New Technology Review

Evaded committee review of his vision

Result: $100 billion and growing

Terrific piece by Somini Sengupta today in the Times (Business Day Front Page), Controlling His Network: Mark Zuckerberg Remains The Undisputed Boss at Facebook) telling how Mark Z resisted the interfering predations of his funders by making sure he retained total control of Facebook as he grew it to gigantic proportions.

A nice lesson in the Jobs tradition of the power and quality of one individual’s vision when protected from the compromises and limitations of groupthink, and from people who do not have the time to compete with the thoughtfulness of the founder and initiator of change in his obsession.

Obviously the individual concerned must be smart, of course. Really smart. And ruthless too, like Jobs. The key thing is, surely, the singleminded attention of the obsessive. Of course, that alone does not separate the sheep from the goats, the fools from the geniuses. The combination needed is, quite simply, focus plus intelligence. Fools can be just as obsessive as the geniuses, as we have learned from television series in the last few years, such as America Inventor, Shark Tank etc

Perhaps one should add ruthlessness too, a la Jobs. Evidently, Zuckerberg rules by edict. He rejected a calendar for Facebook which his staff had been working on for some time. Just cut it off. One wonders why – perhaps it couldn’t be loaded with ads in the way he so determinedly intends.

Anyhow the value of Facebook vindicates him and proves the point. Leave the founder in place. Let the less obsessed and the less smart go and play elsewhere. Twitter should have learned that. Instead it is still stuck with stupidity after stupidity, apparent as soon as you use it. The layout is execrable, hiding the subscribers image, the search obscure and undefined, the history invisible without massive clicking.

And this is one of the most valuable properties on the Net.

February 2, 2012
Zuckerberg Remains the Undisputed Boss at Facebook
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Since the moment he dropped out of Harvard University, Mark Zuckerberg has stayed remarkably focused on two things: Facebook, and being the boss of Facebook.

Early on he was persuaded of the vast potential of the social network he built in his dorm room, say friends, investors and detractors. He pushed his team to be fast and take risks. He resisted efforts to change the way Facebook looked and worked, even if, in the beginning, it meant giving up revenue.

Most important, he arranged the ownership of Facebook so as to give himself extraordinary power to steer the company. By the time Facebook filed for a $5 billion public offering on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg had managed to hold on to more than one-fourth of the shares in the company, and his agreements with other investors enhanced his voting power to almost 60 percent of total shares.

That’s a greater measure of control than Bill Gates had at Microsoft when it went public in 1986 (49 percent), and far greater than what the co-founders of Google had in 2004 (16 percent each). Typically, say Silicon Valley veterans, a first-time entrepreneur gets to the public market with a far smaller stake in his or her creation. Mr. Zuckerberg’s arrangement leaves little room for investors to have much input on the company’s direction.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s success is an object lesson in what works in crowded, competitive Silicon Valley: Remain in charge, stave off potential predators and expand the company so quickly that no one can challenge the boss.

“He always knew before the rest of us what Facebook could be,” said Paul Madera, managing director at Meritech Capital Partners, who invested in the company in 2005. “Mark’s vision on the purity of the product really did benefit from his control and ownership. It wasn’t subject to committee decisions. It was all Mark.”

The power that Mr. Zuckerberg wields over the company has already drawn scrutiny. “You’re willing to take someone’s money but not willing to invite their participation,” said Charles M. Elson, a professor of corporate governance at the University of Delaware. “It makes meaningless the notion of investor democracy.”

Professor Elsen added that Mr. Zuckerberg’s arrangement is similar to moves by founders of other technology companies, including Google, to create special classes of stock that grant them extra voting power. (The New York Times Company and other media companies have similar structures.)

Facebook declined to make executives available for interviews ahead of the offering.

The focus on staying in charge began early. Sean Parker, one of Mr. Zuckerberg’s first and most important advisers, helped him with that. Mr. Parker had learned a hard lesson himself about losing control: He was ousted by the backers of a company he founded, an online address book called Plaxo. Mr. Parker helped ensure that would never happen to Mr. Zuckerberg.

In 2005, when Facebook got an early injection of capital from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Mr. Parker insisted that he control one board seat and Mr. Zuckerberg control two, Mr. Parker said in an interview last year. When he left the company not long after, Mr. Parker insisted that Mr. Zuckerberg inherit his board seat, giving him three out of five seats.

“The only way I will resign,” Mr. Parker recalled telling the rest of the board, “is if Zuck receives control of the board seat, because he’s the only one I trust to steer the company.”

Before Facebook came about, sites like Friendster and MySpace had already defined social networks. But Mr. Zuckerberg was convinced early on that Facebook could be something greater, and his convictions impressed both peers and elders.

Mr. Madera, the venture capitalist, met him in 2005. At the time Facebook was open only to college students, and the only advertising it took in was from things like students selling bikes at the end of the semester. But Mr. Zuckerberg described what he thought it would become. “It was going to be the first place people went to when they got up in the morning and the last thing they went to before they went to bed,” Mr. Madera recalled him saying. “I thought he was unrealistic. If I’ve learned one thing in the investing business, it’s that when people talk about unrealistic things, you don’t tell them they’re crazy.” Mr. Madera invested anyway, putting in a total of $25 million.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s early backers included many technically skilled company founders, including Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal; Reid Hoffman, who helped build PayPal and founded LinkedIn; and Marc Andreessen, who founded Netscape. Through them and others, Mr. Zuckerberg sought out the most successful technology bosses: Mr. Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google.

“There is no problem he doesn’t think he can solve, but he constantly tries to find the smartest people he can to give him advice,” said one of his early advisers and a Facebook investor, who asked not to be identified in the run-up to the offering. “Nearly universally, he asks them, ‘Who are the smartest people for me to talk to about this?’ ”

In 2008, Mr. Zuckerberg brought in Sheryl Sandberg, a veteran executive from Google with expertise in online advertising, to be chief operating officer. She has become a prominent public face for Facebook, but it is always clear who is in charge.

