Coop's Corner

Edgios, a little-known search start-up, may be about to come out of its self-imposed shell.

The company, which has offices in the United States and Serbia, has received extensive advance coverage--especially on Serbian developer discussion boards prior to its official launch.

Edgios: Dropping a big hint?

(Credit: Edgios)

Edgios has been alpha testing its software since the fall. However, Steve Jurvetson, a managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, one of the company's major venture backers, today dropped a broad hint that the coming-out party may be near.

In a presentation he delivered on the history of technology innovation at the Global Technology Symposium on Thursday, Jurvetson said there would be a big announcement from Edgios "in the next week or two." He spiced up that tease by saying that Edgios believes it can "reinvent search." When I caught up with him later on, Jurvetson declined to amplify on his comments.

From the little that is known--or at least speculated upon--Edgios is thought to be a search engine based upon a peer-to-peer technology. That may be a plausible assumption. Jurvetson said Edgios would not need a massive data center or infrastructure build-out. What's more, Edgios' founder, Borislav Agapiev, has previously written about the advantages of P2P and a distributed approach to search, which likely will feature a cloud component.

But Agapiev, too, hasn't disclosed much to clarify the guesswork. For what it's worth, here's the company tease:

"Edgios is bringing you the future of search. This doesn't just involve a bigger index. And it's not just a way for us to deliver you the same old results more cheaply. We're re-inventing web search, opening up the entire process, fundamentally democratizing the discovery of information. Do any of the big search engines let you control what goes into the search index? Do they rank search results according to what real people want? No, they don't. But Edgios does."

Such it is with marketing statements, that could describe anything and everything under the sun.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--T. Boone Pickens offered qualified support Thursday for the Obama administration's plans to reduce the nation's reliance on imported energy but said Washington's track record doesn't fill him with a lot of confidence about the will of the political class to get the job done.

Pickens

(Credit: CNET )

"We have to get a plan going," said Pickens, who made his comments at the Global Technology Symposium at Stanford. He is the founder and chairman of BP Capital and has been promoting his own plan for energy independence since last year. The so-called Pickens Plan would exploit the country's "wind corridor" from the Canadian border to West Texas to produce 20 percent of the country's electricity.

The Texas oil man said dealing with the political class the last 40 years has left him skeptical about Washington's ability to plan in the absence of an immediate crisis. But just to drive home the point, Pickens said that his supporters planned a "virtual march" for April 1 with the roughly 2 million people who have signed up on his Web site ready to send e-mails and faxes to their elected officials.

"I do have an army now," he said. "We are going to have an energy plan and it's going to come from the grassroots. What it's going to say very clearly is that we want an energy plan...It has got to be done."

He was blunt about what he described as repeated failures of leadership dating back to the Nixon administration, when he said the government first promised to curtail the United States' reliance on imported oil.

"We spent $700 billion last year (on foreign energy imports) and we'll spend about $450 billion this year," he said.

"It's been a lack of leadership for the last 40 years," he said, describing the status quo as "a war without guns."

Call it serendipity but Pickens' comments come just as a new study predicts a sharp drop in oil supply production because of falling investment, a development that could be a harbinger of higher prices when the global economy picks up again.

Speaking about the new administration, Pickens said President Obama had shown interest in what the Texas oil man has had to say about developing alternative sources of energy. At the same time, however, he said the country's leadership needs to expand its horizons to include greater development of available natural resources--including gas and oil--in this country to augment the development of new technologies.

"It is America and there's nothing wrong with drilling," he said.

When Ted Murphy started PayPerPost (now called Izea) in 2007, he immediately raised hackles by proposing that companies pay bloggers to post items about their businesses.

Izea CEO Ted Murphy

(Credit: Izea)

ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick described Izea as a "Search Engine Optimization scam that threatens to torpedo the reputation of the already widely questioned blogosphere. It may also be a perfectly fair way for small time bloggers to make a living, depending on who you ask."

"None of us are pure and there are few firm lines established regarding what is and is not acceptable when you're trying to make money blogging (I called a paid review service brilliant just last post) - but disclosure of payment is one of the most basic requirements for paid blogging to be ok. Even with disclosure, PPP is a sketchy operation; the disclosure story at PPP has always been a little murky."

Truth be told, that was among the milder critiques of Murphy's business, which critics attacked for blurring the separation between advertising and original opinion.

