Sean Garrett at the 463.com rails today about the fractured, splintered and otherwise relatively ineffective lobbying of Silicon Valley and high-tech companies in Washington, DC. This is merely conventional wisdom by now.
What is new is the open call by Phil Bond, CEO of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), to consolidate his group with the sixteen or so trade groups that represent the high-tech industry’s interests in Washington. Bond shared his thoughts on the industry’s disarray via this op-ed piece in yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News.
For our leaders to get the message, our industry should speak in a unified, powerful voice. Instead, there are more than 16 organizations clamoring for attention from the same decision makers. Sometimes we’re saying the same things. Sometimes we’re not.
Check out this alphabet soup: ACT, ACT-IAC, AeA, BSA, CCIA, CSIA, CDT, CompTIA, PFF, EFF, EIA, SIA, SIIA, TCC, ITIC and ITAA. That list does not even include the Silicon Valley-launched TechNet or a council representing about 40 regional IT groups across the country, which recently entered a partnership with us at the Information Technology Association of America (we’re the ITAA in the above soup).
Therefore, Washington has far too little appreciation for the fact that IT drives innovation, growth and prosperity across the entire economy. Our industry’s contributions to breakthroughs in areas such as genomics, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, imaging, health care, communications, entertainment and financial services — to name a few — are not well understood.
The bottom line: Our industry’s lobbying, our brand, and our political support are all splintered. We do not have our act together.
Sean raises an intriguing possible solution to Silicon Valley’s scatteredness when it comes to policy matters: use Web 2.0 tools, specifically blogs, to organize people. It’s very sad but very true that high-tech industry representatives in Washington (and I might add the reps of the communications industries…cable, telco, broadcast, Hollywood, wireless and so forth) don’t even read blogs much less write them.
Instead, many in DC take it as a badge of honor that they don’t read blogs. Suggesting that they actually write or comment only gets you quizzical stares. “What are you? From San Francisco?”
Verizon and Cisco are two notable exceptions to this rule. But much of the rest of the DC tech and communications community look upon blogs much the way corporate executives looked upon email ten years ago (they used to make their assistants print out their emails and place the electronic missives on their desks, remember?) The lobbyists simply haven’t caught up yet.
Compounding this cultural lag, most people involved in policy are either lawyers or politicos, two types of professionals who are resistant to writing things down lest they leave evidence, or fingerprints, behind.
So, while Sean has a great idea, chances are pretty slim that it will ever become a reality. If, however, Silicon Valley were to apply its own technologies to policy matters, it might go a long way toward “solving decade-old industry issues.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:53 PM | Print | Comments (0)In a suprising move, Time Warner Cable announced this morning that it has become a public company as a result of Adelphia’s Chapter 11 plan becoming effective today. The surprise comes not because Time Warner hasn’t always planned to spin off its cable arm — the media giant has always more or less planned to create a separately traded cable company in order to insulate the high-performer from the other, more volatile parts of the company — but because Time Warner chose to bypass the traditional underwriting offering that is part of an IPO.
Time Warner apparently skipped past all the investment bankers to save money and time, and withdrew its former S-1 filing at the SEC. Instead, Time Warner Cable filed a monster 8-K report detailing the new company, its structure (see image below) and various financial and operational statistics, which are still relatively confusing given the acquisitions, swaps and divestitures that have shaped the nation’s number two cable company over the past 18 months or so. The stock will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the “TWC” symbol as early as March 1.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:54 PM | Print | Comments (0)
In a case that has always baffled me, Belgian newspapers have, once again, won a court victory that will keep their articles out of Google’s search index. Copiepresse, a group that represents Belgian, French language newspapers, has pursued litigation to enjoin Google from including its members’ articles in search results.
The decision today upholds a September 2006 ruling which favored Copiepresse and initially enjoined Google from including Belgian papers in its index. However, the Belgian court today lowered the fine Google must pay if it violates the injunction from the original amount, one million Euros per day, to 25,000 Euros per day.
Copiepresse wants Google to pay its members fees for including their articles in search results (like that’s ever going to happen.) Google plans to appeal and has defended itself by noting that publishers are always free to exclude their material from the search index through robots.txt features. Moreover, Google has argued that it’s good for publishers to be included in Google results, that many web sites fight with Google about their lack of inclusion in the search giant’s index.
Nevertheless, I guess that Belgian newspaper executives are dancing a merry jig over this judicial affirmation. But, just wait a few months. Traffic will dwindle and ad revenues will be hit, if they haven’t been harmed already due to the injunction that has been in place since September.
