Archive for December, 2011

Image: Daniel Goodman / Business Insider.com

Joe Weisenthal in action.

I’m pleased and proud to announce that Business Insider Deputy Editor Joe Weisenthal has been named “Business Journalist Of The Year,” by Talking Biz News.

Joe joined BI three years ago. From the get-go, we have been blown away by his talent, mastery of the medium, and extraordinary work ethic.

As Deputy Editor, in addition to writing prolifically, Joe oversees our economics, markets, politics, and general business coverage. His newsroom leadership has played a big role in the success of Business Insider as a whole.

It is great to see Joe’s work recognized outside the company. And the honor is especially impressive given some of the other excellent journalists at The New York Times, CNBC, NPR, and elsewhere who were considered for the award.

Please join me in congratulating Joe and thanking Talking Biz News.

And, on behalf of all of us, let me also take this opportunity to thank all of you, our readers and community, for an amazing 2011. We wish you all the best for 2012!

Here’s an excerpt of the write-up at Talking Biz News:

[Joe Weisenthal's] impact has been dramatic for the evolving future of business journalism.

Weisenthal, who represents a new wave of how business journalism is presented, is a multi-platform user who pays close attention to the stock market and the economic data that is impacting its ups and downs. The sheer volume of the news and information he produces each day for his readers is amazing.

He posts on Business Insider at least a dozen times a day, and he is a major user of Twitter using the handle “The Stalwart.” He has more than 14,000 followers on Twitter and has tweeted nearly 50,000 times. Earlier this year, The New York Observer wrote, “Joe’s a one-man news wire who can sell a story like no other. It’s a freak talent and a rare find.”

Josh Brown, a New York investment banker who writes the Reformed Broker blog, wrote Wednesday that Weisenthal is “the most unlikely blogger to be going toe to toe with Fed watchers, Krugman haters, derivatives experts and currency wonks is doing exactly that.  And there’s no need to search the web when news breaks or data is released — because Joe always has it first, even when the government’s servers have crashed from the traffic. Watching The Stalwart’s evolution this past year has been pretty special.”

He’s also revered by his readers for admitting when he is wrong and for providing news in a way that explains its significance. In July, dozens of them came to his defense when someone posted on Business Insider that he should be fired.

Weisenthal begins each morning between 4 a.m. and 5 p.m., announcing to the world that he’s on the prowl with a tweet that simply states, “What did I miss?” And he typically announces when the major market news of the day has come and gone with a tweet that says, “Day’s over.”

One of his co-workers told Talking Biz News about how excited Weisenthal gets covering news. For example, before economic data comes out he starts drumming on his desk and does this countdown thing (“60 seconds….30 seconds…15 seconds…”) followed by silence while he posts the story and then a delayed sound effect such as “KaBoom!”

Read the whole thing

Image: Coldwell Banker

Kleiner Perkins partner Brook Byers seems to be having a tough time unloading his Presidio Heights mansion; the VC and his wife just dropped the price on their eight-bedroom home by 20%, to $12 million, the Wall Street Journal reports today.

The couple bought the freestanding mansion in 1985 for $1.5 million, according to the WSJ. It has a three-car garage, wine room, and large deck.

Our favorite part is the retro-style pool room.

Visit the CenturyLink resource center for relevant briefs and reports to help you better manage your enterprise. Are you in the process of an IPv6 investigation, migration assessment and planning? Learn how to: Build an Enterprise IPv6 Test Lab in our ReadWriteEnterprise Brief.

How long have you held your current position? If you answered less than two years, you are not alone. It seems that turnover could be IT’s biggest challenge in the new year: keeping talented developers. Network World’s Carolyn Marsan writes this week about the topic and it is well worth reading her story.

This isn’t a completely new problem. In 1980, I took my second job, about two years after I started work at a consulting firm in Washington, DC. My father was not happy about the switch. He was working as an accountant for the same place (and ended up putting in 30 years by the time he eventually retired, yes complete with gold watch that I have somewhere). He thought it was too quick a transition. What would other employers think? Little did I know I was starting a trend in the tech field lo these many years ago

A CIO quoted in Marsan’s article mentions how turnover is his biggest issue: “knowledge keeps walking out the door.” I wondered if what he paid his developers was one of the reasons for the huge turnover. All of his six-person team has been with him for less than a year. But it turns out his particular issues aren’t so simple.

