Coop's Corner

After the list of losers they pawned off in the lead-up to the Internet bust, I nearly always distrust the pronouncements of venture capitalists about the future. Of course, why hold a grudge? Isn't that the price you pay in a hit-and-miss business? For every few Webvans, there's always a Google to convince the world that these guys really know how to read the tea leaves better than most folks. I suppose so.

So it was that I was especially curious when the Churchill Club earlier this week invited some of the A-List venture capitalists in Silicon Valley for a panel discussion on the top ten tech trends. (Eric Savitz kept good notes in his recap of the evening.) Most of what got offered up was unexceptional, but one comment in particular from Josh Kopelman may turn out to be one of the most prescient forecasts of the year. I'm actually hoping he's wrong because Kopelman's prediction scares the pants off me.

Vinod Khosla: Privacy is a red herring

Kopelman presented a scenario for the rise of the "implicit" Internet. I'm simplifying, but he was referring to the vast web of personal data that until now has existed relatively undisturbed in different corners of the data world. For example, you may have made a reservation over the Internet one day, or bought a book from an online reseller on another. But that that data is going to get collected from heretofore separate "silos" as ... Read more

OK, I'm having a little sport here. And no offense to "The Scobleizer," but Twitter's been down for much of Thursday and, truth be told, civilization, as we know it, continues.

I was debating whether to even post this update considering the service's flaky performance of late. It's reached the point where Twitter's consistently going down. Looking in from the outside, you have to assume that management has a sense of urgency about resolving these glitches, once and for all. Why it's taking seemingly forever to get on top of the problem is only hastening the departure of the Twitterati to alternatives like FriendFeed, which has reported no such funkiness.

Come on, guys. This is getting old fast.

***
Update 4:05 Pacific Time: Twitter's finally back up. Again looking forward to Scoble-grams as I write these words.

Had it not been for Jerry Yang and Tim Koogle, Mark Cuban would be just another middle-aged rich guy. Not George Soros-rich, but with enough shekels in the bank to spend a life of leisure.

Hey guys, I'm baaaack

In 1999, he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for the princely sum of $5.04 billion in stock (and then was smarter than the average bear by cashing out before the bubble burst). Up until then, Cuban was working with the proceeds from his 1990 sale of MicroSolutions, a computer reseller, for $6 million. Not bad, but not enough to buy a professional basketball team.

Now Cuban is part of the 10-person slate that Carl Icahn is proposing to take over Yahoo's board. Talk about a smack in the head! Of course, Cuban's a sharp tack and knows the ins and outs of the Internet business better than most. Still, maybe it's just me, but talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Yeah, I know, it's business, not personal.

It wasn't exactly Minority Report but Bill Gates' technology demonstration at the company's CEO Summit earlier Wednesday may be remembered years from now as a harbinger of the end for the keyboard and mouse era. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon enough. (Cue Winston Churchill here about how this is not the end, the beginning of the end, but perhaps, it's the end of the beginning.)

As Gates demoed a 4-foot-by-6-foot prototype called TouchWall, there was little resemblance to Tom Cruise's futuristic data juggling in that 2002 sci-fi performance as he moved 3D screens around with simple hand gestures. Making what is likely his last appearance as master of ceremonies at this annual conclave of corporate heavy hitters, Gates used the show-and-tell session to offer a prediction.

(Credit: CNET News.com)

In the future, he said, all surfaces will feature "an inexpensive screen display capability and software that sees what you're doing there so that it's completely interactive."

I've been watching Gates give performances like these since 1985 and it's wise to treat his predictions with the appropriate grain of salt. When it comes to Microsoft, the concept of vaporware is not entirely foreign. Still, I found the demo interesting when you consider the topic against the backdrop of what Microsoft is developing in Windows 7. In fact, a couple of months ago, Gates hinted at future support for touch-based gestures and speech recognition in a the post-Vista OS.

"The likelihood ... Read more

Jerry Yang was able to rope-a-dope Steve Ballmer. But he's never had to square off against a royal pain in the ass like Carl Icahn.

This afternoon, Icahn, a billionaire with a God complex--or is that repetitive?--wrote a new chapter in this deliciously goofy Microhoo saga when he launched plans for a proxy contest to challenge Yahoo's famously feckless board of directors with his own handpicked nominees.

Talk about jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

The problem for Yang is that he's over-matched. We're talking about a geek going up against one of the most brilliant, cold-hearted bastards this side of T. Boone Pickens (and I meant that as a compliment.) Icahn basically wrote the book on greenmail when he was squeezing sundry CEO testicles as a corporate raider in the 1980s. An abbreviated list of corporations he's had his way with include Trans World Airlines, B.F. Goodrich, Phillips Petroleum, US Steel, Texaco, Goodrich-Uniroyal, RJR Nabisco, General Motors--and more recently--Time-Warner.

Yo Jerry, I can take down Gordon Gekko with one hand tied behind my back

(Credit: The Icahn Report)

In a recent profile, Fortune labeled Icahn "The Hottest Investor in America." Aside from the typically Madison Avenue hyperbole, the description is apt. Icahn, who has a brilliant knack for uncovering undervalued companies, has an important ally in this looming proxy fight: the timing's all in his favor.

After infuriating investors by walking away from the sure payday that Ballmer ... Read more

1938 Media impressario Loren Feldman admittedly is an acquired taste. If you're on the receiving end of one of his skewering rants, I doubt you'll judge his monologue to be gut-busting hilarious. But the guy's fresh, and I confess to being a fan boy.

