The Gillmor Gang was today. We started things off with a nice talk about Rajeev Motwani and his contributions to the community. That was nice.
Then Leo Laporte started talking about the Palm Pre, which launches today. That part of the show, which turned as ugly as a show can turn, is in the video clip embedded above. The unedited audio file of the show is here, you can listen to the pre show banter and the first bit about Motwani before the train wreck.
I ask Leo whether he bought the Pre or got it free and in advance of the launch, which I think is relevant because Palm is being very picky about who they give them out to. We were promised one but it wasn’t delivered. We suspect our critical coverage may be the reason, one other blogger I spoke to is in the same situation. Many of the pre-launch reviews are overtly positive, and we’re comparing those reviews where the journalist got a free Pre in advance of launch to the less cheerful ones written by people who had to pay for the device. Getting a high profile device in advance is a huge advantage, and is a conflict of interest that should be disclosed in our opinion. But the catch is this - as long as Palm sends out a letter with the device asking for it back in a week, it isn’t considered a financial conflict of interest. The fact that few people ever return them is rarely brought up.
Anyway, Leo lost it and shut down the show. I’ve had a lot of interactions with him and they’ve always been positive. Or at least I thought so. I wasn’t watching the video live during the show and I really thought Leo was joking until the very end (as did Steve Gillmor and Loren Feldman, who were chuckling in the video). My “what are you going to do about it” comment doesn’t sound so great in hindsight. But I really did just think he was joking around.
We’re under so much scrutiny at TechCrunch (read the last two paragraphs here) that i guess I don’t always stop and think about the fact that most journalists are never questioned, and don’t react particularly well when they are. We were once, for example, accused of a conflict of interest when we wrote a story about a product and I happened to be a “friend” on Facebook with the PR person for the company. So you could say I’ve had to develop a thick skin when it comes to questions about conflicts of interest. And I don’t consider asking a journalist to disclose if a device he says he loves was given to him for free or not as being a particularly trollish thing to do.
I’m bummed this has to be an issue on a day that we’re all mourning the loss of such an important member of our community. And I’m sad that my professional relationship with Leo is apparently over. I apologize to you, Leo. I didn’t mean to imply that you were being unethical. I just think that, given the story that’s brewing about favoritism at Palm, it was important to disclose whether you paid for that Pre, and/or got it in advance.
I think I’ll go take Laguna for a walk now and try this blogging thing again tomorrow. I know a lot of you are going to be commenting strongly on this. Comment moderation is going to be tight on this post, so keep it constructive.
Update: comment from Leo below:
Thanks for the post, Mike. Apology accepted. Now that I know what was going on in your mind, I apologize to you.
There seems to be something about the Gillmor Gang that just engenders over the top passion. I'm embarrassed by my overreaction. Peace.
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In early June 2007, Palm was teetering on the edge of obscurity. Their flagship Treo product line had gone stale, numbers were down across the board, and rumors of a sale were abound. On June 4th, 2007 it was announced that Elevation Partners had purchased a 25% equity stake of Palm for $325 million. Flash forward to today; just two years later (almost to the day), Palm has launched the Pre, a phone which managed to nab the attention of just about every blog and blog reader out there.
So what changed? What had that new-found $325 million bought them? Talent. Lots and lots of talent - from their competitors, no less. With a good amount of lucky timing and some decent salary proposals, Palm managed to snatch up at least 8 people who were just oh-so-damn good at what they do, ending up with the Palm Pre and webOS as a result.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin have always given Professor Rajeev Motwani significant credit for helping them create what would eventually become Google. Today, as I say my personal goodbye to the man who helped so many people in our community, I’m also spending some time going back and reading some of the early papers that Rajeev co-authored describing how PageRank could become the basis for a new kind of search engine.
In a 1998 paper called “What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket” Brin, Motwani, Page and Terry Winograd say “…we have developed a global ranking of Web pages called PageRank based on the link structure of the Web that has properties that are useful for search and navigation..we have used PageRank to develop a novel search engine called Google, which also makes heavy use of anchor text.”
An even earlier paper in 1998 that the four co-authored called “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web” went into much more detail on PageRank. “In this paper, we take advantage of the link structure of the Web to produce a global “importance” ranking of every web page. This ranking, called PageRank, helps search engines and users quickly make sense of the vast heterogeneity of the World Wide Web.”
Today much of what they wrote appears as little more than common sense. But in 1998 it was a revolutionary way of thinking. AltaVista, the leading search engine at the time, turned down the chance to buy Google for $1 million, saying spam would make PageRank useless. Yahoo also declined to purchase Google, supposedly because they didn’t want to focus on search, which only sent users away from Yahoo.com. So what seems obvious today was considered sort of meh by the leading technologists a decade ago.
