I obviously hit a nerve with my last post. My index for quality of post has evolved to the number of “you suck”, “broadcast.com sucks”, “You got lucky”, etc posts that are submitted but never confirmed. For this post it was off the charts. Good.

When people resort to personal comments. Its usually a good sign.

Among those I respect, there were a lot of great responses. Let me first say, my position on this has nothing to do with HDNet. I’ve not abandoned the net. In fact i have more than 100 RSS feeds and untold other sites Im involved with.

Ive been inundated with spam on Myspace. Used flicker. Used Digg for sourcing news and laughed at the unending ridiculousness of its posters. Used and posted to Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Veoh, Flickr, Slideshare, used every bittorrent client, got bored with twitter after 7 minutes, signed up for other findme, find you, this is where I am, this is where you are, type app I could find, and the lists go on and on. I read techmeme, techcrunch, extremetech, and tons of other tech sites and I make a point to try every and any new site that seems the least bit plausible or interesting. I spend far far too much time on the net just to make sure I keep up and know whats going on.

Honestly, its just a bigger, more time consuming version on CompuServe Forums from back in the day (Find someone who participated in the OS/2 forums if you want to know about social networks). Only back then you didn’t call People friends, they were just forum members.

I have a ton of Internet investments that you dont and wont know about.

i have loaded and used facebook apps and I have downloaded the API documentation and actually read it. I’m such an exciting guy, I downloaded Ruby on Rails and read the documentation as well. That’s what Saturday Nights are for.

I have bought installed and integrated every imaginable wireless device in my house. I think its fun.

I have invested in and gotten involved with application development on Facebook. Had a serious discussion with Facebook about the revenue opportunities they could achieve if they would license their API for full scale commercial applications on other websites. For example, to me, it would be an interesting and potentially explosive business move for Yahoo to license the Facebook API for their Panama platform. I think the beauty of Facebook is that people for the first time have defined and opened up the “database of their lives”. Which if integrated into an advertising platform like Panama would allow advertisers to truly personalize ads, rather than algorithmically present ads. To me it was an interesting conversation.

I think it could change the way advertising is handled on the net. Each user could have the option to publish certain fields/objects which could be replicated/peered to the licensees of the API and then integrated Into the ad serving application. When the user showed up on the licensee site, say Yahoo Finance, the ad server could present a contextual ad chosen based on the published objects within the context of the Yahoo content.

Its one of many good or bad ideas that are feasible because the net is the plain vanilla boring, never really changing platform that it is.

Guess what. When things go from exciting to stable and boring in the technology world, that’s a good thing.

Call me a cynic. I feel the same way about Personal Computers. Faster processors dint do it for me. Installing Vista was a disaster till I read a copy of CPU magazine and used the OS mods they had in there to clean the junk up. Its sad but true that a 25 year old platform is more volatile than the Internet. It still takes so long to boot that for the first time since I had a Mac in 1990 I bought a Macbook and junked my Vista Laptop. My time is at a premium. The days of being concerned that if I bought a Mac there might be some apps that I could use but the wouldn’t run on the Mac are long gone. Not because the Mac has an Intel processor, but because I cant really think of any new off the shelf software that I would get excited to buy.

Beyond Office and email, I spend a ton of time on the net. That boring platform that ain’t gonna change and is dead in the excitement category.

What do I get excited about ?
I’m excited about Virtual Machines, as I have written before, and the changes and impact they could have on all of us. I get fired up about the continuing decline in flash and hard drive prices. Its amazing to me after all these years of watching drive prices fall that I can buy more than 500gigs of drive for under 100 bucks. That i can buy a 16gig flash drive for not much more. and it still pisses me off that i have to deal with file size limits that require me to manage my email files when I back them up.

And of course I’m excited about the HDTV space and whats happening there. Maybe some people dont think peoples media consumption patterns change when 70″ HDTVs are installed in their homes, I do.

Which brings me to why I said that “The Net is Dead and Boring”

The best way to sum up how I feel about the excitement and opportunities on the net compared to the many other personal and corporate technology options out there is to use a Yogi Berra quote.

“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded”

When everyone is looking for gold in the same river, the best opportunities are somewhere else.

But hey, that’s just me.

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A lot of people are all up and upset about my comments that the Internet is dead and boring. Well guess what, it is. Every new technological, mechanical or intellectual breakthrough has its day, days, months and years. But they don’t rule forever. That’s the reality.

