Archive for November, 2004

Cutting edge tech is consumer tech?

by eleanor on 29 Nov 2004 @ 9:33 pm in Emergent | Life-Culture-Play   ++

I’m starting to pay attention to consumer tech because I have to: consumer tech adoption is a subtext to many of the themes I’m tracking.

Blogging is an inherently populist, human activity - its very ethos is to make editing pages easy enough for junior high girls and soccer moms. The uber-kewl iPod has, in a sweep, legitiimized the portable digital audio market (probably as much by providing a legitimate place to purchase music for mainstream users via iTunes) and become a fashion and lifestyle accessory. Then we have podcasting, the nascent phenomenon (of which I remain highly skeptical - I struggle with the aural format and hate talk radio). Then we have projects like Creative Commons, with their groundbreaking work with Wired to distribute a free ‘rip mix burn’ cd with major artists under the CC license, and also projects like OurMedia which are trying to create a ecosystem around CC-licensed media. Then there’s the crazy ringtone market.

I’ve been tracking some of these themes for a while now, but have only gradually become aware of some of the implications of this. I first noticed when I discussed with people their iTunes habits - people I’ve spoken with have been regularly spending $20-30 a month at iTunes. Then I started checking out the wireless service I will want when I get the Treo650 - TMobile’s all-purpose data+voice service package starts at $80/month, to which you can add SMS, video, Hotspots, etc. That’s a tremendous annuity - and just plain astounding. I’ve resigned myself to the fees because of the productivity gains I will enjoy, but am struck that this is presented very casually as the price of entry. Note that NECSAM doesn’t fund cell phone service that extends beyond traditional voice - so this is my assessment as a user paying out of pocket; I imagine many of those who use these services have their fees covered by their businesses so they might have a different perspective (but that’s a bigger issue - see this post for a sense of the general chaos all us mobile workers are bringing to enterprises) .

Then you look at gaming - the launch of Halo 2 topped $125 million in its first weekend - players pay a further $6/month for the service. The gaming industry just held a conference, State of PlayII hosted by the New York Law School - if you can believe it. Prominently featured is the game Second Life, where characters roam through a user-built 3-D environment (I actually signed up for this to see if I can understand what the buzz is about). Check out the blog set up to chronicle the happenings of the online world for a real sense of how deep the consumer connection with virtual worlds is.

What all this bespeaks to us is, in economic terms, a revealed willingness to pay. We can see consumers spending a huge amount of recurring money on new toys and services. Consumers are willing to buy cameras and cameraphones and mp3 players. They’re willing to subscribe to broadband and wireless services to use them. They purchase add-on services and applications to make them more usuable and fun. What an astonishing change - and so much of it is driven by the pursuit of access to information and entertainment.

And there’s data to back this up - all these disparate trends are being mirrored in the purchasing of content online. Consumers are consuming more as they get a taste for the way they can use it. ClickZ, a site for web marketing, discusses how paid content increased by 14% in 1H2004 - hitting $853M in the US.

Contrast this to the state of the industry documented in 1999 by Austrailian Roger Clarke and the change is startling.

Startups and enterprises are noticing and improving their offerings. Last week, at the IBDN Under the Radar event showcasing a handpicked cadre of startups, I was struck that at the number of innovative consumer companies. Roku is selling network music players for the home; Akimbo is offering a video on demand service of old series and niche programming; Mirra sells backup devices. These are all toys that will be found at major US consumer electronics stores like BestBuy.

It appears that a broad trend is emerging - that a fundamental shift has occured between US consumers and their media. As we heard from SBC’s CEO - people of all walks of life are making media their own - repurposing it, sharing it, and documenting their thoughts on it - via blogs or epinions or amazon comments. Broadband adoption and emergence of meaningful applications have opened up a huge new market, and the pursuit of that market is pushing the state of the industry forward.

Just in time too, because enterprise spending growth has shown no meaningful increase.
/p>

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IBDN Under the Radar

by eleanor on @ 4:04 pm in Venture & Startup   ++

Hmmm…. I just realized I never published this report. This is just an info dump out of my head. There are no doubt statements somewhere in here which can both help and threaten the companies involved, but it’s nothing they shouldn’t have thought of before.

IBDN Under the Radar was a day-long event brought together companies seeking funding, VCs, and people like myself to get a sense of the state of innovation in the Valley. The event was expensive - $390 (a package deal that included a $95 No Frills membership – for members it was $295, for nonmembers it was about $400). That kept out the riffraff. There were no bloggers here, and very few job-seeker types. The format was highly regulated – a series of timed stages on the order of 6 minutes for presentation, then ~7 minutes for questions from the VC panel. The below is the full agenda of company presentations. There was also an intro session and a closing session with a panel of VCs moderated by CNet journalist Rafe Needleman.

The strongest message from this event was the lack of real innovation in many of these players. It’s a clear signal that the last 2 years of little seed-stage funding has yielded few truly interesting companies. The weak companies here should not have been allowed to present. The fact that they were means that this was the best they could find. VCs I’ve spoken with on this topic have agreed. When early stage funding dried up, we could see it in the VentureOne statistics, but now we’re seeing it in the market in a lack of viable startups ready for the next stage.

