After a really fun day-long strategy session with portfolio company Athletes Performance in Arizona on Tuesday, and a not so fun red-eye home, yesterday I packed up 3 [...]
Boiled down to its essence, the article makes a few elementary but big points.
Mermigass broad thesis is that Internet-related [...]
A few interesting points that I recall [...]
This has been a particularly busy week for remote access software, with SoonR announcing 100MB of storage and better Outlook integration and LogMeIn Hamachi named one of PC Magazine's best free software downloads.
SoonR, of Campbell, Calif., lets you get to files on your computer via your mobile phone and LogMeIn Hamachi is a free VPN connection. LogMeIn is based in Boston.
If you've ever pulled upto your vacation hotel in...
Aggregate Knowledge, the company that tracks Internet user surfing patterns within a site, has become one of the hotter start-ups in Silicon Valley.
It is about to raise $20 million, and rumors are circulating that interest by venture capitalists is pushing the company valuation north of $50 million (before the investment). This is significant because the company launched less than a year ago, and is already raking in millions of dollars.
We wrote announcement...
It sucks when your Web site's traffic isn't being measured correctly.
It also sucks when you're trying to measure the significance of someone else's site, and are getting conflicting signals.
Here's what we've learned over the past few days, after our initial piece on the problems of Alexa, Quantcast and Compete, all sites that independently verify how much traffic a site is getting.
We've learned that if a measuring company doesn't have a tracking...
Visit the venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road, and you'll sense significant confusion about how to invest in the latest Internet technologies.
The old guard can't keep up. Young, smart engineers are proposing ways to exploit the paradigm shift of Web 2.0, and it takes the younger, more curious venture capitalists to understand it all. One solution would be to promote more younger partners, but older VCs are only slightly less tenacious than Supreme Court justices...
The Google-Microsoft showdown begins in earnest.
Google will announce today it will begin selling online office software for $50 a year, including 10 gigabytes of email storage, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar.
The move comes just as Microsoft is trying to convince businesses to upgrade to its Vista operating system, so Google's offensive is perfect timing -- and is likely to be enough to win over some small businesses.
But here's the fine-print: Google says the services...
After weeks of negotiations over who could use the "iPhone" trademark, Apple and Cisco have agreed to share it.
Cisco gave up its claim to exclusive use of the name, but in return won commitment from Apple to allow Cisco to work with it on future products. We "will explore opportunities for interoperability in the areas of security, and consumer and enterprise communications," the joint release said. The companies didn't provide any other details.
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Nextbio is a new search engine for the biotech-health industry, something you could have seen coming a mile away.
The nation's multi-trillion dollar healthcare industry is the equal sister to the information technology sector. In IT, you have plenty of niche search engines, such as Koders and Google Code Search. On the healthcare side, you've got a bunch of search engines focused on consumers, but few serious sites oriented to the biotech business-research community....
Cisco Systems, the San Jose Internet backbone company digging deep into its pockets to acquire Web-related companies, has agreed to acquire Reactivity for $135 million. The purchase will allow Cisco to integrate its networking operations more closely with Web applications.
Reactivity provides so-called XML gateway technology, which is placed in a layer of the Internet network that talks with Web applications. Reactivity has built things like XML firewalls, but will also help wireless and...
Why not let Internet junkies do your marketing for you?
Brickfish, a San Diego company, lets you do that by tapping into the creative energies of Internet users -- getting them to work for free, essentially, to generate marketing ideas for you.
The music band Incubus tried it out. Take a look at the 150 marketing ideas generated (or see samples at left) when the band asked for ideas on an album...
Mozes, the Palo Alto company that lets you text-message music bands for information like concert details, venue changes and promotions, had raised $5 million in a first round of venture capital funding.
Mozes' mission is straightforward, but difficult to carry out. It wants becomes the one place you send messages to for information about your favorite band. All you do is send a message to M-o-z-e-s (or 66937 on your mobile dialpad), and then type in...
Woo-hoo! An honest-to-goodness, made-to-order-by-a-real-sushi-chef venued called Kyotatsu just opened up next to Gate 34 at Narita Airport. I was the envy of an entire 747 cabin... until I spilled soy sauce on myself. Doh!
