May 2005
But if they were chosen to come to Mauritius, why had they also been chosen to fail, and leave? Is that a choosing, or is it a passing-over? Are they Elect, or are they Preterite, and doomed as dodoes?-- Thomas...
I'm off on an evil travel jag over the next few days: Boston (for a venture capital talk), Quebec City (for another venture capital talk), and then Ottawa (for a family visit), and then back to San Diego. I'll still...
I have written here a number of times in the last few days about Amerindo founder Alberto Vilar (and co-founder Gary Tanaka) being charged with playing fast and loose with investor money (and I don't mean by buying Taser shares)...
BusinessWeek has an interview/visit with newly-single (in the partnership sense, not the marital one) venture guy Vinod Khosla. He maintains an office at Kleiner Perkins, but is no longer a partner in the current KP fund. While he is actively...
Nature has an article summarizing some recent research showing that readership of online news falls off significantly by 36 hours after posting, with most subsequent readership traffic coming from archives/Google search. Fair enough, I suppose, but where' s the news...
Flow my tears, fall from your springs,Exiled for ever let me mournWhere night's black bird her sad infamy sings,There let me live forlorn.-- John Dowland (1563-1626)I had an interesting conversation recently with an editor at a major publication. He had...
In the spirit of my comment a few posts back about enterprise software turning into a loss leader for consumer products, Kragen Sitaker has captured the trouble with enterprise products in pithy and quotable fashion:Enterprise software is software that gets...
Shades of the famous Star Trek IV movie moment when Scotty tried to talk to his mouse, here is a sobering anecdote about how one woman went badly (but understandably) awry in usability testing:Over the last several months we at...
While I don't think it was necessarily Mark Cuban's intent, in a post over on Blog Maverick he implicitly describes entrepreneurship in a way that would be highly familiar to students of the "lottery effect":In basketball you have to shoot...
Chris Anderson has put up the slide I mentioned from my conversation with him at "D": Being a cliche is a *good* thing, right?...
While flat panels are already selling at a fantastic rate, they just passed an inflection point. How do I know? Because I just paid far more than I needed to for a new 32" Sony LCD television, largely because I...
The current issue of InformationWeek has a cover piece on Google's enterprise strategy, including an interview with CEO Eric Schmidt. The supposed nugget in the piece is Eric Schmidt's sorta pre-announcement that Google sees its Google Mini as a Trojan...
A new paper runs deliciously contrary to accepted wisdom in science, which says that most scientists peak in their 20s. It is welcome news to those of us who have not yet, ahem, done our Nobel-winning work:Great achievements in knowledge...
There is a biting two-minute advertisement (a contradiction in terms?) out from Levis that takes on the metrosexual movement. A highlight comes about one minute in when our stop-motion protagonist is decked out in new duds and reading a series...
Today's Boston Globe opines that the "iCon" book about Steve Jobs that he banned from Apple stores is not worth banning:...''iCon" seems scarcely worth the bother. It's your typical corporate bigwig biography -- admiring but not fawning, critical but not...
Funny how, card-carrying grammar nag that I am, I had never really noticed this bit of broken language usage before:"If you're spring cleaning this weekend, start with your bookshelves - or maybe the boxes of books in your basement, still...
Medpundit has a typically direct comment on the current concern (and instant joke material) having to do with a supposed relationship between use of erectile dysfunction drug Viagra and a kind of blindness. He quotes from eMedicine's mortality/morbidity description of...
Rohit Khare has a piece over at Infoworld where he muses about what comes after software solution du jour Ajax -- Ajay and Ajaz, of course. He argues, correctly, that Ajax's inbred inherent inability to handle "push" data streaming is...
Sunday's N.Y. Times contains a must-read story on the underbelly of business: Taking companies public via reverse takeovers of shell companies. I can't tell you how many times I have had VC-frustrated entrepreneurs come to me with virtually the same...
Okay, not really-really, but this weekend's issue of Barron's does have an interview with a money manager who makes the case for being negative about Red Hat, the Linux vendor. In so doing he implictly makes the uber-bull case for...
While the bell has been tolling noisily for enterprise software for some time, the data has finally become as compelling as the criticisms. A nice summary of both is a piece in the current issue of IT Manager's Journal, where...
Jorn Barger at the ever-eclectic Robot Wisdom has been back for a while, and his site is still (sort of) RSS-less. While Jorn clearly uses RSS in his own wandering about, he wants to know what his readership thinks about...
