Here’s a head-scratcher.

Meganet, the company that makes the portable system that can intercept phone calls (only to be sold to law enforcement in the US, mind you), has on their homepage code that could take over the page entirely (also known as an ad tag — from Google — they also have YouTube videos on the site).

I guess building hardware for intercepting messages doesn’t mean your website is clean and free of security risks; or maybe everyone trusts Google

*Sigh*

I contact Fox Sports in order to see how we can get AT&T Uverse to add Fox Soccer Plus where all the rugby is shown (yes it is odd that the Soccer Plus channel has Rugby on it, but never mind) and having just visited the Uverse site as a customer, I get an ad encouraging me to sign up for the service. Check out the screenshot here [new window] that I also helpfully will post to the Fox folks.

Thanks Microsoft Advertising. Thanks AT&T – and other vendors who helped make it happen. The danger of putting ads on a website.

This is mostly a coincidence and/or just wasteful targeting – but the main thing that irks me is actually the little AdChoices icon in the ad. This indicates that this ad was “interest-targeted” (the new name for behavioral targeting) but silly me, expecting a page that tells me how it was targeted I get a generic page [new window] that tells me that Microsoft Advertising served it and how I can opt-out. How bout instead you let me delete whatever information that led me to get THIS ad served to me? Not possible.

Deja vu all over again – I’ve always been annoyed by telcos like Comcast and At&t sending me messages encouraging me to sign up for their service when I’m already a customer – and later realized obviously it might be cheaper for them to do that than to send it to only non-customers: but i really thought we could expect better online.

I received the email this morning from the CEO of Rubicon Project, Frank Addante – it looks like Rubicon is “sacrificing” millions of dollars of ad revenues by not competing with its partners. Yay! Thanks Rubicon (oh I kid the kids from the Southland!) -  we’ll see how this storyline develops. [also links into the questions about the future of ad networks we're having on Quora.com] I’m guessing it was pub relationships and some LA-based developers they are mostly buying. Though curious what the “complete platform” is: maybe it’s in the release I haven’t read yet …. Here’s the email:

NEWS ANNOUNCEMENT: the Rubicon Project has acquired the Fox Audience Network (FAN)!

Greetings!

Today we are tremendously excited to announce that the Rubicon Project has acquired the Fox Audience Network (FAN), one of the Web’s most advanced advertising technology platforms, to significantly expand our team in the areas of product and engineering, and continue driving rapid revenue growth for our premium publishers. The acquisition also accelerates the Rubicon Project’s plan to deliver premium Web publishers like you a complete, end-to-end display advertising platform.

In addition to the acquisition news, we’ve achieved profitability significantly ahead of our plan, and raised $18MM in additional funding.

Click here to be directed to the press release with all the details. A couple of points to highlight:

• the Rubicon Project is not, and will not be, an ad network. We chose not to acquire the advertising sales team that FAN built, sacrificing many millions in annual revenue in so doing. Selling directly to the advertisers that your in-house sales team is reaching out to would put us in conflict with you, our customer, and we won’t do that;

• We are targeting a launch of the complete platform for Spring 2011. Stay tuned for more news on this, as well as forthcoming sneak peeks…

We have long believed publishers need a better choice. A choice that gives your business the technology, scale and data advantage it needs to compete in an ever-more complex marketplace. FAN’s technology team and assets combined with our financial position and market share mean the Rubicon Project is better poised than ever to offer you that choice. Which is why we say now, more than ever:

Power to the Publishers!

Frank Addante
CEO & Founder

I’ve been blogging for a long time now – the initiation point was Michael Gartenberg encouraging Jupiter Research (now Forrester) to create a blog for its analysts. I like writing (though sometimes I have to force myself to make time for it!) and writing a blog post was always a great way to talk about relevant research or react to news stories, or just ideas bumping around in my head.

