People sometimes ask: what's the argument for special-purpose databases like MarkLogic, as opposed to general-purpose databases like DB2, Oracle, or SQL Server? While I have written much on this topic, in the end I think it boils down to one word: performance. The big 3 database
Seedcamp, a London-based, week-long camp for European entrepreneurs recently did an interesting exercise. They took the several hundred applications they received for their event and made tagclouds. Here's what they found. What are you creating? How will you make money? What tools will you use? (I&
Back in June, Paul Krugman wrote a nice op-ed piece in the New York Times entitled Bits, Bands, and Books which looks at the changes in the information and media business (e.g., publishing, music) and compares them to what I call the Grateful Dead business model. Having been
I've already spent a lot of space covering the financial issues at Fast Search & Transfer. In part that was because, prior to the Microsoft acquisition, we competed fairly often with Fast, particularly in our publishing practice. Part was because the company reminded me of MicroStrategy, against whom
Enterprise
[Revised 8/2/08; still working on cleaning up this consciousness stream.] Back in the old days, it seemed easy to create a category in software. Look at the database market, for example: * IBM invents the relational DBMS (RDBMS) category * Oracle, Ingres, and Informix enter in a largely undifferentiated way,
Frequent readers will know I'm a pretty tough grader, but I have to give Alfresco an A+ for the positioning and strategy around (if not the naming of) today's launch of Alfresco Labs Beta 3. They're drowning in coverage -- press this link to see
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
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
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
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
(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
