Playing Monopoly in the Advertising Space

Posted on May 18, 2007 by Simeon Simeonov

So, let’s see:

It feels like a game of Monopoly where the three players with a lot of cash (MS, Google & Yahoo) are buying up all the real estate. Across both the Web and mobile, control of advertising is consolidating. Search has long consolidated. If search is the traffic driver and advertising is the money maker, then it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Net is increasingly falling under the control of the majors.

Only Google and MS have guaranteed staying power for the next few years. Since the fate of AOL and Yahoo is yet to be determined, there is a possible future with an overwhelming, antagonistic duopoly controlling the majority of search traffic and ad delivery.

This will be an interesting world for both startups and big publishers, one requiring significantly adapted strategies for success. It’s not all bad news. Sometimes restricted but efficient choices enable better outcomes.

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The Rise of Social Infrastructure

Posted on May 18, 2007 by Simeon Simeonov

I wrote this piece on social infrastructure last fall for the inaugural issue of Social Computing Magazine. As most startups, SCM was a little late to launch and hence some of the data and references in the article are dated. No matter, I still believe we are entering into a period where communities and social networks will be part of everything. No, there won’t be many more MySpaces. There really isn’t a need for too many huge social networks. Instead, we’ll see verticalization/specialization–the long tail of SNs. And these won’t be built from scratch. They’ll be built using Ning, GoingOn, PeopleAggregator and the dozen other social infrastructure platforms that are emerging right now.

I talk about three trends we are likely to see:

  • The opening up of social networks
  • A battle for the ownership of user data
  • The introduction of social economics
Posted in Digital Media, MySpace, Social Commerce, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Do We No Longer Care About Beauty?

Posted on May 17, 2007 by Simeon Simeonov

This is old news and has nothing to do with technology, startups or venture capital, but I just happened upon a Washington Post piece about a fascinating social experiment–violin virtuoso Joshua Bell playing for tips in a DC Metro station.

Only one person recognizes him because she saw him perform three weeks earlier at the Library of Congress. Net of that person’s $20, Joshua makes $12 for nearly an hour of playing some of the best violin music on Earth.

It’s an elegantly written piece with a good bit of philosophy and reflection on the speed of modern day life. The video of people ignoring the music is surreal.

John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L’Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said — not because people didn’t have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.

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3D Design For Virtual Worlds

Posted on May 17, 2007 by Simeon Simeonov

A friend of mine pointed me to this video of a designer creating an anime character in Maya. Time is speeded up so that the whole process takes 4mins. The soundtrack (Japanese techno?) adds to the sense of speed.

I know nothing about 3D design. (In fact, the old developer in me occasionally has a hard time with the timeline in Flash, which is why I prefer Flex.) From my naïve standpoint, the video is a demonstration of how backward 3D design tools are. It looks like it takes a huge amount of work to create a basic character. What about animating the character? What about accessories, such as clothing and other gear? What happens where the character gets a haircut?

Why does this matter? Because the high cost of 3D artifact creation limits the supply of cool artifacts in virtual worlds. When building something cool in 3D becomes as easy as, say, building something cool in 2D we will reach a tipping point that will lead to significant improvement in the sophistication and, I hope, the use of virtual worlds.

Posted in virtual worlds | Tagged | 1 Comment

MIT $100K Competition Final Awards

Posted on May 16, 2007 by Simeon Simeonov

Despite the downpour in Boston, a good group showed up at the final awards ceremony for the MIT $100K competition. The event is famous for forging many startups, including our own Akamai, and generating billions in value and thousands of jobs.

The $100K has a development track for businesses targeting the third world and having blended profit/socio-economic impact goals. It was impressive to see the drive of the entrepreneurs and the range of ideas + approaches adapted to developing economies. The runner ups were Promethean Power (solar concentrators + turbines made from car parts) and SaafWater (multi-level marketing scheme for distributing daily chlorine treatments for safe water). The winner was Bagazo whose goal is to produce an alternative home fuel–charcoal from sugar cane waste. I’ve seen the burning of sugar cane fields in Hawaii. It seemed like a waste. Turns out it was.