Part of the problem is that loyalty is so over. Back in my dad’s day, you wanted to amass a retirement portfolio, or get more vacation time, or other benefits of being with a firm for decades. Now, those seem old-fashioned, and there are fewer pension plans and more contract workers. Hypergrowth is what matters. Getting challenged, learning stuff. Layoffs can happen at a moment’s notice, making more of a “what’s in it for me” attitude.

The CIO interviewed in Marsan’s article spoke about a very different developer mindset for today’s 20-something coders. “There have been a number of cases where we have had a system that runs into issues, bugs, defects or a major change requirement. We thought it would be a challenge for a developer to own it. But their first reaction is to want to scrap it and start over.”

Another problem is that we expect instant gratification in our work lives. We can download what we need almost immediately from the Internet. If we don’t get super-fast bandwidth and sub-second response times from our computer we get frustrated. If it takes more than a few minutes to understand something, we move on. I have noticed this in my own use of apps recently: I get very impatient when I can’t understand something at first, and tend to drop products that have even a modest learning curve. (This is one of the reasons why Second Life went nowhere: it was a lot to learn at once.)

One often-heard demand is for better workplace flex times. Back when I was in my 20s, I worked day and night sometimes to get projects done. There was no such thing as 9-to-5, telecommuting, or flexible Fridays. Today’s GenY wants it all.

IT has to do a better job explaining the business context of their code and be engaged in what the company is actually doing with their apps. Coding just for coding’s sake is passé, as it should be. Granted, this was true back in my formative years, but it has gotten more important as IT has become more of a distributed operation, and coders are closer to their departments.

Certainly, it is a delicate balance to train and retain highly technical people. But it does seem as if these times have made it more of a challenge. What has been your experience?

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How long have you held your current position? If you answered less than two years, you are not alone. It seems that turnover could be IT’s biggest challenge in the new year: keeping talented developers. Network World’s Carolyn Marsan writes this week about the topic and it is well worth reading her story. nnThis isn’t a completely new problem. In 1980, I took my second job, about two years after I started work at a consulting firm in Washington, DC. My father was not happy about the switch. He was working as an accountant for the same place (and ended up putting in 30 years by the time he eventually retired, yes complete with gold watch that I have somewhere). He thought it was too quick a transition. What would other employers think? Little did I know I was starting a trend in the tech field lo these many years ago
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A reader sent this to us. Frankly, we’re not sure what it means, if anything, but it’s pretty funny and the side by side comparisons make sense in a weird (visual) way.

Catch up on our coverage of the latest twists and turns in the HP-Mark Hurd-Jodie Fisher saga:

Well, There’s No Longer Any Mystery About Why Mark Hurd Was Fired

This Is The Letter That Got Mark Hurd Fired As CEO Of HP

Image: Sent in by a reader

See Also:

This Is The Letter That Got Mark Hurd Fired As CEO Of HP

Well, There’s No Longer Any Mystery Why HP Fired Mark Hurd

Emails Sent By Mark Hurd’s Accuser Jodie Fisher Have Leaked

Apple has an immensely successful self-run retail arm, but it wasn’t always that way. Once, it depended heavily on the kindness of strangers, and those same strangers (third-party resellers) are now bristling at what they see as unfair business practices. The latest example is a new suit by eBizcuss, Apple’s largest reseller in France, which accuses its partner of favoring its own stores with inventory shipments and undercutting its ability to compete for small business customers.

According to its CEO François Prudent, who spoke to French newspaper Le Figaro (via AppleInsider), eBizcuss saw a 30 percent decline in business during the third quarter of 2011 due to stock shortages of iPad 2 and MacBook Air computers. That wasn’t due only to their popularity, Prudent claims. Apple’s tendency to prefer its own retail outlets when shipping new stock contributed significantly to its inability to meet customer demand. Likewise, the iPhone 4S has been in short supply in the fourth quarter, Prudent says.

EBizcuss has spent around $6.5 million getting its point-of-sale system up to scratch with Apple’s very specific criteria. Also, Apple also has taken away eBizcuss’ business customers by offering them prices that the third-party reseller can’t possibly match, since they undercut what it pays Apple itself for the hardware.