Every generation has its defining breakthrough. Cars, TV, Radio, Planes,highways, the wheel, the printing press, the list goes on forever. I’m sure in each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions “dead and boring”. The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted.

Some of you may not want to admit it, but that’s exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.

That’s not to say the impact of the Internet on the entire planet hasn’t been off the charts. It has been. It has changed the lives of billions of people and it will continue to be a utility to billions of people. Just like cars, TVs, Radio, Planes, Highways, you get the point.

Some people have tried to make the point that Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet is evolving. Actually it is the exact opposite. Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet has stopped evolving and stabilized as a platform. Its very very difficult to develop applications on a platform that is ever changing. Things stop working in that environment. Internet 1.0 wasn’t the most stable development environment. To days Internet is stable specifically because its now boring.(easy to avoid browser and script differences excluded)

Applications like Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, etc were able to explode in popularity because they worked. No one had to worry about their ISP making a change and things not working. The days of walled gardens like AOL, Prodigy and others were gone. The days of always on connections were not only upon us, but in sufficient numbers at home, work and school, that the applications ran fast enough to hold our interest and compel us to participate. In other words, the Internet stabilized. Great software was developed to run on the software.

Just as a reminder to some, Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, etc are not “the Internet”. They are software applications that run on the Internet. Just like MicroSoft Excel is a software application that runs on MicroSoft and Apple operating systems.

The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead. They are dead until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers than the vast majority of broadband users get today.

Few people’s actual throughput to their homes have increased more than 5mbs in the past 5 years, and few people’s throughput (if you dint understand the difference between throughput and the marketed downstream speeds your read from your ISP, you should) to their homes will increase more than 10mbs in the next 5 years. That’s not enough to define a platform that allows really smart people to come up with groundbreaking ideas.

In fact, if you index the expected growth in bandwidth consumption by applications that are heavy LAST MILE bandwidth users (as opposed to the Internet backbone where there is plenty of bandwidth but consumers cant get to it) vs the actual increase in LAST MILE bandwidth available to the home, our net effective throughput to the home could decline over the next few years. The Internet is like a highway. There is plenty of room for everyone to go as fast as the throughput will let you go, that is until the traffic forces everyone to slow down.

For some reason a lot of people don’t understand that concept.

So, let me repeat, The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead for the foreseeable future..

The Internet is boring. That is not a bad thing. In fact its easy to make the argument that its a great thing. That it has become the utility that the people who worked to get it started firmly believed it would. That it finally is the platform for any number of mundane applications that are easy to write and that anyone can use and trust.

Just like wheels, printing presses, cars, TV, radio, electricity, water…..

When we reach a point

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You know how things just pop in your mind from time to time that just make you crack up ? You could be doing anything. Working. Working out. Talking to someon. Eating. When all of the sudden it hits you. Some moment from your past.

I don’t know what triggered it, but all of the sudden I was remembering the last time I got into a fight. A fight where real punches were thrown. It was hysterical….

It probably was 15 years ago. I was in Dallas and we went down to the West End. A part of town that at the time had some fun bars and places to hang out.

It was about 4pm or so. I was with my buddies Ron and Scott and we were getting an early start on happy hour. We pulled up to what I remember as a bar with bar stools that looked out on the open court of the Mall area of the building. Me, Scott, Ron at the corner of the bar. I was sitting, they were standing.

Just off to the side where I guess the Mall part started, there was one of those old recording booths. You remember those booths they would have around malls where you could go in and basically do your own personal karaoke and they would record it and give you a tape of it ?

Well to our delight, there was a guy in one of the booths who decided he was going to sing and record Elvis tunes. Not only was he going to sing Elvis tunes, but he decided he needed to keep the door to the booth open so that a couple girls sitting by us could watch him sing.

As I remember it, he wasn’t that bad. But he was playing to these girls in a big way. Which we had no problem with. In fact we thought it was hysterical. THe more he sang and tried to impress these women with his Elvis voice and his Elvis facial contortions, the more we laughed. The longer he went , the more we couldn’t stop laughing.

Then it happened.

No, he didnt run out and throw a punch. I remember it vividly. He turned his attention away from the girls and looked directly at me and sang to me:
“I challenge you to a sing off, I challenge you to a sing off “

Yep, the guy singing Elvis in the cassette tape recording booth was looking me right in the eye, giving me the crooked lip and singing an Elvis singoff challenge to me. We couldn’t help ourselves. We were laughing so hard we were near convulsions. Then it happened.

