Liberty Egg

Competition and the tollbooth on last mile

Please god let open video on demand hurry up and get here. I pay a stupid amount every month for cable...about $70...stupid considering I don't have any "premium channels" like HBO, etc. I watch ads anyway on most of the channels I watch, so why can't they be embedded in the content so I can just get the content directly from the producer...I'm already paying $20 a month for a "fat pipe" to download stuff. I'd even be willing to answer some questions so that the ads I watch would be more relevant.

Some of the ISPs though are saying they might start charging to allow access to such content. Aren't I already paying for the access? This is why things like free municipal wifi make sense. We need more competition in the last mile (connection to the house) so that the old school vendors (like the old Bells) can loose their visions of grandure and emancipate the connection between people and the content they want to consume.

With all the video announcements from Google et al recently, this can't be too far down the road. Please let it hurry up.

Search is the new "Exchange"

In the mid 90s I started a business designed to create exchanges or marketplaces where buyers and sellers could come together and find each other.  The idea was to mimic financial exchanges but make the concept apply to buying and selling anything.  It was eBay before eBay and before the widespread use of the internet.  We were WAY too early.

But now I have lived to see the concept come full circle.  I predict that unless eBay changes its game, they are in for a decline.  Search has made it such that you no longer have to go to a single central "place" (physical or virtual) to find stuff. So why, if Google and others, start making it easy for me to find stuff anywhere on the net, would I need to find it on eBay?

The same concept rings true in what some people are calling sell-side advertising.  If people or companies can now publish "ads" for the goods or services they have to sell, literally by making the ads available for any publisher to present, isn't this the same intermediation that exchanges and marketplaces (physical and virtual) used to provide?  You used to need a marketplace to aggregate the people on the other side of the transaction from you.

From this point on, search will make the connections that used to require the marketplace or exchange.