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02:14 AM Friday, August 29, 2008
Aug
29
Fri
Hilarious poem by Sam Charrington highlighting the difficulty of nailing down a definition of cloud computing.
The Blind Men and the Cloud
It was six men of Info Tech
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Cloud
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind
The First approached the Cloud,
So sure that he was boasting
"I know exactly what this is…
This Cloud is simply Hosting."
The Second grasped within the Cloud,
Saying, "No it's obvious to me,
This Cloud is grid computing…
Servers working together in harmony!"
The Third, in need of an answer,
Cried, "Ho! I know its source of power
It's a utility computing solution
Which charges by the hour."
The Fourth reached out to touch it,
It was there, but it was not
"Virtualization," said he.
"That's precisely what we've got!"
The Fifth, so sure the rest were wrong
Declared "It's SasS you fools,
Applications with no installation
It's breaking all the rules!"
The Sixth (whose name was Benioff),
Felt the future he did know,
He made haste in boldly stating,
"This *IS* Web 3.0."
And so these men of Info Tech
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were partly wrong!
There has been much cacophony about cloud computing definitions, and I have little inclination to dive into the fray. What’s most interesting to me are startups that can demolish the barriers standing in the way of mainstream cloud adoption – it is challenging to use, difficult (and sometimes impossible) to manage, and doesn’t play nice with many regulatory requirements.
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02:00 AM Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Aug
27
Wed
As Green IT becomes increasingly sexy, there has been much chatter about the power savings that solid state storage can bring into the datacenter. Does this make economic sense, or is it yet another case of greenwashing?
Let’s walk through some napkin math. Most magnetic disk drives consume at least 10 watts of power, versus about 1 watt for solid state drives. If we assume that power costs 10 cents per kWh, you will save (10 watts – 1 watt) x $0.10/1000 x 24 hours x 365 days = $8 per year by using a solid state drive.
Next, we need to factor in the savings from cooling infrastructure – a useful rule of thumb is that every watt generated in the datacenter requires an additional 0.7 watts to cool it. Given that datacenter hard disks are expected to last at least 3 years, the total savings over the lifetime of a solid state drive will be ($8 + $8 x 0.7) x 3 years = $40 per drive.
Now, it’s not uncommon for datacenters to have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of disk drives, so $40 per drive can translate to millions of dollars in potential savings, nothing to be sneezed at. The big problem, however, is that solid state drives still cost hundreds of dollars more than equivalent magnetic disk drives, which more than negates the savings from power consumption.
So while there are certain usage scenarios (such as IO intensive applications) where solid state storage makes economic sense, if peddlers show up waving nothing but a green flag, they ought to be abruptly shown the door.
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02:53 AM Thursday, August 21, 2008
Aug
21
Thu
To say I was surprised would be putting it mildly – apparently you can watch full-length episodes of most anime series for free at various websites (according to my anime-addicted buddy). If any website tried to pull the same stunt with say, Disney’s content, you’ll have trouble finding the body after the lawyers are done.
Now, anime is mainstream media in Japan, and together with manga (its printed cousin) is a multi-billion dollar industry. Corporate Japan is not exactly known for altruism or incompetence – why on earth would they tolerate such blatant pilfering?
Perusing the startling variety of anime available online, I noticed that the majority had been translated, in some cases into as many as 5 languages. This translation was done for free by dedicated fans who superimpose their own subtitles onto the video, in what’s apparently a common practice known as “fan-subbing”. This allows the anime to reach a broad audience well beyond its home market, gaining legions of new fans, of which a small subset might decide to purchase the original article (for better quality) and/or its associated merchandise.
Another interesting phenomenon in the anime/manga industry is Dōjinshi, graphic novels drawn and self-published by amateurs with original plots but based on popular copyrighted characters. While such antics are not exactly encouraged, the owners of the characters usually choose to look the other way – and I believe there are at least 3 reasons why it makes business sense.
First, it gives fans an infinite variety of sub plots, filler arcs & alternative storylines to satisfy any need or fantasy, which can indirectly boost the popularity of the original series. Didn’t like the romantic pairings in Harry Potter? Check out the version where Harry secretly makes out with Hermione. Hated Jar Jar Binks? Go for the alternative where he gets crushed to bits by droids.
