Continuations

Is it a good or bad time to start something new, with the economy tanking as it is? I believe the answer depends entirely on your personal financial situation and risk profile. If you have a family to support and only have enough savings for a few months, then it’s a terrible time to start. If you can afford to fund yourself and maybe a few others for a least 6 months and possibly much more (or have friends who the “more” bit) then it’s a great time. You can find talent (and space should you ...

There is a high probability that we are in for a recession and many folks think that it might be a fairly severe one. What does that mean for startups and VC funding? VentureBeat today has an article suggesting that funding is slowing down both from VCs and angel investors. For startups that are already well funded this is great news because they can focus on building their product / service and worry less about the markets becoming overly crowded with me-too competitors. The same argument ap...

Personal media management and consumption are a mess. For instance, I use Picasa for photos and short video clips coming off my camera onto my laptop. But given the large number of photos and video, I then move everything to an EasyNAS RAID array. Pictures from my mobile phone go to flickr. For music and video downloads I use iTunes on my laptop, but in my living room I have a Sonos. My PVR is from the cable company and (big surprise) doesn’t talk to anything else. My DVDs are largely not rip...

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 good as offerings that are entirely free (competitors may be entirely free because they are ad supporte...

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 overview and you can find a detailed summary directly from NEC. Interestingly, the study shows that ther...

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. It’s true that these are not 100% accurate, but for many applications they could provide significant value for...

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 at the same time do so with an innovative organizational design. I believe that’s an example of too ...

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 from one level to the next. For instance, kids are introduced to subtraction and within short order ar...

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.

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 though how much less responsibility we seem to be giving children today than when I was growing up. It starts wit...