So it's been a while since PPP, or Izea, was heard from. More recently, however, it was back in the news when it facilitated a Kmart-sponsored free shopping spree in December for bloggers who wrote about the experience. Here's the transcript of a recent conversation I had with Murphy, who counts a roster of 265,000 bloggers ready for future assignments.

Q: Why did you change your company's name from PayPerPost?
Murphy: When we originally launched, we were just PayPerPost, but now we have a variety of different properties, like SocialSpark and Bloggers Choice, so we wanted more of a corporate umbrella to house our different operations.

When was that?
Murphy: In November 2007

It's a recession out there, obviously. How's the company doing?
Murphy: This down economy has really been a good thing for us. A large number of bloggers are looking to make some additional money and supplement their incomes. Advertisers are looking for alternatives to more expensive media. So, it's a bit of a perfect storm.

What was the genesis of the idea for starting your company?
Murphy: I started an interactive agency prior to Izea in 1999. In 2004, I started doing some blogger outreach programs, things like giving away movie tickets and gift cards. And I quickly realized that while it was great and people would blog about our clients, it was also incredibly resource-intensive and really impossible to scale those efforts. Depending on the client, it was hard to find the right bloggers. The base of bloggers would constantly have to change. Just because we found a blogger who blogged on entertainment, our next client might not be in the entertainment business so we'd have to start from scratch.

I looked at what Google was doing with all those self-service ad tools. and thought it would be great to create a marketplace where all those bloggers and advertisers can find each other.

Describe how this works in practice. Let's say that Charlie Cooper Enterprises makes thumb widgets and they come to you and want to contract with Izea. What happens?
Murphy: You would create an opportunity in one of our marketplaces and you would say, "I'm Charlie Cooper enterprises. We've got this thumb widget and here are its features as well as a link to the Web site. We'd like you to check it out and tell us what you think and then link back to the site." The people who are part of our network would browse through the opportunities and if it would be a good fit for them and their audience, they'd post it on their blog and submit the URL back to us, which we would provide to you.

How do you handle payments?
Murphy: It's an electronic payment to us and then we pay the blogger through PayPal.

Why do you think that the practice of companies compensating bloggers in this way is not any longer considered taboo?
Murphy: I think a lot of it has to do with the frameworks that have been put in place. It's not just us, but the PR folks as well as other governing bodies to make sure that there's a certain level of transparency and disclosure happening with these transactions. And the freedom of voice with the person writing these posts being protected. When people first heard about the concept, they thought it was all about shilling. But when you're shilling, you're trying to kind of hide that relationship. We try to be totally open with readers and give bloggers a sense of protection so that they can say something they don't like about the product and still get paid.

So a blogger can a slam a company and its product?
Murphy: They could do that. Typically, a blogger's not going to slam a product or service. They're typically going to shy away from those if they don't like the product or a service, but it's not going to all be roses...

Every once in awhile, we will get someone who slams a product or service. But more usually, it's a case of being balanced. You have to take the good with the bad.

And what are their marching orders when they receive the assignment?
Murphy: Typically, we just point them in a high-level direction: Here's the Web site, here's what we think is important...share your experience. These mostly are Web sites or existing products that people may have. It works particularly well for Web sites because anybody can do it.

And how are they compensated?
Murphy: You're going to get paid on a per-post basis, depending on how big of a blogger you are or how well known you are. It's a sliding scale. We track the clicks and the advertiser gets to see that information back in real time. When you sign up for SocialSpark, we give you a piece of code to put on the site to give you a rank against other bloggers on network based on their traffic.

Do you require them to note high up on their blog posts that they are essentially hired hands?
Murphy: Every single post has to be disclosed and we give them a disclosure badge. That's a little piece of code they embed in their posts that lets readers know it's a sponsored post.

The argument you hear against the idea of "compensated conversation" is that if marketers pay bloggers to write about their experience with a brand, that sends a buyer beware signal to people reading the blogosphere for insight.
Murphy: I think at the end of day it comes down to the bond between blogger and the reader. Any site that I happen to stumble upon, I don't automatically give that a high level of trust. But the Web sites I go back to on a daily basis, as long as that blogger is being transparent and disclosing those relationships, I feel comfortable that they're telling it like it is. People in our network are compensated on connecting to their audience...so it's very much in the bloggers' interest to be true to the audience and share their experiences.

Dell beat IBM to the PR punch, but does it really have the technology jobs to beat Big Blue in the server competition?