Mr. Zuckerberg has always kept a direct hand in controlling the way the Facebook site works, his associates and advisers say, refusing early on to clutter the news feed with advertising. He tweaked the site constantly, sometimes even earning the ire of users, as when it suddenly made some information that people had made visible only to friends available for all to see. That misstep ultimately prompted the Federal Trade Commission to cite Facebook for engaging in deceptive business practices. Mr. Zuckerberg issued a personal apology, admitting to mistakes.

“Better done than perfect” was how Mr. Zuckerberg described his philosophy on products in Facebook’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

One former Facebook engineer described Mr. Zuckerberg as having taken on a role similar to the one Mr. Jobs held at Apple. Everyone understood that Facebook was his creation, and that he would have the final say over what it would become.

A few years ago, for example, a small team at the company worked long and hard on building a social calendar feature, the engineer recalled. They talked about it for weeks, until the day when they suddenly stopped. The engineer asked what had happened to the project. “Zuck said no,” they told him. “Killed it. Not modified it. Killed it.”

Just as remarkable, he recalled, no one seemed especially upset. “We all sort of viewed Facebook as a manifestation of Zuck’s taste, his idea, his vision,” the engineer said. “When he made a decision, that was the decision.” The engineer did not want to be identified ahead of the public offering.

To Mr. Zuckerberg’s advantage, Facebook grew fast and became so valuable that its chief executive’s influence could not be challenged.

“Mark has retained nearly absolute control over his board of directors,” said Joe Green, a former roommate at Harvard who now runs Causes, which has a popular Facebook application. “Facebook would have been sold a zillion times over if not for Mark. Especially as you hire older people with direct financial needs, you get a lot of pressure to get liquidity. But you need Zen-like self-confidence to turn down a billion-dollar acquisition offer.”

By all accounts, one of the most critical decisions Mr. Zuckerberg made was to defer a public offering for as long as possible. He did not want to get bogged down with regulatory requirements and, improbably enough given his site’s bread and butter, sharing the details of his company’s workings.

David Sacks, who was at PayPal when it went public, remembers what happened there: employees obsessed over the value of their stock and executives worried about making quarterly earnings targets. “You would rather be a pre-I.P.O. company than post-I.P.O.,” Mr. Sacks said.

After Mr. Zuckerberg’s I.P.O., it seems highly unlikely that he will take his billions and leave Facebook. The company’s filing gives Mr. Zuckerberg the authority to designate his successor “in the event that Mr. Zuckerberg controls our company at the time of his death.”

On Wednesday night, hours after the filing, a photo was posted on his Facebook page. It showed his desk, with an open Mac laptop, a yellow Gatorade bottle and a sign that read: “Stay focused and keep shipping.”

Reporting was contributed by Evelyn M. Rusli, Quentin Hardy, Nicole Perlroth and Nick Wingfield.

Blogger publishes lying slander, loses suit

But lies stay on Web, ruining reputation

David Carr, ex-drug addict (Night of the Gun, Simon and SChuster, 2008) and one of the few genuinely unique characters on the Times, tells the story today of a female blogger out of control who published outrageous libel and slander on the Web about someone she had never met, yet even though she has now lost a civil case and damages of millions have been awarded, the huge pile of false statements she engineered on the Web with multiple URLs now fills google and there appears to be little the victim can do about it.

THE MEDIA EQUATION: When Truth Survives Free Speech By DAVID CARR Published: December 11, 2011

When Truth Survives Free Speech
By DAVID CARR
Last week, a story came across my desk that seemed to suggest that a blogger had been unfairly nailed with a $2.5 million defamation award after a judge refused to give her standing as a journalist. A businessman who was the target of the blogger’s inquiries brought the suit.

I went to work on a blog post, filled with filial umbrage, saddened that the Man once again had used a boot heel to crush truth and free speech. But after doing a little reporting, I began to think that what scanned as an example of a rich businessman using the power of the courts to silence his critic was actually something else: a case of a blogger using the Web in unaccountable ways to decimate the reputation of someone who didn’t seem to have it coming.

The ruling on whether she was a journalist in the eyes of the law turned out to be a MacGuffin, a detail that was very much beside the point. She didn’t so much report stories as use blogging, invective and search engine optimization to create an alternative reality. Journalists who initially came to her defense started to back away when they realized they weren’t really in the same business.

On the surface, it seemed that the blogger, Crystal Cox, was doing the people’s work. A blogger and real estate agent in Montana who spent a lot of time fighting with the National Association of Realtors, Ms. Cox took an interest a few years ago in the bankruptcy of Summit Accommodators, an intermediary company in Bend, Ore., that held cash to complete property exchanges. The company went belly up and a federal grand jury indicted three senior executives — a fourth pleaded guilty — charging them with conspiring to defraud clients of millions.

Kevin D. Padrick, a lawyer in Oregon, was appointed as trustee in the case after the company entered bankruptcy. Prompted by the postings of someone whom Mr. Padrick was going after to recover assets — the daughter of one of the men who was indicted — Ms. Cox began suggesting in her blog posts that Mr. Padrick had used inside information and illegal measures to take control of the remaining assets and enrich himself.

In a long-running series of hyperbolic posts, she wrote that Mr. Padrick and his company, the Obsidian Finance Group, had engaged in bribery, tax fraud, money laundering, payoffs and theft, among other things. Her one-woman barrage did not alter the resolution of the Summit affair, but it was effective in ruining Mr. Padrick.

In a phone interview, he told me his business as a financial adviser had dropped by half since Ms. Cox started in on him, and any search of his name or his company turned up page after page on Google detailing his supposed skullduggery, showing up under a variety of sites, including Bend Oregon News, Bankruptcy Corruption, and Northwest Tribune.

