The average smartphone today has a number of radios to serve all the communications functions being crammed onboard this compact portable device. To start, there’s the 3G or CDMA transceiver. Next, comes Bluetooth, the second most pervasive transceiver in today’s handset, according to Scottsdale, Arizona market research firm In-Stat. After Bluetooth, WiFi is the next most prevalent receiver. Finally, the GPS receiver is the last of the radios found on these devices, though more are planned. They include NFC (near field communication) and RFID. The former is typically used on application like automatic toll taking and the latter for tagging merchandise or automotive keyless entry. NFC is the technology associated with electronic money—paying for fast food or favorite café latte. With such a large number of radios, the average smartphone is beginning to look like a miniature microwave antenna farm.
Bluetooth was intended initially as a personal area network for moving voice and data very short distances. However, with the advent of large multimedia files, Bluetooth is being pushed—Bluetooth 3.0—into higher data rates to accommodate video and picture sharing phone to phone or phone to consumer device or PC. While Bluetooth has been pushing up in speed, WiFi—initially added to handsets to allow Internet browsing at local hotspots is being offered as the natural means of transferring multimedia files. WiFi is being pushed with the latest version—802.11N—to achieve data rate from 54 Mbit/s to a maximum of 600 Mbit/s. “Wi-Fi's penetration into handsets has more momentum than the bad economy,” says industry analyst Michael Morgan with Oyster Bay, NY-based ABI Research. "This year WiFi is on track to see 144 million handsets shipped, with forecasts for 2011 at just over 300 million."
Look for GPS to be the next radio to begin receiving from the average smartphone, thanks to national legislation that requires phones transmit their position for emergency response teams. Boston, Mass. Market research firm Strategy Analytics reckons “global GPS penetration of total handset shipments reached 15% worldwide in 2008 and is expected to reach 21% by the end of 2009. “ Fuelled by the Oct-07 acquisition of NavTeq, Nokia GPS enabled smartphones dominate the global market. But with increasing interest in navigation and mapping apps, Research in Motion and, particularly Apple, are closing in on Nokia's lead.
Which of the other radios possible on a cellphone will experience similar explosive growth is anyone’s guess, but one is sure to emerge.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
PC Industry Looks Poised for Growth
Good news came out of China during the ViMicro International second quarter financial results conference call. Shipments of the company PC camera processor chips showed a 123 percent increase in the second quarter. The company continues to experience strong demand into the second half of the year. David Tang ViMicro CFO points to netbooks as the major driver behind this growth. However, he also sees strong demand for camera processors for high-end desktops as well as for notebooks.
Austin, Texas-based market research firm DisplaySearch echos Tang's accessment predicting mini-notebook (netbook) shipments to double year over year to more than 30m units in 2009, while notebook shipments flatten. Netbook growth in China will exceed all other regions of the world jumping from 1.1 million to 3.9 million from 2008 to 2009. http://www.displaysearch.com/cps/rde/xchg/displaysearch/hs.xsl/071309_mini_note_netbook_shipments_to_double_y_y_to_more_than_30m_units_in_2009.asp
This is good news for the high tech sector that has languished in recent months owing to the worldwide economic recession. Forrester Research is holding out for high tech to hit bottom in the third quarter and rebound in the Q4. Research firm IDC is predicting new product introductions coming this fall, including low-cost, thin-and-light consumer portables, low-cost Intel Atom-based all-in-ones, and, of course, Windows 7, should provide a spark that helps to push market towards positive shipment growth over the next 12 months.
