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Terayon sold to Motorola

April 25th, 2007

Motorolo just bought Terayon for $140 million.

This is the year I finally became a serious cell phone user so I’m going to start paying a lot more attention to these stories and what they mean.

Heavy use of a cell phone has made three things clear to me:

1. Mobile is where things are headed. The PC will be for production (word processing, graphics, video), TV sized entertainment (video games and TV), and involved browsing, but a lot of what people use their PCs for will migrate to the handheld.

Clearly, e-mail is headed there. So is what I call simple browsing: searches where you’re looking for something immediately needed – and local – like stores, hotels, gas stations, or places to eat.  As for play, a whole generation of kids have been trained on Game Boys so I can see lot sof entertainment possibilities too.

2. Handhelds wil get more elaborate: bigger screens (for video watching), more mini-keyboards, and headsets will become common.

3. In this environment, consumers will not be very receptive to intrusive advertising. In fact, they’ll be as opposed to it as they are to intrusive telemarketing.

Interestingly, some of the things that Motorola reportedly bought Terayon for included its ability to deliver locally relevent video, permit digital insertion of ads, and graphic overlays.

I’ve actually developed a system that makes these same capabilities availble to web publishers. I’m hoping that after the System Seminar, I’ll have some time to package it for others to use. It’s quite slick, easy to use and makes it a lot easier to make Internet video sell.

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