Article by Kara Swisher on why there are so few senior women in all the new Silicon Valley startups, complete with TED talk by Sheryl Sandberg. Well, being modelling wonks, I naturally look at the flow of the supply chain system (see above).
Look at the above model. Assume that for every board seat there are 3 candidates (a Neck of the Bottle thing), ie a 67% attrition rate. For there to be only 15% women on the Board, that means you need c 45% to be women in the next level upstream (the middle boxes). If each of the initial starting boxes were 50% full of women (ie 150% women in total start the flow), then in order to get only 45% candidate representation for Board level you are looking at a 70% attrition rate to those middle boxes.
One can argue that the attrition rate between stages is higher for women, one can argue that some routes (eg Boardroom clubbiness) are not open to women, but as you can see, if the starter boxes were primed at 50% each, you have to believe in a massive attrition rate through the system - the sort of losses that the most profligate of a First World War generals would be proud of (and that led to mutinies).
In fact, we can use this model to deduce something approximating the "real world" attrition rate. If I assume that about 25% on average (rather than 50%) of all the people starting out as middle managers, technologists and entrepreneurs are women, then to deliver a 15% representation at board level (today), still assuming a 33% final attrition, then the actual attrition rate is more like 40%
Now clearly, there are issues that impact this attrition rate, and Sheryl goes into them in good detail (this is PC territory for us men, so let me just re-iterate her points and say they tally with my experience too):
- Sit at the table (ie don't be backward about coming forward
- Don't drop out early (don't make the decision to stop striving when you are thinking of having kids, make it when you have them - keeps options open)
- Equal partnerships at home - its hard to be a CEO if you are also doing 67% of the housework (to this I'd add, don't be shy to use some of the extra income to bring in helpers).
But you still have to start with the initial flow, as that is where the leverage is - assuming the "real" attrition rate is something like 40% as above, if you then have 50% of all starters being women you should immediately see a 30% board representation by women.
Which brings us back to the older chestnut - why are there so few women coming into technology and entrepreneurship areas?
"We have this insatiable need for writers," Managing Editor Brandon Copple said. And if you're hired as a writer at Groupon, you will be writing. All day long. Writers churn out anywhere from six to ten blurbs each day.
For many Groupon staffers, the promise of a heavy writing load was what attracted them to the company. Each attended Groupon Academy, a training seminar on the Groupon voice -- now infamous for its sarcastic wit -- as part of the preliminary recruitment and hiring process. Applicants attempt a write-up, and then get feedback on their sample. "It helps would-be writers see how seriously we take the craft," Copple said.
It also illuminates the company's focus on teaching. "I was really excited to work for the company because it seemed like they really wanted to train us," said Katherine Banich, a graduate of Columbia University's journalism school, reflecting on her experience in Groupon Academy. "They were very interested in making us into better writers."
A PR puff piece claiming writing coupon Ads is journalism in the Atlantic, without even a smidgin of Groupon's famed sarcastic wit? Good Grief, not even the Flat Earth News folk thought it would come to this......
Sad thing is, it probably pays better than journalism.....
"Some day there will be one extra coastline, we will tire of The Atlantic" - Sparks (above). Connoisseurs will appreciate the synthesizer.
Just over 2 years ago we wrote about YouNoodle, which was going to predict the probable success of startups. Now it appears a better method has come to hand - look not at at the makeup of the Startup team, but instead at the VC team:
This paper examines whether the human capital of first-time venture capital fund management teams can predict fund performance and finds that it can. I find that fund management teams with more task-specific human capital, as measured by more managers having past experience as venture capitalists and by more managers having past experience as executives at start-up companies, manage funds with greater fractions of portfolio company exits. I also find that fund management teams with more industry-specific human capital in strategy and management consulting and, to a lesser extent, engineering and non-venture finance manage funds with greater fractions of portfolio company exits. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I find that fund management teams that have more general human capital in business administration, as measured by more managers having MBAs, manage funds with lower fractions of portfolio company exits. Overall, measures of task- and industry-specific human capital are stronger predictors of fund performance than are measures of general human capital.
The paper is " The Role of Top Management Team Human Capital in Venture Capital Markets: Evidence from First-Time Funds" by Rebecca Zarutskie of Duke University's Fuqua* School of Business.
