Brian Grey Blog

Upton Sinclair must be turning over in his grave.

Last night I went to check out the documentary Food Inc., a movie that chronicles the far reaching industry that one would describe most aptly as the “food production and distribution” industry.  Now, what I learned from the movie foremost is the fact that there exist what are referred to as veggie libel laws (the laws that got Oprah in trouble for her comments about the beef industry back in 1996), so I will keep many of most sacred opinions about Food Inc. to myself.

That said, here are a few thoughts:

1.  Go see the movie now (if you can find an art house near you that will be showing it) or at least rent the movie when it shows up in Blockbuster or on Netflix (hopefully the latter two aren’t owned by Tyson or Monsanto).

The producers of Food Inc. do an admirable job laying out many of the component parts of the food industry that when taken as a whole make you really think about how the food you eat gets to your table — and once on your plate what’s really in it.

2. Find a cause somewhere in the food industry ecosystem

There seem to be so many pieces of this puzzle — from early onset diabetes to e-coli outbreaks to labor practices to questionable policy making — that everyone should feel compelled to do something that has a positive impact on the food industry.  As the movie points out quite effectively, there are parallels here to the tobacco industry, (hint, hint).

3. Act and vote locally

Ever wonder why a fast food cheeseburger costs less relative to a bunch of broccoli or a pack of organic carrots?  Well, next time you feel the sudden urge to swing in to a drive-thru, keep going until you run in to a local farmer’s market or supermarket that carries something organic (heck, as the movie highlights, this could even include your local Wal-Mart).

4.  Don’t think of this as a date movie fellas

Unless your girlfriend or wife is super liberal (e.g. Berkeley grad?), is looking for another cause to take on (e.g. African malaria cure isn’t enough), only eats organic food (e.g. she’ll be able to name the Stoneyfield CEO when he appears in the movie), and you’re not planning to go to dinner afterwards (e.g. this may be a conscious tactic on your part to save a few bucks?), find something else to see as a date-night flick.

Don’t ask me how or why, but for some reason I ended up at the broadcast network end of the TV dial this morning.  Toggling between David Gregory and George Stephanopoulos (whom my wife correctly asked “what did he do again that warrants him moderating one of these shows?”) a couple of things struck me that reminded me what  a dinosaur these shows are in today’s media environment.

First, these shows better never plan on making the switch to HD.  Anyone who has to see up close how much make up George Will is wearing or whether Arianna Huffington’s eyelashes are real, will certainly click off to another channel no matter how compelling the chit chat is about North Korea.

Second and most notable is the “fishbowl” feel that these shows have — especially in a digital media world that has rapidly moved to putting a premium on audience conversation.  The old school method of having a moderator like George and David leading a discussion with analysts and experts is way too antiquated.  Having Huffington on the Stephanopoulos panel seemed the most ironic.  Here is a pundit who has arguably embraced the new medium via her Huffingtonpost.com blog platform, yet on George’s panel she appeared as 2-dimensional and archaic as Will and the other two stooges on the set.

How about this for a programming idea for these Sunday political shows.

While they are taping the show, run it live online.  Suck in the Twitter feed — heck bring in the FriendFeed, Facebook Status feed and any other audience conversation that can be gleaned from the Web while the host and guests are actually talking on set.  Then, during the actual taping, have the host dip in to the “conversation” and use the vibe coming from the audience chatter to steer the discussion a bit.  Not entirely audience driven, but enough to make it feel like we’re not just watching the show as though we were waltzing through the Television & Radio wing of the Smithsonian Institute.

Now I might watch something like this — a show where George Will had to reply to what real people were saying about what he was saying about North Korea.  Actually, on second thought, I’d probably just watch the thing online while it was being taped so that I could contribute to the conversation live.  I’ve got better things to do than watch network television at 9 a.m. Sunday mornings!

Here we are in the midst of Little League baseball season so it must be about time for more outcry from psychologists, parents and journalists about how our star craved culture is ruining our kids’lives by driving the little ones too hard in youth sports.

Sure enough, Monday’s WSJ “Bookshelf” section takes a full column to review BusinessWeek writer Mark Hyman’s book “Until It Hurts:  America’s Obsession with Youth Sports and How it Harms Our Kids”.  Okay, first off Mark needs to slow way down with that title.  He makes it sound like we’re back in the 19th Century running our 11-year olds through 14 hour days in the neighborhood sweatshop.

