2011 Apr 20

Matza and business disruption

For roughly 3,500 years, Jews have eaten unleavened bread - Matza - as the staple of the roughly one week annual Passover holiday. It is a severe religious violation to eat leavened bread, even matza that accidentally rose too much. Unsurprisingly, matza was made by hand for all of those years, carefully watching the clock (or sundial, or other time keeping method). Also unsurprisingly, like any hand crafted item, matza was exceedingly expensive.

2011 Mar 12

Why you must understand your brand, or kill it

The Internet is great. It simplifies a lot of things, makes others cheaper, and often brings win-win situations. Take airlines (if you have the money to actually take them). Before the Internet, you made a reservation with your agent, who had an expensive computer connection to the airline. When you got to the airport, the check-in agents, gate agents and flight crew would go insane trying to balance families, groups that traveled together, safety and weight considerations, frequent flyer priorities, etc.

2011 Mar 8

HTML5 and Incentives

When Apple first released the iPhone, the only way to get apps on the phone was via the Web browser. It ran on the Web, (or from Apple) or it didn't run on the phone. In July 2008, Apple opened the App Store, allowing certified apps to run on the iPhone. Along the way, it took 30% of the sales price of the app, not a bad deal for everyone: the developer (many of them small) got better coverage, while Apple received a pretty hefty chunk of the sales price as commission.

2011 Mar 2

Agile development and capitalism

Years ago, I had the pleasure of having lunch with the late Sanford C Bernstein, the founder of the eponymous company and the creator of the money management industry. He made the argument that capitalism was the perfect system, because it was the only system that viewed people as people were, rather than as they wished they would be. In essence, Sanford argued, capitalism is the only system that said, "

2010 Mar 22

Open-source licensing - fact and fantasy (or at least religion)

Open-source, as discussed in the previous posting on network equipment, is a fascinating world. Perhaps the best intellectual and business promotion ever written is Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." There is no question that open-source has led to an upheaval in the world of business technology, enabled entirely new industries, and benefitted the overwhelming majority of individuals and companies out there, with few tears shed for those commercial vendors that have lost business due to open-source competitors.

2010 Mar 14

The future of networks

If you asked anyone current in the technology world to say the first word that comes to mind when told networks, it is a fair bet that 99% (if not more), will say, "Cisco." For years now, Cisco has dominated the business of network equipment. Despite challenges from Juniper, 3Com, Bay, Nortel and many others - including many no longer with us - as well as from Asia such as Huawei, Cisco remains dominant.

2010 Mar 7

In Praise of the Sun - Can Solar Energy Solve Our Problems

Clean technology, especially energy generation, has generated (pun intended) an enormous amount of interest lately. Using one simple (and admittedly simplistic) metric, VCs invested almost $5BN in green/clean tech in 2009, out of a total of just under $18BN, or over 25%. Given that most VC investments involve uncertainty whether or not a market will adopt new technologies or services, but not whether or not they will work in the first place, while clean/green is often a question as to whether or not it will even work, that is an astounding number.

2010 Feb 15

Check Your Assumptions - a good decision not to enter a market

Ten years ago, two colleagues and I decided to create a start-up to create electronic academic transcripts. For various reasons, mainly involving the movements of the dominant player in academia IT, we decided not to pursue the venture. In the end, the dominant player did not move in that direction, leaving the market wide open. In the years since, several ventures have pursued this market, notably TranscriptCenter and Scrip-Safe. In the last half year, discussions have renewed as to whether we should venture back into the e-Transcript market.

2010 Feb 12

Cloud Virtualizers - Is virtualizing the virtual worthwhile?

Cloud computing is all the rage, and for very good reason. The economics of everything within cloud computing - Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Storage-as-a-Service, basically anything "XaaS" - are just way too compelling to ignore. Unless you are: so big that you cannot gain any more economies of scale, e.g. GE or JPMChase; dealing with such sensitive data that you must host it on your own, e.g. Bank of America or anyone processing credit card transactions; or dealing with such flows of data in-house and on-location that doing it offsite makes no sense, e.

2010 Feb 10

Future of Wireless Follow-Up - Linquist Agrees

A few weeks after writing the article on my vision for the future of the mobile carrier industry - let's call it the "pipification" (as in turning into pipes) of mobile, especially with the advent of 4G in the form of LTE and WiMax, and the subsequent conversion of everything into data, including voice, data, SMS - I came across the October 29, 2010, issue of Forbes magazine. Cover story?