Dana Blankenhorn

England and the Threat from Immigration

When Americans think of a “threat” from immigration, we are thinking demographically. (Click below to meet the two gentlemen to the right.)

We think, rationally or not, of millions of low-skill workers, either taking public services from us or low-wage jobs. “They're too lazy to work. They're stealing our jobs.” 

England is a completely other country, especially in its politics, and I sometimes wondered why until I came across the story of Yougov.

I was mainly looking for an interesting Seeking Alpha story, some hidden gem that just reported earnings. That's not Yougov.

Oh, it is of some mild interest that they're buying up U.S. market research outfits like Harrison Group and Definitive Insights, so that it now has more employees here than in Old Blighty.

What Warren Buffett Doesn't Know

Warren Buffett won himself some headlines today with another call for newspapers to charge people for content. 

Newspapers grabbed this one eagerly but there's something neither they nor Buffett know.

They already do charge. All of them.

They charge you in time. The time it takes you to read anything is a real cost, to you. I can very much understand why you would resent anyone talking about charging you money for something you're already paying for, with your time, attention, and (assuming you believe what you read) credibility. I resent it, too.

Especially since, in the old print model, content was always free to begin with. The cost of the paper was never more than the cost of getting it from the printer to you. The cover price was split between the newscarrier (or newstand) and the truck that dropped piles of paper on the street (or driveway).

How were writers paid 20 years ago? Advertising. The ads that surrounded the content paid for the writers, the editors, the salesmen, the typesetting, and the printing. Not to mention the executives at the top of the tower and the profits that went to shareholders.

Bitzio Bids For App Store Bit-ness

Not every interesting idea I see at Seeking Alpha (where I'm now the #1 writer on technology) is from the Fortunate 500, although that's what gets the clicks.

Some are in the "pink sheets," the penny stock listings where much is dross, but some nuggets can turn into gold.

Companies like Bitzio Inc., whose symbol is BTZO.

According to Bill Schonbrun, head guy (OK, CEO) , Apple doesn't really want to run an app store. That is, they don't want to be in the business of approving – or disapproving – every program that runs on its iPhones and iPads.

They just want their cut of anything that's sold.

To Schonbrun, this spells opportunity. Bitzio has created a system that lets anyone create a Web app, that runs in an as Javascript and HTML5, which Bitzio will then distribute and monetize through ads.

Balance in Internet Law and Enforcement

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 5 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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For digital activists, the Obama Administration has proven a bitter disappointment.

Rather than seeing the growth possibilities in unfettered access to the Web, the Administration has focused instead on the national security threat, and has been captured in turn by copyright extremists.

It's a slippery slope, but it's one liberty must navigate. It's one America itself has been navigating, sometimes with mixed results, since its founding. With the rise of the Internet, and its global impact on growth in every country, it's one we all must navigate.

Let's be clear here, because I'm hearing a lot of whinging from my side of the aisle. Activists for an open Internet are not powerless in this fight. Far from it. Because in our hands is growth – economic growth, human growth, intellectual growth. When people are forced offline, when they merely feel less than free, that has a profound, negative impact on growth.

It doesn't take a formal boycott. The action against SOPA/PIPA was merely an overt example of what happens every day, in billions of places around the world. By simply refusing to submit, by withholding the weapon of growth from governments, people demonstrate real power.

On the other hand, government must play a role as both guarantor of liberty and maintainer of order. We can't let the Internet be so open that a foreign government can hack it down. We can't let people steal from our own people and hide from justice. That's anarchy, not liberty. It may seem like a Randian paradise, but it will quickly end as all such paradises end, either in the dictatorship of the Moneytariat or a Somali wasteland.

Both sides must admit that there is a balance to be struck, but right now no one is standing in the middle and saying so. Thus we blunder on.

So let me stand in the middle and say so.

The U.S.-China Alliance

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 4 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Steve Jobs did something generations of political leaders have been unable to do.

He cemented the alliance between China and the United States.

He did this by making money for both, through cooperative development of his iOS line.  As he told the President, you can't make this in the U.S. We don't have the human infrastructure and logistics to produce, say, 37 million iPhones and 15.4 million iPads in one 90-day period, box them and and ship them, the way China can.

On the other hand, China lacks the software and marketing imagination needed to move that merchandise in countries around the world. It lacks the branding. Even the Chinese people know the difference between a real Apple Store and a Chinese knock-off. They will pay a premium for the real thing. And Apple, today, sits on $96.7 billion in cash.