If I had to hypothesize why this is the case, it would be that VC's who understand startups, strategy or technology will invest earlier into the "lead" company, the others will be part of the thundering herd and invest later and/or into me-too's
Very good satire of the whole Wikileaks affaire and the worrying level of extra-legal reactions by the powerful (I see Bank of America has now stopped suspected payments to Wikileaks, though how they are going to make that happen is not clear). The whole Mastercard/Paypal/Visa/BoA thing sends a worrying signal about how easily a lot of the world's financial systems can be "leaned on" by the US, but as the snippet points out, more worrying is the ease with which citizen rights built up over decades are being walked over.
As the sketch says at the end, this should ring alarm bells if you know your history.
Those who watch the Big Bang Theory will know the innate snobbery aimed at Howard Wolowitz, who only has an MSc in Engineering, rather than a PhD. It would appear, however, that he may have the last laugh - the Economist:
PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree.
John Battelle scoffs at those who would question Groupon's business model:
In the current issue of the New Yorker, columnist James Surowiecki, who I generally admire, gets it exactly wrong when it comes to Groupon.
He writes:
" But it seems unlikely that it’s going to become a revolutionary company, along the lines of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google. ....Groupon, by contrast, is a much more old-school business. It doesn’t have any obvious technological advantage. Its users don’t really do anything other than hit the “buy” button. And its business requires lots of hands-on attention..."
Well, that's a defensible opinion, but after visiting CEO Andrew Mason this week in Chicago, and thinking about it a bit, I must say that I wholeheartedly diasagree.
Many folks think of Groupon as a relatively simple idea. A daily deal, a large sales force, and that's about it. Too easy to copy (there are scores of "Groupon clones"), and too labor intensive (the more small businesses you want to work with, the more sales and service people you need).
(That's "The Wisdom of Crowds" Surowiecki by the way). Battelle's view is essentially that Groupon is the Next Best Thing for The Little (Business) Man:
Groupon has built a new channel into the heart of the the world's economic activity: Small businesses. And it is that channel where the true power lies.
Small businesses create more than 50% of US GDP and create more than 75% of net new jobs each year. But small businesses represent a fragmented, maddeningly difficult sector of our economy - 23 million small pieces loosely joined. Any platform that has connected them and added value to their bottom line has turned into a massive new business.
Battelle thnks Groupon will be better than the Yellow Pages and better than Google at unifying and selling to this market, and he goes on to tie Groupon to Mobile goodness too. The Holy Grail of being the single server to a massively fragmented market is clearly what is driving the Groupon groupies, but is this even viable, never mind is Groupon going to do the task? John eulogises the growth, but brushes off the increasing volume of complaints emerging that it doesn't actually make economic sense:
Sure, some of them buy too much of it, or fail to do the math and lose money on the come. They'll adjust, and if they don't, smarter SBOs will eat their lunch, and the world will move on.
So to summarize, I think those who claim Groupon's business is too simple are focused on the wrong things. Sure, there are other deal sites. But none have Groupon's scale. Sure, Groupon's model of one deal in one city on one day is limited, but it's easy to see how the product scales against category, zip code, time of day, and many other variables. And sure, Groupon has a lot of people who have to touch a lot of businesses and a lot of customers every day. But to me, that's the company's strength: SBOs are in the people business, and therefore, so must Groupon be.
And this, to my mind, is why Facebook or Google can't compete with Groupon. Imagine Facebook or Google with 1,000 people who do nothing but talk to customers all day long? Yep, I can hear the laughter from here....
Those 1,000 salesmen cost real money though, and they do not give added scale benefits, which is why these sort of businesses are low margin ones when they grow up, and low margins means low free cash, which (in real world economics) means utility valuations.
I recall reading his book on Google and thinking that he was writing it at Google's zenith, as it was getting to the end of it's "S" curve growth phase, and that he was making the mistake of assuming the future will look exactly like the past. But, given that John is brave enough to put his predictions out there though, I clearly have to come up with mine. So what do I think is the likely outcome (after the hyped IPO, that I can guarantee - but I still have the nagging sense that it could be Pointcast 2.0).
Well, actually the commentors to the post already have it taped in my view - its a nice, viable business - but not the New New Thing that it is being hyped up to be:
- Harry: There are literally thousands of categories in the yellow pages, not all of them are "Groupon-able" whereas Google still has a considerable advantage for the classifying, mapping and rating of all SMBs (ie, plumbers, divorce lawyers). Flyers, Entertainment Book and Valpak are the ones getting kicked in the pants here.
