November 2006
There is a story floating around that U.S. financial firms have been warned of an al Qaeda cyber attack tomorrow (Friday). According to the story, the attack would be directed against banks and online stock trading firms. So, how have...
I use Yahoo's TV listings on a fairly regular basis to see what's on any particular night, and then I usually get distracted and don't get around to watching it. The nice thing about Yahoo's TV listings has been that...
My friends at CNBC are making major changes to their web presence for a December 4th relaunch. In addition to bringing on more journalistic talent, the business network is apparently set to introduce live and on-demand streaming (see a demo...
It's great that the Supreme Court is now pushing out same-day transcripts or oral arguments. As a result, we already have up a transcript for today's tete-a-tete (KSR INTERNATIONAL CO. v. TELEFLEX, INC., ET AL., No. 04-1350) concerning the so-called...
There is some fascinating data in a new comScore release comparing reach for various popular web services across PC and mobile platforms. Weather, sport, and email draw disproportionately on mobile (as would realtime parking data, if it were available there,...
I've written recently on the staggering increase in online spam, driven, in part, by Russian bot-nets doing micro-cap stock flogging, but seeing the numbers directly is stark stuff. According to Postini, unwanted email is now 91% of all email traffic,...
I'm guessing I'm not the only one who will think that this clip (remixed via Jumpcut from D7TV) of ever-ebullient venture guy Tim Draper dancing at the recent DFJ Schmoozefest event must have been a kind of David Brent homage:There...
Peter Thiel of global macro hedge fund Clarium Capital had an interesting comment in the weekend Barron's on the market's (until-recently) dampened volatility:Thiel: Our view is that volatility has been suppressed across all global markets as a result of the...
A just-released CIBC report makes the argument that water is the new oil. I have made the same case in various presentations lately -- the global water industry is larger and faster-growing than the global software biz -- so people...
Whoa, I like this: The city of Santa Monica has launched a web-based service displaying realtime parking space availability on a lot-by-lot basis for the shopping district . Link this to vehicle navigation systems and SMS and a whole bunch...
IAC Corp CEO Barry Diller thinks all Internet companies are overvalued: "We don't see anything big to buy. We think that prices right now for most things Internet ... are very overpriced at various stages from early capitalization to venture...
If you had to guess, what will the splits in the following breakout of venture investing look like ten years from now? While many think we'll see other regions grow markedly, I'll argue the VC share percentages by geography will...
From a new report on the Canadian telecom industry: In 2006's second-quarter wireless industry total profits for the first time exceeded those of conventional wireline telecommunications. ...
Okay, I have long argued that mobile porn is going to grow dramatically over the next few years -- a new report says it will grow from $1.4-billion to $3.3-billion by 2011 -- but I want to know who these...
Here are some of the best "skipping work" excuses hiring managers had heard, according to a recent survey. I'm particularly fond of the buffalo/game reserve excuse, but I've always been dramatic that way: 1) Employee was poisoned by his mother-in-law....
Heads up: I'm on CNBC's "On the Money" today at around 4:40pm PST talking Microsoft/Vista....
Okay, Wal-mart is seeing a same-store sales decline year-over-year while its web presence whiffed badly last week, and Amazon wants to abandon online commerce and be a provider of virtualization services -- S3, etc. -- to other companies. Can we...
Online and offline video are substitutes. What a non-surprise....
I mentioned it earlier in a round-up, but I really want to draw people's attention to Time's cover article this week. The magazine has done some very good work lately, and this week's cover is another example. It painstakingly gets...
It turns out that Sarbanes-Oxley regulations have an upside for more places than just securities lawyers, consultants, and London's AIM. It has also dramatically boosted the fortunes of UBM's PR Newswire division, which is now apparently set to be the...
Large companies appear to be jumping en masse onto the software-as-a-service bandwagon, according to a new survey of CIOs by management consultants McKinsey & Company. The survey found that 61% of North American companies with sales over $1 billion plan...
I'm briefly in Quebec City (brrrrr) late this week to speak at a conference, as well as in Toronto, Canada, the week following to speak at another event. I know I've mentioned both trips to a few people as possible...
I recently moderated a panel at Ventureforth's 4th annual entrepreneurship conference in San Diego. They do heroic work pulling these things together, and all I had to do was show up at the last minute and enjoy facilitating a conversation...
