New TSX site

The TSX just recently launched a new site. I must say this is a HUGE improvement over their last site. www.tsx.com

The Real Value in Sarbanes-Oxley

Informative interview on the value that SOX is bringing to companies. I find this interesting because lately a number of smaller companies have been complaining about the increased cost associated to being compliant. This article really opens up the true value of compliance and why this is a good thing for all companies.

The Real Value in Sarbanes-Oxley

APRIL 10, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Fear can be a powerful generator of upstanding conduct, say Stephen Wagner and Lee Dittmar. But business runs on discovering and creating value. In this month's Harvard Business Review, the co-authors discuss how smart companies are finding unexpected benefits in Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Wagner, who is the managing partner of the U.S. Center for Corporate Governance at Deloitte & Touche, and Dittmar, who leads the enterprise governance consulting practice at Deloitte Consulting and co-leads its Sarbanes-Oxley practice, talked with Kathleen Melymuka about how your company can use compliance requirements to its advantage.

Personally I find the last statement in the article the most interesting:

It seems that a lot of these Sarbanes-Oxley benefits are the kinds of things that CIOs have been advocating for years, with mixed results.

DITTMAR: I agree. CIOs say, "Things would be better if we standardized on a particular application," and the business units say, "Sure, as long as everybody moves to mine." So this is an opportunity not just for CIOs to step up but to get various CXO stakeholders to understand all the elements -- people, process and technology -- because they all have to go together. The president of a very large technology company recently told me that compliance will be the single largest driver of IT priorities over the next decade. CIOs have a very important role to play, and even though they've been frustrated over the last decade, the impacts of IT are pervasive, and companies can't do this efficiently and effectively without properly leveraging technology. It's not enough to just write good policies and processes; you have to have technology to support it, or it won't be sustainable.

Looking back on the web

Catherine over at Weave sent a link to the Internet Archive today.

The Wayback Machine is a web archive that goes back to 1996.

It’s slow and not perfect but fun to look back on early sites. Plug in your URL and go back in time.

The Human Honda

Have you seen the new Honda Civic UK commercial?

You should.

http://84.40.3.164/

Be sure to click through at the end of the movie. The site is pretty impressive.

Netvibes storage module - the web desktop is coming into focus.

After my last post I went to www.netvibes.com and checked out the new 1GB web storage module. What is soo cool about this is that this module was made in partnership with box.net.
http://blog.netvibes.com/?2006/03/09/44-netvibes-welcome-a-free-1-giga-web-harddrive-for-every-netvibes-users

Netvibes, setting the new standard

www.netvibes.com is an ajax based rss newsreader/portal/news site. If you haven't seen it, be sure to check it out. If you like MyYahoo (or things like that) you will love Netvibes. I'm using it now, but it's taking time to move all my feeds over. (grrr)

They just closed their seed funding from some high-profile investors - like Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape. More here: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060322/sfw063.html?.v=52

Been a while

Yes, yes it's true. This is my first post in about 4 months. Been so busy setting up the new company that finding any time to post has been impossible. But I am going to slowly start posting again.

Also, at the advice of a good friend I'm going to consolidate my blogs into one to make things a little more managable for me. Meaning I'll be including riding related and other general stuff into this blog in addition to the Internet and business commentary.

All for now

Google custom meta-feeds are on the way.

If it wasn't already obvious, it is now. RSS is changing the face of the web....

RSS and Google Base: Google Feeds Off The Web

Google...you're beautiful. stop it.

Google is releasing products at an impressive pace. Today's is Google Base.

I can't help but be impressed.

From Google's PR

Google Base is an extension of Google’s existing content collection efforts such as our traditional web crawl system, as well as Google Sitemaps, Google Print and Google Video – all which enable content owners to easily make their information searchable via Google.

Google Base is a place where you can add all types of information that we'll host and make searchable online. Among the types of information you can make searchable by Google are cars, jobs, news articles, products, reviews, and wanted ads.

From Business 2.0 Blog

Yes, it's a Craigslist killer. But it's also much more.

