Business

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Measuring efficiency in the cloud

In the world of cloud computing every action has a cost. Every HTTP request fires off a chain of actions, each uniquely measured on a variety of billable meters. Gone are the days of idle or unused resources on our local servers. Cloud computing charges by the sip (when sips are available) aligning business goals of resource efficiency and its cost. The cloud computing world shares many similarities with the plug-in and go world of electricity, including the need to run green for the sake of resources and cost savings. What can the world of green energy teach us about the future of cloud computing? How can we measure computing resources in the cloud for efficiency, replacement costs, and cost savings?

The anatomy of cloud computing

Cloud computing is changing the way we provision hardware and software for on-demand capacity fulfillment. Lately I have been thinking about the ways on-demand servers, storage, and CDNs are changing the way we develop web applications and make business decisions. In this post I will provide an overview of the cloud hosting landscape with a particular focus on cloud utilization by web companies. I will walk through a managed infrastructure stack and examine a few major business targets.

How will Twitter make money?

Micro-blogging service Twitter will celebrate its third birthday in March and may have a revenue model to support the company over the long-term. Last month Twitter CEO Evan Williams told Kevin Maney of Porfolio.com the company will kick off new revenue streams by March 2009 to avoid raising another round of venture capital funding. Twitter’s deeply engaged community would love to see a sustainable business develop around the site, its services, and the community. In this post I will take a deeper look at Twitter and its revenue potential as publicly hinted by its founders.

Syndication and Widgets Primer

Today’s publishers need to think beyond the fixed location of their website and fully integrate with the large hubs of user activity on the desktop, mobile phone, social networks, blogs, and web pages at large. Syndication and widgets power new opportunities to carry content beyond the walls of a single site and into some of the largest brands in the world yet some publishers still haven’t gotten the message. I recorded a 1-hour video presentation earlier this week to better explain the syndication and widget landscape to web publishers.

Inside the iPhone App Store acceptance process

Apple’s relative secrecy regarding the iPhone platform and distribution policies have caused market uncertainties in need of some further clarity. In this post I will examine the iPhone OS 2.0 platform and the iPhone App Store from the point of view of Apple and other hosted storefront providers.

Intel and Yahoo! announce Widget Channel for HDTV

The Internet is coming to your TV, reclaiming your split attention span from the other gadgets around the house. Intel announced its latest effort to power your living room yesterday with new media processors, reference designs, and software stacks that may eventually find their way into the cable boxes, Blu-ray players, and home media centers of 2010. Intel partnered with Yahoo! to deliver Internet-connected widgets, advertising, and content to potential partners with a software stack branded The Widget Channel. What new opportunities are available inside the Widget Channel platform? When is the right time to implement?

Upgrade your Google Analytics tracker

Google released a new version of its Google Analytics tracking code last month. In this post you will learn about the new features available to webmasters and how to move away from the deprecated libraries.

FeedDemon and NetNewsWire are now free

NewsGator is giving away desktop clients FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator Inbox as part of a new plan to capture more enterprise revenue.

Facebook cleanses Pages of supposed fakesters

Facebook is proactively deleting Pages and other content from its site in an attempt to limit fake listings created by unauthorized entities. The new enforcement procedures started on Thursday night with many Facebook users receiving notifications of their deleted pages and an apparent violation of the Facebook Pages Terms of Service.

Startup Search: tracking the web startup ecosystem

Tonight I am unveiling a new site tracking the startup ecosystem. It’s a directory and analytics tool I’ve personally wanted for a long time, and I know others will enjoy. Introducing Startup Search. Startup Search tracks Web startups, their products, key employees, investment firms, and investment partners. Startup Search also tracks the success of each product since it was first introduced to the world, using publicly available metrics pulled into a single page. It’s a research tool, a discovery engine, and a fact-filled directory of our little Web startup world. I’ll walk through a few features. Directory data Startup Search…

Every good domain is taken. Here’s why.

Kevin Ham built a $300 million web company in Vancouver you’ve probably never heard of. You are likely familiar with his work as you drop vowels from the domain names of your favorite web startups such as Flickr or Tumblr, or try selecting a name for your new company or product. Kevin Ham built a domain name empire named Agoga, cutting exclusive deals with local registrars and national governments, attracting over 30 million unique visitors a month according to an article by Paul Sloan in the June issue Business 2.0 magazine. Think of a name, any name, and it’s probably…

The end of Apple Computer

Today marked the end of Apple Computer after 30 years. The company has come a long way from kit computers assembled in a garage, capitalizing on at least one eureka moment a decade that causes people to rethink the intersection of cutting edge hardware and software. The release of the Mac in 1984 combined the best available hardware with commercial software utilizing the best ideas developed at Apple and research labs such as Xerox PARC. The release of the iMac in 1998 changed consumer views on personal computing, adding a colorful and quiet device to our desktops, placing an…

Business Plan Archive studies companies of the late 90s

I’ve been sucked in to the Business Plan Archive created by the University of Maryland and George Mason. They’ve archived business plans, investor pitches, term sheets, screenshots, mockups, and even old business cards. Here’s a sample company description from an online job site: The company will introduce a new network of online recruiting sites that will utilize the latest advances in internet technology to provide online interaction between employers and job seekers. Seeking a $26 million Series A in mid-1998. Another company I found was after $10 million for a sports site and ended up with $500,000 in convertible notes….

