Blog

Long form is increasingly rare on the Internet, and I’m no exception. Here’s a list of all the long form I’ve written on my blog in the past 3 or so years.

Themes of the Future As part of some brainstorming I was doing with a friend raising a new fund, the concept of future trend themes came up. It’s not new, Brad Feld has a whole blog post about this. However, it got me thinking about the way I look at the future and what themes I see. So, without ...
Startup Infrastructure In the past year, I’ve worked with a lot of startups and the one recurring thing I notice is the amount of time people spend worrying about basic infrastructure. So, here’s my roundup of the stuff I’ve used, recommended and would use again for my next project: Mail, calendaring, document sharing Hands down, Google Apps for ...
Search is on for a new WP theme… and here are the resources I’ve been looking at: http://www.web3mantra.com/2011/03/04/50-free-wordpress-themes/ http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/08/19/100-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes-for-2010/ http://victorsosea.com/75-best-free-wordpress-themes-ever/ http://smashinghub.com/15-free-clean-minimalist-wordpress-themes.htm http://www.wpmods.com/50-free-minimalist-wordpress-themes http://www.bloggingtechnews.com/wordpress/themes/free-minimalist-wordpress-themes/ (yes, I was looking for a minimalist theme) The upshot of this is that my website will be variable and possibly broken in the next few hours… stopped my trials with the Titan theme (link in footer) – going outside as it’s gorgeous out and there’s a concert ...
Finally fixed Twitter integration Finally bothered to fix the Twitter integration on my blog. When Twitter changed auth, a lot of things broke and I had to upgrade all of WordPress just to fix it…. Well, I finally found some time to do it, thus all the new ‘Continuing Education’ posts….
Links to companies mentioned in NY update Olliance – http://www.olliancegroup.com BlackDuck – http://www.blackducksoftware.com Chikpea – http://www.chikpea.com Equalis – http://www.equalis.com Earthster – http://www.earthster.org And finally, my own company: Concept32 – http://www.concept32.com
New Year’s Update I sent this out last week but thought I should post it here as well… Apologies for the late New Years email, I returned from a month without internet access just last week and dove into 2500 unread emails, along with countless other backlogged items. I wanted to wish you all a great 2011 and ...
The Untracktable Problem of Hollywood I was in Los Angeles last week attending the Digital Hollywood conference. The crowd was mostly executives from the entertainment business and it was held at a luxury hotel in Santa Monica. Aside from the fact that every other session was either about mobile (re. content on iPhones) or about how to monetize content on iPads, ...
Listening to the Numbers A couple of months ago, I sat down to help a company that was struggling to grow beyond subsistence for a few people. Before actually sitting down with them, I spent time talking to the CEO about the state of his business. It was clear that there was a lack of process ...
The Hard Work of Social Media I was just looking at a discussion about LinkedIn where someone called it useless. I’ve been a LinkedIn user for years, basically since it was launched, so I’m more than a little biased about it’s utility. However, I also recognize that quite a few people think it should be a magic bullet to a variety ...
Client Success – Wavemaker It’s always good to see a past client become successful. In this case, it’s WaveMaker, a company for which I did business model, licensing and community strategy several years ago. Looks like that work has finally paid off, thanks to good execution on the part of Chris Keene and the rest of the ...
VC Math – Or why you’ll never get funding… Yet another cleaned up post from a startup thread on LinkedIn. This one is about VC math and TAM’s. One thing that’s very much missing in most entrepreneur’s understanding of the fundraising process is the notion of total addressable market (TAM) and it’s relationship to fund size. Basically, it’s the understanding that fund size vs ...
Startup growth metrics for Silicon Valley Last December, I was in an interesting meeting where the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) presented a bunch of interesting stats several days before they were due to be released. The most interesting statistic, however, was one that was generated specifically for this particular meeting and is not part of the regular dataset. It was statistics ...
What I look for in a pitch Over the years, I’ve gotten many requests from people wanting help raising funds. Most of the time, I find that they have failed to do their homework and that even the most basic elements are missing from their pitch. I recently posted in a forum describing what I would look for in a pitch, so ...
Choosing a VPS hosting provider As part of my ongoing effort to reduce technology administration, I’ve also been looking at fully managed hosting. Right now, I have a dedicated server at SoftLayer, which has been a fantastic hosting provider. But, I have to manage the server, which means keeping up with all the updates, handling backups, etc. It’s not a ...
Hosted Email – Update #1 Well, after 24 hours of trying out 01.com, I’m left frustrated by their jumble of different systems with no attempts to aggregate them into a single ‘portal’, particularly the diversity of different admin systems. OTOH, the mail service is quite fast, although I have not tested inbound mail much. They called me this morning to ...
