The Inkjet Refill Racket

Came across an old but rather informative article at Popular Science on inkjet refills. To summarize it, at up to $8,000 per gallon, inkjet ink is by far among the most expensive liquid in the consumer market today - far far more expensive than gasoline even with the huge increase of recent days.

Basically, inkjet printers are the new razors of today. Printer manufacturers practically give away the printers - heck, they are being bundled for free with computers. Then they gouge you every time the ink runs out. Since ink cartridges are not universally compatible, you are pretty much stuck shelling out the equivalent of $3,000 and $5,000 per gallon of ink whenever you buy your printer's manufacturer's cartridges. (That's how HP's imaging and printing group accounted for 40% of HP's USD2.63 billion profits from the last quarter alone.)

It is not surprising therefore the printer manufacturers has taken the offense against low-cost generic refill cartridges via lawsuits and installing chips on both their printers and cartridges that prevent the use of other brands. Similarly, the manufacturers have also made it much more difficult for consumers or third party service providers to refill their cartridges using generic ink.

The article does put things in sobering perspective, doesn't it?

Source article here.

Why iPhone Won’t Redefine SMS Texting

From iPhonetics -
For all its innovations, Apple’s iPhone has slim chances of making an impact on the way mobile phone users around the world do SMS texting. In two words: QWERTY keyboard. Here’s why:

First of all, even if the Apple goes on to sell 10 million iPhones in the first year as Steve Jobs has predicted, that is just roughly 1% of the nearly 1 billion phones sold annually. You simply can’t redefine a market with such a miniscule share.

Secondly, most of the new market gains are entry level phones sold in third world countries. This implies that most buyers are first time users who in most likelihood have never used a computer before, or if ever, sparingly. Thus, for a lot of them, the mobile phone keypad has become their first exposure to typing. For the younger generation, it is their de facto standard. In fact, a lot has mastered the art of touch-typing on phone keypads. They can enter SMS messages one-handed rapidly into the phone without ever looking at the keypad or the LCD. Somehow I simply can’t imagine them doing the same with the iPhone’s on-screen QWERTY keyboard. The Apple design lends itself to two thumb typing, which is definitely far from the current single thumb texting experience.

Yes, Apple will most likely go on and sell millions of the iPhone as it has previously succeeded with the iPod. But until it adds a physical mobile phone keypad, it most likely will remain a niche play. And when it does add a keypad, it will no longer be redefining the SMS experience but merely improving it.

Digital Divide via Social Networks

Interesting piece from Danah on how the American social classes are reflected in the respective user bases of Myspace and Facebook.

Curiously, I personally feel Faceboook, with all the recent updates and changes, is fast approaching the chaotic look of Myspace. Just my 2 cents.

How a six-month-old startup got bought by Google

Interesting how-to item from Business 2.0 -

The article discusses the successful efforts of Wayne Crosby and Robby Walker, who co-founded Zenter to develop an online version of Powerpoint. It was bought by Google even while still in private beta. Helpful tips to other entrepreneurs -

• Don't focus on getting acquired. That's like being a single woman who desperately wants to get married. Of course you want it to happen, but 99% of the time if you purposely try to get acquired (or married), it won't. The way to get acquired really fast is to not focus on it. If people get the impression that you want to get bought, you won't.

• Instead, focus on the user. This is possibly the single most important thing for entrepreneurs to remember. "Every startup that dies fails to do this. A lot of startups focus on their competitors or lawsuits, but what really kills startups is if users think it's boring. It's a much quieter and dangerous reason, but if users don't care about your product, that will just kill a company."

• Ignoring limitations lets you tackle problems from a different angle. Zenter looked at how they could build a slideshow application that really takes advantage of the Internet, like adding community slideshows, delivering presentations online in real-time and dragging and dropping content from the web into a presentation. "Every system and every platform has limitations. Some people look at a problem and say, You can't do that because a browser won't let you and proceed to work around those limitations What we (Zenter) did was look at what we wanted to happen and then found a way around the limitations."

