Comcast Has a Better Eye than CBS

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:45:26 -0400

By Carl Ford

While the world was complaining about the CBS purchase of CNET for $1.8 billion Comcast bought Plaxo for $150 million. This is probably the best purchase yet in social networking.

For those who have not been following the controversy between Rob Scoble and Facebook; Rob Scoble decided to part ways with Facebook for a variety of reasons and wanted to stay connected to his community. Given Rob's presence in the blogosphere when he gets upset, it can form a ground swell of support. So Plaxo enabled a functioning (but not ideal) tool for exporting out of Facebook into Plaxo's Pulse social network. Facebook cried foul and blocked the application. Rob ended up with more support and an offshoot has been the formation of the data portability forum.

The Data Portability Forum has become frenzied with activity and, thanks to folks like Phil Wolfe and others, I expect it to yield some good strategies. (Although I am not sure I would use all of them.) The forum is probably going to yield some agreements in formats and may be a good place to think about your own social network strategies.

From my perspective Plaxo stands to gain a lot from the controversy and the formation. I cannot describe Pulse well. It feels like everyone is posting to a common wall, but I am sure given the two million end users on Plaxo there is some discernment about "my" network. But the point is that Pulse has found a high ground in a world of social hysteria.

So what made Plaxo sell for $150 million now? After all, Facebook and MySpace are valued far higher. Could it be because of the Millenials? After all, I have been using Plaxo for at least four years. It has legitimately about 2,500 of my names (it claimed I had 10,000 but the dedupe killed off a 4-to-1 problem I had in Outlook). If I am part of the demographics so, probably, is the Lawrence Welk fan club.

We can take at face value Comcast (the buyers) investing in the growth opportunity, and the sellers probably have lots of ideas what they can do with the money. But in these days of widgets, is the money that important for development? What about for marketing? Where would you place the money?

And, as the buyer, what is the benefit to Comcast in buying into a still-to-be-separate social network.

Don't get me wrong, I can make a case. Comcast has embraced end-user video and one thing that Plaxo can be is a Personal Video Answering machine. It can also be used to build communities around Comcast content. Last year at this time, Comcast integrated Plaxo into their portal for Voice customers. Given the fact that no press release about the acquisition is on the Comcast side, maybe the cost of buying Plaxo was a wash given the payment for the services to their customers.

Meanwhile, imho its clear Comcast has a lively Pulse in Plaxo.

Carl Ford is Strategic Advisor and Community Developer for FierceMarkets. His words of wisdom can be found at www.carlford.net.

The value of good enough

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 06:59:58 -0400

People talk about HD and high-end video cameras and the need for higher-speed broadband, but there's a lot of "good enough" content playing on YouTube. The video quality isn't something that will work out the full capabilities of your 42 inch 1080i widescreen TV, but the content and presentation are sufficient to provide satisfaction.

I wanted to have a way to poke around with online video, a method to record a couple of minutes of life and then quickly edit and post it. My first go-to thought was to pick up a $300 to $400 mini-DVD or hard drive video camera. You get the zoom, you get hours of video, easy data portability via disk or cable and the option for fun home movies outside of business hours. You also get weight, the need to drag around data and charging cables, and extra disks if you go the mini-DVD route.

Plan B was inspired by David Pogue's review of the Flip video recorder. Flip is about the size of a mid-sized digital camera without a folding lens, lightweight, carries all of the software you might need onboard, has a pop-out USB prong so you can plug it into a Mac or PC so there's no video cables to futz with, powered by a pair of AA batteries for up to 2 hours, and it will store up to 60 minutes of recorded video. Very KISS. Flip has even thoughtfully put a screw mount on the bottom so you can plunk it on a tripod or a folding stick and do a lightweight imitation of Les Stroud on Survivorman. I've been lugging it back and forth to work over the past week and haven't even noticed the weight.

Flip saves videos to an .AVI file, with a minute of video taking up around 11 Mbps. Not bad and more than reasonable for meeting YouTube's 10 minutes/100 Mbps upload role.

Now, this isn't an HD-based solution, it doesn't have any bells and whistles on it, like say GPS-location stamping, and Flip doesn't even have a port to add on an external microphone. Other than the USB port and the screw mount, there's a single open plug for putting video on the TV and that's it.

It's not the best solution, but it is good enough. And that's the way a lot of people need to start thinking about online video. Ultimately, you'd like to have HD and a lot of other features, but right now it is good enough to start using and making money.-- Doug