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Tech Trends: Open Source

Tech Trends
Open Source Software Made Developers Cool.
Now It Can Make Them Rich?

WIRED magazine
April 2008 (16.04) issue

By Daniel Roth

Last spring, marketer and blogger Hugh MacLeod posted a question on his site: If open source is such a phenomenon, where are all the open source billionaires? His audience wasn't amused. Open source software relies on a community of volunteer developers who tinker on, write for, or amend a program, then give it away free. MacLeod's site filled up with complaints that even to look for billionaires violated the spirit of the open source movement. "There have to be rewards," one commenter wrote, "but they don't have to be financial." Another simply recommended that MacLeod "shut the fuck up," adding: "You don't know what you're talking about." (more)

Hacking: The Pirates Can't Be Stopped

The Pirates
Can't Be Stopped

A lone teenager hacked into the outfit charged with protecting companies like Sony, Universal, and Activision from online piracy—the most daring exploit yet in the escalating war between fans and corporate giants. Guess which side is winning?

Condé Nast Portfolio
February 2008 issue

By Daniel Roth

From: Ty Heath [MediaDefender]
Sent: Wednesday, June 6, 2007 7:02 p.m.
To: it <it@mediadefender.com>
Subject: pm webserver
                     
The 65.120.42.146 pm webserver has been compromised […]
As a side note, please do not ever use the old passwords on anything.
                     
The first time Ethan broke into MediaDefender, he had no idea what he had found. It was his Christmas break, and the high schooler was hunkered down in the basement office of his family's suburban home. The place was, as usual, a mess. Papers and electrical cords covered the floor and crowded the desk near his father's Macs and his own five-year-old Hewlett-Packard desktop. While his family slept, Ethan would take over the office, and soon enough he'd start taking over the computer networks of companies around the world. Exploiting a weakness in MediaDefender's firewall, he started poking around on the company's servers. He found folder after folder labeled with the names of some of the largest media companies on the planet: News Corp., Time Warner, Universal.
                     
Since 2000, MediaDefender has served as the online guard dog of the entertainment world, protecting it against internet piracy. When Transformers was about to hit theaters in summer 2007, Paramount turned to the company to stop the film's spread online. Island Records counted on MediaDefender to protect Amy Winehouse's Back to Black album, as did NBC with 30 Rock. Activision asked MediaDefender to safeguard games like Guitar Hero; Sony its music and films; and World Wrestling Entertainment, its pay-per-view steel-cage championships and pudding-wrestling matches.

Anime: It's... Profitmón!

It's... Profitmón!
From Pokémon to Full Metal Panic, the anime industry is doing everything the rest of show biz isn't: embracing technology, coddling fans--and making a killing.
December 12, 2005

By DANIEL ROTH

It was 2 A.M. when John Ledford heard the banging at his door. Stumbling from bed on that night in the fall of 1999, he threw on a robe over his boxers and opened the door of his Houston apartment to a twentysomething guy with glasses and a face full of freckles. Ledford was about to tell him he had the wrong apartment when the stranger launched into a speech. At that moment, Ledford knew: This visit was no accident. This stranger was an otaku.

Translated literally, the word is Japanese for "your household." But for obscure reasons, otaku morphed in modern Japan to connote a scarily hard-core fan, a nerd obsessed with a hobby to the point of unhealthiness. In the U.S. the otaku's infatuation is focused on anime--the Japanese style of animation that typically features saucer-eyed women and giant mechanical men. American otaku wear the label with pride.

The specimen at Ledford's door was going on about an anime TV show called Neon Genesis Evangelion, a series about humans fighting an alien invasion. He had a problem with the ending. "I don't like the direction you went in and I want you to go back and fix it," he demanded. Ledford explained that he didn't make the show and closed the door. He was rattled by the nocturnal visit--later that morning, leaving for Japan, he called his assistant and told her to find him a new place to live. But he should have known: That's what happens when your customers are wild with desire.

Buffett and Gates: The $91 Billion Conversation

The $91 Billion Conversation

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates answer questions, first for 2,000 Nebraska students, then for FORTUNE's Daniel Roth. The billionaire buddies on the economy, philanthropy, and investment strategy--an exclusive report.