But would you pay for the privilege of knowing the latest bit of happenstance pissing him off?

(Credit: Loren Feldman)

We're about to find out. Starting Tuesday, Feldman will begin charging 99 cents to people who want view some of his videos and posts. Here's the link to his video entry where Feldman outlines his thinking.

I have no idea whether he can make a side business charging for the occasional post. Neither, apparently, does Feldman, who acknowledges swimming against the tide.

"Why am I doing this? Because I want to. It's an experiment. I know that most of 99 percent of you aren't going to pay 99 cents ever. So it goes. But you know what? Content has to be paid for at some point."

He may have picked a propitious time to put that proposition to the test. In 2001, the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said that half of the people it surveyed said they looked for free alternatives when a site they used asked them to pay for content. "Just 12 percent of them pay for the service and the rest just decide to stop getting that content or service from an online source." ... Read more

Consider me second to none in embracing Twitter for all that it's worth. But the service's publicized brown-outs naturally raise questions about backup plans in case of further outages. The Gillmor Gang, in particular, has into this question, but the most searching critique I've come across comes from Echovar. It's worth reading the entire post. Here are a couple of excerpts:

It must be an odd thing to run a company in the midst of a debate around the idea of nationalizing your core technology. In a Venezuelan moment, the Gillmor Gang considers the idea that Twitter has become so important that our national security requires nationalizing its technical infrastructure. In a two-part discussion about an open mesh / cross-service dashboard mashups and the roll of Twitter as a sort of fundamental glue, the question surfaced of breaking up the centralized Twitter monopoly."

The idea of building competitors to Twitter on the same platform, or redistributing Twitter to multiple players reminds me of the idea that New York City should be rebuilt in Ohio because it would be cheaper. Or perhaps we could distribute a little of New York City in every state of the Union. New York City is what it is because of the people who live and visit there. Building another New York City in Las Vegas doesn't result in the phenomenon that is New York City.

This ... Read more

An unexpected bump in the head landed yours truly in the emergency ward recently, and when they wheeled me up to the CAT scan, I handed over my cell phone.

"Oh, we don't need that," the attendant told me. "We only take iPhones."

Wow, I thought. Of all places to land a scoop!

"You mean there's something about the device that interferes with the picture process?"

"No," the attendant laughed. "We're just looking for iPhones, not that other stuff."

Just around the same time, Consumer Reports announced the results of its findings that Apple had the best technical support in the computer industry. Talk about the rich getting richer.

These are obviously boom times for Apple. But fortunes are fleeting in the computer business and it wasn't so long ago that Dell was the PC maker with all the sizzle. In fact, in October 1997, Michael Dell was at a Gartner symposium, and he was asked what he would do if he owned Apple (which then was struggling). "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," he said. (Dell was responding to a verbal pot shot from Steve Jobs, who was quoted previously saying that Dell makes "un-innovative beige boxes.")

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, Jobs wasn't entirely wrong. Dell's bigger problem wasn't that it was unexciting. Rather, the company got sloppy as it grew into the world's biggest PC manufacturer (nowadays, it's No. ... Read more

From time to time, I'm going to open up this space to guest writers with an interesting point of view. This week, Gregory L. Rosston is taking a turn in the spotlight. Rosston is the deputy director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and of the Public Policy program at Stanford University. He served as the deputy chief economist of the Federal Communications Commission from 1994 to 1997.

The Federal Communications Commission is about to continue its anticompetitive policy of protecting incumbent telecommunications providers at the expense of consumers. The FCC has one focus--making consumers better off by forcing suppliers to compete. Yet, nearly every recent FCC decision seems to promote incumbents instead of consumers. Next up is the FCC's proposal to cap universal service funding for new entrants, while maintaining excessive subsidies for incumbent telephone companies.

Ever look at the details on your telephone bill? It shows some, but not nearly all of the money you pay for inefficient "high-cost" subsidies to telephone companies. It's about 10 percent of your bill. That adds up to more than $4 billion per year to subsidize telephone service in certain locations. The costs of this system could grow substantially if Congress or the FCC votes to include more advanced services. The FCC has a chance to revamp the system to inject competition, or even better to eliminate completely the inefficiencies.

Why do we give a $4 billion gift to "rural" incumbent telephone companies? Because they have high ... Read more

It was simply happenstance but this headline crossed the wire just as I was boring a colleague with another doom-and-gloom update on the skyrocketing price of energy.

"Fortune 500 Visionaries Speak at Woodside Private Home Theatre for Discussion on Smart Energy & Grids."

Telecommuting's best argument

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Turns out that Scott McNealy and Jim Rogers of Duke Energy are headlining the event next week along with CEO Echelon Ken Oshman to celebrate what's being billed as "20 Years of LonWorks Technology."

For anyone unfamiliar with Echelon, the company's embedded control technology fosters "smart energy" applications in homes and businesses. If we're going to figure out how to thrive in a future annotated by increasingly expensive energy costs, tech companies like Echelon will take the lead. Couldn't happen fast enough, because the near term is looking bleak. The price of crude pushed past the $126 a barrel line Friday for the first time. For what it's worth, Goldman Sachs predicts that oil prices may hit $150 or even $200 a barrel in the next six months to two years.

All this is making IBM's Mike Rhodin look more prescient by the day.

A couple of months ago, Rhodin, the general manager of IBM's Lotus group, gave a speech at the VoiceCon conference where he talked about the emergence of the "virtual workplace," in which employers increasingly let their people telecommute. (Here's a link to the press release where IBM ... Read more