The Vampire Diaries: A Darker Truth, which premiered last week, is a four-part series written by Diaries staff co-producer Sean Raycraft and directed by Kling and Hanada that’s meant to serve as a prelude to the teen vampire drama that kicks off Sept. 10th. In preparation for this review, I tracked down a copy of the show’s pilot script, which is adapted from the L.J. Smith book series of the same name and has resulted in pretty standard CW fare with a True Blood twist. The series’ focus is on Elena (played by Nina Dobrev), a teenager with a tragic past who becomes entangled with vampire brothers Stefan (Paul Wesley) and Damon (Ian Somerhalder). Teen angst ensues, albeit fairly edgy and well-written teen angst that tackles some serious issues — props to Dawson’s Creek creator Kevin Williamson and co-writer Julie Plec for that.

While Vampire Diaries is all about Elena, A Darker Truth belongs to an entirely different character. Jason Harris (Matt Perello) is an enterprising young man armed with a laptop, a DV camera and a mission: His sister Joanne was recently killed, and he suspects Stefan, whom he’s thus followed from New York to the sleepy little town of Mystic Falls, Va., (where the series takes place, thus enabling the web series to be shot on the same locations as its parent show). Jason has evidence that proves Stefan’s much, much older than he looks, and he’s determined to make sure no one else gets hurt. It’s a clever way of building up elements of the show’s premise — including the fact that Stefan is obsessed with Elena — without needing to make use of its stars, who appear in archive footage and still images. And it perpetuates the notion that Stefan is violent and dangerous, which (SPOILER ALERT) proves to be one of the pilot’s biggest twists, as Damon is revealed to be the one who still feeds on humans. (END OF SPOILERS)

Darker Truth is presented less as a vlogging experience and more as found footage, which, for those who remember The Blair Witch Project, suggests that nothing good happens to our man Jason. Though to be honest, that’s not terribly surprising, as the second episode is pretty blunt about how he’s not terribly well-prepared or well-informed about vampires, at least in this mythology, which shows little indication of its vampires being vulnerable to the rays of the sun, garlic or crosses. There’s a playfulness to that presentation which is fun, and I have to say, I much prefer Darker Truth‘s use of the titular diaries. In the script for the pilot, they’re a pretty blatant excuse to incorporate voice-over hinting at mysterious backstories, whereas in Darker Truth they’re a much bigger plot point.

Is this series enough to intrigue new viewers? Is there any end to young America’s hunger for vampire tales? It’s hard to be sure from only four minutes (each episode is less than two minutes long), but if the last two installments of Darker Truth set up why Vampire Diaries isn’t just a Twilight copycat, then on a creative level it’ll have done its job and more so.

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Between April and June of this year, online accounting service FreeAgent surveyed its users. The result is “The Freelancer Report,” an in-depth study of 535 freelancers and small businesses. Though the respondents were mainly based in the UK and the Netherlands, and the survey was primarily intended to understand the impact of the global recession, it provides some indications of trending behaviors and make for interesting reading.

• More than half of responders describe themselves as freelancers, with a minority using terms such as “consultant” and “contractor,” while “small business” is the smallest category. Does this represent the triumph of personal branding for freelancers?

• Unsurprisingly, the bulk of surveyed freelancers are working in technology — from IT and consultancy to design and development. Curiously, journalism is also quite prominent, suggesting that the implosion of the newspaper industry is perhaps encouraging talent to go it alone.

• Most respondents have been self-employed for under three years, suggesting that the recession isn’t hurting independent workers.

• Freelancers seem to be servicing large and small clients quite evenly, indicating that it’s a mode of work with which that most clients are comfortable.

• It’s heartening to know most freelancers are paying a lot of attention to actually running their businesses — from accounting to invoicing — suggesting most aren’t surprised by the overheads of operation, and are not just simply delivering the work.

• Surprisingly, most don’t seem to have felt the full effects of the recession, and although cautiously optimistic, many anticipate lower earnings in the immediate future.

The report goes on to rank “indices of optimism,” “expected earnings” and the degree to which various industries are feeling the downturn.

Overall, it seems freelancing is particularly a robust and optimistic mode of work, even in a meltdown. This is perhaps a reflection on the agility of small businesses in a turbulent marketplace and being able to maintain a portfolio of opportunities.

Has the recession impacted your freelancing business to the extent that you thought it might?

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Maybe that was more of a nightmare than a dream. Last year, there weren’t a ton of non-Verizon devices allowed on to the network, and most of those were business or vertical-market specific. I suspect the certification process is so long and arduous that it would be faster to simply wait for the Pre to become an official Verizon offering in 2010 or beyond.

Popular opinion when it comes to Verizon appears to be a “great network but poor devices” thought. The sad thing is: a carrier stands to increase voice and data revenues by allowing more flexibility with devices. They don’t have to subsidize the hardware, and they can still reap the benefit of increased plan revenues. Sounds like a winner to me. It also sounds like I’ll be using the Pre on Sprint’s network in 2009 or I won’t be using it all.

