What's Up, Mike? A Brief Talk with TechCrunch's Editor

Rob Hof

Mike Arrington's new CrunchGear blog won't be the end of his ambitions. Mike told me he's planning two more blogs in the next month, starting with gaming, probably by acquisition. That's on top of flagship TechCrunch, as well as MobileCrunch, CrunchTalk, Crunchnotes, and the recent Crunchboard job site.

What's up with all this? A blogging empire? Well, Mike doesn't put it that way, but it kinda sounds like it. His goal is to have 10 to 15 of them in his network. In fact, he says he hopes to create a sort of "distributed CNET," especially if a lot of other blogs in this increasingly crowded space hit the wall. "I'm hoping everything crashes," he says. "Then I want to go buy all the big blogs."

Regardless of if or when that happens, he's aiming to have the No. 1 blog in each category--a tall order, given the dominance of blogs like Gizmodo, more generalized job sites like Monster, blooming podcast sites, and so on. He thinks that for now, it's less a competition than an ecosystem, but even an ecosystem can support only so much flora and fauna. Nonetheless, this is one ecosystem worth watching.

Munch, Munch, More Crunch: Now It's CrunchGear

Rob Hof

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington has sure been busy. Tonight he debuted yet another site, CrunchGear, a new gadget blog headed by former Gizmodo editor John Biggs. As Mike describes it:

Expect CrunchGear to look like something between a pure blog and CNET Reviews. Our goal isn’t just to let you know about the hot new stuff coming out soon, but to also help you decide what kind of camera, laptop or MP3 player you want to buy as well.

Seems like I'm writing about a new TechCrunch site every few days. What's up with that? Find out in my next post.

GoogleBay?

Rob Hof

A group of fed-up eBay merchants is petitioning Google to start an auction site, following eBay's decision to hike rates on eBay Stores, according to a report in AuctionBytes. Those hikes have clearly struck a nerve with some sellers. Says one:

C'mon Google...you know you have what it takes to get an auction site going.... Please...let's show those guys that their time is almost up.....

Still, it seems highly doubtful that Google will decide to take on what is still eBay's stronghold because a few disgruntled eBay merchants ask it to. Google has plenty of other ways it's challenging eBay.

Mega GigaOM

Rob Hof

Om Malik's new site is up, packed with more features, like tabs for various sections and RSS feeds for each of those sections. Lots to digest. Bon voyage, Om.

Sliding out of Beta

Sarah Lacy

In the Web world, it’s fashionable to stay in Beta in perpetuity. But there are exceptions. Yesterday, Max Levchin’s Slide announced it was emerging from Beta-land. Levchin was the co-founder of PayPal and has been slogging away at Slide for about two years.

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As investors place bets on Cisco's stock, Cisco execs bet on the investors

Peter Burrows

If there was ever a company that seemed to have figured out the mysteries of investor behavior, it was Cisco Systems during its glory days in the 1990s. By beating quarterly estimates by a penny for seemingly years on end, the company managed to keep CSCO shares climbing in a nice predictable pattern: up and to the right.

Not anymore. In recent years, Cisco's top executives have become so mystified by Wall Street's unpredictable reaction to financial news that they each put down $20 when the company announces its quarterly numbers. The bet: who can guess where the stock will be 24 hours after the news hits the wire.

Take this quarter, when Cisco blew past analysts' growth targets, but with less impressive growth in profits. While clearly good news, senior vice president Charlie Giancarlo says the bets were all over the map. Given the near 10% run-up in CSCO shares in after-hours trading, Giancarlo admitted his guess was way too conservative. “I’m flabbergasted, but then I haven't been the winner very often."

Giancarlo says Cisco's operations and sales chief, Rick Justice, tends to take home the winnings most often. As for CEO John Chambers, "he's always the high bet. But then, John's generally an optimist.”

Giancarlo is the first to admit that Cisco never really did have investor's pegged as well as it seemed. “When you’re growing at 50-60% a quarter, it's not a sign that you really understand what investors are thinking. It's a sign that you're involved in a really hot market."

Still, I can understand this need to take bets, given what must seem like totally random--and usually disappointing--treatment from Wall Street. After all, it's been more than half a decade since Cisco righted its ship after the Net boom went bust. For the most part, it's put up numbers that other $20 billion-plus companies could only imagine--usually posting obscene net profits of more than 20%, while growing the top-line more than 10%. Of all of the maturing tech giants that have struggled to keep investors interested in recent years (think Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, IBM), Cisco has arguably done the most impressive job of maintaining profits while building new growth opportunities. Maybe this quarter's surprising growth figures will finally lead to a more coalesced view of the company among investors--and ease the need of Chambers & Co. to resort to gambling to help make sense of their world.

My$pace

Rob Hof

Suddenly, MySpace has a $900 million deal with Google that dwarfs the $580 million News Corp. paid for it. Is there now any doubt that social networks can make money? Now, whether MySpace can continue to keep fickle visitors coming is another question, but I think the business model questions have just been buried.

Muni Wi-Fi: Not Free For All

Olga Kharif

Many cities are currently trying to figure out how to pay for citywide Wi-Fi operation -- while offering the service to their residents for free. Many, like San Francisco, are counting on ad revenues from local businesses to raise much of the necessary funds. Alas, as a new study done by Craig Settles, of Successful.com, and sponsored by Embarq, indicates, local businesses aren't lining up to pay for Wi-Fi ads.

Of the 176 business owners surveyed, 57% say they won't be interested in buying Wi-Fi network ads. While the rest are more open to the idea, 45% of them say they'd only be willing to pay less than $100 per month for the ads. Chances are, it will take a long time to get to even $100, as, before they pay up, advertisers will want to see these networks reach critical mass of users.

