The Great Seduction

My Message To Google: Stop Cheating

In mid February, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt expressed pride in Google employee Wael Ghonim’s brave struggle against the autocratic Mubarak regime to establish political transparency in Egypt. “We are very, very proud of what Wael and that group was able to do in Egypt,” Schmidt said in Barcelona. But what Schmidt needs to do now is apply Ghonim’s views about political transparency to Google’s own search business.

With its 70% control of the global online search market, Google’s power to make and break online businesses is unrivalled. So it’s not surprising that website owners want more transparency over the reasons why the often autocratic Google sometimes impose penalties on their businesses. But a report issued last week by the newsnavigator OneNewsPage found a distinct lack of transparency in the search business with 88% of respondents saying that paid search advertising costs lacked transparency, while 24% said that they had experienced large, unexplained falls in site traffic as a consequence of changes in their search engine status.

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Keen On... Anthony Wood: The Inventor Of Personal Video Recorder Of The Future

    Meet the man who killed the television industry. In the mid Nineties, while he was looking at a Fry’s ad, Anthony Wood invented the personal video recorder (PVR). From this epiphany, Wood founded ReplayTV in 1997, a PVR company which, for a short while, gave TiVO a run for its money.

    But Wood not only invented the PVR, he also helped kill it. In 2002, after leaving ReplayTV, Wood founded Roku, a self-styled “cable killer” hardware company which provides a box for accessing on-demand video.

    Almost ten years after founding Roku, Wood really is starting to scare the traditional cable industry. He’s already sold a million Roku boxes and streamed a billion minutes of content from Roku devices. And this year, Wood expects to sell a million and a half boxes, thus making Roku, Wood says, the 10th largest cable company in the US.

    And that’s just the beginning. Wood’s goal is to control video access to the world – to be the “one box that rules them all.” The $100 billion question, however, is whether Roku can compete with Google and Apple when these giants really focus on refining the hardware that links the Internet with our screens.

    So, will Roku, like ReplayTV, be a footnote to 21st century video content, or can it really be the box that rules them all?

 

 

 

 

 

Keen On... Peter Guber: "If You Can't Tell It,You Can't Sell It"

I was born curious,” Peter Guber confessed to me when he came into the TechCrunch studio earlier this month. We should all be so curious. The legendary Guber – whose list of accomplishments as a superstar Hollywood producer (Rain Man, Batman, Midnight Express, Flashdance etc.), broadcaster, university professor, best-selling writer, new media mogul (board member of Demand Media) and sports franchise owner (co-owner of the Golden State Warriors) are probably unrivalled by anyone, either dead or alive – has just written a book explaining both his success and failure as a story teller.

Guber writes about his storied life in Tell To Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story, a book released tomorrow, but already #1 on Amazon’s best-seller list. Tell To Win is going to be the Tipping Point for storytelling. “If you can’t tell it, you can’t sell it,” he explains. The power to tell a compelling story is, for Guber, hard wired into us and is the difference not only between success and failure but also between happiness and misery.

Guber’s book challenges us to use story to get into “the emotional transportation business.” If you want to learn how to tell a really killer story, you need to listen to the master of storytelling, Peter Guber….

 

 

 

 

Public and Private

Sherry Turkle's new book, Alone Together, ends in mourning. In October 2009, the author, an MIT professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, went to her local synagogue for Yiskor, the special Yom Kippur service that remembers the dead. There she heard the rabbi deliver a sermon about the importance of talking to the deceased and communicating four messages to them: "I'm sorry. Thank you. I forgive you. I love you."

 

"That is what makes us human, over time, over distance," Turkle says of our ability to talk sincerely to other human beings, whether they belong to our past or our present. Our "knowledge of mortality" and our "experience of the life cycle" is conveyed in just such simple messages: "I'm sorry. Thank you. I forgive you. I love you." They are the most intimate words we can say to another. Without them, she suggests, we are machines akin to the robots in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which imagines a future in which robots and humans are indistinguishable.

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Keen On... MIT Professor Says Robotic Movement Has Arrived, And We Are Toast

Once a cheerleader of the Internet revolution, Sherry Turkle, the Director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, has become deeply pessimistic about our digital future. In her controversial new book, Alone Together, Turkle argues that the development of emotionally sympathetic robots like Tamagotchis and Furbies means that the “robotic moment” has arrived for the human race.

