Pajama Entrepreneur

This is an amazing story of how three bloggers in Spain managed to create the most popular pro basketball site (Hoopshype) in the US. Never mind that one of them doesn’t even like the sport or that they’ve been blogging (and continue to blog) out of Madrid. Fantasy Sports Ventures bought Hoopshype from the founder, Jorge Sierra, for an amount in the low seven figures, according to the Wall Street Journal, and continues to blog with his colleagues.

I have also been running Muniwireless for several years out of Amsterdam and am often asked how I managed to become the authority on the US municipal wireless market. My answer: anyone can blog from anywhere and become an expert, if he or she is interested, writes well, has passion and . . . a good broadband connection. I can do my work from anywhere in the world as long as I have broadband. Indeed, if you make good money from ads on your site, why not live in a place that has good broadband but a lower cost of living? Why not Buenos Aires or Bangkok?

Geosign, a startup that raked in $160M in VC funding, blew up one year later after its business model — gaming the Google search engine — was effectively shut down via a change in Google’s algorithm. Read more here.

Posted on Rose Cantine last month:

•  Jason Calacanis on Internet pollution and how to stop it
• Users revolt: blog network turns out to be owned by a marketing agency

Think Secret, the popular Apple rumor site that once ruined Steve Jobs Mac Mini surprise, is shutting down after coming to a settlement with the company. Apple claims Think Secret violated Apple’s trade secrets by leaking out news of upcoming products and sadly, a judge agreed with Apple two years ago when the ompany sued Nick Ciarelli, who runs Think Secret. Ciarelli says that under the settlement, *at least* he does not have to divulge his sources. At least. Yeah, at least he isn’t in prison getting his fingernails pulled out.

Apparently, bloggers like Ciarelli are not entitled to the same protection that journalists have under the California reporter’s shield law (which says journalists do not have to divulge their sources).

What does this mean for bloggers who do investigative reporting on corporate fraud or dangerous materials in the things that corporations sell, the environmental damage they do?

It’s a tragic day for freedom of the press and investigative reporting, but will anyone in Mac-obsessed Silicon Valley even notice?

I don’t know whether to call Pudding Media the most loathesome business model in the world or the most cynical, or both. Pudding Media is the latest company to take advantage of the “free services in exchange for ads” business model. We’ve seen free Wi-Fi in exchange for viewing ads (MetroFi) and free mobile phone service supported by ads (Blyk).

Now comes Pudding Media, founded by two guys who used to do intelligence work for the military. You can see where they got their ideas. This is the ultimate monetization of phone surveillance or snooping. They have a web-based phone service that lets you call any phone number for free (in the US for now), but they (or rather their software) listen in on your conversations and display ads on your browser.

Here’s what the NY Times says:

. . . Pudding Media is eavesdropping on phone calls in order to display ads on the screen that are related to the conversation. Voice recognition software monitors the calls, selects ads based on what it hears and pushes the ads to the subscriber’s computer screen while he or she is still talking . . . The company’s model, of course, raises questions about the line between target advertising and violation of privacy. Consumer-brand companies are increasingly trying to use data about people to deliver different ads to them based on their demographics and behavior online. Pudding Media executives said that scanning the words used in phone calls was not substantially different from what Google does with e-mail. Still, even some advertising executives were wary of the concept.

You might think it’s not different from Gmail, Google’s free web-based mail service that delivers ads on the side. But I think it is. There’s something very intimate about phone calls and I would be completely freaked out if strangers, even if it were a software bot, were listening in on mine. Of course Pudding’s founders don’t think so, having been in the military intelligence business. Does it help them to have the former chief privacy officer of Microsoft on their advisory board? It depends on whether you think Microsoft is a friend or foe of privacy.

I think most people will be freaked out by the idea even though Pudding says they don’t record your conversations.

Where it might work well: the sex chat industry

But I can see where it would be quite popular: in the sex chat industry. The caller dials a number via Pudding’s web-based service, sees ads on the side while he or she is chatting — although I think this destroys the pay-per-chat business model of sex chat businesses unless they offer this free version to their customers in exchange for seeing ads on a web browser (and the ads actually make up the lose in revenue).

One of the fun things about blogging is being famous for … what people think you’re famous for (uncritical fan of any muni Wi-Fi project, Tropos fan girl, whatever). In my case, I built a blog called Muniwireless.com and turned it into a niche tech publishing company (with research products and conferences) with the help of Microcast Communications.

I am, and continue to be, a big fan of cheaper, faster broadband not just for geeks like me, but for everybody. I believe that to achieve fast, cheap ubiquitous broadband (not the 512 Kbps upstream junk that some people love to call broadband) but real broadband that allows high definition happiness via Joost or some other video on demand service, you will need: (a) a regime that has a real broadband policy that encourages competition on the service level and (b) structural separation (or in the interim, local loop unbundling with mix of infrastructure owned not by the same people trying to sell you Internet access). That means some government regulation is needed to ensure competition.

How do you know your home market has crappy broadband (and little competition)? Check out this article: US Broadband Speeds Can’t Support Joost. Replace “US” with the name your country — how fun is that? How does it feel to be a tech backwater falling further behind?

As a small entrepreneur, I am very sensitive to big firms with overwhelming market power squeezing out little gals like me. I am especially furious when big firms use their power to lobby corrupt and/or stupid politicians to devise rules that continue to let them have so much market power that they deprive me and my fellow entrepreneurs of choice — choice of broadband service level and price. That is why I am a big fan of the Amsterdam CityNet FTTH project and many of the fiber projects - private, public and private-public. No one model fits all but you need to think about which model to use to achieve the results you want. You cannot be doctrinaire about it and say “all government intervention is bad”. And I am still not happy with what I consider to be the very slow deployment of FTTH in the Netherlands. Like many governments, there are many in ours who think that it’s enough to have Telco versus Cable. Wrong!

So I am pissed off when a “think tank” residing at Reason.org who is nothing more than a front piece for the lobby-happy telecom industry starts saying that I will start sounding like them. I will slit my own throat before I become a telco sock puppet like them. I posted this comment on their blog:

Actually there is one reason I will never sound like you. I am not a telco sock puppet, like you. Where I live - Amsterdam - we are not waiting for the Invisible Hand to do its job with broadband. Europe is ahead and we are going to have Joost while the rest of America waits to get video on demand. I’m not saying government should do everything (I am an entrepreneur with several other businesses, Muniwireless is just one). I believe in looking at each situation and finding out what works best — sometimes you need more government help, sometimes you don’t. I am not a doctrinaire like you. And I don’t kiss TELCO ass.

I love Wordpress, the software behind this blog and Rosecantine. It’s easy to use, fun and versatile. And there’s a huge community of developers writing widgets and plugins, and creating beautiful templates for it. Mashable posted a list of more than 300 Wordpress tools so if you have not yet bookmarked that page, do so now.