Back in January, I wrote about Ash Patel, the newly appointed chief product officer at Yahoo and how he loved his mac. At that point, I thought it was pretty much a done deal. I saw his name pop-up in many different places including The Washington Post with his title.

Apparently, that memo had not reached the PR department got around to issuing a press release this past friday, saying Ash Patel, had been appointed as the new chief product officer. Or was it a slow news day? Anyway congrats to Ash and Yahoo – after all how many companies can boast a serious techie who stayed in their ranks for 10 years.

For some odd reason, technology industry refuses to learn the lesson of simplicity. Instead, they try and cram as many features into a device, be it a mobile phone, a MP3 player, a media center or a computer.

I fail to understand why it is hard for the industry to learn from the success of Blackberry, iPod, and TiVo. (Okay, TiVo hasn’t been that successful financially, but it is still a simple and easy experience.) Nicholas Carr, recently lamented, “Even Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, not to mention all the Web 2.0 mini businesses, seem intent on waging feature wars that mean a whole lot to a very few and nothing at all to everyone else. At this point, the whole tired affair seems to point not to an overabundance of creativity but to a lack of imagination.” Jason

University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business researchers Roland Rust and Rebecca Hamilton just finished a study on a phenomenon they describe as “feature fatigue — the frustration that occurs when consumers are overwhelmed and confused by the number of features on their electronic devices and other gadgets.” As part of their research, the duo found that though initially consumers attracted to feature packed products, they are soon confused by it all, and this can lead to dissatisfaction with the product and the company that manufactures it. Or as Jason Fried likes to say, “less is more dude.”

“Simpler is better – despite popular wisdom and a marketplace ingrained in the creation of products that are ever smaller, faster and more feature laden,” said Roland Rust, “Our research showed that consumers will be initially attracted to the mobile phone that ‘does everything’ for example, but once they get it home they become frustrated,” Rust said. “Companies can actually make more money in the long run by making products that are simpler than what customers think they want. The smarter strategy is to design simple, dedicated devices like the iPod, that do one thing very well, to build long-term satisfaction and profitable customer relationships.”

Kaboodle, a web-based clipping service has raised $3.55 million in Series A funding reports C/Net News.com. Investors include early Google advisor Dr. Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford University professor, Ron Conway, an early investor in both Google and Ask Jeeves; Georges Harik, former director of new products at Google and Kanwal Rekhi, a managing director of Inventus Capital Partners. Other investors include Ashish Gupta, the founder of Junglee, Shea Ventures, Garage Technology Ventures and Alpha Group.

I had written about Kaboodle earlier, and since then many different companies have come into the market with their own twist on the concept. Clipmarks and MyPicklist are two such start-ups that are doing things differently. I find Clipmarks much more useful, and often use to collate and collect different things on the web.

Improbable as it may seem, but the bandwidth glut created by the telecom bubble of the late nineties might be coming to an end. Or there is at-least light at the end of the tunnel. Many of the major long haul service providers are in fact are in the process of lighting up their dark fiber and/or additional wavelengths to add capacity. There is talk of a new transpacific cable being laid by a new group. The network operators who are looking to add more capacity include VSNL, FLAG Telecom, Asia Netcom, and Telefonica.

But unlike the 1990s, this time around the capacity is being added in a as-needed basis, according to research firm, Telegeography. The demand is being driven by a big growth in consumer broadband connections, says Alan Mauldin research analyst with Telegeography. The growth has particularly strong in Asia, and Latin America, where traffic has more than doubled, Mauldin says.
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If you are interested in keeping an eye on what files – music, movies and software is flying over the Darknet, check out this site, Peer Mind. This is a service of a company called Nareos. Peer Mind doesn’t track BitTorrent traffic, but will soon track Fast Track and Bit Torrent in addition to eDonkey and Gnutella networks.

By Jackson West

Korean social-network juggernaut Cyworld has landed on American shores, with a new office in San Francisco. The social-networking service has reached saturation among young South Koreans, with reports estimating 90% of people in their late teens and early twenties as users according to Businessweek Online. A division of mobile wireless provider SK Communications, the company has already expanded into the Chinese and Japanese markets. How successful it will be in the US, especially against the MySpace?

While the American press is currently obsessed with MySpace, and media positing Cyworld as a potential competitor, the two products are very different in their approaches, though they’re striving for the same demographic users. While MySpace is relatively open to modification and third-party functionality, Cyworld is a walled garden. But Cyworld’s look and feel is very attractive, whereas MySpace pages are often eye-numbingly awful. And Cyworld is immensely profitable, reportedly earning over $12 million on revenue of $110 million.

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By Jackson West

Bubbles is an interesting new solution that provides a bridge between rich web applications and the desktop. While still in development, Windows users can download and install it for free. Then they can set up their favorite web applications (Gmail, Flickr, 30boxes, etc.) to run as programs on their start bar. Then it’s as simple as hitting alt-tab to cycle through them alongside your other client applications.

Developed by Ohad Eder-Pressman and his small team at 3D3R, a computer graphics studio, the project was part of their effort to split their time between client projects and ‘cool stuff,’ in Ohad’s words. Happily surprised by the reaction to the application, their now in the process of polishing the application and fixing bugs.

They’re also building in more desktop functionality, like providing a Javascript API so that web apps can interact with the right-click menu on the system tray and also display alerts — even building a set of GreaseMonkey-type tools to let the community build functionality into sites with or without help from the original developers. “If the community accepts this, it means it wants these sites to have these features, so hopefully when enough people use it, it will convince sites to add it themselves.”

The application uses the Internet Explorer rendering engine and ActiveX controls, making for a light weight download. “The funny thing is that we’re all Firefox users, so we’re also trying to put some work into a cleaner integration with Firefox, albeit I must admit Microsoft made it easier for developers this time.” They’re also currently looking for someone to help them port the application to the Macintosh, and want to focus on building a development community by creating forums for users and developers to communicate, script libraries and documentation. As for new features, he said that drag-and-drop and rich copy-and-paste between applications and sites were user requests that are now on their to do list.

Ohad, based in Raanana, Israel, about 20 minutes from Tel Aviv. His team currently works from their respective homes. “[D]oing a garage-stunt has its own benefits, like being able to not make any money and not take capital for a while.” He recently returned from Kinnernet — a meeting of the minds among techies from Israel and abroad modeled on O’Reilly’s Foo Camp. Ohad says that the Israeli hi-tech scene, which really matured in the late nineties, is “booming big time.”