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March 30, 2007
TechNation audio interview
Moira Gunn of the syndicated NPR radio show TechNation interviewed me about tech industry developments and Supernova 2007.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:43 PM | Comments (0)
.XXX Marks the Spat
As Susan Crawford explains, ICANN's rejection of the .XXX top-level domain shows how the organization is still struggling with the basics of governance.
I have great respect for friends of mine like Susan, Joi Ito, and Esther Dyson, who have selflessly committed enormous energy and time to improving ICANN. I just can't get over the sense I've had all along, that the organization will never be better than an inertial force in the development of the Internet.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:14 AM | Comments (0)
March 28, 2007
My Own Private ICANN?
Susan Crawford reports that ICANN is discussing the possibility of becoming a "private international organization." I'm not sure exactly what that means, or whether it's a good thing. But it could be significant. ICANN has many problems, but it's a lynchpin holding the Internet as we know it together.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:50 PM | Comments (0)
A Strange SAP Press Release
What an odd press release from SAP. Shai Agassi, the company's wunderkind rising star, is leaving. Because he wants to devote more time to his personal passion for alternative energy. Or, because he's unwilling to wait until 2009 to take over as CEO.
Huh?
Maybe this is a cultural thing -- in the US, the release would just say that he "wants to spend more time with his family."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:20 PM | Comments (0)
Group Think
Tom Evslin explains (via Andy Kessler's interview with Mark Zuckerman) the secret to Facebook's success. The short version: it's about empowering existing groups online, not forming new ones.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:03 AM | Comments (0)
March 27, 2007
Small Whirrled
Twelve years ago, my brother Adam and I threw together a website and the beginnings of a book called Whirrled: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century. "Whirrled" sounds like "World" -- it was a pun on the fast-changing nature of the environment we found ourselves in.
The whole thing was something of a lark, an exploration of the technological and social trends surrounding the emergence of the Web that was itself web-like and open-ended. I almost got a book contract out of it, without even trying. In the end, Adam and I moved on to other things. I left the website up, but it hasn't changed since 1996.
So imagine my amusement when I read last week about a casual virtual world called Whirled, announced at the Game Developers Conference by a company called Three Rings. The guy behind it even contacted me about my Supernova conference, unaware that I'd done something with a similar name.
It was nice to have an excuse to go back and look at that old site. For all the changes since then, our wild predictions and theories retain a certain freshness. It's important not to lose that sense of wonder at what we're all experiencing and creating online.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:55 AM | Comments (2)
March 26, 2007
A Sad Day in the Blogosphere
Kathy Sierra, a well-known blogger and speaker on tech marketing, cancelled her participation in the Etech conference today due to a series of disgusting death threats in comments on her blog and others.
This is simply awful and unacceptable. Even assuming the best case -- that this was intended as a sick joke -- because the other option is too horrible to contemplate. I don't know the details of the situation, beyond Kathy's post, but I've seen plenty of things expressed in comments and email messages that would never be said face-to-face.
We should never forget that the Web is people. No one deserves to experience what Kathy is going through. And there's something wrong if the blogosphere encourages or even shrugs off such heinous behavior. We all ought to take a good look in the mirror.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:42 PM | Comments (0)
NY Times Spectrum Article
I'm quoted in John Markoff's New York Times article today about the 700 MHz spectrum auctions. The column grew out of a spectrum policy discussion I led a workshop last week, which John also attended.
My quote compresses a longer point I made, which hopefully comes through. It's that the direct transactional price of acquiring a spectrum license may not accurately reflect the economic and social value of certain spectrum uses. This was a key point of my Supercommons law review article. The 2.4 GHz spectrum where WiFi operates was considered worthless "junk" spectrum due to interference, but opened for unlicensed use, it is the foundation for massive investment and economic activity.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:46 AM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2007
The TV Guys Aren't as Stupid as You Think
With a few notable exceptions, the blogosphere is, predictably, dumping on the NBC-News Corp. announcement of a new video distribution service. Don't be so quick to write it off.
There are two ways to build an audience: aggregation and syndication.
