I was perusing my RSS feeds this morning and came across an article from ZDNET entitled, Inside India’s CAPTCHA Solving Economy.  A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer (wikipedia).

I had never thought about the potential economics about setting up a service to “crack/break” CAPTCHA’s but a few enterprising individuals in India apparently have.

No CAPTCHA can survive a human that’s receiving financial incentives for solving it, and with an army of low-waged human CAPTCHA solvers officially in the business of “data processing” while earning a mere $2 for solving a thousand CAPTCHA’s, I’m already starting to see evidence of consolidation between India’s major CAPTCHA solving companies. The consolidation logically leading to increased bargaining power, is resulting in an international franchising model recruiting data processing workers empowered with do-it-yourself CAPTCHA syndication web based kits, API keys, and thousands of proxies to make their work easier, and the process more efficient.

I like how they call this Data Processing.  I guess it really is.  This reminds me of Gold Farming that generally takes place in games like World of Warcraft.. that’s data processing too I guess.

Looks like CAPTCHA might be on the decline if marketers start buying more from these solving services, so what’s next?

Technology has disrupted many industries over the course of time which in most cases has brought positive long-term change. Within 24 hours of each other, I read a post by Mark Cuban entitled, My Olympics 2016 Business and Technology Predictions and Auren Hoffman’s Technology is the Deciding Factor in Election Campaigns.

Both Cuban and Hoffman touch upon a major/premiere event (Olympics, Election) and how technology is creating new opportunities, creating efficiencies, and has the ability to scale the event itself much greater than it is currently today.

Cuban writes about how the Out of Home (OOH) market is going to create new opportunities for viewing the Olympics:

o what can NBC, or really any bidder do to give themselves an advantage ? What technology could they monetize in 2016 that would help get a return on their bid that doesn’t exist today ?

The answer is simple: The Out of Home Market

How many people can they convince to leave their homes to watch the games in a unique viewing venue. Would people pay 20 bucks to watch Michael Phelps go for medals 17 to 25 in a theater on a 3 story screen in the highest possible quality HD with a thousand other screaming fans ? Would they pay 30 bucks to watch it in 3D ?

Could they get 10mm people into theaters (thats the equivalent of a movie that did about 70mm in box office in 2 weeks). Would people get more excited about the Olympics than they did Batman ?

Would people go to the Royals stadium in KC to watch any of the games on a Daktronics screen that is 12 stories tall with 40k of their friends ? Would they fill 100k in the new Dallas Cowboys or the new Yankees stadiums whose HDTV screens will be even bigger ? How many different nights ? Particularly given that in 2016, those screens will be “old” and probably smaller than the current generation of screens in arenas and stadiums.

Of course it would also not be a stretch to place the biggest screens in existence in open air locations where huge gatherings and related events can take place. Would families pay 50 bucks for a day of Olympics fun outside on 100 acres ? Olympicsalooza anyone ? Why should it be any different than all the events that take place SuperBowl, or NBA or MLB All Star weekends ? Make it a huge party. In 100 cities across the country.

Could you sell 20mm tickets to attend out of home Olympic events at an average of 20 bucks each ? Thats 400mm minus the cut to the theaters, locations, etc of 50pct, or 200mm. Plus of course there is all the non stop advertising that will be built into all of these events. On screen, at stadium/field/farm/theater………

I would mostly agree with Mark. I’ve been saying this for a long time in regards to watching concerts such as the Dave Matthews Band in theaters. We’ve seen hints of concerts touching the big screen such as the Beastie Boys movie back a few years and recently, the Rolling Stones. When we go to the theatre, even though we’re watching with a group of people we chose to go with (surrounded by other potentially like minded individuals), it’s still a solitary experience. If you talk during a movie, you can expect to get a few looks from people who are displeased. With concerts, it’s all about the EXPERIENCE. The stage show is one part of it, but the crowd, smells, energy, and all of the intangibles make the experience. The Olympics is just like a big U2 concert… lots of hoopla, lights, great performers, but we should be able to watch and witness in a crowd of likeminded people to really share in the experience. I would love to see this happen for the Olympics.

Next, we’ve got the election. The media attention is switching from the global stage of Olympics to the national stage for the Election and we’re about to have a media blitz that will own the airwaves for the next few months. Hoffman talks about the 3rd Ask as noted below:

The Third “Ask”

In politics, supporters traditionally get two “asks” from candidates: one for money, and one for a vote. That’s it. That means most of the campaign work is done by a few paid staffers. Not a very participatory democracy.

The Obama campaign has turned this notion on its head and built a community involvement strategy. Axelrod and his team realized that supporters of a political candidate are passionate and want to help. And while most have full-time jobs and families, and can’t spend weekends knocking on doors, they all have five minutes to spare to help out. The Obama campaign has brilliantly taken advantage of this by actually asking people for help. They’re letting a large number of people do a small amount of work each.

So if you go to an Obama rally (or just sign up on his Web site), you might be asked to call three voters in a swing state. Or if they know you are a member of Digg (the popular site that lets users vote on articles of interest), Obama’s people may ask you to Digg an article that is favorable to Obama or critical of his opponent. Or they might ask you to put a bumper sticker on your MySpace page.

In 2012, all major candidates will be leveraging their supporters more effectively. But for now, Obama’s campaign has the technology advantage.

He’s right. Technology is allowing us to unite supporters, create an experience between everyone, and then have them go off and be brand advocates, in this case, for the Obama campaign. Hoffman may be quietly inferring that the successful candidate will utilize the Wisdom of Crowds model to move from a top down campaign to a bottom up.

