Google Also Answered My Blog Search Prayer

Now I would really, really like to sit on the Board of Google.

My Gmail Prayers Heard: Multiple Inboxes
A Ridiculously Good Blog Search Engine
Google Does Not Need Social Envy

This is still not the blog search engine I asked for, but it is a great start.

There is an information angle to search, and there Google can carve out an easy lead. Google does not need to "get" social. Actually my argument has been that it is not possible for the same company to be extremely good at information and also be extremely good at social. You can either be a chimpanzee or an orangutan. You can't be both. Sorry. It is a DNA thing. Google should stick to what it is good at, and keep blazing ahead with Android and the Chrome OS. Those two are paradigm shift promises.

I never really "got" the iPod, but I can't wait for the Chrome OS netbook. (The iPad Is No Laptop Killer)

ReadWriteWeb: Google Launches Blog Finder For Any Topic: This has the potential to be a wildly useful service. How many of you have had professional or personal reasons to seek a list of the top blogs on a new topic?.... then a new option will appear in the sidebar: search for posts or blog home pages related to your query......pages and pages of clearly topical sources ...... The more closely tied the title of the blog is to your search query, the higher the blog shows up in search results. That's not the best indicator of quality or authority...... Add some ranking, some OPML export, and then we're really talking.

Email Finally Emerges as a Platform: 3 Must-Have Plug-ins & What They Mean
Is A More Insidious Industry-Written Net Neutrality Proposal On The Way?
Crowdsourcing National Challenges With the New Challenge.gov
The Rise of the Anti-Facebooks
Top 10 YouTube Videos About Internet of Things
Orkut Now Encouraging Users to Project Different Personas to Different People

Facebook IPO Promise And The Brain Gain That Brings

You can always expect Mike Arrington to write a snarky little blog post like this one.

TechCrunch: Google Making Extraordinary Counteroffers To Stop Flow Of Employees To Facebook: Out of control growth in users and revenue and a nearly certain IPO run in the near future. That’s when employee growth expands at the greatest rate for a company as it grows from hundreds to thousands and then tens of thousands of employees..... Facebook is quietly telling people, never in writing, that there’s no reason their stock won’t hit $100 billion in total valuation over the next couple of years. No guarantees, yadda yadda, but hey if you get 1/10 of 1%, that’s $100 million in stock. Now it’s a party

I think Facebook is waiting for the recession to truly be over before it goes for an IPO. Otherwise it is ready. It has been ready for an IPO for a while.

The IPO gold rush can be heady stuff. There is at least one obvious, big billionaire waiting in the wings, one they made a movie about. But Facebook is big enough that there will be a whole new crowd of super rich people.

And to think I once proposed a rapid fire Twitter IPO to end the recession. (Twitter Should Go For A Netscape-Like IPO)

Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost

TechCrunch

Google Making Extraordinary Counteroffers To Stop Flow Of Employees To Facebook
Gmail’s Permanent Failure: Only Humans Can Build Software For Humans
Reddit Cofounder Alexis Ohanian To Join Y Combinator
Apple Announces The New iPod Touch: Dual Cameras, Retina Screen

Dead Web?

I have been reading this phrase for a while now, the web is dead. I have not bothered to click so far. That phrase makes no sense. The web will never be dead, like never, never, never. But the phrase seems to be making the rounds just like the women in tech meme, and I just came across a post by Al Wenger on the topic off my blogroll. I decided to click on it to see what all the fuss was about.

Al Wenger: Another Take on the Web Is Dead: Limits to Decentralization: Much has been made of the potential shift of attention from the totally open web to more proprietary platforms on mobile devices...... Almost all the knowledge that is on Wikipedia also exists on the web at large distributed across millions of sites.....Small merchants could set up their own web sites rather easily these days and sell directly. So what is it that Amazon adds?

The iPhone revolution has create new space, and that news space has added to the ecosystem of information consumption, but that new space is nowhere even remotely close to taking over the old, wide web. China has not overtaken America. Chill, people.

Amazon and Wikipedia are not examples of a closed web. They are two flagships instead that the open web boasts of.

iPhone apps are fine but so is table tennis as a game. Does not beat soccer, though. (World Cup: Spain Deserved To Win)



Marc Andreessen: Good Ambition, Bad Ambition
Ben Horowitz: The Right Kind Of Ambition

Brad Burnham: Internet Architecture And Innovation: the architecture of the internet is changing - that the economic interests of the internet access providers are not the same as the interests of the applications developers or end users, that there is not enough competition in the local loop to provide market discipline, so without intervention, innovation on the Internet will suffer. .... protecting the original design principles of the Internet is the most efficient regulatory regime

Mark Cuban Says Put Your Cash Under The Mattress

This has got to be one of the best Mark Cuban blog posts I ever came across. For a risk taking maven to put together such sane advice, we must really be going through some tough times as a people.

Mark Cuban: The Best Investment Advice You Will Ever Get

I Share Mark Cuban's Passion On The FCC Broadband Plan
Free Is The Future: Picking A Fight With Mark Cuban

Here's my summary of his three points.

