Since last fall’s economic downturn, dozens of pundits of various stripes have announced the death of venture capital as an asset class. And it’s true (as Paul Kedrosky and the Kauffman Foundation have convincingly argued) that the class is grossly overcapitalized and will have to shrink radically to produce the kinds of returns investors rightfully continue…
A few years back I proposed (and only partly in jest) a “Hippocratic oath for business.” This morning I read in the New York Times that a group of students at Harvard Business School had publicly made a similar pledge. I don’t really expect this to sweep the business world by storm, but I applaud continue…
My kids were restless last night, which means I spent a decent chunk of the night half-awake. As I was falling back asleep for the fourth time an idea popped into my head for an iPhone app that I have no intention of building, but that I think might actually sell. Here’s how it came continue…
I just came across this mini-rant by Fred Wilson in my feed reader and couldn’t agree more. His key point: “Aggregation is the central element of distributing content on the web. It’s not going to get shut down by calling these services names, suing them, or even worse taking your content out of them. The continue…
I just put down Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World and couldn’t leave the house without knocking out a quick endorsement. If you’re even the least bit interested in the changing role of America in the world it’s a must-read. Zakaria’s analysis of China and India as societies, economies and political actors is concise, lucid and continue…
Nice piece today from Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOm that ties together a number of themes I’ve been following. Her main point is that paired advances in the browser and web-capable mobile devices have opened the to door to a (near) future in which device manufacturers and carriers lose control of the end-user experience, to be continue…
This mention of a possible revival of Google’s MyStuff idea caught my eye. I’ve been interested in the idea of a persistent personal data archive for a while now, and Google’s a natural for it. I was initially optimistic about EMC’s plans for Decho (their combined acquisitions of Mozy + PI Corp), but if so continue…
I just finished Ian Ayres Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. It’s very pop / light, along the lines of Freakonomics, but still worth a read for the reminder that (unlike pretty much everyone I interact with in the Web software world) surprisingly few folks are aware of the extent continue…
…I’ve just punted on Facebook out of sheer annoyance with the redesign and am going to give Twitter whatever social software love I have to give (which isn’t all that much). Thanks to AJ Vaynerchuk for the quick tutorial on linking Twitter to FB, and to Ralph Zimmerman and Thomas Marban for creating Twidroid, a continue…
I’ve noticed a few phrases creeping into my everyday speech and am wondering if they reflect a broader trend or are specific to my little software / Web / high-tech world. These are: “Missing a chip” – denoting an inability to understand or process a certain kind of information, e.g., a friend and I were continue…