32 Years Down the Toilet: Neokast 2.0

I received a large response from my most recent column on the Neokast mystery.  The most interesting post was this one:

Insider Joe says:
March 8, 2009 at 8:23 pm  (Edit)

Um, the real answer to from someone who knows is much simpler and less intriguing:

a) NK’s management team had no business experience in either the streaming space or in running tech startups

b) Said Mr. Johnson was arrogant and unwilling to accept the above point

c) He was unable to come up with a business model that made money

d) He did not want to raise venture capital until it was too late to do so

Btw, there was never any serious offer from Microsoft or anyone […]

By |March 9th, 2009|Uncategorized|61 Comments
Read More

The Neokast Mystery

 

technologyevangelist-neokast179What happened to Neokast?  It’s a mystery to me.  But I suspect the answer will surprise us all soon enough.

Neokast, as readers of my old PBS column will recall, was a peer-to-peer live video streaming application developed by graduate students from Northwestern University near Chicago.  That’s me talking about it there on the left, back in 2007.

I loved the company instantly. It was out of the Silicon Valley limelight, away from the technical mainstream for such software (Neokast was a .NET application and therefore pretty much Windows-only), but most important of all, it seemed to actually work.  The potential was extremely compelling.  Here’s how I described it back then:

“…the more people who watch your Neokast […]

By |March 8th, 2009|Uncategorized|132 Comments
Read More