The Indie Movie Mogul

WIRED.COM: Like any rich geek with a conscience, Jeff Skoll wanted to give back. So the first president of eBay launched the Skoll Foundation to bankroll worthy causes. He established Oxford's Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, endowed three chairs at the University of Toronto, and even underwrote a PBS series on nonprofit entrepreneurs that I helped produce. And, after cashing out of eBay with $2 billion in his pocket, he started Participant Productions, a movie company that had a remarkable burst of critically acclaimed films last year: Syriana, an antipetroleum political thriller starring George Clooney; Good Night, and Good Luck, which revisits Joe McCarthy's Red Scare; and North Country, about a landmark sexual harassment lawsuit. If you notice a lack of boneheaded action, smarmy romance, and brain-dead comedy, it's because Participant's mission was to make not blockbusters but messages - movies that promote social and economic justice. So Skoll is still giving back. This time, though, he may get an Oscar in return.

=> Read the interview with Jeff Skoll in Wired here.

Imagining the Google Future

BUSINESS2.COM: Top experts - including Ray Kurzweil (pictured above with former President Clinton) - help us plot four scenarios that show where the company's geniuses may be leading it--and, perhaps, all of us.

We all know that the company Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded a mere eight years ago is one of the new century's most cunning enterprises. If there were any lingering doubts, 2005 erased them. Google's sales jumped an estimated 50 percent to $6 billion, its profits tripled to a projected $1.6 billion, and Wall Street answered with an unprecedented vote of confidence: a $120 billion market cap, a share price soaring above $400, and a price/earnings ratio close to 70.

That's a huge bet on future growth that seems unthinkable during the postbubble period. But in Google's case, the exuberance is rational. That's because Brin, Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt cornered online advertising: They've made it precision-targeted and dirt cheap. U.S. companies still devote more ad dollars to the Yellow Pages than to the Internet (which accounts for less than 5 percent of overall ad spending). Yet Americans now spend more than 30 percent of their media-consuming time surfing the Web. When the ad dollars catch up to the trend, a mountain of cash awaits, and Google is positioned like no one else to scoop it up.

=> Read the full report and about the four scenarios here.

Craigslist's laid-back approach to success

NEWS.COM: Online classified-ad site Craigslist isn't your typical Internet company, and CEO Jim Buckmaster isn't your average media mogul.

While other CEOs in the fast-paced technology market are driven by growing revenue and guard their turf against competitors with their lives, Buckmaster espouses a laid-back approach to revenue growth and competition.

"I don't really lose much sleep over it," he told a group of online media executives attending the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) 2006 summit here on Wednesday. "Our traffic growth in the past 12 months was about 200 percent. If it slows to 100 percent, I don't think that's the end of the world."

A soft-spoken San Franciscan dressed in a black fleece pullover and jeans, Buckmaster revealed the secrets to Craigslist's success during a one-on-one public interview with Fortune technology editor David Kirkpatrick.

Craigslist, launched in 1995, is a bare-bones classifieds site for people looking for almost anything--from apartments to jobs to dates to baseball tickets. Since its founding, the site has created a flourishing network of online buyers and sellers while maintaining a simple look and feel free from banner ads.

Today, 11 years after Craigslist was established, the site operates in roughly 190 cities across the U.S. and abroad. And it generates roughly 3 billion page views from about 10 million unique users every month, making it the seventh most popular site on the Internet in terms of page views.

=> Read the full article in CNET here.
=> Visit Craig's List here.

RONNIEROCKET.COM Online Store

RONNIEROCKET.COM VS. CAFEPRESS.COM: CafePress.com is an online marketplace that offers sellers complete e-commerce services to independently create and sell a wide variety of personalized products, and offers buyers unique merchandise across virtually every topic. Launched in 1999, CafePress.com is the intersection of entrepreneurship and self-expression - enabling consumers to create their own businesses without inventory or investment and empowering them to express their individuality. CafePress.com manages every aspect of doing business online, including storefront development, site hosting, order management, fulfillment, secure payment processing, and quality customer service.

=> Please visit the RONNIEROCKET.COM Online Store here.

IE7 Beta 2 Preview Available

IE BLOG: If you’re a developer, an IT Pro, or just plain interested, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/ to try the IE7 Beta 2 Preview.

What’s a beta preview? It’s a release for everyone involved in making the Internet work.

