Global Nerdy

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed blog points out this well-told and painfully familiar-sounding story of one entrepreneur's VC pitch meetings. Partners showing up late, that one guy who insists on asking bizarrely irrelevant questions, bored partners staring into space, or never raising their eyes from the obligatory print out of your PowerPoint deck…I've been there.

Aren’t they tired of this ritual? Well, in this company’s case, yes. Blackberry man is probably asking his girlfriend where to meet for dinner. Gotta-meet-me man is thinking about some other deal. Condescending man keeps jumping in with curveball questions so I am not able to get into the flow. Intent man works for the wrong company. MAN … get out of there!!! Don’t you guys want to see the product?

In an otherwise ever-changing world, it gives me comfort to know you can count on some things always remaining the same.

In truth, though these awkward meetings happen all too-often, they're more than made up for when you wind up in a room with smart people who, for whatever reason, happen to buy what you're selling (even if only figuratively).

As for Koral's Mark Suster, all I can say is "So, what's your plan for when Microsoft enters this market?"

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Tags: VC, Koral, pitching

It must be pretty clear by now that we here at Global Nerdy have more than a passing interest in the way content delivery over the network evolves. After all, one of the few bits of evidence that Opencola ever existed is Swarmcast.

Very few people, outside of the veterans of the Great P2P Wars of ought-one (or, VotGP2PWo01), have heard of Swarmcast, but everybody's heard of BitTorrent. As we've noted elsewhere, that's partly because while Swarmcast (and other companies like RedSwoosh and Kontiki Networks) have decided to play an infrastructural role in grid content delivery, BitTorrent's always put their brand in front of the individual user.

Somewhere north of $20MM in VC, and several deals later, BitTorrent.com's pushing that strategy further by becoming an online media store. In an interview with Wired News, BitTorrent's Bram "I'm Still the CEO" Cohen makes the case for BitTorrent The Brand:

WN: Do you think BitTorrent has gained enough mass-market recognition to be a destination for people to find and download online video? Right now, they can get movies from Amazon, Apple or Wal-Mart. Why will they use BitTorrent?

BC: Currently, when people want high-quality video they turn on the TV or get a DVD. The space is wide open in terms of gaining mindshare for an online download site. We're going to excel both in having a comprehensive catalog so people can reliably find something they want and in having a simple, friendly consumer experience.

Let's leave aside for a second the fact that the "simple, friendly consumer experience" Bram describes seems somewhat at odds with the fact that BitTorrent.com will be delivering their wares locked in Windows Media DRM; that should strike fear in the hearts of anyone who's been Played for Sure.

The interesting thing is that BitTorrent.com has opened up a war on two fronts. First, they've got to keep whatever perceived technology lead they have over other companies with pretensions to the content delivery crown. There are a lot of companies, from Akamai, to InterNAP, to RedSwoosh, to Swarmcast, quite busily trying to one up each other with better, faster, and (effectively) cheaper. BitTorrent.com's appeal to the customer is in the experience, and if anyone else does it faster, BitTorrent.com loses. If anyone else does it basically as fast, but cheaper, BitTorrent.com loses.

The second front is the one Wired News discusses in the interview: BitTorrent.com also competes as an online media store, a retail destination. The competition's pretty stiff here, wth Apple, Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart being just a handful of the brands in the mix. Bram must think there's a lot of demand for high-quality video, because he's betting $20MM of other people's money on that fact alone protecting BitTorrent.com from irrelevance.

Zudeo, the commercial incarnation of the Azureus BitTorrent protocol client is, aptly enough, cloning the BitTorrent.com strategy as well: a technology play as well as an online media store brand.

This is one of those classic "Why fight in the war when you can be an arms trader to all sides?" setups. BitTorrent.com's arming itself for conflict, while the others are ready to sell to all the combatants. It'll be interesting to see who's standing when the smoke clears.

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Tags: BitTorrent.com, Zudeo, Swarmcast, Kontiki Networks, RedSwoosh, Akamai, Apple, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Amazon.com, BitTorrent, Azureus

Let's face it: nobody does high weirdness like the Japanese, and as this Gizmodo article featuring illustrations from the Japanese safety manual shows, new technologies give rise to new weirdness.

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File this under “It may be old, but it's new to me and it might be new to you”: over at the blog Modern Life is Rubbish, they've got an article that shows which countries have the most IP addresses per capita and which have the least.

Here's how the article's author did the math:

First of all, I obtained an IP address to country lookup list, which revealed the blocks assigned to each country – from this I was able to calculate the total number of IP addresses allocated to each country. I then divided that total figure by the country's population, giving an indication of the number of IPs available to that country per capita (person).

Here's a world map, color-coded by people per IP addresses. Green is fewest (best); red is highest (worst):

Let's look at the ten countries with the most IP addresses per capita. As you might guess, all these couuntries seem like pretty decent places to live. To find out more about each country, click on its flag or its name; you'll be taken to that country's entry in the CIA World Factbook.