According to the WSJ book reviewer (I obviously haven’t read Hyman’s book — and I don’t intend to), much of Hyman’s focus on youth sports centers around the physical injuries that apparently millions of kids suffer playing sports each year.  From the author’s research, he claims that last year 3.5 million kids suffered a sports related malady that required treatment.  Sorry, mom putting a band-aid on a skinned knee doesn’t really count here.  I’d like to know how many kids actually had Tommy John elbow surgery (one of the actual examples in the article)?

This one sided view of youth sports misses the mark on two fronts.

First, as those who know me well know, two of my favorite movie characters are Vic Morrow as the overly rabid Yankees manager in “The Bad News Bears” and Robert Duvall as the demented military dad in “The Great Santini”.  Both roles epitomize the evil wrongness that we all fear about youth sports.

Now if I could point to any real life examples where I saw a coach slap his pitcher like Morrow did in “The Bad News Bears” or if I had even one example of a parent berating and/or embarrassing his or her child on the field of play, I might be receptive to Hyman’s thesis.  But I can’t recall a single incident that even comes close.  The annual story of the Texas dad who beats up the Pop Warner football ref in the parking lot after the game is an anomaly — but a convenient one for the 11 o’clock news and USA Today’s front page.

Actually, my experiences have been far different.  The parent-coaches that I have come in contact with have by in large understood the purpose of youth sports.  What’s more, I would reckon that the percentage of kids who even in today’s society zero in on just one sport before high school (e.g. move to Texas to be a gymnast or play on the year-around traveling soccer club team) is pretty darn low.  Like probably a very low single digit percentage.  Hardly numbers that would lay claim to youth sports being the epidemic that Hyman’s book appears to claim.

The bigger point, however, apparently not addressed by Hyman as relates to youth sports — or at least not highlighted in the WSJ review — is the fact that we have a glaring epidemic afflicting our youth today that youth sports can actually help address.  Child obesity and early onset diabetes.  And one of the best things we can be doing is encouraging youth sports participation wherever possible.

Again, I would be willing to bet that not a single kid on the team of little leaguers I am coaching will ever play baseball in the majors — let alone in even college or high school.  But I do hope that little league is just one of many sports they all try and that eventually they pick a couple (team or individual) that they really like and that this pursuit keeps them off the couch and keeps their hand out of the Doritos bag.

A book like Hyman’s smacks of sensationalism — playing off of corner cases and the easy line that can be connected from any topic to our “star struck society”.  Maybe Hyman will do a sequel that tells the other much bigger side of the youth sports story.  The one about how sports can have so many positive impacts on the lives of kids not only when they are kids but when they are grown ups too.

Wow, quite a dry spell from my last post – more than a week. Pretty lame I know, but hey, I’ve been on the road and let’s face it, booting up a laptop while you’re running around to meetings is such a hassle. I really live off my iPhone while on the road, and have come to love posting to this blog via the WordPress iPhone app.

Here’s a quick synopsis of the last week – to at least convince you all that I wasn’t at the beach or on the slopes:

Monday 3/2

Made my way to Boston via LA since the massive NE snowstorm kept me from taking the redeye Sunday. I flew Virgin America for the first time – I describe VA as flying in the lobby of a W Hotel. In fact, I knew my first leg was going through LAX when I noticed that the guys across the aisle were wearing white Ferragamos and thumb rings.

Tuesday 3/3

Spent the day out at Polaris HQ in Waltham. Was like minus 10 degrees with the wind chill. Not sure how people back East handle those winters – guess they’re just tougher than us soy latte drinking Californians. Of course I had to race back to Boston late in the day to buy a shirt and tie for the LP dinner that night. I was actually surprised I remembered how to tie a tie – it had been awhile!

Wednesday 3/4

Most of the day was dedicated to the Polaris annual partnership meeting. This was my first such meeting, and as a guy who has been on the operating side for most of my working years, I found it to be quite interesting. It felt a little like budget season in a company, but there was an impressive amount of financial rigor and analysis behind how the Limited Partners were updated on the status of their investments.

