Friday Morning Bytes: Napster, Web 2.0, Local Deregulation
Napster's Lost Potential: Don Dodge,
who was v.p. of product development with Napster during the Shawn
Fanning era, has an interesting insiders look at what happened and what
could have happened before the P2P rebel was neutered. A point,
however, you must question is Dodge's contention Napster had more than
50 million users willing to pay $5 a month or $1 a download. “That
translates to about $250M a month
or $3B per year. Even if Napster kept just 10% of the revenue that
would be $300M per year against expenses of less than $10M. At the
stock market multiples of the day that would have been a $15B IPO.” The
fundamental flaw in this argument is it assumes all of Napster's 50
million users would have been willing to pay for music, which is a
ridiculous assumption. If Napster was really lucky, I'd willing to
guess 1 million would have been a fantastic number.
Web 2.0: From all accounts, the
Web 2.0 conference has been a roaring succesing - providing more
evidence the conferece industry has come roaring back to health after a
deadly period that saw the demise of Comdex. I wonder if Rick Segal,
who's down on the whole the concept of Web 2.0 to describe the
Internet's evolution, will be allowed to attend the conference next
year. Given the event is not being Webcast - which seems like a strange
move - the most intriguing things I've seen are Om Malik's lists of
things about the conference, which can be found here and here.
Local Deregulation in Canada:
So did Industry Minister David Emerson really said he wanted to see the
$10-billion local phone market in Canada deregulated so Telus and Bell,
et al could set their own prices? After conducting an interview with
Emerson earlier this week, Bloomberg dutily reported it but the big quote
to support their headline had nothing to do with deregulation and
everything to do with accelerating the CRTC's decision-making process -
something the the regulator is already implementing. I think Bloomberg
tried to do a torque job to make a story out of a non-story. It's not
like Emerson is going to tip his hat publicly before his three-person telecom review panel comes out with their report in the next three months.
October 7th, 2005 at 7:14 pm
Web 2.0 - The best blogs
Ed Costello does an excellent job of giving all the details of all the sessions, blog is at, http://artific.com/, the blog is so well written you can hear the Nokia phones ringing.
Paul Miller's blog is also well done and offers some good insights to the event, especially what he writes here http://paulmiller.typepad.com/thinking_about_the_future/2005/10/web_20_conferen_2.html
October 8th, 2005 at 12:49 pm
Actually, I'm not down on idea of actually making stuff that works, solves problems, etc. What I'm down on is this label mentality. If somebody doesn't use the term web2.0, does that mean it isn't worth a look (from a VC perspective)?
I'm reminded that Ktel, those guys making 50 greatest hit albums dropped in with an IPO after announcing Ktel.com. Made a fortune and changed basically nothing. I'm worried we are doing it all over again.
The label I'd be fine with is Bubble 2.0 as it might give people/investors/press/etc cause to pause vs. Web 2.0 which seems to invite lots of things to happen that shouldn't. If free shipping for 50lb dog food was dumb then, it's dumb now.
Telling me where the cheapest price is as it relates to my house, when I'm going to be out shopping, etc, well, that's a better use of technology but not version 2.0 of anything, rather getting good data to a potential customer. The way it's always been..
And I never get invited to the good parties, anyway, they make me sit at the kids table when I do manage to sneak in.