July 20th, 2008
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Who Has Stolen the Old Jerry Yang? (But No Need to Return Him!)
Could the new and improved Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang actually manage to beat back the proxy fight being waged against him by activist investor Carl Icahn?
It increasingly looks that way, with only 12 days to go until Yahoo’s annual meeting on August 1.
But exactly which Yang will be running Yahoo, if he does win, is probably the most important question shareholders need to ask.
Would that be the seemingly energetic Yang of the past two weeks, invigorated by the battle with Icahn and his new best friend and Yahoo foe, Microsoft?
Or will it be the other Yang?
Because, for months and months now, since Microsoft waged its takeover bid on the Internet company he founded, the woe-is-me vibe emanating from Yang has been working the last nerve of anyone paying attention to the proceedings.
Given that had been combined by a kind of cave-dweller PR strategy of not speaking publicly–other than releasing an indignant, non-capitalized letter every now and then about the situation–it definitely was causing some to question Yang’s ability to gin up the kind of passion needed to being Yahoo back from its current straits.
Even before the Microsoft parry in February, that ho-hum mood had trickled down to the troops, causing lower morale, too many departures and a general feeling–deserved or not–that Yahoo has been circling the drain for much too long under its current lackluster leadership.
And, let us not forget the drippy stock performance either.
And while BoomTown especially has to give both Yang and also Yahoo president Sue Decker much credit for appearing onstage at our sixth D: All Things Digital conference in May, most who saw the appearance (we posted the whole thing last week, starting here) were not blown away by the performance, considering it too enervated.
What then, do we make of the current round of pugnacious, dare-we-say passionate and, as it seems, pretty effective moves Yang has made this week to ward off the attacks of Icahn and Microsoft?
I should have gotten clued-in to the shift when Yang actually made contact with me on July 9, after being out-of-touch for many, many moons, presumably due to pique over my 100-day Sacred Cow Countdown (he started it!).
As it happened, I was in Seattle visiting a lot of Pacific Northwest companies, including Microsoft, when he called.
After our discussion, I published these choice quotes from Yang in a post on July 10, titled “Jerry Yang’s Pledge: Not on My Watch”:
“I think handing over the company to Carl Icahn for the express purpose of hoping he can negotiate a complex deal with Microsoft is a big mistake for shareholders. This is particularly true since Icahn has no plan B and therefore will have no leverage and will be dealing with Microsoft from a position of weakness.
“Furthermore, Microsoft’s interest in Yahoo has been inconsistent at best and they refuse to even put a firm proposal on the table. Their motivations are suspect and there is simply no good reason to think they will actually show up at the end of the day. And then what will shareholders be left with? A weakened, Icahn-controlled Yahoo.”
Then Yang went into overdrive over that next weekend, as Yahoo managed to make a new Microsoft search proposal–which was really very, very generous–look radioactive, by loudly declaring that Icahn’s taking over of Yahoo was crazy-glued to the plan.
It was not, but no amount of Microsoft spinning could undo the damage of what looked like a goofy power play by Icahn and Microsoft.
That was followed up at the end of last week by the news that Yahoo had convinced one big investor, Bill Miller of Legg Mason Capital Management (who has always been a supporter of Yang and, especially, Decker) to back the current board.
Legg Mason owns about 4.4 percent of Yahoo.
While not saying it was final, Miller noted that it was his intention to stick with Yahoo’s leadership, adding that he also wanted Yahoo and Icahn to settle their differences before the annual meeting.
Of course, Miller still tried to get Microsoft back to the table, noting: “If Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo, it can make the terms and conditions of its offer public.”
One can hope, Bill! (Actually, as I have written many times, Microsoft should make that move, if it really intends to compete against Google.)
But, best of all, was Yahoo sticking a big fat banner on its much-trafficked home page Friday, alerting its users–most of whom were really just minding their own business and trying to get their daily horoscopes.
Nonetheless, in a box that flashed various outrages about the proxy fight, Yahoo linked to a presentation that pretty much called Icahn a Luddite. It included a quote attributed to him from The Wall Street Journal: “It’s hard to understand these technology companies.”
You can say that again, Carl!
And Yang did say it again in video message to Yahoo employees, noting, “We’re taking full advantage of the power of our network to remind our stockholders why voting for Carl Icahn’s board of directors is a bad choice.”
Ah, there is nothing like a technically clueless billionaire as an enemy to get Yang’s blood boiling!
Apparently, that has helped employee morale too. This weekend, I have heard from several execs contemplating leaving, tired of waiting for the 12th shoe to drop, who noted that more passion from Yang was helping.
“People feel like he is showing some strength, which you never see,” said one. “It sounds corny, but we want someone we believe in.”
Well, we’ll see if institutional investors do, after they get a recommendation mid-week from the large proxy-advisory service ISS Governance Services, which Yang and other Yahoo execs and board members visited last week to make their case.
