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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Johann Höchtl

Johann Höchtl

What Happened to Yahoo - 0 views

  • When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing.
  • What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company.
  • Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.
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  • The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons.
  • we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop. It was a way of sorting shopping search results.
  • It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded.
  • I didn't say "But search traffic is worth more than other traffic!"
  • Hard as it is to believe now, the big money then was in banner ads.
  • Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions.
  • By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto pyramid scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth.
  • The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it.
  • I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search.
  • But Yahoo also had another problem that made it hard to change directions. They'd been thrown off balance from the start by their ambivalence about being a technology company
  • Microsoft (back in the day), Google, and Facebook have all been obsessed with hiring the best programmers. Yahoo wasn't. They preferred good programmers to bad ones, but they didn't have the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had.
  • The company felt prematurely old.
  • The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people,
  • I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that.
  • In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture.
  • Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007. He said that in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing.
  • Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.
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    Paul Graham hat mit dem Verkauf seiner Shop Lösung an Yahoo 1998 Millionen von Dollar gemacht. Er ist Buchautor und respektierter Columnist. Ein Artikel von ihm, warum seiner Meinung nach Yahoo scheiterte und FB und Google erfolgreicht waren.
Johann Höchtl

Scott Adams Blog: Startup Country 07/27/2010 - 0 views

  • My idea for today is that established nations could launch startup countries within their own borders, free of all the legacy restrictions in the parent country. The startup country, let's say the size of modern day Israel, would be designed from the ground up for efficiency.
  • The entire banking system would be automated. There would be no cash in the start-up country. You wouldn't need to "apply" for a loan because the virtual bank would always have a current notion of your credit-worthiness.
  • The tax code in the startup country would be simplified to the point where residents might forget it exists.
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  • Most of what is scary about the government having power is the lack of transparency. The startup nation would have full transparency. Any citizen could log on to his computer and see what court orders had been issued for what videos and why.
  • Arguably, China accidentally performed a variant of this experiment with Hong Kong. Oversimplifying the history, Hong Kong was part of China and leased to the United Kingdom for 99 years, like a startup country within a country.
Johann Höchtl

Peer-to-Peer Governance, Production And Property: P2P As A Way Of Living - Part 1 - 0 views

  • Such free cooperation can only be hindered ‘artificially’, through either legal means ( intellectual property regimes) or through technical restrictions such as  Digital Rights Management, which essentially hinder the social innovation that can take place.
  • The expansion of peer production is dependent on cultural/legal conditions. It requires;open and free raw cultural material to use; participative structures to process it; and commons-based property forms to protect the results from private appropriation.
  • In most cases, distribution beats decentralization and centralization as the best way to deal with  complexity.
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  • The sphere of commons-oriented peer production, based on stronger links between cooperators, think Linux or Wikipedia, usually combines a self-governing community, with for-benefit institutions (Apache Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation, etc…), which manage the infrastructure of collaboration, and a  ecology of businesses which create scarcities around the commons, and in return support the commons from which they derive their value.
  • Finally,  crowdsourcing occurs when it is the institutions themselves which attempt to create a framework, where participation can be integrated in their value chain, and this can take a wide variety of forms. This is generally the field of co-creation.
  • We must note that monetary value that is being realized by the capital players, is – in many if not most of the cases, not of the same order as the value created by the social innovation processes.
  • peer governance requires a priori consensus on the common object. But society as a whole lacks such consensus by definition: it is a decentralized collection of competing interests and worldviews, rather than a distributed network of  free agents. Therefore, for society at large, there is no alternative to a revitalized democratic political scenario based on representation.
Johann Höchtl

THE OPEN DECLARATION « Co-creating an open declaration on public services 2.0 - 0 views

  • An Open Declaration on European Public Services
  • The needs of today’s society are too complex to be met by government alone. While traditional government policies sought to automate public services and encourage self-service, the biggest impact of the web will be in improving services through collaboration, transparency and knowledge-sharing.
Johann Höchtl

Industrie vs. Wissenschaft: Die "Pepsi-Affäre" bei ScienceBlogs.com | Astrodi... - 0 views

  • Bei unseren amerikanischen Kollegen von ScienceBlogs.com geht es gerade rund. Die Blogger verlassen scharenweise die Plattform - Neuron Culture, Science after Sunclipse, Good Math, Bad Math, Neurotopia und Laelaps haben schon ihre Abschiedsbeiträge geschrieben
  • Was ist passiert? Bei SB.com gibt es ein neues Blog - es heisst Food Frontiers und wird von PepsiCo betrieben
  • Natürlich wäre es was anderes, wenn nun die PR-Abteilung von PepsiCo das Blog nutzen würde um einen Beitrag nach dem anderen darüber zu verfassen wie super schmackhaft, gesund und wichtig die PepsiCo-Produkte sind.
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  • bei Food Frontiers gibt es bis jetzt nur einen einzigen "Hallo, da sind wir"-Artikel. Ich verstehe also nicht wirklich, warum sich die amerikanischen Blogger-Kollegen nun so enorm aufregen.
  • Aber die eigentliche Frage ist ja eine grundsätzlichere. Wie ich oben schon gesagt habe, arbeiten Wissenschaftler nicht nur an Universitäten sondern auch überall in der Industrie und Wirtschaft. Sind die per se weniger glaubwürdig; weniger unabhängig; wenig verläßlich? Sind Blogs von Industrie-Wissenschaftler a priori mehr PR-Blogs anstatt Wissenschaftsblog?
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    Spagat zwischen Wissenschaft und Popularismus: Rolle der Blogs
Johann Höchtl

