Editor’s note: Last Sunday, we published a guest post by Wharton Professor Eric Clemons on “Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet.” The post questioned a basic assumption that many of us in the tech industry hold near and dear. It sparked a blogstorm and 600-plus comments, most of them filled with rage. Even Danny Sullivan, the normally unperturbable editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand, couldn’t believe that Clemons could be serious, and let loose in his own post. He even offered for us to republish it here (and he wasn’t the only one champing at the bit to write a response).
Instead, we invited Sullivan to present a more concise counter-argument, absent some of the raw emotion that fueled his initial response. It is presented below, followed by a rebuttal from Clemons, and then another round. We instructed both to fight clean, but fight hard. In his rebuttal, Clemons offers this startling long bet: “In five years revenues from internet advertising will constitute less than 20% of internet business revenues, excluding revenues from the sale of physical goods. Winner buys the loser lunch and gets to gloat.” Danny counters with his own wager. These two can’t even agree on what to bet on. → Read More
Here’s a magnificent one-day-only deal on a 26-inch Westinghouse monitor. PC Connection is selling the L2610NW-SP for just $229.95 — that’s a lot of monitor for under $250. Specs include a 1920×1200 resolution, 2ms response time, 3000:1 contrast ratio, 350cd/m2 brightness, and there’s HDMI and VGA inputs. Westinghouse 26-inch L2610NW-SP Widescreen LCD Monitor [PC Connection via dealnews] → Read More
Right now I’m at an un-conference called KinnerNet. It’s hosted by famed Israel entrepreneur Yossi Vardi and set near the Sea of Galilee. Funny thing: There are a few hundred entrepreneurs here, mostly Israeli. And only one has said something negative to me about my post earlier this week about the poor venture returns for Israeli startups that incited such passionate feelings everywhere else in the world.
No one is arguing that the returns have been good for Israeli companies in the last eight years. But there are some legitimate questions about how Dow Jones (whose numbers I used) slices its data and how the numbers could be quite so low. Since 2001, according to Dow Jones, $10 billion in venture investments have yielded only $860 million in IPO and M&A exits. The study of venture economics is at best imperfect, so it’s quite likely there are several big Israeli exits the numbers are missing. It’s like measuring Web traffic. Most Internet companies will tell you their traffic logs report higher numbers than measurement agencies like Hitwise or comScore.
But the Dow Jones numbers aren’t likely to be off by, say, a factor of 50 or 100. And since the same sources—usually venture firms—give firms like Dow Jones the investment data and the liquidity data, the relationship between the money going in and the money going out is pretty reliable, even if the absolute numbers are not. Put another way, if Dow Jones is missing some exits, they’re likely also missing some investments going into the country. In any case, the returns are down dramatically from the 1990s—period. Be mad at me all you want; those are still the numbers.
The more interesting question—and I think what’s creating such passion around the topic—is why the numbers are down? We’re actually going to do a session on this tomorrow at KinnerNet. It’s also the one question I’ve been asking Israelis pretty much non-stop for the week I’ve been in the country. Two interesting cultural answers have emerged that I wouldn’t have imagined. Both have to do with a phenomenon that’s hurt venture returns in the United States too: Entrepreneurs selling companies too early. → Read More
internSHARE is an all-in-one internship job and review portal where students can not only find a internship but also access the reviews of internships at companies, submitted by former interns. Internships can often be a hit or miss in terms of experience. Some companies merely make interns fetch coffee and make copies while others let interns step into the roll of a full-time junior employees. Regardless of how a company decides to handle its interns, it’s always helpful to know exactly what your role will be prior to the internship.
The site’s reviews seem fairly comprehensive, offering overviews (provided by Wikipedia) and reviews of a range of companies including Research in Motion, IBM, and Amazon.com. The site also has a feature where existing interns can post descriptions about the interview process and give prospective interns tips about the interviews. Another cool feature is the ability to use Facebook Connect to integrate Facebook friends and features into internSHARE. → Read More
Last week, a blog post hit Techmeme detailing how Dell had screwed up by not securing Adamo.com for its ultra-thin notebook, which CrunchGear’s John Biggs spotted at SXSW a day before its official release on March 17.
It’s not like they tried: the former owner of the domain name, Tucows subsidiary YummyNames has no record of ever even being approached for a sale or lease of the internet address. Dell claims they had a broker contact the firm anonymously, who was quickly convinced the price would be too high (yet YummyNames leases domains from $750 per month).