Austin, Texas-based market research firm DisplaySearch echos Tang's accessment predicting mini-notebook (netbook) shipments to double year over year to more than 30m units in 2009, while notebook shipments flatten. Netbook growth in China will exceed all other regions of the world jumping from 1.1 million to 3.9 million from 2008 to 2009. http://www.displaysearch.com/cps/rde/xchg/displaysearch/hs.xsl/071309_mini_note_netbook_shipments_to_double_y_y_to_more_than_30m_units_in_2009.asp
This is good news for the high tech sector that has languished in recent months owing to the worldwide economic recession. Forrester Research is holding out for high tech to hit bottom in the third quarter and rebound in the Q4. Research firm IDC is predicting new product introductions coming this fall, including low-cost, thin-and-light consumer portables, low-cost Intel Atom-based all-in-ones, and, of course, Windows 7, should provide a spark that helps to push market towards positive shipment growth over the next 12 months.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Leveraging “I Love Lucy” to a Sell Network Processor
When I worked for Lexra, a start-up since sold to its rival MIPS Technologies several years back, we were faced with the challenge of explaining in easy-to-understand terms the operation of Lexra’s network processor unit (NPU), the LX8000, nicknamed NetVortex. If the Lexra NPU were an internal combustion engine, its equivalent would be the BMW S70/2 V-12 power plant inside the McLaren F1, which on March 31, 1998 set the record for the fastest production car in the world at 240.1 mph (386 km/h). In other words, the LX8000 was flat out fast.
It was in 2000 and ST Microelectronics was in the process of building a network processor chip to compete with every other chip company hoping to cash in on the Internet build out happening at the end of the last decade. In addition, several high-profile billion-dollar acquisitions of network processor design companies were creating urgency among major semiconductor companies to build or acquire an NPU solution. Even Intel was rushing its XScale line of network processors into production. We saw the potential for a big time buyout if we got the right deal and we were betting this was it.
Our sales guy, ML had set up a meeting to present the NetVortex solution to ST Micro’s decision-making team and we needed something to grab the team’s attention. I suggested a clip from an episode of “I Love Lucy” to demonstrate the problem before launching into the full explanation of how NetVortex provided the most elegant solution: a high speed pipeline running fast enough to keep up with OC192 bandwidth—just under 10 gigabits per second; a series of packet processors along the pipeline each handling a data packet; and a control processor handling the control information to route the packet to the next stop in the network.
I called my buddy Michael Labash at designbymikee.com and asked him to digitize the clip from the “I Love Lucy” episode for me. I dropped the clip into the PowerPoint presentation we were using for the pitch. MJ and our CEO CC flew to Europe, made the pitch, and played the video. It shows Lucy and Ethel on a chocolate candy assembly line with a belt rolling past them containing equally spaced truffles. Their job is to take individual truffles and wrap them in paper and put them back on the assembly line—sounds like packet processing, yes? The belt moves slowly at first then picks up speed as comedy ensues.
The clip was received with the hardy laughter we had hoped for from the international audience attending the meeting and we got to move to the next stage of negotiations—getting upper management to sign the P.O. Unfortunately, unknown to all of us, the Dot-Com Bubble had burst on March 10th and every major corporation worldwide was dealing with the fallout. The deal we thought was done quickly became undone and no amount of humor was going to put it back together.
It was in 2000 and ST Microelectronics was in the process of building a network processor chip to compete with every other chip company hoping to cash in on the Internet build out happening at the end of the last decade. In addition, several high-profile billion-dollar acquisitions of network processor design companies were creating urgency among major semiconductor companies to build or acquire an NPU solution. Even Intel was rushing its XScale line of network processors into production. We saw the potential for a big time buyout if we got the right deal and we were betting this was it.
Our sales guy, ML had set up a meeting to present the NetVortex solution to ST Micro’s decision-making team and we needed something to grab the team’s attention. I suggested a clip from an episode of “I Love Lucy” to demonstrate the problem before launching into the full explanation of how NetVortex provided the most elegant solution: a high speed pipeline running fast enough to keep up with OC192 bandwidth—just under 10 gigabits per second; a series of packet processors along the pipeline each handling a data packet; and a control processor handling the control information to route the packet to the next stop in the network.
I called my buddy Michael Labash at designbymikee.com and asked him to digitize the clip from the “I Love Lucy” episode for me. I dropped the clip into the PowerPoint presentation we were using for the pitch. MJ and our CEO CC flew to Europe, made the pitch, and played the video. It shows Lucy and Ethel on a chocolate candy assembly line with a belt rolling past them containing equally spaced truffles. Their job is to take individual truffles and wrap them in paper and put them back on the assembly line—sounds like packet processing, yes? The belt moves slowly at first then picks up speed as comedy ensues.