Here are my biased, potentially misguided, and personal notes from the event, broken out by session:

Communications – 9-10:15am

• BEDD was first. What a strange operation. This was by far among the shakier ideas. I met the marketing guy before the session – an old college buddy of the founder, he took a day off from his real job of surgeon to attend, saying the event cost him his $20K of fees. That’s the first hint here this is a “dentist” style operation – they can fund it mostly themselves and they have. The company is based in and running out of Singapore. They have customers there now and sell the application for $.60 a month, $7 a year. It is a “viral” Bluetooth application that serves as dating service and connector. I load my ideal man into my phone, and if I should pass him, it will let me know. Same idea for things like flat rental. Totally crackpot, especially here in the US. What I did learn of interest from the surgeon, which went unmentioned in the presentation, was they were primarily running off a patent portfolio, and that they have some overly broad and spurious sounding patent for peer to peer matching over Bluetooth. These guys don’t seem capable of growing a real business, but their patents could cause trouble for someone else down the road.
• Idetic is fielding MobiTV in the marketplace – tv content streamed to mobile phones. They gave a good presentation, and seemed to have done some of the work in content acquisition and partnering. Their technology is bandwidth intensive, which is an attractor to higher-priced data services, but originally the app drew down ~45kb/sec to support the video. Idetic has done tuning to bring that down to ~18kb/sec with decent-ish quality, which has pleased carriers.
• Traverse Networks brings presence-driven call routing and handling, aiming to manage multiple phone lines and voicemail boxes. Apparently it’s software for mobile phones that lets you select where you are, and opt to receive landline calls on your cell phone. The software also lets you manage preferences for your landline, so that you could route all calls to your land or office line. The tricky part here is that mobile handsets are currently the best place to deploy this software (or VOIP providers, but that wasn’t mentioned) – so that’s the deployment platform. Traverse’s presentation said they had assembled a decent array of partners and were already well integrated with the RBOCs and traditional carriers. They had exploited regulation that required carriers to forward calls out of their systems. Traverse seems like it has a decent offering for right now and has laid much of the groundwork to establish it. However, if you look at people abandoning their landlines (both home and office) for wireless phones – this is just one solution among others that the market – the people who see this as a pain point – will evaluate. In 5-10 years time, this switching problem will be largely eliminated by the move to IPV6. Traverse won this session’s VC pick.
• Zeosoft gave a presentation that was heavy on statistics and research but that left too little time to explain their business and business model. It’s a Java framework for mobile application delivery and billing, and sounds very much like a startup version of Nokia’s Preminet. The area where this startup did sound like it had an interesting idea was in its use of Cloudscape-style local databases to maintain state and a repository of commonly used data. In this sense, Zeosoft might be able to sell directly to enterprises looking to make existing applications mobile, but yet prefer to keep the data and the applications on their own system (I believe this is a service, but I’m sure they’d sell a big customer a blackbox appliance).

Security – 10:30-11:45am

• AirZip has integrated a software security solution with office products to maintain security of documents at the print (output) and scanning (input) level, in addition to the file system level (who can read, change, etc).They’ve got partnerships with Sharp printed in the flyer, but mentioned Ricoh, Canon and Xerox. The system works on a file folder level – expecting that users will save documents to be protected into a particular place, which I thought was quite burdensome to the user. In order to access a document, the user must be authenticated, which involves bouncing against a central server – one of the VCs asked ‘what about when flying in a plane?’, to which there was no clear answer. I was generally underwhelmed by this, but can see vertical market potential, especially in banking and financial services and healthcare. This would be a low-cost, theoretically countervail-able solution of the sort that would fit for mortgage and loan operations, health insurance claims and the like.
• Akonix is going after securing the enterprise instant messaging space, as an entrée to build out a more fully functioned security platform for other kinds of messaging. They are funded in part by their founder, have 70 people and are supporting one installation with 50K licensed seats. The tool can work with IBM’s Sametime and Microsoft’s Live Communication Server. They basically just serve as a message gateway through which to channel IM and screen it for content and malware. Akonix won the pick of the session.
• Vidius is military quality encryption somehow based on sonar waves. They claim that they fingerprint individual pieces of a document so that it continues to be protected if there is a change. It wasn’t clear how granular the fingerprinting extended – to the paragraph or sentence level – but it certainly covers the full document, chapter and memo level. The technology here might be interesting for someone else to explore, but they’ve got some 25 patents and were dead serious about the integrity of the encryption models.

Enterprise - 2:15-3:30

• Digipede aims at the Microsoft-only distributed computing market, which they say is growing rapidly. They look to harness the latency in application processing and in general underutilized capacity of Wintel boxes for processing, a la SETI@home. The idea is to use these cycles to provide peak utilization on demand capacity. The VCs commented that this likely to be a smaller market because most distributed computing is down in *nix HPC environments.
• nLayers’ software listens to the traffic on the network, looks inside the packets and creates a model of the data center. They aim to attack the problem of not knowing what is running where on the network, so that IT managers “do not have to unplug the box and wait to see who complains their application is down”. I’m not aware exactly how unique this technology is, but it seems like a very useful component in the toolkits of IBM’s and HP’s consulting orgs, both of whom are customers. This seems like a prime acquisition play. This company won the pick of the session for the VCs.
• Singlestep is a technology platform provider selling to service providers who need to help their clients integrate disparate services. It reminded me of capabilities of Opsware. They sell their platform to providers, who then use it to provision their clients. The core of their IP is a toolset to describe interfaces and workflows in a visual manner so that operations personnel can understand what is going on and quickly make changes. The prime value it brings comes from its autonomics capabilities – as it’s possible to describe powerful rules in the system to keep operations up and running. It’s very high performance, with live installations processing 3 million events a day. They’ve partnered with IBM around IBM’s first autonomic computing engagement, and their technology is apparently playing an important part in delivering that QOS. I found their case most compelling of this session, and it struck me as the startup of the day most relevant to the enterprise markets I’m looking at. Chris Noble is the CEO, I spoke with him afterwards and can get more information if you are interested.
• Trigence has a very complicated product, that sounds like it’s roughly like wrapping applications in virtual machine-lets so that they can be moved about the data center as needed. The founder didn’t get across much information during his presentation because he was talking in theory.

