A final push to get the code into beta and Project V will be a commercial goer.

As much as I enjoy product development, the real fun begins for me when you hit the market for the first time.

Time was you beavered away and then called a press conference. These days you work in stealth, do an alpha trial with a study group, then an invitational beta and then a beta launch and then, many years later the word ‘beta’ quietly disappears. In the meantime you hope that the blogshphere (and the press) will have cottoned on to what you’re doing with bated breath and will be speculating like crazy.

But if you’re not going directly public (or ‘B2C’) things are a bit more straightforward. Project V will not be available to the public – it is what they call a B2B product, so the marketing comes down to preparing promotional and marketing materials and searching out the right partners to work with around the world.

Product, price, promotion and place (in this case resellers) was how I was taught marketing, and very little has changed. Soon we’ll see if I’ve got all four right.

Originally posted here:
Project V – The Fun Begins

I’ve just found that, perhaps due to the advent of mobile broadband, my local Starbucks has disabled the plugs in its public areas just as I’m working there (well, watching the Tae Kwon Do…). But what they don’t know is that I have a battery that lasts for

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SIgn Of The Times ?

As long predicted on these pages, Level3 have made their move and have started at the top by announcing that they have usurped Akamai as the BBC’s provider of choice.

Now Akamai have the disadvantage of not being a Tier 1 carrier, so their prices are always going to be more expensive since they need to buy the bandwidth in the first place from the likes of Level 3, AT&T and iBasis. All of this points to Akamai being in trouble commercially. But you have to ask if Level3 is beginning to bite the hand that feeds it.

I feel a closer alliance between iBasis/KPN and Akamai coming along.

There is also a technical angle to this. To date, edge caching networks have been a good way of distributing lots of VoD content around the web. But it does have many weaknesses and it less useful for live and simulcast applications. Multicasting is a real possibility for Tier 1 player with the right investment and technologies like the soon-to-be-announced Edgeware IP Internet TV server are also going to change the paradigm.

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Dropped Connection

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m not big on CDN company Limelight. Performance, management and IP issues make me cynical. But, you can’t dispute pure stats and they’re walking all over Akamai and the other incumbents at present thanks to an aggressive sales team as recent sales figures show. Their serving of the Olympics for NBC have also moved them on a notch after some live streaming disasters.

Part of Akamai’s problems are its prissyness – an unwillingness to handle gambling outside of the US, and an unwillingness to be realistic about pricing, linked with a general arrogance about its service (which is superior imho) are really hitting its bottom line.

Boy, with the advent of technologies from companies like Edgeware and new pricing from network companies like Level 3 and AT&T, this market is due for a major shake up. If you’re willing to invest £30k or so, expect prices of 5p/GB for sub 20TB and 4p/GB for higher bandwidths very soon – under a quarter of current rates….

However, at the moment, I’d still rather trust my major live event with Akamai over Limelight any day…

Read more here:
In The Limelight

I’ve received legal letters from my previous employers trying to gag me. These seem to especially concern my view of the management team that took over in November 2006. However, this is a graph that is publically available to anyone:

The top of this graph is when David McCourt (or Run DMC as he is now called by a fellow shareholder, employee and sufferer) took over as ‘Interim’ CEO and Chairman, the bottom is where he sold out, and then even re-negotiated a poorer deal for shareholders just a week ago. Due to this guy I have lost well over $6m dollars whilst he issued himself more and more shares in the company for free.

The US is a difficult place to go public, but it still provides scandalous levels of protection to people who destroy shareholder value. I hope ome of the company’s shareholders will sue him

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Devil Days