Disqus - Latest Comments for tomo

Re: Should Apple Quit Hardware Business?

tomo — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 02:48:17 -0000

I wonder how much money Dell spends with Gartner every year....

Re: Does Google need more fiber in its diet?

tomo — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 19:43:57 -0000

Mathew,

Google would benefit by controling the user experience from end to end as it gives them all sorts of contol over the packets...some application make take higher priority than others, ie. VoIP traffic gets priority over RSS traffic if they are competing for bandwidth. While this may be able to be accomoplished via software on routers, switches, etc. the serivce provider, as in telco, cable co, etc, has the ultimate control. . In order to truly control user experience they need to own or at least have some authority over the last mile such that they can prioritize packets based on their products. My take is that they will rely upon wireless to do so. What's interesting is that they are doing this totally off the radar(or at least attempting to), are building these monstrous datacenters for the purpose of supporting a platform for delivery of services(formerly known as software among other things) and are doing it in a way that is more effiicient than anyone else.

Sounds far fetched but look at the management team. Huber and Rosenburg tried this once before at @Home Network but were likely ahead of their time. Urs has publicly stated that power companies should give pc's away because they'll make more money by selling customers the power to run the pc's than it will cost them to give away which is why it would not be too unlikely to see them roll out free inet access globally....similar to what they do in Mt View.

So one day you will have your email, your office apps, your tv or vod, your dial tone, your music, your personal publishing, etc all hosted by google all for free and even with free access to it because they'll be able to deliver the most customized delivery of advertising that the world has ever been exposed to. No joke, it's happening while politicians and others ignorant folks try to cry wolf over the telcos and net neutrality and open access and all that other crap which is smoke and mirrors while google sneaks up behind everyone and steals the eggs right from under the chicken.

Re: 5 reasons why Google is looking to purchase YouTube

tomo — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 22:11:29 -0000

steve, check out the link below to google's internal jobs. i searched for "ISP" and these were the jobs listed. the dark fiber purchases and these jobs lead me to believe that your reason #2 is on the money. i think they will build a network and give away access...they already are doing it via wifi in mt view. why do you think the actual yellow page phone books are free? same thing here, each end customer or user or subscriber if you will, is 'worth' more than it costs to get them to be a subscriber...in this case it just happens to be the cost of building the network.

Re: 5 reasons why Google is looking to purchase YouTube

tomo — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 22:12:07 -0000

forgot the link...

http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/search.p...

Re: Carly Fiorina’s book & board viruses

tomo — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 23:44:08 -0000

I wonder if Walter Hewlett was still on the board if the situation would have played out differently.... Has anyone read Carly's book who can provide info on what she said about Walter? What goes around comes around is soooooo true.

Re: Roundup: Digg, MyBlogLog, Sling, Trumba, Kongregate & more

tomo — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 14:07:53 -0000

i like digg. i like it alot but since when is conventional wisdom the â€˜bestâ€™ way to get news? it seems like most people digg stories they think are interesting, not that they think are newsworthly. what is news anyway? it is different to everyone. i donâ€™t care about what the UPS guy thinks about my welcom mat or why some dude thinks apple failed, or what happens with 10,000 coins topple like dominoes and those are three stories on the front page of digg at 10:10 PM PST Friday night. if anyone believes that the news is a function of what we like to read about then it is no wonder that Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, Oprah and any other content catering to the welfare set is more watched on tv or viewed online or read in a magaizine or newspaper have been on the air for as long as they have. news shmewsâ€¦figure out what you like and that is your news. some of us live our lives in ignorance and some donâ€™t. most of the front page of digg is blogs and blogs are written or recorded by the everyday joe who barely gets by and doesnâ€™t have the grasp or scope to analyze why apple is a success (it makes money dude!!! itâ€™s called a business and that is what businesses are supposed to do) let alone try to write an informative article(NOT STORY) on relevent issues like why the middle east is so fâ€™d up or why the catholic church canâ€™t come clean with what they have been brushing under the carpet for so long. the point is who cares if 30 users are hijacking digg because at the end of the day by considering digg your source of relevant news you are by default subscribing to the theory that conventional wisdom is correct. does anyone reading this think slavery is ok? in the 1700s and 1800s and in some part of the world today that acceptance of slavery was the conventional wisdom of the population. had it not been, your ancestors wouldnâ€™t have had slaves.

Re: Edgeio gets $5 million to expand Web 2.0 classifieds site

tomo — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 17:40:12 -0000

why is everyone so down on Edgeio? I have used the site and while it is super slow, I found it useful. It should only get more useful as it's audience and membership grows. Matt, you refer to the idea as audacious and i'm not quite sure why... CL is obviously succesful and new companies will try to do whatever it takes to compete against them and other leaders in any market. Some companies do it via price and others get creative or try to...

