The Mike Abundo Effect

Anime CG Girls

Mike Abundo — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:23:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered what anime girls would look like in real life? CG artist Chris Scarborough does. In fact, he renders realistic portraits of girls with anime features, big eyes and all.

Years of watching anime must have warped my idea of beauty. I don’t know whether these portraits are pretty or creepy.

(Via Danny Choo.)

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Firefox Revenues Up

Mike Abundo — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:15:15 +0000

How do you make money giving something away for free? Ask the Mozilla Foundation, who manage the development of the open source Firefox browser. They just released their financial statements for 2007. Late as those statements are, they look really good for the upstart browser.

“Mozilla’s revenues (including both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation) for 2007 were $75 million, up approximately 12% from 2006 revenue of $67 million. As in 2006 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google,” says Mozilla Foundation Chairperson Mitchell Baker.

Firefox reached 20% market share earlier this month. On a geekier scale, 48% of this blog’s readers use Firefox. What was once a deemed a toy exclusively for geeks is now recognized by a fifth of all netizens as an extensible tool for everyday tasks.

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PC Magazine Abandons Print

Mike Abundo — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:41:49 +0000

PC Magazine, an icon of IT journalism since 1982 and home of the famous cranky geek John C. Dvorak, will see its last issue roll off the presses in January 2009. Do not weep for PC Magazine, however. They’re not closing down. Instead, they’ll do what all old media publications will inevitably do: shut down their print edition and focus on their more profitable online properties.

On the online side [Ziff Davis CEO Jason Young] wouldn’t disclose the revenues for the PCMag brand, but said it was in “tens and tens of millions” of dollars. He said the revenues on the online side have grown an average of 42 percent yearly since 2001; digital is about 70 percent of the revenues for the PCMag brand, and overall is profitable. He said that despite the economic situation, the PCMag brand revenues grew about 18 percent in Q308, and thinks that it will hold up despite advertising downturn due to the power of the brand.

What’s truly amazing is that, out of 140 employees at PC Magazine, only seven were actually involved with the print edition.

I can already hear the print media guys reassuring themselves: sure PC Mag’s online properties are more profitable, but that’s only because their readers are total computer nerds who spend all day on that Internet thing. To those people, I say: today’s geekery is tomorrow’s trend.

PC Magazine abandoning print should serve as a reminder to everyone in media that your website isn’t just a brochure for your “real” show/magazine/newspaper/whatever. Your website is your business, especially in the media business.

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Intel Core i7 Turbo Boost

Mike Abundo — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:02:30 +0000

Of all the new features in the Intel Core i7 processor, I’m most excited about Turbo Boost. You have got to love a machine that automatically pushes itself into overdrive. The Knight Rider reference certainly doesn’t hurt.

Turbo Boost should be especially useful for people who run various numbers of applications throughout the workday. Will you be getting a Core i7?

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Minority Report Computer

Mike Abundo — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 07:36:31 +0000

Think of it as the Power Glove with big-screen TVs. One of the science advisors on Minority Report, John Underkoffler, founded a company called Oblong Industries to make Tom Cruise’s fancy computers a reality. The result is G-speak, a spatial operating system using huge monitors and clunky mittens.

Sure, spatial computing looks impractical now, but so did multitouch early last year. Now it’s on iPhones.

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Yahoo Seeks New CEO

Mike Abundo — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:37:43 +0000

Can you save Yahoo from its fallen stock price, its hemorrhage of talent, its loss of a Google deal, its damaged credibility from Jerry Yang’s backpedaling, and its utter humiliation at the hands of Steve Ballmer? Then get your resume ready, because Yahoo is hiring a new CEO!

Yes, that’s right. After having him as CEO for only seventeen months, Yahoo’s board has finally realized founder Jerry Yang is too wishy-washy to lead. First he publicly bashes tech-clueless corporate raider Carl Icahn on Yahoo’s front page in a desperate bid to save the company, then he gives Icahn three seats on the board and deletes his bash post. First he fights off a takeover bid from Microsoft by allying with Google, then he tries to offer Yahoo to Microsoft once Google leaves him.

I’m all for a vibrant and independent Yahoo, but I have no respect for a leader who can’t stand his ground. Anyone who can do that is probably more qualified to lead Yahoo than Yang.

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Multiply is Cheap. ABS-CBN is Stupid.

Mike Abundo — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:19:19 +0000

Last year, also-ran social network Multiply stepped into a petty third-world TV network war by entering into an ad deal with Philippine TV station ABS-CBN. Now Multiply gets pwned in that war — literally. ABS-CBN now owns 5% of Multiply, for the ridiculous price of $5 million.

