If Adam West gets a nap, I want a nap, too!

Where does Steven Hodson find these wonderful images?

Reminds me of a writing challenge I wrote back in 2000 on “Why Batman is my Hero.” Obviously, from the first paragraph, you can tell this was before Bill Gates became a philanthropist.

My Wife’s Volleyball Action

My wife, Iris Hopkins, digging it (as they say) on the volleyball courts last night.

Spotify Mix: Good Ol’ Songs to Listen To at VMworld 2011

Good Ol' Songs to Listen To at VMworld 2011

It’s been a minute since I’ve made a Spotify mix to share, which is a little funny, since a great deal more of you have Spotify now than when I started doing this. I guess I’ve been a bit busy to actually type these up and share them, but if you friend me on Facebook (or, alternatively, click this link), you can have access to all my shared playlists.

At any rate, I put this list of songs together while I was waiting at DFW airport, before the trek to VMworld in Las Vegas last week.

The inspiration for this list of songs was that I wanted a bit of Adult Swim-ish goodness on Spotify. Unfortunately, while many of the songs that are themes to Adult Swim shows are well known, few have ever been cut to CD, and are thus mostly unavailable on Spotify. Instead, when the original theme song wasn’t available, I either took the album version or another song with a similar sound by the same artist who wrote the theme.

After I put together a few songs with that operating principal, I discovered two things: it sounded distinctly southern, and in some cases, distinctly geeky. I grabbed a few songs from some other playlists in progress, threw them in, and came out with this list.

As a side note, it just so happens that this list of songs is exactly long enough to last a brisk walking pace from the Sands convention center show floor up to a room in the Mirage and back (a walk that I had to make more times than I’d like last week).

If you want to see what we were up to at the show (aside from listening to Spotify), click here. Otherwise, as always, here’s the full track list and the appropriate Spotify links.

Good Ol’ Songs to Listen To at VMworld 2011

1.) King of the Hill Theme – The Refreshments.  (from KotH)
2.) Commin’ Home – Cheeseburger (from Superjail!)
3.) Stuck in the Middle with You – Stealers Wheel
4.) You Just Can’t Beat Jesus Christ – Billy Joe Shaver (inspired by Squidbillies)
5.) Italian Leather Sofa – Cake (from Mission Hill)
6.) I’m a Human – Flashlight Brown
7.) Laser Cannon Deth Sentence – Dethklok (from Metalocalypse)
8.) Indiscriminate Murder is Counter-Productive – Machinae Supremacy
9.) George Romero – Sprites
10.) Re: Your Brains – Jonathan Coulton
11.) Mambo Gallego – Tito Puente (original to 90s [as] theme)

Here’s the HTTP link. Here’s the Spotify link.

Cover art from IF WE DON’T, REMEMBER ME.

Previously:

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Soundtrack

“Modern Mix Tape, Swing Edition”

Fallout 3: GNR

Early Adopters

This is what your stats look like when you’re first to blog an earthquake.

I just happened to be looking at twitter today when the first tweets about the DC earthquake hit. I went and quickly got the stats and info from the USGS and did a blog post about it. That landed me in the #1 slot on Google for about 20 minutes.

After I’d updated the post with all the relevant info I could find, I vegged out on my real time stats (provided by Woopra).

So in case you’re wondering what it looks like to be blitzed by a natural disaster, this is it.

Thanks to Rackspace for not rate-limiting my site during the storm.

Earthquake in DC/Virginia Area

Folks on Twitter were reporting it being felt all the way in NYC. Data from USGS.

Image of corner of 13th and Penn post-quake, from @levyj413.

Several reports say that the effects were felt in Virginia, Philadelphia, North Carolina, Connectitcut, Toronto, Boston, New York City, Ohio, and Maryland. Unconfirmed reports that it was felt in Colorado.

My web stats log can confirm that it was indeed felt in Ohio, as a good third of requests came from that location.

