Last week was hectic! Brad Feld hosted two “Beers with Brad”, one in Albuquerque and one in Santa Fe; participated the Open Coffee meeting in Los Alamos; had a peak at the first supercomputer to attain a petaflop/second; and finally he was a panelist at the NNM CONNECT’s Springboard Program.

He began his NM trip by driving straight from Boulder to Albuquerque. At Blackbird Buvette (make sure to check out Geeks Who Drink) he chatted with us almost for three hours. There were about 20-25 of us. The size of the group was perfect for a lively discussion and Brad engaged everyone, not surprisingly I forgot to take a picture.  Next morning, Brad met the Los Alamos crowd, and in the evening he hosted his second “Beers with Brad” in Santa Fe. There were over 50 people at the Santa Fe Complex, it was a blast. This time I remembered to take a picture (my apologies for the poor quality image).

In Santa Fe, Brad had a long Q&A session. Most of the questions were about creating a vibrant tech community. Brad talked about his Boulder experience and how they got where they are today. I was very happy with those questions because it proved, at least to me, that we are serious about creating a unique technology culture in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. At the beginning of the event, Brad mentioned that he was going to share his thoughts about his NM experience, but got sidetracked by questions and ran out of time; maybe he saved his observations for his blog. I am hoping that he will stop by more often and, in addition to art, he will be on the lookout for cool technologies and companies.

For those of you, who don’t know him, he has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur for over 20 years. He is the author of highly respected and popular blog, Feld Thoughts, which took the fourth place in Top Ten VC Blogs list. Please visit his blog and read his full bio here.

Brad is not your traditional VC. He is very approachable, he has been an entrepreneur (an instant hit amongst entrepreneurs), and he is taking on really important issues for the entrepreneurial community, such as The Startup Visa Act and standardizing Seed Financing Documents.

Let me try to explain why I am really excited about Brad’s visit to New Mexico. Visits by renowned entrepreneurs and investors are vital for regions those are trying to create a sustainable startup ecosystems. Networking events that they attend motivate and connect entrepreneurs, investors, state officials, service providers, academicians, and researchers. New Mexico has been testing many regional economic development initiatives, and as expected it is taking time to figure things out and carve a niche. Silicon Valley was not created in a year. San Diego did not become the biotech and wireless cluster with some magic legislation. When I first came to New Mexico from San Diego in 2001, there was not much happening. Few local VC firms, less than a handful of serial entrepreneurs, no professional service infrastructure for high growth startups, and the list goes on.

Today, we have plenty of Venture Capital firms in the state, an active angel investor group along with tax benefits for angel investors, exciting startups, experienced executives, two increasingly active federally funded research and development centers, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, and the list goes on.

Brad’s visit will give us a chance to get together, talk about cool things we are doing here in New Mexico, and get some reality check on our projects. Please try to show up to at least one of these events, here are the logistics:

March 31^st, “Beers with Brad”, Albuquerque

April 1^st, Open Coffee, Los Alamos (AM)

April 1^st, “Beers with Brad”, Santa Fe (PM)

I believe many of you will agree with me that networking events provide tremendous value for startups. I am a huge believer in face-to-face interaction when possible.  Local networking venues create opportunities to form partnerships, get to know future employees/employers (who knows right?), to test concepts, to better understand current technology trends, you name it.

However, social gatherings are especially important in technology regions, which are just mapping out their human capital and local resources, such as the Santa Fe/Albuquerque area.

I attended the BarCamp Albuquerque 4 this weekend. You can search for “#abqbarcamp” on Twitter to learn what went on. It was a small group in an intimate setting.  I enjoyed every minute of it and learned a lot. There were exciting presentations about HTML 5, Collecta real-time search engine, web design fundamentals, Google Analytics, ArtSpark, Google App Engine, and more.

I am 100% sure that BarCamp Albuquerque will get bigger as more people will talk about it. Reid and Chris did a great job of organizing and handling the details and our host Eric opened the doors of UNM ARTS Lab to us.

I think we need more events targeting various segments of innovation and technology crowd in the region.  Here is a list of the networking events in Albuquerque and Santa Fe region.  The list captures most of the main venues; feel free to add more in comments.