Thursday 3/5

A quick day trip down to NYC – the leg down was by air. First meeting was with Avner, the founder and CEO of Boxee.tv. He had just returned from meetings on the west coast with some content partners you can probably guess. I spent the rest of my day in NY catching up with a few friends and colleagues from various walks of professional life, including my good friend Hal who I worked closely with at Yahoo!, and who is now at AOL. The return leg was on the Acela train – have to say Penn Station is a little shabby these days.

Friday 3/6

Back in Boston and out at PVP for the day. That evening I had dinner in Cambridge with a couple friends and Dr. John Ratey, a Harvard professor and author of the book “Spark”.

A quick comment here about Boston/Cambridge and driving: easily the most difficult city to drive around. I must have circled the restaurant for 45 minutes before I could figure out how to get on the actual road that went by it.

Now, back to Dr. Ratey. If you are at all intrigued about the brain and how it can be influenced by exercise, you should read “Spark”. It’s relevant for understanding how exercise helps the brain learn at all ages, deal with ADHD and addiction, and slow down the aging process.

Saturday 3/7

Last day in Boston. Spent most of the day over at the Sports Analytics Conference at MIT with my friend Rudy and his wife Trish. The conference takes an interesting angle on some of the major topics in sports, but also delves in to less mass market areas like talent evaluation and analytics for specific sports like basketball and baseball. Overall they had pretty solid panels – I even ran in to NBA Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver, one of my favorite guys in the sports business.

So that was my week. Saturday night I climbed back on the “W Hotel” in the air and got back to my house in SF around 10:30 pm.

And now here it is Monday night the 9th and I’m writing this post from my flight to LAX as I head down to the Montgomery & Co. conference. Should have some interesting updates from there.

I’m not exactly sure how Bob Dylan and Robert McNamara — two more polar opposite icons from the 1960s — popped in my head Friday night when the news started pouring in that Hulu had requested its content be taken down from Boxee.tv.  A lot has been written about this — mostly of the tone that Hulu as a front for old media doesn’t “get it” and that they will eventually be overtaken by innovative open source community-based technologies like Boxee.

Well, this is where I guess Dylan comes in …more specifically his 1964 album “The Times They are A-Changin”.  Indeed, the speed of technology innovation and digital social networking seems to create this non-stop feeling that the times are “A-Changin”.  Look at what has happened over the last decade to the music industry.  Look at how prolific social media has become thanks to Myspace and Facebook.  Look at what is happening now with the onset of real-time messaging services like Twitter.  Not even a 15-year old girl with her hands strapped around an iPhone can keep up with it all.

Now map all of this change to what Boxee.tv purports to do:

• create a single interface on your computer that can assemble all media content — that which resides on your local hard drive as well as that which can be accessed via the Internet — combined with social networking features that enable you to see everything your friends are watching.  Then, to make matters more scary for traditional media guys, make all of this insanely easy to plug in to your big fat plasma HDTV so you can experience everything from your living room couch.

Whew!  That’s a mouthful…and at the same time a whole lot of disruption for the offline guys to deal with thanks to one service.

So Hulu’s actions that culminated with Friday’s “takedown” of their content from Boxee pits battle lines once again between the digerati creating cutting edge technologies and the contentorati creating premium content offerings.  Ah, the classic battle between software engineers and TV/movie producers.

So this is where McNamara pops in to my head.  Yes, probably the last guy you’d think of in a classic “us vs. them” matchup like Boxee.tv vs. Hulu.com, but if you happened to take in the 2003 documentary “The Fog of War” which chronicled McNamara’s life up through his tenure as Secretary of Defense, you’ll no doubt remember the 11 life lessons that McNamara delivers while telling his story.

Well one of my favorite, yet least practiced by people today and perhaps most applicable here, is his “Lesson #1:  Empathize with your enemy”.  McNamara makes this point as part of his depiction of the Cuban Missile Crisis and how during the most perilous days and hours of that event it was ultimately important to empathize with Soviet Premier Kruschev to resolve the conflict.

Now, far from me to try and equate the Cuban Missle Crisis to the Boxee-Hulu Crisis, but I do think the lesson is well served here.  You see, as someone who has worked in both Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, and who has worked closely with brilliant and passionate software engineers as well as content producers, I think right now would be a good time for both parties to empathize with their supposed “enemy” a little bit.