- Kevin: Groupon's margin is way way way way lower than google's, so revenue is not a good metric. Groupon has yet to build a massively profitable business with a giant core of repeat customers. I think you're wrong, John. To be like google, you need massive, high margin, and repeat customers. Groupon has one of these three.
Once the hype is over - Smaller market, lower margins, back to Coupons 2.0, as another commentator puts it.
Delicious never really did it for me - I wrote in 2008:
Del.icio.us, that early icon of the Web 2.0 movement that has to mentioned by page 11 in any book that wants "2.0 Cred", has brought out version 2.0 - to considerable interest again, it would seem. Must admit though, my usage behaviour resembles the remarks in Matthew Ingram's piece quoting one Adam Ostrow who:
....never bookmarks things any more — he either remembers something, or searches for it, or asks someone else if he can’t remember the details. It has occurred to me over the past year or so that while I religiously bookmark things, often dozens of them in a single day, I rarely go back and look them up. If I’m writing about something and I remember some details, I type them into Google and eventually track the page down.
I suspect that is true of many people who tried the service - the "hit head" of stuff you bookmark you'll put on your browser, the key papers you find you'll store yourself somewhere personal, and the rest you'll re-search for when you need it. (I also find that stuff I marked 4 years ago is pretty irrelevant now, there is a half life to web pages. Also, I got lazy - I just look at the bookmarks of other people who I know are assiduous markers )
Still, its not the death that is interesting (expiry has been predicted since at least August 2009), it's the disposal thereof. There has been a call that, rather than close it down, give itt to people who want to run it:
There are many who still use Delicious. I admit I am not one of them [That's a standard story, hence it's demise - Ed] I stopped using it shortly after Yahoo bought it. But there are lots of people who use it, just as there are people who still use MyBlogLog (I think my ashimmy.com blog still has their widget on it). Yahoo! could make lemonade out of lemons here. If they would open source these and the other properties they are killing they could garner a ton of good will from the users of these projects, not come across as the hatchet men they are being portrayed as and out Google Google even.
Heck, why not give it away for a dollar, but keep 10% of the share so if others can make it work at least you have an option on the upside?
(Update - they have clearly been reading Broadstuff, the latest decision is to try and sell Delicious. Be interesting to see if anyone will buy, if 'twere me I'd ask everyone who wants to see it live pay £24 into an escrow account for 1 year's service, and if I got 100,000 signups I'd buy the business for a dollar.
(From Broadsight's ever-thoughtful Paul Lancefield)
Last week I got the new Sunday Times app on the iPad. The subscription is £2 per week for six days of The Times and the Sunday Times, as you would expect, on Sunday. The operative concept is that it is a news magazine. They are offering 1 month for free to new subscribers. The overall experience is really very good. Much better than I was expecting actually.
Having been using New's International's The Times app and from last week, their Sunday Times application, I'm going to make a prediction about the future of online news. My verdict is, though it may take time to grow, Murdoch's venture onto tablets and paid for news is going to win out. 100% it will. Just as before the iPad launch I was thinking "yep I'd love one, but will it really work for most people as a product" and after it's launch I realised "yep it 100% works as a distinct product category in it's own right and it will really take off", so now I'm feeling the same degree of conviction regarding paid versus free news gathering.
Actually I'm feeling also, strangely, a little relieved. It's giving me much more what I want as a consumer and I have been wondering for some time how quality news would be gathered without it all degenerating into the news equivalent of the free tourist city guide books found on every desk in a hotel bedroom.
Of course some avid users of Twitter and advocates of Open data initiatives may not like the implications of my reasoning on this, so I will state upfront, I am not saying paid for news is the only show in town, nor am I taking a political stance. A rich news ecosystem will remain with paid and commercial free and web2.0 free and up to the minute. It's just that I'm now feel sure paid-for news can survive and thrive whereas before there was a big question mark over the sustainability of the model. Now there is a mechanism where investment can be rewarded and, low and behold, investment has been made and the result is really gratifying. The increase in value returned for my money, for me, far exceeds the £2 per week subscription cost (which gets me The Times and The Sunday Times).
