David Sifry and his new venture, Offbeat Guides.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)
David Sifry, founder and former CEO of Technorati, has apparently had enough of new media and of blogs. His new venture is attacking a traditional business: printed travel guides. As of this writing, the site is in private beta. (Webware's invitations to beta test this service, mentioned in previous versions of this story, have all been given out.)
Offbeat Guides is a service for printing customized travel books. When you go to the site, it asks you five basic questions: Your name, your destination, your trip's dates, where you live, and where you're staying (if you know). With that information, it scours various open sources (like Wikipedia, Wikitravel, and Eventful) as well as some licensed content providers, and builds a custom file for you about your destination.
Users can tweak the content: If you don't know where you're staying you can be sure the hotels section is included; if you already have a place, you can remove it and save some paper. You can include, or not, sections on food, events, history, transportation, etc. Books will always be customized for your travel dates and will be printed with the most recent weather forecasts (or historical weather data), exchange rates, and other relevant and timely information like fairs and festivals happening when you're there.
Your custom book will be delivered in four days, Sifry says, and will cost $24.95, with a PDF download available as well. If you just want the PDF file, it's $9.95.
Will people pay for the convenience of the printed guides? Most of the data that appears in the guides is available for free online, after all. But I believe the convenience factor, and the very attractive printed end product, will win over a broad base of consumers. The travel segment of the book publishing business has always been strong; people pay for the convenience. Furthermore, Offbeat Guides can cost-effectively produce printed books for "long-tail" destinations that wouldn't otherwise be attractive to traditional publishers, opening up a deeper market than most publishers can reach.
Users can select what they want in their Offbeat Guides.
Technology, business, and outlook
Offbeat Guides' key technology is its capability to parse all the data sources it subscribes to, and render that information in a useful, consistent, and attractive format for printing. A sample book I saw looked great for the most part, but there were still some weird formatting artifacts on some pages. Sifry said that by public launch the formatting would be much better (and in full color; the book I saw was black and white on the inside).
But the technology is only part of the equation for this business. Getting the word out, and getting people to pay for the books, sight unseen, is the real trick. I'm convinced that this is a great business, but I do not know if Sifry's company has the marketing chops to push this product into the mainstream, where it belongs.
There are other opportunities for Offbeat Guides, too. For example, "destination weddings" are on the rise; Sifry said he thinks that he could market a version of this service to that market. Partnerships with travel sites, corporate event planners, or housing services (like VRBO, which I use and love) would also work. Local advertising could also add some revenue to the business.
Sifry is also considering opening up the content side of the service to local writers, who could write specialized guides for the service. (Example: The geek's guide to shopping Akihabara; I'd definitely want that in my book.) Offbeat would pay those writers a bounty when customers chose to include their content in books.
Sifry and I talked about this business at some length at the D6 conference, and the more we talked, the more ideas for the business and for making money from it popped up. Offbeat Guides is one of those business ideas that seems almost obvious after you've looked at it for a few minutes. That doesn't mean that execution on the idea will be easy: getting customers, fending off competitors, and maintaining margins will be serious operational challenges. But as Sifry's business ideas go, this one has much longer legs than his previous venture, which had still not turned a profit when he left the CEO job in August.
The result: Just the guide you want, with (hopefully) no extraneous pages to weigh you down.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)See also: NileGuide, TravelDK, Lonely Planet Pick-and-Mix. And also: Tripit.
Conference co-hosts Walt Mossberg (left) and Kara Swisher interview FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam.
(Credit: Ina Fried / CNET News.com)CARLSBAD, Calif.--The D6 conference wrapped up on Thursday with a session on broadband access: Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher interviewed Lowell McAdam, CEO of Verizon Wireless, and Kevin Martin, chairman of the FCC.
Mossberg started by putting a chart up showing how far behind the U.S. is in broadband access, and how expensive our access is. Martin said you need to look at the unique demographics of the U.S., and if you compare some states, like Massachusetts, to Korea, then they'll hold up better. Of course, providing access to less-advantaged areas is still a challenge.
So why do we pay four times as much per megabit, Mossberg asks? Again, Martin says, it's because of demographics: The average cost considers rural areas, which are more expensive to serve. On the issue of providing service to more communities, Martin wants to get away from providing subsidies to multiple carriers in rural regions, although he recognizes that limited subsidies will lead to the "carrier of last resort" being the provider in each community.
Open access
Mossberg asked about spectrum auctions and the open access provision that go with that spectrum. Will we have an open system?
Martin: "I think it's important. I've heard that from consumers and entrepreneurs. So in the most recent auction we did, we proposed that whoever wins this spectrum has to be willing to be more open." He said, "We're not completely there yet, but every carrier is embracing and talking about how they are going to be more open." He listed T-Mobile, Sprint, Google, and Clearwire as participants in this movement. And, of course, he was sitting onstage next to Verizon Wireless' CEO, which has also announced open access to its network.
