May 30th, 2008 by mhjones

When US tech entrepreneur Jason Calacanis flew into Sydney for CeBIT this month, I joined the queue of Aussie journalists who wanted to meet the man who sold a blogging company to AOL for US$25 million (yes, we’d ALL like to do that…).

Here’s the result of our chat – part 1 and part 2 – on the new-look, big-screen tv.afr.com that my colleague at Fairfax Business Media, Marc Tewksbury, has been working on for months (btw, nice work Marc!). You can also watch it over at misaustralia.com.

Tagged: MISaustralia.com, Social media, Tech news, The Australian Financial Review, Weblogs
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May 23rd, 2008 by mhjones

Facebook CEO Marc Zuckerberg has stressed his desire to keep the company an independent operation.

“You can tell, from our history and what we’ve done, that we really wanted to keep the company independent, by focusing on building and focusing on the long-term,” Zuckerberg told Reuters while in Japan to launch a Japanese language version of Facebook.

Well, he’s right in one sense. You might recall his famous US$1B Yahoo! snub that made the cover of Fast Company.

But really, what else was he going to say? Microsoft is already an investor in the business and he doesn’t want to upset the facebook community (again) by appearing to blatantly chasing the dollar.

I got thinking about this because of a conversation I had with Jason Calacanis this week. He was in Sydney to attend and speak at CeBIT, and I recorded a video interview with him for misaustralia.com (stay tuned for that).

And we got talking about social media business models, as you do with someone like Jason. His point was that the only real way to make big money from social networking is to sell it to a bigger internet player. There’s little money to be made from the ads wrapped around social media – which is what free email services like Yahoo! Mail and Gmail are. You need to take them and dump them into a larger bucket where you can charge for different, higher value services, Jason said.

I don’t completely agree with his assessment because Yahoo! Mail is one of the biggest traffic generators among Yahoo!’s web properties. There has to be a very nice income stream from associated traffic on that site alone.

But yet there is clearly merit in the sell-out idea from Mr Zuckerberg’s selfish perspective. And Jason would know, he made about US$25million from selling Weblogs, Inc. to AOL.

Tagged: Random musings, Social media, Tech news
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April 28th, 2008 by mhjones

It’s great to see that Steve Gillmor and the gang have returned from hiatus and found a home with Mike Arrington.

The Gillmor Gang sprung out of conversations Steve was having with Jon Udell (now at Microsoft) during our time at InfoWorld. These two would muse, debate, and generally play verbal pong pong for considerable chunks of time. As Steve writes (yes Steve, I am a full 10 days behind on this news), he wanted to share the ideas they discussed with the world at large.

One of many other characters worth pointing out in the fray here is Mike Vizard, former editor in chief at InfoWorld who took a punt and imported yours truly from Australia in 1999, just before the Internet business went pear shaped.

These three guys, perhaps more than any others, shaped my experience in San Francisco from 2000 to 2003 – and I’m still enjoying the fruits of that season. So that’s why I listen to the show. There are breadcrumbs here that I do want to pick up and run with.

For other people, the Gang is arguably what RSS/Web 2.0/attention/social media/social networking was always all about. Shared ideas, and turning the mythical “conversation” into reality – warts and all.

In fact, it was this show that partly inspired me to launch The Scoop podcast. We are no Gang, but to my knowledge we are still the only podcast in Australia that’s based on the concept of a panel-style conversation.

Update: wrap your noggin around this post and comments at TechCrunch. The fun has started.

Tagged: Podcasting, Social media, Tech news, The Scoop
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April 8th, 2008 by mhjones

Hugh Bradlow had been on my list of people I wanted to interview for some time. In part, because I was reading his blog on Telstra’s infamous NowWeAreTalking. We finally met recently at a broadband conference and this video is the result. It’s a shade long at nearly 16 mins, but we decided it was a good yarn and worth the effort. Hope you agree!

