houstonhungarianconsulate.com

(Credit: Learning by Connecting)

“The difference between the optimist and the pessimist is that the pessimist has more facts,” said Jean-Paul Betb?ze, Chief Economist and Head of Economic Research Department, Cr?dit Agricole S.A., in a panel at the Millken Institute’s Global Conference 2008 in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. True as this may be, his statement stood in sharp contrast to the overall vibe of the event: Yes, we can, was the prevailing sentiment, and the overwhelming majority of attendees would probably have outed themselves as fervent optimists, despite an abundance of fact-featuring PowerPoint slides supporting each of the panel discussions (I’ve never seen so many pie charts in my whole life). In fact, the gathered crowd was comprised of optimists with lots of money to spend on the world’s most pressing problems (poverty; terrorism; population; resources; energy; environment; human rights; social justice; etc.) and may well have the power and means to solve most of them if they wanted to. Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and micro-lending pioneer, pointed out: “We wanted to go to the moon, and we went to the moon. If we really wanted to end poverty, we would have ended it a long time ago.”

After listening to him and some other brilliant minds, I felt over-inspired and under-accomplished, ready to change the world or at least my life. It was indeed a humbling experience. And yet, it stunned me to realize that many members of the powerful elite are struggling to cope with the new realities of business and society. The difference between being on top and being ahead, between being innovator and pioneer, became obvious in several of the panel discussions, particularly those that addressed the changing media landscape, the ongoing digital revolution, changing consumer behavior, and the new business paradigms that come with it.

These trends include:

- A surge in broadband penetration enabling ubiquitous content distribution and hyper-social connectivity

- The explosion of user-generated content: every minute 10 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube

- The collection and the friction-less, platform-independent distribution of content as the next big challenge for media and communication companies

- Mobile as the new container and memory device: 85 years of video (a whole lifetime) will be able to be stored on any new
iPhone in a few years

- The power shift from content providers to media distribution platforms (Comcast, Hulu, etc.)

- The consumer consuming on his own terms

- The “prosumer” as a market force to reckon with

- The wisdom of the crowds as a source of innovation (”we are smarter than me”)

Lex Fenwick, the CEO of Bloomberg LP, exemplified the old guard’s awakening almost in real-time. First he boasted that he invented email and created the world’s most valuable user community (of 350,000 customers) “by mistake,” then he warned of giving users too much control (”they may join forces to challenge your prices”). Barry Libert, CEO of collaboration software provider Mzinga, nailed him on this: “If you have something to hide from your customers, or you are afraid of giving them too much power, you have a problem.” At the end, Fenwick had converted from Saulus to Paulus, from “From Me to We,” and, in a cathartic turn of events, he admitted he had learned quite a bit from the panel: “Thank you for your insights. I am inspired to make a few changes to the Bloomberg community based on this discussion.”

Other companies have made this leap before him: Amazon, Netflix, Virgin Mobile, P&G, Dell, and recently Starbucks are all moving from a firm-centric to a network-centric organization, building and leveraging their community of users by giving them a voice in strategy, product development, and marketing decisions. They understand that crowdsourced and peer-to-peer business intelligence helps them overcome the “not-invented-here” syndrome, reconciling “inside-out” and “outside-in” innovation. Libert: “If customers cut the red tape and re-connect with customers, that’s making it easier for them to find out what they really need.” Of course it’s always easier to proclaim a new paradigm than defending an old one, or as someone noted on another panel: “If you’re a futurist and you think ten years ahead, by the time you’re wrong, no one will notice.”

Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo and in-character as enfant terrible, thrived in the devilish charm of the futurist. In a panel on “The New Rules of PR,” he joyfully exposed the insecurity of his audience. It was not so much his co-panelists — some old-school PR pros who bravely defended their profession against his “PR is dead” claim — but rather the ensuing Q&A that demonstrated how disturbing the new rules still are for many who have held the power in organizations for decades and find it difficult now to grasp and embrace some of the earth-shattering changes happening these days. “Should our CEO blog?” — Yes. “How do I stay in control of my brand if our CEO gets critical comments to his blog posts?” — Well, the truth is, you don’t. Just let go. Brands are assets in the public domain. With production capabilities and financial assets off-shored and out-sourced, brands are ever more important as the only remaining indispensable value of a company, and yet they are ever more volatile. In this open-sourced, hyper-transparent economy, your customer owns your brand, and no brand platform, no brand book, no rigid compliance guidelines designed to protect your idea of your brand, can change that. Brands are social funds. Your mission is to raise their intellectual and emotional capital. The creation of brand equity is a cooperative act based on the values that you share with your customers. And, by the way, marketing’s job is to promote these values, not to invent them.