Planning a small conference

I like small, focused events especially in the early days of an industry. Om and I organized the Widgets Live! conference to bring together the major players creating widgets, gadgets, and modules and the major endpoints of deployment. Many decisions were made along the way, and I’ll share just a few in this post. When? We knew lots of people from around the web industry would be in San Francisco for O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 conference November 7-9. Scheduling the widgets conference adjacent to the Web 2.0 conference creates a convenient opportunity for a few people to extend their visit…

Conference industry basics

I’ve been busy over the past few weeks organizing the Widgets Live! conference. I’ve talked to lots of people interested in various aspects of the conference industry, so I’ll summarize a few logistics in this post. Venue costs Event venues typically charge a room rental fee combined with a minimum catering expense. All prices quoted are usually a “list price” and negotiable depending on factors such as the length of the conference, number of rooms booked at the hotel, your total catering spend, and your repeat business if you host multiple conferences a year. Many venues will waive the room…

Data launchpads of the cloud wars

The war of the data clouds will really start to heat up in 2007 as large Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft open huge data centers in the Pacific Northwest fueled by cheap power and bandwidth. Our digital lives continue to be fueled by the cloud, with new data services and software that replace or complement desktop tasks coming online every month. Software as a service is the new development push, and custom build outs next to a few large dams and fiber highways are a sign of what’s next. Internet giants are building up their server…

WSJ raises questions about Mobius Venture Capital

Rebecca Buckman wrote about the seemingly impending breakup of Mobius Venture Capital on the front-page of the Wall Street Journal Markets section this morning. Buckman cites “people familiar with the matter” saying Managing Director Brad Feld may break off and form his own fund, bringing a few people from Mobius with him. Mobius raised a $630 million fund in 1999 and a $1.25 billion fund in 2000. The firm does not plan to raise another fund and the article cites investors saying the funds are “well underwater” Mobius invested in blog and feed syndication firms FeedBurner, NewsGator, and Technorati. The…

Forbes on PubSub’s business history

Forbes provides a summary of PubSub’s business history, from the company’s founding through it’s recent collapse. “$4 million is down the drain, and PubSub can’t even afford to file for bankruptcy. No one has filed suit–yet.” PubSub is still online, so someone must be paying the continued hosting costs….

Accidental Innovation

Harvard business school professor Robert D. Austin is writing a book on reliable innovation and shared some of his findings in a HBS Working Knowledge interview last week. He takes a look at how some big accidental discoveries such as anesthesia, cellophane, cholesterol lowering drugs, cornflakes, dynamite, the ice cream soda, Ivory soap, NutraSweet (and several other artificial sweeteners), nylon, penicillin, photography, rayon, PVC, smallpox vaccine, stainless steel, Teflon came about and what are key factors allowing accidents to happen and realizing value in what could be considered chaos. It takes a considerable capability to see the value in an…

LinuxCare rises again

A poster child of the dot-com boom, LinuxCare has rebranded itself “Levanta,” raised another round of capital. BusinessWeek profiles the company though it’s rise and fall and attempt to rise again and I found the details rather amusing. Levanta sounds a lot like erectile disfunction drug Levitra but it’s possible the company may be able to get their finances up again. Renaming the company seems like an attempt to hide from its past, which BusinessWeek covers in detail. Some highlights from the company’s history. Raised over $70 million in venture capital, including big names such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield &…

Buzzword laden startup launches

I just received a press release for a new startup launching today. The announcement is heavy with buzzwords, but doesn’t actually tell me what the site is all about. Here’s the actual first paragraph, with the name and industry removed. Web 2.0 changes the way we perceive information. [Company name] uses Web 2.0 in the [vertical name] (i.e. blogs, podcasts, ajax, tags, etc.) and is particularly attentive to RSS, which presents a formidable opportunity for this sector. The press release on the launch of this new company next explains what a typical RSS button on a website looks like, and…

Turning a pitch into a Survivor

A multi-billion dollar TV almost didn’t happen. A television producer was eventually able to find one person who understood his vision to reinvent television and was persistent enough with his idea to help an old industry grasp a new concept. British producer Mark Burnett had an idea for a new reality TV show but needed support from network gatekeepers to make his vision a reality. In the late 90s Burnett went all over Hollywood pitching the show to whoever would listen, including the cable networks. No one was interested and the idea of reality television had not taken off….