The computer manufacterer instead went with AdamoByDell.com but belatedly realized it wouldn’t be such a terrible idea to own or at least use Adamo.com too. → Read More
Everyone knows there are plenty of Europeans already in Silicon Valley, but Web 2.0 Expo San Francicisco provides a reasonable opportunity for those of us on the other side of the pond to invade en masse. Which is why TechCrunch Europe is organising a couple of meetups as part of our particular invasion. How about that – a TechCrunch invasion from a different continent.
The first involves a bunch of British and Irish firms on a co-ordinated attack on the Valley. WebMission09 involves 20 companies rattling around the Valley meeting investors and making contacts. TechCrunch Europe is co-hosting them tonight (Saturday) for the WebMission09 Cocktails @ Ozumo bar, adjacent to the Harbor Court Hotel in downtown SF.
And on Monday night it’s an ad-hoc meetup in downtown SF just prior to Web2Expo. Logistics-wise we don’t have a venue for the meetup right now right now but it’s likely to be within striking distance of the Galleria Park Hotel on Sutter St. Sponsors of the bar are very welcome! To get an update on the venue for Monday, leave a comment on this post or follow Mike Butcher, TechCrunch Europe editor on Twitter, or follow the official WebMission09 hashtag of wm09 – you’ll find us. → Read More
The Rhythm Heaven contest is over! By playing both the kid card and the economy card, Kenneth has demonstrated that he is lacking moral rhythm, perhaps the most important rhythm of all.
“I want this game because winning it is probaly the only way my daughter may ever get it in these trying times for now maybe a little bit of rhythm is what might get us through the next day.”
Yikes! → Read More
If you or a friend’s computer has been infected with some nastyware or a real bona-fide virus, the last resort is always to do a complete format and reinstall. It’s the computer repair equivalent of nuking the site from orbit — it’s the only way to be sure. However, in computers as in Aliens, you may find your opponent is more tenacious then you think. In this case, some security professionals have created a virus that makes its home on your motherboard’s BIOS. I call it the “Chestburster” virus, but I think they came up with something else. → Read More
Earlier today Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake announced the release of her latest startup, Hunch, in private beta. The site revolves around helping users make decisions spanning a wide array of topics. To help users make their decisions, Hunch presents them with a brief series of questions that have been submitted by other members, using their responses to help them make their ultimate decision. It’s a great idea that combines the crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia with services like Yahoo Answers. But does it work? We’ve managed to get our hands on an invite to the service, and have put it to the test.
From the start, it is clear that the site is very clean and unintimidating despite an already-large amount of data. Users are presented with a handful of featured topics on the homepage, most of which have been ‘played’ through many times before so they have complete sets of questions and answers. To the right of the page is a widget enticing users to anwer questions about themselves, which helps the system make more accurate judgements (the placement of the widget is clever – users are constantly invited to participate but aren’t forced to toil through a lengthy initial signup to ‘teach’ the system). And the questions used to analyze users are actually pretty fun (I was asked goofy questions such as “Do you believe in alien abductions” along with more conventional questions like “Where do you live”). → Read More
Facebook updates its official user numbers periodically on a statistics page that currently says 175 million users. They say that they update it every 25 million users, but many of us have long suspected that they may trail by much more than that.
So how many users does Facebook really have? Check out this video (which we’ve clipped below), where Facebook developer Wei Zhu seems unsure how many users they’re allowed to say they have, until someone official steps in and corrects him with “200 million.”
Zhu says Facebook has “250 or 60 million users,” then says “280.” At that point someone off frame says “200″ in an official voice, which Zhu then sticks to. But he doesn’t look like he’s happy about it.
Comscore, which if anything tends to under report user numbers for most sites, says that Facebook had 276 million monthly visitors in February. Active users and monthly visitors aren’t the same thing, but they’re close, and with a closed site like Facebook, they should be very close.
If Facebook has far more than 175 (or 200) million users, why aren’t they proudly announcing it? Perhaps because of all of the speculation on Facebook’s absurd growth over the last year. Specifically, all that growth is leading to outside analysis of Facebook’s costs, and when they might need more money. → Read More
Jonathan Miller, the former CEO of AOL, is taking over the digital assets of News Corp., we’ve confirmed – his new title will be CEO of Digital Media. This will include Fox Interactive Media and other duties. Peter Levinsohn, the current president of Fox Interactive, will be leaving his current position but will remain at News Corp.
This is more than a little ironic. Miller currently works with Ross Levinsohn at Velocity Interactive Group – and Ross Levinsohn was the head of Fox Interactive before Peter Levinsohn took the position in late 2006.