In a panel on “Business Innovations that are Changing the World,” Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said: “Let’s not forget that the fundamental goal of any corporation is to change the world and not just to satisfy the interests of particular stakeholders.” Indeed, this was the overarching theme of an economic summit that was all about social: social innovation, social media, social networks, social web, and social capitalism. What once was a noble mission is now a mandate for CEOs: the future of business is social, both in terms of raison d’etre and modus operandi. Companies that open themselves up to promoting and fully leveraging the social dimension of human beings in order to create smarter and more effective solutions for social problems will be the winners of this new social economy.

The social news/video/photo site, Digg, will be rolling out their long anticipated recommendation engine to users this week. The rollout will be starting with a random sampling of users and eventually moving towards the entire user base at the end of the week. Digg’s recommendation engine will try to engage more users in the upcoming section of the site by recommending stories from similar users.

Digg’s upcoming section, where stories wait for enough diggs in order to get promoted, has been very intimidating for users to jump head first into, given the volume of stories being submitted. It was fairly hard to sift through all of the crap in order to get to the real gems. Hopefully the introduction of a recommendation engine will make it a lot easier for users to find the quality submissions.

I believe that the addition of a recommendation to Digg is going to significantly help with the usability of the site and direct people towards the long tail of submissions. By adding a lot of new eyes to the upcoming section, Digg’s homepage will certainly get a much fresher look than we have seen recently.

Digg's new recommendation engine lets you compare your tastes with the tastes of other users.

(Credit: Digg the Blog)

The other important factor to look at here is the apparent benefit that the recommendation engine will be giving to websites. Making content more discoverable on Digg means more traffic for the sites that the content has been submitted from. I suspect that more and more sites will begin to feel the Digg effect as a direct result of the launch of this feature.

The introduction of a recommendation engine should give Digg a nice jolt. I haven’t seen the feature in action yet, but if it is implemented correctly, I see Digg becoming a much more valuable resource and frequented by a lot more people. Kevin Rose posted a couple of videos on the Digg Blog which you can see embedded below. The first is an overview by Kevin of the recommendation engine, complete with graphics and the second features Anton Kast, Digg’s Lead Scientist, talking about the new engine. You can read his whitepaper on the subject here.

Digg Recommendation Engine from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

Anton Talks About The Digg Recommendation Engine from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

In addition to a flurry of new PCs, HP also announced this week that it would, at long last, start shipping the HP iPaq 900 smartphone on June 30. First introduced back in September 2007, the iPaq 900 is a business- and messaging-centric smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard; Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Edition; a 3-megapixel camera; and integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. The quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) smartphone also has tri-band UMTS/HSDPA support.

Currently, no U.S. carrier has picked up the device, though, according to HP, that may change in the future. (AT&T did pick up the HP iPaq hw6900 series a while back, so if any carrier will do it, we think it’ll be AT&T.) For now, the iPaq 900 will be sold unlocked through HP’s Web site, though pricing has not been finalized at this point.

[Sources: Phone Scoop, HP]

“Lenovo will accept the return or exchange of a product in its original, sealed package for a full refund in cases of Lenovo error. Returns allowed for any other reason will be subject to a restocking fee equal to 15% of the purchase amount.”

I was gladdened yesterday when techbargains.com reported a sale on a new Lenovo ThinkPad R61 running SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ($552, see below). It’s not everyday that you run into a major PC vendor selling machines pre-loaded with Linux (excluding servers).

Update May 19, 2008: The day I wrote this, I contacted Lenovo for clarification on the tech support situation. It is now 9 days later and there has been no response from Lenovo.

If you haven’t purchased a computer from Lenovo recently, be aware that their return policy has changed. It used to be great, if you didn’t like the machine, simply send it back for a full refund, no questions asked. No more. Their current return policy is:

The big issue, to me, with pre-installed copies of Linux is technical support. If Linux support could be offered at a quality level as high as Apple, and at a reasonable cost, then Linux usage would take off. In this case, Lenovo provides Level 1 support. If you don’t know what Level 1 means, then perhaps this computer is not for you. At least that’s what Lenovo seems to be saying - they don’t explain the term and say nothing about Level 2 or 3 support.

