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One of the blogs I visit frequently is NewTeeVee. Liz Gannes put up a post on the site last week called "Need to Know Video Stats." If you're tracking the growth of key sites and video online overall, see here post for the latest data from ComScore, etc. To summarize, they are all going up and to the right.
138 million Americans watched 9.5 billion videos online in November '07 (31% of them on Google sites like YouTube).
Given Kontiki's role in digital media, and our role as the download platform for BBC's iPlayer, I'm frequently asked "how's it going?" The short answer: very well. Ashley Highfield, Director Future Media and Technology at the BBC, put up a blog post last week called "iPlayer Launch: First Indications" that provides some insight into the success of the iPlayer since it moved from beta to official launch on Christmas day. To quote Highfield:
"Demand for long-form video content over the web may be much higher than iTunes has witnessed before; It's too early to say, but I think we may be at the start of rewriting the rule book."
For more on this topic, see another good article on iPlayer by the Guardian's Mark Lawson from January 3rd.
The title of this post is a bit of a misnomer - I never actually finished The Last Tycoons by William Cohen. The author's 750 page account of the history of investment bank Lazard Freres is a reasonably good read - but no human should be forced to read 750 pages about an investment bank. As a friend who works at Lazard put it to me: "Why would anyone want to read a 700 page book on Lazard?" Putting that basic question aside, it is an interesting read - if you've got the time to work through 750 pages. For more comments, see below.
I really enjoyed the early parts of the book, which focus on the early founding families of the bank, their struggles to keep it afloat, escape from Paris during Hitler's reign, and other interesting historical elements. However, the last 75% of the book focuses primarily on Felix Rohatyn and the internal politics of the firm (battles with Wasserstein, etc.). Interesting stories and an incredible level of detail (the author uses actual emails to walk through some accounts), but there's a bit too much rumor and gossip for my taste.
If you want to read a more interesting (shorter) book with tales of Wall Street, read Goldman Sachs, The Accidental Investment Banker, or some of the classics like Liars Poker or Den of Thieves.
Coming out of the Holidays, I've got two new favorite toys. They're new to my arsenal, but not new on the market (in both cases, I'm not exactly an early adopter). #1 is a Toyota Prius, and #2 is my new Jawbone bluetooth headset.
The first: a Toyota Prius. I bought mine to start saving on gas, as well as to start driving in the carpool lane. For California residents who don't know, if you have a Prius (or other certified hybrid or electric vehicle), and you applied for and received the special stickers before they ran out (in early '07), you can drive in the carpool lane with only one passenger. California's effort to reduce gas consumption has done two things: 1) drive up sales of the cars in CA (estimates I saw peg about 50% of US Prius sales to California buyers), and 2) drive up the price of pre-owned cars that have the stickers (mine is an '04 with about 50K miles on it, and I paid about what it costs to buy a brand new one - without the stickers). Even at a premium price, getting 45 MPG and driving in the carpool lane are worth it - and it's actually entertaining to watch the little meter that tells you how much energy is being recycled through the battery.
The second is my new Jawbone bluetooth headset from Aliph. Santa brought them for my wife and myself for Christmas. I've used a million headsets over time, and never been happy with any of them - too much background noise, and the person on the other end can always tell I'm on a headset. The Jawbone uses a set of new technologies to both enhance the sound quality and virtually eliminate background noise. Even if you don't buy one, you have to check out the demo video on the Jawbone site - a guy using a Jawbone while standing next to a leaf blower - with near-pristine sound quality.
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