February 2007
While it wasn't quite what I was expecting -- I'll put up my own set of slides on venture capital from a deep science perspective someday soon -- this is still a highly useful presentation on venture capital by Gilman...
Lest anyone think all venture firms are the same, here are some interesting comments from a Kodiak-based venture guy on how the culture there differs from the one at Battery: Angel Mehta: Tell me how the cultures at Battery and...
This is a strange story. Ex-analyst Steve Milunovich, who turned would-be hedge fund manager in October of 2005 has now decided to move into public relations. After his hedge fund couldn't raise money he returned to Merrill in February of...
When it comes to stock markets, they ain't got a thing if they ain't got that (volatility) swing. Traders are near giddy at the arrival of a little up/down movement in major markets, as this Bloomberg piece shows: "Non-volatile, docile...
If you're interested in doing some financial writing, Schaeffer's Investment Research may be looking for you. Check out the job listing here....
Charles River started a much-ballyhooed $250,000 venture loan program late last year, and here are the first stats for it:Number of applicants: 1,400Number of funded companies: 6Interestingly, at least for a smaller and supposedly more democratic program, those are very...
Adobe definitely seems to have the wind at its back these days, with its Flash technology ubiquitous in web video. That edge was reinforced yesterday with a widely-loved unveiling of the company's Apollo technology at the Engage event yesterday. The...
It seems clear that while the market was going to do a deep drop yesterday anyway, the tumble was exacerbated by technology troubles on the NYSE. Specifically, a Dow Jones computer that feeds updated index prices got behind on all...
If you're in the mood to watch what's happening in Asian markets tonight, Yahoo has the best live ticker of what's happening on the major Asian indices. While Shanghai's up slightly, the rest are down anywhere from 2.7 to 6%...
Whoa, sorry about the market decline. If I had known that spending the day in meetings and on airplanes and generally incommunicado would make the markets tumble like this, I would have stayed on blog sentry and posted reassuring thoughts....
Okay, Microsoft's Ray Ozzie comments at the Goldman Sachs technology investment conference in Las Vegas today got me thinking: How do you invest around data center construction? Because here is Ozzie:In order to continue to seek advantage over Google in...
Some selected slides from a recent workshop I did on the future of IT investing:...
It is car-crash fascinating -- and very sad -- watching professional cycling die in realtime. The main cause remains blood doping, but the recent troubles are tied to a Spanish investigation last year that implicated many top riders -- some...
From a new study by VentureOne / E&Y:[VentureOne via Rob Day]...
My friend Rohit Shukla of Los Angeles-based Larta has an entertainingly multisyllabic attack on Silicon Valley envy:....by its very nature innovation is a dynamic and sometimes frustratingly unpredictable set of constructs along a long and winding road. Silicon Valley was,...
Given that a $45-billion sale of TXU to private equity firms Texas Pacific and KKR is apparently a done deal, it's worth thinking about some of the consequences. For starters, while this is a big deal, it isn't yet the...
I'm often asked what single book I'd recommend startup founders read. Until now, I didn't have a good answer, but now I do: the recently-released "Founders at Work" is great. It is the best read for startup CEOs (now and...
I just love this finding from a new Federal Reserve study. It confirms all my favorite cynical and utterly non-empirical beliefs about traders' reading skills:Our results suggest that market participants might be focusing irrationally on the headline number, as opposed...
I somehow missed it until now, but there was a puffy profile of Battery Ventures valley guy Roger Lee in the Merc last Wednesday. Whatever Roger's and Battery's merits, and they are undoubtedly many, this late-'90s-ish piece doesn't do much...
There is an entertainingly combative interview with big-toothed financial advice-dispenser Suze Orman in this weekend's NY Times magazine. Go read the whole thing, it's short, but here are a couple of snippets:Are you married? I'm in a relationship with life....
