June 2005
This is such an interesting factoid from the San Jose Business Journal and the Bureau of the Census. Detroit is no longer in the ten largest cities in the U.S., having been surpassed by San Jose:San Jose passed Detroit in...
Not to rain on a new fund's parade, but to the extent that newly-closed $100-mm fund "RSS Investors" follows a strict investment mandate of chasing RSS opportunities it will be tough. While there are few hard and fast rules in...
While a venture capital guy saying that the venture business is a dud is a little like a grocery store owner warning others against opening their own stores -- it's arguably self-serving -- the quotes from Greylock Partners' Bill Helman...
Yesterday's Financial Times contains an interesting article on location-based technologies -- geo-visualization, to be jargon precise -- and their use in archaeology and retail. The core of the piece is a recounting of one fellow's search for Ulysses' Ithaca via...
Some would-be phishers have a clever new idea. Rather than pretending to be from your bank and sending you an email asking you to click through and confirm account details, they are pretending to be from a magazine whose mailing...
David Hornik of August Capital has taken a shot at the titleholder, Marc Canter, of most active conference-goer on the planet -- and conceded that the title is still Marc's to keep. Hey, it was worth a shot, but Marc's...
There is a thought-provoking article in Tennis Magazine about Roger Federer's rise to his current dominant position in professional tennis. While it's a good piece on its tennis merits, many of the points made have much broader applicability, including Federer's...
There is an over-the-top essay-length rant in the current Philadelphia Magazine about the evils of MBAs and, specifically, Wharton's biz school. It contains some juicy anecdotes, but I'm not sure it moves the ball far on the whole discussion of...
One of the problems with attending conferences like the current Where 2.0 is being buttonholed by smart and interesting people with great early-stage projects. Why is it a problem? Because while I'm fascinated with what people are doing I want...
Joe Kraus makes a point today that I have been irritating people with repeatedly in recent speeches: It has become radically less expensive to be an entrepreneur. His factors underlying the change mirror my own, and they are:1) Hardware is...
Fixed up my little hack for manipulating Feedburner's API. Click here to visit a page that does a better job of helping you set up an RSS feed to receive Feedburner statistics for your site. As always, if it doesn't...
From a panelist on a geolocation panel moments ago:"Looking for WiFi hotspots is a bourgeois activity [and then realizing people were laughing at the idea] ... and so is driving directions for that matter." While that might or might not...
John Hanke, founder of Keyhole (now part of Google), just did something in his Where 2.0 presentation that I think was a software first: He apologized for having created a binary-installed app (Google Earth) as opposed to a web app....
Here are two things most people demonstrably don't get about user-generated content in Web 2.0: It doesn't work if it feels like work.For the general population to embrace it needs to skew toward drive-by data.Too many of the current Web...
The WSJ has a classic third-column piece on the front page of today's paper. It is on the bizarro technology-denying behavior of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services boffins who, for reasons lost in the yellow-papered past, insist that fingerprints expire,...
I'm generally fond of my (already-scuffed) Treo 650, but I'm frustrated as heck that Verizon has apparently made it impossible to send photos as attachments to email messages. While that was possible with the Treo 600, the 650 defaults to...
I like Ajax-y online email app Oddpost, and was a paying subscriber before it was purchased by Yahoo, so apparently I'm going to get to play with the new Yahoo/Oddpost beta ... but I have a confession to make: I...
Tomorrow (Wednesday) and Thursday I'll be at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco. If any readers are around and would like to hook up send me a note and let's see what we can do. I'm fascinated by the...
Netsift, a firm that was a pre-seed awardee of the Center that I run here in San Diego, was purchased yesterday by Cisco. Was about twelve months from company creation to exit, which is far from typical for an early-stage...
William ("Bill") Elfers, founder of venture firm Greylock, has died. He was 87. Having worked for General Georges Doriot at the original venture capital firm, American Research & Development, Elfers went on to create Greylock, an innovative firm that emphasized...
There is a nice factoid buried in this piece on venture capital in the current BusinessWeek. The article is nominally about the supposed excess of venture money out there, but the more interesting aspect is some discussion mid-way down about...
From a piece in EE Time today suggesting that any phffft-ing of global house prices would have a nasty effect on semiconductor markets:[The analyst] cited an article in The Economist and reported that the total value of residential property in...
Whenever I first visit someone's house I can't stop myself from shelf-surfing. What books do you have? What CDs? It's not me being nosy -- okay, it is -- but it's something I can help myself from doing. I love...
