Reading Listening Absorbing Placing

At times when I used to play chess against my grandfather I thought I could beat him.
I was fast, daring and between moves I incessantly kept on chattering to disrupt his concentration, dare I say I never won, cornering his King, Queen and measly other pawns in no time only to watch shell shocked his houdini acts...

It's the same thing which is happening in business. But this time 20 years older I'm trying to learn the virtues of patience, stealth, and observation. I want to think I'm like the black mamba, I'll gather information, read even more to fill in not only the facts but the links between different businesses, who's sharing with whom, what are the drivers of revenue sharing, absorb the weaknesses which my partners have and then judiciously strike where the weakness in the link is the highest.

I was brought up through strict catholic upbringing to believe in honesty, straightforwardness and ethics. I've got to change these to trust through suspicion, guile and defining what ethical means. There are choices I need to make in life. I can't depend on the providential state system to bail me out, there is only one goal I pursue ... starting my business.

I met a guy in Grenoble after chatting 4 months with him on skype for CTO role. He's technical without being geekie, understands the cost benefits of open source projects and the horrible problems it might bring. He's actually deployed 1000 screen network in Switzerland in petrol stations and is actively pursuing the dream of integrating intelligence in digital signage.

In Malaysia we've looked at our competition and in a few weeks will be happy to announce some good news.

On the investment front our drive to find the 1.1 million US$ continues. We've sent the business plan to MAVCAP, and to a few high net worth individuals. We're looking at the debt side of things also and come next week I'll be knocking on doors of some highly ranked individuals.

And on the client side we're working on a prospectus we could send to people who've approached us for pilot projects.

At times, I do get lonely and disencouraged. Is all this scarifice really worth it. I could have been a Investment banker or in a General Management role in a firm... and then I remind myself of a higher goal, I think of the parable which always struck me for its brutal honesty ... that of the multiplication of talents, and I strive on.

Digital Signage

Digital Signage has come a long way since abribus posters of JC Decaux. I was meeting a very smart Israeli entrepreneur who used as he says Physics 101 ( I can testify that) principles to create a higher efficiency light guide for LED driven LCD backlight units.
Backlight unit manufacturers take up 26% of the cost of goods of Flat Panel Display manufacturers like LG, Chin Mei, Samsung or AU Optronics. For the moment CCFL and EEFL displays are mainstream (>98%) of TFT LCDs because LEDS have lower Lumen/watt efficiency and backlight units would need a high number of LEDs to have equivalent lumens at the display. This of course drives up costs for LED driven backlight units (2.5 x to 3x) times costs of CCFL. But Leds and CCFL have the same problem in Television sets ... loss of brilliance as photons from light sources cross media of different refractive indices.

So our Israeli entrepreuner came up with a smart idea....
But I started with Digital signage.
I posted this video on youTube which I'll share with you





I think we could earn good margins in Digital signage. And now mash it up with the acoustic signage post I talked about before.
That's a true Mashup ... Web 2.0 is passé.

VC Comic Strip

Intelligent Acoustic Signage

An interesting article on Lamb Wave devices can be found here.

In short Lamb waves are guided elastic waves that propogate in solid plates or layers with free boundaries. The energyis guided along the plate parallel to the boundaries. Now the most imortant factor for Lamb wave proagation is the frequency-thickness product. Only certain fundamental modes are supported depending on the FT product.

So why am I excited about this technology? Well as described in the paper it does open up the realm of "intelligent devices". Let me explain:

By coupling capacitive micromachined vibration transducers which would then couple with lamb waves in structures one could capture the acoustic signage of the external force. This "acoustic image" then could be correlated to templates in a data base for applications ranging from detection of failures (i.e. machine parts) to detection of activity (a keyboad/ touchscreens).



I uploaded this cool video on French Start up which uses the blackboard to remotely command the windows media player on the latop. Guess which song from Queen is rendered ? What the researcher is doing is remarkable. He records the acoustic waves and maps the waves to a key in the database (that's why he has to return to the laptop each time in the beginning). Later on using correlation, of Energy distribution of Fast fourrier transforms with the templates of the recorded audio signals the system is able to detect the correct key.


So the technology is smart, in some fields (big touchscreens) it can even be a killer application .
The new interactive JC Decaux abribus billboards could do even better with such a technology and this could open up a new realm in interactive marketing ( A google AdSense model on billboards ? - if people do not break these things in the first place) giving real time data back to marketing personnel ...

So What do you think ?

Nomadisk: A solution for Data Room Woes

I went for the first time to a Data Room and hopefully that's going to be the last time. I refuse to go when we have good solutions like Nomadisk

This virtual hard drive solution could be a great collaborative solution for the Deloitte's, KPMG, Ernst & Youngs of the world. I could very well imagine a virtual drive where company sensitive data would be put for the due diligence process. Only a few registered users would be able to access the data and any copying/editing would be disallowed unless authorized. The higher security concerns could be a suggestion towards higher revenue models for Aventiv, the company which came up with Nomadisk.

