Is The Dotcom Craze Back?

For a bubble-wary Internet observer, some of the indicators may seem ominously similar to the dotcom boom. But 2010 is no 1999


These are tough times for the US equity market. The fear of a double dip recession looms large. Investors are wary and quick to punish stocks for the slightest hint of shrinking margins or slowing growth rate. Nothing surprising; investors are still licking the wounds caused by the recent crisis.

eBay: E-Commerce To Be $1bn Biz In India By 2013

eBay wants to change the popular perception of being just an e-auction site and make the most of the fast-developing Indian e-commerce market


In an interview with CNBC-TV18's President & Editorial Director of TV18 Business Media, Senthil Chengalvarayan, eBay's President & CEO John Donahoe spoke about the company's India plans. Below is a verbatim transcript of the interview. 

Google, the genie of our future, tells us what to do

I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," said the search giant's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable - before his malfunction. But HAL was a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand axe, with which we chop our way through the densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to bot.

What's at stake in BlackBerry crisis

The BlackBerry crisis

Large internet and telecom firms challenge the notion of a nation state. That's why governments want to control them

No shades of grey here

Monitoring BlackBerry communication is important for national security

For more than two years, Indian security agencies have been engaging with Research in Motion (RIM), the manufacturers of the BlackBerry mobile system, to work out an arrangement by which the former can get access to the communications - particularly e-mails and chats - that are transmitted in an encrypted form from such handsets. But little was achieved and pressure was building up on both sides due to the increasing fears of usage of such handsets by terrorist and other fissiparous groups. Notwithstanding the fact that there was a verification process in place for the provision of any mobile connection, the agencies were adamant to gain access to the traffic flow through the BlackBerry mobile handsets.

A bitter-tweet tale

There was silence in the twitterzone for over two hours. We are extremely outraged at this outage

Super outages. That irritating thing that residents of south Delhi faced on Tuesday? That moan-inducing phenomenon that is making a revival in Kolkata? That headache that rain-pelted Mumbaikars are dreading? Nope, we're talking about the catastrophic, civilisation-regressing two-and-a-half hour shutdown of Twitter.

Friend indeed?

Sushweta Ghosh

Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

Let me confess that in this nearly half-a-century of existence I have managed to befriend only a handful, much to the disgust of my juniors who think I am unsocial since my Facebook account has not scored a century.

Murdoch trashes his prime brands with a 'paywall'

News corps's move to charge for accessing its papers over the web is bound to fail

Comment Matthew Lynn

Bold move

Starting this month, both the Times and the Sunday Times will start charging to access the papers over the Web

This is the first attempt by one of the big, international, general newspapers to put up a paywall around its whole website

There are a few simple rules that will st.and you in good stead in the markets: And never bet against Rupert Murdoch.

The Australian-born media tycoon, 79, has railed against the conventional wisdom in a career spanning many decades. He has taken plenty of rulebooks, ripped them up and come out a winner.

This month, he will make his most ambitious gamble yet: He will try to redesign the way the Internet and the media work by putting up a "paywall" around two of his British newspapers: the Times and the Sunday Times.

And this time he is doomed to fail.

It is a bold move. Certainly, anyone who cares about journalism should hope it succeeds. There is little sign that Internet advertising will ever be strong enough to replace the revenue that used to come from selling printed newspapers.

There are several reasons why it won't work. First, if newspapers wanted to start charging for their websites, they should have started more than a decade ago, when the Internet was emerging as a medium. Once you set a price for any consumer product, it determines what people expect to pay for it. In this case, the price is zero. It will prove impossible to shift that perception now, particularly when there are lots of other news sites that don't charge.

Second, the product isn't worth the price. That isn't a criticism of the Time in particular. Even British highbrow newspapers have placed too little emphasis on substance, and too much on entertaining and exciting their readers. Sensationalism worked as a strategy in the print world, when you were trying to get people to buy copies in a shop, usually with eye-catching headlines. Online, newspapers aim to build relationships with their readership through subscriptions. That involves creating a higher degree of trust and credibility. Newspapers have spent too much time blaming new technology for their decline and not enough examining what they offer readers.

Third, it is hard to see a future for traditional papers on the web. The newspaper was a product of two old technologies: the printing press and the delivery truck. It provided a bundle of news, sport, business, crosswords, television guides and gardening tips, all organised by a single editor. That worked fine for old media, when our access to news was very limited, but is irrelevant now that we can get all kinds of stuff from around the world with just a few mouse clicks.

Imagine if EMI tried to sell us CDs with its selection of new music - some classical, some jazz, some pop. It wouldn't word. The customers would be baffled. Likewise, the package that newspaper editors put together doesn't make sense anymore. Why not get soccer news from one source, television reviews from another, and political commentary from a third?

People will pay for news and entertainment. They always have. But in a world that depends more and more on information, readers are much more selective and no longer rely on the one-stop shops that newspapers have always been.

Little man's revenge

The lesson perphaps is simple. Companies which do not look after their people are most likely to suffer

Let the employer beware. A recent survey reported in this newspaper yesterday has found that Indian companies lose an average of Rs60 lakh a year because of data theft or loss. Most of this loss happens apparently because of badly paid disgruntled employees. Is this some sort of subversive rebellion which possibly represents the new way of keeping the blood-sucking capitalised bourgeoisie in check- the revenge of the proletariat on keyboards? Or is it a natural fallout of this information age in which we live, where large amounts of data can be moved around the world at the press of yes, key on a board?

Either way, it seems we are all at the mercy of a faceless army, a good proportion of which has the ability, skill and inclination to mess with our lives. After all, everything from our bank accounts to our phone bills, travel arrangements, credit cards even movie tickets are negotiated or monitored online. The internet has become our one-stop shop for most services and not all the sales people it seems are happy.

The interesting thing here is not just cyber fraud or robbery. That is easier to understand. The instinct o steal is strong and active on the real world. But this is cyber sulking, finding insidious ways to make an organisation's life miserable. Hackers after all started out to make money: they hacked because they could. Even now, the intent is often malicious not monetary.

The lesson perphaps is simply. Companies which do not look after their people are most likely to suffer. No matter how technologically advanced you are and how much you have reduced your dependency on manpower, the fact will remain that somewhere, somehow some human hands are operating your systems.And if you've been negligent or stingy, they have ways of making you bleed. The corporate system tends to give you bigger rewards the higher up the ladder you go. And as the world saw with the collapse of the global economy two years ago, the higher they went, the more fraudulent they became.

But now it seems that it is those left behind at the bottom of the ladder have the means to bleed an organisation slowly and effectively. It would make sense then to keep the nameless, faceless technicians, who really know what's going on, happy. Pay them well and feed their egos. After all, your company and your clients _ and all of us consumers - depend on them!

Cyber crime

In spite of massive Internet penetration in the metros, a whopping 79 per cent of Mumbai's citizens have no idea what to do when faced with cyber crime, reveals a survey of KPMG Advisory Services. What is equally alarming is that 96 per cent of the respondents didn't know whether they had been victims. This is ignorance of a dangerous kind when it is rising rapidly. It is not restricted to online fraud and child pornography. Terrorists have also found a safe haven here. The police in Mumbai and in other cities will need special units to tackle cyber crime.