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Will pro TV networks kill web creativity? It’s a valid question and the sparring is fun to watch. But ultimately there is a much bigger, more interesting story — about the bold new places NewTeeVee will take us, where video has not been before.
Read the rest of this post over on our NewTeeVee site, where you can also find out how to upload Webcam shots directly to YouTube, a new way to add text captions to online video, and why CBS and YouTube are filtering and censoring some reader comments. All in a weekend’s work in the new land of the tube.
Written by Paul Kapustka on December 12th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Articles and Media and Startups.
A hyper-hectic visit to New York, coupled with news breaking thick and fast, I almost forgot to blog about my recent book review of Invisible Engines by David S. Evans, Andrei Hagiu and Richard Schmalensee for the Wall Street Journal. The book looks at rise of software platforms including the Windows, iPod, and Sony PlayStation, and how they spawn an entire ecosystem.
One moral of the authors’ story returns us, in effect, to Mr. Ballmer’s own platform dance: Get the developers. The smart ones–helped by luck and investment capital, among much else–can make invisible engines rocket a company into the stratosphere. “Invisible Engines” offers iPod as an example.
While the book is quite academic in nature, it might be worth taking a look. If not, just read the review. 
Written by Om Malik on December 1st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Articles and Software 2.0.
Earlier this morning our good buddy, Mike Rundle was talking about widgets, in response to a previous post.
I think the next stage would be to allow users to get the web data they want without even opening their browser. Targeted, practical, functional widgets that give users the dashboard-like information they get from their favorite sites or RSS aggregators.
Funny, he brought that up. This morning, my debut column for Business 2.0, Suddenly everything’s coming up widgets, went live on their website. That’s precisely what I am talking about and talk about startups like PostApp (which has changed its name to Widgetbox), Mashery and Netvibes.
Even Nokia has gotten into the action with Widsets. There are some companies that I could not include in the column, such as Snipperoo, but then that’s what this space is for. My current favorite widget: MeeboMe.
Written by Om Malik on September 11th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Articles and Software 2.0 and Startups.
Ross Levinsohn’s wheeling and dealing to get News Corp. back in the Web game has been ridiculed by many as profligate and late. But he may yet prove them all wrong. … this is my latest article for Business 2.0, which is now available online. A lot of people had some wonderful comments and insights on Robert Young’s post from yesterday, and perhaps this piece adds to the whole conversation. I hope you find the time to read it. (Of course you could read about Ross’ boss here!)
PS: Slow Blogging today - a pinched nerve is preventing me from writing today!
Written by Om Malik on June 28th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Articles and MySpace.
New technologies are creating new business opportunities on the Internet, on mobile phones, in consumer products, and in information services. At the same time, many of these technologies have radically reduced the costs associated with launching a new venture. While birthing a company is easier, succeeding is as difficult as ever.
I teamed up with my long time colleague and comrade-in-arms Michael Copeland and talked to seasoned entrepreneurs, early-stage investors, venture capitalists, and first-time CEOs—to understand what they’ve learned about the art of getting a new company off the ground. This is a 16-step guide for building a start-up, and what are the things to avoid. Read this month’s Business 2.0 cover story, How To Build A Bullet Proof Start-Up
Perhaps, it will be something you will clip-and-save.
Also, check out B2.0’s 100 Fastest Growing (Publicly Traded) Tech Companies.
Written by Om Malik on May 24th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Articles and Start-Ups.
A few days ago Dave Winer talked about next steps for Bit Torrent. Good time to point him to my story on Business 2.0/CNN Money website, about three start-ups that are taking peer-to-peer networking to the next level, making it easy for rest of us.
This new wave of file-sharing startups isn’t aiming to share music or Hollywood movies, however. It’s just using the technology to speed and simplify the problem of moving a large file from computer A to computer B.
The three companies included in the story are Pando, Perenety and Wired Reach. Their P2P apps are called Pando, Shooter and Box Cloud respectively. Pando and Box Cloud are cross platform while Perenety’s Shooter is a windows only application.
