mschwar99

They are preparing to fight off 4G wireless.

Here in Austin, Clear is marketing their wireless full tilt: all the media and even door to door (had two salesmen come by). The pitch is that the service is as good as cable broadband (for the "average household") and available everywhere (home, office, kid's school, on the commute).

No idea if that is true yet, but its easy to see how it could eventually be. Makes sense to band together against a common threat.

Aren't the rating agencies a counter example of the success of this model? They have proved that private market "over-site" is just as susceptible to influence of the regulated.

A flavour of this idea already exists inside the government and it has lead to a race to the bottom not increased accountability. Large corps are free to choose whom their primary regulator is.

Interesting take on from This American Life on the effects of the Office of Thrift Supervision's efforts to market themselves to businesses as a regulator.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/382/T...

It will be interesting to see how the iPad will do in the non-techie segment when the market becomes saturated with all the other pad-type products.

In my little world I have noticed that most all of my non-techie family and friends consider the iPod to be the default choice for an mp3 player regardless of any price differences. However, most of these same people would scoff at the idea of buying an Apple laptop or desktop as a waste of money when compared to a Windows machine that could be purchased for a few hundred cheaper.

There is a big difference in the price points of an iPod and a Macbook, and the iPad is right in between the two. It will be interesting to see if a $100 or $200 premium for the iPad compared to a Windows or Android pad will be palatable to the masses or push non-techie people to a non Apple alternative.

Looks like it might take an act of Congress to bestow the authority? Can't find the full text of the decision yet, but first reports seem to suggest the court finds the FCC's authority doesn't extend to enforcing net neutrality rather than net neutrality is itself unenforceable.

And its fair to speculate that this lack of substance is contributing to the ratings decline by making places like CNN boring or immediately interchangeable with the web. Why spend your time watching what feels like "easily" produced news that often consists of summaries of YouTube/Twitter or a split screen featuring spin from either party made of pure opinion and devoid of critical analysis?

There is no production value in either of those categories that would build brand identity or loyalty from its consumers. Without actual journalism a news source is just a broadcast medium for press releases and there is nothing stopping consumers from tuning out or finding an interchangeable service.

There probably isn't a big enough market of people that care to sustain it, but it would be wonderful if a rainbow pot of gold could fund a 24/7 channel consisting of Frontline and This American Life caliber journalism.

I think you are probably partially correct in the sense that a company as large as Google is not comprised of one single personality. The decision making voices in Google could well run the spectrum from those advocating a moral line in the sand all the way to those bottom liners that were convinced that an action like this could well have enough PR upside to offset any potential losses in the Chinese market.

I totally agree with your overall conclusion that the article is silly alarmist. However, even government bodies that don't deal with "secret" information house lots of "sensitive" data whose public release would be a big deal. Departments / agencies have lots of confidential and proprietary business information of the private companies they regulate and most agencies have truckloads of personal data belonging to their constituents.

To say that Google Apps, etc is a new and unique threat to it is silly though. At this point between contractors and private infrastructure providers there is little or no government data that is handled only by government employees.

edit: Also, on the federal level one of the big pushes of the new CTO is for GSA to build out its own "cloud" of datacenters with which to host applications and house data for the rest of the executive agencies. While the government might well hire could services from private companies, the goal is to warehouse data inside a government controlled environment.

A large part of that broadcast was also targeted at the civilian, middle management Federal bureaucrat. They need buy in from the rank and file content managers of federal program offices because that is where the bulk of the non-headline Federal data lies. (not things like legislation - but rather research, stats, etc)

There is very little groc-ing of these types of efforts on that level because by and large the federal government outsourced all it's IT years ago. The people that run the show at these levels are by and large print journalism people with little experience with the web - much less the open web. They are used to completing a project and getting a "web page" set up for it by simply tasking a contractor to turn a PDF brochure into a web site.

The contractors are set up to act as worker bees rather than consultants and there are very few feds at the middle management level that have an understanding of the underlying technologies to innovate in this area without help. The CTO's office is trying to set up models to follow and help the ideas permeate the civilian workforce.

If this is a economic winner, I would have already expected it to be done informally already by hustling undergrads... is it common?

Going only off of personal experience I frequently swapped or loaned books within my social circle. Already had trust established and knew where I could get my hands on them. Facebook app facilitating trading between established connections?

Personally I think it would work better at which ever school you were able to be more engaged with and / or knew better.

There might be some benefit to focusing on a more technical school in terms of the student's willingness to trust a web site. However, I really think the key to getting your first community would be personal knowledge of the school and ability to market on the ground.

Right on. If you are going to focus on a single community I'd suggest branding the site (or at least a corner of the site) that way. When trying to build your first community I think it would earn more trust from people if they knew that this service was being focused at them.