FeedShow and RemoteAds

FeedShow is an online RSS aggregator from France hoping to create a business around splitting advertising money with feed publishers. A publisher may opt-in to the advertising system and display up to two contextual advertisements alongside their feed. FeedShow receives a 50% split of the advertising revenues from publishers participating in the program. FeedShow created a new RSS namespace allowing feed publishers to define their ad provider, account number, and additional provider data such as an AdSense channel. While ads alongside e-mail created new businesses and accounts for a large percentage of private e-mail usage today, feed publishers seem…

Yahoo! is top portal

Hitwise just published rankings and market share for top portals in search, mail, news, finance, and maps. While Google dominates in search, Yahoo! is the clear aggregate leader across these top categories with an almost 10% lead over the search leader. SearchE-mailNewsFinanceMapsTotal Market7.39.33.40.60.521.04 Google47.42.51.90.37.53.80 Yahoo!16.042.46.334.920.55.62 MSN11.522.913.44.33.07 Other8.56 While Google Maps is an often-cited example of the Web 2.0 world Mapquest has 7x the market share according to these numbers….

Mark Fletcher presentation at Startup SIG

Mark Fletcher spoke about his experience starting ONElist and Bloglines at this month’s SDForum Startup SIG in Palo Alto. Mark has given a similar presentation at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and at Startup School, but if you are not in California you might have missed his advice for starting your own company while moonlighting and being super-cheap. Mark’s last corporate job was with set-top box maker Diba which was eventually acquired by Sun Microsystems in July 1997. He started working on a new company, ONElist, on the side, funded by a $5,000 bonus check for its first six…

iPod, the rejected startup

Tony Fadell helped develop handheld devices for General Magic and Philips. Tony had a vision of a portable MP3 player complemented by an online music store. His startup, Fuse, couldn’t get VC financing to build the product. He shopped the idea around to big companies such as Real Networks and only one company decided to experiment with his idea, hiring Tony as a contractor to build a prototype in two months. The first review on Slashdot in October 2001 called the product “lame” and “not very exciting” for lacking wireless and a bigger hard drive. The product idea became the…

PodSession: Startup School

Want to found a startup! First you should go to school and learn a few things. Last Saturday’s Startup School at Stanford brought together about 600 people from across the country and in some cases the world to learn what it takes to take a business from zero to profit without going broke. Om and I both attended and talked about the event and the current environment for new startups in this week’s PodSession. The event was organized by Y Combinator, a venture firm focused on seed funding for geeky projects. Students in the Y Combinator program can try startup…

Big companies and Lawrence of Arabia

One of my favorite scenes in Lawrence of Arabia is “Chaos in Damascus.” The Arabs have just captured Damascus from the Turks and various civil tasks are divided between multiple tribes. Damascus in the hands of Turks was a pie-in-the-sky dream they never thought was possible, yet they are now all in the great hall trying to organize. There is infighting among the tribes, civil tasks break down, and tribal leaders point fingers blaming other tribes or things they do not understand. The telephones do not work because they have no electricity. There is no electricity because no one will…

PodSession: eBay shopping for partners

According to The Wall Street Journal eBay is talking to Microsoft and Yahoo! about partnerships that could help the auction giant better compete against Google and its expanding offerings. EBay is a large advertising spender but sees Google’s moves into e-commerce as a threat to its main businesses in auctions, PayPal, and Skype. Should eBay and other companies be afraid of Google as the search company expands to new areas? Is it fair to eBay sellers to exclude a large referral source such as Google? I think eBay is just asserting itself in the marketplace and shopping around for some…

Application-specific WiFi for free

I’ve read some chatter lately about free WiFi offerings by Yahoo! and others tied to a specific application. Connecting a product to an established network of connection points makes a lot of sense for companies with established branding power, and I think there will be many new partnerships to help users of specific applications stay connected on the road. While there is a lot of talk about companies building their own WiFi networks for specific purposes I think we will instead see partnerships with existing restricted access networks with some advertising and branding swap to offset costs. Yahoo! Messenger On-the-Road…

The cost of commuting to Silicon Valley

Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft employ tens thousands of people in the San Francisco Bay area including many talented people driving close to 100 miles round-trip every day to work for these big companies. AAA released today their 2006 driving costs report and I decided to run the numbers to associate a conservative cost with a commute to these companies. How much would it cost to drive a Toyota Camry to work every day from the city centers of San Francisco, Berkeley, or Alameda? Prices below include conservative costs from AAA for average fuel consumption, maintenance, tires, insurance, license and registration,…

theOffice, creating the ideal workplace for indie writers

I am in west Los Angeles today and dropped by theOffice, a community workspace serving the professional writing community of Santa Monica and surrounding areas. They have put a lot of thought and effort into creating an ideal creative work environment combining elements of a cafe, library, and Feng Shui garden into a place creative professionals feel inspired and focused. Background information The workspace was founded by writer and director Aleks Horvat in 2004 with charter members such as J.J. Abrams, Jim Uhls, and Mara Brock Akil. A wall-of-fame tracks successful works written in the space. Aleks was working…