Aggregation means bringing everyone to you. It's what the broadcast networks do on television, and what YouTube does on the Web. It's a two-step process: build scale, then monetize. I think most people get this model, although doing it effectively (especially the second part) is harder than it seems.
There's also syndication, which means distributing the content (or applications, or transaction opportunities) to where people already are. TV content producers do that too -- in fact, they largely invented syndication as a business model. And YouTube syndicates as well. I rarely go to the YouTube.com website, but I watch lots of YouTube videos embedded on blogs and other sites I visit. However, YouTube's revenues primarily come from leveraging viewership into visits to the central site, which creates and advertising and transaction opportunities.
The new NBC-News Corp. venture is all about syndication. They are getting beaten up for not having a name for the website, but as they made clear at the announcement, the central site is almost an afterthought. The core of the effort is syndicated distribution through a network of partners, like Yahoo! and MySpace. This is smart. Putting only some popular content into the syndication pipe isn't smart, but I predict that if the effort takes off, that limitation will go away soon. Notice that lots of midsize media companies are already syndicating through third parties, like Voxant and Brightcove. An effective monetization ecosystem for content needs three things: platforms, standards, and tracking data. That's what the current efforts are working towards.
Put aside the copyright rhetoric, which I agree is still overblown. This debate has never really been about "piracy" -- it's about business models and strategy: How big is the pie, and who gets which pieces. Don't underestimate the significance of big traditional media players acknowledging they need to follow their users to the Web.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2007
Vonage Injunction
The court just issued an injunction against Vonage in the Verizon patent litigation. Stayed for two weeks pending appeal, but this is serious.
Unlike the RIM-NTP litigation, Verizon isn't in this for the patent licensing revenues. Vonage is a direct competitor. It can't abuse its patent by refusing licensing entirely, but it certainly doesn't have the incentive to make it easy for Vonage to cut a deal.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:29 PM | Comments (0)
The FCC Net Neutrality Inquiry
The FCC launched its inquiry into network neutrality yesterday. As and I others have noted, this is essentially an attempt to bury the issue, by putting it on the slowest possible policy track. But it's still interesting to look at what the FCC is asking about.
The actual notice of inquiry hasn't been published yet, but the press release indicates that the FCC is seeking comment in four areas:
- How broadband providers are managing Internet traffic on their networks today
- Whether providers charge different prices for different speeds or capacities of service
- Whether our policies should distinguish between content providers that charge end users for access to content and those that do not
- How consumers are affected by these practices
The first and third one are quite interesting. One big problem with the Net Neutrality debate is that we don't have good information on how broadband access networks are being managed today. And the third question gets at the key business model clash animating the current Net neutrality fight.
It will be intriguing to see what comes back in the comments.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:36 AM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2007
Has Net Neutrality's Moment Passed? And What Might Replace it
Here's veteran telecom policy analyst Cynthia Brumfield's take:
One of the hottest topics in the Internet arena last year, net neutrality, is now just about one of the most boring ideas.
I attended the same Net Neutrality session as Cynthia at the VON conference yesterday. And to be truthful, I was surprised at the lack of energy and relatively light attendance, given the setting and the speakers. It may be that the grassroots energy behind Net Neutrality last year has dissipated.
Then again, the other surprising aspect of the panel was how much the debate may be changing. A good chunk of the conversation concerned recent actions by Cingular, Qwest, and Verizon to refuse to terminate calls to certain Internet-based conference-calling services. These services are taking advantage of an arbitrage opportunity caused by inflated termination rates in rural Iowa. However, it's unusual to say the least for phone companies to resort to "self-help" remedies, as opposed to going to the FCC and State regulatory commissions.
The other big issue on the panel was Skype's recent petition (and a similar paper by Tim Wu) advocating "Carterphone" principles for wireless. The argument is that wireless carriers should not be permitting to prevent users from connecting any phone or any application to their network.