There is a worth-reading piece in today's San Diego U-T on the changing world of biotech, and the implications for everyone from venture capitalists to urban planners. The gist: Repurposing existing drugs is steadily more important than creating new ones,...
There are some predictable and irritatingly limp articles out there in the major press this week as Microsoft preps for this Thursday's initial rollout of Windows Vista. Of the two major pieces -- BusinessWeek's cover, and a WSJ feature --...
An interesting article in Monday's Times of London states the obvious, at least to us intermittent cynics. There is an excess of crappy companies among the crew that have raced overseas to AIM and avoidance of Sarbanes-Oxley. Specifically:Nearly two thirds...
The sole North America stop for Airbus's A380 super-jumbo jet as its does its marketing test flight around the world will come this Wednesday in Vancouver, BC. For those of you in the neighborhood, watch for the A380 to come...
While the stuff is sometimes unintentionally hilarious, there is a burgeoning academic industry in venture capital research -- and it's now and then worth a scan. The following papers have all recently appeared in academic journals (even if some of...
Here is what I need, so if someone has a solution I'd happily hear it: Take as input an arbitrary list of company URLs, and then deliver as output a list of locations for all the companies. I don't want...
Holidays, travel, and general over-busy-ness have conspired to keep me away, so some quick links to empty out my "to-do" box:Pricegrabber.com reports 45% y-o-y growth in holiday-shopping merchant referralsGoogle can't stop growing, and that scares some people (SJMN)People worry about...
As Rafat points out, CBS is reading too much into the recent ratings increases at Letterman and the Late Late Show. Nevertheless, it is still interesting to see how many viewers those shows' clip are getting on YouTube.While I'm doubtful...
There was an interesting press release out from Enterprise Partners here in La Jolla yesterday. It's not often you have a (relatively) young guy near the top of the Forbes Midas List of VC dealmakers retire from the business:William Stensrud...
An article in today's NY Times got me thinking: Should VCs have a dress code? The article cited a 2005 paper in the American Journal of Medicine that showed patients responded better (and confided more) to doctors dressed in traditional...
My friends at Flickr have just rolled out something very, very smart -- and potentially game-changing. They have released live meta-data about trends in the camera market based on what they are seeing in pictures uploaded at that popular photo-sharing...
Sad news. One my favorite film directors has died: Film director Robert Altman dies at 81 Altman, whose films include "The Player," "M*A*S*H," and "Nashville," revealed earlier this year that he had been the recipient of a heart transplant approximately...
Interesting seeing how Google's market capitalization has chased Microsoft's since Google's IPO. We have seemingly plateaued at a little under 60% for a year now, but any takers on bets with respect to how long that holds?...
A newsflash: Google stock topped $500 for the first time this morning. While it's just a number, it is a reminder that Google has been on a rocket ride since its August lows: The company's stock has soared from $370...
It is interesting watching the growing schism between each side of the "is venture capital broken?" debate. On the one side you have VCs saying that "something is rotten" and venture capital returns cannot recover without a new, hot sector...
When I see quotes like the following from senior scientists at Google I am reminded why it is inevitable that one day the company will be caught unawares by someone much smaller and nimbler:"Every time, they have maybe one small...
Many people are making much of a Dealogic stat out yesterday showing that 2006 is already the biggest year ever for global mergers & acquisitions. Sure, but there is a much more interesting nugget in the story, and it is...
According to the Consumer Electronics Association, here are the top five gadget gifts teens are looking for this year for Christmas:MP3 playerGaming systemPortable gaming deviceComputersCell phonesWhat I find most remarkable about this list is its sheer unremarkability. For all the...
I continue to find it remarkable how Microsoft's Bill Gates underestimates the importance of Google. Here is a quote from a weekend interview with BillG proving the point:[Google is] in this honeymoon phase of, Google can do anything at all...
I've been meaning to write about for some time, and now Joshua Jaffe has beaten me to it. One of the more entertaining aspects of the current venture capital ardor for All Things Consumer-centric is that they have no flipping...
While the financial media hasn't really paid this story the attention it deserves, one of the more important technology finance stories in 2006 may yet turn out to be botnet stock spam. Estimates vary, but it is possible that as...
A few things I've been meaning to mention, but am posting en masse instead:Was the wealth of nations determined in 1000 B.C.? (NBER)Private equity is now so big that even Ford and GM are buyout candidates (SF Bizjournal)U.S. commercial real...
