I am totally delighted with the idea, as the simple displays in the cars I used before, which was inflated by car manufacturers with terms like ‘Drive Computer’, have lots of potential to do more but in fact accomplish only a little in practice. If a group of automakers decide to collaborate together, it would provide a critical mass for application developers to come up with new functionalities that we never experienced before. It would even make my stretch Crowdsourcing for Traffic idea possible.

Coming to pros and cons, the system could turn into an extra revenue stream for car makers, where they would provide drivers the opportunity to buy new functionalities and navigation maps on the go. Moreover, it would be a significant boost for owners’ convenience, as the manufacturers would update the firmware of various car functions on the air, without a need to visit the service shop. On the flipside, unauthorized access of appllications to mission critical electronic functions such as braking and airbag control has the potential to be simply lethal. The consequences could be far more disastrous than the ones caused by security holes in Windows or Facebook.

How about that?

P.S: Do you think it can be done in Starbucks too?

Here is the story that helped me experience a paradigm shift about tempering the cycles of nature.

Back in January 2006, the world got crazy about avian flu, a contagious disease that has reincarnated from its grave in every ten year for the last 50 years. Turkey was one of the hotspots for the disease. Although the death toll was at the same magnitude of people dying after accidentally falling over their balconies, the fear factor erased the minor conscious portion of the decision makers and soon, a mass slaughter of poultry was in place. In a few weeks, hundreds of millions of chicken and roosters were burnt in farms and villages. No chicken, no avian flu. Risk-free solution.

One of the most interesting facts is that, some poultry animals (let’s call them chickens from now on to avoid sounding like a farming lab blog) are naturally immune to some of the most poisonous fluids found in scorpions, snakes and, yes, ticks. As per their natural immunity, chickens were able to eat these small animals without getting poisoned from their venom. In a typical meal of a chicken, a combination of ticks almost always found their role.

Fast-forward to late-2007 and these ticks, with no chickens to feed, was left alone to expand and populate. With them, came Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), That illness took more lives in Turkey than Avian Flu did in the whole world in the last 18 months.

The very interesting point in this story was that, the folks in the village I visited seemed to know this natural relationship and feedback loop all along the way. Apparently, the science and public management community didn’t know that much.

Building on that, I have a word or two for the company named Planktos, which is trying to reincarnate in these days. They call their efforts under the "ecorestoration" and they hope to fill massive areas of oceans with planktons, in an effort to have them process way much more carbondioxide and reduce the current levels. A good intention coupled with a very risky execution. With no villagers living under the ocean, it will be even harder to learn from experience what effects such a bold move can ignite.

In a week from now, I will attend the wedding of a friend of mine. A few days ago, I RSVPed online and right at that moment I got curious about whether this wedding RSVP service provided some wedding table planner tools. It simply couldn’t, because RSVP form did not have any questions or fields regarding my close friends or colleagues. At that very moment, I understood that Facebook would be the killer platform for building a wedding table optimization app.

I am still not married and don’t know how much effort is needed for the wedding table optimization (best friends go to same table without leaving anybody at the same table with people they don’t know). Coming from an industrial engineering background, I can at least sense how big of an optimization problem should it be for the bride and groom. So why not outsource the RSVP process through Facebook, in which an internal engine could set up an initial table setting based on guests’ own friends that are invited to the event. It can even score the closeness of a friend pair based on either number of mutual friends, number of mutual wall posts or etc. Then the bride and groom can fine tune the details, add out-of-facebook guests to some empty points and voila, every guest is optimized happy! The Friend Wheel application has already completed much of the groundwork on that front!

Economics? Ok, barely an app is making money from Facebook but come on, isn’t the wedding one of those rare economic phenomenas that have a nearly complete price inelasticity?

Turkish Fantasy Football (Soccer)

Up to facebook’s rise and shine in Asia Minor, I could only list a few addictions that could be related to the whole population. One of them would be soccer. Right at these days every year, the life stops to speculate, watch and fight about the opening games of Turkish football league. Then came Facebook, as another general population addiction (Turks being #4 in overall population and #1 in non-English speaking population in Facebook rankings). Yet, I am disappointed that nobody came with a fantasy football app on Facebook that combined these two socioeconomical addictions in the perfect platform! I am pretty much inclined to take equity in such a venture, but be quick! The opening match is today!

