Category: Emerging Technologies

SiliconBeat writes:

We talked the other day with Ronald Chwang, over at Acer Technology Ventures.

He’s one of four partners in the Silicon Valley office (Santa Clara) of the venture firm, a spin-off from the Taiwanese computer company Acer. The firm was on the early side of the latest wave of VC firms scrambling to invest in China, making its first investment there in 2000.

True, Chwang is here in Silicon Valley, he says, because it still leads technology innovation broadly. Hands-down winner. Developments in intellectual property, new business models, or just divining things that are “very hard to do” — it’s largely happening here in the San Francisco Bay Area. So the trick so far has been to apply the innovations here to the market back in China, tweaking products so they fit in with local usage habits, cultural preferences and so on.

But then Chwang says things have been shifting lately. In some areas where China’s market size so exceeds the U.S., they’re poised to sneak ahead with several technology innovations. Take the mobile phone usage, where China clearly exceeds the U.S. Chinese companies, he says, are developing new ring tone, music/picture/video messaging capabilities not yet seen here. “Just because of sheer population,” he says. Short Messaging Service (SMS) is taking off faster in China because of the country’s censorship of official newspapers and online news sites. “SMS is China’s underground news media,” he notes. He predicts new innovations sprouting from that usage. Another area is in DVD media. China already has a higher DVD standard, offering higher quality and more storage capability than the going US standard. And with broadband usage taking off in China, companies are moving aggressively to offer video-on-demand — something slow to catch on here. So just as Japan forged a lead in consumer electronics, China has potential to lead in several of these new mobile/DVD/broadband areas, Chwang concludes.

Fred Wilson writes on the next big thing in radio:

Radio is re-inventing radio. But they need new technology to do that. They are getting that new technology. It’s called HD Radio and its coming.

The radio industry is already rolling out the new digital HD signal and they are going to get more agressive shortly as the new radios hit the market.

This digital platform will do for radio what the digital cable plant is now doing for cable.

Satellite radio is not the next big thing in radio. It’s a head fake just like satellite TV was in the TV world. Satellite TV can’t do what digital cable can do. And satellite radio can’t do what digital radio can do.

Just think about this for a second. HD Radios will be adressable and provide conditional access. That means radio programming can be provided on a subsription basis and the programming and the ads can be targeted. A typical FM station will be able to broadcast at least five audio streams on a given frequency. And you’ll have tivo-like store and replay.

Fast Company peers ahead and comes up with 101 ideas. “It may be convenience or transparency or a new way to think about strategy. We think you’ll see ideas that will help you change the way you work or how your company does business. In some cases, you may just be able to adopt the concept itself. In others, you may be inspired by the soul of it.”

75. Software Becomes a Utility

Imagine if we all had to pump our own water and generate our own electricity. Primitive! Yet that’s what we do every day with our computer infrastructure. Every business re-creates the wheel every time it has to tie its financial software to its customer software. Now it’s time to turn everything into a service. Leading companies pursuing this idea are Softricity and Grand Central Communications. Grand Central, founded by CNET and Vignette founder Halsey Minor, promises “integration on demand” for Web-based services by creating a shared infrastructure that everyone can tap into. Sure sounds like the power company, but considering that it’s taken five years for companies to get comfortable with Web-based applications for sales and support, only the bold need apply.

Business Week writes about Churchill Club’s Seventh annual Top Ten Technology Trends dinner, and the ten trends identified:

1. Web services will evolve and create new businesses
2. Patients will demand online medical records
3. Corporate computing won’t see big changes for at least five years
4. The next big tech innovation will come out of China
5. Blogging and other online content will force traditional media to change
6. California will lead the world in embryonic stem-cell research
7. Text messaging will become more pervasive
8. New consumer technologies will appeal to more than just young hipsters
9. Every consumer-electronic product you own is about to become obsolete
10. Utility computing will keep tech spending strong

Barron’s adds:

Always a crowd-pleaser, a panel of four tech experts predicted trends that should take hold over the next two or three years. The panel included Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr, whose most recent mega-hit is Google; CNET pundit Esther Dyson; private-equity investor and Barron’s Tech Forum veteran Roger McNamee; and Accel Partners venture capitalist Joe Schoendorf. The moderator was AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins, who co-founded the original incarnation of Red Herring magazine.

McNamee has traditionally been the panel’s lone voice with a perspective on public markets (he is a founding partner with Integral Capital Partners, a Menlo Park hedge fund that was seeded by Kleiner Perkins), but his recent diversions with a rock band and a private-equity partnership, Silver Lake Partners, has him less focused these days on public-market trends we can all profit by.

Still, he made the most unpopular — but probably most poignant — prediction of the evening: There will be no major waves of enterprise-technology spending equivalent to the 1990s’ for another five years. There will be nothing to match the evolution of Windows in the early ‘Nineties, the introduction of Enterprise Resource Planning in the mid-1990s, and the Y2K build-up of 1999, he said.

Yet Accel’s Schoendorf found a silver lining in McNamee’s cloud. The venture capitalist said that whenever “Silicon Valley” declares a trend over or a market kaput, it usually means that the opposite will actually be the case.

Schoendorf added: “This is actually a good, bullish sign.”

[via Doc Searls] IndexedForever has more details.

Business Week has a special report: “Whether it’s tech industry’s giants or a new class of startups that push computing into the easy-to-use world of utilities, customers will benefit the most. In this special report, BusinessWeek Online explores various facets of this trend, from wireless technology to big bets being made by Sun to the impact on small businesses. It will also examine how well browser pioneer Andreessen has done in his efforts to address the problem, and it follows the venture-capital money to a new generation of tech startups.”