As it turned out, all of the allegations and almost all of the coverage in the case were coming from Ms. Cox, who churned URL’s and cut-and-pasted documents to portray Mr. Padrick as a “thug,” and a “thief” who “committed tax fraud” and who may have “hired a hit man” to kill her while engaging in “illegal and fraudulent activity.”

Here’s the problem. None of that was ever proved, nor was it picked up by other mainstream media outlets.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, but there is nothing in Mr. Padrick’s professional history or the public record that I found to suggest he is any of those things. He was appointed as a trustee by the court, he was subjected to an F.B.I. background check, and there have been no criminal investigations into his conduct. About 85 percent of the funds have been returned to the creditors, which seems to be a good result.

Annie Buell, the chairwoman of the Official Unsecured Creditors Committee who was appointed by the United States Trustee’s Office, said in an interview by phone that there was no basis in fact for Ms. Cox’s scabrous postings about Mr. Padrick.

“He did a very good job for the creditors,” she said. “He was above-board, had all of his cards on the table and was competent and fair. If I ever was in the same situation again, he would be my first choice.” Lawyers I spoke with who had done business with Mr. Padrick used similar adjectives to describe him.

Mr. Padrick, a lawyer who is a member of the bar in four states and has never been disciplined or investigated from anything I could find, said he spent a lot of sleepless nights wondering how he ended up as Ms. Cox’s bête noire.

“A woman who I did not know, who had no connection to me or my company or with this case she has been making statements on, has turned my business life and personal life upside down,” he said. “Companies who are considering doing business with us do a routine search on Google and there is page after page of these allegations. If it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody.”

And it has. Ms. Cox, who calls herself an “investigative blogger,” has a broad range of conspiratorial/journalistic interests. She has written that Bruce Sewell, the general counsel of Apple, “aids and abets criminals”; that Jeffrey Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, is “a proven technology thief”; and that various Proskauer Rose lawyers have engaged in a pattern of “conspiracy.” And don’t get her started on the local officials in and around her hometown, Eureka, Mont.

When she gets in a fight with someone, she frequently responds by creating a domain with the person’s name, some allegation of corruption, or both. Many of the negative posts about Mr. Padrick appeared on obsidianfinancesucks.com and there are many more like it. In order to optimize visibility to Web crawlers, she often uses the full name and title of her target, and her Web sites are filled with links to her other sites to improve their search ranking. She has some 500 URLs at her disposal and she’s not afraid to use them.

“I have a gift for getting on top of search engines and I want to give voice to victims of the corrupt judicial system,” she said in an interview by phone. “The system wants to shut me up and they have been trying to for years.”

“I’m glad I lost the case, because it gives attention to what I have been doing,” she added, saying she doesn’t have money to hire an attorney — she represented herself in the defamation case — let alone $2.5 million to pay in damages. She plans to appeal.

She said she remained convinced that Mr. Padrick would be indicted, “even if I have to stay on it for the next decade.” But, as Forbes first pointed out following the verdict, she had been willing to negotiate a cease-fire.

“At this Point in my Life it is Time to Think of Me,” she wrote in a letter to Mr. Padrick’s lawyer, David Aman. “So I want to Let you know and Obsidian Finance that I am now offering PR Services and Search Engine Management Services starting at $2,500 a month,” she wrote, to promote “Law Firms” and “Finance Companies” and “to protect online reputations and promote businesses.”

What looked to be an unsubtle offer to holster her gun in exchange for a payoff was signed, “In Love and Light, Crystal Cox.”

Ms. Cox said that she sent that note in response to a request from Mr. Padrick’s attorney — Mr. Aman said he made no such inquiry — and that she was “not on trial for writing e-mails.”

In the pre-Web days, someone like Ms. Cox might have been one more obsessive in the lobby of a newspaper, waiting to show a reporter a stack of documents that proved the biggest story never told. The Web has allowed Ms. Cox to cut out the middleman; various blogs give voice to her every theory, and search algorithms give her work prominence.

Mr. Padrick, who had never met Ms. Cox and had no idea why she seemed intent on destroying him, sued her last January. Judge Marco Hernandez of United States District Court in Portland, Ore., threw out most of his claims of defamation, ruling that Ms. Cox’s posts were so over-the-top that no reasonable reader would conclude that she was making allegations of fact.

But Judge Hernandez did allow that a single post published on Christmas Day in 2010 charging all manner of criminal conduct could be read as containing “provable assertions of fact.” A one-day trial took place on Nov. 29, and after deliberating for 75 minutes, the jury awarded Obsidian $1 million and Mr. Padrick $1.5 million.

“I view our case as a blow for the First Amendment,” said Mr. Padrick. “If defamatory speech is allowed just because it is on the Internet, it cheapens the value of journalism and makes it less worthy of protection.”

Mr. Padrick signed off by reminding me that those who have been in conflict with Ms. Cox frequently find their names showing up in newly registered Web addresses. I’m thinking of buying RottenScoundrelDavidCarr.com as soon as I’m done typing.

Then again, I’ve got some institutional muscle when it comes to how I’m perceived on the Web. All Mr. Padrick had was his good reputation. Too bad there’s no algorithm to measure truth.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Like gossip, mud slinging on the Web leaves a permanent stain, until there is some kind of legislation to force Google and other sites to erase it, when and if that is possible.

Decide.com helps by forecasting price change, whether new models better

Those who lined up a day and a half early for Black Friday sale items at the Best Buy at 86Street and Lexington in Manhattan were able to get $500 Sharp 42inch LCD TVs for $200, and others were able to buy PNY 16GB flash drives for $11.99 and Ultra SanDisk 16GB SDHC cards for $17.99, and 8GB for $9.99, instead of paying $39.99, $49.99 and $29.99 respectively two days later.