On Wednesday, Dell made a splash with a massive introduction of servers, workstations, storage arrays, and yes, even services. The message to corporate IT buyers was that yes, Dell understood their needs and could supply a variety of sophisticated hardware and software for the modern data center.

Has Michael Dell finally figured things out? Is this is the start of a dramatic assault on what has been the near-exclusive preserve of Hewlett-Packard and IBM? I wish him the best, but it's hard to get too excited. The company has been down this same road for the better part of the last two decades with limited results.

I remember listening to a couple of representatives from Dell expatiate on how their brand new enterprise services team would put a severe hurt on Big Blue. The pitch boiled down to one line: "we can offer service and support for so much less than IBM can charge." That was in the late 1990s.

Turns out that when it came to supporting multimillion dollar installations of sophisticated equipment, the calculations surrounding total cost of ownership were a lot more complicated. In the years since then, IBM's Global Services has enjoyed a remarkable run. Perhaps the recession will open more doors for Dell, which wants to appeal to a more cost-conscious subset of IT buyers. But this isn't going to be a cake walk.

In fact, next week IBM will debut its own server redesign based on Intel's Xeon 5500 Series. The new line is being touted by IBM for its ability to help reduce management costs and overall energy use. Take it with a requisite grain of salt, but IBM is positioning the announcement as its most comprehensive x86 upgrade in years. The highlights:

•  Systems with 92 percent energy efficiency

•  Blades that offer twice as many transactions per minute at 1,333 GHz

• Yearly energy savings up to $100 per server

On the software side, the announcement will include tweaks to the company's Director management suite for helping customers deal with virtualized environments.

In coming weeks, the analysts and test labs will sort out fact from fiction in the claims made by Dell, IBM, and the other computer makers lining up to make announcements surrounding Intel's next big chip proclamation. But I was intrigued by a comment by Tom Bradicich. He's an IBM fellow and distinguished engineer at the company who often winds up doing face time on customer calls.

"I met with a customer recently who had a 5 percent utilization rate," he told me over the phone, adding that this phenomenon was widespread in IT and had contributed to data center sprawl. At the same time, he noted that it's also a reason for the concomitant increase in costs and energy use.

"Price performance is appealing, but the idea that you need more servers, and so then you go out and buy more servers, is a failing concept," according to Bradicich. "If we can up the utilization rate, which is a high end concept (from the mainframe era), then we can lower the number of parts you buy. We want to sell you less."

Counter-intuitive, but it fits with an increasingly common theme at IBM, which wants to accentuate the myriad parts of its company as a way of "out-geeking" the competition in customers' eyes. That's what it's done with HP. And that's what it will play up in its competition with Dell. Who can fault CEO Sam Palmisano for flaunting what he has at his disposal? By playing up its size and tech chops, IBM figures it has a convincing story to help fend off forays by rivals eager to sell into the data center market.

To be continued...

Add Canonical to the roster of companies offering technology to help enterprise customers build their own cloud-computing setups. But unlike most of the better-known players in this nascent market, the twist here is that the technology will be supplied by an open-source shop.

Canonical is best known as being the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu operating system, a computer operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. With 8 million to 10 million users, Ubuntu has enjoyed success in no small part because of its ease of use.

Next month the company will offer the first details on plans to roll out cloud-computing services to its customers. At this point, details remain scarce but management isn't planning to reinvent the wheel. Instead, the company is going to adopt the same approach it used to promote Ubuntu as an open-source operating system.

The basic idea will be to supply the technology on an open source basis and then let users alter it to fit their individual company needs. At the same time, Canonical hopes to benefit from a developer feedback loop, which presumably would contribute any bug fixes or suggestions on how to advance the offerings. Any profits would roll in through the later sale of ancillary support and add-on services to customers.

This is just the latest announcement in what's fast becoming a crowded and super-hyped field. The umbrella terms refers to the concept of allowing access to computing power and storage space by connecting over the Internet. Most recently, Sun Microsystems last week offered details on a plan to enable developers, start-ups, and even students access a cloud-computing infrastructure.

For more than two decades, personal computing has been anything but inexpensive. To be sure, prices for the average computer have dropped substantially since the 1980s. But with the exception of the occasional bargain or bare-bones configuration, the price of a good computer system still takes quite a bite out of the family budget.

That iron calculation no longer applies and shoppers can now find low-end systems in the $300 range running Celeron or Sempron processors. But the more intriguing development is the emergence of Intel's Atom chip and what it might suggest about the Netbook's ability to one day replace a traditional desktop or notebook as a family's primary personal computer.