That will come one day after Yahoo releases its second quarter earnings on Tuesday, which I am sure will be decent, as they just have to be considering the hubbub around Yahoo.
(And you can be sure Yahoo CFO Blake Jorgensen is working overtime this weekend, adding in all he can to make the picture as pretty as possible.)
It’ll be a big week for Yahoo, as usual, made bigger if Icahn does not mount an effective offense, such as releasing a cogent plan of his own and showing he has some managers in the wings who can run Yahoo if he were to get the reins.
Which Yang is not showing any signs of giving up anytime soon.
So, I fully expect him to get even more hopped up this week with more speeches to employees, more visits to shareholders and perhaps even more calls to the press (BoomTown is waiting by the phone!).
Of course, this is all just show. And while it’s a good one, as I said, the most important thing everyone has to keep in mind is what this all means after August 1.
So I have some questions for Yang:
Does Yang have the energy and vision and, most important, management chops, to really move the needle at Yahoo and make the kinds of changes it needs?
And what are those changes? More of the same direction (more social, more open) or perhaps a much more radical focus on core businesses like content and communications?
And what about search, a losing game as Yahoo inevitably will be crushed between Google and Microsoft? And what about fending off that pair’s new focus on display advertising, where Yahoo does excel?
Will Yang, if he does not think he has what it takes, be willing to step aside? And does that mean Decker will become CEO or will he bring in new outside execs, who have not been part of the problems of the past?
I could go on and on, of course, but it pretty much boils down to one key question:
Is the Yang who acts like he can win really here to stay?
Also, here is a post and also a video of me talking about the topic on Yahoo’s Tech Ticker last week with Henry Blodget and Aaron task:
July 19th, 2008
Lenovo is the next Dell!
For just a little more money you get almost the same configuration and a cooler (at least a non-trite) laptop. Why not?
Vertu
The phone also has a 'Concierge Key' that provides a 24/7 concierge service.
With its current strength at 400 employees, I am sure it will be quite a company to work for!
The Roof and the Root
MAHATHIR.
Once more I turn to you, o Varied and Learned Readers, in my perplexity. For years I've been reading about Mahathir bin Mohamad, longtime prime minister of Malaysia. Without giving it any special thought, I mentally pronounced Mahathir something like [maˈha.θir] (ma-HAH-theer, with voiceless th). But when I visited his Wikipedia article, I noticed the pronunciation given was [maˈhɑ.ðe] (ma-HAH-they, with voiced th). Now, the voiced th makes sense, because the Arabic spelling (which I had never looked up) is محضير... but why is there a final r in the romanized version, and is the final r pronounced or not? Googling mahathir pronounced got me "Mahathir (pronounced mah-hot-te, btw -- don't ask me why)," "pronounced ma-hah-TEER," "pronounced Mahat'hir," and the presumably jocular "pronounced as Mad-hat-tail," leaving me no wiser than before. I know, I know, you can't trust Wikipedia, but I can't help but think somebody who went to the trouble of correctly formatting and using the IPA symbols probably knew what they were talking about. But (in the immortal words of The Troggs) I wanna know for sure. So: anybody familiar with how Malaysians actually pronounce this name? (Bonus points for explanations of the phonemics involved.)
Update. In the comments, pavel says [ma'ha.te(r)] is a more accurate transcription, and he seems to know. Thanks for all the thoughtful and informative answers!
Frisbee
I found this beautiful piece in Richard Lederer’s “A Man of My Words”:
Writing is...
by Richard LedererFor me, writing is like throwing a Frisbee.
You can play Frisbee catch with yourself, but it’s repetitious and not much fun. Better it is to fling to others, to extend yourself across a distance.
At first, your tossing is awkward and strengthless. But, with time and practice and maturity, you learn to set your body and brain and heart at the proper angles, to grasp with just the right force, and not to choke the missile. You discover how to flick the release so that all things loose and wobbly snap together at just the right moment. You learn to reach out your follow-through hand to the receiver to ensure the straightness and justice of the flight.
And on the just-right days, when the sky is blue and the air pulses with perfect stillness, all points of the Frisbee spin together within their bonded circle—and the object glides on its own whirling, a whirling invisible and inaudible to all others but you.
Like playing Frisbee, writing is a re-creation-al joy. For me, a lot of the fun is knowing that readers out there—you among them—are sharing what I have made. I marvel that, as you pass your eyes over these words, you experience ideas and emotions similar to what I was thinking and feeling when, in another place and another time, I struck the symbols on my keyboard.
Like a whirling, gliding Frisbee, my work extends me beyond the frail confines of my body. Thank you for catching me.
The India Uncut Blog © 2007 Amit Varma. All rights reserved.
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An Old Wives’ Tail
When you’re having a low day, there’s nothing better to do than read a bit of Mahinder Watsa. Reader Nandu writes in to point me to this gem, which I’d somehow missed:
Q. A lot of women approach me for a physical relationship since I have a good physique. However, I am scared. My instructor says that sex reduces physique due to loss of semen since semen is a kind of blood. Is that true or just an old wives’ tale?
