Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Just a quick note for our venture database subscribers: we’ve added filtering of companies by industry on our alphabetical listings of local companies, and we’ve fixed a longstanding search bug related to subarea searches.

For those of you who haven’t yet signed on to our venture database, socalTECH’s database of venture capital deals, local companies, and venture investors is a handy, premium service attached to socalTECH. People are using it for due diligence; locating prospective partners; finding potential companies to invest in; researching venture firms; finding new customers; competitive intelligence; and lots and lots of other interesting things. I’m amazed at how often I sit down with someone and they tell me a new an innovative way they’re using the data we’ve got in the database.

We believe we have (and are really focused on) having the deepest, most real-time, and most regularly updated database of local technology firms — small and large — here in Southern California, and beyond.

For an otherwise, sort half-vacation day that Monday was, nothing topped the strange saga of the case of the cloned press release. Basically, a press release(credited to a new firm “HD AmeriTV”) showed up on one of the marginal “free PR release” services, and was picked up by a bunch of venture capital blogs. However, quite a few of them noticed that the PR was almost a word-for-word copy of a release from Joost a few months back announcing their $45M funding.

Followers of Southern California’s high tech market might recall back to August 2000, when a faked press release took an astronomical amount of market cap from Emulex (for awhile — it recovered when the hoax was uncovered, but left a landscape littered with battered investors). That release went out on Internet Wire (which subsequently had to rename itself Marketwire to escape the stigma attached to the fact that one of its employees was the instigator of the fake release).

Astute observers on the art of “vetting a press release” might notice:

1) The release did not come out of any of the major press wires. Most of those wires charge a pretty hefty fee for posting a release, which has the side-effect of weeding out most of the scams and junk. The service in question lets anyone register and create an account, for free, and send out whatever release they want.

2) The release did not carry any contact information from the company. (no contact name, no phone number, no email address, or web address).

3) The release did not have any PR firm representation. Usually, a company which is raising $45M would tend to have professional representation, from a well-known firm.

Anyway, it was something interesting to spice up a Monday in the blog press world.

We’ve recently posted an article on some good advice for entrepreneurs just starting out on their ventures, from Scott Edward Walker. The article, Tips On Starting A Venture, talks about incorporation, stock and vesting, and other tips which new entrepreneurs ought to be thinking about. By the way, if anyone is interested in contributing their knowledge to the pool of articles in our Startup Section, please let me know. The section is open to anyone with something relevant and useful to provide to entrepreneurs and others in the technology community here, and we post the articles as a service, for free, as long as they are useful to people. Some prior articles:

• Basic Information About Trademarks (from Steven Sereboff, Mark Goldstein, and Michael Harris)
• A Look at Business, Strategic Marketing, and Information Technology Plans (David Gadish)
• Thinking Like An Investor (Matt Ridenour)
• A Practical Guide to Venture Capital (Bowne)
• and lots more…

We’re hoping this will be a useful reference, particularly to entrepreneurs.

This is completely off topic, but found this (not so) amusing:

It looks like the personal injury lawyers (or their search engine marketing firms) are a bit faster than Target in updating their “aqua dots” keywords. (for those who haven’t been following it, the Aqua Dots toys were just recalled, because they metabolize into the drug GHB, with a chance of sending kids into a coma).

As most longtime readers of socalTECH know, we often give away free tickets to events, and offer discounted rates to conferences. Next week, there is the Opportunity Green conference at UCLA, and I thought I’d pass on a discount offer from the organizers to the event, which will cover green technology/cleantech. The event is co-sponsored by the UCLA Anderson School of Management, Price Center for Enterpreneurial Studies. socalTECH members can get a $25 discount on tickets (use code “SoCalTech”) to the event, if you enter that discount code on their registration site.

Being neither in Silicon Valley, nor on “Main Street,” I’m always fascinated by the delays between the launch of technology and the adoption of that technology by what I like to think of as “Main Street”–people who are not in the technology industry, not in Silicon Valley, or otherwise in the immediate influence of technology culture.

It’s clear that the most successful companies are the ones which cross over from being “cool technology” into mainstream, useful tools - ie, think iPod, YouTube, MySpace, etc. This can be most clearly marked in my own personal sphere, by when my parents forward on an email, buy a product, or otherwise talk about something coming out of the tech industry.

For example, I knew that the iPod had hit the mainstream, when my mother mentioned to me she needed help updating her brand new iPod; and that text messaging had finally penetrated and ruled the market when my father text-messaged me with a photo from a web site. Not that my parents are luddites, it’s just they’re of another generation, do not generally adopt technology very quickly, and live in a state that’s generally six months to a year behind “state of the art” here in California.