Cuts of 2/3rd may seem as deep as you can get, but according to a New York Times piece on Nov 24 – Friday’s Deals May Not Be the Best by Stephanie Clifford an AI expert, who teaches computer science at the University of Washington, has worked out that prices are actually lowest not on Black Friday but at the beginning of December.

Oren Etzioni writes articles about artificial intelligence for scholarly journals, is a renowned expert on data mining and gained fame when Microsoft paid $115 million for Farecast, an airline-ticket price predictor he founded.
Now, Professor Etzioni, who teaches computer science at the University of Washington, has directed his considerable intellect at the American ritual of shopping for bargains on Black Friday. After examining billions of prices of consumer electronics, he has decided to spend the busiest shopping day of the year scuba-diving in Bali.

Why? It is not until early December, Professor Etzioni’s research shows, that prices are likely to be the lowest for electronics, products that are among the biggest sellers on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

“The bottom line is, Black Friday is for the retailers to go from the red into the black,” he said. “It’s not really for people to get great deals on the most popular products.”

What the professor has determined with a complex computer algorithm for consumer electronics, others have found through less scientifically rigorous means for other products, including clothing and toys: despite all the ads that suggest otherwise, the lowest prices tend to come at other times of the year….

Following the approach of Farecast, now part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, the professor’s start-up company, Decide.com, studies current and historical prices, information about new models and rumors about new product introductions to figure out the best time to buy.

Type in the name of a product — a Soundcast SurroundCast speaker system, for instance. Decide.com will pull prices from around the Web, and tell you to buy or wait. In the SurroundCast case, it showed this week that prices were at $150 in early September and had now gone up to $160.

The verdict: wait. Decide.com said it was 96 percent confident that prices for the speaker system would drop within two weeks.

Introduced this summer, the Web site predicts prices for consumer electronics only, though Professor Etzioni says there are plans to expand to categories like cars and potentially even clothing in a couple of years….

For higher-end electronics, Mr. de Grandpre’s trends show, shoppers should wait until the week after Thanksgiving.

“Black Friday is about cheap stuff at cheap prices, and I mean cheap in every connotation of the word,” Mr. de Grandpre said. Manufacturers like Dell or HP will allow their cheap laptops to be discounted via retailers on that Friday, but they will reserve markdowns through their own sites for later.

“Their best promotions happen during Cyber Monday week,” he said, referring to the marketing name drummed up by online retailers for the Monday after Thanksgiving.

Did Decide.com agree with the laptop advice?

It did. A low-end Dell laptop had dropped to $249 at Amazon this week, and Decide said to buy it now. But for a more feature-heavy laptop, priced at $1,528 at Sears and $1,541 at PCNation, Decide said to wait, as it expected prices to stay flat or decline by up to $339 within two weeks.

In fact, in the period Dec 4-10 Best Buy ran the above PNY Flash Drives at full price, though a 4GB PNY with a different SKU number was only $5.99.

UPDATE: A New Secret Weapon for Electronics Shoppers -by Danon Darlin (December 6, 2011)

IF only shopping for electronics were as easy as buying a car.

There was a time not so long ago that buying a car was one of the worst shopping experiences. As you drove off the dealer’s lot, you couldn’t escape the feeling that you hadn’t gotten the best deal.

Then something changed that made shopping for a car almost, well, fun, like shopping is supposed to be.

That something was information. Much to the annoyance of the dealers, a car buyer could obtain reliable data on auto prices. For only a few dollars, Consumer Reports estimates what a dealer paid for the car and what, after a fair markup, the buyer should pay. A shopper often got enough information to know when it would be the best time to buy the car.

Buying a camera or a smartphone isn’t as easy because we lack information about prices. There is the illusion that the Internet has provided what we need to know about the prices, but that jumble of information makes any buying decision more confusing and anxiety producing.

The fact of the matter is, the shopper is not on a level playing field with the retailers and the manufacturers. They know, thanks to the Internet, more about you and your intentions than you could ever know about theirs. Every time you look at a product on a site, every time you buy a product online, you are providing valuable signals.

When companies scrape the Web and collect those billion of signals and sophisticated software collates the data and interprets it, you don’t stand a chance. It is just too difficult and expensive for you to gather all the information. And in any case, you probably lack the degree in mathematics and computer science needed to parse the data.

Yet nearly everything you spend money on is determined by the algorithms they create. The prices of your airline ticket and hotel room, even your rent, are determined this way. Electronics and other consumer goods are priced the same way.

Over the last few years, price comparison sites like Pricegrabber.com and Bizrate.com have proliferated. Google and Bing have started providing similar information. That neatly solved the where-to-buy problem.

Along came price tracking sites, like NexTag.com, that provide historical information. It is certainly useful to know where you can get a product for just a few dollars less, especially when those sites also calculate taxes and shipping costs for you.

Price-alert sites like FreePriceAlerts.com inform you by e-mail when the price of a coveted item drops. That all these services are available on mobile devices that you can use in stores to determine the best price has certainly made shoppers a lot smarter.

Perhaps the biggest consumer weapon arrived this year in the form of Decide.com. It is a Web site, and more recently an app for mobile devices, that collects and mines billions of transactions to determine what the best price is and whether there will be an even better price soon.

“It’s the first time when-to-buy is addressed,” said Mike Fridgen, Decide’s chief executive officer.

For example, Decide.com said last week with 81 percent confidence that the Panasonic Viera 50-inch plasma TV (model TC-P50S30), a popular model, would drop within the next two weeks. It also predicted, with 62 percent confidence, that a new model would come along within three months.

Scoff if you will, but a week before Thanksgiving, Decide.com was advising shoppers to hold off buying a 16-gigabyte iPad because it predicted a price drop. Apple did lower the price of that model by $41 on Black Friday, the big shopping day that follows Thanksgiving.