Some international websites (the most popular being YouTube.com, followed by others such as Slide.com and Alibaba.com) with heavy user generated content are being sued in Turkish courts for permitting such content that insults Turkish people and heritage. In case these websites do not comply with the content removal request, Turkish courts request access restriction from Turkish Internet Authority, and the ban gets put into action in a few days. Currently, a handful of websites are inaccesible through Turkish ISPs.

This is no breaking news for most regular readers, but another set of developments lately arose with a so-called "social movement" coming from some Turkish webmasters, publishers and authors. It is a no-miss event playing only till August 20 evening, so I suggest you take a look through Turkish websites such as Webrazzi.com and AnaFikir.com.

In its core, these 200+ of "social-moving" websites put a landing page (script) on their domain to meet first-time entrants with the following message "Access to this website is restricted as decided by its owner" in an effort to get a sarcastic reference that YouTube receives "Access to this website is restricted as requested by Turkish courts".

It is a completely different discussion whether the move is right, wrong or the most effective one. Instead, I will put light on one subject that easily passed through each of these 200+ website managers’ minds. As Turkish citizens by nature (I suppose), I would expect these next-gen website authors to care at least a fraction of how much they care about Turkish internet freedom as they care for upholding Turkish values and heritage. Burning with passion to freed Turkish internet, I was sad to see that these people didn’t put similar emphasis in protesting these major international websites and requesting the removal of such insulting content. Instead, as I would expect for most superficially activist-minded people, they are burning with the desire to "be a part of the shiny, PRry social movement of Turkey and gain some brand recognition and Resume bullet" instead of the duty to "do the right things in the right order for the sake of social awareness".

Please find, read and elaborate on the following content on this subject:

Turkey’s TechCrunch clone style blog on the subject (Turkish).

Original TechCrunch play on the subject. (English). Woohoo, Turks are in TechCrunch! Sad that not with a killer startup though.

A Turkish VC General Partner’s standpoint on the subject. (English)

Let’s mark the Energy Recovery Inc. IPO details here and track the progress to see whether this water desalination company with ever-efficient energy usage beats the market in the long run.

Ticker: ERII

Market: NASDAQ

IPO Price: 8.50 US$

Money Raised: 119 million US$

MCap: 471 million US$ (based on yesterday’s closing price of 9.83 US$)

Financials: In 2007, Energy Recovery’s earnings rose to $5.8 million from $2.4 million in 2006. The company’s revenue grew to $35.4 million from $20.1 million.

When I read about DimDim in ReadWriteWeb here, I was surprised that nobody get into the field of WebEx with the open-source lenses that DimDim used. In three bullet-points I can summarize what DimDim does and why they do what they do in a great way.

1. DimDim lets people connect, write and talk to each other while sharing their desktops and slides. This is what many others (and other others) offer. The DimDim’s killer feature is that the connectivity features are all inside the browser, with no need of software installation.
2. Its revenue model is quite flexible for different types of organizations. Big corporations get the same fee approach with good savings vs. other services. Small companies share a percent of the revenues and start-ups get the service free in exchange of the start-ups’ engineering staff’s contribution to DimDim’s open-source platform.
3. Continuing from 2nd bullet, the platform being open-source is a huge gain by itself. And the penetration model for start-ups inherently supports the development of the system towards the excellence.

My only comment for DimDim, which is almost half joke and half opinion ( ), is that big corporations may see its funny name as a penetration barrier.

Great work…

The way I was denied was a bit of failure for me. I applied with a detailed business plan depicting how to expand into Turkey, which merchants to start partnership and which banking institutions to get alliance. VP Tom Fischer had replied with a standard e-mail of denial and the rest is history.

Here is the e-mail I received:

Dear Mr Dogan

I returned from my US trip this morning having discussed your proposals with my US colleagues. While we appreciate your interest in Pay By Touch, we are not looking to expand our operations into Turkey at this point.

We do believe that Pay By Touch is applicable globally and intend to provide the service around the world in the future. As our international expansion plans evolve we would be pleased to explore the possibility of a partnership with your organization. However, we would not anticipate this taking place for another 12–18 months.

We would like to keep your details on file and will contact you at the appropriate time. I have copied your details to my colleague Gus Spanos who is the Executive responsible for Investor relationships.