There is a whole dark Web out there that Google's bots cannot crawl, so they want you to be helpful, please, and become unpaid data-entry clerks to fill up their index. Why would you do this?

It seems obvious that people will do this. User driven content continues to drive the growth of the web. Social networks, people sharing content, products, services you name it. It's all about having tools that make it easy to publish and search to help people find what they're looking for.

When you have a little time read this ariticle written in 2002 by Paul Ford.
August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web

Google on a roll

I just read this great article on Google, I've been impressed in the past by what they are doing. This article opened my eyes a little bit more to the real impact that Google is having on the world. Enjoy. What Lurks in Its Soul?

Finally back online

Colleen and I just recently moved, and I've finally got the Internet up and running again. Great to be back online at home. Simply can't get to reading and blogging from work. More posts to come...

Why Search Engine Optimization is Six Times More Important than Paid Search

A great post by Paul Allen( managing partner of Infobase Ventures).

Why Search Engine Optimization is Six Times More Important than Paid Search

A friend alerted me to a great article at searchenginewatch.com. The article explains how humans view search results (there is a natural "F" pattern, starting at the top of a page, going down along the left side scanning for keywords, and then going to the right when something catches the eye.) It also reinforces Jupiter Research last December that claims that 6 out of 7 commercial search engine referrals come from natural search engine rankings, and only 1 out of 7 come from paid clicks. So why are so many search engine marketers and agencies only focusing on paid search? Because it is easy and instantaneous. Search engine optimization requires a great deal of technical skill, time, effort, energy, and outreach.

Finally an arcade game worth the money.

It seems like it's been forever since there was an acrade game that was actually worth the money. Well this puppy would certainly pull a great deal of coin out of my pocket.

A virtual Gundam robot arcade game is demonstrated by its developer team staff Hisaharu Tago during a strategy briefing by the president-elect of Namco Bandai Holdings Inc., the soon-to-be joint entertainment company set up by Japanese toy and game makers, Bandai Co. Ltd. and Namco Ltd., in Tokyo Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005. Facing toward a 180-degree wide screen, the game allows a player to sit inside a cockpit-like room to control a virtual Gundam robot. (AP Photo/Katsumi Kasahara)

Personal Broadcasting

A new photo sharing service is coming online soon. I know, with Flickr being so popular do we really need another site out there? Well looks like Flickr is a couple steps behind this new service called Slide, sounds pretty interesting:

From Business 2.0 Blog: Instead of just being a Website, Slide is an application you download to your computer. It indexes all of your photos, and then lets you publish albums so that other Slide users can see them, as well as lets you subscribe to albums that other users publish.

Really like the idea of being able to set up RSS feeds of your photos (and video) so that people can subscribe to updates. The only drawback may be that it is a desktop app - then again Picasa is pretty good, so we'll see. The service is in beta right now and you need to be invited. I sent an email to inviteme@slide.com, hopefully they'll let me try it out.

The term “personal broadcasting” seems to be trademarked on the site. What a great term. Makes me think of my earlier post about where the web is headed. Personal, relevant content being distributed and consumed. Great to see this trend continue on.

New Video Search Engine

I just came across this and thought it was interesting: www.blinkx.tv

From the site:
blinkx.tv allows you to search the web for video and audio clips. Unlike other search providers, blinkx.tv not only lets you search using standard keyword and Boolean queries but you can also use conceptual search. This type of search is provided by blinkx only, and allows you to enter normal text for which blinkx.tv will return results whose content is conceptually similar to your search text.

Give it a try, let me know what you think.

Google Vs. Yahoo

It’s great to see Yahoo and Google battle it out on who can build and release more cool stuff into the market. At http://next.yahoo.com/ we see a bunch of new tools related to blogging, podcasts and social computing. While over at http://labs.google.com/ they have all things search related, but with one very cool addition – the next step from Google maps - yes, Google Earth. http://earth.google.com/

I installed this when it was still “Keyhole systems”, but it looks like Google has certainly expanded on the original product. You can see all the top examples here.

Speaking of Google, seems that with incredible success comes increased risk. You may have heard over the last little while about an article on CNET that talked about Google’s immense collection of personal data – and what is truly at risk if someone gained access to it.

