A Review of the Tim Harford Article in WIRED 16.02
“In theory, technology should allow new-economy firms to prosper as easily in [Indiana] as in Silicon Vally. But far from killing distance, it has made proximity matter more than ever.” – Tim Harford, “You’ve Got Mail”
Harford writes how technology was supposed to level the playing field. It wasn’t supposed to matter whether you were in your office or at home, in the middle of Iowa or in lower Manhattan–but that’s not what happened. He references American Economic Review who found that most commercial innovations still reside in only three areas: California, New York/New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Indiana has been bleeding cash building up fiber optic networks and technology parks in counties all over the state. Will it make a difference?
Harford goes on to suggest that technology hasn’t allowed us to be farther apart–and yet still stay successful. Those who are more successful use technology to better communicate with the people closest in proximity to them. For example, the most productive workers are the ones emailing the guy in the cubicle next to them. Their also the ones who use tools to “meet up” with others based on cell phone proximity alert services. Face-to-face meetings are where ideas best come forward.
It could be said that by the Law of Averages, the greatest number of innovations should come from the areas of highest population, but there is something else going on here. The whole idea of communication via technology, whether that be by email, cell phones, social networking sites, mash-ups, or whatever, its people on the other end. People are social by nature. Facial recognition is built into our DNA. We need human contact. Use technology to get more human contact, and in so doing, be more successful.
When I first got into web design, I didn’t even know what SEO was, let alone stood for. If you’ve stumbled upon this article you might already know that it stands for search engine optimization. This refers to the process of improving search engine results, which leads to our next SEO term, SERPs. SERP refers to search engine results page(s). The number your site is on that SERP is your PR or page rank. When the term is smashed together with no space it is a Google registered trademark. You might also see the term PR5 or PR4. Search engines give greater credibility to sites with links from PR1-PR5 websites. PR, as noted before stands for page rank and the number indicates the rank on that page (1-10). A PR1 website is the number one website for a given search term, for example.
If you choose to get help on your Internet marketing, how do you decide which SEO firm to go with? Erich Stauffer, an Indianapolis SEO firm writes that, “web design built around search engine optimization,” is something to look for in a SEO firm. SEO is more than just in-bound links. The website has to have good content and a good structure. Are you using H1 tags on every page? Strong tags instead of bold? Are you adequately using your description and keyword meta tags? Are you using tables or DIV tags to organize your information? Can your web page be viewed on a mobile device? Have you submitted your website to ODP? If you do nothing else, please do this last step as the ODP, the Open Directory Project, is the most important step in your SEO or Internet marketing campaign.
So many major advances in automobile technology will come to market in 2010 that I started calling it the Year of the New Automobile. 102 years since the first Ford Model T rolled off the assembly line the internal combustion engine is finally on the way out. Nissan is releasing an all electric vehicle. Toyota is to sell a plug-in hybrid vehicle (PEHV) with next-generation lithium-ion batteries. The Prius is said to have solar panels by 2009. Volkswagon is releasing a vehicle with a 1-liter engine that gets 235 MPG. GM plans to make the Volt in 2010, which is an electric vehicle with a gasoline generator on-board. Audi is making a hybrid SUV beginning in 2010 called the Q7. France-based Zero Pollution Motors is releasing an air-powered car in the US called Breeze. 2010 also shows the return of the Camaro with GM‘s new 6-speed transmission. For all these reasons, I believe 2010 is the Year of the New Automobile.
So when was the Year of the Automobile? TIME magazine reported in 1934 that 1933 was the original Year of the Automobile. This was because, “in 1933 the automobile industry … fashioned some 2,040,000 cars, 42% above 1932. Its sales not only bulged in May and June when all industries were booming, but afterwards, when other industries felt a reaction, it continued making headway. In darkest November it did 108% more business than in November 1932.” Sales of alternative fuel vehicles rose to over 1.7 million in 2007. Hyundai’s Dr Sungho Lee predicted in June 2008 that the cost of running gas-powered vehicles will double by 2010 and zero-emission fuel cell vehicles could be commercially available within five to ten years. The future looks bright for alternative automobile technologies, especially in 2010 and on.
UPDATE: Honda is bringing the Insight back to the U.S. as a 2010 model for an MSRP of $18,500. The Insight is rumored to get over 70 miles per gallon.
I’m in Kokomo, IN this week, at a branch just off of US 31. I drove by this branch on the way to Niles, MI back in 1999 on the way to Michiana Christian Service Camp. The camp cook often visited a past family member at the graveyard just down the street from my home at the time in Franklin, IN. The son of the camp director left at the end of the summer to attend Milligan College in Tennessee. The next year, I’d leave Kentucky Christian College for Milligan College with my friend, Ben. By then, the camp director’s son had left.