"Would you have done this without Google?" Swisher asked Verizon's McAdam, referring to Google's push for open wireless access. "Yes, we launched this before Google. We've seen what open networks can do. We don't ever want to be in the business of excluding business."
Regarding the new "open Verizon" network that's been announced, McAdam said access to it will be at the same rates as it is for Verizon's own hardware, although some value-add services that Verizon handset customers get may not be available, at least not for free, for the non-Verizon customers.
McAdam said he's aiming for service penetration beyond the current 80 percent or so that Verizon Wireless enjoys. He's looking for growth up to "500 percent penetration." How is that possible? By counting access to multiple Verizon services available to each customer, perhaps home network access and other services.
Terminate!
"Let's talk about termination fees," Mossberg said, bringing up a pet bugaboo of his. "How do you justify charging people hundreds of dollars two years after they've bought a phone?"
"We don't do that now," McAdam said. It's been about a year since the charges have been adopted. It costs about $200 to subsidize a smartphone, he said, but "we're going to tier that down...pro-rate it over time, so it makes it easier for the customer to leave if they want."
"If they wanted to pass a law that said no more subsidies, I'd eliminate it tomorrow. None of us (the carriers) would complain."
Martin agreed that termination fees "need to decline over time," and that new customers should have a period of time for a new phone--"14 days or so, after your first bill"--during which they should be able to cancel with no nuisance fee. There are class action lawsuits already under way, he said, which are blocking the FCC from working on this issue proactively.
"This practice is now going on in other industries," he said, and implied that he would like to halt the spread of it.
Access and speed
Martin said that many of the same debates that we have on wireless networks apply to other networks. Access providers cannot limit access to content, he said, but "network management" applications can be appropriate. "I think the commission needs to address that in a constructive way, to reinforce that the consumers have unfettered access to the network without the operator getting in the way."
Mossberg repeated to McAdams an AT&T claim that it can double their wireless access speed this year, triple it next. "And you guys are stuck," Mossberg said. "Is your technology limiting you?"
"There are no miracle technologies. You have to work through it. There's a difference between peak speeds and average throughput in the field. There's a difference in how much spectrum you want to dedicate to it. And the third factor is devices. In the next three or four years, that's a series of interesting financial decisions."
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A D6 attendee tries the Walkstation.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)Here's an idea that only goes half way: Furniture maker and D6 sponsor Steelcase was showing off its Walkstation product. It's a stand-up desk integrated into a treadmill. So now you can take a walk while you're working.
I tried it and it's not as awkward as you might think. You have to get the speed on the treadmill just right, so you can walk without thinking, but once you do it is actually possible to read and type while walking.
The device is thousands of dollars, steep for the average worker. I fully expect the Walkstation desk to show up on CSI soon, as metaphor for wretched executive excess.
And here's why the device doesn't go far enough: It lets you expend your energy but doesn't do anything with it. In an era of emerging environmental consciousness, I don't know how it's legal to build exercise equipment that doesn't feed the energy that people expend working out back into the power grid, or at least back into the equipment itself. I'm serious.
See also: More Walkstation coverage on Crave.
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Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki of the genetic testing service 23andMe gave a perplexing demo this morning at the D6 conference. The service, launched last November, costs users $1,000 ($599 with current discounts) and provides a growing amount of information based on your genetic profile: predisposition to certain diseases, a profile of your overall racial makeup, and your relationship to another genetic profile in the database if you have access to it (it will tell you if you're related to your father, for example).
23andMe co-founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki
(Credit: Dan Farber / CNET)As more of the human genome is decoded, the 23andMe service will continue to get more useful, especially in regards to health care issues like drug allergies.
Today at D6, Avey and Wojciki announced the service's new "Gene journal" feature, which lets users refine their data by answering questions that indicate broader genetic trends, such as lactose intolerance and a like or dislike of foods like cilantro. The team also showed a cute 10-question quiz that you can use to compare your genetic profile to others. This part of the demo was perplexing: if you pay $600 or $1000 for a genetic test, why should you also have to take a quiz?
At the tail-end of the presentation, Avey and Wocjciki discussed their company's new project, 23andWe, a new research platform based on the 23andMe genetics data. The idea is that users fill out surveys (which, I guess, earlier quizzes on the site have softened them up for), which are correlated with the genetics, and which can be used for medical research. Surveys could be created by researchers and end up getting peer-reviewed, or could be set up by concerned groups on the service, like parents of children with particular syndromes.