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column at TheStreet/RealMoney:Markets get screwy on rounded headline numbers in news releases (FRB) Smaller universities are significantly upping their endowment allocation to hedge funds and private equity...
Steve Jurvetson took a nice picture of the public kickoff of EntrepreneurshipWeekUSA at Stanford Saturday. I'm not in it -- I was already in a car to San Jose Airport after a prior non-public session -- but imagine my smiling...
Interesting how two pieces in the last couple of days have used Mark Zuckerberg and his supposed will-he-won't-he-sell dilemma over Facebook as a jumping-off point to natter about Valley "bubble fear" and general tech-finance giddiness.See below:"Silicon Valley whiz kids grapple...
While traditional tech entrepreneurship boosters over-fixate on how the Valley does it, folks (like me) interested in getting good early-stage science out of labs sometimes over-fixate on how Stanford University does it. Is it culture? Permissiveness? Local capital? Role models?...
The following are my slides from a presentation today in Portland on the outlook for angel investing. It includes some misuse of a picture of Ram Shriram, plus the story of Edgar B. Davis, and a little trouble-making musing about...
Paul Saffo has a typically insightful comment up on how blogs, MySpace, and the like will lead to future trouble for many of their users, especially teenagers who forget that the peccadilloes to which they e-confess last forever on the...
Chrysler Chief Exec Tom LaSorda sent an email to employees yesterday about the ongoing speculation concerning the troubled auto company's future. It was typically evasive pay-no-attention-to-the-discussions-behind-the-curtain biz speak. So, I thought I'd do the usual, and bring MS Word's auto-summarize...
This should come as no surprise, but never underestimate the perpetual pining for the fjords among major media companies -- but not among advertisers -- hoping that this whole Interweb/iPod/YouTube stuff is a fad. The following is a little on...
Geek-out interesting lecture coming up in La Jolla on March 15 at UC San Diego campus:...the "Basic Sciences" lecture will be presented March 15 by Dr. Hirotugu Akaike, a statistician from the Institute for Statistical Mathematics in Tokyo. In the...
There are many myths in the venture business -- I alluded previously to the myth of U.S. VC value add -- but I was reminded of another one today. The myth? That access to money matters.Here is some drive-by proof,...
Google has submitted filings (prospectus plus supplement) about its initial test of its transferable stock option (TSO) program. The idea, you'll recall, is to give employees with vested stock options a new alternative with respect to making money from vested...
I love all the Google Apps skeptics here on this site, as well as here and here. As most readers of this site will know, I'm no tireless Google booster, having criticized the company many times, but I do believe...
Interestingly, JBLU stock has traded over the last few days in line with the scenario I described earlier here. There was a first-day drop on Tuesday, followed by a snapback rally on Wednesday. We'll see whether we close with further...
While there is plenty in tonight's Google Apps announcement to give Microsoft fits -- what sane small- or medium-sized business would still install Office/Exchange? -- for now I'm just looking at price and Gmail storage. The new pricing? $50 for...
Jon Friedman at Marketwatch thinks Conde Nast doesn't need to launch Porfolio as it already has the best business magazine in America: Wired. Interesting take, and one sure to delight Chris A.[Marketwatch via Dealbreaker]...
I'm on a binge of speaking trips over the next few weeks, so things here may be a little slow and/or erratic. It's up to Portland today for a keynote at the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network tomorrow, and then Stanford on...
The VC quote du jour goes to Lucinda Stewart of Seattle-based OVP:"The last time we fought for a deal was 2004." [via PEWeekWire]...
JetBlue's new Customer Bill of Rights is fun reading. Everything hinges on a "controllable irrregularity", which is never defined. What the hell is that? Assuming it means "anything in our control", that almost certainly means that all those people crowing...
On a quasi-social note, I had a nice oceanside breakfast here in La Jolla today with Barry "Big Picture" Ritholtz. He is a smart financial blogger, as well as an all-around good guy. Read his stuff, if you're not doing...