Founder Frustrations blog

I am enjoying the blog of Harvard Assistant Professor Noam Wasserman and if you are a founder, entrepreneur, or venture capitalist you may appreciate his research into founder frustrations. He covers economic concepts of stewardship theory and agency theory from a startup’s point of view. Past topics: Founder-CEO succession Co-founder issues Hiring and scaling challenges Communicating with investors Building a board of directors Entrepreneurial compensation Case studies Graphs, charts, hard data, and real stories. Enjoy! Tags: startups…

Linuxcaffe serves up coffee and Ubuntu

Linuxcaffe is a small Toronto café with free WiFi, organic food, and lessons in Python and Ubuntu with a view of the park. You can burn any of over 80 linux distributions, rent a laptop, and become a member of the café with benefits such as hard drive backup privileges and web hosting. It’s serving the community in unique ways and has become a geek tourist landmark. I especially like the membership features of the café similar to what I proposed in my elements of an ideal café blog post a few months ago. Photo by mtl3p Tags: internetcafe…

Startup round-up

Om and I discussed the latest startup companies that caught our interest in our latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions. We talked about some companies presenting at the DEMO conference as well as companies who are bootstrapping to deliver an interesting new product with a different approach. The startup round-up podsession is 22 minutes in length, a 10 MB download. A full transcript is also available. Tags: podcastsmallbusinessstartups…

Dog.com buys Fish.com for $1 million

Chris Andersen: “The owner of Dog.com just paid $1 million for Fish.com, in hopes of starting what amounts to a new Pets.com.” Online shopping for your pets is big business again but this time the company is focused on selling smaller items such as dog treats instead of 50 pound bags of dog food. Is the fish food market worth a $1 million domain name? Graphic by Wired News Tags: dogspetsfish…

The story of PriceGrabber part 3: Small ball

This post is part 3 of a series about the early days of shopping comparison site PriceGrabber.com. You may want to read part 1 and part 2 before continuing. We’ve all seen the overconfident hitter come to the plate, take three home run swings, and look back at the catchers mitt every time he fails to connect. Given a small team with limited resources I prefer the BIlly Beane approach of playing small ball to bring in the wins. Landing small business development deals in succession can establish a small player and bring in the revenue needed to swing for…

Entrepreneurial sellout podcast

The latest episode of OnPodSessions, When to sell out, is now available for download. This week Om and I talk about large companies acquiring startups, what they are looking for, and how various startups position themselves. The selling out podcast is 23 minutes long and a 10.6 MB download. Last week I read a blog post and PowerPoint presentation by Joel Toledano of Yahoo! Search’s business development team. The presentation and blog post was a follow-up to an entrepreneurial event organized by CalTech and MIT. I felt like the presentation suggested small companies need approach Yahoo! about being acquired and…

The story of PriceGrabber part 2: Funding with a zip

This post is part 2 of a series about the early days of shopping comparison site PriceGrabber.com. You may want to read part 1 before continuing. PriceGrabber was created in 1999, at the height of the Internet boom, with only about $1.5 million in seed money. The company was able to raise a sizable amount of capital using the tools it had created for the general Internet marketplace of expert users and enthusiasts. By tracking exceptional deals from merchant crawls performed multiple times a day PriceGrabber was able to turn bubble-worthy goofs of other companies into seed money for a…

The story of PriceGrabber part 1: Grabware

Successful companies can be formed out of the failure of a dream and a side project created for friends and family growing into much more. This is the story of the birth of PriceGrabber.com, a shopping comparison search company that grew from a side project into a half-billion dollar sale in about five years. Grabware was envisioned as a software distribution company providing on-demand distribution of software through store kiosks. A buyer would approach the terminal, choose a few shareware titles or full versions of the software, and an in-store fulfillment service would burn a CD and print a user…

Mac small business dinner January 11 in San Francisco

I am organizing a dinner for Mac small business owners and developers on Wednesday, January 11, at Chaat Cafe in San Francisco starting at 7 p.m. I want to bring together the small businesses attending the conference for face-to-face discussion and sharing of ideas among other people who have probably used your software and read your blog but might have never met face-to-face. I enjoyed the lunch meeting during this year’s WWDC and want to keep the conversation flowing. Chaat Cafe is located at 320 3rd Street (corner of 3rd and Folsom) in downtown San Francisco, one block from…

Paid placements over broadband pipes

The latest of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. This week Om and I talk about the emergence of paid placement or prioritization of services on networks run by broadband providers such as your cable or telephone company. Cable and phone operators currently prioritize the handling of data packets from their own services flowing across the network. A call placed using a carrier’s Internet telephony product will receive priority handling ahead of calls placed using competing services such as Skype or Vonage. The carriers are now in discussion with other businesses dependent on fast delivery of their content to…

