Daniel Lyons's Blog, page 10

Smuggling iPhones back into Shenzhen

Good friend Faddah sends a link to this funny video showing a guy getting busted trying to smuggle iPhones strapped to his body. The clip seems to be taken from the following newscast:

New project: A month of Microsoft

The idea is this. A devoted fan of Google and Apple products (me) spends a month using nothing but Microsoft products. Meaning: Windows laptop, Windows phone, Bing, Office, Internet Explorer, Hotmail, Office 365, Xbox. Hilarity ensues. Or maybe not. I have been thinking about this for a while, ever since I tried (and really liked) the Nokia Lumia 800 smartphone running Windows Phone, and since Google started feeling creepy about privacy, and since the Galaxy Nexus came out and I got one and realized that I wasn't as knocked out as I'd expected to be.

Then I saw this blog post by Microsoft PR boss Frank Shaw inviting people to come back and give Microsoft a fresh look, which includes this quote:

If you haven't tried these Microsoft products and services, give 'em a shot. If you've tried them before and moved on, come on back. We've left the light on for you.

So I emailed Frank and told him about my idea. He signed on. Microsoft has sent me an HTC Titan, an Asus Zenbook and a bunch of peripherals and accessories. I'll spend all day Wednesday in Redmond getting briefings and tutorials. It's been six years since I've used Windows on a regular basis and several years since I've touched Microsoft Office applications except when someone sends me a Word or PowerPoint file and I need to open it. I write everything in Google Docs, using a Chrome browser on Apple computers (MacBook Air for travel, iMacs at home and office). I use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Search. I have an iPhone 4S but mostly use Android phones, and lately my daily driver has been a Motorola Droid Razr Maxx, which I like a lot.

I wouldn't say that I hate Microsoft and/or its products, though I did make sport of them for years when I was doing the Fake Steve blog, and often in extremely unkind ways. But the truth is that I did bail out of Microsoft's world after growing increasingly frustrated by the difficulties of running a Windows machine and by the complexities of Office apps. The whole thing just seemed like a huge pain in the ass, fraught with loads of tiny (and not-so-tiny) annoyances.

Anyway. I will blog as often as I can about the journey, and maybe write something up for Newsweek or the Daily Beast at the end. During this time I'll be taking a short ski vacation, and I'll bring the gear along with me.

The experiment hasn't officially started yet. For one thing, I need a SIM card for the Titan (the card from my iPhone 4S doesn't fit) so I'll pick that up Wednesday at Microsoft. But there have been some troubling signs. For one thing, I cannot for the life of me get used to Internet Explorer. Worse, when I was setting up my favorite sites on IE, I'd barely begun when I was hit with a spammy come-on telling me I was the lucky winner of an iPad 2, and leading me to a page where I was invited to hand over my address, phone numbers, email address, and other personal information, and also choose which color iPad 2 I wanted, with choices that included red, pink, orange, blue, green, and others — none of which you'll find in the Apple store. Ahem. Another issue was the Asus Zenbook itself. It's basically trying to look like the MacBook Air, and it is, in fact, nice looking. Things fall off quickly, however, when you actually try to use it. Maybe I got a lemon. I don't know. I'll just say this: The Zenbook is not my cup of tea.

So: a rocky start, but I think things will get better. Lenovo has agreed to send me their beastly 15-inch ThinkPad W520 running Windows 7. Thin and light it's not, but as a desktop replacement I think the W520 will be perfect. I've always liked Lenovo products, especially their keyboards.

For now I'm still on the Mac. (I'm writing this post on my iMac at home.) Tomorrow morning, however, I will get on the plane to Seattle, and I will leave the wonderful world of Apple-Google behind. I'm starting to worry that I might have made a huge mistake, and that I've done something that will cause psychic damage requiring months or even years of therapy to repair.

Or maybe not. Maybe the new world according to Microsoft is one I want to live in. Fingers crossed.

