May 2008
23 posts
2 tags
Nautical Bug Project
I have been reading a fascinating book about nautical charts. It turns out that there are many pitfalls in using GPS navigation that result from the translation processes that take place between the original survey data (some of it quite old) and the GPS devices. It would be great to use a Bug to store a history of lat longs and depth soundings each time one goes out with a boat. The data from...
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Publish First, Filter Later
Clay Shirky has a great chapter in his book titled “Publish First, Filter Later.” The gist is that when publishing was expensive (print a book or newspaper, bind and collate, distribute to reader, etc) there was no alternative to filtering first, i.e. figuring out what to publish. With the Internet, the cost of publishing is essentially zero, so anything can and should be published...
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Competition in Search, Investor Edition
Yesterday I wrote about the need for competition in search from an Internet ecosystem perspective. But what if you are a shareholder in Yahoo or Microsoft? Should they outsource search to Google? Here too I believe the answer is a clear NO. If Google did not have grand ambitions that are directly competitive with large parts of Yahoo and Microsoft then this might make sense — but one would...
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Competition in Search, Revisited
It’s not often that I find myself disagreeing with both Tim O’Reilly and Fred and instead agreeing with Mike Arrington. First a quick recap of the discussion (in case you have not followed it). Fred supported the idea of Yahoo outsourcing search to Google as far back as February. Over the weekend, Tim reiterated that view and extended it to Microsoft. Mike responded with a piece...
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Javascript Security Wonderland
I have seen various headlines about Javascript security issues but never paid any close attention (my bad). But today I was talking to a friend about keeping javascript based widgets small by using a two stage process of loading a small script first, which would then pull down the rest of the script and any associated data. I assumed that this could simply be done as follows. A site located at...
BugLabs and Security
The team at BugLabs has brought a bug online with a simple ‘crowdsourced security’ app. http://www.bugblogger.com/2008/05/building-a-crow.html It’s just a few steps away from an app that I want to create with the Bug. We live on a street that goes up a slight hill to the elementary school. Lots of kids have to cross it on their way to school. Despite the 30 mph speed limit some...
Competition in Search
This should come as no surprise - Microsoft is apparently launching a ‘cash back’ program for searchers who go on to buy products. I won’t try to speculate as to whether this will be successful in stopping or even reversing Microsoft’s slide in search share (I am sure there are already plenty of opinions about that and in any case we will find out what happens). But it does...
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Synch or Stream
A while ago I bought an AppleTV, mostly on a whim because I had some store credit. I liked the form factor and the HDMI output and thought it might provide a good solution for getting pictures from my ReadyNAS onto the TV. Sadly, the AppleTV software is geared toward synching content instead of streaming it. Streaming is possible, but it’s not the default mode of operation, is hard to set...
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Radio Silence
This is the second in my occasional series on negotiating. When negotiating a term sheet or a biz dev deal it’s important to keep in mind that the end goal of the negotiation is establishing a partnership. This is very different from say buying a house where post closing you (hopefully) have nothing to do with the seller. For a partnership to get off to a good start it helps for both...
Who Controls the Social Graph?
As I had suggested in a post earlier this week on Google’s Friend Connect, there is a fight brewing over control of the social graph. Much of the discussion of FaceBook’s reaction has focused on the explicit social graph as declared by people via a ‘friend’ type mechanism. But there is also the implicit graph based on interactions such as email or commenting. That graph is...
VOIP As It Was Meant To Be
At our house we have Optimum Voice, which is Cablevision’s VOIP service. It works perfectly well with good call quality and a decent web admin panel. It even let’s you forward a .wav file of your voicemails to PhoneTag for transcription which is truly useful since Susan and I see both out of the house all day. But it’s not really VOIP as it was meant to be. The service is...
Product Research is Broken (So Is Our Dryer)
So the decade plus old dryer in our basement that had been making funny noises for the last year finally broke. With 6 people in our household (3 kids and 1 Au Pair) we need an immediate replacement. No big deal, I thought - I will just do a bit of online research. Well two hours later I am none the wiser. I have settled on a model but with an awfully low degree of confidence. I started by going...
Friend or Foe Connect
It is amazing how quickly google is expanding its influence beyond the idea of organizing the world’s information. There are plenty of community-in-a-box vendors out there plus some great open source packages. There are also standards emerging for connecting these communities together so that members of one can participate in another. Yet google appears to be releasing a free competitive...
Blackberry iPhone Competition -- Loving It!
There is nothing like competition to help drive innovation. I love using my Blackberry because of its enterprise integration, but I hate the barely functional browser and the complete absence of HTML email support. Now that Apple and RIM have locked horns, we are on the path to rapid innovation. Apple will be offering enterprise integration for the iPhone. RIM claims that the new Bold will...
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Cloud Competition, Part 3
This is my third post on cloud competition. Today I want to address the question of how cloud computing changes competition at the infrastructure layer. A part of the answer comes from yesterday’s post on the changing boundary between the application layer and the infrastructure layer. As infrastructure pushes up ever higher, the lower portions of infrastructure become further hidden and...
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Cloud Competition, Part 2
Yesterday, I started a series of posts about how the move to cloud computing is affecting competition. The second question I posed was how cloud computing changes the boundary between “infrastructure” and “applications”? At the most basic level I believe that some things that were standalone applications will become features that are provided by the cloud. We have seen this play out with...
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Cloud Competition
At USV we have been thinking a lot about the nature of competition as the cloud computing era takes hold. The three closely related questions we are interested in are: How does cloud computing change competition at the “application” layer? How does cloud computing change the boundary between “infrastructure” and “applications”? How does cloud computing...
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Is the US the Next Great Britain?
When I first came here as an exchange student at age 16, I fell in love with the US. Compared to my native Germany, I felt a wonderful sense of possibility. That is still the case today for many of the businesses we look at and invest in, but I worry about the future of the US. There appears to be a parallel between the US today and Great Britain at the end of the colonial period in the 20th...
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Language Choice
Several of the companies in our portfolio have gone through extended and often heated internal discussions about which programming language to use for backend development. In these discussions I have encountered a bunch of arguments that I find myself disagreeing with based on experience. I am presenting these generically even though they are often made with respect to particular languages. The...
MSFT YHOO - You Never Know When You Had a Good Day
A friend of mine likes to say “You never know when you had a good day” by which he means that only time will tell the true impact of a particular event - something that looks favorable on the day it occurs may not turn out to be so and vice versa. This came to mind when I saw this morning that MSFT had called off the YHOO offer. I could see YHOO shares falling dramatically and not...
3 tags
Comments - Yeah - Thanks!
Spent some time today catching up on comments from my crazy Friday. I have already learned a ton from the thoughtful comments — many thanks! (Also thanks to Fred for sending folks over here). Replying to comments by email via disqus is super convenient for short comments. For longer comments, especially ones that refer to other comments or include links, I still need to see the web...
Post Postponed
I am working on a blog post about technology choices in startups, in particular the question that seems to arise in everyone of our companies about which programming language to use. I started writing earlier in the day than I usually do, but found that I had so many thoughts on the subject that I only managed to get halfway through the post. Then I had a 6 hour board meeting followed by two...
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Listening to Customers is Hard, Hard, Hard
In building a business it’s generally considered a good idea to listen to your customers. The idea is that if your product/site/service is a better fit with customers’ needs you will have more of them. As it turns out though, listening to customers is a lot easier said than done. First, which customers should you listen to? Is it the early adopters or should you try to identify what...
