Posts tagged business

35 posts

What Venture Capitalists say

Guy Kawasaki writes a nice little bit about VCs (some of my best friends are VCs) and about entrepreneurs. It rings very true to me. Here’s some of what he says:

“Venture capitalists are simple people: we’ve either decided to invest, and we are convincing ourselves that our gut is right (aka, “due diligence”) or there’s not a chance in hell. While we may be simple, we’re not necessarily forthcoming, so if you think it’s hard to get a “yes” out of venture capitalist, you should try to get a conclusive “no.””

“Alas, entrepreneurs are also simple people: If they don’t hear a conclusive “no,” they assume the answer is yes.” (From “Let the good times roll by Guy Kawasaki“

Read the whole thing. It’s well written, humorous and contains some really good advice!

Technorati Tags: vc

Why is everything free?

Have you noticed how man how many new apps that have appeared of late are available free of charge?

Web 2.0 services like gada.be or flickr or del.icio.us. And more conventional client apps like Firefox? The list is approximately infinite. They come and go at an amazing rate. And they are all free.

Not only are they free, users seem to expect them to be free. I am not sure how this came to be…

Is it a unintended consequence of the open source philosophy? Is it a incorrect reframing of the fact that major and well known services like google and yahoo are (...

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Thinking about business models

Inquisitor is a really cool program that augments the search box in Safari (which for you heathens out there is the default Mac OS X web browser.) It’s kind of hard to explain just what it does – it’s kind of a magical word completion thingie that guesses, based on other searches and who knows what else, what you are going to search for.

But I am not writing about Inquisitor, although I recommend it highly. Here’s a post by it’s author, Dave, who is trying to figure out how or whether he can make some money with his creation.

“Why am I considering pay-per-download? Well, one advantage is that it’s far easier to do than a full-blown regi...

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Microsoft blogging: “What do managers do…”

I often cite Microsoft as an example of corporate blogging that seems to really works: If you work with, for, against Microsoft (and who in the computer industry doesn’t do one of those?) Microsoft Bloggers will give you a view into Microsoft’s thinking, attitude, plans and challenges that is incredibly valuable.

You (generally) won’t learn any trade secrets. You will hear what you might have heard if you ran into this or that Microsoftie in a Starbucks or at a conference. But few people do.

Exhibit #1 is a recent post by Steven Sinofsky, a very senior Microsoft manager, about how Microsoft thinks about...

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Interesting article about Open Source in the Financial Times

And in classic Blogosphere form, you can find a report on the report from Nicole-Ann Boyer on World Changing, where she says:

“With the FT riding high as the world’s best daily for the business intelligentsia, take heed large organization types: if you ever needed a piece to put in front your boss’s nose and add credibility to some of your open source ideas, this should help.” (from World Changing)

She goes on to comment and link to some especially interesting parts of the FT Special Report.

I guess that makes this post a report on the report on the report. Can anyone spell **e-c-h-o-c-h-a-m-b-e-r?

**

Technorati Tags: dangillmor, opensource

Really good article about the music business

Robin Good points to: “The Myth of The Rock Star and of the Need To Sing-up For a Major Recording Label”:

“Music” does not equal “compact disc”. Music is data. It doesn’t matter whether you burn it to a CD or rip it to an iPod or a Memory Stick or store it on your hard drive. It’s still music.

**Take a minute to internalize this concept. **

Once you get past the notion that music has to come in the form of a shiny little Frisbee that retails for $16.99 at your local MegaSuperMusicPavilion, certain other truths tha...

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Who will buy Skype, and why…

Robert Cringely has a relatively little known quasi blog, for some reason on www.pbs.org. The stuff is generally very good, and little noted.

Given Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Teleo, this recent post about Skype is interesting and timely:

Expect Skype to be sold, another viral marketing success sucked up by big business. Expect it to go to either a major broadband provider or, more likely, to a big mobile carrier with no fixed telephone assets. And whoever buys Skype, expect them to throw money into making the company into even more of a multinat...

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Business opportunities in blogville?

All software has bugs, no doubt. So pulling out one story to make a point isn’t really fair. (Especially recalling the story about stones and glass houses.)

But if I looked I know I could find story after story, including some that I could write from first hand experience, about the terrible rough edges on all the software on which our much beloved blogosphere runs. And from that observation and those stories comes the premise of this post. Here’s one of the stories:

“It all started two weeks ago when I undertook the “drop-in” upgrade from Movable Type 3.14 to 3.17. Well, “drop-in” is not really the word. I had made some changes to my server configuration that I thought...

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Distributed network of service providers

Not computer service providers, but folks like carpenters and plumbers….

I came across ServiceMagic, which is a pretty cool site for locating and hiring people to work on projects around the house. I needed three doors repaired and on a lark I posted the project on this site. I had a phone call in 5 minutes, and 2 more within the hour. I chose one of them to come by and give me a free estimate in 2 days.

So that’s pretty impressive, considering usually you don’t even get a call back. Now lets see the quality of the service!