Repeat after me: There is no bubble … there is no bubble …

Well the party is officially on, bitches — just check out the photo above, taken outside Yelp headquarters a few minutes ago. You thought Groupon, Pandora and Zynga were overpriced? You thought Facebook was too cocky when they talked about a $100 billion valuation? Well listen up. Yelp just went public and its shares are selling at 20x the company's 2011 revenues.

Sure, there are some naysayers, like wet blanket Henry Blodget of Business Insider, who thinks this is nuts, or a sign of the apocalypse, or something. Henry, you just don't get it, do you? You're still stuck in the 90s. But the world has changed. The old metrics don't apply anymore. We're not talking about car companies or tire companies or food companies. We're not talking about companies that actually make things. These are social Web sites. This isn't about making a profit. This is about changing the world! Can you even remember what the world was like in the days before Yelp, when you had to find a new restaurant purely by chance, without being able to consult a Web site where young people with no real expertise or context could review an ethnic cuisine that they've just tasted for the first time? And you're down on Yelp because — sniff — you don't like the look of the financials? You're missing the forest for the trees, dude. Seriously.

Henry, the other tech blogs will be telling you this soon enough, but let me go first and just say that you are a stupid, corrupt, moronic moron, a dumb lazy hack who is too lazy to do his homework and sounds like every other member of the mainstream media establishment that you so obviously want to be part of. You think it's nuts that Yelp did only $80 million in revenue last year and they lost money on that and now they're now valued at $1.5 billion? You think that's expensive? Because I think that if anything, that price is way too cheap! But go ahead and make your big predictions. You and all your rich stupid cronies on Wall Street will be crying in your beer when the valuation hits $15 billion by the end of this year. Mark my words, dipshit.

Also: even if the stock is not cheap, we should all be happy for Yelp because Yelp is awesome and I know some people who work there and they are totally hardworking and high-integrity people who are 110% committed to changing the world, and frankly we're all part of the tech community and it's our job to cheer this shit on, and if you can't be happy with Yelp's success than you are a hateful hater who hates tech and you really have no business writing about it, you big old East Coast party pooper. Plus, remember: you're a venture-funded company too, so if Yelp can pave the way for your overpriced exit, all the better, amiright?

Now I am going to put on my party hat and blast some Prince. Then I will go find a snowy parking lot and do some donuts in my car while firing a pistol out my window like Yosemite Sam! Happy Friday, fools. Go Yelp!

Wizard of Oz focus group

For some reason I can't find an embeddable version of this video where idiots in a focus group give their suggestions for how to improve "The Wizard of Oz." But you can watch it here on Gawker. The really funny thing is that these comments aren't so far-fetched. I spent 18 months working on a TV show in Hollywood and got comments like this all the time. Worse yet, these "notes" weren't coming from focus group members. They were coming from network executives. We had to pretend to listen to them. Sometimes we even had to take a stab at accommodating them. I was told that this is par for the course in the TV business. Good times! I look back on the whole experience like a bad dream.

Robert Scoble recruited by Davos money men, and other signs that the end times are upon us

Yesterday I wrote an article about Robert Scoble trying to follow in the footsteps of Michael Arrington and go from blogging to angel investing. Scoble is crying foul and calling this a "drive-by shooting." He's ranting about the horrible old "mainstream media," of which I am a member, and he now refers to me as a "journalist," in quotes, which I'm guessing is meant to be derogatory. He's also rushing around, blasting out sound and fury everywhere, posting stuff on his blog, on other blogs, on Google+. He's an impressive one-man band, and it's a clever strategy: you fill the air with smoke and noise and loads of anti-aircraft flak, and maybe you can distract people, or make this into a story about me rather than a story about him.

First off, this is not some fight between me and Scoble. I like Scoble, and if he can find a way to get rich off his blog, good for him. The great opportunity of blogging has always been that, for the lucky few, a big payday awaits. Furthermore, while Scoble may be one of the world's most relentless and shameless self-promoters, he is also, by all accounts, a genuinely nice guy.

