Anthony De Rosa

Michael Arrington, the bull in the china shop that is the tech industry, recently revised his 2009 proclamation that he would divest himself from the companies he was covering and stop investing in startups to avoid a conflict of interest. In his revision, he announced he has begun investing in startups again and rationalizes it by making the investments public record. This has led to cackles from his peers, most notably from Kara Swisher who pointed out the hypocrisy of his boss Arianna Huffington to allow Arrington to be the sole exception to her policy of not allowing her employees to invest in the companies they cover.

Investments, however, are just one component of what can lead to a conflict of interest. I would submit that a far bigger conflict that goes unspoken and leads to much worse journalism are the relationships writers have with the people they cover. Friends, lovers and acquaintances muddle who gets covered and how they are treated by the people covering them. I can speak with some degree of seeing this with my own eyes when it comes to the New York tech startup beat and the founders they cover. Many of the same people writing about these startups are good friends with the principals, and the nearly flawless fawning coverage reads more like an extended arm of their public relations group than anything resembling real journalism.

On top of that you have people who hop between being journalists and working as either advisers or evangelists who participate in promotional events for products. The conflict of being an adviser or an evangelist is obvious, diluting the person’s journalistic ethics and their ability to be impartial.

The participation at various events can be harmless in some cases if it’s simply to cover the event and gain information about a product. Too often, though, the participants wind up becoming a shill for the very product and, in fact, in some cases, are even used in the promotional material. They also make their affinity for the product or service known through social media. These folks can no longer be taken seriously on any journalistic level.

Would disclosure help fix this problem? If there was better transparency of the investors, would the relationship the writer has with their subjects lead to a more informed reader who could take those biases into account when reading an article? In a study I was directed to by Boston.com’s Courtney Humphries, the answer is that disclosure may actually make writers less ethical.

The study (PDF) found the participants felt that if journalists disclosed their conflicts they would have carte-blance to lay their biases on thick. Assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management Daylian Cain along with with Don Moore at the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley and Professor of Economics and Psychology George Loewenstein at Carnegie Mellon University conducted the study.

In the end the only basis for our ability to weed out good information from bad, propaganda from well balanced editorial or commentary, is our own motivation to seek out alternate sources. Al Gore once changed the famous Thomas Jefferson quote: “A well informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will” to “The well-informed citizenry is in danger of becoming the ‘well-amused audience’“.

Given the rapt attention toward the political aspirations of a certain New York City real-estate mogul in recent months, it’s not difficult to see which of the two quotes applies more accurately to our modern culture. We’re all too eager to reinforce that which we already believe rather than look for proof to the contrary.

A decade ago, we wondered what happened to the product that Google just announced. The Chromebook, Google’s version of a netbook, finally has the ecosystem and infrastructure to support it. Many have declared the PC age on its deathbed, with mobile on the verge of overtaking its marketshare. Google simply believes the PC will evolve, into the cloud and beyond local based storage.

Google will make their notebooks, running entirely on their Chrome OS, available in June, partnering with Acer and Samsung for the hardware and Verizon for connectivity. Samsung will charge $425 for a Wifi only version and $499 for one that includes 100MB data service. Acer’s version will cost “$349 and up.”

The notebook has virtually zero boot time — hit power and you’re on. The battery is said to last an entire day. Your files, entirely in the cloud and accessible anywhere, have built-in security. Updates to software, purchased in the Chrome App Store, will be automatic.

Some of Google’s strongest and most widely used apps: Gmail, Docs, and Calendar, will be available online and off, within the Chrome OS. This is where Google will attempt to eat into Microsoft’s bread and butter: Outlook and Office. While many large corporations use Outlook for their email, and Office for their documents, the flexibility that Google’s free versions of these applications, which don’t require a download and can be accessed anywhere, are an attractive alternative.

These Google applications are, however, already readily available on existing hardware like your laptop or work computer. In order for Google’s post-PC device to succeed, it will need to attract a market that cannot or does not want a fully functional notebook computer, and have been unimpressed with the netbooks that have come before it. What exactly will the Chromebook bring to the table that isn’t already available over the web with existing netbooks, at virtually the same price?

Perhaps they simply want to play Angry Birds on a bigger screen.

The first time I used Skype I was in awe. The video quality, the effortlessness it allowed me to see and hear my family far away over my laptop computer screen was magic. It was even more magical when I tried it on my iPhone — a Dick Tracy moment. And it was more impressive than FaceTime because it allowed me to talk to anyone with Skype, not just with those who had an iPhone.

Today, Skype will likely begin to be lost in the maw that is Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft still remains one of the most valuable companies this country has ever produced but aside from the XBox, it hasn’t been on the leading edge of innovation in many years. Apple, Google and companies like Facebook and Twitter are seen at the forefront of the digital age. Microsoft, in comparison, seems like the once great star athlete, a Michael Jordan attempting to regain some glory by playing minor league baseball.

The best case scenario here is that Microsoft rolls Skype into a product like Kinect, which hasn’t quite taken the world by storm, and becomes a simple, easy to use videoconferencing device for the living room, that takes us beyond just hunching over our computers to interact with our friends who are far away.

The reasoning, however, provided in a rather unimpressive press conference by the awkward and uninspiring Steve Ballmer, was to bring new customers to Windows and Office. I can tell you with some degree of experience, business users want screen sharing but they don’t have a great need for videoconferencing. It isn’t a tremendous business advantage or productivity tool.

If, instead, Microsoft predictably turns Skype into Windows Messenger Live Video Vista Professional Edition, then we will have watched one of the most exciting products developed in the last century killed off in the interest of its shareholders.

It began with the White House announcement that President Barack Obama would make a statement at 10:30pm ET. The speculation on Twitter was that this was either going to be a major update on events in Libya or that Osama Bin Laden had been captured or killed. Below is the twitter stream starting from last night with some comments in between that give it context.