(The quote in the title is from rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot in this Business Insider article) These guys are so good at making noise that I almost feel silly piling on, but since the cat is well out of the bag I wanted to at least confirm the news that Giant Thinkwell is our newest addition continue…
Like almost everyone I know, I’m a total content junkie. I read everything I can get my hands on, mostly tech and startup stuff, but with frequent side trips into economics, behavioral psych, education, endurance sports, music, organizational behavior, and… well… pretty much anything that catches my eye. When I first discovered RSS I was continue…
I just finished reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From (I know, I’m a little late to the party) and among the many ideas now rattling around in my head is that of the “commonplace book“: a 17th Century habit of maintaing a written personal idea log. As Johnson describes in a related blog continue…
Seattle’s newest technology blog – GeekWire – just broke the story this morning: we’re delighted to announce our investment in Highlighter, a social commenting, sharing and note-taking platform for digital publishers (including this blog – just select any text in this post to see how it works). Co-founders Josh Mullineaux, Matt Blancarte and Nate Whitehill continue…
I was out for the past two weeks so TechCrunch beat me to the punch, but just before I left town we closed an investment in SPARQCode (the company has been operating as MSKYNET but is rebranding to match their flagship product name). I think of SPARQCode as “Bit.ly for the real world” – a drop-dead easy way continue…
I’m not yet sure what to make of the iPad, and have been asking my journalist, developer, marketer and investor friends what they think of the device to try to get my head wrapped around it. The thesis that keeps popping into my head looks something like this: The iPad is designed to be the continue…
Last September we announced our investment in Nearlyweds!, a two-year-old provider of beautifully-designed wedding websites. At the time, we hinted that they were working on some “secret sauce” that would bring some exciting new ideas to the wedding services ecosystem (a $71 billion marketplace, per this snazzy infographic from BridePop). The Nearlyweds team still has continue…
Twitter is a mind-blowingly huge platform for sharing personal opinion. John Borthwick recently shared some stats about the Twitter ecosystem that give a rough sense for the sheer velocity: Twitter: Jan 11th was the highest usage day ever (source: @ev via techcrunch) Tweetdeck: did 4,143,687 updates on Jan 8, yep 4m. Or, 48 per second continue…
I just wasted 15 minutes of my day talking to Craig (Greg?) Malloy, who represented himself as an Associate Producer at Going Green Television. His appointment setter had called one of our portfolio companies – Cooler Planet – asking for me, claiming he wanted to talk about doing a feature on the company’s work in continue…
A few months ago the AppStoreHQ team noticed a spike in visits from The New York Times. We checked our referrer logs and discovered a very flattering description of our iPhone app search offering in this article. This morning we saw a similar bump and wondered if the same piece had been rediscovered. Instead, we continue…