Posts tagged Victory
Another Victory For Big Media in Piracy Wars as Torrent Site Shuts Down
Feb 6th
If recent crackdowns against file-sharing were meant as a warning shot to other site owners, it has indeed been heard loud and clear. First, sites like FileSonic and FileServe voluntarily scaled back their functionality, while others vocally defended their own practices in the wake of the Megaupload shutdown.
Today, popular BitTorrent index BTjunkie shut itself down to preempt legal action of the type experienced by the Pirate Bay, Megaupload and others. The seven-year-old site may not have been squashed directly by authorities, but it is nonetheless good news for the RIAA, MPPA and other opponents of online piracy.
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The voluntary shutdown of BTjunkie isn’t going to single-handedly change the file-sharing landscape, but it’s symbolic of a larger trend in the ongoing war over digital piracy. The copyright lobby has scored several big victories lately, most notably the seizure of Megaupload by federal authorities on January 19. Since that day, the aftershocks have been felt across the Web, BTjunkie’s closure being only the latest example.
Separately, the Swedish Supreme Court recently upheld the sentences of three Pirate Bay cofounders who were convicted of copyright infringement in 2009.
Battling Piracy in a Post SOPA-World
Apparently by pure coincidence, the Megaupload shutdown came one day after large-scale online protests against SOPA and PIPA, the proposed anti-piracy legislation. The timing of the crackdown raised a few eyebrows, as well as questions about why SOPA would have been necessary in the first place.
SOPA and PIPA may be shelved for the time being, but the war between the content industry and the parts of the Internet that they perceive to encourage copyright infringement is far from over. The next battle may be legislative, or it may rely on civil or criminal law. In some cases, the aftershocks of previous strikes will be enough to shake other perceived enemies from their positions, as happened in the cases of BTjunkie and FileSonic.
The counterstrikes in these battles have come in occasionally dramatic flavors such as the DDoS attacks from Anonymous that followed the Megaupload shutdown. More subtle – and far more powerful – is the mass migration of users from one service to another as authorities engage in what appears to be one giant game of Internet whack-a-mole.
There have been recent successes, but the very nature and structure of the Internet raises questions about the longterm effectiveness of this approach. As we saw with SOPA, any attempt to tinker with that structure will be met with fierce resistance.
Photo by Mike Baird.
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Belgian Newspapers Claim Retaliation By Google After Copyright Victory
Jul 17th
Perhaps the lesson is: be careful what you sue for. The French and German-language Belgian newspaper consortium that successfully sued Google for copyright infringement got more than it bargained for this week. The newspapers’ content has been removed not only from Google News (as desired)…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Beligian Newspapers Claim Retaliation By Google After Copyright Victory
Jul 16th
Perhaps the lesson is: be careful what you sue for. The French and German-language Belgian newspaper consortium that successfully sued Google for copyright infringement got more than it bargained for this week. The newspapers’ content has been removed not only from Google News (as desired)…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Ryu gets first big LPGA victory – Vancouver Sun
Jul 12th
 CBC.ca |
Ryu gets first big LPGA victory
Vancouver Sun South Korea's Ryu So-yeon won her first major title by beating compatriot Seo Hee-kyung by three shots in a three-hole playoff for the weather-delayed US Women's Open on Monday. The 21-year-old Ryu rolled in a five-foot birdie putt on the 18th green, … Krieger: Gifted female athletes take world by storm Ryu downs Seo in US Women's Open playoff So Yeon Ryu wins US Women's Open in a playoff |
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Golf roundup: Hee Kyung Seo on verge of victory at US Women’s Open – Detroit Free Press
Jul 10th
 msnbc.com |
Golf roundup: Hee Kyung Seo on verge of victory at US Women's Open
Detroit Free Press Hee Kyung Seo hits a tee shot Sunday. At three-under 281, she had a one-shot lead over So Yeon Ryu, who had three holes left. / HARRY HOW/Getty Images Where: The Broadmoor, East Course (7047 yards, par 71), Colorado Springs, Colo. … Hee Kyung Seo leads Women's Open – for now Seo leads heading into Monday finish at US Women's Open South Korea's Seo leads by 1; Miami's Kerr two back |
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A Victory for the Community? Oracle Spin Out OpenOffice, but Questions Remain
Apr 15th
Oracle made the announcement today that OpenOffice will become a community project and no longer a commercial endeavor.
