Internet Radio in My Car

So I finally have Internet radio in my car and it's working great. It's not exactly the way I thought I would get it, but it works great nonetheless.

Background: I love Internet Radio! Ever since Anders Kruus and I discovered it working for a little-known web wealth-management company in the Avenues in the early '00s. No ads, better music, virtually no downside, EXCEPT that you need a wire.

When I bought my car, I spent a long weekend tearing the dashboard apart and wiring it so I could play my iPod. Ironically, Audi had no iPod solution, so I had to buy various pieces-parts and assemble them per the instructions on some obscure European website.

A week ago, I bought the new 3G iPhone which has the same connector on the bottom as the iPod. When I plug it in, it works the same way the iPod does. But here's the interesting part:

The iPhone supports Pandora and AOL Radio over it's wireless 3G network. Both applications stream Internet radio. When I fired Pandora up in the car it worked great and the sound was wonderful!

The only downside is that our friend Steve decided that non-Apple applications (like Pandora and AOL) could not run in the background on the iPhone. So.... when I check my mail or tweet-stream in the car (both probably now illegal in California) I lose my music.

I think he will reverse his decision on non-Apple applications in the future (due not in small part to all my badgering). But who knows with Steve, he can be... how do you say in English... persnickety on his best day.

Oh, well. I still possess the Holy Grail, Internet Radio in my car.

Notes from the IBF Venture Conference - Part Deux

For those of you interested in global VC investment trends:

It's official: with the VCs these days, the consumer is king.



According to Morgan Stanley, 2008 looks like the year, after trailing by a significant margin, that consumer global IP traffic gains parity with business traffic and by 2011 consumer traffic will be three times that of business traffic.



VC investing is following (rather, enabling) the trend. For investments in 2007:



Internet / Consumer media is up over 90%

Both IT Services and Application Software off about 10%

Enterprise Networking Equipment investment is off 60%



In the Software Application space



Web based software (SaaS) is up over 90%

Mobile Consumer Apps up 80%

and Web 2.0 and social media applications are up 60%



In communications and wireless



Video on the Network is up 50%

while VOIP, RFID, WiFi and Optical Networking are all off 25-35%



To those of you trying to figure out what business to start next, the most venture money is going in to:

• Rich Media (video)


• Web 2.0 (assuming that means social-media enabled stuff)


• Cleantech


• Gaming: both mobile and on-line


• Mobile applications (see my previous post re: iPhone)


• Software as a Service


• Global Outsourcing


• and next generation network services (we'll always need bandwidth).

Random additional notes:



VC cleantech investments, according to our friends at E&Y are up globally 25% CAGR since 2001, up 21% CAGR in the US, Europe and Israel and up 195% CAGR in China (from almost nothing in 2001).



Since their respective peaks in 2000, the Dow is up 11% (13,063 vs. 11,723) but the tech-heavy NASDAQ is down 50% (2,525 vs. 5,049) as of Q2 2007.

News from the IPO Watchers

Per my previous post, here is an interesting article. The second quarter numbers are coming in (or not coming in):

U.S. venture-backed IPOs absent in second quarter

Notes from the IBF Venture Conference

I recently attended the IBF Venture Conference at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco where there was enough information on the global technology markets to sink a battleship and one overarching theme:

Global, Global, Global.


Wow! I can't say I had no idea, but the numbers I saw were more staggering than I'd expected.

Here are the numbers for venture investment growth in mature markets in 2007 (B):

• United States grew from $US 27.7 to $US 29.9 (8%)
• Europe grew from €4.5 to €4.6 (2%)

In comparison,

• China grew from $US 1.8 to $US 3.2 (83%) and
• India grew from $US 0.3 to $US 0.9 (195%)

The good news for US companies is that the US remains far and away the largest market for invested venture capital.

The bad news is that as it stands it is much harder for equity holders to find liquidity. Venture backed tech IPOs which were having a nice run: 11 in 2003, 40 in 2004, 27 in 2005, 25 in 2006 and 47 in 2007 look completely stagnant in 2008 (crossing our fingers for one, so far). The median time from initial equity funding to IPO nearly doubling from 4.5 years in 2001 to 8.3 in 2008.

Also both M&A and LBO activity are off significantly in 2008 despite corporate cash balances remaining at an all-time high.

One of the reasons for the significant fallout of the US IPO market is the adoption of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. One of the panelists said that they don't even think about taking a company public if it's got less than $300M in revenue, maybe a bit extreme, but as Dwight Badger of Advanced Equities artfully put it, the $50-$80M IPO is on constant life support.

IPOs are diversifying around the globe. From 1997 through 2007, as a percentage of global IPO proceeds, the US declined from just under 60% to just under 20%. Japan, China and India all experienced moderate growth while the category of Other expanded from 20% to 40%.

So much for globalization... As Zakaria points out in The Post American World, we promoted capitalism and capital markets around the world and damned if they didn't listen. It's less about us falling as it is about "the rise of the rest" and we've got a lot of work to do, policy-wise and otherwise to keep the pace...

