18 October 2002

Let's Uninvent It BALLYBLOG -- Ever have something you wish could be uninvented? Coming from Lancaster Dutch Country, I've seen the Amish shaking their heads and wondering aloud at "what in the world are those English doing?" Right now, stuck on a train overflowing with boisterous students, I wish I could uninvent automatic doors. They're a nuisance as they open and close. I'd rather have them close off the rowdy bunch between carriages and let the cold draft suck their loud mouth energy away. [x: 17]

TV over IP >>  I think the Premier County should have a TV over IP. It shouldn't hog a lot of bandwidth. Streaming services with two minute shorts sounds just about right. [x: 350]

Ireland's Fortitude in The Information Age BALLYBLOG -- Perhaps the biggest investment Ireland has made in the Information Age is the human resources and IT infrastructure behind local government initiatives. The hiring practises alone reveal courageous management. Many of the IT specialists come from outside the civil service. These newly-hired professionals aren't mired in a government career path. Rather, they are linked to well-defined skill sets as programmers or Web designers. And they're good. [x: 26121]

Evolution of Cam Communications JD on MX -- The Washington Post is talking to the experts and the punters are blogging about the cameras. Everywhere the cameras. "The average American is caught on camera eight to 10 times a day, law enforcement officials say." [x: 261]

Blogs Improve Writing Skills Matt Mower -- How about using blogs to improve language skills? One of Matt's friends commented on his imperfect English and suggested her help for improving it. She is going to start Radio blog, so he thinks: She makes a special category, which is not visible in her blog, but has an RSS feed. Then she uses this category to comment on my posts pointing to errors and suggesting improvements. I subscribe to this RSS, get my personal feedback and correct posts. For multinational companies this could be a solution to help their employees developing language skills and overcoming fears of writing in foreign language. [x: 109]

Will Momoko Kikuchi Be The Next Ellen Feiss? APPLE -- Now Switch comes to Japan and you have to wonder will Momoko Kikuchi be the next Ellen Feiss? I don't have Japanese fonts installed and I know the answer. [Der Schockwellenreiter and The Aardvark Speaks] [x: 261]

Arid Desert of Venture Capital Funding BOSTON -- Bleak news on the VC front. In 2001, for the first time ever, America’s venture capital industry generated a negative return. This dismal performance will repeat in 2002. Most of the money invested by east coast VC companies in 2000 is likely to be lost. Most of the start-ups are failing because they were ideas, not businesses. While poking around different offices, it's easy to see that the American VC industry faces a huge liquidity crunch because the lack of exits for venture capitalists to generate a return on their investments. In the late 1990s, many new companies could plan for an IPO and benefit from a huge windfall. That’s not happening now. Some considered IPOs as the bellwether of the Irish Celtic Tiger boom.Now that IPOs are difficult, VCs focus on the potential for trade sales. This puts a premium on forging strategic partnerships. VCs will not put money into a company without an exit mechanism being considered. This has created a high hurdle for new companies searching for VC funding. It's not much better for later-stage companies. Several start-ups discovered their companies were valued less during second and third rounds of funding than their initial valuations. That’s depressing for founders. But I've seen fund mangers who are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into mature businesses that show growth potential linked to the new business brought by an innovative acquisition. [x: 109] [r: 3733]

Fortune Magazine Explains Hollywood's Clueless Muppets FORTUNE -- The print edition of Fortune magazine often arrives to my Irish mailbox two weeks late. Even so, there's illuminating reading. David Kirkpatrick has written two articles that spotlight the declining fortune of big media in the eyes of the consumer. In Turning Out the Consumer, he explains how media companies are defeating their long-term interests. In Listen to People Who Listen to Music, he heard media executives telling a discussion panel that they wanted to enter the digital future. They then proceeded to lay out the criteria for how they'd like to do it--by encrypting all movies so they could only be viewed on approved devices that electronically monitored your rights to see a movie, and by inaugurating a complex system of payments that would vary based on how long you intended to use a movie. If you wanted to keep it and indefinitely play it on all the devices you own, you'd pay a much higher price than if you just watched it once or kept it for two days. But such unlimited usage would cost considerably more than we pay today for a movie on DVD. The word the executives used most often was "protection" -- they aim to protect their products from the depredations of their untrustworthy customers. Is there any doubt why highly talented programmers want to defeat this obnoxious perspective? [x: 26121]

Open Spectrum: The New Wireless Paradigm Kevin Werbach -- A thoughtful 148k white paper discussing Open Spectrum, alongside ideas for cognitive radio, ultrawideband, and software-defined radio. Werbach envisages a world of non-scarce spectrum where high-speed wireless data networks drive community activism, economic recovery and unparalleled innovation. Plus commentary from the Slashdot Rabble. [x: 109]

Microsoft Piggy Bank Tops $40bn Dan Gillmor -- "Innovation is almost dead in desktop software, where Microsoft has sucked the financial oxygen out of the system." [x: 261]