Watsa: The instructor badly needs sex education. It is an old wives’ tail.
Rarely is a pun so masterfully used.
PS.: Oh, and just to clarify, when I said ‘low day’, I was not punning. Thank you.
The India Uncut Blog © 2007 Amit Varma. All rights reserved.
Visit: India Uncut * The IU Blog *
Rave Out * Extrowords *
Workoutable * Linkastic
Yoko-chan’s Singing Event
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — 1/50 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Yoko-chan Preparing to Sing
It's been a busy few days, photographically speaking. The other day Anthony went swimming in the river with Greg. This evening I had one photo-op event with noh musician Riko-chan's daddy, and another with Yoko-chan, whose daddy arranged for my recent visit to a Japanese high school. On the way home, I spotted the most amazing (not in a good way) car in the parking lot of a convenience store, and had to whip out the camera then as well. Much photo-processing awaits.
This post is about Yoko-chan, one of Anthony's kindergarten friends. She
performed today at the Kyoto
Brighton Hotel's “Relay Music Festival in Atrium”, which is a series of
free musical performances every evening in July. They've apparently been
doing it a while, because tonight's was performance #519 (for the series, not for Yoko-chan 
).
The hotel has a large atrium, at one end of which is the stage....
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm — 1/40 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Brighton Hotel
Kyoto, Japan
There is, to a first approximation, no light inside. I was expecting the worst, but wow, it just goes to show what a monopod and a little VR can do. This next shot was taken with my Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 zoom at full 200mm zoom, with a glacially long 1/20th second shutter...
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — 1/20 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Nervous Kids Waiting to Perform
There was a mix of women and girls, singing old children's folk songs. Yoko-chan's daddy told me that most people wouldn't even know them today, but most people's grandparents would. I actually knew one song because I heard it over and over and over in a Bank of Kyoto radio commercial that played about every five minutes throughout the afternoons while I was working on the first edition of my book in 1994-1996.
Anyway, they came out and sang very nicely...
The kids both sang and did little dances. I'm not sure what's going on in this next shot, but it's cute...
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — 1/60 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1250 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Yoko-chan's daddy is also a camera geek, and was getting shots as well. I like to get the shot of people getting the shot, so where we are....
I don't know about you, but I'm just a sucker for little kids in traditional Japanese dress. Cute. cute. cute.
It was over all too quickly, and Yoko-chan came out to be greeted by a bunch of her classmates...
There was even less light after the show, because now there were no spotlights. I switched my super-fast Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens for the lobby shots. Here's Yoko-chan's daddy and other parents waiting for the kids...
The lady in red is Mizuki-chan's mommy. I see Mizuki-chan at “Jumping” (preschool gymnastics) and just know that she will be participating in the 2020 Olympics in some event. I hope she'll let me take pictures.
F|R Crib Sheet: 15 Sites to Cut Your Startup Operating Costs
Clever founders always eke the most out of every buck. But economic conditions being what they are, even the best bootstrappers could use a little extra help.
By now you’ve probably heard of web sites like GasPriceWatch.com, GasBuddy and MSNAutos, which help consumers find the cheapest fuel prices at gas pumps in their geographic area. Such “cost-optimization” sites are now proliferating across all sorts of verticals directly relevant to your most basic startup operating expenses. We’ve assembled a list of a few we like that can help you shop for everything from health insurance to web hosting to wireless service plans and more.
If you’ve discovered, or possibly even built, additional tools for cutting commodity costs, please add them to our list via the comments section.
1. Phone Service/Wireless Plans
Carriers make it hard to do head-to-head comparisons of their plans. BillShrink.com will help you find the cheapest plan for your immediate needs, and then monitor your usage pattern over time to continue to match your needs to the carriers’ constantly changing service offerings. Like many sites included here, BillShrink (funded by David Cowan of Bessemer Venture Partners) is designed for consumers, not businesses, but as co-founder Schwark Satyavolu notes, startups find it handy, too: “The vast majority have fewer than five employees so they use family plans or extended family plans that go up to 10 lines, the very same services consumers use.”
Also try MyRateplan.com and Telebright.com, which does energy expense management as well (more on this below).
2. Credit Cards
Many founders bootstrap their operations in the early days using credit cards. There is nothing wrong with this, so long as you do lots of research up front and remain extremely vigilant about managing your accounts. Credit Cards.com does a nice job of winnowing down and showcasing the many different small business credit-card offers out there.
And in coming weeks, BillShrink plans to add a credit card service that will, like its wireless service, marry your borrowing patterns to the best-available credit card offer. Whether you carry a balance or pay it off, BillShrink will assess your “cost of ownership” on each card, and rank them for you. Stay tuned.