Neither of these new developments is about Net Neutrality, strictly speaking. However, they tie into a broader debate about potential limits on network operators. Not to beat a dead horse, but I see interconnection, rather than non-discrimination, as the key issue here. That's particularly relevant in the Iowa situation, where the incumbent carriers are essentially asserting their right to refuse interconnection. That would be a very dangerous precedent to set.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:33 PM | Comments (0)
Hope for Internet Radio
Good news (potentially). The Copyright Royalty Board will rehear its decision to set performance fees for webcasters and Internet radio stations at exorbitant rates.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)
March 19, 2007
The Global Conversation
Cool site of the day: Twittervision. A live look at Twitter posts around the world.
It's like watching the firings of the neurons of the global brain.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 6:18 PM | Comments (0)
"Dearest One"
Wonderfully self-referential introduction to a Nigerian 419 scam email that somehow made it past my spam filters:
Before I introduce myself, I wish to inform you that this letter is not a hoax mail and I urge you to treat it serious,
Hmmm... I don't think I'll send this guy all my money.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:36 PM | Comments (0)
Atten...shun!
Ross Mayfield has some good thoughts on "Attention Abundance", linking to several useful blog posts by others.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:17 AM | Comments (0)
Paul Kouroupas of Global crossing groks what I articulated in my Only Connect paper, and another article I'm working on now: interconnection is the key Internet policy issue today. Even if what we're talking about is intellectual property.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:57 AM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2007
Meet me for drinks in San Francisco -- Wednesday 3/21
I'll be in the Bay Area briefly next week. I'm inviting friends to join me for drinks on Wednesday evening, before I head out to catch the redeye.
Wednesday, March 21
6:00-8:00pm
House of Shields
39 New Montgomery St.
San Francisco
Anyone reading this is welcome to come, but please email me so that I have a sense of how many folks will show up.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:51 PM | Comments (0)
It's Dialtone 2.0
More on Microsoft's plans for Tellme, from BetaNews.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)
Barack Obama and Technology Policy
I attended an event last night for Barack Obama outside Washington DC. As expected, he's impressive. What shocked me wasn't him, but everyone else there. Most of the extraordinary team I had the privilege of working with at the FCC in the late 1990s was under that tent. Along with quite a few other technology policy experts I deeply respect. This bodes extremely well for an Obama administration.
What many people don't appreciate about government is that successful policies require both leadership and implementation. I truly believe that the extraordinary creative energy of the Internet was unleashed, in part, because we had visionary leaders in Clinton and Gore, along with exceptional implementors at the White House, FCC, and other agencies. If you care about technology policy, therefore, don't just look at what the candidates are saying... look at who is working for them.
From talking with my friends who are most active in the Obama campaign, it's clear that this guy is on fire. Watch what happens when the first-quarter fund-raising numbers are released in a few weeks. I may need to revise my prediction about the 2008 race. At that point, I thought Obama couldn't win, but I'm starting to change my mind.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:00 AM | Comments (1)
Here Comes the FCC Net Neutrality Inquiry
The FCC is scheduled to release its Notice of Inquiry on network neutrality at its open meeting next Thursday. Gentlemen, start your engines!
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)
Superdistribution and Syndication
What Fred Wilson is talking about as superdistribution is really what I called syndication in my 2000 Harvard Business Review article.
Superdistribution got a bad name because it was associated with digital rights management (DRM). But as Fred explains, its bigger and different than that. And it's bigger than the web 2.0 notion that every consumer can also be a producer.
In a syndication ecosystem, every consumer can be not only a producer (which I called "originators" in my framework), but also a syndicator (who finds, packages, refines, and aggregates assets) or a distributor (who manages the delivery of the assets to end-users). They can even be more than one of those things, or play different roles in different contexts. And this model isn't limited to content; it applies to commerce and applications as well.
As Fred observes, we're getting close to realizing the syndication model. There are already some great success stories, starting with Google AdSense (a multibillion dollar, insanely profitable business).
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2007
Club Penguin
Why does no one ever mention Club Penguin when discussing social networks and virtual worlds?
Based on my wholly anecdotal and non-scientific survey, approximately 73% of pre-MySpace kids (ages roughly 6-12) are using it. For all we know, it might be bigger than Second Life in both free and paid subscribers. My 4-year-old even seems to find it more addicting than World of Warcraft, much to my chagrin.