There is a useful new CERA report out strongly critical of peak oil theory. Instead, the report's authors argue, technology advances mean we are set to see a near-doubling in oil supply by mid-century, and then an "undulating plateau", before...
Some worthwhile musings in the 50th anniversary issue of the New Scientist. It contains predictions from more than 70 scientists on the future of the future, etc....
This critical, internal Yahoo memo was being forwarded all over the place late yesterday, and made the WSJ this morning. The author is allegedly Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior V.P. I'm guessing this was written with full knowledge it would...
You can read the Universal Music Group lawsuit against MySpace here. While it isn't riveting reading, it is still fairly remarkable, not least because of UMG's heated rhetoric....
iSuppli has out its teardown of the PS3, and it contains some fascinating factoids:Sony is losing an astounding $306.85 to $241.35 in manufacturing and component costs per PS3, depending on the configurationCell processor costs are a rock-bottom $85In the entire...
It's too bad that Nichia, the dominant player in the high-performance blue-laser diode isn't public. The company and market is clearly capacity/yield squeezed, as evidenced by the short supply of PS3s (and Xboxes to a lesser degree). Someone, somewhere in...
My word of the day:hallucinoberry (n.): Hallucinations experienced by frequent Blackberry users wherein they look for email on any small, electronic geegaw. Example: "I had an embarrassing hallucinoberry today where I caught myself staring at my car's keyfob for 30...
There is a detailed and interesting new report out on online video (User Generated Video 2006 - 2007: Mania and Myth, AccuStream Media Research) with some fun factoids:User-generated video (UGV) will grow 50% year-over-year to 46-billion views in 2007YouTube and...
Late mention, but I'm on CNBC tonight around 4:40 PST. Check your local listings, etc....
Citi analyst Mark Mahaney posits that at its current growth rate Google will be the top trafficked site on the Net by late 2007. By then Google, in #4 position with 110-million monthly uniques across all properties, will have passed...
Some fascinating data out this morning from Greenwich Associates on the near ubiquity of equity derivatives among institutional investors: 81% trade single-stock options75% trade index options74% using ETFsTwo-thirds using index futuresThe single-stock options number is waaaay higher than I expected....
Coming up on Monday a fun Yi-Tan, especially considering the CRTC overruling on VOIP yesterday:Until recently, there hasn't really been an open phone. Now a few offers are on the way, including Trolltech's Greenphone and First International Computing's Neo1973.What, exactly,...
From the wires:SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has died at the age of 94, according to media reports Thursday. Friedman, one of the most influential economists of the past century, died last night, the Wall Street...
Lycos is reporting that "spyware" is the number one search term on that service this week. It coincides with my conviction that consumer interest continues to grow in anti-spyware tools, privacy protections, etc., as they become more concerned, rightly or...
Is there a global newspaper exchange-traded fund, or approximate equivalent? [Update] PowerShares' PBS doesn't do it, as it's a media ETF....
The IAB data yesterday is a good reminder that online advertising revenue growth is the real story in Web 2.0. Jason makes the same point here, and it's an argument I've been making in presentations for years. As the IAB...
From VC Ratings:...
A recent paper made the point that Google can be a fairly effective tool in medical diagnoses. My beef: The results could have been better, but the keywords used in the study weren't that great. Try for yourself and see...
I've written here many times about my current fondness for all things realtime, so I was intrigued to see that major Internet sites have begun to take up the fight. They are squabbling with the various U.S. exchanges about the...
An article in this morning's WSJ got me thinking: Where is the Norton Utilities of cell phones? The idea that SMS text remains on your cellphone for months -- even if deleted -- is an eye-opener. People might be surprised...
The following from a recent MIT lecture by Michael Yaffe on computational approaches to cancer is fascinating:If the distance between each DNA base pair were one foot apart, then each time a cell divided, it would have to copy 568...
David Cowan touches on something I haven't articulated very well, so thanks to him for making the points below:....the winning recipe today for aspiring entrepreneurs is GET BIG CHEAP. Don’t waste expensive development on untested ideas, and don’t let a...
I've being commenting a bunch here and in the Other Media on cycles in technology markets, whether in online video, Web 2.0, or elsewhere, and the word "bubble" keeps coming up, as if it's something bad. The word "bubble" has...
The WSJ takes a small business perspective on click fraud this morning, doing the usual anecdotal empiricism thing of citing a few small-business owners who think they have been the victim of fraudulent clicks. Perhaps more worrisome for the PPC...
