On Tech Media - yet another departure at TechCrunch

So Erick Schonfeld, the chief editor of Tech Crunch left yesterday. His incompetency as a leader was clear when he spoke on the stage of Crunchies Award, insecure, nerves, lacking proper posture for a public figure. 

Michael Arrington wrote about it. Interesting piece. 

Michael Arrington's distinct style and Tech Crunch's lean structure has make it hard for outsiders to maintain the blog's flair once Michael left. And its flair and insider scoop are its life blood. The drama and personnel changes

erode the blog day in and day out. Sooner than we know readers will look for alternatives (or have they already done so?), then everything else goes with it.

 

Is it too late to start a TechCrunch Death Watch here? 

On Tech Media - away with the old guards

The rise of The Verge corresponds with the slow death of Engadget and other tech blogs who had glorious days. The Verge is founded by ex-Editor-in-Chief of Engadget and other Engadet’s core members in November 2011. New as it is, I am already checking it everyday for new reviews and long-forms features. The website is beautiful, showcasing Flip-like designs, putting each article in distinct, variant squares instead of text-based hyperlinks. The product review page is quite refreshing too – I love the tiny links on the left side of the page that can take me to different sections within the article (e.g. hardware, software, display…). Most importantly, it’s a visual driven website with large, hi-def pictures and videos. The pages are not 100% reader friendly though – you will find the disgusting “1, 2, 3” at the bottom of some long articles that break one article into many to boost the number of clicks.

Perhaps it is not coincidence that AOL is the headmaster of both Engadget and TechCrunch, both of which are failing and overtaken by new ventures formed by its departing employees. Makes you wonder about the timing of yesterday giant’s final fall. But I am not expecting an ear-piecing thud there, I would image the subtle sound of wind slowing blowing away the ashes of whatever is remained of the giant.

Also, Brian Lam, the former editor of Gizmodo, founded a new gadget website called Wirecutter last year. It is the opposite of Gizmodo – bullshit-free, clean, to the point. I am happy to see the demise of Gizmodo (and all the filth and noise it brings) quickened by likes of Wirecutter.

On Blackberry

The new king of tech blog The Verge had a wonderful piece on RIM last week. It was a thoughtful reflection on its past and introduces glimpse into the future of the company made famous by Blackberry phones.

My main take-away from that piece is that Blackberry’s success is attributed to the founder – Mike Lazaridis. His philosophy defined the product and its development over the years. While it is still too early to call RIM a failed company, the declining market share and street credit of Blackberry are also Mike Lazaridis’ fault.

I believe one should look at a product for its own merit, but not how close it (could) resemble the best-in-class product in roughly the same vertical. Along this logic, I think it is unfair to blame Blackberry for not being an iPhone because it is not an iPhone. Its declining market share was due to poor managerial judgment, failing to meet new customer demand. It is not so much about not jumping on the bandwagon of Android or creating an ecosystem around apps. There is always room for prosperity being an alternative products - as long as you are meeting both the need and expectation of your customers. 

Blackberry has done well meeting the needs of its business customers with few significant changes to its operating system and basic features. Its simplicity and keyboards are well-regarded. However, Apple changed  customer expectation in a number of important ways: 


 - touch screen: intuitive control and faster navigation between functions 
 - larger display: making web browsing and infrequent video viewing enjoyable on a cell phone
 - apps, creating a true "ecosystem"
 - "sexy design"


When business people realize that they can type reasonably well on a touch screen and when IT departments at corporations find it easy and secure to sync corporate email on iPhones, Blackberry lost all of its appeal. It is essentially a nice, easy to use device, not the package of experience iPhone and its apps bring to the customers. But RIM still has a second chance, its longer battery life, lower price point, and full keyboards still have tremendous potential in the emerging markets. With a revamped software platform and a better services to its third-party developers, we may see a good comeback some time in 2013.

On Display Technologies - Samsung and its competitors

I made the following table in my blog in Chinese, here are the English version:

Smartphone Display Technology Comparison

Also, lazy as I am, I removed the footnotes (“注”) in the English version because I don't want to translate them. It's Sunday after all and the weather is really really nice.

On ARM, Windows, and semis industry

This is the first of a series I intend to do on semiconductors industry. The purpose is to educate myself on a number of key trends this year in the semiconductor space and their historical roots.

What is ARM?