• Don't be afraid to tackle the giants. Big companies like eBay and Microsoft may have more manpower and financial resources, but they also have disadvantages. Often times, they're not as driven. They're not willing to make the sacrifice, like two guys sleeping on air mattresses, to make their product really good. Case in point. Google bought YouTube, which was far superior to Google Video. eBay bought PayPal because clearly, no one was liking eBay's Billpoint. Big companies also have restrictions that startups don't have to worry about. E.g. Microsoft has to think about web-based applications that don't threaten Windows. A company like Zenter doesn't care about hurting Windows. All they want to do is make the best application.

• Pay attention to the details. When your product is 80% done, that means you have another 80% to go. To get something pretty close is easy, but you need to concentration on the little things. That's what will set you apart from the competition. You can have the best algorithm in the world and the fastest process, but at the end if the day, if the user struggles to find out how to click a box or delete something, then you don't succeed.

The question now that begs to be answered: How much?

American Consumers Mainly want WiMAX for On-the-Go E-mail

From Cellular-News -

A Motorola consumer survey reveals that the top four anticipated Internet uses for WiMAX mobile will be email, live news, mobile TV, and music downloading:

● 49% would likely use WiMAX to read or respond to e-mail;
● 31% would read or view "live," real-time online media;
● 28% would enjoy mobile entertainment;
● 28% said they would use WiMAX to download/listen to music.

In the survey, WiMAX was defined as a new, long-range wireless broadband technology that provides secure, high-speed Internet access through a laptop or other device, which can be used in a "fixed" or stationary setting like a home or office.

More importantly, WiMAX was defined as being able to be used while walking or traveling in a car, cab, bus or train, and the Internet connectivity it provides will have the connection speeds of cable or DSL, but with the mobility and roaming of today's cellular networks.

The survey also confirmed what most wireless service providers are counting on: 57% of Internet users think it's important that wireless broadband service be available wherever they may be.

On another level, consumers were asked a variety of questions about how they would most often use wireless broadband. According to the survey, the following scenarios rank among the most popular personal consumer uses of mobile WiMAX:

● 20% of the consumers said they would use Internet-delivered navigation services to get a real-time video view of traffic at major intersections while driving to or from their homes.
● 17% would rely on Internet mobile TV to help entertain restless children in the car while waiting for an oil change or other minor repair.
● 11% would use a mobile broadband Internet connection to check restaurant wait times, menus and daily specials online while coordinating dinner plans with busy friends.
● Internet users also want mobility at work. Of those surveyed:
● 45% would find it beneficial to use WiMAX for reading and responding to e-mail;
● 43% for accessing the Internet for work;
● 33% for accessing their company Intranet to better manage customers, resources and field service;
● 30% for sending data, including pictures or video, from remote sites back to the office.

The survey of 601 USA Internet-using households was conducted by CENTRIS through a national telephone omnibus survey between May 9-15, 2007. The margin of error for the survey is +4%.

North Korea Executes People Caught with Mobile Phones

Just some sobering food for thought -

Cellular-News reports that the North Korean government is executing people caught with mobile phones. In this day and age when so many of take the benefits of mobile communications for granted, it is sobering indeed to learn that elsewhere people are not as fortunate as we are.

According to the report the South Korea-based Korea Institute for National Unification said in a white paper that executions of those who "circulate South Korean leaflets and sell videos and use cell phones are on the rise" without citing numbers.

There are two North Koran mobile phone network but these apparently have been shut down or at least forbidden to the general public following a 2004 train explosion, which some claim was an attempt on the life of Kim Jong-Il.

While no mobile network is presently available to the general public, many phones are smuggled across the Chinese border, where Chinese networks are reported to have unusually strong signal strengths which reaches deep inside North Korean territory.

The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip

Interesting read by Randall Stross from The New York Times re Google and the economics of the Internet search business. Salient points follow -

The most valuable secret formula in American business used to be Coca-Cola’s. Today, it’s Google’s master algorithm. In the search business, however, there’s no rival to play the role of Pepsi. Yahoo is the closest but still a distant No. 2, and Google earns more profits in a single quarter than Yahoo does in a year. Microsoft, an even more distant No. 3 , can’t keep up, despite having USD28B in cash iat the end of March.

