Tim Oren's Due Diligence

Whither Yahoo!?

First Zod, now Semel. Not that anyone's surprised. The miasma of strategic drift has been evident out by the Sunnyvale disposal plant for quite a while. So what now? Jerry Yang's post is as full of platitudes as the CEO of a struggling public is obliged to be these days. Leaving it to amateur pundits to contribute their own foresightful or lame recommendations. I'll stick these out in public and we'll see how they fare:

• Quit fighting the fight you've lost - search based advertising. As long as the market compares you to Google, you're going to look lame. Just say it: "We let 160 billion dollars of value get built on our back because we didn't understand the Internet." Get it over with, blame it on you-know-who. Now try to define yourselves a fight that you can be seen to win.


• Maybe that's building a grand alliance of destination sites, as I've speculated before. If so, get on with it. There are a lot of decent reasons that high traffic destinations may want more control over advertising than a Google-like system can provide. With a little innovation, you might able to harvest reader information there that could actually make the ads placed be interesting from time to time.


• Yahoo has always had a vibrant communities area, from e-mail to Groups, and managed to handle the Flickr acquisition well, in contrast to Google's botch of blogger. Too often obscured by other hoo-rah, both communications and community generated content are underworked assets. Repeat after me: It's community that keeps people present, not content. Perhaps buyers, and hence advertisers, will be more motivated when they are engaging with socially significant activities. Here's an old motto: Reinforce success, not defeat. Act accordingly.


• Use destination site alliances as an opportunity to triage and scrub your own content origination and packaging. Come on, where's the use in slapping a purple logo on yet another MSM story, and putting it up without any outbound links? If you're not adding value, get out, and cut your expenses. You've got a perfect opportunity to dump the last illusions that Silicon Valley knows how to run a studio system. Blame it on...


• The access provider alliances are going to die, along with the notion that the default home page drives the user value. We're out of noobs for all practical purposes, the valuable eyeballs can now find their own way around the Innernut. Remember, $160b of valuation says so. AT&T doesn't need you, and you don't need them. Unless you're going into the outsourced infrastructure biz bigtime, prepare to take the hit. Blame it on...


• Down in the bowels over there, you've got bright folks working on JSON and other goodly, RESTful stuff that enables mashups and occasionally lets one smell a whiff of platform through the miasma. And you've still got a huge audience that makes that foundation inherently valuable to partners. I don't know exactly how to monetize that, but why don't you let those folks out to play in a serious way? There's a lot of developers and users that might help you find the answer. And wouldn't you hate to have to explain to the shareholders how you let yet another startup build a mega-billion dollar market cap right on top one of your core values? I sure would.

Good luck, guys. I really do mean it.

Marc Andreessen on Venture Capital

If you haven't seen this series of posts re venture capital by the Netscape founder, I recommend it highly:

• Part One


• Part Two


• Part Three

Well-informed, crisp and to the point. (If you avoid the often inane comments, one of the reasons I seldom host them here.)

Compare my own earlier "No Exit" post for how some of the same processes look from the other side of the table. It's good to hear this from multiple points of view, and especially valuable to have it come up fresh periodically. More wisdom to spread around, and the same Old Farts don't have to bestir ourselves to write it again.

BumpTop and Piles: Literalism vs. Magic

From the "While You Were Out" Department: I'm one of the few tech-oriented bloggers who didn't note the BumpTop user interface prototype from University of Toronto shown at TED a few months back. That's what comes of being nose down in a startup with a different focus, but it's ironic given that I was an author on related work done during my Apple days and on the related patent (fair warning there). Mind you, while I had design and directional input, most of my contribution was of the "provide resources and stay mostly out of the way" managerial sort.

The BumpTop research group's site (scroll down) gives pointers to a CHI paper and thesis with further background on the design and related prior art related to organizing information in a 'non-desktop' fashion. The original desktop design, born at Xerox PARC, was designed to manage a few hundred items, according to Alan Kay and others who were there at inception. Ordinary users exceeded that threshold long ago, and the situation has gotten far worse since we struggled with it in Apple research in the early 90's.

Pentile Matrix: 50% Flat Panel Power Saving Now, More to Come

I don't usually blog about Pacifica Fund portfolio companies, for a variety of reasons, but I'm going to break that rule here. (Consider this my full disclosure.) I've been involved with Clairvoyante since our initial investment in 2001. The company's business is to create novel 'Pentile' subpixel layouts and rendering software that offer improvements in power, brightness, and cost in flat panels compared to conventional RGB 'stripe' designs that have been around since the beginning of the color LCD business. Recently the company got a very nice pickup from Technology Review that was based on its announcements at the annual SID display industry trade show. That's gratifying in raising awareness, but the ensuing chain of pass-along coverage also makes an interesting exhibition of the lesser habits of the technical blogosphere, and motivates a slightly mendacious use of googlejuice to amend the record.

The basic Pentile design is a result of insight into the human visual system. For some reason lost in the evolutionary record, we only perceive blue at about half the resolution at which we can discern features in the red/green space. So why should we give blue subpixels equal weight when laying out panels that are simulations of the natural visual experience? By using this bit of naturally occurring slack in engineering tradeoffs, one can come up with designs that yield more brightness for equivalent power, or allow display power reductions of up to 50%, and often give cost benefits. The company site has a more cogent explanation, with a cute simulation. Given that mobile device manufacturers are scratching for energy savings in the face of increased power demands from displays, MPEG processors, more complex basebands and so forth, some of these tradeoffs sound attractive. The Pentile designs have been in the hands of flat panel manufacturers for some time, and there are standard modules now available to OEMs of cell phones and other mobiles. (This investment is one of the better ones for getting sneaks on upcoming cool toys. Except I can't blog about any of them. Rats.)

Additionally, the company has been working on some further optimizations that can occur when the content to be displayed is time varying, e.g., video on smart mobiles, or even full size HDTVs, allowing further improvements in brightness/power. (Televisions account for 6-8% of US wireline power consumption. Who knew? Not me.) So Clairvoyante is cooking up a new generation of their designs that combine the subpixel tricks with dynamic changes in backlighting to further reduce power and apparent contrast. Those are coming soon, but not yet in commercial product.

So the original Technology Review story got the two generation story right, making it clear that the Pentile layouts are here-and-now, and the dynamic systems is coming soon. From there the story bounced through the gadgetsphere, shedding words and nuance as it went. For one example, Gizmodo to Ubergizmo to 2dayBlog. I suppose I shouldn't be complaining about coverage that spells the names right, but while the blogosphere often turns up its nose at the MSM's verbatim parroting of AP coverage (or press releases for that matter), at least the gadget-chasers have developed similar habits. Along the line the distinction between two different generations of technology got lost, with Gizmodo conflating the initial Pentile design with the new dynamic control, but at least the later follow-ons got it it right that end user devices with the first should be out early next year. (No, I can't say who or what.)

Since some of the Gizmodo commenters seemed fascinated re where the name came from, for the record: One of the first designs from the company had a pattern of five (penta-) subpixels to cover (-tile) the LCD panel. And once you've got the name established with the customers, you don't change it gratuitously even if later designs use a different repeat pattern. At least not with my money, you don't...