Update: Over one million monthly Club Penguin users, according to this article. Way more than Second Life, as Clay Shirky's sleuthing demonstrates. Sure, Second Life is a bigger cultural phenomenon, but a million monthly uniques (and growing) is nothing to sneeze at.
Update #2: Apparently Club Penguin is now seeing 3-4 million monthly unique users. A few smart folks in the games world, like Raph Koster, have also picked up this.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:08 PM | Comments (0)
Doc's Take on Net Neutrality
Doc Searls concludes his critique of an anti-Net neutrality column by my former boss Bob Pepper with the following:
Neutrality may be an important Net virtue, but arguing for it distracts from three things that deserve more attention: 1) what the carriers are doing wrong; 2) what the carriers could be doing right (for their sake and everybody else's); and 3) the need to open the market to more and better offerings at the local level.
This is completely in line with my argument that what really matters is not neutrality, in the sense of non-discrimination, but the interconnection practices of network operators.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:52 PM | Comments (0)
How to kill a great service
Verizon Wireless wants to charge me $1.99/month to program my Tivo over the phone.
WTF!?!
Get real, guys. This service is a long-overdue missing link to connect the mobile and home media ecosystems. It could be huuuuge. But limiting it to one carrier, and charging a nickle-and-dime monthly fee, is the surest way to kill it.
If you don't grok this yet, go read Josh Kopelman's fantastic post on the "Penny Gap."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)
Cisco's Big Deal
Cisco is buying Webex for over $3 billion. That's a substantial amount even for Cisco, a company known for aggressive M&A. It's especially significant because Webex doesn't make any of the things Cisco is known for -- routers, wireless devices, network management services, etc. It offers web-based software for online collaboration. This deal comes after two smaller social networking acquisitions, Tribe.net and Five Across.
Clearly, something is afoot at Cisco. When you see a company strike out in a radical new direction like this, it's usuaully a sign of panic (the core business is dying), or a response to a competitor's actions. Neither seems to be the case here. Cisco weathered the crash, and is now doing very well thank you in its traditional markets. And I don't see Juniper, or Nortel, or Sun, or Alcatel, or Siemens going gaga over social networking and collaboration software. So what gives?
Cisco is either being brilliant or idiotic. I incline toward the former, as I explained earlier this month. Even if they are wrong, though, it says something significant about the state of the industry and its future. If I were looking at key trends, I'd sure want to know just what Cisco is thinking.
Makes me extra-glad Cisco will be the premier sponsor of Supernova 2007....
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:33 AM | Comments (0)
Law and Switching Costs
University of Chicago law professor Randy Picker hits on a significant issue in his blog entry on the legal aspects of switching costs.
As more an more of our data resides in the cloud, who controls it? And what are the legal mechanisms to either protect or pry open that that data? As Picker observes, sometimes the issue is seen as copyright, sometimes antitrust, and sometimes telecom regulation.
It's these important questions falling between different legal domains that are often the hardest.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2007
Net neutrality and capacity investment
Harold Feld has an interesting discussion of a new paper by three economists, arguing that network neutrality rules would produce more investment in broadband capacity.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:18 PM | Comments (3)
The Long Head of Startups
Congratulations and good luck to my friends Mike McCue, Angus Davis, and the others at Tellme. I've been excited about this company since I met with the founders at the early stage of the startup, 6 or 7 years ago. Mike and co. deserve a lot of credit for weathering the dotcom bust, and emerging changed but stronger. Most people still don't appreciate the deep significance of what they are doing, merging telecom and the Web at the infrastructure level. I hope this works out well for both Tellme and Microsoft; as with any acquisition, time will tell.
I'd still love to have seen Tellme try to realize its grand vision as an independent company, but the reality is that's tough to do. It's cheaper than ever to start a tech company today, because so much of the platform is already out there and standardized, and so many of the tools are free or nearly so. On the other hand, it may be harder than ever to reach escape velocity as an independent actor. Not just to go public, although that's also not easy any more, but to become a major player in your own right. Google and Salesforce.com are the last two I can think of, and both started well before the end of the prior bubble. The stakes are higher, the scaling issues are tougher, and the landscape is more crowded.
