Earlier this week a new Internet search engine with an oh-so-hip name, Cuil (pronounced "cool"), launched to great hype about ex-Googlers taking on their former employer with a 121,617,892,992 page index (that's 121B if you're not good at counting digits), supposedly
I received this question the other day from an old friend: Clearly, having [our CEO] write his own real blog would be ideal, but do you think it's possible that a ghost-written blog is better than nothing at all, or is the downside not worth it? If you&
Strategy
Just a quick post to highlight an exceptional PowerPoint deck (that I suspect is making the viral rounds) on happiness as the first-principle from which you can create a successful business model. It's by Tara Hunt, founder of Internet consultancy Citizen Agency, and author of a blog called
VC
The romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle popularized a faux statistic about age and the single woman, saying "a single woman over the age of 40 has a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than of getting married." Another equally invalid urban myth relates to age and
Bernard Liautaud, co-founder of Business Objects, and CEO for the company's initial 1.5 decades, las landed as a general partner at Balderton Capital in London. See the press release from Balderton, suitably in English here or French here. Balderton manages $1.5B and has now four general
(Updated: I read the earnings call transcript and made a few changes.) One of the items I'm tracking in this blog is Convera's burn-the-ships attempt at transition from a Federally focused enterprise search provider to a vertical search platform provider. (See prior posts: Honey I Shrunk
Check out this video featuring Mark Logic's own Kelly Stirman -- appropriately wearing an official Mark Logic shirt -- on the Microsoft Document Interoperability Initiative, a launch and series of events we participated in a few months ago related to the new Microsoft Open XML file formats. Here
I've written a fair bit about Fast Search and Transfer on this blog (e.g., The Blood-Letting Begins, Fast to Restate 2006, Fast Search Train Wreck: Who's Accountable?, Microsoft Bids $1.2B for Fast) and I've done so for a number of reasons: * Competition.
Marketing
Go here to check out coverage of the recent panel session I did in New York City at the CMO Club summit. Overall, I enjoyed participating on the panel and want to thank both Pete from the CMO Club for inviting me and the other panelists for the fun debate.
VC
Check out this article in the San Jose Mercury news, entitled Watching Their Words: In A Soft Economy Venture Firms Trying To Avoid Hot Air and Arrogance. Excerpt: "There's a lot of hot air and arrogance in the business that we all would be better off without,
Marketing
Branding always has it problems. Often, they're international in nature; remember the Unix systems vendor Arete? They had big problems in France where arrete means "stop." Who wants to buy the stop computer? Sometimes, they're cultural -- I remember at Business Objects when the
Marketing
I've been traveling a lot recently (including a nice vacation at Club Med in Mexico) so please excuse the hiatus in posting. In restarting, I thought I'd blaze out of the gates with a controversial marketing rant on user conference branding provoked, in part, by a