• ARM stands for many things. It can be the company behind ARM architecture, the ARM architecture itself, or ARM chips produced by one of the many licensees of the ARM architecture. Here are the answers to the first two questions, and the third question is very relevant to development of Windows on ARM and Microsoft’s future. 
• ARM Holdings, according to its own words, is a British semiconductor intellectual property supplier founded in 1990. In layman’s terms, the company designs a basic structure of computer chips then sells the designs to other companies who make actual computer chips. Here are two things to be noted, one is that ARM does not manufacture computer chips like Intel does; two is that the chip designs from ARM Holdings largely determined the kind of devices (hardware) and operating systems (software) the resulting chips work with.
• Due to its business model, ARM’s name does not appear on devices (as opposed to “Intel Inside” label). Therefore it is far lesser known than Intel. However, ARM architecture chips have universal presence in the world of consumer electronics, most notably, Smartphones (almost 100% market share!). The main reason for its dominance in the smartphone space is its low power consumption, which translates directly to longer battery life and better user experience.
• ARM architecture, is a 32-bit instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. An instruction set, simply put, defines how computer “compute”. It affects both hardware and software design of an electronic device. Another common instruction set is x86, which is the foundation for most Intel and AMD CPUs. ARM architecture, those lesser known, is much more prevalent in our daily lives because it is used in phones, tablets, cameras, media players, GPS, cars, telecom equipments, and many many more.

What is the difference between Intel and ARM Holdings?

• Intel has actual factories (called “fab”, short for “fabrication plant”) manufacturing chips only for itself. ARM Holdings license its technologies to other semiconductor companies who make their own chips. For example, most tablets and smartphones today have Nividia’s Tegra (Samsung Galaxy Tab, Moto Droid X2), ST-Ericsson’s NovaThor (Nokia’s windows phones), Qualcomm’s Snapdragon (HTC Evo 4G, Samsung Galaxy SII), Texas Instruments’ OMAP (Barnes & Noble Nook Color, Nokia N9) , Samsung’s Hummingbird (Samsung Galaxy S), or Apple’s A5 (iPhone 4S).

What is Windows on ARM (“WOA”)?

According to Steven Sinofsky, the President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, WOA is “a new member of the Windows family that builds on the foundation of Windows, has a very high degree of commonality and very significant shared code with Windows 8.” Also according to Steven, WOA was “created to enable a new class of PC with unique capabilities and form factors, supported by a new set of partners that expand the ecosystem of which Windows is part.”

On tech media - TechCrunch brain drain continues

Today, Jason Kincaid joined the series of "high regarded writers" who used to work for TechCrunch but somehow moved on to seek other ventures. In Jason, no next step is disclosed. I could only image that he is fed up with the deteriorating TechCrunch of today and just wanted out. Reading Erick Schonfeld's insincere and half-assed post on Jason's departure convinced me that the article quality of this once-glorious blog is one step closer to the scribble of a gorilla.

On Display Technologies

I got my first cell phone in 2001, a Philips Xenium DB GSM phone. It is the first of its Xenium line that continued to this day, after a good 12 years. The model was top of the line, targeting at business customers (it has voice control for God’s sake…). Its design was sleek, operation was smooth with the 3-way dial (“Pilot Key”), the OS was a cute one Philips newly designed for the model. Released in 2000, the same year as the blockbuster Nokia 3310, Xenium’s larger, more “refined” display almost has 1.5 more dots (my guess) than the 84*84 on 3310’s. But those monochrome dots (or squares if you look close enough) are still dots nonetheless, visible even from a distance. It was as hard to image iPhone’s “retina display” back then as visualizing a tablet computer in 1940. 

Philips Xenium

Nokia 3310

But in mass market’s eye, technology changes over night, merely a year later in 2001, Sharp was already marketing the first camera phone in Japan. 7 years later when I got my Blackberry Curve 8310, the display was 320*240 with 160 ppi pixel density (“retina display” has little more than twice the density). When I view pictures on 8310, there is no noticeable difference from viewing them on most desktop monitors. However, I can still see the little “dots” on the screen. Then comes iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4 and their “retina display” – it finally becomes almost impossible to see the rough edges and squares on the screens. I remember playing with my new iPod Touch for the first a couple days solely to enjoy its beautiful display. It was perfect. 

