My Own Pirate Radio

Dane Glasgow is moving on.

See also my previous post on this topic.

A few days ago I mentioned Arizona trying to stop Zillow from providing zestimates within their state.

Here’s an update from John Cook’s venture blog:

UPDATE 4/24/07: The bill, including the amendment in support of Zillow, was defeated today by a vote of 32-22 in the Arizona House of Representatives. A spokesman for the Arizona house said that the bill was defeated because it dealt with increasing fees, though he said it was likely that sponsors would re-introduce the legislation along with the amendment related to Zillow.

By the way, John Cook is worth reading if you’re into tracking US ventures, especially on the west coast. He works for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and blogs regularly on entrepreneurial happenings.

In the US, the Communications Decency Act says it’s the person who created the content. In Canada, as far as I know, that question hasn’t been settled conclusively yet. There is now a lawsuit underway that should shed more light on it. From the Globe and Mail:

The hosts of the speed-of-light world of Internet blogs and interactive websites that publish anonymous commentary should be forced to pay when reputations are damaged, says a former Green Party staff member who is suing three such sites.

Google, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and openpolitics.ca, a Canadian political website based in Toronto, are being sued in Vancouver in a libel case that could change the way Internet opinion is monitored and published.

This case is critical to track for anybody who is thinking about hosting user-generated content on a Canadian-based website. Which would be just about anyone doing a Web 2.0 service.

Arizona is trying to stop Zillow from providing “zestimates” — their algorithm-based home valuation estimates — on the grounds that Zillow isn’t a licensed appraiser in the state.

That’s just plain silly. Zillow is, so far at least, a benevolent information provider, not a company people need to be protected from. And its estimates are just that: estimates. They should be taken with a grain of salt, just like all other analysis that tries to predict market behavior.

Lots happening in search recently, especially in the local search segment.

• On Friday Google announced it acquired DoubleClick for $3.1B, beating out Yahoo!, Time Warner (AOL’s owner), and Microsoft in the bidding. This gives Google ability to place display ads (graphical ads) on sites, in addition to their existing text ads. In an ironic twist, both Microsoft Corp. and AT&T Inc. called for antitrust regulators to investigate the deal.
• Two days ago Google struck a deal with Clear Channel Communications to sell airtime on their 675 radio stations to Google’s advertisers. Clear Channel is America’s largest radio broadcaster.
• Also this week, Yahoo! expanded its agreement with a consortium of newspaper publishers to run their content on Yahoo!’s websites, and to place advertisements on the sites of the newspapers.
• In late March the News Corporation and NBC Universal struck a video content distribution deal with AOL, Yaho, MSN and MySpace. Some are casting this as an ill-fated effort to compete with YouTube (I agree), while the dealmakers claim it is more about creating a shared network of content and ads.

It’s neat seeing all the old media companies come around, albeit belatedly, to doing deals with the new media companies. It’s nice for the old media companies; they get a handy cash infusion, some positive PR, and new ad inventory to sell. But this is just a short-term fix. The new media companies get the better part of this deal, because:

1. They get to tap into the local sales force of the old media companies. This reduces a huge barrier to success in local search: the cost of creating and running a local advertising sales force, a.k.a. “feet on the street”.
2. They get to demonstrate their reach, innovation, and cost efficiencies to a new advertising base. (Google and Yahoo! are surely saying nice things about not trying to steal away advertisers from their new radio, television and newspaper publishing partners, but you’ve got to be skeptical about that in the medium to long term. Ad dollars are shifting online, fast. These deals only grease the skids.)

For an overview of US local search market trends, see LennAnn Prescott’s Hitwise blog post.

BusinessWeek also has more commentary on Google’s recent moves in the ad business.

Unless you’re massively bored, and truly have nothing better to do, you should ignore this post.

Really, I strongly recommend you skip this one. It’s horribly dull. And you already know it, because you read the title.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’ve spent several hours tracking down a bug in Adobe Create Suite 2 Illustrator. After following many false leads I found a valid fix. In the interest of saving other people time, here it is:

Problem: When trying to save a file in Illustrator, you get an error dialog that says, “an unknown error has occurred”. The file will not save properly. Illustrator will then continue working, but in a strange way, and will pop up more error dialogs. Illustrator will also refuse to close properly when you try to exit.

Temporary Workaround: In the “Illustrator Options” dialog that pops up during file save, turn OFF the checkbox labelled “Create PDF compatible file”. With this done, you should be able to save properly, but you won’t be able to save PDF-compatible files.

Solution:
1.) Make sure you have Adobe Acrobat installed. I tested this with Acrobat 8.0, and apparently it works with 7.0 as well.

2.) Open up a new Explorer window and browse to: “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\Resource\CMap\”. (If you have Acrobat 7.0, try the folder “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Resource\CMap” instead.)

3.) Browse to this folder: “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Font\Reqrd\CMaps\”. If there isn’t already a folder at this location, create a new empty folder with this name.

4.) Copy the two files “Identity-H” and “Identity-V” from the folder in step 2 into the folder in step 3.

That’s it. Illustrator should behave normally now.

Thank you “CWM”, who posted this fix here in the Adobe Forums on 4:16pm Feb 20, 07 PST.

Questions, follow-ups, etc. –> please post on the Adobe Forum.

Good luck.

InformationWeek published an article on Microsoft’s internet strategy yesterday that I found interesting. Two bits in particular:

(1) The discussion on the new team under Ray Ozzie that’s going after cloud services (”Heavy Hitters on a Secret Mission”). This is a ray of hope. (Pardon the pun.)

(2) Speculation on business model:

…where online advertising figures into a software-plus-services environment isn’t entirely clear. Ozzie said in February that ad support won’t be the predominant way Microsoft generates revenue from its online enterprise software–volume licensing or subscriptions are more appropriate–and it will play a mixed role in its small-business services offerings.

Seems kind of obvious. Many businesses are happy to have a company like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo or Amazon handle some of their infrastructure — who wants to worry about storage, for instance? — but not at the cost of peppering their employees with ads while they’re trying to get work done.

The obvious alternative is subscriptions. This is a long-time Microsoft dream; I recall as far back as 1999 very explicit discussion about how to move to an “annuity” business model, i.e. deriving annually or monthly recurring revenue from customer subscriptions to software services that continuously improve over time. That’s essentially how it works anyway for really large Microsoft customers, by way of the multi-year enterprise licensing agreements they sign. These agreements give them “all you can eat” access to Microsoft products, services, and support. The only catch is that much of the software still comes in boxes, on DVDs. But that’s changing fast as network pipes get bigger.

The challenge is making this model turnkey and cost-effective for all types of customers. Think how far we have to go before we can buy “computes” the way we buy kilowatts of electricity and liters of water. We’re getting there fast with gigabytes of disk space, though.

I wonder, also, how far up the stack software services will become commoditized in the way true utilities are.

It’s a fun race to watch.