Thank you again for your interest in Pay By Touch.

Best regards

Tom Fischer

Vice President

And here is the Pay By Touch landing page as of March 28th, 2008 (click for a readable copy):

So, sometimes denial is really meant for good.

So why don’t computer producers preinstall some distributed computing programs (e.g. Stanford University’s Folding @ Home project) and give the users the choice to opt-out from the project, rather than today’s opt-in setting?

My words are especially emphasized for Sony, which overloads its laptops with trial versions of several software packages such as Sony Vegas, MS Office and Norton.

The catch here is that, the best thing an individual can do for environment is to shut down the computer while not in use. But if you won’t do it, then make that energy loss a little bit meaningful…

I can not say that the citizen’s ability to ticket misbehavior in traffic is zero. If you are keen enough, you can call the 154 service in Turkey to directly connect Police Hotline and tell your complaint. Or in the case of commercial vehicle violations, there is usually an hotline stickered on the vehicle, which you can call and file your complaint. The problem is that both of these methods are effort consuming. Except quite serious circumstances, the effort to call the hotline, wait for the operator and tell the details outweigh the potential benefit of making the violent driver avoid another crossing while red light is on.

What I dream is a crowdticketing or crowdflagging system for traffic issues, which primarily rests on mobile phones. And the tagline should read "everyone is a policeman!".

Let’s say you are just at the pedestrian crossing area when a car ignored the red light and has gone by. You simply write its license plate number, the type of violation (in this case, it should be something like ‘violate pedestrian crossing’) and voila. The violation is received by the system and is instantly linked to the license plate. When there is the GPS function embedded in the mobile phone system, it is even better. You simply add the GPS data in the text message, and the system will know exactly when and where that license plate violated some laws or showed misbehavior.

I am not taking the highest proponent level that this database should form a strict source for issuing bans or fines. But it may help mainly with two ways:

1. When a serious complaint is made to police hotline, the officers can login to this system and see whether that license plate has received some similar flags from the crowdticketing system. By doing so, police can have its case reinforced and commit to a serious legal action.
2. In the case of multiple flagging, police officers can be convinced that a particular driver is ‘hot’, that is he is on a violating track right now. In this case, let’s say the first user reports a particular driver about speeding and 10 minutes later, another user reports the same car for dangerous driving or not stopping at a stop sign. In such situation, police officers would know that different, and independent, sources of information will reveal a outlaw driver case!

Although I foresee many opposing ideas to this case, I still believe this would be a great complementary service for public good and wealth. If that service existed, I would certainly flag many drivers using their horns unnecessarily early morning…

So what do you think? Anybody out there to turn this idea into another web 2.0 service?

The Fortune blogpost covers the perspective of Seagate CEO on the recent developments in flash-based hard disk drives (so-called Solid State Drives) that potentially present significant drop in weight, operational noise and increase in durability. As the biggest producer of hard disk drives in the world, and as one of the best stock price performers in the market, Seagate has the privileged position to drive the market convergence towards SSDs and take a major stake from the growth to come. In a world that mobility is highly appreciated, a leader has to occasionally leave his ivory tower and look beyond what his organization possess today. Although I don’t the impact would be of the same magnitude, I expect a big crash for Seagate in a similar way that Kodak lately realized that they made a huge mistake ignoring the rise of digital photography…

As always, here is the real deal. As of today, Nasdaq is at 2268 and Seagate (STX) is at 21.73$. We will see what happens with the rise of SSDs…

Torrent is a world that is yet to be discovered by corporations. Yet, that untapped potential will be the subject of another post. Rather, I would like to talk about aXXo and TorrentFreak’s DVDRip Charts.

Let’s start with aXXo. I am not sure how many of you know him, but he is one of the heroes of the alternate internet universe. I suspect he is physically met by many people, yet he has millions of fans throughout the world. In a world of piracy, the aXXo brand stands for sustained-quality for hundreds of illegal DVD rips. Just as Volvo stands for safety in car manufacturing, aXXo name puts a high-quality stamp in the pirating world of torrents. The interesting part for me, is that people grow empathy and love for somebody they barely know. aXXo can be a 70-year-old grandpa or a lady aged sixteen, but there is a crowd out there that worships him/her no strings attached. His pirated work of hundreds of blockbusters are said to be downloaded more than a million times a day, and news about him going to jail is protested by hundred thousands of people around the world.