1. Credit cards are no good. Pay them off. 
2. When in doubt, stick with the cash, don't invest.
3. Spending 15% less is a better return than any on the stock market. 

Women In Tech: The Debate Rages On

This women in tech debate has really taken off, and I am glad.

Here's the guy who introduced me to Twitter, JP Rangaswami.

Women are underrepresented in a number of dimensions in the tech world, and this is noticeable in conference line-ups and in start-up founder lists. .... Take The Indus Entrepreneurs, TiE in short..... TiE was created to ensure that people of South Asian extraction were given the funding opportunities they were otherwise being denied. There was general acceptance of the engineering excellence of such people, but for some reason question marks were raised about their ability to run companies. Which meant that the “engineers” never got funded when they went forward with business plans..... We need to make sure that we eradicate prejudices that go along the lines of: Women don’t code. Founders must code. So women can’t found startups…..Systemic problems often need systemic solutions

I am glad he mentions the organization TiE, and draws the connection between gender and some of the challenges faced by brown people. And the thing he says about it being just fine for women entrepreneurs to not be coders, that is a theme a ran with when I blogged about a panel discussion here in New York City during Internet Week. (Women In Tech-Media Event At JP Morgan: Internet Week) I just had an email from the panel host Neha Chauhan yesterday saying she is working to launch her own startup in October.

And finally JP touches upon a theme I touched upon in a post I put out this past hour, (Gender Talks) that some of the biggest solutions are perhaps political.



Shefaly Yogendra: “Women in tech”: What Gives?:

Super Angels

Brad Feld: Serious Questions For Super Angels: As individual angel investors made more and more investments, they became super angels. One day a super angel woke up and thought to himself, “Gosh, I could do a lot more investments if I had a fund.” .... Now the micro-VC is a mini-VC. Does this keep scaling, or does the mini-VC succumb to the same challenges that $200 million funds ran into when they turned into $1 billion funds? ..... There’s a renewed focus and interest in early-stage investing going on in the United States



Some of the best bloggers in tech are VCs. I have often wondered as to why the top tech entrepreneurs are not also avid bloggers. It would make sense to avidly blog while you are trying to build a company. But there really are no entrepreneur versions of the top VC blogs. I wish it were otherwise. I felt this while reading this post by Brad Feld, quoted above.

The venture capital worlds has been seeing some major churn. And it is so much fun watching the drama unfold through the various VC blogs. It is gripping. It is like watching a good movie. There is high drama. It is capitalism in action. Blogging has brought forth much transparency to VC action, and that is a good thing.

Early stage investing is seeing some major fermentation. That will impact the VC world in that investing, even at mega scales, will become more hands on. VCs will have to get more involved.

Gender Talks

The Daily Beast: Leah Culver: Is There a Gender Divide in Startups?: The situation for women in technology isn't ideal. When I show up to tech events, I worry about looking out of place. For every job I apply for and don't get, I wonder if I just didn't fit the interviewer's mental picture of the perfect candidate. When I'm invited to speak at a conference, I doubt that I'm qualified. When most of my coworkers are men, I can't help but wonder why..... we need to criticize less. Blaming other members of the community (especially men) provokes a knee-jerk defense and doesn't help solve the problem. Instead we need to congratulate more women on their accomplishments and praise those who helped them along the way...... I could keep writing about the lack of women in tech, but starting a new company sounds like a lot more fun

Wall Street Journal Blogs: Venture Capital Dispatch: Shira Ovide: Addressing The Lack Of Women Leading Tech Start-Ups: a dearth of women in top positions at emerging tech firms...... Y Combinator has had just 14 female founders among the 208 firms it has funded. ...... in start-up land, where the good idea is supposed to trump social status and everything else, the lack of women in positions of authority stands out...... some techie women are – in true start-up fashion – attacking the problem with meetups, money and social networking ...... Ms. Ziv said she tries to encourage women to integrate more forcefully into male-dominated tech events such as the New York Tech Meetup....... Mr. Wilson, who said 3% of investment pitches he fields are from women, said he has become more attentive about the challenges of women tech entrepreneurs

FoodSpotting Is The Next FourSquare
Mike Arrington Is A Sexist Pig: Say PeeeeG!
Tech, Women, Diversity



Gender in tech is one of those topics where I feel like progress is being made simply when people are willing to talk about it. You will come across defensive men, sure. You will come across women who have internalized the wrong order. And there are people who are simply not interested in the topic any more than they are interested in calculus or robotics.

What's interesting to me with this debate is that the startup world is supposed to be meritocratic and the gender ratio is not that much better in the startup world either. That seems to surprise a lot of people, but not me. Gravity is in effect in Nevada, but it is also in effect in California. That is how I feel.

Men and women could create microcosms of progressive realities. Major social changes will hopefully take place. But they will not take place on their own. I personally see a clear politics, policy angle to this.

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking coding might be a specialized skill, but politics is just common sense. Politics is also a specialized skill. (September 14 Will Birth The New Woman)

I just hope we can keep the topic current, and keep making steady progress. This is not a men versus women thing. Sexism is not good for men either.