Technology, Venture, Innovation, Globalization
I will be speaking in the IBF’s 9th annual Corporate Venture and Strategic Investing Conference coming up on January 25 - 26, 2007 in Palm Spring, CA. This year’s topic is on capturing innovation, market share and revenue streams through corporate venture capital, M&A, and corporate development partnerships. Should be a fun one… IBF conference is normally a good place to catch up with old friends and meet new people.
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….
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.
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:
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.
Here are a few good startup resource sites:
How about suggest some of your favorites?
Given the low margin in retail business, it is interesting to see a new wave of technology spending from retailers. Here are some new innovations coming up in the retail space: