Blue Print Ventures has a series of videos featuring the entrepreneur Gary Snoman, that are about fall down funny to read. Some of them are also out on YouTube, meaning you can cut and share them. So what it is really like being a Venture Capitalist, let Gary show you the way.
There is something elegant about a VC fund making a video like this. Of course a lot of this is also scary if you have ever worked with or known a VC person, they do act like some of this many times over. Then there is the downside, it is all work most of the time. Not for the faint at heart. In the mean time enjoy the laugh.
Have to admit, this makes for some serious humor.
Tags: blueprint ventures, vc, funding, money, humor, gary snoman, lots of laughs
After an interesting appeal to use Disqus, a comment management system for blogs, from AVC, sure I’ll go take a look and see what the hoopla is about. Then start coming up with problems on the reasons why I probably will not use it.
The biggest downside is that there will be two places to go to work with comments.
I have been using the WordPress comments for years, I’ll use the home page to write, screen comments, and see who has linked to me lately. This is where I am used to doing all the work for my blog, getting updates, reading stuff. I can get to here from anywhere without worrying about anyone blocking me from getting there. It has been this way for years.
This is where by using the Disqus admin page I would have to go now to do all my comments. Mind you I average .5 comments per blog entry. The compelling reason to pull comments off and drop them into another system is if my work blocked access to my WordPress comments section, or I had a ton of comments to plow through, there might be some work flow benefit here.
But in the mean time, it might be the greatest system in the world, but probably a low comment blog like techwag does not need it, a blog writer who can get to anything anywhere probably does not need it.
Here is the only compelling reason I could think of to use it, and where it might be handy.
You can basically “off shore” your comments without exposing all your blog login credentials. This is a good thing, if you want to outsource comment management, you can make someone an account here and have them do all the work.
For blogs with tons of comments, this might be a good thing, for everyone else, probably not all that compelling a reason to use the system. While it might be bright and shiny, off site management of comments and pushing all your comments to someplace else might make sense for a system that is overloaded, cranky, don’t want to deal with comments anyways. For people who want to push comments off someplace else and let another social network handle it, sure, makes sense.
For everyone else outside of the top 1000 blogs on the planet, this does not really make a lot of sense to do. If your audience is a highly trafficked blog, there are so very few of them that for everyone else, it makes sense to stick to what is already available to you in your blog of choice platform.
Tags: disqus, compelling, reason, not found, comment, system, off site, off shore, out source, problematic, shiny
In more of what is wrong with brinkmanship, Todd Bishop from the Seattle PI is reporting that Jerry Yang is still interested in talking to Microsoft. So let me get this strait, you let the suitor walk away from the table during intense negotiations on what the deal with eventually cost, you keep on bringing up more money and more money, and Microsoft won’t do it. They tell you they won’t do it, and they take off.
Now Jerry Yang is sorry?
Executive Jerry Yang said he wasn’t necessarily closing the door on further talks with Microsoft. The comments came as Yahoo’s shares closed down more than 14 percent today following Microsoft’s announcement Saturday that it was withdrawing its acquisition bid. “We were negotiating a way to find common ground and then on Saturday they chose to walk away,” Yang told Reuters. “They started it and they walked away.” He added: “If they have anything new to say, we would be open … I am more than willing to listen.” Source: Seattle PI
That one boggles the mind, the deal is over with, Jerry is telling folks about all the great things that Yahoo can now go do, but still will be willing to go on talking?
But is it not, knowing that they are wounded, and needing to work out ways to keep themselves from collapsing, offering hope is about the only thing that Yahoo has left. There are “so many deals on the table” that our future is unlimited style of talking.
Placating angry employees, angry stockholders, and other issues along the way, hope is about all Yahoo has right now to offer. Hope that they will once again do good things.
If they can raise hope of an AOL, Google, Microsoft, Someone/Anyone kind of deal, then maybe the fallout of the deal breaking dollar amount can keep the company afloat for a few more years. Hope does not make a business, but it keeps people placated for a bit, until that hope fails to generate action.
Tags: yahoo, microsoft, google, aol, failed, takeover, money, wants to talk it over, sad
Business is rapidly expanding into the web 2.0 space now that Millennials and the Internet generation start hitting the work force. The problem right now is that we are in a cycle of incremental innovation rather than any real true disruptive innovative technology. While VC’s might have passed on Google and a host of other companies initially, with the cycle of incremental innovation that we are in now, VC’s are busy looking for the next “big thing”.
Can’t blame them for this one either.
The next big thing offers the payoff that a VC is looking for. In an Article by Jeff Nolan at Sandhill.com the problems with finding the next big thing in a world of incremental innovation is not a surprising issue. Incremental is easy, disruptive technologies are hard to find.
We don’t teach enough critical thinking.
The picture above from sandhill and how they invest is an interesting number to know, bur what is interesting is the information on page two, the trouble with Web 2.0. While techwag has lamented the fact that many web 2.0 products all look alike, there is more to web 2.0 than a glossy flash based interface.
