Above the Crowd

Last Thursday, while attending the Wall Street Journal “D” conference, I was asked by Scott Wapner at CNBC to share my thoughts on the current IPO market. Here is the link to the video. If anyone knows how to embed these CNBC/NBC videos in WordPress.com (the SAAS web version, not the software package), let me know.  I tried to insert the HTML embed code with no luck – every time you try to “update post” the code is wiped out.

There is a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley circles that Apple may be working on a actual physical television (as opposed to the set-top box product known as AppleTV). There have also been assertions by business analysts that such a product is coming. I have no confirmation of this from inside of Apple, but I must say that this makes huge sense to me.   Here is my logic: For Apple, the fact that the TV business has become a commodity business will not be a road block. In PCs and MP3 players, they have proven they can charge a huge premium and extract enviable gross margins even […]

I recently spoke at AlwaysOn’s OnHollywood conference on the subject of today’s extremely dynamic online/Internet video world. Things are moving so amazingly fast that its extremely hard to predict specific outcomes. That said, I believe there are a number of critical issues to understand as we watch this market unfold over the next  few years.  Here is the video of the event:   And here are the slides: I wish they were synchronized, but alas after well over an hour of work, I gave up.  I believe that Google bought a company that will allow this, but they haven’t released the functionality yet on YouTube. […]

On May 5th, Nielsen released its March numbers for the top 10 PC game titles.  The number 1 spot is no surprise, with World of Warcraft from Blizzard holding a huge lead over all others. But the number two position may be a surprise to some of you, particularly with the wrath of negativism SecondLife has received in the press over the past 18 months. The truth of the matter is that the company is quite large, it’s growing, it’s profitable,  it has hired a number of great people over this time frame, and as the data shows it’s kicking butt. Note that the data also shows SecondLife actually leads WOW in terms of minutes […]

It is reassuring to see the press take a more modulated view of the swine-flu risks, especially as it becomes clear that both deaths and incidents have been overstated in the past week.  Our “instant on” media has an insatiable appetite for the scintillating story.  These days, you can actually sense the disappointment in the news anchor when a category four hurricane is downgraded to a category three.   Some people rationalize that this hysteria serves a noble purpose, in that it prepares us for the worse.  This, however, ignores the fact that there are tremendous real economic costs to overreaction, and that sometimes overreaction has far reaching negative impacts which can be many times greater than […]