@fednewsradio: Pentagon, @whitehouse, Capitol all briefly evacuated after earthquake. @NavyNews says Pentagon has now been deemed safe.

According to USGS, the magnitude was “greater than 5 on the Richter scale.”

Epicenter was Virginia. Centered at 37.875°N, 77.908°W near the town of Jackson. Magnitude of 5.8.

USGS details here.

Google Map link here.

J. McKinley posted first hand images of the “DC Earthquake Devastation.”

Twitter wordcloud of the Quake, from the Daily Dot.

A few minutes ago from TBD.com:

Californians might sniff at D.C.’s reaction to this 5.9 earthquake, but the damage it caused was very real. The National Cathedral seems to have gotten the worst of it, with a Washington Business Journal reporter confirming that at least three pinnacles on the central tower have broken off.

The Lessons of the iPad and the TouchPad

So HP today discovered what happens when you make an affordable tablet: you sell out.

This is exactly what I preached about the iPad back when it was still a rumor waiting to happen in my negative-leaning editorial: while many pundits were preaching that the gargantuan costs of a single iPad were a “non-life changing amount of money,” I predicted no ultimate mainstreaming of the iPad because it was so highly priced.

In a sense, I was right. Sean P. Aune (Editor-in-Chief of Techno Buffalo, former SiliconANGLE writer and fellow Mashable alum) and I have continually gone round-and-round over the years as to whether the iPad delivered on the promise of all its hype. He says that very clearly the iPad has gone mainstream and delivered the magical rainbows and unicorns that Steve Jobs promised.

I, on the other hand, insist that by all sales estimates, the iPad has failed to make a dent that’s significant enough to call it a truly mainstream mobile device. Certainly, it has failed to single-handedly end-of-line the PC.

In 2010, There Were Only 13.8 Million iPads Sold

Around the beginning of the year, when Quora was still the new hotness, I asked the community for the most accurate sales figures for the iPad (since most pundits and analysts seemed to be at odds with one another on the topic).

Several folks, including Fortune covers editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt, collaborated to come up with the number 13.8 million, which was backed by  sources including Fortune, CNN and Apple Insider.

To compare that to other things we call mainstream, that’s about 1/23rd the number of users Facebook had around that time, and about 2/3rds of the number of Twitter users at the time. Perhaps even more astonishingly, even MySpace had more active users than the iPad in 2010 – by a factor of four!

To be more apples-to-apples, though, the iPad defines itself as a mobile device (that may or may not be a PC-killer). Gartner says that 1.6 billion mobile devices were sold in 2010 (to say nothing of mobile devices still in use sold in prior years), and that the iPad only accounted for .86% of mobile device sales that year.

This coincides precisely with what I predicted in April of 2010, just prior to launch:

But even if they (generously estimated) end up selling two or three million of these things over the next several years, it still has to contend with billions of other smartphone sales and billions of other computers of differing platforms sold.  This isn’t going to be a mainstreamcomputing device for the majority of users.

I’m not sure about you, but in my reality, when a product only accounts for .86% of device sales in its category, that’s not mainstream.

The iPad is Still Important to Watch (there, I said it).

This is not all to diminish the impact that the iPad has had on the mobile, and this and the subhead above are about as close as you’ll get to a retraction of my infamous “Anti-iPad Manifesto.”

The impact of the iPad on the enterprise, which in my opinion has more to do with it’s popularity as a tradeshow give-away than anything else, is undeniable. The “Journey to the Private Cloud,” and the march towards virtualization we see in enterprise can trace its roots back to the birth of the iPad and the smartphone revolution.

Entire IT departments have dedicated themselves to making their workplace computing environments conducive to these types of advanced mobile devices. Most of the technologies we cover at SiliconANGLE (to say nothing of the new pub we launched a month or two ago, ServicesANGLE) are more or less a monument to impact of smartphones and tablets on the enterprise.