The VC track (“traditional startups”) had a great mix of enertech, life sciences. and tech startups. The runner ups were C3 Bioenergy (renewable propane gas production) and ImmuneExcite (FDA approved particle for boosting immune response). The winner was Robopsy (robotic device for remote-controlled biopsies). Oops, no tech winners this year…

For next year the event will change somewhat. There will be a number of $1,000 awards early in the process to give teams a bit of diligence capital. This doesn’t sound like much but it’s a meaningful amount for a student or a post-doc. Also, semi-fanilists will be paired with legal and VC advisors in addition to the mentors they will still have.

Posted in startups | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Social Computing Magazine

Posted on May 13, 2007 by Simeon Simeonov

After many years with SYS-CON, my friend Jeremy Geelan has struck it on his own with Social Computing Magazine. Worth keeping an eye on it as Jeremy has a number of sharp people (and me) on the editorial board. Computing has been social all along but it has taken Web 2.0 to bring this front and center in our collective consciousness.

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Long Tail Worries

Posted on May 7, 2007 by Simeon Simeonov

Found an interesting study by Lex Miron from CIBC World Markets that tries to test for the existence of a long tail in interactive media properties using Nielsen Net Ratings (NNR) data. Lex measures user engagement as total number of minutes spent on a site + then looks at the distribution.

These findings alone do not support the existence of a long tail in interactive media. In fact, they support just the opposite: Interactive media is indeed the “land of the large.”

No surprise. I’m not sure anyone has claimed that there is (or should be) a long tail in brands, which is what Lex is measuring.

Long tails are enabled by the diversity in human interests. Most of us will like at least one of the songs on the current top 20 hits list. Thus begins the head of the distribution. From there on, our likes will distribute over a wider and wider universe of music. Hence, the long tail in music consumption. In short, long tail distributions are likely to appear when consumers are faced with a concrete set of product/content choices.

Most large online interactive media brands are diversified. They aggregate large amounts of content to become more attractive destinations for consumers and keep them engaged longer. Choosing between brands operating across content categories is not the same as choosing content within the same category.

Just consider the following. Brands can merge, combining their standing in the usage distribution and altering its shape without altering the underlying set of consumer content choices. It hurts to contemplate songs/artists merging…

Posted in Digital Media, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

You Are Safe Until You Are Not

Posted on April 26, 2007 by Simeon Simeonov

ZDNet reports on John Pescatore’s talk at the Gartner Symposiumin SF this week. John is probably the best security analyst at Gartner and an influencer of many a CIO. It’s a good article and there are links to the hype cycle slides for threats and security solutions.

Two key messages: (1) a false sense of security is emerging and (2) building perimeter defenses is not the answer–we have to look for ways to build + buy more secure software.

“Every time there’s a piece of software built there should be evidence of vulnerability testing and the software lifecycle,” says Pescatore. “If I buy a shirt, I see it was inspected by checker 27. Where is 27 when I buy software?”

With SaaS, Web 2.0, Web services + mashups, the security landscape (both attacks and solutions) will get quite interesting.  There are two core principles of information security that have prevailed over time: defense in depth and the weakest link breaks the chain. Defense in depth would suggest that we are likely to see more layers in the security solution onion as the nature of applications and their interactions become more complex. The weakest link principle would suggest that we’re likely to see a lot more broken chains and interesting front page articles in WSJ about fraud and data loss.

Source: » Are businesses getting complacent on security? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

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To Find the Danger, This Software Poses as the Bad Guys

Posted on April 21, 2007 by Simeon Simeonov

Michael Fitzgerald published a nice article on Veracode in NYT today. He gets to the heart of the matter about why the Veracode approach matters.

Veracode isn’t the first company to try to automate elements of hacking. Companies like Fortify, Coverity and Watchfire offer automated tools to help companies test aspects of their software, as does Microsoft. But Veracode is the first to offer a service that tests binary code, produced after a program’s source code has been put through a compiler and converted into the 0’s and 1’s needed to make it work.

Source: To Find the Danger, This Software Poses as the Bad Guys – New York Times

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Analysis: Automated Code Scanners

Posted on April 17, 2007 by Simeon Simeonov

One of the best articles I’ve seen on application security analysis. Of course, some of the problem with current approaches are remedied when one takes a binary, SaaS approach and issues are scrubbed for false positives by trained security experts–in other words, the Veracode approach.

Link to Analysis: Automated Code Scanners

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