I'm sitting here this morning riveted as I "watch" the pivotal penultimate stage of the Giro d'Italia, the world's second-biggest cycling race. But as will amost certainly be embarassing to me within a few years, I'm watching it via textual...
Wouldn't you know it, there is a venture capital twist on the Alberto Vilar story I mentioned earlier today. What was the intended use of the $5-million from a single investor that Vilar allegedly used as his "piggy-bank"?According to the...
For the sake of argument, let's say that over the next four years that most non-stationary devices that can be Internet-enabled are made so -- and that most of those devices have embedded GPS and telemetry. Yes, phones, PDAs, cars,...
Earlier this week the story made the rounds of the low-rent venture capital guy who allegedy duped Kodak. That story, while interesting in a tawdry sort of way, pales beside this one: Alberto Vilar, president and founder of Amerindo Investments,...
Here are two more technology finance podcasts for folks. First up is my interview with Dr. Jacobs, followed in the second podcast by a speech by the aforementioned founder, Chairman and then-CEO of Qualcomm:25-minute interview30-minute talk...
There is nothing guaranteed to bring back the spirit of Alexander Graham Bell quite like being on a conference call where multiple participants are on cell phones. People drop in and out, the call alert beeping both times, and the...
Some savvy and appropriately contrarian thoughts on the recent upswing in consumer-centric venture investing from Jeff Bussgang:I confess to being personally biased on this one. At Upromise (college savings loyalty program I co-founded in early 2000), we raised over $100M...
The N.Y. Times is making much today about a new Alpha magazine article on salaries of managers at top hedge funds, but I'm uneasy. While there are hedge fund folks who are (very) highly paid, the idea that the 1/20...
There is a good interview with David Roux of technology buyout firm Silver Lake Partners over at BusinessWeek. The decision to start Silver Lake in 1999 ranks as one of the shrewdest moves in recent private equity history. WIth the...
Lots of people making noise about some stats concerning AOL users' email usage, but my question goes in the opposite direction. Who are these people that only check email five times a day? My various PCs poll both personal and...
While Tom Peters' presentation style may not be your favorite, there is no denying that the man is a skilled and entertaining presenter. That is why it is great that he has put out (in Powerpoint format, of course --...
Lower sticker prices are everywhere in the IPO market, but not everyone likes the idea:... what's good for buyers isn't all that good for venture capital firms and large private equity firms, which rely on a healthy IPO market to...
All you zombies hide your facesAll you people in the streetAll you sittin' in high placesThe pieces gonna fall on you-- "All You Zombies", Hooters (1985)One of the more interesting quasi-economic developments in the world of spam, security, etc., is...
Bill Burnham has up a long-promised piece on how the deal-flow model of venture capital is dead. There is, as he correctly argues, too much capital and too much competition in the venture industry for venture firms to sit by...
Okay, let's see if this works. While you can click on the following links and get an audio track of venture capital guy Bill Stensrud's interesting talk and interview with me, it should also work as a podcast. I think....
Nature has created a fascinating weblog from the future written as the blow-by-blow blogging of an avian influenza outbreak starting late this year. It is harrowing reading: 25 January 2006 Escaping from hellApologies for the long delay in posting. The...
There was a nice piece in the N.Y. Times earlier this week concerning a recent Science paper on obesity. The upshot: People tend to be sedentary because they are overweight, not vice-versa as many people had long thought/hoped. While that...
The trouble with thinking in long tail terms is that you can't stop thinking in long tail terms. After a while, pretty much everything you see looks like a long tail, even it's really just commonplace power laws, Zipf distributions,...
News today that the NY Times is laying off 190 employees will have bloggers playing taps for the Times. Coming on top of news that the paper will be charging for access to its columnists, this is truly schadenfreude-inducing if...
Dan Primack's PE Week Wire now apparently has 23,000 subscribers. To put it in context, that is roughly three times the numbers of principals/partners at North American venture capital firms. There are apparently an awful lot of venture capital junkies...
Dennis: Come see the violence inherent in the system. Help, help, I'm being repressed! -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)Apparently the open wireless network in the main conference room yesterday at Walt Mossberg's "D" conference in Calsbad was...
Ana Marie Cox -- better known as Wonkette -- was wandering the "D" halls today. It was interesting in that I got the sense most people there had no idea who she was, so she was kind of meandering around...
I had a brief visit to the "D" conference in Carlsbad today, where I enjoyed a stimulating hallway meetup with Chris Anderson of "long tail" fame. Among (many) other things, we agreed that all memes worth memification need a good...