And that’s not to say that the impact of the iPad and other tablet PCs have been miniscule on the consumer markets – but one thing is for certain (thanks to what we know as economics 101): the pricepoint of the iPad and most other tablet PCs are a major stumbling block for massive consumer adoption.

In fact, while the iPad and the iPhone began as consumer devices and continue to be marketed as such, when you go to as many vendor trade shows as I do, it becomes plainly obvious that far more practitioners and executives carry iPads (everywhere!) than the rank and file of the rest of the world.

It can’t be because the product doesn’t work as advertised, or doesn’t entertain, or doesn’t offer productivity boosts. If that were the case, you wouldn’t see so many smart and powerful individuals carrying them.

Instead, we have to assume that most people either can’t afford it, or can’t justify spending what is basically an entire rent check on a mobile computing device.

The Sell-out of the TouchPad Further Proves My Point.

Mellisa Tolentino reported here this morning that HP (shockingly) lowered the price of their tablet, the TouchPad to $99:

Hewlett-Packard shook the computer world last week with their announcement to focus more on software–possibly dropping their hardware business, in talks to acquire the software company Autonomous and discontinuing their webOS. If you think they’re done turning your world upside down, be ready for another shake up.

Last Saturday, they lowered the price of their HP TouchPad.  The 16GB tablet now only costs $99 while the 32GB costs $149.  The marked down tablets are available at Best Buy, Office Depot, Sears, Staples, and Walmart; though some retailers are still offering them at regular price but are expected to follow suit in the following weeks for the second wave of the TouchPad markdown.  The marked down tablets flew off shelves, which greatly increased the sales of the TouchPad as it was previously not a popular choice for tablet buyers. But the sale is perceived as an act done to sell existing stocks just to get it off the market.

Several SiliconANGLE staffers can vouch for the fact that the TouchPad is flying off the shelves right now.

“I see we just posted about $99 TouchPads,” Art Lindsey told me this morning. “Good luck buying one man. There just aren’t any; I’ve called every store that supposedly carries them.”

Others I’ve spoken to today say the same things, and according to some reports, TouchPad app developers have seen spikes in downloads of their software as high as 10x what they normally receive.

This is what you happens when you price a mobile device within the “impulse purchase” range, and HP is recognizing that, promising to restock the item, despite announcing it’s end-of-life only days ago, though no more are being manufactured.

One has to wonder if this real-world life-lesson for HP (and anyone else making a tablet) will recognize this and other lessons from the TouchPad.

Lessons like “the public loves an untethered device.” So many of the iPad competitors on the market come pre-tethered to an expensive mobile carrier with a corresponding expensive mobile data plan. Time and time again, the giant mobile carriers, by-and-large, have shown themselves to be concerned with juicing the customers for as much money as possible rather than providing an enjoyable mobile data experience.

The TouchPad was arguably the most successful tablet at exploiting this key differentiator. Just earlier this month, the news was out that the TouchPad brand was “number two in mindshare, behind the iPad.”

“Bottom-line is that the TouchPad has only been around for a month,” argued PreCentral’s Tim Stiffler-Dean. “If you think the game is over now, guess again. We’ve only just begun.”

Stiffler-Dean could still be right (though it would take a truly special miracle to revive the TouchPad). The second most important lesson from all this is that $829 is a life-changing amount of money to most people. I’ve been making this point since 2008. Only Apple can get away with this price-point because they’re the only company in tech with a working reality-distortion filter (and even they can only get it to work to a certain point, as I said earlier).

It’s Too Late for HP. Who’s Going to Get the Point?

The word on the street is that HP EVP Todd Bradley is on his way out. Speculation is that it’s because he’s miffed over the end-of-life of WebOS and his failure to be promoted to the CEO slot over Leo Apotheker, amongst other things.

Bradley was the executive generally credited as being responsible for the Palm acquisition in the first place, and he feels as if he’s not been recognized within the company for his achievements.