Podcast with 37signals

Earlier today I had the opportunity to interview Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals for my podcast with Om Malik. We talked about scalability’s role in business planning, built-to-flip startup companies, and programming using the Ruby on Rails framework. Our interview with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is 29 minutes and 50 seconds in length and a 13.7 MB download. Om posted earlier this week about companies that don’t take scale into account when building a web service. David Heinemeier Hansson responded to Om with his own experiences building Basecamp and other hosted applications. We took the…

Brightcove receives $16.2 million Series B

Brightcove just closed a $16.2 million Series B funding round led by AOL. Other investors include IAC, Hearst, and Allen & Co. Barry Diller of IAC will join Brightcove’s board. Series A was led by Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and David Orfao of General Catalyst Partners. Brightcove was founded by Jeremy Allaire, formerly chief technical officer at Macromedia where he helped develop the Flash format. Brightcove makes heavy use of Flash throughout its site to deliver video direct to customers over the web for free, subscription, and individual purchases. Brightcove also signed a deal with AOL allowing publishers…

Corporate blogs as more than a marketing brochure

Too many corporate marketers see a blog as a marketing brochure to spread the same marketing content in multiple formats. Below are three different areas often overlooked by companies considering blogging as a communications strategy. Recruitment Corporate blogs can be a recruiting tool for both active and passive candidates. Job candidates like to know who they will be working with, on what types of projects, and if the company takes good care of its employees. All of this information is best discovered and trusted from individuals within the company. In a larger company the blogs of individuals can be used…

Amazon receives customer reviews patent

Amazon.com received U.S. Patent number 6,963,848 this week for “methods and system of obtaining consumer reviews.” Amazon has the full purchase data for an item and can determine when a user has enough experience to review the product. The patent covers the solicitation of a review and what metrics might be used to determine the right time to solicit a review. The patent was originally filed over five and a half years ago in March 2000 and seems to be focused on better competing with a site such as Epinions.com. Some interesting snippets: The predetermined amount of time may be…

VoIP podcast with Om Malik

I use voice over IP applications such as Skype and Gizmo Project but I don’t follow industry developments in the same detail as Om Malik and his broadband blog. Om and I tried out the podcasting abilities of Gizmo Project tonight with a 19 minute discussion of the current state of voice over IP (VoIP). We talk about some of the industry basics, news of the week, and where the industry as a whole is headed. Click here to download the 8.7 MB MP3 file. Topics covered: Skype vs. Gizmo Project Dialing out to a phone grid Microsoft Windows Live…

VeriSign acquires Weblogs.com

Michael Graves of VeriSign announced the acquisition of Weblogs.com this evening. SiliconBeat reports Dave Winer sold the service for $2 million. VeriSign plans to maintain the ping beacon in its current form with additional revenue models and ping extensions beyond the current implementation. VeriSign hints at upsell opportunities for ping submission and retrieval and views the weblogs.com ping beacon as a “competing service.” They plan to overhaul the Weblogs.com infrastructure to achieve higher levels of performance and stability. VeriSign also mentions a future statistics service available at Weblogs.com that will display statistics such as total pings received, processed feeds, and…

Weblogs Inc. sold to America OnLine

Jason Calacanis just announced the acquisition of Weblogs Inc. by America OnLine. Weblogs Inc. is a blog network of 90 weblogs employing over 130 bloggers in the consumer, technology, wireless, video games, media & entertainment, business, life sciences, and events. Weblogs Inc. received venture capital funding from Mark Cuban. I have heard terms of the deal are cash and stock with about a $25 million base and $15 million worth of incentives. If true, Weblogs Inc. received a similar valuation to Flickr. Update: Wired News reports the deal was $25 million in cash with no mention of incentives. Some questions…

eBay and Skype terms and details

I talked to Steve Jurvetson today about the sale of Skype to eBay, the terms of the deal, and what the team at Skype looked for when considering potential acquirers. It sounds like Skype had a pretty good deal and were able to name their terms. Skype was approached by a variety of potential acquirers but was not too interested in selling at first. Skype was able to keep some form of autonomy by through its own board of directors, an annual budget from eBay, and a two-way incentive plan that provides financial and ownership incentives if Skype meets certain…

Determining the birth of a startup

Many people consider September 7, 1998, the day Google was incorporated, to be it’s birthday. Google has a birthday logo on its home page today as well as a blog post about the the company’s birthday. When is the born on date of a startup? When you first file papers of incorporation? When you move into your first company-specific office? When you hire your first employee? When you close your first deal? I consider the birth of a startup to be the first time you solve the problem you set out to solve. It might be the first time…

Bay Area Technology Jobs Blog

I created a new weblog focused on technology jobs in the San Francisco Bay area. The process of potential employees with potential hirers seems so inefficient I just had to try to better connect the two sides. The economy is improving and there are many interesting jobs available at technology companies building cool new things that push the boundaries of conventional wisdom, behavior, and code. The new weblog provides a way for me to experiment with various forms of advertising, connect people, a provide a pulse on industry employment movements to all who are interested. I am currently using FeedBurner…