Some fascinating stuff in a Bloomberg article on how corn farms have replaced New York lofts as hot property:Price increase y-o-y of crop land in Idaho/Indiana: 35%/16%Price increase y-o-y of Manhattan lofts: 12%U.S. farmland area decrease 1981-2001: 9.6-million acresIt's partly...
Just fyi: I'm on CNBC at 4pm PST talking about some airline whose name starts with "J". Sorry. Really....
As a point of minor historical context, it's worth noting that the last time a major airline held a significant number of passengers hostage in a snowstorm was January 3, 1999. The offending airline was Northwest, and it happened in...
While this could rapidly get overdone and turn JetBlue stock into a buy, the airline's share price has unsurprisingly fallen out of a tree at the opening today, off a little less than 7% -- or about $150m in market...
My current usage-based tag cloud from Google Reader:...
I am highly fond of Mike McDerment's Freshbooks web-ified re-do of the invoicing app category, and I want the same thing in accounting apps. But I've looked, looked, and looked some more and ... nothing.Where the hell is the Freshbooks...
One story behind the XM/Sirius merger announced today is how much money -- perhaps a half-billion or more -- the two companies spent trying to differentiate themselves in the minds of radio consumers. Other than to a rabid few, the...
Not to make this All JetBlue, All the Time, but I'm interested in how the stock market reacted last week to the developing problems at JetBlue. If you look at the five-day chart, the stock had been down in the...
Everyone is rightly complaining about how little ongoing information there has been from JetBlue about its troubles. To a perhaps naive way of thinking, it seems like a classic opportunity (one right out of Scoble/Israel's Naked Conversations text) to use...
Given the ongoing meltdown at airline JetBlue -- with people trapped in airplanes, terminals, and generally adrift in the system after a complete system meltdown -- the following defaced logo emailed to me tonight seems awfully appropriate:...
Digression-filled but interesting video of Google's Larry Page's keynote from AAAS in San Francisco last week:...
Here is a sneak peek at my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet/RealMoney:Toyota's journey to world auto domination (NY Times) Hyundai is leading the pack of suitors for Chrysler (Times) GM cuts $600-million off ad spending (Ad Age) Parched...
I feel a little like I'm fighting a firehose lately, but here is another attempt to empty my exploding inbox o' stuff that people have sent me, as well as a few things I've run into myself:A profile of Jim...
Great profile of Yale's David Swensen in the Sunday NY Times. Almost certainly among the best portfolio managers alive, Yale's Swensen has turned in consistent best-in-class returns managing Yale's endowment -- 22% in 2006 alone -- despite it growing from...
Some very sad news in venture capital: Todd Brooks, formerly of Mayfield and Jafco, died Thursday of an apparent suicide attempt. He was 46 years old, and had a wife and three children. I only met Todd once, so I...
Some new research from Quixel shows how LCD panel hypergrowth continues -- and how revenue is holding up despite falling prices. The latter is largely a function of the people's shift to ever-higher panel sizes in the face of falling...
There is a common view out there that prediction markets, like TradeSports, require sports betting to work. If true, that would hurt many people experimenting in this area, from weather on outward. But Stanford's Eric Zitzewitz begs to differ:Just to...
The weekend WSJ has a tick-tock on Apple's deal for iPhone with Cingular. Some highlights: Cingular's CEO only saw the iPhone for the first time two weeks before launch, and Steve Jobs seemingly didn't let him touch itOnly three Cingular...
Some funky data in a small-sample new survey of people's mobile TV interests on a per-country basis:India is the leading consumer of comedy clipsIn Germany and England the most watched mobile TV programs are weather reportsSpanish mobile TV viewership is...
I have to confess that I think there's pretty much zero chance that current rumors of GM buying Chrysler are correct. While I understand the superficial attraction -- getting a broken asset for a low price while shrinking supply to...
