2011: The year that was

Before we kick in a new year of post, I want to take a quick look back at things I cov­ered on 2011 as I still believe many of those rep­re­sent impor­tant trends and inform some of my thinking.

I kicked off the year with the usual pre­dic­tion list (and closed it out with a review) and was sur­prised by how many of the themes I high­lighted ended up mak­ing their way through other entries.

I had set a goal for myself to do a post a week and decide to cre­ate a frame­work that allowed me to do so effi­ciently. My process is to cap­ture sim­ple ideas in a back­log and then dig through them once a week, some­times tying the story to a recent devel­op­ment. Every Fri­day night or Sat­ur­day, I then crank out a post that cov­ers that top in as broad a way as I could.

I write mostly for myself, as a way to get a bet­ter sense of my own think­ing on a topic and then get feed­back on how wrong (or occa­sion­ally, right) I am. This allows me to refine the strat­egy behind Keep­skor and get a bet­ter sense of where our indus­try is heading.

While I never set a nar­ra­tive for what is being cov­ered on TNL.net, one seems to emerge when I look at the work I pro­duced over the last year.

An emerg­ing New York

I kicked off the year by mak­ing a bold pre­dic­tion about a re-emerging and re-invigorated New York tech­nol­ogy scene.  A year later, I feel ever more strongly about the things I high­lighted in that series of posts: New York has emerged as a major player and I sus­pect that, within a gen­er­a­tion or two, New York has a chance to dis­place the val­ley as the cen­ter of the US tech indus­try (note that the longer view is some­thing I artic­u­lated later in the year but has been a dom­i­nant theme on this site for a decade).

The series cre­ated quite a stir when it came out and was one of the most traf­ficked group of entries this year (in fact, it still gets a decent amount of traf­fic a year later.)

If you’re on the East coast, you no longer have to relo­cate south of San Fran­cisco to make it. New York pro­vides an envi­ron­ment that rivals San Fran­cisco and has a few extra advan­tages I had not cov­ered in that series. For exam­ple, being halfway between Lon­don and the Val­ley, New York is the per­fect place to man­age a busi­ness that is not solely aimed at the US.

Myth-busting in startup land

This feel­ing from the ground, as I started re-entering the startup world, got me in the direc­tion of think­ing about the broader trends relat­ing to star­tups. I a series about startup myths, I debunked the ideas that star­tups are risky, expen­sive, idea-based, smooth rides where every­one makes money.

My rea­son for doing this series of post was to archive thoughts on this that I could send to peo­ple when they brought up those myths (and as some­one who spend too much time on Wall St., I’ve been exposed to quite a few of those people.)

Finan­cial Markets

Using some of the skills I did pick up on Wall St., I’ve been try­ing to make sense of the finan­cial mar­kets and get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the over­all eco­nomic pic­ture. This first led me to ana­lyze whether inter­net val­u­a­tions were get­ting over-inflated (they weren’t.)

As inter­net com­pa­nies started test­ing the IPO waters again, I checked to see if LinkedIn was over­val­ued and high­lighted some con­cerns around the GroupOn offer­ing and later in the year, I started think­ing writ­ing more about dig­i­tal cur­rency.

The Inter­net War

The con­cept of dig­i­tal cur­rency is but one of the hot flash­point between the cur­rent world and the inter­net one. Over the past year, we’ve seen increased activ­ity from hacker groups and the rise of the inter­net as a polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. Call­ing for an end to apa­thy on the part of our indus­try when it comes to pol­icy mak­ing, I tried to make the case for the cre­ation of a new set of def­i­n­i­tions and pro­to­cols to con­trol the inter­net of the future.

This is in reac­tion to an increas­ing pri­va­ti­za­tion of large parts of the web, balka­niz­ing the open web,  as com­pa­nies try to mon­e­tize their user base to return value to their investors or counter sus­pected threats by new entrants. Along the way, those com­pa­nies are redefin­ing iden­tity own­er­ship through sur­pris­ing terms of ser­vice agree­ments.