The fumbling of Google’s largest challengers, however, has not dampened the enthusiasm of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists for entering the search game. The combination of low start-up costs and potentially huge profit makes it seem a reasonable bet.

Developing a search algorithm can be accomplished by very small teams. It was a team of two — Larry Page and Sergey Brin — who developed a new and improved search algorithm. They beat out Alta Vista, whose search engine was developed by seven people at DEC.

Profit margins in the search business are mind-boggling. Google’s net profit margin last year was 29%. Amazon’s was a mere 1.8%. Even gathering the crumbs left behind by Google could generate a lofty market capitalization. In his blog, Don Dodge, a Microsoft manager argues: “Why 1% of Search Market Share Is Worth Over USD1 Billion.” He reasoned that 1% of the 7.3 billion searches performed in the US alone in March, multiplied by 12 cents in advertising revenue per search, would yield annualized revenue of USD105M. Assuming a market cap that is 10 times revenue, his arithmetic leads to a billion-dollar company.

Another attraction: Any company that offers a superior search service would be able to poach the customers easily. No long-term contracts binds Google users. In addition, even though each search engine conducts a search in its own way, there is no daunting learning curve to prevent users from shifting. Search users merely type in the word or a phrase — no matter which service they are using.

Engines like Hakia, Accoona and Powerset are trying to grab market share by writing a more sophisticated algorithm. A growing number of entrepreneurs are placing their bets, however, on a hybrid system that puts humans back into the search equation. They are grouped under a newly coined rubric, “social search,” and it is becoming a crowded field.

Newcomers like Squidoo, Sproose and NosyJoe offer search results based on submissions or votes by users. Bessed also relies on users to suggest the best Web pages for a topic, but then has editors refine them. ChaCha gives customers the opportunity to have an online chat with a human being who can provide search assistance.

Sometimes a small variation on an existing idea is enough to make it stand out. In Oct 06, when Bessed began its search service with the manually edited results pages, it had only two editors and covered just a few hundred search terms suggested randomly by users.

Last month Mahalo inaugurated a search service with manually edited results. It started with several advantages: VC backing, 30 editors, systematic focus on the most commonly requested search terms, and the added idea of supplying Google’s search results for any search not covered by its own best-of-the-best lists.

Mahalo now has pre-prepared pages for 5K terms related to entertainment, travel, health, technology and other subject areas. It plans to expand its coverage to 10K terms by year-end, and eventually to provide results for one-third of the most common search terms.

The company is financed by Sequoia Capital, an early backer of both Yahoo and Google. Sequoia, like other Silicon Valley venture capital firms, offers experienced entrepreneurs an office and salary to figure out an idea for a new start-up.

It was while he was an entrepreneur in residence that Jason Calacanis,36, thought of Mahalo. He previously published The Silicon Alley Reporter in the mid-90s and went on to be a co-founder of Weblogs, which was sold to AOL in 2005 for about USD25M. He took up residence at Sequoia in Dec 06, founded Mahalo and gathered two rounds of financing, including backing from the News Corporation. He claims to have enough financing to provide five years of experimentation and refinements.

A hand-built Mahalo search-results page has one conspicuous advantage over Google’s: grouping into subthemes, which make a page of links much easier to scan and to find items of particular interest. Mahalo’s page on Paris Hilton, the site’s top search subject last week, lists more than 80 sites, but arranges the recommended links into clusters including news, photos, gossip, satire and humor. The use of subject categories also eliminates the need to provide, as Google does, two-line text excerpts from the listed sites to provide clues about the site’s contents. Thus, they are easier to skim than the 12 sites that fill the entire first page of Google’s search results.

More importantly, all of the links listed in Mahalo send the user to Web pages that contain genuine content, not sales pitches in disguise. By using its own editors as the final arbiters of what goes in, Mahalo cuts off access in its listings to Web sites that confuse a search engine’s algorithm with advertorials that commingle ads with noncommercial information. To those in the trade, outsmarting the algorithm is called “search engine optimization.” For the rest of us, it produces Web pages littered with spam.