Nor is this some argument between mainstream journalists and independent bloggers, at least not on my part. I've been on both sides, and I don't think one is better than the other.

The story that I find interesting and worth reporting is that some popular tech bloggers are finding new ways to make money, and these ways usually involve becoming entwined with the same venture capitalists whose portfolio companies they write about, which raises some interesting issues.

Now on to the matter of hand, which is what, if anything, Scoble has been up to.

Last week I was talking to a top partner at a venture capital firm. We were talking about other things, but in the course of the conversation this partner mentioned that last year his firm got a call from a guy at another VC firm asking if they'd like to invest in a Scoble project.

My guy says: "I didn't talk to Scoble directly, but rather someone who said they talked to Scoble and they were seriously considering investing, and wanted to know if we were too. We weren't."

My source is a credible guy, well-known and with a good reputation. I don't think he would just make this stuff up.

I also spoke to a principal at his firm who was on the same call. The principal backs up the account and says it wasn't clear whether Scoble was trying to raise money for an angel fund, like Arrington did with CrunchFund, or raise money for a blog, as Sarah Lacy did with PandoDaily, or some hybrid of the two.

"But the idea was he was going to raise some money and spin out of Rackspace. He'd carry the Scoble brand forward out of Rackspace," the principal says. "We backed away because it didn't feel right. This idea of venture capitalists putting money into journalists, it just feels like there's a line being crossed."

So let's assume this VC firm really did get a call asking if they wanted to invest in a Scoble project. Is it possible (or likely) that someone was going around soliciting money on Scoble's behalf without Scoble's knowledge or consent?

This, apparently, is what Scoble would have us believe.

But the principal who received the pitch says, "There was way too much detail for Scoble not to know about it. There were terms. I don't see how he could have not known. My guess is he either put it on hold after the shit hit the fan on Arrington's CrunchFund project, or he couldn't raise the money, or maybe he just changed his mind."

But wait, there's more.

In addition to whatever happened last year, just last month Scoble participated in talks at Davos, at the World Economic Forum, with people who are trying to organize a global angel group.

The group is led by Rich Stromback, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur from Michigan. The working name is Piano Bar Partners. (There's a famous piano bar at Davos where people schmooze.)

I talked to Rich Stromback yesterday and again today. He confirmed that Scoble expressed interest in joining the group, and says he'd love to have Scoble on board.

"There is kind of a trend where Michael Arrington and other people who cover the industry and are knowledgeable about the space, it's almost a natural progression that they would go into angel investing," Stromback says. "I would imagine that ever since Arrington did CrunchFund a lot of tech bloggers in the space have been looking at doing the same thing."

Stromback says tech bloggers like Scoble see a lot of of early-stage companies and have a grasp of the industry. He says Scoble could add value to the Piano Bar angel group because he has a wide network of contacts, sees a lot of early stage companies — "deal flow," it's called — and some of the big name investors who are interested in joining Piano Bar would trust Scoble to help them evaluate new tech companies. "There's a lot of knowledge there" he said, meaning in Scoble's head.

Stromback says Piano Bar Partners is still in the very early stages and "there's nothing formal at this point." But he expects it will come together, and says some big names are involved.

After talking to Stromback, I got a call from someone who saw Scoble meeting with Stromback and a bunch of VCs at Davos. They were huddled together in a meeting room, engaged in what looked like a serious conversation. "Scoble was taking notes, and he was not doing so as a reporter," my source says, adding that later he talked to some of the people in the room and learned about the plans for Piano Bar Partners. He specifically asked about Scoble, and was told that Scoble had been included as a potential member.

This apparently is what Scoble was referring to when I asked him (via email) about angel investing and he replied this way: "Hah. There is some bar talk about this but nothing official yet. I am interested but not anywhere close and certainly I wouldn't be managing it."