While at Milligan College (read about my time at Milligan College here), I visited friends from Kentucky Christian College now attending Ball State University in Muncie, IN, Jason and Derek. The next semester I moved to Muncie and roomed with Jason and Derek in Jason’s home. I tried applying for a job at First Merchants Bank, but they were closed on Martin Luther King Day. I opened a free checking account at Old National Bank. Two months later Jason got a job there and married Krista. Derek and I had to move out into our own apartment. In June of 2001 I drove through Tipton, IN on my way to meet my brother in Lafayette, IN. He worked for Purdue University. That same month Derek began working for Old National too. The next month, I met my future wife in Tipton and also began working for Old National.
That August I began school at Ball State. By mid-semester, Derek met his future wife, Shannon. In December Jason, Derek, and I were given the choice to be laid off or transferred to Indianapolis. Our plant was closing down in Muncie. Jason left Old National for First Merchants Bank. Derek stayed in Muncie and got laid off. I stayed with Old National and moved to Indianapolis, transferring to IUPUI. There I worked with my roommate from Milligan, Ben. I also met Jake, who left to attend Purdue. I visited Jake a year later in Lafayette. He had just met a girl the night before, who he later married.
Ben left Old National in 2004 after a lawn mower accident cut off part of one of his fingers. Derek later moved to Indianapolis with his wife, Shannon, and began teaching. He works part-time for Old National in the evenings. In June of 2007 I left Old National Bank and in June of 2008 I began working for First Merchants Bank with Jason, which brings me back to why I’m sitting in a branch in Kokomo on the edge of US 31, where I passed 9 years prior, on my way to Michigan.
Why did CollegeClub.com fail and others succeed?
CollegeClub.com was registered on April 4, 1996 and by 2000 had around 3 million registered users. I was one of those users who used it to find friends at other colleges online. On August 22, 2000, CollegeClub.com announced bankruptcy and said it would be acquired by Student Advantage, an Internet educational content and commerce specialist, for $7 million in cash and 1.5 million shares of its stock. Almost exactly three years later, in August of 2003, MySpace.com launched. Less than a year after that Facebook.com began as a social network for colleges on February 4, 2004, but eventually opened up to the general public on September 26, 2006. What happened to College Club? What made it different from Myspace or Facebook?
Why did MySpace and Facebook succeed when CollegeClub failed?
All of a sudden what seemed so hard for CollegeClub.com to do seemed easy for others. Was it the curse of the “first to market first to fail” concept that’s befell such greats as Palm, Netscape, and Tivo? Or was it something else? EDIT: since writing this initially in September of 2009, MySpace may not be the best comparison, but Facebook is still doing just fine. 11/4/2011.
Lets take a look at the business model. CollegeClub.com allowed users to sign up for free, create profiles, communicate with each other, and post pictures online. Once it attracted a certain number of users, the site was then able to sells advertising to businesses looking to sell to this highly impressionable market with loads of free time and disposable income. Marketers know that if they can hook a customer in college, they may have them for life. Both MySpace.com and Facebook.com used this same model so why did CollegeClub.com fail?
CollegeClub.com was getting funding at the tune of $15 million from a group of investors that included Convergence Partners and France-based Viventures as well as $40 million from Seligman Technology Group via the group’s investment fund and additional money from previous investors Convergence and Sony. Later deals included partnerships with Ericsson and General Motors, with a planned IPO in the offing. The old addage of “it takes money to make money” wasn’t making CollegeClub.com any money. Why?
I have two reasons why I think this site tanked:
The first reason is bad management and the second reason is the high cost of technology at the time.
Infoworld said at the time, “While one source close to the company traces the financial difficulties to some unorthodox spending practices by management, [new owner, Student Advantage] said it believes that problems stemmed from the nature of the site’s business model.” I think Student Advantage was wrong. We now know there was nothing wrong with their business model (because it worked for both Myspace and Facebook) and this next statement from Infoworld backs this up:
In the recent past, Student Advantage has shown less than stellar financial performance itself. Since the beginning of the year, the company’s stock price has plummeted from a high mark of just over $20 to its current price, which is hovering just above $7. In addition, Student Advantage has continually met analysts’ predictions of red ink, and the company has suggested that losses will continue throughout next year.
The company went from bad management to worse management – and technology costs were adding up.
