Ben Horowitz And Dave McClure

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeBen Horowitz: Why Has Andreessen Horowitz Raised $2.7B in 3 Years?

I was just reading this blog post by Ben Horowitz - great blog, by the way - and could not help thinking this guy sounds a lot like Dave McClure, only at a much larger scale. Dave McClure wants to help build your accounting department.

Investment firms aspire to be incubators. It is not like, here's the money, and now go build. The money is good, heck, it is the primary thing. But then there's the advice, the network.

I mean, look at this, this looks like a FoxConn report. As in, we cooked 30 tons of rice today and 12 tons of pork.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/2659065551/ via CrunchBaseIn 2011, we hosted over 600 portfolio presentations to corporate customers and partners at our office in Menlo Park. These presentations resulted in more than 3,000 introductions between portfolio companies and prospective Fortune 500/Global 2000 senior executives.

We’ve built relationships with over 4,000 engineers, designers and product managers, and we’ve made more than 1,300 introductions to our portfolio companies, resulting in 130 hires within the portfolio.

We added over 550 executives to our network in 2011 and made more than 300 executive introductions to our portfolio companies.

We’ve had nearly 400 interactions with media on behalf of our portfolio companies.

Amazon, I Never Received My Book

Twitter Integration Into Google's Search Plus

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeDick Costolo in GigaOm: “Google crawls us at a rate of 1300 hits per second… They’ve indexed 3 billion of our pages,” Costolo said. “They have all the data they need.”

The Next Web: 2009: Total Tweets Tweeted Nearing 5 Billion

http://gigatweeter.com/counter: 29 Billion Tweets

Twitter Blog: Measuring Tweets

If there are 29 billion tweets out there and counting, and according to the Twitter CEO Google has indexed three billion of them, then obviously Google does not have access to all the tweets out there. There is some cooperation that is necessary. And so far it has not been forthcoming.

I speak for the consumer. If tweets are not included in Google's Search Plus Your World, that is not a good thing. I hope the two giants work things out.

Dick Costolo Of Twitter
Google Should Get The Twitter Firehose
Twitter, France And Germany
Twitter Should Open Up Its API ---- To Google

Dick Costolo Of Twitter

Pando Daily: The Real Story of How Dick Costolo Kicked Investors Off Twitter’s Board
VentureBeat: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo: 2012 is going to be the Twitter election
AllThingsD: Twitter CEO Says Board Changes “Not Some Ninja Move”
TechCrunch: Twitter’s Dick Costolo: “We’re Growing Faster Than We Have Ever Grown Before”
GigaOm: Twitter CEO: Google has all the data they need
Business Insider: We Just Heard A Rumor That Twitter Wants To Buy Tumblr, But Here's The Truth
AllThingsD: Costolo: Twitter Isn’t Looking to Censor Anyone

Yosemite

Yosemite HD from Project Yosemite on Vimeo.

Via Saaya Yasuda

Six Is Half A Dozen: Tweets From Suster

Mark Suster's Web Second Applies To Istagram

Shit Birds Say

Via Craig Newmark

MegaUpload: The SOPA/PIPA Aftermath

Image via CrunchBaseThe Shout: Megaupload: A Lot Less Guilty Than You Think

The heart of this case is whether and when an enterprise can be held criminally liable for the conduct of its users. ....... “Can the Grokster theory of CIVIL liability even be the basis for CRIMINAL copyright claims?” This has never been decided by any Court. ...... Rojadirecta’s lawyers at Durie Tangri have challenged the U.S. Government’s assertion that criminal liability arises from linking to infringing content. The lawyers argue that judge-made secondary infringement liability theories, including Grokster style inducement, cannot be the basis for a criminal copyright violation because the criminal copyright statute doesn’t mention secondary liability. Congress considered and rejected statutes that would have created such liability, in COICA and PROTECT IP. In sum, due process doesn’t allow incarceration under a civil legal theory that the Supreme Court dreamed up in 2005. The issues yet to be decided in Rojadirecta apply to the Megaupload case as well. ...... The list of overt acts show that the object of the conspiracy was infringement by Mega users. ....... If the idea is that Mega conspired with its users to infringe, those users may or may not have been criminally infringing copyright. They were located all over the world, and may or may not have acted willfully, i.e. intended to violate U.S. law. Again, the government would basically have alleged an agreement to violate a U.S. CIVIL law, including by many people who are not subject to U.S. rules. ....... Is it a federal crime to conspire to induce others to violate a U.S. civil law? ....... The answer to that is an obvious “no”. ...... prosecuting this case against Mega, especially if Defendants get good criminal lawyers who also understand copyright law, is going to be an uphill battle for the government. ..... the indictment identifies four films that the defendants supposedly distributed before release: The Green Hornet, Thor, Bad Teacher, Twilight–Breaking Dawn Part 1. But Count 4 only charges one such act of prerelease infringement, the movie Taken. What about the other films? Why were those not also charged? .......... Finally, this case is extremely interesting from a JURISDICTIONAL standpoint. One of the very first issue to be litigated will be extradition to the United States. Does the United States have jurisdiction over anyone who uses a hosting provider in the Eastern District of Virginia? What about over any company that uses PayPal? That’s a very broad claim of power, and I expect it will be vigorously contested.