For us map lovers, this news about a new feature in Google Earth is great stuff:This week the company will announce that it is adding 16 historic maps of six cities, including New York, London and Tokyo, from the collection...
The stock market basically flips between two states: fear and greed. If it isn't in one or the other, it's on the way from one to the other. When investors are at their most fearful it's generally time to buy,...
Here is my free business idea of the day. It would be straightforward to take Lifehacker's AIM BudgetBot and turn it into a more robust paid (or ad-supported) service for SMS-based budgeting and expense tracking. I hacked it myself into...
You have to love Roger McNamee. He a savvy, straightforward, and entrepreneurial investor who is smart, rich, and gives good quote. He has also created some of those most innovative investment vehicles in technology, like his current perfectly-timed Elevation Partners...
While comedian Jerry Seinfeld was talking at the Foursquare conference about the entertainment industry's skittishness about funding risky new programs, he might as well have been talking about the venture business:"I think of the entertainment industry and Detroit similarly," Mr....
Say, just for the sake of argument, that Web 2.0 is a bubble. If so, and assuming it one day pops, what public companies get hurt? I mishandled a variant of that question last night on CNBC, so I'm looking...
There is an interesting new StatsCan report out with useful data on all aspects of information technology, but one table in particular caught my eye. It is used to support the authors' argument that, contrary to received wisdom, paper consumption...
Google continues to blur the differences between email and IM with a new feature released tonight:Embarassment-reducing new message notifications Ever replied to a message only to find out that someone sent a better, smarter reply right before you? Now, if...
I've pushed this line anecdotally before, but never actually bothered to collect the data showing the inverse relationship between MBAs going into the brokerage business and the economic outlook:This year, some 37% of Harvard Business School's graduate found work on...
Apparently an Ontario musician posted the 16,777,215th comment on Slashdot last night, thus blowing up the comment table on the popular site. Slashdot has its comment index as an unsigned mediumint in MySQL, which maxes out at 2^24, thus putting...
Funny how these things go. For a while we all happy with disconnected apps, tools like Word, Powerpoint, Access, and Excel that were PC-only software. And then it was cool to discover online apps that could do many of the...
I'm live on CNBC's On the Money today at 4:30pm PST talking Web 2.0....
While I was in awe at the 50 marathons in 50 days that he just finished, I'm now flummoxed beyond words. Having completed running 50 marathons in a row by doing the NYC marathon, ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes is running home...
While I didn't see it, Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley did her annual State of the Internet preso at the Web 2.0 conference yesterday. The slides are online and worth a look....
Jacob Weisberg has a useful column up at at Slate on how last night's Democratic win represents the rise of the Lou Dobbs Democrats -- economist nationalists against free trade, globalization, and immigration policy -- which isn't exactly a good...
While many people are bemoaning the breakage of Moore's Law -- CPUs are no longer doubling performance every eighteen months -- there is an upside. Improvements in batter technology -- energy density in lithium ion has increased by 20-30% since...
The estimable Mikhail Parparita has updated his Gmail-enhancing Greasemonkey script with some of the stuff that other people have hacked into it. If you live in Gmail, like I do, this remain the must-have productivity add-on for Gmail. Highly recommended....
In case people hadn't played with it, Microsoft's adCenter Labs keyword forecasting tool is good fun. Another example of how trends in keyword prices are useful to more people than advertisers....
Web 2.0 Summit and related meetings in San Francisco are really cutting into posting frequency here. Thanks, by the way, to people who attended my session on Enterprise 2.0 yesterday. We had a good set of panelists (Ross from Socialtext,...
Because I know it will come up in the workshop this morning, here is a link to my recent presentation on Enterprise 2.0: Sheer Hype by Desperate Men....
I've haven't abandoned my gripe about having my laptop searched by Canada Customs officials when cross the Canada-U.S. border a month ago. I was interviewed about it last week by CBC radio in Canada, and the story ran this morning....
From a new report, here, by mode of transport, are the percentages of Canadians who called their work commute the most pleasurable part their of their day:Bicycle commuters: 19% (used by 1% of commuters)Car commuters: 2% (used by 81% of...
I'm in and out of the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week. This morning I am running a workshop/panel on Enterprise 2.0....
Dan Primack at Thomson has launched PE Hub, a blog-centric locus for all things private equity from a Thomson perspective. I like it -- which is no surprise, given that I've always liked Dan's perspective on things. My sole criticism:...