I had a journalist ask me this morning whether recent lawsuits would cause equity analysts to be more careful about what they say concerning companies that they cover. In other words, would said analysts pull punches and not give critical...
Back at O'Reilly's ETech conference in March some of the most interesting stuff centered on location. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the company announced an upcoming conference on the subject, called Where 2.0 (what happened to Where 1.0? oh, i get it) on...
While it sounds a little like duelling kitchen cleansers, O'ReillyNet's Tim O'Brien points out that Xamlon (here in La Jolla) is pushing AFLAX as an alternative to AJAX for doing interactive data-centric web applications. The company has redone Google Maps...
Lucy Kellaway has a nice piece in today's Financial Times on the dumbing up of management research. She starts empirically with a typically silly bit of academic research on trust:The Harvard Business Review then solemnly reported his findings, including the...
The N.Y. Times has a good overview this morning of Mark Cuban's plan to mess up the movie business for incumbents. It all centers around HD, digital technologies, and changing the release schedules, and it is an interesting read:Theatrical releases,...
There is a fascinating front-page article in Monday's Wall Street Journal on the tussle between publishers and academics over open-access journals. The gist: There is a move a-foot to abandon expensive journals from publishers like Reed-Elsevier and others in favor...
Jason Calacanis is blogging the D conference up in Carlsbad, California -- and, Jason being Jason, is sneaking some advertising in with the editorial:I’ve been at the D conference for a day and I just spoke with Steve Jobs who...
While some people were apparently disgruntled about the IDG Syndicate conference last week -- Too many suits! Too many businesspeople! -- I actually came away fairly, well, gruntled. While I like to beep, blink, and buzz at a dandy geek-centric...
While the IPO market is doing better recently that it was two years ago, it is still less receptive to smaller IPOs and related risk than at any time in recent memory. Is this secular or cyclical? Venture folks want...
I'm geographically book-ended by interesting conferences this week, with Walt Mossberg's "D" conference up in Carlsbad and Mark Anderson's "Future in Review" conference down at the Hotel Del Coronado across the bay from downtown San Diego. Anyone planning to go...
Gary Rivlin of the N.Y. Times has inaugurated what is apparently going to be a monthly piece on the venture industry with a fairly savage article. He implies that the U.S. venture industry remains over-staffed, and venture tourists are still...
Today I cheerfully participated for the second year running in the VentureForth Biotechnology Entrepreneur 2005 conference here in San Diego. Once again there was a great turnout of both speakers and attendees, so kudos to the organizers. Here are links...
A pithy and worth-reading comment (scroll to the bottom) was just added to a month-old entry on the site. The subject is serial entrepreneurs and why the venture capital fixation with same is wrong-headed. The fellow posting says he is...
Smallthoughts has this nice musing about the role of email as universal life interface:I find myself using email as a quasi-database all the time: to make lists, send myself reminders, record important snippets of information, even log hours spent on...
Marc Hedlund at O'Reilly's (excellent) Radar site has a great comment about whether Google is hiding something:...the tone [of Google communications] just feels all wrong. It's akin to watching comedy from a foreign culture; you can see that the director...
From today's LA Times:More than 22,000 applicants took the state's real estate exam in April, nearly three times as many as in April 2003, according to the Department of Real Estate. To handle the surge, the department has rented six...
In almost two decades of email use, here are just some of the many email pathologies and phobias that I have encountered:People that cannot stop themselves from checking mail when the new message indicator comes on. I mean, literally: I...
There are many ways to keep good people. You can, for example, pay them more, give them more interesting projects, flatter them, promote then, or even stop treating them badly. As unpalatable and irritating as all those options might seem...
In statistical physics the hypotheses of ergodicity say, in essence, that everything that can happen will eventually happen. Given enough time and a system with different states, each of those states will eventually happen with equal overall frequency. So, is...
Chief:"What part did you miss?"Maxwell Smart: "Everything after, 'Now listen carefully...'" -- "Get Smart" (1965-1970)Just had the CEO of an early-stage company relate to me this blackly comedic venture capital anecdote. Young big-ego venture guy swaggers into a room late, tells...
Slashdot is running a silly piece about the likelihood of Google diseappearing in five years (or so wishes Microsoft's Steve Ballmer). While that's wildly unlikely, it did remind me of a great quote unearthed recently by management guru Tom Peters...
In case folks can't tell the from the number of posts, I'm back from New York and IDG's Syndicate conference. I'll have some comments on it later, but as always most of the more stimulating stuff happened in the hallways....