Next, it provides a source of talent by being the training ground for the next generation of artists. Several prominent manga artists started out drawing Dōjinshi. And in Europe, many professional DJs similarly got their start at pirate radio, a variety of clandestine and unlicensed radio broadcasting.
Finally, it can deliver valuable market data. Dōjinshi are sold quite openly in Japan, including at massive conventions dedicated exclusively to the medium, where the quantity and variety of materials available about a particular series are pretty good leading indicators of how “hot” the series is. Similarly in the US, media measurement outfits like BigChampagne are already mining data about P2P music downloads to determine where fans of a particular band are geographically concentrated, enabling bands to optimize their live performance schedules.
Purveyors of media in the US tend to reach instinctively for the lawsuit stick when confronted with pirates, though it is quite possible that a more nuanced approach might actually create more value for all parties involved. While it is not always possible (or indeed desirable) to embrace a pirate as a partner, their very existence suggests that perhaps there’s some customer need that’s not being fulfilled, so maybe the constructive thing to do is to craft an appropriate competitive (as opposed to legal) strategy. For when it comes to media, what kills is not piracy – it’s obscurity.
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01:53 AM Thursday, August 14, 2008
Aug
14
Thu
10% of all non-spam emails that arrive in corporate inboxes are never read, according to informal polls of Microsoft Exchange administrators. Within Microsoft, that number rises to a whopping 33% – I guess I should count myself lucky that most of my colleagues actually respond to my emails.
Lots of folks would interpret the non-reply to a business email as a social snub. The reality is that most recipients are being grievously assaulted by a relentless barrage of messages, so they probably either never saw or didn’t have time to get to your email. Few people I know would stridently assert that they have their business email communications “under control”.
Given the intensity of end user pain and the fact that there are at least 300M business mailboxes worldwide, you would think that ought to be a thriving gaggle of email organization vendors out there somewhere. In fact, the pickings are rather slim:
ClearContext purports to solve some of these issues, but my test run of their beta revealed many rough edges, both on their user interface & their underlying analytic engine. Seriosity (Attent) gives email senders a virtual currency to tag the relative importance of their messages, but this requires users to do extra work and feels like too much friction to adoption. And xobni, despite being endorsed by no less than Bill Gates himself, is primarily an (excellent) visualization tool of your historical email heuristics, but does little in terms of actual organization.
I believe that the El Dorado here is an effective email prioritization algorithm. When I open my mailbox, I want all the high priority emails bubbled up to the top, and those of lesser significance relegated to the bottom of the heap. And as an ancillary to that, I would also find it immensely valuable to be automatically alerted should recipients be recalcitrant in replying to high priority email messages that I send.
All this is easier said than done. What constitutes “high priority” can differ quite significantly from individual to individual & situation to situation, so some type of static metric is unlikely to cut the mustard. The key is to be able to acquire very rich context for individual email messages or threads, which seems to be a natural application for semantic technologies.
While most media buzz around semantics has focused on consumer web services – such as Powerset (acquired by Microsoft), Hakia, Radar Networks (Twine), Adaptive Blue and Evri – there have also been a handful of startups applying semantics to address enterprise markets, such as Attensity, Endeca and Silver Creek Systems. It would be particularly interesting to find any startups building something at the intersection of email & semantics.
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12:19 AM Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Aug
06
Wed
One of the key attributes that startups seek in an investor is relevant domain expertise. If you’re making quantum computers and you ask someone who made his fortune in digital media to join your board, that’s sort of like asking a NASCAR racer to be your co-pilot in a stealth bomber. At best, no harm will come of it, but chances are it could be fatal for all parties involved.
So how do you tell if your prospective investor really “gets” your domain? Other than walking thru their career experiences and doing a few reference checks, you can learn quite a bit simply by observing how they react to your pitch.
As a general rule of thumb, if you find yourself spending a lot of time on the problem definition/market opportunity part of your presentation, chances are that you’re dealing with a neophyte. Experts will typically breeze through that section and deep dive into your product and value proposition.
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02:13 AM Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Jul
30
Wed
During my first drive into Boston many years ago, it didn’t take me long to get hopelessly lost. I later learned that the labyrinthine road system was not in fact an elaborate trap for hapless outsiders, but owed its legacy to a time when horses were the primary vehicles it conveyed.