Here is a snippet from the great Scalia dissent on the muddled CableCo Supreme Court ruling this morning. He is differing on the lawyering by the majority whereby they convince themselves that cable companies are not offering telecommunications services:The Court...
For better or worse, the Supreme Court decision in favor of the cablecos is an important one, at least as interesting and important as the Grokster loss today. Read it....
This news is so interesting. As John Battelle points out, the further that Google goes down this path the more content creators you are eventually going to see abandon the nasty closed world of broadcast and cable quasi-monopolies. Consider, for...
InformationWeek has a useful piece about the continuing struggles over Bill S.786 and the National Weather Service's provision of free meteorological data. This sort of tussle, the piece rightly points out, is historically predictable:Efforts to control public information that profits...
Wistfully funny Tom Shales piece on Jerry Seinfeld's continuing comedic success in the weekend WashPost:And why do we always see, in all these [terrorist training] films, terrorists training on monkey bars? Is it expected that eventually a crucial battle is...
CERA has a contrarian take on oil markets in a new report out this past week. It says that oil supply will outstrip demand for the rest of the decade:Despite current fears that oil will soon “run out,” global oil...
There were two typically entertaining McNealy notes struck during a lengthy and combative interview by the S.F. Chronicle with Sun CEO Scott McNealy. First, we have McNealy on his own blog:Q: I was told that Sun was going to set...
Speaking as someone with a last name that people insist on messing up, I have sympathy for people with tricky surnames. But that said, PartyPoker's Anurag Dikshit has a prize-winner of a family name, to the point that every newspaper...
Typically wacky anecdote from Joel Achenbach in this weekend's WashPost about having once been at a dinner party with Alan Greenspan:I walked up and asked, point-blank, if he had the power to order me to take the cash out of...
... Tom Peters has a great set of PPT slides on the subject up from a talk he is giving today to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) in Toronto. Good confrontational stuff, including this scathing quote from Jeffrey Pfeffer:"There...
Have had a few people ask if I'm at Gnomedex conference this week, and the answer is no. Had originally thought I might go, but scheduling issues intervened as a result of all my recent travel. I will, however, be...
The ever-quotable Tim O'Reilly is fond of saying that in Web 2.0 "data is the Intel inside". He is right, but I think his forward-looking phrase is set to become inverted. To start at the start, Tim's (correct) point is...
For those of you interested in such things, I have re-activated my custom RSS feed containing daily price trends in the hard-drive market at various size breakpoints. You can access the feed here, but note that the feed no longer...
I am amused by Larry Ellison's decision to hire Greg Maffei and give him the title of President. For those of you keeping score at home, that makes three people that hold the title of President at Oracle: Maffei, Safra...
There was a wonderfully bizarre moment in a conference call earlier this week. An analyst thought that he had been cut off during the Ameritrade/TD Waterhouse merger call, and Ameritrade CEO Joe Moglia said that was not the case --...
People are making unduly much of Microsoft's announcement tomorrow that it is extending RSS to support other forms of information beyond news. Is it really a revelation to people than you can and should be thinking about RSS for more...
Charlie Wood, ex- V.P. Enterprise Solutions at Newsgator, has set up a new RSS company called Spanning Partners....
I had a conversation last week where we agreed on something that I hadn't thought about before: The bloggers we both liked best were people who spent most of their time doing other things than blog. They find a few...
Some fascinating papers being presented here in San Diego at this week's IEEE CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) conference. Am hoping to pop by tomorrow to geek out for a bit on the latest work in this hot area....
In reading about the venture funding of Sypherlink I'm intrigued by its data-sharing technology. Sounds overly heroic to me, but I like idea of building tools for extracting implict meta-data and sharing across enterprise systems, plus monitoring for key information...
People might want to check in on the discussion about firing a few MBA professors. Good and informed back-and-forth about the future of business schools....
Cliche-watch: Every once in a while I realize I'm thoroughly tired of a phrase. That moment has come with "If so-and-so has his way". The phrase has become an all-purpose segue in articles, with the author setting up a straw...
Too many people are investing based on current Brent Crude prices, so clean tech venture investing has become the flavor of the fortnight. In today's NY Times there is a solid Gary Rivlin piece on the current VC ardor for...
Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Associated Press late today that Google is not going to compete directly with PayPal. But it was a somewhat tricksy denial, with Schmidt saying that Google won't tread on PayPal's turf, saying, "[Google does]...
