Viodi View – 08/17/11

Alan Weissberger may have said it best when he suggested that the Google purchase of Motorola Mobility is representative of what has become a sort of patent mania these days.  At approximately $734k per existing patent or $500k if pending patents are included, this is a good deal compared to the $750k per patent that the Apple/EMC/Ericsson/Microsoft/RIM/Sony consortium paid for the intellectual property assets of Nortel.  Those figures ignore Motorola Mobility’s business ($3.3B revenue in the latest quarter and $3B+ cash in the bank) and the well reported synergies of bringing a hardware manufacturer with deep ties to service providers into its fold.

VC Falling over Internet Start-Ups, Telecom & Networking Left in Dust; TiE Angels Wins for Smaller Deals! by Alan Weissberger The just released PricewaterhouseCoopers National Venture Capital Association MoneyTreeTM Report for 2Q-2011 contains some very revealing information about the amounts and types of companies venture capitalists (VCs) are investing in. VCs opened their wallets and invested $7.5 billion in 966 deals in 2Q-2011. That was an increase of 19% in terms of both dollars and the number of deals compared to the first quarter of 2011 when $6.3 billion was invested in 814 deals. The quarterly investment level represents the highest total in a single quarter since the second quarter of 2008.  Click here to read more.

Sponsor Message Sponsor WSTA’s Fall Conference and receive video vignette produced by Viodi. This sponsorship generates revenues for WSTA and is specially packaged by Viodi to produce short video interviews, customer testimonials, or product highlight video segments. Click here for more details from WSTA website.

TiE Angels 1 Year Check-Up: Outstanding Health & Getting Stronger! by Alan Weissberger Just over one year ago, TiE Angels was started as an experiment by the Silicon Valley (SV) Chapter of TiE. Short for “the Indus Entrepreneurs,” TiE is the world’s premier non-profit organization promoting entrepreneurship. The Angels seem to fit perfectly with TiE’s charter–to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs and to educate and mentor them. TiE had been doing this with great success for close to 20 years but somehow it did not provide an organized platform for angel investing until August of 2010.  Click here to read more about this unique organization.

Original Content 

Last week’s announcement of the Starz, LLC partnership with the BBC to co-produce content for their respective networks was hinted at in this interview with John Penney, EVP of strategy and business development, of Starz at the 2011 Connections™.  He was a keynote speaker at Connections™ and one of the things he spoke of is the continued high cost of making television programming.  He said that there are overhead costs that continue to make scripted television expensive.  Click here to view.

Fiber to the Wireless Drop

Building a robust last mile is a challenge for broadband operators.  In this interview, filmed at the 2011 IP Possibilities,  Rob Riordan, EVP and director of corporate development for Nsight, an award-winning pioneer in the deployment of femtocell technology, advances an idea for using hardened femtocells at the pedestal to solve the drop part of the last mile access challenge.  Click here to view.

New Telecom Services that Capitalize on Broadband Connectivity – Part 3 by Alan Weissberger The theme of this three-part series is to examine potentially new and different telecom services that enable telcos to participate in the value chain created by broadband Internet access. Pressure is on telcos to build out their fiber based and/or mobile broadband networks for greater coverage and higher traffic carrying capacity. Yet it is other companies (and not the telcos) that are making money from the value added services and apps they’ve created which take advantage of the telcos broadband network. So are telcos nothing more than purveyors of a fat, dumb pipe? Or can they find new services that will generate revenues and profits? That is, can telcos transform a “dumb pipe” into a “smart pipe” which they can make money from?  Click here to read more.

Crossroads for Mobile Carriers

Mobile carriers are at a cross roads in terms of being able to monetize the investments they have made in their infrastructure, according to Harry Wang, Director of Health and Mobile Research for Parks Associates.  Looking at other markets and ways, such as Machine to Machine connectivity, to build on that infrastructure will be critical in order for them to justify their network investment.  In this interview, Wang indicates that the carriers have only just begun to exploit these new opportunities.  Click here to view.

---

Some Tweets, Google+ & Other Short Thoughts:

•  IAB Opposes New Web Domain Program From ICANN – This seems like a cybersquatter opportunity-albeit ones w/deep pockets
• Gadget support services going mainstream, as evidenced 2 clever ads in the same 30 minute program for Xfinity’s (Comcast) Signature Support.
• bitflx – interesting spin on local content from former Raynet colleague who makes video relevant to locale & time
• Sign of the times – so my 12-year-old,tech savvy son asks me, in all seriousness, to look at a paper phone book. He says he never has seen one and can’t believe that it could hold all the phone numbers of our county. Interestingly, we couldn’t find one in our house.

---

The Korner – 11 Miles Down Pena Boulevard Pena Boulevard is a familiar trek for anyone who has rented a car out of the Denver International Airport.  The drive through the prairie to I-70 seems like the world’s longest off-ramp and can be frustrating for someone who wants to just get to their destination.  After listening to Sean Riley’s track, Pena Boulevard, I now think of that song’s hook line, instead of the realities of this lonesome road.

Pena Boulevard is off Riley’s album, Not Like Them, and is representative of  his music, which has a 70s feel and is reminiscent of artists from that era, such as Roger McGuinn or Dan Folgerberg.   The lyrics of the dozen songs on his Johannes Luley-produced CD are personal and range from heartbreak to the frustration felt by an overnight disc jockey.  The songs are radio friendly.

What makes Riley unique is that, despite what his album says, he is like us, at least in one sense.  Being entrenched in the distribution side of the media business (you can find him in past ViodiTV interviews), he has a bit of a double life, as hinted at in his song, Somebody Else.  And Riley’s story of what he has done to create this first-rate album while having a day job reminds me of the first lesson of local content – that is, talent is often in our midst. And, if you are in the LA area on August 26th, you can catch this talent at his CD Encore party at the Genghis Cohen restaurant, bar and music room.