Yogen: See, in many ways the changes that will come with IPv6 is to really enable, as you said Kamla, thousands and thousands of devices to become internet enabled where they would have an address. Well, it’s like saying if you don’t have enough street numbers, you can’t add any more houses to the street and we want to make sure that you can add as many devices as you want to.
Now technologically, doing IPv 6 is fine but the question is, what are these IP devices going to do? Are they going to be phones, are they going to be MP3 players? Are they going to be digital picture frames? We just don’t know but the point is to make sure that there are enough street addresses so that the innovators, the entrepreneurs can figure out what these devices might be.
And then consumers will benefit from these devices and not only consumers you can think of street lights, traffic signal, every thing is going to be an IP device and the ones that really succeed are the ones like the iphone or the ipod where it meets customer needs – consumer needs.
Kamla: I’m curious. Why didn’t you mention the Ad network?
Yogen: Ad networks are very very important and I think the world eventually is all about commerce and we know whether we are living in the United States or Europe or China or India that advertising makes the world go round. Most of us sometimes get annoyed by ads but I think we are willing to live with ads because the benefit of that is that the service that we get is for free and so there’s this constant tension between “for free” and “for subscription”. But what the internet has done is, it’s created a very unique mechanism to allow the smallest company to get world wide distribution. All you have to do is type some random phrase in a Google search box and you can find that small company that will satisfy your need.
Kamla: So personalisation becomes the key phrase there.
Yogen: “Personalisation” is the key phrase that the ad networks and the internet will eventually give you ads that you really want as opposed to ads that are irritating you.
Kamla: So that brings up the question of privacy.
Yogen: All technology has dealt with the issue of privacy. You know, privacy of what you do, what you don’t do and I think that’s a constant set of hecks and balances that the industry will create to ensure that privacy is upheld. But today, for example if you wipe your credit card, your credit card company knows exactly what you’ve bought. So it that a violation of privacy?
Only if the organisation that you’ve trusted misuses that information and I think there is sometimes that concern that companies on the internet aren’t quite as crisp in terms of protecting the consumers’ privacy and I think there will be technology and a variety of other mechanisms, not necessarily legislation which will protect the consumer.
Kamla: I want to switch to Judy Estrein, who is an old friend of yours. You have invested in her companies. She was the CTO of Cisco and she has recently published a new book, “Closing the innovation gap” and one of the things that she points out in the book is that the innovation eco system in Silicon Valley is polluted; both in the US and Silicon Valley. She says that the roots of the innovation system have started to rot. What are your thoughts?