Things that live on forever…. There have been quite a few memes in the past decade about the stupid things you do online living forever. Well, it’s not just the stupid things, you see. Just for kicks, I went back and looked at the website of the very first organization I built a complete, commercial web-presence ...
Hosted email – The task of finding a provider… Well, for the last month or so, I’ve been investigating several migrations to more managed hosted services so I don’t need to spend so much time doing admin. Email is rather difficult as I host several power users who have pretty exacting requirements and I wanted to get more capabilities. A lot of people suggested ...
TEDxSV – Not inspiring I’ve heard a lot about TED over the last 10 or so years. It’s always an event I’ve wanted to attend but have never been able to justify the cost. Lots of brilliant people I know rave about it, so I was happy to see the TEDx series of local events emerge. I missed TEDxSF ...
Thunderbird 3 on Mac OSX – Not so great I’ve been a longtime Thunderbird user, and I thought I would upgrade to V3 today. Bad idea. Although the UI was slightly updated (notably through the use of tabs), everything else was either the same or broken. The mail compose toolbar wound up overwriting the From field section (with From, Subject, etc all in lower ...
The problem with biometrics I’ve always said that the security of biometrics is really problematic. Once someone figures out how to hack a biometric device, it’s impossible for users to ‘change the password’. Unlike most systems that provide authentication (e.g. passwords, SecurID tokens, drivers licenses, etc), you can’t just throw out the ‘token’ (e.g. your fingerprints or eyes) and ...
VCs may be exempt from new financial regulations Never mind the apocalyptic drop in funding for VCs, what would have really killed off the industry would have been financial regulations. According to the Wall Street Journal, looks like these have been stopped by Barney Frank. As a rule, VCs carry no debt, don’t use derivatives and don’t trade in the public markets. Since they ...
New healthcare plan ignores small businesses Kevin Kelly, a small business owner in Union City, CA, writing in Newsweek, outlines how healthcare plans are just not doing it for him. One interesting datapoint is the way SMBs are defined by congress vs the Small Business Administration: most legislation defines small business as companies with less than 50 employees. This stands in sharp ...
Obama as Nobel-laureate – Not popular Well, everyone is buzzing about it and mostly not in a good way. This post by port1080 @ TnT provides a good series of comments from usually supportive websites: If there’s any question that this decision was bizarre, it should be dispelled by the fact that even most of the left (from the center-left to the ...
34 banks miss TARP dividend payments Naked Capitalism has a good post about banks missing TARP dividend payments. It’s pretty stunning that some are missing payments on relatively small sums: Of the 34 miscreants, two are pretty large, namely AIG and CIT, But the next on the list is First Bancorp, which received a mere $400 million from the TARP. Probably more ...
Featured Video – Wim Elfrink on Cisco’s Globalization Strategy There are quite a few short videos online with lessons learned by business leaders, often through painful experience. I”ll be showing some of the more interesting ones here. Wim Elfrink on Cisco’s Globalization Strategy. The metrics around growth and opportunity are particularly interesting. These kinds of global competitiveness measures are not often discussed in ...
Cisco’s Globalization Strategy – One year on I’ve recently looked back at Cisco’s globalization strategy, something they put into place about a year ago. It’s similar to a strategy I outlined for a client about 18 months ago, so I was curious how Cisco has done. Very generically, the premise behind the strategy is that Western countries, and the US in particular, are ...
Featured Video – Heather Dawson on finding time to focus and think There are quite a few short videos online with lessons learned by business leaders, often through painful experience. I”ll be showing some of the more interesting ones here. The first is Heather Dawson, an executive coach, on how to find time to focus, something we’ve all struggled with.
Oracle and Sun – A good fit There has been much speculation in the news about Oracle buying Sun today. Unlike the potential IBM acquisition, this seems like a better, if unexpected, fit. For a number of years now, there has been a large amount of consolidation in the tech business. The goal of most of these consolidations has been to create vertically ...
Five ways to survive a downturn There’s a presentation I’ve given a number of times titled “Why Startups Fail”, it has 3 slides: Do what ever it takes Focus Remember the Exit I was describing recently to a friend of mine and it occurred to me that some of the lessons I have learned over years working with startups might apply in downturns. So here ...
World in Transition I don’t know how many people remember the ‘World at War‘ series produced in early 1970′s, but if you do, I think someone, in 20 years, will produce a similar series about the last dozen years. Except, it will start in January 2009 and go backwards. If you step back and look at what has happened ...
Open source and government – A 15 year adventure Last week, there were a bunch of articles about the US government being newly interested in open source. Specifically, President Obama requested a report on the use of open source from Scott McNealy, chairman and former CEO of Sun Microsystems. Never mind if Scott McNealy is the best person to write such a report, what’s ...
Motion theory, markets and the speed of information One of my side hobbies is building small CNC machines. Some part of this requires a pretty deep understanding of motion theory and, in particular, the interaction between physical hardware and computer systems. The major problem in computer controlled motion systems is that, while computer commands to move are virtually instantaneous, motions of physical systems ...