It’s not a surprising move. But it does feel like a victory for the open source community and a sign that Oracle may be easing up a bit on its hard-line stance toward the open source community.
But it’s not unfair to say that OpenOffice has seen better days. OpenOffice had its own glory when Sun Microsystems was an independent company with a belief in open source and a commitment to the project.
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Oracle really never had much interest in OpenOffice. And so it is refreshing to see the company turn it over to the community.
An Oracle executive had this to say in the press release announcing the news:
“Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis,” said Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect.
Oracle says it supports open source and will continue to be involved in projects that it has a commercial interest – namely MySQL and Linux.
But there are still a lot of questions to answer. Namely, what is the organization that will manage it. There are also questions of governance. Oracle is keeping quiet about its intentions.
Would the Document Foundation be a likely successor? That would be quite a surprise but a welcome one, too.
The Document Foundation is a creation born out of frustration after Oracle purchased Sun. In September 2010, the group formed after Oracle refused to turn OpenOffice over to the open-source community. They forked OpenOffice and created Libre Office.
Now there is some uncertainty about the Document Foundation’s future. Much will depend on what organization manages OpenOffice.
The Register ‘s Gavin Clarke provides an astute analysis of the politics in play. Oracle snubbed the Document Foundation and managed to take some bruises for its tough stance. “Google, Novel, Red Hat, Ubuntu-maintainer Canonical, and the Open Source Initiative all issued forthright statements of support for the formation of the Document Foundation.”
He goes on to write:
As for politics: one of OpenOffice’s biggest proponents is IBM, and the systems giant that Oracle has courted to carve up Java’s development cannot have been happy by the implications of last year’s divorce on the development of OpenOffice. Although LibreOffice provided an alternative, it’s sorely lacking in the kind of brand recognition held by OpenOffice, while as a fork it was within Oracle’s power to accept changes in LibreOffice back in the main code base.
It’s entirely possible, therefore, that IBM has spoken to Oracle and made it realize that it’s better for OpenOffice, IBM, and for everybody if Oracle just lets go of this one.
Oracle has the trademark to OpenOffice. With that still in their hands, it’s anyone’s guess what will come of OpenOffice.
But our guess is a softer stance on Oracle’s part. Those executives are too smart to be too tough. It just is not in their best interest.
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Weekly Wrap-up: Why Facebook Marketing Fails, Watson’s Victory Isn’t Science, Twitter Beyond 140, and More…
Feb 19th
A dissection of failed Facebook marketing campaigns topped this week’s list of our readers’ favorite stories. As a few commenters noted, success comes down to one thing: keep things simple. As always, this week we followed several of the key trends shaping the Internet today. In mobile news, Netflix had some good and bad news for Android owners. Audrey Watters found that location marketing dollars go to Facebook Places over Foursquare and Groupon. And if you were worried about our new overlords, Alex Williams had a smart piece on how the Jeopardy man vs. machine contest had little to do with science and a lot to do with hype. Read on for more.
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Top Stories of the Week
- Why Most Facebook Marketing Doesn’t Work
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- Why Twitter Must Expand Beyond 140 Characters
- Google Gets Social: Your Friends Bust Into the Ten Blue Links
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A Watson Victory? This is About a Contest, Not Science
Feb 16th
We go into day two of the three-day Jeopardy contest with IBM’s Watson tied for first place with Brad Rutter. They each have $5,000. Ken Jennings has $2,000.
What does this show more than anything? This is a contest and nothing more.
It is not a scientific experiment to do a live broadcast of a game show with a contestant that is a machine. It is a game to use a television show to sell the concept of machine intelligence and set market expectations.
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That expectation being that someday we will all have a Watson of our very own. It will be in the walls, perhaps, to answer our questions. It will know the language we speak. it will always be listening, mechanically processing what we say and adjusting the information to the algorithm that correlates the data.
