Jeff Richards' Demand Insights

If you are like me, you visit and link to Wikipedia often (more than 40 million people do every month). Now, you can see who's behind the latest edits to your favorite terms. As covered in Wired and I'm sure elsewhere, a CalTech student named Virgil Griffith has written an app called Wikiscanner that pulls from publicly available data to correlate the IP address of the editor to its corporate owner - thus showing where an employee may be making favorable (or unfavorable, for that matter) revisions to entries referencing the company. Some pretty interesting reads under the Editor's Picks links on the right side of the page.

Posted by Jeff Richards at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the last few weeks I think I may have been asked 107 times "what just happened to the CDN market?"

It's a pretty good question. Noted market leaders Akamai and Limelight had difficult times in the public market (somewhat for reasons that don't really tie to the market overall), and out of the woodwork came analysts and media reports that the CDN market was collapsing before our very eyes - a little more than a month after many agreed it was booming following Limelight's IPO.

I happen to have a different opinion - the stock market drops had more to do with tactical issues than the market at large (we are still talking about 50%+ growth rates here) - but do agree there are major questions to be raised around business models, pricing and competition. I also agree that the market will look very different 18 months from now, when video advertising has taken hold (noted in previous post and today's WSJ/paid link after today), P2P is making an impact, and users have figured out how to connect their PC's to their TV's.

As usual Dan Rayburn has taken the time to write extensively about these subjects on his site, and I'd encourage you to read his posts. a) He has more time to write than I do, b) I agree with most of what he says, and c) Dan's clearly pretty tapped into the CDN scene.

Apologies for lack of more original thinking here. It's late. And I didn't want my only post of the day to be about a book on wine...

Posted by Jeff Richards at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over a few flights and late nights I recently finished George Taber's Judgment of Paris, The Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine. It's a very well written book and quite frankly an incredible expansion (300 pages) of what was originally a one day, 2,000-word writing assignment for Taber, who was writing for Time Magazine at the time.

I didn't find the story line as compelling as House of Mondavi, but it's probably on a short list of must-reads for any hard-core wine enthusiast. The story line refers to a famous (or infamous, if you are from France) blind tasting of French and California wines hosted in Paris in 1976. At the time, French wines were considered the clas of the wine trade, and really the only world-class wines available commercially. A wine merchant named Steven Spurrier (I don't believe any relation to the football coach) had visited several of the emerging wines in Napa Valley the previous year and found several of them - including Stags Leap, Chateau Montelena and Heitz, to be outstanding and worthy of exposure to French enthusiasts.

He then set up a blind wine tasting by notable French judges - and the rest is history. Montelena went on to be voted the best of the white wines, and Stags Leap the best of the reds - both unheard of outcomes for the time period, given that California wines were mostly known as low-end jug wines at the time. Notably, today both the Montelena and Stags Leap web sites have links to info on the Paris tasting.

Taber does a great job of going into the history and personalities of these storied wineries, including their founding teams, winemakers and owners. The amazing stories behind Mike Grgich (winemaker at Mondavi, then Montelena and now owner of Grgich Hills) and Warren Winiarski (founder of Stags Leap) are particularly compelling.

Net/net if you are really into wine and wine history, this is a book worth reading. If you are simply looking for a good book with interesting plot lines and a bit of history on Napa Valley, House of Mondavi is an easier read.

The book does feature one of my favorite quotes on the subject of wine from no less than Benjamin Franklin, whose autobiography is at the top of my list of all time great reads:

"Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

Posted by Jeff Richards at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week in VeriSign's Mt View HQ, I met up with Andy Plesser from Beet.tv. On Monday, Andy posted the video on Beet.tv (click here to go to the site and watch the video). We talked about a wide range of subjects associated with VeriSign's play in the content space. The most timely happened to be the successful launch of the BBC's iPlayer Beta, and most of what Andy posted on the site talks about the role of the VeriSign/Kontiki platform in the BBC's delivery platform.

Posted by Jeff Richards at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Update: The BBC confirmed that its recently launched iPlayer has been downloaded more than 120,000 times, and predicts 500,000 users after 6 months in beta.

Posted by Jeff Richards at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of my favorite (definition: I get an RSS feed and read daily) blogs on the new media and video space is Dan Rayburn's StreamingMedia.com blog called The Business of Video. Dan recently posted a list of online video and media sites he subscribes to in his Google Reader (sites he gets an RSS feed from). IMHO, it's a pretty complete list, and I subscribe to more than half of the sites on his list.

Of course this is also a bit of a self-serving post - Demand Insights is on the list.

Posted by Jeff Richards at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you are a golfer and enjoy watching and reading about the PGA Tour, Chris Lewis' The Scorecard Always Lies is an entertaining read.

Lewis covers the Tour for Sports Illustrated, and he obviously has an existing rapport with many of the more colorful players in the game (Daly, Woods, Mickelson, Couch, DiMarco, etc.). What is perhaps unique about this book is Lewis' stated goal to tell the personal side of the Tour players's lives - as opposed to just covering tournament play. We get insight into what they do between rounds (Couch ends up in a New Orleans tattoo parlor in the early morning hourse before a win), in the morning before teeing off (Mickelson napping at the Masters in the locker room before his second green jacket victory) and travel to and from tournaments (private air for the top players, commercial coach for the others).

If you enjoy golf, this is a good summer read.

Posted by Jeff Richards at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)