On Wednesday, after my partner Brad and I finished a meeting in Washington DC, we settled in for the long drive (during rush hour) from DC to Dulles International Airport. Sitting in the back of the car, we fired up my MacBook Pro, got online using my Verizon EVDO card, fired up my SlingPlayer, connected to the Slingbox in my living room in Boulder, and then proceeded to watch Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report as we made our way to IAD. From the back of a moving car, our connection speed averaged about 500 kbps, and we were treated to an impressively high-quality viewing experience.

Amazing.

Technorati Tags: Gadgets, MacBook Pro, EVDO, Sling Media, Slingbox, Travel

It has been a rough travel week. It started with my ill-timed journey from Denver to Harrisburg, PA on Sunday afternoon when the snow in Denver and Chicago conspired against me and trapped my plane on the tarmac in Denver for 4 hours while we waited for de-icing and runway plowing. Once I arrived in Chicag, snow had caused 5+ hour delays. I arrived in Harrisburg at 2am Monday morning. Never thought I’d be so happy to see Harrisburg, PA.

Now I’m sitting in the airport in Pittsburgh waiting for a flight to Philadelphia. The terminal is relatively empty and my gate is near the end of one of those moving walkways. There is not a single person on the moving walkways, yet I’m sitting here, forced to listen to a pre-recorded voice politely saying, ad nauseum, “Caution, the moving walkway is nearing its end, please watch your step. Thank you.”

What would otherwise be a relatively quiet and peaceful experience has been destroyed by the incessant repetition of this disembodied voice at the end of the walkway. Two things about this absurd situation really grate on me.

First, no doubt the only reason this bit of noise pollution is being forced on every person sitting at my gate is because some enterprising lawyer successfully sued some airport at one point after their oblivious dumbass client fell on his face at the end of some moving walkway.

Second, this is just terrible design. Would it have been that hard to install a sensor near the end of each walkway such that the Voice of Caution would only be triggered if there were actually someone on the walkway?

Jeesh.

Technorati Tags: Airports, Rant, Travel

I was in Las Vegas last week with my partner Jason Mendelson for CES, my third or fourth (they sort of all blur together) trip to Sin City for this bit of consumer-electronic craziness. I just read Dave Hornik’s post on his trip to CES and felt compelled to share my thoughts as well. While I think it is highly unlikely that I’d find a startup to invest in in Vegas, it is a great way to get the lay of the land in the consumer electronics industry and generally soak in the zeitgeist of today’s gadget universe. We also walked the halls to see the buzz that our portfolio companies which exhibit at CES are drawing. We had several MobiusVC companies to check in on this year: eCast, MicroDisplay, Perpetual Entertainment, Reactrix and Sling Media.

In the past few years, the big themes that have been prominent at the show have ranged from digital music devices, mobile video and smartphones. This year was the year of Full HD (1920 x 1080 progressive scan), and, of course, the ongoing game of one-upsmanship in flat screen TVs. Sharp’s 108 inch LCD TV ruled the day, trumping the 102 inch and 103 inch plasma screens in previous years, thanks to Sharp’s new eighth-generation LCD plant. We looked at as many TVs as we could find, since Mobius VC is a co-investor in Microdisplay, along with the fine folks at August Capital. MicroDisplay was showing their gorgeous LCoS (liquid crystal on siicon) Full HD RPTVs in their booth as well as in the booths of their partners Akai and Memorex, who will soon be shipping MicroDisplay’s TVs into the retail marketplace.

But the best-quality, most astonishing TV I saw at CES wasn’t even a big screen TV (the biggest was a mere 27 inches) and, sadly, is not yet commercially available and was billed as a prototype. Sony’s ultra-thin OLED TVs were truly stunning and their display quality was markedly better than anything I’ve seen before, owing partially to their remarkable 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio. I’ll be picking one of these babies up when they are finally ready for prime time — I’m guessing that Sony’s still struggling with lifetime issues on these displays, given the organic compounds used in the displays.

I’ve been involved with Sling since leading their Series A round in the summer of 2004, and it has been great to see how they’ve grown each of the three years they’ve been at CES. The first year, they were showing pre-release prototypes of the original Slingbox, last year their announcement of the SlingPlayer Mobile for mobile phones was all the rage, and this year, Sling made waves with the announcement of the upcoming SlingCatcher device, as well as with CEO Blake Krikorian’s appearance during Les Moonves’ keynote speech, where they announced the upcoming release of the clip-n-sling feature in the SlingPlayer and CBS’s partnership with Sling whereby Sling users can freely clip and share snippets of CBS programming they capture while watching their Slingboxes. Kudos to Sling and CBS for this groundbreaking deal.