TorrentFreak: Mega Aftermath: Upheaval In Pirate Warez Land

While last week’s shutdown of MegaUpload is of huge interest in itself, but a wave of aftershocks and side-effects are proving equally fascinating to watch. In addition to causing all sorts of problems for legitimate users of file-sharing services, there is no avoiding the fact that certain elements of the piracy scene are in a mess. But amazingly, still the beat goes on. ....... The perception of the established ground rules had been changed, without the passing of a single new law. ....... “If the US government can come for Kim Dotcom it can happen to almost anyone,” a file-hosting operator told TorrentFreak on condition of anonymity. “I’m trying to think of everything I did possibly wrong in the last 3 years and worrying about that and the next 3 years also, if we even have that long.” ..... For many hosting sites it was time to react – quickly. ......... drastic actions taken by services such as Filesonic and Fileserve who shut down all 3rd party sharing and, like many others, closed down their affiliate payout programs ...... file-hosting competitors such as 4shared, Rapidshare and Hotfile had grown as users hunted for spare capacity ...... huge libraries of both legitimate and pirated material were wiped out as filehost after filehost deleted an impossible-to-calculate number of files and closed down thousands of suspected infringing accounts. ....... For more than half a decade Hollywood and the recording industry have spent millions of dollars not so much on actually eliminating illegal content, but getting rid of links to content such as those found on BitTorrent........ But this week, without a single cease and desist being sent, cyberlockers across the globe not only self-deleted vast quantities of files, but in doing so made millions of links across thousands of ‘linking sites’ completely useless too. ......... While there is money to be made in torrent sites, the content sharers there are largely altruistic. ...... But like worker ants whose nest has just been smashed apart by angry humans, others are utterly unfazed and just want to know which hosts are still paying out. Despite the climate of fear, quite a few hosts say they are ...... Cyberlockers are in a mess, but already recovering. Release sites are continuing, albeit with a reduced number of multiple links to the same content. ...... Perhaps the best test is whether it’s now very hard or impossible to find and download popular content. Not even close.

This MegaUpload stuff is related to SOPA/PIPA. The people who lost the battle in Congress hit back in New Zealand. There is no fighting the technology. But the music and movie industries have the option to come up with new business models.

The Solution Is Tech Heavy, Data Heavy

Mark Suster's Web Second Applies To Instagram

Image via WikipediaSomeone also needs to shout Android!Android!Android! to them Instagram folks.

Kevin Shitstorm Of Instagram

Mark Suster: Web Second, Mobile First

In the long run it will not be an issue of first and second. Right now I am talking to a client who has this iPhone app in mind that I think would be great on all three platforms: iPhone, Android, web. I think I have convinced him, but now it is just a matter of money. If the money is tight he will start with iPhone only. My team will build him an iPhone app first.

Seven Screens

But then the real news here is Mark links to a blog post from Fred Wilson where Fred Wilson links to a blog post from me.

A friend was quick to note. And I was quick to pass that message on to Mark in his comments section.

Safe House
Getting To Meet Mark Suster In Person
Local Response: Monetizing On "Their" Behalf

I wish there were a few top tech entrepreneurs who blogged like Fred Wilson and Mark Suster do. As in, regularly, or at all. Where is Sean Parker when you need him?

John Borthwick Of Betaworks

Betaworks Shareholder Letter

Michael Jackson: Remember The Time

Via Ilyasah Al-Shabazz