It’s great to sound smart and thoughtful about your industry and other things that are related to it, and even things totally unrelated. Being quoted in the WSJ is wonderful, but lets face it that doesn’t happen that often. When a CEO blogs, the company’s stakeholders know their leader is thinking, and often thinking ahead: he/she writes about big picture issues that might not even be problems they’re dealing with yet -  a CEO who is unafraid to express viewpoints about important issues (e.g. the pre-revenue CEO talking about how one should treat customers in their view based on what they see in everyday situations) can instill confidence in employees, investors and partners alike even before the company has a product in market.

I really believe that tech startup CEOs have to make time to blog. Not just on their company’s blog, but also elsewhere in a venue that can be somewhat freer and not as constrained by thoughts of marketing and positioning. And I don’t mean Tweeting either. Twitter is great and startup ceo’s must tweet too (don’t get me wrong), but you need a spot where you can put up more detailed, reasoned viewpoints and discussions that won’t fit into one or more 140-character bursts. I recently have come to enjoy posting on Quora.com, but I think the tech CEO can still find a destination audience for their thoughts.

Writing and sharing thoughts is a great way to learn about new technologies that you might not yet be using in your business. When your clients see you sharing information on a blog, they know that you really care about creating a conversation and communications stream with others, and often they see the passion you have about the stuff you’re working on and that authenticity certainly comes through.

Focus is very important for a startup leader, but so is not ignoring ideas and changes happening elsewhere. I think prospective employees want to get a sense that their leader can take a step back and isn’t always bogged down by details if it doesn’t serve, but can put them into perspective and drive their team to solve problems.

You get to frame the conversation and a lot of the time as the leader of a dynamic startup you’re not going to have that chance to make the first move. Take the chance to share your message on your own terms.

I used Square this weekend for a small moving sale. Square is (in my case) an iPhone app with a little credit card reader you plug into the earphone jack of the phone that you can then use to swipe credit cards. There were a couple of categories of potential transactors as you might imagine:

• People I knew, who trusted me (neighbors)
• People I’d never met, who were tech savvy
• People I’d never met, who were not as tech savvy

So, the neighbors also were fairly tech savvy and it didn’t seem a stretch that something like this might be possible. They may have seen such an application e.g. at the Apple Store where wireless PDA-type credit card readers are commonplace. They were also quite happy to give it a try and have me email them a receipt. The other types of people were more interesting.

The responses were fairly predictable – one person asked how does this thing work? Though really, most people seemed to think the technology made sense and it was possible; credit card swipers in stores are understood by most to be a telecom-like device. One older gentleman asked me if I was going to store his credit card number – a good question, of course I said I never see the number it gets sent straight to the processor, and if anything bad happens he can call the credit card company of course. (Not something the merchant really wants to be talking to the buyer about though at the best of times) This same person wasn’t sure if they should sign their name or something else, but I said just use your finger to sign your name and that was okay. The email receipt worked well, though another person asked if I was going to send them some email later — I said no. Etiquette about who enters the email address remains unresolved though mostly it’s me except in just one case where they typed it in.

Overall, a good experience for me and the buyers – some issues that will clearly come up from these initial observations: as is usual with payments, there will be issues around trust of the payment mechanism as distinct from trusting the merchant (and especially if that is an unknown). Credit card safeguards already have a lot of mindshare so that helps – but as Square extends to less tech/finance-savvy customers it’s likely they will have to get their name out there to be seen as a trusted payment brand as well.

Good luck to Jack Dorsey, Keith Rabois and the rest of the Square team with that – it’s a very cool concept and as usual the payments space could use some more disruption.

How long until very specialized dedicated devices are replaced by applications and procedures surrounding multi-purpose personal devices – or put another way, when will the solar-powered dynamic parking meter be replaced by the mobile device parking payment app?

Using this example as illustrative, these dedicated devices are quite expensive, and what they really amount to is:
- a database with user and admin/overseer reporting
- a user interface, acceptance of funds
- storage/retrieval for funds by admin

Old-school parking meters (coins, one per parking spot) have user and admin reporting that is the same little mechanical flag system, and that is in the same place as where the user’s vehicle is parked. Their user interface is very simple and easy to understand, and the funds collection is very cumbersome requiring an individual visit to each one to collect.

