Blog Reboot (maybe) and What’s Next

It has been almost a decade since I updated this blog. Perusing the previous blog posts, it is interesting to see evolution of my professional interests from Data storage and Clouds to FinTech and Startups. This blog appeared to had become an exploration of random ideas and interests while I was in between larger projects.

Start and End of PeerCube

My previous interest in crowdfunding and analyzing peer to peer lending data evolved into PeerCube, a startup helping retail lenders, and a few institutional lenders, make better lending decisions. While writing was on the wall for a while, once Lending Club decided to discontinue retail lending platform, there was no path forward for PeerCube to continue. As a bootstrapped startup focused on retail lenders and being very efficient with our limited resources, we also couldn't figure out a pivot to continue operations. Considering over the years, we were pitched several competitors for potential acquisition, we feel PeerCube did quite well. But, it was time for us to start next chapter in our lives.

Podcast 19: Anil Gupta of PeerCube on P2P Lending Analysis

During the existence of PeerCube, we captured and collected lot of lending data, specifically from Lending Club's primary and secondary platforms that we felt was relevant for broader consumer lending industry. There were also some good posts shared on PeerCube blog based on analysis of lending data, for example changes in FICO score during the life of loans and how it impacted the final outcome of the loans. Unfortunately, they all have lost any relevance now and are no longer available online.

What's Next

During the past few years, I have explored and learnt about several random areas, such as Autonomous driving, Satellite imaging, Text mining, Options trading, Web development, in addition to moving to Japan due to family reasons and learning Japanese. I continue to be interested in AI/ML/DS applications and data-intensive projects.

While I am not planning to restart this blog again, going forward I will use it as personal repository of my notes, most likely in unfinished, incomplete, and unpolished state.

Storage Jobs @ Startups

Recently, Nathan Kaiser at nPost contacted me regarding his new widget displaying Startup Jobs on blogs. As sidebar on my blog is already too long, I decided to include his widget in a blog post. Try it out and let me know your feedback (positive and negative).

P.S. If you are using a RSS reader like Google Reader and don't see the widget, please visit my blog. While I am writing this post, I am not sure if widget will show up in the blog post either. In case it doesn't, please visit nPost Startups Jobs site to check out the startup jobs. Use keyword "storage" to find storage jobs at startups.

Online Backup Services - What's Next?

Earlier this month, Jeremiah and I were having debate about prospects of online data storage. At that time, I invited people who may be involved in online data storage services to contact me. I am continuing to receive responses from various industry professionals on this topic.

One of the person responded was Damien Stevens, CEO of Servosity, an On Demand Backup company. Using emails and phone call, we are having a great conversation around online backup services, where it is today and where it needs to be. In my usual direct manner, I started with a very specific question in an email.

AG: How is your approach unique compare to other online backup companies?

DS: Right now we're winning customers over the competition because we've made it easier to understand, we don't charge for backup agents or extra computers, and we are not overpriced like some of the higher end competition (redacted name of competitors).

In last four years, I have heard the same pitch combining ease of use and cost too many times from online backup providers and, I have seen dozens of them come and go in the same time frame. So I wasn't very excited.

Then, he piqued my interest wanting to discuss the technologies that may enhance the value of online backup services. The demand for these technologies is not something that can be delivered on overnight. Customers are not asking the benefits of these technologies right away either. But if customers were to ask for them in 12 - 24 months, it needs to go on the service/product development roadmap soon.

Since then, our conversation has been very lively and wide-ranging. The discussions revolved around potential customer requirements of versioning, lowering network bandwidth utilization, making restores easier, and better backup/restore job management. We also discussed wide variety of technologies like CDP, data de-duplication, snapshots, replication, archiving, monitoring and management.

In the end, I decided to leverage the power of blog by writing this post and putting forward questions to my readers.

What is your opinion and experience with online backup services?

As a customer and user, what would you like to see in an online backup solution in next 12 - 24 months?

As a service provider, storage vendor, or someone familiar with various storage technologies, what technology would you recommend to be included within next 12 - 24 months?

