NewGround Technologies

McChrystal Legacy – a case study for war college?

2010-06-26T06:39:04Z

Stanley McChrystal is a liberal who voted for Obama and banned Fox News from his HQ TV. Which may at least partly explain how he became the first U.S. general to be lost in combat while giving an interview to Rolling Stone: They’ll be studying that one in war colleges around the world for decades.

From the incomparable Mark Steyn – Rules of an unengaged president | obama, one, president – Opinion – The Orange County Register

One of those pictures worth several thousand words?

2010-03-23T04:05:15Z

Each additional dollar borrowed is now generating a REDUCTION in GDP of almost $.50. For more background and details, visit Nathan’s Economic Edge (h/t to Business Insider).

Dems Eat Their Own?

2010-03-17T05:55:58Z

The Democrats are considering a parliamentary maneuver to brazenly and arrogantly avoid the “up or down vote” that Obama has demanded for Obamacare. Should they decide to do so, they will “slaughter” and “eat their own”, as the Wall Street Journal says more eloquently below, all for the sake of power. Move over Jim Jones, let Harry and Nancy take over…and start passing out that kool-aid.

We have entered a political wonderland, where the rules are whatever Democrats say they are. Mrs. Pelosi and the White House are resorting to these abuses because their bill is so unpopular that a majority even of their own party doesn’t want to vote for it. Fence-sitting Members are being threatened with primary challengers, a withdrawal of union support and of course ostracism. Michigan’s Bart Stupak is being pounded nightly by MSNBC for the high crime of refusing to vote for a bill that he believes will subsidize insurance for abortions.

Democrats are, literally, consuming their own majority for the sake of imposing new taxes, regulations and entitlements that the public has roundly rejected but that they believe will be the crowning achievement of the welfare state. They are also leaving behind a procedural bloody trail that will fuel public fury and make such a vast change of law seem illegitimate to millions of Americans.

The concoction has become so toxic that even Mrs. Pelosi isn’t bothering to defend the merits anymore, saying instead last week that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Or rather, “deeming” to have passed it.

Why Government Needs Downsizing – Example #1 (many more expected!)

2010-03-09T17:53:03Z

With nonsense like this going on, it won’t be long before even liberals begin demanding the downsizing of government – that’s the only effective way to limit it’s intrusion into our lives.

Troopers raid popular bars for unlicensed beers | Philadelphia Daily News | 03/08/2010

IT WAS ELIOT NESS and the Untouchables, as played by the Keystone Kops.

The alleged offense: Although the bar owners had bought the beer legally from licensed Pennsylvania distributors and had paid all the necessary taxes, the police claimed that nobody had registered the precise names of the beers with the state Liquor Control Board – a process that requires the brewers or their importers to pay a $75 registration fee for each product they want to sell in Pennsylvania.

Based on a complaint from someone the State Police refuse to identify, three teams of officers converged last Thursday on the three bars, run by Leigh Maida and her husband, Brendan Hartranft. Checking their inventories against the state’s official list of more than 2,800 brands, the cops seized four kegs and 317 bottles, totaling 60.9 gallons of beer, according to police calculations.

In fact, according to Maida, more than half the beer removed by the State Police was properly registered – but the cops couldn’t find it on their lists because of "clerical errors" or "blatant ineptitude" between the police and the Liquor Control Board, with whom the officers were conferring by telephone.

She estimated the total value of the confiscated stock at $7,200, representing about 20 brands, some of which go by multiple names.

For instance, the cops grabbed Monk’s Cafe Sour Flemish Red Ale.

The beer has been sold throughout the state at dozens of restaurants and distributors for the last seven years. The brand appears on the state’s online list as "Monk’s Café Ale." It’s on tap seven days a week at the Center City bar after which it was named: Monk’s Cafe, at 16th and Spruce streets.

But that wasn’t enough to keep the State Police from confiscating 20 bottles and three kegs of the supposedly illegal ale at the three bars run by Maida and Hartranft – Resurrection Ale House, at 2425 Grays Ferry Ave.; Local 44, at 44th and Spruce streets, in West Philadelphia; and Memphis Taproom, 2331 E. Cumberland St., Port Richmond.

Maida said that the State Police also confiscated bottles of Duvel, a popular ale imported from Belgium that is widely advertised and available in at least 200 bars throughout the city and suburbs. The beer appears on the PLCB list as "Duvel Beer," while its label reads "Duvel Belgian Golden Ale."

…She added: "It’s McCarthy-like. They swarm in here and confiscate this product because they don’t know what the product is."

Industry sources complain that brand registration is typical of the onerous regulations that make selling beer in Pennsylvania difficult. For example, while it is the responsibility of the brewer or importer to submit the necessary paperwork and registration fee, it is the tavern or restaurant licensee who may be liable for selling unregistered brands, they said.

How many lessons here? Excessive regulation. Small businesses screwed once again. Government seizes private property due to the ineptitude of public servants who nevertheless demand that the rest of us pay their above market, exorbitant pensions for life. And so on…

The Incomprehensible Absurdity of a Proposed $1.3 Trillion Budget Deficit

2010-02-04T19:26:47Z

President Obama spent last week gloating about a spending freeze that will (supposedly) generate $250 billion in savings over 10 years, but no more than 10 billion for the 2011 budget. Some think that he was sincere in that undertaking, yet given his announcement this week proposing a fiscal 2011 budget deficit of $1.3 trillion, it is very difficult to believe there is a shred of economic literacy within the Obama administration.

Take a look at this post from BusinessInsider.com:

Now, what do you think? Is Obama crazy? I doubt it. Does he have the foggiest clue about economics? Clearly not. How can the POTUS propose something so irresponsible? I suppose it could be because no one on Obama’s team has a clue about economics either, so we have the economically blind leading each other around inside the White House. See the chart below for details.

: Obama Cabinet Members with Private Sector Experience

If it is not economic ignorance, what is it? The Cloward-Piven strategy? I don’t know, but if Obama continues to pursue such absurd economic policies, he will lead the US to economic ruin. Whether that is his intent or not will be for historians to figure out.

Source of Healthcare Price Increases

2009-12-30T23:53:15Z

This chart illustrates the decline in personal responsibility for healthcare costs over the last 50 years. Now I have to find the best source for healthcare cost increases over the same time period, but I would guess the correlation between these two factors will be quite high. It’s what always happens when people can use “OPM” – other people’s money – to purchase anything for themselves. Note: This chart was created by Dan Mitchell, using data obtained from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ national health expenditures data website and originally posted at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com.

Most outrageous Obama action yet

2009-12-24T03:42:14Z

Last week, President Obama quietly signed an executive order that makes Interpol, an international police force that functions as an agent of international tribunals and foreign courts, immune from the restraints of American law. It is outrageous to grant any foreign police force that operates without accountability to any US institution immune from the restraints of American law. It is even more outrageous to co-locate that agency within the offices of the US Department of Justice, which can use that agency to shield information, files, records and activities from the jurisdiction of US institutions. How can this action be even remotely squared with US interests? I would submit that it cannot, and is part and parcel of the anti-American agenda of America-hating Barack Hussein Obama. He wants the US to bow down to the International Criminal Court and other international organizations, all part of his radical agenda to “transform America”.