Perhaps pre-installing Linux will become more popular, in part, due to a Vista backlash. Or, the popularity of Linux of ultra-cheap laptops (where Vista doesn’t belong) such as the Asus EEE PC, will lay a foundation for its expansion. Once people see and touch and smell recent editions of Linux, they’ll realize it is no more different from Windows XP than is the
Mac OSX. And, as Lenovo says, Linux “Eliminates virus and spyware downtime”.

I found it interesting though, that on the very page where you order this Linux laptop, Lenovo is in your face about recommending Vista Business and Vista Home Premium.

full size image

Note the word “allowed” in the second sentence. Makes a skeptic wonder what returns they don’t allow.

Theoretically, Linux computers should be cheaper than those running Windows since the manufacturer gets the operating system for free. Indeed, $552 was cheaper than all the other R series ThinkPads at Lenovo.com yesterday, except one. Lenovo was selling an R61e with
Windows Vista Home Basic for $536. Both machines have 1GB of RAM, an 80GB hard disk, a CD burner/DVD reader, a one-year warranty and wide screens. The Linux ThinkPad has a 14.1 inch screen, the Vista machine comes with a 15.4 inch screen.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

More surprising, perhaps, is that 60 percent of the respondents said they trust online reviews left by complete strangers on retailers’ sites.

“They don’t–not as individuals,” Bernoff wrote. “But they do in groups. Strangers are assumed not to have an ax to grind. If 100 people on eBags say a laptop bag is great, then it is great. If they say it’s inferior, then it is inferior.”

It should come as no surprise that a vast majority of us trust our friends’ recommendations about products or services, but according to a study, a strong majority also trust the product reviews of anonymous online commenters.

The authors of Groundswell have determined that people most trust recommendations from friends, but they also put a lot of faith in reviews from anonymous commenters online.

According to their study, 83 percent of respondents believe in friends’ recommendations, a number higher than those who put stock in newspaper, magazine, or TV reviews (75 percent).

And why do people take the word of those they’ve never met?

I’ll say, however, that I personally don’t buy into this theory. Mainly because when I go looking for online reviews by the masses, I never find them. Instead, I find postings on Yelp or other places where three people have left reviews, all of which have divergent opinions. That’s not very helpful.

Perhaps.

This is why it’s harder to sell something on eBay when you don’t have a high feedback rating. And this is certainly a function of the wisdom of the crowds, for better or worse.

These are some of the findings of a study from the book Groundswell, by Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, highlighted in a post on the book’s blog this week.

Of course, if there are 100 reviews of something, I will get behind the groupthink. The same is true on eBay, for example. If someone has a feedback rating of 8, I’ll stay away, as will almost all buyers or sellers.

(Credit:
Forrester Research)

Apple’s Aperture is used to edit and catalog photos.

On to editing. For sophistication, I’d give the edge to Adobe, though to be fair I haven’t looked in detail at important aspects of Aperture, namely noise reduction and edge sharpening. I sometimes find those wanting in Lightroom.

Apple was first to enter the higher-end photo software market with Aperture in 2005, but the software languished at the same time Adobe Systems released and rapidly updated Photoshop Lightroom over 2007. But now Apple is back in the game with Aperture 2.0, which reproduces some features in Lightroom, boosts performance, and has a price tag $100 less than Lightroom’s $300.

Something Aperture does better is vignetting, the darkened corners that once were a lens deficiency but now have caught on (altogether too widely in my opinion) as an effect to focus attention on the center of an image. Lightroom can fix lens vignetting or add it to a full image, but if you want to apply the effect to a cropped version of the photo, only Aperture offers that mechanism.

One major edge Lightroom has had is much earlier support of the raw image files of new cameras. Apple said it was held back by an overhaul of its raw-processing engine and that things should now go more swiftly, but it’ll take real work to win back the hearts of disgruntled Nikon D300 owners. In the meantime, Apple now can make use of Adobe Systems’ Digital Negative (DNG) format as an intermediate step to handle raw files Adobe supports and Apple doesn’t.

Let’s start with the interface. I like Lightroom’s pull-out panels–as many as four–that can be deployed or tucked away as needed. Most of the time I only have zero, one, or two showing.

News.com Poll Which software is better: Lightroom or Aperture?
With Aperture 2.0, Apple is back in the game when it comes to editing and
cataloging raw images. But Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom works on Windows and
has been evolving faster. Which do you think is better?

