Ged Carroll

Search results for: “vcs”

  • Facebook Yahoo! patents case

    I had delayed writing about this as I had a busy run-up to Easter and just about everyone of note in the Bay Area seems to have weighed in on the Facebook Yahoo legal case over patents. Fred Wilson (aka A VC) channeled the concern that the start-up community in general over wide-ranging patents being a tax on innovation.

    The new, new thing

    There is a certain amount of prejudice inbuilt against incumbents going on; Silicon Valley doesn’t make big money from existing large businesses but the new, new thing – for example:

    • IBM vs. Apple, VisiCalc, Oracle and countless Boston corridor enterprise technology brands before them
    • Beckman Instruments vs.the traitorous eight who went on to found just about every other semiconductor company from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s: Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Intersil, AMD, National Semiconductor, LSI Logic and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins
    • Microsoft vs. Apple, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, the open source community
    • Google vs. Facebook and just about anybody else looking to make money from online advertising

    Monomyth archetypes

    I don’t necessarily hold this against them, it is the classic tale of David and Goliath that resonates at a deep level in the human psyche. It probably helped us move beyond being slightly smarter than the average ape and turn our use of tools into a decisive advantage with humans becoming the apex predator throughout the world.

    What a lot of these arguments are failing to do is look at the underlying form in the Facebook Yahoo patent case:

    • Yes, the patent system is broken
    • Yes, Yahoo! has multiple business issues which would merit a series of posts in it’s own right
    • Yes, Yahoo! is unlikely to survive at least in its present form. Though for reasons that I have gone into previously  I don’t think that Microsoft is a suitable suitor (just look at what has happened to its continued inability to match Yahoo!’s previous returns on search with Microsoft AdCenter) and more controversially I didn’t think that it was serious about its takeover bid first time around
    • Yes, Yahoo! is likely to be outmaneuvered by Facebook and be on a hiding to nothing

    But for me, the story isn’t about Yahoo! or the inequitable nature of patent laws, but about Facebook and its business practices in relation to data.

    Facebook Yahoo case similar to 1990s Microsoft practices

    In the 1990s file formats: .doc, .xls, .ppt and others were used by Microsoft to leverage a competitive advantage. Competitor applications couldn’t open them; so your information was locked into using Microsoft Office software. This was one of the reasons why the web was so transformational; HTML opened up publishing of documents that had been previously locked into Microsoft Office – electronic versions of scientific papers, price lists etc.

    Data portability is the document format of web 2.0 (or social web). During my time at Yahoo! we introduced the requirement to sign into Flickr using a Yahoo! ID, Stewart Butterfield and the team at Flickr worked hard to ensure that existing Flickr customers who didn’t want to have a Yahoo! ID could move their pictures off the service.

    The idea was that the customer’s data was their property and allowing them to freely move was as American as apple pie, capitalism and the free market. Allowing customer’s data to be portable fitted in with the web being free as in speech ethic that had predominated up until then. Portable customer data kept you honest and encouraged you to innovate as losing a customer was only one export click away.

    In the case of Facebook; the data that really matters is your address book. Whilst Facebook eventually allowed consumers to download their profile information (after it had gained hegemony in the US social network sector), it holds on fast to your address book. Om Malk over at GigaOM wrote a really good post on how Facebook leeched off Yahoo! user’s address book to build its business, but didn’t allow Yahoo! users to transfer data back the other way.

    This had a detrimental effect Yahoo!’s already weakened business. It wasn’t only Yahoo!, Facebook did the same on Plaxo and has been in conflict with Google over the same issue. In the Yahoo! patent case; Yahoo! is in the position of shooter and patsy – but like the dreams of conspiracy theorists looking for a dark hand moving the pieces around the board – Facebook is responsible.

    So consumers and some companies got screwed on their address book; but what the great and good of the start-up community who criticised Yahoo! forget is where Yahoo!, Plaxo and Google have gone before their start-ups could be tomorrow. The problem is the over-reliance on Facebook Connect as a federated ID and as a marketing tool using consumer news feeds in their word-of-mouth marketing campaign strategies.