Digital Home – 3:45-5

• Akimbo launched a niche digital content delivery service. They aggregate and make available for on-demand consumption niche programming – old tv shows, sports events, cooking shows, and other special interest categories. It’s a low cost model for them because this is not deemed premium content that the content owners can easily monetize, but if made available through this system content owners can gain a new revenue stream. They’ve been working with Hollywood for 2 years to secure exclusive rights to content and are adding between 50-100 program selections each week. Subscription pricing starts around $10/month and currently requires purchase of a dvr (which Akimbo has been developing itself for lack of availability for a OEM version that meets their requirements). Right now it’s a progressive downloading which takes time, that should be done ahead of time (overnight for example) – instead of on demand, but they are working on that. They’re early to own a market, one that matches exactly with the “Long Tail” (article in Wired, blog) philosophy that’s been seen with Rhapsody-type services – that each show will be consumed by someone out there.
• Watching iControl was funny in a deeply ironic way because my boyfriend, Mike worked for a startup with this exact business model (only they were selling to Europe) that died a slow death. Even the screens looked the same - too, too bad. They sell home networking systems, basically a control box and devices that link to a central server via your home network connection. This enables dreams of monitoring kids from work, opening the garage for the delivery man, etc. The problem is real burning customer need and lack of a concrete problem to solve, combined with the fact that these systems are still too hard to set up, maintain, and troubleshoot by most home users, and the service provider they’re starting a “paid trial” with (has to be Earthlink or Comcast since they’ve had an interest in this for a while to sell their broadband svcs) doesn’t have the technical support staff (or the margin) to really support it. All the VCs were very harsh on this startup.
• Mirra makes consumer backup and media distribution servers. They’re selling them in mainstream consumer electronics stores now. It’s a nice package to serve as a central media server for the house and also to backup media, solving the problem of both having too many digital pictures and sometimes deleting them all. VCs questioned whether this was a technology that would really be adopted by mainstream households, rather than just us tech types in the Valley. But for now it’s a good business – the boxes still have a reported 40-50% margin on them (that won’t last), after leaving 25% margin in the channels.
• Roku also makes boxes. They make audio equipment that play from media servers. They showed pictures of pretty machines that would, for example, make a great bedside radio, but didn’t give a hint of a strategy or a larger services tie in. Roku might just be a plain vanilla consumer electronics company. It’s worth noting that their founder is Anthony Wood, who, according to Roku’s description, invented the DVR. It may be a case that he’s very good at coming up with CE innovations, but leaves it to companies like TIvo and Akimbo to try to build a value-add services business around it — sounds like a good place for a case study.

Companies to watch

• InnerSell is a peer to peer lead swapping service aimed at local business communities. I talked to the founder for a while, and he’s a sharp guy, but the value proposition is murky.
• Buzznet has built a photocommunication platform for sharing photos from mobile devices. It has some aspects of social networking and community building, and other aspects of marketing and advertising potential.
• Commendo is big in Mexico, but sounded confused. The founder stressed the need to run data centers like manufacturing facilities, with process controls and attention to efficiency, but didn’t make it clear how his software? service? product? delivered it.
• Satori Labs built its Sure Scribe technology on the Anoto technology to streamline digitization of text. The application is targeted towards medical applications.
• Nisvara is a materials company that has come up with a special material to diffuse heat. This is important (I think) to make less noisy home devices. Their value proposition this year (I spoke with them last year) is trying to sell data center power and cooling savings. That strikes me as a very difficult, high end area to persuade to adopt a new material. Home users are much less risky, and probably more appreciative of the benefits. Data centers have a lot of problems, heat and power consumption often drive server consolidation not buying a lot of new servers with lower power consumption.
• GroundWork Open Source Solutions sounded a lot like Spike Source, whose CEO, Kim Polese, I heard speak earlier in the week at the SDForum Open Source Conference. GOSS has customers though (which I don’t think SpikeSource had), 25 in the last 8 months. I have the same doubts about GOSS’s long-term business model as I did about Spike Source.
• Protego Networks is headed by a spunky Asian woman who was much more enthusiastic than explanatory. She talked a lot about all the great things they do for their customers in the network security and compliance spaces but did not explain what they do or where they’re headed.

Winners overall:

• Security: V-secure whom I did not hear present, but Izhar Shay, their CEO whom I spoke with briefly was an interesting guy.
• Communications: Traverse
• Enterprise: Tableau whom I also missed
• Digital Home: Orb Networks whom I missed too
• Companies to watch: Groundwork (shows what I know)

My timing wasn’t as good as I wanted - I clearly missed hearing pitches for some of the most exciting companies out there. Still I wanted to break up my day so that I could attend one session from each segment.