Blackberry Curve 8310

This piece was originally intended to compare and contrast the current day display technologies on smartphones. Apparently my nostalgic digression has taken too much of my time, leaving little energy in me to continue the quest. So here is the much abridged version:

The basic display technologies on most smartphone today are either TFT-LCD or AMOLED. iPhone 4S uses TFT-LCD, which has lower manufacturing cost and higher resolution. Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus uses AMOLED, which boasts better color and wider viewing angle. Also, the AMOLED used in Galaxy Nexus almost has the same pixel density as iPhone 4S (316 vs 320, who could tell the difference…remember Galaxy Nexus has a larger screen).

The not-so-well-written article by CNET Asia somehow categorized the different technologies except for the most advanced one used on Samsung Galaxy Nexus. I may write a better one if I had the time – it gets frustrating if you dig into the details. For example, Samsung’s AMOLED displays can be broken down by display quality into AMOLED (Samsung Captivate), Super AMOLED (Samsung Galaxy S), Super AMOLED Advanced (Moto Droid RAZR), Super AMOLED Plus (Galaxy S II), HD Super AMOLED (Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy Note), and potentially HD Super AMOLED Plus (for next gen OLED TVs). Perhaps 24 months later we will see Samsung calling its display “Ultra Super Fantastic Extreme Premium Terrific HD AMOLED Plus Multiply Exponentiate Supreme Deluxe”

Below are seriously metaphorical illustration of the different aptitudes of display technologies

If Nokia 3310 had color display...

 

Blackberry Curve 8310 display

 

                                              The wonderful world of HD Super AMOLED

The Case with Management Meetings

One of the key functions at my job is management meetings. These are meeting with company management such as CEO or CFO, but more often than not, investor relations people. Investor relations personnel is unique to public companies, who are dedicated to communicate company information to institutional investors (portfolio managers, fund analyst, etc) and research analysts (sell-side analysts).

One wonderful thing about management meetings is that you get to know a very human side of the company. You sit face to face with the CEO, monitoring his posture, speech, and responses to your questions. You get a real sense of the person, instead of the vague image you form through earnings calls or industry conferences, where the delivered speeches are previously crafted.

The other benefit of such meetings, for analysts with no prior knowledge of the industry and technology, is the in-depth view of these technical aspects. Management meetings provide a narrowed-down version of industry jargon and terms, helping one to focus on what are really affecting the business (as opposed to numbers on the financial statements). Also, the comments on the competitors are always the highlights - the management is generally more open with talking about the competitors than about themselves.

On tech media

My current job and personal interest have me read tech blogs such as TechCrunch ("TC") and VentureBeat ("VB") almost on a daily basis. As people in a similar situation may notice, TC has gone through a lot of drama in the past year with its editor Michael Arrington departing and then a series of other highly-regarded writers. With the exodus of competent writers, the deterioration in overall quality is appalling. TC used to be quick but yet insightful. It was able to break the news fast and reveal information no one else could. The articles, the longer ones, are thoughtful and precise. However, all of that are lost to some degree. The current TC has successfully brought itself down to the level of Gizmodo -  a illiterate blog with an addiction on number of posts it comes up every day. I have observed the writer in person (their speak and posture), I can confidently say they don't look like their more competent counterparts at other media outlets.

Was I wrong about Twitter?

(Still 7 posts behind my other blog, damn, I should have shut up about my workout schedules...）

If you asked me what Twitter is in 2009 and 2010, I would not be able to give you any remotely informed answer other than "I don't know." "This thing doesn't make any money and will not make money." "It doesn't make sense to me."

If you ask me the same question now. My answer is the following (no I am giving a definition, but I think a scattered description is a little better than "I don't know.") :

- Twitter is public media
- Twitter is real time information flow
- Twitter is an open social media
- Twitter is the biggest and the most effective mass broadcasting tool
- Twitter is a diary
- Twitter is a trend setter
- Twitter is  personal media outlet

2010/2011 - a number of things I was wrong about

1. Cleantech: just because the godfather of cleantech investing said 2011 for cleantech companies will be the same as 1999 for internet companies does not mean it would really happen. And seeking evidence from rosy pictures depicted by some would-be portfolio companies did not help. They merely enhanced a man's erroneous view with confirmation bias. When I reviewed the cleantech companies my previous employer was looking at, I was basically cherry-picking evidence for a prediction I already formed in my head: cleantech will go big in 2011. It was not an objective observation, but a opinion without ample support. I underestimated the tremendous price decline of raw material (therefore ASP decline for module makers) and overestimated the capital market's appetite for solar companies. If the IPO had been strong for 2H11, a number of our portfolio companies could have gone public. But of course, one can never catch the right pulse of the market.