Finally, I should mention that the biggest buzz during CES wasn’t at CES at all. It came from up north in San Francisco at Apple’s MacWorld conference. Apple’s announcements of the iPhone and AppleTV easily generated as much press coverage as all of CES combined. For any consumer electronics company other than Apple, hosting a conference at the same time would have been suicide, yet, once again, Steve Jobs has pulled off a marketing masterstroke and demonstrated his company’s ability to define the conversation in the world of digital media and consumer electronics.

Technorati Tags: Apple, CES, eCast, Gadgets, HDTV, LCD, Microdisplay, OLED, Perpetual Entertainment, Reactrix, Sling Media, Slingbox

Many blog pundits have predicted that blogs and RSS will ultimately kill the press release / newswire business. But as Mark Twain might say, “the rumors of the press release’s death have been greatly exaggerated.” At least thus far.

The more accurate thing to say is that world of PR will be forever changed by the emergence of citizen media. PR Newswire is wisely embracing this change and has just announced a deal with Technorati, whereby reader of PR Newswire’s press releases online are provided with links to Technorati at the bottom of every press release they publish online. The press release can be found here at PR Newswire, and the real-time conversation going on in the blogosphere about this release can be found here.

Congrats to both Technorati and PR Newswire, each of whom has made both the press release and the blogosphere more relevant by bringing them together.

Technorati Tags: PR Newswire, Technorati

As reported earlier this week, eBay announced it is buying StubHub for $310m. As a (small) individual investor in StubHub, I’m delighted by this outcome. StubHub is a great success story: the company was started by Stanford MBA students Eric Baker and Jeff Fluhr in the dark days of the tech downturn and was able (or forced by necessity) to raise money primarily from angel investors (with the exception of the Series D round they raised from Pequot last year) when most VCs had pulled up their tents to ride out the storm. At the time, conventional wisdom was that eBay would own the auction market for every conceivable type of good, and, furthermore, it wasn’t worth the risk to invest in what was regarded as “online scalping”.

StubHub’s insight was that while eBay is a fantastic generic-auction marketplace, the secondary event tickets marketplace had several unique characteristics for which eBay’s one-size-fits-all approach would fall short. First, event tickets spoil. After the days of the game or show, the ticket becomes worthless. eBay probably doesn’t sell much milk on its site, and you wouldn’t want to buy a glass of milk that had been on auction for a week’s time. Nor would you want a ticket for an event that had already occurred.

StubHub’s buying experience is totally specialized for buying and selling tickets. It is very easy to find tickets for the specific date, artist, team, venue, etc, that you are looking for. StubHub provides seat maps for most of the venues they carry tickets for. StubHub handles the fulfillment for both the buyer and the seller via FedEx (making sure those tickets get there before the event to prevent spoilage), preserves the anonymity of the buyer and seller, guarantees the tickets and takes a healthy fee from both parties, for a total of 25% commission per ticket.

StubHub also had an insightful approach to build critical mass in their marketplace quickly. Early on, they partnered with several teams in each of the major sports leagues so the teams could offer their season ticket (or single event) holders a better way to sell off tickets they were not going to use. StubHub (and the teams they partnered with) recognized this as a win for everyone involved: fans who could not attend a game gained a safe and convenient way to sell their seats and recoup some of the cost of their season tickets, the team in some cases got a cut of the secondary sale, StubHub made money on the transaction, and, importantly, the venue would gain valuable revenues from concessions and memorabilia sales that would have otherwise been lost. And there were the less quantifiable benefits associated with a more crowded venue: more fans meant more noise and cheering to build home field advantage, and the team certainly looked better on TV when there were fewer empty seats in the stands. The fact that the average transaction is worth hundreds of dollars also makes the secondary tickets marketplace very attractive when the revenue model is based on a percentage of the sale price.

StubHub’s strategy of partnering with teams coupled with heavy advertising on sports radio (which can be a very cost-efficient media buy) enabled StubHub to build inventory, traffic and transaction volume quickly. Eventually the site grew large enough that it no longer needed to partner with the sports teams to build inventory and transaction volume, and it started growing quite well organically as buyers and sellers of tickets recognized the superior experience that StubHub provided. The company grew quickly and is said to have sold over $400m worth of tickets in 2006, netting the company about $100m in revenue last year.

StubHub’s success can be attributed to the power of vertical specialization. While eBay may have a lock on generic merchandise auctions and Google may own generic web search, these markets are so vast that there are often extremely rich verticals that can be better served by specialization, be it shopping search, travel search, ticket auctions, or other as-yet-unidentified verticals. When vertical specialization offers a sufficiently more compelling experience than the generic approach, real value can be built. The trick is figuring out which verticals are ripe for this type of mining. Clearly StubHub found a rich vein to mine.

While eBay also does a decent volume of ticket sales on their own site, in spite of the inferior experience their generic auctions provide, eBay smartly recognized that StubHub was the market leader with a congruous business model and a better user experience, and it was a natural (and smart) decision to buy StubHub.

Congrats to Jeff, Eric and the entire team at StubHub. Your success is richly deserved.

Technorati Tags: eBay, StubHub