The question of why Baidu continues to outperform Google in the world’s largest internet user-base has fueled much discussion. I explore business practices and cultural factors that may have fueled this advantage in an article for China International Business this month.

Check out the article here.

Spitzer: Now I know why I always hated IT.

“…what really snared Spitzer was a money laundering investigation that was flagged by suspicious activity reports (SARs) that banks have to file with the Treasury to surface everything from money laundering to terrorist activity. This network has been around for a while, but its importance escalated following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. According to the FBI’s charges the prostitution ring that counted Spitzer as a customer was investigated due to some shady bank accounts, checks and wire transfers with big totals ($39,000, $400,000 and others).

You can also find out more about the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, as it’s more commonly known, by clicking on this resource guide on our sister site BNET, which tracks suspicious activity reports and currency transaction reports.

After all, Spitzer as New York Attorney General forced Blodget to eat humble pie en route to an ignominious exodus from the securities industry. But in his new role as tech industry commentator, we’re seeing a kinder, gentler side from the one-time Wall Street stock pumper.

On this blog at Silicon Alley Insider, Blodget opted for a “just the facts, ma’am,” approach and reposted The New York Times’ coverage as well as an excerpt from Spitzer’s apology.

No matter. The more interesting angle in this affair is the role IT played in Spitzer’s downfall. As my ZDNet compadre Larry Dignan writes, Spitzer’s name got flagged during the course of a regular computerized activity report financial institutions now must regularly file.

Bummer.

(Credit:
New York State)

I was sure that Henry Blodget’s comment on the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal would come with a heavy dollop of schadenfreude.

Message notifications pop up on top of your task bar (or below on Macs) and let you know which account the message is tied to.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

The latest build of Twirl is nice enough to let you plug in your log-ins from Jaiku and Pownce (two popular competitors) in order to cross-post whatever you’re Tweeting about. Yes, there were ways to do this before, but this involves no such RSS hackery, and lets you tweak either of those two external accounts in one place. And for those of you who have more than one Twitter account, you can add in as many as you’d like (I successfully added six).

I’m a big fan of microblogging services like Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku, but a number of solutions that have popped up to help you make the influx of information more bearable can also be overwhelming.

Twhirl lets you monitor multiple Twitter accounts and cross post your Tweets to Jaiku and Pownce too.

The one crucial thing that’s missing (and such a tease) is the inability to pull in feeds from the other two services. While it’s nice to send out your message to three places at the same time, it’s a one-way street. It’s also worth noting that Pownce and Jaiku differ distinctively from Twitter in making replies from other users more of a public experience, which might get a little hairy when all three are getting the same message from you.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

As an app, Twhirl feels very similar to Snitter, although I found the selection of skins to be a little more robust. There are a dozen to choose from, and none of them are tied to the size and style of text, or the shape of the window. It’s also got several handy features that the Web front end for Twitter doesn’t have, like a built-in tool to shorten URLs from two different services (Snurl and is.gd), and message notifications that can be tweaked right down to how much speaker volume you want to give them.

Twhirl lets you add in your Pownce and Jaiku accounts to cross-post your Twitter messages to each service on the fly.

To help sort through some of that chaos is Twirl, an Adobe Air-based communications application for Twitter that sits on your desktop and monitors the traffic flow of your friends. Sure, there are similar apps that do this, like Snitter, Spaz and Tweetr, but none of those let you post to services besides Twitter.

Twhirl’s been kicking around since mid-November of last year, and you’ll need the latest version of Adobe’ AIR runtime to have it work on your system. Screenshots after the break.

But Woodlock’s response was one of skepticism, especially considering that ConnectU had already signed the paperwork to settle the longstanding lawsuit. The three founders, who attended Harvard University alongside Zuckerberg, have been engaged in legal action against Facebook since 2004.

Under an agreement that he would not discuss anything with ConnectU except developer code, Parmet produced a collection of documents to Massachusetts district court judge Douglas P. Woodlock that included the aforementioned instant-messaging logs.

Court documents filed on Wednesday reveal that the founders of ConnectU, who claim that Facebook czar Mark Zuckerberg pilfered their business plan and code, are touting new “smoking-gun” evidence against the 24-year-old billionaire.