In other words, if you graphed the fitness landscape for today's startups, you'd see a mirror image of the famous long tail curve. Lots of companies coming in, at very low cost, but a higher and taller mountain than ever to scale at the back end. Very few companies will reach the last local optimum, where we find YouTube, Skype, and Tellme -- the billion-dollar (or nearly) acquisition. Maybe no one will scale the final cliff. That's different than the environment of the last boom, where the landscape looked more like the traditional bell curve.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:01 PM | Comments (0)
Misunderstanding Network Neutrality
Drew Clark at GigaOm reports on the outcry among network neutrality supporters over concerns that Google is backing away from its pro-neutrality position. This is a big misunderstanding, but it highlights the weakness of the current net neutrality debate on both sides.
As I explain in my Only Connect paper, there are two ways to think about network neutrality, and about the broader challenge of network infrastructure policy. One is to focus on discrimination. That's what most net neutrality proponents do, following the argument of Columbia law professor Tim Wu. The problem is that discrimination is hard to define, hard to demonstrate, and not always bad.
Fortunately, there's an alternative. The better way to understand network neutrality is to focus on interconnection: the rich web of open connectivity between unaffiliated networks that makes the Internet, well, the inter-net. Potential actions by dominant network operators to break the Internet interconnection model are what will cause the innovation-killing effects that network neutrality proponents are (justifiably) concerned about. And making rules for interconnection turns out to be much easier than doing so for discrimination.
In concrete terms, here's the difference. What Google's global policy counsel (and in full disclosure, my friend and law school classmate) Andre McLaughlin said to kick of the firestorm was that differentiated quality of service (QOS) is OK, as long as it's available to anyone who will pay. This is no different than the current situation, where all major websites pay a content delivery network (CDN) such as Akamai, or pay to self-provision a CDN, in order to deliver popular content quickly and efficiently to their users. Those who don't pay for CDNs are disadvantaged, just like those who don't buy enough bandwidth for their network connections, but that's their economic choice. Sure, the startup YouTubes of the world can't afford the CDN overhead on day one, but if they take off, that's where the venture funding, and revenue flows, and Google buyout dollars go. And we should keep in mind, as a Google spokesperson told Clark, that most of the QOS notions that network operators are floating simply don't work in practice.
So, put aside all the conspiracy theories. If supporters of network neutrality don't have room in their big tent for the view Andrew expressed, they are really in trouble. (Taking a few comments from one company representative out of context doesn't help either.)
Trust me, I'm on the side of the debate that sees a threat to the future of the Internet. I've been there since at least 1999, when I wrote an issue of Release 1.0 called "The Architecture of Internet 2" about the danger closed broadband networks posed for innovation and user empowerment. It important, though, to see the issues for what they really are.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:29 AM | Comments (2)
Open Data Workshop
Sounds like Seth Goldstein's Open Data Workshop 2007 was a good discussion about an important topic. As usual, Seth is ahead of the curve. A great many companies and industries will need to figure out how to leverage user data in ways that are open, responsible, and profitable, all at the same time.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)
Information Gets What it Wants
So Viacom sues Google/YouTube, seeking $1 billion in damages for copyright infringement. The blogosphere goes nuts. The usual suspects have the usual response. Larry Lessig objects. Mark Cuban cheers. Umair Haque says something provocative. Etc.
Why is anyone surprised? The shocking thing, to me, was that Google had so much success buying off and negotiating with the major media companies after it purchased YouTube. Those companies appreciate that they are making "bet the company" decisions. They risk handing the keys to the kingdom to someone else, as IBM did when it gave the DOS monopoly to Microsoft, and Yahoo! did when it gave handed its search capability to Google. On the other hand, the smart executives in the content industries (and believe me, they do exist) understand they can't if they stick their heads in the sand and hope that online distribution and user control go away. It's a high-risk game of chicken. And legal uncertainty is part of the equation.