John R, while you may feel 'smart money' didn't invest, let me assure you that not every investment by Sequoia is a 100 bagger and Intel, ebay, amazon and cafepress appear to see some value in investing and partnering which certainly gives some cred to their model/strategy.

FWIW, CL has a finite # of markets it serves while Edgeio doesn't have to create unique sites at all, it appears to be done on the based on the users selected inputs.

Having said that, hopefully they'll use some of the money they raised to beef up the infrastrucutre because it is really slow.....

Re: Will statistics mess kill Digg acquisition by News Corp?

tomo — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 20:55:19 -0000

there have been all sorts of opinions on why news corp got a great deal on myspace so comparing what the multiple is based on the news corp deal to buy myspace is moot...at least it's moot if you believe myspace was undervalued as many do. it was rohan or blodget and a timeline of three years. the point is comparing digg @ $150M sale price is like comparing youtube at $1.6b. digg has revenue and apparently youtube didnt. how do you compare that? why even bother because you can come up with 6 ways to sunday and at the end of the day it becomes a bet no matter how you slice it or dice it. some companies bet with cash and others bet with stock...how do you compare those? did goog make a mistake by paying in stock because today it sure looks like a big cost to shareholders because the 1.6b in stock has more value than 1.6b in cash. the point is that justification of these valuations can't be on revenue or eyeballs or user attributes, its a combination of those(or two of them) and a belief that they can add at least the value that you pay for them even if it is difficult to measure initially. over time it may get easier but its a bet now.

Re: People in Glass Houses

tomo — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 13:20:55 -0000

Robert,

Question for you on the graph from Nebraska:

Does that account for the actual energy produced from a gallon of gasoline or ethanol? I believe the answer is no and if so, the cost per unit of energy is almost 3x more expensive with ethanol than gasoline. Additionally, what energy sources are the ethanol plants using in their production of ethanol? I'd be surprised to learn if they were all green sources and they transport it to the distribution points and then on to the retail outlets on all ethanol using trucks? It sounds to me like this issue is two fold, one is the cost of gasoline and keeping it 'low and affordable' to the consumer and the second is using renewable energy sources. It seems like apples and oranges are getting compared here. A gallon of gasoline doesn't produce the same amount of energy as a gallon of ethanol so it would make sense to create and measure upon a unit of energy as opposed to a gallon of liquid. You mention the $7.24 price point for the net energy equivalent of one gallon gasoline and I would like you to elaborate on that. If the point of pro 87 folks is to keep the cost of energy lower and they are doing so by comparing the cost of a gallon of ethanol to a gallon of gasoline there would appear to be very questionable logic behind that argument. Am I missing something because that just seems too obvious to not be dwelled on by the oil producers as if this is the case, the environmental trade off if you will, is close to $5 per gallon to use ethanol. That seems expensive to me and goes against the grain of the argument for keeping costs lower.

Last but not least ethanol is a fossil fuel is it not? Should there be a way for someone to snap their fingers and the gasoline industry disappear and be replaced by ethanol wouldn't we be having this same discussion sooner or later about ethanol and some new alternative fuel source?

I am excited about solar and wind power because those sources allow for the individual consumer to produce their own power and not be so subject to international politics when burn a watt or start the motor on their cars.

Re: Amazon.com and the fabless semiconductor industry

tomo — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 01:16:52 -0000

I like the anology of the datacenter market to semiconductors.

This strategy makes sense if they're able to keep scale which will be a challenge should this be successful. Amzn has deployed a bunch of assets, most have a fixed cost and aren't being used to maximum efficiency. So they take the excess capacity, for lack of a better term, and sell it off. The question becomes how ineffcient is their current use or how much capacity do they have to sell. How many youtubes, facebooks, myspaces or whoever can they support and at what point does selling off your excess capacity stop or does it? if it doesn't and they must continue to scale to support their customers requirements and build datacenters and everything else that this initiative could easily become and this is extremely expensive.

Re: Entrepreneur Idol competition shows digital media is hot — perhaps too hot

tomo — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 11:39:07 -0000

Ben Savage? As in the actor, Fred's little brother who played Cory Matthews on Boy Meets World? I know Fred went to Stanford and am curious as to whether this Ben Savage is the same guy.