For more information, see these posts by Threatswatch, Andrew McCarthy, DBKP and Anchoress.

Gov’t Mule with Grace Potter – Live at the Warfield 9.26.09

2009-12-24T03:44:38Z

Exactly how can you top this? Warren rocks and Grace smokes!!!

Taking the National Debt Seriously – WSJ.com

2009-10-14T04:05:15Z

From yesterday’s WSJ Opinions, Lawrence Kadish discusses the utter folly of creating more government obligations.

It is the interest on the national debt that makes our future unstable. The exploding size of that burden suggests that, short of devaluing the dollar and taking a large bite out of the middle class through inflation and taxation, there is no way to ever pay down that bill.

As of Sept. 30, 2009, the national debt was almost $12 trillion and interest on that debt was $383 billion for the year, according to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Public Debt. The Congressional Budget Office on Oct. 7 estimated the 2009 budget deficit to be almost $1.4 trillion (about 10% of GDP). In August, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimated total government revenues at about $2 trillion. The revenue estimate included $904 billion from individual income taxes. This means the cost of interest on the debt represented more than 40 cents of every dollar that came in from individual income taxes…

In stark but simple terms, unless Americans are made aware of this financial crisis and demand accountability, the very fabric of our society will be destroyed. Interest rates and interest costs will soar and government revenues will be devoured by interest on the national debt. Eventually, most of what we spend on Social Security, Medicare, education, national defense and much more may have to come from new borrowing, if such funding can be obtained. Left unchecked, this destructive deficit-debt cycle will leave the White House and Congress with either having to default on the national debt or instruct the Treasury to run the printing presses into a policy of hyperinflation.

It is against this background that Washington is now debating whether to create social programs it can’t afford…

Americans need to take notice, stand up, and remind our elected officials that in a democracy the people can change bad leaders.

Ivan Seidenberg shines the “light” on Verizon’s FIOS strategy

2009-10-05T15:38:40Z

Dave Burstein at DSL Prime reports that Ivan Seidenberg effectively says the the wireline voice telecom business is dying:

“we have to pivot and make a shift from the voice business to the data business and eventually to the video business. … we must really position ourselves to be an extremely potent video-centric asset.” He further states, “The issue there is perhaps it is like the dog chasing the bus a little bit. So what I need to do is get ourselves focused around the following idea, that video is going to be the core product in the fixed line business. … I shed myself of the burden of chasing the inflection point in access lines and say I don’t care about that anymore.”

Despite Seidenberg having been one of the few telecom industry visionaries to truly embrace data/video as the future of the industry as long as 10 years ago, it still sounds strange (heretical, in fact) to hear a telecom CEO say “I don’t care about that [access lines] anymore.” On the other hand, I believe Seidenberg is correct in focusing Verizon’s strategy on the combined communications capabilities of its wired and wireless footprints.

Googling for further insights from Seidenberg’s comments at Goldman Sachs Communicopia Conference, I found this statement, made a week earlier at SuperComm:

“But here is what is happening in our view,” Seidenberg said. “The Internet, the PC and the TV are integrating at the fastest rate you can possibly imagine. So this is not a matter of only putting video on mobile; that will happen. We are also talking about turning the TV into an interactive device. And the experience we have had with that is just off the charts. So we have this Widget Bazaar on FiOS, which is kind of like our apps store. And so in addition to getting the weather and the news and that kind of stuff, traffic, now you can do your Twitter, your Facebook, your YouTube, you’ve got a Kodak Gallery, you have got fantasy football, you have got the RedZone ticket and there probably are 50 other things we have in negotiations right now to take the interactive capability of the TV and turn it into a hilarious issue.”

Next up, Seidenberg said, is the likelihood that a mobile smartphone interacts with the TV, as part of the convergence process. That’s why, he said, Verizon is focused on having fewer total access lines but hosting them on a “much higher potency platform to take to the customer.”

Unlike Ed Whitaker and Duane Ackerman, Seidenberg truly grasps the converged future of communication networks, and more importantly, is willing to act upon that vision. In addition to developing the platform to focus on the common interactive experiences to be encountered on mobile, video and computer devices, Seidenberg is also focused on the operating efficiencies to be found in the flat architecture of the fiber network. According to the New York Times in its article titled “Verizon Hangs Up on Landline Phone Business”:

By converting most of its landline operation to FiOS, Mr. Seidenberg said Verizon had a new opportunity to cut costs sharply. FiOS uses the decentralized structure of the Internet rather than the traditional design of phone systems, which route all traffic through a tree of regional, then local offices.

“We don’t look any different than Google,” he said. “We can begin to look at eliminating central offices, call centers and garages.”

Mr. Seidenberg said that he was just beginning to work through the implications of this and that he planned to reorganize the company in order to emphasize this strategy. He told investors it may take a year or two for the financial impact to be apparent.

Plant and operations in the legacy telco network is insanely complex, labor intensive and consequently expensive. An all optical network will prove much cheaper to operate. One of Seidenberg’s challenges probably has been and may continue to be overcoming the copper voice-centric Luddites within his own organization. My guess is that when you see Seidenberg publicly announce the cost savings to be realized via the replacement of the copper with fiber, you will know for certain that he succeeded in that endeavor. Unfortunately, that will mean a lot more people looking for new jobs and careers. Given that many of those are members of the CWA and IBEW, you can also bet those unions will seek to delay that process as long as possible, just as they are also doing in attempting to impede Verizon’s sale of unprofitable rural operations.

China’s leaders MUST create 24 million new jobs EVERY YEAR vs. Obama “expects” US jobless rate (15 million in August) to persist for years.

2009-09-17T00:11:10Z

Newt Gingrich observes the pressure on Chinese leadership to create jobs while discussing his recent trip to China.

The economic pressure the Chinese dictatorship feels to continue creating jobs can be captured by the fact that they need 24 million new jobs this next year just to break even.

Their fear is that without jobs unrest will grow and that historically in China unrest can rapidly become very destabilizing. This focuses their energy on jobs and the economy in a way no American politician can fully appreciate.

So, the Chinese leadership feels intense pressure to create 24 million jobs every single year! Meanwhile, back in Obama’s USSR, unemployment reached 14.9 million (August – US Bureau of Labor Statistics) and Obama & Co. appear perfectly content to simply manage expectations for this level of unemployment to persist for years, as indicated last week by Obama’s chief economic advisor, Larry Summers.

“We’re just community organizers, just like the president used to be.” – ACORN Chief Organizer, State of Nevada

2009-09-16T18:40:58Z

In his latest WSJ opinion piece, John Fund documents the damage done to ACORN by the outstanding work of James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck, as well as other less sensational but equally corrupt charges brought against the organization across the country. In all likelihood, we have only seen the tip of this iceberg.