What’s interesting in both cases here is that technology is making a real difference in both the Olympics and Elections. The Olympics was the most viewed event in U.S. TV ratings history (source) but the experience of the games could be much larger. Technology allowed us to watch most of the Olympics coverage whenever we wanted it (if you could find your way around NBC) and those access points weren’t figured into the ratings so it’s even higher.

I’ve always been a fan of how technology can penetrate an industry and picking two premium events in a 6 month time span is certainly fascinating to watch.

Lefsetz said this extremely well. Everyone should read the full posting.

Jump in the mud, mud
Get your hands filthy, love
Give it up, love
Everyday

Get up from that couch! Go out into the bright sunshine. Dial your crush and ask her for a date. It may be messy, but maybe not. Don’t be somnambulant, get out of your own way, don’t only embrace life, but eat it up. Everyday.

From a statement on The Dave Matthews Band website:

LEROI MOORE 1961-2008

08/19/2008

We are deeply saddened that LeRoi Moore, saxophonist and founding member of Dave Matthews Band, died unexpectedly Tuesday afternoon, August 19, 2008, at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles from sudden complications stemming from his June ATV accident on his farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. LeRoi had recently returned to his Los Angeles home to begin an intensive physical rehabilitation program.

I cannot stress enough how much this band has touched my life - both personally and professionally. I wrote about this in my book and multiple times on this blog. My deepest condolences go out to the Moore’s and all friends of the family.

I’ve met Moore a few times and he was one of the most understated members of the band - extremely reserved, but had a big presence on stage. We are going to miss him as the tour continues…

Great chart from Gartner.

Makes you think that if you ran a fund or were an investor, where would you place your bets?

NBC sees new media habits form with

Olympic games

By DAVID BAUDER – 12 hours ago

NEW YORK (AP) — About half of the people who are using mobile phones to pull down video or information about the Olympics have been trying out that technology for the first time, NBC said on Wednesday.

NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co., has been using the Olympics as something of a research lab to track the adoption of new media technology. Since the opening ceremony last Friday, the company has made content available online, through video on demand and via cell phones along with traditional TV.

The number of people requesting Olympic content over their phones is still relatively small — 494,506 on Sunday and 476,062 on Monday — but NBC executives say they’re stunned at how many of those never used the phones for this purpose before.

“To some extent, the Olympics are beginning to influence how people use new technology,” said Alan Wurtzel, research president for NBC Universal.

By far, however, television is still the preferred format. Of the estimated 107 million people to experience at least a few minutes of the Olympics on Sunday, 95 percent watched it on TV, NBC said.

Given the choice between a high-definition TV placed before a couch or a small, grainy picture on a computer screen, it’s still a pretty obvious call, Wurtzel said.

NBC’s prime-time ratings are running well ahead of the Athens games in 2004. Through five days, the average prime-time viewership for NBC is 31.3 million, the network said. Interest in Athens started slowly but heated up with gymnastics, while the Beijing games have been a draw from the start.

It has become a communal event that the country has enjoyed sharing, Wurtzel said, a rarity in the day of media fractionalization.

“I don’t think you’re going to see too much of this in the future,” he said.

Americans downloaded some 1.7 million video streams of Monday’s stunning swimming relay where the American team came from behind to beat France and keep Michael Phelps’ gold medal streak alive. An estimated 1.5 million video streams were e-mailed from one person to another, Wurtzel said.

NBC Universal worried in past Olympics years that its decision to air much of the events on cable outlets like CNBC, MSNBC and USA would siphon interest from prime-time, which is still where the network earns the bulk of its advertising revenue.

But the opposite proved to be true and, this year, the same thing has happened with the digital content, said Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics.

I thought it would be interesting to post this b/c the Olympcs affect people at a global scale in one of the most (if not THE most) premiere events.  Comment your thoughts on the release above - I’d love to get a conversation going.  I’ll be doing so today as well.

Bain & Co. along with the IAB released a study that states use of ad networks surges six-fold as media companies step up monetization of unsold online advertising inventory.  I read this study on Friday (somehow got a pre-release) and had some questions that I’d like to ask Bain/IAB:

1. How do you define premium?
2. In some cases, ad networks purchase inventory directly from publishers at a significant discount.  Was this taken into account?

The more important question of the two is #1.  Everyone has a different definition of “premium.”

Andrew Chen has a nice in-depth writeup of the study.

Hindsight is 20/20.  Right?

There are times that when we look back, we think we would have made a different decision.  In today’s Mercury News, Scott Harris wrote about deals that got away.  If you’ve not seen Bessemer’s Anti-Deals page, certainly check that out as well.

David Cowan is a successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose credits include VeriSign, Ciena, HotJobs, Postini and LifeLock. His golden touch is such that in 2001 he made the Top 10 of Forbes magazine’s “Midas List” of deal makers.

Yet to some people Cowan is the guy who whiffed on Google, eBay and PayPal.

Who else missed Google? Cowan’s friend, Susan Wojcicki, now is a Google executive as well as Brin’s sister-in-law. She said she once chatted them up to Tim Draper, founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Draper, she said, passed because he already was invested in a search start-up.

Actually, Draper said, “We turned down Google because we already had six search engines in our portfolio.”

There have been a few other regrets, Draper said. The firm got outbid on Yahoo and Facebook, and a clerical mishap cost him Xilinx, he said. “Now, we try to make sure we don’t let any e-mails fall through the cracks.”

We’ve all had deals/relationships that got away.  This article makes us all feel human.  A great read.

One of my colleagues in the office passed along this link to me which I have found fascinating.  If you’d like to see where/how conversations have started since 1930, check it out.

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