Bill Burnham has again a great post regarding the things startups have to pay attention to in order to avoid any problem when they will be negotiating their exit through a trade sale. Summarizing Bill’s 10 rules, and adding my own twists, I should state one thing – even if I agree with Bill, many of these points are easier said than implemented:

Don’t take an investment from a company that could be a legitimate acquirer, and if you need to get a strategic investor involved, avoid side letters, right of first offer, etc. as much as possible Drag alongs are important (which essentially means that no single class of equity can block a sale) Limit the number of class of shares to 3, or recap to get down to 3. And if it takes more than 5 minutes to understand a cap table (who owns what) and a payout structure (who gets what, taking into account liquidation preferences, conversion prices and warrant … Read more »

I have just been pinged by the Pete Flint, the CEO of Trulia that their Real Estate search engine is now open for (beta) business. I had been aware of Pete’s plans for some time and found them interesting, but the implementation they have done is really very clean and easy to use: enter a Zip code or a city, and you get a list of houses and a google map showing their location. You can filter the results by price, number of bedroom/bathroom, price, sq footage, etc. Results also contain some statistics about average house prices in the neighborhood, etc.

Clicking on a house link gives you a detailed page, providing more information about the house, a link to the original listing, a list of houses that have been sold recently, etc.

Amazing! Go check this out.

PS: Sorry for the slow posting. Am just swamped. More later.

Tag: trulia

According to this San Jose Mercury News piece, a Silicon Valley Leadership Group report ranks the region last among eight high-tech areas in quality of life.  The report, called “Daring To Compete: A Region-to-Region Reality Check,” will be officially released Wednesday. The leadership group compared Silicon Valley to Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Fairfax, Va.; Boston; Seattle; Austin; Portland, Ore.; and San Diego.

According to the Merc, in the seven categories examined, Silicon Valley ranked no higher than six. When it came to housing affordability, only San Diego did worse. Some data points:

Raleigh-Durham ranks first among the eight regions overall, thanks to its low cost of housing, easy commutes, good schools, and low unemployment and taxes. While all the tech regions were hit hard by the downturn, Silicon Valley continues to struggle with the highest unemployment rate. While Silicon Valley eighth-grade students have … Read more »

Like a good portion of the blogosphere (it sounds like) I have been playing with the new Google blog search – which technically speaking should be referred to as FeedSearch since feed content is the basis of the indexing – but no matter. Danny Sullivan has been playing as well apparently.

The index contains about 2/3 months worth of posts, and Google claims that it will be backfilled as time goes. Since many feeds only list the latest n posts (10, 20, 50 ?), I am not sure how they will be able to do so – besides scrapping blog pages or extracting posts from the cache of their main index (?).

A few things caught my attention:

Tags and categories seem to be ignored in the indexing or the ranking algorithm. The content of the title field for both the blog and posts seems to have a high (if not disproportionate) degree of importance in the relevancy … Read more »

I posted last night about the new version of Memeorandum being available, and why it looked really great, especially with the new Tech focused content aggregation. However, because my DSL is out of wack, I could not only get minimal access to the Net through my neighbor’s Wifi.

One of the things I missed is Gabe’s mission statement for Memeorandum: in Why does memeorandum exist?, Gabe lists these three objectives.

Recognize the web as editor: There’s this notion that blogs collectively function as news editor. No, not every last blog on Earth. Tapping the thoughts of all of humanity uniformly would predictably lead to trivial, even spammy "news". But today there are rather large communities of knowledgeable, sophisticated commentators, (and yes) even reporters writing on the web, signaling in real time what’s worthy of wider discussion. I want memeorandum to tap this signal. Rapidly uncover new sources: Sometimes breaking news is posted to a blog created just to … Read more »

You must have heard a number of times about Memeorandum given that the biggest fan and user of the application is Robert Scoble. He introduced me to the initial implementation around BloggerCon III, and this is also when I met Gabe Rivera, the innovator behind Memeorandum.

What is the main concept ? The program is going to monitor a set of news sources, track the links pointing to news items, and elevate the posts that get most linked. You can also see short snippets of these “linking” posts.

What is it used for ? To show what are the most important conversations going on (based on the number of links, etc.). Today’s tech meme is the acquisition of Skype by eBay, which leads the home page to be almost only focused on that topic.

Gabe just released the second version of this application, that now covers News/Politics and Technology. Scoble has a long post explaining … Read more »

Lots of buzz around the second mega acquisition of the day ($5.8B), seeing Oracle eating up Siebel Systems for dessert. Given that the company has about $2.2B cash on hand, Oracle is paying $3.6B, i.e about 2.7X Siebel’s trailing revenues.

The best quote about the deal comes from… SalesForce.com’s Marc Benioff (who worked at Oracle, and made $25M or so as an early stage investor in Siebel if memory serves me right) in his note to employees:

Oracle put Siebel investors out of their misery today.  We have been doing that for Siebel customers for years.  Our announcement today at Dreamforce will accelerate that. It’s the end of software.  Client/Server software is being consolidated by Oracle just as mainframe software was consolidated by Computer Associates. Oracle’s strategy is simple, instead of innovating, buy as much installed software as possible, call it all Oracle Fusion, and make sure it all uses Oracle’s database.

Now, the same … Read more »

Search Engine RoundTable points to a thread on WebMasterWorld related to the effectiveness, measured in revenues, of Google AdSense versus Yahoo Publisher Network. Message 9 provides a good summary:

I run Adsense and YPN on the homepage of my main site interchangeably to test which is better (equal pageviews at the end of the day, same weights). Both ad networks are both on target, although Adsense ads show more "less sophisticated" adverts (no brand name, mostly mom and pop operations); while YPN shows brand names. Google’s Adsense gives me double digit CTR, while YPN only gives me 1/10 of Adsense’s CTR. At the end of the day, even if YPN gives me higher earnings per click, Google gives me better revenues. It seems that G’s targeting is designed to show what ads fit the page AND what ads are most likely to get click (probably due to some historical data of my target audience or whatnot). On … Read more »