I'm fascinated by Viacom's decision to buy Neopets, the wildly popular online synthesis of Pokemon and Sim City. And I'm equally fascinated by how few people are seemingly paying attention. Here we have one of the most successful pieces of...
Tim O'Reilly is attending a directors' program at Stanford Law School where Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway fame apparently delivered this very nice (apocryphal) story:After winning the Nobel prize, Max Planck went around Germany giving talks. His chauffeur heard the...
There is a money quote in a story on The Deal today that adds color to something a large LP guy said to me recently about institutions and their appetite for the venture capital asset class. The piece is about...
Here is a helpful and self-serving rule for anyone pitching a wireless startup and looking for venture money: Don't yammer (overly) about the size of the ringtone market.Depending on the audience, it is either an unnecessary factoid that everyone knows,...
While Feedburner has launched an awareness API, the folks there have not yet given users a way to subscribe via RSS/Atom to your own traffic data. The absence bugged me enough that I wrote a little script so that you...
The current Fortune magazine contains an interesting interview with Microsoft's Ray Ozzie and Bill Gates. The subject is the trouble with email, which validates a point I have made here a number of times lately: Email is still the undiscovered...
Outgoing Yale School of Management Dean Jeff Garten has some sensible comments on why M.B.A. schools are failing. He's right in what he says below, but I have zero hope anything will change:Q. Are you a critic of how your...
I disagree heartily with Bloglines' founder Mark Fletcher's recent post saying that stealth startups suck. They don't suck, and matter of fact, they are downright rational. Mark argues his case along multiple superficially-compelling dimensions: First mover advantage is important. Fair...
In case folks haven't noticed, there is a meaty Sarbanes-Oxley debate going on in the comments to my post earlier this week where I cited Greg Mankiw saying that SarbOx needs work. Worth reading....
Here is KP venture guy Joe Lacob on why telecom venture investing sucks:This is going to be a decade of opportunities, and I would say that you ought to hire some healthcare partners and spread your risk a little bit....
Assuming chatter about Google's plan to launch a PayPay-like payment service is correct, it is seismic stuff. It will transform the payment business, making eBay a near-term short. After all, PayPal represents something like 25% of eBay's revenue, and at...
Some people are seemingly, ahem, bowled over by their Treo 650s....
While many people are getting giddy about Steve Jobs' recent Stanford convocation speech, and while I'm not an uncritical Lance Armstrong fan, I found this excerpt from Dan Coyle's new book about the cancer-survivor and six-time Tour de France-winning cyclist...
I added a command to Yubnub. You can now enter "SEC [company]" and get back the results of a search of recent company financial filings. For example, "SEC Amerindo" gets back some fun stuff....
Yesterday I was skimming through David Kaplan's excellent "Silicon Boys" while looking for good venture capital anecdotes for an upcoming talk, and I was stopped dead by this typically spot-on Scott McNealy comment on John Doerr of KP: McNealy, the...
Ace venture capital commentator Dan Primack is away from his usual daily seat at PE Week Wire, so Bart Schachter of Blueprint Ventures is guesting this morning. While Bart's column is worth reading on its own merit, part-way down he...
The folks at Feedburner announced an "awareness" API yesterday, with which there are plenty of interesting things you can do. As a general note, it is worthwhile thinking about why people want others to know a little about their subscriber...
I'm elevating the following from a comment to my earlier post about Rep. Randy Cunningham's apparent skill in choosing real estate agents: Another Senator with an amazing real estate agent."Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) made $822,000 last year from the sale...
Yubnub is a lovely idea: an Internet command line. Check it out and see what you think -- already find myself thinking of things that I need to turn into Yubnub commands. [From Scott White]...
When the first explorers came to North America you could have apparently clubbed cod to death with paddles from small boats. By the late 1990s, however, northwestern Atlantic cod populations had collapsed by more than 95% of maximum historical biomass;...
Wish it were possible to see this live query scroller somewhere else other than Google's lobby. Always stops me cold when I visit there. Originally uploaded by Stewart....
I have gone through a number of phases in my use of online travel sites. In my first phase I used Expedia for pretty much everything. It worked, provided decent prices and a good selection of options, and it meant...
Entertaining essay from scifi writer Bruce Sterling in the Sierra Club's magazine's first ever technology issue. In effect, he argues that technology has helped get us into our current environmental problems, and it can help get us out:Even our civilization’s...