The service is still too expensive to generate reliable, broad-based data, but the new direction opens up 23andMe to research grants that can be applied to collecting genetic information from people who would otherwise not participate in the service.
The growth of genetic testing like this for more people is inevitable, and the price will continue to drop. If you want your genome sequenced but don't want to spend this kind of dough for it, just hang tight.
23andMe has sequenced Rupert Murdoch's genome. Lactose intolerance: negative. Presence of freckles: positive.
(Credit: Dan Farber / CNET) See also:
The cheek is in the mail: Ancestry launches DNA testing
DNA dating site predicts chemical romance
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Glam Media has always been adamant that it's not just another ad network, something it reiterated when it announced a revenue-sharing video platform for its member sites this week.
But apparently, some big company really thinks that Glam's something special. Amid the gossipy deal making of the D6 Conference, someone at tech money blog VentureBeat heard that Glam had just received a $1.3 billion acquisition offer that it plans to turn down.
The reason it plans to shug off the offer, according to VentureBeat, is that Glam's investors--which include Accel Partners and Hubert Burda Media--"see a bigger opportunity for Glam to build a large business for high-end display advertising." That might mean an initial public offering.
So who is the spurned suitor, if VentureBeat's report is correct? I don't think it would be Google or Yahoo--or Microsoft, for that matter. My money's on a big "old media" company, or possibly a massive ad industry player looking to expand its digital footprint.
Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.
Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher put Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer up on stage first thing at the D6 conference, and by doing so, let them set the agenda for the operating system discussion here at the show.
Microsoft's duo didn't do a great job of capitalizing on that position. Rather, they left a lot of room for other companies to excite the audience with newer ideas. Two companies here are taking on that charge.
Ghost
The first, Ghost, demo'd Wednesday. Its product is a "virtual computer," as the company calls it. Hosted at Amazon Web Services, it's designed to be everything you need from a computer, except it's not on your computer. You get a file system (with 5GB of storage for free), a media player, and links to some apps. For example, if you want to edit a word processing file, you can launch it into Thinkfree or Zoho.
The fact that Ghost doesn't come with a bunch of its own apps is the key to this product, and what makes it more like an actual OS than many other Web-based OS experiments I've seen. The design goal of Ghost is that it acts as the clearinghouse for all your Web app accounts, letting you shuffle data between them. For example, if you have a document in Zoho Writer and want to edit it in Google Docs, Ghost will make the transition automatic. If you want to drag a file from your Flickr account into your Ghost file store, and later to an e-mail, Ghost will do that, too.
The Ghost desktop looks--and works--a lot like Windows.
The interface for all of this runs within a browser, and that's the only place it will work at first. There's no offline version, and one of the venture funders for the company said the team doesn't believe that online/offline synchronizing will work with typically forgetful users (although a company representative later told me they're considering talking to Sharpcast to offer sync capability). Ghost is being built to be the one true glue that holds all your online apps together.
Also, Ghost is cool since it's a Palestinian/Israeli collaboration.
The company plans to make money through affiliate deals for the services it links to.
Answering the obvious question--How do you change user behavior to get them to move their computing to the cloud?--the founders respond that people have already moved their e-mail behavior online. So it could happen to productivity as well.
Like many other Web-based operating systems, it's a compelling demo but a confusing marketing pitch. The "you don't need your own computer" line doesn't work all that well when everyone has their own laptop already. Ghost is a very long bet. It is not a product for today (and it's still in early alpha testing anyway), but it is one of the most interesting Webtops I've seen, and more OS-like than most.
Glide
The second company, Glide, will showcase its new service on Thursday. Glide is more of Web application suite than a Web OS. It's more mature than Ghost, and more comprehensible to the average user today.
The new "Glide OS 3.0" is a fairly complete Web-based desktop, with a word processor, a presentation app, a spreadsheet, e-mail, calendar, media players, and so on. I was critical of the apps in Glide's early versions, but they do keep getting better. Glide also has a rights management system built into its system, which lets users closely control what happens to their documents if they choose to share them.
Unlike Ghost, Glide has an offline version, and a sync engine that keeps your online and offline files in lockstep. Glide works on mobile devices, and the offline apps works on PCs, Macs, and Linux devices.
The Glide desktop is a bit more polished, reflecting the fact that it's already in its third major revision.
Glide does not offer real-time collaboration, like Google Docs does, though.
These two suites show two different approaches to building Web-based app platforms. Ghost is a glue app--really more like an operating system than a suite, since the idea is that you run your favorite apps through it, and use it to manage your file storage and sharing. Glide is an app suite--the Microsoft Office of Web apps.
Glide has a full app suite. Its word processor is shown here.
