John Lamb's Week: New economy mechanic takes pot shot at incubators

This Monday evening I'll be legging it over to Westminster Hall in London where venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, the man under the bonnet at Garage.com, will be giving members of the Indus Entrepreneurs club the benefit of his wisdom.

We liked Guy when silicon.com met up with him in the summer, but the former Chief Evangelist at Apple will have to work a miracle to impress some members of his audience tonight.

The Indus Entrepreneurs, open to anyone who has roots or an interest in the Indian subcontinent, claims to have more billionaires on its books than any similar business association. Among the leading members are Harpal S Randhawa of antfactory, Dinesh Dhamija of ebookers and Nishit Kotecha, Lehman's head of Internet Capital Markets.

Guy tells me he will be looking at the future for dot-coms, having a pop at incubators and talking about his top ten tips for entrepreneurs. Garage.com is famous for its boot camps for would-be entrepreneurs, who once queued in their thousands to learn the secrets of online success.

Indus members will doubtless be looking for Kawasaki's ideas on how to profit from India's impressive high-tech talent. In that context, contrast the £400 to £600 that it costs to hire a contractor in the UK with the £130 per day charged by software companies in the region.

More movers and shakers will be on display on Tuesday at the Regent Conference run by financial services company Regent Associates at the Hilton Hotel, London. Regent chief executive Peter Rowell has splashed out on Jeremy Paxman to chair a line-up that includes David Edmonds, director general of Oftel, and software industry entrepreneur Ann Winblad, co-founder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

Speakers will be mulling over European business prospects in the IT sector, but not for too long. Cocktails start at 4:30, according to the programme. Clearly a case of shaken, but not stirred.

While bad news about dot-com start-ups is so frequent it is almost not news any more, some of the dinosaurs of the IT world are thriving, relatively speaking. There was a lot of thrashing in the undergrowth from storage company EMC last week in advance of its year-end figures out on Wednesday.

In an outbreak of musical chairs at the top, Joe Tucci, president and chief operating officer, has taken on the CEO role. Current CEO Mike Ruettgers has moved to the position of executive chairman.

EMC's remodelled board will be expected to cash in on an astonishing bonanza. At present 45 per cent of IT budgets are spent on storage, according to research firm IDC. That is forecast to move to 80 per cent within five years. Not surprisingly, Ruettgers is confident EMC can hit its 2001 revenue target of $12bn, despite the downturn in the stock market. Analysts expect the company to bring in between $8bn and $9bn for the year 2000.

New markets in data storage are likely to emerge based around data transfers over the internet. The problem is that current storage solutions - network attached storage (NAS), storage area networks (SAN) and the services of storage service providers (SSPs) - are all oriented to the needs of big companies and expensive to use for external data transfers over the internet.

However, a number of companies have developed new internet-based storage solutions. Nishan Systems is touting a new switching platform based on what it calls storage-over-IP. Another company, Scale Eight, says its answer to net storage demands is a management system based on parallel processing techniques at one-fifth the cost of existing storage.

Finally, keep a look out for announcements this week about a new e-envoy, the curiously titled government promoter of the new economy. The dictionary definition of an envoy is an emissary or an ambassador, implying the e-envoy's role is to represent the UK in a foreign land. Not far wrong judging by some attitudes to the online world.