BTW, if you have any experiences with Servosity On Deman Backup service, I would like to hear about them.

Success Factors for GridNetworks … closure

Wrapping up my thoughts on prospects of GridNetworks. Continuation from previous post.

The second method, more likely to work for GridNetworks, is to pre-install or embed the player in to as many devices as possible, preferably the type of devices that are almost always on, almost always connected and publicly available to participate in content distribution without compromising owner-user experience.

One of the biggest challenge in my opinion is to get people to install a P2P based player on their computers. I personally started the installation process several times and backed out. The main concern was the impact of a P2P player on my work machine, both performance and security aspects. Pre-installed player and embedded appliances are a good method to overcome such concerns.

Another challenge is to have as many nodes public and participatory in content delivery as possible. Most computing nodes where users install GN player are more likely to be located behind a firewall/broadband router whether in the office or at home. This may result in a disproportionately higher number of nodes acting as freeriders without aiding delivery to others.

Newell claimed that their player is successfully running on Xbox. Embedding in Game consoles is definitely a step in the right direction. Some of the other devices, they may want to consider for embedding are:

• Network routers - The ones normally used with broadband connections at home from companies such as Linksys and D-Link.
  
• TV Set-top boxes - Comcast provided me a Motorola HD cable box with Ethernet port. May be GridNetworks can help set-top box manufacturers utilize this port for some meaningful purpose.
  
• Helping NSLU open source community to install player on Linksys NSLU2 storage device.
  
• Develop, partner and market NAS and Media PC devices with embedded player for consumer markets.

They need to focus on embedding their player in to any device that has storage capacity and a network port. This may be the differentiation GN needs to stand-out in overcrowded P2P based online video streaming market.

Good luck to Newell and his team at GridNetworks.


Communication using hand/body gestures at dinner table in Hokkaido, Japan. I knew no Japanese and others knew very little English.

Success Factors for GridNetworks ... contd.

Continuing my thoughts on success factors for a video distribution infrastructure play like GridNetworks from previous post ...

As Michael Gersh commented in previous post, high quality video distribution will be viewer paid.

Who is going to collect payment from viewers? Will it be a content distribution infrastructure owner like Comcast or content distributor/aggregator like Netflix? Why is it important? IMO, it is the company in value chain that has most viewers captive benefits the most. And this is shown very clearly from some back of the envelope calculations for iTunes and Akamai.

Assuming weekly revenue of $10 million from analyst download estimates of $18.5 million songs per week, annual revenue of iTunes store, a content aggregator/distributor, is over $500 million+. Akamai, a distribution infrastructure provider to iTunes and with near monopoly in CDN, total revenues are barely in $400 million range.

With the success of iTunes, it is assumed that content aggregators/distributors are the ones who will be collecting payment from viewers. Distribution infrastructure owners like Akamai will be a service provider to iTunes for a fee.

Cost-side Success Factor

As GridNetworks (GN) will likely be paid by content distributors, it's profit-side success factor depend on number of content distributors using its delivery infrastructure and the revenue generated from each content distributor.

To attract paying content distributors and be a preferred delivery method, GridNetworks need to have the most expansive hybrid CDN P2P infrastructure. So the cost-side success factor for GN comes down to how quickly they can build 40 million quality nodes contributing to their delivery infrastructure and at what cost.

One method to achieve this goal is to freely distribute software for media sharing and playback. Once there are sufficient nodes established, harness those nodes and the brand recognition to make deals with content developers, owners and distributors. BBC deal with Azureus [pdf] will fall in to this category.

There are already enough high quality video content delivery startups trying to follow this route. Most with very little value differentiation originating primarily from the high profile and visible content deals. The success will belong to the ones with market/brand recognition, deep pockets and influence to make high-profile visible content deals.

Should GN follow the same path or there is another way to succeed? Chime in if you have any thoughts.

To be continued later ...

Housekeeping Notes

Recently, I noticed in Google Analytics stats that some traffic to my blog is coming from penny stock forums where link and text of my entries were posted. A caution note for readers from these forums: My posts are nothing more than personal rants and shouldn't be considered thoroughly researched analysis on prospects of any company, its stock, industry or market. Believe in my rants on your own perils.


