Om Follow Up

Om posted a nice item on his blog titled Orb dials-up Sprint and with this we are back in communication. It seems that he wasn't getting my emails for some reason. We have agreed to get together soon to update him on Orb Networks, which I am looking forward to as there are a number of things to talk about....

5 million local telephone customers being marketed to by Sprint for one, not just the 500,000 DSL customers. And our distribution agreement with ADS, also announced today... and some interesting upcoming announcements.

I also agree with Om's observation about place-shifting becoming an important technology for a lot of different kinds of players -- cable companies, CE companies, content companies... but will they all have the right mix of technologies and services? In addition to the market traction that Orb is getting, we have an interesting take on what the media portal of the future will look like... not necessarily a vision that is absolutely unique -- but rare in that it is grounded by what customers actually want, not by entrenched business interests.

DRM and Exotic Inefficiencies

Very interesting reading over on Curt Van Inwegen's blog on DRM and Exotic Inefficiences, a term Curt picked up from Moneyball. Here is a short excerpt from Curt's post

After a long business trip across the country this week ruminating on some of the discussions Orb Networks is having with various partner prospects, my laptop ran out of batteries and frankly I just needed a book to read on the way home. Without thinking about any correlation to Orb, I picked up Moneyball, a fantastic book by Michael Lewis, where I came across the term “exotic inefficiencies.” The essence of the book is how the Oakland A’s, one of the “poorest” teams in baseball manage to win so many games in contrast to the rest of the league, who have sky-high payrolls and, so it is assumed, the best players. But against the prevailing wisdom, the A’s keep winning.

As I got deeper into the book, the similarities to Orb and our own conversations with both technology and content distribution partners was stunning...

More on Curt's blog...

Sprint and Orb

I finally get a chance to shoot back at Om Malik who has some reason to promote Avvenu and wrote about the two of us recently.

In his article, Om states that Avvenu is "a polar opposite" of Orb Networks in that Avvenu is partnering with big companies, and Orb is not. Well, today we announced our partnership with Sprint so that should change the way that Om thinks about us... of course he hasn't responded to my emails and hasn't agreed to talk to us -- though he has met with the Avvenu team... ?? (CORRECTION -- OM Just Answered my email...)