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.500826&w=425&h=350&fv=guid%3Dguid93432] from www.misaustralia.com posted with vodpod

Tagged: MISaustralia.com, Social media, Tech news
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November 9th, 2007 by mhjones

Yahoo! Mail is down, and there’s little explanation beyond admitting it’s their fault. I use both Gmail and Yahoo Mail (US), and it’s been a long time since either service was unavailable, so it’s kinda surprising…. And I was expecting the Yahoo! Mail Blog to have something more, but as of this moment, nope.

Update: Yahoo! Mail is back. I’m not sure how long it was off air, but presumably a few hours given the time I was away from it.

Tagged: Tech news
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March 13th, 2007 by mhjones

Last Tuesday I jumped in the back of a cab at the Australian Technology Park, bound for Sydney’s CBD, after a colleage at the SMH offered me a seat. I cheerily introduced myself to the other passenger who was already in the back seat. "Oh, Mark Jones! We know you," she exclaimed. "I work at eBay." We all broke out in nervous laughter.

It turns out she was one of eBay’s government lobbists, and this was the day I had broken my second story in as many weeks on eBay’s status as a Switzerland-registered company that does not issue invoices to Australian merchants with GST included.   

I’m flattered The Australian followed my story today, quoting my sources, and I hear it’s been picked up on radio. What’s unfolding is a story about one of the great elephants in the room as far as multinational Internet companies are concerned — if a transaction happens in cyberspace, which government collects the tax? eBay has operated at a loss for the past couple of years in Australia, as I first reported, because its offshore arm that managed the ebay.com.au domain directly collects the transaction revenues. If eBay thought this thing was going to blow over, it seems they were mistaken.

Update: I wrote a feature on "who pays tax in cyberspace" which was published in this weekend’s AFR. Sorry that I can’t point to it here cos our website doesn’t permit such things. But to give you a flavour of the piece, it makes the point that 10 yrs ago the ATO issued reports dealing with the problems posed by e-commerce on the internet. A decade later, and we’ve still got apparently loopholes in Australia’s tax legislation that let multinational Internet companies like eBay send revenues derived from Australian consumers straight offshore. One of eBay’s defences, if you can call it that, is they are not the only company doing this.

Meanwhile, The Australian also ran a small piece this weekend pushing the fear and loathing angle around the fact that eBay has handed the ATO the full contact details of its large merchant sellers as part of an investigation into who is incorrectly claiming GST on eBay invoices. This is normal behaviour – they handed the ATO these details three years ago, and it states in eBay’s user agreement that they will share those details with the ATO and the government. What doesn’t seem to have been picked up in the reporting tho, is that eBay actually wants its merchants to be investigated because they have a bias in favour of the small "mum & dad" auctioneers. Recent fee hikes were designed to disadavantage the large merchant community, and make life better for smaller auctioneers and retailers. What’s confusing to me is that at the same time, eBay has gone out and told the world they want to take on Australia’s big offline retailers. How can you do that without big merchants in your eBay community?

Tagged: Tech news
Comments: 5 Comments »

February 7th, 2007 by mhjones

Steve Gillmor has the uncanny ability to proclaim a technology is dead, long before it’s actually dead in the sense of not being used. But if it’s going to be dead soon, it’s dead now, goes the argument. I had fun being a fly on the wall at InfoWorld when he really upset IBM by proclaiming Notes is Dead.

His next big meme last year was "links are dead." And so it was memories of these stories that came flooding back when reading this piece lamenting the fact that the 2000 Bloggers project has killed the value of links forever. I guess Steve would argue they were already dead, so what’s your point?

I’ve been thinking about this from another angle. I made my way over to Ad:Tech Sydney this morning to see MySpace’s Shawn Gold and participate in a panel discussion on blogging. (Just as an aside, I got the official figures and there were 600 people in the room for the keynote — that’s big for Sydney. Australia’s online community is going NUTS I tell you).

Shawn’s take on the whole social networking thing is that people want their 15 minutes of fame (just like all the people on 2000 Bloggers who dream of being a so-called A-List personality, it would seem). Except with social networking, "everyone is famous for 15 people". Of course, most people are already famous for at least 15 people in the offline world, it’s just now we have another way of creating fame online.