So the question is, what will be the inception point that heroes of the online world will surge over heroes of the old world as we know it?

Disclaimer: My perspective in this post is more inclined towards dynamics of internet world rather than the question marks regarding torrent world. I believe using torrents for pirating copyrighted content is the worst way for the Torrent technology to be leveraged.

It is already in my Wish List. I expect a reasonable productivity increase for individuals all over the world when they start to use this sound-recording-while-writing pen. With its 150-200US$ price range, it is reasonably affordable. The innovation comes from the fact that Smartpen records what it hears while you take notes with the pen, and it syncs your hand movements and writings with the timestamp of audio, letting you to relive your lecture at its full potential. As should be, their prime prospect is collegiates, a group of more than 17 million just in US. There are numerous opportunities for distribution rights in other countries, including mine, Turkey. The risks? The pen has too many features and micro-gadgets on it (OLED screen, audio recorder, speaker, infrared camera, usb connector to name a few) that may turn out to be as fragile as first-generation ipod nano’s scratchable screen.

This will be a big life-saver for small businesses. Not all companies have their dedicated IT teams that provide them with reliable and safe collaboration & productivity features such as business e-mail, calendar sharing and appointment managing, online file storage and private instant messaging. CatalystWeb is just that. Their CatalystOffice suite is a turn-key collection of smart tools that will boost a small company’s productivity capability overnight. I would list at least 50.000 small businesses here in Turkey that will subscribe to this service if the price tag stays below 3000 US$ per month.

One of the factors that delayed my post on Demo 2008 was the big category presentation we had to build for Procter & Gamble Oral Care Review on Feb 21st. When there are eight managers supplying content to a single presentation and there is only one person providing feedback, the proper updating process of that single presentation file turns into a mess. The last time I counted, there were 22 versions of that presentation before we gave it a go. KonoLive, hopefully, will eliminate that collaboration friction. When MS Office’s "Compare and Merge" function does not fulfill its duty, which in most cases actually does not, KonoLive may present a great opportunity for co-workers to cut merge-and-edit times and boost productivity.

A free, robust mobile browser that helps you experience rich media in your mobile, almost in the same way that you would experience it in your PC screen. It is simple and powerful, if and only if it delivers its promise of seamless transformation of the website into the tiny mobile screens. The browser’s flashy feature is that it does not need a mobile version of a particular website. If it manages to create the mobile version of ANY website by itself, that browser will be a killer and I guess it won’t be long before we hear an acquisition news from Google, Microsoft or Nokia.

Let your work computer open and connect it remotely from anywhere via your mobile. Another killer mobile app. It is another productivity-booster idea coming out of Demo 2008 and I don’t think it is just a coincidence that three out of six favorites of mine turned out to be services that boost corporate output per capita. May there be a big gap there already? PCMobilizr is not the only big shift Rove did recently. It was of course another good move that they changed their former name: Idokorro Mobile. One important piece of feedback: Please bundle Folding @ Home setup file along with PCMobilizr client suite, so that work computers left open to be able to communicate remotely does not completely waste the electricity but turns some of it into medical supercomputing effort! That is exactly what every remote-access software company should do…

At last a pure surfer fave in the list. It is not very paranoid to think that some of your favorite articles on the web may cease to exist suddenly. Then you are only left with a link that summarizes the text with 6 words, and you regret not copying it to Word. Or in another case you could be travelling with your girlfriend and you just wanted to share a Forbes Most Expensive Houses List (I don’t personally recommend doing such a thing…) but you sadly see that you can’t reach it offline. Iterasi fills spots such as those two. It lets you download webpages in their entirety and view them offline. The key point is that although there are efficient ways to export content, it is quite hard to arrange the same browsing experience in an offline or isolated mode. Iterasi claims to do that, and apparently they do. On one side, we all know that not all content needs downloading. For most of the cases, links are vital, and enough. Yet, in many situations when you think you found an article that deserves mummifying and isolating for next generations, iterasi is your mate.