While Pando has tried to keep its application close to the email-attachment model, Perenety has modeled its Shooter application after Skype, the voice-over-Internet-protocol outfit which was bought by eBay (Research), says co-founder Xavier Casanova. It may seem like an unlikely comparison, but Perenety, which is now conducting a limited test of Shooter, is emulating Skype’s one-to-one connectivity and buddy-list features. Just as Skype connects two PCs directly for a call and tells you which people are available to talk, Perenety connects PCs directly for speedier file transfers and lets you know when your contacts share new files.
You can read the full story at the CNN Money website Screenshots after the turn!
Programming Note: I am busy finishing up stories for the magazine so posting is going to be sporadic in the near foreseeable future.
Written by Om Malik on May 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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No longer spooked by Microsoft, startup investors are backing desktop-software startups again — but this time, the desktop’s on the Web. You can read rest of my story on Business 2.0/CNN Money website.
The new wave of investment is driven by the convergence of three major trends. First, broadband is spreading everywhere. Second, open-source programming tools are widely available and improving in quality. And third, technologies are emerging that make Web-based software as graphical and interactive as desktop applications, like Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Adobe’s Flash.
As part of the story, there is scoop on two new start-ups, who are using Web 2.0 technologies to create brand new opportunities.
* Hive7, a startup launching today, is building virtual-world environment — similar to the ones World of Warcraft and Everquest gamers spend hours in — within a browser.
* Fabrik, is offering an online file-storage service that offers a click-and-drag graphical interface like Windows Explorer or Mac OS X’s Finder for navigating through your files.
* Also included in the story is Goowy, which just announced that it will add a new I GB storage and IM functionality. (I have been using the alpha product.)
Check out my detailed posts (with screenshots) on Hive7 and Fabrik.
Written by Om Malik on March 29th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Articles and Web 2.0 and Start-Ups.
The $34 billion merger of Lucent and Alcatel, if approved, will unleash a wave of mergers in the telecom equipment sector. Will Cisco merge with Motorola? What will happen to a host of smaller companies? This and more issues are covered in my story, Life after Lucent: telecom feeding frenzy, which is up on CNN Money website.
“This proposed deal is reflection of the resugence of the incumbents not only in the U.S., but worldwide,” says Muayyad al-Chalabi, principal at Boston-based telecom consulting firm Adventis. “This (Lucent-Alcatel merger) could create a domino affect and I hope it does,” says Pip Coburn, chief strategist and principal at Coburn Ventures, a telecom research firm.
The analysts say that Cisco will have to make a move, and going after wireless, by merging with Motorola might be its best bet.
Ericsson, Nokia, and even Nortel are in better shape than ever for making acquisitions, says Coburn. Nortel’s new CEO, Mike Zafirovski, until recently the No. 2 executive at Motorola, could be looking to bulk up his company’s offerings. On his menu could be names like Juniper, Ciena, Tellabs, Sonus Networks and Foundry Systems.
Written by Om Malik on March 26th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Articles and Wired.
My article on Google’s office ambitions just went online over at the CNNMoney website. Between the Writely acquisition, GDrive and the content of the documents leaked accidentally, the question is not if, but when.
The leaked documents stated that the online-application strategy “will help us make the client less important…which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user…Gmail started to do this for webmail, but that’s just a small first step. Infinite bandwidth will make this a reality for all applications.”
An alternate take on why Online Office Apps don’t really cut the mustard.
Written by Om Malik on March 10th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Articles and Google.
The merger of BellSouth and AT&T would create a near facsimile of the old Ma Bell, and it will have tremendous powers. And that may not be such good news for some start-ups, and equipment suppliers.
“It is ironic that market forces are putting back together what the Justice Department broke up with the Judge Greene consent decree (in 1984),” says Sanjay Subhedar, a telecom veteran and now a general partner with Palo Alto-based (and telecom focused) venture capital firm, Storm Ventures.
“This enhanced ability to drive a hard bargain would affect pretty much any company that AT&T-BellSouth does business with, particularly hardware and technology suppliers,” says Cynthia Brumfield of Emerging Media Dynamics. While the consolidation of customers means more buying power, it also means more spending and bigger budgets for new technology architectures. Industry experts believe that the suppliers of new-fangled metro-ethernet gear will come out ahead as a result of this merger.
