ESPN announced that it was pulling the plug on its MVNO venture.  This is an unfortunate trend since MVNO’s are new service and application vendors best shots at getting into the market place. Since MVNO’s, by definition, are marketing oriented, they should, in theory, be more willing to integrate new apps or services. However, the carriers have realized that while they like the notion of selling profitable, wholesale minutes to MVNO’s who then do the expensive customer acquisition dance, they also found that they were increasingly competing against the carrier for its retail customers. As a result, most carriers have ramped (or shut) down their MVNO programs. Existing MVNO’s are finding customers expensive to acquire and, like ESPN, have some tough decisions ahead. This also unfortunately leaves mobile app developers with having to deal with the galatial carriers for scaling…ouch. More to come on this topic.

"The word "Tipping Point", for example, comes from the world of
epidemiology. It’s the name given to that moment in an epidemic when a
virus reaches critical mass. It’s the boiling point. It’s the moment on
the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards."
  — Malcolm Gladwell

Is it just me or are colds and flus starting to pack dramatically more punch these days? My wife is one of the most resilient people I know, has been down and out with a cold for 5 days. I have had two colds in the past year that were so bad that I couldn’t even get out of bed for two days and didn’t return to full strength for a couple of weeks. It could be that, at 42, I have become old and decrepit. However, it seems that the viruses are getting more powerful and, worse, the resulting bacterial infections following colds are uber-strong strains that have survived over a decade of mis- and over-use of antibiotics.

Meanwhile, most of the pharma companies have dropped their anti-infective programs since the end markets are not big enough to make it worth their while. In their place, several start-ups, like Replidyne, are working on novel approaches to deal with drug resistent bugs. Replidyne’s technology acts by directly inhibiting bacterial DNA replication. This is one of the few biotech segments where early stage companies are not competing with multiple large pharma in-house efforts.

Unfortunately, the biotech venture model is broken. The last five biotech IPO’s, which by definition are supposed to be homerun events, returned between 0.8 and 1.2 times capital invested. In venture capital, you generally want to match the amounts of capital with the level of risk. You want to deploy small amounts of capital early and increase amounts as risk factors are removed. However, in biotech, because of the high cost of drug trials, investors need to deploy $50-100m before they know if they have a credible working product. These companies can soak up $100-200m before getting through trials and nearing market launch. I’m not certain how to fix this model, but for all of good, we need to figure this out (certainly glad Bush has banned federal funding of stem cells…sorry, had to slip that in).

This combination (more potent organisms and declining pharma programs) is dangerous. While nothing catastrophic has happened to date, chaos theory shows that once a particular strain hits its tipping point, we quickly end up with an epidemic.  This won’t necessarily be the catastrophic flu that the CDC and others are fearful of. It will also include increasingly debilitating colds and infections as well as the really nasty bugs hanging out in hospitals (can you say flesh eating bacteria…). I will do everything I can to stay out of hospitals.

In the interim, gives us all a break and keep those hands washed and stay at home if sick…

After much worrisome debate, we bought a trampoline for the kids this summer. It is our small attempt of staying up with our neighbors and their seven connected trampolines. After seeing this video, I feel much better about our decision… 🙂

When I thinking of online gaming, I think of 15-24 year olds battling away until the early hours of the night, loaded with Red Bull. According to a recent Comscore Gaming report, the average gamer is 41 years old and 52% of the gamers are women. I know that some of our gaming properties have suffered in formal traffic metrics since the younger gamers blow away their cookies and tracking programs and so tend to be under represented in the counts. Would be interested in getting feedback from a couple of the Comscore readers to this blog about this. This report would indicate that there are a large number of mid-aged women gaming. Not certain if there classes of games that I am not thinking about here that would target this group.