I'm on the record as saying that Microsoft's Vista is set to disappoint, but there is another view floating around out there. It is best captured in a note this morning by Microsoft axe Rick Sherlund of Goldman Sachs. In...
My OpEd in this week's Wall Street Journal arguing that Vista is flopping turns out to have been awfully timely. During an analyst briefing in Redmond today Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer guided analysts lower on the outlook for sales of...
There is a lengthy and interesting new profile out of Google founder Sergey Brin. Published in a Jewish politics & culture magazine, you learn about how Brin thinks anti-semitism has popped up in his Wikipedia profile, and about how his...
Some people apparently spent a snowy Valentine's Day inside of JetBlue planes at JFK Airport in New York:JetBlue Airways tried to calm a barrage of criticism after passengers on several planes at a New York airport were left waiting on...
Like Mike, I make it about two paras into this major Yahoo restructuring announcement before serious MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) sets in over all the corporate speak. Oye.As usual in these important cases -- and this is a major...
Rumors are flying that we will soon see price lists for additional Gmail storage. If true, color me gleeful:Now that Google's Gmail is open for everyone worldwide, free of charge, Google's Sergey Brin has been rumored to have said that...
Peter Rip has a funny (and painfully familiar) comment about the near-inevitable "Oh shit" moment that comes at the first board meeting of a newly-financed early-stage company:One of the 'truths' of the VC business is the "Oh Shit" board meeting....
In a 24-hour period today we had two upscale (or at least offbeat) demonstrations of Sudoku solvers. On the one hand we had D-Wave showing off how $20-million worth of venture capital had produced a prototype quantum computer that could...
Market researcher iSuppli argues in a new white paper that you can trade the SOX semiconductor index based on some two industry parameters that it collects. Specifically, it points to its excess inventory index and its pricing power index. More...
Some things hiding in my inbox, links, reader, and elsewhere:BlogPulse's daily list of top videos/news/blogs posts, etc. (BlogPulse)The Stanford Global Technology Summit is imminent and interesting (Stanford)HardtoFind800Numbers (via ResourceShelf)The New Yorker Conference / 2012 (New Yorker)My Yahoo-beats-Google-in-2007 stock pick is...
Okay, people have to stop launching these rich, weather-related sites. I just about missed a plane while gazing lustfully at the new NOAAWatch page. Oooooh....
Worth reading piece by Gilman Louie at Alsop Louie on what he calls the "Web 2.0" myth. While I mostly agree, I think it's also somewhat over-general in a rapidly-changing media market, not to mention having a whiff of post-YouTube...
Quick tech question: Why are there no style sheets in Excel for graphs? Drives me flipping crazy recreating my preferred appearance every darn time....
Surprisingly (at least to me) lopsided results so far in a WSJ survey of people's feelings wrt checking email during business meetings:This strikes me as unrealistic and "do what I say, not what I do", but I'm curious what people...
Heard in a meeting recently while discussing a venture investment syndicate:Ah, you speak of the legend of U.S. VC value add....
A quick heads up: I'm in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal talking search, Vista, and the future of MSFT.[Update] The column is here....
Mike Arrington has up a tough post on the troubles at VC-backed Filmloop. It alleges that the company's minority VC backers forced a sale on the cash-burning company, despite it having millions on the balance sheet. Evil, evil, evil. Right?Well,...
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. -- Richard Feynman, Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger AccidentWhile physicist Richard Feynman was talking about NASA's unwillingness to face...
Funny Altucher/Stockpickr "system" for trading blizzards. The upshot: BUY: If there are 5 inches of snowfall in Central Park in the prior 24 hours to the open, then buy the open.SELL: At the close the same day...
For those of you interested in tracking such things, I'm on CNBC tonight at 4pm PST. Subject is blizzards and trading the weather....
Interesting stuff in a new international mobile survey:People in these emerging economies considered themselves to be much more proficient with mobile technology than respondents in more developed regions such as North America and Western Europe73 percent of users in Latin...