Deficit Spending for Profit An interesting thing happened last Monday. The yield on 3-month Treasury bonds went negative. For most people, that statement is basically meaningless as bonds are pretty much black art. The simple explanation is: People are paying the US government to take their money. Usually, it’s the reverse. The US and other governments need to pay interest on ...
Open Source – The Walmart Effect? There’s been a really negative meme going around in the last week or so about Open Source destroying the ability to make money from selling software. It’s patently nonsense and quite the contrary, Open Source saved the software business. Here’s why. 1. Software development as an act of alchemy Making software has always been a complicated thing, ...
Bad times good for Open Source? There is a certain meme floating around about bad times being good for Open Source. I’ve heard it from a wide variety of people, from project maintainers to execs at large companies to VCs. On the face it, it would seem to be an obvious statement, that Open Source does well when people are squeezed ...
Precision vs mass manufacturing I’ve recently gone on a watch buying spree*. For years, I used my cell phone as a watch, but I’ve recently come to realize how much I actually hate doing that. It’s hard to be discreet about it and it just screams ‘I’m bored’ in a meeting. Plus, watches have experienced a renaissance of sorts ...
When electric cars were the future I was reading Car and Driver’s commentary on electric vehicles recently, which was as follows: “The media are making all kinds of noise lately to the effect that electric cars are coming, that they’re going to help us kick our imported-oil habit, and that you’ll be able to drive them for pennies a day. A company that ...
Free WiFi harder than expected I can’t say this was really a surprise, but MetroFi just folded. They sent an email out to subscribers that the service was going offline June 20th, 2008. Chances are, if you spent any time in the South Bay and have a laptop with WiFi, you ran across MetroFi’s service. MetroFi’s plan was to subsidize ...
High power in small things In my spare time, I’ve been experimenting with a new generation of microcontrollers. Microcontrollers are at the core of modern electronics, and are basically full computers the size of a postage stamp. Following Moore’s law, these things have been getting faster and faster. In the last five years, they’ve become almost full computers and the ...
Patent rulings since 2000 invalid? In a very strange twist, a law professor John Duffy discovered last year (PDF) that, since March 2000, the appointments to the Patent Board may have been unconstitutional. The net effect of this is that nearly 2/3rds of the Patent Board judges are not legally appointed and their decisions could be invalidated. While the details ...
Brazil as VC hotspot? Chris Morrison over at VentureBeat has just posted an article about Brazil being a new venture capital hotspot. I can’t say I’m surprised. Last year we did a project for a major F500 firm about key software growth markets, and Brazil was one of the hottest. There are some amazing stats about the Brazilian software market: $13 ...
Failure: Open Source & OLPC I never thought much of the One Laptop per Child effort. My belief was that spending so much effort and capital on technology could be re-direct to better uses, such as food and books (notably The Book Thing in Baltimore, MD which has shipped thousands of books to emerging countries…). The other part of my ...
Tesla & why startups fail Well, I posted something on Sunday about Tesla and, lone behold, they are in the news again with more internal turmoil.It seems that Martin Eberhard, the visionary founder of Tesla was promised car #2, which has not yet been delivered despite the fact that car #3 has… Whether this is due to internal production ...
Tesla vs Fisker – The battle for the electric car… I was at Tesla in March, hosted by Kurt Kelty, their head of battery technology. As I’m sure most people who are following Tesla know, it’s basically a stretched Lotus Elise with a different body. This was largely made possible by Lotus’ use of aluminum extrusions bonded together (rather than welded or mechanically attached). Two ...
Skype, the GPL and the courts As many of you may have heard, Skype today dropped an appeal of their GPL violations case, accepting a lower court decision that they had violated the GPL (the details of the case are available here). What I don’t understand is that, after the Linksys/Broadcom fiasco, how could anyone think that it was OK to ship ...
The coming Linux desktop? I’ve gotten a number of questions in the last few weeks about Linux desktops and OpenOffice. These have come from enterprise users, the press and venture capitalists. It’s interesting, because this seems to be a meme that is revived every few years. I was really enthused about the possibility of an Open Source ...
Linux only 10% of US datacenter installs? I was going to mention this earlier, but when Levanta closed, there was a really interesting quote on CNET: "In the U.S., there’s only a 10 percent penetration rate for Linux data centers." Really? Only 10%? I mentioned this to Tim Golden, VP of Unix at BofA and their lead on Open Source and he didn’t ...
Open Source vs Intellectual Property Misconceptions The other day, while flying home, I picked up a copy of the Harvard Business Review (HBR). The cover had a teaser about an Open Source strategy article, so I thought they might have something interesting to say. The article was a (fake) case study* about a CEO worried about Open Source stealing the IP of ...