So this game show exercise is not a scientific achievement of any kind. Watson, Rutter and Jennings are contestants. The show is on television. Advertisers pay to be part of the show. People watch it and tweet about it… a lot.
What the Watson Jeopardy Contest Represents
In our view, the opportunity for IBM is to discuss the context for Watson and move that conversation beyond the common-man-versus-machine stories that are popping up like cliches do when this topic moves past a tipping point.
IBM is offering a new alternative that shows the applications for machine intelligence. It’s not about cloud computing.
In this case, it is more effective to use a room full of servers to process natural language.
The screen that appears on the Jeopoardy program is connected to server racks that would encompass a large part of the studio floor where the Jeopardy game is taking place. Those servers are processing the data, which is being fed into an algorithm that is listening for subtleties of the natural language.
Watson listens to the question and takes the data score. It works down a decision tree and extracts the answer based on how narrow it can define the data set.
For example, that’s why it may not know about oddities. Obscure matters may be lost on it. It does not have enough data to know the context for what the oddities represent.
Watson will move on after the Jepoardy game and out of the contest spotlight. IBM is offering Watson for university research.
The applications? Watson may be in your doctor’s room someday, listening to your symptoms, parsing down your data, applying it to a decision tree, eliminating extraneous data about exotic diseases that have not been in your community for more than 100 years. It will take seconds to get from that point to insight about your condition.
There are limitless ways the technology can be applied.
Lost Opportunity?
Unfortunately, with any contest, there is a bit of a lost opportunity with the Jeopardy game.
MIT Professor Henry Lieberman writes that contests can be detrimental to science:
In the past few years, there’s been a fad for contests, “challenges,” “grand prizes,” etc. in scientific and engineering fields. I have no objection if it’s only good, clean fun between consenting adults. But on the whole, I think this fad has been detrimental to science. Contests encourage competitive attitudes and secrecy between contestants. They focus people on incremental progress in very specialized areas, for one-shot tests. Science needs exactly the opposite–collaboration between researchers, openness, a diversity of approaches and “out of the box” and long-term thinking. It needs the freedom to choose what problem to work on, rather than have it dictated by the arbitrary rules of the contest.
Let’s be clear: winning a particular contest is not, by itself, a scientific achievement. Science is not a contest. Science advances by learning general problem-solving principles. If it happens that scientists introduce new, general principles that enable them to win a particular contest, then a contest can serve as a public demonstration of their prowess. It’s great PR. But sometimes contests can be won by tricks or specialized techniques that don’t cause scientists to learn anything really new. It all depends on how it’s done. Scientists judge by the principles and techniques, not by the contest results. Even after the Jeopardy event, we won’t really know “who won” until all the details of how it was done are published in the scientific literature.
The Jeopardy contest is fun. But it’s important to keep in mind that this is a game. Scientists study games. They conduct experiments about games. Using games as research lab? That’s a practice you will most likely only see on television.
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Startup Strategy Roundtable: Not Coming To The Rescue Of Victory
Nov 20th
During this week’s roundtable I addressed a commonly held critique of the 1M/1M program: that we’re focusing on the basics and stating the obvious. I have seen this criticism at various places where this recap is syndicated on a weekly basis, as well as in certain random forums on the internet.
Well, I have coached early stage entrepreneurs for a couple of years now – diligently, patiently – and have learned a few things. First is that there are, perhaps, a thousand people in the world of entrepreneurship who know what they are doing when it comes to dealing with issues like financing, positioning, market sizing, customer validation, customer acquisition and other seemingly obvious topics that all entrepreneurs need to deal with.
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However, 1M/1M is a development economics project. We’re trying to bring the lessons we have learned in Silicon Valley to a million entrepreneurs. As you may know, 99% of the entrepreneurs who seek financing, get rejected. Please try to understand why. I happen to have a pretty significant understanding of the reasons behind this, and have created a curriculum within the 1M/1M premium lounge to address these commonly repeated mistakes. For a rather small $1,000 annual membership fee, we’re addressing the needs of a large pool of entrepreneurs trying to navigate the entrepreneurship waters, and mostly failing.