Comscore just released its Top 10 Video Ratings. According to Comscore in July:
Property              Unique U.S.          Streams Initiated               Streams per            
                           Streamers (000)      by U.S. Users (MM)      Streamer
——–                   —————              ——————                  ———–

Total Internet     106,534                      7,182                           67.4
Yahoo! Sites       37,934                        812                            21.4
MySpace            37,422                       1,459                           39.0
YouTube            30,538                        649                             21.2
Time Warner Network  25,675                258                             10.1
Microsoft Sites    16,227                       156                              9.6
Viacom Digital     14,077                       322                             22.9
Google Sites       7,520                           60                              7.9
Ebaums World       7,143                        67                              9.4
MLB                        6,442                      30                             4.6
ROO Group Inc.     5,841                        186                          31.9

This puts YouTube in third place with 649m streams and less than 10% share. However, in June, YouTube claimed it did 2.5B streams and had a 43% share. Hitwise reported that it was actually a 29% share. You would assume that the June numbers would be less than the July ones reported by Comscore. Nielsen claims YouTube has 20m uniques a month and Comscore says 30m.

What amazes me is the wide divergence and rank between all of these. Granted, tracking streaming is a relatively new "science" compared to straight page views, but you would think, in this day and age, that things would be +/- 10%. Also, companies are always promoting and bending reality a bit but a 400% differential between Comscore and YouTube’s claims is a bit much.

That said, I am a Yahoo fan and was glad to see that they are in the hunt though it is obvious from trends that YouTube and MySpace will be racing by them (if not already). Maybe Yahoo’s challenge is that they need to capitalize a letter in the middel…YaHoo!

A couple of readers pinged me about Xdrive versus S3 (Amazon) and Googlebase. S3 is competitive at $0.15/GB and $0.20/GB transferred. Googlebase is free but Google crawls your info. I still haven’t gotten over the creapy experience of reading an email in Gmail (say a friends Caribbean trip) and seeing Caribbean ads served up by Google. Sign me up for a paid model. I don’t necessarily trust that S3, at the end of the day, will maintain privacy as much as I would like. AOL’s privacy policy (minus the bone-headed search fiasco) is straight forward regarding user content like email and this applies to Xdrive as well. Lastly, there are services like Box.net and Streamload (now MediaMax) that also have compelling offers but I have more faith (fingers crossed) that AOL will be around in the long run with my data versus some of the independents.

Lot of interesting posts on S3 and EC2 which are Amazon’s Online Storage and On-demand computing offerings. They have been so well covered in the Blogosphere that you don’t need to hear my two cents on them. However, EC2 offers a new chapter in web development and a number of start-ups are taking advantage of it. Feel free to Google them…

AOL has launched an online file storage service called Xdrive which is offering 5GB of storage for free and 50GB for about $100/year. I love digital photography and my collection continues to grow. I have backup hard drives, burned DVD’s, etc as I am absolutely paranoid that all of the family memories are going to go up in flames some day in a fire or worse. Online is the obvious answer, but the costs have been outrageous until now.

AOL acquired Xdrive last year as it struggled to make its 5GB for $100/year model work. Not enough storage to fully back-up my collection so I was not willing to fork out $100. However, I am willing to do it this year since with 50GB ($2/GB), I can get all of my photos and then some backed up and I figure that this cost/GB is only going to go down.

They are working on a Mac client, but we Mac users can still use a browser to upload files. Windows users can do things from the desktop client like schedule multiple backups, manage & share folders, drag and drop folders/files and such.

Ironically, I came across the reborn Xdrive by seeing the ad underneath my posts. Talk about a backwards situation. The blog world never ceases to surprise me… Feel free to click on the ad link to sign up if interested. However, this is not a promotional post on Xdrive because of that. I’m just happy to have finally found a place to upload my extremely large photo files…

After a very successful first event, TeckCocktail, an informal and stripped-down quarterly networking event for technology professionals, will hold its second gathering Oct. 12 at the Gramercy in Lincoln Park. TechCocktail is run by Eric Olson of Feedburner and Frank Gruber, a local tech blogger and product manager with America Online. What I like about this event is that there is high percentage of developers & entrepreneurs there which leads to a productive set of interactions between people (versus some of the more generic social events). You can register at their site at this TechCocktail link.