So, using this scale, it’s often a good reality check to look at technology from a “Main Street” point of view, and see where (and if) that technology might cross over from the early adopters to main street.

Throwing together a graphic, a rough distribution on the classic business school adoption curve (click for full size graph):

I’ve been recently playing around with Facebook and Twitter, and — although extremely fascinating from an entertainment standpoint– I’m wondering if all this “communication” is just contributing to an already, immensely information overloaded world. It’s bad enough with the hundreds of emails I get every day (not including the spam); do I really need a minute-by-minute update on everything you are doing every day? Does knowing what forty of the people I know ate for lunch really enrich my  life?

Most of the people I know are extremely busy, and it’s difficult enough to get a slice of time to discuss worthwhile and important things — much less sit around the water cooler and trade idle chitchat.  Back when I was involved in day-to-day engineering development, you could tell the “good” developers from the “lousy” developers by their productivity — lines of good code they could churn out every day.  Generally, the top tier, elite software developers were able to shut out all of the distractions of the day — emails, phone calls, unnecessary meetings, etc. — and really execute, and make things happen. On the other hand, the folks who just weren’t up to snuff would often be seen hanging out in the hallways and other people’s cubicles, getting a cup of coffee, chit-chatting with other people — ie think of Wally from Dilbert.

It’s all well and good that we can now provide micro-updates on every move of our life on the Twitters and Facebooks of the world, but it seems like what we really need is a massive information filter to prune down what is, and isn’t important.  The fact that your biggest business partner was just acquired: let me see that. The details of what you paid for cab fare from the airport, that you just clipped your toenails, or had a bagel instead of a donut for breakfast: filter that out.

As the Writer’s Guild strike continues, one of the issues which has been coming up ishow writers might get paid for content which is re-broadcast on the Internet. Apparently, writers are unhappy that they receive no residuals when shows are re-broadcast on the Internet.

Interestingly enough, the whole issue of clearances for new media is one of the biggest issues facing the studios in actually applying their content to the Internet. Even at the levels of residuals today, studios cannot pry their content out of the old media world and post anything online, without going through huge hoops and investing more money than they could hope to earn back to get their content onto the web.

I was discussing the difficulty of getting movies onto the Internet the other day with Derek Broes, Senior Vice President of Digital Entertainment at Paramount Pictures, and Derek described to me the great difficulty and time involved in clearing films for the Internet. For example, looking at Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the popular 1980’s comedy film with Matthew Broderick, Broes told me that it would cost Paramount “millions” in order to clear just the music in that film for Internet broadcast — not to mention all of the other clearances required from the rest of the production. In many cases, it would cost the studio more than it took to produce the film in the first place — to clear a film to show on the Internet. Not to mention the legal hassles, lack of paperwork, and very strange geographic distribution rights requirements that Hollywood currently has with its film distributors (ie. say you figure out how to post your film online in the U.S., but legally you can’t let someone in Romania view it) which just can’t be addressed all that well without a lot of strange DRM twister.

The way much of how Hollywood content gets to the Internet (think ring tones, video clips, etc.) is through the also controversial use of promotional clauses–which allow studios to use that content without any payments or residuals to the artists.

It’s a digital dilemma for Hollywood. The whole system is built on such an antiquated system of physical distribution, that there’s almost no hope of “adapting” the current system to the new world of the Internet. The fact that the studios can’t pay a few more cents for residuals to writers for Internet streaming is but a small part of the huge issue the industry faces. It’s almost easier to start from zero than it is to try to unravel the old media habits and traditions in this new world.

Here’s the biggest robot I’ve ever met:

I spent some time at lunch talking with the folks working on TerraMax, one of the entries into DARPA’s Urban Challenge race over the weekend. I’ll be running an interview in a few days. The robot is built on a Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement (MTVR) truck — built for the US Marine Corp. This is most definitely the biggest robot I’ve ever seen…

The biggest story today in the region is the Writer’s Guild strike, yet the vast majority of technology firms here —even in the Los Angeles area—have very little to do with Hollywood and entertainment. Looking over the companies we cover on a regular basis, I can only find one or two companies (who provide technology to the entertainment industry) who might be affected directly by the strike. There’s a lot of companies who have absolutely no connection to Hollywood (chip companies, software companies, Internet services); and in fact, some companies which have connections, but might actually benefit from the strike (professionally and user generated video sites and related companies). In fact, I suspect many of the creative minds who are currently being idled due to the WGA strike — if it continues beyond just a short few days — might have some time to think about their new Internet ventures, if they are so inclined. I wonder if there will be an uptick in new media deals over the next few weeks, as people have more time to work on their Internet/new media related projects?