The clip was received with the hardy laughter we had hoped for from the international audience attending the meeting and we got to move to the next stage of negotiations—getting upper management to sign the P.O. Unfortunately, unknown to all of us, the Dot-Com Bubble had burst on March 10th and every major corporation worldwide was dealing with the fallout. The deal we thought was done quickly became undone and no amount of humor was going to put it back together.
In search of painkillers in Taipei
It’s around eight in the morning on Wednesday June 3rd at the Grand Hyatt Taipei and my cell phone is ringing. I answer to find TP at the other end of the line in a voice tinged with pain. “I need something stronger than Tylenol, the pain has gotten to be too much,” he intones in that deep bass sounding voice of his that sound like Hans Solo’s sidekick Wookie from Star Wars. With his thick mane of blond gray hair and droopy mustache and matching height he also resembles the hairy hero in bearing and gait. He’s a guy my age but a full-time geek, unlike me who is at best a part-time geek.
TP and I are in Taipei attending the Computex 2009 Conference, “the” PC and consumer show in Asia—CES in size and importance, especially for the 2009 Christmas buying season (whatever gets sold during this week will appear in products this year). We’re here with a bunch of other folks from our California high tech company pitching audio enrichment software. TP is an audio mastering engineer who used to work for the Grateful Dead and other rock legends. How he came to be at the tech company we both worked for is another story on its own. And no, TP, is not into elicit drugs, nor alcohol—not even beer and wine, though he is addicted to Red Bull—I know because our PR firm AccessPR scored every last case the Taipei Costco had in stock along with several jumbo bags of Mars miniature candy bars and a half dozen jumbo jars of nuts. Red Bull was no longer being stocked because of the misguided suspicion that the beverage contained trace amounts of cocaine. It does have lots of caffeine, though.
I tell TP there has to be a pharmacy close by that we can get a prescription filled, “can you call your doc in California and have him fax a prescription to the business office of the Hyatt.” That’s where I am when his call comes to my cell phone bouncing stateside to AT&T Wireless and relayed back to Taipei to the local wireless carrier here—roaming charges Cha-Chinging away. It’s just past five in the evening on the West Coast but TP has his doc cell phone number. As a backup plan I check the front desk halfway across the sprawling lobby of the Grand Hyatt to ask if they have a doctor on duty to check TP out and write a prescription in Chinese. The clerk directs me to the nurse station, where I find that the only way TP is going to get any prescription painkillers is to go to the hospital and have a doctor examine him.
I check back with TP and sure enough he got hold of his doc, who will fax the prescription. I tell him it’s no good we have to go to the hospital. The kind of painkillers TP needs are controlled substances and you’ll get mandatory jail time if you’re caught with them in your possession without a doctor’s prescription. I tell him to suit up and meet me in the lobby as soon as he can. In the meantime, I find CS our PR account exec at AccessPR and ask if she’ll accompany Tom and me to the hospital. “No problem,” which is the response I always get when I make a request from AccessPR. I just ask for something to happen and it does. CS tells the cab driver where we need to go and we’re off.
TP came to his state of pain as a result of something that happen on Saturday May 30th. I met him inside the International Terminal at SFO. I was to be his mule as he brought with him two large Pelican cases filled with audio “stuff”—cables, keyboards, PCs,… Since the airlines have begun limiting the amount of checked baggage per person, I’m checking in one and he’s checking in the other. We’re joined by CS who will carry a third Pelican he’s brought along similarly crammed full of gear. These three Pelicans represent what didn’t make the shipment from San Francisco to Taipei two weeks earlier—something like 12 Pelicans flown by a freight forwarding provider and awaiting us in Taipei. There are two EVA Airways flights leaving SFO within an hour of one another this Saturday night. The one TP and I are on, BR0007 lifts off just after midnight and the one CS is on, BR0017 departs about an hour later.