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Despite the dismal global economy, widespread layoffs and rising unemployment, 61 percent of surveyed employees would not be willing to take a pay cut if they discovered their job was in jeopardy. A whopping 40 percent expect a pay raise in the next 12 months, despite job cuts at their employer. Of those eligible for an annual bonus, 57 percent expect a bonus and 40 percent do not expect a bonus

The most amusing part? Four out of five employed adults say they are not concerned about being laid off from their job in the next six months. Just one in five employees are concerned they will be laid off during the same period. Perhaps the pessimistic 20 percent are reading the news.

Today, a report put out by ADP, a payroll services company, showed that 693,000 jobs were lost in December — 220,000 more than ADP was expecting based on a previous survey of economists. Of course, when it comes to others, job cuts are fair game. Forty-two percent of employees say they are concerned their company will lay off other employees in the next six months. As they say, bad things (and layoffs) happen to other people.

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The New York situation is not unique. Across the country, the aftershocks of the credit crunch are impacting municipal broadband projects. City- or municipality-wide broadband efforts depended on cities’ ability to sell bond to fund these projects. The booming economy allowed cities to garner extra tax revenues, which allowed them to easily raise the bonds to raise funds to spend on various projects — including MuniFi.

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“We have to behave as though we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal. It seems like a prudent move. But I see it as a big red flag and I think Schmidt is preparing us for what could be a terrible 2009. The WSJ says that Google executives have been preparing for slower growth for a year but that “the economic crisis is forcing them to step up their efforts.”

According to conventional wisdom (and investors), Google is the best-positioned company to survive and perhaps thrive in the current advertising slump. If the leader of the pack is feigning ignorance about its chances, what can one say about mere mortals?

I find it hard to believe that a company that keeps world-famous economist like Hal Varian (who muses on the economy and Google’s prospects often on the investor calls) doesn’t know. As a company, Google collects enough data on a daily basis that it can take a fair pulse of the broader economy. Remember, they could accurately track the spread of flu across America just based on searches, so why can’t they track economic sentiment? Additionally, it sells ads to everyone from mom-and-pop shops to consumer durable goods giants and as such it has a fair idea on the degree of tightness with which people are holding their billfolds. They have enough intellectual horsepower on campus to put two and two together.

Beyond Schmidt’s statement, one has to look at their other moves, such as plans to slash 10,000 or so of their contractors, slowing cap-ex investments and killing off projects. These point to tough times for the company that has lived a lush life so far.

Projects that are too pie-in-the-sky are going to be killed. Schmidt calls it the “dark matter.” Google Lively and Google SearchMash are two of the many projects which will soon not matter. Google is contemplating killing off Google Notebook and Google Audio Indexing as well. Google Page Creator has given way to Google Sites. In that vein, Google is going to prune overlapping products. No more the 20-percent time for pet projects for engineers, though it might come back once the economic wheel churns. These are smart and prudent moves even if they are prompted by desperate need to control costs and meet their numbers.Update: I totally misread the WSJ post and made an incorrect interpretation. In other words, I totally messed up about the 20 percent timing thing. A commenter from Google was quick to point out that the 20 percent rule still stands and I am just flat-out wrong. This is what Schmidt said, which I misread:

He says the company is “not going to give” an engineer 20 people to work with on certain experimental projects anymore. “When the cycle comes back,” he says, “we will be able to fund his brilliant vision.”

I know it might sound hokey, but the rich don’t stop driving their Aston Martins just because the price of gas is going up. They do so when they are not as rich! The same analogy holds for Google and its cost-cutting efforts. Just remember how much of PR they milked out of their 20-percent philosophy. They are essentially eating a cow-pie on that. (Now I am the fool for making the wrong assumption on the 20-percent philosophy, though the rest of my sentiment still stands.) They wouldn’t be doing this unless things are really really REALLY tough.

Google needs to keep its sales machine going at a time when it is facing the same malaise as that of the broader market – slowing spending on marketing and advertising. There is some argument that Google is going to win because of their performance-based advertising system.

While that is true to some extent, what happens when the economy goes into a deep freeze? If you don’t have the money to splurge on a large-screen plasma TV, there is little chance you are going to search for that, and thus there are fewer opportunities for Google to sell more ads against those searches. Of course, if there is no intent to buy amongst the searchers, then there is less inclination to click on those ads as well. And that is not good news for Google.

Google, of course, is going to try and meet its targets by taking more out of the pocket of its “adsense” partners and undercutting competitors. The WSJ points out that the company is focusing heavily on display, mobile and other ad opportunities, which can only mean bad news for their rivals.

Related: Why Silicon Valley Should be Worried

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But what’s really is shocking is the billions of dollars of taxpayer money that are being spent to prop up this enterprise. Why are we trying to save a company that Cody Willard, an outstanding blogger (and a TV show host) correctly identifies as criminal?