Then again, it suggested you would be safe to buy the 64-gigabyte model before Thanksgiving, but Apple lopped $61 off the price on Black Friday.

“We are not clairvoyants,” said Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer science professor who co-founded Decide. “We give consumers visibility.”

Decide is run by many of the same people who built Farecast, a site that gave consumers a fighting chance against the airlines, which are constantly changing prices to match demand.

“Consumers have no access to big data,” said Mr. Etzioni, who also founded Farecast.

After he sold Farecast to Microsoft for $115 million — it is now part of the Bing search engine — Mr. Etzioni went looking for another consumer problem to solve. He discovered that there was also considerable price volatility in electronics. Certainly, over the long term, the prices of electronics steadily drop. But during the shelf life of a new product, prices rise and fall. And, to Mr. Etzioni’s surprise, it was not random volatility. Companies were constantly changing prices to meet changing demand just like the airlines.

That meant his company’s computers could search the Web for prices of products — it looks at 10 billion of them in a 60-terabyte database — note changes and then look for patterns. It also searches for news reports and rumors in order to guess when new models may be coming out. Mr. Etzioni calls it “scaling information extraction.”

He said that Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, had recently stopped by his lab at the University of Washington and looked at Mr. Etzioni’s research. “He was surprised by the degree of volatility in consumer electronic prices, which reminded me just how unaware even the most savvy people are of the prevalence of dynamic pricing in consumer electronics,” he said.

“We really feel the industry needs an honest broker,” Mr. Etzioni said.

The access to big data and analytics improves how we make decisions. That this information is available on mobile devices only enhances its utility. The increased information transparency coupled with the use of smartphones in stores is driving a consumer revolution, said Mr. Fridgen, because it provides shoppers the information they need when and where they need it.

The balance of power has shifted, he says. Most retailers know that shoppers can easily find a better deal using their mobile devices. Almost half of American retailers have a policy allowing store personnel to negotiate prices, he says.

As the software gets more refined, the power relationship between consumers and the retailers and makers will change, although, Mr. Etzioni concedes, it will never really be a level playing field.

Guessing where prices are going is a big step forward. It was not easy, and it is still not complete. But Mr. Etzioni already has his eye on the next problem, which he says is even harder: a Web site that tells you what to buy. The decision-making process, it turns out, is remarkably complicated because he has to build an algorithm, a personalized “value formula,” that finds the sweet spot for each shopper. “Some people value some things more than others,” he said.

“What we really see, and I am very excited by this, is the increased transparency,” Mr. Etzioni said. “The inexorable trend is towards transparency.”

Sounds a little too much like stock market forecasting, which science has shown does not yet reliably do any better than dart throwing, regardless of what experts say.

But Decide.com is an attractive page with its advice to buy now or later and forecast of the price trend on anything tech you may be thinking of buying.

Prize Items include Audyssey’s Single Unit of Speakers and PC Mechanics Software

TripIt Pro Phone App, the mobile trip organizer from Concur, also winner

SHOWSTOPPERS: The consumer tech press in New York City has its holiday research done for it annually by Showstoppers, who collect some of the best upcoming Christmas hardware and software each year and show it off at tables in a hotel to the assembled hacks, their critical tendencies softened up by high quality hot snacks at several tables (beef with tangy sauce, pasta with mushroom sauce, mini egg rolls, roast beef, etc) with an array of drinks, generally ignored.

This year the bash at the Millennium Hotel just off Broadway on 44th Street towards Sixth was only a little smaller than some of the Showstoppers before the housing/WallStreet/global crash of vivid memory, but almost all of the offerings were worth noting.

In the order of tables from left to right:

Nuvyyo Inc jetstreamHD to “mobilize your media” ie transmit all digital media – video, somgs, photos – to your iPad (25% off off the list price of $199.99 USD until December 25, 2011 currently at www.jetstreamhd.com) (JetStreamHD is the world’s first Mobile Media Streamer on the market. JetStreamHD allows remote iPad users with a Wi-Fi or 3G connection to instantly access and view all of the digital content that is stored on their home network regardless of size, including movies, TV shows, songs, photos and more. The result is the most vivid HD viewing experience possible in any situation, without stuttering or freezing on a mobile device),

Audyssey speakers either in a pair or in one unit. Audyssey demoed its new Lower East Side Audio Dock Air, the company’s premium audio dock, which uses AirPlay to stream music wirelessly anywhere in the home. On the hardware side the Audyssey speakers seem very promising, though it was hard to tell given the uproar that surrounded them, exactly what their quality of sound was. Audyssey’s algorithms are used in everything from IMAX to Denon home theater, and with acceptable spatial volume shrinking every year, better algorithms are more and more necessary. The all in one unit (two tweeters, two mid range, two “passive bass radiators”) was a chunk of black gold, sonically, as far as one could tell: deep firm bass without being hard or unnatural, the “passive bass radiators” being “guaranteed to play deeper bass than anything its size.”. Labelled rather intriguingly the Lower East Side Audio Dock Air, it streams Apple AirPlay anywhere in the house from all the iSources including iTunes from any PC and Apple TV.

Pretty cases for phones etc from Otterbox

HP with a touch screen desktop and colorful Netbooks at every price point, now with the sad gap which the Touchpad used to fill.

E FUN touch screen premium Nextbook Android tablet computers and Apple-compatible APEN Digital Pens to digitize handwritten notes and drawings for work, school, and leisure.

a 360 degrees lens which attaches to your phone for circle panorama video,

Excellent fold-under keyboards for iPads from Logitech, among its latest accessories, including the newest Logitech tablet line-up and the new Wireless Solar Keyboard K750 for Mac.

