Internet — How Big? May Catch On?

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Internet, today we talk the size and breadth of the Internet.

Big Red Car here on a gray day with a new roof almost finished on my house. My house.

So, The Boss comments on the Internet using Disqus as “JLM.” You can find his fingerprints if you look.

One of his favorite blogs is AVC.com which is an extraordinary blog about all things venture capital.

Internet and Email, Big Red Car?

The other day, The Boss receives the attached unsolicited email from Kathmandu, Nepal. Hello, America!

The “your blog” the gentleman (Mr. Ashutosh Tiwari) is talking about is me — The Musings of the Big Red Car.

Me, a Big Red Car, has readers in Nepal. Kathmandu, Nepal. Haha, this stuff is wild. And I can’t get a new paint job. Boss? Hey, I’m INTERNATIONAL, INTERCONTINENTAL.

Get me a new paint job, y’all!

[I knew you were going to ask — the time difference is 10 hours and 45 minutes. The straight line distance is 8,436 miles and that’s going west across the Pacific Ocean.]

Email from Nepal

The emailer runs a clothing company, Sherpa Adventure Gear, which manufactures in Nepal and sells in the US and internationally. It’s like Patagonia clothing.

Here a Big Red Car is going to link y’all up: Sherpa Adventure Gear. This linking stuff is part of the Internet. Very promising technology. Look into it.

Believe it or not, you can buy his stuff on … wait for it … the INTERNET. Wow!

So, the Big Red Car is going out on a limb here — THIS INTERNET STUFF MAY CATCH ON.

But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car. Be good to yourself and help me get a new paint job.Monkey pic 2

 

13 thoughts on “Internet — How Big? May Catch On?”

  1. Going over the Pacific is not recommended for the BRC. If it can somehow make the journey over Atlantic, then it can easily trace the silk route and get an easy entry via north-west frontier into Nepal- via Mumbai as a good pit stop. The route is ancient, expecting respect and yet respectful at the same time.

  2. I have had the great fortune of mentoring a student from Nepal – bright, hard working and all around awesome. Proud to have been able to find grant resources to keep her in the country and get her MBA (though I had to promise her dad I’d keep a close eye on her.) Was able to introduce her to our local billionaire and his leadership team, and she’s landed a great job driving innovation for their company.

  4. Catch on? Yup. Lots of stuff on the Internet? Yup. Now, just to find one instance of interesting stuff, e.g., Sherpa Adventure Gear, is worthy of a blog post!

    [Insert: Likely Sherpa Adventure Gear will be selling direct, i.e., no retail stores, no big ad budget, no smiling, teenage girl, athletic, beauty queen clerks, no middlemen, from a place that would highly value US dollars (once the Nepal operation gets going well, they will want money to buy more computing equipment, e.g., software from Microsoft, for dollars) and, thus, look comparatively cheap to US buyers.

    Okay. Then, once someone said “There are only two ways to make money in business, bundling and unbundling.” Well, that’s not true in general, but there are such cases! So, to reduce shipping costs (even Amazon when shipping all within the US wants to lower shipping costs), Sherpia might want to bundle the orders for a day, ship to a US unbundler, say, FedEx in Memphis, or to a FedEx hub in Asia and then to the FedEx hub in Memphis, who could, with an economy of scale, do such unbundling for lots of small sellers and, then, bundle again for all the shipments to each of the major US cities, which FedEx does at least twice a day now anyway. Or, when orders for merchandise go one way on the Internet, the physical items have to go the other way via shippers like FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc. The Internet way is dirt cheap; the other way is much more expensive.]

    Also, that AVC.com is an extraordinary blog is also worthy.

    So, presto, bingo, we get two, count them, two (2), URLs in one, just one (1), blog post!

    Uh, ballpark there are 1 trillion (T) Web pages on the Internet, and millions of Web sites. At two Internet Web URLs per blog post, there could be a lot of posts for a long time!

    So, there’s a lot of, call it, content — for old school types that might have worked at ABC, CBS, NBC, call it media content. — on the Internet.

    E.g., last week happened to see

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTkIyYMP27c

    from Russia, with Svetlana Zakharova in the “Rose Adagio” from Sleeping Beauty. So, that’s some “media content”.

    So, it’s some obscure Russian ballet dancer. So what? Well, notice with that Web page so far there have been ballpark 600,000 views of just that one video clip. But for people who would like that video clip, there are lots of totally unbelievably drop dead gorgeous video clips, each with ballpark 100,000 to 1 million views each.

    So, ballpark there are 1 million people who like just such ballet content. And we have to guess that nearly all of these people are in the US or Europe where there is money; indeed, the viewers might have relatively good ad demographics. Then maybe such a person tires of watching the same video clip for a week and wants more content. So, that’s ballpark 1 million people a week.

    So, beyond ballet, outdoor gear, VC blogs, how to find stuff on the Internet? How many people might want to do that, maybe over 50% of everyone using the Internet? Sure, if (A) know what content really want, (B) know that that content exists on the Internet, and (C) have keywords/phrases that accurately characterize that content, then can use a keyword/phrase search engine. Otherwise it’s millions of Web sites, billions of video clips, PDF files, blog posts, etc., and trillions of Web pages all in a big pile worse than if someone had dumped everything from the Library of Congress on the DC Mall. Right, I know; I know; we can find all of these, it just takes a little time, two at a time in lucky blog posts!

    Let’s see: The first good or a much better solution, say, a Web site, for this problem of 50+% of the people on the Internet finding stuff where they don’t have all of (A)-(C), might add up to a Web site how busy? Could there also be some good ad targeting opportunities?

    Sometimes inquiring minds ask such questions!

  5. I think my favorite thing about the internet is having the opportunity to sit at the bar to talk with and learn from some amazing human beings. People that, otherwise, I would have no possibility of interacting with. And it not like the communal bonds aren’t there or otherwise shallow. Real connections are made and lives are changed.

    The comments you fling around on discuss are a trough of wisdom so many of us value. You were missed over at AVC. The moderator who told you to f’off the other day was just having a bad day and didn’t mean it.

    Thank you again for all of the effort you put in both here and on Discuss. Oh, and you’re dead on re: Mr. Musk.

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