Looking back in time to when the internet was built, it’s hardly surprising that the mix of data funneling through its pipes has changed dramatically. Most striking has been the growth of video traffic, which is expected to account for 90% of consumer traffic by 2012.
While it’s a stretch to compare delivering video over the internet to an 18-wheeler truck trundling over cobblestone roads, the fact of the matter is that online publishers are still getting stomach ulcers over how to distribute their high quality video content cheaply & reliably. And it’s abundantly obvious to viewers that there’s a huge difference between watching the same show on their broadband-connected PC versus their TV. Some pundits go as far as asserting that this lousy fidelity is the root cause behind the scarcity of online video profits.
Now, there’s no shortage of startups proffering solutions for video distribution. Move Networks, Velocix, Oversi, BitGravity, RawFlow, Digital Fountain & Vusion are just a small sample of what’s out there, and while they have different approaches, they generally operate (wisely) within the confines that existing internet infrastructure imposes.
I’m curious though, given the sheer magnitude of the problem, if it makes sense to follow a more audacious path. Video traffic possesses its own unique characteristics and looks set to take over the internet – should we really be using the same stack developed for a different era to convey it?
Perhaps there is a whole new class of network device designed from the ground up for video. Maybe it’s about making changes deep down the stack between the physical & IP layers. Because it really doesn’t matter how many lanes you add to a road, or how you optimize the placement & timing of traffic lights, or how many vehicles you outfit with GPS systems – traffic will still crawl if the roads aren't properly paved in the first place.
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12:50 PM Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Jul
23
Wed
Won’t it be neat to know which customers your competitors are calling on? Or perhaps the number of salespersons they have in a particular geography? How about the technical details of that “top secret” product they’re developing?
You would think that procuring such information would require messy tactics like breaking into their systems, executing a well-placed bribe or stealing an unguarded laptop. In fact, it can be accomplished from the comfort of your armchair simply by browsing and mining profiles on LinkedIn.
To be fair, LinkedIn cannot control what folks choose to disclose on their site. Though I would except that many companies will find a tool that monitors what their employees are up to on social networking sites and sends alerts of potential issues to be rather compelling.
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01:18 AM Thursday, July 17, 2008
Jul
17
Thu
Chinese mythology is replete with deities that ride clouds up into the heavens. Many startups similarly seeking nirvana on the back of cloud infrastructure have found their ascent rudely interrupted.
It seems unlikely that any single cloud infrastructure provider can be entirely immune to outages. The massive scale of such operations is unprecedented, so statistically catastrophes are to be expected. And there’s the Dark Side of the web, already capable of taking out the internet infrastructure of a small country. By comparison, crippling a cloud provider for fun or profit should be a walk in the park.
While starving startups have few alternatives, businesses are likely to take a dim view of such unscheduled downtime. Of course, they could choose to maintain a duplicate copy of their systems on-premise, but that will really screw up the economic advantages of using cloud infrastructure in the first place.
But what if the duplicate copy lived at a second cloud provider, so if the first cloud provider went belly-up, the systems would automatically failover? Even better, how about an abstraction layer that knits together all cloud providers, so you can just deploy your systems to this “meta cloud” which would automatically distribute it across multiple cloud providers?
Well, we could wait years for cloud interoperability standards to (hopefully) emerge – kudos to Eucalyptus for starting the ball rolling. In the meantime, this feels very much like a wide open opportunity for aspiring cloud startups to step into.
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02:56 AM Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Jul
09
Wed
Purveyors of plush mattresses are quick to point out that since you spend 8 hours per day on their product, their eye watering prices are fully justified. Rarely mentioned is the fact that you’re unconscious for most of those 8 hours.
Less well known is that the typical US commuter spends 1.5 hours per day in their car, which is about 3x the average time spent on the internet. Multiplied across 600 million vehicles, that’s a huge chunk of “dead time” that folks are wasting stuck behind the wheel.
In parsing the market opportunities for tech startups building consumer products/services for the automobile, I find it helpful to think of the car simply as a very big consumer mobile device, with many parallels in particular to the mobile phone. The usage scenarios are similar – location based services (navigation, local search, traffic, tracking/SOS), entertainment (audio, video, games) and communications (diagnostics, maintenance alerts). Both even have a similar bugbear with distribution – while mobile startups have the wireless carriers, auto startups have to contend with the auto manufacturers.