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Chip Chatter - Consumer & Converged Devices

by eleanor on @ 1:57 pm in Enterprise IT | Life-Culture-Play   ++

I have a lot of back posts to put up over the next few days, but first a current piece from today.

Right away I’ve seen two pieces on chips from big players, tracking with themes I’m developing. First the announcment of the Cell chip, product of joint development efforts of IBM, Sony and Toshiba. This chip is designed for consumer electronics applications targeted at the digital home including Sony’s Playstation and handling video display for high resolution displays. As The Wall Street Journal reports in WSJ.com - IBM, Sony, Toshiba Unveil Chip For Home-Entertainment Sector:

Analysts said the processor might be able to reorient digitized video as it is received to provide views from above or an end-zone view. In other applications, the processing power of Cell might permit a viewer to take a TV character and place him in a videogame, or interact with a commercial to see how a dress would look on an image of herself stored in the system.

(edited 13 Dec) See also The Red Herring blog post which has more info about the Cell chip as well as comments on where it will fit in in the world of consumer electronic devices and games.

The New York Times focuses on Intel and its strategies and challenges ahead with a piece looking forward to Otellini’s ascent to CEO. Most noteworthy for the theme of convergence around multifunction advanced handsets, the piece reports on Otellini’s new strategy of “platformization” — what seems to be Intel focusing less on the hardware attributes of chips but more on the holistic solution. Looking forward to Otellini’s first strategy presentation to Wall Street, The Times expects him to announce Intel’s focus on “four areas for growth: international markets for desktop personal computers, mobile and wireless applications, the digital home, as well as a new initiative aimed at large corporate computing markets that Intel is calling the Digital Office.” We’ll have to wait to see what is shared about the “Digital Office” initiative… that makes me think of Xerox.

Perhaps to underscore this shift, the most innovative part of Intel’s strategy that’s discussed in the article talks about Intel’s investment in Craig McCaw’s wimax startup, Clearwire:

“Voice is going to be free as a result of all of this, which the carriers don’t like to hear, but that’s essentially where it’s going,” he said.

What is in it for Intel? A cellphone-like wireless handset that works seamlessly both inside and outside the home throughout an urban area.

That is a market that could easily mitigate any number of missteps and blunders - potentially a market that would remake the cellular phone world that so far has largely eluded Intel.

“Any market of 600 million small computers is not just important, but it’s critical to us,” Mr. Otellini said.

What I take away from this is more evidence that consumer facing applications are receiving the focus that was formerly centered around the enterprise. I’m going to be posting on this theme quite a bit (including backposts) so I will return to add links later.

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Open vs. closed approaches of carriers, BREW vs Java

by eleanor on 28 Nov 2004 @ 11:32 pm in Mobility   ++

The distinctions between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ come up quite a bit in the discussion of the future of mobility and wireless providers - because some carriers have controlled both the transmission of data and what you can load on a handset. Developers froth and foam at the walled gardens and the difficulty of getting their applications out of paying customers. Since I’m posting for Japan, it’s probably worthwhile for me to explain the chaotic US carrier market as it related to our heterogenous networks, delivery platforms, and operating systems, so I will give it a shot.

Previously, Verizon was the largest carrier and able to provide subscribers with the security that comes from joining the largest and best supported ‘critical mass’ carrier. Developers were faced with the choice of developing via BREW and going in through the closed Qualcomm-Verizon system branded GetItNow, or going through decentralized channels to develop on Java for handsets using MIDP and Symbian based products (for a good overview of the complex world of Java on handsets - see the slides Bill Day developed for Nokia’s Tech Days last week). Many developers I’ve spoken with have cited Verizon’s 40 million customers as the reason they develop in BREW, despite the transaction costs of working with both Qualcomm and Verizon and the sense that it is a ‘walled garden’ with only limited areas of allowed development. The merger of AT&T Wireless and Cingular has shifted the conversation in a new direction, because now the dominant carrier in the US will be a GSM provider - the applications for which are developed primarily using the Java and Symbian operating systems. The new Cingular’s 50 million customers change the calculations, potentially to favor the more-open Java and Symbian world.

I’m tracking this for its likely impacts on innovation, startup formation and investment patterns. In the closed-system Verizon world, you can only download applications through their GetItNow program, and it is only feasible to go through the entire process of application validation and catalogue engtry for commercial applications. In the Java/Symbian world, applications are designed to be downloaded straight from the provider and publisher, but until the recent announcment of Preminet, there was no integrated application and delivery system available on the Java side. Java has always had the ability to support viral applications with free or shareware type licenses, or applications which are free but exist to drive revenue in other areas (think of a mobile app to enhance functionality for paid services, like Buzznet’s community photo sharing services). Now the Java side is supported by both the infrastructure and the flexibility to accomodate alternative business models.

As we’ve seen countless times, standards faciliate innovation by speeding adoption. Cingular uses the GSM /GPRS format that is in use throughout much of the world.

And Nokia’s Tech Days event is worth a second look - not only did attendees get free training, but they also received copy of Borland’s developer kit (essentially all you need to begin Symbian development). This signals a strong investment by Nokia in nuturing and growing its developer community.