Now my primary concern is how long it will take the Telegraph and The Guardian (in the UK) to follow suite. They risk being left for dead because currently they are facing an ever reducing budget for producing quality editorial. There is going to be steady growth in this as word gets out and as customers get the opportunity to try it on friend's devices and realise they also want news this way. Tablets have made the Free News situation a whole lot worse. Since I got my 3G enabled iPad, I haven't bought a single paper newspaper. Why would I? It would be interesting to check the impact of a tablet computer purchase on revenues from the customer. I wouldn't be surprised if for every Telegraph or Guardian reader who buys an iPad, paper sales revenues are decreased by at least 50% or more (and will decrease yet further over time). I would dearly love to know if there have been any studies yet that confirm this.
Now my fear is (and this is not healthy for the news industry), Twitter is going to end up being much more of a threat to commercial purveyors of free news (e.g. commercial companies funded by ad revenues) than paid for news. Free news has to maintain critical mass and compete with Web2.0, where paid-for news will be able to establish a virtuous circle with subscribers and real substantial subscription revenue with which to grow and improve a value product justifying the subscription.
You have to hand it to Murdoch that he invested big in Satellite at just the right time. But can the world afford for him to repeat the same trick with tablet hypermedia publishing? Of course he won't be able to monopolise the means in the same way as he managed with Sky but now he does have the rather distinct advantage of being able to leverage his paper publishing and TV operations all together.
I can't fully put my finger on why the The Sunday times app should be so much better than content accessed via a web browser.
- Partly it is due to the fact HTML5 isn't yet being used to it's full potential - you should be able to have the same on screen experience via open web technologies if it were. Part of the reason (following on from the last point) is because so much effort has been invested in the iPad version to ensure the full range of content is available. Partly also because, once a news/magazine producer has gathered all the material they have (e.g. the stories, the photo's, the live footage) that is gathered as part of the news day and edited it and prepared it for slick media presentation, it has the opportunity to become so much more than the same material in a static paper.
- The wealth of photographs alone and the high quality is quite something. Being able to touch almost every photo and instantly see it smoothly scale up to the high res version and being able to swipe between each photo in a story is truly a revelation. In traditional newspapers and magazines you get the large photo and then many small ones. On a tablet, they can all be large and colourful and add the kind of quality feel only previously found in dedicated photo-journals, only now that feel is mixed in with everyday news and magazine stories. And yes, video is also getting mixed in there in a much more intimate way, with the start and stop and scaling full screen or leaving it playing in-situ on the page and scrolling it off page all instantly and smoothly accessed. That browsing is a seamless uninterrupted experience without any of the pauses http entails is much more powerful and a more significant than I expected.
- And lastly of course, the most essential ingredient is that tablet computing provides a genuinely more intimate experience where smooth and natural operation is near-as-damn-it 100% of the time. None tablet form factors simply can't match it (it also underlines Google have to seriously work on the offline capabilities of Chrome OS if they are to maximise inroads on Apple and Microsoft - HTML5 should help here again of course).
I'm also realising something here about news gathering. We have this assumption people want up to the minute news. But what does up to the minute really mean for most people? The closer you get to the minute of occurrence, the less value there is for most people and the less value there can be. For nearly all news for nearly all people for nearly all the time there is no real tangible value from being up to the minute. For a start, up to the minute means minute by minute and most of the time we are doing something else and don't want interruption for what is mostly trivia.
Most people want, most of the time, at most, up to the half an hour or up to the hour, because they want someone to actually prepare a story for them. Most news stories don't affect them, their lives or their careers in any way. But they still read the stories. So most news reading is "entertainment," or "mental stimulation," or "mind expansion" but is almost certainly not for most people about upping personal productivity or getting better at your job (industry journals fill that role). So social media supplements and adds additional layers, nuances and - to a limited extent - competes with paid-for news, but my biggest realisation with the tablet form factor is that social-media surely doesn't replace paid-for news.
This is where someone like Murdoch has always excelled. He may seem like a dinosaur when you hear him talking about the Internet and Internet technologies. But where you or I might take an intellectual look at the potential for social-media to displace paid-for news, where we might conjecture about wiki style open editorial co-operatives taking over, a grizzled old news-dog like Murdoch comes along and applies his simple understanding of what selling news is all about. His instinct is "the people want news and we will work to give it to them and that doesn't happen for free." So he invests, provides a real news magazine experience and the price, if compared with the value of what you get back, is miniscule. Compare the volume of content of 5 Days of the Times and full content of The Sunday Times to the cost of a paperback to see what I mean. £2 for all that? It's peanuts. Murdoch opining on the Internet may, at times, have sounded like a fool but Murdoch the arch-capitalist selling news to punters is simply untouchable.