If search history, e-mail and registration information were combined, a company could see intimate details about a person's health, sex life, religion, financial status and buying preferences.

It's "data that's practically a printout of what's going on in your brain: What you are thinking of buying, who you talk to, what you talk about," Bankston said. "It is an unprecedented amount of personal information, and these third parties (such as Google) have carte blanche control over that information."

Seems that Google is taking their time responding to this article….

Google could not be immediately reached for comment. (Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.)

But what about Yahoo? Considering the size and maturity of Yahoo’s long list of personal services - wouldn’t they be a bigger threat to privacy than Google is? Probably…but Google is still a sexier target…at least for now.

The real impact of RSS

I was reading Alex Barnett's blog about an article that he read on CNet about the "RSS Effect".

Bill Flitter, writes:

RSS, like other time-shift technologies such as TiVo, will change the way traditional media consumers interact with their content. When people get an RSS feed, they need not go through standard Web site navigation patterns that we are accustomed to tracking. They look at just what they want, when they want.

While this is great for the consumer, it can be detrimental to publishers that have heretofore ignored the impact of RSS. Suddenly content that used to take a few clicks to get to on a Web site--providing ample room for profitable ads to appear--can be accessed in one page view, sans the ads. That's a huge change that most publishers have yet to grasp.

Smart publishers need to wake up and smell the RSS coffee because it's not just a flavor-of-the-day trend for bloggers. RSS is a permanent and fundamental change in the way content is delivered and experienced online. If they don't watch out, their Web sites just might die along with the traditional viewership model.

Welcome to the age of consumer-controlled media.

Pictures better than real life!

Recently, just across the lake in Rochester, NY Kodak laid-off 10,000 employees as part of their overall strategy to lay-off up to 25,000 in the near future. The obvious reason being the huge impact that digital photography has had on the company.

As I’m sure you know Kodak has been around for a long time and built their business in traditional photography business. Although somewhat slow to make the change to digital, they have certainly demonstrated a commitment to be a leader in the space, although the losses are still pretty dramatic.

Anyway, the reason for my post is on the Kodak easy share gallery site the opening statement is pretty amusing:

Tell you Story. Share your photos.
Get pictures that look even better than real life.
100% quality guaranteed.

I laughed when I read this. Pictures better than real life? What a joke. Seeing as Kodak is cutting and slashing, I'd suggest adding the moron behind this to the pile.

All for now...

Always know when to sell...and when to buy.

So…been quite a while since my last post on this blog. If you’re interested in what I’ve been up to outside of work you can always see on http://pain-is-weakness.blogspot.com/ .

Anyway, I came across an interview with Nathan Kaiser, CEO of Webshots in March of 2004. Shortly after this interview Webshots was acquired by CNET for $70M, but that’s not everything….

From www.paidcontent.com This is the craziest bit: the history of Webshots is very interesting: Webshots co-founders Andrew Laakmann, Narendra Rocherolle, and Nicholas Wilder sold the company to ExciteAtHome for $82.5 million in late 1999. Then, when the doomed broadband portal and access company went bankrupt, the founders back it bought from the bankruptcy court for $2.4 million in 2002. And now, they've flipped it again, for $70 million, to CNET, out of which $60 million is in cash.

These young guys (all of them in early and mid-30s) are brilliant, and crazily rich now...

Talk about making the right decision at the right time. I hadn't heard of these guys until now, but I have to say I’m impressed. I liked the interview, have a read…

Media RSS

Been hearing some interesting things about Media RSS lately. Yahoo is talking more and more about RSS and using Yahoo services to create, distribute etc. They also support the new Media RSS format (similar to podcasting). As I was reading through these articles I came across a use case written in 2001 (yes 4 years ago) that is probably the easiest to understand explanation of what Media RSS is and why it's so important in changing the landscape of the Internet.

Blogging leads to RSS > leads to podcasting > leads to Media RSS > leads to relevant content delivered to me when I want it. But what is missing? That is the million dollar question - would love to hear anyone's comments.