Continuations

A group called SpeechNow.org is suing the Federal Election Commission to allow individuals to contribute as much as they want to the group’s effort to buy TV advertising. Their argument, loosely paraphrased, is that billionaires can spend as much as they want to on TV advertising, so why shouldn’t “ordinary” folks be allowed to pool their money in donations of more than $5,000 (the current legal limit). This is a case where I believe the best regulatory approach by the government would be “fo...

This is the third post in my “clouds over” series, which points out areas of the current IT landscape that will be affected by the inexorable move to cloud computing (the first post was on hosting, the second on DB software). Today’s edition covers simple paid apps and services, such as hosted blogging platforms. Exhibit A is of course 37Signals’ Campfire, for which google engineers built a free version with very similar functionality which they had called HuddleChat. Google took it down beca...

Two days ago I wrote about how Google App Engine and cloud computing more generally will put pressure on traditional hosting. Another major area of the current IT landscape that will come under pressure is DB software. Sun recently (inadvertently) marked the top of the market for traditional DB software by paying $1B for MySQL (apparently this was 20x revenues). Storage will be a fundamental service in the cloud and will subsume both traditional file storage and most of the relational DB mark...

The fight over Yahoo will have many unfortunate side effects if any of the combination outcomes currently being considered come about. How did we get here? Back when Terry Semel was first announced as the new CEO, I thought it was a huge mistake (wish I had started to blog a long time ago so that I could now link to that). My reasoning was that conceiving of Yahoo in terms of media first rather than technology first was missing the opportunity. That is the only way to create a mass media oppr...

Google’s App Engine is the first major cloud forming over several key segments of the current landscape . In today’s installment of this multi-part series: hosting. GoDaddy has a very profitable business (paying for Superbowl ads out of cashflow) in large part because many people put relatively small sites on shared hosting, charge it to a credit card and forget about it. Over time GoDaddy’s cost declines but the charges stay the same - voila a profitable account. Many of these sites fall wel...

A big step forward towards cloud computing and a potential breakthrough in scalability for startups. I (may) have found a new platform.

Just announced our investment in Covestor.

Saw 21 last night. It was reasonably entertaining. Knowing Ben Mezrich from college, I was not surprised to hear the main character called Ben (the character is based on Jeff Ma and was called Kevin Lewis in Ben Mezrich’s book ‘Bringing Down the House’ from which the movie is loosely derived). But the movie could have been so much better simply by ironing out the many minor nuisances. There are three sources of nuisances. First, unnecessary dumbing down of material, such as in the lecture sce...

Hiring is maybe the single hardest thing for any startup. Marc Andreesen has had a number of great posts about it. He covers interviewing in some depth, including the importance of planning out interview questions in advance. Something implied in Marc’s post but worth spelling out is the following – make sure to (1) have a decent number of candidates, (2) schedule interviews close together and (3) use at least some fixed set of interview questions with each candidate. Leave out any one of the...

I used to read the NYT every morning as a way to get an overview of what was happening in the world, find in-depth coverage and investigative reports, and see opinions on politics and the economy (I also used to do the same with the WSJ). But increasingly I find that I only skim the paper and then head for my computer to read techmeme and the Huffington Post. Both are great at what they do, but leave me yearning for more. I want a personalized new service that meets the following needsCovers ...