Most of us have seen variations, updates and improvements on this (though some have also spent several minutes stuck behind someone who was having trouble figuring out some new variety) like “pay and display” the paper on the car dashboard, the “4 in 1″ meter with numbered spaces etc. Some of them allow nearby remote monitoring capabilities for parking enforcement, faraway monitoring, solar power, etc etc but it strikes me that dedicated hardware is cumbersome and unnecessary when this problem could be addressed by specific software running on smart client devices. At some point, it becomes economically desirable (when considering not just this problem but many others that face us every day and that are either grudgingly borne – like lining up for things – or inefficiently addressed by single purpose solutions) to give out devices to people.

With the database and the backend of a payment system in the “cloud”, all that’s left is the right user interface which can live on the user’s smart device. And is subject to the kind of rapid innovation that can happen in software and is harder to happen in hardware. The revision and update cycles are much faster – and boom, you’re “checking in” to your parking space and paying for it on your phone. Imagine: “Rob just got a parking ticket on Sansome street.” Status updates will never be the same! Well, perhaps we won’t choose to share that little fact, but I’d love to see these ‘boring’ services exposed to some serious connected innovation.

The “singularity” is the tipping point where every single person has a smart device because the cost/benefit of provision of the majority of public and private services make much more sense with them, instead of without them (e.g. for equivalent functionality, cost of giving a device to everyone who doesn’t have one already is < cost of dedicated devices in aggregate), and probably there are penalties for not using one and/or services are not provided to those who lack devices. Think social networks matter now? Just wait…

I will spend some future posts further analyzing my thought process around this, but it is wholly clear to me that we are shifting to smart clients, software- and network-driven that will next change the actual physical architecture of where we work, play and live.

Did you know (from wikipedia and wikipedia here as well):

• In 2009, world energy consumption decreased for the first time in 30 years (-1.1%) or 130Mtoe, as a result of the financial and economic crisis.
• In 2008, total worldwide energy consumption was 474×10¹⁸ J (474 exajoules) with 80 to 90 percent derived from the combustion of fossil fuels, equivalent to an average power consumption rate of 15 terawatts (1.504×10¹³ W), .
• 1.5×10²²J, the total energy from the Sun that strikes the face of the Earth each day
• 3.9×10²² J, the estimated energy contained in the world’s fossil fuel reserves as of 2003

So basically two days’ worth of sun power (if you could capture all of it which you couldn’t) is equal to all the fossil fuel reserves we have left. Fun with numbers!

Just a fantastic book about why a lot of what we think about exercise and sports performance is wrong. Too bad for runners — Body by Science.

By the team at XA.net‘s count, from Facebook’s own figures, about 495,362,600 users. Still a lot, perhaps the other 4.6mm or so are from other countries than the 186 listed, or people who live on the moon or whatever. Here’s the data in an excel sheet, along with country populations from Wikipedia for all to use as they wish (but please keep attribution intact).

Here’s the top 25 – Southeast Asia has made a big push:

Here is the full data file in Excel. Enjoy!

I just received a letter from a Financial Advisor at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management (part of Bank of America Corporation). In it, it says that “Mortgage rates are at some of their lowest historic levels” and that “For over 25 years, we have been offering innovate refinancing solutions and one of the broadest product spectrums in the industry. We have [my emphasis added] distinct options such as interest-only payments and 100% financing, as well as great rates on traditional fixed-rate mortgages.”

Yes, please promote the kinds of teaser programs that caused the huge subprime mortgage mess which in turn pretty much destroyed your company and lost you (and the American taxpayer unfortunately) over $50 billion in 2008. Cognitive dissonance is alive and well, and living in financial America.

“Smart solutions that make the most of your total financial situation – that’s the Merrill Lynch Advantage.”