The sad part is, neither company knows what they’re really offering each other aside from five million dollars for three million Filipino Multiply users. Consider the following statement from ABS-CBN Interactive head Paolo Pineda:

Multiply is a natural fit for ABS-CBN. It is the social network that is most consistent to our business model because they have focused on photo, video and blog features compared to the other social networks such as Friendster and Facebook, which focus on connecting friends and running applications… With this investment, we now have a commitment to the social networking industry and we believe it is here to stay.

You don’t want a social network that focuses on connecting friends? Isn’t connecting friends the whole point of a social network? If you want something focused on media, why don’t you just apply for the YouTube partner program through your US office? It would cost you far less than five million dollars, create a new ad revenue stream for your existing shows, and bring you far less PR headaches.

All ABS-CBN is really getting out of this is three million Filipino users, at $1.67 each. ABS-CBN could have probably gotten that and more for free with a YouTube deal, but that’s too far above their heads. They don’t understand things like content superdistribution or audience engagement or viral marketing or customer evangelism or online video. All they understand is buying Filipinos like cheap mindless eyeballs.

I’d hate to be Multiply CEO Pete Pezaris right now. While Mark Zuckerberg rides high on Facebook’s $15 billion valuation, Pete has to convince some third-world TV station that Multiply is even worth $100 million. We always knew Multiply was cheap; now this deal shows us just how cheap.

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Why Friendster Went Down

Mike Abundo — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:14:41 +0000

The data center power outage that brought down Friendster didn’t just leave them powerless. It also left their data center soaked in fire suppressant.

“Regrettably, the maintenance did not go as planned and we suffered a catastrophic UPS failure at 8:22 am Pacific Standard Time,” said Mark Waddington, President of Quality Technology Services, in an incident report for customers. “The UPS failed to stand in and smoothly transfer power from the utility to the temporary generators due to a voltage regulator problem with the temporary generators. The failure resulted in the triggering of the FM200 (fire suppression) system in the enclosed battery room and the subsequent EPO as part of our life safety system.”

FM200 is a popular fire suppression system that uses a chemical “clean agent” rather than water. The EPO (Emergency Power Off) button instantly cuts power in the data center when a situation presents a risk to worker safety or equipment.

The Santa Clara facility was back on generator power within two hours, but Friendster remained offline for more than 23 hours over three days. While it has been eclipsed in the U.S. by MySpace and Facebook, Friendster has seen strong growth in international markets (particularly the Philippines) and says it has 85 million users.

When Friendster came back online, many of its users found large chunks of their friend lists missing, triggering rumors that the site had been hacked.

Friendster’s spotty data caching caused slow updates in years past, and contributed to its decline in the face of MySpace and Facebook. In the face of disaster, that problem returns to hound Friendster.

As a result, the memory caching of data was affected. Since Friendster has 85 million users, the cache is taking a considerable amount of time to build. Once the cache has been completely built, all friends will re-appear.

Notes to self: do not host sites at “Quality” Technology Services, and do not concentrate social graph on Friendster. Notes to Friendster: make data cache less volatile, find a better data center, and keep customers informed during a crisis through a corporate blog in a separate data center.

(Via Jim Ayson.)

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Guild Wars: More Ways to Earn Points!

Mike Abundo — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 08:19:08 +0000

The highly modular design of Guild Wars is meant to create less grind than World of Warcraft, but some of its progression tracks still encourage a very limited set of extremely repetitive tasks. It’s not that I’m too lazy to improve my characters (My primary warrior is already a Legendary Sunspear in Nightfall and a Legendary Delver in Eye of the North.), it’s just that I’d like more ways to improve my characters.

I’ve lost count of the thousands upon thousands of convicts I’ve systematically executed in the Jade Arena just to earn Luxon ranks in Factions. I can still see their faces when I close my eyes, and they’re all the same.

That’s why I heave a sigh of relief as ArenaNet introduces a whole bunch of new ways to earn points in various title tracks across Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North. Further expanding a game mechanic introduced in the Bonus Mission Pack, they’ve also implemented storybooks across all campaigns.

It’s a long, long list of changes, but it’s all good for those of us who want a little more variety in our quests for self-improvement. Check out the full changelog at the Guild Wars wiki.

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Friendster Down. Who Cares?

Mike Abundo — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 03:12:35 +0000

Five million Filipinos can’t find their friends this morning, because Friendster is down. Jim Ayson’s contact at the social networking service says the downtime is due to a power outage at Friendster’s US data center.

To be fair, Friendster is trying to engage the local blogosphere in a key geographic market. Most of their users are in the Philippines, where I also happen to be based. They invited me to a roundtable with their marketing guy the other day, but I was too busy to come. Nevertheless, all the marketing in the world cannot make up for service outages.

Of course, Facebook is now the world’s number one social network, so we’ve still got that to keep up with our friends. I’m going to watch the traffic stats on this post to see if anyone still cares about Friendster.

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The Mike Abundo Effect

Anime CG Girls

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