June 2008
1 post
The case against net neutrality
I’m not sure net neutrality is a good thing. Here’s why:
Networks have to throttle traffic when there is congestion
If networks can’t selectively prioritize traffic during congestion, they must resort to random dropping of packets
Throttling randomly leads to unfair application quality of experience impacts
We want convergence of our phone, our mobile, our tv, our computer,...
May 2008
1 post
The reason software is so bad is that it's so easy...
New Relic announced that it raised some money today. It looks like a pretty cool product. Assuming it works as advertised, you drop their plugin into your rails app, then visit their web app to browse and analyze its performance. Isn’t this a problem that every programmer in every language runs into? Tools like gprof and DTrace perform similar functions, but in a MUCH more general set of...
April 2008
6 posts
Fail! makes bid to acquire Fail!
Blockbuster made a bid to acquire Circuit City today. I can’t really imagine this being successful. Here’s my reasoning in sexy bullet list format: Seems like old-school business model (brick and mortar movie rental) trying to bail itself out by combining with another old-school business (brick and mortar electronics). If blockbuster is really going to introduce a box in the home...
The distributed computing myth
GigaOm posted this article about Google’s App Engine and I couldn’t help but comment. Much of what Mr. McConnell has to say is right on. Yes, we want utility like computing that can scale up and down as needed. Yes, we want to be able to use our development language or platform of choice. Yes we want it to be standards based. But where I take issue is with the notion that cloud...
Is new media really going to be better than old...
Lots of buzz about SellaBand raising $5M today. It’s a really interesting model. They have 18 groups that have been funded to the $50,000 level. That’s $900,000 raised $10 at a time from people over the web. Pretty impressive! But have you read through the terms and conditions? My favorite part: “5.5 All rights in the titles on the CD, including intellectual and commercial...
Babelgum unveils first fund project →
I can’t say that I understand the strategy here. Babelgum has been investing in technology to deliver content for several years now. Why would they try to cross over into the studio business? Do their skills in building P2P software translate into “picking ponies” in the media business? They must believe that the only thing that’s going to bring users to their platform...
Peer to Peer Throttling Continues, But the Real...
Bell Canada has been caught throttling peer-to-peer traffic. The reality is that this stuff has been deployed in most networks around the world in either test or production capacity. The debate is all about throttling which may miss the point. Throttling is a necessary component of a working network. Your PC throttles its bandwidth usage by virtue of using TCP. The routers and switches along the...
Web-Video Ad-Price Survey, Take Three : Case... →
Interesting report. Numbers seem high tho.
March 2008
11 posts
How Not to Get Rich Quick: Create a Web Series «... →
Interesting story. I wonder how much YouTube, Blip.tv and MetaCafe made off all those views?
Is a la Carte Cable a Sucker’s Bet? « NewTeeVee →
Another “sky is falling” prediction. This time from Yankee group indicating that a la carte pricing would reduce overall cable viewership, drive up pricing on surviving channels and overall wreck havok on the industry. The thing is, networks are already paid based on their viewership (as reported by our friends at Nielsen). The biggest thing they’re going to uncover is that...
Stats Junkies Get Another Fix: Woopra →
Cool stuff. Look at who’s on your site in real time.
BitTorrent and Comcast have a deal, but is P2P... →
So we’re all pretty alarmed by net neutrality issues. And recent issues at comcast surely have many raising their arms in the air praising Comcast for their recent moves. But what gives? Instead of blocking traffic by the corporation that sent it, now they’re blocking traffic by the USER. The guns have been turned away from corporate america and towards you and I. Beware!
Online Video: Joost hires chief software... →
What’s going on at Joost? They have had nothing but employee shakeups for what seems like forever. Does anybody even use the service?
Turner Picks Rentrak for VOD Metrics →
It baffles me that there isn’t more of this going on (e.g. monitoring what the set top boxes are doing). Why aren’t the MSO’s capturing census level data across all of their set top boxes for both broadcast and on-demand? And why haven’t they been doing this for years? Is Nielsen’s panel really so good and so cheap that nobody’s needed anything better until...
The Pogues: Tonight @ Orpheum →
Yay
Net Neutrality: Net Neutrality Shouldn't Extend to... →
Okay, so let’s dig into this for a second… First of all, in order to prevent illegal acts, you need to snoop ALL traffic going through the network. I can see why people don’t like this. But also keep in mind that the techniques used by the telco’s to filter traffic aren’t able to snoop into encrypted streams. So the people who are doing _really_ illegal stuff are...
Songkick Launches “Alexa For Bands” →
Does anybody ever question the data underlying these services? Compete sniffs data out of ISPs. Alexa installs software on a panel. But Songkick? They crawl the web. Well sorry, the crawl myspace and amazon. It would be interesting to see some statisticians chime in on the validity of such limited panels. Are friends on Myspace really indicitive of usage patterns? Songkick captures such static...
The Ad IS the content →
It strikes me that the techniques used to by a website to measure its audience (think web analytics ala Omniture, Google Analytics) are one and the same that a marketer would use to track a campaign. Why don’t adds embed the same level of analytics as a website? Why can’t I put analytics tags into my widgets or videos? Interesting article suggesting that my ads should be nothing less...
Combined TV / Internet Ratings →
It would be interesting to see how many people were double counted in these combined ratings. Can you really just add up online and offline audience? How many offline users also watched online?