Is The Times paywall working?

The Observer today reports on a significant drop in The Times’ traffic since the launch of its paywall.
The Experian data it reports is much richer and shows the following data:

• Overall drop in visits of 66%
• Linger time drops from 5 minutes to 3.5 minutes

The question is–and not touched on–in the Observer piece is whether this is a good or bad outcome.

It’s early days to make a call. But my judgement:

• Linger time for people who don’t bounce off the paywall has probably increased. Times probably has a much larger number of people seeing one page only (the paybarrier).
• The drop in visits it far lower than I would have expected. The net sentiment was that a drop would be precitipitous–like 95% or more. To have only seen a drop of 60 or 70% actually leaves traffic at The Times an order of magnitude higher than some predictions.

The Times was seeing about 20m visits a month, call it 5m unique users per month. If conversion rates to paid are really running at 33% (with a 66% of traffic declining), then the times will be looking at 1.5m subscriptions. At the promotion rate of £1 for 30 days, that works out at £1.5m in revenues.

If they hold on to 50% of those users after the initial trial, then they’ll run to 750k subs at £100 per year or £75m a year.

If they hold on to 10%, then it is a paltry £15m a year.

Replete with assumptions but it shows the fine balance. At 750k paying subscribers, the subscription revenue, together with higher advertising yields might become material.

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• Early Indications Say Paywall For The Times Is A Dreadful Failure (techdirt.com)

Yes, I am jumping into the politics bandwagon, a bit late.

Would we really have ended up with 12 BNP MPs under a system of PR?

No. Systems of PR can be designed badly, to engineer terrible outcomes. Or they can be designed well.

Generally you have thresholds below which a party gets no seats. Israel which is the most Proportional of all in the sense that it has a single constituency nationally and only a 2% threshold.

Even in the hyper-permissive Israeli system (which i not what the Lb Dem’s would propose), BNP would fall below the 2% threshold and get nothing. Generally fewer than a dozen parties get seats in the Knesset as a result.

We are more likely to have a model of with STV across larger constituencies (with trigger thresholds) or the additional member system which is used most famously in Germany at federal level; and is similar to the system used for Scottish and Welsh and other elections.

In this model, you have two types of seats. 300 MPs come from constitutencies and 300 from party lists. & two votes. Say Party A polls 40% of Vote and B polls 25% of vote; but in the constituency contests (which are FPTP, but could also be STV), they end up with 60% of seats; i.e 180 seats from constituencies.The second vote then goes to the party lists– but is balanced to ensure that any skew from FPTP on the constituency seats is somehwat corrected.

In Germany there is a trigger threshold of 5% below which you get no representation. This tends to keep the freaks out.

Some parties do extremely well with constituency based MPs; others are more balanced, and still others like Greens or Frei tend to get their MPs from the list.

A second model is to use some other voting system like AV or STV across single member or larger constituencies. In this model, you might have (for example) 500 MPs who are elected in 250 constituencies (2 MPs per consituency) — these are voted for using an STV (i.e. you rank order your choices; and if your first candidate doesn’t make the cut you number two vote is selected; until someone gets over 50%).

In this instance, centrist parties tend to do relatively better than FPTP; and you could imagine the Lib Dems who are often everyone’s second choice getting rather more seats; and certainly closed to their share of vote. You might also apply it to single member constituencies.

There are lots of combinations and a lot of thought needs to go into the mechanics of it. It also ends up being rather simple to figure out for voters.

They are basically told something like:
* Rank order your candidates in order of preferences. You don’t need to rank order but it will generally help you if you do.
or
* Vote twice: once for a candidate & once for a party.(surprisingly, you end up seeing a lot of split-ticket voting in this instances).

But suffice to say, it isn’t quite as simple as naively multiplying the monster raving loony parties national share of vote and saying ‘they’d get five seats’.

You could certainly design a PR system badly, but there is nor reason why you should.

(I should mentioned that Westminster had constituencies with 2 MPs until 1950.)

