Index Guide to TelNotes if you are new to this blog

InfoStack Topics:

1) Horizontalization:
a) a data and content map to horizontalization.  Points of Control Map from Web 2.0 summit and article explaining its impact including data frames.  Key data categories: purchase, search, social graph, interest, location, content.
2) Upper Layers:
a) how long can Apple take 30% off the top before appdevs rebel or find new methods for getting to customers?  Carriers already lose out.
b) as with data caps, carriers will make mistake of charging too much for something ridiculously cheap, like SMS,  Sprint raises rates to ESPN by $0.005.  See 4a below.
3) Middle Layers:
a) TV, communications and social media are converging with wireless and internet TV.  3 separate channels/environments brought together via control layers.
4) Lower Layers:
a) smartphone shipments drop sequentially 1.5% to 97m.  Ya think data caps play a role?
b) watch Google’s Chromebooks to see if bandwidth & availability is a hindrance to success.  Boot-up times of 8 seconds, like a phone, and total redundancy.  Intriguing.
c) Craig Settles highlights demand components for rural and less tele-dense markets.

Market and General Interest Topics:

5) Industry Statistics and Events:
a) Chart of VC capital raising and discussion of changed environment/approach.  Not sure the premise and contra to tech bubble speculation is all that sound.
b) Music industry stats:  negative trends slowed or reversed; but it is a 1x Beatles blip?
c) great timeline on computer processing; from 1958 to 20xx
6) Business Strategy:
a) article on grouponomics.  Expensive advertising; so it will correct.  Always be coupons and rewards (as most businesses operate at the margin) and the trend will be towards greater targeting and real-time for greater cap utilization and or reduced perishables. 
b) Localresponse aggregates other checkin services via twitter.
c) micropayments provider flattr piggybacks off twitter as distrib method. Interesting.
7) Financial:
a) not only are social media companies highly valued, but so are blogs about them!
8) Other:

Index Guide to TelNotes if you are new to this blog

InfoStack Topics:

1) Horizontalization:
a) MSFT’s purchase of Skype precursor to broader spinoff of all comm & gaming assets providing an enormous pool of connected users to enterprises?  Perfect horizontal event for common P2P technology; and a reason to buy stock.  Would solve Fred Wilson’s concerns that skype will whither on the vine.  170m active users, 207bn MOU in 2010 and registered base over 600m. Video potential huge. Nokia would be a major mistake.
2) Upper Layers:
a) Horowitz’ insights into Skype fending off Google’s Free Voice push. It’s the network!
b) markets adjust as Om suggests apps developing offline abilities given lousy coverage.
3) Middle Layers:
a) Clearspring is neat app that cuts across silos.  Raises $20m from Institutional Ventures.
b) good article comparing iOS and Droid app environments; latter catching up by next yr given 3 to 2 sales pace.  72.5m smartphones in US today.
c) Twitter and FaceBook remove RSS support.  Article on changing web: balkanization.
d) will Google’s +1 button that empowers the individual websites impact FB’s like button?  This on the heels of RSS being turned off at Twitter and FB.
4) Lower Layers:
a) good overview of potential consolidation in fiber markets.

Market and General Interest Topics:

5) Industry Statistics and Events:
a) non-smartphone tablet etc sales up 30% to $3bn, with enterprise at 62% of spend.
b) good stats on repeat traffic for news-sites; surprisingly low!  Power perusers just 7%.
6) Business Strategy:
a) S&P cos have $1 trillion cash.  HBR says it retards growth; big companies not flexible.
b) some companies are pursuing Youtube channels well, others aren’t.  Enterprise is where it will be at as I point out in 1.a above.
7) Financial:
a) Neutral Tandem shows 4% sequential growth w/ Tinet; acquisition that took them from layer 3 to 2. EV of $420m 1.5x revs, 5.2x EBITD, stock is 50% below all time high.
8) Other:
a) CA’s job miracle and rebound should be noticed in DC.  Decrease deficit 64%.

Index Guide to TelNotes if you are new to this blog

InfoStack Topics:

1) Horizontalization:
a) by charging for service tiers that have nothing to do with underlying bandwidth consumption the telcos are setting themselves up for disintermediation.
b) great discussion on fight between iOS and Droid and what might happen given certain outcomes.  What is missing from discussion is impact lower layers might have.
c) 2 very smart people (Tom Wheeler and Alan Quayle) saying very similar things.  But the end result has to be horizontalization, as the carriers do not have the acumen to fight Facebook, Google, Apple, et al.
2) Upper Layers:
a) Localmind is a location app that cuts across other location/checkin silos.  Neat.
b) Watch Adapteva.  Smartphone processor with 64 core processor, vs 2 today. 
c) I now do 90+% of my text entry via voice on my Droid.  Google is now scaling that capability back online to google.com on your PC.  Now, will it remember my voice?
3) Middle Layers:
a) Ericsson tries to wake carriers up to the opportunity of servicing their customers better.  Like a network engineer would care about the needs of any one user.  Hah!  This article further underscores what carriers should be doing and aren’t.
b) MSFT offers API tool to convert iOS apps to Win7. Smart. Unity does this 4 droid
c) Big Data is something the Bellheads will never get; see what internet cos are using.
d) language analyzers are becoming an important and crowded field to help parse SM txt.
Lower Layers:
a) an open wifi standard, but one also that combines open access with link-layer security.
b) classic monopoly pricing and usage caps driven by average, not marginal cost.
c) Rural Telcon underscores how bandwidth (don’t forget electricity along with it) creates “markets anywhere it goes”; especially rural markets

