{"id":450,"date":"2011-01-17T18:44:47","date_gmt":"2011-01-18T02:44:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/twothirdsdone.com\/?p=450"},"modified":"2011-01-17T18:44:47","modified_gmt":"2011-01-18T02:44:47","slug":"am-i-the-great-grandfather-of-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/twothirdsdone.com\/it\/2011\/01\/17\/am-i-the-great-grandfather-of-the-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"Am I the great grandfather of the Internet?"},"content":{"rendered":"
This blog is a bit more personal than most. \u00a0Last night I was watching the Golden Globe Awards (which was taking place just a few miles from my West Hollywood home). \u00a0The Social Network <\/a>won a great many awards. \u00a0I have not seen it. \u00a0That is surprising to a lot of people who know me and my background. \u00a0Last night someone I was chating with on Facebook asked me why I had not seen it. \u00a0I said it was too long a story for chat. \u00a0But frankly, I am not sure what the story really is. \u00a0 For the last ten years, I have \u00a0slowly reduced my involvement in business which for me means Internet Business. \u00a0It was very purposful. \u00a0I think there were two many reasons. \u00a0The first is that I wanted to use the last third (or so ) of my life exploring my own personal creativity. The second reason was that, I did not want to work my way down in an industry in which I had played a meaningful role. Frankly, I do not know which of these two forces was the greater but I hope it was the former.<\/div>\n
I know most of the board member of Facebook. \u00a0I worked closely with some of them when I was Vice President of Business Development at Intel. \u00a0 I do not know the managment team at Facebook other than \u00a0Sheryl Sanberg<\/a> who I think is a very capable, talented person that is also a wonderful human being. \u00a0I never meet Mark Zukerberg<\/a>. \u00a0Frankly, I don’t think I would like him. \u00a0He reminds me too \u00a0much of Steve Jobs \u00a0(I am sorry to write this on a day when we all have to be concerned for Steve’s health).<\/div>\n
I have never called myself the father of broadband but I had as much to do with creating it as anyone when I sponsored the developmen<\/a>t of what became the cable modem and introduced the concept to most of the cable operators both in the USA and Internationally. There can only be one father and since there where a number of people who played an important role in creating residential broadband, I did not find that a good term for my role.<\/div>\n
It seems to me that a generation in technology is about ten years. \u00a0The residentail broadband network the now use was developed in the 90s (starting around 1992). \u00a0The companies that played the major role in creating residential broadband were companies like Yahoo, AOL, Lycos, Amazon and Ebay \u00a0The next generation was dominated by Google and towards the second half of the second generation, Facebook. \u00a0We will be entering the third generation soon. \u00a0And just like the major companies of the first generation played an important role in the second generation, Google and Facebook will play an important role in the third generation. \u00a0Is if I was a “father” in the first generation, I was a “grandfather” in the second and soon and I will be a” great \u00a0grandfather”.<\/div>\n
Two years ago, I was on a yatch party in the San Francisco Bay with about 30 people. Larry Page<\/a>, the co founder of Google was on the boat. \u00a0I had meet Larry at a few parties but obviously had not made an impression. \u00a0This time he had nothing to do but to talk to me. So he asked me what I did. \u00a0I said I was pretty much retired but that I had worked for Intel. \u00a0At that point, I think he lost interest. \u00a0His whole company was based on technology that I had made happen and he had no idea who I was or what role I had played. \u00a0He probably did not know that Intel had played such a promient role in creating residential broadband just as he probably had no idea about the role of companies like Broadcom<\/a>. \u00a0And does it matter? \u00a0I think not. \u00a0Yes, my ego would have been pleased if he had said, “you’re avram miller”. \u00a0But it is exactly my ego or in particular that ego that I need to leave behind. \u00a0 A few years earlier, I had lunch with Matt Mullenweg<\/a>, the founder of WordPress (which I am using for this very blog). One of his investors asked me to meet him. We had a nice lunch an a fun convestation of no consiquence. \u00a0I realized that not only was I old enought to be Matt’s father, I was actually old enough to be his grandfather (although people are having children much later than my grandparents and parents).<\/div>\n
Last week, I meet with an old friend who knew me at the hight of my career. \u00a0He worked at the Creative Artist Agency<\/a> when Intel and CAA creative multimedia demonstration lab<\/a>. \u00a0My friend asked me what I was doing. In particular, why had I decided to buy a home in LA (actually West Hollywood). \u00a0I told him that I came for the sun but he perhaps wisely thought otherwise. \u00a0He said \u00a0there was a reason for my coming and imagined that I wanted to continue to work in the transition of the media industry to the digital world. \u00a0I tried to explain that I wanted to explore my own creativity. I play jazz piano and I have recently started composing again. \u00a0But it was clear from the discussion that I stil have a lot of passion and maybe too much passion for technology and media. \u00a0But it also true that I want to explore my own creativity. \u00a0I though the next day about how I could explain this a bit better. \u00a0Imagine you want to learn Italian. \u00a0You decided to take a year off and live in a small Italian village. \u00a0Once there you discover that everyone there wants to improve their english and so they will never speak Italian with you.<\/div>\n
So this brings me back to why I have not seen The Social Media. \u00a0I think if I am honest with myself it is because I miss the time of my life when I was creating business and developing technology. \u00a0It is the reason I stay away from conferences. \u00a0It is hard to let go of something that possesed \u00a0you so.<\/div>\n
And I will always have a love for technology. A love that started when I was six years old.<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is maybe the reason I have not yet seen the Social Network.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":607219,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[536874,536881],"tags":[791020647],"class_list":["post-450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-business","category-about-life-in-the-last-third","tag-facebook"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2v2x-7g","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/twothirdsdone.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/twothirdsdone.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/twothirdsdone.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twothirdsdone.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/607219"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twothirdsdone.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/twothirdsdone.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":452,"href":"https:\/\/twothirdsdone.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions\/452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/twothirdsdone.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twothirdsdone.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/twothirdsdone.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}