“He’s out interviewing for every CEO job he can,” a source familiar with Bradley’s plans told Boy Genius Reports today.

The Scuttlebutt on Bradley is wide and varied. Some circles call him “well-respected,” while others say he’s “a bit on the arrogant side.”

“..[W]e have been told that one of the reasons he hasn’t exited HP yet is due to his personal demands from potential new companies, which are said to be somewhat excessive.”

It’s all rumor and speculation at this point, but one commenter at the original post wondered why he’d be a hot CEO commodity:

Hmmm. This guy contributes to WebOS devices being one big fat failure despite the OSs uniqueness and technical excellence, and now he wants to be a CEO? And we should hire you because…? [sic]

Within a large organization like HP, certainly no one man can be singularly to blame for the failure of a product line as big as WebOS, but his failure to recognize what I view as the two key weaknesses of the iPad are what lead to his pet project’s downfall.

HP certainly isn’t alone in this. Many mobile devices have tried and failed to even hold a candle to the iPad, let alone topple it.

Until those that would dare to dream of their own tablet recognize these problems, Apple will continue to dominate their tiny little corner of the market.

Is VCE a Flailing Startup? A Study of Snark in New Media.

The UK Register’s Chris Mellor wrote a short hit piece last week on VCE’s Vblock, entitled “Vblocks bleed out EMC money, VCE = virtual cash erosion.” True to Register form, the cleverest thing about the entire post is the title, but as both Wikibon analysts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman noted this week, not only was Mellor’s post short, it was short-sighted, missing a great number of key points with regard to the enterprise startup.

For those who don’t know, an 18-month-old VCE is a joint venture primarily between Cisco, VMware and EMC centered around creating a “fully integrated IT offering” that maximizes the product lines of the three companies. Their central product, the Vblock platform, incorporates the best of EMC storage and software, Cisco converged networking, and VMware virtualization.

Mellor wrote in his post that: “we know that EMC’s 10-Q SEC filing says total EMC-contributed funding to VCE is $173.5m, plus $7.8m in stock-based compensation for VCE executives such as CEO Michael Capellas. EMC losses in VCE for the June quarter of this year were $46.6m, with $41.9m in the preceding March quarter.”

Mellor went on to pan VCE as a company, rating it as a startup:

“Viewing VCE as a startup it has not been very successful thus far. If it doesn’t make a profit by the end of this year then perhaps EMC, Cisco and VMware might reconsider things. Perhaps they should change from stock-based compensation to stick-based incentivisation [sic]?”

In other words, you can always trust the Register to be the Register. They come up with very sensational headlines around enterprise, occasionally prop up the theories with some facts; they’re not always the full set of facts, but there are some there to make the position sound plausible.

Mellor Misses the Part about it being a Joint Venture

As Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante pointed out in their posts on the Wikibon research blog, the upside for investment by the joint venture partners at VCE aren’t purely in owning a profitable company.

From Miniman’s post:

While different stacks may look similar at a component level, VCE’s mission is to accelerate change in the IT industry and has invested a significant amount of money and people to assist enterprises, service providers and partners down the “journey to the cloud”. While many early deployments of Vblock were looking for virtualized infrastructure to reduce costs (77% as of January compared to 23% deploying for Private Cloud according to VCE), traction in repeat-customers and service providers are good signs that the business model is attractive.

Changing customer habits is a long and difficult process, but it does appear that VCE is moving the needle. While VCE may be currently running a negative cash flow, the accelerated investment from EMC points towards positive momentum.

Today, Vellante went into further detail:

What Chris’ analysis misses is that when VCE sells Vblocks, EMC and Cisco take income into its mainstream P&L’s. The whole idea behind the joint venture is that the investors take the benefit into their main businesses.

This is critical to get buy in from all the lines of business managers.

