Following the post of my buddy Rodrigo, and the rather acid comment I left there, I thought that I should spend some more time trying out Odeo. My initial 5 minutes on the product two days ago led me to think that it was a lot of hype and not much functionality – especially given that the podcast production bit is not available yet (more power to Eric Rice and audioblog.com).

I decided to try Odeo on my Tablet PC, which is running Windows XP and Windows Media Player 10. Because of the automatic synchronization of WM10 playlists with my "scoblephone", the SMT5600, Odeo performs similarly to other iPodder implementations – except for the tagging aspect.The social networking functionality (i.e the ability to connect to friends and see what their subscriptions are) is definitely not straightforward to use, since I had to guess the usernames that my usual contacts (Ross, David,…) … Read more »

In one of his landmark posts, Bill Burnham dissected SEC filings and other publicly available information to tell us Just How Much Did VCs Pocket On Google?

I recommend the reading to anyone interested in understanding VC exits, and to some extent, how profits are split in VC partnerships – unequally so.

As a reminder, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital invested $12.5M each in Google in 1999, for about 24M shares. Both funds have distributed a majority of these shares to their own investors, otherwise their investment would be worth $7.1B (at today’s closing price).

Because of the distributions of shares at "lower prices", Bill estimated the value of KP’s investment at $4.3B, i.e a multiple of 344x in 6 years. This is the number that will be used to calculate the performance of their $500M fund IX (?), which was returned multiple times with just … Read more »

Just got an email from Six Apart announcing that as a TypePad user, I now had the option of displaying ads on my blog in a custom typelist. It is actually not a surprise since the deal was sealed and announced last November.

Bloggers have been using Google or Yahoo ads on their blog for the longest time, and the most heavily read have been making some money. So what I am missing here is why would I need to upgrade to the Pro version of TypePad in order to use that functionality which is otherwise available to me "for free" ?

The ad revenue is credited against the monthly cost of the TypePad Pro subscription ($15). Which means basically that one needs to have roughly 20,000 page views (at a 50c CPM) in order to make up the difference between a Plus and a Pro subscription, or 30,000 page views between … Read more »

Great post from Ross re  A Flip/Flop Bubble of Microventures? in which he "attacks" the concept of  startups launched and bankrolled by former "bubble entrepreneurs" for the sole purpose of flipping them to large established players.

[...] there are a ton of former entrepreneurs getting back in the game these days. The lure isn’t just that markets are opening again. A mindset is developing in the valley that you can and should develop startups for quick flips. If you have your own cash, you can seed a play like this yourself, filling a targeted niche — both in product, market and engineering expertise. I even heard of a major portal getting into seed funding to encourage it. Perhaps this whole thing was started by Google’s micro-acquisitions. I don’t have any data on this trend, as it is the most private part of equity, but it is the talk of many … Read more »