The Week in Geek – Nov. 16, 2007

I, For One, Welcome Our Android Overlords
Check out the YouTube video linked in this TechCrunch post. It shows Google’s new Android software – a mobile toolkit Sprint & T-Mobile will embrace, and which we should see in real products next year. The demo shows a touch-screen device rapidly switching from map to street-level views. Also demoed – a quick frag in a handheld multi-player version of Quake. Google has also announced the Android Developer Challenge. It’ll pony up $10 million in prizes (ranging from $25K to $275K) for the Top 50 apps submitted between Jan. 2 and March 3, 2008. Sounds like a nice first-quarter project for enterprising undergrads! A particular point of pride for Boston – a big chunk of Android came from Cambridge. Let’s hope “Google East” helps spur more consumer tech in New England. While Microsoft and RIM (Blackberry) already have established mobile development toolkits and Apple promises an iPhone SDK in February, Google’s effort may be the most open. Whoever wins the lion’s share of developers may be the Windows of mobile (umm… even though there’s already a product that sorta has that name).

Also noteworthy: Google has launched OpenSocial, a set of Social Networking APIs for creating apps that integrate any service choosing to participate. Think of it as a sort of open platform competing with the efforts Facebook announced at F8. Google’s partners include MySpace, Beebo, SixApart, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Oracle, and the firm’s own Orkut platform (“it’s huge in Brazil and Iran”).

Al Gore’s Next Act: Planet Saving VC
Venture Capitalists know the “best deals” are nabbed by VCs with track record, advice, and contacts. As the firm that helped fund Google, Amazon, Sun, and Genetech, among others, Kleiner Perkins has long been seen as the most elite of elites – a firm with a platinum Midas touch. As TechTrekkers learned last spring, the Sand Hill Road firm runs remarkably lean, operating with just 22 partners. Now that number includes Al Gore, who joins Kleiner as an active, hands-on partner (albeit attending many weekly partner meetings via HD video conference from his Nashville eco-mansion). KPBC hopes there’s a lot of green in green. Kleiner’s John Doerr (the “Dean of Sand Hill Road”) estimates more than a third of the firm’s recent $600 million fund will be invested in technologies that lower carbon dioxide emissions. The firm’s other funds have already invested some $270 million into 26 firms pioneering everything from non-corn ethanol to electric cars. In five years, no green investment has reached exit, but such radical, basic-research-based tech make take more time to ripen than software, Net businesses, and products rolled from commodity hardware. From Bangalore’s blackouts to Shanghai’s smog to the Northeast’s acid rain-spoiled lakes, the opportunity is tragically vast, global, and perhaps our generation’s most pressing challenge.

How Alibaba found riches
Alibaba is China’s eBay beater – having won back a majority share of China’s e-commerce from eBay’s EachNet. Beating an auction leader is something that almost never happens, so Alibaba’s rise is a major exception. The firm has made Chinese e-commerce real, and sports success stories like entrepreneur Chen Qiutian who grew his business from $671,800 to $6.7 million in a year, almost entirely through Alibaba sales. Still, with a stock that started trading at trading at 320 times projected 2007 earnings, a bet on Alibaba is a speculative gaze into the crystal ball. The LA Times points out that “Alibaba is exhibiting the kind of growth trajectory – a projected 82% annually from 2004 through this year – that analysts last saw with Google“. Google and China? Recipe for an IPO pop! It was up over 300% the first day of trading. Them’s 1999 numbers (although we saw that with Baidu last year, too). Too bad these guys hadn’t called W.R. Hambrecht. Alibaba is headed by Jack Ma, the Hangzhou entrepreneur who famously saw opportunity during a 1995 trip to the US where he typed “China” and “Beer” into a search engine and got no results. Ma now looks to have the English Alibaba act as a hub for international trade with China, the Chinese site as the domestic e-commerce leader, and AliPay as China’s PayPal. By year-end ’06, AliPay had 33 million users and a daily transaction volume of $12.8 million. Alibaba also runs Yahoo China, after Terry Semel sold control of the Yahoo brand for a 40% stake in the joint venture.