Of course, there are important differences between the car and other mobile devices – in particular, the user is always multitasking & has restricted freedom of motion. While it will be foolhardy to speculate on what the next auto-based killer app will be, I believe there are a handful of factors that will increase the probability of an auto startup’s success.
First, user interactions with the service should primarily be auditory – perhaps you could talk to your car and ask it to play a time-shifted radio program. While I’ve come across intriguing systems that can project various images onto the windshield, I personally believe that visually distracting interfaces can be fatal for the driver.
Second, the ability to execute with zero help from auto manufacturers. This does not mean ignoring them – they are a crucial part of the value chain that will need to be engaged at some point – but rather that the business should not pivot entirely on “winning that big distribution deal with GM”. So perhaps making some sort of device sold through retail channels, or maybe software that allows existing devices (e.g. mobile phones) to perform something useful with respect to a car, such as enabling the user to pipe music from a virtual jukebox in the cloud through a car’s audio systems.
Finally, an effective method for in-car advertising that can sustain the business. The reality is that most auto startups’ products will fall in the “vitamins” rather than the “antibiotics” category, and charging a subscription can really crimp adoption. All that excitement around satellite radio seems to have petered out of late, and anecdotal evidence suggest that ONSTAR’s renewal rate is rather dismal.
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02:40 AM Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Jul
02
Wed
Interesting rule of thumb based on military operational research performed by Frederick Lanchester during World War I: If you’re trying to enter an existing market where the dominant player has greater than 40% market share, you will need to spend at least 3x the sales/marketing budget of that leader to succeed in a head-on attack. However, if the largest player has less than 25% market share, all you need is 2x the sales/marketing budget of the leader to succeed – the cost of entry is much lower. Thus, if you're a startup confronting a formidable incumbent that you lack the financial wherewithal for a frontal assault, consider re-segmenting the market to create a submarket where your product can be unique or substantially different. As an agile but (usually) dirt-poor startup, it’s crucial to pick your battles carefully.
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01:32 AM Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Jun
25
Wed
Along the road from starting a business to (perhaps) getting to the Next Big IPO, one of the more daunting assignments that an entrepreneur will likely face is the process of raising capital.
The task can be decomposed into qualitative & quantitative elements. The former has many parallels with serious dating. Get a mutual acquaintance to make an introduction. Present yourself well, but be sure to also check out what others think of the investor. Remember that you may be spending many years together, often under high pressure circumstances, so if something doesn’t smell right or makes you uneasy, don’t be shy to walk away.
When it comes to the terms & numbers, it’s important to educate yourself on the basics. Know your way through a term sheet. Understand the common financing options you have. Talk to others who’ve been through this before. So when rubber hits the road, you have a mental framework ready to guide the negotiations.
I believe that a helpful perspective is to start with the total capital you expect to need at multiple points over the next few years to get your company to where you want it to be, and then back into an appropriate valuation range for today. A useful simulator for visualizing this analysis can be found here.
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01:02 AM Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Jun
18
Wed
Given all the cacophony around JeOS, and the vigorous (and probably correct) assertions that virtual appliances are the future model for application delivery and deployment, you could be excused for tolling the death knell for server operating systems.
After all, should you desire to deploy an application in this alleged future, you would just download the appropriate virtual appliance, plunk it on your favorite hypervisor and viola! Who needs an operating system (described memorably by FastScale as a “bloated 2GB DLL”) that brings with it a nightmare of configuration mismatches, incomprehensible incompatibilities and other sundry pain points?
The reality, as is often the case, is a little more nuanced. The operating system hasn’t vanished – it’s simply morphed into a more svelte entity that’s comes bundled within each virtual appliance and only contains the components that the application actually needs.
So what’s changed is not the existence of an operating system, but rather how it is packaged & distributed. The era of the one-size-fits-all operating system pushed out through hardware OEMs may be drawing to a close. What we could see instead is a buffet of operating system components that application vendors will selectively mix-n-match and then distribute as part of their virtual appliance.