    Federated identities

    Federated IDs are not a new concept, Microsoft tried to have their Passport technology adopted in a similar way some ten years ago and it was stymied because of early adopter and technology sector mistrust.

    Like Facebook, the businesses adopting Facebook Connect usually rely on some sort of advertising-related business model, either for their revenue, or for garnering customers; yet with Facebook Connect – Facebook holds all the cards on targeting information that means:

    • Your advertising platform will always be worse than Facebook’s because they have a better customer view – as we’ve seen in search this is likely to turn into a zero-sum game
    • For more e-commerce-based businesses, Facebook data could be used by rivals to directly target your customers – because Facebook already has your customer list. By using Facebook Connect you already gave it to them and they could even infer a good estimate of customer engagement were by how often and how long they logged in

    It has the potential to be digital equivalent of the way Standard Oil used its dominant position as a buyer of railroad transportation to screw over rivals. By supporting Facebook in the Yahoo! patents case; I believe that leading players within the start-up community inadvertently darkened their own futures.

    What Microsoft was like back in the day

    It is hard to imagine now, but in the mid-1990s Silicon Valley was genuinely afraid of Microsoft:

    Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft. If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.

    It’s hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if they tried to be the next Netscape, they’d suffer the same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be Microsoft’s last victim?

    That was Y Combinator’s Paul Graham on Microsoft back in the day and how fear of it partly sewed the seeds of failure at Yahoo! Great ideas couldn’t get funded if they where considered to fall anywhere near the purview of Microsoft – and Microsoft wanted everything, at that time the company mission statement was:

    A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software

    Now the vision uses softer language that also takes into account technological change with Steve Ballmer describing it as:

    …enabling people and businesses to realize their full potential

    Microsoft still isn’t a cuddly business by any means. Let me show you: Some six years ago I spent a weekend in San Francisco on the dime of the agency I worked with at the time. The reason why I had a free weekend was that I was originally going out there to pitch an international brief for an enterprise technology company – and the weekend should have been very busy and productive in preparation fo the pitch early the following week.

    The US folks had checked the substantial non-compete list that we had been provided with by Redmond and senior clients had been checked in with and they were ok with it.

    Happy days, I was put on a Thursday flight from Heathrow to San Francisco with British Airways. I deplaned, got through immigration and got a taxi into town. I went to the hotel first; dropped by bags off and washed my face and then got a taxi to our San Francisco office down near the ball park.

    As I walked in the door, I could see of the office general manager getting off the phone. Apparently my trip was a waste of time; someone at head office had a call with someone at Microsoft who asked us to withdraw at the last minute as the company operated in a space that Microsoft would like to enter in the next five years.

    I ended up spending the Martin Luther King day weekend at the Hotel Monaco close to Union Square and spent much of the Saturday exploring the Asian Art Museum, the then Sony Metreon centre and shopping off Haight.

    The point I am trying to make is that fear is relative, Microsoft is a changed but still fiercely ambitious and competitive business.

    Facebook power

    Facebook is much more than Microsoft. If we look at address books as an example; Facebook bought and closed down Malaysian start-up Octazen to close the door on others using their technology to import contact lists in February 2010.

    Facebook is keenly competitive in the way that Microsoft has been, but it has learned from Microsoft’s mistakes; it has lawyered and lobbied-up much earlier in its development, so with Facebook there will be no humiliating Judge Jackson trial which gifted the start-up culture of Silicon Valley a second chance.

    I believe that in the medium-to-long-term Facebook will have a neutron bomb effect on the Bay Area start-up finance community and at the moment they only have themselves to blame.

    Although it may seem counter-intuitive to the start-up community at the moment, fueling Yahoo!’s patent duel with Facebook may make more sense in the long run.

