Geekfishing Blog

Here are some random companies in the satellite world:

• WildBlue. Funded by Liberty Media this is a $50/month internet access over satellite
• Telesat. This is the combination of Telesat and Loral Skynet, this was a CAD $3.25B buyout controlled by the Canada Public Sector Pension Investment Board. It is the fourth largest fixed satellite services provider (FSS). They have 12 satellites. They have two additional satellites fully contracted to Canada Bell ExpressVu for direct-to-home satellite services.
• Inmarsat. They are mainly maritime company that has a lot of satellite offerings that are low to medium bandwidth
• Intelsat. This is a rollup of the original intelsat and pan am sat. They also acquired Comsat General in 2004 to do government integration. You can also see their bird position.
• Hughes. These guys are worth about $800M and are the only pure play reseller that is public. They primarily focus on the consumer services
• Dish has just split their satellite from their consumer marketing group. They acquired Sling Media for $380M in October 2007 (wow!) so they will end up as Dish Network and then the infrastructure business is EchoStar Communications.
  

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Posted by Rich at 6:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So how do you create a synthetic name these days. Well over the last twenty years, there have been some incredible trends. Right now, it is synthetic fun names like meebo.

Just a few years ago, it was names that were just fun like yahoo, amazon and google.

Then there was the era of the meaningful synthetic name like Compaq, Lexus, etc.

Before that was what I think of as the tech era, where everything sounds like computech, microsoft and so forth. Everything that micro something or compu something or something tech.

And before then that were the three letter acronym years where you took very boring words and made them cool so Digital Equipment Corporation was DEC, then there was IBM, NCR, CDC, etc.

Then there was the era of faceless companies like General Motors, General Electric, American Telephone & Telegraph, US Steel and so forth.

Finally, you have the era of the & Sons era, where you had people's names like J.P. Morgan Bank, Carnegie Steel or Ford Motor Company.

In the venture business, everything seems to sound like a tree (Sequoia, Oak, Evergreen, Madrona) or it sounds like a TLA (MDV, KPCB, TCV) or it sounds like

Posted by Rich at 9:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Three weeks ago I had an accident (not on the bike) that severely injured my left thigh. I am writing this to share with others what I learned during this process.

Right after my fall I eleveted and iced my leg. This was the right thing to do. I should have done it a lot more unfortunately I was taking my mom to the baseball game for Mother's day so I got up to take a shower. While in the shower I ran hot water on the leg and massaged the injured part of the leg. This was the wrong thing to do. While it felt great at the time it was accelerating the bleeding for which I would pay later.

Sitting at the baseball game also was a problem because my leg wasn't elevated and I was slightly pinching off the circulation in my leg. After about 5 innings of baseball the leg was swollen stiff and very sore. It was difficult to walk up the stairs and drive home.

That night the leg was very painfull. I kept it elevated and on ice as much as I could but by then the damage was done and I would just have to wait for the injury to heal and the internal bleeding to stop.

I continued to ice my leg for several days until I was told I could apply some heat. For heat I chose to use our hot tub. This is not the type of heat you should use. The heat should have been local and not general like you get in a hot tube. While I was in the hot tub I would rub the sore part of the leg which wasn't a good thing to do.

After over three weeks I am finally able to walk normally and get back on a bike for short rides. I am stil icing my leg each night and keeping it elevated. I don't know how much I exacerbated by injury by applying heat and massage too early but I sure learned the hard way not to do that for future injuries.

Posted by at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Interesting area right now:

• Accuray is going public right now. Did 53M in revenue with $27M COGS (so its not like pharmaceuticals with essentially a 50% margin. The fascinating thing is they are going public having never made a profit at all. It is all based on futures.

Posted by Rich at 5:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now Three is doing a channel where if you upload a video and someone watches it you get 1p.