By itself, the Atom (as well the expected arrival of a similar chip from Advanced Micro Devices one of these days) probably won't be enough to compel a huge change in consumer behavior. (Though since the Eee PC's debut in late 2007, about 12 million low-cost Netbooks have been sold.)

The Atom's fortune is to arrive at a particular juncture in the history of technology and the global economy as several trends are working simultaneously to its benefit, as pointed out recently in a convincing paper by Bernstein Research's reliably excellent Toni Sacconaghi.

•  The recession: Stimulus or no stimulus, the global economy is going to need months to repair itself. Against the backdrop of growing joblessness on the rise and financial insecurity, families are looking twice and three times at discretionary purchases, like a PC.

•  Free software: Microsoft long ago lost the perception fight around open-source software. Now with the emergence of Ubuntu, the idea of Linux on the desktop isn't the pipedream it was at the start of the decade.

•  Cloud computing: Not everything will reside in the cloud but Web-based computing increasingly dominates what we do in front of the terminal. If all you need is a good data connection, there's less rationale for paying top dollar to buy a fancy computer. You don't need a top of the line machine to access YouTube.

•  Fresh technology and the "cool" factor: Admit it, we're all fashion whores when it comes to tech toys and Netbooks are a hip item these days, especially compared with the frumpy Celeron and Sempron boxes they compete against.

Ubuntu man: Mark Shuttleworth

(Credit: Mark Shuttleworth)

I can hear the objections already. What about gamers or advanced photo editing or video encoding? Fair enough, but that still doesn't account for more than half the population of consumers for whom Atom-based systems are more than enough. Sacconaghi points to a Pew Internet & America Life Project in December, which found that "38% of adults (roughly 75% of the gaming population) reported using their desktop or notebook PCs for gaming." And while it's true that high-end hardware offers richer capabilities, the fact is that most people don't do heavy-duty photo editing or video encoding.

The wild card here is Canonical, the company which puts out Ubuntu. Until Ubuntu, there was little to the argument that mainstream computer users would load Linux onto their machines. On paper, it sounded great but it never worked out in practice. Simply put, people have lives to live and don't have the time or the inclination to immerse themselves in learning a new operating system.

But I like what Mark Shuttleworth, has done with Ubuntu since he founded Canonical in 2004. Not only is it relatively easy to use but Ubuntu is compatible with Microsoft Office. Unless I'm terribly mistaken, more developers will pick up on that over the next year. Especially if this recession-depression drags on.

Quadrangle Group partner Dan Rosensweig will be named CEO and president of Activision Blizzard's Guitar Hero franchise, CNET News has confirmed.

The pending appointment was first reported Sunday evening on AllThingsDigital. Rosensweig's appointment will be announced Monday morning, according to people familiar with the decision.

New Guitar Hero CEO and Bruce Springsteen fan Dan Rosensweig.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News)

Rosensweig spent 18 years at Ziff-Davis in a variety of senior sales and publishing roles, the last one as CEO of ZDNet, before its acquisition by CNET Networks in 2000. He then served as CNET's president before becoming chief operating officer at Yahoo in 2002 during the Terry Semel era. He left Yahoo in 2006 and then joined Quadrangle Group, a private investment firm, in 2007.

Since moving over to Quadrangle, Rosensweig has been content to remain off the center stage, though he often has been mentioned as a possible CEO candidate. His name came up during interregnums both at Yahoo and Facebook. But the lure of the Guitar Hero job struck the right chord as Rosensweig is known to be passionate about music.

On a day when IBM's reportedly mulling a buyout of Sun Microsystems, Uncle Ben Bernanke decides to print another $300 billion or so, and Congress gets a chance to throw spitballs at the weasels at AIG, there are better things to do than mock NBC's Jeff Zucker as an empty suit.

But after reading the synopsis of Zucker's remarks Wednesday criticizing Jon Stewart for eviscerating the goofs who predominate on CNBC, it's not even fair. How can one resist?

I don't want to prejudice you (just yet) so here's how BusinessWeek reported the story:

Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, is calling comedian Jon Stewart's attacks on business network CNBC "incredibly unfair." At a media conference Wednesday in New York, Zucker said "The Daily Show" host's recent rips on CNBC, its "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer and business media in general were "completely out of line."