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SBC’s Chair discusses intent to offer integrated cable, cellular, wireline service

by eleanor on 26 Nov 2004 @ 9:16 pm in Emergent | Mobility   ++

The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting piece with an interview with SBC’s Chairman and CEO, Edward Whitacre. I’ve posted the entire article here for those without subscriptions.

This piece is important for several reasons. First, SBC is 60% owner of Cingular (which is now the merged entity including AT&T Wireless), so this shows that SBC is planning on creating synergy between their wireline and wireless offerings as a strategic necessity. Secondly, he offers valuable insights into the competitive dynamics of the industry.

Even more subtly, I was struck by Whitacre’s assessment of personal technology:

I’m not a real techie. I have a computer at home, but don’t mess with it that often. I mean, what am I going to do with 200 e-mails a day? No, I’m really not very techie, but I can use a computer.

Believe it or not, I can even burn a CD, or I can buy a CD, take it home, and put it in my PC and then load it on my iPod. I looked last night, there’s something like 514 hours of music on it. I have Ray Charles on there, I have Steely Dan, I have the music from “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”

This is an additional datapoint which is fueling a new theme I’m starting to track - consumer-driven adoption (I’m writing a longer piece with an overview of the themes I’m tracking - see .

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Intel assisting Asian OEMs with support for Linux installs for desktop machines

by eleanor on @ 6:17 pm in Open Source   ++

Cynthia Webb, in her Filter column in The Washington Post has a great rundown of the news around Intel’s move to simplify Linux installation for Asian PC manufacturers. Check out the full piece Linux Ready for Prime Time, Intel Says.
Intel’s assistance comes chiefly in the form of drivers - long the hardest part of Linux installs since manufacturers haven’t placed a premium on porting drivers to Linux. Driver availability has made such routine things as printing, scanning, supporting graphics and sound cards a challenge for Linux, and can be see as a key criteria for desktop usuability.

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Mozilla-based browser Firefox off to strong start

by eleanor on 24 Nov 2004 @ 11:29 am in Emergent   ++

Information Week has a decent round up of the recent browser stats wars. We’ve got a couple different reports with slightly different takes on the numbers, but it’s clear where the momentum is: Firefox is definitely taking market share from Internet Explorer and is surprising in its swiftness.

In a summary of the stats, OneStat.com, an Amsterdam-based Web metrics firm, has Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with a 88.9% usage share (down 5 points since May) to Firefox’s 4.6% and sister-suite Mozilla at 2.8%. That puts Mozilla-based browser share at 7.4% (up from 2.1% in May).

US-based competitor WebSideStory has IE at a 92.9%, and Firefox at a much smaller 3%. Under their model, IE is only down 3% since May. Not a huge difference, but IE share falling below 90% represents a pyschological threshold. So it’s worth quibbling just a little:

Brinkman [OneStat’s founder] attributed the difference between the two companies’ number to a larger sampling size for his data and the later reporting period. OneStat, for instance, claims it monitors Web usage at some 50,000 sites in 100 countries, while WebSideStory says it counts about 600 enterprises as its customers.

“And we did our research just last week,” he said. “WebSideStory’s research is already a couple of weeks old.”

This time period is especially pertinent when you consider that FireFox itself was only officially launched (v 1.0) 2 weeks ago. Since then users have downloaded more than 5.6 million copies of the free Firefox. Based on what I see and hear, I tend to agree with Brinkman that a couple weeks brings a lot of change with all the buzz around Firefox.

I still use the Mozilla suite (since 1999). I’ve spoken with other power users (as I type I have 3 windows open, one of which has 39 tabs open) and they say it’s not quite ready for prime time. Thunderbird (the Mozilla-based mail client) definitely isn’t, and Mozilla mail has finally become stable - I don’t want to play the crashing game. I’ll move to Firefox and Thunderbird together, once they are both stable. Updated: I hadn’t checked on Thunderbird’s status - but today I see that Thunderbird is nearing release and that release candidate 1.0 is available for testing. Full release of 1.0 is set for tomorrow!

I do, however, feel less cool not using Firefox too. In the Bay area, people have Firefox stickers and t-shirts and it is quite the topic of conversation, even (especially?) among the less technical folks. I feel sort of left out of the revolution. Well, I’ll just download Mozilla 1.8 alpha 5 and try my best to feel cutting edge.

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Perils and travails of social networking

by eleanor on 23 Nov 2004 @ 3:08 pm in Emergent   ++

David Coursey’s deeply skeptical article from back in August, Beware of ‘Free’ Services, captures a subtle objection to some of these social networking sites. As Coursey says, everything has a price - whether obvious or implicit. I share his deep suspicion of Plaxo - the lame company which offers to spam customers’ contacts with arbitrary email requesting that contacts update their info. This is a personal predjudice, but I have to confess that I tend to think poorly of anyone associated with Plaxo’s email. As a non-user, it’s worse than spam - it tells me someone else has shared my info with a 3rd party. Not to mention the fact that it implicitly says I am valuable to that person only as a correct email address in their database. Maybe Plaxo could fix it by adding a chattier tone to the notes, but its request to ‘please update my info so that so-and-so has it correctly’ leaves me cold.

Services like LinkedIn however do suit me - I use LinkedIn quite a bit. For me it serves as a mental map of my contacts. My outlook contacts are too extensive and fragmented by the categories that I use to classify them locally. LinkedIn serves a useful purpose as a sort of superset category of something that could be classified as ‘people to keep my eye on’.

