Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Korean Broadband Market (year old data):

I came across very interesting blog by rediff founder, Ajit Balakrishnan, on Korean market. He put together some facts, he found during his Korean trip (a year back),

-> 90%+ traffic is in Korean language (who says English is Internet langua franca)
-> 1.5Mbps is considered as Broadband (not 300K like in other part of world)
-> How Internet bandwidth is consumed: 40% is p2p traffic ( music, porn), 30% is video-on-demand ( people watching TV shows they missed), 10% is gaming and the balance is http traffic (according to his contact).

with 40% p2p traffic, I want to analyze how its impacting entertainment industry...

Monday, February 06, 2006

No Free Lunches: Taxing WiFi

Finally some biggies are able to push through the legislative maneuvering what they were saying from last 2-3 years. White elephants are not able to innovate, so they are planning to kill the fast growing sectors.
The budget which is sent to congress (by the US President) has clause of imposing the tax on Unlicensed Spectrum (read WiFi). Why they didnt tax Ham Radio, and whats the urgency to tax WiFi.

The news item can be read here:

http://www.rcrnews.com/news.cms?newsId=25545

The Budget details can be accessed at this site:

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy07/browse.html

Now you must be asking, how congress can kill this naive but exploding phenomenon,

If I am a lobbyist, I will put this clause in Telecommunications act '07,

the owner of Equipment shall pay a royalty of $xx amount for each channel and for each individual user accessing the spectrum on the spectrum, only if,

  • The user of channel(s) is not the owner equipment transmitted the airwaves in unlicensed band.

This small legislation will kill all the hotspots as well as the plan by municipalities for deploying WiFi.

Good Luck Silicon Valley..

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Back to Future: Bubble is back

This phrase has been so much that sometimes its just doesnt make sense to use. But sometimes you finds the things repeating and happening in a way, you cant stop.


Whats so great about this picture?

Some guy pasting all the little yellow "post me" all over the room. Either this guy is crazy or working in some Indie movie.
No, this guy works in Venture Capital firm.
His role: Go through the old articles (First dot com boom time) of the technology magazines like Red Herring, Wired...

Wired Magazine detailed about a Mayfield VC who's perfecting the art of refurbished ideas. Allen Morgan reached the heights of gold mining by hiring a 24-year-old to flip through old magazines for business ideas.
Morgan's researcher, Ankur Luthra (picture posted), reads through a stack of Red Herring, Industry Standard, and Wired issues and slaps post-it notes on stories of now-dead dot-coms.

The link to story is,

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/mayfield.html?pg=1&topic=mayfield&topic_set=

What should we call this.
Going back to past, or going back to Future.

Only time will tell whether these guys are right or fooling themselves. But with Google stock touching all heights, Microsoft is moving "live" project like a new goldmine, braodcasting is moving to IP network, and people are again talking about e-community; these guys may be on right path.

Another thing, I am liking Microsoft "Live", although nothing special compare ot My Yahoo or personalized Google... but the first thing coming from Microsoft after a long time, which is good.. more on this later...