March 2008
36 posts
2 tags
The Scylla and Charybdis of Freemium
Freemium is an attractive business model in theory. Offer a free service to attract folks and then convert some of them into a paid version with premium features. In practice it turns out to be hard to pull this off. The free version needs to be fairly functional in order to attract people. Unless the free offering is unique, which is rarely if ever the case, it also needs to be at least as...
1 tag
Multiple Displays and (Developer) Productivity
I have always encouraged companies to spend on great chairs, keyboards and multiple monitors for developers. This was based on the conventional wisdom (among developers) that more screen real estate is better.
Recently, NEC sponsored a study that finds actual productivity benefits from using multiple displays. The study was conducted at the University of Utah. Ars Technica published a good...
1 tag
Location, Location, Location
We are all excited about what we can do on cell phones (and especially the iphone) making use of location information. It’s surprising though how little use is made at web sites today of the already available geo information. There are many different vendors (MaxMind, Quova, Ip2Location, Geobytes, …) that provide databases of IP address blocks either for download or as a web service....
3 tags
Can You Be Too Innovative?
The startups that we invest in at Union Square Ventures are based on delivering an innovative product or service (at least we like to think so). There are also examples of startups that deliver an existing product or service using an innovative organizational design, such as a virtual law firm. Once in a while I run across a company that wants to do both, i.e. deliver an innovative service and...
2 tags
Teaching Math as a Language
Our kids are in a public school that is generally considered to be great (it better be, given the school taxes we are paying). Yet the math teaching is appalling compared to the teaching of English. In English there is a huge amount of repetition of basic exercises at every level. English is woven into other subject areas as well. Neither of these is true for math. There are ridiculous jumps...
3 tags
Structural Change and Marketplaces
Just posted over at the Union Square Ventures blog on a topic that combines my interest in technology with my interest in economics: Structural Change and Marketplaces.
2 tags
Age of Responsibility
As a father of three fairly young kids, I often think about how much responsibility is age appropriate. Two weekends ago we attended the bar mitzvah of a friend’s son. It was at a reform temple and much of the service was in English, which meant that I could follow it. I am a big fan of the message of personal responsibility that’s at the heart of bar mitzvah. It is striking to me...
2 tags
Do The Right Thing: Google Edition
Yesterday I wrote about Apple’s update push of Safari and how easy it would have been for Apple to do the right thing. With Google’s most recent addition to search, “search within a site,” things are a bit more difficult to figure out. At the moment when you search on Google bestbuy you get a site search box in addition to the search results. The same is true for a...
2 tags
1 tag
Do The Right Thing
There was quite an uproar over Apple’s opt-out push of Safari via its updater to Windows users. A lot of the rethoric was over the top, including comparisons to spyware. A few folks, such as Bijan, disagreed and argued that it’s not a big deal. I feel the same way, but what a missed opportunity! It would have been so easy to do the right thing. Have Safari show up below a big ...
1 tag
I Love Easter Eggs
Of course I do love chocolate easter eggs (my favorite ones are filled with brittle). But I am a huge fan of easter eggs in software. There are several good lists on the web including Egg Heaven and The Easter Egg Archive. It’s great to discover a bit of humor and surprise in something one uses almost every day.
1 tag
Uncharted Territory: Inflation or Deflation or...
Several of my friends are very successful public market investors. Some of them routinely find opportunities that produce 2x or better returns in liquid assets. But even they are stumped when it comes to trying to predict how the drama in the financial markets will impact prices. There appear to be (at least) two competing theories. The first theory holds that the actions by the Fed will...
1 tag
The End of Privacy?
We have just had one of the periodic waves of articles and blog posts about privacy, touched off by news about Phorm. The typical concern, which was invoked by Tim Berners-Lee, runs something like this: You start reading a lot online about cancer and suddenly find that your health insurance rate goes up or is not renewed. The proposed solution to this problem, is to more clearly give the...
1 tag
Fed Makes 'Lemonaide'
A little while ago I wrote about why the Fed’s lowering of the interest rate did not alleviate the credit crunch. The Fed has now taken two much more dramatic actions. First, it vastly expanded it’s lending to financial firms by including brokerage firms (under a depression era law) and allowing firms to provide a much larger array of securities as collateral. Second, it made sure...
Battlestar Galactica Streams Into Season 4 →
bijan: I can’t wait. Same here. Have not been watching TV shows (other than John Adams mini-series on HBO) since Season 3.
1 tag
Cash Is King -- Except When It Isn't Cash
I twittered that yesterday and wanted to elaborate. For a startup nothing is as important as watching cash and burn rate. Until recently the only hard part of that was the burn. But as some companies have found out not everything touted as “cash” by their investment advisors. Some companies had part of their cash in so called auction-rate securities. Fred wrote about his...
4 tags
Fooled by Correlation
As someone pointed out in a comment to my previous post, simply using RAND() in Excel gives you independent random variables. That’s perfectly OK for situations where the risks are not closely related to each other. For instance, the if you are trying to project the cost of bandwidth, the uncertainty in the growth of your traffic is likely to be independent from the uncertainty around the...
3 tags
Welcome to Monte Carlo, Excel
Following up to yesterday’s post about randomness, Excel provides a very easy tool for modeling probability. Just insert =RAND() into a cell. This will generate a new (pseudo) random number between 0 and 1 each time the spreadsheet is recalculated.
For most business modeling one wants to have a discrete distribution of values with a subjective probability distribution. For instance, in...
