His death nearly brought the Web to a standstill with several sites buckling under the sheer weight of traffic. Of the 1.6 million fans that applied to attend the memorial event in L.A., only 8,750 people were chosen at random. This is one event that will test the entire infrastructure of the web and will almost certainly shatter records for the biggest single live stream ever.

And just to prove our point:

It seems that even in death, Michael Jackson could prove once again to be a record breaker.

Amidst the panic and paranoia (and the love for bacon)–we had to step back and look at the silver lining: at least we don’t have a Pig for a best friend. 

From the Wall Street Journal:

Fred Smith is in an agitated state. He’s just returned from a Washington Redskins game — played in FedEx field in Washington — and the team has been upset by the St. Louis Rams. “It was just awful,” he grouses. “My son’s one of the coaches, and he was ready to jump off the ledge of the stadium.”

There are few better people to ask about our current economic precipice than Mr. Smith — or, as some people call him, “Fred Ex.” His company has $38 billion in sales, employs four football stadiums full of workers, owns 300 jet airplanes, and tens of thousands of trucks and vehicles. FedEx moves an incomprehensible seven million packages each day to every corner of the globe. And the good news is that Fred is optimistic — sort of.

“Oh, the country is going to get through this and the financial markets will stabilize,” he assures me, but only after we go through a period of “trauma and readjustment.”

I ask him just what he means by “trauma.” He attributes the financial crisis to “the intersection of four long-term developments.” Reckless mortgage lending policies; high energy prices; mark-to-market accounting rules; and national policies that favor what he calls “the financial sector over the industrial sector.”
…Read More…

Erick Schonfeld and Mark Pincus of TechCrunch asked leading venture capitalists 20 questions, most of which were submitted by readers. The venture capitalists who were quizzed: Sumant Mandal (Clearstone Venture Partners), George Zachary (Charles River Ventures), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Raj Kapoor (Mayfield Fund) and Ross Levinsohn (Velocity Interactive Group).

Snipped from TechCrunch’s coverage of the event:

Is innovation dying in Silicon Valley?

Botha says the question isn’t whether it’s dying here, but rather that innovation is no longer limited to Silicon Valley. He also says VCs need to continue to take big risks with crazy ideas in order to win.

Schonfeld: What’s more important, great revenue model but no user traction, or great user traction but no revenue?

Zachary - great user traction is really important.

Roelof noted that PayPal had terrible cost issues and little revenue, but founders focused on creating a highly efficient architecture.

Pincus asks how important an obvious monetization strategy is in the early stages. Botha says they’re willing to take the risk.

…Read More…

If Firefox is your browser of choice, click here right now and download Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment that attempts to find a new way to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. Try it a couple of times and you’ll be hooked.

Essentially Ubiquity is a way to work with the command line within Firefox, but the result is that you can use natural language commands to do all sorts of things on the web superfast. Just hit “Control/Space” and type whatever you want to do into the command line. Ubiquity comes pre-loaded with a slew of commands, but you can create your own commands to mashup your daily tasks too.

But how could typing commands make your life on the web easier? Here’s just one example — let’s say you want to send someone an email with directions to your office. Rather than going to a map app page, typing in your address, copying the link, going back to your email program and pasting in the map you can simply type your address in the email, select it, enter the command “map”, click on the preview, and then insert the map. You don’t have to fully type all the commands either, there’s a handy autofill feature.

Check the list of commands here, and look at the tutorial here and you’ll start to see the potentials.

In a recent article Ogilvy’s China digital guru Kaiser Kuo said that said Beijing 2008 is the world’s first web 2.0 Olympics. And he went on to write:

 

There’s ample irony, and for some perhaps a certain poetic justice, in this — that the capital city of a country so infamous for censoring the Internet should be the first to host the Games in the age of Internet video sharing, citizen journalism, social networking, of microblogging, and the myriad online services and tools that have empowered ordinary people. Significantly, Beijing 2008 will also be the first Olympics in which a sizeable percentage, if not an absolute majority, of those in the audience will have in their pockets or purses a device capable of sending text, pictures, and often even video around the world almost instantaneously.

 

Another irony is that all of those devices in peoples’ pockets are provoking huge headaches for mainstream media here in the US. …Read More…

We are finally settled into our new office here in NYC! Everyone is staying very, very busy and looking forward to all the new and exciting projects that are coming up in the next few months. Here is a shot of the new office:

Also, Arthur was interviewed yesterday by Matthew at Scribe Media. They will be launching a podcast early next week on http://www.scribemedia.org/, I will be sure to post the link when I receive it next week.