For Hulu e.g. NBC and Fox, it’s important for them to truly understand that what they have built with Hulu is their own path of technological change and the embracing of the new ways consumers will want to consume content — premium or otherwise.  However, once content producers wade in to the fast lane of this change, they have to understand there’s no turning back the clock.  Consumers will demand the ability to get content when and where they want it — and as evidenced by the “workaround” developed just hours after Hulu’s takedown, they will do whatever it takes to have that experience.

On the other hand, for the Boxee’s of the world e.g. technology innovators, empathizing means taking the time to truly understand what it takes to create premium content.  The next time they watch the credits at the end of a TV show or movie, watch how many people are involved in creating this premium content experience.  Producing high quality content — the stuff that people really want to watch, particularly on their HDTVs — takes time and money.  Too often the technology folks lose sight of this fact — and the fact that it’s a pretty big drop down from “24″ and “The Office” to the pool of Webisodes and what some think of as “premium UGC” (oxymoron anyone?).

Maybe it’s too Polyanna-ish for me to think that these two sides of the brain can empathize with one another to create a solution that brings the eloquent digital product experience of a Boxee together with the unparalleled premium content experience developed by the NBC’s and Fox’s of the world.  But taking a step back to truly look at what is going on through the lens of the other guy is a really good lesson — particularly when times are A-Changin.

Dropped by my first Mobile Meet Up SF tonite in South San Francisco.  Overall seems like a good event — heavy on the developer front, not necessarily “investor friendly” in that the discussion is pretty deep on product (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and less focused on the business aspects of the presenters and their potential funding needs.  Of course, this was the only one I’ve been to, so perhaps tonite was a special case due to the focus on Twitter.

After sitting through a handful of mini presentations from early stage companies, the big takeaway is that Twitter is fast becoming a significant part of the Internet ecosystem.  They are thinking smartly about how to embrace the developer community — enabling all types of services to be built on top of Twitter in a way that increases the importance of Twitter not just to early adopters but ultimately every day Internet users.

Based on a sampling of tonite’s presentations Twitter is getting some early traction from developers. A quick run down of a couple of the examples that were showcased this evening:

• Mosio is a mobile community that enables questions and answers — their interesting implementation is on Twitter at twitter.com/qna.  Once you’re signed up at mosio and you start following twitter.com/qna you can ask questions and get answers from the Twittersphere.

• Twittelator is a do it all Twitter app — hard to even explain all of the things it enables you to do in concert with Twitter…I would recommend downloading it if you have an iPhone and just start banging around on it.

• TwitterFon is a slick iPhone Twitter app that enables a robust set of Twitter functionality on the iPhone, while TwitterFox (from the same developer as TwitterFon) is a FireFox plugin that lets you track your Twitter feed from the friendly confines of FireFox browser.
  

• TwitPic — This is the Flickr of Twitter …embedded in to multiple Twitter clients, they got a server crushing boost after the US Airways plane landed in the Hudson last month.  And the guy running it — Noah — is a hoot!
  

Oh, and one other thought from tonite’s gathering:  Apple may want to throw it’s hat in the “who’s gonna buy Twitter” ring if they haven’t already.  Beyond the obvious driver Twitter would be in iPhone handset sales, the real potential upside for Apple would be in Twitter’s ability to bring Apple in to the media business — the new age media business.

If Twitter becomes the conduit through which users communicate, publish and access content, and they do this on the iPhone, well…AAPL at under $100 may be a major bargain right now?

Well I guess in light of the financial crisis and economic meltdown, in a world where everyone’s net worth has taken a dive of 30% or so since this time last year, it’s as good a time as any to fund another sports stock exchange business.

OneSeason.com just announced a $3.5 million round led by CRV and my buddy George Zachary (Note: George was the first VC in on Shutterfly where I spent nearly two years back in that company’s early days). Here’s the TC post on the raise.

