Faith + Reason = Truth

I've added some details today to an idea in a previous post, so here's what it looks like now (I won't make you click to go there):

So you want to be the President of the United States.  But wait - you say you don't have a "healthcare solution"?  And hold on there - you haven't already made up your mind about whether to commit the troops in Iraq for 10 more years or yank them out the day after your inauguration?  And how about that wall between us and Mexico - SURELY you've already got your preferred chain link fence vendor lined up for a big fat payday, or maybe, conversely, you'd eliminate the Border Patrol altogether.  Well, there may be hope for you yet!  I believe those "big issues" may be nothing more than political hot air, and that real voters would cast real votes based on a candidate's stands on an array of niche issues, and more importantly, on their "feeling of trust" in the candidate him/herself (there's some support for this theory, in a non-scientific poll conducted right here on this very blog).  Case in point:  the Democrats swept into power 3 months ago on a wave of "get us out of Iraq" sentiment.  Here we are, drawing up and debating "non-binding resolutions" that may or may not result in a SEVERE slap of the hand.  Nothing more.  And so it goes with most overarching policies, covering issues too large and unwieldy to be solved or resolved by a President or even a Congress.  So why not base your vote on issues which CAN be addressed and which matter to you, or base it on someone you actually believe when they make a promise (i.e., a non-politician)?  I'll tell you why not - it's because we don't know where the various candidates stand on these issues, because there's no room in the campaign to drive home where they stand on these lesser issues.  If we had a forum, or a scorecard, where candidates could check off where they stand on these myriad "long tail" niche issues, then one candidate may garner enough support based on these lesser issues alone to defeat other candidates who are more broad-based and have propensities to fill themselves and the rest of the Electionsphere with much of their aforementioned hot air.  It won't take much to get this thing rolling, and we're early enough in Campaign 2008 to be able to impact the way that informed voting decisions are derived.  Tell everyone you know, and let's get some traction on this.  We'll do it American Idol-style and get some of Rupert Murdoch's cash horde behind it in the form of "most popular candidate wins a Presidential Election Warchest to campaign with".  I'm serious - Murdoch has not backed a particular candidate as of now, nor does he see himself doing so any time soon.  Give him 1st dibs on a sure-fire ratings hit AND tie it all in to Youtube, where the candidates will post videos that will be voted on to narrow the field, and he's jumping in with both feet!

Tying in a bit with an earlier post on the strength of university networking vs. former places of employment networking, we take a look at past U.S. Presidents and current hopefuls.  The winners of the last 5 Presidential elections, going back to 1988, all have Ivy League educations, be it undergrad, law/graduate, or both.  Harvard and Yale are the players here.  Among the early primary favorites for both parties, the advantage would go to Hillary (Yale Law), Romney and Obama (both Harvard men).  And no breaking news here, but if Romney were to be elected to the Oval Office, he would become the second Presidential holder of an MBA (though he also holds a Law degree and therefore would not be the rare non-lawyer President; the current Bush was the 1st President to hold an MBA).  Hillary and Obama each hold degrees in Law.

The old cliche from Field of Dreams is alive and well in Arlington, TX.  Driving through town yesterday, I was struck by a visually stunning sight:  there, on the great white water tower jutting over the low-rise suburban landscape, next to the south-facing "A" city logo, was a gigantic Official Logo of the Dallas Cowboys (a blue star with a thin blue outline around it) painted on the east side of the tower.  The Star looks off in the distance towards downtown Dallas, some 20 miles away, the city that had forsaken America's Team when Jerry Jones came calling for civic "help" in building his new $650M stadium a few years ago.  While the various Dallas-area suburbs vied for the right to build it without wanting to kick in too much in return, a simple radio announcement one day declared that a deal had been struck with a heretofore unannounced player:  Arlington, home of Major League Baseball in North Texas (the Rangers), Six Flags Over Texas, and a huge GM plant, all of which had been brought to this once desolate outpost halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth decades ago by its "Boy Mayor" Tom Vandergriff.  The Cowboys weren't an easy sell, believe it or not.  Jerry Jones, the owner, is a polarizing figure, illustrated by this quick story.  At a breakfast I attended early on in the "Touchdown Arlington" campaign, serving as the official kickoff to get the residents to vote in favor of funding the stadium, at least one prominent local attorney almost withdrew his support at the last minute.  He was extremely upset that Jerry Jones had made an appearance at a breakfast in Fort Worth, reportedly telling the organizing committee that Jerry better be nowhere near the city of Arlington when Paul Tagliabue and crew made their presentation at the Arlington Convention Center in support of the stadium deal.  So there we were at the breakfast, and EVERYONE was there:  Commissioner Tagliabue, Roger Staubach, Troy Aikman, the mayors of Arlington and Fort Worth (not Dallas)...everyone, that is, except Jerry Jones.  You see, as publicity hungry as he is (and has to be), he knows politics and dealmaking as well as anyone, and he knew that Arlington wanted the Cowboys DESPITE their owner, not BECAUSE of him.
A couple of years have passed, the stadium deal overwhelmingly passing with the voters long ago, and the price of the complex has now increased to $1B (Jerry's kicking in the difference, not the City of Arlington).  A couple of weeks ago Roger Staubach was named chairman of the committee to bring the Super Bowl to Arlington a year or two after the stadium opens in 2009.  Just yesterday, the front page story in the 2 local papers was "Cotton Bowl Coming to Arlington", and with it one day, almost certainly a slot in college football's BCS Championship rotation.  There's also talk of a future national convention (most likely Republican) and much, much more.  Apparently, if you build it, they will come.

