Parisista

Joe Kraus continues to write about his experience at JotSpot. According to him — to get from idea to launch and up and running is 30X cheaper than what it was 10 years ago.

Why?

* Hardware is 100X cheaper
* Infrastructure software is free:LAMP stack, stable Linux distros, tools, Java app. servers, etc.
* Access to cheap on-demand labor markets

More people would be jumping on the bandwagon, trying to boot strap on their own, which would lead to better valuations in front of investors, VCs.

On a different note, it would be easier to try out an idea for less than $10,000. Doesn’t work? Get the soap box and move-on to the next one.

Where’s my cauldron? Need to continue stirrin’ the ingredients.

Joe Kraus continues to write about his experience at JotSpot. According to him — to get from idea to launch and up and running is 30X cheaper than what it was 10 years ago.
Why?

* Hardware is 100X cheaper
* Infrastructure software is free:LAMP stack, stable Linux distros, tools, Java app. servers, etc.
* Access to cheap on-demand labor markets

More people would be jumping on the bandwagon, trying to boot strap on their own, which would lead to better valuations in front of investors, VCs.
On a different note, it would be easier to try out an idea for less than $10,000. Doesn’t work? Get the soap box and move-on to the next one.
Where’s my cauldron? Need to continue stirrin’ the ingredients.

Adam Bosworth presented at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual user conference. Here’s what he proposes as the new software model:

1. Run like mad
2. Try things out, watch, learn
3. Iterate
4. Learn from the customers in real-time
5. Focus on Intelligent reaction and not intelligent design
6. Real apps, API’s follow

In simple English — Run like mad (a la Andy Grove’s “Only The Paranoid Survives”?), do Beta products; iterate/fix bugs/get feedback. Launch it if people like it, otherwise move on. Product is successful? Release APIs and let people invent their own products on top of it.
Adam’s post is here.

Just saw the transcripts of the Q&A from Apple’s conference call. This is something I have been waiting for a long time. The conference calls are scripted, well scripted — but the Q&A is where the tough questions are asked e.g. “What are the revenues of (that failed) product from your last year’s acquisition?”

Go ahead, read on and find the hidden gems. Here’s a sample:

Question:“…you talked about constraints in terms of nano shipments. Just wondering to understand what the constraint was. Can you talk about what’s constraining it, is it a component, is it the process?”
Apple:“We would never allow manufacturing capacity to get in the way of shipping a lot of these products so it is a component constraint and I don’t want to go further, with this one.”

Just saw the transcripts of the Q&A from Apple’s conference call. This is something I have been waiting for a long time. The conference calls are scripted, well scripted — but the Q&A is where the tough questions are asked e.g. “What are the revenues of (that failed) product from your last year’s acquisition?”
Go ahead, read on and find the hidden gems. Here’s a sample:

Question:“…you talked about constraints in terms of nano shipments. Just wondering to understand what the constraint was. Can you talk about what

I was trying to edit a slide, and wanted to delete and add some important pieces of text. Instead, of completely deleting the text — I wanted to make it strikethrough so that the audience knows what has changed. Here’s what Powerpoint suggests:

Microsoft Office PowerPoint does not include the text effects for strikethrough on the Format menu that come with Microsoft Office Word. You can reproduce these effects by using the Drawing toolbar, however.
1. Display the slide with the text you want to show in strikethrough format.
2. From the Drawing toolbar in the lower-left corner of the screen, choose the Line tool.
3. Draw a line over the text you want to format as strikethrough.

Lame, lame, lame, lame!

Jonathan Schwartz writes, “DOIP (“Do IP”) is to the PC industry, what VOIP (voice over IP, simplistically, using the internet to make phone calls) is to the telecommunications industry. Phone calls are near to free at this point, and the business model is undergoing radical change. It’s inevitable that pervasive and sufficient bandwidth will allow most of what happens on a client to migrate to the network. Why upgrade your PC if you can rely on plentiful bandwidth to have someone centrally deliver it as a service? You don’t upgrade your TV set, BBC and News Corp do it for you every evening with fresh content. And you don’t buy a new TV to watch it. The same should apply to your PC. DOIP is to a PC as XMRadio is to a CD player. ”
He further writes about Sun Ray, an ultra-thin client which consumes 15 watts of power compared to 120+ watts for an average PC. The client does not have a HDD, nor is any state saved locally. You come to work, log in and start blogging. I think we are reaching the full circle, 15 years ago when a room full of “Terminals” were powered by large almirah like servers (they were called CPU then) placed in superly cooled chambers. Fast Forward; Today, I have to back up my laptop, download anti-spyware, upgrade to 1G RAM, apply SP4 to Win2K and pay more money to upgrade my OS to make my basic computing tasks even more difficult. Computing was simple then.

via Corante, Emergic.
Mary Meeker, the venerable analyst at Morgan Stanely presented at the AD:TECH conference in San Francisco. According to Meeker, the Internet has “nowhere to go but up.” The session was packed with datapoints:

• Google:5b global searches (+62% YOY, 2/05); 355m global unique visitors(+36% YOY, 2/05)
• Broadband:135m global subscribers (+51% YOY); 35m in America; 63m in Asia
• Yahoo!:917m multimedia streams; 40m My Yahoo! users
• Digital Music:300m cumulative iTunes; 16m iPods
• Blogging:27% of US Internet users read blogs
• Wireless Internet:196m messaging subscribers in China; No. 1 in world
• VoIP:33m registered users (4/05)
• Shanda Networking:2m peak concurrent online gamers in China
• PayPal:72m accounts (+57% YOY); 22m users
• Broadband:S Korea broadband penetration of 70%; No. 1 in world
• Ad Spend: Internet Ad Spend at $120 per home vs. $898 for Newspapers

However, the Big Media Channels are Going down:

• Music: 2004 sales down 21% from 1999 peak
• TV:Network TVs audience share down by 1/3 since 1985
• Radio:Listener-ship at lowest level in 25 years
• Newspapers:Circulation declining
• Magazines:Circulation peaked in 2000; now at 1994 levels

Interesting comment at IEBlog: “The so-called browser wars have fundamentally changed. It’s no longer Microsoft vs. Mozilla vs. Opera et all. Now it’s the good guys vs. the bad guys. The bad guys are the phishers, malware distributors, and other miscellaneous crooks looking for a quick score at the expense of the browsing public. ”
We’re all in this together.