Blog » Archive for August, 2007

Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 11)

Thu, Aug 30, 2007

SM: Did the market understand your positioning as an integrated networking solution? EB: I think they did. Of course we were coming from behind in routers, and we were behind SynOptics in hubs, and we were behind others in single categories. We started to strengthen our position in all our segments, and this helped because [...]

Don’t Touch Blockbuster

Wed, Aug 29, 2007

Early this month, in the space of a week, two things happened at Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI). First, on August 8 it announced acquiring Movielink for a price that later came to light to be a measly $6.6 million. 10 days later on August 17, COO Nicholas Shepherd and outgoing CFO Larry Zine both unloaded a [...]

Web 3.0 & Online Sports (Part 3)

Wed, Aug 29, 2007

Business Model Most online sports sites earn money from advertisements, subscriptions, retailing of sports equipments and merchandising. They have also realized the need for convergence with other media and mobile network for better broadcast and more ad dollars. The popularity of fantasy sports leagues has also drawn advertiser attention, as the fantasy games bring in [...]

The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 10)

Wed, Aug 29, 2007

Here Anant discusses his final area of innovation in Tilera, which is the piece which really supports their go-to-market strategy and allows companies to become early adopters of multicore processors. SM: What is the final innovation? AA: The fifth and final innovation is in software. The third ā€œPā€ is programmability. There, we have done some [...]

Eric Benhamou & the Turnaround of 3Com (Part 10)

Wed, Aug 29, 2007

3Com started growing revenues again in 1992 on the strengths of new products. The company grew about 15 fold in a decade, in terms of revenues, and became profitable again. SM: That was a golden age in networking! EB: Yes, and shareholder value went from the million range to billion range. It was fun, because [...]

Netflix Needs to Rethink Strategy

Tue, Aug 28, 2007

February 25, 2007 was a red-letter day for Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX). It marked its one billionth DVD delivery since the service was launched in September 23, 1999. The happy NFLX top brass decided that the lucky recipient from Helotes, Texas would be a free lifetime member. The occasion also had NFLX changing its TV advertising [...]

Web 3.0 & Online Sports (Part 2)

Tue, Aug 28, 2007

Top Players and Rankings Sports is a lucrative media vertical and an important lifestyle segment. With online users frequenting various sports sites for live scores, news, updates, streaming videos, etc. it is fast catching on as a major online segment as well. The advent of fantasy sports and networking sites have taken online sports to [...]

The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 9)

Tue, Aug 28, 2007

I am curious how Anant addresses the intellectual property strategy for Tilera. In the back of my mind is the story of Tessera, a company that has had fundamental innovations in chip scale packaging, and today every single manufacturer of miniaturized consumer devices violate their patent, and pay them royalties. Some of the innovations that [...]