As a longtime Treo user the new Blackberry 8800's physical appearance is awfully familiar: Stubby Treo antenna aside, the 8800 is a near keyboard clone of the Treo 700. The non-iPhone smartphone market is apparently converging on something approaching a...
There is lots of partner tribalism in venture capital, but one worth noting is the schism between pickers and pokers. Most IT investors think biotech investors are "mere" pickers. In other words, to the extent said biotech VCs are successful...
Startup.com is a classic of its rare kind, an inside look at the genesis and collapse of an over-funded startup, govWorks.com. I saw it years ago when it first came out, and loved it in a car crash kinda way....
Here is a sneak peak at some of the links from my weekly column over at TheStreet/RealMoney:Calpers complains loudly about hedge fund fees: Why pay for average market risk? (Bloomberg) Rock-star Bono's investment empire (Bloomberg Markets) The history and importance...
More people are joining the crusade to pay for Gmail, if that means more storage. This time it's Jason Calacanis who is waving his credit card around hopefully:Right now I'd like to give Google my credit care and pay $10...
I have an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal about Steve Jobs' supposed embrace of life without digital rights management....
An apples and oranges comparison, some might think, but less so than you might imagine: I see that in the last few weeks Wordpress's reach (ed., all the usual Alexaholic disclaimers apply) has caught Digg's, passed it, and and stayed...
For those of you interested in all things Microsoft, I note that as of today Microsoft stock has been down seven trading days in a row, dating right back to the consumer Vista launch. By way of comparison, that is...
While I know diddly about football, I was fascinated by a new academic paper out analyzing Superbowl XLI using matching price changes from a Tradesports futures contract on the game result. The most interesting part? The way it turns common...
Some very funny stuff in a Mark Gilbert column today on Bloomberg wherein he explains most of modern finance using "two cows" metaphors. Maybe you have to be a finance geek, but he had me laughing hard:Leveraged Buyouts You have...
While it's nice to see people not treating Google as inviolable, color me a natural-language search skeptic. Leaving aside how insanely difficult that problem is, and leaving aside that people who know the Parc technology that Powerset has licensed say...
Unsettling article in today's WSJ on the continuing rise of the luxury pied-a-terre. More and more high-end apartment units in Manhattan (and elsewhere) are owned by wealthy people who don't live there, and only ever visit maybe a few weeks...
Apparently not everyone likes the Google Kool-Aid: The two founders of dMarc, a radio ad insertion company acquired by Google almost a year ago for $102-million, have left the company. The gist is apparently that they didn't like Google's automated,...
Speculation is that the denial of service attack this week on the some of the Internet's root servers was carried out by a botnet of a million or more zombie computers. Fascinating stuff.[via EETimes]...
While Y2K was a bust, there are a lot of people more credibly nervous about the unanticipated consequences of the change in daylight savings time coming up on March 11th. With DST moved forward four weeks in the U.S., courtesy...
Warner Music's Edgar Bronfman had some strong words for Apple CEO Steve Jobs during an earnings conference call today:... let me discuss a couple of issues that have been in the news recently, interoperability and digital rights management, or DRM....
I'm on CNBC tonight around 4:40 or so talking Apple, Steve Jobs, DRM, etc. I also have an editorial in the weekend Wall Street Journal....
Josh Jaffe is doing some more parsing of the Sequoia LP list to be found in the recent Google/YouTube filing, and he comes up with some surprising names:Among the recipients was NBC newsman Forrest Sawyer, who received 170 Google shares,...
This will come as a surprise to many of its critics, but Rupert Murdoch says that cable business network CNBC isn't friendly enough to business. His soon-to-be-launched business network will, the suggestion seems to be, redress that failing.obDisclosure: I'm a...
The folks at Dabble DB have up a provocative post wondering at why databases have traditionally been so unimaginative about data: I’ve always found it strange that databases are so unimaginative whenit comes to data types: text, numbers, dates, times,...
