Jun

26

Kevin J. Delaney at kevin.delaney@wsj.com from the Wall Street Journal had a piece on how YouTube was able to become more popular than Google Video, MSN Video etc:

“It stood out from the growing corps of online video services, including an offering from Google, for its simplicity. YouTube serves up videos from its Web site directly or from other sites where people insert them, generally not requiring users to download any special software. To accomplish this technical feat, YouTube drew on open-source software and wrote its own code. The service can handle about 110 video formats and 64 audio formats used by digital photo and video cameras and cellphones.”

Now both Yahoo and Google has improve their service and matched YouTube’s uploading interface. But the popularity of YouTube as a web destination has already being established. Even big Hollywood companies are starting to use YouTube to distribute short films and TV clips.

Jun

20

Ran across a survey by M:Metrics on Wireless Data Service Usage:

Wireless Data Service Usage by M-metric

What’s interesting is that the combined multimedia consumption (music, video etc.) is only 4% of the cellphone subscribers. Not sure whether it is because users have shown no interests or just because the wireless data networks do not provide the appropriate bandwidth for multi-media content yet.

Still, industry insider such as Allen Beasley is still very (maybe a little overly) optimitic. His company, Redpoint Ventures, has invested in cellphone-TV programmer MobiTV, mobile-payment service Obopay and AirPlay, whose technology lets cellphone users play along with TV sporting events and game shows. With broadband wireless networks and handsets in place, “the explosion of the Internet is going to happen in the mobile space,” he says.

Jun

19

Apparently the world’s richest man Bill Gates decided to leave the day-to-day operations at the company he founded 30 years ago, leaving some big shoes for Ray Ozzie and Mundie to fill. I think, what’s more important is that he decided to fill himself in some even bigger shoes, i.e. to become a full-time phlianthropist. I truely admire his courage to step up to the plate to address the world’s endless problems.

The high tech industry produced no small number of high power phlianthropist from individuals such as pioneer William Hewlett and David Packard (HP), Gordon Moore (Intel), Steven Kirsch (Infoseek), Dave Duffield (Peoplesoft), Jeff Skoll (eBay) to organizations such as Community Foundation Silicon Valley. But Bill Gates’ decision to devote his full attention (i.e. his smart and money) to his fundation is sure to generate some very positive outcome for the entire sector.

I just hope that more high-tech leaders will rise to the challenge and work together for a better (not just more profitable) future.

Jun

6

Matt Miller, a managing director at WaldenVC, has a great piece at the Sandhill Group Software blog.

“In the case of consumer Internet plays, the fundamentals are the cost to acquire a user, the number of interactions (or even better, the ‘take’ rate on subscriptions) we can get from a given consumer, the value to an advertiser of that consumer and the much-dreaded ‘churn’ rate. ”

“This is how we evaluate these businesses at Walden. If they look good on these metrics, then we turn to the barriers to entry. Some are technological, some team-based and some relationship-based. ”

“a company needs more than a great focus. It needs sustainable differentiators”

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