09.25.06

Take your PC/data with you

Posted in Technology Ventures at 5:07 pm by Ray Wu

RingCube, with its mojopac product, just got $4M of funding from NEA. It essentially allows you to carry your computer with you on a portable device. I think it is a cool idea. If you want to know more, Matt from VentureBeat has a good write-up on this.

In my mind, people have been and are trying to solve this PC/Data access issue from various angles and each one of them has its place in the market depends on what you want:

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09.22.06

Noise on the Internet

Posted in Technology Ventures, Random thoughts at 3:33 am by Ray Wu

It seems that there are just too many blogs on the Internet (including this one). Blog is a great system that allows anyone to voice his/her opinion, but are we really creating something meaningful or just duplicate each other’s opinion? People continuously to find ways to trick the search engines. Trackback is becoming a marketing trick like a link farm. How much of the news are true vs rumors, and even worse, pure noise on the Internet? As more of more content becomes available, it places a bigger challenge for any legitimate content providers to make their voice heard. In my mind, even google search engine starts to lose its potency, many and many results coming back are just not that relevant anymore. I guess that’s why there are so many vertical search engines around now….

09.20.06

Partner with large companies

Posted in Technology Ventures, Events at 1:47 pm by Ray Wu

As a startup, there is a tendency to wonder when and how to partner with a large company like HP. Since I am speaking in a SDForum event this afternoon on this topic, here are my thoughts at this moment

  • Know your objectives well. Understand what exactly you want to get out of this partnership. Is it marketing, sales, OEM, joint R&D, investment, or M&A? Once you know your objectives well, it is much easier and clearer when you communicate in the discussion
  • Study your potential partner. This applies to both the organization and product areas. Once you clearly defined your objective, know how the other company is organized. Who are the decision makers, influencers and your champions in the company? This reminds me of a good book called Selling to the Top which seems to apply the same principal even though it is mainly written for the sales. Try to ping down the organization chart and measurements. Nothing waste more time than working with a person whose goal is not aligned with yours. In addition, know the product areas. Don’t come into a large company and try to indicate you want to partner on everything because it just does not help whomever you are working with to focus and get the results out quickly.
  • Consider timing. If you are a small startup and do not have the man power or the engagement bandwidth, don’t start the partnership dialogue unless you know the key executives there. Even if you know the key executive who is willing to sponsor you, you still need to put enough financial and time allocation to this endeavor because anything it normally takes a while to get something done.

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09.19.06

Linkedin

Posted in Technology Ventures, Random thoughts at 11:57 am by Ray Wu

I have been using linkedin since it started because I know one of the founders relatively well. One of the major benefits I recently discovered is how to recruit using that network. I am able to get 6 - 8 qualified leads for the job I am posting after I blasted out a message within my network 2 days ago. Like a lot of people, I don’t seem to need to post in the linkedin job board to get what I am looking for.

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09.18.06

Distribution infrastructure for video and music

Posted in Technology Ventures at 1:54 am by Ray Wu

With popularity of music and video on MySpace.com, iTune and YouTube.com, the web is getting more crowded by the day. According to Akamai and Yankee, a typical music file is about 5M in size, and a typical movie is about 1500M. Compare to a typical web page at 100K or less, that is 50x - 15000x magnitude change. What this means is that as more and more bandwidth is consumed for multimedia content. The long forgotten fiber backbone will light up and more service provider infrastructure is going to be needed to distribute content to the edge.

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09.17.06

Events coming up next week

Posted in Events at 1:29 am by Ray Wu

There are quite a few events coming up next week

    • I am arranging a VC/CEO breakfast discussion on 09/19 with HP’s head of solution marketing in Palo Alto. We will share the latest innovation on blade systems and how to partner with HP. We have about 20 VCs and CEOs registered for now. Contact me if you are interested to attend.
    • I will be speaking at this SDForum event with 8 Korean companies & Cyworld USA on how to partner in the valley. The topics are about mobility and gaming, probably 2 of the strongest technology areas we can learn from Asia. If you are interested to see what’s up in Korea, this might be a good event to attend.

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