Disqus - Latest Comments for azeem

Re: Mochila, the market place for individual articles

azeem — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 05:00:06 -0000

Hi matt,

Mochila has been around for a long time--is this just a review of the company or is there a news peg?
a

Re: Mochila, the market place for individual articles

azeem — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 23:26:21 -0000

Sorry Matt. I couldn't see the story only the history: http://venturebeat.com/2007/01/03/mochila-the-m...
a

Re: Powerbeam, the wireless electricity start-up

azeem — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 06:51:15 -0000

Also don't forget Splashpower which has had wireless charging pads for an age.

Re: Cooler than Cuil, True Knowledge takes a sniper’s approach to search

azeem — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:18:29 -0000

Thanks Chris. Great write up. There are a couple of points I'd add:
the first is that there are times when the onebox gets it wrong because it is extracting sentences without understanding the meaning. This is where True Knowledge can help existing search engines.
The second is that there are queries which involve some common sense and quite a lot of inference, but are perfectly reasonable queries. Examples include: Who was US president when John Lennon died? I put these and a couple of other queries up as screenshots: http://www.flickr.com/photos/azeem/tags/true/

Re: Overseas startups jump to pick up Twitter’s slack

azeem — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:54:43 -0000

As I understand SMS is pretty much uncharged between operators and aggregators in India allowing for this sort of model. As an aggregator you can pay an operator a flat fee for unlimited SMS, therefore margin cost = zero. A unique market.
Corrections, clarifications, anyone?

Re: seedcamp: 2008 application zeitgeist

azeem — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:52:09 -0000

That is so cool.

Re: Now they’re simply drooling

azeem — Mon, 09 Sep 2002 05:08:00 -0000

Good negotiators, good diplomats and great persuaders know the importance of using the right words and right language to achieve their ends. This is particularly valuable when you or I agree with those ends and we think those ends are good.
But your vernacular, in common with so much of the rhetoric, flowing from the US sounds jingoistic.

The US is the most powerful nation on earth. And considering its power and its ability to create havoc and destroy, it has behaved very well over the past 40 years. Compare the US to an al-Qaeda leader: generations of US presidents could have rained nuclear terror on the planet and they chose not to (supported by a generally good system of checks an balances). The first thing a TinPot dictator does with his new batch of second hand strike aircraft is to drop chemicals on his own people.

But it is the richest most powerful nation on earth. And that puts it in a tough position, because to those who have been granted much... and unforutunately, it appears that for all the wealth (and for every smart, considered thinker), it lacks acute analysis or geopolitical sensitivity.

For example, read Geoffrey Robertson's piece on law vs war. Regardless of GRs views, he provides an interesting mechanism to get broader European--in particular German--support for a war. http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,78...>
I want frothing, battle crazed lunatics. In battle, during combat, taking an enemy command post. I'm not sure how valuable it is during the political process, policy making or strategy building.

It's time for the US to shed its image as a gungho naive nation tempered by its more well-considered and thoughtful European neighbours. The last time it did (in Suez) things went remarkably well for most of us, except the Brits.
azeem

Re: Enterprise culture 2.0 - shift from control to co-ordination

azeem — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 05:00:56 -0000

Nick

Follows on nicely from the point's we discussed around disaggregation--it's implicit in disaggregation that new types of management discipline are required. Not least

Re: Explained: VC target returns

azeem — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:37:03 -0000

Hey Nic

I'm surprised about the 25-30% IRR. I surveyed lifetime returns for 1004 US VC funds in early-stage or balanced funds; and 664 European VC funds.

Only 5.6% of European funds returned 25% or more over their lifetime; in the US that number was 16% or so, fewer than 1 in 6. Only 39% of venture funds did better than the S&P 500 performance during 1996-2005 (IRR 9.1%).

According to Thomson, balance Euro VCs returned an cap weighted average of 7.3% and an upper quartile fund (if you could get in one) returned 7.4%. Early stage funds did even worse.

There are of course exceptions--the top performing Euro fund did 262%. Very very nice indeed, if you can get in. (Messrs Rimer, I'm sure ;) )

Want to chat with you. Ping me a mail.
aa

Re: Internet TV - Unclear how it is going to work

azeem — Fri, 25 May 2007 05:33:36 -0000

Hi Nic,

The economics of BT Vision are interesting--I wonder how it will play out if BT achieves a meaningful level of penetration off any individual DSLAM. Is this a business predicated on low penetration? It would be interested to see how VideoNet is doing under Tiscali right now.

On model 2, p2p, there is the challenge from the ISPs. A bigger challenge with Joost is that they are also trying to change behaviour, and I am not sure how that will play out compared to the availability of video content on YouTube, et al. Am sure Joost will create hooks into the establish clickstream, but they'll need to.

On the niche channels, I question the economics as well. (Look at Aggregator.tv!) In particular, the platform one builds is solely an increasingly affordable Web streaming platform, but every niche you create has the same unattractive economics (develop content expertise, recruit users, sell niche advertising). It becomes ugly and unscalable.

To this you can add what I would describe as 'zeroconf' IPTV distribution platforms. Inuk Networks is one which I am involved in. Protocol agnostic, standard, understandable content (Multichannel package) and then rolling out more niche content across the platform. You shd take a look,
aa

Re: RSS readers on the decline

azeem — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:58:19 -0000

So this is your April fools joke, right?

'Somone shd rescue blog friends' -- i understood blogfriends died (as many things do) due to lack of capital. Do you know anyone who invests in early stage internet businesses??? MMm... I can't think ;)

Re: What a new search engine should be about

azeem — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:36:25 -0000

Nic

There is also always room for an alternative way to solve the IR problem, which is what True Knowledge is doing.

I think it is tough to pretend to be a Google-killer because there is such depth to their offering and it is dumb to attempt to attack them on exactly the same or similar enough value axes that they excel at.Sometimes sidestepping the competition is also a sensible move (to be played out...)
aa

Re: Twitter ends free SMS updates for Europe

azeem — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:01:50 -0000

Nic,

The guys at Zygo (who you know) are launching http://www.zygotweet.com/ which will route tweets to SMS and beyond for you. It'll be available in a few weeks. Will work in UK and most other countries.
a

Re: 2008/04/01/piratebay-now-operating-from-sinai-desert/

azeem — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:21:21 -0000

april fools?

Re: 2008/08/14/tweetsms/

azeem — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:40:05 -0000

As is http://www.zygotweet.com/ Zygo, which has the advantage of already having a group SMS/web service up and running

Re: Guardian May Kill Tech Supplement; Could Go Online-Only Or Merge With Media

azeem — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:55:14 -0000

Robert

This isn't quite correct. Online was launched in May 1994. The original editor was Nick Passmore who has gone on to be the Guardian's production editor and then its editorial systems director.

I joined online on 26 September 1994 as the team monkey. At the time Jack Schofield wrote some computing stories and Tim Radford covered science. In Jan 95 Nick went full time as production editor and I ran the section with a couple off freelancers. Bill O'Neill joined from New Scientist in late 95 and left a little later when Vic took the section over.

We also launched the Guardian's first news-based web sites through the Online team:
a. a two page website with political news the day the IRA attacked docklands and shut down the presses
b. a special on the Scott Report (which was built using Dave Winer's ClayBasket scripting engine!)
c. Go2 : which was the Guardian Online's daily IT news service (which had a content management system comprising of MacPerl and Quickeys scripts written by Tom Standage, now the Economist's business editor).

How is that for a bit of boring Graun history.