Apple’s practices have been the subject of legal action before. MACadam, an Apple reseller that shuttered its business in 2005, joined together with other third-party Apple partners to file a class-action lawsuit alleging unfair business practices, among other alleged wrongdoings. According to both that suit and this new one, Apple has preferred its own retail operations for available inventory since they began opening around the world.

Almost every time Apple unveils a new product these days, especially in the mobile space, early demand leads to supply shortages. According to Apple executives, these shortages result from Apple’s not being able to make product fast enough to keep up with consumer appetite; but these accusations suggest that when new stock does come in, it goes to Apple’s stores and online customers first. That would indeed harm the business of outside resellers, since customers will go with the retailer most likely to be able to meet their needs in a pinch.

Back in February, Dave Greenbaum talked about how Apple’s approach to dealing with its third-party reseller and service partners is beginning to look like outright hostility. This latest suit suggests that the problem isn’t improving as Apple’s own retail reach expands and its website continues to be a hit with consumers. After all, if Apple can sell direct, it will: It recoups more money and builds a stronger direct relationship with customers than through third-party sales. But is it worth costing the Apple user community the benefits of the local independent Mac shop forever?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro

Image: Wikimedia Commons

At age 9, Arfa Karim Randhawa became the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional, a certification the company awards to people demonstrating fluency with its products in IT and development.

Now at age 16, she’s in a Pakistan hospital with a grim chance for survival, reports The Express Tribune.

She suffered an epileptic seizure that caused severe heart and brain damage. This ultimately led to a heart attack, and now she’s on life support that could be switched off “at any moment.”

Doctors said yesterday that there is no hope for her survival.

In 2005, Pakistan’s prime minister awarded her the Fatimah Jinnah Gold Medal in the field of Science and Technology. She was part of the 2006 keynote presentation in Microsoft’s Tech-Ed Developers conference in Barcelona, Spain.

And she was even invited to Redmond, Washington by Bill Gates himself. Upon meeting him, she asked him why children weren’t allowed to work for Microsoft and why so few women work there.

#10

After people finish college, they probably grow (in their professional capacity) about 10% a year – learning and earning double in 7 years. As a startup, you can’t afford to do it that way. You need to invest in them and get them to grow faster. Spending time with them is key.

Auren Hoffman, CEO, Rapleaf, a personal data aggregation service, to RWW’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, September 8, 2011.

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#9

I see the platform business being in a once-in-a-decade transformation. That transformation is driven by the move to cloud, to build social apps, mobile apps, real-time applications. Developers are saying, “Look, the ten-year-old technologies from .NET or Java Enterprise Edition weren’t really designed for this new world.”

Byron Sebastian, CEO, Heroku, in an interview with RWW’s Scott M. Fulton, III, October 28, 2011.

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#8

We’re faced with a real challenge of covering an entirely new coverage area. A lot of the tried and true methods don’t work anymore. I remember being a cub reporter and going in at 5 am to write up the police blotter. There are no media rooms in what we’re trying to cover. No one is faxing us things. There are so much less formal systems; everything’s out there but it’s an enormous mess. When someone walks down the street it doesn’t leave a path of 1s and 0s but when someone walks down the street on Twitter, it does.

Nick White, CEO, The Daily Dot, to RWW’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, August 23, 2011.

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#7

I think one of the real challenges was not knowing what the challenges were going to be and kind of uncovering a lot of new problems here that no one has solved in the past. So, it requires a lot of new solutions that no one has never thought up. It is a lot of hard work.

Mat Marquis, principal designer, The Boston Globe, discussing the paper’s “responsive redesign” project with RWW’s Dan Rowinski, September 14, 2011.

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#6

A lot of us are too willing to accept roles as consumers in society. I understand the economic reasons for that, but I don’t think it leads to a fulfilling life or a sustainable community. The best way out of this is to deconstruct what you’re consuming, or better yet to become a creator yourself. I’m trying to help people see their own creativity.

Douglas Roshkoff, author, Program or Be Programmed, to RWW’s Klint Finley, May 26, 2011.

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#5

There are literally 100 million people who are building software in one way, shape, or form. One of the things that we want to do, particularly in this world of connected devices and continuous services, is to say, how can we make our platforms and our tools desirable and relevant to the broader development community? At the same time… we absolutely want to keep in mind that there is a set of people who we call “the existing Microsoft developer base,” and we actually want to figure out how to move them forward into this new world. When you have a .NET or a .NET code base, how do you bring that forward into the new world? Do you want to run it as a Windows Desktop application, or into the Metro world? We want to make it easy for people to bring their skill set, their expertise, and their code forward into this new world.