Out of the gate my gut reaction to OneSeason raises several questions as to whether they can be successful:

1. A number of companies (TradeSports, HSX, ProTrade) have taken a run at doing this to little success. In fact, ProTrade (now chasing a different opportunity as CitizenSports) has some of the smartest brains in the digital sports space and they weren’t able to get traction with the concept.
2. Sports fanatics aren’t the same as fantasy sports fanatics — the number of the latter is skewed heavily by football and even that number is overestimated by the sources that are most often cited when sizing the fantasy sports space. Just as important, fantasy sports fanatics aren’t the same group of guys who are “traders”. Like the aforementioned sports stock exchanges, there will be a loyal, fanatical user base — it just may be a small niche crowd.
3. What are you buying here? The buying and selling seems to be based on a “beauty contest” — not on any underlying metric that provides some fundamental value of what a player should trade. Feels like a good breeding ground for the young Bernie Madoffs of the world. If I put my cash in to the OneSeason market and my player stocks go up and I want to cash out, what happens if everyone who is “up” wants to do the same? Doesn’t this imply a bunch of people have to be losing money on the other side so that the house isn’t exposed?
4. I’ll assume that this passes the legal sniff test — for now. But what about the SEC or whomever is supposed to be regulating “markets” in this country. Now that Obama is in D.C., might somebody pay attention to something like this? And the Leagues I am sure will be big fans of this.
5. And the argument that this is playing in to the multi-billion dollar virtual goods market? What are the virtual goods that I’m buying and getting to own here? I don’t see this as the same as buying a new sofa for my virtual world room or some additional ammo for my shoot ‘em up MMOG.

So given the above, conventional wisdom would have it that OneSeason.com will get some initial interest, a few people will kick the tires on it for the novelty factor, but eventually it will settle in at a fairly low active user base of “investors” who won’t generate enough transactional volume to make this big exit.

Ok, that’s conventional wisdom — which has been known to be wrong. I suspect there is more to the OneSeason story that hasn’t been revealed. George and CRV I am sure dug in to this one pretty significantly to get comfortable with the various risks and market opportunity here.

This will be an interesting one to check back on in a year.

Tonight I tackled the latest Web 2.0 mystery:  how to tie together the convoluted network that exists when one is simultaneously signed up for Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter.  What happens when you try to use each of these services to make your Web user experience easier and more fulfilling?  Well, you spend a lot of time clicking around to set and reset your settings, linking in to various subsets of “friends” and generally going through various phases of euphoria (“oh, cool, that’s awesome how that works”) and frustration (“what the f@&k is going on now?!”).

Alright, here’s my latest rundown on how these three sites have inserted themselves in my daily existence.

For several months I’ve been cruising along adding friends to my Facebook account and pinging on Twitter every once in awhile some of the same jibberish that I see so much of on Twitter (what I’d really like to see is Twitter to make Twitter Search more integrated and useful at Twitter.com — that’s where some of the useful filtering gets made discoverable to users).

Then, about six weeks ago I figured out that I could actually send an automated Tweet everytime I posted to my blog so I immediately installed the plugin in WordPress to do that.

Meanwhile, in the background I at some point had installed the Friendfeed app on Facebook — and actually set up Twitter and my blog as “services”.  So what happened then?  Well, not much.  Same user experience:  add friends on Facebook and Twitter randomly — with an occasional notice on Twitter that I’d submitted a new blog post.  But at the same time, Friendfeed would pipe in updates in to the News Feed on Facebook (basically resubmitting what was already being posted by Facebook), and oh, yah, I also installed the Twitter app on Facebook so that I could update my Facebook status via my Twitter iPhone app!

Confused?  Good, so was I.

So that brings us to this evening when I attempted to “rewire” my Web 2.0 life.

First, I actually went in to Friendfeed to see if there was more there than just a switchboard for routing stuff I do on other sites.  And actually there seems to be, though I need to put in more work to subscribe to what my friends are doing and to set up “Rooms” and special groups of friends so that I can order the conversation a bit better.  What I still don’t get is how to source meaningful “conversation” from Friendfeed — especially when what might be really meaningful is being said by people who I haven’t identified as my “friends” somewhere else.  For example, how do I find out about a really interesting conversation that’s going on about who the Phillies are going to sign before Spring Training?