Of the two projects, the Glide direction is more comprehensible. Users get that it's a competitor to paid productivity suites. Ghost is far too novel an idea for mass adoption; and I do worry that by the time users are ready for it, its strongest capabilities--data transfer and universal online storage--will be typical features of online apps. But it is, still, the more interesting idea and the bigger bet.
Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to gingerly explore online extensions to its core suite. And although I have been known to complain about the glacial evolution of the architecture of its application suite, in truth it's probably moving at close to the right pace to keep users onboard.
Microsoft could not do Glide today. It wouldn't work for its business. And it certainly couldn't do Ghost (although it's possible that Microsoft Live Mesh [stories] is an early move in this direction). But these new Web-based operating systems do show us where Microsoft must eventually move because that's where many of its users will be going.
See also: Xcerion, Startforce, YouOS, EyeOS.
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Glam CEO Samir Arora
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks)CARLSBAD, Calif.--Glam Media is launching a new platform for content distribution, the GlamTV Platform. It will allow the video assets in its woman-focused network of sites to be shared to new destinations, and more importantly, everyone in the value chain of the distribution will collect a piece of the advertising revenue. Videos on the Brightcove platform will also work on GlamTV.
"It's a rights-managed platform end to end," Glam Media CEO Samir Arora told me at the D6 conference here. An example he provided: Let's say the editor of SheFinds, an independent site, saw some video on a Glam site that she wanted for her site.
On the TV Platform, she would grab the embed code for the video, but unlike with a YouTube video, once the media played, all the participants in the value chain would share in the advertising revenue--SheFinds, the Glam site that acquired the video, and potentially the contract video producer as well. Arora was pleased to remind me that Glam is currently running over-$50 CPM ad rates, so its publishers can afford to split some of their revenues.
The Glam TV Platform will also allow publishers to pick and choose videos from around the network, bundle them into their own branded widgets, and then make those widgets available to others in the network. Again, when the widgets play videos, all participants get a piece of the action.
Glam makes this economy function by securing and managing the rights for all the video assets that go into its network. In most cases, the company acquires blanket rights for videos, but it can also accept more restrictive rights from publishers who want to control where the assets they paid for end up.
Various display options for GlamTV content.
The content-publishing platform lets users build widgets with custom video playlists.
See previous story: Social networks don platform shoes.
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The following is live coverage from D6 of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg being interviewed Wednesday by Kara Swisher:
Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.
Nathan Myhrvold was chief technology officer of Microsoft, but since 2000 has been building a portfolio of inventions (patents) at Intellectual Ventures. He's also a talented chef, photographer, and paleontologist. He was interviewed Wednesday at D6 by Walt Mossberg.
Walt Mossberg interviews Nathan Myhrvold at the D6 conference.
(Credit: Ina Fried / CNET)Mossberg dived into the controversy around Myhrvold's venture, which has been called an institutionalized "patent troll." Myhrvold says, "We invest in ideas, not the realization of it." He says, "We recruit inventors before they have an invention."
"And then you own it?" Mossberg asks. "Yes, but we pay the inventor."
The company, started in 2003, works on a process that takes four to five years before it has ideas that can be protected. "A lot of (the ideas) are 10 years out." The company files 500 patents a year, and has filed 1,700 in total. Only about 50 have been granted so far, he said, but as of yet none of the patents is realized in products.
Example projects include a "new kind of nuclear reactor." Myhrvold says, "We need an affordable source of carbon-free energy," and, "Maybe this is the first time that a little company could rethink nuclear power. Dramatically."
How does it work? Myhrvold believes his company's technology can run without operators, with spent fuel from current reactors and depleted uranium. "We have a wonderful containment vessel already: a Dell blade server. You really want to simulate the hell out of this stuff first."
"We're swinging for the fences," he said.
There's another part of the business, similar to the private equity model. "There are lots of inventions that people have that the owner doesn't know what the hell to do with."
It's buying patents, Mossberg said. Myhrvold agreed, but of course disputed the "patent troll" appellation. "I challenge the notion that there's something wrong with having an investable asset," he said. "We're closing the loop of capital."
Mossberg pressed Myhrvold on the issue, trying to get Myhrvold to admit that his company is happy to litigate for patent damages. Myhrvold: "There's nothing wrong with trying to get a reasonable return" on patents. Yet, he says, there are many ways to monetize patents. "We've never sent a litigation notice to anyone, and we've never filed a suit." He did not rule out the possibility in the future, however.
"Thomas Edison's business model was very similar to ours," he said. What's different, he said, is that he thinks there's a new model, called "invention capital," that's similar to venture capital in that "you create an algorithmic way that people can get funded."
See also: Myhrvold on Microhoo and his new cookbook
Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.
The following is live coverage from D6 of Yahoo's Jerry Yang and Susan Decker being interviewed Wednesday by Walt Mossberg:
Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.
