Made in Israel

Meeting notes by Michael Olson ,
http://PleiadesTechnologyFutures.com,
blog http://PleiadesTechnologyFutures.blogspot.com

A View of the Consumer Internet

by Michael Olson  ,
http://PleiadesTechnologyFutures.com,
blog http://PleiadesTechnologyFutures.blogspot.com

At the February 7^th CTC meeting we had a great presentation by George Zachary of Charles River Ventures on his view of the social network-driven consumer Internet. George brought to the group insights derived from his experience in the venture capital industry, the social network Internet and the Hollywood movie culture. He shared his thoughts on what that means with the rise of social networks and the ability to derive revenues on the evolving Web. You will find my outline of his presentation below but let me highlight some of the thoughts embedded in the outline.

At the recent CoolTech Club meeting we enjoyed an excellent presentation by William Norton , Equinix co-founder and Chief Technical Liaison. Bill presented his calculations on cost of digitized media distribution over various Internet architectures (presentation – full paper) .

Apparently, convenient Content Delivery Network (CDN – Akamai and others) architecture has a quite significant price tag – about $0.24 per full-format movie. Some cost improvement can be made by deploying content servers in few major peering points managed by Equinix ( surprise ! ;-)  - cost decrease to about $0.17 per movie. This is certainly improvement over reported $1 spend by Netflix for snail-mail delivery, but still to high for mass adoption (Also , it questionable if existing Internet infrastructure can survive significant volume of video content).

March 6,2008 John Sebes Saving Democracy from Computers: Creating Trust in Next Gen Digital Voting

You might think it wouldn't be hard to build a voting machine - all it needs to do is count, and computers are good at that! But in fact, billions have been spent in the as yet unsuccessful quest for e-voting systems that work. It's not so straightforward. In fact, the majority of ballots in U.S. elections are cast with electronic voting devices that are in most cases fundamentally flawed. In California, all but one of existing voting device products were de-certified as a result of an ad hoc independent review convening by the Secretary of State, resulting in largest switch to pure paper manual elections in history - all of California except two counties. Yet this change is a temporary setback as county elections officials across the state and across the country scramble to enable further use of electronic systems.

February 7,2008

January 17,2008

It is sad to write something bad about a good company, but they deserve it….Probably…

In the Former Soviet Union ( oh, boy, how I love the sound “former” ), whenever we had a political discussion in the family room, we used to rotate a phone dial a half way and fix it in this position with a pen. Why, you may ask? Somehow we believed that it prevented “people who need to know”  from snooping after what we talked about. (Soviet-made rotary phones had a microphones connected directly to the line. ) Someone may call it “a paranoia”, but not the ones who survived “advanced socialism” experience….