The Prime Directives…

Short post but a very important one for entrepreneurs… there are lots of things you can do, there are a couple of things that you MUST do…

1. A known customer with a identifiable problem


2. Measurable, sustainable, profitable revenue from volume

I never had much trouble with the first directive, after all everyone has a problem that they need fixing, it’s directive number 2 which causes me the most concern. The key word is “sustainable”. Many startups today figure out people’s problems, very few of them figure out how to turn that into sustainable profitable revenue over time.

I’m watching with interest Web 2.0 I think it’s early and there is still much confusion around business models, especially ones that can show sustainable revenue. It’s relatively easy to get a few customers, harder to get a few hundred thousand (unless it’s free) and really, really hard to crack the million user number.

A product that we released some years ago has cracked the million users. It took about 2 years. Although the product was free, it’s still very hard to get someone to use free “crap” and harder still to get them to depend on it.

Mod_gzip achieved the million plus user base by doing one thing really, really well. It saved you time, improved the utilization of your web server and customers (end users) loved it because pages load much faster. The network admin’s love it because they didn’t have to learn anything new, it simply worked the way they like to work.

Some of the largest web sites in the world now use mod_gzip as the defacto standard for accelerating content from an Apache web server.

We solved the first prime directive – I only wish we’d solved the second. A million or so users at $49.95 would be nice. However the good news is that was Act 1 – Act 2 is just around the corner and we are now back hard at work focusing on both prime directives.

Look for something new around the end of February, early March.

So what are the secrets inside Intels Itanium chip?

About 4 years ago I founded another startup (Secure64 Software). The focus was 64-bit computing. So why did we focus on 64-bit computing. After all as everyone knows 64-bit computing is all about more memory and who needs more memory? Well I could think of some big databases that would benefit but that doesn’t build a sustainable business. In December of 2002 I was fortunate to bump into the former Chief Scientist of HP. He was part of the team that built PA-RISC which then morphed into PA-Wideword which later became Itanium. I only asked one question – what are the secrets inside Itanium that no one knows about.

Well folks there are two.

The first one is all about performance. Itanium it turns out has a unique parallel processing architecture capable (with the right programming techniques) of sustaining up to 8 instructions per cycle. Compare this with CISC (3) and RISC (4) and you can see the benefit for transaction scalability. Indeed by removing Linux from a regular 2 CPU Itanium and adding our own microkernel we actually demonstrated a factor 25x performance improvement when delivering web transactions. In round numbers we went from transmitting a 3,000 byte file 150,000 times in a minute to a 4.1 million times in a minute. Try that with a Pentium!

So that’s one secret – what’s the other? Well Itanium as it turns out has a unique security architecture built into it. Which if programmed correctly you can now lock down the entire system including memory. For the techies who want to learn more the patent that describes how this is done in hardware is US2002/0194389 A1. Pay special attention to the section “protection id and compartmentalization”.

So what does this mean? Simple – a measurable security improvement over an above anything else out there coupled with transaction scalability that lowers the customers capX/opX.

Itanium is much maligned – very few people really understand what a differentiator it is. This is primarily because no one has programmed it correctly. When you do goodness results.

I’ve not yet met a customer who doesn’t want to go faster for less money and improve his security.

Web 3. 0

Web 3.0 – skating to where the puck is going to be?

Having been immersed in security and 64 bit computing for the better part of the last four years I’ve spent the last two months coming up to speed on what’s going on with the Internet. I’d sum it up like this:

Web 1.0 – all about deploying the infrastructure. People made lots of money by exploiting (repackaging open source software for commercial benefit)

Web 2.0 – the current rage. I have to admit I’m confused. To me it’s all about AJAX and advertising. AJAX allows you to do some “cool” things by running another browser in the background and passing messages back and forth. Advertising now seems to be the “business model du jour”. Not being an advertising executive I have to say I’m skeptical. I’m willing to bet right now that a new advertising paradigm will emerge in the next five years that will disrupt the landscape

Web 3.0 – this is where (my partners and I) are spending our time. It’s all about improving the mobile experience and blending “content” (king on the desktop) with “contact” (king on the mobile device). Look for interesting new developments from our new startup 5o9, Inc in the coming months.