Signs you should consider replacing your company

Brad Feld’s recent post about signs a board of directors should replace the company’s CEO got me thinking about a larger issue. Why not apply the same problems to a worker’s role in the company? The main difference is the middle manager or line worker usually has less money and capital invested in the success of the enterprise but many of the same ideas hold true. The list below is modified from Brad’s post to focus on the role of an individual worker. Signs you should consider replacing your company I never hear from my commanding officer (other than at…

The history of Labor Day

Today is Labor Day. A day for every man and woman in the United States to take some time off, sip some ice tea, and spend time with friends and family. The tradition began with coordinated unpaid day off of work and became a part of the national scene under political pressure and a mid-term election in 1894. The work environment of the late 19th century heavily favored the employer. The Pullman Palace Car Company company was one example of a company where you assumed not just a job, but a lifestyle. Founder and CEO George Pullman created the town…

RSS jobs at Yahoo! and Microsoft

Yahoo! and Microsoft are definitely paying attention to emerging forms of data transport such as RSS. It is evident not only in their product roadmaps but also in the essential tools to help potential candidates succeed in their jobs. Microsoft mentions RSS in 15 current job descriptions across product groups such as portable media center, marketing, and MSN. Looks like Microsoft has some plans for RSS on mobile devices. Yahoo! mentions RSS in 12 current job descriptions including what they are calling their “open content (RSS) platform.” Google currently has no job listings for feed technologies RSS, Atom, or even…

LinkedIn social hack

Would you like to contact people listed on business networking site LinkedIn without a paid account or even an approval? I have received a few calls from recruiters lately using LinkedIn as a prospecting service but not paying anything for the service. How? They simply look at my current company and search the web for corporate contact information. A quick call to a receptionist at a small company like Technorati and the recruiter asks to speak with me. It’s not too difficult, and the recruiter just avoided the LinkedIn InMail cost of about $5 an e-mail. The practice seems to…

Jeff Hawkins on entrepreneurship

On May 18 I saw Jeff Hawkins speak at Stanford. Full video of Jeff’s talk is available on Stanford’s website if you are interested. Jeff referred to entrepreneurship as “a tool of last resort.” An entrepreneur is not a thing to be, it is an intermediary thing. If you succeed as an entrepreneur you transition out of that job into a success. Jeff became an entrepreneur out of desperation because he could not accomplish the things he wanted to accomplish with his current employer or an existing major player. In 1987 Jeff decided to not take the entrepreneurship route when…

Anil Dash in New York Times wearing a goatse shirt

Anil Dash appears in the Thursday, June 2, edition of The New York Times posing in the Six Apart offices wearing a goatse t-shirt. I think it’s in bad taste to appear in a national publication in your employer’s offices while wearing apparel promoting pornography but that’s just me. (via Boing Boing)Tags: goatse…

Mozilla Foundation looking for product managers

Yesterday Joi introduced me to Mitchell Baker, President of Mozilla. We talked about the Mozilla community, gathering feedback, and planning new products that build upon or extend existing features. Mozilla’s two main products are Firefox and Thunderbird, used by millions to interface with the Web, e-mail, and RSS. Sunbird currently a community project but not a Mozilla product. The Mozilla Foundation has been very successful gathering the technical talent it needs to develop its open-source software. It is currently in need of good product managers to identify critical features and keep everyone on track to release a competitive and innovative…

NewsGator purchases Bradbury Software

NewsGator Technologies has purchased Bradbury Software in a cash and stock deal. Bradbury Software is develops FeedDemon, a feed aggregator, and TopStyle, a website editor, for the Windows operating system. Nick Bradbury lives in Franklin, Tennessee and is the sole developer and runs his entire business from the top floor of his house. Nick develops in Delphi. I used FeedDemon from its first beta until I moved to Mac last May. NewsGator develops free feed aggregators for Windows Media Center, and online as well as a paid aggregator for Microsoft Outlook. NewsGator is currently developing an enterprise server (“Dino”) for…

Tim Draper music video

Tim Draper broke into song during yesterday’s speech at Stanford. I have never before seen a high-profile venture capitalist prance around on stage, play air guitar, and slap his ass, but luckily I had my camera ready to capture this unique moment. Tim Draper recently attended an event with a very unique auction prize: Scott Cargo of The Eagles would produce a song using your original lyrics. Tim won the auction and wrote “The Riskmaster.” Draper Fisher Jurveston sent a CD of the recording to 5,000 business associations last December, and I happened to get a CD from Tim. The…

Tim Draper on changing the world

On Wednesday I attended a lecture by Tim Draper of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurveston at Stanford. Tim talked about new ideas that will change the world and solve common problems of humanity in the process The Draper Fisher Jurveston logo was designed to symbolize change. A globe is at the forefront, representing the referenced but uncharted world. The delta in the background symbolizes changing that world through new investments, ideas, and support. Tim likes to think in terms of “cyberspatial” competition. Given an environment of perfect information a new idea or breakthrough will spread throughout the world…

