gets things patched up. Short answer for Mac users – use the Little Snitch firewall enhancer from Objective Development. Or, if you want the free solution – be careful what you click on. Me? I already run Little Snitch so I’m covered. It’s a great product that watches for outbound traffic requests (the vector used by exploits that leverage this vulnerability) from your Mac and allows you to selectively block them.
I got an interesting e-mail yesterday from Jason Nazar, founder and CEO of docstoc.com. They did some Alexa and compete.com analysis of how the TC40 companies have fared since that event. The document, which can be viewed or downloaded from docstoc reveals two interesting trend lines. The first, which will come as no surprise, is that all of the companies in the TC40 enjoyed a nice spike in traffic leading up to and climaxing on their day on stage. The graph for all of the companies reveals the same pyramid-shaped spike. So… interesting but not surprising.
You can read our own Ewan Spence’s live blogging coverage of TC 40 here.
More surprising is that only a handful of the 40 companies have managed to sustain that sppike in any meaningful way. In addition to docstoc, TripIt (a favorite of mine in that they actually solve a real problem I and other frequent travelers have), clickable, PubMatic, and a couple of others have parlayed their moment in the sun into meaningful increases in site visitors. Reach, as measured by Alexa, doesn’t necessarily track in a symmetrical fashion however. It’s an interesting snapshot for those interested in understanding web traffic vooodoo.
docstoc also shared some interesting news about their company’s progress following their launch:
Beating Google to the punch, Zoho today announced that they’ve used Google’s Gears technology to enable full offline editing with their Writer application. Google’s “Docs” word processor (based on Writely) s still online only. Like other applications employing Gears (Google’s most excellent Reader has been “Gear-ed” for a long time now), you simply click on an Offline link and the current content you have open in the application is saved to a SQLite database on your Mac, Windows, or Linux PC.
It works quite well. Zoho has posted a video demonstrating the capability and an official announcement on their product blog. The limitations of working in the browser chrome notwithstanding, this is a critical step towards making web apps truly competitive with rich client applications and if a browser-based word processor meets your needs, Zoho has taken the lead in delivering critical functionality for those times when you cannot be connected to the net.