ABC’s Charlie Gibson – Emblematic of the “See No Evil” MSM

2009-09-16T22:36:14Z

Newbusters reports that Charlie Gibson declares no knowledge of the ACORN scandal ignited by the investigative reporting and filmmaking of James Okeefe and Hannah Giles. And this guy is the lead reporter/newscaster for a “major” network? Duh! No wonder the “major” networks are either not ranked or at the bottom of the TV news audience rankings.

ACORN – Roasted and Toasted!!!

2009-09-15T21:36:48Z

Politicians: Wake the Hell Up!

2009-09-17T00:06:48Z

[Note: This post from Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker so completely captured my state of mind that I felt compelled to re- post it here in its entirety. I also encourage you to visit his blog for consistently high quality economic analysis and insight. We do need to jerk these politicians' chains and either force to work for us, or throw them all out and start over.]

From Yahoo News:

On the eve of the August recess, members are reporting meetings that have gone terribly awry, marked by angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior. In at least one case, a congressman has stopped holding town hall events because the situation has spiraled so far out of control.

“I had felt they would be pointless,” Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO, referring to his recent decision to suspend the events in his Long Island district. “There is no point in meeting with my constituents and [to] listen to them and have them listen to you if what is basically an unruly mob prevents you from having an intelligent conversation.”

Really?

Well Tim, guess what: you work for your constituents, not the other way around.

It would appear to this commentator that the Reps and Senators who feel “besieged” by their constituents in town hall meetings might have paid better attention in September and October when they were told by 300:1 margins not to pass the EESA/TARP bill.

Or when they were told repeatedly to NOT try to advance amnesty for illegal aliens and refuse to enforce our immigration laws.

Or when they were told repeatedly to quit bailing out the irresponsible, looking the other way while the populace is looted systematically by those in the banking and other “coddled” industries.

There are a whole host of issues like this, and Congress seems to think (because it has gotten away with it for years) that ignoring the voters is not only acceptable, but is indeed a good idea.

Let me remind Mr. Bishop, along with the other Congressfolk, that the entirety of our government serves at our pleasure, not the other way around. Specifically, let me cite The Declaration of Independence:

….That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness….

Loud voices of dissent and sign-waving constituents are an unmistakable sign that our government has pressed the line of tolerance, and may, if it does not reverse course, exceed it.

And before someone claims that I am some sort of “right-wing nut” or similar, let me point out that the above text is not mine – they are the words of the founders of our nation, who believed that absent consent government does not exist – that’s tyranny, not government.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

How close to the line has our government come?

I have no idea, but this much I do know: I do not want to discover that the line has been crossed.

Again:

Stop the looting and start prosecuting. The bankers, lenders and others in the “bizness side” have been literally robbing the people for over two decades. This includes both so-called “captains of the banking industry” and government officials who have looked the other way and in some cases (e.g. OTS) actively conspired to conceal the truth. Taxpayers have lost hundreds of billions as a consequence yet nobody has gone to prison for it nor are there even outstanding indictments. There is no reason on God’s Green Earth why Goldman Sachs should be allowed to keep the roughly $13 billion in AIG pass-through money, nor why they should, having elected to become a bank holding company, be able to keep using their “VaR” risk model (instead of the more-stringent BANK risk limits.) There are dozens of examples; Goldman is hardly alone in this regard.

Quit voting FOR bills you did not read – end to end! There’s no excuse for this. The Stimulus Bill, EESA/TARP and more – this is absolutely common behavior and it’s outrageous. Sorry, there is no emergency that demands passing a 1,000 page bill until every member has read it from one end to the other, personally. If you need to pass something fast then it needs to be simple enough that it can be read in the hour you get before the vote! I don’t care what the emergency is – if you haven’t read the bill cover-to-cover the only acceptable vote is NO.

Quit spending more than you make. We are here because we have turned into a nation of Madoffs, and nowhere is it more evident than in Washington DC. We cannot have a sustainable economic recovery until the debt-to-GDP ratio is restored to a rational and sustainable ratio. This means much less spending; promising that which cannot be paid for is how we got into this mess.

Represent your constituents and TELL THE TRUTH. We’re tired of being lied to, and government has done a LOT of lying. The idea that “the economy is improving” is just one example; go ask your unemployed constituents what they think of this claim. Fact: The economy stinks and it stinks because Washington DC conspired to blow a bubble after the 2000 tech implosion. You’re culpable; take responsibility and do the right thing instead of trying to blow air into a popped balloon!

Our government has become an unacceptable and unaccountable den of liars and thieves, and the people are getting damn tired of it. The evidence of extreme dissatisfaction, which may rise beyond the soapbox and ballot box if this trend is not reversed and soon, is clear. Nobody with a shred of intelligence wants to see the inevitable outcome of a government that refuses to follow the law itself, refuses to prosecute criminal wrongdoing by favored parties, and refuses to listen to the electorate on the issues of the day, instead mollycoddling those who have committed massive fraud upon the public and giving them hundreds of billions of dollars in hand-outs funded by the very people they ripped off in the first place!

Latest GDP Figures – Ugly!

2009-08-01T08:20:18Z

Thanks to the Ticker Guy – Karl Denninger @ The Market Ticker – for the chart, the data for which comes directly from the US Dept of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Not a lot to cheer about in those numbers, and, the deeper you look in them, the worse the findings.

Goldman “Profits” ? Even the NY Times scorns them.

2009-07-20T18:35:15Z

Goldman, with it’s agent Henry Paulson, operating as Secretary of the Treasury and using the full power of the US government, eliminates competitors (Lehman and Merrill) and gets bailed out indirectly via AIG. And now they are making “profits”? This is crony capitalism in extremis.

Even the New York Times scorns these scoundrels, and amazingly, applauds bill O’Reilly at Fox News for doing likewise.

Something closer to the current zeitgeist was captured last week by Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News commentator, who likened Goldman Sachs bankers to pigs during a scathing segment on his TV show. “You’ve got to make an example of the big boy,” he fumed in a rant about the company’s tax-avoidance methods, suggesting Goldman ought to be punished for failing to cough up its fair share of taxes. “And this is the big boy.”

See Windfalls for Bankers, Resentments for the Rest – NYTimes.com for more details on

Great chart from The New York Times

2009-07-20T16:35:56Z

The associated article can be found here, however, this graph provides far more useful info than the article’s text.

Henry County, Ga pays respect for the ultimate sacrifice of Sergeant John Beale

2009-09-22T02:10:07Z

This video speaks for itself and makes me proud to be an American.