“These guys should be in prison for criminal incompetence if not for accounting fraud and lying to investors and lenders and regulators,” he says, pointing to lies, lies and more lies from Citibank CEO Vikram Pandit and his stooges. As Michael Lewis so eloquently writes in his obituary of Wall Street, “These people, whose job it was to allocate capital, apparently didn’t even know how to manage their own.”

How can an institution, which spends tens of billions of dollars on technology infrastructure, not know that all the risk associated with toxic financial products and bad loads were like TNT sticks strapped around its thighs? Technology is supposed to help keep tabs on when risk gets totally out of hand. In this era of Google, where instant information and its analysis are becoming strategic assets, how does a company as large as Citibank fail to read the tea leaves?

There can be two explanations — they are either dumb or lying. Saul Hansell, in a brilliant piece published earlier this fall pointed out that

… most Wall Street computer models radically underestimated the risk of the complex mortgage securities, they said… The people who ran the financial firms chose to program their risk-management systems with overly optimistic assumptions and to feed them oversimplified data. This kept them from sounding the alarm early enough…. Top bankers couldn’t simply ignore the computer models, because after the last round of big financial losses, regulators now require them to monitor their risk positions. Indeed, if the models say a firm’s risk has increased, the firm must either reduce its bets or set aside more capital as a cushion in case things go wrong…. Wall Street executives had lots of incentives to make sure their risk systems didn’t see much risk.

In other words, they were straight up lying. Pandit practically admitted as much last night in an interview with Charlie Rose last night. He blamed the previous management for not knowing what they were doing and taking on too much risk. What really was shocking was that Charlie didn’t wrestle this guy — who essentially got paid $165 million to just show up at work — to the moral mat.

Citibank, at the very core, is big, fat, greedy and incompetent. When I look at this bank, which has held my money for more than 20 years, I see an obese Roman Senator at a drunken orgy, waiting for Darwin to ring his number.

P.S.: Sorry for going off topic, but I can’t help it and I am angry about incompetence being bailed out in name of looking out for the little guy. Amidst this global economic meltdown it is hard for me to get excited about a new video portal or some mythical deal.

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Their estimates are more conservative than the $30.3 billion in online spending this holiday season projected by eMarketer, which estimated a total of $136.8 billion in holiday spending. In comparison, comScore is projecting $131.3 billion in total. Despite this lower number, I think comScore is being too optimistic.If you take the estimates at face value, they mean that we will see additional spending of $21.01 billion during the remainder of 2008 holiday season. In 2007, for the same remainder of the season, consumers spent $20.69 billion, a gain of 1.54 percent. If you believe comScore’s survey, which says that 46 percent of people are buying less expensive gifts, and 47 percent are buying fewer gifts — it is hard to see how they are going to get to the $21.01 billion number.

Hitwise, another research firm, today reported that “for the retail category overall traffic is flat when the market share of visits for last week is compared to the week before Thanksgiving in 2007.” They are seeing an increase in traffic interest to web sites preceding Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and at the same time “daily market share of visits to the Retail 500 (adjusted to reflect the number of days leading up to Thanksgiving) has also remained relatively flat.”

The upside of this bad news is that if you are actually looking to buy anything, it is a pretty good season for bargain hunting. The longer you wait, the more you may be able to save. For the past few days I have been getting all sorts of offers from online retailers…I smell the desperation. Now, wait for prices to fall low enough.

Santa Claus Photo by Alex Buhrmann via Flickr.

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Cisco’s four-day shutdown is part of an effort by the company to save $1 billion. It might be more than just cost savings because Cisco (and many of us) doesn’t have visibility into 2009. Cisco, as a company has just seen Wall Street, a major customer shrink in size. At the same time it is facing low-cost competition from Dell, HP and Huawei. The New York Times is correct in identifying HP’s ProCurve businesses as slowly becoming a major competitor to Cisco. “HP is a much more formidable challenger to Cisco, and it has sent an obvious message,” Nikos Theodosopoulos, an analyst at UBS Securities told The Times.

Cisco has confirmed the shutdown and other cuts in a blog posting pointing out that it had started talking about these initiatives following its Q1 2009 earnings release

We will be target reductions in travel and discretionary-related expenses, including offsites, outside services, equipment, events, trade shows, marketing and other activities.  As part of this effort, we will also implement a year-end shutdown of the US-Canada theater from December 29, 2008, through January 2, 2009 (note that January 1 is already a holiday).  There will be some exceptions for targeted business-critical teams including technical assistance services and channel partner and customer product ordering services.  

While this is not our first year-end shutdown as we followed this longstanding Silicon Valley practice in our early years as a company, it is our first in over a decade.  Given the difficult macroeconomic conditions, we believe our cost control focus at this time is appropriate while still providing our partners and customers with critical services over the holiday period.

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