“The business model works.” said Monte Brem, senior vice president of corporate development at CollegeClub in said in 2000 – and he was right – but he noted that with nearly 3 million users, the back-end costs for the site ran high and needed multiple rounds of financing for success. “It requires a tremendous amount of scaling to be profitable,” Brem added. And back then, scaling cost much more than it did in 2003 and 2004 for MySpace and Facebook respectively. Moore’s Law has two effects. Not only does technology double in speed or capacity each year, but the price almost always shrinks by half every two years. For example, a Pentium III desktop PC with 128 MB RAM and a 40 GB hard drive cost $1800.00 in 2000. In 2003, the price of a desktop had dropped below $1000 for over twice the power. Multiply that over all the equipment needed to run a large social network. In April, 2008 Facebook expanded the number of servers it uses to 10,000. The more CollegeClub.com added users, the more technology they had to add on back-end to support the load. Their revenue simply could not overcome their expenses.
So why did CollegeClub.com fail?
Primarily, it was ahead of its time. It had a good idea, but no one had really succeeded with it before. Bad management decisions were made and the implementation of the idea did not match up with the cost of the infrastructure at the time. Had they waited until 2002 to launch, they could have superseded either MySpace or Facebook, but there is another reason why they may never have made it: their name. Names like MySpace and Facebook are not associated with a specific group like CollegeClub.com is. Eventually CollegeClub.com started HighSchool.com to address this problem but even it has the same problem of locking it into a specific group. There were also privacy and age related problems on the site, much like MySpace ran into in 2006 and Facebook has ran into almost every year of it’s existence.
What can we learn from CollegeClub.com?
There are three things they could have done differently:
When You Say Yes but Mean No: How Silencing Conflict Wrecks Relationships and Companies…and What You Can Do About It
In 2003, Leslie Perlow wrote a book called, When You Say Yes but Mean No: How Silencing Conflict Wrecks Relationships and Companies…and What You Can Do About It. In that book, Leslie does a case study on the demise of CollegeClub.com in the chapter, Nine Bad Endings. Pages 141-156 cover the merger with Versity, the talks about the IPO, and the eventual bankruptcy. Overall it’s also a good book on management as one reviewer called it, “A Management Must-Read”.
“Saying yes when you really mean no” is a problem that haunts organizations from startups to big businesses. It exists across industries, levels, and functions and is inflamed by a sour economy, when the fear of losing your job is on everyone’s mind and the idea of allowing conflict to surface or disagreeing with others seems inherently risky. Too often, the conversation at work bespeaks harmony and togetherness, even though passionate disagreements exist beneath the surface. Is this what really happened to CollegeClub.com? Read the book to find out.
CollegeClub was full of so much promise. What happened?
CollegeClub “The world’s largest college community”
FREE E-mail you can also hear through the phone!
FREE voicemail, with your own 800 number!
FREE discount card!
FREE Web page builder!
TONS of ways to meet people like you! (Chat, Interest Groups, and more!)
LOTS of other cool stuff! (Including online games and music videos!)
Suprise. CollegeClub is no longer offering free email.
In 2007, Alloy Media, owner of the CollegeClub.com trademark, discontinued the CollegeClub email service rendering all “@collegeclub.com” email addresses defunct. Their website (http://mail.collegeclub.com), simply said:
“Oops! Sorry about that! These CollegeClub applications are no longer in service.
If you are trying to access your old emails so that you can forward them on to another address, use this url: http://legacy.collegeclub.com/mail.
This Service will only be available until Friday, March 16th, 2007.
Here is what the email login screen last looked like in March, 2007:
If you type ‘http://www.collegeclub.com‘ into your browser you will be taken to Teen.com, which is, according to their web site the, “ultimate online destination for teens on celebrities, entertainment, music, and fashion.” I think what they mean to say was that they are a ‘destination for teens’ that covers ‘celebrities’, not “teens on celebrities,” which has an entirely different meaning.
Teen.com is owned and operated by Alloy Media, LLC, which is a New York based media company that is partners with Alloy Marketing and Alloy Entertainment. Alloy Media also owns Channel One News, which most know is a 12 minute news program for teens broadcast via satellite to middle schools and high schools across the United States.
The Internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.” -Facebook’s Little Red Book
For those looking for other ex-CollegeClub.com members, check out ExCollegeClubbers. The ‘tribe’ is “for everyone who wants to meet new friends, but in particular for ex members of Collegeclub.com…It used to be cool like Tribe and we have all lost contact with each other. So non-ex members and ex- members alike are invited to join.”