Twitter has faced harsh criticism from celebrities, including Kanye West, about impersonators creating unauthorized accounts on their behalf. Tony La Russa, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals Major League Baseball franchise is suing Twitter claiming that someone is pretending to be him on the site.
Today, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stoneresponded to the lawsuit, adamantly stating that Twitter will not settle with La Russa, calling the lawsuit an “unnecessary waste of judicial resources bordering on frivolous.” Twitter, as it has done with other similar situations, suspended the account in question.
But in response to the problem of impersonators of brands and famous people, Twitter is giving us a sneak peak of an experimental feature they call “verified accounts.” Twitter says it will start rolling out the beta of this feature this summer for a small set of public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other celebs who run the risk of impersonation. Businesses will not be included in the initial beta testing of the verification seal. As you can see from the image, the account holder’s page will have a “verified account” official seal in its profile box.
Impersonation is a problem on the web in general. Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler recently tried to sue a group of anonymous bloggers for pretending to be him, which proved to be futile. Facebook, like Twitter, is another platform where impersonators can create unauthorized pages on behalf of celebs and public figures.
Of course some Twitter impersonations can result in amicable situations. During the Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN race to a million followers, it was revealed that CNN didn’t own the CNNbrk Twitter account. CNN ended up taking control of the CNNbrk account, under the agreement that the original account holder, James Cox, would act as a “social media consultant” to the network. While Twitter’s verification seal is still in an experimental phase, it seems like a step in the right direction.
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Here’s a question that’s been running through my head ever since Michael posted about FriendFeed being in danger of becoming the coolest app no one uses: exactly how many startups out there are trying to be the one social networking service aggregator to rule them all, and how many is enough?
It seems like every day startups come up with new applications, be it for desktop, Web and/or mobile phone, that essentially want to be the gateway to our online lives. In reality though, there are not that many people who want - let alone need - continuous access to multiple social networking services, and even if they do, how many people (outside of the tech industry) do you know who are genuinely waiting for a extra third-party that helps them manage all their online personas?
Is this a sucker’s game? Is it a battle worth fighting?
For example: how many clients exist that basically aim to lure you away from using Twitter’s standard web interface by adding more features to the core micro-sharing functionality and throwing in more eye candy? And yet, the Twitter website remains, by far, the most popular way for users to update their message streams, with dozens of apps like TweetDeck, Twhirl / Seesmic Desktop, PeopleBrowsr, Sobees, Streamy, Tweetie, Nambu, TwitterBerry, and HootSuite trailing in its path (and there are many more where that came from).
Don’t even get me started on the plethora of apps that syndicate FriendFeed feeds alongside Facebook and Twitter to deliver the best-user-experience-known-to-mankind when it comes to updating your social graph on your current status. It’s the ultimate social networking service aggregator update management tool, baby!
All these applications appeal to only a fraction of the users of the more popular social services, many of which are still trying to figure out how to turn all that attention into cold hard cash themselves. I’m not necessarily saying that that’s a reason not do get into that business, I’m just saying chances are little that they’re ever going to be able to turn it into something even remotely profitable.
I sincerely think we’ve seen enough of these social network aggregators, and while I’m sure one or two will live on, get acquired or turn out to be a successful venture in another way, most are destined for failure like most startups in any other market, especially if they’re as saturated as this one has quickly proven to be.
I’ll sure be pointing back to this post when the next contestants in this particular arena find their way to our inboxes.
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Let’s face it, most people are sheep. It is much easier to follow than to lead, and on Twitter it is no different. A full 80 percent of Twitter accounts have fewer than 10 followers, according to an analysis of seven million Twitter accounts provided to TechCrunch by Web security firm Purewire (which operates TweetGrade). What’s more, 30 percent have zero followers.
Does this mean nobody is using Twitter? Or that they are using it more as a one-way information consumption service?
The fact that an estimated 32 million people around the world visited Twitter.com alone in April certainly indicates that there is something going on there. It just may be that Twitter really isn’t as much about two-way micro-conversations as it is about one-way micro-broadcasting. Indeed, a recent Harvard Business School study suggested that the top 10 percent of Twitter users produce more than 90 percent of all Tweets.
Here is how Purewire breaks down activity on Twitter by number of followers, followings, and Tweets:
Followers Accounts with 0 followers: 29.4% Accounts with 1 to 9 followers: 50.9% Accounts with 10 or more followers: 19.7%
Followings Accounts following 0 people: 24.4% Accounts following 1 to 9 people: 43.4% Accounts following 10 or more people: 32.2%
Tweets Accounts with 0 Tweets: 37.1% Accounts with 1 to 9 Tweets: 41.0% Accounts with more 10 or more Tweets: 21.9%
What stands out from this data is that about a quarter of all accounts are not following anybody, nearly 30 percent have zero followers, and more than a third have not posted a single Tweet. The problem with all of this data, however, is that it includes abandoned accounts (as most likely does the Harvard data as well).
