Goofy: Ongo
New print-media funded news aggregation site:
Subscribers who pay that basic fee get access to the top 20 stories in The New York Times* and all the content from USA Today^ and the Washington Post, plus one other paper of their choosing. Those who want still more sources can add them for additional fees.
* marks where I stopped taking this effort seriously.
^ is where I laughed.
Hilarious: H.P.’s Board
In my book, this is corruption. Bunch of insiders with spotty track records at best hire one another at exorbitant rates to crush value:
Indeed, on the surface, it looks like H-P (HPQ 47.08, -0.46, -0.97%) has become a haven for failed executives. The biggest dismay was adding Meg Whitman, former chief of eBay Inc. (EBAY 30.92, +0.01, +0.03%), to a board that will number 13 after H-P’s annual meeting in March. More recently, Whitman achieved infamy for spending more than $160 million on a losing run for California governor. Her last years at eBay were marred in part by the $2.6 billion acquisition in 2005 of Internet phone service Skype, a deal that didn’t include its software code and never fit well within eBay.
Another gem on the remade board is Patricia Russo. Like H-P’s former CEO Carly Fiorina, Russo was once a rising star at Lucent Technologies, but was forced out as CEO of Alcatel-Lucent SA (ALU 3.31, +0.05, +1.53%) in 2008, after the difficult merger failed to achieve results, cultures clashed and losses widened.
Another new board member, Gary Reiner, had been at General Electric Co.(GE 19.99, +0.01, +0.05%) since 1996, but quit in March 2010 as chief information officer to “pursue other opportunities.” According to his bio on the H-P web site, Feiner has been a special adviser to General Atlantic, a private-equity firm, since last September.
Obvious but ignored:
You are putting four people onto this board who have failed elsewhere,” said Stephen Diamond, an associate professor of securities law and corporate governance at Santa Clara University’s law school.
“You hope that putting them together in the same room is going to help lead this iconic tech company into the future. One has to be very skeptical,” Diamond said.
Bizarre validation by the media, in this case by Tom Foremski of ZD Net, who apparently doesn’t know any other motivated tech executives:
These are all people who want to put their past behind them so I would say it is a highly motivated group. A good sign for HP.
Facebook Doesn’t Get Social Buying
Well, to be fair, it does from a producer’s point of view. Not a consumer though.
Liu said the new feature would allow users to share purchases in their Facebook update stream with friends on the social network. But sharing wasn’t the only interesting aspect of Buy With Friends — the feature will also let one user “unlock” a deal and then share that same deal or discount with friends who can take advantage of the fact that it’s already been unlocked.
Would be much more interesting would be using collective buying to empower the consumer rather than clutter up their news feed. But… y’know, providing value to its free workerbees is antithetical to Facebook’s culture.
Goofy: Whitehouse Quora
Anil is backwards on this effort to create a question + answer site for the White House. The question isn’t how to collect the best/most qualified talent to contribute. It’s how to turn the best/most useful ideas into action.
All sorts of useful governance ideas out in the wild. Recreating that isn’t going to get the breadth or depth of… y’know, the internet. Why?
If you were interested in breaking into the niche-conference-attending DC group, you would have already done it and will probably participate in this new site. If you’re a guy with an idea, you’re not going to sign up/undergo a qualification process to contribute.
The real problem isn’t talent. It’s that none of those ideas are being executed. I’m not sold that a walled garden is going to do anything about it, more than the same ol’ people talking about the same ol’ stuff. So you need to source from the wild. And/or have a totally open contribution-based submission process. (Think Reddit.)
So the emphasis must be on getting a commitment (or hard coding into the system) that White House resources will be committed to whatever it is the community turns up. Emphasize that what the ecosystem produces will be valuable/used and the talent and ideas will bring themselves.
On Saving Indie Bookstores
Lisa Lutz wants to save the LA Mystery Bookstore. That’s cool. If they want to do this right though, they’ll have to rethink the value proposition.
These guys get put in the worst position. The big authors (who aren’t corporate identities) like to support them, but have to go to the big publishing houses to get compensate for their work, which is to the detriment of the indie stores they like. Small-time authors can’t generate the interest required to fund and run a storefront.
An independent bookstore can’t just be a smaller Borders/Barnes and Nobles. It’s not news that model can’t compete with Amazon’s tax-free long tail. So the value has to be provided in another way.
- Services. This varies from consumer: – speaking gigs, book groups etc – to producer: peer to peer editing, and even to publishing (via any number of the JIT printing services). The ratio of consumer to producer depends on how much of an author cooperative this is vs how much of a pet project to keep an artifact around.
- Niche. Curation is the key service here. Access to authors that haven’t made it yet, but have positive reputation among their peers. A particular genre (like mystery novels a la this particular instance). Books that don’t suck. Books that aren’t corporate but can compete. Accompanying film, music, education efforts.
In the simplest of terms, that’s what it’s going to take. A parallel publishing process that can outpace the system we have today. Anything else is just delaying the inevitable.
Sidenote: There’s a venture to be had that packages this value (these niche specific services in a box, from consumer group creation to editing, typesetting, etc) and takes it from indie store to indie store, connecting them when necessary. That’s going to be the publisher of tomorrow.