    More information

    Yahoo! Crosses The Line – A VC
    Will Yahoo Torch its Search Deal With Microsoft, Outsource Search to Google? – Search Engine Watch (#SEW)
    Is the internet too perfect a market? – renaissance chambara
    A quick primer re @blakei @yahoo #delicious – renaissance chambara
    Yahoo-Facebook patent fight: more than meets the eye | GigaOM
    Google Renews Battle Over Facebook Contacts, Removes Phone Directory Sync On Nexus S – TechCrunch
    Why Scoble Got the Boot from Facebook: Plaxo’s New Feature – Mashable
    What happened to Yahoo – Paul Graham
    Steve Ballmer: Microsoft Venture Capitalist Summit 2008 – Microsoft News Center
    Facebook Acquires Contact Importing Startup Octazen – GigaOM

  • James Earl Jones + more news

    James Earl Jones

    James Earl Jones has one of the most distinctive voices in the entertainment industry as you can hear in this Sesame Street clip. You might recognise from his appearance in Conan the Barbarian film, but James Earl Jones has a surprising variety in his career across film, television and stage performance. James Earl Jones has done voiceover work for everything from Disney’s The Lion King to CNN station idents.

    Consumer behaviour

    FRONTLINE: young & restless in china | PBS – Interesting US TV documentary on the changing face of China throough the eyes of young Chinese people that PBS followed.

    apophenia: teens, dating, friendship, and school dances – interesting dissection of current thinking about social network augmented relationships for teens – common sense required

    Design

    Hollow Spy Coins – talk about niche businesses, this is definitely on the long tail. You have to admire their dedication to engineering this.

    Economics

    Boomtown of Dubai feels effects of global crisis – International Herald Tribune – Until recently, credit in Dubai was growing by 49 percent a year, according to the Emirates’ Central Bank — a rate almost double that of bank deposits’ growth. That unnerved some bankers here, who felt it could lead to a collapse. “In the U.S., the challenge is about keeping the banks going,” said Marios Maratheftis, chief economist for Standard Chartered Bank. “Here, the economy has been overheated, a correction is needed, and it’s about making sure the slowdown happens in a smooth, orderly manner.”

    Klein Verzet: Freaking doomed – the premise is that the demand for shipping of raw materials like coal, bauxite and iron ore have ground to a stand still and soon even the factories of China will be a lot quieter – so the economic outlook is nothing short of ammegeddon

    IT’S OVER! POP GOES THE BUBBLE. – web start-up bubble has burst as financial crisis hits the VCs

    FMCG

    P&G to launch washing gel that cleans at 15 degrees – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic – “According to P&G, Ariel’s Cool Clean campaign encouraged more than five times as many customers than normal to switch to low-energy washing programmes, with Ariel customers twice as likely as the average consumer to wash at a lower 30 degrees temperature (28% of Ariel customers in 2007 versus 13% of those using other brands). P&G has a partnership with the Energy Saving Trust, which encourages people to use energy efficiently and reduce their carbon footprints.”

    Hong Kong

    Apple Sells Unlocked 3G iPhone On Its Hong Kong Website – OMG 188 USD per month is an obscene amount for Hutchison to charge for its monthly tariff for the iPhone

    Scary Shirts – WSJ.com – Hong Kong’s answer to H&M, Giordano satirised the Wall Street bloodletting in Hallowe’en-themed t-shirts

    How to

    How to Persuade People With Subconscious Techniques – wikiHow

    Better Lenses for Less Money: How To Use Vintage Lenses with Your DSLR

    Phil Windley’s Technometria | Making Screencasts in OS X

    PrintWhatYouLike.com {beta}: Save money and the environment printing only what you like.

    Ideas

    Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity by Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero, Fang Wu of HP Labs – Web content creators do it for attention, its been proven. Or as common sense has told us for a while the currency of kudos

    Rands In Repose: The Culture Chart

    Innovation

    I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Cool Threads | PBS – multi-threaded programming increases software complexity and performance

    I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS – cloud computing versus DBMS, interesting reading, I need to go back and look at it a few more times to understand it fully. But initial take is that parallel computing as well as parallel processing changes how computing works and databases have to be adapted (like Oracle’s Grid database concept from the tail end of the dot com era and cloud computing. It’s the failings of Moore’s law rather than progress that is driving this change

    Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman – while I have sympathy for some of what Mr Stallman says, his argument misses the point about the benefits of social software.  Open formats and APIs allow you to move from one service to another as needs must.

