A Yahoo! exec friend of mine commented on a call today that Flash should be named “the technology of the year” because it enabled Internet video and let sites like YouTube and Heavy get big very fast.
I had never quite thought of it that way but imagining online video without Flash is difficult (think Windows Media or QuickTime downloads or some Java applet rooted in early days of the online adult industry).
I wonder what will the impact of Flash Lite on the mobile ecosystem be…
ColdFusion customers have often asked what does ColdFusion mean. Explaining cold fusion was confusing and sharing the bizarre story of how the name actually came about would expose too much of Allaire’s early history–we were a bunch of kids just out of college, after all. 🙂
I found a new answer from Art.com.
WSJ reports on the launch of SiCortex, a company I’m involved with. Talk about a contrarian bet–to back a “supercomputer” company in the age of Linux clusters and to spend non-trivial amounts of capital on developing sophisticated chips, interconnects and enclosures when everyone else gets their stuff made in China for hundreds of dollars per machine.
It all began with the right question. Rather than focusing on how to increase performance, the founders asked themselves how they can reduce power consumption. That changed everything. The typical approach in the PC space is to push for more performance, which has the unfortunate side effect of making machines run very hot, which effectively puts a limit on performance because chips needs to be far enough apart so that they don’t melt and you just can’t pack enough of them in a data center before having to do unnatural acts with power and cooling. SiCortex machines run cool, which enables densely packed chips, which leads to low latency and high parallelism, which significantly increases delivered performance.
The company’s top-of-the-line supercomputer has 972 such chips — or 5,832 processors in all — in a cabinet a little less than six feet tall. A cluster with comparable performance might need eight to 10 cabinets, and would draw about 10 times more power than SiCortex’s machine.
So, just another fancy supercomputer then? Not really. WSJ should more accurately describe SiCortex machines as “superclusters” because they look like traditional Linux clusters that communicate using MPI. Contrary to traditional supercomputers which had custom architectures and required scarce brainiacs to parallelize algorithms to these specific architecture, SiCortex machines can run industry standard codes. I guess I learned Occam in school for nothing.
BTW, there is a cheaper $200,000 machine with only 648 processors for you power-hungry geeks with a successful startup experience under your belt.
People seem to fall in two camps with respect to mobile advertising: those who see it as an imminent opportunity of significant size and those who say it’s a few years off. No one is willing to say that mobile advertising won’t work.
Certainly, there is a lot of experimentation in the space. MS toyed with Third Screen Media. Yahoo is experimenting with mobile advertising in search and yesterday announced graphical ads for e-mail and news. Google has tested mobile ads in Japan. AOL allows sponsors on AOL mobile search.
The publishers (both carriers and brands) are jumping in the mix, attracted by CPMs in the $25-50 range (anecdotal data I’ve heard from people in the industry). Since, especially in the US, they control the users, the carriers will definitely make a lot of money from mobile advertising. Not just through SMS but also WAP (data I’m getting from carriers suggests 40+% of new plans sold include HTTP access) and branded downloadable applications.
The user experience will be figured out–there is too much money at stake. The good news is that mobile as a platform is even more measurable than the Net. Therefore, many mistakes can be made quickly and relatively cheaply. (As an aside for entrepreneurs, follow Esther Dyson’s “always make new mistakes”.)
So it’s no surprise that there are the slew of mobile ad startups entering the space, teased by predictions of $1-10B (yeah, that’s quite a spread) market size for mobile advertising by 2010 and month-to-month growth rates in excess of 50% (according to AdMob). There are too many companies to list here. The ones I’m tracking have teams with deep experience in both online advertising and the carrier world, which is a rare combination. The typical pitch is that locking up relationships & inventory early offers lasting advantages. I’m not so sure about this. The Net has taught publishers a lot about optimizing ad revenues by playing vendors against one another and making real-time decisions about which ad to show when and to whom. That creates an opportunity for technology companies to offer the equivalent of DART for Publishers on mobile.
At the current pace of company formation, within two years, I’d expect the mobile advertising platform and technology space to be quite crowded and experiencing some margin pressure. As on the Net, the best place to be would be as a large publisher–it’s the only guaranteed way to make money.
Who will be the large publishers in mobile? Certainly the carriers and certainly the big brands. What about everyone else? On the Net there is a Long Tail of content providers. You don’t need to be a Top 5 brand in a category to do very well. There is no such thing in mobile. The hits make money. There is no Long Tail. In fact, there isn’t even a short tail. Something worth thinking more about…
Adobe announced a partnership with the Mozilla Foundation. Adobe contributed the code for the ActionScript 3.0 VM that powers Flash Player 9. Why is this noteworthy? Because the new VM is a speed demon and the folks at Mozilla working on ECMAScript 4 could certainly benefit from access to the IP that some of the top minds at Adobe created. The new project is called Tamarin, named after a cute monkey.
Strategically, the move makes a lot of sense:
First, the more I talk to people about Flash becoming the “operating system” of choice for highly interactive-based Web apps, the more I hear “uh huh.” AJAX and Flash are like peanut butter and jelly with one providing base-level interactivity and the other bringing that interactivity to life.
