Posted on December 21, 2006
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I got blog tagged by Mike Herrick. (For those of you new to this if we get tagged we have to post five things most people wouldn’t know about us and then tag five new folks who have to do the same.)
Of course it’s a little like a chain letter but it adds some fun since we are creating some new information here and it can be interesting.
So here goes…
1. At 16 I tried to get a job at every fast food joint and department store and was turned down without so much as an interview. After giving up I started playing a game in a computer store and seeing my interest they hired me to do odd jobs like empty trash, pull weeds and so forth. A year later I was building and programming the first mainstream microcomputers. So from complete failure my 27 year (and counting) career in technology was born.
2. In my first days of showing up at Carnegie Mellon University I got hired to work with professors like John McDermott, Lanny Forgy, Allen Newell and many others. This had a more formative effect on me than all the classes I rarely attended. I’ll never forget my job interview with John McDermott: “Are you familiar with the LISP language?” No. “Are you familiar with BLISS or C?” No. “Are you familiar with production system languages?” No. “Okay well you are hired to recode routines used to implement the OPS production system from LISP to BLISS. Here they are. Let me know when you are finished and ready for your next assignment.”
3. I’m an existentialist. Don’t know what it means but neither does anyone else. So I enjoy Camus, Sartre, The Talking Heads, Nabokov, Kafka and all the rest. At the same time I believe in Universal Law from the teachings of Arnold Patent and Zen from the teachings of Charlotte Joko Beck.
4. I have a barn with a woodshop. It’s a very relaxing place. I’m into furniture design and construction, architecture, woodworking and doing work outside like clearing, dry-stacked stone walls, and just being out on the land. I have 10,000 bd/ft of rough lumber there begging for more time in the shop.
5. I hate the phone. I’m not sure why but I just do. Even when I am initiating the call I generally don’t like it. I prefer face to face meetings or even IM to the phone. I think I’m souring on email these days as well. There were jobs I had where being on the phone would have been normal but I almost always found a way to do it as well or even better by not having to use the phone. I think it’s strange but find there is little I can do about it.
Here are my five tags: Roman Stanek, JP Rangaswami, Roger Ehrenberg, Annrai O’Toole, and Tim O’Reilly.
Posted on December 20, 2006
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The Alpha Geeks are chattering about the quiet closure of an important Google API. We got excited about Google a couple of years ago because they clearly understood the power of helping the world solve what we call The Binding Problem.
Today Google is under pressure to perform and in so doing is making some moves that suggest they are abandoning some small but critical elements behind their success. (We don’t want to be overly dramatic here but Yahoo! fell into the same trap somewhere along their path to the mainstream corporate world.)
We’re not saying that it’s all downhill for Google from here but this move, combined with a few others, suggests that the company may be in the midst of changing gears. Our guess is that any changes are not likely to increase the multiple for the stock so our conclusion would be to get cautious.
Google going corporate also creates some real opportunities for others to offer new software and services that do help us continue to solve The Binding Problem and make a great deal of money in the process.
While this is technical and a bit beyond the ken of your typical institutional investor, we think it matters.
Posted on December 20, 2006
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Since moving to WP we have come to understand that it is indeed much more than a blogging tool. The primary reason for this is due to the architecture of the system and the openness of the implementation.
There is a growing divide between very easy to use tools which are generally free and the more complex tools and services which tend to be expensive. The problem with the very simple free tools is that they break down soon after one begins to get serious about anything. What we mean when we say divide is that once you decide the simple solution is not acceptable the available options have steep curves in cost and/or effort.
Beyond the superior blogging capabilities in WP there is an active development community building not just themes but additional functions and features that can be added easily via a plug-in manager. Before this one had to be willing to write code to customize functions.
As the open source tools and platforms like WP continue to evolve it’s hard to continue to think about “investing” in tools from Adobe and Microsoft given the cost not so much in dollars (although the ADBE stuff is very expensive) but in the learning curve. Maybe it’s just me but I can actually learn a new scripting language and write something myself faster than figure out how to use InDesign or Illustrator. Even after two decades of rust on my technical machinery.
