VC
Everybody has some understanding of what venture capitalists do, right? * They sell money * They invest in [technology] startups hoping to get 10x returns * They invest in people, not technology or companies * They invest in market segments, not companies or technologies * They take risk hoping to yield superior returns * They eliminate
I found an interesting post on SandHill.com by Ken Bender of the Software Equity Group, entitled After the M&A Frenzy: What's Next? One of my recent memes is that the mega-players in enterprise software are becoming new conglomerates. They seem more driven by size
Strategy
I found this post today on Vallewag, which shows that Facebook grew from 8.7M to 19.5M users in the year ended 10/07 while LinkedIn grew from 1.7M to 4.9M. So while Facebook is nearly 4x LinkedIn's size (and MySpace nearly 3x Facebook'
As predicted in my post about the SAP acquisition of Business Objects, IBM today announced that it has offered $4.9B in a friendly bid to acquire #2 independent business intelligence tools maker, Cognos. Per this New York Times story, the bid amounts to a 9.5% premium over Friday&
One of our consultants is doing some testing of MarkLogic vs. XML-extended relational databases, and he sent me an example of the kinds of queries you need to write when you're mixing SQL and XQuery/XPath. Here is an example: SELECT XMLQUERY( '$p/Citation/Index/ConceptCodeList/
If I told you fifteen years ago that a family-owned California hamburger chain founded in 1948 was going to beat McDonald's in hamburgers, what would you have said? "Beat McDonald's in hamburgers? Are you crazy?" And you might have added: "Burger King&
One reason I give Fast Search & Transfer a hard time is that I don't like their communications strategy. For example, during their recent and ongoing financial travails there has been way too much "happy talk" in their communications for my taste. They irked me again
Here's a great presentation on this topic that I picked up courtesy of The Content Wrangler. [slideshare id=85551&doc=death-by-powerpoint4344]
I had a long overdue lunch the other day with former Business Objects co-worker, and one of the smartest people I know, Alex Moissis. While most people you talk to in Silicon Valley compare software industry evolution today to evolution of the automobile industry in the early 20th century,
Fast Search and Transfer announced their Q3 2007 results on 10/30. Here are some highlights from the announcement, some of which (the net loss, for example) aren't actually in the company's press release. * Revenues of $35.6M, down 16% compared to Q3 2006 revenues of
I am a big fan of Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed blog. He's clearly a data junkie, finds some remarkable pieces of data and representations of them, and makes some great, non-intuitive connections across different data sets and applications. While I did not attend his speech
I picked up via this post on the High Scalability Blog a new paper by Michael Stonebraker, Nabil Hachem, and Pat Helland entitled The End of an Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite) presented at the VLDB 2007 conference in Austria on September 23rd through 27th. From