Zucker went on to say that while "everyone wants to find a scapegoat," he defended the home team. The suggestion that the business media or CNBC was responsible for the economic meltdown, he said, was "absurd."

On the yuckster scale, that one is off the charts. I realize that Zucker can't come out in public and say, "Well, the truth is that Jim Cramer is a clueless clown" or that "Dennis Kneale doesn't have enough sense to tie his shoes, let alone offer financial advice." (The truth is that Zucker wouldn't find an awful lot of people jumping ugly if he did. Maybe one day.)

I monitor CNBC each day as part of my job. And after watching the channel's coverage nearly every day since the late 1990s, I can tell you that Zucker is full of malarkey. He claims that CNBC has "distinguished itself" in its coverage of the crisis and the economy over the last two years. Now that's a comedic touch that even Stewart would applaud.

Distinguished? The only personalities at CNBC who don't seem to be smoking the funny stuff before going on air are Mark Haynes, Steve Liesman, and David Faber. That's it. The rest of the forgettable bunch over there take dictation from Wall Street. Did CNBC cause the crash? Of course not. But the track record of empty-headed prognosticating and cynical sniping at anyone daring to take a more critical look at the economy speaks for itself. Until everything came unglued last fall, the economists Robert Shiller, who called the housing bubble, and Nouriel Roubini, who called the stock collapse, often served as pinatas for sundry CNBC cheerleaders trying to pump up the noise.

Stewart, who has had a lot of fun at CNBC's expense the last couple of weeks, obviously struck a nerve with his lampooning. The subject clearly wasn't to Zucker's liking, but the bigger question is why it takes a fake newsman to point out the channel's litany of screw-ups.

Instead of circling the wagons, Zucker and his management team should take a long look at the content CNBC puts out. A public skewering was long overdue, though I'm sure that CNBC will survive (and probably thrive) this episode. Will it improve? One can only hope. Meanwhile, this one is another asterisk in the lengthening bill of particulars against the quality of U.S. journalism. Note to the Zuck-meister: The fact that you don't get what Stewart's talking about is yet one more reason to worry about the future of the mainstream media.

Update 8:49 a.m. PDT: Sun has made its official announcement and provided a link to its cloud computing site.

During the Internet bubble era, Sun Microsystems profited as one of the big suppliers of networking computing technology to IT. Now it's hoping to similarly benefit from another tech trend as the computer industry slowly migrates toward cloud computing.

On Wednesday, Sun will announce its entry into the cloud-computing business with a public cloud service aimed developers, students, and start-ups. It will also detail its plans for an open cloud-computing infrastructure, for public or private clouds.

Sun will be making the announcement at its CommunityOne developer event taking place in New York City.

As part of the announcement, Sun plans to release a set of open application programming interfaces as part of its positioning that--and here I'm quoting from the official press release--"Sun is fostering collaboration and interoperability among other clouds and cloud-based applications."

At the core of the Sun Cloud Compute Service are the Virtual Data Center (VDC) capabilities acquired in Sun's purchase of Q-layer in January 2009, which provide everything an individual or team of developers needs to build and operate a datacenter in the cloud. The VDC provides a unified, integrated interface to stage an application running on any operating system within a cloud, including OpenSolaris, Linux or Windows. It features a drag-and-drop method, in addition to APIs and a command line interface for provisioning compute, storage and networking resources via any Web browser. The Sun Cloud Storage Service supports WebDAV protocols for easy file access and object store APIs that are compatible with Amazon's S3 APIs. By leveraging pre-packaged Virtual Machine Images (VMIs) of Sun's open source software, developers will be able to easily deploy applications to the Sun Cloud.

PR spin or not, it's still a bold change of pace for Sun, which will now be competing against the likes of Amazon and Google, a couple of companies that have fast established their bonafides as successful suppliers of cloud-computing services. But this shouldn't surprise anyone. Actually, Sun has been signaling plans to enter the cloud business for several months now. In fact, the company formed its cloud-computing business last summer and has been preparing the ground with periodic briefings for press and analysts.

In an interview, Dave Douglas, the senior VP of cloud computing at Sun, acknowledged the looming clash with the established names in cloud computing but suggested there was ample room for a number of competing offerings to coexist.

"I really believe there will be very many clouds tuned up for particular industries, and niches or countries," he said. "We're basically giving developers their own development data center."

Douglas said that Sun's cloud offering will feature a service payment model but said pricing details would not be immediately available until later in the first half of the year.