Like any popular Web service, millions of people create a Twitter account, try it once, and never come back again. The Purewire data shows that about 40 percent of users have not sent out a Tweet since the day they created their accounts. You can compare this with the 60 percent abandonment rate claimed by Nielsen. But even these may not be the true abandonment rates. Just because you are not Tweeting does not mean you are not listening.
After getting rid of the dead accounts and spam accounts (24 percent of accounts follow nobody), what do we have left? All the activity on Twitter is coming from the remaining people who stick around—that 20 percent with more than ten followers and the 32 percent following more than ten people. If you look at active accounts—which Purewire defined as those with at least 10 followers, 10 followings, and 10 tweets—it shows that Twitter is still filled with sheep. Of those active accounts, 63.6 percent follow more people than they have followers (2.8 percent have the same number of followers as followings).
But that is what you’d expect. When only 22 percent of accounts have more than 10 Tweets, people who bother to Tweet on a regular basis will attract more followers than people who prefer to sit back and read. Twitter is no different than any other form of participatory media. A small fraction of users produce the overwhelming amount of content, even if it is just 140 characters at a time. Everyone else just drinks from the stream. Baaaa!
The news of Professor Rajeev Motwani’s untimely death on Friday afternoon spread quickly throughout the couple of hundred attendees of tonight’s TechFellow event in San Francisco. The mood of the event turned from cheerful cocktail sipping banter to stunned silence.
Most everyone who was there is his friend. And most everyone there had a story to tell about how Motwani had helped them at one time or another, asking nothing in return. I have a couple of those stories myself.
Ron Conway, a long time friend of Motwani, was visibly shaken. We asked Ron to make a few remarks to honor Motwani before the event started. His talk was not scripted or prepared. He was in a state of shock before, during and after his talk. And it clearly came directly from the heart. He talked about a man who loved entrepreneurs and who would meet with anyone to at least give them advice. Motwani influenced hundreds of entrepreneurs and students, Conway said, and never refused a meeting. We’ve included the video of Conway’s tribute to Motwani above.
It has been a long time since I have updated this blog. In fact, I have been doing some research for what I thought would be my next post.
Unfortunately, life does not always give you the luxury to plan what may be close to your heart next. It is with great sadness that I write about the passing of my teacher and good friend Professor Rajeev Motwani. But I would rather not dwell on the sorrow of his death and instead celebrate his life.
Officially, Rajeev was not my advisor, and yet he played just as big a role in my research, education, and professional development. In addition to being a brilliant computer scientist, Rajeev was a very kind and amicable person and his door was always open. No matter what was going on with my life or work, I could always stop by his office for an interesting conversation and a friendly smile.
When my interest turned to data mining, Rajeev helped to coordinate a regular meeting group on the subject. Even though I was just one of hundreds of graduate students in the department, he always made the time and effort to help. Later, when Larry and I began to work together on the research that would lead to Google, Rajeev was there to support us and guide us through challenges, both technical and organizational.
Eventually, as Google emerged from Stanford, Rajeev remained a friend and advisor as he has with many people and startups since. Of all the faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly. Yet his legacy and personality lives on in the students, projects, and companies he has touched. Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it.
Goodbye, Rajeev. You will be missed. What a sad, sad day.
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It's a Saturday morning. You're making Silver Dollar Hots for the family. The doorbell rings. It's the mailman. He's brought a CubeGuard. That's right: on the traditional day before or the actual day of rest, the mailman is here to bring you something to remind you of work. But what a gadget it is! It's basically one of those crowd control tapes with a spring loaded reel to wind it back up after use. However, this tape has a calming scene - a mountain range or a happy face - with a message ("Do not disturb" or, in my case, "John is blogging. Do not disturb." That's right: it's crowd control tape for your cubicle. Read on for more info and a giveaway.
We’d like to congratulate the twenty-two inaugural winners of tonight’s TechFellow awards, each of whom has made outstanding contributions in one of four different categories: Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management, and Disruptive Innovation. Below is a listing of the winners, broken down by category.
Disruptive Innovation
This category is meant to highlight the visionaries, the starry-eyed fools who believe when no one else will. They are undaunted when told NO by stern parents, when told it WON'T WORK by a thousand dismissive VCs, when failure after failure would dash the hopes of lesser mortals. These are the men and women whose incredible ideas burst forth like Athena from their foreheads, and they know what it means to make Fire, the Wheel, and the Printing Press.
Engineering Leadership candidates are people who have demonstrated technical excellence, built amazing technology infrastructure and products, or led teams that together built complex and elegant solutions that changed our lives. They are the uber geeks who calculate 10-digit squares in their heads, and write a thousand bug-free lines of code on the fly without skipping a beat.
