Saturday, March 13, 2010

Broad Broadband

Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher interview Ste...Image via Wikipedia
New York Times: Vast FCC Plan Would Bring Net To More In US establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network..... Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service........ broadband Internet is becoming the common medium of the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries..... the plan should pay for itself through the spectrum auctions....... a third of Americans have no access to high-speed Internet...... remote locations where private companies have little incentive to build networks....... the F.C.C. is hoping to free up roughly 500 megahertz of spectrum, much of which would come from television broadcasters ...... 100 Squared — equipping 100 million households with high-speed Internet gushing through their pipes at 100 megabits a second by the end of this decade
High speed, universal internet is fundamental to America becoming a post-industrial, information age society. It is the very backbone. It is the foundation.

The Obama FDR Parallels



Heartthrob’s Barbed Blog Challenges ChinaWith more than 300 million hits to his blog, he may be the most popular living writer in the world..... The Internet, he says, will eventually prod China toward greater openness. No army of censors can completely constrain free expression. “I think the government really regrets the Internet,” he said, pausing for effect. “Originally, they thought it would be like the newspaper or the television — just another way to get their view out to the people. What they didn’t realize is that people can type and talk back. This is giving them a really big headache.”
Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personalthe clash between Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jobs offers an unusually vivid display of enmity and ambition..... cellphones that physically, technologically and spiritually resembled the iPhone .....“We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business” ...“Make no mistake: Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.” ........“You might want to tell me the difference between a large phone and a tablet.” ....Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, considered Mr. Jobs a mentor and, according to a former Apple executive, were regular visitors to Mr. Jobs’s office in Cupertino, Calif., during Google’s early days. ..........Mr. Brin was also known to take long walks with Mr. Jobs near his house in Palo Alto, and in the nearby foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. ......... Schmidt... relished his position on Apple’s board and the proximity it gave him to one of the most famous figures in American business.......Google continued to push ahead with Android and its vision of a more open mobile phone ecosystem. ......Android’s features were based on longstanding ideas already circulating in the industry and that some Android prototypes predated the iPhone. ........“Google is not a company that is particularly afraid of anyone, including Apple.” ........“Everything iDon’t ... Droid Does.” ........with Android and plans for a computer operating system, Google was “unfortunately” entering more of Apple’s “core business.” .........a wrestling match began on the acquisition front. .......Google, which counts Microsoft, FacebookYahoo on an ever-expanding list of rivals .......Bill Campbell .....had a hand in smoothing over the initially turbulent relationship between Mr. Schmidt and Google’s founders..............Apple, where he is co-chairman of the board .........the old dynamics between Apple and Microsoft being recycled, with Apple still trying to control every aspect of the user experience, and Google, like Microsoft before it, working with multiple partners to flood the market with a large number of devices. ............an unlikely sight: Steve Jobs and Apple, running from the arms of Eric Schmidt and Google, into the embrace of Steve Ballmer and Microsoft.
You're the Boss: The Secret to Having Happy EmployeesI fired the unhappy people.
Findings on Lehman Take Even Experts by SurpriseExecutives at other Wall Street banks professed surprise at Lehman’s accounting maneuvers.Goldman SachsBarclaysCapital and other banks said on Friday they did not use repos to hide liabilities on their balance sheets.
Report Details How Lehman Hid Its WoesThe bank’s bankruptcy, the largest in American history, shook the financial world. ......Lehman reverse engineered the firm’s net leverage ratio for public consumption ........Repo 105 involved transactions that secretly moved billions of dollars off Lehman’s books at a time when the bank was under heavy scrutiny. ......firms essentially lend assets to other firms in exchange for money for short periods of time, sometimes overnight. ......Lehman managed to “shed” about $39 billion from its balance sheet at the end of the fourth quarter of 2007, $49 billion in the first quarter of 2008 and $50 billion in the second quarter.
Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy With My Blog and Building My Brand.the Secret Is in the Sauce, a community of 5,000 female bloggers....... blog, about her life as a mother of three, typically draws about 36,000 page views a month. .......BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners .....a modern-day kaffeeklatsch, a vital outlet for conversing and commiserating about day-to-day travails.......“Through Twitter and blogging, I found a whole community of women going through the same thing as I am at the same time.” ......Just as television viewers have a seemingly insatiable hunger for reality shows, mothers often prefer the warts-and-all experiences of other moms online — and the ability to discuss them interactively — to the dry, inflexible pronouncements spouted by experts in books and parenting magazines. ......“The blogosphere is where authentic conversation is happening” .......advertising on blogs will top $746 million by 2012, more than twice the figure for 2007........some defend the growing alliance between bloggers and corporate America as empowering rather than exploitative, giving women a voice in shaping the brands they consume.
One on One: Andrey Ternovskiy, Creator of Chatroulette
One on One: Esther Dyson, Health Tech Investor and Space Tourist the newsletter Release 1.0, which I ran for 25 years......FlickrDel.icio.us....And I made a lot of money from Google through another investment. .........if you want to run a business, you need to monitor costs and revenues. In the same manner, if you want to run your body, you need to monitor intake and returns ......I don’t actually want to be the guy — I want to foster the guys........Partly this whole start-up phenomenon has been very male .........I have a short attention span. I couldn’t stay doing the same thing for 30 years......I often like to quote what the math professors say: The remainder of the proof is an exercise left to the reader.
One Analysis of the Google Buzz Mess “Nothing that the Buzz team did was technologically wrong,” Ms. Boyd said. “Yet the service resulted in complete disaster.” “Neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both”
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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Silicon Valley Vs. New York City


New York Times: New York Isn't Silicon Valley. That's Why They Like It.