Specifically, for example, Rich Napolitano and Brian Gallagher, who run EMC’s VNX and VMAX businesses respectively (and their Cisco counterparts). These executives are happy to support VCE because their divisions recognize income from the JV. If they didn’t, VCE would be viewed internally as competitive. But EMC and Cisco were smart in the way they structured this because internal politics can kill deals like this.

The point is Chris’ analysis ignores the broader picture and simply looks at the cost, not the cost/benefit. I’ve stated several times that in my estimate, EMC gets more than 50% of the revenue from Vblocks.

This analysis from the guys at Wikibon takes in a comprehensive understanding of the impact of a sale of a single unit from VCE to the bottom lines at the investing organizations.

What if we look directly at VCE as a standalone entity, and pretend as if EMC, Cisco and VMware are Sand Hill Road venture capitalists, eagerly eyeing the bottom lines for their investment?

Apples to Oranges: Is VCE Really a Startup?

One thing both I and SiliconANGLE can stake a reputation on is being plugged into the world of startups. Our primary offices are in the heart of Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, and both the Palo Alto and Dallas offices of SiliconANGLE co-office with other startups. We are both literally and metaphorically plugged in to the startup community.

When we talked to Michael Capellas at EMC World in 2010, he characterized the work they he was doing with Acadia, the predecessor to VCE, as very start-up-ish in nature. Later in 2011, when I was at SxSW in Austin this year, I met Jay Cuthrul in the blogger’s lounge, who without provocation extolled the virtues of the VCE startup culture.

Jay is the Lead Principal vArchitect at VCE, which in true startup style, is a title that’s about a week old. I followed up with him today, in light of the recent questioning of VCE, to see if what he told me then was still his sentiment after having been at the company a little over a year.

In short, it was.

“What makes VCE a startup? Aside from the age of the company, the wild-eyed hours, and tasks that you’re assigned?” Cuthrell fired back. “No one tells you what you can’t do. The expectation is that you’re going to attack a problem that’s never been attacked before, and there’s no ‘it can’t be done’ mindset.”

Startups are like that. SiliconANGLE is only the latest in a string of startups I’ve either founded or been party to. Most startups, in my experience, are borne of a big idea, an inkling of how to solve it, and craploads of man-hours devoted to solving the big idea.

That’s consistent with VCE’s problem-solving style.

“Our approach is akin to ‘I’m going to point you at these trees, now make toothpicks,” said Cuthrell. “Our mandate is similar: go look at a floor at of that datacenter; now go figure out the best way to fill it up [from various variable constraints].”

Cuthrell also described the management and task force style of VCE as very ad hoc and iterative.

The Register Doesn’t Understand the World of Startups

This is a world that the Register isn’t plugged into, nor are they usually responsible to their audience for understanding this. That combined with their tendency towards sensationalism, and it’s not surprising it wouldn’t even enter into their minds that this company indeed truly functions like a startup, nor would the thought to compare VCE’s progress at eighteen months to other startups at eighteen months.

For instance, at eighteen months old, where was Facebook? At eighteen months old, they were still taking venture funding, and hadn’t even bought their primary domain name yet. In fact, they weren’t estimated to be profitable until just this year at the ripe old age of eight years old.

What about Google, another Silicon Valley luminary? They were founded in a garage in 1996, and didn’t even incorporate until two years later. The mainstay of their current revenue engine, Adsense, wasn’t even launched until 2000, four years after the company was conceived.

And then there’s Twitter’s mythical revenue model; the company was founded in 2006, and five years later they’ve yet to present a viable model other than endless amounts of venture fundraising.

Still, if we’re going to discount the ancillary benefits that Cisco, EMC and VMware see from funding VCE and focus purely on the merits of VCE as a startup, comparing an enterprise focused organization to social and consumer tech startups isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples comparison.

Mellor May Not Even Understand Enterprise Startups

The last several years have been fantastic, as someone watching the space as a pundit and journalist. The startup and M&A season last year was particularly exciting, and was an great baptism by fire for me as I oversaw the SiliconANGLE editorial focus-shift from consumer to enterprise.

