Monthly Archives: May 2012

Does anyone have enough time anymore to enjoy their Memories

  By Carl | May 28, 2012 - 10:21 pm | Uncategorized
Leave a comment

- Does anyone have enough time anymore to enjoy their Memories.
For those of us in the US, I wish you an observant Memorial Day. Next Week I will be in the district and visit my aunt. Her father, my grandfather was a gun designer for the Navy. He was also a Sergeant during WWI, which he was promoted to since he was the only one of the farm boys that could read. Clearly our society has changed a lot particularly when you consider that our military is stationed in over 75% of the countries in the world. The reason we are in 75% of the world’s countries has more to do with commerce and commodities than with military aspirations. Perhaps we should make it an International Holiday. Or perhaps we should consider what an amazing transition from an agricultural isolationist pre 1917; to a literate International power in less than 100 years.

One thing that’s truly amazing to see is how the military solution that started the Internet has changed the world. If information is power, the Internet has shifted power more than any other military effort. Jonathan Stewart joked about the Afghanistan & Iraq wars after the Arab Spring started “couldn’t we have just tweeted”. The transitions in culture the Internet has caused are bound to continue. At Devcon5 I often ask Jason Hoffman to speak http://bit.ly/KkJ2Fu. He is the CEO of Joyent which competes with the likes of Amazon with their virtualized cloud offerings. He points out that data is a commodity business. From Wall Street we know that information has shelf life. I unfortunately am more of a historian, so often I stay focused on a piece of information that has grown stale for most money makers, but I believe you watch for the trends in the news.

The world assembles in China, but the components are coming from everywhere. It will be interesting to see as China’s role continues to grow what changes in the next 100 years. In replacing my phone’s hot spot capability, I went to a carrier that gave me two choices, Huawei or ZTE. While Sir Terry Matthews sold boards to the CEO of Huawei back in the 80’s now we see the rise of Chinese brands and by the way, I still believe we are going to see the rise of Chinese standards. While the world is focused on Frequency based LTE, I think the TDD standards, championed by China, are going to win out in the end. That’s one of the reasons our Crossfire Mobility Tech/ M2M keynotes http://bit.ly/K3WfVp include Hamid Ahmadi of Huawei with our friend Hossein Eslambolchi of 2020 Venture Partners http://bit.ly/L5iplB. The Internet commodity is transforming into more than transport and into services hence the further marketing term “Cloud”.

As a historian new marketing terms are often frustrating, (for example I should call myself a “curator”), the M2M cloud discussion has made the term Platform universal hence this week’s M2M article http://bit.ly/JFWKoE.

Speaking of being leery of marketing, I would like to know if Whitey Bluestein http://bit.ly/K3VtaS has some inside information when he suggests Apple should become an MVNO? Apple has a great relationship with Capital Cities who learned some hard lessons when they made the Disney and ESPN MVNOs. I hope Apple’s Tim Cook will take the time with Disney and not arrogantly think the Apple brand solves the problem of managing wireless networks.

Speaking of arrogance, I was asked to elaborate on my analysis of Facebook, so I am going to end with this link http://bit.ly/JFgioE. As we celebrate memorial day, let’s not let arrogance get in the way of our future together. Take the time to enjoy the memories, regardless of where you are.

What’s to “Like” about the Facebook IPO

  By Carl | May 27, 2012 - 10:21 am | Uncategorized
2 Comments

I have to tell you I feel for a lot of people on the Facebook IPO. Let me walk through my thoughts in as organized a manner as a maniac can get.

First of all I am proud of the general consumer of stock. A lot of Wall Street was expecting Facebook Frenzy and thought that the demand was going to give them a lot of people wanting Facebook at any price so the traders are the ones that have been hurt the most by the IPO. Given the fact that Wall Street continues to not recognize the pain on main street, maybe this can help them get on the Cluetrain.

Secondly, I feel for the employees of Facebook. In the past on another stock, I made the mistake of not declaring the value of my stock until required by law. The result was that my shares were valued at the price of the opening as income. The result at the end was that I owed the government 75% of the value of the stock by the time I sold it. (And Yet I am still a Liberal). My expectation is the Facebook employees will have a lot of guys like me in their mix, so I feel for them. This includes Eduardo Saverin who is trying to solve the problem of paying to much.

Third, I feel for NASDAQ and Morgan Stanley who were suppose to have a shining moment and ended up with egg on their face. These opportunities to learn from your mistake often come at the price of executives being removed, or worse the blame being misplaced. Either way, I feel for those involved.

Now for those of us still interested in investing in Facebook the stock restrictions end in about 85 days. I would say wait until those who were as ignorant as I and not as smart as Eduardo, sell to pay their taxes.
Then you can buy the stock. Don’t be surprised if that dip brings it down into the teens. Their a lot of people with stock and taxes to cope with.

And I feel for those people who are paying those taxes the most, since I am sure they will not see the benefits of being good citizens, just the cost.

And for those in that pain, I want you to know that I am “like” you.

