Cisco buys Flip Video maker

I've a lot of respect for Cisco and its employees. Most of their innovation or acquisitions have turned into product leaders. I understand that their human network strategy needs a few major acquisitions in the consumer electronic market but I've considerable doubts about this recent acquisition and the price they paid for it ($590 million). I see a few reasons:

• With a price tag between $100 and $200, you could spend a little more and have a better designed iphone.
• The device can only do one thing: video. I'm quite sure the market is expecting something more versatile than that (mp3 player, geo tagging). This would have been a great product 5 years ago.
• Where is the connectivity (software and network) to your social media youtube or facebook?
• It has no wireless capability (WiFi or GPRS). Yes, they can add it later on, but why acquire something that is so much behind the curve and has zero appeal to developers.

On the other hand, PureVideo has gained a lot of market share with a simple product. This acquisition is very good news for them, not so much for the CSCO shareholders.

Omnitrol Networks enters relationship with BT Global Services to Deliver Real-Time Supply-Chain Visibility Solutions

We built our software with telco scale, performance and reliability in mind, it's only natural to see telco operators joining forces with us to deploy network-based solutions. But what's more exciting is to work with a leading technology integrator such as BT who has so much experience in the supply chain IT services area. You can read more here, but here's a short excerpt:

"We were previously developing customized solutions to address customer needs in the RFID market, which was quite costly and time consuming," Keith Sherry of BT Supply Chain Solutions told RFID Update. "Omnitrol gives us an appliance that can accept multiple sensor input and a platform for processing the data, which is enabling us to create solutions where we wouldn't otherwise be able to show a strong ROI."

Omnitrol Networks bolsters RFID edge application software, releases industry’s smallest middleware appliance solution

We are in GA! The new release of EASE comes with a new development environment (SDK) that allows our partners to quickly develop new SDL-based Edgelets with an intuitive user interface. The new release also comes with an upgraded emulator to complete the picture.


Time to development is an important part of our value proposition but ease of deployment is also very critical; this is why this new software release comes with a new small foot print appliance. The new OMNITROL Nano is both a plug-and-play solution, and practically plug-and-forget. A manufacturing company can have a complete OMNITROL-based track and trace solution up and running in less than 60 minutes, and need only maintain it when they add more sensors.

Read more here.

Google releases a browser

Google is obviously going after Microsoft's position on the desktop with this new announcement. But if you look at the Android announcement last year, this makes even more sense for Google to have a light-weight browser that can run on top of mobile devices using their OS. It's always a concern to see too many initiatives launched without a real long-term strategy behind it. The Chrome announcement doesn't seem to belong in this category, and could become a cornerstone of Google's strategy in the mobility space.

Gartner Hype Cycle

This is a very interesting blog entry about Gartner Hype Cycle. This is a great way to look at future, current and past technologies and understand investment and development cycles. They key to understand and use these graphs is to estimate the time to plateau. Monitoring these graphs for a long time, I can tell you that some of the technologies tend to exceed or miss their target dates. They can even get stuck in that "Trough of Disillusionment" and never get out of it.

Facebook Hits 100 Million Users

Facebook, as did MySpace in 2006, just reached 100 million registered users. There are a few things fascinating about this platform. As opposed to MySpace which was mostly focusing on music, Facebook has the potential to develop into a single unifying platform for all services. Another key to their success is the focus on the developer community with their Facebook platform. The establishment of a strong developer community allows Facebook to keep their users on their site and increases the volume of interactions between them.

The importance of Facebook struck me as I was walking in an airport lounge and everyone had a Facebook screen on. It would be interesting to see how they develop their mobile strategy. With so much personal information at stake, security has to be their number one priority if they want to become the fabric of the new internet operating system.

Will Facebook follow in the Apple and Google's footsteps and provide a phone or even become a service provider? They are clearly becoming a key player around the network triangle from a content point of view.

Social Networking Mobile Applications

You might have missed the news two weeks ago, but myspace and facebook released their mobile applications for smartphones. One important thing I noted is that there is no advertising on the facebook mobile application. From the screenshots of the myspace application, it seems that it is the same thing there too. As more people will access and share content and updates through their mobile applications, how will myspace and facebook monetize these interactions?

There's great potential for location based revenue opportunities but they are mostly based on some sort of ads (coupon). If the screen size is a limitation, they have to think about inserting them in another way. The integration of GPS data can certainly make the ads extremely relevant to the user while making sure it is not perceived as a nuisance.