(From Broadsight's ever-thoughtful Paul Lancefield)
Last week I got the new Sunday Times app on the iPad. The subscription is £2 per week for six days of The Times and the Sunday Times, as you would expect, on Sunday. The operative concept is that it is a news magazine. They are offering 1 month for free to new subscribers. The overall experience is really very good. Much better than I was expecting actually.
Having been using New's International's The Times app and from last week, their Sunday Times application, I'm going to make a prediction about the future of online news. My verdict is, though it may take time to grow, Murdoch's venture onto tablets and paid for news is going to win out. 100% it will. Just as before the iPad launch I was thinking "yep I'd love one, but will it really work for most people as a product" and after it's launch I realised "yep it 100% works as a distinct product category in it's own right and it will really take off", so now I'm feeling the same degree of conviction regarding paid versus free news gathering.
Actually I'm feeling also, strangely, a little relieved. It's giving me much more what I want as a consumer and I have been wondering for some time how quality news would be gathered without it all degenerating into the news equivalent of the free tourist city guide books found on every desk in a hotel bedroom.
Of course some avid users of Twitter and advocates of Open data initiatives may not like the implications of my reasoning on this, so I will state upfront, I am not saying paid for news is the only show in town, nor am I taking a political stance. A rich news ecosystem will remain with paid and commercial free and web2.0 free and up to the minute. It's just that I'm now feel sure paid-for news can survive and thrive whereas before there was a big question mark over the sustainability of the model. Now there is a mechanism where investment can be rewarded and, low and behold, investment has been made and the result is really gratifying. The increase in value returned for my money, for me, far exceeds the £2 per week subscription cost (which gets me The Times and The Sunday Times).
Now my primary concern is how long it will take the Telegraph and The Guardian (in the UK) to follow suite. They risk being left for dead because currently they are facing an ever reducing budget for producing quality editorial. There is going to be steady growth in this as word gets out and as customers get the opportunity to try it on friend's devices and realise they also want news this way. Tablets have made the Free News situation a whole lot worse. Since I got my 3G enabled iPad, I haven't bought a single paper newspaper. Why would I? It would be interesting to check the impact of a tablet computer purchase on revenues from the customer. I wouldn't be surprised if for every Telegraph or Guardian reader who buys an iPad, paper sales revenues are decreased by at least 50% or more (and will decrease yet further over time). I would dearly love to know if there have been any studies yet that confirm this.
Now my fear is (and this is not healthy for the news industry), Twitter is going to end up being much more of a threat to commercial purveyors of free news (e.g. commercial companies funded by ad revenues) than paid for news. Free news has to maintain critical mass and compete with Web2.0, where paid-for news will be able to establish a virtuous circle with subscribers and real substantial subscription revenue with which to grow and improve a value product justifying the subscription.
You have to hand it to Murdoch that he invested big in Satellite at just the right time. But can the world afford for him to repeat the same trick with tablet hypermedia publishing? Of course he won't be able to monopolise the means in the same way as he managed with Sky but now he does have the rather distinct advantage of being able to leverage his paper publishing and TV operations all together.
I can't fully put my finger on why the The Sunday times app should be so much better than content accessed via a web browser.
- Partly it is due to the fact HTML5 isn't yet being used to it's full potential - you should be able to have the same on screen experience via open web technologies if it were. Part of the reason (following on from the last point) is because so much effort has been invested in the iPad version to ensure the full range of content is available. Partly also because, once a news/magazine producer has gathered all the material they have (e.g. the stories, the photo's, the live footage) that is gathered as part of the news day and edited it and prepared it for slick media presentation, it has the opportunity to become so much more than the same material in a static paper.
- The wealth of photographs alone and the high quality is quite something. Being able to touch almost every photo and instantly see it smoothly scale up to the high res version and being able to swipe between each photo in a story is truly a revelation. In traditional newspapers and magazines you get the large photo and then many small ones. On a tablet, they can all be large and colourful and add the kind of quality feel only previously found in dedicated photo-journals, only now that feel is mixed in with everyday news and magazine stories. And yes, video is also getting mixed in there in a much more intimate way, with the start and stop and scaling full screen or leaving it playing in-situ on the page and scrolling it off page all instantly and smoothly accessed. That browsing is a seamless uninterrupted experience without any of the pauses http entails is much more powerful and a more significant than I expected.