1. Vatican City	10.5 IPs per person
2. United States	4.5 IPs per person
3. Canada	2.2 IPs per person
4. Iceland	2.0 IPs per person
5. Monaco	1.8 IPs per person
6. Gibraltar	1.7 IPs per person
7. Liechtenstein	1.51 IPs per person
8. Sweden	1.501 IPs per person
9. Finland	1.496 IPs per person
10. Australia	1.459 IPs per person

Now here are the 10 countries with the fewest IPs per capita. Unsurprisingly, most of these countries don't figure very heavily on most people's vacation lists. To find out more about each country, click on its flag or its name; you'll be taken to that country's entry in the CIA World Factbook.

195. Afghanistan	1,458 people per IP
196. Madagascar	1,514 people per IP
197. Guinea-Bissau	1,550 people per IP
198. Central African Republic	1972 people per IP
199. Burundi	3,278 people per IP
200. Myanmar	4,112 people per IP
201. Malawi	4,197 people per IP
202. Ethiopia	4,582 people per IP
203. Niger	58.139 people per IP
204. Democratic Republic of Congo	58.140 people per IP

In response to this entry, someone on Reddit posted this list of holders of class A address spaces, each address space representing about 16 million IP addresses:

  3/8   May 94   General Electric Company
  4/8   Dec 92   Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.
  6/8   Feb 94   Army Information Systems Center
  8/8   Dec 92   Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.
  9/8   Aug 92   IBM
 11/8   May 93   DoD Intel Information Systems
 12/8   Jun 95   AT&T Bell Laboratories
 13/8   Sep 91   Xerox Corporation
 15/8   Jul 94   Hewlett-Packard Company
 16/8   Nov 94   Digital Equipment Corporation
 17/8   Jul 92   Apple Computer Inc.
 18/8   Jan 94   MIT
 19/8   May 95   Ford Motor Company
 20/8   Oct 94   Computer Sciences Corporation
 21/8   Jul 91   DDN-RVN
 22/8   May 93   Defense Information Systems Agency
 25/8   Jan 95   UK Ministry of Defense                 (Updated - Jan 06)
 26/8   May 95   Defense Information Systems Agency
 28/8   Jul 92   DSI-North
 29/8   Jul 91   Defense Information Systems Agency
 30/8   Jul 91   Defense Information Systems Agency
 32/8   Jun 94   Norsk Informasjonsteknology
 33/8   Jan 91   DLA Systems Automation Center
 34/8   Mar 93   Halliburton Company
 35/8   Apr 94   MERIT Computer Network
 38/8   Sep 94   Performance Systems International
 40/8   Jun 94   Eli Lily and Company
 43/8   Jan 91   Japan Inet
 44/8   Jul 92   Amateur Radio Digital Communications
 45/8   Jan 95   Interop Show Network
 46/8   Dec 92   Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.
 47/8   Jan 91   Bell-Northern Research
 48/8   May 95   Prudential Securities Inc.
 51/8   Aug 94   Deparment of Social Security of UK
 52/8   Dec 91   E.I. duPont de Nemours and Co., Inc.
 53/8   Oct 93   Cap Debis CCS
 54/8   Mar 92   Merck and Co., Inc.
 55/8   Apr 95   Boeing Computer Services

It figures Halliburton would be in the list.

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Unlike Om, Scoble, Kevin McDigg and the rest of the techno-pundits with bigger, more heavily-trafficked blogs than this one, we've got real work to do…real man's work. We'll have some articles posted tonight. Stay tuned!

A couple of people I know actually fell for this site, msfirefox.com, which purports to be a site announcing that Microsoft has purchased Firefox and is releasing it as Microsoft Firefox 2007…

I've got my hands full with a PS2, XBox 360, a handful of software projects and a life, so the Wii is not likely to be part of my hi-tech entertainment altar in the near future. There's another factor: aside from good looks, a quick wit and a bon vivant approach to life, I have also inherited this from my father: sweaty palms.

Given that the Wii's control — the Wiimote — is a motion-sensitive thing that you're encouraged to wield and movelike a sword, a fishing rod or gun, depending on the game, it comes with a strap that users are encouraged to wear in order to prevent it from accidentally being sent flying across the room. Ed Burnette points to a YouTube video demonstrating what happens when a sweaty-handed player loses his grip:

Nintendo has issued a safety bulletin that explains the proper use of the Wiimote's strap, complete with these rather airline-safety-card-like diagrams:

Included in the safety bulletin is this bit of sage advice:

Hold the Wii Remote firmly
and do not let go.

“Damn,” I can hear some Wii owners saying, “Now they tell me!”

Burnette suggests that Wii oweners might want to get their paws on Wiimote protective sleeves:

or perhaps the skid-proof glove:

Meanwhile, the jokers at the Penny Arcade webcomic suggest that it's some Wii users' lifestyle choices that are ruining their gaming experiences…