Documents filed Monday reveal that ConnectU also hired a new lawyer, D. Michael Underhill of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner. The settlement is set to be approved June 23 in a court in San Jose, Calif., which is dealing with Facebook’s countersuit against ConnectU that alleged its founders hacked Facebook’s code to mine its member directory.

Forensic expert Jeff Parmet was commissioned by ConnectU to trawl through Facebook hard drives after a court order opened them up for discovery in September.

Facebook settled ConnectU v. Facebook in April, but ConnectU founders Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra say a search for related documents has produced some results.

Scandal fans, rejoice–the crimson-hued nastiness between ConnectU and Facebook ain’t over yet!

Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Seagate have all recently announced 320GB 7,200rpm laptop hard drives, but Dell is the first to stick them in a consumer laptop, using the Seagate drive in the massive 17-inch XPS M1730.

Most laptops have slower 5,400rpm or even 4,200rpm hard drives, usually between 120GB and 250GB in size. For high-end types, there are 320GB laptop hard drives, and also 7,200rpm laptop hard drives, but you couldn’t get both of those specs in the same laptop drive [dramatic pause...] until now.

“Laptop users want every bit of capacity, performance, and durability that desktop PCs deliver,” says Michael Wingert, Seagate’s executive vice president and general manager, Personal Compute Business, in a press release.

We checked out the Dell Web site and the 320GB drives are available right now, for $50 more than a standard 5,400rpm 320GB drive. Look for these to show up in Alienware laptops next, followed by desktop replacement systems from other manufacturers.

Today the company announced it will be put into use in all of Revision3’s programming–starting with the latest episode of Diggnation filmed last week in Amsterdam. Other Revision3 shows will follow, including Tekzilla, The Totally Rad Show, and Internet Superstar.
In its first version, users were required to download the video and play it back in Apple’s QuickTime player to get the technology to work. However, in the latest model, the self-contained Flash player now includes small overlays that pop-up from the right side of the player and link off-site. There’s also an entire list of embedded objects users can browse. Clicking any of them will skip ahead to the part of the show.

What the technology brings to the table is an alternative to the pre, post, and video overlay models of advertising usually seen in Web video. Services such as Asterpix have been moving toward such a model, linking to information or reference sites over advertising alone. Personally I find it much more useful and fun to use than current iterations of overlay ads, although I’m sure video purists will be turned off by how much product placement can be intentionally packed into videos without them even realizing it.

You can test out the new technology with the latest episode of Diggnation here. You can also check out the earlier iteration of the technology from a show filmed in 2007.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

VideoClix.TV ads show up as small overlays on the side of the video. Seen here is clicking on Alex Albrecht's red laptop, which links up to the product page on Best Buy. Creeped out yet?

(Credit:
Intel)

Intel's Otellini is still confident about 2008.

“What we’re seeing is growing strength in the core business,” in the second quarter and through the rest of the year, Intel Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts. In an offhand comment, CEO Paul Otellini intimated that the biggest fretting is probably taking place in Manhattan (read: Wall Street), but Intel’s global business is still going strong, including in mature markets such as the United States and Europe.

But chastened honchos at companies like Intel would be happy to blame bad news on a souring economy if they felt a need to do so. At the moment, it seems clear at Intel at least, there’s no need.

That’s not to say everything is rosy in tech. While Intel was optimistic in the face of skeptical questioning from analysts Tuesday, storage manufacturer Seagate lowered its forecast for the current quarter. And we’re waiting on earnings news from some of the other bellwethers: IBM reports Wednesday, and Google reports Thursday.

Another factor Intel mentioned: Companies building out on the back-end to take advantage of so-called cloud computing. Maybe Facebook isn’t the only young outfit planning to spend big this year to improve its data centers. Like I said, selling shovels (or servers) is a great business during a boom.

Now here’s the good news: Intel executives aren’t as freaked out about the economy as the rest of us. In earnings news that had to have had many breathing a sigh of relief, Intel announced Tuesday afternoon that its first quarter, while admittedly difficult, beat Wall Street expectations. More importantly, Intel executives signaled confidence in the year ahead.