There was a guy sitting to my right that I hadn’t really noticed. I guess I glanced over towards him to see if he was laughing as hard as we were. He wasn’t. What he was doing was in the process of standing and throwing a punch (i couldnt tell if it were jab, roundhouse or ?). The dude sucker-punched me. While i was laughing my ass off. Right in the midst of an Elvis Singoff Challenge.

My buddy Ron saw it coming before I did and was up and pushed him back off balance just enough for me to stand and start throwing those wild bar fight type punches. All the while we are still laughing trying to figure out what was going on.

Im swinging. Im laughing. Ron and Scott are laughing. I remember landing a punch and him stumbling but not going down. He had to be pissed that some guy was laughing and hitting him at the same time

It probably wasnt 30 seconds into it that the Cops showed up and had pulled me away.. At which point having to explain to the cops what had just happened caused us all to start laughing again.

Turns out the guy who suckerpunched me was a buddy of the guy singing. I guess he took his Elvis far more seriously than we did.

At the suggestion of the Police Officers, who by that time were trying not to laugh, the 3 of us left via the back elevator…

And here i sit years later , with a big smile on my face, memorializing my last fist fight

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From a wired blog just posted here

ES&S Failed to Disclose Manila Manufacturer to Fed Agency

By Kim Zetter August 14, 2007 | 3:33:21 PMCategories: E-Voting, Election ‘08, Glitches and Bugs

Per the previous post about a manufacturing facility in the Philippines that has been assembling voting machines for Election Systems & Software, it appears that ES&S failed to disclose the foreign facility’s role in assembling its voting machines to the Federal Election Assistance Commission.

The EAC is newly in charge of overseeing the testing and certification of voting machines. As part of that process, voting machine companies are required to disclose the names and locations of all of their manufacturing and assembling facilities. But, according to a letter the EAC sent to ES&S today (pdf), ES&S failed to disclose the existence of the Manila sweatshop that has been assembling its machines for several years, although the company did submit a list of other manufacturing facilities involved in making its machines.

read the rest on wired

In addition, the inquiries from election boards have started.

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I have to say I’m incredibly proud of the work we do at HDNet .

We have great people who work hard to make great shows. Tonight’s Dan Rather Reports is another great example. You can catch a Sneak Preview of the show here You can read Frazier Moore’s AP story on the show here

This is not your basic “look what we found” 12 minute segment. This is exactly what we set out to do with Dan Rather Reports. We wanted to find stories, uncover the news and report it in the best way possible. Dan’s show is normally 1 hour long. Not only will this story take up the full hour, but Dan asked for and got another 15 minutes to make sure we covered the entire story.

Fans of foes of Dan’s, or of any story related to politics will assume there was some political motivation behind the story. There isn’t. I will show you exactly where the story started with the following . There was nothing new to say until the following happened:

“A CRITICAL LEGAL DOCUMENT IN THE BATTLE OVER FLORIDA’S TOUCHSCREENS WAS FILED FAR FROM SARASOTA, HERE AT THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT IN MINNEAPOLIS, IN A CASE THAT ALMOST ONE EVEN KNOWS ABOUT.

THE CASE, BERGQUIST VERSUS HARTFORD CASUALTY, BEGAN TWO YEARS AGO. IT SEEMS AT FIRST A SIMPLE DISPUTE BETWEEN A POLICYHOLDER AND INSURANCE COMPANY OVER COVERAGE AND LIABILITY. BERGQUIST, THE COMPANY THAT MANUFACTURED THE SCREENS USED IN THE ES&S IVOTRONIC WAS SEEKING REIMBURSEMENT FOR COSTS INCURRED IN RECALLING AND REPLACING THOUSANDS OF POTENTIALLY DEFECTIVE TOUCH SCREENS, MOST IN VOTING MACHINES IN FLORIDA.

AN AFFIDAVIT IN THE CASE, RECENTLY FILED, LOOKS LIKE JUST ONE MORE DOCUMENT IN A MOUNTAIN OF COURT PAPERS. BUT THE AFFIDAVIT OF DR. PATRICIA DUNN, A FORMER MATERIAL SCIENTIST FOR THE BERGQUIST COMPANY, WAS A BOMBSHELL.

PATRICIA DUNN’S EXPERIMENTS AT BERGQUIST SUGGESTED THAT MORE SCREENS WOULD GO OUT OF CALIBRATION OVER TIME, ESPECIALLY IN HUMID PLACES…. LIKE FLORIDA.

