June 2009
22 posts
4 tags
The Continuing Confusion About Free
Last night I read Malcolm Gladwell’s review in the New Yorker of Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” followed by Chris Andersons’s response on his blog. I have not yet read the book, so my initial reaction is based on and to Gladwell’s review: there seems to be profound and ongoing confusion about critical economic concepts including marginal...
5 tags
The Mobile Challenge
Today’s post is over at the Union Square Ventures site on the challenge of creating native mobile applications. We are fascinated with the disruption that is taking place in mobile. The big question is what “native” applications will emerge based on the unique technical capabilities of the mobile platform and the emerging behaviors around those capabilities. Head on over there...
4 tags
Heyzap Introduces Payments
The team at Heyzap yesterday launched payments to enable virtual goods for Flash games. This is really neat because it is exactly the kind of thing that is difficult to do for an individual game developer or publisher but delivers value to the whole system. By difficult I don’t mean from a technical perspective, but from a social and network perspective. For long-tail casual games,...
Inflation, Startups and VCs (Part 3)
Yesterday’s post focused on how the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet may or may not translate into inflation. But the Fed is not the only thing to worry about — there is also the growth of the Federal Government deficit. The Obama administration has been spending a lot of money to fight the recession and prevent the collapse of several “too-big-to-fail”...
Inflation, Startups and VCs (Part 2)
Yesterday, I wrote a post about why startups and VCs should care about whether inflation is a real threat and promised a follow-up about some of the arguments floating around. The eye-popping chart that prompts one line of reasoning is this:
After 40 years of growth in the 0-10% range (with a brief spike in 2000), the monetary base jumped by 110% 2008-2009. In absolute numbers, the monetary...
“Failure to complete your Domain name search engine registration by the...”
– [From my Inbox today]
Yeah right. And while I am at it, why don’t I send you my bank account info also?
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Inflation, Startups and VCs (Part 1)
I wrote last September about the competing views around deflation versus inflation. Interestingly, about 9 months later we still seem don’t seem to have real clarity on the subject. Over that time we have approached deflation but there has also been a ton of government intervention, which has prompted op-eds predicting future inflation and even a new fund run by Mark Spitznagel (a long...
6 tags
Bing's Design Challenge for Google
I have been trying out Bing last week, as has Fred, and the team at Clickable (and probably a lot of other folks). Generally, the verdict seems to be that it’s not terrible but has some obvious shortcomings, especially when it comes to integrating blog and very recent content. Despite these shortcomings, I do believe that Bing represents a real challenge for Google because of its design. ...
8 tags
Multi-Tenant Vs Multi-Instance Cloud Architecture
For the longest time I would have said that the right way to design a cloud application or service is as multi-tenant. But yesterday I was having a conversation with Peter Soderling from NY-based Stratus Security, which provides a secure managed API proxy (in closed beta). Peter said they had chosen to architect their service from day one as a multi-instance solution for added security and...
Board Effectiveness Tip #1
On a panel at NYU last month someone asked how to make sure that having VCs on the board actually adds value. Other than saying “make sure you have the right VCs,” I thought it might be a good idea to start a series of posts addressing this question more broadly, that is, how to make sure your board is effective (independent of whether there are any VCs on it). Without further ado,...
Culture Change in Startups
A long long time ago, when I was a management consultant, I did a strategy project for a large European IT company. At the same time this company was going through a “Culture Change” project with the idea of transforming itself into a fast and nimble “US like” culture, instead of its existing plodding and slow ways. The “Culture Change” project was huge and cost...
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Return of the Clerver--Opera Unite and Michael...
In the mid 1990s at MIT, I spent quite a bit of time with Michael Dertouzos because we were both doing some consulting for Siemens Corporation’s IT division. Michael was heading up the Laboratory of Computer Science at MIT, which combined with the AI Lab is now MIT CSAIL. Michael was great at many things that made LCS a big success, including fund raising and attracting and supporting top...
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Why We Need Diversity in Search (Rooting for Bing)
Fred posted on the weekend about giving Bing a chance. I am doing the same this week having set Bing as the default search engine in Firefox. My main reason is that I firmly believe in the need for search diversity. A search mono-culture would be bad for the Internet for several reasons:
Too much power. Search is so central to the web experience that it provides a lot of power. That power...
4 tags
Proud of New York Startups
Yesterday evening, NY Tech Meetup and CEA LineShows organized an event to pick a startup that would receive a free booth at the next CES. I don’t know how the presenting companies were chosen, but whoever did the initialy seleciton did a wonderful job of representing the diversity and accomplishment of NY startups. There was both hardware (Peek and MakerBot) and software/service...
Growth Anti-Patterns: Neglecting Ops
We love investing in small and scrappy teams, but I have noticed a distinct anti-pattern that has affected many of these teams: as their site or service grows they neglect ops and it comes back to bite them. I believe the source of this pattern is twofold. First, many folks today are perfectly capable doing a fair bit of ops themselves because they have had to do it and also because there is just...
Blinded By The Past (Technology Adoption)
I have been thinking about how our past experience can blind us to the potential of new technologies to provide a breakthrough experience. My favourite example is 3D movies. I remember the early versions that required red and blue glasses and delivered a horrendous image quality. Then there were the ridiculously bulky and heavy glasses used in IMAX 3D. Each time there were two reactions. First, 3D...
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It's 2009 and Calendar Invites Don't Interoperate?
So I must be missing something big here, because it seems that this should not be an issue in 2009. Susan is fully on a Mac using the iCal app. When she sends me an invite, it shows up in Outlook on my end sort of looking like one, but when I click on the attached .ics file, the Accept, Reject, etc buttons are greyed out (for those of you wanting details, this is Outlook 2007, Service Pack 2...
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Pre Might Actually Work. Good News for...
Starting the middle of last year, I thought it would be great to have a competitor to the iphone that would make it easy to create web based applications that can fully exploit the capabilities of a smartphone. I therefore started rooting for Palm as soon as they showed the Pre at CES at the beginning of this year. Well, the Pre is arriving tomorrow and the reviews by Mossberg, Pogue, Engadget...
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SoundCtrl Speech: Change in Music Industry
As part of Internet week, there is an event tonight organized by SoundCtrl to talk about music and the net. Here is what I am planning to say at the event:
The other day my 9-year old daughter came up to me and said “Daddy, when you were a kid, what were your favorite web sites?” I had to tell her that when I was young there was no Internet. She looked at me as if I were putting...
7 tags
RIM Must Fix the Browser ASAP
The likelihood of my switching to an iPhone is rising rapidly. Earlier this year I switched from a Pearl to an 8900 (both on T-Mobile). At first, I was very happy with the 8900, especially the wifi calling capability that T-Mobile offers is super handy as I have no cell coverage in my house. Also, tethering my laptop was easy and I use it frequently.
But the browser is simply atrocious. I am...
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Middleware Services in the Cloud (Mashery, Gnip,...
Middleware seems like a dinosaur concept from enterprise client-server computing. On the web, everything is open and anybody can connect to a service, so who would need Middleware? Damn it, the whole Internet is Middleware! Not so fast. Let’s revisit some of the enterprise issues that Middleware helps to address: scalability and flexibility. The root of these tend to be the N*M problem...
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From Atoms (GM) to Bits (Bing)
It is an interesting juxtaposition to have GM file for bankruptcy the same day that Microsoft launches its new search engine bing. It would be difficult to find a clearer illustration of how the shift from atoms to bits is transforming industries. It is not just the recession that is causing a smaller demand for cars — the demand will never be the same. Using the net, we can share cars...