Before we release a consumer-focused beta, we want to make sure anyone with a website can look at the changes we’ve made to our layout engine and the stricter user experience around security certificates. Developers should try out their toolbars, ActiveX controls, and applications that host or rely on the IE platform. IT Pros have their own concerns when a new browser is coming, as do domain registrars (especially with the IDN support), network operators, and many, many other groups. The site has some checklists we’ve written to help people exercise IE7 with their sites and applications. If we missed items you think we should call out, please let us know. We’re looking forward to feedback that will help us deliver a great, consumer-focused beta.

Should everyone install? First and foremost, all the usual warnings about "beta" software apply. Also, while most of the functionality is in place, the user experience is not done. That said -- we welcome your feedback if you try it. The next post will cover the best ways to send us that feedback.

And in case you haven’t been there, http://www.mix06.com/ is still a good site to check out.

- Dean

P.S. Please remember to uninstall any previous IE7 builds before installing this one: Control Panel, Add / Remove Programs, Show Updates, scroll to the bottom.

Published Tuesday, January 31, 2006 9:16 AM by ieblog Filed Under: IE Announcements, Developers, IT PRO .

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Google To Acquire Napster

NYPOST.COM: Internet giant Google is considering an extensive alliance with Napster, which could include an outright acquisition, as it plots its move into the digital music world, The Post has learned. According to sources within the music industry, Google has been pushing to align with Napster — rather than build its own online music store — a sign that Google sees subscription services, rather than the individual download model that Apple's iTunes is built on, as the future of digital music.

=> Read the full story in The New York Post here (registration required).

$10M for Heavy.com Video Clips

REDHERRING.COM: Online video portal Heavy.com, which attracts more than 10 million unique viewers a month, said Monday it had raised $10 million in a fourth round of financing led by Polaris Venture Partners.

Founded in 1999, the New York City-based company has been profitable for most of its existence. It had previously raised about $5 million several years ago.

The influx of cash is intended to accelerate mobile content production and a new community-oriented site called MyHeavy.com. The company’s content is currently viewable on its web site and as downloads to devices that include Sony’s PlayStation Portable and Apple’s video iPod.

Unlike the many online video companies such as YouTube and Vimeo that aggregate video contributed by users, Heavy has about half user-generated content and half its own programming, including the popular “Behind the Music that Sucks.”

“Because everybody’s brother and potentially their mother are doing some sort of video site, I think there still is a place in the marketplace for programming that attracts an audience that is original,” said Heavy co-founder and co-CEO David Carson.

=> Read the full article in The Red Herring here.

Web 3.0 by Jeffrey Zeldman

ALISTAPART.COM: Google, with the cooperation of prestigious libraries, has been digitizing books to make them findable. The practice excites futurists but angers some publishers. Of necessity, digitization creates virtual copies. The publishers claim that such duplication violates copyright, even if the book’s content is hidden from the public. The New York Public Library, one of Google’s partners in the project, recently hosted a public debate on the subject. It was while attending that debate that my discomfort with the hype surrounding an emerging genre of web development turned into a full-blown hate-on.

=> Read the complete article here.

When Terry Met Jerry, Yahoo!

SLASHDOT.ORG: With the recent CEO smackdown and Steve Jobs profiled by BusinessWeek, The New York Times talks about yet another high-tech CEO - Terry Semel of Yahoo! An outsider to the industry, Terry Semel currently leads the global company with the broadest reach. NYT looks into Yahoo!'s most valuable assets - technology produced by its employees, and covers many Yahoo! products, some of which, like Yahoo! Search, launched 2 years ago, trail only Google in the amount of users.

=> Read the original article in The New York Times here.

Microsoft Would Put Poor Online by Cellphone

ENGADGET.COM: Looks like it's getting harder to separate Bill Gates the aggressive monopolist from Bill Gates the saintly man of the year. While hobnobbing with the world's elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Gates (pictured above at CES) proposed an alternative to Nicholas Negroponte's vaunted $100 One Laptop Per Child program: cheap smartphones that could be used as computers. According to reports, both Gates and Microsoft CTO Craig J. Mundie talked up the idea of a specially designed smartphone that could be connected to a TV and keyboard, turning it into a full-fledged computer. "Everyone is going to have a cellphone," Mundie said. While we have no doubt that Gates is sincere in his desire to help get the world's poor connected, reports also point out that he was disappointed that Negroponte chose Linux for OLPC -- even after Gates offered an open-source version of Windows CE to power the laptop. A Windows-powered smartphone could get Microsoft back into the game and assist the man of the year with his efforts to help the downtrodden.

=> Read the original article in The New York Times here.

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