TechCrunch did a great related piece on “The China Bubble“. Some key points: In 2003, the combined market capitalization of China’s publicly traded Internet companies was $5 billion. Today, it is $50 billion. Also, when one looks at the upper-esceleon of most valuable companies by market cap, 41% are Chinese, while 38% are from the U.S. In 1999 when U.S. companies represented 77%.

Intel Unveils New Chip Technology
Goodbye silicon, hello hafnium. That’s the material (sometimes referred to as a “Hi-k” formula) used inside Intel’s latest chips. The new brains, code-named “Penryn“, also use new .45nm technology (down from the previous .65nm). Shorter paths on a chip are like shorter roads between two points – travel is faster & uses less energy. Look to the latter half of ’08 for Intel factories in Arizona, New Mexico and Israel to be churning out Penryn chips at full capacity. Gordon Moore himself claims that the tech responsible for the chip represents “the biggest transistor advancement in 40 years“.

I want my iTV
It’s been around the corner for over a decade, but Interactive TV is still barely out of the gate. The BusinessWeek cover story sheds light on the delays. Says Cisco’s Kip Compton, “You’ve got device manufacturers, content providers, service providers, networks, software makers, security providers all trying to sort out how big their piece of the pie should be”. The pie slides being protected are big – $24 billion in annual DVD sales, $185 billion in TV advertising – and all of them could be displaced by something new. Players fear losing pricing control (think the music industry’s beef with Apple’s fixed fees) or having revenue vanish altogether (as Craigslist has gutted hundreds of millions in classified ad sales in major cities).

Facebook’s Strategy: More Than Ads
Say you buy something at online at Amazon. In the not-too-distant future, Facebook hopes that, the retailer will ask if it can ‘publish’ your purchase in your social network profile. This way, with a gander at their Facebook feed, your buddies will tell if you bought, say, a Bugzooka, and can ask your thoughts (the kids love it). Most consumers will trust the opinion of a respected colleague over a late-night infomercial or magazine ad. It’s about world-of-mouth marketing and Facebook wants to be the lubricant that automates the process. And the firm will, of course, collect a small fee for acting as the middleman. Having retailers share purchase data to better profile users isn’t new – catalog retailers use the AbacusDirect database (EagleFact: now owned by Epsilon, headed by BC alum Mike Iaccarino). But the Facebook system would encourage user-to-user endorsements. On a related note, Slate declared “E-Mail is Dead“. Not entirely true, but my students definitely use Facebook and text messages as their primary ways to stay in touch.

Also (marginally related) – just how old is that younger MySpace guy? For the past few years I’ve been putting this guy in the heroic Internet “under 30” Pantheon. Looks like we were fleeced.

Wal-Mart’s $200 Linux Computer Sells Out
The nation’s biggest retailer firm moved 10,000 Everex PCs in a week. The so-called ‘green’ PC (due to low power consumption) is bundled with Ubuntu Linux, Google Apps, and Open Office. Everex is even offering Wal-Mart buyers free tech support on their new computers. No real threat to Microsoft, but Wal-Mart shipping penguin boxes is a milestone worth noting.

YouTube U.
TechTrek’s favorite author, former super-star hedgie Andy Kessler, takes an irreverent look at profs on YouTube. I promise not to take Andy’s advice to ‘show more skin’, but jokes & one-liners are always welcome! I’m not on YouTube (does anyone really want to see a sweaty, bald guy run around the classroom?), but my course podcasts are online.

Japanese Urban Camouflage
Here’s one for the MBA’s I’ll be taking to Tokyo in May: Never mind that Tokyo has the crime rate that wouldn’t register on a US tourist’s frightometer, here are some snappy duds that change, transformer-style, into disguises to fool would-be Japanese evildoers. Be sure to catch the slide show to see the skirt that transforms into a full-size coke machine disguise, and the kids backpack that makes him look like a Japanese fire-hydrant. Safety first, plus it’d double as a Halloween costume!

The Daily Show on BC’s Art Museum
Also for fun – John Stewart and John Hodgeman (the PC) examine the disputed Pollacks currently on display at BC’s McMullen Museum.