During the process of unloading the two Pelican cases from his ride to the airport, TP “does something” to his back and he’s not throwing the cases around as nimbly as he usually does. CS and I know he’s having trouble and though it irks him not to be able to manhandle the bulky black boxes, he’s content to let the two of us do the heavy lifting. Once we arrive we check in at the Grand Hyatt Taipei and TP unloads every Pelican we’ve shipped over in his corner suite on the 15th floor. He gets busy putting together over a half dozen demos for our two demo suites at the Grand Hyatt five floors below.
We arrive at the hospital and the three of us exit the cab and I’m so focused on getting TP into the hospital I neglect to pay the cabbie, who is speaking frantically in Chinese to get my attention. CS realizes the problem at the same time I do and I beat her to the punch paying the cabbie, tipping him profusely for the mistake—five bucks U.S. including tip. We enter the hospital and CS learns quickly we need to go to the second floor and sign in at reception. Remarkably, upon arriving, the whole registration process takes place in English with TP providing all the information without needing CS to translate. We wait a half hour and TP is finally taken into an examining room where, we learn later, the doctor is fluent in English and proceeds to lecture TP on the evils of companies exploiting their workers and causing them work related injuries. To be sure, TP’s trouble was work related.
While TP is in the examining room with the doctor, CS and I wait, making small talk about the event, how TP came to be in the state he’s in… I’m surprised by the number of westerners in the waiting room: adults, kids, and older folk. At the reception desk with its four clerks serving the slow but steady stream of arrivals, I hear nearly as much English as Mandarin spoken.
TP appears forty-five minutes later. He’s smiling and relieved to be done with the visit. He’s got his supply of prescription Vicodin-equivalent painkiller and it’s cost him less than sixty bucks. No, this is not the co-pay, it’s the total cost. We take the cab ride back to the hotel and back to the grind.
TP and I are in Taipei attending the Computex 2009 Conference, “the” PC and consumer show in Asia—CES in size and importance, especially for the 2009 Christmas buying season (whatever gets sold during this week will appear in products this year). We’re here with a bunch of other folks from our California high tech company pitching audio enrichment software. TP is an audio mastering engineer who used to work for the Grateful Dead and other rock legends. How he came to be at the tech company we both worked for is another story on its own. And no, TP, is not into elicit drugs, nor alcohol—not even beer and wine, though he is addicted to Red Bull—I know because our PR firm AccessPR scored every last case the Taipei Costco had in stock along with several jumbo bags of Mars miniature candy bars and a half dozen jumbo jars of nuts. Red Bull was no longer being stocked because of the misguided suspicion that the beverage contained trace amounts of cocaine. It does have lots of caffeine, though.
I tell TP there has to be a pharmacy close by that we can get a prescription filled, “can you call your doc in California and have him fax a prescription to the business office of the Hyatt.” That’s where I am when his call comes to my cell phone bouncing stateside to AT&T Wireless and relayed back to Taipei to the local wireless carrier here—roaming charges Cha-Chinging away. It’s just past five in the evening on the West Coast but TP has his doc cell phone number. As a backup plan I check the front desk halfway across the sprawling lobby of the Grand Hyatt to ask if they have a doctor on duty to check TP out and write a prescription in Chinese. The clerk directs me to the nurse station, where I find that the only way TP is going to get any prescription painkillers is to go to the hospital and have a doctor examine him.
I check back with TP and sure enough he got hold of his doc, who will fax the prescription. I tell him it’s no good we have to go to the hospital. The kind of painkillers TP needs are controlled substances and you’ll get mandatory jail time if you’re caught with them in your possession without a doctor’s prescription. I tell him to suit up and meet me in the lobby as soon as he can. In the meantime, I find CS our PR account exec at AccessPR and ask if she’ll accompany Tom and me to the hospital. “No problem,” which is the response I always get when I make a request from AccessPR. I just ask for something to happen and it does. CS tells the cab driver where we need to go and we’re off.