We’ve been working on our noise filters at Viewsflow, hunting down ‘bad’ Twitter accounts the look good. This afternoon’s exercise left me relatively surprised at how bot-rich Twitter is. Looking at a couple of hundred accounts which were regularly sharing high quality links, we found these (approximate) proportions:

Now I figured there were a lot of bots on Twitter but what is clear that there are a lot of bots on Twitter, reposting content from feeds of various sites. Broadly speaking there appeared to be three different types

1. Republishing feeds which slice and dice other feeds in, presumably, interesting ways – make up a tiny minority; one might assume their is a segment of the audience interested in them.
2. Out-and-out megaphones: Twitter accounts which pull off reliable sources, like the WSJ or FT rss feed, and ping meticulously on the hour
3. ‘Social media experts’: You can tell by their twitter backgrounds (with the phone numbers on the left), who appear to be part of some mutual back linking exercise. They are 90% retweet, some smartly trying to retweet what looks like a Google Alerts feed, and 10% ‘thanks for following’.

Twitter is spotting rogue accounts. A couple of accounts (not shown in the pie chart had been suspended by Twitter).
The most popular Twitter clients were for the bot accounts were twitterfeed and Hootsuite.

At one level I might ask ‘Who am I to judge whether a Twitter stream is worth of publishing or not’? But without making that judgement it raises a few interesting observations.

1. The cost of creating links in the social graph is so low that these links may be decreasingly valuable: In the same way the link-farms found ways to attack the core value of PageRank. Acquiring followers is really easy. Create twitter bots that echo what you say is easy. And little cost is imposed to those who do. Many of the services we might use to evaluate the impact of a piece of content (like Tweetmeme or Topsy) return gross popularity measures, rather than a qualitative or contextual assessment.
2. The cost of creating messages is also incredibly low–and the noise is public, which is why the search for Twitter search is hotting up.
3. The low cost of creating lists is making lists very noisy, as well.
4. Twitter link-farms must be spreading rapidly. The cost of creating a Twitter account is low — heading towards 48 cents — and can be amortised over a life-time of pump-and-dump scams.
5. How much electricity goes into the frequent repeating of noisy content; across 10s millions accounts?

When we do more robust analysis of what we’ll find, we’ll share in due course.

Hey Alex,

Thanks for the response. Couple of points:
On the Harrison Ford quote on my blog, where I originally posted this, I attributed to the quote to Harrison Ford. When @mikebutcher asked me to post this on TC:UK, I thought I’d better do some fact checking (happens occasionally) and the provenance of the quote ended up being in dispute, or maybe I thought a picture of Leia was more suited for TC:UK.

As someone whose entrepreneurial achievements I have a tremendous amount of respect for (‘It’s the van Somerens’ was often muttered in kow-towed tones by attendees of First Tuesdays back in the wild west), the thing that surprises me about your note is that it sounds incrementalist.

Your notion that the tradeoff for getting EIS and Vat reclaims should be complex is absurd. What does the complexity do other than, well be complex? The purpose of the forms is–I assume to log this is going on and to guard against fraud–fine. That is the purpose. The question is: can it be done simpler? Should it be done simpler?

I am happy–as i am sure many are–to warrant the veracity of claims that I might make (except for Harrison Ford / Carrie Fisher claims which I clearly pull out of the ether). But the question is whether those warranties can be done in a simple way or a complex way. Wonga manages to lend money faster than its rivals and at similarly (penal) rates. The complex an be made simple.

I am not the only one who thinks complex is stupid and a waste of everyone’s time. And that poorly designed systems are dehumanising. (There are probably ten TED lectures on the subject).

In fact, on the tube this morning I noticed an ING advert touting the simplicity of their mortgage application process (Something like ‘ You’re applying for a mortgage not writing a thesis on quantum physics’ Having not written a thesis in physics, I can’t tell you how complex it would be, I assume complex.)