3. Insurance Plans
Most Choice.com offers you custom quotes for all kinds of insurance, including health plans, liability policies, even directors’ and officers’ liability coverage. See the left column of various listings, go to Group Health Insurance and in the search field use the tab for Professional Scientific and Technical Services.
Vimo.com, another Bessemer-funded site, is directed at helping consumers source insurance plans and physicians, and generally get more out of their health care expenses. Its tab for small businesses is where you can also get quotes for group plans.
4. Web Hosting
We found this category to be particularly tricky as there are so many different kinds of hosting (shared, dedicated, co-location, etc.). One choice is FindMyHosting.com, an independent site that, despite a cluttered home page, has a simple field where you can enter your parameters and get a quote. Also check out its Guide to Budget Web Hosting.
For comparison shopping, WebhostingClue.com simply displays a list of competitive offers.
There are fewer optimization resources for co-located hosting, but one that came recommended is WebHostingTalk.com, a discussion site where you can ask questions in topic forums, get tips, even special pricing from vendors. Note, however, that the rules strictly prevent lead generation or advertising.
5. Storage and Remote Backup
Founders tells us this is even harder to source than hosting, but we suggest you try BuyerZone.com.
6. Office Supplies
You want 24-inch LCD screens to prompt your developers’ creativity? FatWallet.com aggregates and publishes the best prices for office wares from a range of retailers including Wal-Mart and Buy.com.
Roosster.com aggregates content from the aggregators, including FatWallet. Penny-pinching expert Schwark Satyalovu of BillShrink built this site, also. “I bought ALL of our office equipment, including our computers, LCDs, projectors, printers, by finding the best deals on these sites — including 24-inch LCD screens — for only $299.”
BLUNDERINGLY.
Apologies for a second post about lexographical trivia, but sometimes trawling through dictionaries is too much fun not to share. This time the word my eye lit on was lespedeza, "a genus ... of herbaceous or shrubby plants of the legume family," and what struck me was the etymology: "New Latin, irregular from V. M. de Zespedes fl1785 Spanish governor of East Florida." Irregular indeed! So I turned to the OED to see if it could shed any further light, and found:
[mod.L. ..., blunderingly (by a misreading of the surname) f. the name of V. M. de Céspedez (fl. 1785), Spanish governor of East Florida.]The word "blunderingly" seemed a trifle snide, especially when you consider that the OED seems to have gotten the spelling wrong itself. (Googling tells me that historians use the Z- spelling, e.g. Zéspedes in East Florida, 1784-1790
.)Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
I can't seem to stop humming the tunes from this little, quirky, three-part musical, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. It's funny and witty in a way I find quite enjoyable (and I don't normally find musicals to be enjoyable. At all. Ever.).
It's apparently free to view until Sunday night, after which it'll be available for purchase at the iTunes Store.
Will Mark Kingdon’s Reign Boost Second Life?
Back in April, ex-Organic CEO Mark Kingdon took the helm of Linden Lab, replacing its charismatic founder, Philip Rosedale, at a time when the company was already struggling in an increasingly competitive market. While Linden claims to be profitable, its market share has plateaued, with scalability and usability woes keeping the number of monthly active users around 550,000 since last summer.
Is Second Life still relevant in this far more dynamic playing field, which now includes Lively, an offering from the Internet’s biggest player? I posed that question to Kingdon a few days ago in an extended conversation at the company’s spacious San Francisco headquarters.
“Anytime Google enters a new market,” Kingdon told me, “people’s reaction is ‘Oh look! Google’s there; they’ll win.’” But he doesn’t even see the search giant as a direct competitor. “I think the thing that most people looking from the outside don’t realize is how diverse the use cases [of content in Second Life] are,” he said, citing everything from art exhibits to a company’s shareholder meeting to a new educational initiative. By comparison Lively, Kingdon said, “…has I guess you could say almost a single-use case, graphical chat.”
As an author and blogger who writes about Second Life, I remain convinced that user-created virtual worlds are a transformative medium. But I’m less clear as to whether or not Kingdon can address the myriad challenges that await Second Life in the post-Rosedale, post-Burning Man era. So I wanted to know how he plans to fix them, especially with the proverbial train already going 60 miles per hour.
The Infrastructure
“We’re working on three things really intently,” he said. The first is “solidifying our proposition for what we’re defining as our core markets.” That includes the traditional personal user of Second Life, which is typically someone in their 30s, as well as the “enterprise segment,” which addresses the many corporations that use Second Life for conferencing, job fairs and other business applications. And finally there are the educators that use the virtual world as a teaching tool. “I think 18 of the top 20 educational institutions in North America are in Second Life and doing wondrous things,” Kingdon said.
The second task, he went on, is improving Second Life’s complex user interface, especially in relation to its confusing first-hour experience, which he admitted prompts many people to give up. “We’re also working very hard to make Second Life intuitively, and maybe even delightfully, usable,” he told me.