TP came to his state of pain as a result of something that happen on Saturday May 30th. I met him inside the International Terminal at SFO. I was to be his mule as he brought with him two large Pelican cases filled with audio “stuff”—cables, keyboards, PCs,… Since the airlines have begun limiting the amount of checked baggage per person, I’m checking in one and he’s checking in the other. We’re joined by CS who will carry a third Pelican he’s brought along similarly crammed full of gear. These three Pelicans represent what didn’t make the shipment from San Francisco to Taipei two weeks earlier—something like 12 Pelicans flown by a freight forwarding provider and awaiting us in Taipei. There are two EVA Airways flights leaving SFO within an hour of one another this Saturday night. The one TP and I are on, BR0007 lifts off just after midnight and the one CS is on, BR0017 departs about an hour later.
During the process of unloading the two Pelican cases from his ride to the airport, TP “does something” to his back and he’s not throwing the cases around as nimbly as he usually does. CS and I know he’s having trouble and though it irks him not to be able to manhandle the bulky black boxes, he’s content to let the two of us do the heavy lifting. Once we arrive we check in at the Grand Hyatt Taipei and TP unloads every Pelican we’ve shipped over in his corner suite on the 15th floor. He gets busy putting together over a half dozen demos for our two demo suites at the Grand Hyatt five floors below.
We arrive at the hospital and the three of us exit the cab and I’m so focused on getting TP into the hospital I neglect to pay the cabbie, who is speaking frantically in Chinese to get my attention. CS realizes the problem at the same time I do and I beat her to the punch paying the cabbie, tipping him profusely for the mistake—five bucks U.S. including tip. We enter the hospital and CS learns quickly we need to go to the second floor and sign in at reception. Remarkably, upon arriving, the whole registration process takes place in English with TP providing all the information without needing CS to translate. We wait a half hour and TP is finally taken into an examining room where, we learn later, the doctor is fluent in English and proceeds to lecture TP on the evils of companies exploiting their workers and causing them work related injuries. To be sure, TP’s trouble was work related.
While TP is in the examining room with the doctor, CS and I wait, making small talk about the event, how TP came to be in the state he’s in… I’m surprised by the number of westerners in the waiting room: adults, kids, and older folk. At the reception desk with its four clerks serving the slow but steady stream of arrivals, I hear nearly as much English as Mandarin spoken.
TP appears forty-five minutes later. He’s smiling and relieved to be done with the visit. He’s got his supply of prescription Vicodin-equivalent painkiller and it’s cost him less than sixty bucks. No, this is not the co-pay, it’s the total cost. We take the cab ride back to the hotel and back to the grind.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
What's beyond Facebook and Twitter?
I recently listened to a panel with the suggestive title “Beyond Facebook & Twitter: The Social-Media Future” moderated by Bambi Francisco, the journalist turned entrepreneur heading up Vator.tv. It took place at the AlwaysOn Conference Thursday afternoon, July 30th. The panel examined how start-ups were leveraging the “social graph”—the sticky title blogger Brad Fitzpatrick described as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related" to offer users new forms of information and entertainment.
As networking technology moves forward, the newest innovation—facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube… have, in turn, become the platform that the next wave of entrepreneurs is building upon. The site colleca.com, for example, uses the social graph for streaming real time search. A visitor to the site might search on a real time event such as the “launch of the space shuttle” Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell explains. The site’s search engine then searches across every news feed—Reuters, AP, ABC, etc and every social networking site including youtube to locate any current or recent posting about the space shuttle launch and provides the information to the visitor.
Entering the search term “Afghans vote for president,” into Collecta produced 10 results. Most were twitter posts with links to an Associated Press new story. The results also included Twitter pointers to the Kansas City Star, Philippine Star, Boston Herald, and WBAY, an ABC affiliate in Wisconsin, however these all were reprints of the AP report. Entering the term “Michael Jackson” produced a larger and more varied set of results including stories in different languages, however, most were from Twitter postings—with commentary or references to blogs or news stories. It’s an interesting concept still in Beta.