View results

But I think Aperture makes smart design decisions with a few interface options. Its movable panel isn’t very obtrusive, and now in 2.0 you can toggle it easily between editing, tagging, and file management modes. For me, editing and adding metadata such as titles, captions, and tags are much closer operations than the big divide between Lightroom’s develop and library modules would suggest, and I don’t like switching back and forth between editing and tagging.

Please vote in the poll here, and share your reasoning in the Talkback section below to enlighten others.

In essence, that means the software can be a gatekeeper to your data–not the original images, but the editing settings, titles, captions, tags, and organizational structure. For me, having a rich, searchable catalog is definitely worth it, but tread carefully before you commit, because it’ll be difficult to extricate yourself.

Of course, one of the biggest advantages Lightroom has is a Windows version, and that alone is likely to ensure its market dominance over Apple. And where Apple has a lot going on with iPods and iPhones, image editing is Adobe’s bread and butter. Should those externalities be factors, too? Weigh in.

(Credit:
Adobe Systems)

Looking beyond editing, my expertise thins out because I don’t do much in the way of exporting photos to Web galleries or printing at home. But I will note one Aperture advantage: Apple expanded its book-export options with 2.0, and Lightroom has no answer so far. That’s a drag for wedding photographers and amateurs (like me) who want to whip up a quick birthday present for the grandparents.

(Credit:
Apple)

It looks to me like Aperture has a better search interface, especially for complicated operations that combine multiple parameters such as keywords, date ranges, and the handy photos-I-actually-edited filter. I’ve sometimes gotten bogged down swimming through Lightroom search. And I love the smart folders feature, which automatically updates a folder that’s been set to watch for a particular attribute. For example, with Lightroom, I would love for the software to automatically add a photo with a specific recurring tag to a particular collection.

With the new Aperture now available and Lightroom just celebrating its first birthday, I thought it opportune to survey readers. What would you buy? What would you advise somebody else?

The good news is that there’s some competition again for software to edit and catalog raw images, the detailed and flexible file formats from higher-end cameras. The bad news is that anybody buying the software has a harder choice to make.

Correcting lens problems is a real issue, though, and Lightroom has a chromatic aberration correction I find very useful. It lets you fix some of the magenta, red, yellow, and blue fringes that show up in high-contrast areas, especially near the corners of images, and it also can alleviate the purple fringing overall. Aperture lacks this.

I like Lightroom’s targeted adjustment tool (TAT), which lets you adjust the tone curve as well as color saturation and luminance by clicking on the relevant portion of the image directly and dragging the mouse up and down. And Adobe was smart to actually employ user testing to determine which colors are individually adjustable–orange has more psychological importance than most software, including Aperture, gives it. And I’m a big fan of tone-curve adjustments, though I sometimes wish Lightroom divided the curve up into five or six subranges instead of four.

Performance is better with Aperture 2.0 (it was faster on the dual-core iMac I played with than Aperture 1.5 was on a quad-core
Mac Pro I used for Aperture 1.5), and a particularly nice feature is the ability to work in a preview mode that employs only JPEGs–either the images built into the raw image or an Aperture-rendered version. You can’t edit with it, but it’s good enough at least for the first pass through a photo shoot to delete the duds and add tags and titles.

One unknown is the plug-in future of both applications. Right now Lightroom has a software development kit for export options, and there’s work of unknown scope to come. Apple said it’s future SDK will permit editing plug-ins, too, which Adobe says is a difficult challenge. On the other hand, Adobe’s already got some editing plug-ins of a sort, with the ability to import custom settings for all manner of adjustment options.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is used to edit and catalog photos, chiefly the raw images that come from higher-end digital cameras.

Speaking of metadata, though, one option I like better with Lightroom is the ability to assign five colors to photos (but where’s the keyboard shortcut for purple?). The one- to five-star ratings that both packages offer is dandy, but I use colors to classify photos in other ways.

Pros and cons
Both packages are solid overall, but there are some features I preferred with one or the other. Here’s how I see things stacking up–be warned, though, that I’ve used Lightroom for countless hours but by comparison only dabbled with Aperture 2.0.

Apple Aperture
Adobe Lightroom

Photographers would be best to think carefully about which software to purchase, and not just because of the necessary investments of time and money. Unlike applications such as Photoshop, which can easily be substituted or used in conjunction with other software, Lightroom and Aperture are equipped to extend their tentacles to manage your library of images.

