Baidu: Party like it’s 1999!

Haven't seen this in a few years:

Chinese search engine Baidu had it's IPO today. Shares were priced at $27, started trading at an eye-popping $66, and closed at a monstrous $122.

Wow. Now, I know this company is growing fast, is highly profitable, and rides the China growth  wave, but still....

Link: BIDU: Summary for BAIDU.COM, INC. - Yahoo! Finance.

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Estonia rocks

Another link from ZDNet, showing that in Estonia 44.58% of cable revenues are from broadband. This is far, far ahead of any other European country, and far ahead of the US.

One has to assume 100% of those broadband users are Skype users as well :)

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It can’t be just file-sharing

A graph showing the decline  of CD sales in 2000-2004, split by major country in Europe is revealing in that some countries declined much, much faster than others.

Internet and broadband penetration was not any higher in Germany than in the UK or France during this period. So if file sharing was the only factor behind music sales declines, you would expect the declines to be roughly similar among these countries.

Link: � European CD sales 2000-2004 | IT Facts — Your Daily Research Synopsis | ZDNet.com.

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Steven Vincent

I never heard of Steven before reading the news of his murder in Iraq.

Two things that really struck me by this event:

-  Steven is a remarkable man. He was an *art critic* who, upon witnessing the events of 9/11, resolved to try to do something to help, and became a war journalist. He headed to Iraq, wrote a book, maintained his blog, and published many articles in the mainstream media. He was 49 and happily married when he was killed.

- Steven was killed presumably for his exposes of corruption, not insurgency, in Iraq. Reminds me of that journalist from Forbes who wrote about corruption in Russia and got murdered.

A great tribute to Steven is here: Mudville Gazette, found via Instapundit.

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Vonage like old skool telco, only worse!

What’s with the big service outage at Vonage? And this isn’t the first time…

I’m curious to know: has Skype, which is supporting a much larger user base and arguably completing a much higher number of calls, ever had outages? Can a totally distributed p2p service like Skype even have outages like what’s happened to Vonage?

In my mind, this sort of problem nails the Vonage brand squarely in a voice service “no-mans land”– far more expensive than Skype, far less unreliable than traditional telco service.

As “Vonage gets Dell’d” throughout the blogosphere and message boards, *no* amount of marketing spend will overcome brand-killing events like this last massive outage.

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Breaking News! BellSouth now only 7 times more expensive than

 Via Om, news that BellSouth is cutting prices on ADSL services.

Now, you can get 256k for $24.95 [256k, are you kidding me?? Only if you're a wireless carrier can you get away with offering that kind of miserable speed]

The "Xtreme" product is 3 mb/s and goes for $42.95. Respectable speed, but still way overpriced

Here's the funniest part: By the end of the year, ADSL2+ will have been installed, so they will start to offer "FastAccess DSL Xtreme 6.0" which is 6 mb/s. That means, by the end of the year, American's unfortunate enough to live in BellSouth areas will be able to get ADSL at 1/3 the speed that French consumers *have been getting for a year already*, using the exact same technology.

Those same French consumers today pay 30 Euros/month (about $36), for 20 mb/s access (and this includes 80 channels of TV, unlimited national VoIP, and 100 digital radio stations...but I digress). That's a little less than $2 per mb that the French are paying.

On BellSouth's new "lowered" rates, Americans will be paying from $14 to $100 per mb depending on the product. Between 7 and 50 times more expensive than in France.

Perhaps that's why the fine folks in America's south are starting to rebel.

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EuroTelcoblog

James raises a good point about the relative market caps of CW and Iliad making a takeover unlikely. Although, at the rate Iliad's share price is skyrocketing, maybe it could within a couple years be the acquirer instead of the acquiree?

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The Ask Jeeves ad network

Gary Stein of Jupiter research provides some analysis of Ask Jeeves setting up its own pay-per-click ad network.

A quote caught my eye:

"Assumedly, most of Jeeves' current users will shift over to the new system (hopefully they had large numbers of customer service reps on hand today). Some number of Google advertisers who were enjoying good returns from AJ will shift over to re-capture their traffic."

I think everyone will need to watch this very, very carefully. In theory, a click of jeeves traffic is a click of jeeves traffic, whether it came via a Google network ad or a Jeeves network ad. And since the Jeeves network starts out with far fewer advertisers, clicks on Jeeves' network should be much cheaper than on Google's.

So this is potentially a really big risk for Google. Even if advertisers don't actually leave the Google network, the huge increase in quality ad inventory should help keep PPC rates down.

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Change is the only constant

Seth Godin is spot on with this comment. There are *so* many other examples, particularly from the past quarter century... How long did it take for the fax machine to show up, get big...and die? How long for VHS tapes? How long for cassette tape Walkmen? From zero to huge to zero.

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New Europe: The Brussels Journal

A new European publication, The Brussels Journal,  looks promising.

It follows a clean blog format and is collaboratively written by individuals that, according to their mission statement, believe in restoring "three values that are so lacking in the so-called 'consensus-culture' of contemporary Europe: Freedom, the quest for Knowledge, and the Truth."

The libertarian, individualist flavour is refreshing; let's hope they follow up with some good content.

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