Alex, I believe one of your busineses was in cryptography. You’ll note (as I do, having made five EIS compliant investments in the past year or two) that the reference code of an EIS investment is, er, long. I checked one of my forms-the reference code is 28 (twenty eight) characters–and is not human readable. My twitter ID (which has much more and much more nuanced information) is six characters long (including the universal @ sign). The designer in me looks at a 28 character long reference (seriously, are there really around 10^28 investors in EIS schemes? Will there ever be?) and says something has gone wrong. And that might not be the fault of Mr L[xxx] of Cardiff’s VAT office. It is a reflection of a cultural problem within bureaucracies.

To your point that business is about overcoming obstacles–it certainly is. The message behind Hernando De Soto’s forceful book, The Mystery of Capital, he clearly walks through how bureaucracy–the inability to start a limited company easily or to hold title to physical and other assets–is one of the things that keeps people poor. At the same time on the main TC site, Vivek Wadhwa has shared some data that show that in the US since 1980 startup businesses have added 40m jobs to the US economy and contributed one-third to GDP growth. If you consider that net of population growth, US employment is flat today compared to a decade ago (read John Mauldin on this), then the only reason the US doesn’t have 20%+ unemployment is to do with these businesses.

But push this further, Vivek further argues that it is the small precentage of highly-scaled businesses (i.e technology businesses) that drove the bulk of these gains.

So let’s say that those similar dynamics are true or good be true in the UK. I guess TC readers want it to be true, I guess @mikebutcher does too, and we are all rooting for TechHub.

Then the question is how far can we go? What do we know about high-scale businesses? We know that they are close to winner take all. These aren’t 40:20:10: blah market share sectors that get created, they are 80:10:5: who gives? sectors. So every incremental advantage that you-as a representative of HMG-can give us, increases our chances of being the 80% winner.

There is an argument put forward by the truly awesome Naval Ravikant that points out that the winner-take-all-nature of cloud-based consumer businesses means you should need every single edge. . Perhaps he’s right, perhaps he’s wrong. But there seems to be some truth in it.

So if you believe, any or all of this, then I am kind of shocked at your response. EFG was a total waste of time, since basically no-one lent. But your implication seems to be that it was a good way for me to waste my time. And that I seriously doubt.

And yes there are little obstacles, and we overcome them. (Like our bank having four different sort-codes and account numbers for our one bank account–that is weird.)

I am also surprised to hear you say that I should try doing buisness in other countries. That isn’t relevant. Seriously. This isn’t a comparative game: “Yeah, we have 4% infant mortality, but it’s so much lower than in Congo” – this should be about absolute standards and absolutely moving forward.

But there are also obstacles that don’t need to be there. There are things that could be done much better. Systems that could be designed with the end user in mind. With customers in mind.

In a weird way our jury system is quite a good example. I was called to be a juror a decade ago around the time I was closing my first funding. I phone up the court officer and explained that being away for three weeks at this time could have a really crippling effect on a three man company; and he understood. Jury service postponed until the next time.

We have a great opportunity with a real entrepreneur, like yourself, in the heart of UKTI, because you dared the world to be different with NCipher and the others, and so you made it different. Likewise, don’t start with the status quo and say let’s inch from there. If we want government to understand entrepreneurship–and understanding is never bad–then we need you to get them to feel it, feel the raging desire to make it different, to have a big goal and get going.

Cheers
Azeem

This is a truly awesome post, which I recommend anyone interested in entrepreneurship should take a look at.

There is a great quote I came by from an HBS entrpreneurship professor (I forget the source). Entrepreneurship is “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled”.

In order to do that, you do need to score strongly on Mark Suster’s 12 criteria.

And if you look at some of his criteria its clear that that are determinants could be driven by what happens in utero.
Take for example risk taking in high-frequency financial trading which can be predicted by the second-to-fourh digit ratio on a hand (http://bit.ly/ce15Bb). Coates et al point to prenatal androgens (i.e. testosterone levels in the womb) as having important organizing effects in the brain, resulting in different adult behaviours.