This means Miller is now running MySpace and other News Corp. digital assets, making him MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe’s fifth boss in the last few years.
Miller was under contractual obligations with AOL not to work with AOL competitors until this month. Time Warner vetoed his appointment to the Yahoo board of directors last year under the agreement. → Read More
GDC isn’t exactly our cup of tea, but we did manage to find some worthwhile things to report about. I think the team needs to dye their hair blue or wear kilts next year because that’s what the cool kids at GDC do. Anyway, we’ve known about the GameTrak Wiimote-like controller for the Xbox 360 for some time now and we tracked down their booth to test out the controller. It’s an exact clone of the Wiimote, but it worked with the two games that come bundled with the remote. It should be noted that Microsoft did not develop this device. → Read More
This is tremendous. It’s an application for Android called BarTor that you use to automatically download movies using BitTorrent. You simply hold the G1′s camera to a movie’s barcode, presumably while at Best Buy or something, then the software sends the movie title to your computer, which you’ve already set up to run uTorrent or Vuze. And off it goes! → Read More
Kids! Get ready for back to school already! An anonymous troublemaker leaked these colorful product shots to Gizmodo showing what’ll be called the Dell Latitude 2100 series of netbooks. Specs will apparently include all the standard 10-inch netbook fare – 1.6GHz Atom CPU, up to 2GB of RAM, three- and six-cell batteries, sub three-pound weight – and they’ll be positioned at students, with talk of “a possible touchscreen.” → Read More
It’s getting warmer out, which means we’ll soon all be switching from heavy, dark wintertime beer to delicious, nutritious summertime alcohol. The ShotCarver costs $12 and can be used to create a shot-sized pockets inside apples, pears, watermelons, and more. → Read More
Last October we wrote about how Facebook’s breakaway growth combined with a declining advertising market was forcing the company back to the capital markets.
The company has been all over the place with on record comments about fundraising since that post.
In November Founder Mark Zuckerberg firmly said “No” in response to the question ““Do you need money?”
But in December Zuckerberg told me the company was open to raising more capital, but only at the previous $15 billion valuation:
We discussed Facebook fundraising issues and valuation. He said some of the speculation was true and some wasn’t. he confirmed that Facebook’s $15 billion valuation round was still open and that CFO Gideon Yu was open to new investors at that price. But he denied that Facebook was pitching for new money at a lower valuation. “We’re not actively going around trying to raise money from a lot of different people. It’s more just a follow on to that [previous round].”
All you Twitter addicts stuck in traffic, some good news. You might not have to risk your life any longer sending out one-handed Tweets on your Blackberry or iPhone, while trying to hide the fact that you are doing so under the dashboard. If you have OnStar in your car, you may soon be able to send and receive hands-free Tweets through OnStar’s voice-activated calling system. Andru Edwards at Gear Live discovered the potential feature. Your voice messages will be converted into text and sent to all of your Twitter followers. (Don’t worry if the translation is not perfect, everyone will think you are just using Twitter’s abbreviated style). It is not clear, however, whether or not the system tells you if you are over the 140-character limit.
I can just see it now. Instead of listening to the radio, people will start listening to everyone they are following on Twitter (your Twitter stream can be read to you by the OnStar system). Then you are lost, and instead of using teh OnStar GPS, you ask your followers for directions. And they each give you a different way to go.
This is definitely a sign of the Armageddon. → Read More
We featured Bandai’s weird beer can simulator yesterday, mentioning the company started behaving strangely a few weeks ago. Now Banpresto, a subsidiary company of the Japanese toy giant, adds another odd gadget to the mix: A mini shaking hip that’s powered by USB [JP]. Yes, Thanko is innocent this time.
Video after the jump. → Read More
Here’s a reasonably priced iPod-compatible quick battery charger from Energizer. Buy.com is selling it for $9.99, while most similar iPod/iPhone battery backup solutions are going for more than double that amount. → Read More
Whoa, now here’s a patent that’s actually worth discussing. (The majority of patents are boring, that’s the implication.) Apple filed a patent last September (but just now made public) that would turn give your iPhone or MacBook the ability to determine your identity, thereby increasing its security. That is, the device would have a built-in scanner, biometric or otherwise, that would determine if you’re really you, if that makes any sense at all. You touch the iPhone’s screen and it recognizes your fingerprint; hello, world! You place your palm on your MacBook’s palm rest and trackpad and the computer recognizes you; no password needed anymore! → Read More