Some critiques have said that we’re focusing on amateurs. Well, I was once an amateur. Mark Zuckerberg was once an amateur. So was Steve Jobs. All first-time entrepreneurs, arguably, are amateurs…
Let me remind you again: 1M/1M aims to reduce infant entrepreneur mortality: 600,000 companies go out of business every year in the United States. Globally, this is a much larger number. We’re trying to make a dent on these staggering numbers.
So, before you get on a high horse and start criticizing our work, please try to understand what we do.
It is easy to come to the rescue of victory. The entire startup ecosystem is interested in the 1% of entrepreneurs who are fundable, have already defined strong market opportunities, and are already well on their way. We are trying to reach the 99% that is not up to a certain level, and help them achieve success.
Some critiques have said that we’re focusing on amateurs. Well, I was once an amateur. Mark Zuckerberg was once an amateur. So was Steve Jobs. All first-time entrepreneurs, arguably, are amateurs. And in 1M/1M, we’re trying to short circuit their process of learning and maturing into successful, seasoned entrepreneurs by teaching them things that they need to know, and augmenting their rolodex (or lack thereof) by putting ours to work on their behalf to help recruit customers, channel partners, and investors.
What we have taken on is hard enough. We can do without the armchair slander.
So. On to the roundtable recap.
Rangrut.com
First up today was Yogesh Sharma presenting Rangrut.com, a business that connects employers with learning institutions and on-campus students to fill job openings. He discussed his business model analysis and it was clear that he needs to move to a subscription-based model where the employers pay and the universities and students can come online for free.
He also needs to create a pricing strategy that works by asking employers what they are willing to pay for the access he is offering. Since hiring relationships between branded employers and branded universities already exist, I believe the best opportunities are for Yogesh to connect brand name employers with unbranded institutes, and unbranded employers with branded and unbranded institutes. The crux of the discussion revolved around segmentation and business models.
Yogesh already has 45 employers onboard, but while discussing his customer acquisition strategy it became clear that he needs to figure out some way to close sales by phone or online without personally traveling to close every sale. The first step is to develop some reference customers, something all early-stage startups should do. Telesales simply don’t work without reference customers. But once a set of reference customers are in place, this business definitely needs a telesales channel, not a direct, feet-on-the-street sales force.
Also, it is too soon to raise money, so Yogesh should continue to finance the business through consulting and executing on various customer hiring projects. To interest investors, the pricing model and customer acquisition strategy would need to be scalable. I cautioned Yogesh from believing that he has to raise money. For now, he should stay focused on his customers and gradually growing the business organically.
SalesVu
Next Pascal Nicolas presented SalesVu, a cloud based sales management tool for restaurants interested in tracking the value of their promotions. With a growing variety of online coupons and social media promotions available, Pascal is looking to bridge the gap between the online world and the often dated marketing approaches of physical restaurants. His analytics product links back to online coupons used, for example, to help restaurants see what did or did not work and plan for future promotions.
As for acquiring customers, so far he has used Internet marketing, and they have just started a partnership with a large reseller of restaurant management software, which is great. I believe he needs to find more partners to go to market through. Since they have already connected with OpenTable, I think they are a natural to explore a partnership with since their customer base is already so familiar with using technology to promote themselves. Yelp, ChowHound, and even Zagat come to mind as other channels worth exploring.
Another idea he has not yet tried is to use search engine marketing to make sure that when any restaurant goes online to look for the type of service he provides using popular key words, they find SalesVu. And by regularly adding to their online content, restaurants will also find them organically through SEO.
It is clear to me, after doing these coaching sessions for over two years that entrepreneurs need a lot more training on positioning and go-to-market. As such, I have created video lecture modules with case studies in the 1M/1M premium lounge on these topics with very specific guidance on what analysis to perform and how. The easiest way for me to teach a large number of entrepreneurs some of these basics is to have you spend 30-40 hours on the curriculum I have created, and THEN have you come work with me on refining your strategies and positioning.
I have thought a lot about how to make entrepreneurship education and eco-system scalable and accessible to a vastly larger number of people. The answer to that question, I believe, is the 1M/1M Premium Lounge. Over the upcoming months, the program will become much, much richer. But for the moment, we can get you started and give you a significant jump-start.
Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.
Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.
Photo by tatlin
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