Persistence has top of mind for many Internet visionaries and technopreneurs at this year’s WWW2004 conference.

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It seems that Plaxo has finally taken the wraps off its fairly elusive business model. For some time now, many have pondered exactly which avenue they would pursue as they chased the carrot of profitability.

According to a News.com article, revenue will come from one of two main outlets, pay-for-use enhanced services and API partnerships:

The basic service is free, but the company plans to charge for more elaborate versions, said co-founder Todd Masonis, who started the company after graduating from Stanford University. A VIP version that costs $19.95 a year offers better customer support, for instance. Future paid-for versions might include automatic synchronization for cell phones and handhelds, he added.

Third-party partnerships will also bring in revenue, the company said. Plaxo version 2.0 incorporates a Yahoo search bar into the Outlook interface. Ideally, subscribers will instigate searches from the Outlook bar. Yahoo and Plaxo share revenue generated from these searches.

In the future, more partnerships could be added by linking to the company’s application programming interfaces (APIs). By using Plaxo’s APIs, an e-commerce site could, hypothetically, automatically retrieve an address for the intended recipient of a gift, Masonis said.

Source: News.com, “Start-up Plaxo sketches out business plan”

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As technology encroaches more and more on our daily lives, there is going to be a growing audience that does not completely embrace the presence of the Internet and its accessories. Recently, I came across the “Baseball + Wifi” entry at StopDesign which was talking about the recent installation of Wi-Fi at the SBC Park in San Francisco.

As the entry notes, there are quite a few “purists” that very offended that others would consider using laptops during a game. Here’s a sample:

Now one can watch the Giants, pull up any kind of stats, replay video, and apparently, even pretend to be working. Some fans are understandably upset. They don’t like the idea of ruining the sport with additional technology brought into the park. When I first saw the news about the wifi, my first reaction was “Why would you ever want to lug a laptop with you to a game?” Wouldn’t it kind of ruin the spontaneity of jumping up to cheer when Bonds cracks his homers into McCovey Cove?

However, I can also see the brilliance in the idea, despite the fact that I’d feel iffy about using it. I mean, baseball isn’t exactly the most non-stop action-packed sport we’ve invented. There are tons of lulls in the game, which make it a great social spectator sport: it’s great for conversation with friends and colleagues. Those lulls would make good opportunities to jump online to check email, or prove your point on who held the record for the most stolen bases in ‘97 (if you’re into that kind of thing). Baseball is one of the only sports I can think of that attracts so many stats-freaks. To them, I can see wifi access is a dream come true.

Source: StopDesign, “Baseball + Wifi”

The commentary is also particularly interesting and worth a read.

Continuing with more examples of the extreme cases of cellphone camera abuse. Yesterday, I came across a quick article in the Mail and Globe about a young man arrested for publishing child pornography.

Matthew Kalijarvi was sentenced to half a year in jail after being found guilty of surreptitiously using his cellphone’s digital camera to take nude pictures of his 17-year-old girlfriend and posting those images on his website for anyone with an Internet connection to see.

He was charged with possessing, manufacturing, and distributing child pornography.

Globe and Mail, “”Illicit cellphone photos of girlfriend land man in jail”

I meant to post this yesterday, but got sidetracked. It seems that cameraphones are not just dangerous in corporate and gym environments. A tricky little student was caught using his cell phone to snap photos of an exam and send it along to a friend.

CNN reports:

School officials banned cellular telephone use after a student was caught using a camera phone to photograph an exam and trying to send it to a friend.

“All we are doing is stepping up the enforcement level, because of the student’s flagrant violations,” Principal Joe Rice said Monday.

Cheating by using camera phones and text messaging has become a nationwide concern.

Last year, six University of Maryland students admitted cheating on an accounting exam by using their phones to send information to one another via text messaging.

The Salinas Union High School District has had a ban on “electronic signaling devices” since April 2003 but has let individual schools decide how to enforce it.

Source: CNN.com, “Camphone used to cheat on exam”

It’s been years since I was in a high school, forget attending one. It’s hard to understand how much students can “get away” with these days — now teachers have to be technologists on top of educators.

foo points to a news story about the use of text messaging in Britain as a means of ending romantic relationships (aka dumping your mate). As the clip notes:

Nearly one in 10 Britons admit to dumping their partner by cellphone text message rather than breaking the news face-to-face, according to a survey.

While a third of those polled said they had had an argument by text, nearly half admitted flirting by cellphone message.

Of the 771 Britons aged over 15 polled by market research firm NOP for Swiss software company Sicap, 38 percent confessed to reading their partner’s private messages.

Source: UK Reuters, “Brits send “U R dumped” txt msgs”

This really seems inevitable considering a while back stories were cropping up about the e-mail breakups. Heck, I’ve even done it myself :)

An interesting question about the potential use of decentralized software.

http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002760.html

I wanted to drop anyone reading a quick update to let them know that I have not abandoned the Twister. I was away on business over the last week which made it difficult to blog. This was compounded by the apparent overload of our DSL connection which resulted in zero access to all of my sites (plans are already underway to remedy this), hence making it actually impossible to post.

I’ll begin posting again regularly today or tomorrow, but first I need to take a nap (48 hours, 500 miles, and still going).

More later, Greg.

Over at Many 2 Many, Clay Shirky discusses some recent criticism relating to his comments on the RELATIONSHIP, a vocabulary designed to express the nature of human relationships. It seems that many people took issue with Clay’s dismissal of the language as highly flawed — a reflection of the far-too-varied nuances of relationships as a whole. This discussion exemplifies the struggle between the two, often discordant, forces: business and academia.

I should clarify that when I refer to business, I indeed mean the attempts to commoditize or otherwise compute and leverage principles for the achievement of an external goal. implementors often become quickly offended when academic opinions and analysis are applied to their creations, while academics tend to have far less flexibility in interpreting implementations. Clearly, judgement tends to get clouded when one is focused on a series of thoughts. The question is which force should we listen to and in what proportion?

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Last month (1 ,2), I covered many different aspects of anonymity, mostly focused on how anonymity and our perceptions of it, were impacting our lives and decisions. As I categorized previously, there were three primary uses for anonymity:

• Anonymity as control
• Anonymity as convenience
• Anonymity as security

Over the past week I have been secretly battling with another, more sinister form of anonymity, “Anonymity as observer”. It seems that certain competitors of my soon to launch service have taken to visiting my web site with the intention of spying on the work and efforts undertaken on our end. Surely, it is expected that competitors would be interested. What peaked my interest was the effort put into this examination.

After discovering that I had blocked access to the site from their offices, the user switched to using the-cloak.com to anonymize their access, essentially giving them access once again. I mention this breach because it not only annoys the heck out of me, but it pulls back on my comments from just a couple of days ago regarding innovation and attribution.

In this case, attribution is not open for discussion nor remotely considered. In this case, the larger entity is specifically trying to co-opt the innovations of one system for use in their own. Hoping to leverage their size as the advantage, the goal of this is to launch features and thinking into the marketplace with a force that blurs the truth and minimizes our own contribution to the community. Clearly, this is the other side of the power law pressures — the side where business rules, friendships flicker, and ethics fade into the scenery.