It has been a few days since I bought an EVDO card (using the excuse that my new office would not have Internet access for about a week), and I must say that I am totally bought in: this is the best productivity tool I have bought in a while, both in terms of convenience and time saved.

Time saved can be measured in the (sometime long) minutes one has to spend testing, configuring and sometimes paying for Wifi access. Convenience is due to the ability to access the Net during a “downtime” (like this morning when I waited for the airport shuttle) where this was no Wifi access point around.

Add to this the fact that the first couple of hours of a large conference is generally spent screwing around with a non-working Wifi (apparently Etech’s attendees faced that last week), and you will very quickly rationalize that $60 to $80 a month is *nothing*.

I for … Read more »

It is with delight that I have discovered that my friend Josh Kopelman, the Managing Director of First Round Capital, and one of the early stage investors I respect the most, has finally given up and has launched his blog a few days ago. “Redeye VC” relates to the fact that Josh seems to exclusively fly the redeye from SFO to Philadelphia, his home base. Here is his feed.

In his first post, Josh tries to explain why he has taken so much time to give in: #4 rings so true (it is 4:29am as I type this on Sunday morning).

4. I don’t have the time.There are currently 364 unanswered emails in my inbox.  I have 14 phone calls to return.  Six meetings a day.  I’m currently sitting on the redeye flying back from SFO to PHL. I have a wife.  Two kids.  If I had an extra hour a day, I’d rather spend it … Read more »

I spent the day hanging out at the TechDirt Greenhouse, and I am glad I did – even if this meant spending a day away from the family. Mike Masnick and his team came up with an interesting concept: getting startups to present their product/services for 5 mins, and get the audience divided up in small discussion groups that would address a key business or strategy question related to one of the presenting companies. We’d spend about 40 mins talking around the subject allocated to us, and report back to the whole group. In order to make sure that attendees would hang out with different people (as opposed to their friends), the TechDirt team put together a set of markers that defined which session/meeting room one should attend.

Oh, and there were the leaders: Red, Blue, Orange, Pink, Green, Mauve. Guess which one I inherited ? Yep, the Pink one. Our role was to facilitate discussions, and make sure … Read more »

Much of the week-end has been spent on packing and moving to our new offices, in downtown Menlo Park. There have a number of notable news over the past few days, but I have been very busy with mundane things like getting new furniture, Internet connectivity, a parking permit, etc… and a Verizon EVDO card (the Kyocera KPC650 – the one working fine on both PCs and Macs). Since the new office won’t be connected to the net for  a week, it seemed to be the perfect occasion to try EDVO. The result so far is conclusive: with compression turned on, effective bandwidth got close to 700 Kb – not too bad (!!!).

What I am not sure of is the drain on the battery generated by the card, and whether I should set the card so that it turns itself off automatically when a Wifi connection takes place.

Here are some pictures of the office “in progress”:

… Read more »

This candle is double sided and makes a nice center piece on a table. It is an original design, imported from Argentina.

Dimension: 11" x 13" x 2"

Price: $49

PS: This is a listing that will be aggregated by Edgeio – and this candle is really for sale

Tags: listing

I am a sucker for data vizualization projects, especially when it comes to news and stock prices (my roots I guess, as this is what I was building as a young C developer). I particularly like this one: What’s Up, a news map display developed by Jeroen Wijering, a UI designer recently graduated from the Eidhoven Design Academy. It basically displays headlines from a bunch of news (geolocated) RSS feeds on a planisphere. Jeroen says that he plans to make this available as a screen saver at some point.

You can launch it full screen here. Very cool.

After the “everything 2.0” meme, I see the “un-“ something meme developing. What does it mean ? An event based on a two-way, open, discussion.

One of my favorite tech blog, TechDirt, is putting together the first edition of its Idea Workshop. The concept is very appealing:

A group of pre-selected companies and individuals will present ideas in quick, five minute presentations. Unlike a standard product showcase, this is not the “final word.” After a group of presentations, the attendees are split up into breakout groups, and given a specific issue from one of the presentations to “workshop.” For a company with a new product, this could be anything from “what new features should be added” to “what target market should they focus on” to “is there a business model here?” Other presentations may not be about products, but ideas, and the workshops will be related to those ideas.