And as you point out, the effects are not linear or totally deterministic.

There are those who become entrepreneurs because they have little other choice. Look at immigrants arriving at a new country, who don’t have access to traditional professions or jobs. They often do have access to extended community networks which allow them to build businesses serving those communities. If the timing is right, as for many Indian migrants to the UK in the 1950s and 60s, great businesses can emerge.
There are those who may have many pop out of the womb on the far end of the distribution, but emerge in cultures where the things that can make one an entrepreneur are not valued. The pastiche of this would be the high-performing child who is driven back to the fat-middle of law or consulting by school, college and parental pressure. I am sure this group keeps many a psychiatrist and divorce lawyer in business as they hit their forties and reality dawns.

I don’t think entrepreneurship can be taught. Because teaching is today, in some way, about closing down to frameworks and models.

I was lucky to hear Nobel Peace Prizewinner, Marti Ahtisaari, speak at DLD on the subject of conflict resolution. And he said that there were no models that could be applied to conflict resolution. Every situation was different. There were patterns you could draw on but little else.

My own experience is that the frameworks are helpful–to the extent that you pay them five minutes notice, process them and then just get on with it. The problem with being ‘taught’ (in a six week or ten week module) entrepreneurship, is that it’s a bit like learning to read a map. When you actually get on the terrain it looks and feels very much more different. There is so much more noise and so many inadequate simplifications on the map. (Not least of which is the fact that the terrain may harbour threats or opportunities not captured by the cartographer).

What I am certain is that entrepreneurship can be analysed. And data can be produced. And it can be used to drive web traffic on blogs.

I look at my experience over the past decade. I am doing a very much better job today (at 37) than I was at 27 (when you were running BuildOnline — whose offices were across the hall from our annex in 42 Brook St). It isn’t the availability of frameworks, although I do occasionally use them, it is.
I have far better pattern matching. To the 10,000 hours of Gladwell — I have an extra c. 25000 hours of waking, business experience — to bring to bear, to spot patterns, to make quick judgements.
I have much more experience. I have spent the equivalent of 3 yrs in technology sales, 3 years in tech marketing; 3 yrs in tech direction/architecture, years in people management, on top of what I had in 1999. It doesn’t make me a black belt or a guru in these areas by any means, but it allows me to go very deep in my discussions with any of the teams.
This isn’t about nature–this is about nurture.

But where nurture –and certainly early childhood development–has made a difference is in fostering that belief that you can pursue an opportunity. That what you have around you (in terms of resources and talent) isn’t the only thing you can rely on. That if you want to make it happen, you can.

What I’ve seen in many people who want to be entrepreneurs, but after beautiful powerpoint slides can’t get started, is this hang-up of our modernist thinking which may begin with Saint-Simon and progresses through our scientism, and perhaps culminating logical positivism. The same ‘fact-based’ ‘model-the-world’ thinking that came out of Newton and reached warp speed in the 19th century and the Royal Insitution, that persuaded political economists to be physicists and build models of the world, seems to cast a dark shadow of our ability to dream the impossible–and get on with it.

Sixty per cent of my time is spent with customers, forty per cent with investors, thirty per cent with my team and thirty per cent doing work. The result is a busy schedule made easier by these ten great products.

1. Pzizz on iPhone : totally essential. Pzizz is a power napping application which I have been using since it was an app on the Mac

Builds unique sleep environments, allow for refreshing 15 minute power naps during the day. Sadly usually only have time for one every other day.