This article in the New York Times has been making the rounds this past week in the New York tech circles. I have seen it in a few different tweets, buzzes and blog post mentions. It is an interesting article. What is my take on the topic?

Silicon Valley is the old, established company. New York City is the startup. New York City does not need a silicon name, although I hold no grudges against the Silicon Alley Insider. New York City already has a name. The name is New York City.     

There is tremendous liveliness in the New York tech scene right now. There is a lot of early stage work going on. An ecosystem is being nurtured. Infrastructure is being laid out. When you get into the tech startup scene in New York now, you are getting on the ground floor. Office spaces that look like evicted starving artists to make room for developers, coders, programmers are in a few different places. There are numerous tech events every week, small and big. There is feverish networking. You might see a string of IPOs in a few years.

What does Silicon Valley have? It has become mature and crowded. Google's sexiest offering to date was Google Search, but that was over a decade ago. Yahoo stands eclipsed and stagnant. Windows is on its way out. Wait, that would be Seattle, but never mind. Steve Jobs just finished work on the final product of his career, the iPad. IBM is upstate New York. Okay, so Oracle bought Sun. Intel and Cisco are humming, but those are global companies, tens of thousands hired in India alone. Facebook started on the East Coast, and many of Mark Zuckerberg's college friends are still in New York City. Zuck, it is not too late to move back. Twitter might be out there, but the next Twitter - FourSquare - is in New York. TechCrunch might be out there, but Mashable is in New York.

New York is the place to be.

Personally I am not in the dot com space, but I am so glad tons of others are. To me it feels like they are all working to better my product for free. My company will bring hundreds of millions of new people online. (Fred Wilson's Insight)




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Lady Gaga








Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Biggest Open Source Company: Oracle, Google Or Red Hat?

Image representing Red Hat as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase
There is a similar thing going on with blogging. Blogging started as a thing far flung individuals do. By now most of the top blogs are all corporate. Open source seems to share the story. So which do you think it might be? Which is the biggest open source company out there? Oracle, or Google?
We are all open-source companies now. Which also means that none of us are. Open source is simply a way that we enable some aspect of our businesses, whether we're Red Hat or Microsoft or Google or Facebook.



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Saturday, March 06, 2010

Fred Wilson's Insight




At the end of his talk Fred Wilson says, "I think that was about 15 minutes, and now I will take questions." That so impressed me. Because that was exactly 15 minutes. How did he do that? I was watching him, he was not looking at his watch. This guy obviously has a black belt in pitching. His body has become a clock.










Okay, this clip 10 is huge. "Why would you want to live in an office park and suburbia when you are 21 years old when you could be living in Williamsburg?" I love this city, so does Fred Wilson. He loves it because he has called this city home a long time. (Did he grow up here?) I love it because this is the first hometown I ever had. I have a refugee's love for the city.

I think this city needs to go head to head with Silicon Valley. Fred shares that thought. I dig that. Silicon Valley is the big, old established company. New York City is the startup.



"The same qualities that make you a great entrepreneur make you a terrible manager." I so buy into that. Visionary startup people need good old school COOs. Keep the trains running on time while I go shake things up.



Fred Wilson is a VC like Al Pacino is an actor. This guy was born to be a VC. You will not see this guy retire for a long, long time because he loves his work so much.

I don't see Fred Wilson invest in my company, not now, not in any of my future rounds. He does what he calls "web services." That is his "domain expertise," his phrase. I make it very clear I am not in the dot com (Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era) space, at least that is not my step one, or two, and those two steps are a 10 year run easy. There we part. But that at some level makes it even more interesting for me to follow him online. I am not someone waiting in the wings thinking only if he knew me well enough, or he liked me enough, he would put his money down on my venture. The conclusion that he is not going to ride my boat gives me a certain detachment, a certain objectivity to enjoying him. Makes me more carefree.

His is my favorite solo blog. The guy is an avid user of many of the products of his portfolio companies. Like Dennis Crowley said some place when he was asked why he let Fred invest in his company. "Fred's entire family is on FourSquare!"

Like I said to the First Round Capital guy Charlie the other day over email, I have heard a lot of good buzz about you and your firm, that you do early stage very good, what I have not figured out yet is if you are stuck in the dot com space.

Fred Wilson: VC
Fred Wilson: A VC
Fred Wilson

Fred says he is in the "web services" domain, but he also bemoans the fact that New York City has not, has not shown any signs of producing a 50 billion dollar company. A company that is worth 500 million is a successful, wonderful company, but it is small. At 10 billion you are mid size. 50 to 200 billion is big. Fred's portfolio is crowded/littered with small to mid size promises. My company is going to be big. (An Immigrant Story For Brad Feld) In my book you can't stick to the dot com space and in the same breath bemoan not seeing any big promise on the horizon. Those two thought trains don't go together. I see a train wreck. So at some level I do feel like maybe I am not totally done with the guy yet. I should not write him off for me completely. 
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