03.30.07
Venture information aggregation
Here is a nice web site that aggregates venture information together called Discoverion: http://www.discoverion.com
01.23.07
Accredited Investor
At an open meeting on December 13, 2006, the SEC voted to propose a change to the definition of “accredited investor” that, if adopted, would apply to offers and sales of securities issued by hedge funds and other private investment pools to “accredited natural persons”. The proposal requires “accredited natural person” to be both “accredited investors” under the existing standards and own not less than $2.5 million in investments (as currently defined in the Investment Company Act for purposes of the Section 3(c)(7) exemption) on the date an investment is made. The $2.5 million test will be periodically adjusted for inflation.
The SEC release estimates that the accredited natural person definition, if adopted as proposed, would significantly reduce the number of U.S. households that are eligible to invest in private investment vehicles. By the SEC Staff’s calculation, approximately 8.47% of U.S. households currently qualify for accredited investor status under Regulation D. The Staff estimates that this percentage would drop to approximately 1.3% with respect to investments in private investment vehicles if the accredited natural
person standard is adopted.
This would be interesting if adopted as it has a lot of implication to smaller PE funds…
12.04.06
Multimedia - the next battle ground
Given recent YouTube success, there are many interesting startups now concentrate on the video and music multimedia space ranging from P2P Video delivery that I mentioned in my blog before to media marketplace and movie download and rental services.
Movie download and rental services have been existing for a while. Recent entry from Amazon and soon-to-come ClickStar adds more competition and validation to this market. Here are a bunch I see in the market place: (I round up the number to make price simpler)
| Name | Service | Price |
| AOL Video | Purchase | $10 - $20 |
| Amazon Unbox | Rent or Purchase | $1.00 - $20 |
| CinamaNow | Rent or Purchase | Free - $20 |
| ClickStar | Rent or Purchase | Free - $25 |
| Guba | Rent or Purchase | $1 - $10 |
| iTunes | Purchase | $10 - $15 |
| MovieLink | Rent or Purchase | $1 - $20 |
| Starz | Rent | $10 per month |
| TotalVid | Rent or Purchase | $10 per month |
| Vongo | Rent | $10 per month |
If you are looking for market place, there are a few jumping on the theme that allows independent producers to sell their content online directly to content aggregators or consumers. This is sort of like a ebay marketplace for digital content. The notable ones are inDplay for motion picture and Pump Audio for music.
A lot of these will depend on how quickly and cheaply the last mile broadband can be deployed. In addition, this business takes a lot of funding, deal marking, legal protection and content. The destination is clear, the timing is a little fuzzy, business model is evolving and startups tend to be a hero when they got bought or road kill in the end
11.21.06
Commoditization in voice mail
It used to take $30 a month to get a local voice mailbox that linked with your e-mail account, then the price got slash to around $10 and stayed there for a while,. Last year, eVoice started to provide the local voicemail service for $4.99 per month, now NetZero just pushed out a service called PrivatePhone that provides a Free local phone number and voicemail services. What a deal! A free local number where people can reach you and leave a voicemail that is then delivered to your e-mail quickly as a wave file. I can see many uses for this services such as ebay sellers who don’t want to give out their numbers directly to buyers, people who is looking for online date and don’t want to share their private number initially, or an international busiess that wants to look like a US business. I think technology has really changed the landscape of the traditional telecommunication industry. After Skype, nothings looks the same anymore….
11.19.06
Infrastructure change
I noticed that my site became slower and slower during the last few months. So recently, I finally decided to bite the bullet and transfer my blog to this new hosting provider called Bluehost. This is not an easy transfer as I need to use the phpadmin to export all of my wordpress blogs from my old provider and then imported into the new mysql database on this new hosting site. It took me a while to figure out the process as this is not as simple as FTP all files over. Now everything seem to be in place, I can get back to blog more…
I found Bluehost’s server to be fast, SSH enabled and provide a lot of open source tools that I can quick install and use. When I performed round trip testing from various global locations to the old site, I used to get close to 5s - 9s of round trip time, now the delay drops to between 1s - 3s. A much better performance. I guess my previous assumption that cheap hosting providers are pretty much the same is probably wrong, but during this process, I did find a comparison chart on hosting providers that is quite useful.
11.07.06
P2P Video
With YouTube’s lofty price, everyone is talking about Video distribution. Given the high bandwidth requirement of a video content vs html and voice, many people start to target P2P as a distribution mechanism. Businessweek has a blog on this topic recently regarding the Venice Project, a P2P startup from the Skype and Kazaa founders. This might not be as successful as the spype for the following reasons:
- Venice is kind of late given there are a bunch of startups in this space already such as Voeh, NeoEdge, Red Swoosh, and skyrider. Of course, none of them has the same influence as Skype and Kazaa, but it would not take long before one or two of these vendors get acquired by large media vendors and then the space become crowded quickly.
- Infrastructure vendors like Cisco is now working on P2P content distribution on its router and blades, so in a way, people will get the 80% of the cost benefits without downloading a client because the cost of the infrastructure will fall quickly once this is in place.
- There is no better player on P2P than Microsoft given its global reach and ubiquitous installation. All Microsoft needs to do is to put P2P technology (either its own or from a acquisition) into the Vista platform, it would change the landscape overnight. Extending this logic, all it takes is a large PC vendor (ie. HP, Dell, Levono) to endorse and distribute with one P2P vendor, the landscape will change permanently.
In my mind, P2P is no longer a technology play as the technology is maturing, this is more of a marketing, sizing, and content play.