Kent Displays / Improv Electronics offered replacements for pen and paper in the form of Boogie Board Rip™ LCD Writing Tablets,the newest eWriter from Improv Electronics that combines a paper-like writing experience with the ability to record your written and drawn images and upload them to your computer for editing, organizing, archiving and sharing.

System Mechanic PC clean up software (recently awarded not one but three prizes in Abu Dhabi) from Iolo, iolo technologies which has the newest version of System Mechanic, the #1 best-selling PC performance software, backed by new research results from busy iolo Labs on file fragmentation and program misalignment.

Lifeproof waterproof iPhone cases (happily residing at the bottom a three small full aquaria, one cohabiting with a salamander), which preserve the iPhone intact in six feet of water and when dropped six feet to the ground, not to mention have glass lens so that the quality of the iPhone 4 camera is preserved too,

Sideline’s very light and portable extra screen for a PC (and soon, they hope, for an iPhone), Zerochroma cases with handles for iPad (Vario-SC for iPad 2) and iPhone (Teatro-S for iPhone 4/4S)(Vario-SC for iPad 2. A triple-function case, the Vario-SC protects the back and sides of the iPad 2, while enabling multiple viewing angles in lap-mode (with Apple Smart Cover), table-mode and handle-mode. Unique to ZeroChroma cases is the super-slim, built-in, rotating Theater-Stand™, enabling users to aim the screen in almost any direction. With 11 angles in both portrait and landscape modes, it significantly enhances both productivity and comfort. Vario-SC also features a textured anti-slip surface, making the iPad easy to hold and stay secure on any surface. For users of the Apple Smart Cover, the Vario-SC is the perfect companion case. When used together, the pair provides full coverage while enabling multi-angle, any-orientation viewing. The Vario-SC is available at www.zerochroma.com in black and white for $49.95, and Verizon online and other retailers this Fall.)

Finally, TripIt Pro the mobile trip organizer from Concur (www.concur.com)

PLUS:

Nuvyyo, your own cloud server: Allows you to use your mobile device anywhere in the world to enjoy and show off every video, song and photo you own. The JetStreamHD enables iPad users to access and stream any video, song, or photo from their home network while traveling or visiting colleagues, friends and family, without upfront planning, conversion headaches, download time, sync hassles, or iPad memory limits.

Today OOMA went down world wide for the first time since its six hour timeout in 2009, but to techies in the know the outage only emphasizes the attractions of a system that remains the most elegant solution to erasing the cost of phone service from personal and even business budgets.

To our taste the original machines were classic in design and the current offerings with their fashionable curves a little less pleasing visually, but the internal works still stand out as easy to operate and just as easy to trouble shoot if a line comes disconnected or some other minor hitch develops.

Among the facilities offered are individual ring patterns for master and extension lines .

Any problems are self-diagnosed by the OOMA device which presents an individual array of lights on its buttons signalling the problem (keep the manual by to interpret these). Thus if the top two buttons are lit orange-red the problem is that the device is not connecting to the OOMA network, as it didn’t today (for only the second time in four years).

We have had OOMA premier installed for four years with its little extension device (for a second line with a second number) and have grown to rely on its pleasing blue lights which signify that it is ready to do everything that you need in 21st Century phone service.

Messages are taken by and accessible on each machine, master and extension, as well as voice mail accessible from any phone.

The only lacks we find are that 800 numbers will not always go through – the response may be a message to try again later, which is invalid. In that case a land line is needed, which is not the case for 911 calls.

Unimpressed with 3D so far?  It may depend on how well or badly filmmakers have used it to date.   Apparently those who made Transformer III screwed up by using such a shallow depth of field that everyone looked like cardboard cutouts.   But we can think of others who made the same mistake.    Or is it that 3D technology is not yet good enough to solve this problem?  And what are the variables, all of them, given the potential subjectivity of individual response?

Hi All
I am fairly quiet on this list but read often. Having seen
Transformers in 3D this morning I have to say something.

This was probably the worst movie experience of my life. Every minute
that I watched I felt my life force being sucked from my soul. I had
to watch the whole thing as it was work research related. Now leaving
aside the none story for a moment the 3D in particular depressed me
beyond anything else I have seen.

The eyes matched well, alignment was good, brightness was good etc but
the reason I was so depressed after seeing it was that the movie is so
high profile and the marketing is going out of its way to draw
attention to the 3D. Lots of articles about the challenge and effort
that went into to shooting in in 3D which I believe and congratulate….

But why go to all the trouble if you are not going to put any effing
depth in your shots? Why shoot the whole movie with a 300mm lens and
set depth to 10% of what is needed to make a head look round. How was
it not blindingly obvious that these stereo settings are a total waste
of everyones time and money. This is moronic.

Now of course there are some good shots, the wider lens shots,
sprinkled here and there through out the movie but their infrequency
tells me it must be pure luck that they some how got through the film
making process. This movie conclusively tells me that the long lens
look is an utter waste of time for 3D. Adding partial depth to these
shots makes the movie worse than having no depth at all. I totally
agree that 3D will die if we continue to see movies like this where
the 3D is a net loss to the experience. Shot after Shot looks like a
composite of wafer thin cutouts of people spaced bizarrely along side
each other with broken eyelines due to the depth compression. A card
board cutout head over a blurry background IS NOT an interesting or
creative depth composition. When you can intercut  2D shots into your
sequences without anyone noticing this is a clue that your movie IS
NOT interesting in 3D.

I would say less than 10% of the compositions benefitted from 3D
depth. What a waste of everyones time and effort to make something
this expensive to produce so little of a result. No it is worse than
that. The result is not little, the result is hugely negative for film
making. It is total nonsense from beginning to end in every aspect of
film making and for 3D in particular, another demonstration as to why
3D is a total waste of time. But in this case light and sound were
also a total waste of time.