So can you blame people for jumping on the 2000 Bloggers bandwagon? No, people want fame. Should we have seen it coming? No, but who sees any of these things coming (apart from Steve)? So are links really dead now? The evidence is mounting, it would seem.

So the question is what comes next? Maybe we should start Blog Survivor and vote the A-list people off the proverbial digital island and start all over again. Anyone got a better idea?

Oh, and while you ponder that bit of inspiration, Vicorp has posted this promo-video from Ad:Tech which includes a Shawn Gold quote (and some shopping centre-style music I’m afraid). And here’s Ross Dawson’s post on the subjects covered during our blogging panel this afternoon. (Ok, that’s the last link for the day, since they are supposed to be dead.

Update: Darren Rowse has a great overview of Ad:Tech day one here, and Andrew Pascoe‘s linked to a few bloggers at the show.

Tagged: Tech news
Comments: 3 Comments »

January 23rd, 2007 by mhjones

California has Silicon Valley. Sydney’s got Silicon Beach. Where would you rather live?

Joshua Gliddon has his first page one in today’s AFR – go get a copy! He’s grabbled hold of the "Silicon Beach" moniker coined by Tilefile’s David Bollinger.

I’ll tell you why this is a big story. There’s truckloads of money available for web startups in Australia if they’ve got a good business model. But many of the new companies Joshua quotes (such as Atlassian, Tangler, Quotify and the Freshview boys pictured on page 1 with their surf boards) are building companies with real revenues and real customers. That’s a good story now, but think about what value they are creating for the future. Any potential M&A activity will be grounded in discussions about real numbers and not just pie-in-the-sky evaluations.

And in case you’re wondering, the idea for this yarn surfaced when I met these guys at Stirr Sydney.

Tagged: Tech news
Comments: 3 Comments »

December 1st, 2006 by mhjones

As we media types shivered our way through the Windows Vista launch in Sydney yesterday (very efficient air conditioning), an irony flashed through the mind.

This was Microsoft’s big corporate launch. It’s all about proving Vista, Office et al is a vital piece of technology infrastructure that directly impacts the corporate bottom line. Non-IT business leaders need to know this stuff. But amusingly enough, Microsoft didn’t really turn down the jargon-o-metre – although to their credit there was only one mention of Web services.

So with tongue firmly in cheek, here’s my Windows Vista Launch Top 10 Jargon List:

1. Productivity
2. Collaboration
3. Innovation
4. Flexibility
5. Agility
6. Speed
7. Seamless
8. Unified
9. Strategic
10. Governance

Tagged: Tech news
Comments: 1 Comment »

October 11th, 2006 by mhjones

Google just launched Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a service that combines Google Spreadsheets (formerly in beta) and Writely, the online word processor it bought earlier this year.

I’ve been digging around on the site after interviewing some Google product managers this morning about the release. A couple of quick observations.

• It’s completely intuitive and has a ‘clean’ UI like other Google services.
• The collaboration features seem powerful. Microsoft is building similar collaboration features into the next version of Office. But that’s not until January (or later??), and it costs big bucks. Windows Vista Ultimate costs AUD$751 in Australia. That’s close to the price of a desktop PC!
• Auto-save is probably its ‘saving grace’, as it were. It seems to negate the risk of an online app as it saves the document before your browser crashes, as mine just did, or if you lose your connection.
• It’s a free sign-up, unlike previous invite-only exercises. That’s Google code for "we really want you to use this thing."
• The Google product managers I interviewed said they don’t have a Powerpoint equivalent in the wings. Even if Google does, I’m sure they wouldn’t tell me. But it’s not an impossible thought. Docs & Spreadsheets already allows you to save your document as a Word file, PDF, RTF, OpenOffice etc. What’s to stop them adding PPT …
• What I really want is complete integration with Gmail, Talk etc.

What do you reckon?

btw, if you’re keen for a peek, here’s a screen shot:

Tagged: Tech news
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