From the Oct. 17, 2005 issue

By Daniel Roth

It's the Friday before the University of Nebraska's Big 12 Conference opener in football-mad Lincoln, but the Cornhuskers game isn't the only hot ticket in town. On a beautiful late September afternoon, some 2,000 students are lined up outside the school's Lied Center auditorium, an hour before the doors open. Andrew Schoemacher, a lanky 19-year-old chemical-engineering sophomore, doesn't even have a ticket but hopes he can scrounge one to get inside. How could he miss seeing this show? After all, he says, "It's Bill Gates and Warren Buffett."

Gates and Buffett--friends who just happen to be the two richest men in the world, worth $51 billion and $40 billion, respectively--are coming together for a free-ranging question-and-answer session. They have done this kind of talk before--once. The two met up in Gates' hometown of Seattle in 1998 with students at the University of Washington. Back then both men were on the verge of turbulent times: Microsoft about to face off against the government in its epic antitrust trial, and Buffett weeks away from buying reinsurer General Re, now the thorn in his company Berkshire Hathaway's side, thanks to its involvement with the troubled AIG. FORTUNE, the only magazine invited to attend their first chat, found the interaction "something pretty darn close to wisdom" and put the talk on the cover (see "The Bill & Warren Show" on fortune.com). So when the billionaires decided to meet again, we went along for an inside peek at the event--and more important, some private time with the two men to pose our own questions.

The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy

BRAINSTORM
The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
By Daniel Roth

It's doubtful that Steve Jobs ever faced these kinds of interruptions. "Daddy, I want to take a picture," says Owen Misterovich, motioning to a digital camera on his father's desk. "Okay," says Pat Misterovich, handing it to his 5-year-old son, who proceeds to snap a few self-portraits. Then it's back to the work at hand: producing the next great MP3 music player. Only instead of the simple, elegant lines of the iPod, Misterovich's device will look just like a Pez dispenser. Oh, and instead of working from a corporate campus in Cupertino, Calif., with nearly 12,000 employees, Misterovich is a stay-at-home dad, creating his Pez MP3 player from the basement of his Springfield, Mo., home.

Misterovich is the former head of IT at the University of Detroit Mercy. He has few of the engineering skills necessary to build a device like this, no marketing experience, and absolutely no corporate infrastructure. And yet he's got two factories—one in China, one in the U.S.—vying to build the player. He has a small Austin company started by an ex-Apple engineer designing the innards. And on his blog, pezmp3.com, he uses prospective buyers—some 1,500 people have already expressed interest—as an R&D-center-meets-focus-group. What's better, he asks, AAA batteries or Li-Ion? In come dozens of replies ("Go for the AAA with a USB NiMh recharger if possible," suggests one reader). What's a good slogan? Some 50 ideas roll in (one of the best: "Candy for your ears"). By the end of this month the first prototype should be in Misterovich's hands. "I don't know that this product could have come to life years ago," he says. "I seriously doubt it. And if it did, it wouldn't have come through a guy in his basement."

Why There's No Escaping the Blog

10 TECH TRENDS
Why There's No Escaping the Blog
Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product—or destroy it. Either way, they've become a force business can't afford to ignore.
from the Jan. 10, 2005 issue

By David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth

Early in the evening of Dec. 1, Microsoft revealed that it planned to take over the world of blogs—the five-million-plus web journals that have exploded on the Internet in the past few years. The company's weapon would be a new service called MSN Spaces, online software that allows people to easily create and maintain blogs. It didn't take long for the blogging world to do what it does best: swarm around a new piece of information; push, prod, and poke at it; and leave it either stronger or a bloody mess. The next day, at the widely read Boing Boing blog, co-editor Xeni Jardin opted to do the latter.

She titled her critique of MSN Spaces "7 Dirty Blogs" and hilariously sent up the fickle censoring filters Microsoft appeared to have built in. MSN Spaces prohibited her from starting a blog called Pornography and the Law or another entitled Corporate Whore Chronicles; yet World of Poop passed, as did the educational Smoking Crack: A How-To Guide for Teens. Within the first hour of Jardin's post, five blogs had linked to it, including the site of widely read San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor. By the end of the day there were dozens of blogs pointing readers to "7 Dirty Blogs," a proliferation of links that over the next few weeks topped 300. There were Italian blogs and Chinese blogs and blogs in Greek, German, and Portuguese. There were blogs with names like Tie-Dyed Brain Waves, Stubborn Like a Mule, and LibertyBlog. Each added its own tweak. "Ooooh, that's what I want: a blog that doesn't allow me to speak my mind," wrote a blogger called Kung Pow Pig. The conversation had clearly gotten out of Microsoft's hands.

