This is part of my ongoing series on Raising Venture Capital.
I often tell people that raising money is worse than getting married. I have to be careful in how that sounds because I love my wife and am happily married. But the truth is that in marriage if you’re unhappy you can at least get divorced (in most countries). Not so in venture capital. You’re tied at the hip to your VC.
So my first advice is not to rush in the fund raising process. Get to know VCs over a long period of time so that when
Since I’m speaking on the topic of Social CRM at the New Comm Forum in April, I decided to reach out to a few folks to get their ideas and impressions on what’s going on in the space. One of the people I reached out to was Frank Eliason from Comcast (many of you may know him on twitter as @comcastcares) to find out how they were approaching Social CRM. I chatted with Frank for over an hour and here’s what Comcast does.
Comcast monitors pretty much every social media channel that is relevant. In other words, they exist where
I’ve been talking a lot recently to cloud storage, cloud synchronization and cloud backup vendors (all variations on a theme but they all have a different emphasis to what they do).
Recently I had a couple of opportunities to talk with Dropbox, first with founder Drew Houston, and later with recently appointed SVP Marketing and Sales, Adam Gross.
First some history, Dropbox, founded in 2007 out of the Y Combinator is a file sharing and synchronization product now backed by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners . In its first seven months it grew impressively – expanding
Image via CrunchBase
I am a strong supporter of Open Source Software and a proponent of the importance of open source in cloud computing. It is my strong opinion that open source will empower the customers giving them access to the software even after the company behind the product goes out of business. In this regard, I have even called Open Source as a SaaS endgame . Even though Open Source plays a predominant role in empowering the customers, there are some vendors who use open source as a pure marketing ploy. These vendors use open source to entice users
Image via Wikipedia
One of the buzzwords we hear in the marketing campaigns of this cloud era is the concept of Green. Some of the cloud providers target our guilt to sell their services. They clearly understand that most of us are very worried about the impact of global climate change and we are willing to do everything possible to stop/reduce it. So, every single cloud provider use the idea of going green in their marketing campaigns giving an impression that anything cloud computing is green. In this post, let us dig through the hype and cut to the chaff.
I picked up a couple of Facebook stalkers over the last couple of weeks
and have been debating how to handle it. Cyber stalking is not a new
thing; it has been going on for a very long time and resulted in broken
lives, hurt people, and people who retreat back into their non-internet
ways. What makes this interesting is not that Facebook facilitates
stalking – but that even middle aged guys can be stalked by people. So here is what I am doing about it.
This is the final part of my series on Entrepreneurial DNA that was originally published on VentureHacks. OK, it’s not really my final part...
Recently ReadWriteWeb started a series taking a very high level look at online finance. One of the posts discussed the evolving online finance ecosystem. In the post, RWW editor Richard MacManus interviewed CEO of Xero (see disclosure), Rod Drury and repeated Drury’s assertion that online finance can be separated into four distinct types of markets:
1) Personal Finance (e.g. Mint, Wesabe, Yodlee)
2) Small Business Accounting (e.g. Xero, Kashflow)
3) Cloud ERP (e.g. Netsuite, Salesforce)
4) ERP (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle)
Which strikes me as a somewhat bizarre classification system, and not
John Edwards and Tiger Woods. Both famous, powerful men who projected one public image while living a completely different life in private. Both certainly deserve our scorn for their behavior.
But the lesson to draw here is not that politicians are scumbags (though, by and large, they are) or that famous athletes are philanderers (though, by and large, they are). Rather, it's that for a skilled entertainer, it's possible to deceive a huge audience (an entire country!) about one's true character when that audience has only limited access.
We all like to think that we can look a man in
When I first tweeted that Jack Trout's new book "In Search of the Obvious" had arrived from Amazon, my mate @euan
suggested his (excellent) blog is actually easy to find. He called it "The Obvious" because when he started writing about the application of new technology and social media in organizations, he felt that, actually, he was saying pretty obvious things - even though they are important, and often missed by the many. Jack Trout's book has a similar theme around today's complex marketing mess and era of killer competition that we
That was the fun part. After all, it's Sunday. Now read the story here:
According to Sage Circle, Forrester is telling all of their analysts that have their own personally branded research blogs that they must either take them down or re-direct them to the Forrester site. Apparently Forrester feels like they can provide more value to their clients if they aggregate all of the content into one space, that place of course being Forrester’s site. My favorite comment on this issue came from Dave Mcclure who said:
“What is the downside for Forrester? Likely not much unless there is a big stink in the blogosphere…”
Seriously, you think that’s the only downside?
Some our “young adults”, others look more like kids – they are teenagers, and while the official age limit is 13, I’ve seen tweets from 12-olds boarding their planes for the Teens in Tech Conference. Yes, they are not “normal” kids – if normal means hanging out in the mall or video arcades. They are the Digital Teens – more tech savvy than I am, many are entrepreneurs, having started a business or two.
It’s happening today, and you can follow it right here, thanks to UStream.tv .
Free live streaming by Ustream
Let me throw some things against the wall and see if anything sticks.
This week I confirmed Chris Messina (of OAuth, and now Activity Streams fame) and Jeff Lindsay (who gave an awesome talk on Webhooks last year) to speak at Gluecon. Simultaneously, I’ve been reading blog posts like this — where the punch-line is:
“Jump to the future when all of your favorite sites implement programmable hooks. The pipedream, holy grail, end result is that you no longer even need Twitter, because it’s become a protocol. Just like blogs happily send pingbacks, you can install a Twitter-speaking, open
Siri provoked a flurry of interest last summer, and presumably not just because CTO Tom Gruber
took part in one of my podcasts. With their genesis inside a big DARPA-funded Artificial Intelligence project, their talk of emergent Virtual Personal Assistants and their slick iPhone-powered demonstrations, the company ticked more than enough of the right boxes to get the semantic technology community positively drooling for more.
And then things went quiet.
Fast forward to 2010, and Siri is back. The back-end technology is faster, more robust, and fuelled by loads more data. Robert