Posted by Rich at 8:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I use ffdshow and zoom player for all movies I watch. ffdshow has an amazing number of settings, here is htpcnews' guide for setting

moved the "Blur & NR" setting up as far as possible it is time to configure it. Enable this setting by checking the box next to it. You have two preferred methods of removing noise from your DVD picture. The first is to use Gradual denoise. You can use this option by selecting the check mark next to it. I typically set mine to 25. The method I currently use is denoise3d, which is located at the bottom. Try setting the dnoise3d luma to .5, the chroma to .5, the time to 5 and check the HQ box. Again use this as a reference and then once you get everything working play with the settings on your own to find what you feel looks best.

"Resize & aspect". Do the same as you did with "Blur & NR" and use the arrows on the left of this setting to move it up just below "Blur & NR". Resize does basically what it sounds like, it resizes the video to the size you specify. Typically you want to keep the resize setting at double DVD resolution (1440×960) or your desktop resolution whichever is greater.</blockquote
HTPCnews.com: The Media Center Resource - ffdshow DVD Guide (2004)

Under "Resize & aspect" you will see a settings area for resize. This is the main area where the sharpening of the image is done. You will notice a drop down box here with many selectable items in it. These are all the available resize algorithms. Typically I tend to use Lanczos as this gives the best quality image on my display. You will have to change the Luma and Chroma Sharpen settings to your taste but for now you can start out with the settings I use which is 1.5 for each. as for parameter you can try many options here or leave it at default. For now I will put it at 10.</blockquote

Posted by Rich at 9:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/10/apple-about-to-announce-wireless-video-ipod/

Supposedly they're preparing to announce the device in the very near future, which we've been told is both wireless and widescreen (both features we've been waiting for the iPod to take on, since, well, forever)

Posted by Rich at 12:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

a bad list of sites from time

Posted by Rich at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A tongue in cheek site that actually is pretty close to how most Web 2.0 site look :-)

Posted by Rich at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sequoia was among YouTube’s first funders, providing $11.5 million in two rounds. When $25 million more was rumored to have come from parties unknown this April, Michael Arrington wrote that Sequoia likely did whatever it could to maintain it’s equity share in the company. He estimated that share was between 25% and 30%.

These numbers beg comparison with Sequoia’s investment in Google. According to Bill Burnham’s respected analysis last summer of Sequoia’s take from the Google IPO the fund turned a $12.5 million investment in 1999 for 10% equity into roughly $4.7 billion.

Posted by Rich at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fox is in a very unique position vis-à-vis this deal. News Corp chief operating officer Peter Chernin recently told investors that 60-70% of YouTube traffic comes from MySpace. While direct integration with Google could certainly make up for part of this traffic were MySpace to shut off YouTube access, it would still be a huge blow. And Fox is also the owner of much of the copyrighted material contained on YouTube.</blockquote

Posted by Rich at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More from Techcrunch who also covered lala.com today:

• Mypw.com. Some sort of encryption security thing, I didn't really understand it. Seemed mainly for developers.
• Revver.com. Another video uploading site with earnings. Amazing page rank at 2,300 or so.
• Faces.com. Beside an amazing URL they are doing music
• Smalltown. A local yellow pages and reviews site that uses something called a webcard to put thing and swap things.

Posted by Rich at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are two incredible contendors. Hat tip to Techcrunch for them and I'm continuing my logon to 10 web 2.0 sites a day push:

• Zoho. These are absolutely free utilities and include PowerPoint, Word, Excel equivalents and are free as long as you have less than 10 users in a collaborative environment.
• Docs.google.com. This puts writely and their spreadsheet program together.
• Google.com/reader. Wow, an amazing RSS reader, probably the best I've used. Amazing use of AJax

Posted by Rich at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Youtube was launched February 2005 and is today 18 months later an Alexa 10 site which is pretty amazing. They were acquired by Google $1.65B and had 100M videos viewed per day and 72M uniques (wow, that's amazing!).

Sequoia is going to make a mint from its total $11M investment in it. Youtube by the way had only 67 employees.