As for Twitter, I’m still struggling to find the real value here.  I follow people, see their posts — many of which are like somebody shouting at me in short, inaudible snippets.  I do the same type of posts and imagine people are out there seeing them saying “so what?”.  I guess it’s a decent distribution channel for letting people know I’ve updated my blog — but most people get the update when they see my Facebook status updated (via Twitter of course).  I am going to keep trying to find the value in Twitter — as I said above, there is value in Twitter Search in the filtering that can be done and the corralling of meaningful conversation.

And what about Facebook.  Well they have made many iterations to the service in the past year.  Not the least of which is becoming more “Friendfeed” like.  Though piping in outside services like I can in Friendfeed seems harder to find and do on Facebook.  The real value with Facebook for me is in the fact that I have 600 “friends” on there and when I am on the site I can get a good, cursory update on what my friends are doing and saying.

So, where did I end up tonight?  Here are my conclusions — take them as a work in progress because I am sure that the way I have set everything up I am going to be blasting out multiple updates across these services in a way that will piss off my friends and get me accused of being a rogue spammer (kind of like my friend “EarnCashOnline1″ who is following me on Twitter).  That all notwithstanding, here goes:

1. Friendfeed is worth spending some time with — but I’d really like to use it in a way that allows me to follow and participate in conversations that I care about, like sports, managing, certain topics in digital media, etc.  Today it still just throws in a bunch of “activities” that come from the lives of my friends but doesn’t necessarily add a lot of utility to me.

2. Twitter is the “what’s happening now” platform — but I’d really like to see them invest in bringing the filtering that they are able to foster via Twitter Search in to the core Twitter experience.  Otherwise I suspect that the other guys out there like Friendfeed and emerging services like Twingly will co-opt the “conversation” spaces that exist within Twitter and render Twitter as just the pipes that deliver the messages.

3. Maybe what’s really happening here is another Bernie Madoff scheme.  Could it be that Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter (along with Digg, Tumblr and the dozens of other Web 2.0 features) are actually in cahoots in all of this confusing interplay?  Any time you spend time on an additional one of these sites you de facto increase the time you sink into trying to manage your Web life at the expense of your real life.  Maybe the guys at FB, FF and T are actually Facebooking, Friendfeeding and Twittering in the background new and devious ways to get all of us to intertwine their sites with our lives (how’s that for a visual?).

Nah, that’s crazy talk.  Now I gotta get back to www.FaceFriendFeedTwitterBookDiggMixxTumblrStumbleBook.com to make sure all my auto updates are, well, up to date!

Times are tough, consumers are tightening their belts and the Web is here to help us manage our finances.

The folks at Wesabe just launched a tool to help me and my wife do just that — it’s called the “Cutback Tool”. So what do I think of the idea? Well on one hand, it may provide a more scientific way for me to encourage my wife that we don’t necessarily need to subscribe to say six home-related magazines (sorry Domino and ReadyMade, you’re probably on the cutting block!).

At the same time, however, the Venture Beat article describing Wesabe’s latest innovation cites an example from the CEO where he used the tool to decide he wasn’t getting value from his Netflix subscription and that maybe he should cancel it. Listen, I don’t need a “Cutback Tool” to tell me that I’m not getting my money’s worth from Netflix. All I have to do is look at the “Entourage: Season 3″ DVD that has been sitting around my living room since Thanksgiving to calculate who’s getting the best of that relationship.

But, here’s few thoughts on what will be important to users. (Note: despite my initial happiness with Quicken per the post on Quicken Online I did earlier, I am going to try out Mint on the advice of a friend).

1) Insanely easy to hook up all the accounts that matter — if I can’t simply wire in my bank accounts, investment accounts, credict card accounts, etc. easily and then manage everything in a simple UI then forget it.

2) Clear ability for me to track spending in any time interval — this is obvious, but Quicken struggles in presenting an easy way for your credit card purchases to be synced with your checking account payments so that you can easily get a snapshot of your spending in any time frame.

3) Fast performer and learner — none of us like keeping track of our finances, so patience is short going in. The service needs to be fast and always working, and it should “learn” from me so I don’t have to keep telling it how to categorize my payments.

I’m sure some people will want an iPhone app, a Facebook app, the ability to some how use Twitter in some crazy way to manage their personal finances, or some other cool features, but all I really need is somebody to nail the 3 points above so that I have to spend as little time as possible sitting in my home office on a Sunday night playing “family CFO”.