    Ireland

    logainm.ie – Placenames Database of Ireland

    Japan

    A leftover city of day laborers in Japan faces grim future – International Herald Tribune – Japan’s version of McAlpine’s Fusiliers

    Digital World Tokyo | Massive online agony forum published in book form

    Projector inc. – Tokyo’s hottest digital agency

    Korea

    South Korea pushes to dissolve ‘the old way’ of business culture – International Herald Tribune

    For all kinds of good, clean fun, Koreans turn to bathhouses – International Herald Tribune

    Media

    Online Video: Why YouTube’s desperate revenue hunt is on the money

    Online

    Chinese surfers see red over Microsoft black-outs – Reuters

    Coming in 2009: Yourname@somewhere.chinese characters – Internet standards move away from the roman language monopoly

    Security

    Thunder Tables Kill Microsoft 40-bit Encryption – password protected files may not be secure due to the advances of Moore’s Law and Russian ingenuity

    Software

    I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Collateral Damage | PBS – interesting take on the mobile market, not one that I necessarily agree with, but interesting none the less. Cringely expect that Microsoft Windows Mobile software will fail and has some interesting ideas around the why. I think Microsoft has everything to play for with enterprise users and can leverage items like security authentication and Outlook email access – they might not be dominant but they could still be in with a shout

    Drupal goes pro – InfoWorld

    Technology

    I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Ctrl-Alt-Del | PBS – speculation on Apple’s hardware plans

    Dork talk: Stephen Fry explains the principles of cloud computing | Technology | The Guardian

    Knowingly Undersold Article – Eurogamer – nice analysis of the Nintendo Wii’s place in the gaming market

    Beginning of end of megapixel marathon – Pixel count gives phones and cameras the ‘Dixons Factor’ – being able to be sold easily by some pimple-faced oik; but doesn’t mean you will have better quality pictures. I have a digital SLR which takes pictures at 5.1 megapixels and a phone camera that will do the same – no prize for which one takes the better pictures.

    Telecoms

    BT’s 21 Century Network Is So…Last Century – GigaOM – BT’s next-generation network provides poor shareholder value.

    Web of no web

    Samplify Systems — a rare semiconductor startup » VentureBeat

    Second Life now offering Business Teleconferencing – I am surprised that this didn’t happen sooner, I’ve thought that this was the killer application for metaverses for a long time.

  • Microsoft alternatives + more news

    Microsoft alternatives

    EU stumbles on buying Microsoft alternatives – The European Commission, a thorn in Microsoft’s (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) side for its antitrust campaigns against the software giant, is falling short in its own internal attempt to promote Microsoft alternatives – this isn’t surprising. The open source community have failed with desktop Linux and Office type programmes. Google has managed to do better with web services based alternatives to Office in certain use cases. Munich city government have vacillated for almost a decade on using open source as Microsoft alternatives. Apple provides an OS, but has no Microsoft alternatives for Excel, OneNote or Visual Basic.

    China

    In changing face of Beijing, a look at the new China – International Herald Tribune

    Consumer behaviour

    Teen Lab at Alcatel-Lucent: Teens Say Music on Mobiles is Still a Challenge: Mobile Accessories Results Part One

    Culture

    Coco Wang – cool comic strips based around the individual stories of the Sichuan earthquake

    Design

    Unto This Last – interesting furniture

    Solution, or Mess? A Milk Jug for a Green Earth – NYTimes.com – A squarer PET milk bottle with ridged sides allows thems to be stacked without a crate and packed 50 per cent more densely. They can be shipped on a pallet bound with cardboard and shrink wrap stacked several units high. Fewer delivery runs are required

    Panasonic swivelling HDMI cables – Really nice, clever design

    Economics

    Eastern Europe: The Worst is Yet to Come – Seeking Alpha

    How to

    Three Truths to Help You Create a Life of Gratitude | Zen Habits

    How to Reduce Camera Shake – 6 Techniques

    Scanr – copy and fax with your camera phone or digital camera – handy for pulling in business cards or the contents of a whiteboard

    Apple lends scientists a hand with productivity tutorials

    Great looking presentations made easy with PowerPoint 2008

    Ideas

    apophenia: markers of status: different, and yet the same – danah boyd responds to Clay Shirky’s article

    Bored With Web 2.0? Demand Change – ReadWriteWeb

    Slate Magazine – Long Tails and Big Heads – Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory picks up some critics