Google has just filed some great data with the SEC on its deal for YouTube. We get to see all the selling shareholders, from angels to VCs to insiders, as well as the returns reaped by YouTube's giggly co-founders, Steve...
Why do so many incompetent senior execs fail so successfully upward? While there are a bunch of recent public examples, I've seen a few private ones lately too:The phenomenon is most common in the business world, where the typical scenario...
All this discussion about New York banning cell phones and iPods from crosswalks is overdue. I hate when those damn things are lying in crosswalks; while they make a satisfying crunching sound, it's hard on low-profile tires. So, why stop...
One of my favorite quirky investment books is Calculated Bets, a comp sci professor's journey through coming up with a working computation model for betting on the jai alai market. While it's nominally about jai alai-related issues, much of the...
If it's true that Google is about to being charging for Google Apps for your domain, does that mean we will finally be able to get more storage? Inquiring minds -- and holders of 75% full Gmail boxes -- want...
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has a 1,870-word missive up on the Apple site calling for music companies to eliminate digital rights management. For those of you without the time and patience to read the whole darn thing, here, courtesy of...
Lots of people keep sending me links to this story, so I might as well put a link here. This NY Times story today is one of the strange things I have ever read....
Interesting upcoming iSuppli webinar:Automotive Infotainment Market Enters Disruptive PhaseFebruary 6, 2007The three most popular consumer electronics products used in automobiles now are mobile phones, navigation devices and MP3 players. Motorists are moving away from traditional automotive entertainment electronics such as CD players...
Some fascinating data in a Hollywood Reporter piece today, including that CNN leads the way in online news, as well as that it streamed 600-million videos in 2006 (including 67-million around Saddam Hussein's execution alone). By way of context, the...
"People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network, but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet."[Gary McGraw via Jon Udell]...
Things were just getting going for telecom, and Cisco in particular, and a bunch of people are thinking that maybe this is, at least for now, as good as it gets. As a Bloomberg piece points out, analysts are pulling...
Two fascinating MIT Technology Review pieces are out about great work being done by researchers at UC San Diego here in La Jolla:A foldable fluidic lens that could bring telephoto to camera phones (MIT TR)The first complete -- and freely...
Some remarkable growth stats on U.K.-based Flirtomatic, a ... flirting service:There were 13m wap page impressions in January, up 3x on December levels and 10x on NovemberIn January over 40% of Flirtomatic’s usage came from mobile users on the wap...
Roger Ehrenberg has up the best post you have read on Microsoft this year. He cuts through the crap on Vista, being appropriately cutting about its supposed merits, as well as about BillG's inability to sell them. Meanwhile he puts...
Check this: Two South Korean computer programmers have been arrested on suspicion of sending out 1.6 billion spam e-mail messages in violation of the country's commerce laws, Reuters reports.The two men, one aged 20 and the other 26, are suspected...
Rosencrantz: It didn't have to be obscene. I was prepared. But it's this, is it? No enigma... no dignity, nothing classical or poetic... only this, a comic pornographer and a rabble of prostitutes.Player: You should have caught us in better...
I've been calling for some time here for some more interesting companies in the general area of weather, traffic, etc. With that in mind, I was intrigued -- and more than a little envious, weather porn guy that I am...
You can fill in your own joke at news that some heretofor IT venture investors have funded a company that does advertising on dry-cleaner hangers. I have to confess, however, that I'm impressed at how ballsy this is. Could you...
The percentage of companies guiding earnings higher is at multi-year lows:[via Tickersense]...
Fascinating stuff from iSuppli on the current LCD panel price freefall:Despite Production Cuts, Large-Sized LCD Panel Prices PlungeFebruary 5, 2007A major slowdown in demand for large-sized TFT-LCDs in December for all applications -- televisions, monitors and notebooks -- triggered a faster-than-expected fall...