It could be my position as an itinerant researcher, but I’m not at all bombarded with requests for contact (or then it again, it could be that, as I sense, my network is already interlocked - that would be an interesting analytic tool for LinkedIn to add). I haven’t used it to make contacts either, as I have nothing to sell and usually get information from relationships I’ve developed in the real world. So, for me at least, the business case of LinkedIn in forming new connections has fallen short. It has helped me keep track of and keep in touch contacts I’ve formed elsewhere.

I heard (or read? I forget) that a possible business model for LinkedIn was selling companies access to “the references that are not on the resume” people with whom you have worked, but explicitly did not list as references. Now, how they would sell that access I’m not sure (it sounded more reasonable before I got to putting it down here) - but in that case, I agree that it would be a valuable thing. It’s so costly to mishire that I believe it’s economically benefical to reduce uncertaintly. On the flip side prospective employees can mine LinkedIn to get a sense of the culture and even the personalities of some of their potential colleagues. It’s on the same scale of reasonableness as Googling dates to get the backstory on them. With the data out there, we are better off knowing.

And that’s where I come down on Coursey’s objection - I am ok with the risk as long as I can extract value as a user. Fail to deliver me value, and the contract is broken.

The other social networking companies have failed to interest me. I deemed Ryze worth trying until I realized that I needed to pay $10 a month to get the sort of data I wanted out of it (it is free however to submit a tremendous amount of personal data, and it is free to get contacted by those in your affiliations 0 se here for more info). Friendster is for dating and pure social stuff - and the hype around that one crested when I was deeply skeptical about it as a popularity contest. Tribe might be interesting, especially in light of their partnership with (someone I’m interested in), but then again - it’s a matter of time. I can only invest so much attention in these services. And then there’s Tribe - but you know - I have never figured out what that’s for.

But all this is so much work, and requires investment. Take the last 2 days, for example - it took me the better part of yesterday to input my 60 new contacts into Outlook (granted I was addled with a bad cold). Today I spent time sending followup notes and invites into LinkedIn. While social networking tools make this process easier to tackle in a bulk fashion, they don’t do anything to mitigate the fact that dealing with people on the one-to-one level that is so essential to building and maintaining solid relationships. And that takes time.

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Solaris 10 on x86 - critical to Sun’s continued success

by eleanor on @ 1:23 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

The Register’s Ashlee Vance has a piece on Sun and its future - positing that Sun will only retain relevance if Solaris 10 on x86 becomes the new growth engine. Vance takes the audacious positon that Sun is in extreme danger of becoming “a bigger, richer version of SGI”. I definitely recommend you check out the full article, but it goes like this:

Sun has for many years garnered more than its fair share of attention and power for one reason and one reason only - Solaris. There are more Solaris customers on this planet than IBM, HP, Intel, Microsoft, and Dell care to remember. If HP came to you and said there are only three important operating systems on the planet - Windows, Linux and HP-UX - you would laugh. If IBM did the same with AIX, you would laugh again. When Sun pulls this trick with Solairs, the thesis flexes a bit of muscle.

This part is very insightful, because its at the crux of the fight between HP and Sun over Schwartz’s blog posts (which I blogged here) that marginalize HP-UX as a dead platform. But Solaris’ franchise is based on its success with the RISC architecture - which is itself in decline. Therefore, it is critical to Sun that they get their ‘best of breed’ operating system out there on as many x86 boxes as possible, as quickly as they can.

There are reasons to believe Sun can pull this off. Its Solaris engineering team is arguably the best operating system design group on the planet. Sun pours billions into the operating system and has countless features that neither Windows or Linux can match. It’s secure, scales incredibly well and now, Sun claims, fast. Beyond all of this, Sun faces no real Unix competition from a big player in the x86 market. It’s Sun’s segment to win.

Should Sun carve out a large chunk of the x86 market and have Solaris running on the systems, the rest of its business will likely thrive. Sun will sell more of its enterprise software - another growth area - and sell more storage. A thriving x86 business even legitimizes much of Sun’s Linux desktop play, which opens another avenue for growth.

Sun has a lot of interesting RISC technology on the way such as its multicore processors, high-end file systems and virtualization technology. This will keep its current customer base happy and might even help Sun regain some lost ground in the high-end market. No matter how well this business performs though it will not carry Sun to the $50bn mark.

Sun’s other bets such as making more money off of Java, thin clients and renting out computing power may pay off in the long run. They won’t, however, pay off like a massive Solaris x86 server business. That’s where the billions in upside are.

Interesting stuff.
Updates: So, while “El Reg” can bring a good perspective - they just don’t report on news like the other tech publications out there. Information Week has an informative rundown of what McNealy said, with more detail than offered by Ashlee:

Throughout the day, Sun execs sought to position Solaris as a low-cost operating system that’s a better choice than Red Hat Linux–the most popular version of Linux among corporate IT departments–for small computers. At the same time, Sun’s technical investment–the company spent more than four years developing the new system–would provide its platform a longer shelf life than Unix operating systems from IBM and HP, they said. Solaris 10 includes performance-increasing technology called DTrace that the company says is giving test customers 20% increases in performance over older versions of Solaris. It also includes a new file system called ZFS, security technology taken from Sun’s Trusted Solaris, which it sells to government accounts, and technology called Containers that could make servers easier to manage. Solaris 10 also includes the ability to run Linux applications with a small performance penalty, as a way to migrate apps from Linux to Solaris.