I was reading an article in WIRED magazine about Open-Source Hardware and how it is the newest trend to hit the open source market. It was mostly about the Arduino circuit boards, but towards the end began to mention David Rowe. I hadn’t remembered hearing his name before, but thought I may have used his products or been introduced to them in the past. A quick Google search and I am staring at this minimalist, humble-as-pie, mac daddy of projects. Check out this list:
I don’t have the time for these right now but would love to see them move forward – please contact me if you are interested.
This list inspired me to coin the term, “Stud in Geekdom”. Geeks who read this understand that this a) not easy stuff, b) is beneficial and useful, and c) varies in specialties, something that not everyone can do. Every once in a while I run across people like this and from now on I will start to track them as Studs in Geekdom.
If anyone has anyone, guy or girl, they would like to recommend for this honor, please post it in the comments.
It’s as if Chris Hardwick asked WIRED, “Is there anything I can do to re-inspire confidence in your magazine with Jason Cobb? He’s been reading your magazine since your covers featured tight-fisted EFF logos, even before Marc Andreesen launched Netscape. He’s the rebellious teenage hacker whose grown up to work in an office everyday, but still yearns for the fancifulness that only WIRED can bring. Let me bring it to him. Let me be the one.” And so, we get “Diary of a Self-Help Dropout” by Chris Hardwick, freelance writer, comedian, and musician.
Its a review of three self-help books including Allen’s Getting things Done, a feature favorite and life changer for Jason Cobb and millions of others around the globe. I busted out laughing on page 75 when he summarized Allen’s system for prioritization, “Explode my individual tasks into a philosophical framework incorporating my life’s ultimate purpose. Oh, OK. That’s all I have to do.” I’ve often felt the same way. One more quote that just reeks of Jason is on page 77 when Hardwick says of menial tasks, “You might as well write a check to ‘Failure’.” I think that if Jason just gives this issue a chance he might come to love WIRED again.
Best “Crash” Ever?
Jan 2009’s WIRED magazine sees more bells and whistles than ever before. There are more things going on, each page filled with sub-boxes, clues to guide you through the choose-your-own adventure that editor Chris Anderson wants every issue to be. The first article to stick out to me was by Scott Brown on page 66 entitled “Best Crash Ever.” What caught my eye was a reference to “The Great Facebook Panic!”. Okay, Scott, you have my attention. Go on. He does. The premise of the story is to imagine what the new depression, which starts in 2008 will look like now that we are in the digital age, but around half-way through the article, something started sounding familiar. The dystopian mix of technology and hard-times sounded like a sequel to Snow Crash and then it hit me. Why not have a sequel to Snow Crash set in today’s “metaverse” and economic slowdown. When the only thing we are good at as a nation is programming and pizza delivery, it pays to have tight wheels, friends you can trust, and a fast connection – even if it means living in a U-Stor-It.
I emailed Scott Brown this message:
Great story in the Jan 2009 issue. Wondered if “Crash” was a wink to Stephenson’s Snow Crash? I didn’t think about this until about half-way through when I realized how your article could be construed as a premise for a sequel to Neal’s epic.
And he replied a little over a month later:
Oh dude. I wish!
The lines between television and the Internet have been blurring so long I hereby no longer define television as a device which sits in your living room, but as a medium that can be played anywhere. I can play television on any device I choose. I have come not to be thankful that the shows I see on traditional television networks are available online, but to expect it – and when they are not, I am shocked, then angry.
I can view television on my LG cellphone, my Apple iPhone, my HP netbook, my Dell Desktop. I can play TV on the Internet through a network’s website such as ABC.com, NBC.com, or CBS.com, or through aggregate networks like Hulu.com. My favorite, by far though is on Netflix using their instant viewing feature. My wife now watches more shows on Netflix than on our XP Media Center PC, which saves shows from cable television.
Wired Magazine ran an article April 2007 entitled, “The TV Is Dead. Long Live the TV”. The gist is that, “TV is evolving into something new and hardly recognizable to generations raised on its earlier incarnations.” This evolution is more of a time-and-space separation. Where and what we watch is no longer coupled with a specific device, location, or time of day. But what does this do to the previous culture we had whereby office cooler or dinner table talk revolved around the happenings of a popular show? The term “popular” is now somewhat irrelevant. You might even go as far to say that going forward, markets won’t exist, only niches and micro-niches.
In the photo you can see me pointing out “proof” that Snuffaluffagus exists. This is a sort of inside-joke between peers of my generation who grew up watching Sesame Street back when Big Bird was the only one who could see “Snuffy.” This was also back when the Cookie Monster actually was allowed to eat cookies, but both have changed. Nowadays, are there enough children watching Sesame Street to allow for such inside-jokes? This isn’t a problem, per se, but just a reflection of our times. You might even say, “The Market is Dead. Long Live the Market.”