Robert Reich says it will be a very slow recovery

2009-07-10T08:57:13Z

I rarely agree with Robert Reich on anything, so i found myself shocked to be in complete agreement with this post regarding the long, slow climb we face in resurrecting the US economy, Reich says

In a recession this deep, recovery doesn’t depend on investors. It depends on consumers who, after all, are 70 percent of the U.S. economy. And this time consumers got really whacked. Until consumers start spending again, you can forget any recovery…

Problem is, consumers won’t start spending until they have money in their pockets and feel reasonably secure. But they don’t have the money, and it’s hard to see where it will come from. They can’t borrow. Their homes are worth a fraction of what they were before, so say goodbye to home equity loans and refinancings. One out of ten home owners is under water — owing more on their homes than their homes are worth. Unemployment continues to rise, and number of hours at work continues to drop. Those who can are saving. Those who can’t are hunkering down, as they must.
Eventually consumers will replace cars and appliances and other stuff that wears out, but a recovery can’t be built on replacements. Don’t expect businesses to invest much more without lots of consumers hankering after lots of new stuff. And don’t rely on exports. The global economy is contracting.

Birds of a Feather

2009-07-06T18:11:17Z

Lots of articles commenting on the One and his socialist buddies, but the Michael Ramirez cartoon above sums it up succinctly. Other commentary on the “coup” that wasn’t (Zelaya arrest by Honduran military) and the coup that almost was (Zelaya illegal referendum) includes:

Investors Business Daily – Banana Democrats

Wall Street Journal – Honduras Defends Its Democracy

The Enterprise Blog – Honduran Cowboy Falls Out of Saddle

Site renovations

2009-09-22T02:10:59Z

Please excuse our temporary dishevelment while we are refreshing the site design, which includes working out a few kinks.

Trial Lawyer Bonanza

2009-06-17T09:19:36Z

Looks like this will be Obama’s first play during his opening possession. Damn this is gonna be a long painful four years, watching OPR (Obama, Pelosi and Reid) wreck our economy for the next 20 – 30 years. It just sucks.

Science of Evil and the Financial Crisis

2009-06-17T09:23:41Z

The Belmont Club describes how the WSJ and the Washington Post, while searching for the culprit in the financial crisis, pass one another like ships in the night, yet both arrive at the conclusion that more regulation could have prevented this mess. The author, Richard Fernandez, then goes on to wonder whether any regulator could have stopped the gravy train that was sloshing so much gravy. He then posits an alternative suggested by “ponerology”, which defines itself as the science of evil. A basic tenet of ponerology holds that approximately 5% of the population is psychopathic, and that over time, they accumulate in the upper echelons of organizations (due to their ruthlessness?) and are well positioned to breed corruption within and without their organization and those related to it. His closing and provocative thought:

It’s amusing until one realizes how often we discover, at intervals of 50 or so years, how a cohort of people more or less simultaneously learn to game a system until it crashes.

Wall Street’s Demise

2009-06-17T09:25:30Z

This Fortune/CNNMoney article sums up concisely how Wall Street arrived at its logical end – it’s what happens when the Masters of the Universe play the “game” with other peoples’ money instead of their own.

Paid Search 101 Rap

2009-07-14T02:55:18Z

This creative gentleman converts the concepts of SEO/SEM (Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing) into catchy rap lyrics. I think he should consider entering the employee training or seminar business – it would sure make some of this stuff easier to learn!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c96LTLlaXew[/youtube]

American Music at its BEST! – The Band with the Staple Singers

2009-07-14T03:19:40Z

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trhrN39li1M[/youtube]

This version unfortunately omits Mavis’ comment just after the end of the song -”beautiful!” And that it was and is.

Latin America Wireless

2009-07-14T04:19:42Z

Like most of the Middle East and Africa, Latin America is skipping the 100% wired stage of telecoms. Governments in those countries were too financially unstable &/or corrupt to mandate buildouts beyond the wealthy enclaves and business districts of their major cities. The beauty of wireless is that it is so much less capital intensive. Consequently, wireless telephony penetration in LatAm now approximates 60-70%. Moore’s Law continues to reduce the cost/increase the functionality of handsets (and you can have either, but not both, as a consumer). In LatAm, prepaid service is a much bigger mode of payment for service, as it facilitates budget management. Also, calling party pays, not the one called. Finally, network convergence is driving all the margin out of the historically high margin voice telecom service (in late nineties 45% OPERATING profit was the norm), whether wired or wireless.

The Internet is in the process of aborbing wireless telephony. The constantly improving economics of optical and/or digital networking infrastructure and innovation enabled and fostered by entrepreneurs leveraging of IP (Internet protocol) internetworking technology (browsers, hyperlinked web, free email, graphic design, etc, etc,) has and will continue to drive the merging of all heretofore physically discrete analog networks (each being a separate business unto itself) into a single interconnected set of commonly structured and operated digital networks, all of which transport and connect video, voice and data applications – the “converged network”. Text/sms messaging is but one of thousands of applications that operate on and interconnect through the Internet. It is, in fact, the highest revenue /bit form of communications service for which consumers pay (by a factor of 1000), primarily because of the telecom operators end-to-end control of that network. For details see The Evolution of Price Discrimination in Transportation and its Implications for the Internet (especially Table 1 on second page of this pdf). The author, a mathematics/computing professor at U of Minnesota, is widely regarded for his fact-based approach to the economics of telecommunications networks.

Despite the convergence phenomenon, the US lags Europe and Asia in its usage of mobile telephony and mobile Internet (you can mostly thank the FCC’s bureacracy’s money-grubbing wireless spectrum lotteries for that). Nevertheless, US usage of wireless Internet will pick up dramatically in the next couple of years, as ATT/Cingular, Verizon and Sprint/Nextel have deployed their 3G (they call it broadband, but its really medium band) networks. (Europe/Asia finished theirs 3-5 years ago). Here is a chart showing Internet enabled mobile phone penetration as of a couple of years ago.

Publishing and Advertising 2.0 – Part 2

2007-02-16T08:35:19Z

The Internet will continue to drive major structural change into the advertising and other digitizable media for the next 25-35 years. (The Carlota Perez book previously mentioned explains paradigmatic technology diffusion; Ray Kurzweil, referenced below, builds on the same concept to posit that technology/human change has accelerated since time began and will continue to do so, resulting within 30 years in implanted brain chips that leverage our thinking capabilities the way our foot on the gas petal leverages our muscular capabilities). Anyway, back to the present. Broadband connectivity (medium band, really – until we get more competition in telecoms, the 100MB/sec links available throughout Seoul, Korea and other foreign cities will be a figment of our imagination here) just recently hit critical mass in the US. Broadband mobile phones (again, medium band vs other nations) will reach critical mass in the next three years. That $200/household for Internet ad spend represents only that revenue that has been derived from the move of print ads to the web; audio/video related advertising is at its inception (and is why Google paid $1 billion for the largest market/mind share position in that market. Audio search is well developed and will begin to be monetized via ads soon. Video search has further to go, but I have no doubt that Moore’s Law will bring the processing power required to do it to an economically viable level. The number of doublings in processing power/unit ($) of resources consumed just recently passed thirty. Given the exponential nature of this growth, however, the absolute gain from each doubling has now reached the point of delivering stupendous economic impacts (same applies to storage, where you can now easily buy Terabyte storage servers for less than $1000). For more on the law of accelerating returns associated with technology advances, see Ray Kurzweil.

