Was just channel surfing a few nights ago (ok, fine I’ll admit I watch reality TV ) and came across Filthy Rich Cattle Drive. Had no idea Terry Semel’s daughter is on the show until now. Did a quick Technorati search and didnt find a peep about it in the tech blogosphere what so ever. Seems like its a definite hand-off topic for whatever reason (or more likely no one cares except for boring old me)

Courtenay Semel seems to be the spoil brat/drama queen of the show. Not sure what that say about Terry Semel (or Mr. Semel as he originally wanted people to call him when he first arrived at Yahoo!) as CEO, but I got an eerie feeling that its somehow related culture clash Om had talked about a few weeks back. (Ya, my free association skills are highly sensitive.) The media and/or LA types are driven much more by style (back with substance, I hope) compared to the Valley. Of course, giving credit where its due, the egomaniacs we got here are just as brash and inconsiderate, but I dont think they necessarily need to wear $700 shoes to prove it. Not sure what’s better or worse . . . just different.

In BitTorrent, seeded, now waits for VC funds Om gives a glowing report on BitTorrent’s (the company) future to dominate the future of content delivery. But as much as I think BitTorrent (the company) is a better investment than Podcasting (Odeo/PodShow), lets not forget the difference between the company and the technology.

A bit of history here on Mp3.com. The founders/VC’s made a ton of money, but the format outlived the usefullness of the site. A directory service is pretty useful but its longevity and ability to win is not certain just because it has the same name as the format. I say BitTorrent (the company) focus on building better commercial software and make the directory a marketing/lead/PR engine.

In Om’s latest post on Skype’s acquisition rumors (more here), he left quite a bomb at the end. . .

So what does that really tell me? Two things. First, Skype is open to the right offer. Secondly, the asking price of $3 billion is tad too over optimistic. There must also be realization that in not so distant future, the wireless and wireline operators are going to clamp down on Skype, and create quality of service issues for the service. More on that later.

well here is how they can do it. . . (not technically but rationally)

Taking a note from the WiFi world, the legality of sharing bandwidth has yet to be determined. Most ISPs except Earthlink and Speakeasy have terms in their customer contracts that expressly prohibits sharing bandwidth with a third party (targeting WiFi Access Points). Lots of ISP’s have already sued companies for “sharing” bandwidth via an open AP or shared WEP/WPA password.

Now, if I remember how Skype works, Skype members are essentially nodes in the Skype peer-2-peer network. As a result, every node acts as a router, directing traffic/packets from another node until it reaches its ultimate destination. Once someone joins the network by downloading the application, they are essentially letting other people’s “voice traffic” hop through their ISP connection on the way to the final IP address. Technically, this could be considered bandwidth sharing.

There are plenty of RBOC’s with huge traction in their ISP/DSL service. If they want to, they can shut down the Skype applet by claiming the users are violating their customer agreement. Not everyone needs to do shut Skype down to effect Skype’s QoS, if just 10% of ISP’s do this, quality of the Skype network will deteriate exponentially.

I’m not sure its the best business practice to piss off your customers (the music industry learned this), but you never know if the RBOC’s will get desperate enough.

Rumors flying everywhere. Outside of China, the rumors are about Yahoo buying Alibaba, But the Chinese press seems to believe that Alibaba is “acquiring” Yahoo! China.

More details from Pacific Epoch

Chinese business to business website Alibaba will transfer a 35 percent stake of the company to Yahoo and in return gain control of Yahoo China’s core businesses, reports Sina quoting an inside source. The deal will not involve cash and Alibaba CEO Jack Ma might be appointed Yahoo China president, said the source. Softbank, one of Alibaba’s investors, is also participating in the negotiations. Yahoo’s China businesses currently include a Chinese Internet portal, the search engine Yisou, online auction website 1pai (a joint venture with Sina (Nasdaq: SINA)) and instant messaging service Yahoo Messenger.