2. Docscanner on iPhone : constantly running around, so you never have the paper work you need when you are near a fax or scanner. And vice-versa. Docscanner takes better than average photos of documents and then allows you to transform them into scans that are acceptable to lawyers and bankers.
3. Berghaus Extrem Incinerator Duvet: London has been freezing these past two months, and I have done much more walking and running around in this wet, snowy city than I would like. My Incinerator Duvet jacked has kept me warm and dry. Plus doubles as an sensory-isolation chamber during power naps. (You need to see it to believe it.)
4. Quaker porridge oats : Eaten on most mornings to get me through to at least eleven am.
5. Sharemyplaylists : Great for finding a suitable playlist for late night working sessions. Something laid back for writing presentations, some more thumping for building a training set for one of our modules.
6. Dropbox : Just have to add my entrepreneur love for Dropbox.
7. Xpad : Very simple Mac App for keeping scratch notes. Autosaves, but sadly doesn’t sync easily across Dropbox.
8. Chartbeat / Analytics App / Server Density : three apps that help us stay on top of our site performance and uptime. Chartbeat has become completely essential, but Analytics App which is an iPhone app for grabbing headling Google Analytics data during the day. David Mytton’s server density is a useful Nagios-as-a-service.
9. Blackberry Bold : Great device for writing emails, to dos and tweets, while carrying a laptop bag in the order hand. Unlike my iPhone I can pretty much navigate this with one hand, while walking/running. It also functions really well in 2G mode, giving me better-than-odds chance of reaching 10pm with a mobile phone that still has batteries.
10. iPhone tethering: When it works, money saving. No more £10 trips to Starbucks just to pull a presentation or check something online.

Number 11 … of course there is a number 11.

Number 11 is a special shout out for Rememberthemilk, a task manager  that achieves the simple task of

• Working on the Blackberry via MilkSync
• Working on the iPhone via its free app
• Being accessible on any of the two computers I regularly uses (via the Website). It even has an offline version using Google Gears

Now Rememberthemilk deserves a special mention. I have found it horribly complicated to use, with way to many features for my basic needs. And a very weird web interface. However, unlike Omnifocus, Things and any number of other to apps I have bought and paid for, RTM does what I need it to do. It is accessible from iPhone, BB and laptop. Syncs easily. Allows one handed task collection on a BB. And now that I have learnt the key board shortcuts, works very nicely indeed.

So those are a few things that make my life a little easier. Would love to hear yous.

Lots of people have helped us in our journey to build the world’s database of professional expertise. To name but a few, by their twitter handles: @robinklein, @rayyans, @nauiokaspark, @wdavc, @eileentso, @quixotic, @moia, @umairh, @aainslie, @harikunzru, @julien51, @philiphotchkiss, @marklittlewood to name but a few.

And I thought it might be worth accounting for my government’s help in our entrepreneurial journey:

• Education: Of our (extended team) of eight, I am the only one educated in the UK. And then my degree (PPE at Oxford) is of tangential relevance. The others, whether on the development, product management or knowledge engineering side,  have been educated in Europe, Canada, US and Australia.
• Company support: HMGs input so far has been to send me constant reminders to file my 363, now threatening to strike us off the company record. Yep, we’re a 13 month old company with £6k in revenues, and you want my 363 already? Should I spend time filing it ahead of working out the global licensing agreement framework with X Megacorp? Or reviewing the latest developer release of the iPhone app? Or indeed writing this blog post?
• Taxation: HMG has also been kind enough to pester us with VAT returns every quarter. From a cashflow standpoint this is fine because I have a few refunds, but in reality that puny cashflow doesn’t matter a jot to our business right now. And anyway, you sent me a cheque rather than making a direct bank transfer, because obviously waiting in a queue is the best use of my time.
• EIS: thanks for the EIS relief, although I have to confess that less than 10% of the capital we raised was eligible for EIS relief. The paperwork is absurdly complicated both for submission and for the forms themselves. Why make it this complex, when it could be simple and allow me to spend more time on–I don’t know–talking to lead customers.
• Employee options: Yep. It’s really important to incentivise employees. And thank god one of my cofounders had  trained as a solicitor. And we still had to iterate the forms three times.
• Enterprise finance guarantee: To misquote Harrison Ford, ‘You can put up the website for it, but you sure as hell can’t get the banks to lend’

Where did you help? (Credit where it is due)

• You mishandled regulation of the financial services which allowed for a runaway risk culture resulting in a massive financial & economic implosion in 2007. Watch this culture of satisfaction implode and wake us out of our reverie, prompted me to pull together what is now Viewsflow.
• You created the conditions that make it really tough for entrepreneurs to raise capital in the UK, which has worked in our favour. (Be greedy when fearful, etc).
• You joined the EU which has allowed me to access some awesome talent in Europe. And your former colonies have given me access to some brilliant Canadians and Australians.