Another new venture hoping to leverage off the social graph is Aardvark.com, which has yet to go live. It hopes to use the collective knowledge of all those actively on line at any given moment as a form of real time information resource. “It’s about getting into the experience and knowledge of your friends and their friends that no one would ever write down but if you happen to run into them and ask ‘where should I go in Belize?’ And someone says, ‘I lived there for four years, check out this, this, and this…’” Max Ventilla, Aardvark CEO said. “That’s an incredibly satisfying experience for both of you, (which) we’re able to productize because these platforms (social networks) not only have created the data (but) open themselves up to third parties.”
The third panelist, Shervin Pishevar, CEO of Social Gaming Network, had a more conventional approach to exploiting social networks by offering Facebook users interactive games, such as “Nicknames” and (fluff)Friends—which plays across Facebook, MySpace and the iPhone. The offerings seem to be a hit as (fluff)Friends has 584,137 monthly active users and 22,892 fans and Nicknames has 440,720 monthly active users and 24,211 fans, both building the SGN brand rather than generating income. SGN’s real money seems to be in iPhone games such as F.A.S.T. downloadable from the apps store on iTunes for $0.99. Bambi asked Shervin to confirm a million downloads, but without success. Shervin did state that SGN has recorded around 15 million installs of his software on the iPhone. That has to be worth a few million in real money.
The final panelist Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Labs, not to be confused with the Hearsay Lab offering from IrregularStuff Academic, was less forthcoming about how her company planned to draft off the social graph. “We’re developing tools for marketers to measure and optimize their campaign interactions across Facebook, Twitter and their own web site,” Ms. Shih stated. Her background building Faceconnector gives some clues to her new venture. Faceconnector is an integration between Facebook and SalesForce.com CRM (customer relationship management), which in many ways suggests that Facebook and Twitter are the new CRM. The concept of mixing anything “management” with a social networking site sounds a bit Orwellian.
The takeaway from this panel discussion seems to be that the metamorphosis of the “continuously connected” world from high speed connection—the 1980s, to web storefronts and search—the 1990s, to social networks—the double “00s” is moving to the next stage as the new decade looms. Let’s see if the next Facebook is among any of these early ventures.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Innovating out of Recession: The Next “Next Thing”
The AlwaysOn & STVP (Stanford Technology Ventures Program) Summit at Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center on the Stanford University campus featured a panel with the unwieldy title "Silicon Valley in the New Millennium: Chief Geeks & VCs of the Old Guard lay out the New Software & Computing Agenda." It was an attempt to articulate the next “next thing” for Silicon Valley in the wake of social media, the iPhone, and a major recession. As panels go, this one touched on the conventional wisdom appearing in every tech story about futures: Cloud computing, social networking, media technology, and portable devices.
However, a couple of impressions from the discussion, moderated by Craig Menden, a partner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, are noteworthy. Foremost is that content is being developed without consideration for the devices consumers will use to access it. Furthermore, devices are being developed without considering the content that these devices will be accessing. Furthermore, neither content creator, nor device manufacturer are creating devices that address the use model of the consumer. To be fair often the consumer has not found the use model until a device has become available. Who at Apple anticipated the Tsunami of apps flooding the iPhone?
Panelist Dan Scheinman, senior VP and GM for the Media Solutions Group at Cisco Systems, Inc. articulated the position big media companies find themselves in: struck dumb with Google-envy. Scheinman cites a big media company committing 95 percent of its revenue to developing technology. He cited Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.’s CNN as the model for what big media should be doing: creating new content tailored to a new media distribution system—cable versus over the air broadcast. He said that the “CNN” of the Internet has yet to arrive—though you could argue that the Yahoo web portal and Google search constitute successful content models tailored for the web.
Norm Fogelsong, general partner, Institutional Venture Partners, another panelist raised the point that it’s a three-screen world: portable media device, desktop/laptop PC, and the 40+ inch screen in everyone’s living room. Furthermore, he contended that media has to be fluid across these screens—instead of siloed as they are today. The solution said panelist Tom Malloy, chief software architect at Adobe Systems Inc. is smart content that automatically adapts to the device the consumer is using. A crude example is a web browser that conforms to handheld devices. Malloy cited the PDF and Flash platforms as early versions of tools to create such content.