Posted by Rich at 6:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I can't wait for this, I had heard about this from a Microsoft buddy, basically, it takes a set of photos, analyzes them and creates a 3-D space you can walk around in. Very cool!

Turning photographs into 3D spaces

Posted by Rich at 8:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

. The company last week disclosed details that eventually led to a former board member to resign due to the poor way the situation was handled.

Federal investigators and Congress began pressuring Dunn to step down yesterday. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, House Energy & Commerce committee and the U.S. Attorney also have joined the investigation. The company now faces five inquiries from a number of federal organizations.

HP also announced that George Keyworth II resigned from the board of directors. Keyworth acknowledged that he was the confidential source used in a CNET article that came before a probe into media leaks by HP. The decisions came after the board frantically met over the weekend and yesterday.</blockquote

Posted by Rich at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hat tip to Bob who notes John Cooks piece on the 63 (!!!) Web 2.0 companies in Seattle alone which Greg then resorted into Alexa order. The one we all know is Zillow, but the other ones are interesting, like how high Newsvine is and yes I'm about to get logins on all of them and in case you are wondering, the stats are:

• Of the top ten in Seattle, I already had logons to the eight of them. Of course, two are Ignition companeis, so there is a little cheating there.
• Of these 63 or so, most have a lower page rank than tongfamily.com, so they are clearly very, very new :-)
• I did add the Alexa hotlinks too, but haven't figured out an easy way to make this a nice sortable database.

1. Zillow, Alexa rank: 976. Predictive online real estate technology. Rich does it again!
2. 43Things/Robot Co-op, Alexa rank: 2233. Social networking through sites such as 43things and 43people.
3. Newsvine, Alexa rank: 3492. Blogging and social media. Reminds me I should call Slade again sometime.
4. Judy's Book, Alexa rank: 7590. Local search and social networking. Our buddies Andy & Co, go guys.
5. Wetpaint, Alexa rank: 10987. Wikis. Some of the founders of Blue Nile do it again. Nice site. We did look at this deal. See me
6. Trumba, Alexa rank: 11146. Online calendars. Good luck Jeremy.
7. Jobster, Alexa rank: 13034. Job search and social networking. Rock'n Roll, this was seeded by Ignition
8. PayScale, Alexa rank: 14497. Predictive salary technology. Kind of fun and I can see how like Zillow this will be sticky, doesn't work so well for venture capitalists though :-)
9. Mpire, Alexa rank: 14660. Comparison shopping search engine. Go Matt, Dave and Greg!
10. GarageBand.com, Alexa rank: 15247. Social networking music service. The Partovi brothers.
11. Farecast, Alexa rank: 17716. Predictive airfare technology. Madrona deal we looked at. Growing fast, nice service
12. Findory, Alexa rank: 19248. Personalized news service. Ex-Amazon guys, some great work they've done.
13. HouseValues/HomePages, Alexa rank: 21720. Online real estate. Listing service, cool UI
14. Redfin, Alexa rank: 22117. Online real estate. Definitely a zillow clone, looked at in seed stage
15. BuddyTV, Alexa rank: 23795. Social networking TV community. I tried it but actually don't get the point.
16. Blue Dot, Alexa rank: 38110. Social networking recommendation service. Delicious clone.
17. Mixxer, Alexa rank: 41301. Mobile music and social networking. Hmm, look slike a ringtone site.
18. Bag Borrow or Steal, Alexa rank: 44630. Luxury goods borrowing service. Michelle looked at
19. PixPo, Alexa rank: 57770. Online video broadcasting. Looked at this deal, it is P2P sharing network.
20. Vizrea, Alexa rank: 58137. Digital media distribution and social networking. Good luck guys!
21. "Broadband Sports" Alexa rank: 62649. Online video
22. PixPulse, Alexa rank: 63524. Mobile media publishing and social networking.
23. TripHub, Alexa rank: 88059. Online group travel community.
24. Pluggd, Alexa rank: 111033. Podcasting.