But what about EIS, I hear you say?

• EIS is a nice bonus. A definite nice to have, and certainly helpful for some of our current and future shareholders. But I am looking at our funding needs over the next three years and I can comfortably say that EIS is in most scenarios not going to be a deciding factor.

What I can say is that you have lived up to my expectations of you. I expected you to be troublesome, problematic, unempathic and a general PITA. You haven’t disappointed.

Yours,

A taxpayer

Techcrunch’s piece on venture returns seemed a little optimistic to me when I read it. And @cdixon agreed–pointing to the Calpers data which I have used before.

What is good about Calpers CEV program is that it is a massive program of investment into VC funds. While it misses many of the locked-up super-stellar West Coast VCs (like Sequoia), it is a fair bet that Calpers is a choice LP for many VC funds.

As a caveat to my analysis: I am not a trained financial analyst, so this is best efforts. Since I don’t have the dates of either draw downs and disbursements, I can’t calculate precise IRRs. Someone with more time could build a probabilistic model of this, if  you need.

Headline numbers: Calpers put $3bn into CEV from 1999 to mid-2009. By that point, the net value (in terms of cash paid out and the book value of investments held) was $2.86bn, representing an overall loss of 6.4%. J-curve affects aside, this suggests that venture has returned less than zero over the past decade.

What was really suprising was this: the 2000 vintage funds (a year when CEV put to worked $1.1bn) far from performing poorly during this glut of venture, actually returned 12.6%.

The bumper year was for 2003 vintages, born in the pit of post-9/11 gloom — returning 84% over the 6 years to Calpers. This was also the leanest year for venture investing by Calpers.

By vintage, here is what the cash-in/cash-out:

1999 : In: $189m ; out: $160m . Overall return: -15.5%

2000: In $1.1bn ; out $1.25bn. Overall return: 12.7%

2001: In $562m out $ 538m. Overall return: -4%

2002: In $281m; out $319m; Overall return: 13.3%

2003: In $93.7m; out $172m; Overall return: 84.6% <—- lowest funds raised, best return

2004: In $125m; out $117m ; Overall return: -6.5%

2005: In $146m; out $133m; Overall return: -8%

2006: In $103m; out $52m ; Overall return: -50% — but in reality these funds have just stopped their investing period and are in as deep a J – as possible.

2007 In $254m;

2008 : In $146m

2009: In $57.5m

It is hard to be optimistic about 2005 and 2006 vintages. The companies backed by these funds would have steamed straight into the credit crunch, while at their most expansionary. If they read Sequoia’s Good Times RIP, they may well have dodged the bullet but most probably didn’t.

Of the 186 firms Calpers invested in with, only 31 returned 12% or better–I choose 12% as it is a better than stock returns; or around one third. 12% is far from a stellar investment return.

Stellar starts at 16-18% over your career (a sort of Paulson-esque number), if we take it to 16%, then 20 Calpers GPs hit that hurdle, which is bang on the halcyon top quartile GPs aim for.

What to make of this?

Well Calpers may have selection bias since it disagrees with the NVCA data. I may have made an error too.

It definitely demonstrates how difficult a business venture is. And massively asymmetric. It is well understood that the bulk of returns go to a few firms and a few partners within a few firms. (Calling Fred Wilson, Roelof Botha, anyone?)