The third crucial task relates to what Kingdon called the “stability and scalability of the platform.” The Second Life client and server grid is notoriously crash-prone, but he said they’ve been working on it for months and were showing good progress so far.
The Competition
Linden Lab has also recently added ultra-realistic, 3D graphic enhancements to Second Life. But it remains to be seen if the market will broadly embrace immersive 3-D worlds. As I pointed out to Kingdon, World of Warcraft has cartoonish graphics, while the web-based, teen-oriented virtual world Habbo Hotel, which is just as big, is in 2.5-D.
Kingdon, however, insisted that he was extremely optimistic about the 3-D experience. “The 2-D or 2.5-D experience doesn’t offer you the rich, meaningful, visceral, profound connection that you get in Second Life,” he said. Take an in-world meeting with colleagues; the immersive sense of interacting with them as customized avatars via voice and text chat, he said, “beats a video conference hands down.”
The Money
In the last couple years, several Linden Lab staff have described the private company as profitable; on my Second Life blog, I did some back-of-the-envelope estimates of Linden’s publicly known revenue sources, and it seemed like the company was making $40 million to $60 million dollars in profit. But Kingdon said it wasn’t quite that much.
“I won’t say [how much], but it’s not that high, although we are profitable and generating positive cash flow,” he said. Much of that’s going into “making hardware purchases, improving the experience for users, investing in people, hiring a lot.”
And what about recurring rumors that the company was already preparing to go public?
“Our focus — I can tell you — is very much on the three initiatives I talked about before. That’s what’s occupying the minds of the management team right now,” he said. “It does take some time to get ready for an IPO, so since that’s not on my agenda today you can probably do the math and form your own conclusions about when it might be a possibility.”
The Future
Finally, I brought up the recent joint announcement made by Linden Lab and IBM that they’d managed to move several avatars from Second Life to Open Sim, the open source virtual world. This could eventually create a market for interconnected virtual worlds, but moving mere avatars was a tiny step toward meaningful interoperability, which would also require transporting objects and other virtual assets between worlds — a much more daunting, perhaps insurmountable challenge. Did Linden Lab have a road map for that?
“There is a plan and a timeline,” Kingdon said. And while he acknowledged the interoperability challenges ahead (”it’s an incredibly complex technical issue”), he said progress was imminent. “The next milestone will be between now and the end of the year, but it may not be the milestone you have in mind — so stay tuned!”
Image credit: Kingdon photo from AdWeek.com. Kingdon’s Second Life avatar “M Linden” screenshot by Crap Mariner
BRB != BBIAB
BRB in a bitdoes not make any sense.
The TOEFL score...
Reading section - 30/30
Listening Section - 29/30
Speaking Section - 26/30
Writing Section - 30/30
---
Total - 115/120
I messed up the Speaking section and was actually expecting worse scores - I never finished the last task leave alone conclude it. I was in the middle of a word in the middle of a sentence ("...gener...") when time ran out. Am happy about the results though, especially since I had no time for preparation with the summer internship, the IMSc lectures and the physics exams.
I gave myself a treat with a trip to Pizza Hut and a movie ("Kismat Konnection") - the former was great while the latter sucked :)
Elephants
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deponti's post about Thattekad made me go back to my archives and revisit that fascinating place. Thattekad is south India's top birding destination and doesn't usually have elephants in attendance, but during my February 2006 trip, there were a herd (or two) of elephants in the park. From the safety of a building inside the forest, we watched these magnificent creatures in the river...( Photographs of elephants in the water... )
Zibahkhana: Screaming Pakistani teens meet burqa psycho
Omar Ali Khan’s Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground) raises the question "Which is the worse fate: to be chased across a deserted jungle by a homicidal maniac armed with a spiky iron ball or to have a sweet old lady hold your hand, look closely at you and ask Tumhari shaadi kya ho gayi hai, beta?" Watching this movie in one of the smaller auditoria at Cinefan was among my most surreal experiences in eight years of attending the festival. The camaraderie in the audience was comparable to that in the screening of Ram Gopal Verma ki Aag (mentioned here). As the Pakistani teenagers in the film followed the example of their predecessors in western horror
movies – saying and doing numerous brainless things, wandering off alone in the woods when common sense dictated otherwise – and paid for it by having their limbs chopped off and ground to mush, people in the hall hooted and whistled. Roars of laughter accompanied the scene where a boy and a girl suddenly turn all bashful and awkward just because they’ve been left alone with each other (never mind that their friends are being massacred a few trees away).As you can tell, Hell’s Ground follows the 1970s and 1980s B-horror movie template of errant teens doing something they shouldn’t be doing (in this case: lying to their parents, stealing out together on a long drive to a rock concert and shooting up along the way). Naturally, this invites bloody retribution.