-          Coronado Ventures Forum : All things Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, Technology

-          Ignite NM : We  presented our thoughts on future of learning at an Ignite event, you can view the presentation here

-          BarCamp Albuquerque

-          Webuquerque

-          Animotion NM : Everything animation & motion graphics

-          ABQ WebGeeks

-          New Mexico Technology Council

-          Open Coffee Club : Informal gathering time & place for NM entrepreneurs, VC’s, and related people

-          NNM Connect : Organizes various events

“Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies (2009)” by Department of Education shows that students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. The study is a meta-analysis of the research, and it notes that caution is required in generalizing to the K-12 population since the results are derived mostly from studies with adults such as medical training and higher education.  The study notes that the benefits of online learning especially apply to undergraduate, graduate and professional learners.

The research suggests that elements such as video or online quizzes do not appear to influence the amount that students learn in online classes. Quizzes at the end of a video segment could be categorized as static learning. One key statement in the research addresses this issue: “online learning can be enhanced by giving learners control of their interactions with media and prompting learner reflection”.  This is exactly what Veezyon aims:  to transform static learning into a dynamic and interactive one by merging branded content with collaboration tools.  It is very encouraging to see that the discussions are around how and where online learning should be utilized rather than the usefulness of it.

This was expected and now we have data to prove it.  According to a study, jointly conducted by Arbor Networks, the University of Michigan and Merit Network, peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing took a very significant dive. P2P traffic has gone from 4% of all Internet traffic in 2007 to about 0.5% in 2009. Based on what I have read on Arbor Networks’ site this undertaking is believed to be the largest and most extensive global Internet traffic report since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990s. And the ATLAS Internet Observatory 2009 Annual Report Presentation introduces the study as the “First global traffic engineering study of Internet evolution”. The total Internet traffic monitored over the two-year long study was more than 256 exabytes, gathered from 110 large and geographically diverse cable operators, international transit backbones, regional networks and content providers. By any measure these numbers and credentials are very impressive and the study should be examined closely.

The fall of P2P is not a surprise because we, as Internet users, have been experiencing this. Watching a video on YouTube, listening to Pandora at work or depending on CNN’s short clips to catch up with the day are all part of that experience. Simply put, streaming is much more convenient than peer-to-peer sharing. Why would I want to hassle with peer-to-peer to watch the last episode of Mad Men while I can watch a high quality version of it on AMC’s website, securely and instantly? I am not saying peer-to-peer will disappear. My point is that from consumers’ digital media consumption point of view, it doesn’t make sense. That is why Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are doing pretty good. For instance Akamai’s market cap is about $3.7B. A couple of confirmations for CDN market’s bright future are Microsoft’s announcement of canceling its free Silverlight Streaming service and introducing a new paid service hosted on Azure platform by the end of 2009; and Sorenson’s entrance to the market with Sorenson 360, a video delivery network.

Another Internet trend that is negatively impacting peer-to-peer use is the explosion of social media.  On Veezyon you could watch the video of Gordon Moore as many times as you would like. But for most of us that might not be enough, you might want to share it with your friends and colleagues. A link to that video is all you need. Well, if you want you can insert the link and share that video in a research note that you created on Veezyon, but how we engage with the digital media is another blog post.

image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/catorze/293011175/

Few years back, I decided to start a company. I didn’t take this decision lightly, neither any entrepreneur should. Having worked with inventors, entrepreneurs and investors in my entire career, I had the privilege to observe how challenging it was to create and manage a high growth company.  I can now unquestionably say, while “observing” really helps, nothing could prepare a first time entrepreneur for actually “doing” it. It is much more challenging than I thought, but thankfully it is also much more fun and rewarding. Regardless of how the story will unfold, my biggest accomplishment was convincing my partners Lale and Josh to join me on this journey.

The idea for Veezyon had begun formulating partly because of personal frustration and partly observing the rapid growth of rich media content online. While researching online, I wanted to have quick access to credible rich media content (videos, images, documents), which were/are available but fragmented. However, it did not end there; I wanted to be able to organize and share my research on the same platform. In time, we completed our team, gained the trust of great organizations, prototypes have been built and with our content partners’ input we morphed the idea into what you are seeing today.

Veezyon is a social learning platform. We are building Veezyon based on the principles that we believe will define the future of learning:

-          Student/Learner centric

-          Participatory (social)

-          Dynamic

-          Location independent

-          Cross  institutional

Why are we doing this?  I can assure you it is a lot of work, stress, and of course a massive risk. We believe in the idea and in each other. We want to build something great and really valuable to its users. Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll find value in what we are building.