There is a well-known legal aphorism that "hard cases make bad law." In this case, we've already got a bad law. Two of them, in fact -- the 1996 Telecommunications Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I'm not sure the courts, however they decide, will necessarily make things worse. Maybe the Viacom lawsuit will be settled, and maybe it will just reinforce the ongoing ambiguity of the Napster and Grokster decisions. Or maybe it will provide a bit of clarity in a muddled, muddled situation.
But here's the good news. The smart money here is playing a long-term game. Whether copyrighted material gets onto YouTube or iPods without authorization isn't important in the grand scheme of things. It's just the surface tension stirred up by a deep destabilization of the media value ecosystem.
The real question is what comes next. What funds the production of good and worthwhile and valuable content, especially the critical subset that is both popular and expensive to produce? (And yes, I know those are loaded words.) There will be multiple answers, but few if any of them are operational and proven today. Information goods, and especially experience goods, are not just about transactional efficiency. The "products" themselves are made of the same raw material -- networked digital bits -- as the mechanisms that move and transact them. Recursivity begets complexity.
It's a hard, hard question. But it's one I'm confident will be answered. It has to be. As Stewart Brand famously said more than 20 years ago, information wants to be free... but information also wants to be expensive. And, if I could add a corollary, it's this: information eventually gets what it wants.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:50 AM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2007
Yes, I'm Twittering
I may not have been at SXSW or TED the past few days, unlike every other techie I know. But I'm participating in the greatest online fad since that coffee machine webcam back in the day. Yes, I'm playing with Twitter. Please, come and be my friend!
In all seriousness, Twitter is rather ingenious, and useful in rather fascinating ways. If you haven't caught the bug yet, it's a hybrid blogging/IM/SMS messaging service that works across the web and mobile phones. It's made by Obvious Corp., run by Blogger co-creator (and past Supernova speaker) Evan Williams. Over the past week, Twitter adoption has exploded. I'm not sure how well it will scale without significant changes, but it's fun to watch and participate in the boomlet.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:09 PM | Comments (0)
March 9, 2007
The Description of Life
"Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plans and stored in the form of complex carbon molecules."
-- Michael Pollan, from The Omnivore's Dilemma
I must say, I've never heard it put quite that succinctly before.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:21 PM | Comments (0)
Metaweb
Legendary computer scientist Danny Hillis is finally taking the covers off of Metaweb, his startup that is creating an intelligent database of online information. The new service is called Freebase. It integrates existing resource with user contributions, using structured semantic web techniques for mapping relationships.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:17 AM | Comments (0)
March 8, 2007
The latest patent eruption
The jury in the Verizon-Vonage patent litigation just returned a verdict in favor of Verizon, finding that Vonage infringed on VOIP patents. It ordered Vonage to pay $58 million, plus 5.5% of revenue in royalties (about $1/user/line). And the judge still has the option of ordering an injunction against Vonage.
Vonage has lots of problems, and I've been skeptical of its prospects as a standalone company for a while. But this could be a huge drain on what is still a financially uncertain business. I'd expect the decision to be appealed, and potentially settled.
Even so, it's potentially a dark cloud for other VOIP providers. Verizon isn't just a bunch of investors and lawyers looking to get rich; it's a major competitor of those VOIP companies. I don't expect it to hold back in using its patents as a competitive weapon. And one can only wonder what fundamental patents lurk in the depths of the new AT&T, waiting to be dragged out against new competitors....
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:54 PM | Comments (0)
The Celestial Jukebox Nears
I just experienced a small convergence revelation. I used Amazon.com's Unbox video download service to transfer a movie directly to my Tivo.
Really slick. Beats having to wait for Netflix to deliver DVDs to my mailbox, as well as the limited selection, high prices, and poor interface of my Comcast On-Demand. I realize those other options will get better, along with other alternatives like downloading a movie to my XBox or getting it through a P2P network such as Joost.
It's all part of the long-awaited arrival of the celestial jukebox. All media, anywhere, instantly... it's manifest destiny. Even the confusion, fragmentation, and hesitancy of the major media and consumer electronics companies can't prevent this future; they can only slow it down.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:05 PM | Comments (0)
March 7, 2007
Google Phone
Simeon Simeonov has a fascinating post on his blog about the skunkworks project to develop a Google Phone. It's being run by Andy Rubin, the former CEO of Danger, which makes the T-Mobile Sidekick. He reportedly has a team of 100 people -- this isn't just one of those experimental side projects.