This picture of a Pachinko in Tokyo seems quite appropriate after the above housekeeping note.

Success Factors for GridNetworks

Note: For background information on my interest in GridNetworks, please read my previous posts:

Challenges of High Quality Video Delivery

GridNetworks, what's my Interest? Part one.

GridNetworks, what's my interest? Part two

Based on my observations of startup universe, I believe that every startup needs to have at minimum two success factors, one on profit side and one on cost side, to succeed.

Profit-side Success Factor

For GridNetworks (GN), the profit-side success factor is dependent on the number of distributors of high-quality content willing to pay for using GN infrastructure, irrespective of whether they are well-known content distributors with large content library like Disney or niche distributors leveraging long tail phenomena like Reeltime.

Some might argue advertising may be a viable option. I seriously doubt viability of an infrastructure intensive play like distributing high quality video solely based on advertising. Capturing $10 in advertising while paying $28 for delivery doesn't look like a viable business proposition to me. See, Comment on A-List Blog may result in high traffic and Internet Video Business Challenges.

A subscription based viewer model may become viable option for predictable delivery quality once the delivery infrastructure has achieved a critical mass of viewers, content, participatory nodes and content distributors. Most probably, only to be realized in next phase of GN.

To be continued ...

GridNetworks, what’s my interest? Part two

Click here for the first part.

Third, GridNetworks piqued my interest with the use of word “Grid” in the company name. Grid is a powerful concept for utilizing idle resources and addressing infrastructure scalability. GridNetworks provides the extra scalability through P2P to fixed infrastructure of content delivery networks for superior user experience at the end of the last mile of Internet.

Few years ago, I researched a company for a client, Bycast and its StorageGRID product. During last bubble, Bycast was positioned as online video streaming startup. With its underlying technology, Bycast was successful in navigating turbulent times by repositioning in healthcare storage. Even though, Newell was quick to shoot down my comparison of GridNetworks with Bycast, I felt that the underlying technology of GridNetworks will find its ways in to other areas and applications too, not discounting its application in storage either.

Fourth, GridNetworks website listed Sujal Patel on its Advisory Board. Sujal is co-founder of Isilon Systems, a storage startup, soon to be public, and a veteran of RealNetworks. This piqued my interest to find out what connection Isilon or storage may have with GridNetworks.

In the end, it turned out to be nothing more than ex-RealNetwork links. Sujal is now acting more like angel investor. So, he doesn’t seem to be a good proxy anymore to find ties with Isilon or storage.

Fifth, the hints of P2P implementation in PowerGrid End User License Agreement piqued my interest as I saw a way to accomplish Distributed Storage Aggregation (DSA). And if you like me scan IEEE and ACM publications regularly, P2P way to utilize unused storage distributed across enterprise has started to become interesting.

Newell claimed about 50,000 nodes currently contributing on, average, 1GB of storage and 200kbps of bandwidth per node. His users are contributing almost 50TB of storage and 10Gbps bandwidth to deliver high quality video. When his vision of 40 million nodes comes to fruition, he may have access to 40 PB of storage without shelling out a single penny to any storage vendor.

The above reasons may explain what encouraged me to initiate contact with GridNetworks. One day, I expect to see the same technology being implemented with in the enterprise for distributed storage aggregation.

Excerpts from PowerGrid EULA:

"Segment" means a small block of encrypted Content data, typically under one megabyte.

Encrypted, managed peer-to-peer "grid" network architecture.

The Content Segments stored on your computer may be portions of files you have viewed, or may be copied to your computer by GridNetworks host systems for later sharing with other GridNetworks authorized users.

The Segments contained therein are only accessible through the GridNetworks PowerGrid application and cannot be individually viewed, altered or deleted through your computer's file management tools.

These Content Segments are periodically removed and replaced with other segments and shall never exceed the maximum capacity of the Data Store, established by you.

City view from Tokyo TV Tower. Mount Fuji is barely visible in the background.

GridNetworks, what’s my Interest? Part one.

As I mentioned in my post, Challenges of High Quality Video Delivery, last week, I spent an hour with Newell Edmond, Co-founder and Amy, Project Manager talking about GridNetworks, its technology and business.

Contrary to what few readers thought and queried, neither I met them for a job nor they rented me to blog about them. I discovered GridNetworks through John Cook’s blog post Getting 'Goodfellas' on the grid. It piqued my interest for several reasons.

First, I have been thinking of ways to highlight startups working on interesting infrastructure solutions. Consumer Internet and Web 2.0 startups are topic of discussion by bunch of bloggers. But the infrastructure startups that enable them are largely ignored.

There was nothing better than a local infrastructure startup to initiate my coverage. Expose your infrastructure startup, you know whom to contact and how!

Second, even though my initial impression was that it is yet another startup trying online video delivery. Further research showed their aspirations are more substantial than just becoming a video destination.

And after meeting with Newell, I am convinced that they are actually a video delivery infrastructure play, combining content delivery network and peer to peer network technologies, than just a torrent player. And this is also confirmed by Michael Gersh, a VP at Reeltime, a GridNetworks customer, in his email.

We are currently using Grid's tools as part of our end-to-end solution that is streaming DVD quality video over the web, to customers all over the world.

Second part coming soon.

Challenges of High Quality Video Delivery

Since Google acquired YouTube, online video sharing and delivery segment has been hot topic of discussion. A good overview of online video viewing is presented by Scott Kirsner in As online viewing booms, the amateurs give way to big media. As more and more big media content coming online, a new technology challenge is emerging for content distributors.

How to deliver a high quality full-length video instantly to multiple viewers on their big screen simultaneously and securely?

Sneakernet

The file size for 90 minute full length HD quality video can range from 2 to 6 GB. And it may be easier, convenient and hassle-free for viewer to get it delivered via next day Sneakernet than to wait 3 to 18 hours in downloading it online. There is nothing instant about downloading full-length high quality video.

Streaming

The next best online alternative is to stream video to viewers in real-time. For smooth playback, video streaming needs to have some buffering and a 12 second buffering of HD quality video requires a 5 to 15 MB of video that need to be always available to user. And, if streaming video is originating from a centralized distribution infrastructure, the number of viewers are first limited by the processing capacity of central system and then available bandwidth.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

To address the central system processing capacity limitation, the option is to have multiple delivery nodes. And, to address bandwidth limitation, these content delivery nodes should be located as close to the viewer as possible. This is the model used by CDN providers who share the processing capacity of these nodes and available bandwidth among multiple content distributors to maximize utilization of their edge nodes.

Content delivery nodes work great as most viewers reside on the last mile that extends beyond the Internet spiderweb and as long as nodes are not overloaded by too many viewers trying to download and watch the latest video simultaneously.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) Networking

P2P networking is one scalable alternative proposed to deliver high quality video and bring the viewers in to the Internet spiderweb. Among it's other vices, from delivery perspective, P2P is infested with freeriders. You know the ones who want to download content but don't want to allow their system to be used to deliver content to others. And, the whole P2P premise fails if there are not enough P2P nodes participating in content distribution.

GridNetworks – New Kid on the Block

Today, I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Newell Edmond, co-founder and the technical brain behind a local startup in online delivery of high quality video, GridNetworks. Newell and his team worked hard for last two years to develop a hybrid solution combining the best of Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Peer-to-Peer Networking (P2P) for delivery of high quality video.

More about it next time.

P.S. This is my first effort to reach out and highlight early stage startups in Seattle area working on innovative infrastructure solutions. If you are one of them, get in touch.

Be Generous

Busy preparing for the trip to Japan. Already in holiday spirit. Need to catchup on storage stuff.


Medina House of an Hungarian guy. He reportedly received one percent stake to leave IBM and work for a startup, now we know as Microsoft.

Got photo blog inspiration from Andy Gray's Japan Photo Blog.

Where are you being De-duped?

As I wrote previously (See, Evolution of Data De-duplication similar to FC SAN), presently data de-duplication is making a name for itself in backup and recovery area.