Ok, I’ll be honest.  I don’t really put a lot of credence in predictions.  They seem to be right about half the time — and nobody really is ever held accountable for their predictions.  Think about it.  When was the last time some “financial expert” who predicted on CNBC that some stock or bond would go up over the next six months got fired when the stock or bond in question actually tanked?  Never happens.

But for fun, and to give my friends and family some additional fodder (like they need it!) to harass me this time next year, here goes…5 predictions for the coming year.  Remember, however, you have to treat me like that financial guru on CNBC if these predictions turn out to all be duds!

1.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average will close on December 31, 2009 at 10,092

Here’s the thinking on this one.  It’s the reverse of the old adage “what goes up, most go down”.  I’m taking the what “goes down, must go up” philosophy.  I’ll bet that so much gunk in the market was flushed out in 2008 via forced selling from every investor class that what’s left to be flushed will be done in the first half of 2009, and the Bulls will come back in the second half of the year.  By the way, 10,092 is a 15% increase — put that way it doesn’t sound so outlandish does it?  Consider this my “glass is half full” prediction for 2009.

2.  Microsoft will buy Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! will buy AOL, and then the 3 of them will do a deal

All three of these guys have to get off the pot in 2009 and actually come up with a way to make a credible run at Google.  Microsoft is the only one of the three capitalized to engage in the arms race of search and they have a smart search guy they snagged from Yahoo! to focus on the challenge.  What’s left at Yahoo! after search is still pretty significant audience-wise so why not hook it up with the audience business at AOL and actually build the biggest content distribution platform across all digital platforms?  Oh, and as part of this Yahoo!-AOL marriage, the combo will do a deal with MSFT where MSFT runs search across the whole thing and Yahoo!-AOL run the audience biz for MSN, including a deal that works out how to take over selling display advertising for the combined audience network.  Now that might actually give marketers another option to Google?

3.  Twitter will exceed 10 million monthly uniques (Quantcast) in November 2009 but that won’t be the story

First off, this means roughly a 5x increase from the 2 million uniques Quantcast has them at this past November.  But the real story will be the fact that over the next year we will see an outgrowth of innovation that plugs in to the Twitter platform and creates real value to it’s users beyond being able to Tweet what are essentially status updates (snore…).  Oh, and I suspect that with this emerging Twitter ecosystem a revenue story will emerge for Twitter (though I’m not smart enough to come up with specific predictions on the details of what the various revenue lines will look like!).

4.  Digital media M&A activity will rebound beginning in Q2 and carry on through the back half of the year

Now this is what I call being truly “fearless” in my predictions.  But given the “values” that will be out there, the thawing of credit markets and the need for big media companies to redefine their digital stories for Wall Street, M&A in the form of digital media monetization technologies (across all platforms) and audiences (specifically those that are truly engaged and that can be defined behaviorally) will be back in the news in 2009.

5.  My sports picks will look good on paper, but be way off in reality

For my sports wagering friends who I know follow my picks religiously, here you go (all of these are for competitions in calendar year 2009, so some are coming up later this month):

BCS Champion:  Florida Gators (two words:  Tee Bow)

Super Bowl Champion:  Carolina Panthers (two amazing RBs and Steve Smith…even Jake can’t screw this up)

Daytona 500 Winner:  Jeff Gordon (the guy needs to get back to winning if he wants to keep his Pepsi deal)

NCAA Men’s Basketball Tourney Champion:  North Carolina Tar Heels (Roy’s stacked the deck this year)

Kentucky Derby:  a horse

Stanley Cup Champion:  Detroit Red Wings (my heart says Sharks, but my mind says Wings)

NBA Finals Champion:  LA Lakers (almost went with Clippers here, but Baron Davis isn’t quite enough)

Golf:  Tiger Woods will win 2 Major Tournaments in 2009 (see Sportsman of Year below)

Tennis:  Roger Federer will win 1 Major Tournament in 2009 (my other pick here for Rog is “zero” Majors)

World Series Champion:  Philadelphia Phillies (I’m a fan, have to go with the repeat!)

Sportsman of the Year:  Tiger Woods (non-Olympic year, he’s back from knee surgery, SI needs all the help it can get selling magazines…this one’s an obvious choice)

Good luck to all in the New Year!