I am spending some time on product development, a favorite activity of mine, these days.  I came across this post on Signal vs. Noise.  I could not agree more.

Last Thursday Google announced its Q1 numbers that blew the estimates away.  I have been meaning to write about how incredible these numbers are, but Fred Wilson was quicker:

Quarterly revenues – $2.25bn, up 79% year over year
Quarterly EBITDA – $1bn – up 86% year over year

Now let’s just take a second to comprehend those numbers.

We are witnessing a business that is approaching $10bn in annualized revenues growing at 80% year over year.

And we are looking at a business with operating margins of almost 50%.

Now, having lived through the go-go 90’s with my 401K in picked-tech (i.e., very few tech stocks), and having learned my lesson, I am usually the sceptic who says, "everytime we are promised a ‘paradigm shift’ and that this time ‘it’s different’, we see asset prices reverting to mean." (I am reading "American Sucker" by David Denby right now, which serves as a nice reminder.)

However, I can not help but get excited about what an amazing company Google seems to be building.  If I were old media, I would be worried.

The Mercury News’s Silicon Beat blog has a post highlighting Baris’s Web2.0 List, with comments on the huge size of the list and how even a list of this size can not keep up with the Web2.0 pace.

A nice quote is:

David Hornick, venture capitalist over at August Capital, sees the list and wakes up to the fact that four of his companies now have 33 competitors, and that’s only counting ones on the list. "That is mind blowing," he remarks.

Thanks, Tahir, for the link.

Timely for today’s Istanbul NEG April Meeting, Paul Graham has a great post about ideas being copied:

Even when competitors realize your idea is good, (a) it will take them a long time to implement and (b) they’ll probably screw up critical things.

And finally, working on your ideas will lead you on to new ideas. So you’ll be a moving target; by the time competitors copy what you’re doing now, you’ll be doing more.

…

Worry most about how to make something people want. If you’re building anything good enough to copy, you’re way ahead.

I’d written about timeshifting and placeshifting in media before. TiVo had blasted the time restrictions in media consumption, although, I don’t think it has won the game, yet.  DVR technology has probably benefited cable co’s more.  And, the Slingbox is rocking the place restriction.  We’ll see how IP protection requirements will affect Sling’s development.

For the connected world (i.e. 3G coverage areas) there is now a new frontier.  Russell Beattie shares his experience with Orb’s DVREverywhere, the mobile TiVo integration system that streams one’s TiVo content to their 3G phones. (Thanks, Burc)

Users of social networking sites are familiar with versions of the "connect to/link to/accept me, please" request.  But, i bet most have not gotten one with the request in the headline.  With Snubster, now you might.

According to Wired (thanks, Volkan, for the link), Snubster,

Software engineer Bryant Choung intended to satirize social discovery services when he launched his beta site, Snubster, last month. The site lets members create public lists of people and things that rankle them.
….
Lately, Choung says the application he created to poke fun at the
idea of online community is becoming its own place to network. People
surf each others’ hate lists and occasionally make contact.

"It has developed into a sort of community atmosphere," he said. "It
seems as though people find entertainment and connections in finding
other people that hate the same things as them."

We’ve seen other parody sites poking fun at the SNS area; however, I must admit, I like the antisocial networking concept, in that, disliking (or being annoyed by) someone, is in itself, a social act.

Friday, I began noticing a spike in my site stats.  Looking at the referrers, I realized that I was getting a lof of hits through a link in FazlaMesai.net, a Turkish community of web developers, similar to slashdot.  Specifically, it was a post related to my Israel Envy blog entry.

So, SortiPreneur got FMd (akin to "slashdotted") and it’s now feeling the FazlaMesai effect.

Thanks, Emre, for the reference.

So, Disney’s done it first:

In an effort to extend its broadcast economic model to the Internet, the  Walt Disney Company
said today that it would offer some of its most popular ABC television
shows free on its Web sites but with commercials that cannot be
eliminated.

Fred Wilson and Jeff Jarvis are excited about the move.  Both write extensively on the future of media. Fred is impressed that it’s big media that’s stepping forward.

This is big, big, big.

It means they get The Future of Media.
They are freeing their content and monetizing it on the web. It looks
like they are microchunking it, but it’s not totally clear.  And I am
not sure about the syndication part.  But it doesn’t really matter.
They get it, they are leading they way.

Jeff comments on what he think this means for the economics of media:

And that leads to the real danger to media competitors: Ad Age reported
last week that the ad industry is “ousting broadcast TV as its central
organizing principle.” That is seismic.

…

What this really means: TV is grabbing a share of online advertising by redefining TV as both broadcast and broadband.

There are detractors, too.  Umair Haque, a prolific thinker on new media strategy feels Disney’s only taking one half of the required action, "unbundling without rebundling", and that it’s going to be destructive.

The point: unbundling media is only half the game: the value creation
half. And it’s exactly and totally the wrong half from a strategic
point of view.

Rebundling is where value capture will
happen – at communities, reconstructors, markets, networks – that
direct people’s attention to individualized ‘casts. This is where
branding will be reborn – and where advertising is already being
disrupted, ripped apart, and reborn (viz, Google, PPC, pay per call,
etc)

….

By focusing on unbundling without rebundling Disney is getting edge strategy exactly wrong. They are handing market power to folks like YouTube and MySpace – literally just forking over market power.

From a consumer’s standpoint, I find Disney’s move to be bold and courageous.  My view is more in line with Fred and Jeff.  It’s difficult to foresee what exactly happens when you microchunk content and release to the general population.  One result may be that (as Umair proclaims) that you get p2p networks flooded with Desperate Housewives episodes sans ads.  The other may be that you get MySpace-like communities created around TV shows, with strong social components.  The former scenario would hurt Disney, the latter would help.  I don’t think we know how it will play out.  At the end, Disney will benefit, even if it costs them some short-term revenue, because they will find out what happens, first.

UPDATE: Fred Wilson replays the above-constructed conversation from his prespective, in his post today.

The Yonja team has launched 7inci.  Emre Baran announced its launch today:

It provides daily articles about hidden gems of Istanbul.  These places vary from restaurants to shops, to music venues to artistic events.

It’s similar to Daily Candy in that there’s no "pay for play".  It should be a refreshing breakout from the spam lot flying around in Istanbul these days.

When Tom Evslin says "huge", I listen.  He’s got an exciting prediction that:

Within four years, possibly three, free WiFi will be available on the streets of every American city. Building
services, applications, and devices to take advantage of this
capability will be the mainspring of Bubble 3.0 and may be the saving
grace for American competitiveness.

Then, he intelligently points out that this will have implications for local search. I remember reading in John Battelle’s The Search, close to 25% of all search is local in nature.  With ubiquitous WiFi, we will have computer-assisted solutions to our remaining "search/find" problems.  This should be a very disruptive wave.