Some talk about buying/selling advertising in terms of the current industry participants like Fox News. Although Rupert does get it regarding broadband Internet, very few organizations with the size and longevity of any of the existing broadcasting/media companies are ever able to make transformative changes to their business models. See Clayton Christensen, The Innovators Dilemna, for hard proof. The companies that break standard price points will have a different view of the economics/business model, just as Bill Gross (Idealabs) did when he invented the pay-per-click Internet advertising business model that Google has leveraged into a $150 billion market cap. Remember, Google did not even begin to sell search advertising until the 2001-2002 timeframe.

A final point about change in content/advertising markets – the Internet evidences and enables statistical distributions commonly known as the Pareto principle (80/20 rule). Chris Andersen of Wired wrote the signature piece on this phenomenon which he dubbed The Long Tail (link to his website, which links to article, book, Wikipedia, etc.) Andersen’s point is that for digitazable products/services, the changes wrought by the growth in interconnected and ever mor powerful communication/computational processing devices will enable the exploitation of demand that was previously unexploitable due to the lack of sufficient market scope to spread the fixed costs of production and distribution over. The fixed costs are now already incurred, in terms of the infrastructure of the Internet, and the marginal costs of distribution are virtually nonexistent. An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday."

Publishing & Advertising 2.0 – Part 1

2009-07-14T04:25:07Z

Publishing and advertising are undergoing structural transition last seen when Gutenberg’s press was invented. The Internet, and more specifically, the broadband Internet (which has reached critical mass during the last six years), eliminates the cost of distribution as an economic factor in media publishing and advertising. The fact that some businesses, including most of the historical advertising and publishing concerns, have not adjusted their business models has absolutely nothing to do with Bush or politics. For extended treatments of this subject, see Carlota Perez: Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital and Clayton Christensen: The Innovators Dilemna. For more concise observations in point of the facts of structural change in advertising business, I refer you to these:

Excerpt from Andy Kessler’s series of blog posts on Media 2.0 (Kessler is a money manager, investment banker & vc/hedge fund operator who also writes books (latest titled Running Money) and articles published by Forbes, Wired, LA Times, Am Spectator, Weekly Standard & WSJ)

So what is a Media Mogul to do? They control pipes in a world of zero margin costs. It costs virtually zero to sell one more digital song, or run one more digital ad or post one more digital classified. As chips and bandwidth get cheap, digital distribution crumbles the quaint old days.

* Craigslist took the classified ad business away from newspapers by doing it better for zero marginal cost. They charge for job listings in San Francisco and NY because, well because they have some bills that need to be paid. So classifieds were are huge profit center and are now,… , are worth almost nothing.

* Music is must cheaper to distribute in digital form than truck deliveries to record stores. Copyright issues be damned, listeners preferred digital music to be carried around in devices the size of a deck of playing cards or a pack of Wrigleys Chewing gum. Morpheus, Kazaa, BearShare, LimeWire gave customers what they wanted. iTunes barely makes up for the record labels missing the beat. Music may not want to be free, but it sure wants to be distributed for free.

* Voice calls via Skype, PC to PC, are free. They single-handedly yanked down the price umbrella of overseas calls to 7 cents a minute. The telcos had to respond to free.

* Newspaper and TV journalists had a long run as the trust voice of news. Now distributed bloggers can take turns scooping professionals. It’s not only that distributed news gathering is cheaper, its the zero marginal cost of distribution. Post it to a blog, get picked up by other blogs and search engines. Bask in glory. Rinse. Repeat.

In each of these examples, because of marginal costs approaching zero, it is increasingly a better business to provide technology to millions, even billions of folks rather than try to protect the control of a pipe to a few. The right answer is to GO WIDE. It’s time to get horizontal. Newspapers should have licensed Craigslist’s (or eBay’s) technology years ago. Telcos should have embraced or emulated Skype. Drop CDs and distribute all your music (and everyone else’s) online at a price that doesn’t protect retail, but destroys it (which is happening anyway!).

The time and the tools are ripe for this GO WIDE approach. Especially on the Web, which is nothing but layers and layers of functionality.

Bill Gates

This process will be hastened, he believes, as more and more television content moves online. “Internet TV and the move to the digital approach is quite revolutionary,” he says. “TV has historically has been a broadcast medium with everybody picking from a very finite number of channels. If you want content that is a local sports thing or a hobby that you are interested in, that’s not available to you. The use of the internet to deliver those video signals and the idea of seeing what you are interested in, and having the ads targeted to you, is becoming the standard way that video is delivered. Over the course of this next decade that will be very common.”

Internet advertising, aimed at niche audiences and more creatively ambitious, will provide a way round the increasing problem for advertisers of television viewers fast-forwarding through commercial breaks in shows that they have recorded. “It will be possible to target the ads and it will be important to have ads that the consumer doesn’t skip over, incorporated in the right way.”

Om Malik’s posts – Google… the OS for Advertising and The Web Money Machine – Beyond Adwords (author of Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist, writer for Red Herring, Business 2.0, Forbes, WSJ and now founder/executive editor for GigaOm.com)

excerpts:

Google’s core competency is to use technology in a manner that devalues and deflates4 traditional industries by extracting inefficiencies in existing processes. And the long-term strategic implications of this “Google effect” is much more disruptive than simple market realignment… rather, it’s an issue of rendering old core (human) competencies obsolete and replacing them with new ones reliant on automated, scalable technologies (much like what Wal-Mart did to retailing and what Craigslist is in the process of doing to classifieds). For instance, the only way for traditional media companies to leverage the core competencies they have today in order to compete with Google’s Ad/OS, in the long run, is to start breeding ad salespeople who will have the expertise and capability to sell across all media platforms. Sure, that’s feasible… when pigs can fly.

The media industry is in the middle of a massive change, thanks to the ubiquitous presence of broadband everywhere. Fast pipes are enabling niche networks, venture capitalists are investing in new media properties. The online video market resembles an old fashioned bubble, and companies are sprouting up like mushrooms after a fresh monsoon. All of this is predicated on one business model: advertising. Google bet $1.65 billion in chips on YouTube, betting that it can profit from this shift to online video. Their confidence is understandable: Google now accounts for 25% of all online advertising dollars.

Great Advice for Jobseekers!

2007-01-09T12:34:36Z

Although this post by Guy Kawasaki is six months old, his advice for Jobseekers has timeless value. A few excerpts are presented below, but there’s a lot of wisdom in this one, so don’t miss it.

The best way is to profess your love of the company’s product or service, and I literally mean “love” not “read about,” “have used,” or “looked at the web site.” If the company is at all enlightened, passion can overcome the lack of a “perfect” educational background and work experience.