 After a short period of time, everyone … Read more »

A month ago, I posted in enthusiasm and sheer happiness about my favorite toy of the moment, my PowerBook G4. After 3 months of moderate use (I don’t blog that much after all and my X41 is my main computer), it melted. About 2 weeks ago, the unit started randomly freezing – having no other recourse than clic-clac (power off/power on). Pretty extreme, but the only solution. Over the past week, it might happen 3 times in an hour, rendering the laptop unusable.

I tried to run hardware tests. Fine. Disk tests. Fine. OS re-install. The machine freezes 10 minutes into the install. FUBAR.

Called in Apple support (very nice) to get an incident ID. I now need to go the Apple Store to give the fried machine to an Apple Genius (doh), who will send it in for repair.

I have had 5 IBM ThinkPads and one Dell Latitude over the past 12 years. They never failed me … Read more »

I am trying to find examples of implementations of Web 2.0 concepts/technologies in the enterprise in advance of my upcoming panel: “Web 2.0 and the Enterprise”. I was therefore very interested in David Berlind’s recent post on “Rethinking BPM in a mashup-based SOA world” – a worthy read if you are tracking the topic.

There are a large number of issues involving enterprise mashups, David pointing out to a couple of them:

 To wit, attendees from the banking and government sectors have questions about the management of user IDs across domains (when a mashup involves multiple APIs each of which relies on its own identity management technology) as well as the reliability of public components.  For example, if an enterprise dispatch application along the lines of what Kemsley describes above relies on Google or Yahoo for its mapping component, enterprise architects want to know what Google and Yahoo are doing to ensure the uptime of the relevant APIs (a … Read more »

MarketWatch’s Frank Barnako published a piece (free sub req’d) about podcast advertising, out of which a few nuggets of information are worth noting:

Podshow claims to have reached in Q405 their 2006 revenue target of $300 to $400K, and predicts sales in the millions of dollars this year. There seems to be a consensus that there’s money to be made by recycling established media in the podcast world, too. Michael Greeson, president of the Diffusion Group of Dallas, pointed out that NPR recorded 4 million downloads in the first two months it offered podcasts. Last summer, Greeson issued a research report projecting nearly 60 million people in the United States will be listening to podcasts by 2010. The report also estimated 15.5 million portable players would be sold last year; the tally was closer to 22 million. Cameron Reilly, the founder of the Podcast Network of Australia, is achieving between $40 and $100 cost-per-thousand on his podcasts, but … Read more »

Whereas it was a must until a year ago, offshoring developments to India has generated enough of its fair share of operational issues to make startup teams and VCs much more cautious. Beyond local issues – like the difficulty of hiring and keeping talent, and increasing wages – getting the coordination, leadership and motivation aspects are challenging.

Ed Sim’s post comes a propos as he relates to a successful offshoring operated by one of his companies. Some key points:

Offshore interesting and motivating projects Develop local leadership talent Hire, train and manage local staff with a long term view in mind

At the same time, SAP is going to be looking to alternatives to India because of rising costs.

You can read the long version of the story on Jeff Bussgang’s blog, but in short, the “Circle of Envy” in Private Equity is spelled out the following way:

Entrepreneurs envy VCs b/c they get to make a lot of money collecting management fees, and not working too hard to earn their salary. VCs envy Buyout investors, who get to manage much (much) larger funds with similarly large management fees to enjoy, and an even easier life. Buyout investors envy hedge fund managers who get to cash in their carried interest every year, and who enjoy quicker path to liquidity for their investments. Think about it: getting VC-like carry (typically 20%) to play in the public market. Hedgies envy… entrepreneurs – who get to build companies serially every 5/6 years, make a ton of money and can take long breaks in between startups. Entrepreneurs envy… you get it.

An amusing read, with a few real traits. … Read more »