Technorati Tags: home, useful, recommended

Good stuff from Paul Graham

If you work with software developers you’ll appreciate these two pieces by Paul Graham, author of Hackers and Painters, a book that I also recommend heartily.

He always has interesting things to say:

“I once claimed that nerds were unpopular in secondary school mainly because they had better things to do than work full-time at being popular. Some said I was just telling people what they wanted to hear. Well, I’m now about to do that in a spectacular way: I think undergraduates are undervalued.” (From “Hiring is obsolete“)

I also came across this ...

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VC: Rumors of its demise are probably premature

Not that I’m an expert or anything…

In the last few days there have been several articles about the problems in High Tech Venture Capital. One particularly interesting one was in the New York Times on Sunday talked about the exodus of recently minted venture capitalists from the business:

“We can’t really have people learning on the job anymore,” Mr. Kramlich said. Two-thirds of the partners who were at N.E.A. in 1997 are no longer at the firm, he said, and then cited an internal study that went a long way in explaining why: the surviving third accounted for 85 percent of the firm’s profit.” (...

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IBM Patent Benevolence?

Doc comments with grudging admirationthat IBM has decided to give away some parts of their much vaunted patent portfolio. One interesting tidbit is that in addition to being responsible for the most patents granted annually, IBM is also the leader in the most patents allowed to expire annually.

Why? Because keeping all those patents current is very costly, and if there is no economic benefit to having those patents, that’s a lot of money down the shute.

So maybe some clever strategist/marketer (difference?) probably realized that the PR value of open sourcing these worthless patents might actually be the most valuable of all!

RSS Feed Advertising

From News.com, about Kaboodle BrightAds RSS **On Monday, the company introduced a self-service system that lets online publishers pair advertising with their RSS feeds. Called BrightAds RSS (after the technology format known as Really Simple Syndication), the service takes advantage of Kanoodle’s keyword advertising system to match Web content to relevant ads. Once a publisher signs up, an advertising link will piggyback on its syndicated feed sent to third-party news readers.

Echo’s of the Google Toolbar debate? It sounds like Kanoodle BrightAds RSS will create and host RSS feeds for their customers, and intersperse Ads in the feeds. I am not sure this is a good idea, but I suppose it was inevitable**.

The question is, will the inserted ads be distinguishable so that an aggregator could strip them out?

VCs and Aggregators

An interesting article in News.Com: As the number of blogs, news services and other syndicated sources of online information balloons, a new crop of start-ups has emerged promising to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

Very relevant to BlogBridge, of course.

“Pure Entrepreneurship” article in tbe Boston Globe

“Pure Entrepeneurs”, according to this article in the Boston Globe, ***… are loopy and obsessed. They have a vision of the future, and while others are casting their lines into the water to see what will bite, pure entrepreneurs are jumping over the gunwales and swimming after the white whale.

Pure entrepreneurship, by my definition, is often driven by a belief that a major shift is coming — and thus it’s hard to find customers who already understand that they need the product a pure entrepreneur is developing.*

You know the funny thing that my wife pointed out? For me, being called “loopy and obsessed” high praise**!

Gmail, Part Deux: Strategy

So what might GMail’s strategy be? I listened to a wonderful Podcast with Georges Harik all about GMail and some of the thinking about it. If you are interested in GMail, it’s a worthwhile listen. I noticed that Georges kept referring to GMail as providing great email and communications capabilities. An interesting and fine distinction to be stressing, although the interviewer never referred to it.

Another interesting strategic point that was covered was the question of providing free POP and SMTP, which is certainly counterintuitive if you believe that GMail is being made to make money, and the only w...

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Free Coffee and Bad Marketing

First the punchline: go to this link, fill out a short questionaire, and receive a $15 Starbucks gift card in the mail, no questions asked. But hurry, because I wouldn’t be surprised if that offer evaporates quickly. Here is one of those cool “internet effects.” There’s a site called DealNewswhere you can immediate reports of interesting offers, coupons, deals, etc. They are posted there by I don’t know who – people without a life. They also have an RSS Feedfor you BlogBridgeusers. That’s how I found out about the offer.

Anyway, ...

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Coding as Writing

If you read this blog at all, you know that I’ve been working on a piece of software (BlogBridge) which at this point I am pretty excited about, even though I don’t know where it will go or end up. I was recently interviewed about my work by Scott Kirsner (of the Boston Globe) who writes the @Large Column. I don’t know whether or when he will write an article, but the questions he asked made me think a bit about what I was doing, and particularlyy the way I have chosen to go about it.

I have purposely decided not to try and raise capital to fund this proje...

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Why Improv didn’t succeed, Part Deux

Seems like a dredged up some “old” (you know who you are) Improv fans with my earlier posting, so I thought an additional comment or two might be in order. First off, lest it be misunderstood, in no way do I feel anything but totally proud about Imrpov as a concept and a product. I hope it is not inconsistent to feel that way, and yet agree that for a variety of reason it was not successful, as a product.

The concept of an alternative (not replacement) for a spreadsheet for real financial modeling is, I think, quite sound. (Yes, I can do page layout in Microsoft Word, but if that’s my purpose, PageMaker is better. You could make an analogous poin...

