TecCrunch has commented on how live video failed us during the inauguration speech of Barak Obama as 44th president of the United States, arguing that live video streams will need much further investment before it can seriously compete with Television. While I agree that the technology still needs much improvement, the fact that millions of concurrent users brought the servers down clearly shows the tremendous potential of live streaming,  a point I’m sure TechCrunch certainly does not disagree with. So, we are slowly getting there.

Incidentally, we at sevenload haev our own live streaming solution for Big Brother - in a subscription model, with surprising success.

…and I certainly hope I don’t get shot for managing to put Barack Obama and Big Brother in the same blog post.

I am very proud that we won this Award (after winning ETRE 100 as one of Europe’s best Startups). Red Herring hands out this Award after a year-long selection process and winning a regional Award is a prerequisite. Red Herring is known to most as the chronicler of the tech industry, and has picked the global 100 from industries as diverse as biotech, optical technology, energy, cleantech and even pasteurized Eggs.

sevenload was one of two media companies selected and one of only a dozen IT / Internet / Software related business. So it is fair to say that Red Herring thinks we are one of the two hottest internet /media companies in the world!

We were also the only Social Media company to get the award!

Past award winners include Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, and YouTube.

Here is the official picture of me with Alex Vieux, Founder of Red Herring!

Thanks to Jeff Braverman (click picture for site)

And this was my reaction to the award

This year, all Las Vegas was abuzz with the expectations of attendance to CES - and how they were not met. From cab drivers to convention exhibitors, everyone was touting the scale of the downturn.

To us, the convention presented a more mixed picture. As often is the case in downturns, in an overall downbeat environment, a few interesting developments could be observed:

1) The Slingbox by Slingmedia: offering some 14 Mil. subscribers of its parent company, a midsize cable operator in the US, the opportunity to access Web TV content through their cable content.

2) The advent of HD to TV and other screens, including a number of interesting personal camera devices.

3) The increasing dissemination of “cloud” (now there’s a buzzword) logic to the consumer world: first through “thin client” notebooks that are not much more than windows to web services, and second through a push towards homes servers, ranging from Windows solutions to proprietary home hifi systems. Its too early to name this a significant consumer trend, but slowly we are seeing the first applications for the “internet of things”, “cloud computing”, and “semantic web”.

Recession is the best time for entrepreneurs, Ken Morse (and others) says. Now is the time to see and grasp the potential of these new technologies as they slowly approach end consumer relevance.

This interview by Charbax, a great blogger/thinker from Switzerland, included his grilling me on tech questions around HD and making me explain the business model of sevenload from an independent publisher’s point of view.