I also have one company that I liked, but has some questions regarding the scale, so that I didn’t put its logo and discuss it in more than one sentence. It is StandoutJobs and it is at least adding a funny side for job seekers, even if corporations fail to utilize what it offers. But I hope they do…

There is a post from VentureBeat that summarizes a subset of Demo08 companies. It is not great to have just three overlapping services, but it is still better than nothing…

Navigenics, the Redwood Shores, CA company that I read about in Technology Review’s Jan/Feb 2008 issue brought me back to the beautiful dilemmas of placebo drugs, Matrix and Minority Report.

Navigenics is the leading developer of a genetics test that has the potential to tell its customers the probability of getting a heart attack or Alzheimer’s diseas in the next 20 years. It looks fairly inspiring at the face value but the word in bold changes everything, I guess.

I will start with the ‘99 blockbuster Matrix. In one scene where Neo meets Oracle, there is a beautifully told story of a dilemma. The old oracle tells Neo not to feel sorry about the vase. Surprised to hear it, Neo turns back to see where the vase is, and his elbow hits the vase to make it fall and crack. And the Oracle asks, “If I hadn’t told you about the vase, would that vase got broken?”

A similar beautifully depicted dilemma was present in Spielberg’s Minority Report. Tom Cruise plays an agent working for D.C Pre-crime department. Thanks to the gifted oracles, homicides can be seen before they occur in real time, and Tom Cruise’s team tries to reach the crime scene before the countdown reaches to zero. As a result, they arrest the suspect before he commits the crime itself. Would that make the suspect guilty?

Enough for movies and Hollywood. I just wanted to make my point about Navigenics a bit stronger. I grew up with the stories of placebo drug effects, with which patients that receives fake medicines show a significant signal of recovery, just because they think the drug they take is proven effective. Today, Navigenics, with its huge potential on the positive side, may also bring a dangerous side effect to the lives of the patients.

Let’s consider a John Doe, at his forties, rich enough to buy a 2.500US$ genetics test from Navigenics. Thanks to his test, Navigenics experts pulls out a diagnostics map of John Doe, with specific vulnerability probabilities to many of today’s fatal diseases. Based on that probability report, experts suggest a dietary and/or medicine plan to John Doe. What Navigenics expects is that John Doe becomes energized to beat his potential vulnerability and commits to the multi-year diet and medicine plan that may help him to overcome his genes’ weaknesses. What Navigenics ignore, in my opinion, is that people tend to give in more frequently than they withstand. What would happen if John Doe is told that he has a 25% probability to have a heart attack in the next 10 years and John Doe loses his faith and excitiment for life. And then, how can we be sure that the reason of him having a heart-attack in 2018 is his genes, but not his mind that previously has shown the significance of human psychology in placebo drug trials.

With the pragmatic sense of US government officials, Navigenics managers can claim that, on average, they may be doing more good than bad. But even if this probability calculations causes 1 single person to live a more pessimistic life after the tests, is it an expandable life of one single life for the good of many others?

Further reading can be found in VentureBeat and Wall Street Journal.

Here are the links that made me discover this great start-up:

TechCrunch40 Conference

TechCrunch post on Xobni

1. post the link here in order to keep track of that analysis
2. show my praise to their work

I won’t talk more. Please read TC work on Yahoo’s next moves. Also turn back to that page in the future to see what really happened and benchmark that vs. what TC foresaw.

I won’t get deep into details of OpenID, as the group explains themselves so clearly here. Instead, I will just share my joy as I just heard Nasdaq moguls Microsoft, Yahoo, VeriSign, Google and blue chip IBM started to collaborate with OpenID. Whatever their real intents are, I see this as a big move to make the web as a far more efficient, smooth-running place. The evil plans? I guess we will see in a short time as they got their seats in OpenID board.

Take a look at what products/services they are rolling out and you will get what I see. Just recently, they put the latest feature into amazonmp3, with DRM-free music and they didn’t stop there. As a global citizen who love to listen US music but fail to buy them as a result of residing in Turkey, I was not an eligible customer for iTunes. Amazon may have located some other customers here and there, and they announced plans to globalize the mp3 sales. Huge move. Until now, I was a loyal buyer of books, DVDs and Blu-Rays from Amazon.com. It looks like mp3 will add to them.