Another reason for caution: The last time there was a tech bubble, executives at even the biggest companies said everything was just fine…right until it wasn’t. And even the most enthusiastic of Web 2.0 boosters would have to admit this year is going to be make or break for plenty of companies relying on advertising for their revenues.

There’s an old joke about being an economist: You never have to say you’re wrong. You’ve just changed your analysis based upon new data. Right now, Intel is only one part of the data puzzle. If the national and global economies continue to worsen, only a fool would think tech could avoid taking a hit.

Don’t let anyone fool you: While Silicon Valley is atwitter over social networking and varied Web 2.0 doodads, the real indicators of tech’s health are the companies that sell the stuff everyone else builds on. As pundits often said in the Web 1.0 boom, it wasn’t the gold miners who got rich during the California gold rush, it was the guys who sold them the shovels.

That’s the tricky thing about forecasts: You can only go on what people tell you. That chief information officer at a big bank may think he’s buying a truck full of new x86 servers, but if his CFO panics because bad sales reports are starting to trickle in, the servers are going to stay in the truck.

It’s easy to say Intel is benefiting from problems at its faithful rival AMD. But optimists would like to think Intel’s forecast is indicative of continued spending on PCs and servers. The forecast could indicate that while many consumers may have given up on buying a new house, they haven’t given up on buying a new PC. And big companies, even the Wall Street financial institutions reeling because of the mortgage crisis, are still buying new servers.

Crude oil prices are at an all-time high. The housing market keeps getting worse. Your 401(k) is probably in the tank, and, oh yeah, unemployment is up.

The technology has also been a hindrance, which Mr. Hilf says Microsoft tried to overcome by making additions to Windows Server 2008 that might appeal to Linux programmers who want better access to the technical guts of the software. Such changes “will be a big impact to that next-generation Facebook,” Mr. Hilf says.

The rising generation of programmers isn’t being fed .Net and Windows. It’s growing strong on Linux and its associated LAMP stack, as Robert Guth of the Wall Street Journal notes. Microsoft thinks it has an answer to this trend toward Linux. It is very telling how far from reality Microsoft is by its response:

Microsoft hasn’t been a player in the Net start-up world, in part because of the cost of its server product. Mr. Hilf tells [the WSJ] that Microsoft is trying to fix that with new licensing schemes that make Windows Server more affordable for start-ups….

commentary

Well, no, Bill. Such changes are largely irrelevant at this point. You’ve already lost the mindshare war, and tepid changes to Microsoft’s server licensing policies won’t change things, either. Your company’s limp olive branch to the open-source community (”You can use our software royalty-free and without fear of legal retribution…so long as you never make a penny from your efforts”) is worse than insulting.

- The collection and the friction-less, platform-independent distribution of content as the next big challenge for media and communication companies

Other companies have made this leap before him: Amazon, Netflix, Virgin Mobile, P&G, Dell, and recently Starbucks are all moving from a firm-centric to a network-centric organization, building and leveraging their community of users by giving them a voice in strategy, product development, and marketing decisions. They understand that crowdsourced and peer-to-peer business intelligence helps them overcome the “not-invented-here” syndrome, reconciling “inside-out” and “outside-in” innovation. Libert: “If customers cut the red tape and re-connect with customers, that’s making it easier for them to find out what they really need.” Of course it’s always easier to proclaim a new paradigm than defending an old one, or as someone noted on another panel: “If you’re a futurist and you think ten years ahead, by the time you’re wrong, no one will notice.”

- The consumer consuming on his own terms

After listening to him and some other brilliant minds, I felt over-inspired and under-accomplished, ready to change the world or at least my life. It was indeed a humbling experience. And yet, it stunned me to realize that many members of the powerful elite are struggling to cope with the new realities of business and society. The difference between being on top and being ahead, between being innovator and pioneer, became obvious in several of the panel discussions, particularly those that addressed the changing media landscape, the ongoing digital revolution, changing consumer behavior, and the new business paradigms that come with it.

