Above the Crowd

“It’s funny how fallin feels like flyin, for a little while…” – Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart Soundtrack On July 1st, Google announced its intention to acquire ITA Software . ITA owns a primarily B2B airfare search and pricing system called QPX. Several of the leading online travel sites, like Orbitz, Kayak, and Bing Travel, use information from QPX to power their airfare search. Many in the industry view this move as a seminal event in Google’s history, as the company makes a decisive step from being a general search engine, into more structured vertical search. Certainly, Google already offers vertical search in Images, Videos, Maps, News, and several other categories. Despite […]

“The clock on the wall’s moving slower My heart it sinks to the ground And the storm that I thought would blow over Clouds the light of the love that I found” – Fool in the Rain, Led Zeppelin More often than not, we here in Silicon Valley are prone to idealism. We see a scenario the way we want to see it, and make predictions that fit our view of how we think the world should work, or perhaps even how we would like the world to be. This is especially true when it comes to technology. Outsider “luddites” […]

[Follow Me on Twitter] We are clearly at a very important point in time when it comes to Internet video, especially video that is served to your television, but over the Internet (also known as “over-the-top” Internet video). Christmas of 2009 and Christmas of 2010 will mark the point in time that Internet menus began to show up in-mass on televisions, DVD players, and game machines. That said, one would be hard pressed to predict exactly how this market will evolve.  There are simply way more questions than answers. For example: Who will own the operating system layer? Who will own the menu “stack” […]

I have been intrigued by the back and forth between Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, and Mark Cuban on the topic of “Free” as a strategy and business model. For those that haven’t read the articles and posts, I highly reccomend them all. Here they are in a list: 1) Back in February of 2008, Chris Anderson wrote the original cover story for Wired Magazine, title “ Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. ” Recently he has expanded this into an  entire book . I have felt for the  past year or so, that Chris’ first article is quintessential reading for the entrepreneurial set.  More on why later. 2) In the July 6, 2009 edition […]

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. […]