But it also remains the case that as an LP, you have a better than even chance of doing really badly. 125 out of 186 firms return less than 4% which is a blue-chip granny bond rate. Fully 60% lost money. The logic of investing in VC must be something that treasurers are looking at. Not because VC isn’t necessary–as founder of a tech startup, I need capital to support my business–but that LPs have been investing in a losing game, probably because it is sexy and not timber (a great thing to invest in in the 90s). And with the fee structure (which I have questioned in the past) massively incentivising GPs to raise large funds (and become rich whether or not their LPs become rich), the asymmetry has led to pension funds chucking money away.

Even as I write this I realise there is no easy answer to this general conundrum. One thing I do believe would help would be greater transparency–from VCs about the deals they have done and the returns they have made. And from journalists digging harder at the numbers. And from entrepreneurs being honest about how much capital we need and what we plan to do with it.

And with that it’s good night.

Before you go, sign up to my AWESOME business Daily Briefing service. It’s over here.

The iPad is a beautifully pitched complement the Apple’s suite of products, which we may consider as Desktop, Laptop, Mobile and media centre devices.

In my own use cases, there were clearly situations where the iPad would better perform than one of the other devices, and virtually all of these use cases are in the home. Here are the four use cases where we currently struggle with an appropriate device.

In other words, the iPad will take over tasks we currently do either on the iPhone or on a Macbook Pro. If I count the hours per day spent on the above, I would reckon it is a minimum of one hour and some times as much as three hours per day. More importantly, it is several critical touchpoints during the day.

• Morning: Most appropriate device for checking weather, train times, quick directions. (Currently we struggle through with looking up flight information on an iPhone or Nexus One; or having to power up the HDTV).
• During the day: quick instant on access to calendars and off email.
• Evening: Video device for kids in the kitchen/dining area (we don’t have a TV in the kitchen)
• Late evening: Used to browse to check for viewing times. Used to control media on the Mac Mini. Casual research browsing for washing machines, furniture, clothes.
• Bed time: iBook reader.
• Weekends: Available to kids for simple games, thus freeing up the iPhone. No wait. I’ll play the games on the iPad. They can play them on my iPhone.

Does the iPad’s technical spec accomodate all of this?

Well yes. I don’t need a camera. I certainly don’t need a boatload of connectors. I don’t expect to be connecting it too much, if anything, except possibly a couple of times a week to shift high definition video across. For everything else the 802.11n will be adequate. (And in my use cases I definitely don’t need 3g). I probably don’t need multi-tasking, at least not in the laptop sense of the word. Lying on my sofa, I have my iPad and two phones (a BB and an iPhone). On a given evening I use the phones for email and Twitter, and they are always within reach. I certainly don’t need the iPad to have a phone at this point. (BB, iPhone and the Nexus One).

What I do need is something to help me manage my media better. We are already pushing our video over a range of screen sizes, 1080p down to the iPhone. So I wuld expect to have some help from iTunes (and Handbrake) to help my find and move the appropriate file across. This may involve needing to store 1080p, 720 and 480 files, which in turn will require some smarter media handling and more drive space.

The 64gig will be a limiting factor. I have almost that much in photos; and far more in music. Moore’s Law will resolve.

I also need wifi vendors to start producing more robust home solutions which take into account real world factors. A typical home needs two access points on the same SSID connected by hard wiring (most likely 300 Mbit/s Powerline) rather than WDS (pushing video around when you have WDS extensions gets very slow). We also need access routers that can handle the speed of modern DSL/cable modem connections.

I can imagine buying the Wifi only one immediately they come up for grabs.

Michael Liebreich, the hyper-focussed, high energy founder of New Energy Finance, has scored an impressive deal: being acquired by Bloomberg. Over the past six years, with incredible creativity and discipline, he has build a fantastic business–the number one player–in covering the new energy, cleantech and green energy markets.

Michael was kind enough to let me get involved in New Energy Finance as a small investor. And from the sidelines I was able to watch incredibly disciplined execution, a relentless focus on building a superb team and the best investor communications I have ever seen. And all this with a comparative modicum of external funding (compared to, say, Spinvox) and no VC involvement.

Well done NEF!