ACCORDING TO DUNN, IN 2002 SHE URGED A RECALL OF MANY BERGQUIST SCREENS FROM MANILA…BUT COURT EXHIBITS SUGGEST IT WAS REPORTS IN 2003 OF SCREEN PROBLEMS IN LEE COUNTY, FLORIDA THAT WAS THE TIPPING POINT FOR MANAGEMENT AT BERGQUIST, ES&S AND PIVOT.

Thats the start of it. From there Dan will take you to the factories in Manilla where voting machines were made to show you why and how there will problems. He interviews the people involved who raised the issues, to no avail. Then he follows the problems from Manilla to Minnesota and beyond.

And thats just the start of the story.

check it out tonight at 8pm or 11pm EST

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I’m far far from being a financial genius. i try to get partners who run the numbers and deal with details. My business strength is in understanding where technology is going (in the areas I pay attention to), what the business applications of that technology are and most importantly, how to sell them.

Thats a polite way of saying that I’m not a details guy.

I mention this because as they say, “The Devil is in the Details”, and I have no idea how to make happen what I’m about to propose. Nor do I know if there are specific laws or common sense “rules of the marketplace” that make this idea just plain stupid. Who knows. What I do know is that I’m curious about whether this would work and there is no better way to open an idea to criticism or support than by posting it on my blog. So here goes.

In the residential real estate world, the concept of buying a house is simple. You pick the house, negotiate a price, then agree to a payment arrangement.

The payment arrangement options are pretty straightforward.

You can pay for it with cash.
You can borrow money to pay for whatever amount that you cant or choose not to pay on the house. The payment terms are then set between you and the lender

This has worked well for a long time. A successful purchase of the house can be quickly defined as being able to make the payments you have committed to make, under the terms you have agreed to, until the house is paid off, all while gaining the utility of living in the house.

The problem with this approach is that when things go wrong and you can’t make the payments the “solutions” are very binary.
1. You find a way to make your lender happy.
2. Your house is sold in an effort to satisfy your debt to the lender.

The binary nature of residential real estate financing also lends itself to being an attractive market for “sharks”. We dont call the houses we live in “assets”, we call them homes. They are very personal and important to us. Which in turn clouds our judgement. People who are at risk of losing their homes get desperate and take measures that aren’t necessarily in their best interests just to save their homes and their families from grief.

There has to be a better way to protect homebuyers on the downside.

Lets contrast the financing process of individual homebuyers with funding in the business world. Businesses have any number of ways of raising capital for corporate purposes but they basically can be boiled down to two:

They can raise money via debt.

They can raise money via equity sale.

Debt resolution in the business world is just as binary as it is in residential real estate. If you can’t pay the debt, you get foreclosed on and everyone probably goes home unhappy.

Which is exactly why , rather than borrowing money, most startups and growing businesses turn to the equity sale of some percentage of their company to raise capital. Need confirmation of this ? Look at the number of bonds available on national exchanges vs the number of stocks for sale on exchanges . The number of stocks is far greater than bonds and thats on the listed exchanges. Throw in the OTC and Pink Sheet markets and the numbers dwarf debt offerings even more dramatically.

Which leads to the question of…

Why can’t home owners sell some percentage of equity in their homes on a listed exchange ? Why can’t I
“Take My House Public ?”

Why not create a market or exchange where homeowners can sell equity in their homes ?

The rules could be very eimple
1. The house is appraised by a company approved by the exchange that lists the houses.
2. “Shares” are set with a Par Value of 10pct of the appraised value. For a 100k dollar house, there are 10 shares potentially available. However at no point in time can more than 40pct of the “shares” in a home be sold. We dont want the opportunity for “hostile takeovers”
3. The price of the shares will of course be set by the market. In a hot market it will be set above par, in a tough market like today, it will sell below Par.
4. All Proceeds from the sale of shares MUST be used to pay down any debt on the home.

This is the key element of this approach. By selling equity in a home, the buyer gets an asset based security that will move up and down with the market. If this market is big enough, there should be enough liquidity to move in and out of positions.

The seller receives cash that can be used to pay down the debt and thereby reduce his/her monthly payments. The seller loses a part of the upside if the market for the home improves and prices go up, but thats a small price to pay for not going into foreclosure.

Beyond creating liquidity options for individuals in the housing market, which i think is a good thing, I think this will also reduce the volatility in the market. Despite the best efforts of the residential Real Estate industry, no one ever really knows what their house is worth until you try to sell it. This exchange listing approach will certainly make for better information available for the market, which in turn will also reduce the volatility.