Paul Graham business tips

Last night I saw Paul Graham speak at PARC about how to sell a startup. Eventually the text of the speech should be posted to Paul’s site. Paul sold ViaWeb to Yahoo! in 1998 to create Yahoo! Stores. Paul believes startups should be created and quickly sold for profit. Below are some tips shared by Paul last night. The most powerful motivator is the fear of loss. Startups get bought for one of two reasons: revenues or strategic purpose. You have to convince people at big companies that not buying you would be a big mistake, either as a…

Danny Shader on entrepreneurship

Yesterday I attended the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar to hear Bill Campbell, chairman of Intuit and corporate coach to startups such as Google, interview Danny Shader, CEO of Good Technology. Stanford posted a video of the seminar. Danny Shader has an interesting background including companies such as GO Corporation, Collabra Software, Netscape, and Amazon.com. Danny was an entrepreneur-in-residence with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital before joining Good Technology. Bill Campbell was an economics major and a former football coach before his highly successful software career. Good Technology originally developed audio hardware for the Handspring Visor…

Adobe to acquire Macromedia

Adobe Systems Incorporated has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia for $3.4 billion in stock.

Dan Neil and General Motors

What would you do if the writing of one of your employees pissed off a client so much they pulled their account worth over $10 million?

Harvard Entrepreneurship Conference

Harvard Business School hosted an Entrepreneurship conference on March 3. Sean Silverthorne of HBS Working Knowledge summarizes the themes of the conference and provides choice quotes from speakers.

Netflix San Francisco subscriber numbers

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings claims “one of every nine residents of San Francisco is a Netflix subscriber” in tomorrow’s New York Times. Seems a bit high to me.

Amazon Prime

Amazon.com introduced a membership program called Amazon Prime that provides free two-day shipping for a yearly fee of $80. You can invite up to four family members in the same household to share the same Amazon Prime benefits at no extra cost. The household option is especially interesting. I might sign-up and share the account among members of my work family….

Value of idle time

I just finished reading “Quitting the paint factory,” an article by Mark Slouka in the November 2004 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Mark looks at the history of the American worker, the pursuit of money over the value of time and mind, and questions what we value. Mark talks about the value of idle time, how we now spend money to have busy leisure time, and he shares the stories of literary figures struggling with some of the same questions about life. (via BoingBoing) What it says, crudely enough, is that in order to be successful, we must not only work…

Howard Rheingold class at Stanford

Howard Rheingold is teaching a class titled Toward a Literacy of Cooperation at Stanford on Wednesdays from 4:15 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. from January 5, 2005 until March 16. The class covers the economics of cooperation and will utilize weblogs and wikis to communicate between classes and with people from all over the world. Syllabus readings include Smart Mobs, Eric Bonabeau, Joi Ito, and Micah Sifry are all required readings. Non-students who live in the area can show up to the course without signing up.If you live outside the area we hope to be able to deliver a videostream to…

Chris Anderson on Long Tails

Chris Anderson wrote an awesome article for Wired about the power of the Long Tail. I had heard the basic ideas behind the article before, with the exception of his take on MP3.com. Andersen argued that you cannot have a successful business containing only Long Tail elements. The problem with MP3.com was that it was only Long Tail. It didn’t have license agreements with the labels to offer mainstream fare or much popular commercial music at all. Therefore, there was no familiar point of entry for consumers, no known quantity from which further exploring could begin. He believes that you…

Weblog recruiting

Eilene Zimmerman of The New York Times writes about the use of weblogs to attract employees and employers. It provides a more human process and gives you a better idea of the people you will be working with. Weblog entries also provides future candidates a better idea of corporate lifestyle….

McKinsey Quarterly on raising productivity

Stephen Dorgan and John Dowdy of McKinsey & Company researched factors influencing productivity growth focused on the period from 1994 to 2002. They looked at 100 manufacturing companies in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States and found that increases in IT spending has little impact on productivity unless it is accompanied by first-rate management practices. The 100 companies were evaluated on a scale of 0 to 5 for their use of three important productivity tools: “lean manufacturing, which cuts waste in the production process; performance management, which sets clear goals and rewards employees who reach them; and…

Knowing when to delegate

Lauren Keller Johnson wrote an interesting article for the Harvard Management Update about how effective leaders delegate. Do you manage or lead? Does delegating make you more expendable? All good questions raised. I especially like the coverage of how to handle a management position for the star promoted and why knowing the strengths of your subordinates and letting them shine is a good thing….

eBay acquires 25% of craigslist

eBay acquired a 25% interest in craigslist by purchasing a former craiglist employee’s equity stake. There is a craigslist forum with reactions, and it looks like Craig has had to deal with some bad comments that are definitely undeserved….

