Speaking of Tony Perkins (see below), he’s got an excellent, rare and candid interview with the CEO of Sony, Nobuyuki Idei, at his own web site.

Sony is pretty much at the center of every piece of technological change going on in the world today — with the probable (and significant) exception of biotech. The fact that Idei seems able to keep ahead of all the relevant trends in all the relevant technologies is a marvel of personal focus. For that alone, the interview’s worth reading.

Some of his opinions:

• Sure, we’d buy PalmSource if they were selling.


• Ericsson teamed with us because they wanted an easy way out of the cellphone busines, and we wanted their patents.


• Nokia cares more about volume than anything else.


• His music division is operating from a position of panic, not thought.


• Microsoft doesn’t have a clue, but IBM might make an interesting partner.

Excellent interview between a smart questioner and a smart answerer. Worth reading.

The Red Herring, the last of the Venture Capital Porn magazines, has finally given it up, just short of its 10th birthday.

There was a time when the Herring, Upside, and the Industry Standard were riding high wide and handsome. More ads than they could take, more editorial pages than they could fill. They were The Elect, in their wierd technoCalvinist way, and they were more than willing to tell you so. Wearing my Publishing Wise Man hat, I was once interviewed by a gentleman from The Economist, who was wondering what was supporting these magazines, and if the success of these magazines meant that the economy beneath them had fundamentally changed.

Of course it hadn’t. Kurt Andersen once said that raising money in 1998 was as easy as getting laid in 1968. He may well have been right, and possibly in a more profound way than he meant. Most of the sex in ’68 probably lead to as many strong relationships as most of the funding in ’98 led to strong companies. In both cases, not nearly enough of them. In both cases, we’re probably paying the price today.

Then, Poof! The Standard, newest and flashiest, went first. Then Upside, the senior title of the bunch and the one with actual Adult Supervision. And now Red Herring.

Why? Because their readership sucked. The vast majority of the people reading those titles had as much involvement with the real venture market as the people reading Playboy have a real involvement with the models. Fantasy, at best. Obsession, at worst. The people who were really involved had better sources than a monthly magazine that needed a four-month lead time. The ads were bragging, the editorial was hagiographic. Though the magazines may once have had a purpose, by their end they were sponges soaking up the excess cash sloshing around the tech industry.

And Tony Perkins, the founding father, comes on and sings the same song: hey, it’s only a respite. We’re just one more round of funding away from being right back on our feet.

Just one more hit of crack and everything’ll be fine fine fine fine fine fine fine fine fine…….

Remember last month, when the Boston Globe was astonished to discover that its hometown Senator and presidential candidate, John Kerry, wasn’t actually Irish? Kerry’s press secretary said that the senator had corrected every instance he was aware of where people cited his supposed Irish heritage.

The Globe isn’t letting the matter rest, and appears to be going through every possible statement and public appearance to see just cute Kerry’s been with the facts over the years. (Think about it. The Globe’s a serious, excellent newspaper, and its reporters and editors must be besides themselves with anger at not knowing Kerry’s personal history.) Today, the Globe digs up a 1986 statement in the Congressional Record where Kerry says:

”For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestory…”

Kerry’s staff says some staffer wrote the piece and inserted it into the record, and that the senator never saw it. Given the misspelling of “ancestry,” that may be true; certainly, no copy editor ever saw the statement.

If this is what Kerry’s in for from his hometown paper, he’s going to have a very long election cycle.

Man meets Toy. One of the funniest bits of writing I’ve seen online in a dog’s age. True? Not true? Who cares?

A petty officer stationed at Pearl Harbor opens a pack of Chee-tos, only to discover…

…the largest Chee-to in the world.

Chee-tos Development Manager Kevin Cogan’s job is to ponder such mysteries. He believes that some of the cheddar seasoning in the company’s machines built up and plopped out in big blob. That sneaked past inspectors.

“We call it Seasoning Accumulation,” Cogan said. “If you love cheese, this is the Chee-to for you. It’s beyond dangerously cheesy.”