Pundit turned venture guy Stewart Alsop is apparently back. Having left NEA a while back after apparently not learning to be enough of an asshole to be a good VC, Dan Primack of PE Week Wire says Also has launched...
There is a sure-to-be much discussed article in VentureWire today about consumer-centric venture investing. While this is by no means the first piece to point out the newfound focus on consumers in venture capital, and I have discussed the idea...
Move over Bono & Elevation Partners: venture firm Enterprise Partners here in La Jolla has announced its buyout of Muze. The southern California venture firm has purchased Muze, arguably the largest source of meta-data about the entertainment industry. The company...
It is every venture investor's biggest fear: Saying no to the next Google. Leaving aside how distasteful I find that metaphor, insofar as it means being congenitally unable to say Yes to big risks with potentially big returns when the...
I had a typically fascinating chat with Jon Udell this morning at IDG Syndicate conference. We talked about Greasemonkey, structured blogging, public email, and Google as a federated operating system. Eavesdropping around me, however, it is like hearing pieces of...
One of the more bizarre phenonema in technology companies is when entrepreneurs and founders become so immersed in what they have that they don't know what they have. Put differently, sometimes founders don't realize that the cheap hack they did...
There is something of a fin du siecle gloom-fest going on in venture capital this week. Here is venture guy Promod Haque of Norwest in the current BusinessWeek:"Over the next five to ten years, I believe there are going to...
I want Amazon's A9 search engine to succeed. Because I like that Bezos & Co. are trying new things in search, ranging from an interesting interface to a pluggable architecture that supports syndication. But here's my problem: I never use...
I'm traveling x-country and back for IDG's Syndicate conference so postings may be a little spotty over next two days. Transporting carbon-based lifeforms long geographic distances is currently antithetical to remaining on the grid. As a sidenote, my panel is...
I spoke at length today with a very large (assets, not girth) private equity fund-of-funds manager. Among other things, we talked about the prospects for first-time venture funds and the flight to (perceived) quality among investors in venture funds. Appearances...
I saw PatentMojo a while back, but I didn't mention it because it came so close to being right that the fact that it was wrong pissed me off too much. But now I see that O'Reilly Radar has picked...
I'm not sure yet how to best use my Google history data, but I just had a look at my Google search stats so far in May. I had no idea that I use Google so much:That said, I apparently...
If you speak Alan Greenspan, and I reluctantly do, the following from a commencement speech of his at Wharton today is fairly easily parsed:I am surprised that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, so rapidly developed and enacted, has functioned as well as...
We have now put together a DVD of the first few episodes of my previously televised interviews with various entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, including Qualcomm chairman Irwin Jacobs and Enterprise Partners venture guy Bill Stensrud. If anyone would like a...
While this N.Y. Times piece is mostly about the writer's misadventures guest-hosting a conservative blog, it does contain a perceptive comment about pacing in blogs:The best bloggers develop hobbyhorses, shticks and catchphrases that they put into wider circulation. Creating your...
Best letter to the editor about BusinessWeek's recent overdone blogs-uber-alles cover article:I am a longtime subscriber to your magazine, and this is probably the only time I am sending a complaint. The headline on the cover is about blogs. You...
My favorite recent quote on the maybe-maybe-not real estate bubble goes to an L.A. Times Calendar columnist writing about the troubles with reality shows, and with The Bachelor contestants in particular:Charlie has done some acting too, but his primary profession...
From this week's Newsweek:As the winner of the second "Apprentice," Kelly Perdew should be in line for a top job in the Trump organization. But you'd never know that from his office...Perdew's desk is in a small, windowless space next...
Despite all the many RSS feeds to which I subscribe I still regularly scan a non-RSS scraped page I set up three years ago, one that doesn't even have an associated RSS feed. At www.kedrosky.com/stories.shtml I have a constantly updating...
James Fallows has an unintentionally (I think) funny piece in the weekend N.Y. Times where various folks alternately take credit for Ajax, or pretend that they invented it under another name earlier, or say that it doesn't really exist: CompanyWe...
Venture folks are fond of saying that they roll up their sleeves and work with portfolio companies. The reality is that, like most people, they'd rather not. As is superficially rational, they'd prefer to have a fully-formed company -- team,...
Okay, it's half-way through May so putting up an April most-read list may seem a little strange, but let's just say I have had a few weeks I wouldn't like to repeat. Nevertheless, here are the most-read items for last...
It was an Internet-wounding error not to include a remote-upgradeable spam protection product in Movable Type from the beginning. Spam-ridden, abandoned MT sites are metastasized cancers in the web that Google and its ilk must now route around, to their...