… here’s the 1/2/3 Rule of Resumes:

1 page long.

2 key points.
3 sections. "Two key points" means that your resume should only have three sections: contact information, work experience, and educational background.

Bring copies of your resume to the interview

Answer the first question, “How are you?” with a great response. For example, a great response is, “I feel great. I’m really anxious to learn more about this job and tell you about myself, so that we can determine if we’re a good match.” In other settings, this question is an unimportant formality. In an interview it’s an opening to blow away the interviewer with your enthusiasm.

Get the scoop from the first interviewer. A job interview is a sales call: Listen to what the customer says she wants and then explain why you are the solution.

"What are you concerned about in filling this role?”

“What are the company’s greatest challenges?”

“What are the hot buttons of the other people I’ll be meeting?”

How can I immediately help this company? If you can’t help the company immediately, then maybe this isn’t the right company for you.

Provide your references on the spot. Print your list of references so that you can provide them in the interview—as opposed to providing them later. In general, try to anticipate every possible request that would turn into a follow-up item: providing references, sample work, examples from your portfolio, software that you’ve written, whatever.

If you really want to play the reference game at the highest level, ask your best reference to proactively call the interviewer.

Tell the interviewer you see a good fit and want the job if this is the truth.You’d also be amazed at how few candidates go for the close. You should clearly communicate that you want the job because aggressiveness counts for a lot in job interviews…

If you don’t think there’s a good fit, say so too. At least you’ll be remembered as an honest person. Perhaps the company will have a position in the future that is a good fit.

Great Picture!

2006-12-23T23:45:12Z

Not much to do with business or technology, but you might find this scene at the newground!

Squarespace

2006-12-15T00:17:32Z

NewGround’s web site, including this blog, is created within a web-based application developed and hosted by a company named Squarespace. This service, in my mind, would best be described as a Web 2.0 Content Management System (CMS). From a business perspective, I believe the Squarespace service offering represents a great value proposition. For $20/month, we get a web development and hosting platform that allows us (non-HTML proficient people) to create, store update/refresh, manage and publish our website, including this blog, I mention this because today I noticed this post on their customer service blog describing the recent launch on the same Squarespace service (and servers) of a much larger and much more heavily trafficked website (of former US House Majority Leader Tom Delay). The contents of that post not only raised my esteem for the Squarespace platform capabilities, but also underscore what a great value proposition it is – for Delay a great website/managed traffic service for $100/month versus several thousand to create the same capability for yourself.

Business Development 2.0

2006-12-14T23:42:45Z

According to a veteran IT venture capitalist and current Web 2.0 investor, the Web 2.0 phenomenon is producing changes in the job description for "business development" Fred says:

But the job of a business development executive is changing. You have to be more product focused, more technical, and focus on making deals where there is already user level integration happening.

In a previous post, Fred described how the public api’s published by Web 2.0 companies not only allow them to effectively partner without all the overhead of a business/legal deal, but also to do so much more quickly. Nevertheless, as a commenter on that post observed:

The BD guy has always been the guy who sees how two companies can play together. Today’s smart (good) BD guy simply works more with his in-house API guru and less with his Rolodex.

Competition in the “Last Mile”

2009-06-10T09:28:42Z

Via Susan Crawford, we learn that at least one government official understands what’s at stake in the telecom regulatory environment in Washington. In support of a recent report from the FTC’s Internet Access Task Force Commissioner Jon Leibowitz opines:

Let me begin by commending the staff for this Report. It begins the process of identifying guiding principles for our growing Internet competition mission. At least as importantly, to my mind the Report provides a powerful basis for the Commission to oppose, as part of our advocacy program, future attempts by states to limit or prohibit municipalities from offering broadband to their own residents. Some of these proposed laws address legitimate questions, but others are simply unconscionable.

In the same report, he also observes:

As an agency charged with enforcing the antitrust laws, we know the importance of competition well. Increased competition means lower prices and higher quality for consumers. But the lack of competition along the “last mile” of the Internet to consumers can have an even more profound effect than high prices in local markets. It can interfere with the growth and development of the Internet everywhere.

I suppose we should be happy that at least one commissioner "gets" it, and that his commission’s mission is to promote and advance the cause of fair competition, especially when the competitors and regulators in the communications industry seem to prefer unfair competition in spite of the harm it brings to our country, its commerce and its citizens.

Digital Storage & the Second Gutenberg

2009-06-10T09:29:05Z

n response to Wretchard’s post regarding the Second Gutenberg Revolution, I would submit that there is no need to worry about books as containers for human thought/history. Given the continually accelerating and exponentially declining cost of digital storage, I-Pods and similar devices with terabyte and petabyte storage capabilities are just around the corner. Consequently, it will soon be as easy for people to carry the Library of Congress plus the entire historical catalog of recorded music as it is to carry one’s cell phone. The Library of Congress would require approximately 80 terabytes of storage capacity, which at today’s cost of approximately $.40/GB, would cost about $30,000. Continued progression down this cost curve is certain, short of nuclear war, which means that the price/GB for data storage in 5 years will be under $.02/GB, at which point the Library could be stored for $1600. Another five years and the cost will be $1/TB (terabyte), or $80. Remember, an I-Pod is essentially a hard drive with earphones, and now a small video monitor, attached. Over 2 billion people currently own cell phones, and assuming trends for the last five years continue, that number will exceed 3 billion by 2010. The rate of decline in storage costs blows away the rate of decline in either cell phone costs or cost/minute of call time, so you can see where its all headed (eg, Apple’s announcement yesterday re: movie downloads). If your find these figures hard to fathom, remember that the first IBM PC included 64 MB of RAM; the current PC standard is 1 GB. Future archaelogists should not have to look too hard to find these devices. Furthermore, Google has already scanned all non-copyright protected books into its database, and others will follow suit. Finally, for those who don’t know about it, the Internet Archives (aka Wayback Machine) already contains an impressive database of historical Internet pageviews, music and other digital information (including most of the live performances of the Grateful Dead in high quality audio format). Check it out!

Caravan – Van Morrison & The Band

2006-08-31T22:25:53Z

Thanks to Scott at Powerline for this post celebrating Van Morrison’s 61st birthday and tipping me off to a video on YouTube of Van Morrison singing "Caravan" with The Band during their "Last Waltz". He makes the following observation about this particular performance:

Van’s performance with the Band is memorably documented on film in Martin Scorsese’s "The Last Waltz." Below, courtesy of YouTube, is the clip with Van and the Band performing "Caravan" from "The Last Waltz." Van steals the show. The camera catches Van with the barest hint of a smile as he triumphantly leaves the stage. "Hey, Van the Man," Robbie Robertson exults.

