Rafe's Blog

An uncomfortable meeting about spyware

I met this week with a top exec of an anti-spyware company. His firm is in the business of preventing damage caused by spyware. It’s a noble venture, yes? But this company also makes money from spyware — it charges for its spyware-fighting tools, the same way anti-virus vendors profit from their products.

Of course, even those pursuing noble goals deserve to make a buck, but after 90 minutes of talking with the folks from this company I realized how uncomfortable I had become. In order to keep their business going, they need spyware to continue as a threat. They’re close to the very element they’re trying to protect us from. No threat = no business.

I probably shouldn’t fee so weird. After all, insurance companies make money from the threat of tragedy too.

I did a CNET podcast on this topic.

Speaking of weird, though: Microsoft is said to be in talks to by spyware maker Claria. Reportedly it’s leading to some heated discussions in Redmond. Good.

Related: CNET.com on how to fight spyware and a comparison of anti-spyware tools.

The signal in the noise

Quick post: Herman Miller offshoot Sonare Technologies is developing a super-weird technology that gives acoustic privacy to an open cubicle by playing little scrambled snippets of your voice over a speaker. It automatically starts when you're on the phone. People can hear you, but they can't pick out your meaningful syllables from the sea of nonsense noises. It's like having your own psycho backup vocals. (Thanks, HardOCP and Wired News.)

Dell factory tour

I just visited Dell in Round Rock, Texas, for some super-double-sekrit meetings regarding their future product plans. Can't talk about those here. But I and another CNET editor also got a tour of the Morton Topfer manufacturing plant, where Dell makes Optiplex desktops.

The plant was humming when we toured. Bins of Dell parts shuttled around on elevated, automated tracks. Elevators lower them to workstations where the parts are assembled into a finished PC. A good assembler takes about five minutes to snap all the pieces together, and then puts the completed PC back into the system, where it shoots off to testing, burn-in, and software loading. 

On one end of the 250,000 square-foot facility, trucks unload PC parts. There is no inventory warehouse attached to the factory -- that's down the road at the Supplier Logistics Center (SLC), where Dell leases warehouse space to its suppliers. In neat accounting trick, Dell doesn't actually take ownership of components until the moment the parts are unloaded at the factory.  Much has been written about this zero inventory, just-in-time manufacturing process. It was interesting to see it, though.

Tidbits: The average time it takes a single system to be built, once it is ordered, is five hours. The record is one hour. In other words, once somebody ordered a PC on the Dell site, and one hour later it left the factory on its way to them. All Dell desktop PCs are built to order; there is no stock of pre-built machines waiting for orders.  It costs more to ship a Dell PC than to assemble it (not surprising, considering how fast their assembly people are).

Until this tour, I was wondering why Dell, which makes high-end gaming PCs (the XPS line), didn't offer a water-cooled unit. Now I get it: There's no way you can build a water-cooled PC in five minutes with current parts. Apple has liquid cooling on its Power Mac G5, but the radiator unit is a plug-in cartridge; most current water-cooled PCs are nightmares of tubes.

About the photo: You can legally carry a concealed firearm into a building in Texas. Just not into one of Dell's.  I couldn't take pictures inside the factory.

Canon PowerShot SD400: Four out of five geeks recommend it

I just got this little camera, a Canon SD400. It's the third Canon digital in the household. I'm retiring my old S100 from 1999 (2 megapixel, no video capability), and my wife has an S230. You can read a lot about this great camera here.  But what none of the reviews will tell you is this: This is the digicam of the digerati.  I just got back from a reception for Kevin Werbach's Supernova conference, and way more than half the people snapping digi pics were using this little guy.  I am so relieved I didn't show up at the party with an uncool camera.

See my Flickr Pictures from the reception.

I'm free, fly me

A few people have told me recently that they'd like to read my biweekly Rafe's Radar column on Release 1.0, but that they don't want to pay for the Release 1.0 newsletter to get it.  I'd like to point out that my column is free.  Registration is required to sign up for it, but no money need change hands.

