Wednesday, September 22, 2010

$400 Million, $140 Billion And 2020

Image representing Netflix as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase
Wall Street Journal: A New Digital Battlefield: The entire business of selling episodes of TV shows through services like Apple's and Amazon's is expected to generate only $407 million in 2010 ..... U.S. consumers and advertisers will spend about $143 billion on traditional TV advertising and subscriptions in 2010
I expect these two numbers to have changed places by 2020. Everything is going online. TV is not going to be a separate medium for too long. The internet will eat up and digest the TV. But we are going to have to move to universal 100 MB plus broadband for that to happen.
Wall Street Journal: Web Start-Up Values Soar:In an echo of the 1990s dot-com boom, some investors also are giving lofty valuations to Web firms that have no revenue and that barely have a product out..... Quora ...... Blippy ...... Foursquare .... last year, when Twitter Inc. was valued at $1 billion during a round of funding, up from $95 million in mid-2008 when it raised a previous round of funding .... Many investors won't recoup their investments ...... SecondMarket, which operates an exchange where investors can trade the stocks of closely held start-ups ...... "There's a big disconnect between the public market and the private market" ..... Deal-of-the-day site Groupon Inc., for instance, was founded in 2008 and quickly brought in consumers eager to tap its discounts. By April when it received a $135 million investment from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies Ltd. and venture firm Battery Ventures, Groupon was valued at about $1.35 billion.

Blockbuster Nears Bankruptcy:a milestone in consumers' shift away from brick-and-mortar video stores to films delivered by mail and the Internet

Netflix, Studio Reach Streaming Deal
A New Digital Battlefield:TV shows are emerging as a new front in the war over digital media between Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc., amid their ongoing battles over electronic books and online music..... Several executives said those rentals could be a step toward a world where people see less advertising or stop paying for cable subscriptions—two principal sources of revenue...... Apple accounts for 57% of transactions in Internet video-on-demand movies, on a number-of-sales basis, and 53% of the TV shows market ...... The entire business of selling episodes of TV shows through services like Apple's and Amazon's is expected to generate only $407 million in 2010 ..... U.S. consumers and advertisers will spend about $143 billion on traditional TV advertising and subscriptions in 2010

Enhanced by Zemanta

Super Angels, The Churning VC Game, And Catch Up Tech

Michael Arrington, famous blogger, and Tariq K...Image via WikipediaThere's web services - aka dot coms - and then there's clean tech, bio tech, nano. Dot coms have become much less pricey. Anyone can rent server space with Amazon. Pretty much anyone can write code.

"You can learn the basics of Ruby in two days," a techie told me a few days back. "And it is all on Google, all the material is free."

Clean tech, bio tech and nano are still capital intensive.

But the biggest returns are in what I am going to call catch up tech. This is the world of microfinance and global infrastructure projects. An annual 10% return is the floor when it comes to these opportunities. If the wise guys - and they were guys - on Wall Street had known to pump excess capital a few years back into catch up tech rather than housing, we might have skipped the pain of the past few years. You pump up housing value, and you sell mortgage based securities to each other. That was like setting the house on fire starting from the basement.

Mike Arrington, TechCrunch: So A Blogger Walks Into A Bar…
Master Of 500 Hats: Fire in The Valley, Fire in My Belly... and Yes, Mike, I Have Stopped Beating My Wife.
Fred Wilson: Collusion
Quora: Who are the Super Angels that Michael Arrington is talking about in his 9/21/10 Techcrunch post, "So a Blogger Walks into a Bar..."?
Silicon Alley Insider: Hooray For Mike Arrington

Enhanced by Zemanta