A resur­gent Microsoft

Mean­while, another story that has made its way through my nar­ra­tive has been a mas­sive come­back: Over the last few years, Microsoft has become a sym­bol of tech­nol­ogy decline. But 2011 has shown us a resur­gent com­pany, first in its agree­ment with Nokia, which will bear fruits in 2012; then with the bets its plac­ing on the web as a core com­po­nent of the next ver­sion of Win­dows; and then through the suc­cess of its rev­o­lu­tion­ary Kinect device.

Microsoft’s bet on the web as the core of Win­dows is a smart one. HTML5 is enjoy­ing wider sup­port and new tech­nolo­gies like WebGL are bring­ing the web to new lev­els, lev­els that could be match­ing native apps soon. I will prob­a­bly write more about these trends in 2012.

Inter­net and TV Colliding

Another item I have cov­ered exten­sively in 2011 is the merg­ing of tele­vi­sion and the inter­net. Last year, I looked at where 2010 box office win­ners were stream­ing, how avail­able pop­u­lar TV shows were, and whether there was a delay in avail­abil­ity.I also looked into why live TV streams were not avail­able online, explain­ing how some of the miss­ing pieces of the puz­zle could fit together. This pro­vided read­ers with a stronger under­stand­ing of where the mar­ket stood. At the time, the results showed that avail­abil­ity was get­ting bet­ter but still had a long way to go.

I will start revis­it­ing a lot of this infor­ma­tion next week to gauge how much progress has been made in mak­ing movies and TV shows avail­able on the internet.

My inter­est in this as a trend is that it pro­vides us with a bet­ter view into whether inter­net TV is ready for prime­time as a new inter­net chan­nel (Net­flix get­ting into the con­tent pro­duc­tion busi­ness was a major event in that direc­tion, open­ing the door for other inter­net com­pa­nies to offer some­thing on that third screen… and for a few play­ers to become new gate­keep­ers if we are not careful.)

I sus­pect this col­li­sion is part of the rea­son we have seen the enter­tain­ment indus­try rally behind SOPA, as it has seen first the music and now the book indus­try get­ting impacted in rad­i­cal ways as media increas­ingly become mobile and can be con­sumed on phones and tablets.

Other trends

How­ever, I was sur­prised that I had not spent more time cov­er­ing some other trends I’m see­ing emerging.

My archives did not include any men­tions of bit­coin, though I think that vir­tual cur­ren­cies are one of the hot top­ics cur­rently sit­ting below the sur­face. While I am not con­vinced that bit­coin is the one that will win in the future, I do believe that we will see increas­ing traf­fic in that arena soon.

I also strongly believe that a new man­u­fac­tur­ing age is upon us. The rev­o­lu­tion behind 3D print­ing, 3D scan­ning and more cus­tomized and micro-produced mate­ri­als is some­thing that we will see on the edge this year and prob­a­bly in the main­stream by end of year or early next year. This will have a sub­stan­tial impact on our econ­omy in the long run and I will keep an eye on it.

Con­clu­sion

While I have delib­er­ately cho­sen not to focus my writ­ing on a nar­row area, it appears there are broad top­ics that I return to on a reg­u­lar basis. The inter­sec­tion of media, tech­nol­ogy, busi­ness and pol­i­tics are part of the broad trends I fol­low around here and gen­er­ally form the core of what I write about. My friend Anil defines his own writ­ing as being about cul­ture and I believe that broadly, he and I write about some of the same things.

Over the next year, I will revisit a lot of the work I did in 2011 as I wanted to estab­lish a few foun­da­tional posts from a trend­ing stand­point. But as we become more pub­lic about Keep­skor, I will also write about some of the things that led to its cre­ation and some of the think­ing behind it. As some­one who spent a lot of time deal­ing a dual life as blog­ger and Wall Streeter, I haven’t really said much about what I’m work­ing on but I’m sure that read­ers will be inter­ested as it taps into some of the trends high­lighted above and a few that I haven’t talked about yet.

2012 is going to be a very excit­ing year and I will try to have a body of work at the end of it that matches what I’ve accom­plished in 2011.