Goes without saying department: Esther's monthly Release 1.0 newsletter is well worth the subscription fee.  With me, of course, you get what you pay for…

The end of the business model

Matthew Koll, CEO of Wondir was coming into San Francisco at the same time as I was leaving last week, so we sat down at SFO to talk about his company, which makes live question-and-answer technology. You ask a question, somebody answers.  It's the mutant four-way love-child of Usenet, IM, Keen, and Tacit. It's interesting not just because it's a cool service but because Wondir is yet another company that represents, for me, the end of the online business model.

Like almost all the other specialized search services I've seen lately, Wondir makes money from Google AdSense.  If Matthew gets enough users to his service, Google will pay him. It's not his only revenue stream, but it's a big part of his profit model, at least for now.

It's gotten to the point that I've almost stopped asking CEOs how they plan to make money. They only have to say, "Google," and it's a clear picture. Search engine experts like Danny Sullivan already know this: Google is an advertising company, not a search company. And for CEOs of online startups, it's the gravy train.

Tag the World

I just talked with Olivier Attia, the CEO of Scanbuy. This company makes software that lets camerphones read barcodes. So if you're in a store and want more information about a product you're looking at (for example, say you'd like to know what it would cost to buy the item online instead), you can just zap the barcode and pull up the info on your phone's browser.  (Minus the barcode function, CNET just launched this utility for technology products: Point your cellphone's browser to m.cnet.com.)

Apparently reading barcodes with a camera (as opposed to a laser scanner) is harder than it sounds, so the company's technology is a defensible barrier to entry.  However, Scanbuy is not the first company to do this: NTT DoCoMo already offers a similar service in Japan, and there are other competitors here in the US.

The concept of using a portable connected device to easily read the "tags" on physical items is very interesting. I'm going to explore it in an upcoming Rafe's Radar column.

CNET is 10!

I haven't been blogging much lately because my day job at CNET has been keeping me fully occupied. But I just got back from the 10th birthday party we had for the site, and it's worth a few words. CNET launched on this day in 1995, running on two Sparc servers. The site got 63,334 visitors, had zero advertisers, and became famous because the CNET television show ran a creepy computer animation of the Nicole Brown Simpson murder… over and over again.

I started at CNET in 1996, and left in 1998 to work at Red Herring, which folded during the dotcom collapse. I came back to CNET in 2004. When I started at CNET the first time, my byline was always my full name, "Raphael Needleman." I began to also use "Rafe Needleman" (which everybody has always called me anyway) later in the year. Here's why: Back in 1996, as a CNET columnist, my name was in the navigation bar. After a redesign that narrowed the nav bar a few pixels, "Raphael Needleman" was too big to fit. The designers didn't want to wrap me to two lines or change the font size, so after an appropriate period of whining, I relented and changed my nav bar name to Rafe, which I've gone by ever since.

Even though CNET made me change my name, I still think it's a great place to work. Here's me on the site then and now.

If it works for Nascar, why not car thieves?

I flew down to the LA last night today for some meetings today. Got to the hotel room, flipped on the TV, and found that all the local news stations were running live video of a high-speed car chase. The news helicopter had a clear view of some busted-up Acura (I think) tearing through city streets.  For a solid twenty minutes the screen was filled with a live picture of this car, and its plain, unadorned roof.  There should have been an advertisement on it -- Champion spark plugs; Billy's Bail Bonds; something like that. I mean, you can't buy programming like that.  All I'm saying is that the bad guys are missing out on a nice revenue stream.

How to make news

I'm moderating a panel discussion on June 22: How Technology is Revolutionizing News Distribution and Corporate Reputation. Paul Argenti of the Tuck School of Business at Darthmouth is giving the keynote, which will be followed by my panel with analyst Charline Li and journalists Joel Dreyfuss, Tom Foremski, and Wade Rousch, most of whom I've known since way back when we got news tips from stablemasters and footboys and chiseled our stories directly into the printing press each night. The event is sponsored by Tuck and by TheNewsMarket, a company that's, not surprisingly, in the business of employing technology to help companies get their message out to journos like me. Basicaly, it's an online distribution system for "B-roll," the video clips companies send to broadcasters.

The panel topic is fascinating and I'm looking forward to a lively debate.