The other day Tivo announced that it had created software to allow Internet Video on Television. The expected convergence of video, TV and the Internet is now in full force. As I wrote in an earlier post about Apple’s announcement of iTV, everything is converging onto the big flat screen in the living room. Channel surfing between ESPN, CNN, YouTube and iFilm while sitting on your living room couch will soon be an experience for many. So the reality of convergence, something spoken about as being in the future for the last ten years, is …

The stock brokerage business was one of the first industries that was fundamentally disintermediated by the Internet. In an earlier post I both wrote about the history of the stock brokerage business and about William Yeh, the Chairman of Sogo Invest. Yeh was the man who, by launching SogoInvest where active traders could take advantage of $1.00 trades, completed the 30 year history of the deregulation and disintermediation of the stock brokerage business.

In an interview Yeh gave to fellow blogger Grant Wittenborn, he made it clear that he felt the day trader and the average investor …

Disintermediation is a favorite subject here. Regular readers know that I believe that we are in one of those historical eras when the world gets reorganized. As I have defined it in earlier posts, disintermediation always occurs during these significant periods and there is usually a dominant agent of disintermediation that forces the reorganization. In this period of course it is the Internet.

I have also written about the fact that while the effects the Internet has had on such businesses as the travel industry and stock brokerage are obvious, there are business sectors that are just at the …

This week in New York I attended the OMMA Conference, produced by Media Post.  The acronym stands for On-line Media, Marketing & Advertising.  Basically this was a gathering of those who work in the Internet space and focus on delivering marketing messages to people.  The title of the conference was “The Internet:  Back on Speed”, which of course references the fact that we are now in the Internet 2.0 stage of development when broadband and video have started to deliver the promise of the Internet that was first glimpsed in the late 1990s before the bubble burst on …