Author Archive for ron

With $50M raised, Nicira disrupts Cisco and Juniper Networks with network virtualization

Published on February 6, 2012 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: .

Network virtualization start-up Nicira is coming out of stealth mode today and it has an impressive set of customers who evidently believe that it can disrupt the likes of Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. The idea is to become a company that can offload data networking demand as needed in the age of cloud computing. If it lives up to its billing, as some of its customers say it does, it can save tens of million of dollars in spending on data centers and network infrastructure.

It’s a new version of virtualization, but one for the whole network. With virtualizaiton software like VMware, a single computer can use translation software to behave as if it were dozens of different computers at once. Each “virtual machine” is a compartment within the computer that serves a particular user. But that user isn’t using the computer, the computer can be rededicated to serve other users. It’s a more efficient way to use computers and serve users. The virtual machines can be created as needed to serve the demands of users within minutes.

Nicira’s network virtualization works in the same way, but serving the owners of huge networks instead. Service providers like AT&T often have to add new network capacity when they are overloaded. Nicira steps in as a kind of middleman, providing the network capacity as needed in an on-demand fashion. This gives networks a lot more flexibility [Source].

A New Net

Published on February 6, 2012 in High Tech & Media and Real-Time Web. 0 Comments Tags: .

A startup called Nicira is launching a product today with the audacious goal of making all Internet services smarter, faster, and cheaper. With his startup, Nicira, Martìn Casado intends to make Internet services slicker by rewriting some of the rules of computer networking.

The crux of that supposedly unworkable idea was to take away the stubborn independence of the network hardware. All those routers and switches would take orders from one central piece of software; a single command could then reconfigure every piece of a network.

Casado’s PhD thesis showed that it was possible. By writing software that could reprogram routers and switches, he was able to turn computer networks into the secure channels that he had been asked for back in 2003. A different intelligence agency put up the money for further trials of the technology, and in 2007 Casado, McKeown, and Berkeley professor Scott Shenker founded Nicira. Rich entrepreneurs and two of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture capital funds soon put in money of their own [Source].

Can Made in China stay competitive?

Published on January 19, 2012 in Emerging Markets. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

While rising wages and tightening credit lines have led some manufacturers to move outside southern China, others are choosing stay and move up the value chain to remain competitive. Josh Noble visits two factories that have been operating in Guangdong for over 30 years to find out how they are shifting up market [video].

Inside Johnson & Johnson’s Innovation Shop

Published on December 28, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: .

J&J is seeding small, high-risk ventures through RedScript Ventures, a two-year-old accelerator program.

A huge health-care company like Johnson & Johnson requires a steady stream of innovation, but that’s getting harder and harder to create. So the 125-year-old company is getting more aggressive at mining ideas from outside. It’s seeking out very early ventures that it once would have considered far too risky and seeding them with money or dishing out advice on how to nudge untested ideas out of the laboratory.

Some experts say J&J’s relationship to innovation is the right model for a large company. “It lets the marketplace do what it does best, which is have an explosion of different kinds of companies in various fields,” says Richard Foster, lead director of the board at Innosight, a consulting firm that has done work for J&J. “These companies will need major infusions of capital, or a global distribution chain. At that point, J&J says, ‘We are very effective in rolling innovations out—very quickly and cost efficiently [Source].’”

The Year on the Web

Published on December 28, 2011 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments

Social networking grew up in 2011, becoming more of a fundamental underpinning of the Web.

We’ve been living in the age of social media for a long time, but 2011 was the year that all the information we share online began to accrete into something greater than the sum of its parts. It is creating a layer of intelligence that anyone can mine in Web searches and that content creators can use to hone their services.

But all the while, our growing reliance on the Web is animating a debate about the potentially catastrophic effects of a cyberwar—an attack, or series of attacks, meant to disable consumer or military resources online. A top computer scientist recently suggested that the U.S. consider striking first against enemies who would be hard to pin down if they struck first. It’s a reminder of the limits of social networking: even as companies like Facebook map more and more of the online world, some sectors will remain in the shadows [Source].

The Venture Capital Winners of 2011

Published on December 16, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Did someone say economic slump? Not in Silicon Valley. The initial public offerings of LinkedIn (LNKD) and Groupon (GRPN) brought billion-dollar paydays* to venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates, Sequoia Capital, and Greylock Partners, while Kleiner Perkins Caufield & is expected to profit handsomely from Zynga’s IPO on Dec. 16.

For venture firms that missed out on those high fliers, plenty of money was made in vacation-rental site HomeAway (AWAY), which helped Redpoint Ventures crack the year’s top 10. Khosla Ventures was the only investor to make a splash unrelated to the Web with its majority ownership of KiOR (KIOR), a biofuel maker that is valued at over $1 billion even though the company has yet to generate a penny of revenue [Source].

Technology 2012: Virgin territory

Published on December 5, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In some parts of the new digital world, it is obvious who is in charge. Google rules in search; Facebook in social networking; Amazon in retail. These territories are still being fought over: Microsoft’s Bing is attacking Google in search, Google is attacking Facebook in social, and so forth. But these are all large, relatively mature fields.

During 2012 the more interesting battles will be those taking place on the smaller, lesser-known territories on the fringes of the technology world, in areas such as mobile payments, location and augmented reality.

They may seem marginal fields now, but it is worth remembering that social networking went from obscurity a decade ago to being used by hundreds of millions of people today, accounting for more time online than any other activity, according to a survey of American internet users by Nielsen, a market-research firm. Like search, social and online retail, these promising new territories have the potential to transform people’s lives, but have yet to be conquered [Source].

The Personal Computer Is Dead

Published on November 30, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Power is fast shifting from end users and software developers to operating system vendors.

The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse [Source].

The transformation is one from product to service. The platforms we used to purchase every few years—like operating systems—have become ongoing relationships with vendors, both for end users and software developers. Jonathan Zittrain wrote about this impending shift, driven by a desire for better security and more convenience, in my 2008 book The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It.

BRICs at 10

Published on November 30, 2011 in Emerging Markets. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

So, was he right? Ten years ago Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs looked at four growth economies – Brazil, China, India and Russia – put their first letters into an acronym, and the Brics (as a concept) were born.

So how have they fared? What if you invested in the Brics ten years ago – where would you be now? Chart of the week finds out. There are a myriad of ways of looking at this, but beyondbrics is going to be hard-headed and stick to equities and GDP.

A quick look at the MSCI indices for the four Brics since 2001 shows that they have comfortably outperformed the S&P 500. If you invested $100 at the time of O’Neill’s report in November 2001 in each of the four Brics, you would now have $674 from Brazil, $451 from China, $459 from India and $414 from Russia. Your 100 S&P bucks? Worth $112 [Read more].

Hong Kong: still the great mall of China

Published on November 30, 2011 in Emerging Markets. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Is Hong Kong losing its allure as a launching pad for foreign brands looking to tap into the Chinese market?
The decision by Gap to set up shops in Shanghai and Beijing in 2010 before making its debut in Hong Kong last week certainly seems to suggest that some foreign businesses have no qualms about bypassing Hong Kong and taking a more direct route into the mainland’s estimated $2,100bn retail market.

There are obvious reasons why brands would jump straight into the mainland. Apart from the sheer size of the market, mainland China’s top cities increasingly offer high-quality shopping centres and department stores where western brands feel at home.

Meanwhile, the cost of doing business in Hong Kong could be prohibitive. Retail rent is now the second-highest in the world and fast-approaching levels charged on Fifth Avenue [Source].