This sounds more plausible given that Zhou Hongyi, Founder of 3721 & ex-President of Yahoo China, left or was forced out of Yahoo! China recently. Yahoo currently believes a local Chinese is best suited to run its business China and is actively seeking an replacement. Furthermore, Jack Ma has notoriously big ego ambitions so this will definitely be something he’ll be interested in. A minority stake by Yahoo! will also not preclude an eventual IPO (although not likely) which will keep the VC’s as well as Jack happy on that front too. Ofcourse, does Yahoo! want to create another Yahoo! Japan situation where its essentially a separate business with its own agendas. Ceding the fastest growing internet market to a minority owned subsidiary is not exactly the smartest thing to do for Yahoo’s global ambitions. Thus, if this moves forward, I’m sure Yahoo will include a buyout clause where it is allowed to buy Alibaba at a certain premium to its expected IPO pricing to take it whole thing off market and back into the fold. (You gotta admire Jack Ma’s negotiation skills to turn a potential acquisition by Yahoo to the current configuration where he gets the best of both worlds - money, position, visibility)

Expect Alibaba to move aggressively into other markets (portal, gaming, IM, etc) creating another huge mess. Remember Alibaba is certainly not afraid of being an new entrant in a market with entrenched players, think Taobao vs. EachNet.

From China Digital Times

In this stifling atmosphere, it was hard to see how the nascent blogosphere could possibly grow and develop. But over the next few months, the concept of blogging received a boost from an unexpected source.

A magazine writer in Guangzhou in southern China, who wrote under the name Mu Zimei, began keeping a sex diary on blogcn.com. “I have a job that keeps me busy, and in my spare time I have a very humanistic hobby – making love,” she wrote. “The partner I take in my hobby is one I choose and always changes. I rely on a large supply pool. I do not need to take any responsibility for them; neither should I give them love. They will not cause me problems. They are like CDs, which will not make a sound unless I play them.”

With explicit details and sometimes even publishing real names, Mu Zimei’s sex diary was a hit. By mid-November 2003, more than 160,000 people had logged on to her site and the number was growing by 6000 a day. While her explicit writing and lifestyle challenged traditional morals, causing heated debate in the Chinese media, Mu Zimei also made bo ke a familiar word for hundreds of millions of people.

As the Mu Zimei debates raged, the number of users on blogcn.com leapt from 20,000 to 160,000. Other blog sites saw similar increases.

Episode II is here from

Global Voice Online

2 Sexy Blogger. In year 2003 Blogchina didn’t have much influence and there are very few people who were bloggers. It was sexy bloggers, who post her almost naked photos and described the details of their sexual life, that made the name “blog” widely known to mass population of netizens. MuZiMei, a pioneer in this field, published her dairies about her sexual activities and gained her fame overnight , which instantly became hot discussion on both online and offline communities. Blogchina made use of the opportunity, copying those diaries on its own websites. It attracted ten of million visitors daily. And this year another similar phenomenon happened when FuRong JieJie(Sister Lotus) triggered off public interest. Just before authorities put a stop to it, Blogchina had been the major power promoting her.

So some Chinese bloggers were unsatisfied with the behaviors made by Blogchina thinking that it used those sexy bloggers for its own propaganda and attracted visits. Ironically Blogchina has initiated an anti-pornography movement before, aiming at the pornographic photo and information on Chinese internet.

Coming on the heels of my Baidu MP3 posts, Yahoo releases their Audio Search engine. Surprised that no one is talking about Baidu (and its IPO) as the impetus for Yahoo’s Audio search release. This is no coincidence people!

Certainly impressed that Yahoo is scanning internationally for potential competitors as well as product ideas. Well Done.

For the last 2 month I’ve been using Baidu’s MP3 search to find ENGLISH music instead of using Kazaa, eMule, etc etc. . . . ofcourse I dont download them cause that would be illegal Yahoo’s new product will make me try it out.

(Note to Baidu, create an English interface for mp3.baidu.com and I’ll guarantee you an additional 100K visits a day . . . although the RIAA now really get pissed)

How come no one is talking about SkyePay? I found it through Skype Journal. Of course it is still a third party proposal without official Skype sponsorship so we’ll just have to stick to our imaginations.

