2010 Feb 8

White Goods - basic innovation

White Goods are normally defined as those basic bland appliances we use around our house, usually the large ones: fridge, washer, dryer, dishwasher, oven/stove. This is a fairly staid market, and has been for many years. Whatever little innovation there is normally comes in terms of features added on. Thus, there may be a new "high-value" GE or Amana line, which may include digital temperature controls instead of a knob, or stainless steel instead of white exterior.

2010 Feb 4

Truly Global Roaming - the Death of Wireless Carriers (we hope)

Wireless carriers are the company everyone loves to hate. No one denies that they bring an invaluable service. However, their legendarily awful customer service; lock-ins and contracts; early termination fees; obtuse bills; and obscene roaming charges force us all to wish there was a better way. I believe that current trends will create new forms of wireless carriers that are likely to spell the death of the old ones, unless they find the ability to innovate and cannibalize their own market.

2010 Feb 2

iPad and the Sixth Deadly Sin

Undoubtedly, the hottest - and most critically analyzed - announcement of the last week has been Apple's release of the iPad. I will take a slightly different perspective on it, looking at it from the perspective of the iPod. We will do this from two angles: marketing and long-term strategy First, from the marketing perspective, I believe this device's name is awful. Jokes abound on the Internet within a day of the release - and having spent almost a decade on Wall Street, I suspect it took less time than the fastest trade-processing system for the jokes to hit the trading floors - about whether it is an Internet device or a 21st century sanitary napkin.

2010 Jan 31

Whither the revolutions? Transportation and portable-power

Many sectors, especially technologically-driven ones, have undergone at least one if not multiple revolutions in the last half century. Much of the technology-driven ones can be laid at the foot of two major technologies, fiber optics (for long-distance high-speed communications) and the integrated circuit, whose children include just about everything on silicon, and, in its microprocessor variant, follows Moore's Law. Two areas that have, frustratingly, followed evolutionary, and at times very slow evolutionary, paths are transportation and portable-power.

2010 Jan 28

Programming languages - seeing the future, but can you make money off of it?

Programming languages are an interesting area of technology. On the one hand, they are the indispensable basis for everything that is done in software, the Internet, embedded devices, essentially everything in technology, and thus are invaluable. Advances in languages - from assembler up to the latest high level languages - are what have made possible the creation of portable devices, Google, Facebook, Microsoft Word, and everything else we do. On the other hand, from a business perspective, they are the arcane "

2010 Jan 24

Social Media as a business loser?

Business Insider, in its 18 January 2010 edition, referenced an article from September 2009 in the Washington Post by Bo Peabody, the founder of Tripod, arguably the first social networking site, founded way back in 1995. For those who do not (or are too young to) remember, 1995 was the year the Internet really took off. Morgan Stanley (where I had the great pleasure of working in IT at the time) took public a virtually unknown company, called Netscape.

2010 Jan 22

The upside of being a cannibal

Most businesses - and non-profit and government organizations, for that matter - fiercely protect their turf. In the case of business, it usually means not doing anything that might jeopardize the core income stream. For example, Microsoft has been loathe, at various stages in its history, to move towards the Web, cloud computing, or anything that might put a dent in its core operating system, desktop software and business server businesses.

2010 Jan 22

How do I love thee communications? Let me ENUM the ways

Last week, Ars Technica had a great in-depth article on ENUM. For those who do not know, ENUM is a standardized method to use Internet technologies to translate your old, staid, telephone number (e.g. +12125551212 or +442076555555) into an Internet device connection. That connection could be simple voice, such as allowing you to use a VoIP connection rather than going through the PSTN (public switched telephone network) that we all love/hate, or even identifying a Skype user ID or email address based on the telephone number.

2010 Jan 20

Information Security is still hot

Ask VCs, most will tell you that Information Security is, well, old. It has been around for a long time, and a lot of money is flowing into newer, hotter areas. While I cannot fault investors for looking for areas that will have the best combination of future follow-on investment, rapid growth and a high-value relatively quick exit, I believe InfoSec is still overlooked. When following information security, I feel like I am listening to the scientist who said, at the turn of the century (right around the time that an obscure patent clerk in Bern was writing obscure papers that might have a minor impact on physics), that "

2010 Jan 17

Google, China, and sensitivity training

Everyone appears to have analyzed the Google and China issue to death, both from the China perspective and the Google perspective. One of the best comments I have seen is from Fred Wilson's "A VC" blog, where he focuses on the reported fierce disagreements between Eric Schmidt, the hired gun non-founder CEO, who wanted to continue doing business in China and sweep the issues under the rug, and Sergei Brin, the founder born under Communism, who insisted on pulling out.