Can cell phones help you stop smoking? The answer is yes, at least according to the results of a study Robyn Whittaker of University of Auckland is going to present Wednesday here in San Diego. Nifty idea:The STOMP (STOp smoking...
There is an unintentionally funny paper on venture capital in the current issue of the (oxymoronically-named) journal Entrepreneurship Theory & Practise. The paper, titled, "When do venture capital firms learn from their portfolio companies?", looks at the following:Relying primarily on...
Rep. Randy Cunningham apparently has the best real estate broker in California. He sold his Del Mar, California, house in November of 2003 for a tidy $1,675,000. A month later, however, the person who bought the house from Cunningham put...
Well, there is apparently more than one unintended consequence of Sarbanes-Oxley. Along with making it more difficult to hire board members, and more expensive to be public, and more difficult to do an IPO, it has done something else:The law...
This U.S. Supreme Court patent decision today will be big news for those financing early-stage life sciences companies:Merck v. Integra, 545 U. S. ___ (2005). In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court has set aside the Federal Circuit’s holding —...
The new (and clunky-named) book from John Hagel and John Seely Brown is out and getting good reviews. Called "The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialisation", the book argues that the recent ardor...
A piece from today's FT on how hedge fund partnerships are not good for strategy could very well have been written about large venture partnerships:The chief executive of Man Group, the world's largest quoted hedge fund manager, said the partnership...
This morning Andrew Willis of the Toronto Globe & Mail touches on something I have mentioned here before: the death of geography in venture capital. He uses a report from Fusion Capital to make the argument in Canada, where it...
Jon Friedman of MarketWatch is apparently looking to build pageviews. While Jon is an able analyst of all things media, he has pulled a John Dvorak in tomorrow's column by nakedly trying to be the only guy on the other...
I've become more of a re-reader of books lately than a reader of books. I don't always have the patience to wait new books out to see if they are good when there are so many other books that I...
Just felt the shake, rattle, and roll of a decent-sized earthquake. According to this USGS site, it was a magnitude 5.6 quake centered not far from Palm Springs, roughly 55 miles northeast of here in La Jolla....
In an interview with CFO Magazine, Greg Mankiw makes some pleasingly frank comments:On stock options...On the stock-options issue, were you surprised that expensing was delayed again?I'm of the view that eventually stock options should be expensed. But to me the...
I'm in the taxi in San Diego and back from my latest travels -- and I'm cooked. Exhausted. Depleted. Travel should be less onerous in rest of June. All I have is Where 2.0, and a private one-day search-related technology/finance...
Jason Calacanis has some worthwhile stats up (go 2/3s of the way down) on how reader contributions are key to some Weblogs, Inc., sites:AdJab is getting half a comment to every post. Cinematical is getting 2.3 comments to every post....
I'm surprised if succession planning at venture firm KP is really as coherent as this piece makes it out to be. While I'm impressed that KP partners are at least doing some scenario-style thinking about firm futures, I bet this...
The Financial Times has a Lex column arguing that LPs are set to turn in favor of venture investing and away (a little) from their current ardor for buyout. While I agree, in general, it does gloss some important issues,...
Too many venture investors end up turning wrongly contrarian after looking anecdotally backward and noticing that there is (seemingly) little rhyme nor reason in which portfolio companies end up being successful. They find examples of companies that succeeded despite a...
From the SD U-T's weather blog:Yesterday's thermometer at Lindbergh Field was very compact. The high was 65, and the low was 62. Shades of L.A. Story, nothing changes in SoCal weather: "Next weather in four days"....
Engadget is pushing the rumor that Yahoo is buying Skype. While I have heard this before (and with other Skype suitors named too, of course), the Skype acquisition chatter seems to be growing again:It’s sort of early in the game...
While I don't usually link to press conferences (and I have to confess I didn't know conferences even had pre-event press conferences), this one with Nat and Tim talking about the upcoming Where 2.0 O'Reilly event is worthwhile reading on...
Lexis-Nexis apparently thinks it can build a business around helping companies categorize unstructured text:LexisNexis ... today announced the launch of a new taxonomy program that allows companies to license proprietary LexisNexis® taxonomies and access expert consulting services ... A team...
There is something syntactically symmetrical about Steven-Johnson-Jon-Stewart, but rather than getting hung up on that it is more fun reading Steve "Everything Bad is Good for You" Johnson blog his appearance last night on Jon Stewart's Daily Show:Doing an interview...