The protagonists are five youngsters – three guys, two girls – in a large van, and we realise that they’ve gotten off the main road (in more senses than one) when they encounter a creepy, Dracula-like tea-stall owner who shouts after them, “Jahannum mein jaa rahe ho, mere bachchon!” (“You’re on the path to hell, my children!”) After a run-in with bloodthirsty zombies and other unsavoury types, the film climaxes with a – what else – burqa-clad psychopath who comes running after them whirling a most unwieldy ball-and-chain. This psycho belongs to a family who make Norman and Norma Bates look like the Kumars at Number 42 in comparison, but I have a word of advice for him: for optimum results in slicing up terrified teens, use a less cumbersome weapon. (Even Leatherface never put himself to as much grief with his bulky chainsaw as this monster does.)Hell’s Ground isn’t a good film. In fact, I wouldn’t even call it a “so bad it’s good” film – more like “so bad that it’s good for a few chuckles here and there, with some fun reference-spotting for the gore-movie buff”. But it’s very entertaining if you’re in the right mood and if you see it with the right audience, and it’s also the epitome of a critic-resistant movie – try to point out that the acting, the script or the camerawork are amateurish or shoddy and someone can retort that it's meant to be that way. As such I feel silly trying to write something coherent about it here.
But as a big fan of the horror and gore genres, I want to make a point. Walking out of the hall, I heard more than one person offhandedly saying, “You know, all gore films are like this – it has all the usual elements of the genre.” I have to disagree. The great gore films are many cuts (no pun intended) above Hell’s Ground in their execution (um, again, no pun intended) and most of them have their own internal consistency; simply having “all the elements” isn’t enough. This one tries to be a spoof but never really fixes on a tone. It plays some scenes obviously for laughs, nudging and winking at the audience (one of the funniest scenes involves the realisation that the real name of the hippest, most “chilled out” member of the crowd – a girl called Roxy – is Rukhsana), but it plays others dead straight. The one thing it gets right is its running time – less than 80 minutes, which is optimum for this film.
It’s sometimes forgotten that horror and gore are different genres, though they often overlap. Hell’s Ground – though it picks up ideas from horror movies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th and even Psycho – belongs in the latter category. There isn’t a single scary (as in “jump out of your seat” scary) scene: all the potentially frightening moments are broadcast well in advance (sometimes with comic panels that show us this or that monster about to make an appearance). The accent here is on showing as much bloody flesh as possible, along with providing viewers a few comic breathers.The highlight of the screening (apart from the sheer thrill many of us felt at experiencing a film like this at a festival that takes its role as a purveyor of Meaningful Cinema very seriously) was the interaction with the director. Omar Ali Khan was very likable, very self-deprecating (honestly, it’s hard to see how he could be otherwise with a roomful of people who had just seen his film!). He joked about his early influences as a movie-watcher (“my parents let me see just about anything I wanted to – maybe they shouldn’t have!”), about Hell’s Ground being “a tribute to directors whom you wouldn’t even have heard of, they are so bad”, about the gore effects being bought wholesale from the hardware store down the road , and even about the contaminated-water problems in Pakistan (referred to in the film), “which doesn’t mean that all of us will turn into bloodthirsty zombies – but some of us might!”
The film has understandably caused ripples at many film festivals, where people tend to have pre-set ideas of what a Pakistani film should be like. Will there be a sequel, someone asked Khan. If I can get someone deranged enough to finance one, he replied. Hell’s Ground cost only about 100,000 US dollars, and it shows. (I suspect the bulk of that money went in purchasing the big van - the teens are more concerned about not getting zombie blood on it than about their own safety.)
[Here's an earlier post on one of my favourite gory films, Dario Argento's stylish Suspiria. And another on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre here. Also see the official website of Zibahkhana - I think it has a couple of clips.]
Go. Watch. Now.
Oh, sure Batman is out.
i'm sure it's a nice movie.
But this disappears in less than 48 hours.
(Heavens, look at my wrist. i must get going.)
With Exits Barred, VCs Keep Investments Flat
If you believe the venture capitalists on Friday’s conference call about the latest MoneyTree Survey results, which covers venture investing in the second quarter, now is the best time to contact them with your ideas. Just because the exit environment is brutal doesn’t mean VCs won’t continue to put their time and dollars into seed and early-stage deals, two of them said. And so far the data bears that out. But if the exit environment stays grim, early-stage fundings will drop as well.
Venture capitalists invested $7.39 billion in 990 deals in the second quarter of 2008, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association based on data provided by Thomson Reuters. That’s slightly less than the first quarter of 2008, when $7.5 billion was invested in 977 deals, and flat compared to the second quarter of 2007, when VCs placed $7.37 billion into 1,033 deals.
John Taylor, VP of research with the NVCA, said that there’s no need to sound the alarm on the exit environment just yet. He also noted the fact that IPOs are more difficult to complete than they used to be. Taylor tied the inability to take a company public or sell it to “fears of the macro economy” and a market that’s unwilling to bet on early-stage companies. But he expressed confidence that once investors realize that the overall tech sector is strong and resilient, in part because it has global exposure, “the slowdown in the exit market will stop.”