Re-recruit employees instead of focusing on retaining employees

Todd L. Pittinsky of Harvard University and Margaret J. Shih of University of Michigan wrote Knowledge Nomads: Organizational Commitment and Worker Mobility in Positive Perspective, featured in the February issue of American Behavioral Scientist. Mallory Stark of Harvard interviewed Pittinsky about knowledge nomads and approaches to turnover in the July 26 issue of HBS Working Knowledge. I like the conclusions from the studies. More managers need to understand motivation and commitment rather than hours and salary. Turnover is a symptom, not a problem. Change your mantra from “attract and retain the best employees” to “attract and re-recruit the best employees.”…

Fortune: Money Machines

Ellen Florian wrote an interesting article in Fortune magazine about the history of the automatic teller machine as well as the changes in human-machine interaction they pioneered. (via Slashdot)…

Fast Company on Whole Foods

Charles Fishman writes about Whole Foods in the July 2004 issue of Fast Company. The management insights are very interesting. Every new hire has to win a two-thirds yes vote from their team before being permitted to join the staff permanently. (via Jason Kottke) Every four weeks, individual work teams (there are roughly 10 per store) are assessed for productivity, and profit sharing is awarded in every other paycheck….

McKinsey Quarterly on the business of sports

The July 2004 issue of McKinsey Quarterly does a good job breaking down what makes sports successful and what hinders large scale success. Tekla V. Back, Philippe Blatter, and Jacques R. Bughin authored “Playing to win in the business of sports” and focused on tennis and golf as two case studies. Some interesting facts:The 2002 FIFA World Cup accounted for 8% of global television-rights revenues in 2002 (about the same as the NBA and NASCAR combined).In the United States the average golf or tennis TV viewer has an income of more than $100,000 a year.Professional tennis is fragmented. The International…

Paul Boutin compares movie download services for Slate

Paul Boutin compares RealNetworks’ Starz downloading service to the BitTorrent and DivX solution in an article for Slate. “Starz offers fewer movies than BitTorrent, at lower quality, for a higher price.”…

Steven Levy writes about Nick

Steven Levy writes about Nick Denton and Gawker Media in Wired magazine. Writers are typically paid $1500 a month (contract, not full time) and build a reputation good enough for a traditional publisher. Levy estimates Gawker Media nets $80,000 per blog per year. “Denton’s move to professionalize blogs bestowed instant credibility on an unknown single-writer Web site.”…

Using blogs to keep teams up-to-date

Michael Schrage, codirector of the MIT Media Lab’s eMarkets Initiative, examines project management weblogs within Fortune 500 corporations. (via Slashdot)…

NY Times: Workplaces in malls and cafes

Matt Richtel of the New York Times writes about Cisco, Microsoft, and I.B.M.’s test market for public work spaces. Mobile workers want a structured environment to work, but also the opportunity to meet others. Target the small business workers and the artists and you will have a nice place to work, meet, and consume. “[T]he essential factor in luring office workers was to give them the aura of freedom; there was no pretense that they are in an office, even though they might be working intensely for hours”…

Women increase productivity in single gender groups?

Alex Tabarrok writes in the Marginal Revolution weblog about competitive differences between males and females. His writing is based on an article in the August 2003 issue (Vol. 118, Issue 3) of The Quarterly Journal of Economics written by Uri Gneezy, Muriel Niederle and Aldo Rustichini. Very interesting implications for sports as well as business. [I]n the single-sex tournaments the women’s performance improves considerably relative to both their performance in the piece rate system and to their performance in the mixed tournament. Women do like to compete just not against men!…

College interns : you get what you pay for

Laura Vanderkam of USA Today writes about the market for college interns in the United States and concludes “unpaid internships are rarely in employers’ best interests.” (via MetaFilter)…

Cingular makes AT&T Wireless bid

USA Today reports that Cingular submitted an offer to the AT&T Wireless board of directors over the weekend. The board is currently in session to consider the deal. AT&T Wireless has a current market capitalization of $27.9 billion….

FedEx to Buy Kinko’s for $2.4 billion in cash

FedEx announced the purchase of Kinko’s for $2.4 billion in cash. This move seemed inevitable if FedEx is to compete with UPS and its UPS Store footprint after the Mail Boxes Etc. purchase in 2001….

Business Week : The Rise Of India

Business Week reports on the rise of India in the services sector. Venture capitalists say anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of the software, chip, and e-commerce startups they now back have Indian R&D teams from the get-go. “We can barely imagine investing in a company without at least asking what their plans are for India,” says Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz. Nandan M. Nilekani, managing director of Bangalore-based Infosys Technologies Ltd.: “Just like China drove down costs in manufacturing and Wal-Mart in retail, India will drive down costs in services.”…

John Mack: Demand to be Managed

In a speech to the Harvard Business School, John Mack emphasized different management approaches on Wall Street. He admits that Wall Street is a money culture, a lone wolf atmosphere, and companies use money as excuses to not care about employees….

Wired News: FedEx Delivers New Tech Lab

Wired reports on the FedEx Institute of Technology, a joint R&D effort by Federal Express and the University of Memphis….

Career Anchors

What is your career anchor?…

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