One question from the audience asked, what’s being done to have technology serve humanity rather than the other way around? Scheinman articulated the answer earlier in the panel discussion by stating that long term the consumer will be in charge, “consumers want to be able to access whatever they want, whenever they want, on whatever device they want.” Scheinman stated that ultimately, the value is going to reside in knowledge of the consumer. For example, when the consumer logs on, the system will know he’s on a Blackberry, that he’s an avid baseball fan, and that he wants to learn something about the Major League Baseball trade deadline, without him having to click around to find it.
As to who will be financing the next “next thing”, don’t expect deep-pocketed venture capitalists to be overly forthcoming. “Venture capital is going to go through a painful adjustment cycle,” said panelist Fred Wang, general partner, Trinity Ventures, “right-sizeing itself to something that looks like $15 to $20 billion a year, about a half to a third of what it’s been. The companies that venture capital will fund will have to be much more capital efficient.”
However, don’t right off Silicon Valley just yet, Fogelsong concluded, “once you get to the point we are now, the system feeds on itself. Everybody here wants to be an entrepreneur. Half the students at this campus have a business plan they’re working on for the next Google. Ah! “Silicon Valley in the New Millennium.”
However, a couple of impressions from the discussion, moderated by Craig Menden, a partner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, are noteworthy. Foremost is that content is being developed without consideration for the devices consumers will use to access it. Furthermore, devices are being developed without considering the content that these devices will be accessing. Furthermore, neither content creator, nor device manufacturer are creating devices that address the use model of the consumer. To be fair often the consumer has not found the use model until a device has become available. Who at Apple anticipated the Tsunami of apps flooding the iPhone?
Panelist Dan Scheinman, senior VP and GM for the Media Solutions Group at Cisco Systems, Inc. articulated the position big media companies find themselves in: struck dumb with Google-envy. Scheinman cites a big media company committing 95 percent of its revenue to developing technology. He cited Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.’s CNN as the model for what big media should be doing: creating new content tailored to a new media distribution system—cable versus over the air broadcast. He said that the “CNN” of the Internet has yet to arrive—though you could argue that the Yahoo web portal and Google search constitute successful content models tailored for the web.
Norm Fogelsong, general partner, Institutional Venture Partners, another panelist raised the point that it’s a three-screen world: portable media device, desktop/laptop PC, and the 40+ inch screen in everyone’s living room. Furthermore, he contended that media has to be fluid across these screens—instead of siloed as they are today. The solution said panelist Tom Malloy, chief software architect at Adobe Systems Inc. is smart content that automatically adapts to the device the consumer is using. A crude example is a web browser that conforms to handheld devices. Malloy cited the PDF and Flash platforms as early versions of tools to create such content.
One question from the audience asked, what’s being done to have technology serve humanity rather than the other way around? Scheinman articulated the answer earlier in the panel discussion by stating that long term the consumer will be in charge, “consumers want to be able to access whatever they want, whenever they want, on whatever device they want.” Scheinman stated that ultimately, the value is going to reside in knowledge of the consumer. For example, when the consumer logs on, the system will know he’s on a Blackberry, that he’s an avid baseball fan, and that he wants to learn something about the Major League Baseball trade deadline, without him having to click around to find it.
As to who will be financing the next “next thing”, don’t expect deep-pocketed venture capitalists to be overly forthcoming. “Venture capital is going to go through a painful adjustment cycle,” said panelist Fred Wang, general partner, Trinity Ventures, “right-sizeing itself to something that looks like $15 to $20 billion a year, about a half to a third of what it’s been. The companies that venture capital will fund will have to be much more capital efficient.”
However, don’t right off Silicon Valley just yet, Fogelsong concluded, “once you get to the point we are now, the system feeds on itself. Everybody here wants to be an entrepreneur. Half the students at this campus have a business plan they’re working on for the next Google. Ah! “Silicon Valley in the New Millennium.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)