Meanwhile, the MoneyTree data shows a buildup of companies that have raised later-stage financing, with 318 late-stage deals getting money in the second quarter, the highest number ever. If those companies don’t exit within the next two to three years, VCs will have to start selling at a loss or pushing firms into bankruptcy. Those types of decisions take up a lot of time and effort on the part of general partners. And that’s why it soon may not be a great time for early-stage companies.
Trevor Loy, a managing partner with Flywheel Ventures, a seed-stage firm focused on cleantech and hardware deals, said that if a VC can carve out the time and allocate the capital, seed investments made now will reach their full potential in five to seven years’ time and will be strong contenders for exits. However, he also noted that “venture capital is a return on time rather then just a return on capital,” and that it can be hard to juggle a lot of late-stage investments while undergoing the rigors of starting new businesses.
So as VCs are trying to negotiate exits and attend board meetings for companies that they need to get off their plates, they also need to be finding and guiding new deals to fruition — a time-intensive process in and of itself. And if exits aren’t forthcoming, VCs may find they have less time to put into new deals while they shepherd their old ones out the door.
image from the MoneyTree Survey
A huge fortune....
It's been exactly one month, and though I *know* that thirty days as such are meaningless, today the thoughts are a torrent, rushing with cataract force through my mind. Worst of all are the thoughts of "Perhaps if I had..." and "perhaps if I hadn't..."
The human mind is the reason why we have philosophy, religion, the esoteric arts....we struggle to make sense of what we feel is beyond our scope to comprehend.
I suspect that more than space, the ocean, the universe or the sub-atomic fields...it is the human mind which will remain the final frontier, which humankind will never be able to analyze or understand fully.
I do want my mind to be like the lotus on the pond...even when moving because of the water currents, not losing its mooring, and looking calm and serene. Born in the filth and stagnation, it is yet so pristine and beautiful, and instead of looking at the mire in which it took birth, it looks up towards the sun, and draws its sustenance from above.
Enough lousy philosophy! Hoping to spend time with friends today....
July 18th, 2008
TSA-friendly bags
The TSA recently announced plans to implement new security procedures that will allow travelers to pass through security checkpoints without having to remove their laptops from their cases. Simultaneously, the TSA issued a request to laptop bag manufacturers to create "Checkpoint Friendly" laptop bags to help speed up security lines, allowing passengers to get to their departure gates in a timely manner. These new cases will help shorten wait times for more than 250 million passengers that travel annually in the U.S.The design team at Mobile Edge quickly responded to the TSA request and came up with three new innovative case designs. This new ScanFast™ Collection consists of a backpack, a briefcase and a messenger bag, all designed to conveniently open for airport screeners and help speed travelers through the X-Ray screening process.
OK, I'm skeptical of this on several levels. First, it's not clear to me that this is going to improve throughput even with constant levels of input. You start in the queue and then move to the tables where you unpack your bags into the bins. The bins and your bags go onto the conveyer belt and get run through the X-ray machine. On the other end, you repack your bags.
There are two ways in which these bags could potentially increase throughput of the system (1) make your bag easier to unpack/pack (2) make all your stuff go through the conveyer faster. It does look to me like these bags could make it easier to unpack/pack your bag, since you don't have to take your laptop out of the bag, just unzip it and flip it open. But this is only a bottleneck (to the extent to which this is a bottleneck) because of insufficient parallelism and pipelining. If you just make the tables longer or have two sets of parallel tables, then people will be able to unpack (and repack) their bags arbitrarily fast. Obviously, this would require some rearrangement of the security area, but it's a lot simpler than introducing entirely new bags.
In my experience, however, the bottleneck is the x-ray machine itself. But it's not clear to me why this would make the x-ray process any faster. Given that the bags open, they presumably take up as much surface area on the belt as the combination of your bag and your laptop, so to the extent to which the linear speed of the scanning process is constant, I don't see why this would make things any faster. Now, it's possible that this allows the scanners to run the belt faster, but given that right now your laptop is on the belt and uncluttered and with this bag it will be partly obscured by the bag, this would presumably make the feed rate required to get an equally thorough scan longer, not shorter.
Given the above, it's not clear to me why these bags would make the screening process faster (or at least that it couldn't be made equally fast with less investment). Even if that somehow were the case, it's not clear that that would make the screening process faster overall; we could easily make the screening process faster by buying more x-ray machines and hiring more screeners, so the current rate reflects some sort of crude cost/benefit analysis. If you could suddenly scan at twice the rate with the same number of screeners, wouldn't you expect the airports to suddenly sharply reduce the number of screeners?
Google Account Hacked And Stupid Password recovery process
As It happens the IDIOTS let the user change his alternate e-mail address. So the hacker changed that too... And google gives me the following message
"
To initiate the password reset process, please follow the instructions sent to your live.it email address.