This could get really interesting. Google, unlike Apple, could be the company that tries to blow up the existing business model of the cellular companies. A Google phone could tie together its involvement with municipal wireless and other alternative infrastructure platforms such as Fon and Current Communications.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:29 AM | Comments (0)
Strange Bedfellows
This is fascinating. Microsoft is attacking Google for failing to respect copyright. It cites Google's controversial Book Search service, the YouTube acquisition, and Google's alleged willingness to sell search keywords for pirated software.
Much of this is PR, trying to reposition Google as the "bad guys" and Microsoft as the "good guys." But there's also a deeper alignment going on between Microsoft and the major media companies. On the other side are not just the usual suspects from the tech community, but also the network operators such as phone companies. They don't want to be held liable for copyright infringement on their networks, and they don't like being forced to serve as agents of the content owners in rooting out infringement. What's interesting is that the battle lines are entirely different around network neutrality. There, Google and Microsoft are on the same side, with the network operators in opposition.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:53 AM | Comments (0)
March 5, 2007
Bye Bye Web Radio?
Michael Robertson, the outspoken founder of MP3.com, Linspire, and Gizmo, posted the following estimates to a list I'm on. It's the annual copyright licensing fees that leading webcasters have to pay under new rules established by the Copyright Royalty Board:
AOL Music - $20MM for 2006
Live365 -$53.6MM for 2006 (3.6MM in royalties plus $500 times 100K
stations which costs $50MM)
Pandora - $70MM for 2006 (20MM for royalties and lets say they have 100K
stations which costs 50MM - I have created 3 of them for myself over
time. Depending on how you count they could have millions of stations
taking their liability to hundreds of millions - hell even BILLIONS.)
Michael described these numbers (which, by the way, increase 20% or more per year after 2007) as "ludicrous." It's hard to disagree. Until 2005 there was a special exemption for small webcasters, but that appears to be going away. It seems like another case of the music industry shooting itself in the foot.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:52 PM | Comments (0)
The Bells' Challenge
Om Malik points to some numbers of UBS Research on how the incumbent phone companies are losing market share to cable VOIP, and pushing video as their salvation.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:04 PM | Comments (0)
March 4, 2007
Cisco and social networking
Cisco is buying the technology assets of Tribe.net, not long after acquiring Five Across. Reaction in the blogosphere has been a collective WTF. Why does a company that sells big iron routers want to get into social networking?
Cisco is being smarter than people realize. The future is about convergence -- both horizontally across different kinds of networks and media, and vertically between infrastructure, applications, and content. There's a bad way to do convergence, which is the vertical integration by network operators that Net Neutrality proponents are upset about. But there are also good, more open, ways to link across network layers and platforms.
Cisco gets this. It was ahead of the curve in putting intelligence into the logical layer of the network, adding quality of service, security, and other functionality to its routing platform. And now it realizes that users are increasingly going to use the network for social purposes, especially those involving rich communications and media. Seeing Cisco, or its customers, as ineluctably creatures of the network infrastructure layers, far removed from everything above, is excessively narrow, old-world thinking.
These deals may turn out to be too early, or too expensive, or the wrong team, or may fail for any number of other reasons. Don't be shocked, though, if Cisco finds gold in social networks.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:52 PM | Comments (0)
March 2, 2007
Interconnection in Action
No sooner do I post my interconnection paper, than the FCC goes and proves my point. Yesterday, they issued an order requiring incumbent telephone companies to interconnection with wholesale providers carrying voice over IP calls.
Rural carriers were simply refusing the VOIP traffic, on the grounds that it isn't a regulated "telecommunications service." Another argument I've made for several years is that the FCC's approach of treating Internet-based activities as crypto-unregulated "information services," while justified early on, has outlived its usefulness. Pretending this stuff is still outside of the mainstream of communications does more harm than good. It's becoming the mainstream.