I'm not sure, although I have some thoughts on the subject.  Let's see if we can find out what some readers are likely to base Presidential voting decisions on in 2008:

This post could have gone under Psychology (why is one Network stronger) or under Web/Tech as well (how each Network is mapped and proved), but it's under Business because that's what I can speak to.  Initial proof, both hard and anecdotal, indicates that ties with people you were tight with at your university bind stronger than ties with former co-workers.  The anecdotal proof is on an individual basis - are you tighter with old classmates or with former co-workers?  The hard evidence is something I'm compiling out of interest in a post last week about the connection between something Mark Cuban said and why it's actually playing out the way he thinks it will.  That spurred me to analyze Google's Board of Directors, mapping each Director's boards served on, former employers, and former universities they attended or had a role in the administration (faculty, President, etc.)  There doesn't seem to be any overlap in boards served, which is an example of solid corporate governance principles (something they picked up by their study/emulation of Berkshire Hathaway's principles, no doubt), nor do I see any cronyism associated with common former employers.  I do see multiple Princetons, multiple UC Berkeleys, multiple Stanfords, and multiple UC SFs on the board, however, which could indicate the presence of strong alumni networks.  Another consideration is the fact that there may be fewer top-notch universities than top-notch companies, but that's another project.
I've just started working on Sun Microsystems, and will then proceed to Apple, Cisco, Amazon.com, Intel, and other Valley icons that have been around a while and look to continue to be around for a while.  I'm an analyst, not a programmer, so I can't produce on my own the desired end-product, which would be a cloud-based network graphic of the interconnectedness of Silicon Valley board members with strong or weak links to other boards, former employers, and educational institutions.  THAT tool would be both fascinating and useful (LinkedIn should produce something like this, if they don't already). 

Last year the History Channel ran a show that detailed Saddam's rise to power.  It spent a good deal of time on the long war he initiated with Iran.  Looking like a World War I documentary that had been colorized, it had trench warfare, gas warfare, hordes of people running into hails of bullets, barbed wired fences, etc.  What struck me is a tactic of the Iranian leadership when faced with the problem of a shortage of manpower and rifles:  they took school kids, elementary school age, armed them each with nothing more than a copy of the Koran, and sent them running on foot in mass waves towards the Iraqi lines, where those in front were decimated by gunfire and those in the next rows would pick up the rifles of the fallen and continue the onslaught.  Would the American people support such a slaughter of innocent unarmed children?  Of course not.  That's why, if push does come to shove, there will be precision aerial bombing of strategic sites, but no invasion.  Such an invasion would be un-winnable on every level imagineable.

The short answer is yes, as this video at Guy Kawasaki's site shows.  Two of the startups featured at this VC panel over the weekend are single-employee ventures, so watch and learn, folks!  As for trying to get things done by yourself, from personal experience, you will need:

1. attention span and commitment to keep at it
2. energy
3. passion
4. resourcefulness
5. giving as much of yourself as you can in the form of freely participating and contributing to other people's successes
6. money helps, but I don't have any and am progressing nicely

A dataset I submitted to swivel.com last week is currently the Spotlighted Data, front and center on their main page today.  The subject matter is blogs by political affiliation, which should be an ongoing indicator as to how effectively the parties are with their "netroots" campaigning.