Next post: VC investment trends

Pivotal Labs and Twitter

I hate to do this, but the cat is already out of the bag.



http://tinyurl.com/3v5amd

Our friends at Pivotal Labs are starting a project this week to stabilize one of the highest profile (and now most infamous) web 2.0 offerings, Twitter (www.twitter.com). It's a perfect example of a company building a wildly viral product, then breaking under the strain.

I was in Rob Mee's office, taking a break from the IBF Venture Capital Conference when he found out that the project had been leaked to Venture Beat. "Bummer" was Rob's first comment, not knowing if he wanted the press. His second comment was "they should have developed it in Java!"

Rob hires only the best of the best and is a brilliant developer himself. They'll do fine as long as they don't let the flak jackets and night-vision goggles get in the way.

Like Madonna used to say "any press is good press" Party on, Rob. Party on Pivots.

Why the iPhone

Let me make it clear up front: I am not one of those rabid Apple Computer or Steve Jobs fans. In fact, if anything, I'm more of a Microsoft apologist. While I was growing up in Alaska, they were the "home team", as it were. I spent my tender years rooting for both Microsoft and (in vain) the Seahawks.

This week is the Apple WorldWide Developer's Conference here in San Francisco and you can't get away from the new iPhone. In true Steve style, the ads are plastered in every BART station to announce the coming of the faster, cheaper version of the device.

Yesterday at the IBF Venture Capital Investing Conference a guy came up to me and asked "what is it with the damned iPhone? I'm investing in companies who have limited resources but need a mobile strategy." I told him to bet on the iPhone and here's why.

At the root are software developers. Not the academic, ivory tower developers like me who learned to code in languages like LISP, Smalltalk and C++. I'm talking about the guys out of the dark corners of the development world; the street fighters, the alley cats. The guys who got a job at an ISP, started writing Perl scripts, then cobbled together some systems with PHP and Python and are now moving on to Ruby on Rails.

The great migration started back in March of 2001 with the release of OS X. At the time many software developers were using Windows machines or dual-boot Mac/Yellow Dog Linux boxes. With the move to OS X and its UNIX kernel Apple slowly started the (now 7 year) process of moving these developers off Windows and Linux and on to the Mac.

It's been partly due to the great tools Apple has bundled with OS X and partly due to the lack of good tools for Windows. It is also due to the fact that the systems being used in the data centers to host those applications are running some form of UNIX. Better to learn to navigate one OS rather then two. At this point, virtually all of the developers I know are now using the Mac as their primary development tool.

Fast-forward to March 2008 and the release of the iPhone SDK. Developers who were already using the Mac environment for development were writing iPhone applications in their spare time. People were able to show me interesting iPhone applications within two weeks of the release of the SDK.

So when people ask me what mobile platform they should be spending their development dollars on. When we're planning a mobile strategy for a software application, it's generally for the iPhone. It should be no surprise. Where the best developers go, the customers follow. Microsoft, of all companies, knows this. And unless Apple makes a big misstep, from what I've seen the developers are on the Mac and iPhone to stay.

Tough Love Russian Style and American Energy Policy

I hope the Russians love their children too. - Sting 1985

Russia has cut off gas to the Ukraine. Lesson: get addicted to Russian oil and expect to be eaten by the Russian bear. Simple stuff. Lesson #2: energy is power.

Now here's the good news. The world is aflood with energy, with energy in every imaginable form. Some forms are more expensive than others. We use the cheap stuff first. We would still be heating homes in the Northeast with anthracite, had it not been replaced with cheaper fuel oil. And natural gas. The mines were shut down, but remain full of anthracite, huge mountains of anthracite. When I first lived in Oregon we heated homes with saw dust. Again, something cheaper and handier came along. Oregon did not run out of saw dust; they just started building houses out of it. In WWII we cut off Germany's petroleum, so they manufactured gasoline from coal. And nearly developed nuclear energy.

There is more oil under Colorado than in the entire Middle East, by an order of magnitude. And that much again in the Alberta tar sands. This is all solar energy, fossil solar energy, stored up in the ground from other lush times. Indeed, nearly all energy on earth is solar energy, from our sun. And much of it is stored away in the ground. There is far more of it than we could ever figure out how to use. But we always used with the cheap stuff first.

If we edge ahead of that just a tiny bit, buy energy a tad pricier than the current cheapest stuff from the current cheapest place, we take charge, create a new paradigm. We leave the Russians and the Middle East with a lot of anthracite in the ground. But this can not be done with market forces. One has to decide to pay a tad more for energy and thereby slip the power away from the cheapest sources. You do that with tariffs. And regulations. Rules, as it were, rules that favor and assure domestic production and thus slide power in our direction.

All this takes is a bit of courage and some brains. And someone to explain how it will work and why we must do it.

What I am suggesting is the fundamental plank of my old Senate campaign, that we have an energy policy, that we take charge and design a system that works for the American people. Had we done that, we would have had none of this mess we face today, including great sandy wars. The sad thing is, we could have done it then. Maybe this time people will get it.

And I am not talking about giving up gas guzzlers. We just let them die of their own accord, as they will have to do, unable to compete with the new high speed rail systems that will have to emerge. And the really cool mini-cars and motorcycles, and hell yes, even subways and (covered?) bike trails.

Energy is different than other industries like, say technology. More like water or money, it requires a policy and rules. Then let the free market do as it pleases.