Silicon Valley
Check out this article in the New York Times that overturns Silicon Valley conventional wisdom about failure. Per a Harvard Business School working paper, which looked at several thousand venture-capital-backed companies from 1986 to 2003: * First-time entrepreneurs had a 22% chance of success * Already-successful entrepreneurs had
It's all happened so quickly. * I've become my parents, * SQL has become Cobol, * and Oracle has become CA Things were different back in 1985, when I, fresh from Berkeley, VAX/VMS documentation in hand, rode the 51 bus to Alameda where my first real employer, Ingres,
We've had major interest in our upcoming webinar on the Google Book Settlement and unprecedented downloads of the related white paper, Google's Settlement with the Publishing Industry: Opportunites and Strategies for Publishers, written by Bill Rosenblatt of Giant Steps Media and available for download without giving
Silicon Valley
I just heard about this index today, the Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index, which measures the confidence of Silicon Valley venture capitalists on a scale from 1-5. In 4Q08, the index hit its fifth consecutive quarterly new low at 2.77 out of 5. The index was started
I'm happy to announce the availability of a white paper on which we worked with information industry veteran Bill Rosenblatt of Giant Steps Media that analyzes the effects of the Google settlement with publishers, and identifies new opportunities that result from it. From the introduction: The second part
I saw Tom Siebel speak last week before a meeting of the Alliance of Chief Executives, giving a talk entitled From IT to ET, as in from information technology to energy technology. Here are some notes on the talk. * Siebel now runs something called First Virtual Group, a diversified holding
Marten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL and subsequently senior vice president of the database group at Sun Microsystems has announced his resignation. Says Cnet: "There is nothing in the MySQL business that is prompting me to leave," Mickos said. "Business is great. We just closed a multimillion-
IPO
In a display of either iron will or total unawareness, OpenTable, the online restaurant reservations service, filed an S-1 on 1/30/09 for an initial public offering of its shares. I'm proud to report that with revenues of $41M in 2007 (and seemingly on track to
As the bloom comes off the Google rose, you can now see the flip side of many of their once-sacred practices, such as their interviewing process and academic elitism. While I'm not a Google fan -- for the record, I always hated "don't be evil&
See this CMS Watch story which says that John Lervik has resigned from Microsoft/Fast. A Norwegian newspaper story on the resignation is here (with bad machine translation here). Stephen Arnold of Beyond Search covers the story here in a colorful post that delves into Norwegian folklore. Since I'
Grateful Dead
First Monday, a peer-reviewed Internet journal run by the University of Illinois at Chicago recently published an article entitled A Grateful Dead Analysis: The Relationship Between Concert and Listening Behavior which I found interesting. Frequent readers will know that I've always believed the Grateful Dead provided a
Enterprise
See this story on SeekingAlpha (which might consider renaming itself SeekingShelter), entitled Goldman Slaps Most Software Stocks. Excerpt on aggregate spending: The worst of the IT-spending slowdown likely remains in front of us, as we start the clock on slashed 2009 budgets. We forecast 0 percent revenue growth for
