http://online.wsj.com/barrons/article/0,,SB108034639134766783,00.html?mod=b_this_weeks_magazine_tech_week Plaxo Blasted at Tech Forum IT WAS OLD HOME WEEK for some wonderboys of the go-go Internet craze at the PC Forum conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., last week. Among the attendees were Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com's CEO; Pierre Omidyar, eBay's chairman, and Tim Koogle, the former chief executive of Yahoo! But not everyone had a good time at the annual thinkfest, run by Esther Dyson, chairwoman of EDventure Holdings, publisher of the Release 1.0 technology newsletter. Prime example: Koogle was sitting on a panel about the evolution of searching on the Internet when the crowd got ugly and turned on him. Koogle, who also worked at Motorola and sits on the boards of about a half-dozen start-ups, is a director of Friendster, the social-networking phenomenon, and a director of Plaxo, a service that updates e-mail address books. And it was his affiliation with Plaxo that put him on the hot seat. If you haven't been "Plaxoed" yet, here's how it works: Users of Plaxo's free service can download the company's software to their computers, which copies the persons' contact database and stores it on Plaxo's servers. A user can ask Plaxo to send out a blast e-mail to everyone in his address book and ask them to update their information. But when the person who receives the message responds, he or she is directly connected to Plaxo's Website, which secretly leaves a software probe on the recipient's computer. The controversial company has many technophiles worked into a lather over a number of issues, including privacy, intrusion and trust. During the question-and-answer period following the panel discussion, a number of conferees attacked Koogle as though he were the second coming of Bill Gates. One man referred to the company's service as unsolicited spam. Others griped that it was simply creepy. Lastly, and perhaps the biggest concern, is the issue of what happens to all of that data if Plaxo is someday acquired? For now, Plaxo executives -- who include Napster co-founder Sean Parker -- insist that privacy is Job One, and that if the company were sold, users would be able to retrieve and erase their data from Plaxo's computers before the acquisition was completed. Koogle, who appeared taken aback by the verbal onslaught, said not to worry -- even if Plaxo were to get snapped up. "If a lot of the company's value proposition relies on that trust, the acquiring company will respect that trust," he argued. Most folks in the audience weren't born yesterday; they're sophisticated users of technology and the Web. And they surely remember that a similar argument was made regarding credit-card information and other data submitted to e-commerce outfits during the bubble years. However, once the Internet market began to crater, dot-com users found that their personal information was being bought and sold as, in turn, companies were bought and sold, or they folded. The audience also wanted to know if the free service had a business model yet. To which Koogle responded: not really. The private company is experimenting with two different approaches, one aimed at consumers and another pointed at corporate users, he said. That didn't instill a lot of confidence among the skeptics. [...] _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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