I Will Never Buy Christmas Gifts Again

By Mark Evans in Main Page 5 Comments

…..at a bricks and mortar store.

Call it an epiphany or just a harsh realization that physically shopping for Christmas/holiday presents is for suckers. It’s a mind-numbing, frustrating and painful experience at the best of times as you frantically search for the “perfect” gift at the exact time as everyone else is looking for the perfect gift.

Case in point: I ruined a stress-free holiday season by visiting the Chapters book store near my office. After wandering around for 30 minutes, I finally find a CD for my wife (aka el jeffa) – perhaps not the perfect gift but definitely solid. But when I go to pay for it, there are 25 other people trying to do business with two cashiers.

Boom. CD hits the nearest display, and I’m outta there. If I ever shop again at Chapters, it will be online.

The bizarre part about Christmas shopping is lots of people enjoy it. Although it’s a lot of work, it must be the thrill of the hunt or perhaps the notion that you’re showing someone how much you care by buying them a great gift. In theory, it’s a nice, romantic idea but you can accomplish the same thing by going online.

Update: According to comScore, holiday e-commerce spending in the U.S. from Nov. 1 to Dec. 18 was $25-billion, 19% higher than the entire holiday spend last year. Here’s an interesting chart showing spending overall and on particular days.

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More: David Utter has some thoughts on the market’s growth.

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Think Again, Think

By Mark Evans in Apple/iPod, Blogs No Comments

Apologies for the Apple-fest today but….Apple has succeeded in shutting town Think Secret, which was probably driving Steve Jobs to distraction for publishing all kinds of rumors about the world’s hottest tech company.

Apple had released its legal hounds against Think Secret, and it has now reached a settlement that will see Think Secret stop publishing.

There are lots of important issues in play, including a blog’s right to freedom of expression and the ability to protect sources just like “real” journalists do.

Then, you’ve got Apple’s behaviour, which is strange and somewhat bizarre given that in the scheme of things, Think Secret a microcosm of the stuff written about Apple within the blogosphere and the mainstream media. Maybe Think Secret was so accurate in its reporting that it was making Apple crazy due to competitive concerns?

For more, check out TechDirt, which calls the shutdown of Think a “travesty”.

Update: CNet’s Dan Reisinger wonders if Apple is in danger of becoming Microsoft.

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Another Leopard Update?

By Mark Evans in Apple/iPod No Comments

It looks like the launch of Leopard is a multi-month process given there’s yet another update on the way.

According to Apple Insider, this update (which is separate from the security and keyboard update recently unveiled) will be 37 items, and address bugs with Data Detectors, the Mac OS X Dock, the Finder, grammar checking, iCal, iChat, Mail, Parental Controls, Quick Look, Rosetta, Safari, Time Machine, and Leopard’s 802.11 AirPort implementation.

Hey, I know that nothing is perfect, especially when it comes to new software, but the release of Leopard is increasingly looking premature. Then again, there must have been tremendous pressure on Apple to get Leopard out the door given there had already been one delay and, as important, Apple had a golden opportunity to take advantage of Vista’s troubles.

Still, you wonder how long Apple can rely on the goodwill and patience of its growing legion of users given some of its luster is beginning to disappear. At some point, they may start treating Apple like a regular company.

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A New Approach to Friends on Facebook

By Mark Evans in Web 2.0 4 Comments

Mark Cuban‘s on to something interesting with Facebook.

With 5,000 FB friends (and counting), Cuban has decided to divide (and conquer?) his FB network into three tiers: real friends, people with whom he has some sort of connection, and people who are interesting because they have influence or power (aka “other”).

I wouldn’t be surprised if FB launches a service soon where you can divide and tier your “friends” into mini-groups. This would let you create different profiles for different groups – e.g. a friends and family profile, a serious business profile and a cool, hip social profile.

While I have nowhere near the number of FB friends as Cuban, I’m already having a bad case of FB Regret because I’ve got family and friends mixed up with business colleagues and people who I don’t know.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have created two FB profiles: Mark Evans (Friends & Family) and Mark Evans (Business). This would have let me communicate and act in two different ways. For friends and family, I would post photos and provide a few updates on what’s happening my personal life, while the business network would be focused on where I work (PlanetEye), the conference I help organize (mesh), etc.

I like Cuban’s new approach, although I’m not sure how he’s going to effectively implement it with some help from FB.

Mashable’s Mark Hopkins has some thoughts about how to make Facebook more useful. It includes a suggestion to: “limit the chaos, and let me organize my contacts by priority, rather than attempting to set up intricate filters to get rid of the incessant chatter and invitations that greet me each time I log in.”

Update: I’ve decided to test Cuban’s new approach by asking him to be my Facebook friend. Here’s hoping I make one of the three tiers! As well, I would disagree with All Facebook’s assertion that the newly-launched Friend Lists is a “killer app”. It’s a step forward but not a knock out punch and I have no clue why everyone is excited.

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Blogs: What’s the Big Deal?

By Mark Evans in Blogs 5 Comments

This video may not provide anything new to people who already read or write blogs but it’s a great tool to show and tell everyone else why blogs are so interesting – at least to those of us reading and writing them. It’s done by Commoncraft, which is carving out a well-deserved niche for explaining new online concepts in easy to understand ways.

Some of Commoncraft’s other videos include ones on social networking, RSS, Wikis and social bookmarking.

Hat tip to Tom Raftery who posted the video today.

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Where are the IPOs?

By Mark Evans in M&A 1 Comment

In thinking about the latest speculation about Digg being on the market, it struck me that one thing oddly missing from the high-tech landscape is the IPO.

During the last dot-com boom, literally everyone did an IPO. If you have little or no revenue and no prospects of making a profit in the near future (or ever), it didn’t matter because there were suckers…er, investors willing to buy whatever you were selling. Fundamentals where thrown out the windows, and replaced by new-fangled metrics such as “eyeballs” and page views.

Today, there’s little talk about IPOs and few companies doing them. Here’s why – or least my theory on it:

1. Sarbanes-Oxley has made doing an IPO a royal pain in the butt, particularly for smaller companies who would find complying with the regulations to be expensive and time-consuming.

2. IPOs require an awful lot of management resources. After the excitement of the roadshow and the first day of trading, management has to continually pay attention to the stock and the investment community as opposed to just running the business.

3. In having to release financial results every quarter, there’s no place to hide if the business struggles. And management has to be very careful about everything they do and say so as to not violate disclosure rules. Wait until Facebook has more than 500 shareholders, and it’s force to file its financial results with the SEC.

4. Selling a company is clean and simple. You agree to the terms and, if needed, stick around for awhile and/or wait for a period of time being dumping all your shares.

This is not to suggest the tech IPO has become entirely extinct, it’s just that they have become a rarity.

More: Last week, the Classmates.com IPO was cancelled. Mashable suggests the deal wasn’t sell-able given the Federal Trade Commission is looking at the company’s practice of auto-renewing paid subscribers without their explicit consent. “There’s also the fact that Classmates.com has a very outdated business model (paid subscriptions) versus the social networking leaders of today”.

Update: It looks like NetSuite – Larry Ellison’s online accounting venture – will be going public later this week.

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