It will also increase the options of homeowners who have paid off their homes to acquire capital for personal uses. If a homeowner has completely paid off his/her home and wants to raise money for whatever purpose, a vacation, a car, education, whatever, rather than taking on debt , they could get their home appraised, have the
option of selling equity in my home that I would not be obligated to pay back. An option that would create a significant flow of capital back into the hands of consumers

How can this actually come together ?

It wouldn’t be easy. It would probably take the country’s biggest banks working together to create an exchange that develops the public market for home equity one city or region at a time. They would have to identify a means to safely set values so that Post IPO price the share pricing was stable. There would have to be provisions set for what happened when a home was sold. Shareholders would have to be paid their share of the salesprice upon closing.

There are thousands of things that i haven’t thought of that would make or break this idea, but I think at its most basic, the concept is sound. However one thing I am sure of, this approach would reduce the Boom Bust cycles of residential real estate and the dramatic impact they have on our economy

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I was sitting in a meeting the other day and decided I needed to take some notes . My memory isn’t the worlds best, so if I think there is something worth memorializing, I will take notes.

Typically I will just use my PDA or Laptop . I can touch type pretty fast. I can thumb type on my Sidekick almost as fast as I type using all 10.. Then when Im done, I email the notes to myself and I have a permanent, searchable record of the meeting. I’ve been doing this for so long, I can pretty much type as fast as I think

This particular meeting for some reason I couldnt go the digital route so I can had to go 1900s and actually handwrite my notes.

What a disaster. I couldn’t write.

I literally couldn’t take notes fast enough because as I wrote, I realized I couldn’t read my own writing. Not only could I not read my own writing, when I tried to slow down so that everything would be legible, I realized that actually writing each letter as part of a complete word was actually difficult

I had forgotten how to write. Sure i could fight it out by going slowly. Very slowly. But any skills I had that used to enable me to quickly write what I was hearing or what my thoughts were, had left me.

Am I alone ? SHould I start a self help group ? Should I take a class with 5 year olds to relearn ???

Is writing with a pen on a pad of paper not like riding a bike ??

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You did it. Not only did you tie the record, but you have done it on your own terms.

No amount of discussion can minimize how difficult that must have been for him No disrespect to Hammering Hank. I remember exactly where I was April 8Th 1974. Hank Aaron had the mountains of his generation to climb to pass Babe Ruth. He took on segregation, integration and prejudice to pass Babe Ruth.. There is not an accomplishment in sport that can reduce the importance of what Mr Aaron accomplished. He will always be revered.

Barry Bonds shouldn’t be revered for his accomplishments, but he certainly should be respected as one of Baseball’s all time best. Barry Bonds should be appreciated for being the most prolific home run hitter in baseball history when he breaks the record.

Every generation of sport has its own unique fingerprint of change. Every generation of sport has traditions that have been retained and those that have been lost. For some reason there are a lot of baseball fans who seem not to recognize the challenges of each generation. That only the “gold old days” mattered.

The PR problem Barry Bonds faces is that all baseball fans know far less about players from their past than they think they do, and that allows them to think far more fondly of them.

Those of us who grew up pre cable, satellite and Internet don’t know nearly as much about our sports icons from the early ’80s and before as we think we do. Back then we got the game of the week and Sports Illustrated as our source of national baseball information.

Barry Bonds has had the misfortune of winding up his career and tying the record in the generation of Massive Media. The last 10 years , with the advent of satellite TV, digital cable, the Internet and even camera phones, have placed every minute of Barry (and most prominent figures) lives under continuous scrutiny. Unlike the legendary stories in baseball history that were never made public at the time they happened to protect the player involved, today there is a “bounty of fame” on any person or outlet who can catch Barry in anything that can be sold to an Internet site or any of the sports TV networks across the country.

The escalation of scrutiny, even since late 90’s annual Home Run Derbies , has been dramatic. Everything is on video these days.

Barry, rather than taking the “film me please, I’m a celebrity” approach to media scrutiny, has done everything he possibly can to live his life on his own terms. He hasn’t been media friendly. He has been family friendly… to his own family.

I respect that to no end.

In 25 years any controversy associated with Barry’s quest for the record will be long forgotten. In 2032, For all the video available on demand that would allow the most die hard fan to relive these 2007 moments as if it were happening in real time, they wont. In 2032 there will be something new that captures our imagination and attention while we yearn, like every generation before us, for the Good Old Days when we watched the great players of our youth, Bonds, Arod, Glavine reach milestones that gave us something to cheer about.

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