To read my full story, visit CNN Money. Read all about the possible impact on how the industry will shakeout in months to come, and how Verizon is going to react.
Also, AT&T To Buy BellSouth
Written by Om Malik on March 6th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Articles and Wired.
Business 2.0’s Next Net 25 list is up. (I have been away and currently posting this from LAX, otherwise would have linked sooner.) The Next Net will encompass all digital devices and the Next Net is deeply collaborative.
Driven by ubiquitous broadband, cheap hardware, and open-source software, the Web is mutating into a radically different beast than it has been. And that is leading to the creation of entirely new kinds of companies, new business models, and oceans of new opportunity.
We have spliced this list into five categories - Social Media, Mash-Up & Filters, The New Phone, The Web Top and Under The Hood. The VoIP Companies we picked for this category include Fonality, SIPphone, iotum, Vivox with Skype (eBay) as the incumbent to watch.
Written by Om Malik on March 1st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Articles.
My latest Business 2.0 article, The Black Box That Would Conquer Telecom, just went online over at the CNN Money website. This is a story about a stealthy startup called Vyatta, that has build the world’s first commercial open-source router, and how open source is slowly moving its way into the telecom world. Vyatta’s first product, an enterprise class router that will compete with Cisco-medium to low end offerings is currently in beta testing with some customers is based on XORP or extensible open router platform and runs off on two Intel chips.
The versatile open-source application can direct data traffic for a giant corporation as easily as it can manage a home Wi-Fi network. And that’s what makes it as disruptive as a leaf blower in a feather factory: Vyatta’s router will cost about a fifth the price of comparable models from big networking equipment makers such as Cisco Systems.
Vyatta is one of the many start-ups that are bringing open source disruption to the highly profitable and closed world of networking. While open source software movement has ravaged the bottom lines of companies like Sun Microsystems; networking behemoths like Cisco and Juniper have continued to enjoy fat margins they earned even before the telecom crash of 2000. Even today, a big portion of their IT budget goes into networking gear. Routers, switches, firewall devices, and even VPN boxes cost thousands of dollars.
“Open-source is providing real competition to the commercial telecom companies,” says John Todd, an open-source telephony expert. “It will force them to improve.”
The scramble for open source in networking comes because two primal forces tearing the old telecom order apart. First, the Internet-based technologies are replacing the closed legacy phone systems, thus helping the convergence of computer and the phone systems. In old times, in order to build a networking box, companies would design specialized chips, and run specialized software on them to get the best performance. Now you can buy extremely powerful processors like Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron chips for a few hundred dollars, run special networking software on them, and get similar performance. There are nearly half-a-dozen open source projects that capitalize on the cheap processing power.
“I used to work in Novell’s multi protocol router group, but that failed because the chips were not fast enough,” Chris Ranch, Director of Network Architecture at data center operator Affinity Internet. “But you can do it all on a good PC.” His company is currently using open source load balancing software running on 15-pizza-box style servers that cost about $25,000. Similar gear from Cisco Systems or F5 Systems could have cost Affinity at least $750,000. “Given that we making money by selling hosting services, the cost of equipment is the difference between us making money or not,” says Ranch.
Corporations shopping for PBX systems are reaching same conclusions, and are turning to ultra-cheap boxes made by start-ups like Fonality, a Los Angeles company that packages open source Asterisk PBX software onto PCs running Linux. But no project is as audacious as Vyatta’s attempt to take on the highly lucrative and profitable router market.
Vyatta’s core brains come from XORP, a software router project started at ICSI in Berkeley back in January 2001. Atanu Ghosh a British-born researcher who works on the project points out that the software can be scaled down to run a simple enough home router on one end of the spectrum, to large-scale data network on the other extreme. “It is easy for third parties to extend the software, and I think people will come up with ideas to extend it,” says Ghosh.