S. Somasegar, Senior VP, Microsoft Developer Division, to RWW’s Scott M. Fulton, III, September 14, 2011.

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#4

The concept of journalism is going away. It is not enough to be a writer. You need to be a writer and an expert.

Jason Calcanis, CEO, Weblogs, Inc., to RWW Managing Editor Abraham Hyatt, June 13, 2011.

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#3

It’s astonishing to me that, when we see certain people with some of the quality that Steve Jobs undoubtedly had, we reject them out of hand because they stand against the tide. Their “hell-no-ness,” if you will, gets on our nerves. I dare say, especially if they’re women. And that’s a little sexist.

Carmi Levy, contributing analyst, CTV News Channel, to RWW’s Scott M. Fulton, III, November 24, 2011.

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#2

BROWSER SHOULD BE WINDOW TO INTERNET. IT NOT JOB OF WINDOW TO BREAK THING YOU LOOKING AT DEPENDING ON WHAT WINDOW YOU USE.

@FAKEGRIMLOCK, GIANT ROBOT DINOSAUR MAKE COMMENT IN COMMENTS, AT JON MITCHELL, OTHER DAY IN 2011.

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#1

It became too much of a tangle. At the end of the day the focus on what was important was lost, and what is important are the developers.

Carlos Icaza, CEO, Ansca Mobile and former Flash engineer for Adobe, to RWW’s Dan Rowinski, November 9, 2011.

Mobile users love their apps and that love affair has outstripped their interest in browsers. That’s according to comScore’s latest mobile subscriber data for November, which found that the percentage of users who use apps has finally surpassed the percent of subscribers who turn to a mobile browser.

ComScore said that 44.9 percent of people used apps in November, compared to 44.4 percent who used a browser. That appears to mark the first time since comScore started noting mobile content usage that app usage has surpassed browser usage. Apps have trailed the browser by just a few percentage points for most of the last two years, but people have still preferred the browser until now.

This follows a similar finding from earlier this year from Flurry, which found that minutes spent per day on apps eclipsed that of time spent on a browser for the first time in June. As some of our commenters noted, it doesn’t necessarily mean that HTML5 is waning, and in fact, some apps are built in HTML5 and wrapped with a native shell. But it shows that people’s interest in apps continues to grow, and that there is value for a lot of people in purpose-driven software that can take them directly to what they want or can make better use of their mobile hardware.

According to other comScore data, Android is close to taking a majority of all smartphone users in the U.S., with its market share growing to 46.9 percent in November, up from 43.8 percent in August. Apple also managed to grow to 28.7 percent, up from 27.3 percent in August. The two leaders continue to sap away market share from Research in Motion, which saw its market share decline from 19.7 percent to 16.6 percent over the same period. Microsoft also continues to wait for Windows Phone 7 to begin gaining traction. Its share of the smartphone market in the U.S. declined from 5.7 percent to 5.2 percent.

These two big data points aren’t completely unrelated. Users love their apps and the two most robust app platforms are iOS and Android. As subscribers continue to prize smartphones for their apps, they will increasingly look to the platforms that give them the best quality and selection of mobile software titles. That’s obviously not the only reason to buy a phone, but it shows again why it’s so hard for RIM and Microsoft to hold their own or close the distance on Apple and Google. They must overcome iOS and Android’s app advantage.

I think Microsoft has done a better job than RIM in cultivating a good mix of apps, but developers are going to be hesitant to really commit more than they already do to Windows Phone 7 when its market share is so small. It becomes a tough cycle to break for a platform like WP7 that got started late, or an OS like BlackBerry, which has hardware that doesn’t showcase apps as well as the competition.