You know sometimes when you go through these moments and it makes you
question your whole existence and direction of life, you walk out in a
daze of depression and confusion, why did this happen? How could it be
possible for this to exist? Why will so many people see it? How do I
start to explain why this so wrong? How could anyone think this was
good?

Well that is me right now.

Maybe the saddest thing of all was I asked my self the question could
I really have done any better given the probably situation on this
production…and if the answer was no would I have been brave enough
to walk away instead of continue to make those settings? Well I am
lucky in that I have not had to face that.

Phil McNally – Stereoscopic Supervisor (on a private rant and not in
anyway related to my fantastic, 3D friendly, company of employment)
Dreamworks Animation.
Apologies to any individual who worked on this movie and gave it their
all late into the night and feels betrayed.
No apologies to anyone who thought these flat shots looked good in 3D.
You are screwing things up.

Google+ enables you to share with small groups

Not to mention Path and several other startups

Obvious to anyone with the smallest social awareness, including every TV viewer, though not to Mark Zuckerburg or Larry Page until recently, it seems, is the plain fact that oversharing on the Web can lead to disaster – ruined reputations, blasted careers, even suicide.

This is more readily apparent to the more mature, perhaps, than the fresh faced innocents who announce on Twitter, Facebook Places and Foursquare where they are at any moment, as in their quest to become “mayor” of their local Starbucks or whatever. Not to say that location info isn’t helpful at conferences, for example, but Twitter should serve well enough for that.

But most people really don’t want the world and any stalker or summons server to know their every move, as Microsoft recently confirmed (see Most Users Don’t Want To Share Their Location) by Matt Rosoff at Business Insider. The new startup Glimpse is one that recognizes the boundaries that people want to put on their information these days, if only because fraudsters and stalkers are around every corner of the Web. Others

Now Google announces Google +, which serves social networking up to all sensible people who want to keep their picket fence up and their front door closed to all but a trusted group. We predict increasing success for this initiative, at least till Facebook wakes up and offers the same thing, which apparently is against Mark Zuckerberg’s core philosophy, a philosophy based on his enormous success so far in signing up most of the world on a system which shares everything with everybody, unless users learn how to doublecheck their hideaway privacy settings.

Sorry, Mark, the real world will soon swing the pendulum forcefully in the other direction, as users wake up to the foolishness of trusting the world to treat them kindly, as if they has six billion loyal friends. Oh, you started Groups, you say? It won 50 million users in the first six months? Ooops!

Here’s the Times report by Claire Cain Miller:

Another Try by Google to Take on Facebook
“In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who’s in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share’ box and you share with the whole world,” said Bradley Horowitz, a vice president for product management at Google, who is leading the company’s social efforts with Vic Gundotra, a senior vice president for engineering. “We have a different model.”….

A brilliant idea which occurred to them only after the Feds busted them for Buzz’s oversharing of email contacts, which Google automatically added to Buzz lists as if all email contacts were friends. Now they have to deal with 20 years of audits to make sure they don’t do it again! But then, Facebook had the same problem, one seems to recall…

But Google+ may already be too late. In May, 180 million people visited Google sites, including YouTube, compared with 157.2 million on Facebook, according to comScore. But Facebook users looked at 103 billion pages and spent an average of 375 minutes on the site, while Google users viewed 46.3 billion pages and spent 231 minutes….

They will catch up alright, if Facebook can’t make its new same thing, Group, work as well. But in six months Group has 50 million users.

Analysts say that Facebook users are unlikely to duplicate their network of friends on Google+ and post to both sites, but that they could use them for different types of communication. Google+ could also attract Facebook holdouts who have been uncomfortable sharing too publicly…..

“Can someone eclipse Facebook in terms of its hold? It is a fantastic broadcast mechanism,” said Charlene Li, a social media analyst and founder of Altimeter Group, a technology research firm. “But if Google becomes the owner of your private groups, it’s going to be a splintering of our social lives.”….

Part of the blame, analysts say, falls on Google’s engineering-heavy culture, which values quantitative data and algorithms over more abstract pursuits like socializing….

Google’s insanity in this respect has long been obvious, and Ken Auletta has long pointed it out. For years they have been oblivious to the simple fact that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you will want to!

Exhibit A is Buzz, a sharing tool for Gmail users. It automatically included users’ e-mail contacts in their Buzz network, setting off widespread criticism that Google had invaded the privacy of users and failed to understand that people’s e-mail contacts are not necessarily their friends….

Google quickly changed the service so it did not automatically connect people. In March, Google settled with the Federal Trade Commission over charges of deceptive privacy practices related to Buzz and agreed to 20 years of audits.

Mr. Gundotra and Mr. Horowitz, both of whom worked on Buzz, say they were chastened by the experience. Google+ grew out of those mistakes, they said, because they realized how much people care about controlling the information they share…..

Why don’t supergeeks know this already? Perhaps because they have such narrow lives focused on their work, and have nothing else going on which might bring them into disrepute with their neighbors or the world.

Go to plus.google.com to see how this is set up.

And unlike its approach with Buzz, which was tested only by Google employees before its broad introduction to the public, Google is calling Google+ a project, as a way to emphasize that it is not a final product. The company says it will undergo many changes to fix problems and introduce features. Still, its new Web site, plus.google.com, is Google’s most fully formed social networking tool yet.

Mr. Gundotra and Mr. Horowitz said they took pains to mimic people’s relationships in real life and eliminate the social awkwardness that things like friend requests and oversharing can generate on other sites…..

Google+ users will start by selecting people they know from their Gmail contacts (and from other services, once Google strikes deals with them). They can drag and drop friends’ names into different groups, or circles, and give the circles titles, like “sisters” or “book club.” Then they can share with these groups or with all of their friends.

Unlike on Facebook, people do not have to agree to be friends with one another. They can receive someone’s updates without sharing their own.

Go to to learn more.

But is Google still as late to the party as ever?