    Innovation

    KVOA News 4, Tucson, Arizona – Can the U.S. Bring Jobs Back from China? – its all about the eco-system

    The Environmental Impact of Corn-Based Plastics: Scientific American

    Pulling the Plug: Summer of ’08 Sparks Creative Conservation – WSJ.com – Americans get cool on the cheap

    Shrinking chip could keep us on track with Moore’s law – tech – 10 July 2008 – New Scientist Tech

    Online

    Google easily extending dominance to mobile search market

    Flickr Co-founders Join Mass Exodus From Yahoo – earn outs have kicked in. However there is still a wealth of talent over in Sunnyvale

    Yahoo Boardroom Brawl? | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD – on and on

    Yahoo: We’re Not Shutting Down Yet! (YHOO) – but the fact that it had to said isn’t encouraging

    Berners-Lee lays in to traditional search

    LinkedIn and The Strange Case of The Disappearing Market – ReadWriteWeb

    Google sees an online world of over a trillion images, wants to organize them all » VentureBeat

    Guardian Media Group Buys paidContent for $30 Million | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD – Kara got the scoop on the deal

    Yahoo, Sony extend ad-funded games offerings – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic

    Retailing

    Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. – Wal-Mart Logo Timeline – I prefer the Frontier Font brand.

    China: Web use accelerates, e-business still lagging » VentureBeat

    Security

    Schneier on Security: Eavesdropping on Encrypted Compressed Voice

    Digital Evangelist: Fierce 15 for 2008 – mobile banking is the way forward

    Citibank ATM thieves broke PIN security – The INQUIRER

    Software

    China in anti-monopoly investigation of Microsoft | Channel Register – pricing differences

    Ballmer: Google Won – But It’s Still All About Search, Baby | paidContent.org – I am inclined to agree with him in terms of search being a wider metaphor of interface for information on and off a device

    Intel won’t touch Vista – The INQUIRER

    ffmpegX a video transcoder for Mac OSX – very handy for posting on video sites

    Seven things you need to know about Nokia-Symbian deal

    Technology

    The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn’t Just More — More Is Different

    17 Mistakes Start-Ups Make

    VCs see ‘crisis’ in lagging IPOs – SiliconValley.com

    Tech Digest: Olympus LS-10 – slip a recording studio into your back pocket

    Telecoms

    Tomato Firmware | polarcloud.com – replacement firmware for Broadcom based routers

    Stuff We Like: The Netgear Open Source Router

    Web of no web

    Infoporn: Tap Into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer

    Wireless

    24% of Apple iPhone users upgraded from a Motorola RAZR

    Survey contradicts earlier claim of no Japanese iPhone love

  • Who is Gary Winnick (and why I am writing about him?)

    You may not know Gary Winnick, but at one time the fund manager who looked after your pension probably knew his name.

    For over two decades, Gary Winnick worked at the sharp practice end of capitalism. In the 1980s he worked with Michael Milken Drexel Burnham Lambert (Drexel) selling junk bonds. These were used to finance some of the most savage slash-and-burn management takeovers in modern history.

    Here’s a simplest version of it

    The ability of a company to get credit to grow depends on a number of factors including market sentiment towards the company, its industry sector and its credit rating. Junk status when a company is viewed to have fallen below investment grade material by a credit ratings agency such as Standard & Poor or Moodys.

    A bond is piece of paper that can be bought and sold like a company share, however it is really an IOU, a company sold the bonds to raise money and promised to pay a set amount of interest on that money and repay it at a set time in the future. They are used by companies and governments to borrow money (you may have heard of them mentioned as gilts or t-bonds, in the UK premium bonds are a government loan but with the interest divided out via a lottery selected by a computer called ERNIE), government bonds are commonly used in a portfolio as a low risk strategy or to hedge against interest rate declines.

    From a practical point of view junk status means that credit becomes more expensive, the company is considered to be a higher risk loan. Consequently, companies seeking credit and having junk status generally had a low share price and relied more on the bond markets to provide their capital requirements. Investors generally seek a higher return for higher risks so bonds from junk status companies (junk bonds) are also known by the more benign name of high-yield debt.