Over time, if the pendulum swings the other way and people start turning to the browser much more, there might be an opportunity for a challenger to move ahead if the emphasis on apps is lessened. But with HTML5 still evolving and potentially always a step behind for some more intensive apps, it’s unclear how much advantage can be gained. And Android and iOS will still provide great browsing experiences as well, so it’s not clear that the rise of HTML5 will shake things up dramatically. This is partly why I’ve been skeptical about Windows Phone 7 leaping into second place in the smartphone wars by 2015. It could still happen, but it’s complicated by carrier and manufacturer relationships. And I think it’s important to remember that apps matter greatly, and will be a key factor in determining the smartphone wars.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’re re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

The reason HTML5 (in all its many manifestations) is such a foreign object to so many companies, especially publishers, is because we have gone so long without acknowledging these basic elements of style that they have ceased to be part of our diet. Blogs, which house a majority of the Web’s daily content, are the fast food of today’s publishing society. They give publishers a convenient means for manufacturing roughly uniform, bite-size chunks of content in a long, single column. And in turn, they give aggregators such as Google News and now, even more prominently, Facebook an easy means for repackaging and broadcasting that content to whatever passes today for a mass audience.

The blog format relieves publishers from the tiresome duty of producing covers and front pages and things to make their content more attractive and attract readers. In some cases, it enables publishers to surrender any responsibility for making content attractive in the first place.

There is a prophetic scene in the magnificent movie “Wall-E” where, after having floated in space for centuries in a self-contained shopping mall, the remains of the human race return to Earth. There, upon realizing that food once grew on trees and that trees must be cared for, the people ponder for the first time in their lives just how the pizza and ice cream sprouted forth from these stem-like thingies.

This is what sitting in that room for the Microsoft session reminded me of. Here, Hrvatin was preaching principles I’ve believed my entire career: that an online publication should become functional, like software, and that software should become informative and balanced, like a magazine.

HTML5 restores to the public conscience all those prospects and possibilities we publishers lost sight of when we became bloggers:

1. Not all articles should be created equal. Blogs are conveyor belts for nuggets of text. But a major news story, a feature on how to build a private cloud in your office, an interview with a mobile app developer, and some guy ranting about the stupidity of the blog format, are different beasts with varying life spans. Longer-living articles should be allowed to live longer, rather than being dumped off the conveyor belt into the void when replacements come along. HTML5 offers the possibility of componentized, two-dimensional layout where the Table of Contents can live and breathe again.

2. Publications are packages. The great thing about the magazine was that the reader tended to consume most or all of it. Readers appreciated it as a whole. Blogs are designed to be entered through the middle, into the meat of an article, and then exited through-and-through like a bullet. Even regular readers of a blog find themselves entering and exiting, letting their aggregator of choice lead the way. By reviving an old concept of scaling components to suit flexible-sized containers, HTML5 enables tables of contents to zoom in and out of unused spaces, so that readers entering through the middle are treated to the entire package.

3. An article does not have to be an “article.” In a blog, anything functional – a video, a podcast, an interactive chart – must be embedded in the text, and the frame and context for the functional element must fit within whatever the text allows. This is, and has always been, backwards. HTML5 recognizes, and to at least some extent addresses, the fact that functional elements do not belong in static containers. In other words, apps are not text. So if a publisher wants to at least try to produce a piece of useful software as a feature of its publication, it need not be concerned with the syntax of the embed tag or the requirements of the plug-in.

HTML5 offers a glimpse of the freedom to define the Web publication the way it should have been defined fifteen years ago: as a more functional descendant of the magazine and the broadcast. But it can only do so to the extent that the content management systems upon which publishers have entrusted their livelihoods embrace, incorporate and advance that vision. This is not a certainty; in fact, I fear it’s not even a likelihood.

The CMS of today is a machine that produces blogs, that shapes and forms content to equal-sized nuggets dropped onto a conveyor belt, the length of which constitutes the duration of their natural lives. It’s about as prepared to embrace the full prospect of HTML5 as government is prepared to embrace “change.” As long as Web publishers continue to rely on today’s CMS to define the nature of their content, they’ll remain stuck in deep space aboard the Starship Buy ‘n’ Large.

We bring in the new year with a new Pokki developer contest. Like the one we mentioned in October, you have a chance to win 30 large. But this one has an extra bonus with an all-expenses paid trip to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next spring. All you have to do is build a new game in HTML5 and other Web technologies (but not using any Flash, thank you very much) and have it approved at the Pokki store before the end of the day February 20, 2012. Games will be judged by a panel of game development managers on gameplay, appeal, polish and overall graphics and sound. Besides the first prize mentioned above, there is a second and third prizes (but no trip) of $13,000 and $7,000. Here is where you can learn more about the contest and enter. Good luck! (We aren’t affiliated with Pokki, but happy to promote other contests if you hear of them.)