Re: Amazon.com and the fabless semiconductor industry

tomo — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 12:47:20 -0000

Paco,

WRT to PacNW, Amazon's actual datacenters are in the northern VA area. They do have a small datacenter in Seattle but nothing when compared to VA.

I am still questioning how much extra capacity do they really have and how on earth will they scale it once they reach 70% or 80% utilization. It's not like they can just add datacenters and other infrastructure with the snap of a finger. The notion of selling off excess capacity is a great one and one that has proven succesful for telcos and carriers but multiplexing wavelengths is a much more scaleable proposition than creating a new paradigm in the outsourcing of infrastructure/datacenter/computing services. The marginal utility to Amazon of adding customers will at some point hit diminishing return because there can't be infinite scale to datacenters based on todays environment....there is a sweet spot to actually benefitting from economies of scale when building datacenters and it is finite.

One more thing to consider, the demands of supporting hundreds or thousands of customers on a service like this require a totally different support and service organization than what running an ecommerce site does and at some point, the two businesses may be equal or the AWS may dwarf the retail which is why I wouldn't be surprised to see Amazon create a new service company that is essentially "AWS" and whose first customer is a retail ecommerce site called Amazon.

Re: Google’s reign of terror over Valley workforce coming to end?

tomo — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 04:21:20 -0000

most employee stock options vest over time. typically four years total for each grant with a 25% cliff at month 13 and then monthly thereafter.

the interesting issue which wasn't addressed is what happens if the employee quits, gets fired, dies, etc prior to vesting those options which he sold? where are the shares going to come from when the call comes due?

Re: VentureBeat down for maintenance

tomo — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 11:27:12 -0000

Matt,

Who do you host with? I want to know so I don't ever use them.

Thanks!

Re: Still looking to invest in Web 2.0

tomo — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:55:57 -0000

Kelly,

Not that it petains to Riya yet or ever will but a success story for the investor is a exit which gives them a good return. Whether or not the company ever makes money is moot in many cases. Online adult entertainment has many companies making money on subscription and ad based business models yet not much, if any VC has been put to work in the space. Likely because there is no clear exit or liquidity perse. You would think the venture funds would mitigate risk on their overall portfolio by getting into a business which spits out large amounts of cash over a long period of time but VC is not put to work to produce cash flow, it is put to work where there is a defined path to a liquid exit. On the flip side, the many of the PE guys love cash flow and are getting more comfortable with venture like risk.

Re: Tit for tat at Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia

tomo — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 20:00:29 -0000

Matt,

What in the world are you thinking? How does one of KP's companies failures not become a big deal bcause Sequoia may experience one as well? They both have experienced and will continue to experience failures with in portfolio companies. Failures are part of the game and hardly newsworthy or blogworthy for the front page of VentureBeat. Am I missing something?

Re: Reactrix raises cash for interactive advertising in malls

tomo — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 20:39:18 -0000

Matt,

You misspelled Reactrix in the first sentence and it links to a parked page.

I seriously think you don't have spellchecker or nobody proofs these stories as there seem to be gramatical and spelling errors in almost all of them.

Hire a college intern to proof them for you. It'll be money well spent if it costs you anything.

tomo

Re: Analyst: Yahoo made mistake in passing on Facebook

tomo — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 00:29:16 -0000

Amen Roman!! What exactly are this guys qualifications to be an analyst? Answer, none. This analyst job isn't a regulated position and this guy along with many others are portrayed as experts in their respective markets when many of them took those jobs right out of college and are analyzing markets which there is no historical track record. In other words, if you place any faith in what they say you're being shamboozled. Lets see, banks make money through fees. they get fees for transactions and management. transactions imply buying, selling or trading of currency or other assets. a management fee entails the bank taking a % of money in their control(not the money they made but money in their control - big difference). ipo's are transactions, secondaries are transactions, M and A's are transactions too. Banks do all of the above and the big ones do it over and over and over again. It would be interesting to see which is higher, the value banks suck out of a dollar(through fees) as it is in circulation or the value the govt sucks out of a dollar(through taxes) as it is in circulation. My guess is about equal sucking.

Re: Leadership – Annapolis style

tomo — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 10:24:13 -0000

@Joe,

You seem to have missed the point. Bob said those five rules were what he learned during his first year in the Academy and are the foundation to building and instilling a team and team thinking.

In your example the only true answer is or at least should begin with, "I don't know", because it's impossible to know unless you can travel through time. Do you think Scott McNealy asked a subordinate at Sun whether opensource had a 30% chance of a chance of negatively impacting future adoption and sales of Solaris? I don't know for sure, but I would venture the answer is yes and the subordinates answer was(on the 18th green), "No. Nice putt."