Some savvy comments from Silver Lake's Roger McNamee on the perceived decrease in the amount of innovation in the technology world. Granted, most readers of this blog immersed in the Web 2.0, Ajax, Greasemonkey, tagging & open source memes won't...
A headline from AP moments ago:TIGER WOODS MISSES FIRST CUT IN SEVEN YEARS - AP...
From a recent conversation:Me: Hey, you're doing a little light reading of the Economist [magazine]? Some Guy: Yes, I'm getting ready to go with the Peace Corps to Georgia. The country. Not the state. Me: Oh, that's great. Yes, the...
Smart people are wrong-headedly applauding a Canadian telecom regulator's decision this week in the nascent VoIP market. The CRTC has decided to cut the baby in half, announcing that the Canadian residential VoIP market will be unregulated for new VoIP...
Here is a quote from a Boston-based venture guy:[LAMP] is a new acronymn that I learned today. It stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP - all open source components that are eating away at Microsoft's value chain. That is...
Translate the following bit of financial columnist bloviation into normal English:It is near impossible to achieve positive results if the inputs to the process and perhaps the process itself are flawed or worse illegitimate.I'll start:Garbage in; garbage out....
While I'm not sure comparing yourself with a broken industry is a great idea, the following is courtesy of Fred Wilson: VCs and Record LabelsRags has a great post comparing and contrasting VCs and record labels....
Good mischief-making piece in today's L.A. Times on the investment practices of Nobel prizewinners:Experts Are at a Loss on Investing Nobel winners and top academics fumble the sorts of decisions Bush's Social Security overhaul plan would ask average Americans to...
One of the more Hobbesian choices faced by academic researchers with commercializable technologies is what they should do with them. While most money-minded people would say "Go out and make money from your invention", the reality is that most (but...
Recent readers of this site may not realize that last year I wrote an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal on the trouble with Tiger Woods: I argued he swings too hard. Without getting over-deeply into the data -- other...
Last night I sat through a lively & irreverent presentation by Martin Wood, CEO and founder of Delkin Devices. Among the highlights was his insistence that if I really wanted to understand Delkin's strategy in memory markets I needed to...
Just about anyone can get sucked into the blogging vortex, even management guru Tom Peters. While he had been posting prolifically to his blog for most of last year, he suddenly disappeared a few month back, only to reappear with...
I continue to see a remarkable number of interesting companies, technologies, and ideas in the messaging/email area. The market reminds me of search, circa 1998: The "smart money" thinks that the market is over, and investors turn up their nose...
From Metafilter:[There is a} growing gap between the really savvy web users and the plain old web users. For someone with a pimped up Firefox install, Greasemonkey, ad-blockers, flash blockers, spam filters and spyware free machines, the net is a...
A few people have asked for an mp3 version of Carl Icahn hectoring Blockbuster management on last week's conference call, so here it is....
attractive nuisance (n.): any inherently hazardous object or condition of property that can be expected to attract children to investigate or play (for example, construction sites and discarded large appliances)No self-respecting startup calls itself "the next Microsoft" any more. Matter...
While entrepreneurs have learned the perils of having more than a couple of venture capitalists on their boards -- too many eunuchs speculating about sex -- venture capitalists themselves are increasingly uneasy with over-large syndicates in their portfolio companies. Among...
Nivi expands nicely on my prior praise of Greasemonkey (in the context of Book Burro) as a venture-category wrecker and says the following:Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind) May 8, 2005 First, browsers that don’t...
Dan Primack of PE Week Wire puckishly suggests that Vonage has already lost the title of largest venture capital round of 2005: ... a new insurance brokerage named Imago Ltd. launched today with over $300 million in private equity funding...
Here is a puzzler: Why are there so many venture capital blogs? It is hard not to notice that there a host of such things out there, from Brad Feld's to Fred Wilson's, and everyone inbetween. Here are five possible...
One of the joys of ego feeds is that you find out that people you've never heard of are saying nasty (and occasionally nice) things about you. Consider this:There's a group of people I can't stand. The book world and...
Interesting AP article out that looks at offshoring from an unexpected angle, that of people in North America who hand off programming work to their offshore counterparts as they go home. Those folks, of course, tag it back early the...
In case folks hadn't noticed, I'm quoted in Matt Richtel's weekend NY Times piece on last week's announcement of a $200-million financing round for VoIP company Vonage. The gist: I put the round in context, pointing out that at its...