The second move is a more recent one; one that I heard from TechCrunch’s following post. Product Ads. Amazon’s marketplace has been phenomenal in providing long-tail items that Amazon couldn’t provide itself. With Product Ads, Amazon is letting anyone -yes it includes individuals like me also- display ads in relevant product pages. Basically, you can use Amazon’s search box to search products, and the results will cover a retail space pretty much larger than Amazon’s and its merchants’ servers. As TechCrunch clearly underlined, this is a feature seriously overlooked by Google -try searching for a specific product in Google’s landing page.

Are these features groundshaking? I wouldn’t go that far. But Amazon’s solid strategy work behind them makes me envy their team. Choose two of the hottest Silicon Valley companies as your targets. Thoroughly analyze their strengths, weaknesses and the features they overlook. Combine the opportunities rising from that analysis with your company’s core competences and the resulting moves will be what Amazon brought to market with Product Ads and amazonmp3.

Almost one year ago, I read a great book on innovation and expansion strategy: Blue Ocean Strategy. Looking at Amazon’s moves, I remembered the main framework to reveal and design innovations: the competitor/s is/are analyzed with respect to each and every parameter that customers find significant. Let’s say for mp3 business, a brief list of these parameters would include: price, geographical coverage, depth of collections, interface convenience, moving-to-device easiness etc. Clearly, Amazon created a competence on geographical coverage while bringing convenience to its users with a small software that ensures easy delivery of amazonmp3 downloads directly to iTunes.

What makes me believe Amazon will be successful in its endeavors is that their experience in e-retailing taught them the way to operate in a razor-thin-margin environment. With their entry into Product Ads and DRM-free mp3, they can disrupt both markets and create some trouble times for Google and Apple. To mark this statement, I am attaching a Yahoo widget to track Amazon.com’s share price. It is currently 73.50$, and Google is at 517$. Apple is at 125.5$.

Qualitatively, I started to ‘feel’ negative about Zuckerberg’s kingdom. With all the hype coming from Microsoft investment, its valuation reached almost 15 billion US$. When that valuation is compared to the numbers reported by TechCrunch’s following post -and leaked by Zuckerberg’s phone conf.- it doesn’t justify the phenomenal company, at least for me.

I will not re-report the numbers but closing 2007 with only 150 million US$ in revenues, and projecting a pretentious 350 million US$ for 2008 would not make me feel confident if I was one of the venture capital investors that poured more than 330 million US$ to the company to date.

What makes me think that? A few friends of mine that decisively withdrew their Facebook accounts lately. While I agree that it does not represent the millions of Facebook users, I learnt to trust my intuition throughout my career, and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink only reinforced that belief. Another set of personal facts solidify my conjecture about Facebook’s supposedly bleak future:

• I had a private Firefox counter that tells me how much time I spent on a specific website and I can look at the numbers on a chronological scale. Although I didn’t feel it, my Facebook browsing time is down by almost 30%, although my total web browsing time is up by 10%.
• When I look at my Facebook friendship timeline, I observe a significant slow-down in the number of new friend requests. For the sharp minds already thinking that I might have already reached all of my friends via Facebook, I can guarantee them a healthy fraction of my friends still out of the blue-white pages.

Bottomline, with 150.000 US$ under management of my micro Venture Capital firm Inventia Capital, I wouldn’t bet on Facebook’s next financing round!

As of this writing, stocks seem to be affected by the general market turmoil. The important thing is to observe whether PBW and STP will rise a lot faster than the big-three responsible for much of the environment destruction today’s earth is facing. PBW is at 21.5$, STP is at 52$. BP rests at 63.7$, Shell is at 67.4$ and Exxon is residing at 82.8$.





This time, Business 2.0 magazine had covered Powercast, mostly related to its partnership with electronics giant Philips, to implement its low-cost wireless charging solution to Philips’ various systems. I am still a true-believer of Powercast and just can’t wait to see the first impact of it in the modern era!

What does these two company feature above have in common? Together (or may be even alone with a lesser chance), they can drastically change the macro statistics on how many people is connected to the net today!