Yahoo! News has a story from the Washington Post:

Now comes a fresh group of contenders for the Internet TV throne, all trying new twists on sending video over the global computer network. They carry funky names, too, like Akimbo, DaveTV, RipeTV and TimeshifTV. All are trying to exploit the increasing number of high-speed Internet links in homes and the declining costs for transmitting and storing digital video.

Some offer personalized entertainment networks, ones you or I create by mixing and matching niche programs that appeal to our inner couch-potato. Like TiVo (news – web sites), the digital recorder company, these services are trying to break away from the static program lineups that dominate today’s TV. Unlike earlier Web video networks — flops such as Pseudo.com and Digital Entertainment Network — today’s contenders collect content from other companies rather than producing their own.

Most of the new players are operating on the fringes of the Internet video free-for-all. That’s because virtually all the leading cable and satellite companies, along with the movie studios, are rushing to develop their own video-on-demand services.

What remains to be seen is whether the niche content from these start-ups — and others in the works — can attract audiences big enough to carry them through to an era when mainstream entertainment finally pops up on Internet video guides.

Technology Review writes:

Gas turbines powered much of 20th-century technology, from commercial and military aircraft to the large gas-fired plants that helped supply U.S. electricity. But these days it isnt the hulking machines in the labs museum that capture [Alan] Epsteins enthusiasm. Instead its a jet engine shrunk to about the size of a coat button that sits on the corner of his desk. Its a Lilliputian version of the multiton jet engines that changed air travel, and, he believes, it could be key to powering 21st-century technology.

Though the turbines blades span an area smaller than a dime, they spin at more than a million revolutions per minute and are designed to produce enough electricity to power handheld electronics. In the foreseeable future, Epstein expects, his tiny turbines will serve as a battery replacement, first for soldiers and then for consumers. But he has an even more ambitious vision: that small clusters of the engines could serve as home generating plants, freeing consumers from the power grid, with its occasional black- and brownouts. The technology could be especially useful in poor countries and remote areas that lack extensive and reliable grids for distributing electricity. A comparison to how the continuous shrinkage of the integrated circuit drove the microelectronic revolution is tempting. Just as PCs pushed the computing infrastructure out to users, microengines could push the energy infrastructure of society out to users, says Epstein.

Epsteins immediate goal, however, is to use these miniature engines as a cheap and efficient alternative to batteries for cell phones, digital cameras, PDAs, laptop computers, and other portable electronic devices. The motivation is simple: batteries are heavy and expensive and require frequent recharging. And they dont produce much electricity, for all their size and weight.

ACM Queue has a special issue devoted to RFIDs. “A technology called RFID (radio frequency identification), which is relatively new to the mass market, has exactly this characteristic and for many people seems a lot like magic. RFID is an electronic tagging technology that allows an object, place, or person to be automatically identified at a distance without a direct line-of-sight, using an electromagnetic challenge/response exchange. Typical applications include labeling products for rapid checkout at a point-of-sale terminal, inventory tracking, animal tagging, timing marathon runners, secure automobile keys, and access control for secure facilities.”

Jeff Jarvis adds:

Learn lessons from the explosion of the print industry thanks to the advent of online:

Many of the big players will be new players — video Googles, Yahoos, Netscapes (RIP), eBays, Amazons, CraigsLists, and so on. Oh, there’ll be money made by the old guys in addressable video; they’ll make it sooner. But eventually, the subsversive companies will do to video what, for example, CraigsList has done to papers.

Walled gardens (AOL = cable MSOs; Pathfinder = oldstyle networks) will not prevail. Open, distributed, ad hoc networks will win.

Interactivity won’t mean pushing a button to get “more about this” while you watch a TV show (as ITV is now defined, insultingly and boringly). Interactivity will mean recommending TV shows to the rest of the world, remixing TV shows, making TV shows: citizens’ TV.

New tools and citizen producers will reduce the cost of producing TV to a comparative nil and there goes the barrier to entry to video.

Fred Wilson writes about a discussion on “about Video On Demand (VOD), TV delivered over phone lines (IP TV), Video on the Internet (Streaming), and Downloadable Video (Bit Torrent)”:

I believe we are going the way of downloaded TV over the long run. What should the content owners do about this? I think they should recognize that the ad sponsored content model can work in a downloaded world. They should cut ad avails into their programming, hard wire an IP address into those ad avails to pull an advertisment off of their servers, and then let the programming go wherever it will go. In an always on world, they’ll get the ad impressions they always got, and probably a lot more.

Who is going to build out the infrastructure for this new world of exploding TV? I am not sure, but I do hope they stop by our offices and tell us what they are doing. Because we want to invest in this trend.

[Via Fred] TV Harmony argues for Video-on-demand:

for a large percentage of the population, VOD, especially if it expands to becoming a centralized DVR, is likely going to be the easier solution.

the battle will ultimately be played out on HDTV. The cost of HDTV is getting lower each day, and more and more people are buying HDTV-ready sets. More and more content is being delivered in HDTV format, and it won’t take too much time before people demand HDTV streams as a viewing preference. HDTV content will ultimately have a “broadcast flag” making reproduction more difficult for people, and the size of the files will increase.

video’s relationship with people [is] different than the relationship people have with music. People listen to music over and over again, but in general, video is a single use commodity for the most part. This changes the calculus slightly in that the pain to download a video has to be less than the pain to download a music track, or it doesn’t seem worth it.

content providers have an excellent opportunity to create their own services before the suffer a napster-like meltdown.