While a good deal of the tweets are useless (see example above), there are a few that link to blog posts, or important notes about long wait times at the polls. However, my bet is that most people will stick to their regular news sites for the most up-to-date information. Speaking of which, if you’re in the mood for more tangible poll results, you can check out Google’s primary results gadget, which displays percentages for each candidate, by state on a simple chart. It’s available as a standalone embed (which I’ve added after the break) and as a gadget for your iGoogle homepage.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

If you’re trying to keep up with U.S. politics today, be prepared for an onslaught. There’s an all-day mudslide of information, and no end of sources to get it from. Google’s decided to join the fray and, with the help of microblogging service Twitter, has created a live, moving mapplet to track people’s tweets that are related to politics. All the tweets are geotagged with the Twitter user’s city and state, so you can see where they posted from, right down to the county.

Just about everyone else on the Internet has written on the potential acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft for $44.6 billion, but I thought that I would weigh in on what I think this might mean for search and Web services.

Microsoft will benefit from taking control of the leading photo-sharing site, Flickr, since its only photo-sharing solution that currently exists is through its Windows Live Spaces product. Several services from the two companies will likely be merged down the road, such as Upcoming integration in Live Events, Yahoo Widgets being integrated into the Vista Sidebar, and a merger of Yahoo Answers and Live QnA. Services that are likely to get the axe include Yahoo Maps, since Microsoft’s Virtual Earth technology far outperforms Yahoo’s, Yahoo 360 (or whatever it ends up being once it is done “transitioning”), and most likely some of Yahoo’s music services.

According to ComScore’s search share numbers for December 2007, Google has 58.4 percent of the market share, with Yahoo and Microsoft trailing at 22.9 percent and 9.8 percent, respectively. If Microsoft and Yahoo combine forces and change nothing, that will put them at 32.7 percent to Google’s 58.4 percent. While those numbers are certainly not enough to overthrow Google, maybe the combined minds at the two tech giants can come up with something. Somebody has to try to make a stand, so that Google doesn’t run away with the industry completely. That said, I think that Google is here to stay, even though this may be its biggest challenge yet.

$44.6 billion is a lot of money to pay for an acquisition, but Microsoft has deep pockets. The deal initially makes me a little nervous, but after thinking about it for a little while, I am feeling better about it. I’m not convinced that Microsoft will take away Google’s search crown as a result of this acquisition, but it will instantly become a larger player. This acquisition will lead to almost complete dominance by Microsoft over Google in the Web services arena, but not necessarily in search.

On the Web services side of the issue, this acquisition is looking really good for Microsoft and Yahoo. Long Zheng has a great rundown of the services that Microsoft and Yahoo provide and where they overlap. The combined user bases of Microsoft and Yahoo’s Web mail services far outpace that of Gmail (they actually both beat Gmail individually), so we will put one in the win column there. If Google Talk wasn’t dead enough before, it sure will be now. Google has not even come close to touching either Microsoft or Yahoo in the instant-messaging market. One more thing on IM, if this acquisition goes through, a little service called AIM is going to finally be in their sights.

Users can submit their own designs with instructions, which go into one of 19 categories. Each item tells you what materials you’ll need, and how difficult it is. Users can also chime in by reviewing each creation and adding their own tips.

Build anything with community designs that can be printed out and put together with household materials.

The number of designs on the site right now is pretty light, but assuming more are added, budding entrepreneurs will soon have a place to find fast, simple packaging on the cheap.

If you’re contemplating liquidating some of your assets, eBay, Craigslist and others are probably looking pretty attractive right now. Don’t forget about the garage sale though!

[via Delicious]

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

A good way to dress one up, or turn those old pizza boxes into holiday gift baskets is to head over to iStockPack. It’s an Instructables-like community that’s filled with various projects to put together anything from a cigar box to a cardboard cookie jar using nothing more than materials you may have laying around the house.

“That, along with our revised outlook and the present economic climate, led us to conclude that financing terms for the transaction are no longer attractive for our shareholders,” the San Jose, Calif., company said.

Cadence Design Systems has withdrawn its $1.5 billion bid to acquire rival Mentor Graphics.

Mentor Graphics rejected the offer last month, saying it was too low, according to Reuters. The company, based in Wilsonville, Ore., released a statement Friday in response to Cadence’s news. “This withdrawal is inconsistent with both Cadence’s recent public statements and recent communications between Mentor Graphics and Cadence,” the company said.

Cadence also said Friday that it is expanding its stock buyback program. The board of directors has approved adding $500 million to the program, bringing the total amount to about $912 million.

Cadence had made an offer in June to buy the chip-design software company, but said in a statement Friday that Mentor’s board and management “were unwilling to engage in substantive discussions.”