Yahoo!'s co-founder, current CEO and "Chief Yahoo!" Jerry Yang offered a keynote presentation at CES today (video here), unveiling a series of new product tweaks, particularly in the mobile arena, while offering a "vision of the future." Maybe I'm a little bored by Yahoo! these days, but the news was relatively underwhelming.
Clearly Yahoo! is aiming to pump up its mobile advantages because the still-beleaguered Sunnyvale Internet giant got a lot of mileage out of some fairly predictable -- and to my taste slightly squishy -- announcements in the mobile arena. Yahoo! unveiled a new mobile home page to be "the essential starting point for mobile consumers," launched Yahoo! Go 3.0, the latest iteration of its all-in-one mobile platform and agreed to open up its mobile set-up to third party developers through a Yahoo! Mobile Developer Platform.
During his keynote, Yang said that Yahoo! wants to become "the best starting point for the entire web" and offer "anything and everything users need online." He proceeded to demo not actual products but conceptual products that Yahoo! might offer, such as an email application that can prioritize messages while linking to all kinds of useful stuff, such as maps and reviews, all from the inbox.
In a very crowded mobile universe, Yahoo!'s Go 3.0, even if slicker and smarter than earlier revisions, is just one of dozens of dizzying mobile application choices. And it's hard to judge whether the enhancements, which seem relatively wispy in the grand scheme of things ("more intuitive interfaces," for example) will set the world on fire.
Basically Yang seemed to outline ongoing, incremental, evolutionary improvements in Yahoo!'s offerings rather than any barn-burning development. Once observer politely characterized Yahoo!'s mobile announcements as a "standard pitch." I wouldn't say standard as much as bland, so bland that I can't work up a good head of steam on anything Yahoo!-related. At bottom, a ho-hum day for Yahoo! at CES.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:56 PM | Print | Comments (0)One of the cooler trends in the blogosphere has been the rise of corporate policy blogs, online outlets that allow companies and industries to enter the "conversation" when it comes to law, politics and society. In the telecommunications sector, Verizon, Google and Cisco have all served themselves well by launching useful, informative and, admittedly at times, self-serving blogs that nonetheless offer positions, insight and other interesting bits of information that only enhance the formation of communications policy. Motorola, it should be noted, has a terrific blog that should be on everybody's blogroll even if it doesn't deal solely with policy matters.
Left out of the conversation until now: the U.S. cable industry, which captures the lion's share of the multichannel video and residential broadband businesses. For a critically important communications business, and a potent lobbying force in Washington, the cable industry is curiously underrepresented in this most powerful arena of political persuasion.
But as of today, things might be changing. Cable has a policy blog, run out of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. It's called Cable Tech Talk and is authored primarily by two staffers at NCTA, industry veteran and erstwhile writer about pop culture Paul Rodriguez and grassroots organizer and experienced political hand Michael Turk.
The goal of the blog is to provide "a place for serious discussion of telecommunications policy and the potential impact of changes to legislation and regulation." But NCTA CEO Kyle McSlarrow says in his first post that Cable Tech Talk will also look at stuff that makes life fun. Guest bloggers, such as cable CTOs, will also make appearances.
Cable's contribution to the dialogue is long overdue and congrats are definitely in order. One bit of advice to NCTA though: don't get cute by spinning too hard or too fast with industry propaganda. You'll get eaten alive by shrewd enemies and go-for-the-jugular bloggers. Play it straight and don't try to play mind games because it won't work in the rough and tumble world of blogging.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:25 AM | Print | Comments (1)A recently released study suggests that contrary to some research, violent films actually reduce violent crime...because the act of attending theaters keeps criminals off the mean streets. Gordon Dahl, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, and Stefano DellaVigna, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, presented a paper (PDF here) outlining their study at the American Economics Association meeting in New Orleans this past weekend.
Remarkably, the two academics even quantify how much less crime takes place because "Hostel 3" is raking in the dough at the cineplex. The two say that that in "the short-run violent movies deter almost 1,000 assaults on an average weekend.
It's not that the films are carthatic or provide an mental outlet for violent impulses. It's that by going to the movies, criminals are subject to "voluntary incapacitation," meaning they can't engage in mischief if they're stuck in theaters and violent films draw more than their fair share of violent people. More importantly, Dahl and DellaVigna say, would-be offenders typically can't consume alcohol while watching movies.
We find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies. The effect is partly due to voluntary incapacitation: between 6PM and 12AM, a one million increase in the audience for violent movies reduces violent crime by 1.1 to 1.3 percent. After exposure to the movie, between 12AM and 6AM, violent crime is reduced by an even larger percent. This finding is explained by the self-selection of violent individuals into violent movie attendance, leading to a substitution away from more volatile activities. In particular, movie attendance appears to reduce alcohol consumption.
Although I think the links between violent content and actual violence are tenuous at best, I had to laugh when I read about this research. Using this kind of reasoning, lots of things that distract violent people can be said to reduce crime. Taking showers, say, or researching the purchase of handguns on the Internet or even sleeping.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:04 AM | Print | Comments (0)Back in 2004, a Harvard student pitched then-university president Larry Summers on the idea of creating a site for intellectuals, aiming to do for high IQs "what YouTube...did for bulldogs on skateboards." A year later, Summers invested in the idea, and an impressive collection of other investors followed.
Now this You Tube for intellectuals, BigThink, has gone live. The site features interviews with "public intellectuals" from all disciplines. Most of the interviews have the same format, with the interviewers off-camera in the style of filmmaker Errol Morris ("Thin Blue Line," "Fog of War").
Many of the subjects are lofty ones, such as "Are beliefs innate or learned?" or "Is free trade fair trade?" or "What is the measure of a good life?" Many of the interviews are relatively prosaic, even if the interviewees are not. For example, the site interviewed Sir Richard Branson and asked "Beyond a Brand, What is Virgin?"
All in all, Big Think promises to be another Internet time suck, chock-filled with interesting questions posed to interesting people. But let's hope the brainy folks behind Big Think catch up with a few good "street level" marketing folks. A site that proclaims its "intellectual" orientation is destined to struggle (even intellectuals shudder a little at that term) and the intellectual label doesn't even really apply anyway.
The site doesn't interview leading thinkers on, say, Cartesian philosophy. (My initial fear.) In fact, it asks Moby what he might advise young artists to do. It's smart, if a little glitchy. An intriguing interview with the title "Are we in a recession?" didn't load, and an interview with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer failed to load the first time, but did load on a second try.
Maybe Big Think should tone down the characterizations and simply say it's a site featuring smart interviews with interesting people.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:49 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