And meanwhile, Skype's recent petition for a "new Carterphone principle" requiring wireless carriers to support unaffiliated services on their handsets has appeared in the FCC electronic comment system.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:15 PM | Comments (0)
The 700
Later this year, the FCC will auction off 60 MHz of wireless spectrum in the 700 MHz band, which is being freed up by the relocation of UHF television stations. The 700 MHz auction has been repeatedly delayed for years due to political battles, but under current law, the FCC must conduct the auction before January 2008.
This may all sound like more obscure FCC wonkery, but it's a big deal if you care about the future of the Internet and broadband. (I was reminded of this by a recent report from the always insightful Blair Levin, a former FCC colleague who is now a research analyst for an investment bank.) Radio waves at lower frequencies like these propagate better. So, the 700 MHz band is ideal for services that cover a large area, including penetrating trees and walls. Like TV, of course, but unlike the shorter-range cellular phone and WiFi services of today. Moreover, the auction is attracting several radically new proposals for how the spectrum would be used.
One proposal, which the FCC itself is floating, is to allow unlicensed use of the so-called "white spaces" around the licensed frequencies. This would be a huge boon to all sorts of wireless innovation and new services. Some other proposals, not mutually exclusive, are coming from the private sector. Cyren Call and Frontline Wireless, two companies led by my fellow FCC alumni (Morgan O'Brien in one case, Reed Hundt in the other), have novel proposals for combining public safety and commercial uses to take advantage of the new spectrum. And we could well see other novel ideas come out of the woodwork as bidders start to line up for the auction.
Pay attention to this one.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)
Not my last FM
I'm in the mood for some background music I have fairly eclectic tastes, and like to find new music. In the past, I've enjoyed using Pandora a web-based service that recommends new music based on a massive database that categorizes songs on multiple dimensions. It's very nicely done, but the options are pretty limited.
A similar service that I've known about for a while is Last.fm. Where Pandora was initially built on a human-generated "Music Genome," Last.fm is community-driven. It's one of the wonderful examples of peer production, like Wikipedia and Digg. Some of my friends are involved with the company, and I've always thought it was very cool. But I'd never tried using it. So, earlier this week, I did. And I'm completely lost.
First of all, there are a million different options. Many seem to revolve around social networking rather than listening to music. I'm bewildered trying to figure out how to simply play some music. For unclear reasons, there's a Web-based version and a downloadable client (which I installed), with completely different user interfaces, and I have trouble making heads or tails of either of them. There's all this talk about "scrobbling," which I gather just means the site tracks what songs I listen to, but other than the ability to say that I "love" a track that's playing, I don't see how I actually train the system toward my preferences.
Worse, other than the first time I installed it, and once briefly the next day, Last.fm simply hasn't worked. Whether using the client or the website, it just says "tuning into station" or something similar, and hangs. No sounds emanate from my speakers, no matter what I select. I found a few other people complaining of similar problems on the forums, but no solutions anywhere. My Internet connection is running fine, I'm not behind a firewall, I can play music through other services, and this happened both on my home and work connections.
I'm left to think that, while Last.fm is a service I'd like to like, the execution is just lacking. Too bad.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:53 AM | Comments (1)
March 1, 2007
Wharton Economic Summit
The Wharton School, where I'm a professor, was the world's first collegiate school of business. We've been celebrating our 125th anniversary this year.
The finale event is the Wharton Economic Summit, a conference that will be held in Philadelphia on April 12-13. It has a great line-up of speakers, including Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal, financier and philanthropist Michael Milken, and Wharton's own stock market guru, Jeremy Siegel. And... somewhat further down the program... it has me, moderating on panel on "The Future of Technology: On-Demand Society."
In all seriousness, it should be a great conversation, featuring renowned HP researcher Bernardo Huberman, the always-insightful business strategy consultant Christopher Meyer of Monitor Networks, and George Pohle, head of IBM's Institute for Business Value. And the rest of the agenda isn't too shabby either. If you're interested in the future of business and the economy, I hope you'll join us at the event.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:49 PM | Comments (0)