DeepDarkSee

A few years ago, right in the tail end of the internet bubble, I was part of the launch of Dotcast. The company barely survived, but more because of technology delivery problems than funding problems. Dotcast could raise money because it offered the promise of something extraordinary – a high volume content distribution pipe that bypassed cable, and DSL.

A key financial player for the company was Disney, who launched the MovieBeam service using Dotcast’s datacasting (data over TV) technology. Disney loved Dotcast because if it worked, it offered a distribution channel for Movie, TV, and other content without any toll takers. It bypassed cable and DSL (and for movies, even video rental stores). In the end Dotcast’s technology took too long to develop, didn’t work as well as expected, cost too much to deploy, and with the delays got squeezed by the plans in the US to phase out NSTC broadcast technologies.

But content companies HATE having to pay for distribution (and even want to be reverse the role)! Look at the RIAA now wanting a share of iPod revenue…they want to be paid BY the distribution channel. In the other direction, here is SBC’s CEO, now saying they want payment from companies like Google to let them deliver their content over SBC DSL lines – even after they have charged the consumer for the DSL in the first place. I’ve been playing around with Vonage, but am just waiting for Comcast to start mucking with connection quality for Vonage voice traffic (and demanding revenue share from Vonage). I recently tried to use Skype over a Verizon wireless data connection and guess what – the Verizon connection dropped every time I tried to initiate any VOIP traffic.

So when I look at the next generation of wide area wireless technology just reaching deployment stage in 2006, I find it very interesting. When I hear about Google buying up dark fiber everywhere and their bid to offer free wireless in San Francisco as a prototype for bigger things, I smile. I think we will see A LOT of non-traditional money get sunk into multiple competing wide area wireless solutions in the next few years. Those that currently control the broadband pipes into consumer homes are going to see incredible competition – mostly made economical by the high tolls they are imposing (making these other huge technology investments look cheap). I’m annoyed that greed drives this, and pleased with what I think the end result will be.

Once a day, every week day. Amanda Rocks!

Beware of fishing expeditions:
…it is always nice to have a large company call you and express acquisition interest. That being said, go into the conversations with a skeptical eye and make sure you do not waste your time as these strategic discussions can quickly lead to a dead end if not managed appropriately. The tricky part of the dance is trying to establish early in the process a range that the acquirer will potentially pay for your company assuming everything you tell them is true. The sooner you can get to this answer the sooner you will know if you should continue talking or just walk away. If you manage this process appropriately you may find yourself in a great place as many of the best acquisitions happen when companies are bought and not sold. The downside is that these discussions can suck up lots of your precious resources and be a tremendous distraction to your management team.

Reblogged from Mobile games:
Sounds like a good rant: “Mobile game guru Greg Costikyan, formerly with Nokia Research but now head of Manifesto Games, highlighted a number of problems facing the mobile games industry, and developers in particular.”

…but, reading Carlo’s notes I’m struck that most of the problems Greg has highlighted aren’t problems with the mobile games industry, but problems with the mobile games industry if they want to sell the kinds of things the console games industry sells:

1. Consumers don’t necessarily buy games based on a single line of text. Many of the channels for selling mobile games (late night TV ads, press ads in the back of Viz or the back cover of Puzzler magazine) allow fuller descriptions of games. Even sales of games via operator portals usually include screenshots.

2. “Mobile device will always be an inferior game platform”. Sorry, I don’t buy that; or has my chess-set been obsoleted by my Gamecube because it’s only got a resolution of 8 x 8?

3. J2ME can access phone and date book information. Not all handsets can, but hey – you’re going to be building different versions of your game for different devices anyway, and at least the mechanisms for address book access are reasonably standardised in JSRs.

4. You can add new levels and content to a Java game on the fly. Flirtomatic is a great example of a massively networked mobile application. Sure, this brings its own set of problems, but it’s eminently possible, and has been for some time (we wrote Java games that download new levels back in 2002).

5. Super-distribution of the kind Greg describes can be done. We’re doing it on a project right now. It’s a little bit fiddly, but it’s feasible.

But overall Greg seems to have it nailed…

A billboard seen next to the highway, travelling from Johannesburg International Airport into town. An Ad for BMW showing a photo of a BMW 328i convertible with the roof and all the windows down. The caption reads:’ Our hardware runs better without WINDOWS!!!’
Identified as real at ahajokes.

I caught about half the episodes of Serenity when it was first on TV. I liked it a lot, and between that and the buzz from the early preview audiences, I’ll be sure to go see it. In fact, I bought the series on DVD a couple of months ago and Leann and I are watching the episodes and having a great time. Should be done, and off to the movie, by next week some time.

I’m even more enthused after reading this review by Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game. I loved that book, although Speaker for the Dead, the follow-on book, didn’t hold me. It’s a very insightful review, well worth a read. Gotta go see that movie!

Good info here. Now I wonder if they will fund a mobile phone initiative, or keep the attention on Garmin hardware.

I was in a conversation last week with AJ Kim about community and web site features, and she made a really interesting comment about Forums. She essentially that forums are OK for customer support and such, but that real community sharing is shifting away from Forums and getting replaced by Blogs. I have a lot of respect for AJ’s thought process, and read her blog regularly. I can see the logic, and would agree if I recast to say that a lot of ‘thought leaders’ (like AJ) contribute to their blogs, and conversations that cross blogs, rather than spend their time on web bboards (Forums). Also, a lot of people, myself included, spend a lot more time reading blogs and making comments on them than in perusing forums.

At the same time, this stuck with me over the weekend in an uneasy way. It’s been slowly gel-ing into the opinion that Forums serve a broader base for a web community with a common set of interests. Lots of forum contributors don’t write blogs, and at least for Bones in Motion, I’m thinking that as subscribership grows, we’ll see some real value come out of the forums (note that we actively encourage and facilitate blogging too – easy publishing of results to internal, and soon external, blogs).

Coincidentally (if there are such things), Russ Beattie just made an interesting post about where huge levels of Forum activity happen, how it is different from blogging, and a case for supporting anonymity rather than forced registration (and this being where the forums get huge in the first place). He raises dimensions that have been yet to cross my mind, especially around 2CH and other things coming out of Japan.