Great Bloomberg Markets article on the (usually) secretive Ken Griffin, founder of Chicago-based Citadel Investment Corp., among the most successful hedge funds on the planet:Citadel employs 72 Ph.D.s, including former mathematics professors and astrophysicists. They’re the heart of the firm’s...
Say what you will about Oracle CEO and founder Larry Ellison, but he gives good interview. This weekend's San Francisco Chronicle contains an exemplar example, with Mssr Ellison opining on life, Peoplesoft, romance novels, turning 60, giving advice to Steve...
It is a dream scenario for man-of-all-opinions, Mark Cuban: the billionaire investor-cum-entrepreneur-cum-jock-manque is the cover boy on this weekend's Barron's magazine.Wall Street Maverick Mark Cuban, who made almost $2 billion by selling his share of Broadcast.com a decade ago, seems...
In an attempt to demonstrate its relevance, the Magazine Publishers of America has put together a gallery of future magazine covers from publications like BusinessWeek, Fortune, Scientific American, Sports Illustrated, and so on. What is most interesting, at least to...
Company quarterly conference calls are usually boring affairs. It is the rare call indeed where you get something like the infamous moment when Enron's Jeffrey Skilling called a questioner an "asshole". Rarer still is when a billionaire major shareholder calls...
This IDG Syndicate Conference in New York May 17/18 is turning into a real coming out party for RSS. An overnight success that has been almost eight years in the making, it's fascinating how RSS and syndication technologies have demonstrably...
Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe. The second worst is that of the Asgoths of Crea. During a recitation by their poetmaster Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green...
Meetings are evil and loathsome, but Professor Bainbridge has nicely captured, mid-meeting, how interminable such things can become:"...a UCLA faculty meeting is not over when everything has been said, it is only over when everything has been said by everyone....
What is most aggravating about "what VCs want" talks and articles is how little useful information there is. If people in any other context kept writing the same article, or giving the same speech, over and over again someone would...
From an Information Week article on the resurgence of venture capital activity in Silicon Valley, there is something accidentally appropriate about someone pinning a 1999-style business plan to a restroom wall:Venture capitalist Ann Winblad's office sits on the edge of...
Big-footed WSJ technology columnist Walt Mossberg has a piece in Thursday's paper on RSS. While it's nice to see Walt bringing RSS to the masses, the article is a little disappointing. He does the obligatory "What's wrong with browsers", and...
A great and thoughtful post here from Michael Sabren, owner of Sabren Enterprises which runs the popular Cornerhost blog-hosting service. Michael has been through a difficult professional period, with support issues forcing him to temporarily close the door on new...
While somewhat self-congratulatory, this is a (perhaps unintentionally) mind-expanding quote from Microsoft's Bill Gates in a recent Seattle P-I interview:While discussing employee weblogs, Gates also talked about Microsoft's Channel 9 site: "A guy just goes around with a digital camera...
As usual, the WSJ has a nice graphical comparison of the last two Fed policy statements:...
SarbOx email compliance software company Orchestria may be in a boring business, but it's hot stuff, as the closing of its recent $21-million fourth round demonstrated:Though Orchestria positioned the round as a strategic one — seeking only investors with contacts...
Trudi: He said it's the first day of spring. Harris: Oh shit! Open season on the L.A. freeway! -- "L.A. Story" (1991)Spring has sprung, and like a scene out of the classic Steve Martin film "L.A. Story", the Los Angeles...
Humorist Gene Weingarten has a heartbreaking piece in the WashPost Magazine this weekend. In it he ably uses the observed balance of trade in Savoonga, Alaska, to show the essential tragedy of this Eskimo village's brutal collision with modernity:Back at...
Maybe it's just me, but you'd think in these gambling-mad times that an academic publication called the "Journal of Gambling Studies" would actually study gambling, or at least contain some interesting papers on probability. But apparently not:Treating Problem Gamblers: Working...
There is a fascinating survey in the current issue of CFO magazine wherein 300 chief financial officers rate their respective bosses' financial savvy. While CEOs are paying more attention these days, the results are still sobering. Almost one-in-five CFO respondents...
While most chatter in the popular press is about the prospects for a "super-spike" in oil prices, count on the Economist for a contrarian view:Julian West of CERA, an energy consultancy, has compiled a list of all of the oil...
From Warren Buffett's annual meeting this weekend:Another skit drawing laughter was a send-up of the Judge Judy show (starring Judge Judy). Mr. Buffett, as plaintiff, sued Mr. Gates for $2 he lost in a poker game. According to Mr. Buffett's...