2010 saw the acquisition longstanding iconic tech brand of Novell for $2.2 billion, McAfee for $7.68 billion, Palm for $1.2 billion.

There were also, though, a great deal of startups that sold for quite a sums in the billion-dollar neighborhood. 3Par went for $2.35 billion, Isilon sold for $2.25 billion, Storwize went for an estimated $140 million, Ocarina also for an undisclosed but likely not insignificant sum, Compellent for around $960 million, and Zimbra for $100 million.

 In fact, it was right around this time last year when the 3Par/HP news broke at VMworld last year. Most of the startups in question did not disclose the financial details of their acquisitions or their record-books, but the 3Par deal was analyzed in great detail by most of the punditry, and as a publicly traded company prior to the acquisition, had to reveal their accounting to the public.

3Par, was founded in 1999, and shipped their first product three years later in 2002, so at eighteen months, there was no possible way they could be considered profitable. Indeed, ten years after their founding, they were described by the pundits and analyst to be “questing for profitability,” and finally reached that territory in 2010.

So, even when you evaluate VCE (purely as a startup) and compare them to their enterprise startup peers, there’s absolutely no shame in not being profitable at eighteen months. In other words, even within Chris Mellor’s operating parameters, VCE still isn’t as bad off as he makes them sound.

Research is Fundamental to Online Journalism

This isn’t an entirely dissimilar incident to the one I reported on about a month ago, when Robin Wauters at Techcrunch incorrectly reported that InMobi was stealing top talent from Millennial Media. The problem with Robin was that he was, in the pursuit of quantity and sensationalism, didn’t do any research whatsoever to support his article.

The nature of Robin’s sin was that he didn’t call anyone for comment (not that he makes or takes phone calls anymore), nor did he do a basic Google search. Chris Mellor’s sin was that he pretended to be an expert in startups when he very clearly is not, and in so doing actually throws into question his expertise on the enterprise space at the same time.

The hallmark of a Register signature piece is a snarkily written headline and throwing the subject of the post under the bus towards the end, very similar to the Gawker style of blogging. The key purported difference between Gawker-style blogging and the style of the Reg is that it’s assumed that the author at the Register has deeper subject matter expertise, so that when throw-away snark is employed, there’s some weight behind it.

Sometimes, as was the case with the post in question, the authority is purely implied.

What are the consequences of bad analysis like this? The Register is listed with most news indexes, and as such post like these will show up in most financial analysis (like Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, and other investment filters). Bad analysis affects the market in measurable ways, to say nothing of the general perception of the companies involved.

Why go with snarky analysis? As I said in my analysis of the Techcrunch fail (and countless my prior posts), it all comes down to pageviews. In the CPM journalism model, the audience is not the customer, they’re the product. Conversely, at SiliconANGLE, our business model relies primarily on selling and exploiting data relevant to our audience’s market. Our loyalty is to the facts and providing value (read: analysis) from those facts.

The audience is better served when they’re not a commodity, and the piece from the Register is evidence of that.

[Editor’s Notes and Disclosure: Image of Jay Cuthrell at SxSWi 2008 by Andrewi709, used under Creative Commons license. Photo of Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante credit to SiliconANGLE/Ricky McGill. 3Par rack image courtesy of Wikipedia/Public Domain. VCE isn’t a sponsor or client of SiliconANGLE, but VMware (who has some stake in VCE) will be sponsoring some of our coverage from VMworld 2011 at the end of the month. Thanks to Dave Vellante and the analysts at Wikibon for research assistance. –mrh]

Fun with Keywords

The keywords that bring people to my website are a never-ending source of amusement.

Here’s the snapshot from today:

Update: since I posted this, even more poorly spelled gestures of Gruber’s public image have hit my stat-window. Also, disturbing quotes from sex-bots.