1. HomeMovie.com, Alexa rank: 138783
   Online video.

1. Melodeo, Alexa rank: 186463
   Podcasting.

1. Musicmobs, Alexa rank: 193467
   Sharing and discovery online music service.

1. PhoneSherpa, Alexa rank: 276364
   User generated ringtones and graphics.

1. Snapvine, Alexa rank: 301367
   Audio comments for blogs and social networking sites.

1. Weedshare, Alexa rank: 302232
   Online music swapping service.

1. Jookster, Alexa rank: 308432
   Social search.

1. Cdigix, Alexa rank: 328498
   Digital media distribution.

1. Super Oyster, Alexa rank: 349830
   Ticket buying marketplace that allows people to buy out others on an online waiting list.

1. Sampa, Alexa rank: 378389
   Web site building tools and storage.

1. Inrix, Alexa rank: 389879
   Real time and predictive traffic technology.

1. Healia, Alexa rank: 404933
   Personalized health search engine.

1. Curious Office, Alexa rank: 409317
   Internet incubator.

1. Avvo, Alexa rank: 411395
   Consumer-oriented online legal service. (Stealth)

1. Cozi, Alexa rank: 486398
   Digital home technology.

1. GoGoMo, Alexa rank: 490065
   Digital media distribution and storage

1. Pelago, Alexa rank: 561566
   Mobile social networking. (Stealth)

1. SecondSpace, Alexa rank: 562914
   Online consumer service. (Stealth)

1. Yodio, Alexa rank: 633350
   Podcasting.

1. NewsCloud, Alexa rank: 640911
   Social media.

1. PrestoGifto, Alexa rank: 689970
   Customized T-shirts, coffee mugs and other products for online merchants.

1. SnapTune, Alexa rank: 741315
   Online radio service.

1. GridNetworks, Alexa rank: 851439
   Digital media delivery.

1. Ontela, Alexa rank: 981609
   Mobile software platform.

1. SmartSheet, Alexa rank: 1359158
   Collaboration tools for small business owners.

1. Pheromone Trail, Alexa rank: 1415162
   Social search.

1. Bill Monk, Alexa rank: 1438348
   Mobile bill paying and online trading service.

1. Positive Motion, Alexa rank: 1484923
   User-generated flash cards on mobile phones.

1. Peppers and Pollywogs, Alexa rank: 1847159
   Online party planning service.

1. TextPayMe, Alexa rank: 2311186
   Mobile bill paying.

1. ImageKind, Alexa rank: 2372741
   Online art community.

1. GimmeNow.com, Alexa rank: 3609578
   Online shopping service.

1. SwitchGear, Alexa rank: 4312922
   Digital home software. (Stealth)

1. Joingle, Alexa rank: 999999999
   Unknown.

1. DigWorks, Alexa rank: 999999999
   Digital media.

Posted by Rich at 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wikipedia actually has a list. These are for the fiscal year end 2005, but so pretty recent figures.

Even more amazing if you adjust for the total number of students although not super fair since undergraduates in my experience give way more than graduate school types:

On a returns basis, Bloomberg reports that Yale did the best although everyone had a banner 2005. What's amazing though is that this is the back of a 2004 year that was even better.

In terms of asset allocation, Yale had 25% in hedge funds, 25% in tangible assets like real estate, timber and energy, 17% in private equity and 31% in stocks. The rumble is that a combination of Google plus oil & gas assets really drove returns.

Here was the base data:

Posted by Rich at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kind of interesting to look at the profitability of the big handset manufacturers which are in order Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson. All of these shipped more than 50M units last year.

For Nokia there results are and they even have a great spreadsheet

For Motorola for three months ended April 1:

For Samsung and a nice three year summary for 2005-2004 in their Summary

For Sony Ericsson shows similar margins:

Posted by Rich at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just these words alone should boost our alexa ranking - here's how to get youtube videos on your ipod - good idea since getting any video on mine has redefined the word "simple" click to wired mag and scroll down.

Posted by at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)