If you don't have a secondary email address, or if you no longer have access to that account, please try the 'Forgot your password?' link again after five days. At that point, you'll be able to reset your password by answering the security question you provided when you created your account.
To prevent someone from trying to break into an account you're actively using, the security question is only used for account recovery after an account has been idle for five days. The Gmail team cannot waive the five day requirement or access your password under any circumstances.
If you're unable to answer your security question or access your secondary email account, we regret that the Gmail team cannot provide further assistance. If you're concerned about the security of your account, please visit our Security Center."
WTF when did i register a live.it address and google in all its wisdom decided that I shouldnt be able to answer the security question for 5 days of IDLE TIME... So if the hacker keeps using my account I will never be able to get it back... WOW. FUCKING IDIOTS.
IF ANYONE FROM GOOGLE IS LISTENING WHICH MORON DESIGNED THIS PASSWORD RECOVERY SYSTEM. FIRE HIM PLEASE.
FOR 5 DAYS THE HACKER HAS MY ACCOUNT TO DO WITH AS HE PLEASES WHILE I THE LEGIT OWNER OF THE ACCOUNT CAN DO NOTHING BUT TWIDDLE MY THUMBS!...
F U GOOGLE... I AM DONE USING YOUR PRODUCTS.
A week in which we feel in love [Recap]
Yes, ladies, there are apparently 110 eligible bachelor billionaires out there — not including Peter Thiel. Sergey Brin's taken, and too bad, because he finds the most thoughtful ways to funnel Google's money into his wife's company. Mission hipsters might not love Google, but within the Googleplex there's still plenty of hanky-panky. Maybe starving artists getting priced out of their apartments could get jobs at Yahoo, where Jerry loves you so much! (Photo by Andrew Mager)
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Playboy offers Violet Blue a happy ending [We Read Twitter So You Don't Have To]
Could it be our wish has come true? Will Playboy ditch their reluctant hot-blogger contestants and go straight to a photoshoot of professional bad girl Violet Blue? Let's see: Playboy gets their photo spread. Unwilling contestants get off the hook. Blue gets onto Playboy.com, which means she can complain about the mainstream media for weeks. Everybody wins! See the attached photo for proof that Violet is fully prepared. Are you?
(Photo by Violet Blue)
Top ten stops on August's memory lane [Nostalgia Trip]
Opening tonight at the Village East in Manhattan is August, the Indiewood tale starring Josh Hartnett of an Internet startup's collapse on the eve of September 11th. The film is an homage to an era of excess gone sour, and we figured we'd sum up the references for those of you who were there to reminisce and for those of you who weren't to get an idea of what you missed. In this clip early in the film former John Hancock Tech Fund manager Marc Klee plays himself as an analyst discussing the fictional company in the film, LandShark, shortly after a gangbuster IPO.
Opening tonight at the Village East in Manhattan is August, the Indiewood tale starring Josh Hartnett of an Internet startup's collapse on the eve of September 11th. The film is an homage to an era of excess gone sour, and we figured we'd sum up the references for those of you who were there to reminisce and for those of you who weren't to get an idea of what you missed. In this clip early in the film former John Hancock Tech Fund manager Marc Klee plays himself as an analyst discussing the fictional company in the film, LandShark, shortly after a gangbuster IPO.
"Any asshole in an Aeron chair, he's a fucking portal." Funny! That is, unless you're Yahoo, which thanks to Google doesn't have much business left besides as a content portal.
Tom (Hartnett) learns of layoffs at Pseudo.com — the real fake company of the era, according to founder Josh Harris.
Yes, that's an Apple Cube followed by an early PowerBook. Not to mention the nice detail of the period sound effects for sending and receiving in Mail.app.
Another actual reference, this time to Charlie Corwin, co-founder of LifeMusicChannel, an streaming video pioneer and early partner of MP3.com.
Yes, the Koosh™ — one of the ubiquitous toys that made working at an Internet company so much cooler than working at IBM, though maybe not if your options were underwater. Also served as handy double entendré for mating pairs looking to hook up after vesting.
In this scene, Rip Torn parrots Ed Bradley in the infamous 60 Minutes moment when RazorFish CEO Jeff Dachis choked on national television.
Here's the Jason Calacanis moment, in case you missed it in my overwrought review. Young Xeni Jardin, Clay Shirky and Rafat Ali all worked for his Silicon Alley Reporter hyping the New York tech scene before it imploded.
"B2B or not B2B." Yes, Howard Rodman manages to work a Hamlet reference into Hartnett's soliloquy.
And last but certainly not least, the scene where Hartnett's Tom finds his employees chuckling as they read LandShark's listing on FuckedCompany — creator Phillip Kaplan went on to found AdBrite, which from rumors we've heard might deserve a listing of its own soon enough.