This transition from a hardware OEM to a software OEM licensing & distribution model will likely be heart wrenching for operating system vendors. Then again, if there are any vanishings in the coming years, it’ll probably be of those operating systems that failed to adapt.
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01:15 AM Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Jun
11
Wed
Won’t it be nice if you could come in for work and just play computer games all day? Given the tantalizing productivity gains that could be reaped if people applied the same zeal to work as they do to games, it’s no wonder that much energy has been expended on bridging the gap.
One approach has been to bring elements of work into the gaming environment. Particularly promising have been the various training simulators for the military & healthcare verticals, some of which are rather effective and quite literally save lives.
More disappointing have been the multitude of educational games that were supposed to revolutionize the classroom. Their main problem is a gaming environment that pales in comparison to what most youths today expect, which can easily cost tens of millions of dollars to build.
Somewhat intriguing has been the idea of using games for crowdsourcing. For example, players in a virtual world often choose a profession such as a doctor or a miner. In order to raise their level, they could be asked to acquire a slice of real world domain knowledge, such as how to identify a cancer cell or a good place to drill for oil, and have actual data fed to them. The results could provide valuable information to real world physicians and geologists.
The other approach has been to bring elements of the gaming environment into the workplace. Here I believe the greatest potential lies in immersive & intuitive user interfaces. Imagine the time saved if I could navigate my desktop, an ERP system, or for that matter the management console of a datacenter with the same ease that I can plunge through a virtual game environment.
Also interesting has been the idea of creating some kind of points system that allows people to store/redeem/trade credit for tasks they perform – an analog to Dragon Kill Points which are used to distribute the loot from a mission among team members in many role playing games.
Seriosity has already built an email prioritization application based on this concept. Another use could be enabling people within a company to build a reputation for domain expertise, hence improving the accuracy of enterprise people search tools. Or perhaps it could form a component of an internal prediction market that augments existing corporate forecasting methods.
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02:03 AM Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Jun
04
Wed
Even as the size of the blogosphere continues to burgeon, I’m finding it increasingly hard to find high quality blog content. The signal-to-noise ratio has decreased, but the filtering technologies just haven’t caught up. Today, if you want to find original, insightful content on most topics, you’ll probably do a lot better perusing the shelves at your friendly neighborhood library than trawling through the oceans of endless blogs.
There are several reasons for this. People tend put a lot more thought and effort into a book than they would into a blog post. And while it’s technically possible today to self-publish, for the most part books still need to survive the scrutiny of publishing houses to get meaningful publicity & distribution, which puts a floor on the quality of what makes it into your public library.
But the most significant problem for blogs, I believe, is the lack of any ranking system that actually works. In comparison, it’s much easier to separate the wheat from the chaff from a mountain of books. A simple & effective yardstick is how well a book sells – when people have to open up their wallets, they’re making a tangible vote of confidence in what they’re expecting to get in return.
One way to augment that yardstick is by also taking into account when the book was published. Any book that came to press decades ago but is still selling like hotcakes probably has something pretty compelling within its covers.
Today, there are at least a couple of ways that blogs are ranked. The first is by harnessing social energy, but that has been shown to be vulnerable to manipulation. The second is algorithmic approaches which try (and mostly fail) to return both relevant & quality content. One of the better tools I’m stumbled across is filtrbox, but there’s still considerable room for improvement.
One way or another, I think there’s a lot of value in building a service that can, for a particular topic, bubble up the best of the blogosphere. I certainly would pay for it. And I think lots of other people & businesses would too.
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02:58 AM Wednesday, May 28, 2008
May
28
Wed
It’s been nearly 10 years since Scott McNealy famously admonished a bunch of reporters: “You have zero privacy. Get over it!”
Nowhere has this statement been driven home harder for me than the few minutes I spent on pipl and ZabaSearch, free websites that search & aggregate data about individuals. Suffice to say that they could be quite disruptive to certain segments of the Private Investigator industry.
While most people are still blissfully unaware of the existence of such services, it’s only a matter of time before they bubble up into the mainstream, and there’s going to be a lot of nervous and unhappy folks out there.
I think there’s a huge market opportunity for a service that can discover and eliminate information about individuals on the internet. Execution could be tricky though – this feels like something that’s going to get entangled with regulatory/legal policies fairly quickly.
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