Having now used the new Gmail mobile Java applet for a while, I've more or less gone back to the old HTML interface on my Treo phone. Here's why:The new interface is faster when running, but it's slower to launch.The...
I missed this on Friday, but venture guy Peter Rip of Leapfrog has hopped over to Crosslink Capital. An anonymous emailer forwarded me a note about it, to which he appended some straight-outta-Valleywag snark. Yeesh, you people are cynical, cynical,...
You probably have to be a real fan/hater of magician David Blaine to snicker at this "David Blaine" video as much as I did, but if you are one or the other, it's highly recommended....
Most of the media attention in today's New York City Marathon was on cyclist Lance Armstrong, who ran a 2:59.36. That is a very impressive result, especially considering that a) it was his first marathon, b) he weighs 20 pounds...
I flew over west Texas around 1pm today, 34,000 feet over booming places like Monahans and Wickett, on the way back from a (very fast) trip from San Diego to Tampa. While passing over I saw some lines I had...
From a post at Gizmodo, the price per mL of various fluids -- with crude oil at the bottom, and HP black ink #45 for printer cartridges waaaaay out in front:...
This new book in the "For Dummies" series of books -- called Hedge Funds for Dummies -- is more or less self-parodying, but it's still fun to put up the cover: I'm particularly fond of the blurb in the top-left...
There are lots of ways to read the news that Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund, historically the "axe" on Microsoft, is leaving the firm and looking to get into money management (read: hedge funds). One straight up view is that...
Why is there no Google-equivalent (admittedly a local thingie) for search my call logs on my cellphone? I constantly find myself trying to call back people who called me, and the only thing I can typically remember is that it...
As an entirely unrelated part of another recent project I was messing around with a list of stock tickers. So, some quiz questions. As always, highlight after the question mark on each line to see the answer:Which first-letter is most...
The "Microsoft may exit China" story yesterday should never have gotten an as much uncritical media play as it did. All it would have taken was spending a little time reading conference transcripts (which I did) at the Internet Governance...
While the FT has said Google's YouTube is "frantic" as it works out media rights with copyright owners, the WSJ has countered by saying that YouTube is merely finding it a "slog". Inquiring media minds want to know: Who's right?...
In yet another case of "invest where I say, not where I do", this story from today's WSJ. It seems that most managers of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) don't, you know, actually invest in exchange-traded funds. F'rinstance: At State Street, none...
I was talking to someone yesterday about Larry and Sergey of Google and we both realized something: This was sooooooo inside baseball. While we thought those two were well known, they almost certainly completely unknown in popular culture, certainly compared...
The FT has chosen a strange word -- "frantic" -- to characterize Google's ongoing negotiations with media companies about YouTube. While that may be, there is nothing in the piece to warrant such a description, just more text about how...
A little while ago Golf Digest published its list of the best golfers among CEOs of publicly-traded companies in the U.S. Being the data junkie that I am I did the only reasonable thing: I checked to see if there...
The culmination of a nifty robotics course at UC San Diego is a contest tonight. Nate Delson's students have built LegoMegablocks-assembling robots that will study an existing LegoMegablocks-configuration, and then try to recreate it in the shortest time possible. Should...
I'm on CNBC's "On the Money" program today around 4:30pm talking about Microsoft in China. Check your local listings, etc....
Been meaning to mention this for a while, but PowerShares has launched what it's calling a private equity ETF. In essence, the holdings are a basket of companies that tend to invest in or hold private companies. It's an interesting...
Only in adult online services sites can you find massive, profitable, fast-growing companies that are shunned by venture capitalists. Adultfriendfinder is a case in point (and one that came up in a recent conversation with the ever-interesting Markus), with a...
I more or less live in Google's Gmail service, so I'm delighted to see that Google engineers have juiced up the mobile version with a Java applet. But here is the problem: Said applet doesn't get recognized on my phone,...
It's nice that Charles River Ventures is getting some press for offering loans to early-stage companies, but this is more of a marketing exercise than a financial one. Most venture firms have been offering convertible notes for ages -- yes,...
No-one does screencasts quite like Jon Udell, and in a new installment he "visits", virtually speaking, with Avi Bryant of portfolio company Dabble DB. It's nicely done, with Jon having a typically thoughtful take on the role of newfangled, data-centric...