Product Design and Marketing candidates are people who have designed insanely great products, who have made technology beautiful, who have created the marketing campaign that blows you away and make you want to go out and buy ten of them for your whole family. These are the storytellers, the artists, the people who make our dreams come alive.
General Management candidates are people who have built the teams and organizations that create and deliver great technology and products to the world. They are company builders who provide foundations and processes for all the rest of the geeks and dreamers to make their dreams reality. They are the folks who wake up at 6am and open the doors, make the donuts, play reveille, and lead the charge to take the hill. They make it *happen*.
Although TechCrunch editor Michael Arringtonrecently posted an April Fool’s joke about hiring a matchmaker to find him a wife, matchmaking services are becoming an alternate (and pricier) way to find a mate (think Millionaire Matchmaker). For those guys who are looking to meet a lady but don’t have the time to devote to the due diligence, outsourcing the job is the obvious option. Trolling Match.com,eHarmony and other dating sites can be a time-consuming and frustrating task. Even setting up an appealing profile on these sites can be daunting. To help these dudes out, VirtualDatingAssistants.com has launched a service to allow busy male professionals to fully outsource their online dating experience.
At a price of $480 per month, the company's virtual dating assistants will use "advanced internet dating techniques and strategies to create online dating profiles, interact with women and set up dates with them.” The company says it will work approximately 40 hours per month for each customer and guarantees them a minimum of 2 dates per month (or their money back).
Co-founders Mark Anderson and Scott Valdez are overseeing a cherry-picked team of virtual assistants that are referred to as "007" Dating Assistants due to the "suave and sophisticated nature of their undercover interactions." Yes, they are actually called “007″ Dating Assistants. Anderson attests to the power of virtual assistants representing you on online dating sites because that’s how he found his wife. As a pharmaceutical sales exec, Anderson had his assistant manage his online dating accounts and schedule 79 dates with attractive women within a period of a year. One of these women happens to now be his wife.
Virtual assistants will help clients fill out their profiles and then search dating sites like Match.com and eHarmony to find women that fit each client’s tastes and preferences. Once the client informs the assistant of necessary information for a profile, the assistant will take over the process of finding, messaging, and setting up dates with women. According to the site, the “007″ assistant will begin “contacting and interacting with the candidates. Once an interesting candidate is qualified as a strong candidate, your 007 Dating Assistant works to stimulate interest, build comfort, and flip her attraction switches.” The client doesn’t have to participate in the process until a “pre-date evaluation” meeting before the actual date.
The service makes me a little uneasy. I get that people are busy but the idea that I’d be trading emails with a virtual assistant posing as the potential date seems disingenuous and gives me the creeps. Not to mention that $480 a month is a hefty price to pay for someone to just handle dating websites for you. There’s no doubt that online dating is a huge market, and there have been similar startups that have emerged to feed off this pool, such as ProfileHelper.com, which assists people in creating the perfect profile for online dating. But I think Virtualdatingassistants.com takes it a step to far. It almost seems like misrepresentation. What ever happened to romance?
Tonight many of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest have come together for the TechFellow Awards, a new startup investment program that we have created in partnership with Founders Fund. We’ll be annoucing the winners shortly, and are live streaming the event below, compliments of Ustream.
Here are more details about the program:
At least twelve fellows will be granted $25,000 each tonight to invest in an early stage startup of their choice. Founders Fund will invest an additional $25,000 alongside those investments and request an additional right to invest another $250,000 when the company raises its next round of financing. In all, Founders Fund expects to devote around $3.6 million to the program.
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Tragic news today for the Silicon Valley community. Rajeev Motwani, a prominent Silicon Valley angel investor and the Stanford professor perhaps best known for serving as the advisor for Larry Page and Sergey Brin during the formative years of Google, has passed away.
Rajeev was an ardent supporter of Silicon Valley startups, investing and mentoring many of them while continuing his research at Stanford University. With investments in companies that included PayPal and Google, he saw an overwhelming amount of success. And through it all he continued to give back to the community though his mentorship, investments, and his time at Stanford, where he continued to teach as recently as last semester.
We owe Rajeev a debt of gratitude here at TechCrunch, as he was kind enough to speak at a number of our events and was genuinely supportive of our efforts.
Om Malik has shared his thoughts on his old friend, writing that there wasn’t a startup that Rajeev didn’t love on his quest for the unknown.
Our deepest sympathies go out to Rajeev’s family. He will be sorely missed.
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In early June 2007, Palm was teetering on the edge of obscurity. Their flagship Treo product line had gone stale, numbers were down across the board, and rumors of a sale were abound. On June 4th, 2007 it was announced that Elevation Partners had purchased a 25% equity stake of Palm for $325 million. Flash forward to today; just two years later (almost to the day), Palm has launched the Pre, a phone which managed to nab the attention of just about every blog and blog reader out there.
For example: 
It's a Saturday morning. You're making 
Tragic news today for the Silicon Valley community. 
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