July 25, 2004
Update: Mesh Radio's Future
Unstrung, the best daily update on news of the wireless world, just handed us the best concrete proof of my earlier post and questions I received on it. For those of you too lazy to click, the high points of the article are a table awash in wireless vendor quarterly losses and the punchline:
"With all the excitement around 802.16 and WiMax, it would be easy for the industry to forget the most important thing: how vendors make a profit," writes the report's author, Gabriel Brown. "Unfortunately the prognosis is dire. The patient is barely hanging on."
Posted by scottrafer at 02:52 AM | TrackBack
Image Ads from Google Adsense
It took two months from the first tease and announcement, but Google has non-PSA image ads up and running. I've only seen them on one site so far, though I'm somewhat late to the game. Unlike other examples, these are targeted perfectly -- iPod ads on a gadget blog aggregator.
Disclosure: I have a financial interest in Gizgadget.com.
Posted by scottrafer at 02:34 AM | TrackBack
July 22, 2004
Walk the Decentralization Walk
In the midst of the debates over media consolidation and where political blogging intersects journalism, one of the most original -- if least-liked -- independent media voices is gagging itself unnecessarily.
Harold Check has started a great series on sites that should have RSS. An "avid reader" (aka me) fingered the first victim. The piece of political reporting on media consolidation last week but the only way it found its way into the RSS world was via Free Press. In addition, their ignorance on blogging and related media keeps them from getting blogged as frequently as they should.
We all count on these kinds of people to champion our civil liberties. They need to know that innovation is a requirement for success.
Posted by scottrafer at 04:04 AM | TrackBack
July 21, 2004
iPod: I is for Induce
Apple does a world-class job of building and promoting the iPod. How good a job will they do defending themselves in myriad court cases for daring to sell what people actually want?
TODAY the Senate Judiciary committee is considering a bill called the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act, which holds Apple and every other MP3-related manufacturer liable for things they don't do. Because you, the consumer, might put MP3s on your iPod which you might not have the rights to, Senator Orrin Hatch and the RIAA want to make it very easy to sue Apple for -- maybe, possibly, in some cases -- making it easy for you to steal music. This law could easily find itself extended to a variety of consumer electronics including general-purpose PCs. The end-result would be slower innovation and higher prices. That would, in turn, slow consumer spending on technology products -- always a good idea.
Organizations like Public Knowledge are working to keep this travesty from taking place -- support them. The EFF has been kind enough to write an fictitious lawsuit for those of you who want a concrete example.
Posted by scottrafer at 07:57 AM | TrackBack
Social This-and-That Grow Up
The newly dubbed social media industry is coming into its own. From blogs to wikis to social networks to search engines for all of them, a new generation of dotcoms is blooming. Now that the social network announcements include Orkut-by-Google, Evite-by-Diller, and Monster.com, social media startups (one of which I run) are all being taken more seriously much sooner than I expected.
It's not a popular stance, but i think that the strength of these new sites and services will be measured in traditional terms once they mature a bit. On the one hand, electronic messaging technology has improved again, making it ever easier to communicate with people you know and people who you value meeting. In addition, social media will increase the cost effectiveness of online customer acquisition by another order of magnitude over the next five years, pulling yet more money out of interactive media and moving it online.
Posted by scottrafer at 05:54 AM | TrackBack
July 20, 2004
Mesh Radio Herd Plagued by Locusts
I have only raised money for software businesses, so I am very used to being asked about open-source projects as potential competition. VCs must not ask hardware systems entrepreneurs that question as often. If they did, they would have passed on a every mesh radio systems business (and probably a few enterprise VOIP businesses).
From a proprietary systems perspective, the mesh radio business was over before it began. Not only is Intel hedging its bets on Wi-Max in cooperation with Cisco, but also an inexpensive open-sourced product from LocustWorld already leads the field. I'd estimate that Locustworld leads all other mesh radio vendors in both revenue and installed units by at least one order of magnitude. The company appears to get paid for their work in all cases, which the other vendors can not currently claim.
There are arguments left and right about how well mesh radio and LocustWorld scale in densely populated areas, but I don't see how these arguments are relevant. In 24 months, when mesh radios are sold in BestBuy for a few hundred bucks, another Moore's Law doubling will be under our collective belts and lots of signal collision software will have been greatly refined. How many $10,000 truck rolls can happen in that period of time?
There are silver linings here, however. The economics of mass deployment will force the primary radio chips and CPUs be sourced from mainstream vendors, but some of the other subsystems businesses may be very lucrative. Following the example set by the Wi-Fi laptop business, radio chips lose money, but smart antenna technologies and innovative power management schemes can be protected and margins preserved. If you dissect one of Dell or Toshiba's Wi-Fi access points, you find a large component overlap with their cheaper laptops. Also, Cisco may soon have a large enough installed base of Linksys wireless access points to open up the platform to developers. Will adding software to cheap Linksys Wi-Fi radios let VC-backed mesh systems vendors generate enough revenue to please their investors?
Posted by scottrafer at 10:31 PM | TrackBack
July 19, 2004
"Market-Earned Monopoly," Quoth FCC Chairman
At the AlwaysOn Conference at Stanford last Tuesday, FCC Chairman Michael Powell was describing how tough his job was in regulating the Baby Bells when he let us all know what he was really thinking. He contrasted the former government-granted monopolies enjoyed by AT&T and its progeny with a "market-earned monopoly."
He never actually said the name Microsoft, but he clearly considered their use of illegal market power to embrace and extend to be standard business practice. Remember, this is the man whose job it is to (a) protect Fair Use, (b) provide diversity in mainstream media, and (c) foster communications technology innovation.
Tony Perkins, Tim Draper, and other Silicon Valley Republicans must have gotten out their lighters and held them high, because Chmn Powell is playing an encore in northern California this week. It's a formal public forum for commenting on ways that the FCC plans to lower restrictions on media ownership, likely furthering media consolidation.
Posted by scottrafer at 06:40 PM | TrackBack
July 18, 2004
Putting TheStandard(s) Back in Political Journalism
Susan Mernit is making a innovative request that the major news outlets learn from Howard Dean's grassroots success and the other civic benefits of the personal publishing boom.
I'm getting warmed up for my week of guest blogging here by adding my voice to the much larger voices supporting Susan's point by linking to her. Please join us.
As Sean Bonner nicely put it SundayWhat [bloggers] will do is put journalists in check. No more free rides, there are other sources with the info now so it's up to the journalists to stay relevant. They need to put in the effort to give us a reason to stay tuned. Maybe get back to real journalism. Take a stand on something, find the backbone that used to make journalism a respectable profession. Because until then, blogs are going to be more than happy to pick up the slack.