Kaiyzen Group

Just left this rant over at Techcrunch on one of Ericks writeups on Radioheads new album.., just getting some thoughts out there.., most of the tech bloggers are completely ignorant.  Its kind of like how the tech bloggers like to rip on politicians who tried to talk about technology and the “pipes”.

Santa seemed to bring retailers good gifts for the holiday season…, we will wait for the official reports over the up and coming weeks.

Merry Xmas everyone

People keep talking about a large uptick in cloud services in 2008.  Several services are helping fuel this fire such as Amazon’s computing cloud and storage service, the beta launch of Microsoft’s SkyDrive (love the SkyDrive branding by the way), and of course the eventual official Google offerings that will start to show up this year no doubt.

The broswer folks supposedly want a piece of the action as well.  Opera announced earlier this year about their Opera Link service which allows users to use Opera and Opera Mini to sync their bookmarks between their home computer and mobile device, as well as access them remotely by loggin into remote Opera browsers to access their bookmarks.  Mozilla is also getting in the game with the introduction of its Weave service.

Mozilla’s offering seems to have much more lofty goals from the get go with not only storing bookmarks, but RSS feeds, cookies, site login info, etc.

 I would not put Opera or Mozilla anywhere near in the same category as the service offerings the other big players are implementing.  I do not really think there to too much value in these bookmark syncing products.  With online services to manage feeds and bookmarks there isnt much need to rely on the browsers to access your content from any computer that has a Firefox or Opera browser on it.  One thing these services could provide is a little help in providing some installs for the folks that want more % points from IE.

I can picture die hard Firefox fans getting on a friends computer to show them some great site only to find out they dont have Firefox installed.  The die hard firefoxer will of course quickly download and install firefox, show them how easy it is to use.., and then demonstrate the great syncing service they provide.

It will be interesting to see what level of cloud service integration Microsoft will bring to IE 8.., and how much people will complain about competitive disadvantages.  Something to keep an eye on for this year.

Ok.., the vegas trip was a great success.  I actually made it out of there only down $60.., quite nice given the price tag of the show tix and the Venetian room. 

The TOOL show was of course fantastic.  They dropped the same set list they did last tuesday in SF, but as usual, always a pleasure to to witness them live.

The Pearl is really a great venue to see a show in.  It is on par with the Warfield in SF, maybe a big bigger from the size of it, but seats probably the same amount of people.., its just a little more open.

We had general admission tix and the floor is probably a bit smaller than the Warfields downstairs GA area.  Definitely the closest I have ever been to the stage and we were towards the back of the floor section.

It was great seeing the sis and I look forward to her return to the bay area this week.., congrads on finishin up school.

LOTS o posting to catch up on.., I have been severely lagging.., I might have to to one of those BS “summary posts” that just mentioned a bunch of things in passing and provide links.

Alrighty.., been lagging on the posting this week, but have a TON o visitors in town for the company xmas party tonight…, theme of “Rocker’s Ball”, as well as a customer visit so things are a little crazy.

While my co-workers are at their Rockers Ball with a band and some card tables/dealers we are getting to show up…, I will be having my own Rockers Ball down in Vegas to see TOOL’s final show of their touring at The Pearl tonight.

I caught the tuesday night SF show.., although they are doing a short set right now.., the product is redirkulous and they had Jello Biafra from The Dead Kenedys come on stage and they played Holiday in Cambodia…, one of the greatest music moments of my life to date.

So.., as I am off to Vegas in about an hour…, I will try to catch up on postings when I return Sunday…, pic of the TOOL stage setup below:

Lots o buzz around tech news sites starting last night through this morning regarding information about Googles Knol project.

Knol is planning to provide infrastructure for people who are experts, or very knowledgeable, in certain topics to provide content on their topic of choice.  Google will be rolling this into their search results, placing ads along side the content, and providing a cut to the content producer if they are so inclined to accept ads on their content.

As much hype as people are trying add to this news it is hardly a “game changer”.  It IS big news just because it Google announcing this and their reach is freakishly large now.

I have talked with people in the tech industry for some time now about this idea aggregating and distributing content with a revenue share back to the producers.  Even though I have my passionate disliking for them as an organization, I like the fact the Google is pushing things forward with this kind of play, it will make people think harder about content distribution and the monetization models of the future.

Back to some Google bashing.., About.com has long been the OG site for “experts” to spit their game on the web.  Purchased by the NY Times for $410 million About.com was the leading commercial pre-cursor to Wikipedia.

Google has to be sick of Wikipedia stealing lots of links from their search results and having the gaul to not put Adsense on their site…, how dare they.  In the past 12-18 months I have noticed the steady rise of Wikipedia entries in search results, appearing at the top of most general topics.

The big question is going to be, Is Knol going to be another Google Maps, or a Google Answers?  Of course I am hoping for the Answers results, but we will have to wait and see.  Google seems to think that just throwing it out their that you can make some money by helping out their content collection will make people flock to this new service.  Wikipedia, and early YouTube just shows that there is a select group of people out there in internetland that love to be involved and provide content and their opinion.

One of the biggest initial issues I see is how to verify copyright, very similar to the YouTube paying its users a cut of posted videos.  Who is to say that I can just go to Wikipedia, copy/paste, or programatically suck data out of it, then re-post on knol.  Now Wikipedia content is free for use, so this type of poaching is technically allowed, but I am not sold yet on whether Google can steal the audience from Wikipedia.

I still need to catch up on my writings from the FTC privacy event.., but just left this comment on a story over at Techcrunch on Ask releasing their Ask Eraser product.

For those of you unfamiliar with the topic, the search engines.., and all sites in general track everything you do online.  They track to provide you will a more personal experience on their sitees, tailor content, study usage of their systems.., and of course target you with better Ads.

After getting slapped on the hand by EU regulators Google lowered their data retention time on your search activities to 18 months…, immediately all other players followed suit and met or exceeded that 18 month mark.

Ask Eraser is a new feature, which was first announced back in July of this year that allows users to erase their search history any time they choose.

Techcrunch’s Nick Gonzalez isn’t too impressed with the Eraser and gave it a “Yawn”…, citing that they are a major player and the introduction of this offering wont matter because of the lack of market share.  I like Nick’s postings, but have to greatly disagree on this one.

 Comment on the story below:

Sometime in the next week I will organize my thoughts and notes from the FTC event and put together some postings.