Thus we have a symbiotic relationship, one that other companies can exploit, one that benefits the people and governments on both sides of the trade. Historically it's an important moment.

I Robot

I am not giving up on the War Against Oil. Far from it. I will continue following its progress, here and elsewhere, through 2012 and beyond crossover.

But I've learned something about myself. I live for the bleeding edge, for the technology frontier. Once things seem set, once the byways are established, I tend to lit out for the undiscovered country.

As a journalist, that's my “thing.” Always has been. I sought out the Internet starting in 1983, got into e-commerce in the early 1990s, covered the Internet of Things as early as 2002, and became an open source reporter in 2005, before moving to The War Against Oil a few years ago.

Each has represented a sea change in how we look at life and technology. The Internet is the biggest story of our time, by far, and e-commerce is a big part of it. The War Against Oil will be the biggest story of this decade, returning us all to prosperity and turning today's unemployment problem into tomorrow's labor shortage.

But what comes after that? What comes after is something I've dreamed of since I was a kid. Useful, commercial, consumer robots. Thus I call this section of the blog Asimov Ville. (Asimov wrote his short story The Last Question, in which the universe was created by a robot, in 1964.

The Real 2012 Campaign

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 50 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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To hear the TV networks tell it we're about to be inundated by a flood of TV ads that will leave us sour and the country divided.

First of all, who are the “TV networks” anyway? They're the talking heads at Fox, MSNBC and CNN. How many people even watch those things? Maybe a total of 5.5 million people. How many voters are there? Turnout in 2008 was 132 million.

Oh, yes, but what about the local stations, and the “real” networks? That's where the money is going. You think people don't know where their mute buttons are? You think people are hanging on to every word of an ad for a candidate in a way they don't for one from a local car dealer?

Most people already have their minds made up. This has always been the case. John Alford of Rice, my old school, insisted to me recently that we're increasingly becoming segregated by politics, that our politics even defines who we marry, and that we may become two separate breeds of people, red and blue, over time.

Uh, no. People change as their circumstances change. Your world gets rocked in some way – you can't get a job coming out of college, you lose the career you had for 40 years – and so does your worldview. But this happens far away from the TV screens. It happens organically, inside us, as we experience life. We come out of these experiences different from the way we went into them.

What happens when our world is rocked? Where do we go? You think we go to TV? What is our medium of choice in these hard times?

The Internet.

Making Money Online

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Making money online, for myself and for publishers, has literally been my life's work.

I started in the spring of 1985, over a quarter of a century ago. In the years since I have found many business models try and fail, many compensation models try and fail. But I've also found something that works, and I want to offer it to you now.

It's a modified pay-per-view structure, very similar to what I've seen work at ZDNet and (more recently) Seeking Alpha, which I began writing for this June. Setting it up is as simple as being able to measure page views, assign a value to those page views, and link page counts to the names of authors.

Seeking Alpha's model is very simple, a penny per page view. If you get 1,000 people to read your “premium” content, that's $10. Average 150,000 page views per month, as many writers with something to say can, and it's $1,500 – not a serious salary but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Cloud FUD is Cloud-Sized

Advocates of the old enterprise computing model are trying every type of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) in order to slow the progress of cloud computing.

In a Financial Times story (behind their firewall – get it through Google News) Gartner executives Drue Reeves and Daryl Plummer go on-and-on about the unlimited liability of cloud computing, acting as though if someone pulled out a plug somewhere your whole business could go down.

Reeves, according to his biography, previously worked at the Burton Group, acquired by Gartner in 2010, and before that at Dell and at Compaq. His background is in server computing and security.

Well you may be a big Gartner wheel, Mr. Reeves, and I may be just a reporter, but I got a very simple response to your FUD.

Diminishing Patent Returns in Age of Software

Florian Mueller feels like he's in his glory.

Lawyers from Apple have been on a global winning streak against Samsung's Galaxy tablet. The latest win came in Australia, where a judge stopped the product's import over a patent personally filed by the late Steve Jobs. 

To Florian this is a really big deal.

After today's decision, I believe no company in the industry be able to launch any new Android-based touchscreen product in Australia anytime soon without incurring a high risk of another interim injunction. The two patents on which today's ruling is based aren't Galaxy Tab 10.1-specific at all. They will affect all Android-based smartphones and tablet computers, across all vendors.

If Apple wins the Australian case at the end of the main proceeding, all Android-based products will effectively be shut out of the Australian market forever, unless Google or its device maker partners settle with Apple.

Bunk.