I guess anytime there is a debit/credit relationship there is an opportunity to create a payment platform. Using SkypeOut/In as a method for money tranfer is actually pretty ingenuous now that I think of it. Its certainly not that far fetched since land line phones bills often act as a bill aggregator. In China ,the payment war is largely based on the mobile phone as a platform.

If this is actually built, I think there is an opportunity for Skype or a partner to create a Keen.com like infrastructure for 1-900 advice service with little or no infrastructure investment. OR copying the latest keen.com incarnation, Ingenio, and create a pay per call advertising network for classified services, again with little or no cost.

Also the problem with short code sms services is that the phone companies take over 20-30% of the total billing amount. So its next to impossible to sell anything with a COGS since the 30% take rate will for sure eat away the gross margin (such as pre-paying for movie tickets using a mobile phone) . With this, and a fixed SkypIn/Out cost per minute, all this might be possible using gateway services (like the ones from the company that proposed SkypePay, Connectotel). This is huge as I’ve talked to numerous entrepreneurs who wanted to use sms short codes as a billing method but was stymied because of the take rate.

Couple months ago I wrote that

Actually the future of UI design is going to get a lot better and a lot worse at the same time. One of the good thing about traditional web controls was that because the available interface elements was so constraining, it was in fact keeping the UI’s from getting too bad (and too good). Now that product managers and UI designer have almost unlimited tool box to play with, expect the Bell Curve to flatten: a lot of over designed and badly designed web app. (Think Windows applications before Visual Basic) End users are used to dropdowns, radial buttons etc . . . now they have mryiad of “clickable” controls they’ve never seen before. On average, it will probably get worse before it get really really good.

Well, Alex Bosworth (who is much more of an expert than me) has actual examples. One of the best nuggets is that Ajax drag & drop is pretty cool but as an UI element in a web app, the jury is still out. Here is the post.

Lots of participation in the forum too so the post definitely struck a nerve.

Billsdue has a good series on Baidu’s IPO. The IPO will be a blockbuster no doubt, it is already the sixth most visited internet site in the world.

However, one of the main concerns of the IPO is that about 20% of searches on Baidu is related to pirated music and how RIAA will respond to the threat. Beyond simply allowing searchers to look for a certain file formats, Baidu has tailored the mp3.baidu.com search experience expressly for music pirates lovers. While from a legal angle it is certainly problematic (to the extend its “aiding and abetting” not just “unintended use”), from the product angle, its a perfect case study of what product strategy to pursue for vertical search engines by going far far beyond just returning a list of ranked search results.

Quoting Luise Monier,

But since I have the mike in hand, what I find the most interesting problem in search is to think of it as a dialog rather than a one-shot thing: enter query, get ten links back. The search engine needs to do its part to keep the dialog going. That’s what I said at Web 2.0 last year.

I believe this is especially the case for vertical search engines of which users have higher expectation on recall & precision. Under such higher expectation of “quality & relevance” it is much harder to create algorithms which will predict the intention of the end user. As a result, vertical search engines must put their ego aside regarding asking users for help, certainly hard to do for a generation of information retrieval scientists reared on the Google concept of “black box” = proprietary advantage/coolness, and begin creating an user expressed method for constraining, filtering, and ranking the initial result set. Furthermore, search engines need to give users more relevant data to help users take action on the search results (much more than just a click through), and in Baidu’s case, the download. Even google has learned the new religion. For example, look at how much Froogle’s and eBay’s search experience is becoming a like.

So lets look at Baidu’s search results set. (BTW, check out Jay Chou, he is probably THE Taiwanese/Chinese singer most likely to attempt to cross over to the US.) Beyond the mp3 itself, baidu lets you listen to the song, find the lyric, and download the ringtone. Baidu also has statistics on format, size, and download speed to help users make more intelligent decisions on what to download. And for those into the whole “social search”/Yahoo MyWeb meme, it also has a “Billboard” section of the various top mp3’s ranked by various popularity methods/scores.

Its no accident that MP3’s are 20% of Baidu’s searches. The product is designed in such a way that the crawled results are served up not unlike a “walled gardened” MP3 music download site - with the requisite information richness and user centric design.