Typically Microsoft would have taken the hits and kept powering forward. That is the Microsoft way. For years such behavior has done little but make people feel defenseless against the company. But this time Microsoft deployed one of its most important voices to talk back: not Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer, but Robert Scoble.

China Tries to Kick the Piracy Habit

TEN TECH TRENDS
China Tries to Kick the Piracy Habit
All of a sudden, China's entrepreneurs are asking for protection from intellectual-property thieves.
from the Jan. 10, 2005 issue

By Daniel Roth

Ben Ye is one of China's many rising young stars. At 24, he won the first round of a business-plan competition at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University with a proposal for a web-conferencing company. Rather than stay in the competition, Ye took his idea and started a business called V2 Technology. He has been able to raise $1.3 million and build a 70-person company, yet the plan didn't account for one potentially fatal threat: pirates. Two years ago, when V2's software hit the market, resellers called to say that cheap, illegal copies were already being hawked.

Ye's lawyers declared that the only way to get relief was to find the pirates, collect evidence, and bring it to the cops. "We said, 'Forget it,'" says Ye. "We aren't Sherlock Holmes."

In Search Of China's Bill Gates

In Search Of China's Bill Gates
Does one of these young entrepreneurs have what it takes to create China's first world-dominating company?
from the Oct. 4, 2004 issue
By Daniel Roth

In the early 1990s, Wang Zhidong jumped into the sea, as the saying goes. The Beijing University graduate left a secure job to set up his own firm in an abandoned school near a street so crowded with stands hawking PC innards it was dubbed "Electronics Avenue." With a handful of friends, he crafted a program that enabled Microsoft Windows and Windows-compatible programs to work in Chinese. By 1997 the software was running on about 90% of the country's PCs. Then, as dot-com fever came to China, he decided to turn the company into an Internet portal.

Wang suffered from the usual problems faced by tech entrepreneurs—lack of funds, contract issues, fear of Microsoft—but there were a few that Western CEOs have never had to deal with. One: whether to install toilets. In 1997 the American CFO of his company demanded that Wang put real toilets in the company's new office. Wang was flabbergasted; he had never worked in an office that had them and didn't understand why he couldn't just have the usual holes in the ground. "We Chinese are used to these toilets," he says. "We call it 'Chinese kung fu.' " The CFO begged, explaining that he had been making up an excuse every day at 3 p.m. to leave so that he could sneak back to his hotel and use the toilet there.

Powell Takes a Pounding

Powell Takes a Pounding
Attacks on the FCC chair have been unrelenting. But Michael Powell might just know what he's doing.
from the Jul. 26, 2004 issue
By Daniel Roth

If you think Colin Powell's had it bad this summer—forget Fahrenheit 9/11, we're still trying to wipe away the image of him "YMCA"ercising in Indonesia—just imagine what his son is going through. In a mere six days in late June, Michael Powell, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, saw his carefully crafted plan for relaxing media ownership restrictions slapped down by a federal appeals court (the decision noted that a central section of his case "requires us to abandon both logic and reality"); had a U.S. Senator accuse his commission of potentially violating federal law in a spectrum swap proposal; and, in what has to be a first for an FCC chief, served as the target of a Howard Stern diatribe. "Michael Powell [is] a guy you didn't vote for, a guy who got his job because his father works for the Bush administration," declared the shock jock to his millions of listeners. "He's a crackpot, and I have said he's a crackpot." Also, pointed out Stern, he's "a boob and a jerk."

Larry Bird Finds Trump In His Backyard

Larry Bird Finds Trump In His Backyard
The Donald is competing to build a casino in the basketball legend's Indiana hometown.
Monday, May 17, 2004
By Daniel Roth

Lounging in his gold-bedecked 727 not long ago, Donald Trump explained one of his rules of investing: "I only do a deal if I think it has the greatest glamour."

Yet his latest deal couldn't be farther from the spotlights.