Update: check out Tunic’s post for more details. And, he has a much better Tamarin picture…
MocoNews confirms what has been talked about for months now–that Voda is making a major shift in how it selects its devices. No more proprietary phone OSs developed by clueless ODMs who really don’t get SW. Voda’s future will be based on Symbian Series 60 (because of market share & device capabilities), Linux (because it is the low cost future) and Windows Mobile (because of its enterprise capabilities).
I would expect lots more carriers to move in the same direction. The winners are going to be MS, Adobe (because of Flash Lite) and the emerging pack of mobile Linux players to whom the ODMs will outsource much of the Linux work. Symbian is too closed for my taste–their lead is primarily driven by device quality as opposed to software quality. That’s a tenuous position to maintain.
There are two big holes in the mobile Linux story. The first one is presentation–C++ GUIs aren’t the right answer. Note their departure from PCs and their absence on the Net. The second one is middleware–tying all the various phone services together. C/C++ is a terrible choice for that type of work.
My ideal phone stack consists of Linux as the HW abstraction layer, real-time Java as the phone middleware and Flash Lite as the presentation tier.
Duane Nickull, one of Adobe’s sharpest, is launching a Web 2.0 project tomorrow called Mix2r.
Simply stated – it is open source music.
The music collaboration site is an online portal that orchestrates the workflow musicians and songwriters use to create and record songs. Rather than being stuck to collaborating with artists and musicians that you can locally interact with, it allows artists to collaborate remotely over the internet. Think of it as a series of really long wires between the control room of a studio and the rooms where the musicians record.
I poked around the site today and found it very usable, though I’m not the best one to judge since my musical talents are limited to reading music. There is a tutorial which shows how to upload songs, so it’ll be easy for everyone to get started.
Duane has some very cool personal goals about how to use the site to raise money for charity but I’ll let him manage the messaging on that. 😉
Emergence is a strong, albeit sometimes unpredictable force. The past two weeks have been full of some interesting conversations/observations. Google bought JotSpot. I was reminded yet again that Google Calendar is a great product, Gmail is a strange one and Docs and Spreadsheet are neither here nor there. At MAX I saw a demo of Nimbus, a Flash-based word processor by Virtual Ubiquity. I spent hours discussing social infrastructure with Marc Canter of PeopleAggregator, Tony Perkins of AlwaysOn/GoingOn and others. I played some more with Ning. Greg Olsen showed me a demo of Coghead. I talked to yet another stealthy Enterprise 2.0 startup. Peter O’Kelly and I pondered the relationship between Wikis and enterprise systems.
Out of that, a few ideas have emerged:
BusinessWeek has a good piece on the likely response of Wall Street to Amazon Web Services becoming a big part of Amazon’s business. It’s a legitimate question. More info in previous posts.
One can argue that the rules for picking winning startups have evolved over the last ten years. In Bubble 1.0, you could have used a dart against a Broadview market map. Bubble 2.0 is all about consumer online/mobile plays, which are characterized by a fast transition between “gee, this may be cool” to “wow, they are getting a ton of traffic” driven by the low cost of consumer/content acquisition, often aided by viral effects.
Spreading your bets in a hot space can be a good idea. For example, how many social networking plays has Benchmark backed? It seems that CRV is going the same direction in an extreme way using its QuickStart program. It’s great that CRV is experimenting. Josh Kopelman who’s worked with CRV on Odeo has a good analysis. The biggest problem I see with this type of approach has to do with the reduced value-add provided by the investor. Why take a VC’s money if you’re not going to get the VC’s attention? Angel money is just as good (and angels have been extremely active in the last couple of years) and may offer less potential for future conflict.
When we’ve won the privilege of working with great entrepreneurs in seed deals it has usually been because of the relationship that has developed between the founding team and one of my partners and the promise of the help we can give a growing company. Every last one of the deals has been good-enough to raise money from other sources, implying that the value of our cash has been low.
A related issue is the notion that since Web 2.0 companies don’t need much cash to grow, the business models of large VC funds doing early stage deals are broken. This may be true for a $500M fund only investing on the Net but is certainly not true for a truly diversified fund. I won’t bore you with the math–I’m sure you can fill Excel spreadsheets like the best of them. Let’s take PVP V as an example. It’s a $1B fund. In the same week that I closed the 8th Ring seed investment, we did an investment that was 100 times larger in a great & growing company with (gasp!) positive EBITDA. We have a small investment in Automattic, quintessential Web 2.0 play, while at the same time backing a capital-intensive dense cluster computing company (SiCortex). Our life science companies start small but if things go well, they become very capital intensive as they go through the FDA process. You get the picture. If you’re diverse, having a large fund is not a constraint, it’s an advantage. Because we can back growth equity companies, there is less pressure to shove millions into startups that don’t need them. On the flip side, our CEOs like the fact that they can depend on us as an investor from seed all the way to (and including) an IPO.
Which brings me to the potential conflicts of working with angels and seed specialists. If you accuse large VC funds of wanting to put too much money to work, you can accuse angels of wanting to put too little. Because most of them don’t have the ability to participate pro rata in follow-on financings, they tend to sometimes worry too much about dilution (I did in my angel investments) and steer a company towards getting by on less capital than perhaps might be optimal. Sure, founders & execs get diluted, too, but they all get reloaded with new option grants–VCs (at least in the US, Europe is a whole other story)always want to make sure that the team is motivated.
Rules of thumb for entrepreneurs:
