32 Years Down the Toilet: Neokast 2.0

I received a large response from my most recent column on the Neokast mystery.  The most interesting post was this one:

Insider Joe says:
March 8, 2009 at 8:23 pm  (Edit)

Um, the real answer to from someone who knows is much simpler and less intriguing:

a) NK’s management team had no business experience in either the streaming space or in running tech startups

b) Said Mr. Johnson was arrogant and unwilling to accept the above point

c) He was unable to come up with a business model that made money

d) He did not want to raise venture capital until it was too late to do so

Btw, there was never any serious offer from Microsoft or anyone […]

By |March 9th, 2009|Uncategorized|61 Comments
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The Neokast Mystery

 

technologyevangelist-neokast179What happened to Neokast?  It’s a mystery to me.  But I suspect the answer will surprise us all soon enough.

Neokast, as readers of my old PBS column will recall, was a peer-to-peer live video streaming application developed by graduate students from Northwestern University near Chicago.  That’s me talking about it there on the left, back in 2007.

I loved the company instantly. It was out of the Silicon Valley limelight, away from the technical mainstream for such software (Neokast was a .NET application and therefore pretty much Windows-only), but most important of all, it seemed to actually work.  The potential was extremely compelling.  Here’s how I described it back then:

“…the more people who watch your Neokast […]

By |March 8th, 2009|Uncategorized|132 Comments
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And a Network Engineer Shall Lead Them

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Friday I was in Kansas City for a meeting of economics bloggers held at the Kauffman Foundation.  My claim to being an economics blogger is slim, I know, but it was a chance to hang with some interesting people and learn something so I went for it.  And in honor of that event, then, I’m making this column entirely about how we can tell when the economy is finally turning.  There’s a strong argument that time is right now.

Yet the economy doesn’t feel any better to me.  Does it feel better to you?  Probably not.  But what we’re looking for is the bottom, or rather that moment just past the bottom when things […]

By |March 2nd, 2009|Uncategorized|126 Comments
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