- And lastly of course, the most essential ingredient is that tablet computing provides a genuinely more intimate experience where smooth and natural operation is near-as-damn-it 100% of the time. None tablet form factors simply can't match it (it also underlines Google have to seriously work on the offline capabilities of Chrome OS if they are to maximise inroads on Apple and Microsoft - HTML5 should help here again of course).
I'm also realising something here about news gathering. We have this assumption people want up to the minute news. But what does up to the minute really mean for most people? The closer you get to the minute of occurrence, the less value there is for most people and the less value there can be. For nearly all news for nearly all people for nearly all the time there is no real tangible value from being up to the minute. For a start, up to the minute means minute by minute and most of the time we are doing something else and don't want interruption for what is mostly trivia.
Most people want, most of the time, at most, up to the half an hour or up to the hour, because they want someone to actually prepare a story for them. Most news stories don't affect them, their lives or their careers in any way. But they still read the stories. So most news reading is "entertainment," or "mental stimulation," or "mind expansion" but is almost certainly not for most people about upping personal productivity or getting better at your job (industry journals fill that role). So social media supplements and adds additional layers, nuances and - to a limited extent - competes with paid-for news, but my biggest realisation with the tablet form factor is that social-media surely doesn't replace paid-for news.
This is where someone like Murdoch has always excelled. He may seem like a dinosaur when you hear him talking about the Internet and Internet technologies. But where you or I might take an intellectual look at the potential for social-media to displace paid-for news, where we might conjecture about wiki style open editorial co-operatives taking over, a grizzled old news-dog like Murdoch comes along and applies his simple understanding of what selling news is all about. His instinct is "the people want news and we will work to give it to them and that doesn't happen for free." So he invests, provides a real news magazine experience and the price, if compared with the value of what you get back, is miniscule. Compare the volume of content of 5 Days of the Times and full content of The Sunday Times to the cost of a paperback to see what I mean. £2 for all that? It's peanuts. Murdoch opining on the Internet may, at times, have sounded like a fool but Murdoch the arch-capitalist selling news to punters is simply untouchable.
It was just a few short years ago that Time magazine hailed YOU! (that is, US!) as "Persons of the Year" in celebration of the New New Thing - the move to User Generated Content.
How Time and times change. This year, Mark Zuckerberg was named Person of the Year.
Marvellous, I hear you say - who could deserve it more. Well, actually..... Julian Assange apparently.
You see, time also had a Readers Choice for Person of the Year, and Mr Assange won that. That's right, WE! (that is, YOU!) chose Juilian, but the Editorial team at Time chose Mark, despite their Readers' Voices (Mark Zuckerberg came 10th in the Readers votes by the way, Lady Gaga came 3rd)
Perish the thought that this was a manage of convenience - this is truly Democracy* in action
Can't help thinking they've been a bit short sighted here though. Mark Zuckerberg is "changing the world", Julian Assange has already changed it. By this I mean that Facebook is the "best of breed" currently of an evolving continuum, wheras Wikileaks has started a change like - as Clay Shirky puts it - the printing press being wrested away from the mediaeval Catholic church.
(An afterthought....the more I think about this, Time is merely showing why the mainstream media is increasingly being bypassed - they clearly did not have the bottle to go with the People's Choice because of the repercussions, and this lack of mainstream media nerve is pretty much why Wikileaks exists)
*True Democracy - ie what Actually Happens - is defined as asking a large number of people to vote, ignoring them, and doing what you want to do for your own ends. (See: Gulf War, Part II)
Update - the wags are in full force - one of the benefits of the rest of YOU being on the 'Net is the scurrilous humour - favourites so far:
(i) Zuck won because he is responsible for the leak of more private information than Assange.
(ii) Zuckerberg is the best "Oh Shit! We can't put Assange on the cover" candidate
(iii) WIKILEAKS exposes information from governments and corporations to private individuals.
(iv) The funniest - one of the judges apparently was a certain Meghan McCain (apparently Senator John McCain's daughter). She appears to be functionally illiterate.....)
FACEBOOK exposes information from private individuals to governments and corporations.
)