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Why Improv didn’t succeed

It’s been a while. Which is why my heart beat just a little faster when I read a reference to Improv (not altogether flattering) in the Adam Bossworth pieceI just wrote about, where he said:

*** Consider the spreadsheet**. It is a protean, sloppy, plastic, flexible medium that is, ironically, the despair of all accountants and auditors because it is virtually impossible to reliably understand a truly complex and rich spreadsheet.

Lotus corporation (now IBM), filled with Harvard MBA’s and PhD’s in CS from MIT, built Improv. Improv set out “to fix all this”. It was an auditors dream. It provided rarified heights of abstraction, for...

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eBay to assist in setting BlogBridge Price

So, some day we will consider BlogBridgecomplete enough to actually be worth a few bucks. But the question is, how much? I’ve said many times, that even if every single cool idea I have is perfectly realized that the most one could expect is maybe $20 or $30 per copy. But even that is a lot. So, here’s a thought. Let the market decide.

What we plan to do is to offer a limited number (say 10) of perpetual BlogBridge licenses on eBay with an opening bid of $1 and no reserve. And see what happens. Depending on how it goes we could offer twice that number of licenses an opening bid equal to the average price the first batch went for. And so ...

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XP SP2 Shows Why Microsoft Is A Great Company

I’ve said (and believe) that there’s no other company on earth that has the capability to develop, debug, beta test, deliver software on a massive scale like Microsoft. The number of configurations (both legal and illegal) of hardware, system sofyware, application software, languages, etc that XP has to be tested against totally boggles the mind.

I truly believe that not IBM, Apple, BEA, Oracle or any of them have the capability to do this at the scale Microsoft does it.

This at some level is a key competitive advantage and provides them the monopoly lock-in that they enjoy. So when that capability ceases to be a competitve advantage is when their monopoly will start eroding.

So let your imagination run free: if all software becomes centralized on servvers, if massive scale software like XP becomes obsolete, when all hardware becomes so cheap that you just throw it out instead of upgrading it, maybe then Microsoft might loose their lock-in.

Not before.

Oddpost Sold to Yahoo!

Dave Winer comments on the sale of OddPost to Yahoo. I’ve been an avid OddPost fan for a while and I am glad to see them succeed. It’s an impressive tour the force, an existence proof that you can build quite a nice UI in a browser. One critical detail which is a bit mysterious to me: OddPost today runs only on Internet Explorer, and in particular, not on Macintosh. This, I assume, because the incredibly subtle and tricky code they had to write to pull of their magic made them not-cross-platform. Clearly Yahoo wouldn’t buy them if they weren’t convinced that this limitation could be lifted.

But can it? And how does this relate to the recent dust up around Apple’s statement that they are adding (incompatible) “enhancements” to allow Safari to be better integrated and interoperable with OSX? People are worried about the divergence of standards.

Can we charge for an open source BlogBridge

As you know we are developing BlogBridge, “a new kind of blog reader.” As you may know, BlogBridge is open source(see https://sourceforge.net/projects/blogbridge/.) With all our recent progress, I feel that pretty soon BlogBridge will be functional enough that it will actually be usable, and suitable for a beta. And after a successful beta, we plan to start charging for it, in some form or another.

The $64,000 question is: “How does it make sense to charge for a product, when all the source code is available for anyone to download for free?” Our theory right now, is that people who would be willing to ...

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The “dark” side of LinkedIn

Well, not really dark: This is in reference to Shel Isreal’s recent bit about LinkedIn. Shel notes that LinkedInis actually good for recruiting. He cites some examples of folks who assembled a team using LinkedIn to locate candidates.

Think about the other side: You’re the CEO of a company. You’ve discovered LinkedIn. It’s kind of cool. You introduce some of your team to it. Before long everyone is on LinkedIn.

I remember a recuriter friend cautioning me that we shouldn’t have people supply both their first and last names in the their voice mail greetings in our brand new startup. It would make it too easy for the best people to be poached by other recruiters just dialing through the directory.

LinkedIn is an order of magnitude worse/better/more.

Thoughts about software licensing

Dan Bricklin’s written a bit on a topic that’s been indirectly on my mind lately. It has to do with BlogBridge, the Blogging tool that I’ve been developing as a back room project for a while now (I post periodic updates, so you might have seen them.) Anyway, the connection is that starting sometime next month when I wrap up my current consulting project I will be devoting more time on BlogBridge to see if I can’t get it to a real stable and usable form, and who knows, try to sell it? Progress has been accelerating lately – there’s another developer working on it part time now (Aleksey, in the Ukraine) and things ar...

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Outsourcing and Immigration (WTF Series, 3)

What’s the relationship between offshore outsourcing and immigration? Here’s an interesting connection. Immigration brings workers from other countries to this one. With outsourcing, we send the work to them (because with fast networks, we can…) For years Immigration was a hallmark of U.S. society, the melting pot and all that. Its fair to say that it’s been viewed positively. The people that are against offshore outsourcing today would have been against immigration in the past. (And I say that as an actual immigrant 🙂