The poor state of publicly available web metrics doesn’t allow me to easily determine if the top Belgian papers have already been harmed by the Google shut-out, but Alexa data (always problematic, but particularly so in this case given what I believe is Alexa’s English-language tilt) shows a decidedly downward traffic trend for three of Belgium’s top newspapers — Le Soir, De Standaard and Belgisch Staatsblad (click on thumbnail below.) You can quibble with the data but the trend depicted by Alexa is certainly not looking good for Belgium’s newspapers.
Update: As a commenter points out, Copiepresse represents only the French language newspapers. De Standaard, a Flemish paper, isn’t part of the lawsuit but has asked to be pulled from Google’s index nonetheless. Not sure about Belgisch Staatsblad, which appears to publish in multiple languages.
The Internet is chock-full of video but only a few video-sharing sites make it easy for the videos to proliferate across the Internet. Two companies making news today are looking to spur greater syndication of video content across the web.
First, MTV, fresh from its parent company Viacom’s demands that YouTube yank 100,000 videos from its inventory, is increasingly allowing people to take videos from Viacom-owned web sites and publish them on their own pages.
“We need to open up our websites and content both for consumers and for other companies,” said Mika Salmi, MTV Networks president of global digital media.
This stepped-up interest in spreading MTV Networks video across the web is a strategy that the company hopes will help pump up the company’s transition to the Internet era. Although the cable channels that come under the MTV Networks’ umbrella are the most profitable part of the Viacom empire, Viacom’s stock has been in the doldrums, leading to 250 staff layoffs at MTV Networks, announced yesterday.
Meanwhile, video sharing company Veoh is launching today a web syndication service that uses P2P technology to allow users to syndicate DVD-quality video. Content creators that upload their videos to Veoh can then syndicate them to web sites, feeds or even iPods.
CEO Dmitry Shapiro (who is speaking at our conference, The New Video Summit) calls the new service, in combination with Veoh’s virtual digital video recording service, a “virtual cable operator.” Although off to a slow start, Veoh seems to be picking up steam. The company, backed by $12.5 million in venture funding from Michael Eisner, Time Warner and others, recently announced a deal with US Weekly to create a celebrity news channel and has a pact with top Hollywood talent agency UTA (UTA’s Brent Weinstein is also speaking at The New Video Summit) to create an audition channel for aspiring filmmakers and actors.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:59 AM | Print | Comments (0)YouTube’s inadvertent role as a magnifying mirror on society fascinates me. From the most mundane minutiae all the way up to horrifying video testaments to cruelty, YouTube’s got it all. Not a day goes by when someone hasn’t acknowledged that some niche of human behavior is now documented and memorialized on the Google-owned site.
Two articles today deal with YouTube’s role in showcasing video footage of violent behavior. The first, by New York Times’ Corey Kilgannon, looks at how YouTube is a font of videos about teen misbehavior, from after-school beatings to a new adolescent phenomenon known as “fence-plowing” (hurling oneself at wooden fences to see the slats go flying.)
YouTube didn’t invent this kind of youthful, foolish behavior, which has been going on in one form or another since time began. But, what used to be fleeting moments of youthful stupidity now get captured on video for all the world to see.
Schoolyard scraps, spectacular skateboard spills, puppy-love quarrels, goofy antics like placing a slice of American cheese over the face of a snoring buddy, and bruising stunts like hurling one’s body through a neighbor’s wooden fence — these and other staples of suburban teenage life have taken on a new dimension as online cinema verite. Instead of being whispered about among friends and then fading away, such rites of ridiculousness are now routinely captured on video and posted on the Internet for worldwide perusal, and posterity.
On the other end of the violence spectrum, YouTube has also become a marketplace of ideas and bluster for Mexican drug gangs. Horrid videos are showing up on YouTube that document the escalating violence between rival gangs — the Gulf Cartel from northeastern Mexico and traffickers based in the western state of Sinaloa.
One chilling video on YouTube called “The Hit Men” shows a handcuffed man, apparently a Gulf Cartel henchman caught and beaten by police. He is curled on the ground and pleading with his captors. “They’re going to kill me,” he says.
Beneath the images, YouTube members boast in Spanish about the powers of rival capos Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, head of the Sinaloa-based gang, and arch-foe Osiel Cardenas, the Gulf Cartel’s leader, recently extradited to the United States.
Like classified ads during the heydey of print newspapers, YouTube videos may actually be a form of communications between gangs, albeit they appear to exist solely to communicate threats. One slide-show posted on YouTube, accompanied by a famous drug gang ballad called “To My Enemies,” was widely interpreted to be a musical attack on the Gulf Cartel’s private army, The Zetas.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:16 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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