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).

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….

To accelerate application development for the future "G-Phone", Google announced a $10 Million challenge .

On the first stage ( submission deadline March 3, 2008), Google will pick up 50 projects and fun each one with $25k to finish development.

The second stage is even more attractive - 20 best projects will receive $275k and $100k awards ( after they will prove to be useful on the real hardware to be released at this time).

More info : http://code.google.com/android/adc.html

Just find by reference from Andrei Alexandrescu  web site:

"Why a new debugger?" you may ask. The answer is simple: increased productivity achieved through a simple, easy to use interface and advanced features such as expression evaluation , conditional breakpoints, watchpoints, and scriptability.

May 31, 2007, at Google Developers Day ( GDD07) Google announced Gears – a small AJAX framework that “enable offline functionalities for online applications”. Despite the shyness of publicly declared goals, many believe that Gears is a long expected first step in Google strategy to take on Microsoft dominance.

  "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I  approved of it."
 Mark Twain

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries  with great pleasure."
 Clarence Darrow