I know that I would have loved to have a service like this that functioned when I was in school.

Can't quite tell how you are going to go about it, but it seems like this type of venture might have the best shot of working by focusing on a single campus at first. A lot of groundwork marketing to social organizations, academic clubs, whatnot in order to try and build a local community whose needs overlap to prove the model and then scale out. Focusing on a single campus or two would make the "ball rolling" phase much more achievable as well.

Also getting going before finals week when everyone is selling books for beer money so you have an "inventory" for the next semester or investing some money in common textbooks yourselves to lend out to get the ball rolling couldn't hurt.

Site wise I can't really see much as everything seems to route back to the home page. I'd say your tag line could use an edit - "Cheap college textbook rentals just got better" isn't really a call to action or very descriptive of what the service the site preforms.

Good luck!

From what I have seen in working with the government and the web I think that anigbrowl's comment is spot on. Many people use tools that are designed for the web or the desktop in the same way that they used to use tools designed for print. In this case just slapping a black line over it works in print, and it does not occur to many people that don't fully understand the technology they use that it might not be directly analogous.

A significant portion of my day job involves working with people in government that have a mental model of content distribution that was constructed during the era of print. Its a fun challenge to help people adjust those models to make things more efficient / more informative / less dangerous.

A government document can't (shouldn't) be rasterized because it would loose all the tagging information making it non-accessible in a 508 sense.

It is however trivial for even a non-technically inclined person to remove the text content through Acrobat's content editing pane.

Just as you suggest, things like this seem to be an example of someone in a large organization not quite understanding how the "magic" behind the tools they use work and winding up with results they didn't expect.

Those categorizations are an interesting way to search through recipes - I like it.

For what it's worth:

I think the UI to the right and the UI at the top of the recipe pages is really busy and not all that intuitive. (things like print / save / search) The options seem crammed together, and I spent a good chunk of time trying to figure out what my options were rather than reading the content.

If you have a busy page I think you might be better off using text than large icons.

I remember the major American news sites like cnn.com and msnbc.com becoming more or less swamped and unreachable by the late morning of 9/11. They came back a little while later with static, text only versions of their home pages for the rest of the day.

As someone who opened a similar business I thought that the ratios that were listed as rules of thumb were failry on target with my experience, but the statement "If you haven't hit the latter mark in a month, close" was crazy.

1.) Your potential customers are creatures of habit and it takes time to change their traffic patterns. Your grand opening is your biggest splash and a key time to get attention, but getting return customers is a struggle to reshape their patterns.

2.) A new business should ideally be properly capitalized to slug out way more than a month. Not only does it take time to get people in the door but it takes you and your staff more than a month to adjust to the unexpected, get your act together, and polish your product.

If your new business is going to be your only stream of income you need capital available before going in to stretch more than a month. This piece of planning is every bit as important as the name on your shingle.

Opening a new and not yet profitable business does suck up your whole life, but if you succeed that doesn't have to last forever. Its after this initial "slugging it out" time period that you can reclaim your life.

"Good tools for non technical people vs Flexibility"

Depending on the group of people using the installation I think this is huge. For user groups that include a big slice of non-technical people web interfaces still have a ways to go.

Lots of businesses have spent big rolls on CMS deployments only to continue farming out the maintenance of content to web techs because the interface "wasn't enough like Word."

Whichever companies develop platforms that Mom and Dad can use reliably will make a mint.

Don't know what kind of management you are pitching this to, but when I have had to convince "semi-technical" manager types I have found pointing to other places that use the same tech helps. It at least gives them a feeling of cover - that their techies aren't using some wacky or risky techs.

IBM, Google, etc etc (http://docs.jquery.com/Sites_Using_jQuery)

Even traditionally conservative (and accessibility obsessed) government web sites are moving to jquery:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/

http://www.epa.gov/region09/

Along the lines of do one thing and do it well: Start narrow but deep in an area that you either know well or have connections to. Excel in a small, defined area in order to build buy-in from businesses and credibility with your audience and then branch out.

Whether it is a core of local businesses, online businesses run by people you know, etc make sure that there is actual value to the service rather than a smattering of unrelated content.

Evidently there is VHS / DVD out there. Didn't find anything streaming, but didn't look too hard. Mr Cringley was nice enough to point us in the right direction:

http://www.pbs.org/opb/nerds2.0.1/

http://www.amazon.com/Nerds-2-0-1-Brief-History-Internet/dp/...

Triumph of the Nerds is great. Hopefully Cringley will make a version for this decade about Web empires.

Very true. Must be the one of first times a major Hollywood studio employed a consultant that had taken something beyond College Algebra.

Fan of:

The headache inducing blue ribbon winner: Pi - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/

The slightly corny but worthwhile: Sneakers - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/