2. Facebook: I remember the day I sat in weekly meetings with the investment committee of my previous employer giving social network updates. I gathered the latest and hottest news in the social network space and invoke small scale contempt. We followed SecondMarket and SharesPost closely for private share transactions of these hot start-up companies to get a sense of their valuations. Every time I announced a new valuation high of Facebook, the meeting room was echoed with a round of suppressed contemptuous giggle and most people had that type of "this is ridiculous" impression. That was the when Facebook was valued at $10 billion. Later, when late stage investors rushed in for $35 or even $50 billion valuation, we still secretly have that "this is ridiculous" impression. As an intern my lesson cost less - I came away knowing that: 1) you don't bet against mega trend; 2) respect the "smart" money; 3) stay removed from your personal feeling on the product/service. You don't get it doesn't mean it sucks (seek professional assistance!!). My ex-employer suffered more damage, at least from a marketing / future fund raising prospective. A similar fund with similar strategy and philosophy invested in Facebook and Twitter, and the fund's share trading on Nasdaq doubled at the news of Facebook's filing. Now you can simply go to investors and tell them that "we invested in FB when it is valued at ### (a price way lower than its market cap).  The position in its portfolio may be too small to make once-in-a-life-time return but the leverage for marketing is tremendous. Image Accel Partners having difficulty raising funds!

Apple and TV, Round 1

Some time ago I promised myself that I will keep pace updating this blog with my other one, as a way to develop my thinking on investment and technology.

Yesterday a survey leaked from Best Buy regarding a smart TV that sports iCloud service and Netflix. The 40-inch, 1080p LED TV costs, hypothetically, $1499. Apple, as usual, declined to comment. Best Buy lamely described the survey as "hypothetical".  Well, to make my following observations work, let's first assume that the Best Buy leak is unintentional and not at all "hypothetical".

The leaked spec of the iTV shouldn't have surprised us highly informed, rumor-hungry followers of tech news. If Apple were to have a TV in its product line then of course it would feature web service, iOS, iTunes, apps, and commands a premium pricing to its competitors (a 46-inch smart TV from Sony cost about $1,000 on Amazon). Such is expected from Apple. And what has not been expected, will be exactly why people will pay that premium (be it 50% or 100%) for the product.

So where will that surprise come from?

Here are a few of my guesses:

Control: controlling by Apple's hand held family (iPod, iPhone, iPad) will not be news. Existing apps such as Apple's official "Remote" will work just fine. The intriguing question is whether iTV will have a native remote at all, like the thin white stick bundled with Apple TV. Will Apple actually incorporate some guesture-based control mechanism and do away with a physical remote all together? It is possible, but that would require a technology faster and more accurate than Kinect. Otherwise user experience will deteriorate because we are all too accustomed to the immediate feedback of a ordinary TV remote, or the sleek feel of an iOS handheld. Assuming not all iTV buyers has a Apple handheld before (almost impossible), it follows that iTV will be equipped with a physical remote control to replicate and hopefully surpass the usual TV control experience. 

So what is this physical remote like? I think it will not have much bells and whistles on itself. Much fewer keys than the terrible and confusing "normal" remote controls. I would image it to include some browsing/playing functions such as "back" and "forward". It may also also include a mic so that voice commands can be clearly communicated to the TV set (I have no doubt Siri will be included and play a major role). As I mentioned above, it is not likely to be a wii control type of remote. I think a small piece of touchpad on the remote is more probable, utilizing similar user experience of the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad: multi-touch, gesture command, accuracy guaranteed. Also, with a trackpad of some sort, user can have similar touch experience to using a iPad or iPhone. However, typing could be an issue with my above speculation of a minimalist voice-enabled trackpad. And very importantly, typing function is almost a must for a smart TV (note that the Sony smart TV linked above did come with a keyboard remote). It is somewhat hard for me to think that Apple would: 1. furnish iTV with a iPod touch/iPad like remote to type on and, 2. give a large and clunky full-size keyboard to iTV. I have to admit I am at my wit's end on this. Perhaps all input by voice? (good luck with your thick accent....)

(update: Or, we can let third-party accessory makers to deal with the "no-physical-keyboard complaints".