What this means: To maintain and operate their Wi-Fi networks, cities are bound to look for alternative funding sources, to supplement advertising. Chances are, they will start charging user fees. While, today, most cities dream of free Wi-Fi networks, that will likely remain just that -- a dream.

The Meaning of "Made"

Rob Hof

Hoo boy. Lots of people have lots of issues with BusinessWeek's current cover story on Digg's Kevin Rose. What seemed to set off folks such as Scott Rosenberg most of all, though, was the cover language: "How This Kid Made $60 Million in 18 Months."

To no few number of people--including, I must admit, myself--the word "made" at least implies that Rose has the money in his bank account. Which he clearly does not, nor does his company. The $60 million refers to Rose’s 30% share of the $200 million valuation that some of authors Sarah Lacy's and Jessi Hempel's sources estimate. (And although that estimate understandably also has a lot of critics, $200 million doesn’t sound completely ridiculous in a time when MySpace’s $580 million buyout by News Corp. is now considered by some to be a steal. Of course, when you take a step back out of the green glow of Web 2.0, $200 mil actually IS ridiculous, but so are a lot of other Web 2.0 valuation estimates. Which is why, I also must admit, it would have helped to have someone on the record saying they'd pony up that kind of valuation for Digg.)

Now, reasonable minds can disagree on the meaning of “made." Chris Pirillo, for one, thinks the wording is OK (and he also thinks $200 million may be too LOW a valuation). But unlike my colleague Steve Baker and some others on the magazine, I think the fact that a lot of intelligent people read "made" to mean something different than what the magazine intended to convey is prima facie evidence that the cover language didn't hit the mark. If there's one place where language needs to be unambiguous, it's on the cover.

No, I'm not apologizing here for the magazine. It's not my place to do so, because I'm not the editor, didn't work on the story, and wasn't privy to this particular discussion about cover language. But I am saying that we hear the criticisms, even if not everyone here agrees with them. I also know that, contrary to the beliefs of some critics, the words on the cover are something that folks here take very seriously and debate vociferously. I’m betting the discussions on future cover language will be even more serious, and vociferous.

Prediction Markets Go Corporate

Rob Hof

My colleague Rachael King has an interesting collection of stories on prediction markets in BusinessWeek Online's latest CEO Guide to Technology. Just like they sound, these are markets set up to facilitate better predictions, whether it's a presidential election or--increasingly--corporate tasks such as sales predictions. The big challenge is setting up the proper incentives--some kind of real skin in the game, especially money, is crucial--and persuading managers that maybe they aren't as all-knowing as they would like to be.

Valley Boys

Rob Hof

My colleagues Sarah Lacy and Jessi Hempel [sorry, Jessi, left off your name at first!] have this week's magazine cover story about Digg's Kevin Rose and the new crop of startups. As I've told Sarah, I'm still a little uncertain how different things really are now in the Valley. For every brash entrepreneur who can afford to blow off VCs, there are 100 more who would give their left, uh, knee to get a few mil for their startups. But Kevin's clearly one of many who are trying to forge a new path, and it will be interesting to see how they fare. As Sarah and Jessi note, it may be easier and faster to start a company today, but it's also easy to fall just as fast. Especially when you've got powerful people gunning for you.

CrunchBoard: Jobs in the New Web

Rob Hof

There's a new kid on the crowded job board walk. As TechCrunch's Mike Arrington tells it:

A good percentage of emails coming to me every day are from people asking me which companies are hiring, or from companies asking me if I know someone who would be a good fit for a job.

I keep a separate email folder with these emails and introduce people as often as possible. But this isn’t a scalable system, and I wanted to do more to match companies with people. So we built a job board and launched it today at CrunchBoard.com. Now these people can connect directly.

Listings are $200 a pop, which makes me think Mike's being modest about his ambitions here.

Has Symantec Turned a Corner?

Sarah Lacy

Finally, Symantec had some undeniably good news when it reported earnings on July 26. Ok the profit numbers looked bad thanks to some merger related expenses. But revenue for the quarter was $1.26 billion, up from $699.9 million last year, better than analysts expected. Even the bears were grasping at arguments as the stock shot up more than 10% over two days to close the week at $17.42.

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Innovation overload

Steve Hamm

Innovation is in grave danger of becoming the latest overused buzzword. We're doing our part at Businessweek. And so is IBM with its big innovation marketing campaign. The danger is when you use a word too much it starts to lose its shape. So I was brimming with skeptism a couple of days ago when I was visited by Curtis R. Carlson, chief executive of SRI International and co-author of a new book, Innovation: the Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want. Could a book with innovation as the title get beyond platitudes and actually be worthwhile? Well, I was pleasantly surprised. Of course, SRI itself has a tremendous amount of credibility built up over 60 years of being a lab for hire to corporations. But Carlson's deceptively simple thesis for bringing discipline to innovation makes solid sense--and could make a difference for companies that, indeed, are under the gun to innovate or die.

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A big shift coming for mobile applications

Steve Hamm

New uses for smart phones seem to be popping out of the woodwork. I know this because my 18-year-old son, Daniel, is one of zillions of teen-agers who are lining up online these days to buy the new Sidekick III hybrid cellphone/camera/Web browser/PDA/musicplayer from Sharp. But the gadgets and services we're seeing now just scratch the surface of what's possible. In the background, all sorts of technology foundation building is going on that will impact the markets a year or two from now. For instance, the effort by the OSGi Alliance to advance capabilities for downloading software upgrades to mobile (in fact, any) devices. Mobile mashups, anyone?

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