Here’s the YouTube vid:

New Business Ideas

2006-04-02T07:02:23Z

Although a bit dated, this post by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch provides a great list of seriously legitimate web-based business ideas. Will follow up on some of these later, but I thought this was a good link from which to begin my blogging here at NewGround Technologies.

Danger Ahead! Telcos Seek to Destroy the Internet

2006-01-07T02:59:56Z

These quotes aren’t linked because they were carried in numerous publications. The first one is a "mashup" of irrelevant irrationality, economic idiocy, and illogical childish "that’s not fair!" temper tantrum. Said differently, its just stupid!

"During the hurricanes, Google didn’t pay to have the DSL restored," said BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher. "We’re paying all that money."

Additional quotes from Bill Smith (BellSouth), Whitacre (SBC/att) and Seidenberg (Verizon) to be added later

Beam Me Up, Scotty!!!

2006-01-06T00:43:57Z

Scotsman.com News – Sci-Tech – Welcome to Mars express: only a three hour trip.

AN EXTRAORDINARY "hyperspace" engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government.

The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today’s New Scientist magazine.

Lots of Lessons

2006-01-01T09:23:46Z

Tom Evslin discusses Yahoo’s purchase of del.icio.us and touches on several issues of interest and/ or lessons to be learned. First, he uses this deal as an example to put down the the notion that a company must be built to generate earnings/cash flow in order to create value. Tom says:

Even if Joshua and company built del.icio.us only for resale, they created real value in aggregating users and creating a folksonomy – a user defined categorization and ranking of web content. They did a brilliant job of solving the dilemma of all network-value businesses – how do you get to critical mass when there is NO network value for the first users?

Real estate analogy holds, but lots more to it – risk, sub-market knowledge, etc.

Remember Metcalfe’s Law that the value of a network scales with the square of the number of users. This implies that big networks have huge value but also that small networks have almost no value at all, Makes it hard to get started.

Del.icio.us had value for user #1 even if it wasn’t “network” value. Tagging is a good way to remember all the web pages you may want to find again. That use doesn’t depend on any one else doing any tagging. So more and more people used del.icio.us to bookmark web pages for later retrieval.

Network value – build it and they will come?

Since the tags are public, anyone can use everyone else’s tags as a way to find information. So, as soon as enough people tagged for their own selfish purpose, their tags became useful to other people looking for web content. Moreover, there is information in how many people tagged a particular web site or blog. Popularity means something although it’s not always clear what. Soon del.icio.us had real network value and was off to the races.

First to market – ?

Del.icio.us got to a critical mass of users before its competitors. That’s crucial to a network business because this lead kicks off a virtuous circle. The network service with the most users has the most value to each new user. Other things being anywhere near equal, the larger network therefore gets more than its share of new users and grows faster than its would-be competitors. Aggregating users faster than anyone else is why Skype succeeded and it’s why del.icio.us succeeded as well.

"Cellular Networks Suck"

2005-10-14T06:42:51Z

From Broadband Reports:

"Cellular networks haven’t taken off [for data] because cellular networks currently suck. Badly. It’s our fault – we’ve done it badly," states Nokia’s Markku Hollstr�m to Silicon.com. Hollstr�m insists that while Wimax wireless broadband will have its niche, "WiMax is hype at the moment – and it’s pretty bad hype."

Picture Worth "A Thousand Words"

2005-10-14T00:54:47Z

Here is a great chart prepared by Martin Geddes of Telepocalypse, along with some comments excerpted from his post regarding Ebay’s acquistion of Skype. Together, they provide the best explanation I have seen for the strategic rationale underlying the deal. Not surprisingly, my web wanderings have yet to lead me to a financial rationale justifying the multibillion dollar price tag.

So, what’s the message? Really, it’s quite simple. Marketplace
enablers can be defined by the breadth f goods on offer, and the depth
of support for the transaction they offer. The picture shows how eBay,
Amazon and Google are currently positioned, and how Skype might be
positioned in future. The edges are “clipped” because not all
transactions go to the maximum depth; e.g. not all eBay auctions are
settled via Paypal, and Amazon sometimes hands off fulfillment to 3rd
parties. (The eBay region is made translucent — I hope it’s still
obvious which bits are eBay despite the colour transition.)

At one extreme, Google has a very broad business base (any
commercial transaction that can have an unambiguous keyword associated
with it). But it doesn’t do much beyond that.

At the other extreme is Amazon, which will encase your goods in gift
wrap and even deliver them to you personally when it comes to certain
digital goods.

eBay falls in the middle. Its business model is narrower and
shallower than these extremes, but perhaps encompasses a greater
“commercial land area” as a result.

The purpose of the Skype-eBay deal is to push eBay into a broader
realm of things for sale. For instance, if you want legal advice today,
Google is the only place to go search for it. Want a reputable lawyer
nearby? Sorry, the eBay reputation system doesn’t help you — yet.

Interestingly, Geddes wrote about the potential strategic value of Skype to Google a few weeks before the Ebay transaction. Here are a couple of excerpts from that post.

Putting together Skype and Google, whilst no match made in heaven, does have a lot of synergy. The Skype client, or something very like it,
has the potential to re-invent telephony. (That, after all, is the
point of the Stupid Network, not disintermediating legacy voice toll
charges.) It just requires you to stop thinking of telephony as an
application, and instead just see it as a feature of a bigger
communications framework.

The e-commerce value chain

Google is competing in a long transaction value chain that looks something like this:

Demand stimulation/market formation. Self-awareness of user need,
awareness of market solution. The domain of traditional marketing.

Capture attention. The user is presented with ads, and eventually
sees a proposed solution to a problem the user has. In the user’s mind,
the connection is ready to be made. In the olde world of directories,
this is (i) finding the category of vendors who match your problem
(often somehting that isn’t intuitive if you’re after something more
complex than a taxi or flowers), and (ii) filtering on the
locality/capability criteria you have. By the end of this stage the
user feels “I am aware of a potentially relevant solution to my
acknowledged problem”.

Connection. The user clicks on a link. The connection is only
one-way; the advertiser doesn’t know who the user is, or what they
really want. An extended Yellow Pages advert is the analogue version of
connection. The user is now engaged with a particular soltion provider and is paying attention to their message.

Contact. The user and advertiser engage in bi-directional contact.
The user presents some form of identity (e.g. gives a phone #, e-mail
address, etc.). This is like calling the 800 number.

Transact. The user’s requirements are codified, and a non-repudiable contract is formed to deliver some good or service.

Settle. Payment is remitted. A third party like a bank or Paypal is normally involved.

Fulfillment. The goods are despatched.

Delivery. The goods arrive.

Google’s competitors aren’t search engines per se. Google is competing
for transaction value chain slices against eBay, Amazon and even
vertical search like Craigslist.

….Google’s competitors aren’t search engines per se. Google is
competing for transaction value chain slices against eBay, Amazon and
even vertical search like Craigslist. Of course, chop off the search
engine leg today, and the Google animal as a one-trick pony falls over.
But Skype could equally be another leg on the Google animal.

