Curious Office
A Seattle-based seed stage investment and technology development organization.

• Home
• Companies
• Contact Us
• Pressplane
• Who we are
• RSS

Welcome

Early stage investments in creative and well executed ventures.

• Recently Written

  • What photos represent your company color palette?
  • Jon Shirley’s Ferrari garage
  • On crashing markets, common sense and obvious things.
  • Charity Code Jam
  • Just another Wednesday in the office
  • Welcome to the office of the ad network
  • View Photoshop files in Safari? Yep.
  • Batch resizing images with Photoshop CS3
  • A new company is company to town. Parlate italiano?
  • Pressplane closes $1.7 million Series A financing!

• Categories

  • Apple
  • Design
  • inspiration
  • media
  • Search
  • seo
  • software
  • start-ups
  • technology
  • Uncategorized
  • vc
  • world

• Archives

  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • February 2006

• Blogroll

  • Adaptive Path
  • Alarm Clock Euro
  • Alarm:clock
  • Beyond VC
  • Bob Parsons
  • Brad Feld
  • Ideas on Ideas
  • IPTV Industry
  • John Cook Blog
  • Jonathan Boutelle
  • Keith Robinson
  • Light Reading
  • Marc Andreessen - Marc Andreessen
  • Monster Ventures Blog
  • Paid Content
  • Silicon Beat
  • TechCrunch
  • Venture Beat

• Admin

  • Log in
  • WordPress
  • XHTML

What of Digeo?

It’s been some time since anyone talked about Digeo - a company that Paul Allen has been financing for a long while now. They actually released a pretty interesting product for the cable market which had one of the most innovative electronic program guides (EPG) that industry had yet seen. Even by today’s standards, their EPG is a more compelling product than the software running in most cable subscribers homes including my own. Yet, the company has had a great deal of management turnover over the years and hasn’t been able to make significant inroads into IP television. Where have they gone wrong? What happened?

When Digeo started out, they correctly determined that a) set top box middleware can be more immersive and b) more powerful set top hardware and chipsets would become economically feasible. When that happened, they knew they could develop a range of addicting applications such as photosharing, jukebox and in-home networking. The problem, quite simply, has been that:

1) The company overestimated their ability to fracture the cable monopolies in a more significant way
2) They overestimated their ability to transition their technology into the IPTV marketplace
3) They didn’t have enough team members that were deeply entrenched in these newer markets

Cable systems are based on radio frequency distribution. These days, its demonstrated that its possible to convert an analog cable signal to digital and transmit it in a standard 6-MHz television channel. Using MPEG compression, CATV systems installed today can transmit up to 10 channels of video in the 6-MHz bandwidth of a single analog channel. Yet, digital cable isn’t the same thing as IPTV. Digeo had a significant opportunity to become the dominant player in the IPTV market because they were a going concern before the first IPTV deployments went commercial. However, Digeo did not begin to develop their knowledge of the IP television market in any deep way until it was too late. As recently as 2004, there was only 3 or 4 people with deep knowledge of IP technology inside the company and zero people that fully understood the landscape. Sr. tech executives began to dabble with the notion of porting their software to popular IP television set top boxes, such as Amino, but they didn’t fully appreciate the full scope and length of the development and certification process. Deep knowledge of the up and coming players simply wasn’t there at the time. Digeo had their own hardware solution and wasn’t viewed as a go-to resource for knowledge about advanced video codec support vis-a-vis other chip vendors who had a prominant place in the market.

Developing an IPTV software solution is a complex task of integrating multiple video and networking technologies that can take years to fully integrate. Unlike the cable market, their were (are) dozens of new vendors in each category to include conditional access, VOD servers, set-tops and more. Prioritizing development resources incorrectly results in non-marketable solutions by the time development is complete. More importantly, overestimating actual IPTV deployments was an easy thing to do. In actual fact, the exercise involves multi-disciplinary concurrent engineering across network, IS, operations and marketing.
As few carriers had any video experience at all, they tended to gravitate towards those vendors that had an early and deep knowledge of actual IPTV customer service metrics, actual field data, installation intervals, churn, repair volumes, contact volumes etc.

Smaller entrants into the IPTV software marketplace began to build trusted relationships in the Tier 3 (IOC) market and larger Tier 2 and Tier 3 entrants found themselves choosing between Alcatel, Siemens and Microsoft. Digeo found themselves making late phone calls to both partners and customers. Other technology vendors that are necessary components in modern IP-based video solutions, such as conditional access or STB vendors had a hard time justifying any engineering resources to do the necessary integrations until Digeo could demonstrate that it had serious customer interest. To compound matters, the market got hot right as management shifts began to take place. New management in various departments was no doubt necessary but it takes time for new, talented people to take stock of the company and develop new strategic visions.

That brings us up to today. Digeo has new management at nearly every department and is working on a range of potentially interesting new directions. Whether or not Digeo can again be viewed as a hot new innovator in the video sector is yet to be determined. Through sheer will and fortitude, companies like Divx were able to stay relevant through a difficult period of consolidation. It’s possible Digeo will find significant new opportunities that are very close to the core competancies they have always had but it won’t be easy.

comments

• Pressplane

  Pressplane is our latest internally developed concept. We raised our $1.7 million seed round on September 22 and are backed by Second Avenue Partners and a variety of tremendous angel investors. We aren't saying too much right now because we still have a lot of work to do but we thank Techcrunch, VentureBeat, Seattle Times and others for mentioning our latest effort!

• CafePress

  Cafepress acquired Imagekind in July 2008. CafePress.com is an online marketplace that offers sellers complete e-commerce services to independently create and sell a wide variety of products, and offers buyers unique merchandise across virtually every topic.

• Imagekind

  Curious Office started Imagekind in 2006 and it is the world's fastest-growing art site offering over 750,000 high-quality fine art images for sale. Imagekind gives consumers limitless options to purchase museum-quality framed and poster art from over 50,000 domestic and international emerging and established artists.

• Shelfari

  Amazon.com acquired Shelfari in September 2008. Based in Seattle, Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers

• Fanzter

  Fanzter was founded in 2007 by veterans of leading media, technology, and consumer products companies and is headquartered in Collinsville, Connecticut. Their first product, Coolspotters.com, launched in May 2008.

• Wishpot

  Wishpot is a free social shopping service that makes it easy to save and share interesting things you find in stores and online. Items are easily collected online or from stores and organized using simple online lists. Lists and items can be kept private or shared with others. You can collect and discover products you like, recommend your favorite stuff, share and explore gift suggestions or ask for opinions and advice.

• FeedDigest

  FeedDigest is a parser, regenerator, and syndicator for, and of, RSS and Atom feeds originally built by Peter Cooper. In August 2007, Feed Digest was sold to its new owners, Informer Technologies, Inc., and in 2008 rebranded to Feed Informer.