On the other hand while in the Data Room I was doing some preliminary calculations ( that's the only worthwhile thing I did). There are 6 partners at my department. Each does 3 deals a year and has around 5 companies in his portfolio. That's 18 new deals per year, and on a steady state 30 companies which require regular reporting as a result of corporate governance. So we could do a little bit of viral marketing ourselves for Nomadisk.

GPS Solutions: Wrong Business models

I walked by a Sony store in Heathrow this Sunday and well, well what did I see ... a GPS solution for cameras.

Now that's a nice one and that too selling for $150 . You might want to ask me why I find this interesting ?
GPS solutions used in your Tom Toms and albeit the fact that they are making you even more reliant on others' knowledge they are gaining ground in Europe . Some companies have interesting products that are really driving prices and areas of these devices down expecting to capture market share. But this is not really a sustainable business model. As more hardware providers provide for cheaper solutions software providers will provide even cheaper one. That's red ocean for you.

I don't find the business model interesting. Hardware or software GPS solutions for tagging pictures sold on a royalty basis is not where the value is going to be captures. It's actually where value is going to be totally squeezed out.

On the other hand I would be interested in paying for a service which could use GPS tracking for track and trace of costly electronic devices as well as geo tagging photos in community based (MySpace) eco systems.

Let's take for example this amazing story on the number of laptops PDAs etc lost in taxis of London, well with a track and trace GPS based service based on some hardware or software solution inside these devices you'd have no problem finding the whereabouts of your gadgets.

How about mothers worried about the whereabouts of their kids. Adidas and such a service would be a great solution isn't it.


I've just pointed out two businesses for which people would really be willing to pay. The whole thing is to look at niches which are not yet fulfilled and think of how to create recurring revenues, how to create a community around products and have the shortest possible sales cycles.

IP Soc Conference in Grenoble

And so I went for my first conference as a VC in making. The conference was aimed at IP integration in System on Chip environments. The world is moving more and more towards multiple processors on chips and integration of IP from different sources, different maturities and at different locations is a challenge. Reminded me of the old days at Philips Semiconductors when I would have to stay up late nights waiting for conference calls with Sunnyvale while I soldered at home.

The talks on the first day were interesting especially that of Jacques Benkoski a Venture Capitalist with US Venture Partners. He mentioned what I've been seeing from Gartner reports i.e. Number of design starts (ASIC and ASSP) are steadily declining but the number of algorithmic engines that will be designed on these chips will grow exponentially. That just means that companies will create more and more derivatives based on a combination of reusable IP. Benkoski broke down IP in three distinct models:

1. Horizontal IP
2. Vertical IP
3. System IP

Horizontal IPs are basic fabrics applicable to a wide range of SoCs providing system level advantages. Take a look at this smart idea.
Vertical IP are application specific IPs, dedicated to enabling the SoC into specific markets segments and are highly differentiated
System level IP leverages itself for designers in all design phases.

I thought that it was a pretty smart classification but what really caught my attention were the following two statements:

1. Semiconductor industry as a whole is growing much slower than before and when looking at IPs one needs to differentiate Unique IPs from Productivity IPs. The unique IPs which have a chance of making it big are those which will not eat into the gross profits of the TI, ST and NXPs of the world. I'm going to do that mental exercise next time I get a Semiconductor Business Plan.
2. The ones who actually make it to first customer reference sales will go through the Lemming effect. After the first high the company will hit a low and only a few wil be able to ride the second crest. It's abit like crossing the chasm an excellent book I read while at Insead. New technology is at first taken aboard by early adopters, in Semiconductors terms by typically small design firms like Pixelworks and only when the early adopters start taping out highly differentiated IPs which earns them really good margins do the big boys buy in.

So what else came out of this conference?

• In Horizontal IPs the start up which enables to reduce leakage current is going to make it really big. Till now design tools and the engineering community has been working on dynamic power reduction. This power depends on frequency with which you move around data and instructions, the capacitive load of drivers on the IC and the square of the Voltage at which blocks run. As long as manufacturing technology was above the 90 nanometres, lazy designers didn't really care about power. Each reduction in technology ( i.e. 200 nm to 130 nm) would have a big impact on the voltage and you'd not really have to worry about power management. But I remember my first real chip design the PNX101 was in 90 nanometres and hey the power benefits from 130 to 90 in terms of voltages was just not enough to meet customer requirements. That's when we started thinking of having different blocks running at different frequencies, clock gating, parallel instruction structures, pushing down bus frequencies in scheduler calls of specific tasks.

• A phenomenal number of ASICs (80%) fail actually due to IP integration. And this boiled down to lazy designers just handing over RTL code. Now that's really funny because it's something I used to have discussions with while I worked at Nijmegen. Some hardware designers thought that their work finished at design level. Yeah they were the artists. It(s only now that the industry realises the need for proper wrappers around IP which allows third party designers or integrators to extract IP specific data. Now that's really funny. Cadence started this and now D&R is promoting some XML wrappers for IP. Is this a space which could be interesting for data quality and heuristic tool vendors ?

• The next big thing which will hit the industry is the Network On chip. There's just too much going on in this space to not take it seriously. But when I see how many teams presented their research work, I also believe that start ups like Silistix and Arteris are going to have a hard time and basically the big boys will use them as bargaining sticks with respect to internal design teams to get them faster to mature solutions.