Meraki is a startup coming from MIT’s corridors, which is pushing its $49 WiFi router mesh devices to expand the coverage of WiFi networks. Let’s visualize it: You live in a 5-block compound. With technology available today, all residents should buy a WiFi modem & router (around 150$ for a quality-one) along with a singular subscription plan (around 30$/month). If there are 100 apartments, it will cost 51K$ for that compound to have full access over internet. Meraki claims to change the way we connect: The administrator of the compound (or of each block) have a physical internet access via modem, and the other members of the apartment just plugs in the Meraki WiFi router to extend the coverage. With this way, a great broadband subscription plan can be extended toward every member of the community, with reduced cost. The good part is, administrator can reach the settings of the network via a web-hosted interface, to put limits for each connection, or make it compulsory to pay for it before gaining access. Meraki says this will bring internet for the low-income population and developing world, with the claim of “providing free of affordable access to the next billion of people.”

*  It is noteworthy to state that Google has recently invested in Meraki with 1$M. VentureBeat’s story here.
Whisher looks at the problem from a software perspective, and bases its potential on the assumption of collaborative community. Its software opens up your personal WiFi coverage to other Whisher software users, and you hope to find the same hospitality when you are out of your home or office. Of course, as the owner of the connection in your office or network, you have the privilege to limit the speed and decide who connects and who does not. On top, you have the chance to IM with other connected people, all from the interface of Whisher software.

I believe, both of these companies will have a significant impact on how people treat and connect to internet. For further reading, I suggest to read: VentureBeat’s story on Meraki , GigaOM on Meraki , GigaOM on Whisher , VentureBeat on Whisher .

Q4 Revenue is actualized as $3.21 billion, up 67%. Earnings hit $1 billion mark for the first time with $1.03 billion, a 277% increase over 2005 Q4.

It would be good (at least for me) to compare Google to my company Procter & Gamble, which is also performing better than the market. PG’s market cap is $207 billion, vs. Google’s $147 billion. PG’s share is at $65.34, GOOG’s $481.75

To keep it simple, an analogy example from Yahoo network would be great I guess. Let’s say that you have been using Yahoo Mail for years but did not ever get into Flickr buzz. Suddenly, you feel the excitement of sharing the visuals with the world and want to signup for the service. You go to Flickr.com and see that you can sign in with your existing Yahoo ID. The same is also true for Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Music. The OpenID project is same in principle vs. Yahoo network, except the fact that the different websites does not necessarily be under the control of same person, group or company for you to carry your identity through different platforms. With an optimistic approach of extending the usage scale, this means we will be able to use the same user credentials to login to Google and Yahoo.

The downside is, there is still no barrier to create multiple OpenID credentials and use them to clone yourself. But, the most important benefit is harnessed by -let’s say- the good-intention netizens, which will save time in filling duplicate personal information and avoiding the need of updating every account of them when any changes occur in their personal info.

I am excited to see the development of the project and see which websites start to use OpenID authentication platform.

Here is two social networking sites that revolve around book-reading preferences of their members: LibraryThing and Shelfari.

If you experience the same problem while browsing Amazon - a vicious cycle of failures to decide which books to get, as there are way too many books with too few valuable comments -. Wouldn’t it be just great to get suggestions from other folks out there who read the same book two months ago? Now, that is the point where LibraryThing and Shelfari gets into business and provides you the interface to accomplish that mission.

[Let's also remember Suggestica [recently reviewed here], which lists reading lists of experts and famous business-persons.]
LibraryThing is older, has a deeper database and more users, which translates into more comments and reviews. Shelfari, on the other side, has graphically superior user interface, which makes browsing a lot funnier. My suggestion: use both and enjoy the next book coming out of these sites.

Lately, the web pioneers gained pace in harvesting the potential of collaboration in several ways. Amazon.com helped shoppers with suggestions from other shoppers who bought similar or same items. Pandora’s algorithm analyzed users’ music listening patterns and generated suggestions for each and every user, based on their recent activity. StumbleUpon built a highly-customized pathway into the borderless websphere, in which you are sent to websites related to your interests and other users’ votes, which you wouldn’t have found by yourself.

As said, e-mails and VoIPs are just marginal improvements over what we already had, with side benefits of cost-saving and convenience. But there are other unique collaboration methods that arose with the foundation of web and its collaboration potential. There are wikis, where users can collectively build knowledge by subject and update it, without any institutional moderation. There are forums where users can share thoughts and learn from each other, based on posting messages by subject. There are blogs, in which users each assume the role of a writer/journalist (just like me here) and share his/her thoughts with the reader universe, and the complimentary RSS makes the world for reader such easier so that they can see each and every update in any blog in one single browser window, instead of visiting one. This development further strengthened the vision of citizen journalism, which was not more than fan e-mails sent to respective newspapers with a slight hope of getting noticed or read, let alone being published.