When I asked Scoble who would manage the fund, he responded, "I have no idea. It never got to that point. I doubt I would be more than a pretty face on any such fund."

Call me crazy, but I read those email messages to mean that Scoble had talked to people about doing this, is interested in doing this, and while there's "nothing official yet," he has already envisioned a role for himself as a "pretty face" on a fund.

Scoble, however, characterizes his comments as a denial. Which is weird, because it seems to me that a denial would be something like, "No, I never met with anyone to talk about joining an angel group," or "Yes, I got an offer to join an angel group, but I turned it down."

But Scoble didn't say that. Nor did he say, at Davos, what a journalist from the New York Times or any other publication would have to say when offered a chance to get involved with an investment group while continuing to write about tech companies: "Thanks, I'm flattered, but I can't do that."

And that's fine. Scoble is an independent blogger and he's not bound by the rules that apply to newspaper reporters. As I wrote in my post yesterday, Godspeed to you, Robert Scoble. You've built an audience with your blog, you've built a wide network among Valley entrepreneurs, so why not go make money with that?

But at the same time, why not cop to it? Why pretend that last summer people weren't getting hit up for money for a Scoble project that apparently sputtered out? Why downplay the fact that last month you were hooking up at Davos with guys who are trying to start an angel group?

Why go blustering and huffing and puffing and making loads of noise and hurling accusations and playing the victim? Why cry foul and paint me as a liar or a drive-by shooter for reporting what I've heard — which turns out, in fact, to be true?

People did get those phone calls last summer. You did sit in those meetings at Davos.

Maybe you haven't succeeded at cashing in, but can't say you haven't tried.

So calm down, Robert Scoble. Take a deep breath.

Whatever you end up doing, whether it's angel investing, or raising venture money to start a blog, or staying at Rackspace, or just erecting huge billboards with pictures of yourself all over Silicon Valley and then driving around looking at them, with Rocky Barbanica videotaping — whatever it is, I'm sure you'll be great at it, and you'll deserve every bit of your success. I wish you the best. Seriously.

Guess who else wants to "monetize his influence" and become a blogger slash angel investor?

Yeah. Good grief. Fucking Scoble. I just posted an article about it here on the Daily Beast.

LA Times weighs in on the Silicon Cesspool

Prompted in part by the back-and-forth that started with the "Hit men" article on this blog last week, Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times asks, "Are Silicon Valley tech bloggers truly objective?" You can maybe guess the answer but I don't want to spoil it for you. Hiltzik talked to Michael Arrington and Sarah Lacy and got their perspective, which is that this is the new normal, at least in Silicon Valley.

Hiltzik's money quote comes in the last paragraph:

It would be unfair to suggest that tech bloggers aren't earnest about trying to produce good reporting on Silicon Valley. They haven't exactly sold their souls by taking money from the people they cover. But what they have sold was worth a lot more than the money they got for it.

It's a great article but it makes one mistake, which is to think that these guys are journalists, and that they care about things that journalists care about. They're not, and they don't.

"The virus in your pocket"

That's the headline my latest article for the Daily Beast about the alarming rise in mobile malware, particularly on the Android platform. This is based on a new study by Juniper Networks, which sells anti-malware software. You can find the article here.

Report: Samsung working on 60-inch Galaxy Note phone

 

You wheel it around on a cart, and when you get home you can use it as a TV. Not really. But they are supposedly working on a 10.1-inch Galaxy Note phone. Which is almost as nuts, when you think about it.

Apple: We did nothing wrong, and we promise it won't happen again

In the wake of the Path privacy fiasco, and after receiving a letter from meddlesome Congress dorks, an Apple spokesman tells John Paczhczhzkowski of AllThingsD that any iOS apps that are uploading user address book information are in violation of Apple guidelines and that from now on any app that wants to use your contact info will have to ask for explicit permission. Perfect response! Even better than the one from Path.