There was a story a few days ago on Digg (it's still there) that I Dugg.  It was about the director of the Titanic movie being involved with the documentary of an archaeological find that's being publicized as Jesus's coffin.  The story I Dugg still only has single-digit Diggs, whereas another story about the exact same subject is on the Most Popular Last 24 Hours list with thousands of Diggs.  The message is the same in each, but it doesn't matter for one of them because the headline and summary were not written in an interesting enough way to get people to click through to the story.

Same thing happened in church today.  Last week, at one of the 2 churches I split my time between, I could have told you every single detail about that day's message - and I did, to lots of friends and family.  Today, however, at the other church, try as I might, I couldn't make my mind stop wandering to other thoughts, chores, the rest of the afternoon, last week's posts, etc.  After he was done speaking, I asked my wife what he was just talking about, and she told me about the Bible verse he started with (which I DID remember), but couldn't tell me what exactly he was talking about in relation to that verse.

Be interesting, say interesting things, write interesting words, and people will remember what you attempted to communicate.  Otherwise, your message will be forgotten, or never even seen or heard in the first place.

Unbelievably (at least in my mind), Oprah Winfrey has already backed a candidate for the 2008 Presidential election.  It's only February of '07.  As my "O Power" post from earlier in the week suggested, I am in awe of the influence she has over the women of America, and women make up the majority of the electorate.  She's also very influential among the black community, although I would argue that her universal appeal to all women is more broad-based than her appeal to African-Americans.  She's keeping her options open with a nod to Hillary and how great she thinks she is, but is now officially on record as supporting Barrack Obama, after comments made on Ellen's show.
Here's a link to an "outside the U.S." perspective on the battle for star power between Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton, which could have a significant impact on the 2008 campaign.  It's not the ONLY thing that matters in the national election between Democrat and Republican, as evidenced by Bush's two triumphs over heavily Hollywood-backed Democrat opponents, but in determining the Democratic candidate who will actually be on the ballot next November, it is very significant.

Second Life is a virtual 3d world that lets players (and companies) create "avatars", on-screen representations of themselves in graphic form, as well as virtual "islands".  Real companies are investing actual money in building their Second Life presences, with total revenue to the site coming in at roughly a million dollars per day.  People and companies spend virtual money, which is exchanged for real money and vice versa.  With a registered "population" of over 3.1 million users in January 2007, the site has grown from just 124k users in January 2006, adding 900k in just the past month (these figures are from the the company's official blog).

Why does this matter?  Companies such as IBM, Dell, and Cisco are spending money creating virtual 3d environments, or islands, in Second Life, hoping to reach people and affect them in the virtual world with hopes of influencing their purchasing decisions in the real world.  Hey, if they'll spend millions on a funny 30-second commercial that people passively watch (maybe) during a football game, why wouldn't they spend large sums of money on building completely interactive experiences that people voluntarily visit and play with (Dell has an island, for instance, that allows avatars to fly through the insides of a pc).  Investor's Business Daily also had a front page mention of Second Life in yesterday's edition, along with a large spread complete with screen shots and interviews with some of the companies investing in their Second Life presences (I read it in my paper subscription and tried my hardest but couldn't find an online version of yesterday's story on today's www.investors.com website, but you're welcome to give it a go if you have a subscription to them).  Pay attention if you're not already, because whether this ends up being the company and environment that brings virtual reality to the mainstream or not, it IS coming and you WILL be participating.

Get used to it, folks - I don't see anything like the impact of the S&L crisis of the 80's, but this will be an ongoing story and it's only going to get uglier.  For some reason, lots of smart financial people thought it would be a great idea to make mortgage loans to high-risk, poor credit buyers.  The plan was to make these "subprime loans" to all of those individuals at a high enough interest rate to offset those that would inevitably default.  Well, it turns out that some of these smart financial people (hopefully not all of them, but it's too early to know) underestimated the amount of defaults that would actually occur, and there's going to be hell to pay.  H&R Block's earnings were impacted and it is now trying to sell its Option One Mortgage unit, which handles the subprimes, and Europe's largest bank (HSBC) has announced that it has axed the head of its North American operations as well as the head of its U.S. retail banking arm.  Here's the link to a great Reuters summary.