Last Weeks Rant – Well That Was Disappointing

  By Carl | May 25, 2012 - 12:53 pm | Uncategorized
Leave a comment

For those who didn’t notice I tried to use the mail merge tool and sent a note with the subject “Funny how the conversation has diminished with all the tools at our disposal” . It was suppose to lead into this email.
Other than three people with an unsubscribe request, I am not sure anyone opened it. Here is what I wanted you to read.

I was listening to NPR http://n.pr/KOwWSu this weekend and they were having a debate as to whether we were really communicating on the Internet or just falling in love with our voice (and those that agree with us). It occurred to me that I was not hearing like I used to from friends about my articles and posts.
So I am hoping you find something interesting in my posts and respond. I will post your replies on appropriate blog or keep them to myself if that is what you prefer.

Here are the places I posted last week.

First of all I gave a lecture at Pace University to a class the Internet as Universal Service. It’s an interesting contrast looking at POTS, IP, GSM and Wi-Fi. In the end I think Wi-Fi is going to be the only safe technology to trust as end to end. I say this since LTE is being deployed as proprietary as possible by the carriers. I understood that for the first few years since the drive was there to get something to catch up to data demand. However, it’s clear this is going to be the norm and not the early adoption issue. http://www.slideshare.net/alwaysoncarl/does-the-mobile-internet

Cooper’s Law may be thwarted by bad deployments and the opportunity for competition is pretty sad. Last week we saw Lightsquared give up the ghost, I swapped my phone from a lesser party back to one of the two big players. http://www.mobilitytechzone.com/topics/4g-wirelessevolution/articles/2012/05/16/290511-cancelled-my-4g-phone-evidently-it-wasnt-primary.htm I went to order from Clearwire and realized the process was going to drive me nuts so I gave up. Pretty Sad and it indicates why there is reluctance to leave the incumbents.

Candidly it’s easier and the fact that the cable operators sold spectrum co to Verizon Wireless points out how hard it is to break in. While our friends in WISPA, do a great job supporting cost conscious customers, the general consumer market is not very flexible. When companies like Lightsquared go under and Clearwire revamps it makes it harder for the next company to break out.

I have friends tell me that Apple and Google are the real carriers and looking at how resentful ATT is that the bulk of the bucks go to Cupertino you can see there is no need for Apple to hurry to buy a carrier.

However, the market cap on Clearwire is so low and the bandwidth is so great, now may be the time. Perhaps it will be Amazon.

I should also note that I was at Blackberry Jam in Orlando two weeks ago so I don’t mean my quoting of others to suggest I think that devices are going to be duopoly like the wireline. In reality I think Microsoft and RIM are both on the right track. You will hear more about this as soon as I get my interviews posted. Let me say this the closer we get to full compliance to HTML5 the more opportunity for end to end to win. This will come up when we do DevCon5 in NYC in July. Http://www.devconfive.com

Not to be pitchy, but that’s also why I added the Bring Your Own Device / Wi-Fi sessions to the 4GWE event (now called Mobility Tech Conference & Expo) http://www.mobilitytechzone.com/conference/ . The business of the mobile Internet is very nascent and while we can be glad the carriers have gotten past WAP. We still have a long way to go before the business is mature.

Hell we can’t even agree on what’s mature yet. Yahoo! As a stock finally found a new height, but we will see if it maintains. I was hoping for a new mobile commerce model from Scott Thompson http://www.imhocorp.com/?p=939 . I guess he may have to pull a Steve Jobs and rise like a phoenix from the Ashes. Speaking of Ashes, Facebook looks like a good buy in about another 98 days http://blog.tmcnet.com/4g-wirelessevolution/2012/05/facebook-you-still-can-judge-them-by-their-cover.html . Although based on the amount of stock already out there and NASDAQ faulty T+1 systems. I may have to add a few more days for the market to equalize.

Mark Cuban said this was the most important IPO ever and in some ways he was right http://www.webpronews.com/facebook-ipo-may-be-the-most-important-in-history-says-mark-cuban-2012-05 . The stock may have single-handedly killed the tech bubble on Wall Street. I don’t know if you watched but for almost every other tech stock in the market it was like a scene from “On the Beach’ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053137/ . Nothing was moving. Even Apple was dropping as the capital went out to meet up with Facebook.

The market however is efficient and is back to work. One thing that kept coming up on Wall Street and with Gigaom is that Facebook has yet to figure out wireless http://gigaom.com/mobile/will-facebook-adapt-to-mobile-or-will-mobile-adapt-to-facebook/ . So let’s end with a discussion of largest user of wireless – machines. I did a webinar with ATT and AXEDA last week that was very good but left me questions about the singularity being near. http://m2m.tmcnet.com/topics/m2mevolution/articles/290542-phases-m2m.htm

Anyway I hope you enjoyed my rant and linking you to most of the places you can find my thoughts. As always I like it best when the audience talks back. I hope to hear from you soon.

Kind Regards,

Carl