So as we build out for 2007 we are increasingly leaning towards a fuller open source solution and the real potential of not using any MSFT or ADBE products. There are still reasons we may never be totally free of MSFT products, especially since part of our business is in serving the institutional investment community and we have advisory clients that sit on Microsoft infrastructure. However we are likely to be able to run our core business and all production in a cruft-free software enviroment of our own design and construction!
Posted on December 13, 2006
Filed Under Research, Software, Technology & The Web | 4 Comments
There are many good reasons to come to France but technology conferences (unless they are hosted by someone like O’Reilly) are not one of them.
Since we were in the neighborhood we couldn’t resist stopping in for a few hours of day 2 at the third annual Les Blogs conference now renamed Le Web to account for what is supposed to be a broader focus on the Internet and technology.
The first surprise was the fact that most of the presentations were vague marketing pitches without much content or time allowed for Q&A and interaction. One presenter from last year, Mena Trott, was so nervous she gave a 5 minute talk and ran off stage rather than offer Q&A; this despite the fact that her firm, Six Apart, was staging the event.
Certainly the worst aspect of the conference was the fact that the man leading it, Loic Le Meur , is a self-absorbed technology entertainer. So much so that he aborted the scheduled conference program to insert French politicians who came and gave stump speeches without even offering an open forum to discuss the many policy issues holding back commercial technology innovation in France.
In so doing this he insulted and offended the pan-European audience he had hoped to build and they were visibly and vocally upset.
Ironically the poor handling of the content led to better than average networking activity as most fled the presentation room to find other people to talk to. The conference was sold out and there were several hundred fairly interesting people in attendance. With many of them swearing off coming to Le Web 4 it may create an opportunity to do something new to provide the true emerging Internet technology conference many are seeking.
Anyone interested in being part of a new conference to be organized in April of 2007 please send me an email (kris@research2zero.com). If we can get enough interest it would be easy to put on and ensure a content-focused, rather than a marketing and political program.
As in all bad situations we spent some time trying to get some interesting or useful information and there were a few small bits to be found.
Myspace: They certainly offers some interesting lessons on user-generated content and site use as well as the potential for the very success of site to precipitate a decline. Myspace picked up where Friendster left off, particularly for musicians and the pre-18 crowd that wanted to reach them.
Because Myspace didn’t explicitly prevent the use of HTML in forms, users were able to exploit the loophole to create highly individualized and often quite ugly personal pages. This was a major “feature” that young users loved.
The large number of “friends” typical of Myspace users is more about the projected audience that a person feels they are playing to and looking to fit into rather than the traditional concepts of friendship.
Because Myspace has become so successful marketers and advertisers are injecting so much spam that the user community is being crushed by it. Teens, although impressionable, hate intrusive ads and will migrate away eventually.
The Myspace perspectives above were presented by Danah Boyd and those interested in knowing more will enjoy visiting www.danah.org.
Second Life: There is palpable cynicism around the success of Second Life. I’d guess the reason is that they are showcased at so many conferences and by the media that people are tired of hearing about it. So although they presented their usual impressive statistics the crowd has started to see through them and realize that there are very few regular users of Second Life.
Despite their approaching 2M registrations they have just 18,000 concurrent users. Although the company does post a metric of 700,000 “active” users the math suggests that what we would all consider a real active users to be something less than 500,000. We will have hard numbers to post later.
Still Second Life is growing and it is yet to be seen how it will evolve over time. There was a bit of consensus around multi-player online game experts that the considerable IP issues may have to be tackled before we can go much further in these online areas.
Mobile Phones: Creative uses for mobile phones are likely to remain a hot investment area in 2007 and 2008 as the number of subscribers expands from the current 2B to 4B by 2010. One firm, BLYK, is focused on free, advertising supported phones for a big chunk of the next 2B users. Mobile phones have become the third or forth item people always carry with them (along with wallet/purse, keys and a watch) and as such is fertile ground for new applications.