    Anyway, somewhere along the line some bright spark (possibly Milken himself) realised that just because a company had junk status, it did not mean that it would disappear overnight. Many large household names and solid industrial performers had junk status, because they were steady but unspectacular performers. This meant that there were bargains to be had. Investments providing high returns because of an unfair high risk status. Junk bonds became the new HOTNESS.

    The outcomes

    – There was blood in the water and Milken was eventually prosecuted for massive corporate fraud, after Ivan Boesky ratted him out rather than take the full rap on a number of insider trading charges

    – Many companies were gutted by modern-day robber barons who borrowed money to buy companies, and then paid back the debt through the placement of junk bonds and asset stripped the company. Books that outline this include Barbarians At The Gates

    – Savings and Loans scandal – S&L are kind of equivalent to mutual building societies in the UK and Ireland. During the 1980’s, they were deregulated and their money poured into the stock market. This deregulation fuelled a feeding frenzy causing many S&L collapses due to fraud and speculation. Since there were regulations still on what S&l’s could invest in, merchant banks put together complex financial instruments (derivatives – so called because they are derived from something else, like orange juice and pork belly futures in the film Trading Places) that would allow them to get into the ‘high-yield debt’. Initially the idea of these derivatives was to bind just enough government investments like T-bonds (treasury bonds) into the deal so that credit ratings agencies like Standard &Poor would not rate the derivative as a junk status investment. These instruments (known as derivatives) were very arcane and complex making it virtually impossible to understand their true investment value or how they would be impacted by changes in the market. Think of the childrens story The Emperors New Clothes. If you would like to know more read Liars Poker by ex-derivatives trader Michael Lewis. The S&L mess was bailed out by the Fed.

    Global Crossing

    Gary Winnick parted company with Michael Milken before Drexel flamed out and set up an unspectacular investment company called Pacific Capital. In the mid 1990s, Winnick saw the telecoms gold rush and founded Global Crossing.

    The telecoms goldrush came about due to a number of factors:

    – Deregulation allowing competition in the telecommunications sector

    – The rise of the Internet created an increased demand for new networks

    – Sustained economic growth in the developed world and a collapse in some emerging markets and Japan meant that there was too much money chasing too little investment opportunities. Gary Winnick raised and destroyed some 20 billion USD. Much of which would have come from pension fund managers in the US and Europe, or was invested into similar companies like Worldcom or RSL Communications (RSL COM).

    – Companies pay to get their credit evaluation from the likes of Standard & Poor and Moody

    – Grow and the profits will come became a mantra for bankers, VCs, analysts and business leaders due to cheap capital and as a way of keeping the castle in the sky; making it exceptionally easy to sell in a new business strategy

    The telecoms market came apart because:

    – Too much telecoms capacity was supplied as companies rushed in to profit from the gold rush. Global Crossing and its peers built out network capacity first and thought about getting customers later

    – Technology, competition and excess supply drove down prices to make the industry less profitable

    – Many of the companies had the same disease of corporate corruption and creative accountancy that occurred in the 1980s in S&L and junk bonds; inflating the value of deals, booking sales before the money was in (when is a sale a sale is a question that has been of interest to accountants for years) or fabricating them as inter-carrier deals

    – Accounting techniques were shockingly useless allowing Winnick and Co to distort reality

    – Equity analyst hyped stocks that they privately admitted were dogs

    – High yield debt was being used to finance a low-yield industry

    – Much of the growth was promoted through equipment-vendor financing, which allowed the likes of Lucent, Nortel and Cisco to bill higher than normal growth-figures and artificially inflate share prices. A friend of mine who was a telecoms analyst at a brokerage in the city of London at the time of the bust was afraid that Cisco would get severely damaged because of vendor financing. He outlined an allegation that new IP-based carriers were being set up by people close to the Cisco channel, financed by equipment for equity as part of a glorified Ponzi scheme to inflate the value of Cisco

    In Global Crossing, Winnick managed to extract his own position two weeks before the firms lawyers stopped internal share trading due to the companies terminal financial decline. Winnick is back in court this week and you can read all about it here. Many see Gary Winnick as a criminal, he sees himself as a business visionary. More on telecoms here and finance here.

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