I'd expected Sequoia's inimitable Mike Moritz and Microsoft's energetic Steve Balmer to be my favorite speakers of the Web 2.0 Summit and they did not disappoint. Moritz provided a fascinating, cerebral discussion yesterday afternoon and Balmer rocked the house this morning: see this
The not surprising answer: you end up a tiny company. Convera's 2QF08 results? * $255,000 in revenues. Yes, that's measured in dollars, not kilodollars. Approximately the amount it would take to buy an Aston Martin V8 Vantage. A nice car mind you, but a car. One
From time to time The Economist amazes me with stories of how economic analysis can be applied to test many and different theories. This one, however, takes the prize. It's about an evolutionary psychologist who decided test a theory related to, well, here it is: This theory is
My former employer, Business Objects, succumbed to its logical and natural ending yesterday, first announcing a short quarter, and then announcing its sale to SAP in a well valued transaction worth $6.7B. Here is some of my perspective on the deal: * I left Business Objects in 2004, after we
I've never liked what I call "the next" positioning. Examples: * Dan Quayle trying to position as the next Jack Kennedy until Lloyd Bensten put an abrupt end to the feeble effort. * The object DBMS vendors in the early 1990s positioning as the next Oracle. (Gartner analyst
I read a great book a few flights ago, entitled Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book was written by a mathematics and statistics adept trader / academic / philosopher who explores fun and interesting questions about probability, causation,
The folks over at Powerset, a much hyped natural language search engine, have a fun post on their blog where they point their parser at Miss Teen South Carolina's now infamous answer to the question: "Recent polls have shown that a fifth of Americans can't
See this post on Search Engine Land entitled Searcharazzi: Salacious Wiki Edits to Fast Search & Transfer. Excerpt: “Would the vandal or PR person removing information from these pages please stop. It is a matter of record that FAST had a share price crash of 28% when they made a
One of my big gripes with most content-oriented software is that it requires a big bang approach (see The First Step's a Doozy). The basic premise behind most content software is roughly: 1. If you do all this hard work to perfectly standardize the schema of your
Read/WriteWeb had an interesting post a few weeks back entitled "Rethinking Crossing the Chasm." Those of you who know me know that I'm a fairly devout practitioner of chasm-crossing ideas and that I'm a big believer that they work, particularly in markets
Here's a fun editorial on CNET entitled "Tech cliches to live by." Here's the opener: Todd, a friend of mine, once gave me an invaluable piece of advice: if you fall asleep in a meeting and wake up not knowing what's going
See this Forbes story for the latest news on the situation at Fast Search (& Loose Accounting) & Transfer: * Layoff of 148 employees * Reduction in operating costs of approximately $12M/quarter * Up to a $55M one-time restructuring charge * Of which $25M will be cash (e.g., severance) * And remaining