“We are toast,” Turkle told me when she came into the TechCrunch San Francisco studio earlier this month.

It’s no laughing matter. Alone Together is the result of hundreds of interviews that Turkle has carried out over the last 15 years with a broad cross section of children, adults and old people. What Turkle finds is that, out of a sense of disappointment with each other, we’ve turned to robots as a substitute for human interaction. What Turkle meticulously charts in Alone Together are robots used by lonely, isolated human beings as lovers, best friends and caregivers.

So has the robotic moment really arrived? When was the last time you fondled your Roxxxy?

Tomorrow, we’ll have more of the interview including Turkle’s dark warning about social media.

 

 

 

 

 

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Keen On... The Domino Project: Seth Godin Reinvents the Book Business

Over the last fifteen years, innovation maven Seth Godin has written twelve best-selling books about breaking all the traditional rules in business. But Godin’s thirteenth book, a little thing about initiative which will be published next month, threatens to be the biggest rule-breaker in his destructive career.

Godin’s thirteenth book may well be unlucky for the traditional publishing business. You see, Godin’s big new thing is the Domino Project, a next generation publishing venture that he is launching with Amazon. And one of the first books published by the Domino Project will be his own little thing about initiative.

What Godin is trying to do with the Domino Project is make books “spreadable.” It’s a big dream – one that reinvents books in the viral age of social media. But, as he told me when we met in New York last month, most start-up businesses fail because entrepreneurs don’t dream big enough.

 

 

 

 

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Keen On… Seth Godin: While We Weren’t Paying Attention, The Industrial Age Just Ended

As the author of twelve best-selling books including his latest 2010 hit Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? and the iconic Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable, Seth Godin is amongst the most sought-after business visionaries in the world.

“So why are you so popular?” I asked Godin when we met in New York late last month.

“I notice things,” he replied.

Oddly enough, though, the things that Seth Godin notices are often so big and obvious that everybody else misses them. For example, Godin has noticed that the industrial age has just ended – and it’s this fact that drives much of his thinking about our indispensability in the post industrial age.

The future, Godin, told me, will belong to the rule-breaking “linchpins” of the digital age. Perhaps. But what’s for sure is that Godin – as a mapmaker of our future – remains indispensable. “I’m a showman,” he confessed to me. Yes. And the Seth Godin show is one that none of us can afford to miss.

 

Godin on his own popularity  

What Seth Godin shipped in 2010  

 

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Exposed: Apple’s Terrible Sin in China (TCTV)

Last I night I had the good fortune to see Mike Daisey’s highly acclaimed show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. It’s both an entertaining and acutely moving performance that anyone who owns an Apple product has a moral duty to see.

Daisey is not only a brilliant monologist in the tradition of Michael Moore and Spalding Gray, but he’s also a crusading journalist who has exposed the inhumane working conditions of the workers at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China. Daisey went to Shenzhen and stood outside the monstrous Foxconn factory and interviewed its workers – some as young as 12 years old – about the inhumane working conditions there. This is what he found…

This is the first of a two-part interview in the Keen On… series. Tomorrow, look for Part Two: Why Journalists Aren’t Reporting the Real Story About Apple and Foxconn.

 

Why Mike Daisey is no longer an Apple fanboy.  

 

Why Apple is committing a great sin against humanity.  

Wired Magazine; Your Life Torn Open, essay 1: Sharing is a trap

Every so often, when I'm in Amsterdam, I visit the Rijksmuseum to remind myself about the history of privacy. I go there to gaze at a picture called The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, which was painted by Jan Vermeer in 1663. It is of an unidentified Dutch woman avidly reading a letter. Vermeer's picture, to borrow a phrase from privacy advocates Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, is a celebration of the "sacred precincts of private and domestic life". It's as if the artist had kept his distance in order to capture the young woman, cocooned in her private world, at her least socially visible.

Today, as social media continues radically to transform how we communicate and interact, I can't help thinking with a heavy heart about The Woman in Blue. You see, in the networking age of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, the social invisibility that Vermeer so memorably captured is, to excuse the pun, disappearing. That's because, as every Silicon Valley notable, from Eric Schmidt to Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly acknowledged, privacy is dead: a casualty of the cult of the social. Everything and everyone on the internet is becoming collaborative. The future is, in a word, social.

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