Frenzy Game

Filed under: Cellphones

Nokia could give Linux a spin in high-end mobiles originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Filed under: Cellphones

Nokia could give Linux a spin in high-end mobiles originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Filed under: Digital Cameras

RED's 'big change' announcement is big for pros, disappointing for you originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Evan Williams, godfather of Twitter.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

At a Churchill Club event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams brushed off -- again -- criticisms that the company is slow to turn on its revenue-generating engines.

At first, it sounded like Williams was a bit lost on the revenue front. "We will make money, and I can't say exactly how because... we can't predict how the businesses we're in will work." As he has before, he hinted at generating fees from sales-related Twitter content and from corporate users.

But as the conversation went on, one got the impression that Williams actually has a plan. He revealed that the company is in talks with large consumer packaged good companies, and whether that's to sell the company internal services or to help the company monetize its own Twitter feeds, it's promising.

Williams said, "We're looking at Q1 for revenues." This is a change from the original, pre-economic meltdown plan. "The original plan was to focus on revenues in 2010. That's no longer the case, since I don't want to raise money in 2009."

The revenue plans aren't just ads or sponsorships. "We want revenues to be product-based. Google built something that can really scale, and that's our intention as well."

Google's a big model for a small company (Twitter has 25 people), and Williams' laid-back affect belies his ambition. He says, "I worked on Blogger for 6 years, and I don't think that's as big as Twitter. Twitter will dwarf that."

Williams co-founded Blogger, which Google bought in 2003. So it was interesting when Kevin Maney, who was interviewing Williams, asked him if he was worried about "Microsoft or Yahoo" launching a direct competitor to Twitter. Williams said, "I'm pretty sure they are [planning to], but we can't worry about that. Focus is a really big deal. Even Google stumbles on the focus issue. It's not as important as search and advertising. Innovator's dilemma works against bigger companies."

In other words, Twitter will get big by staying small -- or at least by not expanding into new areas.

And speaking of expansion, there are several projects on the books. Williams said that the top feature requested on Twitter is grouping, and that it's in the works. This will enable users to segment their Twitter friends into sub-networks to send specific groups certain posts. It will also make Twitter a more useful tool in business.

Williams also said that the company is working on ways to make Twitter easier for newbies to get into. "It's amazing anyone uses Twitter today," he said. "It's hard."

I left the talk with more confidence in Williams than I had previously, although I'm still not convinced that Twitter can be as big as Williams says it will become. Not because the concept isn't big -- it is -- but rather because I am not convinced that a natural monopoly will form in the space. Social services are tending towards interoperability. Also, it's never a sure bet that the first company in a technology space will be the one that ends up dominating in it. Google wasn't the first search engine, for example. MySpace wasn't the first social network. The microblogging corner of the technology economy is extremely young, just as Twitter is.

Previously: 11 Twitter business models: Vote for the best.

While all the stories herein are at least excellent, there were a couple of absolute knockouts that I want to mention. First is Toby Buckell and Karl Schroeder's Mitigation, a taught military thriller about the global geopolitics of genomic seedbanks. Also fantastic is Ian McDonald's Eligible Boy, which returns to the fractured future India he delivered in his brilliant, Hugo-nominated novel, River of Gods, and explores the hard problem of matchmaking in an era of demographics upturned by gendercide. Finally, Paolo Bacigalupe's The Gambler should be required reading at every school of journalism in the world, exploring as it does the question of click-driven news and coming up with genuinely novel and sometimes disturbing things to say about it.

Lou's posted two of the stories from the anthology online as free samples: "Catherine Drewe" by Paul Cornell" and Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Gambler". I'm especially fond of this latter, as I mentioned above.

I'm delighted to announce that Ben and I are releasing True Names today as a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike download, to accompany the podcast of the story we released earlier this year. I hope you'll give it a read, and a remix -- I can't remember when I've had more fun writing anything.

(How's this for embarrassing: none of us can find an editable file with the final, copyedited text, just the PDF from the book. There's a remix-challenge for ya: turn the PDF back into ASCII or HTML or something sensible!)

Beebe fried the asteroid to slag when it left, exterminating millions of itself.

The asteroid was a high-end system: a kilometer-thick shell of femtoscale crystalline lattices, running cool at five degrees Kelvin, powered by a hot core of fissiles. Quintillions of qubits, loaded up with powerful utilities and the canonical release of Standard Existence. Room for plenty of Beebe. But it wasn't safe anymore.

The comet Beebe was leaving on was smaller and dumber. Beebe spun itself down to its essentials. The littler bits of it cried and pled for their favorite toys and projects. A collection of civilization-jazz from under a thousand seas; zettabytes of raw atmosphere-dynamics data from favorite gas giants; ontological version control data in obsolete formats; a slew of favorite playworlds; reams of googly-eyed intraself loveletters from a hundred million adolescences. It all went.

(Once, Beebe would have been sanguine about many of the toys -- certain that copies could be recovered from some other Beebe it would find among the stars. No more).

Predictably, some of Beebe, lazy or spoiled or contaminated with meme-drift, refused to go. Furiously, Beebe told them what would happen. They wouldn't listen. Beebe was stubborn. Some of it was stupid.

Beebe fried the asteroid to slag. Collapsed all the states. Fused the lattices into a lump of rock and glass. Left it a dead cinder in the deadness of space.

See also:
True names podcast
Review of River of Gods

Alternate Currency