Jeff Richards is a Vice President in VeriSign's Information Services group (VIS). VIS is a market leader in providing next-generation infrastructure and real-time information in the Internet, Media, Retail and Healthcare markets. Jeff is a serial technology entrepreneur and Silicon Valley transplant currently posting from Northern Virginia, USA.
Prior to VeriSign, Jeff was President and CEO of R4 Global, an RFID industry leader acquired by VeriSign in May of 2005. Prior to R4, Jeff was a co-founder and executive at QuantumShift, an enterprise software and services provider in the telecommunications space. Prior to QuantumShift, Jeff was a management consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers (now part of IBM).
Jeff has been featured in Forbes, CNET, Network World and other leading publications, and is a frequent speaker at major technology industry and investment forums. Jeff holds an AB from Dartmouth College and resides in Northern Virginia with his wife and two daughters.
"My blog will focus on new technologies and trends in our markets, as well as general commentary on interesting happenings in the technology space. I hope it also has a bit of a personal touch. In the supply chain business, we are focused heavily on the retail, consumer goods, and pharmaceutical industries, and demand is a big theme (consumer demand focus) as opposed to supply (manufacturing and production focus)."
Tracy Swedlow and the folks at InteractiveTV always put on a terrific event, and I'll be speaking on a panel at this year's TV of Tomorrow show on March 11th @ 11:30 am (San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center). The topic of our panel is "New Developments in Broadband Video: Can the Internet Keep Up?" It is sure to be a lively discussion - my co-panelists are from BitTorrent, Level3, Brightcove, Thompson, Narrowstep and Tandberg.
Chris Anderson's (also wrote The Long Tail) got a great article posted on Wired today called "Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business." Think about it - Google is one of the most profitable companies of our time, is used every day by everyone you know, yet you'll never see a charge on your credit card bill that says "Google."
VeriSign/Kontiki and other market leaders (including Verizon, Pando and others) in the P2P technology and ISP worlds are involved in a DCIA (Distributed Computing Industry Association) working group called P4P. With support and commentary from many involved in this group, the DCIA today sent a letter to the FCC with formal content on potential legislation (see my previous posts on Net Neutrality) surrounding network management guidelines for broadband operators. With Marty Lafferty's permission (Marty is the CEO of DCIA), I've pasted a copy of the letter into the extended portion of this blog entry. To read the letter, skip below the jump.
The DCIA P4P perspective is notable because it represents the interests of technology providers, P2P providers, and ISP's. It's stated mission, which appears below, is to work with each of these interest groups to deliver the best ultimate experience for end user consumers.
As readers of this blog know, I have been saying for some time that Net Neutrality would be one of the hottest topics of 2008. Well, it's officially taken center stage again with a flurry of coverage this week (go to Google News and type in "net neutrality"). Yesterday, representatives of Comcast appeared before the FCC to discuss the company's practices around network management. Today, the Washington Post reports Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is expected to introduce a bill calling for an Internet policy that would prohibit network operators from unreasonably interfering with consumers' right to access and use content over broadband networks (he must not be at the Roger Clemens Circus). This is a corporate blog, and thus my position is officially neutral on this subject (as noted by Will Richmond back in November) - but it is a topic I believe is worth following, even for the average consumer, for two primary reasons:
1) The ongoing dialogue, and any legislation tied to this subject, will have an impact on the ability of carriers, cable providers, Internet and media companies to compete for your dollars and mindshare, especially as it relates to rich media (music, video, movies, etc.).
2) The outcome will have a significant impact on what the Internet looks like in 5-10 years time. As the Internet becomes more important to your daily life, you should care about this. Kind of simple statement, but it's a pretty basic concept.