Sun also is offering its customers nontechnical incentives to buy its technology. McNealy said Sun will offer its customers indemnification against lawsuits arising from using its technology, a scenario that’s increasingly on the minds of corporate software buyers. “You, too, may have a Kodak moment,” McNealy said, referring to a $92 million payment Sun made to Eastman Kodak Co. last month to settle a patent infringement lawsuit over the Java programming language.

Sometimes the detail is nice too!

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Institute for the Future report on location based services

by eleanor on 22 Nov 2004 @ 4:47 pm in Emergent | Mobility   ++

The Institute for the Future, a futurist think-tank in Menlo Park has been doing a lot of thinking around location-based services. Check out their report, Infrastructure for a New Geography. Some of it is pretty far out, and of questionable value, but their report of projects and companies involved is useful. Membership in the IFTF is available in the Technology Horizons Program for about $15K a year, with numerous benefits including reports like these, an annual conference and access to thought leaders.
[edited to point to the file on IFTF’s site, rather than to a local copy here, as requested by Sean Ness. It looks like they removed the original blog entry for this file. If this link goes dead, it’s because IFTF removed the file. Note that this price was that quoted for my employer in response to my question, “Exactly how expensive are you?”]

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Future Salon presents Doug Englebart, inventor of the mouse

by eleanor on @ 1:13 pm in Emergent   ++

I was unable to attend due to illness, but they have a very good summary on this page. This is a very good group of people with close ties to SAP.

Another great example of both the sheer quantity of very interesting events we have here in the bay area, and simulataneously that the attendees do circle back to publish a synopsis of what happened.

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Computer History Museum and Computer Reseller News events

by eleanor on 17 Nov 2004 @ 8:05 am in Events & Happenings   ++

I attended the evening reception to honor inductees to Computer History Hall of Fame, but CRN hosted all day events, which I’m told were very sales-oriented. I arrived just in time to make friends with my dinner companions – both VARs. Cappy Frederick, Storage Media Sales Manager with Data Distributing and Brad Green from Redwood Imaging helped me reconnect with life out in VAR-land. I reported back to NECSAM Software Business Division (Adachi-san’s group) that, had I known so many VARs would be there, their people should have gone for sales and business development for the Valumo line. This is certainly the event I’ve seen with the most VARs in one place.

The honorees this year were John Seely Brown (PARC), Jim Clark (SGI, Healtheon, Shutterfly), Dr. Edgar Codd (developed relational database concept) and his partner Chris Date to evangelize the idea, Bob Huang (Synnex founder), Alvy Ray Smith (co-founder of Pixar and graphics guru). Steve Wozniak gave a horrifically long and boring keynote – it was over 75 minutes long and put the reception far behind schedule. I certainly respect the man for his contributions, but he definitely rambles (he told many of the same stories during Gnomedex in October). See here for CRN’s report.

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Churchill Club event around Wine

by eleanor on 16 Nov 2004 @ 5:51 pm in Events & Happenings   ++

I wasn’t inclined to go to this because of the non-busines nature of this presentation, but it was recommended by several of the people I spoke with at last week’s Top 10 Tech events (blogged here). The attendees were again quite interesting. I met some of the people in IBM’s Venture Capital Group, including Juan-Antonio Carballo, their strategy executive. I also met Vintela’s Director of BizDev, Glenn Kesselman, who discussed their announcement of Microsoft investing money in them (blogged here). On the pure technology side, I met Heath Pois, head researcher for ThermaWave – a semiconductor fab equipment and process supplier. We discussed innovation in fab capacity and what it would mean for future innovation.

Based on this and the prior Churchill Club event I attended, I do agree that these are very valuable (no matter what the topic) – it’s a completely different group of people than other events, which tend to have familiar faces. There were several clusters of professional VCs, but they were in tight conversation so I did not interrupt.

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Open Source projects gaining adoption

by eleanor on @ 1:44 pm in Open Source   ++

I’ve been looking at open source this week (as I sit in the SDForum Open Source: Entering the Mainstream event). I ran across an older NetworkWorld piece
talking about enterprise adoption of open source expanding out from the LAMP stack. The article gives a good overview of the open source projects and tools that are entering “mainstream” of the open source environemt.

Somewhat less developed, but more ambiitious is IBM’s Eclipse framework project. For a good overview of what Eclipse is and where it’s at now, check out this eWeek article discussing how Eclipse is coming out from IBM’s shadow and taking on life as an independent open source project. From a keeping-track-of-important-open-source-projects point of view, the piece gives a good precis of the relationship between Eclipse and other players:

Yet, while IBM no longer dominates the Eclipse Foundation, the organization’s failure to reel in two other Java heavyweights—Sun Microsystems Inc. and BEA Systems Inc.—has not gone unnoticed. BEA is, however, working indirectly with Eclipse on a project called Pollinate. The goal of Pollinate is to build an Eclipse-based IDE and tool set that leverages the open-source Apache Beehive application framework. Beehive is based on BEA’s WebLogic Workshop.

How I read that is that BEA is using Eclipse to build the IDE for Beehive, which is an open source version of WebLogic Workshop…. but one thing is for sure - industry leaders are making investments in open source tools development far beyond LAMP. We’ll watch to see what enterprise adoption looks like…..

