Ouch! My last post here was more than two months ago. I’m not a big believer in New Year’s resolutions but I’ve just decided that mine should be to post more often. Turns out there’s a direct, inverse correlation between my workload and blog post velocity… 2010 was a great year for me personally – I’ve continue…
The news is all over the wires today (e.g., Mashable, TechCrunch, PEHub, Xconomy, etc) so I don’t have much to add other than a big congrats to the Urban Airship team. Not for the raise (raising capital is always a bittersweet event) but for rocking the world of smartphone messaging infrastructure so hard. The Urban continue…
Monday this week I was on a panel at DiscoveryBeat 2010, a one-day show devoted to the topic of getting your smartphone app discovered. Speaker after speaker (myself included) delivered the same bad news: the eye of the app distribution needle is getting smaller every day and the deck is now stacked in favor of continue…
AppStoreHQ is a Founder’s Co-op portfolio company that helps smartphone owners (i.e, iPhone / iPad / Android / mobile web) discover the best new apps, with real-time rankings based on the velocity and relative authority of discussion about them on blogs and social platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The company has built an incredible position continue…
Funny timing. Two weeks ago I wrote a piece about how “platform thinking” – using your business to help others succeed – can create massive value for your own company. A week later two of the most-admired platform companies in tech – Apple and Twitter – independently acted in ways that enraged their core developer continue…
I’m a data geek and love the idea of mining my personal data for patterns. A while back I got excited about where EMC might go with Decho (their acquisition of personal cloud data storage provider Mozy), but after a rebranding push and some teaser-y PR, they’ve reverted to the Mozy brand and plain vanilla storage continue…
Guarav Oberoi and Chuck Groom put on another great event last night for their Seattle Tech Startups members. I was one of three speakers – DFJ’s Bill Bryant and CEOSherpa’s Michael Schutzler were the others – and had a bunch of great conversations both during the event and in the post-event party at Big Time continue…
Om Malik has a great piece up today on the iPod Touch, calling it the ace up Apple’s sleeve. In his words: “it is just like an iPhone except that it has more storage, is skinnier and has none of the hassles of dropped calls.” In other words, the Touch is a better device than continue…
As regular readers know, Andy and I have been messing around with a new approach to early-stage tech investing called royalty based finance. It’s still early days, but we’re very excited about the idea because it represents an entirely new “third way” of supporting the growth of young companies vs. the traditional equity-centric angel or continue…
Keith Smith just announced the public launch of his new company, BigDoor Media. The thesis behind BigDoor was formulated and refined by Keith and co-founder Jeff Malek in their Icarus-like journey at their previous company Zango (a.k.a. 180Solutions). As Keith acknowledges in his launch blog post, Zango was built around a powerful insight about online continue…