The biggest interest in XORP and future Vyatta products will be in emerging economies like China and India, which are not cash rich, but have broadband ambitions. No one wants to pay for expensive commercial routers. “In the near future there would be ad-hoc networks on a person, and that could conceivably need a router with a tiny footprint, like XORP,” Ghosh predicts.
Written by Om Malik on February 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Articles and Wired.
Business 2.0: City Telecom, a Hong Kong company that offers 100 megabits per second–65 times as fast as a typical DSL connection–for just $25 a month, with no phone or cable strings attached. Ricky Wong, founder and chief executive of City Telecom, describes his company as “a broadband utility.” Read On…
Written by Om Malik on February 16th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Articles and Wired.
Business 2.0: One of the most frustrating things about CDs and DVDs is that one bad scratch can render them worthless. Now a Denver startup called Scratch-Less Disc is marketing a version that can be clawed at, dropped–even smeared with peanut butter — and still play like new. Read on…
Written by Om Malik on February 16th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Articles.
British supermarket chain, Tesco recently announced that they are adding a VoIP service offering through their Tesco Telcoms subsiderary. Not really that shocking huh? Of course not everyone is hopping on the IP Telephony bandwagon these days. What was found to be interesting was this quote from Alex Freudmann, a commercial manager at the company,
Because Tesco’s VoIP traffic will travel over the public Internet, it won’t be able to guarantee the quality of service. However, the company claims that the quality will be better than traditional fixed-line telephony because of the data compression rates it uses.
“Assuming you have a reasonable phone, the sound quality is better than a landline. We tested the service in customer test groups and had favorable results. We minimized the data feed–it’s compressed as much as possible. It even works very well over narrowband,” Freudmann said.
Statements such as this will continue to come about as more and more companies try to get into the IP Telephony space. What is unfortunate about statements like the one made above is that it clearly over promises. This is a traditional business “no-no” never over promise, then under deliver. By stating that the call quality is “better than a landline” this Alex obviously has never used the service. I have used dozen’s of VoIP services over the past two years, and none of them were “better then a lanline” and certainly none of them “worked well over narrowband” or dial-up. Instead of educating consumers about the IP Telephony and VoIP, yet another company has taken the easy way out and made promises they will not be able to keep.
Garrett Smith
Written by Garrett Smith on January 20th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on VoIP (the New Phone) and Articles and VoIP and News and Providers.
I have made my debut on CNNMoney website, with my first story, Breaking down VoIP’s Walls. You might have read my rant from yesterday, and this one adds more details. Interesting aspect while reporting it out yesterday, most equipment makers say, the VoIP carriers are making them do it.
“We make it very clear to the consumer (on the boxes) that the phone works with a specific service,” says Brett Morrison, manager for VOIP and business communications group at Uniden. “Service providers are not giving us the option to interoperate.”
But the best quote for the story came from Jeff Pulver, who is clearly upset about this trend.
“As someone who has fought for open standards in VOIP, I think this trend totally defeats the purpose.”
Written by Om Malik on January 6th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on VoIP (the New Phone) and Articles.
Folks, here is the good news…. all Business 2.0 archives and new articles are wide open, no subscription necessary! You said…. “bring down those walls….” and we did. Not just Business 2.0, but also Fortune and Money. But its B2 which you want to read …. right! Its a digital perestroika over here at the magazine. Hopefully you will not only enjoy the articles online, but will also be kind enough to subscribe to it. (Just click on the little photo in the GigaAds section!) The bad news: all links to my articles are kinda wonky, and will need time to fix.
To get a sampling on what’s on the offer in the magazine, here are some golden rules:
- Warren Buffet: “When you get out of bed in the morning and think about what you want to do that day, ask yourself whether you’d like others to read about it on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper.”
- John Chambers, Cisco Systems: My golden rule is to focus almost fanatically on customer success.
- Mark Cuban: Treat your customers like they own you, because they do.
- Carl Icahn: Don’t confuse luck with skill when judging others, and especially when judging yourself.
- Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm: Conventional wisdom is always wrong.
- Michael Lewis, Mr. Money Ball: There’s something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad.
My articles:
Written by Om Malik on January 3rd, 2006 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Articles.