Back to ratings, and there is ebay’s seller/buyer ratings which makes you feel easy in your purchase and there is getafreelancer.com which erases geographical borders for all your standardizable work need (programming, web design, drawing, text writing…).

There are infinite number of successful social networking sites, where you ‘connect’ with similar souls (be it in music, politics, gaming, health, profession…) and make friends, learn and teach new things.

Among all, there are niche but successful collaboration harvesters like Innocentive, in which scientific-solution seekers (companies & institutions) meet solution providers (students, lecturers, researchers from all over the world) to work on a project and come up with solutions, along with project-based cash incentives. Now tell me, isn’t it highly-outsourced R&D or not?

As it is expected, the spread of this technology is as much dependent on acceptance from consumer electronics moguls as the real-life practicality of their technology.

In the time of this writing, I have requested some White Papers and detailed reports on a sample product via its publicly accessible website. I will either update the post or put a second one after analyzing those. But up to that point, I have to say that I am really excited to read what they are planning to launch.

Last word: Keep an eye on this company and watch closely whether they can close some big name giants as partners…

Apple’s impatiently rumored cellphone (despite trademark case against Cisco, Apple continues to announce it as iPhone) is unveiled, and expected to be on shelves in 6 months from now. I deliberately waited this long to merge two subjects into one. The other post’s content has just been released: Thanks to strong iPod sales, Apple took off with another record 4Q in 2006. Should we bet on iPhone and buy stocks?

1. TechMeme: What is popular in tech right at the moment, in blogosphere. I am not talking about what Wired or NY Times says; rather what blogosphere is saying. TechMeme is the page 1 of tech news, well before they hit traditional media’s attention. [Sister site memeorandum makes the same thing for political blogosphere]
2. Digg: So many news on web, and who decides what is more significant than the other? Why not let the surfers do? Digg gives the power to users who dig in the news and report to the website, so that only the most significant news make it to the home page!
3. AmieStreet: Though not may seem very important right now, this web site (and its business model) may become the standard for digital music. Song publishers upload their songs and these songs are downloaded for free initially. As the popularity of a song goes up (i.e. # of downloads increases), its price starts to increase too. Therefore, community based free-market economy powers the infrastructure, and good bands start to make money eventually.
4. More to come…

In YouTube, you can embed a video in your web site, but the click takes you back to YouTube. With AdBrite’s InVideo, the click takes you through whichever destination you want.

TechCrunch reports here.

The news has become popular on the net very quickly. The YouTube video was viewed 60.902 times in the time of writing this post. Now it is the consortium’s turn to make a press release and put a video on YouTube.

TechCrunch’s first post of Dec 28 really excited me to add some comments on ProfileLinker’s mission. In the current landscape of booming social x-ing sites, you just need to create another profile everytime and meet with new friends based on your profession, hobbies and interests. As there is next to no chance that all of these content can be aggregated in one website (how can one combine MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Bebo, Xuqa, Orkut, YouTube, LinkedIn, Suggestica…), the only thing you can do to wish for enough spare time so that you will try to handle all of them one by one. Partially fulfilling the wish I have made in one of my earlier posts, ProfileLinker is providing the essential service that will aggregate your web identities and handle them all in one browser window. Benefits not visualized in the first place? Suppose that you just broke up with your girlfriend, which converted you into a single and now you can actively seek a relationship. Or you just get promoted and attained a new title. Or there is a new killer TV Series you got addicted and wanna put it into your interests. That is where ProfileLinker will take the charge and help you update your profiles. In addition, it can gather list of your friends and you can cross-link them in other websites as well.

And now, here is the down catch. The only service that partnered up to now is Photobucket, which is not enough to trigger a bulk user movement by itself. ProfileLinker needs your username/password combination for other websites like MySpace, so that it can harvest your personal records. That may be a big obstacle in the future if some decisive social x-ing sites conclude that ProfileLinker’s automated login system is comprimising the security/confidentiality, so they may block the access.

Bottomline, more than being a great service for the end-user, ProfileLinker must prove to big social x-ers that it can add value to their business as well and grant partnership. Then, may be, they may grow as the ultimate source for keeping our web identities.