Stardust Global Ventures

I operate under the assumption that, like many, many bloggers have half-written, partly formed (or ill formed) blog posts that never quite see the light of day. I know many people who write drafts and then never finish them. I generally don’t. Rather, I leave the ideas rattling around in my head, half-baked and unwritten. Sometimes they come back to to haunt me, demanding attention. Lack of interest, insufficient motivation or some other vague notion simply prevents me from completing my thoughts and writing the post.

Here are some examples of topics and ideas that just haven’t made it out to see the light of day for one reason or another.

• Quality of Service vs Gigabandwidth – I’m a pretty staunch advocate of QoS, which is nothing but a prioritization scheme for deciding what traffic to throw away first. How do we really determine the effectiveness of QoS given the reality of gigabandwidth? And aren’t we really almost to a transition to petabandwidth? And how useful will QoS really be in that mode?
• Why do we think 4G/WiMAX/LTE are such a big deal when we really should be talking about the future of mobile gigabandwidth? That’s our real future.
• Due diligence in development. When did we give up the idea of alpha/beta testing and decide to let others test for us? Has market demand for immediate gratification really offset the value of QA testing? It seems so in many cases, but do we have empirical data to support that. Or are we just intuiting it because it’s what we’d like to believe. And are we really just taking the lazy way out? 
• The evolution of what we call journalism. There are implications of citizen journalism and the now media that get discussed, but is there a change in journalistic integrity we simply don’t talk about? Prior research and fact finding have always been cornerstones of good journalism. Today bloggers and journalists alike seem to often simply show up for the story, with expectations that a story will present itself. Prior research and the art of investigative journalism seem to have lost their way in the NOW media. Instant gratification and the demand for “realtime news” seem to be superseding the motivation to put in the effort to investigate and prepare for many, especially bloggers who aren’t legacy journalists. And I plead guilty to being one of that group often.
• What’s happened in the culture of collaboration that led us to the idea of a team requiring UN-like consensus to move forward? When did we give every member of a team veto power with a vote. If we’re doing something innovative, new, next-generation, or exciting, shouldn’t we expect some percentage of the team, user population or audience to not like it and feel uncomfortable? Isn’t healthy disagreement still a good thing? If two people are in business and always agree on everything, isn’t one of them unnecessary?
• Why do we emotionally invest our support in startups that either don’t listen to feedback or don’t respond/acknowledge customer input and then complain? What made us so shy about pulling the plug. Instead we hang on and harp about what sucks and why we wish they’d listen or change. Why don’t we simply go somewhere else? What makes us stay so fiercely loyal to products and services that don’t give us what we want?
• Where is literacy headed? Books are being written on Twitter and Wave. Our literary world has become a 140 character sound bite. There’s an old Sioux adage about the impact of our actions on the next seven generations from now. So what will the William Shakespeare of seven generations now write in 12 characters and two emoticons that will impact generations to follow and be studied in school?

These are just a few things that rattle in my brain and haven’t made it out to posts yet. Will they? Maybe. And they may just remain half-formed thoughts and questions that never get fully explored.