- The “prosumer” as a market force to reckon with

Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo and in-character as enfant terrible, thrived in the devilish charm of the futurist. In a panel on “The New Rules of PR,” he joyfully exposed the insecurity of his audience. It was not so much his co-panelists — some old-school PR pros who bravely defended their profession against his “PR is dead” claim — but rather the ensuing Q&A that demonstrated how disturbing the new rules still are for many who have held the power in organizations for decades and find it difficult now to grasp and embrace some of the earth-shattering changes happening these days. “Should our CEO blog?” — Yes. “How do I stay in control of my brand if our CEO gets critical comments to his blog posts?” — Well, the truth is, you don’t. Just let go. Brands are assets in the public domain. With production capabilities and financial assets off-shored and out-sourced, brands are ever more important as the only remaining indispensable value of a company, and yet they are ever more volatile. In this open-sourced, hyper-transparent economy, your customer owns your brand, and no brand platform, no brand book, no rigid compliance guidelines designed to protect your idea of your brand, can change that. Brands are social funds. Your mission is to raise their intellectual and emotional capital. The creation of brand equity is a cooperative act based on the values that you share with your customers. And, by the way, marketing’s job is to promote these values, not to invent them.

(Credit: Learning by Connecting)

- Mobile as the new container and memory device: 85 years of video (a whole lifetime) will be able to be stored on any new
iPhone in a few years

In a panel on “Business Innovations that are Changing the World,” Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said: “Let’s not forget that the fundamental goal of any corporation is to change the world and not just to satisfy the interests of particular stakeholders.” Indeed, this was the overarching theme of an economic summit that was all about social: social innovation, social media, social networks, social web, and social capitalism. What once was a noble mission is now a mandate for CEOs: the future of business is social, both in terms of raison d’etre and modus operandi. Companies that open themselves up to promoting and fully leveraging the social dimension of human beings in order to create smarter and more effective solutions for social problems will be the winners of this new social economy.

- A surge in broadband penetration enabling ubiquitous content distribution and hyper-social connectivity

- The wisdom of the crowds as a source of innovation (”we are smarter than me”)

“The difference between the optimist and the pessimist is that the pessimist has more facts,” said Jean-Paul Betb?ze, Chief Economist and Head of Economic Research Department, Cr?dit Agricole S.A., in a panel at the Millken Institute’s Global Conference 2008 in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. True as this may be, his statement stood in sharp contrast to the overall vibe of the event: Yes, we can, was the prevailing sentiment, and the overwhelming majority of attendees would probably have outed themselves as fervent optimists, despite an abundance of fact-featuring PowerPoint slides supporting each of the panel discussions (I’ve never seen so many pie charts in my whole life). In fact, the gathered crowd was comprised of optimists with lots of money to spend on the world’s most pressing problems (poverty; terrorism; population; resources; energy; environment; human rights; social justice; etc.) and may well have the power and means to solve most of them if they wanted to. Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and micro-lending pioneer, pointed out: “We wanted to go to the moon, and we went to the moon. If we really wanted to end poverty, we would have ended it a long time ago.”

Lex Fenwick, the CEO of Bloomberg LP, exemplified the old guard’s awakening almost in real-time. First he boasted that he invented email and created the world’s most valuable user community (of 350,000 customers) “by mistake,” then he warned of giving users too much control (”they may join forces to challenge your prices”). Barry Libert, CEO of collaboration software provider Mzinga, nailed him on this: “If you have something to hide from your customers, or you are afraid of giving them too much power, you have a problem.” At the end, Fenwick had converted from Saulus to Paulus, from “From Me to We,” and, in a cathartic turn of events, he admitted he had learned quite a bit from the panel: “Thank you for your insights. I am inspired to make a few changes to the Bloomberg community based on this discussion.”

These trends include:

- The power shift from content providers to media distribution platforms (Comcast, Hulu, etc.)

In a tribute to Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, MIT students erected a huge 20-sided die on campus.

(Credit:
Eric Schmiedl)

Apparently, according to The Tech, MIT’s student paper, the students put the giant die up in the campus’ Killian Court as a way of paying tribute to the late Gary Gygax, who created the iconic game.

This, obviously, isn’t huge news, but it’s yet a wonderful example of people using a little bit of whimsy and a little bit of creativity and mashing them up to make something that tugs the heartstrings.