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
Those: * Interested in the financial meltdown, * Who are fans of Nassim Nicolas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan), * Who enjoyed When Genius Failed, the story of the ironically named Long Term Capital Management, * Who enjoyed Against the Gods by Peter Bernstein, * Who are generally quants interested in finance, Should
Silicon Valley
In keeping with my predictions series, here are the results of a recently released survey by the National Venture Capital Association featuring predictions about venture capital in 2009. The survey includes responses from more than 400 venture capitalists and was taken between 11/24 and 12/12/08. Some takeaways:
See this Cnet article by Dan Farber entitled Print News is Fading, But the Content Lives On. Among other things, he presents the result of a recent Pew Research survey that showed the Internet passing newspapers in 2008 in response to the question: "where do you get most of
As they did last year, the FBI has again issued a code-breaking challenge. But this year, they say, the code is slightly more difficult. For assistance, they offer up a primer entitled Analysis of Criminal Codes and Ciphers.
Marketing
Thanks to a post by Darren Cunningham on LucidEra's blog I found this wonderful Dilbert cartoon which concludes that EVERYTHING IS A PLATFORM. I was happy to find this because tech marketers have so thoroughly over-used the word "platform" that I now rarely use it
