Business
Under the Radar Round 2 Calls! As many of you know, I am extremely fortunate to be assisting the Dealmaker Media team as co-chair of the upcoming Under the Radar event on April 24, 2009 in San Francisco. This is round 2 of our call for companies in the cloud computing, virtualization, software as a [...]
Knowing Apple and the crazy speculation about their recent alleged touch-screen purchases, I hope that they are finally building an iTablet. I have had some interesting epiphanies lately. My iPhone is actually a much more useful mini-tablet than it is a phone. Honestly, the phone part is not that great. Maybe it was just AT&T [...]
Have you ever googled something and thought “If only I could just ask the computer this question instead of typing in keywords, sifting through pages and pages of crap and finally find THE ANSWER” buried in one of the web pages?” There has got to be a better way. Every science fiction computer has a [...]
(This was originally posted on http://www.undertheradar.com and is being cross-posted here.) “Are companies getting funded?” The answer still appears to be yes. As long as the market opportunity is solid, the company has an “A” team (or is close to achieving that), and they’re solving real pains for known, addressable customers, the funding still seems [...]
(This post is being cross-posted here but the original post is at http://www.undertheradar.com/blog) This April 24, 2009, I’m fortunate to be working with Dealmaker Media who will be hosting the 13th Under the Radar conference. In one day we will present a full roster of innovative startups, tech thought leaders, and REAL enterprise & big [...]
Jason Lemkin and the team over at EchoSign are facing a bit more competition from version 2 of InstaSign by E-Lock Technologies. Jason was one of the speakers at the recent Dealmaker Media Strategy Series events that I blogged here. It will be interesting to see if there is really room in the market for [...]
Amazon had their earnings call for their Q4 2008. Buried in those numbers are the numbers for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Eric Engleman did some very brief analysis showing that the “Other Revenue” category (which includes AWS and other…others.) did $542M in 2008, up 41.5% from 2007. If we guess that AWS makes up 25% [...]
Small and medium sized business customers are flocking to Google Apps. One of Google‘s spokespeople said that they were adding 2,000 customers per day at the end of 2007 and 3,000 customers per day at the end of 2008. I decided to do a little math to see what this all meant. Assuming that Year [...]
Here are my notes from the Legacy apps session on Day 2 at the Cloud Connect Event put on by TechWeb. Thanks to David Berlind and Angela Bole and their team for putting on the event. Moderating: David Berlind, General Manager & Co-Creator, Cloud Connect Moderated: Rob Helm, Director of Research, Directions on Microsoft Lew [...]
In the Trenches: Cutting Costs in a Tight Economy January 21, 2009 | 6:30 – 8:30PM Moderator: Mark Sherman, General Partner, Battery Ventures Speakers: Seth Sternberg, CEO, Meebo Auren Hoffman, CEO, Rapleaf Eric Ries, KPCB and former CTO, IMVU Munjal Shah, CEO, Like.com Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO, Echosign NOTES: Jason Lemkin He built: Babycenter: [...]
WebGuild posted an excellent article today on the effect that all of the world’s live video streams had on the Internet yesterday during Obama’s inauguration. I was hoping that somebody would have the metrics for that. It appears that it was the good people over at Keynote. Predictably the total number of pages viewed was [...]
I wondered when this was going to happen. As distribution of early news gets more wide spread (from the two big papers in town to all uhhh hundred million bloggers), I could see the holes appearing in the dyke. Tech Crunch has posted their new policy which is that they’ll agree to any embargoe you [...]
If anybody knows who built this, please let me know so that I can attribute it properly…
Hey all, I’m at Startonomics today, put on by Dealmaker Media. I’ll be posting updates to this over the course of the day. Live stream is here: My notes and editorial comments are in [square brackets.] These are DRAFT NOTES. Better versions coming after the conference, complete with images. MORNING SESSION: Dave McClure, 500 hats [...]
This is a big deal. GE has signed a deal to put Zoho Applications on 400,000 desktops. Or webtops, really. Congratulations to Raju and his team over at Zoho!
I work on the computer a lot. Probably far too much. One of the things I have been noticing is that because I spend so much time on the computer my back gets very tense from typing too much. So I’ve decided to go back and try out some dictation software again. It seems like [...]
We see a lot of business plans for social networks in our company and this summary is absolutely bang-on. “Peanut Labs CEO Murtaza Hussein said today: ‘The CPMs are so low it’s really hard to build a real business unless you have several billion page views and your own sales team.’” I’m glad somebody is [...]
Thanks Susan for your post. It reminds me that I never did post my summary of the Enterprise 2.0 conference this spring in Boston. You say that you are frustrated that there is a slow pace of adoption. I saw the same thing but rather than being frustrated by it, we used that as a [...]
I love this article from Venture Hacks. I started my career thinking that I needed to heed all of the advice of my mentors. I soon realized their fallibility. Sometimes the advice was right but the timing was wrong. Or the timing was right but the advice was incorrect for the situation. I eventually came [...]
Javier, thank you for recognizing businesses like Mr. Gianforte’s that are “return leaders“. It is too easy these days to continue to buy the “traffic first, monetization second” crap that continues to be perpetuated (and which is really only applicable to about 0.0001% of the businesses out there.) Greg, I’m glad to see that you [...]
I was digging through Marc Andreesen’s archives looking at his past posts and found this recent one from May 14 that is innocently titled Public Speaking versus blogging. His key point is that in the old days, you almost HAD to public speak to spread the word and that now you can just blog. Alan [...]
I read an awesome book recently that made me rethink many things about location, work, and business. It was Tim Ferriss’ book which I highly recommend. “ “The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” (Timothy Ferris) I recently had reason to head to Paris for personal reasons. I thought [...]
Here are two interesting articles: one from Glenn Kelman, and a follow on from Guy Kawasaki on why serial entrepreneurs might not in fact be the best bet for funders. Interesting perspectives and I recognize some of Guy’s cautions from my own experience. Worth reading both articles.
This post at VC Confidential contains some fantastic quotes. I have excerpted a few of my favourites. “The trouble with the first time entrepreneur is that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. After a failure he does know what he doesn’t know and can beat the hell out of people who still have to [...]
Last night, my good friend Ean Jackson and I had the pleasure of speaking at the Canadian Public Relations Society on PR 2.0. We had a nearly full room, and the group was engaged and we had a great time meeting everyone. There were some great questions from the room and some good healthy debate [...]
Ahhh, the joys of setting up infrastructure from scratch. We need a web conferencing application that can be hosted from either a Mac or a PC and it turns out that despite the fact that there are somewhere close to a billion web conferencing applications out there, there are only two that actually work from [...]
My time at Business Objects has finally come to a close. It was an awesome two years, with a lot of learning. I met a lot of extremely talented people there and through my association with the company. I was feeling the entrepreneurial urge again so i decided to throw myself back out of the [...]
Here are a few interesting notes from the opening sessions: Jeff Bezos a better question than “what’s changing in the next five years” is “what is going to be the SAME over the next five or ten years?” because that allows them to build a sturdy business. he talked about the current services: message queuing, [...]
I have to duplicate this entire post here. It’s brilliant. Thanks Seth for the post. I filed this under Business AND Life Lessons. The best time to start is when you’ve got enough money in the bank to support all contingencies. The best time to start is when the competition is far behind in technology, [...]
30 days of Sustainability is once again happening in Vancouver. This year it runs from April 22 – May 21, 2007. I highly recommend that people go check out the temporary site and sign up for updates. The full site will launch sometime in the next few weeks.