How many of you remember SUN Microsystems?  Oh, they're still around, and even make headlines once in a blue moon.  But remember when they DOMINATED the internet hype universe?  They invented Java, for crying out loud.  And they correctly, loudly trumpeted that it would change the internet and, by association, the world.  One thing they were not correct about, however, was distributed computing:  a thin client in every home, powered by massively powerful servers...somewhere.  Maybe in your home's future "media closet", or maybe remotely.
Back on Feb. 11, Mark Cuban (famous owner of the Dallas Mavericks, co-founder of startup that he sold to Yahoo for many dollars, and loud critic of anyone purchasing Youtube due to their un-licensed content liabilities), had an interesting post on his blog about Google's model possibly dominating the pc world in the future.  It's a thin-client model, with web-hosted apps (nice dovetail with today's Google Apps news) doing the day-to-day and possibly gaming machines handling the media and entertainment.  They are well-positioned, in Cuban's view, to enjoy the spoils of victory someday.
Class, who's the CEO of Google?  Altogether now:  Eric Schmidt, formerly of Novell, but most importantly, the leader of the Java deveopment effort at SUN and a champion of its thin client, server-centric vision (who's got a bigger server farm than Google?  I can't think of anyone off the top of my head.).  And FYI, he's also on the board of Apple, which makes sense, since he was at Xerox PARC in the early 80's when Steve was pilfering PARC's amazing ideas and "inventing" the concept of Mac and its glorious GUI/window environment.
Why does everything pc-related (except for MSFT) seem to revolve around Silicon Valley?  It's the people, the history, and the relationships - nothing more, nothing less.

Wherever you stand on global warming, there are some hard data points to consider.  Countries can be ranked by how productive they are in terms of what they produce, be it for physical goods or co2 emissions.  I've summarized some data as follows:

24 countries contribute 1% or more of the world total man-made co2 emissions
These countries account for 84.3% of the total man-made c02 emissions
Man-made co2 emissions for ALL countries account for roughly .73% of the co2 in the atmosphere

Although man-made accounts for less than 1% of the total co2 in the atmosphere, it is not counter-balanced by natural processes, unlike the rest of the co2 in the atmosphere.  This "carbon cycle" is the process of co2 naturally released into the atmosphere by trees, oceans, dead matter, soil, volcanic eruptions, etc., and then re-absorbed by nature.  Our stuff throws things out of balance and leads to a net surplus in the atmosphere - very small, but measurable.  And nature's about to get into the act in a big way too, with unknown consequences, as described by this interesting Washington Post article (you may have to do a free registration to view it, unfortunately, but you should do one anyway because they frequently have great articles). 

The total GDP in $Millions divided by the total  co2 emissions of the top 24 emitters is $1.85, or 1.85 GDP units per co2 emission unit.  The higher your number, the more eco-friendly your GDP.  The U.S. is 9th out of 24 on this basis, at $2.12 (better than average).  Ukraine, Russia, Iran, India, and China range from $.27 (Ukraine) to $.68 (China).  France, U.K., and Italy are all better than $4.  Japan's the only Asian out of the best 13.  Here's a link to Wikipedia's "Carbon Cycle" article, along with a link to IMF figures for the GDP.

The big news today is that Google will be offering paid versions of its online "office suite" (Spreadsheets & Docs are the biggies).  This is not important in terms of market share or a shift in competitive balance, in spite of the fact that Google will be charging $50 while Microsoft's Office suite is several hundred dollars, depending on which version.  Trying online versions of software, such as Google Office or DabbleDB (an online database app), or Zoho's MS Project or PowerPoint clones quickly demonstrates the most important trait of all of them:  they're WAY too slow, basic, and "exposed"-feeling for corporations to implement.  The database programs typically have recommendations to not use datasets of greater than, say, a few thousand records, while many corporate databases are in the millions or even hundreds of millions of records.  And complex calculations and linked sheets in Excel without painful processing and storage delays?  That's just not happening in web app versions.
But it will happen one day, and today's announcement by Google that it is in fact interested in generating revenue streams from offerings other than advertising will have major ramifications across the board.

Youtube was started by 3 guys and sold a year later for 1 and a half billion dollars (give or take, depending on what Google's stock does) to Google.  Is that a smart move by Google, or sheer insanity?  There's no clear answer.  Youtube didn't invent web video, they just simplified the process of posting it to the internet in an easily watchable and sharable format.  Why didn't Google develop that process, you ask?  They tried.  And I would bet they had "smarter" people, more of them, and lots of money for equipment and technology at their disposal than those 3 guys did.  Granted, those 3 guys had some investment capital at their disposal at some point, but nothing on the order of the resources that Google brings to bear.  What's at work here is the unknown, little understood, much-studied process of how technology goes from zero to a billion (dollars, people, whatever) overnight.  As Microsoft is well aware, no matter how many brilliant people and virtually unlimited resources an entity passionately commits to a problem, the odds are against them finding the solution that will be embraced by the masses.  To Google's credit, rather than following MSFT's playbook and continuing to develop their own product and waging a deathmatch war of attrition against the product that the marketplace has already christened the victor, they simply took their medicine and brought the Youtube folks (and user base) in-house.  Google clearly remembers Yahoo not making a big enough offer for Google early on in their search engine war, and look where both companies stand today.  Google, if nothing else, appears to learn from history and is intent on not repeating the mistakes others in this arena have made.  I see the huge purchase offer for Youtube as the right move in this case, but time and media tie-ups will tell the tale over the long haul (Google/Youtube has already lost Viacom to Joost, and things look to be coming apart with CBS, but it's still early, and it remains to be seen whether the Youtube community will switch to Joost for content or stay loyal and continue to enjoy the network effects in place at Youtube).