Last week, Mr. Calacanis tried to illustrate how spam has infested some top results on Google. After running searches for “low-carb diets,” “Lasik” and “lingerie” at Google and at Mahalo, he compared the results. The exercise succeeded in exposing a few examples of Web sites ranked highly in Google’s results that contained advertorials or content apparently scraped from higher-quality sites.

Google contends that its search engine relies on humans and machines. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, said users who place links on their own Web pages pointing to other sites provide the raw information about valued sites that is incorporated into Google’s PageRank algorithm. But determining the best way to utilize that information requires continuing work by human engineers.

Thus at Google the machine has the final say. Once the query is fed into the “engine,” the results are presented without manual adjustment. At Mahalo and other “human powered” sites, the machine performs a first cut at the search in advance of a user’s request, and the results are then winnowed and shaped by human editors, then stored, a process that Mr. Calacanis terms “editorialized search.”

HUMAN-POWERED search may be able to cover a wide swath of queries if it can draw on the enthusiasm of contributors who have made Wikipedia a phenomenon of huge scale. Mahalo just began a “Mahalo Greenhouse” service that enlists users who are passionate about a particular subject to write a page of search results for USD10 to USD15. Submissions must pass the scrutiny of the site’s full-time editors before posting.

Even Google is interested in exploring “human powered” search. It has combed through its own Web pages to remove all references to “automatic ranking” to prepare for the possibility of relying on user feedback to improve search results or other approaches that are more directly “human powered” than the algorithm.

5 ways iPhone will change the wireless biz

It appears Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote speech in which he revealed his game plan to irreversibly change the wireless world impressed both Om Malik and his co-author Tom T. Ahonen.

For his part, Ahonen believes the mobile telecoms world will now count its time in two Eras - the Era BI: time Before the iPhone, and the ERA AI: time After the iPhone. He also believes that even media business should be very very worried about iPhone.

While no one knows for sure how many million units of the iPhone Apple will sell – 5 or 10M in the first year, an insignificant number when compared to over 950M phones shipped worldwide every year, it will challenge some of the conventional notions of the wireless business, take the hidebound industry by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shake. Nokia will join Microsoft and Dell in experiencing Apple envy.

Om Malik is predicting the following for the iPhone:

A true web applications platform for the mobile

“We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of the iPhone so developers can write great apps for it, but keep the iPhone secure,” he said. “… And we’ve come up with a very innovative new way to create applications for mobile devices… it’s all based on the fact that we have the full Safari engine in the iPhone. And so you can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone, and these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services.” (Steve Jobs keynote at WWDC via Engadget.)

Charles Ying thinks that Apple just reinvented the mobile applications platform. “This isn’t mobile Flash, mobile Java, or even the mobile Web. It’s the real Web, the real deal,” he writes. (True web should also mean 3G and not pokey EDGE connections that the device currently offers, one major Achilles heel of this device.) The ease, with which developers can develop and deploy apps on both web and the phones, will put pressure on other companies (and OS vendors) to play catch-up or lose developer attention.

Break the Wireless Walled Gardens

iPhone is a fully functional iPod, with full tracks of music. Do you need to download ring tones for $2.99 a pop, when you get a full song for a third of that price? Ditto for Wallpapers, and themes, and everything else that is being sold on the carrier deck.

Shift of control to the customers

If the embedded (Safari) browser performs the way as hyped, it will give us the choice-control we have on the web. Search engines to web sites – nothing will be determined by the wireless carriers who have thus far done nothing but create barriers between what we want, and giving us what they want to sell.

Slow demise of subsidized, boring phones filled with bloat ware

The introduction of the unlocked iPhone will do two things – it would basically get US buyers savvy to the idea of buying full priced unlocked phones. Secondly, it is going to cause a behavior change - of buying phones instead of freebies. (Will iPhone save the handset business?)

Keep it simple or else

One of the lasting changes that iPhone will bring to the mobile market is simplification. Their new UI is going to make complex mobile services relatively simple, and can have the same impact as Blackberry had on the corporate market.