….So Google = totally unstructured transactions with no integation of
user identity; eBay and Amazon = structured transactions, with limited
flexibility, and some user identity (but isolated within their commerce
island).

….Yahoo is a media company, and is unlikely to be the commerce bridge.
eBay is a real threat to Google, and eBay buying Skype would be a
setback for Google. It isn’t hard to see eBay aligning with, say, Ask
Jeeves and using all the Interactive Corp. properties as seeds for an
integrated search and transaction experience. Amazon is a similar
story. Microsoft has execution problems of its own, but knows what’s at
stake and has boundless cash and armies of developers to throw at it.
Google’s aura of invincibility is largely hubris. They need to
diversify up the transaction chain.

Damn good analysis and extraordinarily prescient and timely insights!

A VC: Point Solutions vs End to End Solutions

2005-10-06T03:59:51Z

In this post, Fred Wilson discusses A VC: Point Solutions vs End to End Solutions.

Point Solutions vs End to End Solutions

Six Sigma Software

2005-05-27T07:03:00Z

In this post, Nicholas Carr asserts that software will have to eventually reach Bell telco levels of reliability. I agree with this argument and believes it applies to almost all businesses. Disciplined focus on process management is the only sure-fire way to attaining this standard of reliability (also known as five nines (99.999+%).

With software forming an increasingly vital part of the infrastructure of the world’s economy, reliability, stability and security are paramount concerns. In the past, software companies routinely shipped bug-ridden programs, figuring they could patch and update them later. And their customers took what they were given. That’s history – or will be soon. In the future, the best business software companies will distinguish themselves by producing industrial-strength, bulletproof code – code that approaches Six Sigma standards.

Fred Wilson says we need a web standard for sharing music playlists!

2005-05-17T04:33:32Z

A VC known as Fred Wilson shares his perspective on the current "tower of babble" that has been created by online music distributors with their competing formats, playlists, etc. I share his view. Just think how easy it is to send a file list, which
most players autogenerate anyway, to your friends and family with
a note "check this out". If your musical tastes hold credibility, it
goes right into any web connected audio file playing device and out
comes the tunes.

Of
course, in all likelihood, none of those big companies like Apple,
MSCT, Yahoo or Real Media will be the winner. This space, as well as
the same one for videos, will be fun to follow. See Fred’s site for more info.

New Growth from the New Ground

2005-04-03T22:46:00Z

Another sturdy sapling sinks its taproot deep into the New Ground as Captain’s Quarters "breaks" the publication ban imposed by a Canadian judge regarding testimony delivered in his court this week. If true, this testimony implicates the Chretien and Martin governments and possibly the Liberal party itself, in complex schemes that channeled over $250 million in Canadian government funds to finance their election campaigns. For details on the story see the link. From the New Ground perspective, however, the key element in this story is the role played by blogs and the Internet in exposing the truth the fresh air and sunlight of free speech. More on this later.

A Rant: Zone Alarm Pro Firewall No Longer Works…

2009-07-14T05:03:24Z

And the company simply ignores the problem.

I am posting this for the benefit of those who do a Google search for ” vsmon.exe memory leak “, as well as anyone else considering the purchase of the Zone Alarms Pro software firewall. This program, vsmon.exe, is the core engine of the firewall and in any of the 5.0 releases of ZA Pro, many users are experiencing diminished system performance as this program consumes system memory in huge quantities (typically several hundred MB and oftentimes on my Dell PC (3.2Hz Pentium, 1GB RAM,Windows XP Pro-SP2) it will exceed 500 MB. It use to happen sporadically, but now occurs on a daily basis and often several times daily. Every time it happens, I have to shutdown ZA Pro and restart it.

Emails to their tech support bring no response. Innumerable posts to the company sponsored and maintained user forums from users experiencing the problem are consistently met with the same answers; either stop using P2P software, which they say causes the issue, or, do a clean reinstall of ZA Pro, or, drop back to an earlier version (e.g., the 4.5 release). All of these responses are completely unacceptable, from my perspective. I paid for a license of the 5.* release, not a 4.* release. I use a P2P program to sync files on three PCs, which is far more important to me than the continued use of ZA Pro. Finally, the re-installs are a waste of time. I’ve tried them repeatedly to no avail.

There
is no reason for Zone Alarm users to take Zone Labs’ (the company which develops and sells the software) support
personnel seriously when they repeatedly ignore this critical problem with their software. The “memory leak” is no longer an
annoying “feature”; it now impairs the software’s usability. Unfortunately, no one is stepping up to be accountable for resolving the malfunctioning code. The
fact that no moderator/support personnel will even acknowledge the
reality of their customers’ experience, as repeatedly described in the user forums, speaks volumes about this
company’s value system, as well as its management.

At this point, I will fix the problem myself by uninstalling Zone Alarm Pro, for the last time, ever! I will find another software firewall – there are lots of them available (i.e., it’s a commodity) and soon enough the one included in Windows XPSP2 will include all the functionality needed in a firewall (although it does not currently).

Finally, I am writing about my experience with the Zone Alarm Pro product and Zone Labs, the software company (now owned by Check Point), to exemplify the power of blogging (which was the original, primary theme of The New Ground Blog). Although my one post will not be sufficient to change anyone’s behavior, if other users also publicize their dissatisfaction, then anyone else experiencing the problem and searching the web for a solution will find our posts. Likewise, prospective purchasers researching the software will also be forewarned. Finally, the message might get through to someone at Check Point who cares and who can do something about the problem. Members of Check Point’s board of directors, perhaps? Significant shareholders? Check Point CEO or CTO, maybe? Someone at this company should be listening (or searching)!

Government as Communications Infrastructure Provider

2005-03-30T10:19:20Z

In spite of being an ardent free market propronent and a believer that less government is better than more, I am beyond beginning to believe, although not yet completely sure, that government would be the best WiFi provider. And I should add that maybe, maybe that could also be true for the physical wired network infrastructure (fiber-to-the-home/business) as well.

Should WiFi Be Public Infrastructure? (continued)
I hate logging in to all of these various hot spots. Each one has a different login, a different account, and the process is one big hassle.
I’ve begged for better wifi roaming and I’ve wondered if Wifi should be public infrastructure.
Yesterday, a reader sent me a link to this story about a silicon valley firm called AnchorFree that is putting up free hotspots that are sponsor supported.
That’s a lot better than the paid hotspots we have now, but what I really want is free Wifi everywhere. Or at least let me pay a monthly bill to someone and then get free wifi everywhere I go without having to deal with different vendors with different payment schemes and different login systems.
This is only going to become more important as we get wifi voip phones, wifi iPods with podcasting built in, wifi cameras, and wifi video.
I honestly believe that the cost of supporting public wifi is not that expensive and the benefits to the citizens of every city that does it is enormous.
UPDATE: A great post on the comparisons between public water projects in the 19th century and wifi today. It’s a very interesting read.