2 tags
Horton Hears a Who and Randomness
Went to see Horton Hears a Who with the kids, who had a blast. Afterwards we talked about things that you can’t see, can’t hear, can’t smell and yet exist (despite the kangaroo’s insistence to the contrary). This was great fun with the conversation ranging from bacteria to magnetic fields. But we did not touch on something even more profound simply because it is too...
1 tag
Widespread Panic
I believe an important factor in the Fed’s decision to help JP Morgan shore up Bear Stearns is the size of Bear’s prime brokerage business. A lot of hedge funds depend on Bear to support parts or all of their trading through clearing and custodial services and lending. While I am sure that some of them have already made contingency plans or migrated away, there would still have been...
1 tag
Team Versus Traction
I had an interesting conversation yesterday with someone who is graduating from B-school and wanted some advice on what to look for in a startup — “a great team or a killer product”? The obvious answer is both, but then again it’s better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick. But what if it’s either one or the other? There is now way to decide without a lot of...
I Love Listening Labs
Spent hours last night with the video from Clickable’s listening lab. Wish I would have been there for the immediacy but even so it is truly amazing how much one can learn by listening to customers. The first key is not to ask leading questions an not to ask the customer to perform specific tasks but to sit back and let them use the system as they normally would. That involves really putting...
2 tags
Bug Attack!
I am very excited because Bug Labs is about to start shipping its first units. I can’t wait to get my hands on the actual device! Peter has been a friend for many years and it’s been great fun to see his vision go from woodblocks to prototype to functional device. Apparently Peter’s presentation drew “squeals of glee” from the audience at SXSW which is well deserved...
1 tag
How the Mighty has Fallen
I was not a fan of Eliot Spitzer’s tactics as AG. Instead of the slow grind of building cases, he frequently used threats and intimidation. I was not surprised that this approach backfired in Albany and there was a hint of self-destructivenes. But his cataclysmic fall yesterday is still stunning. I can’t help but think that one of his previous targets paid a PI to trail Spitzer and...
1 tag
New Fund Same Focus
My partner Brad has a great post with that title over at the Union Square Ventures site announcing the closing of our new fund.
1 tag
The End of Doping As We Know It
On the weekend, the NY Times ran an article on doping in academia. I find the current obsession with doping (including the seemingly endless steroids in baseball investigation) amusing. Not that I condone breaking laws or suggest that we should let folks who break laws off the hook — it’s simply that much of the moral outrage that accompanies these discussions seems misplaced. Most...
3 tags
iPhone SDK Is Awesome
I have played around with the iPhone SDK and Apple has done an amazing job. For starters, the documentation is impressive in both quantity and quality, including a series of introductory videos (quite the contrast with the scarcity of API documentation when the Facebook API first became available). The SDK provides access to most but not all of the nifty features of the iPhone, including the...
3 tags
Apple Vs. MSFT: Building Consumer Products
bijan: -Data transfer. Since I just went through a data migration just a few weeks ago, I was lazy and thought I’d roll the dice and try Apple’s Migration Assistant. Appls, data, everything. Guess what? It just worked. The only thing that didn’t work was the printer drivers for my office but that was easy enough Quite the contrast with my experience setting up Vista this morning on my...
1 tag
Credit, the Fed, and the "Market for Lemons"
In 1970 George Akerlof wrote a seminal paper called “The Market for Lemons” which describes how the market for used cars can seize up if there are enough bad used cars (“lemons”) out there and if prospective buyers can’t tell lemons apart from good cars. In that situation there may be no price low enough for buyers to want to buy a used car and the market goes...
1 tag
“If your office uses Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 or 2007, iPhone 2.0 software...”
– Apple - iPhone - Enterprise
1 tag
Tivo Versus Sonos
A couple of years ago we more or less stopped watching live television. Instead we use a PVR supplied by Cablevision which works more or less on the “Tivo” model, i.e. you have a limited amount of recording space and need to decide upfront which shows you want to record. For my birthday a few weeks ago, I got a Sonos. While I have a bit of a music library the main way I have been...
1 tag
Heeeeere Is Microsoft!
I have been playing around with Microsoft’s Office Live. It seems rushed, is very rough around the edges and of course works properly only with Internet Explorer (in Firefox you don’t get the button that lets you actually edit the document). But having said that, the integration with the native office applications is attractive. The open and save dialogs can now access shared...
1 tag
I Love the US Electoral System
As a fairly recently naturalized citizen I am excited to be participating in my first set of primaries and in the fall my first presidential election. I grew up in Germany where the Chancellor is elected by the Legislature instead of in a vote by the people. Since members of the Legislature generally vote along party lines this means that the party with the majority in the Legislature...
1 tag
Thinking About a New Laptop
My trusty Panasonic CF-W2 is now 5 years old and I am worried that the disk will give out any day (backing up frequently). I tend to buy computers a bit ahead of the curve — even though that means paying up a bit — and then keep them until they start to fall apart. My next machine will have a solid state drive for sure. Finally no more moving parts and hopefully no more disk...
1 tag
Technology Optimist
That’s how I think of myself. I am excited to be living in a time when we are making tremendous progress on understanding aging, fighting cancer, developing clean technologies, and so much more. This is not to say that I automatically assume that technology by itself will solve all our problems (I guess that would be a “technology pollyanna”). Instead I believe that —...
1 tag
Just One Little Wafer Thin Mint
This is the first post in an occasional series on negotiating. Imagine yourself in a situation where a clear bid and ask have been established on an important and potentially contentious deal point (e.g. vesting of founders shares). Now the other side proposes a compromise. The best strategy here is to listen to the compromise proposal but not react to it immediately unless you are 120% certain...