Again personalization of the device and its functions is the key for consumers. From little personalized carry straps to ringtones to LEDs to the ability to beam a photo or song as a gift are all important aspects to end users. Most know that most common application people use on a mobile phone is the clock. Ignoring these consumer preferences and use cases would be a big mistake.
Many mobile users are holding back on broad adoption of data-based services because pricing remains a mystery.
Six Apart: Mena Trott of Six Apart said little before running off stage. Her comments included the fact that personal bloggers are documenting their personal experience to share with others, care about design flexibility, get good use of prompts to come up with new posts, love to post photos and feel that privacy and control is critical even if they don’t use it. Nothing remarkable from her.
Posted on December 7, 2006
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After posting the notes from the NDAQ presentation yesterday we got to thinking about the exchanges and ran some numbers.
That the NYSE will merge with Euronext seems clear enough although the management of Euronext has insisted on a number of conditions that could slow down or even prevent some of the synergy that the NYSE sees in the combination.
Nasdaq still has no visibility on taking over the LSE although they remain utterly committed to make it happen.
Both the LSE with AIM and the Euronext with Alternext have been making quite a bit of noise over being the next destination for small and medium sized companies looking to raise captial and create a public listing.
Because we fled the brokerage business a few years ago our ideas around the profitability from trading had a negative bias. However what has been (and continues to be) nothing but pain for brokerages in terms of declining trading commissions has only been good for the exchanges.
Posted on December 6, 2006
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Focused on the application delivery infrastructure for IP-based software. By being the intelligent link between the application and the network they can optimize for performance, availability and security.
Believes current high growth will continue throughout 2007. From competitive standpoint the familiar Gartner Group grid for application delivery shows F5 as the clear leader. Citrix is the only other company in the upper quadrant with NetScaler. Cisco, Juniper, Akamai are major players but well outside the leaders quadrant. [Note the Gartner chart was dated December 2005 and there has been some movement since then.]
Posted on December 6, 2006
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Talked about broadband penetration as a key driver. Users now have the tools to create, manipulate and consume video and all sorts of multimedia content. Advances in storage and compute power are changing the dynamics around rich content. In a few years we will be able to store a lifetime of video on a hard drive.
Networks of advertising and content partners are strategic assets for Google. Google has paid over $6.2B to network partners. The company claims to treat advertising content the same as other content to improve hit rates and user experience.
YouTube provides the right toolset for consumer video and Google has the right advertising exertise and technology to turn it into money. Content owners have to think outside of their site and realize that they content has to be where the users are.
Posted on December 6, 2006
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Leveraging technology to add new products like intra-day cross. Will compete with others like LiquidNet but be more open and transparent.
Only 30% of revenues comes from transactions and 70% comes from fees. Listing, data products, indicies, access services and so on.
Regulation NMS goes into effect in 2007. Forces best price execution among electronic exchanges. Electronic trading begs the question of what listing services really means. NASDAQ now is focused on value added services like D&O insurance (without underwriting risk). One company that pays $95K a year for the listing paid $160K for an insurance package. Other services include news distribution that competes with companies like Dow Jones.
Read more
Posted on December 6, 2006
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Presentation was given by Eddie Minshull, EVP WW Field Operations; been with Juniper for 6 years, was with Alcatel, Newbridge.
The vision slide is indecipherable but shows some sort of virtuous cycle between Service Providers to Content Owners to the Enterprise. Put up Google, Yahoo, Vonage, MSN, YouTube as major strategic customers.
Posted on December 6, 2006
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Starbucks has grown to be a big coffee company. $7.8B in revenue, 25% ROE, 145K employees… Whew, I’m glad we got those charts out of the way…
They have major expansion plans, especially internationally. For the current FY they should reach 14,840 stores and their goal is 40,000. Same store growth has been between 5 and 10% for the last 15 years. Notable expecially considering how many additional stores are put into existing markets.
keep looking »