I'm airport-bound again, off and traveling thru Saturday. I'm sure I'll still post, but the frequency may be erratic. Side note: Have received notes from a number of people buying non-PC software too. In answer to the questions about which...
Okay, maybe "ever" is too strong, but in cultural dumpster-diving at Amazon earlier tonight I ran across the following elliptical review-cum-parable about a Modest Mouse CD:Bill Clinton Should keep his pants on, June 6, 2005The other day when I got...
Angels fall like rain and love is all of heaven away Inside you the time moves and she don't fade The ghost in you she don't fade -- "Ghost in You", Psychedelic Furs (from Mirror Moves -- 1990) Okay, the...
With this great piece Seth Godin officially becomes the new Tom Peters (especially because I disagree with him fairly violently in places):Today, little companies often make more money than big companies. Little churches grow faster than worldwide ones. Little jets...
From an IBF conference speech by Mike Moritz of Sequoia about the vagaries of hiring people (courtesy of BusinessWeek):"We're very bad at being able to predict human performance ... We never thought we'd wind up in business with a CEO...
Neat duelling stats in the booming external storage market (from IDC):Year-over-year revenue growth: 6.7% (to $3.8-billion)Year-over-year capacity growth: 58.6% (to 409 petabytes in Q1)...
A sizable part of my talk at the CVCA conference last week was about the elephant in the venture capital living room. There is, I argued, something big and important and dangerous (to some) that almost always goes unsaid in...
Novadaq, a life sciences portfolio company at Ventures West, the venture firm where I spend a chunk of my time, filed for a small initial public offering today. The company is broadly in the area of an imaging platform for...
David Beisel asks a good question: Where are all the angel investor bloggers? While I've written before about the surprising (at least to me) number of venture bloggers, that number doesn't include angels, of which I can think of, well,...
The following is adapted from a joke recently told at a buyout conference:A successful venture capitalist who has spent most his life making money and living at the ethical edge dies and goes to heaven. He knew it was going...
When I read this fascinating Gary Rivlin piece on the upward angst of so many Valley entrepreneurs, it felt vaguely surreal, like I was reading the treatment for a technology-centric cross between Grease and Saturday Night Fever. Before getting to...
A column by Chad Waite of OVP in the current Venture Capital Journal combined with some post-presentation conversations after my talk at last week's CVCA event got me thinking. And here is my conclusion: I think a lot of venture...
If you travel at all and you're anything like me you probably have an overstuffed backpack containing your laptop and some books you're currently attempting to read. The set changes all the time, with some books moving from backpack to...
Ray Lane makes some good points about venture investing and the evolution of the enterprise software category in this BusinessWeek interview, but I think the following comment was the most useful one in understanding the venture business itself:Q: You mention...
The U.S. Federal government is set to roll-out some big changes to its Geodata site, including grass-roots marketplaces for geographical data:Version 2, will also introduce a new marketplace capability, according to Leslie Armstrong, deputy staff director for the Federal Geographic...
According to a new study out in the Journal of the American Medical Association, U.S. physicians are evil venture-fund-loving money-grubbers. Okay, the study doesn't say precisely that, but it implies it strongly, mischievously pointing out that remarkably high numbers of...
In yet more "Paul speaking" news, on Friday morning I'm talking at the Canadian Venture Capital Association annual conference in idyllic Quebec City. The subject is the future of venture capital. I will be publicly wrestling Big Questions to the...
From the Inc magazine site:The Chicago Sun-Times announced yesterday that it would no longer publish stock tables in its print edition. Instead, the paper plans to "beef up" its Web-based coverage of the markets, including more investment tools. While many...
Just for interest, I'm speaking at 1pm today at the NCIIA's "Invention to Venture: Life Sciences" conference in Boston. The topic is building teams in early-stage life sciences companies....
Almost every week lately I hear from teams thinking of raising a new venture fund. While that newfound ardor speaks volumes in itself, it is remarkable how people who think themselves adept at figuring out whether a potential portfolio company...
So far in my low-rent, small-sample study into the percentage of everyday people that are visible to Google the answer is even lower than I expected. I have spoken to eight people: two cab-drivers, a lawyer, two students, a cashier,...
There is a fascinating new "small world" study out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It looks at small world phenomena in the context of global air transportation i.e, which cities are most central, and which cities...
Dealazon is a nifty use of Amazon's API combined with RSS. Yo Charlene, you might want to have a look....