Facebook has also recognized people’s desire to share with smaller groups, and last year introduced Groups to make that possible. It has been one of Facebook’s fastest-growing products, with users creating 50 million groups in the first six months, according to Facebook.

“We’re in the early days of making the Web more social, and there are opportunities for innovation everywhere,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in response to Google+.

When users visit their Google+ home page, they see three columns and a stream of status updates in the middle that looks remarkably like Facebook. But Google said that besides an easier way to share with select groups, Google+ has several other features that distinguish it from competitors.

It offers group video chats, called Hangouts, that other members of a group can join as it is happening. Users can search a section called Sparks to see articles and videos from across the Web on certain topics, like recipes or ailments, and share them with relevant groups of friends.

And on the Google+ mobile app for Android phones and iPhones, people can chat with groups using a feature called Huddle. Photos and videos shot with cellphones are automatically uploaded to a private album, so Google+ users can quickly view and post them from their phones or later on a computer.

How about the little guys, who have lready started sites in this direction? Will they be crushed?

With these services, Google will compete with a host of start-ups, like Path for sharing with small groups, SocialEyes for video chat, Flipboard for articles on certain topics and GroupMe for group texting.

“The notion that online sharing is broken is not an insight that is unique to us,” Mr. Horowitz said.

“We have a way to bring in millions of users in a way that is challenging for a start-up.”

OK, we have to admit, when all’s said and done, we don’t believe in sharing much on the Web, since sooner or later everything leaks to strangers, and it is up forever. The Web has no erase button. More than any previous medium, it should be treated with maximum discretion and formality.

The beguiling Web

All this party going excitement over winning new “friends” and broadening one’s social life from its normal level of couch potatodom is a huge chimera, we believe, one which like every mirage will vanish into thin air once the population arrives at its destination. The real need people have is not for public recognition but intimacy. That is what fortifies us against the slings and arrows of daily misfortune, and bolsters us to reach for the stars.

Unfortunately the Internet has the peculiar capacity to create the illusion that a message on the screen from someone far away is the same thing. As ABC 20/20 revealed last night, in Online Dating Nightmare: N.Y. Woman Scammed Out of Thousands by ‘Soldier’ , middleaged women yearning for intimacy in a true relationship will fantasize that the most obvious scoundrel is their new protector and soulmate, and will forward tens of thousands of dollars into thin air until their savings are exhausted and reality comes crashing in.

Presumably this is because the Internet strips all identity tags from communication except those specifically added by the sender, and there is nothing to stop him or her creating entirely false ones, or the receiver from fantasies which fill in the gaps.

Trusting the Internet to filter out falsity is like inviting a stranger home after five minutes conversation in a bar. Entrusting it with your own intimate truths is a recipe for disaster.

Romano, 53, from Lynbrook, N.Y., a busy and divorced single woman, said that she didn’t have time to go out and meet people. On the advice of friends, she joined Match.com. She soon found herself chatting online with a man named “Austin Miller.” Miller identified himself as a decorated soldier based in Kabul, Afghanistan. When Miller sent her a picture of himself in uniform, Romano was impressed.

She thought, “Wow, I hit the jackpot. (He was) a nice-looking guy,” Romano said. “I’m like, this is too good to be true.”….

As Romano and Miller stayed in touch, Romano found herself falling “deeper and deeper” into the online relationship. When Miller asked for a new laptop, she was eager to help a soldier in need.

“I am very patriotic and I worked in the World Trade Center on 9/11,” she said. “So to me, if it’s for a soldier to help, I’ll do whatever I can.”

The laptop cost her $1,000. Miller instructed Romano to send it through FedEx to Ghana. Romano said she was a little suspicious of the mailing address — Ghana is a continent away from Afghanistan — but Miller told her that a man in Ghana would ultimately deliver the laptop to him…..

Romano’s generosity to the “soldier” didn’t end there: She sent him a total of $25,000 within a six-month time span before realizing that she had fallen victim to a scammer.

“Everyone can form their own opinion, but you’ll never know until it happens to you. And unfortunately, it happened to me,” she said.
To help Romano find her scammer somewhere in Ghana, “20/20″ asked her to send one final email to the so-called “Austin Miller.” With a few arrangements from a “20/20″ undercover producer in Ghana, we tracked down her scammer. He admitted to our undercover producer that he was a conman and even tried to convince him to join him in his scam.

“We can even get up to $15,000 to $20,000 more from her,” he told our producer.

Sadly, it looks as if it will take another ten years before this kind of thing is stopped by educating enough people that the Web is still the Wild West of the Internet and not a well regulated and policed urban metropolis.

Piece on real estate gossip site on Web reveals that Web site operators are NOT liable for content posted that they did not create. Battle Waged Over Real Estate Gossip on the Web by Diana Cardwell

Mr. Shiamili’s lawsuit was dismissed, in a close decision handed down last week by the Court of Appeals, which held that Mr. McCann and his co-defendant, Daniel Baum, were protected under the Communications Decency Act, which shields Web site operators from liability when they publish and edit material that they did not create.

But is it true? Techcrunch seems to think companies will give in to pussy assed lawyers:

Flickr v. Free Speech. Where Is Their Courage? It’s clear that the Flickr team wanted to take this image down. Not only was the image removed, but the entire page was taken down with all the comments to the image. There’s nothing in the DMCA that says you have to do that, too.

Flickr lost my trust over this issue. They failed to stand up for a user who chose to display his work on Flickr over competitors.

Front page left above the fold treatment for this story EMail Fraud Hides Behind Friendly Face by Matt Richtel today Jun 3 in NYT. Email from a friend, even your mother asking for your Soc Sec number to enter into her will, may not be real. Facebook feeds these frauds with its vast access to personal information. It catches even security technology executives. Phishing VIPs is known as “whaling”.