The WSJ highlights a controversial data point about the U.S. residential real estate market. It turns out that the that percentage of vacant homes for sale in the U.S. is at its highest level in four decades, with the national...
I just realized that it's become more or less universal in the U.S. to play Kool & the Gang's "Celebration " during airplane boarding. I hadn't even noticed its ubiquity until recently, just that there was always annoying music playing...
schadentraffic:defn: the vicarious thrill you get while in your office surfing various traffic webcams around the country and taking pleasure at all the poor bastards still sitting in their cars...
Purely anecdotal empiricism at a funky time of year -- the list is full of tax software -- but it's at least worth noting that after taking up four spots late last week in Amazon's list of best-selling shrink-wrapped software,...
A few intrepid spelunkers of Google Docs have seemingly found that a Google-delivered presentation tool is nigh. Assuming so, that completes Google's free, hosted suite of anti-office apps, with Gmail/GCalendar, Writely, Google Spreadsheet, and, now, GooPoint (or "Presently" as Google...
Gristmill, like many of the enviro-bloggers I scan, is incensed about the ever-screwy priorities of elected pols given the President's budgetary demands to be tabled on Monday:I don't know about you guys, but sometimes writing about this stufffeels like a...
Here is a sneak peak at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet/RealMoney: Comprehensive coverage of Superbowl ads (AdAge) Percentage of S&P 500 companies missing earnings consensus highest since October 2005 (Ticker Sense) Research: Cross-sectional implications...
I have repeatedly been forwarded alleged excerpts from an email Dell CEO Michael Dell apparently sent to employees last Friday, but skeptical fellow that I am I had not posted the confused-seeming letter. I've now seen it in two papers,...
Some companies do a great job of putting together package for board meetings -- it's empirical, concise, and focused on measures that matter and that can be influenced -- while other companies leave their boards more confused after the meeting...
The future of online communities can be found in sports sites:Given that the BubbleGen demographic--15 to 25--is the sweet spot for sports advertising targets, it was only a matter of time before Time came over to the dark side. BubbleGen...
Funny vid here of Lindsey at Wallstrip doing a random street interview and not recognizing my man Dylan Radigan, host extraordinaire at CNBC. While amusing, I wonder how long it will be until this sort of thing is more common;...
Apparently the American Enterprise Institute hopes the PayPerPost model will work in writing about climate change:Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major...
Since first (!) achieving profitability back in 2002 online retailer Amazon's gross margins have mostly gone one direction: down. It's been a bumpy and unpleasant ride, with just-announced margins the lowest full-year figures since the company's fiscal 2001. Operating income...
Some news today for we info junkies: Google says free streaming realtime quotes are getting closer, with it supporting today's NASDAQ filing asking for same (as well as a similar proposal previously submitted by the NYSE). In a quick read...
In a post today Brad reminds me of something that I've been telling too many entrepreneurs lately: I am not your target market. If your product is perfectly geared for someone like me, then, in a word, you're screwed. Blessedly,...
For those of you, like me, counting the days until the inevitable "Zune flop" stories start appearing in the previously fawning business press, two tidbits for you:Microsoft exec Bryan Lee from J Allard's group who oversaw the launch is leaving...
Sorry, but I love this story: Apparently Microsoft's Windows Vista has a huge speech recognition security hole whereby you email it MP3s that ask it to delete files, empty the trash, and so on. There's productivity for you, because that...
For those you interested in Paul-watching -- or complaining about Paul-watchers -- I'm on CNBC tonight at 4:10 talking about Michael Dell and the post-Rollins prognosis for the HP-embattled Dell.[Updated] Video is here....
If any top-tier VC was going to fund sex toys, you had to know it would be the kids at DFJ (or least them one-step removed):JimmyJane, a startup looking to become the Montblanc of vibrating sex toys, late last year...
When is the last time this happened? So far this earnings season all reporting telecom companies have beaten earnings consensus. That's astounding. [via Ticker Sense]...