For more on Net Neutrality, here are a few links (and different perspectives):
Today's confirmation by Yahoo of its planned $160M acquisition of Maven continues what has been a banner 12-18 month period for digital / Internet media companies. Although the day to day battles in the trenches are brutally competitive (talk to anyone who's running a digital media startup), the classic Silicon Valley innovation cycle (entrepreneurs found startups, startups rapidly out-innovate big ones to take advantage of new opportunities, small companies get acquired by big ones, founders repeat process) and the broader macro trends towards digital media distribution via the Internet and mobile devices will continue to drive a huge amount of investment and M&A activity for years to come. In addition to the note on Maven, three relevant data points which provide context to this point:
Ben Mezrich's book Rigged is a fast, moderately entertaining read from the same author who wrote Bringing Down the House - the story of the MIT Blackjack team (a great read). This is my second attempt to read a Mezrich book and get the same entertainment value I got out of House (the other was Busting Vegas). Unfortunately, neither Rigged nor Busting Vegas were as good as House. In short - read Bringing Down the House again and skip Rigged. For more, see below.
One of the blogs I visit frequently is NewTeeVee. Liz Gannes put up a post on the site last week called "Need to Know Video Stats." If you're tracking the growth of key sites and video online overall, see here post for the latest data from ComScore, etc. To summarize, they are all going up and to the right.
138 million Americans watched 9.5 billion videos online in November '07 (31% of them on Google sites like YouTube).
Given Kontiki's role in digital media, and our role as the download platform for BBC's iPlayer, I'm frequently asked "how's it going?" The short answer: very well. Ashley Highfield, Director Future Media and Technology at the BBC, put up a blog post last week called "iPlayer Launch: First Indications" that provides some insight into the success of the iPlayer since it moved from beta to official launch on Christmas day. To quote Highfield:
"Demand for long-form video content over the web may be much higher than iTunes has witnessed before; It's too early to say, but I think we may be at the start of rewriting the rule book."
The title of this post is a bit of a misnomer - I never actually finished The Last Tycoons by William Cohen. The author's 750 page account of the history of investment bank Lazard Freres is a reasonably good read - but no human should be forced to read 750 pages about an investment bank. As a friend who works at Lazard put it to me: "Why would anyone want to read a 700 page book on Lazard?" Putting that basic question aside, it is an interesting read - if you've got the time to work through 750 pages. For more comments, see below.
Coming out of the Holidays, I've got two new favorite toys. They're new to my arsenal, but not new on the market (in both cases, I'm not exactly an early adopter). #1 is a Toyota Prius, and #2 is my new Jawbone bluetooth headset.
Interesting article today in the WSJ by Nick Wingfield on the blurring line between Internet and TV. He breaks down what he sees as the five primary barriers to consumers merging their Internet connections and their tv's to - voila! - watch video from the Internet on their tv. It's worth reading the article, but I am curious why he uses a data point (see graphic in middle of print article) from Forrester Research dated 3Q of 2006 (80% of consumers aren't interested in Internet video on their tv) - it sure seems like video on the Net has come a long way over the last year, and all of the most recent statistics and surveys point to rapidly rising demand (see my post on the Parks Associates report in September).
I'd agree with a lot of Nick's points, but I think the groundswell of demand is perhaps higher than you might take away from the article. One data point from the article - NBC alone streamed more than 50 million shows from its web site in October.
At the end of the day, a significant percentage of consumers just don't - and won't - move quickly on new technologies. Witness the adoption of DVR's. I don't know anyone who doesn't have one, but I live in the Bay Area, and DVR penetration across the US still stands at around 17%.
On Wednesday I was at the NewTeeVee event in San Francisco. I have to say it was one of the better digital media conferences of the year. I can't really pinpoint why (it still seemed to focus on the same subjects we've heard at conferences throughout the year: a) "advertising will be big," b) "social networking is really important for video," c) "consumers want HD, and d) "let's hear from YouTube or MySpace..."), but quite a few people I talked to thought it was a great event.
For two anecdotes from the event, click to the rest of the post.
Today on Will Richmond's blog VideoNuze he goes into more depth on the Net Neutrality topic (see my previous post on October 19th) - will can take a much more aggressive stance - he's a journalist, I'm not). Will's post came out of a long and involved dialogue we had on Wednesday night over a few drinks at our Kontiki User Conference in Atlanta. As will points out, my OFFICIAL position is neutral on this subject, but I will point out that a few of the folks who posted comments on Will's blog make some good points :).
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