“Dangerously cheesy” indeed. Somehow, the Chee-to has found its way to the Midwest:

The folks in Algona, Iowa — a one-movie-theater town with 5,970 residents — can hardly wait to get their hands on the giant Chee-to. They plan to shellac it, lay it on plush velvet and put it under Plexiglas.

“This giant Chee-to could be a boon to our local economy,” said Tom Straub, owner of Algona’s Sister Sarah’s Bar. “Anything we can do to attract visitors to our town would be good.”

Me, I’d be worried (well, “worried” is way too strong a word) about shipping the thing from Hawaii to Iowa. I’m not sure that I’d trust FedEx and bubblewrap with such a delicate cargo. A courier? Well, that flight from Hawaii to Iowa’s awfully long, and airline food these days isn’t so good, if you get my drift….

AOL blocked 1 Billion pieces of spam yesterday to its 35 million users, according to the NYDaily News — up from 780 million pieces two weeks ago:

A recent report from independent tech consultancy Ferris Research estimated 30% of inbound E-mail at U.S.-based Internet service providers is spam.

Ferris forecast this spiraling problem will cost U.S. organizations more than $10 billion in 2003 because it “consumes computing resources, email administrator and helpdesk personnel time, and reduces workers’ productivity.”

My own mailbox reflects this upswing. One of my accounts gets an average of 70 pieces of spam a day; between all my accounts, I probably delete about 100 a day.

Legislation won’t help. Most of the spammers are (or easily could be) far beyond the reach of U.S. law, and I’m fully confident that any attempt to craft a content-based law to control spam would be perverted to restrict legitimate content.

The answer is technological. I know the wizards are working on it, and I hope to try a solution or two in the near-ish future. I’ll report back.

USA Today reports that your $20 bills will be more colorful starting this fall.

On March 27, the Bureau of Printing and Engraving will unveil a new remake of the double-sawbuck, adding “one predominant, yet subtle, color that will appear in the background and at least one other color,” along with other new security measures.

This will be the first U.S. currency to be a color other than green.

The $20 is the most commonly counterfeited bill in the USA, and close to 40% of the money seized in this country in the last fiscal year was made with laser printers, up from less than 1% in 1995.

The plan is to update currency every seven to 10 years. After the new $20 is introduced, the $50 and the $100 will come next.

In New York, it’s not at all uncommon to see signs in lunch restaurants and other retail establishments saying that they won’t accept $100s — and in some cases $50s. Even with the 1996 redesign, there’s too much counterfeit floating around. And if there’s so much around in New York, can you imagine how much counterfeit U.S. currency there must be overseas, where people aren’t as familiar with the money as Americans are?

[Later: I took a closer look at that press release linked to above. It’s dated June 20, 2002. So this isn’t exactly new news. The only actually new thing is the date of the unveiling; otherwise, it’s USA Today that make it news today. This is instructive for students of the news media.]

Crossword aficianados know that the NYTimes crossword gets progressively harder as the week goes on. Saturday’s is generally a cast iron bitch on wheels. This kind of correction, from today’s paper (unlinked because the Times doesn’t archive corrections as such on its site), won’t help:

The crossword puzzle on Saturday provided an erroneous clue for 12 Down, seeking the answer “mare.” “Mate for `my friend’ Flicka” was incorrect because Flicka, in the Mary O’Hara story, was a mare; her mate would be a stallion.

A friend of mine who rides mostly BMWs swears that Harley riders are the scum of the earth. Me, I don’t care much. I just love the name of this Harley club, reported in the NYTimes.

Instead, the guys with the mezuzas on their Harley-Davidsons will be riding for the first time as a group in Daytona, Fla., during Bike Week, the annual bikers’ Woodstock for half a million motorcyclists.

From the New Scientist:

Fifty years to the day from the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of its co-discoverers has caused a storm by suggesting that stupidity is a genetic disease that should be cured.