Short answer:  whatever Oprah tells them they want.  Women are very underserved in terms of appealing to what's important to them with a company's marketing efforts.  A simple gesture, such as including a link to "Oprah's Favorite Things" on a website, can let them know that you are aware of them and their interests, which is much more than most sites bother to do.  Why is that?  Because the VAST majority of site designers are male, who are not in touch with their inner Oprah.  Oh, sure, their wives or girlfriends watch whenever they can, and these guys may even watch along with them some or all of the time, but it's not top of mind for them when they work.
Some companies get this concept: last week (if memory serves), Oprah ran an episode about "The Secret", which I had never heard of.  It's a DVD that's supposedly sweeping the country (but again, I had never heard of it), and now it's a book, too.  The secret to being happy, rich, healthy, etc., and to summarize, it appears to be "The Power of Positive Thinking" in new clothes.  My wife made we watch, my friends heard of it from their wives from Oprah, etc.  And yesterday, on the main page of the Wall St. Journal's site, in the center box, was a blurb about "The Secret".  Coincidence?  Maybe.  But more likely, it's that the Journal keeps up with Oprah, because her power, reach, and influence are probably greater than any woman's in history.  Women dig her, and if you're smart, you will pay attention to what Oprah's telling women they should want.  Because by the end of the episode, they will.

Do you consider yourself an extremist?  Probably not.  And if you're not at the extreme, then you're somewhere in between, right?  And if you're somewhere in between, then you're probably able to see both points of view, to some degree.  However, if you display that ability publicly, whether in the form of a Bush-backed scientist stating that global warming is happening or a Northern California Democrat supporting the Iraq War, you will be attacked from both sides.  One side will disparage you because you are their sworn enemy regardless of position on a specific issue (Dem vs. Repub, Lib vs. Conserv), and the other will disavow you for believing something that's out of lock step with "the cause".
So you see, you cannot assume the middle ground out loud, even though it's where almost all of us live in our heads.  Which doesn't seem logical on the face of it, until you step through it logically as we have just done.

For those of you who read my post on MySpace Japan and what their strategy SHOULD have been, you're already familiar with my line of thinking.  And so, quite possibly, is the NYSE.  Rather than going in to new markets and trying to start up a competitor from scratch, they go in and partner with an existing player.  There are all kinds of benefits to this type of arrangement, and it's often the only way to go if you're serious about cracking a new market.
With trading though, it raises an interesting question (and not for the first time):  how much longer is it until we are in a 24-hour trading environment?  With the Euronext-NYSE combination, and the possible follow-up of NASDAQ acuiring the London Stock Exchange, it may not be long before the foreign listing requirements at the various exchanges come under pressure and barriers begin to fall.  The trading day may then begin several hours earlier when the European markets currently open, and all that would be left would be the Asian markets mergers/acquisitions.  I couldn't see the Nikkei agreeing to be acquired, but equal partnership would seem to be a real possibility.   Like it or not, it's only a matter of time... .

Wired News has a story about MySpace invading Japan.  It details the current dominant player there, called Mixi, and ponders the cultural differences between the two social networking sites, as well as strategies that may or may not work.  The reason it won't work for MySpace Japan is the same reason why someone can't move into the U.S. and takeover:  MySpace already has network effects at work here that serve as the most effective barrier to new players.  Mixi has those same network effects already in place in Japan.  End of story.
The SMART play would have been to partner with Mixi, creating a solid foundation for a trans-Pacific social network.   That way, they're not re-inventing the cultural wheel that the dominant domestic player has already established and not wasting resources trying to break into something they won't be able to break into.  The partnership then approaches the dominant social networks in Korea and China, then spreads westward to India and Russia, then through Europe, building momentum all along the way.  You would not attack all fronts simultaneously, because if you have a strategic error, you'd want to work that out one partner at a time rather than dooming the whole concept to failure.