In my opinion, data de-duplication will ultimately be incorporated in to data storage infrastructure for three reasons:

1. The growth in volume of information that need to be stored is several times that of the growth in capacity of data storage media, irrespective of media type (See, The Final Frontier for Data De-duplication).


2. Data de-duplication doesn't require the information context of data to eliminate the repeating patterns. It can also eliminate the repeating patterns beyond a single information container.


3. There is no reason that data de-duplication should only be applied to reduce the data-at-rest footprint. It can as effectively reduce the traffic volume by eliminating the repeating patterns in data being transferred. iSCSI aficionados take note.

Some of the near-term applications are going to be in the area of backup, archive, wide area data transfer, data caching, primary storage and enterprise data storage grids. In the end, data de-duplication can be applied anywhere where cost of resources freed by eliminating repeating patterns exceed the cost of resources required to remove repeating patterns.

Do you or someone you know applying data de-duplication to solve unique problems? I like to hear about it. This is your chance to reach out to my unique and focused readers.

Share your vision and thoughts on data de-duplication with me. I will share it with my readers and give appropriate credit to you.



BTW, you are seeing Microsoft OneNote and Tablet PC in action with above doodle. Let me know when it gets annoying!

The Final Frontier for Data De-duplication

Bruce asked important questions in his blog entry What happens on the last day?

How many doublings does it take before the cost of storage exceeds the company's annual revenue? I've yet to have anyone give me their plan for 5 years out. What's yours?

Established storage vendors will like customers to keep purchasing storage at the current pace. But, it is only wishful thinking. In my opinion, nothing available currently is the answer or plan, customers want.

I am currently reading an interesting book Dealing with Darwin by Geoffrey Moore. The answer to cost of storage exceeding annual revenue and the 5 year plan lie in this statement from the book.

Competition for the scarce resources of customer purchases creates hunger that stimulates innovation

So, it will be the innovations that will give the solution and the five year plan to storing information without breaking the bank. And in my opinion, the underlying technology to store more with less will be data de-duplication.

It is matter of time before data de-duplication becomes a pervasive technology with in data storage infrastructure and ultimately becoming a key enabler technology in primary storage to store more data in smaller footprint.

Career move to Entrepreneurship - IEEE Webinar

Just received a note from a fellow IIT alum. An interesting and useful Career Accelerator Forum by IEEE and Webinar for those looking to make move to Entrepreneurship or Computer Science.

A Must-Attend Event for Career-Minded, Tech-Science Professionals!

Are you looking for a career move into entrepreneurship or computer science? At the Autumn 2006 Career Accelerator Forum from IEEE Spectrum Online, on October 12th, industry experts will tell you what employers are looking for, how to match your training and skills with the best jobs, and how to leverage work experience and credentials to your advantage. You will also be able to network with career specialists and higher educational institutions in our online forum. To register or learn more, please visit: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/caf

No right or wrong answers to EQ tests

Do you score high on EQ (Entrepreneurial Quotient) tests like the one
posted by Guy Kawasaki? The high score doesn't necessarily mean that you will make a better entrepreneur. But, you may have a future as a writer who may become successful writing business books.

I took Kawasaki's test but with a twist. I answered eleven questions based on what popular entrepreneurship culture preaches and eleven questions based on my actual experiences. I got three times as many wrong answers when I answered based on my experiences instead of what entrepreneurship books preach.

I used to be a typical engineering guy and had no background in business. So I read a lot of books on entrepreneurship, joined associations and attended events. And only thing I can say that the preachings of popular entrepreneurship culture will not make you successful. The key to success is flexibility and considering all available alternatives.

In my opinion, there is no right or wrong answer to EQ tests, all answers are valid alternatives until one works for you.

How to Start a Startup

I read this interesting article "How to Start a Startup" written by Paul Graham...enjoyed thoroughly as I could relate to the context having gone through the same process now couple of times. I couldn't agree more with the three things he mentioned for creating a successful startup.

1. Good people

2. Delivering something customer actually want

3. Spend as little money as possible