What’s frightening is the inability to answer the basic question “What’s next?” The Valley thrives on “The New New Thing” (possibly one of the most poignantly titled books ever) and with every turn of a generation, there is an awkward moment where we’re just figuring out where we’ve been but have yet to see where we are going… Right now is that moment. Source: Sandhill.com
Right now is the moment to come along with something truly disruptive, and we have not seen it yet. That is a problem, it is a problem for the hype machine, it is a problem for the valley, it is a problem for Seattle, Boston, Austin, Colorado, and a host of other cities/states hosting many startup wannabe’s. We have looked at a ton of technology, few we continue to use because they make things easier for us to gather and collect what we are interested in.
Stumbleupon, Friend Feed, Linked In, Facebook, those are the ones we use all the time. They are immediately useful. To feed our links in friend feed, we use twitter to announce a post on the blog, we use YouTube for our videos (which we have not made many of lately), but friendfeed ties everything we do on the Internet in a nice fashion.
Little of it is innovative, stumbleupon owes its existence to the success of Digg and Reddit, friend feed owes its success to being just another aggregation system, only this time it is personal, twitter owes its existence to some of the early communication systems that existed that only could handle 140 text characters (it looks a lot like the old military order wire system), Facebook owes its success to Harvard and to the success of MySpace. They all tie into some other system in the past that lead the way.
If you have the next big thing, what are you basing it on? Is it just an incremental improvement, or is it really something truly innovative and disruptive?
We have been waiting for this one to happen, and it comes as absolutely no surprise, but John Cook, the venerable technology reporter for the Seattle PI is saying that there is a slow down in Venture Capital money flowing into Seattle. This is no surprise, people have been talking about it for months now, but it is also good to see major reporting from the Seattle PI to go along with it.
We have been thinking about the same issue at techwag, because it is important to the thriving startup community here in Seattle. Slowdown in Silicon Valley this can happen in Seattle too and Will the recession hit Seattle Startups are just couple of articles on the idea that what shows up in Silicon Valley first, will also show up in Seattle. Odds are highly likely that the same slowdowns will also hit in Texas, Boston, and other hot beds around the country.
In Washington, the two reports show radically different numbers, but the general trend in both indicates that startup investing has cooled. According to Venture Source, 23 Washington companies raised $248.9 million during the first quarter. That’s down 37 percent from the same period last year and off 43 percent when compared to the fourth quarter. Venture Blog
In all this makes for some interesting news, and something that all startups regardless of area should be paying attention to when they go out to do their pitches. Money may be tight, so funding people will be looking for the next Google, not the next Facebook application.
Keywords: slowdown, recession, seattle, google, facebook, funding, silicon valley
I know this is old news, but there is much to think about, and wired hits the nail on the head, have mega blogs, those semi-corporate entities that have been giving the papers a run for their money started to top out. Have they effectively gained all the market share they can in a world of fickle media consumers. While it is one thing to deliver value and pray you make it on advertising revenue, the mega blogs are a different matter altogether.
Gawker media is one of those mega blogs, owning multiple sites, three of which have recently been sold to other parties so that they can focus on those properties that are doing very well. This bodes for a recession in the Web 2.0 social space, but it can also bode for some very interesting ideas behind the idea of profit or potential of a blog.
While few are surprised that Nick Denton sold Idolator and Gridskipper, the surprise was with Wonkette the political blog. The idea behind that sale was that in six months Americans will elect a new president. This does not mean that political news will stop, but with a long drawn out contest on the democratic side, frankly the election process is getting a bit dull. No one thought that there would be two huge strong political contenders on the democratic ticket, the republican ticket nominee has been solved for months now.
The conventional take as been that Denton smelled a recession and chose to cash out before the recession hits, as he told SAI. Perhaps he’s hunkering for good reason. Conventional wisdom is that in recessionary times, advertisers will flock to tried and true brands, which could exclude many Gawker properties, however influential they may be of the media. “In a difficult market, there’s often a flight to quality and a flight to the familiar,” Mark Kingdon, chief executive officer of Organic, told us in an interview at ad:tech, a digital advertising conference in San Francisco. Source: Wired
For small niche bloggers, the recession will have some influence on the quality of advertising on the web sites that they write at. While we are not John Chow, telling you I make 30K a month, really I make about > 1% of that, the idea of selling out a semi-hot property before the bad news hits is always a good business decision.
What surprises us is that Valleywag is not on the chopping block. We have talked a lot about valleywag and looking at their websense numbers. There is also that nagging pay cut that people who write for gawker media are trying to cope with. Deep linking is the salvation of a web site, people who are just hitting the main page and not interacting with the site is something that should be causing worries in Gawker head office.
It will be interesting to see if anyone else in the mega blog business will try to sell other under performing blogs, or blogs that have a freshness dating on it. It will also be interesting to see if any other properties in the Gawker Media empire will be sold as the recession really starts to hit middle and upper America in the next six months.