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NorcalBMA Product Marketing/Management Roundtable – breakfast meeting on Blogging and RSS

by eleanor on @ 10:04 am in Events & Happenings | Emergent   ++

I run the Product Marketing/Management roundtable for the Northern California branch of marketing trade association BMA. This month we held our monthly breakfast meeting on Blogging and RSS. Bill Flitter, chief marketing guy for startup Pheedo, who blogs extensively about marketing and blogging, gave an overview to our attendees. 21 people attended, and they were very interested. Their questions however tended towards the very basic. You can view Bill’s presentation here. I offered a link to Mary Meeker’s overview of RSS and blogging as a good primer. When she’s interested, you know it’s important.

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Update on IBM Workplace

by eleanor on 15 Nov 2004 @ 9:27 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

Here’s a snapshot of the current plan for IBM Workplace - IBM Workplace Changes in Store

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Microsoft takes stake in ADFS-enabling startup

by eleanor on @ 9:13 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

Tonight I was at a Churchill Club event where I met Glenn Kesselman, director of channel and partner sales for Vintela, a Utah based company that works to bridge the conflicting identity management services of *nix and Microsoft. Glenn said they had big news coming out on the wires, and it turned out to be that Microsoft took a minority stake, with a cash infusion of “under $10m”.

For full details, Vintela: Microsoft’s Secret Unix/Linux Weapon?. This investment continues a positive relationship of co-development and joint sales/marketing efforts.

Tools like these help ease the pain of integration now, but I do wonder about Vintela’s long term strategy in the face of the Sun-Microsoft alliance - which is fueled by this exact issue. If big customers brought Sun and Microsoft to the bargaining table and extracted committments to deliver interoperability, it throws the long term viablity of Vintela’s product line in question. I can’t help but wonder if they would have been better off in an outright purchase.

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Novell’s leadership carries open source pedigree

by eleanor on @ 9:04 pm in Open Source   ++

From an eWeek piece, Novell Open Source Carries on Without Stone, talking about the sudden departure (reported without comment as being “within days” of the announcement of the settlement with Microsoft) of Novell Vice Chair and top open source advocate Chris Stone, we have a comprehensive list of what open source ’superstars’ still remain at Novell:

Novell spokesperson Bruce Lowry, in San Francisco, said that Novell’s Linux and open-source business is still in good hands. “Our platform business is now being run by David Patrick, the former CEO of Ximian,” Lowry said. “Our European operations are run by Richard Seibt, the CEO of SuSE Linux. Nat Friedman, the co-founder of Ximian, runs the group that just brought out the Novell Linux Desktop, and Miguel de Icaza is running Mono.”

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Novell proclaims intent to back open source with patent arsenal

by eleanor on @ 4:57 pm in Open Source   ++

After acquiring SuSE Linux, Novell has joined IBM as a key large corporate supporter of Linux. In part to quell FUD around licensing and IP risks, Novell has announced a policy of using its patents in a (presumably) retailiatory way against any company that brings a challenge to open source. This is all pretty vague, and as Bruce Perens notes in this InfoWorld article, InfoWorld: Novell to defend open source software with patents, not legally binding. It’s also somewhat of a strange approach since the SCO-IBM case is still ongoing. I wonder how much impact this policy of deterrence would have on those who might bring challenge.

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Novell releases Linux Desktop 9 as competitor to Microsoft Office

by eleanor on @ 4:20 pm in Open Source   ++

Novell made their Linux Desktop 9 broadly available last week. The product is based on SuSE’s Linux Enterprise Server, and Novell is aggressively selling it to enterprises as a viable alternative to Windows. It must be noted that they’re targeting specific job functions, including call centers, and not the broader knowledge worker segment who often uses more of the capabilities of Microsoft Office. The package, which includes Open Office, is priced (MRSP) at $50/user and is expected to appeal first to the public sector and education. See Linux Insider for more coverage.
ComputerWorld notes that the migration won’t be an easy sell, and discusses some of the issues enterprises will confront in evaluating Linux Desktop 9:

“We’ve been looking at Linux for a long time as a cost savings over Windows,” said Joe Poole, manager of technical support at Boscov’s Department Store LLC, a 41-store retail chain. Linux-based desktop systems are especially alluring for use in the back offices of stores, “where we don’t need specially written applications,” Poole said.

But Poole noted that many of the 9,500 workers at Reading, Pa.-based Boscov’s are dependent on Windows applications, such as a homegrown program that’s written in Visual Basic and used by 120 merchandise buyers.

“It’s a critical app, and until it’s rewritten in Java, it’s going to continue to require a Windows OS,” he said.

Tom Pratt, information systems manager at Coastal Transportation Inc. in Seattle, uses Novell’s enthusiast-aimed SUSE Linux Professional 9.2 desktop software but keeps a Windows 2000 machine nearby for applications that don’t support Linux. Pratt said he likes his Linux system but would have reservations about requiring workers to give up Windows, partly because of the different look and feel.

“Technically, it would be easy to switch to Linux,” Pratt said. “But it would be hard for users to adapt, and that would provide no real advantage.”

Given all this talk weighing the attractiveness of stripped down pc’s running an almost-free OS, it’s worth it to revisit Sun’s thin client offering. As cost reducers and Microsoft-free solutions, they certainly must both be on the consideration lists of many prospective customers. Sean Gallagher of eWeek grives his assessment of Sun’s BluRay thin client offerings.

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