Re: Keibi, for busting porn on social networks

tomo — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:17:04 -0000

Seems counterintuitive to driving longer average 'time spent' per visitor :)

Re: More on the future of TV

tomo — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 15:04:40 -0000

I notice you don't have any of the ecosystem type platform providers anywhere in the mix. although, i do believe goog to be a major player in that space so they are accounted for but under the auspices of content aggregation. i'm thinking salesforce.com or msft with their .net will play a big role in turning the internet into the 4th network...radio, print and tv being the first three :)

Re: More on the future of TV

tomo — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:36:51 -0000

Nic, I concur.....even without the parenthetical might :) Bottom line is that delivering anything that can be broken down into 1s and 0s is going to be more efficient than delivering by the other three. While that theory applies to many services or products, I am really referring to advertising because, at the end of the day, advertising is what makes the other three possible and without it they don't work. The internet on the other hand, works without advertising and was up until 11 or so years ago. I'm not ignorant enough to think the internet would be where it is today without advertising because surely the $15B a year online advertising market has subsidized a large portion of the internet as we know it. Evidence of this is happening with google and their metro wifi service that they are giving away for free in mt view. It is free(subsidized) because goog will generate more $$ selling advertisements that you'll be the recipient of than charging you $20 a month for the access.

I mentioned the .net and Apex because they have the potential to be a global trading platform for goods and services. Apex currently has many isv's that have built services o top of the Apex platform which customers can purchase, set up, use and integrate with all sorts of business functions. Ten years ago getting setup on a CRM, financial system for invoicing, etc would take years and cost tens of millions. Today it can be done in a matter of minutes for less than the cost of a desktop pc. When this type of platform is available to the global population you will see, at least imho, a shift in distribution of wealth that is closer to a state of equilibrium than what we see currently.

Re: 2007/03/11/twitter/

tomo — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 01:16:45 -0000

The biggest downside more me was that since Twitter msgs weren't originating on my wireless service provider(verizon), I was charged per msg. Anyone know if there is a way around this?

Re: The difference between TechCrunch and Valleywag

tomo — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 05:37:29 -0000

perhaps Nick Denton is secretly coding some ad serving platform that he'll f'up too? maybe he and pud are in cahoots.

seriously, i miss nick douglas. has anyone noticed that since denton fired douglas and took over the posting that the # of comments is almost zero!?!?!? is that an indication of visitors or just an indication of people can't stand his lame writing?

Re: Content Businesses Don’t Scale Anymore

tomo — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 01:31:44 -0000

Scott,

Sometime during the past 14 years all economic rules got temporarily tossed aside to make way for the internet and the new economy. This was the verge of utopia and then the bottom fell out. The crash or correction during 2001-2004 was the market getting itself back to a state of equilibrium, or as close to it as theory will allow. Since the internet wasn't able to BK itself :) and telco's weren't pulling their fiber out of the ground and content was getting more compelling and lastly ubiquity in broadband access was not a pipe dream of a rocket scientist(milo medin from @home) but was actually beginning to happen, we were presented with an ideal economic setting for growth. Leverage the efficiencies of this internet with a combination of hardware and software to drive efficiencies in every possible nook and cranny of enterprise and consumer goods and services. The relevance to your posting is that this notion of the market evolving to maturity can be applied to the original content industry. Based on the attributes of the internet like always on, ubiquity in reach(global, not local or regional, interactivity between participants it becomes astoundingly clear that the content producers as we know them are not examples of efficiency as it pertains to the internet. So when you state that content producers aren't scaling to the degree that the aggregators are you are 100% correct but that shouldn't be shocking news to anyone. What it should do is stand as a wake up call to how easy it was to get consumed in the hype of web1.0 only to suffer a rather long hangover which wiped out many false dreams. One last example on why youtube, flickr, blogs, and UGC for that matter, are examples of efficiency enablers is highlighted by this fact, it cost the producers of Friends somewhere in the neighborhood of $5M per episode(disclaimer: that # is from memory and rough guesstimate of per actor salary and general production expenses) to produce

Re: Calacanis's New Company: 20.com

tomo — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 07:01:53 -0000

It depends on how they structure the equity but it would seem like this could easily become an achilles heel. If the equity is worth more at X date than it is on the day the producer received it the likelihood of that producer pursuing liquidity is greater than it was on the day of the grant. Assuming that happens, what incentive is left for that producer to stay and continue adding value? Unless they do success based equity distribution whereby they grant equity on a regular basis at FMV at the time and guage the amount on advertising revenue. That may prove tough to scale but will be interesting to watch.