Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

I just installed IE beta 2 preview and I was interested in checking out their RSS reading support. So I went to digg, click on the RSS icon, load the feed and browse through. I found on the digg web site a link to a post from Asa Doztler, an original Firefox team member, where he details why IE 7 still falls short to Firefox. After loading his blog post
into IE 7, it displayed a security report next to the URL saying that his blog was a "Suspicious Web Site", no wonder Microsoft things that when he is saying that "IE users are suffering all of the changes for the worse and missing out on some
of the changes for the better", "it was Firefox that forced this realization on them" and that Microsoft
is following Firefox’s lead when it comes to end-user features.

You can check this out yourself going to Asa’s post here.

CD

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There are actually three companies in Europe, the map is centered in the US (those self-centered americans…) but if you scroll to the right you can actually see three red flags in Europe.

How I found out about this? Through this post from Fleck, a company that refers to themselves as a “patent pending, world changing, paradigm shifting and user experience enhancing technology. Tagging, search, blog, AJAX and social networking, every WEB2.0 hype is covered.” Pretty funny, their blog is worth reading, no idea what they do though, it might not actually be a company and just a pretty cool way of publicize a blog.

CD

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One of the most interesting Google Maps mash-ups I have seen so far.

Check it out here.

Zoom in to see how many companies are in California, actually, I was surprise about the amount of companies on the East coast as well and about the absolute lack of companies in some major cities like D.C.

CD

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Today I had time to open my RSS reader for few hours, something I had not done for a while, I love the new version of Omea Reader and I found the Newspaper View option the best way so far to browse through blogs quickly. Just one recommendation, I want the post to be marked as read as soon as it is on my screen, I do not want to have to move the mouse pointer or to click on the post to mark it as read.

CD

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My sister recently recommended me Ben Stilller’s Zoolander so I got it in Netflix recently and watch it on my way to Tokyo. Pretty funny comedy and very intelligent parody of the world of male models ("3% body fat and 1% brain activity"). I loved David Duchovny self-parody of Mulder from X-Files. Since there are so many cameos in the movie, I checked IMDB to see how many I identified and I discovered that the actor playing the role of the model agent, who plays Frank Constanza, George’s father in Seinfield, one of my favorite characters, is actually Ben Stiller’s father. He was a famous comedy actor in the 60’s so no wonder I did not know him prior to Seinfield. He is very funny so clearly Ben Stiller has inherited his comedy skills from him.
Btw, in Xmas I got an special DVD set with seasons 5 and 6 of Seinfield that included a mini replica of the "puffy shirt" that Jerry Seinfield wears in one episode and that is now part of my apartment decoration.

CD

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Interesting video interview of John Doerr (from Kleiner Perkins) about Web 2.0. Obviously, he does not think that we are in a bubble, just a boom.
My favorite part, his comment about blogs: : “There are more bloggers than blog readers”

CD

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More news on this, too interesting too let it go (this is probably the most interesting thing on TV in Japan now together with my newly arrived set of DVDs of the 4th season of Keifer Sutherland’s 24). Apparently, yesterday they just discovered a complicated money laundering scheme to avoid paying taxes that Livedoor was using with a paper company in HongKong, then the Virgin Islands in the UK and finally an account in Switzerland. I also saw the first images of reporters inside the Livedoor headquarters and some of the employees explaning how they are removing references to Horiemon from the offices to deattach themselves from him. Another interesting fact is that now Livedoor market cap is lower than their cash balance that is more than $1BB currently, it seems that the stock is about to be delisted so it will be interesting to know what happens with the company since certainly some of their business are very properly run business with customers and profits. I read recently that Enron actually still exists as a company since they are still selling some of the assets that Enron owned when it bankrupted, some of them as big a Portland Electric which is still owned by Enron. The same thing can happen with Livedoor and we can start seeing how the company starts to sell all their assets within the next few months (or years) before the company dissapears.

Carlos

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I am in Tokyo and have been working on my computer this morning while I had the TV on. I already saw like three different programs that had Livedoor related news. While in the US the Livedoor scandal is no longer news (in fact, some financial media like the Wall Street Journal seemed to be more concerned on the effect it had on the Tokyo Exchange system and on the nikkei index than on the Livedoor scandal itself) here is certainly still big news. Horiemon pissed off a lot of old-school Japanese people and media and now he is paying big time. One of the programs I saw this morning had a very interesting poll among companies listed in the Mothers stock exchange (where Livedoor still is listed) and the impact of the Livedoor scandal on their stock price. They highlighted that 75% of the high tech companies where affected while only 35% of the non high tech where. Then they went onto interviewing the CEO of a wheel chair manufacturer that is listed in Mothers. He explained that since his company was manufacturing “physical goods” (wheel chairs) they were “in touch with the customers” and therefore they had not been affected by the scandal as Internet companies. The obvious implication was that Internet companies that were not manufacturing physical goods were out of touch with the customers and they were not as good as his company. It was pretty disturbing to hear this and it shows how there is still a lot of old-school thinking in part of the Japanese society. Horie had a chance of changing this but by doing something illegal, it has actually backfired and now the perception of a lot of people is going to be that Internet companies are all corrupt.

As I write this, there are again news about Livedoor on TV, fourth time this morning (and I have not changed the channel), this will certainly will be my entertainment this coming week….

Carlos

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