Market and General Interest Topics:
5) Industry Statistics and Events:
a) good stats on e-commerce history and future.  Probably from mid-2010, but useful.
b) Fred Wilson highlights mobile access to his blog; up to 16% viewing vs ~5-7% last yr.
c) MSFT IE continues to lose ground; still has dominant share of browser market at 55%.
d) Pew reports that gap between whites and blacks has narrowed for broadband adoption.
e) Interop LasVegas May 8-12 should provide lots of good stuff on Enterprise IT trends.
6) Business Strategy:
a) CIO predicts CenturyLink will acquire Sprint; Nextel push to talk would have been ideal with CL’s focus on enterprises
b) Highland Capital partner highlights 3 key traits for successful internet company: photos, immediate gratification, familiarity.  To me they mean: simple, value, usage.
7) Financial:
a) Acme packets demonstrates the power of connections: $5.1bn EV, $300m revs, $100m EBITDA, 54x EBITDA multiple.  Only 5% of lines in US are SIP trunked.
b) stock down 98+%, things couldn’t get any worse for FiberTower as Clearwire cuts $435k monthly revs ($5m annualized): FTWR: $200m EV, $75m revs, ($10m) Ebitda.
c) Boingo has 375k hotspots and is going public Wednesday.  Will this stimulate FMC and interest in alternative broadband solutions?
8) Other:
a) getting close to nature is now possible with the smartphone: Leafsnap!

Index Guide to TelNotes if you are new to this blog

InfoStack Topics:

1) Horizontalization:
a) do the recent cloud failures put a pause on horizontalization or centralization (our thesis is centralized hierarchical networks) because of potential financial liability?  No.  What it calls for is increased security between layers and from edge to core, better settlement systems, and redundancy everywhere!  The redundancy will be much more cost effective and ultimately less risk than what exists (or doesn’t) today.
b) BizWeek article on tech bubbles; PCs late 1980s, Web 1.0 2000, now?  All of these have one common denominator: network bandwidth availability or lack thereof.  The offset, and something I’ve mentioned in middle layer posts is that the new social media companies are working with data unlike anything the carriers ever did.  Zynga comes into possession of 60 billion data points every day!  Reminds me of a future that Hermann Hesse wrote about in Das Glasperlenspiel.
2) Upper Layers:
a) Group buying is stimulating a lot of local commerce and sales hiring.  Smartphone key to both sides of the equation; merchant and consumer. Don’t forget Mom!
b) here’s a phone you won’t find apple building.  Another reason I think people will want flexibility across devices that they can use in different settings.
3) Middle Layers:
a) wlx carriers must be breathing a sigh of relief, because if Honeycomb really did work, they would have an awful mess on their hands with tens of millions of tablets consuming 25x more capacity than average cellphones.
b) Square vs Verifone war takes new twist w/ security addition.  Ok, so it will reduce telephone charges for merchants and expand opportunities for e-transactions, theoretically; but will Square reduce transaction costs materially?
c) with Android and Honeycomb and Chrome, can google replace HTTP with SPDY?  This would have major implications on how content is distributed across devices securely.
d) as the ad/web world processes data more and more, carriers can’t implement IMS.
e) excellent overview on HTML5 and it’s implications.
4) Lower Layers:
a) Intel announces 50gbps speeds for PAN/LAN.  And the MAN is stuck in 1-30mbps!
b) public monopoly failure is always countered by high volume users using private networks; as evidenced by Akamai/IBM partnership to bypass internet for cloud services.
c) this post on ATT’s spectrum and resulting thread just underscores the misinformation and ignorance in the market from the actual amount of spectrum each carrier controls as well as the impact of femtocells, wifi and FMC.

Market and General Interest Topics:

5) Industry Statistics and Events:
a) Over the Top (OTT) video providing so much flexibility remains plagued by bandwidth issues, which is why so many startups have failed and the business model is still evolving.  That said, it made me think that with the amount of money my family spends on all communications and multimedia, will there be services that provide for a la carte packaging so that today’s triple and quadplay bundles end up like the LP/CD?
b) Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Are smartphones changing the dynamic?
6) Business Strategy:
a) FaceBook is or will be “the newspaper of the people.” Video on journalism strategy.
b) Om highlights work by Paul Adams of Facebook on social circles. Very metcalfian.
7) Financial:
8) Other:
a) historical disasters and mistakes to compare Amazon’s cloud outage to.