Postserver.at - Briefe im Internet # Anleitung - 0 views

  • Postserver.at bietet Ihnen im Moment zwei Arten der Registrierung. Die einfachste ist die Registrierung mit Ihrer bestehenden e-Mail Adresse. Diese Benutzer werden im System mit der "Vertrauensstufe Standard" vermerkt. Benötigen Sie in Ihrer Korrespondenz höchste Rechtssicherheit, sowie eine eindeutige Personen-Authentifizierung, dann müssen Sie sich mit Ihrer Bürgerkarte am Dienst anmelden bzw. falls Sie eine solche nicht haben, diese Bürgerkarte zuerst beantragen
Johann Höchtl

Facebook - postserver.at - 0 views

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    Elektronische Zustellung für Private
Johann Höchtl

Horx: "Nur soziale Verlierer bleiben im Netz" - futurezone.ORF.at - 0 views

  • Von Facebook wird in fünf bis sechs Jahren kein Mensch mehr reden", so der deutsche Zukunftsforscher Matthias Horx.
  • Es gibt einen Offline-Trend. Menschen gehen bewusst weg vom Internet und verweigern es. Die Frage ist, wie groß diese Bewegung wird.
  • Am Beispiel Google Street View "wird plötzlich klar, dass die neue Digitalität nicht vor dem Gartenzaun haltmacht. Wir werden noch viele solche Dinge erfahren"
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  • Lieber" wäre Stocker eine Revolution, bei der die Bürgerrechte aus dem realen Leben auf die virtuelle Welt übertragen werden. Denkbar sei das durch ein Übernahme gewisser Infrastrukturen in den öffentlichen Bereich, was einen ungehinderten, freien Meinungsaustausch sicherstellen würde, so Stocker. Genauso wie der Staat für Parkanlagen und Räume sorge, an denen Menschen unbeschränkt kommunizieren könnten, sollte er das auch im Internet ermöglichen.
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    Horx über das "Ende" der sozialen Netzwerke
Johann Höchtl

Ausweis des 21. Jahrhunderts | politik-digital.de - 0 views

  • Herzstück des neuen Personalausweises ist der integrierte Chip. Auf diesem werden jene Daten gespeichert, die beim herkömmlichen Ausweis nur aufgedruckt waren. Der Chip beinhaltet auf Wunsch des Bürgers zudem die neue Online-Ausweisfunktion, die digitale Signatur und Fingerabdrücke in digitaler Form. Die Online-Authentifizierung erfolgt mit Hilfe eines Ausweislesegerätes für den PC, welches separat zum Personalausweis erworben werden muss. Nach dem Einscannen des Ausweises, gibt der Nutzer eine sechsstellige Pin ein. Erst dann kann eine Transaktion zu Stande kommen.
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    Die Deutschen bekommen ab 1. Nov 2010 ihre "Bürgerkarte", dort aber als Personalausweis
Johann Höchtl

Benefits of Enterprise 2.0 - 0 views

  • Enterprise 2.0 is already demonstrating real business value for many organisations. It has opened up new methods for communication and conversations, and has transformed the way that companies share and access information.Openness encourages participationIf people feel like they can make a difference, they will. The Enterprise 2.0 approach promotes open communications that encourage respect and participation, even across geographic and cultural boundaries. Access to knowledge empowers and motivates people to strive towards common goals together.
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    openness encourages participation
Johann Höchtl

Openness in communication - 1 views

  • From an official and public service point of view information providers want openness biased towards information access. One tends to encourage participation, but this is understood as mechanisms facilitating feedback, not as tools making the public producers of content. From a commercial point of view information providers also want to facilitate easy access, but these actors also have strong interests in encouraging openness with users acting as producers of content. These actors are more likely to develop an understanding of the “quality of information” with a bias towards information’s ability to appeal and engage an audience
Johann Höchtl

Testing the Limits of democracy: Participation, Openness, and Effectiveness in Federal ... - 0 views

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    TL;DR: To much openness kills effectivenes The relation between effectiveness, openness, participation; critical paper, Bush administration mindset though
Johann Höchtl

eGovernment - a driving force for innovation and efficiency in Public Administration - 0 views

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    Paper von Archmann et.al.
Johann Höchtl

ots.at: Ericsson Studie: Vom Internet in der Hosentasche zur vernetzten Gesellschaft - ... - 0 views

  • Aufgabe in Österreich: Kluft des Digital Divide schließen
  • Die Kluft zwischen den Early Adopters und der breiten Masse in Österreich ist größer als in anderen Teilen Europas. So ist es für fast die Hälfte (47 %) der Early Adopters wichtig, überall Internet-Zugang zu haben, aber nur für 18 % der insgesamt Befragten. "Der Digital Divide droht die Gesellschaft in zwei Gruppen zu teilen: jene mit Zugang zum Internet und jene, denen dieser verwehrt ist. Dem müssen wir mit aller Kraft entgegenwirken. Damit alle das Internet nutzen können, benötigen wir eine flächendeckende, leistungsstarke Breitband-Infrastruktur"
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