Two stories hit my desk today that serve as a stark reminder that the Internet as we know and love it is not guaranteed to continue on indefinitely. The first was the announcement that the Senate Commerce Committee split their vote on proposed compromise language on Net Neutrality (the idea that carriers should treat every packet on the internet the same). Plenty has been written on this subject so I won’t repeat the arguments here, but suffice it to say that the failure to guarantee neutrality on the net is a huge loss to anyone who cares about the future of the internet (and has a clue). The second was sent by my partner Greg Galanos via Brad and pointed to…
Archives / June, 2006
Are you a Yankee or a Rebel
NPR has the answer.
AppExchange is the new black
eBay jumped on the App Exchange bandwagon with an announcement from their development conference this weekend of a bunch of new APIs and development tools. This was a pretty broad announcement – Shoping.com, ProStores and even PayPal (who had traditionally been relatively closed) are participating in the effort – and expands their existing developer efforts significantly (see their developer site for more information). API’s are certainly nothing new – they are common ways for companies to allow access to their systems – but it seems to me that application exchanges are the new ‘it’ thing to do for platform companies (Salesforce.com, Google, eBay, etc.). This is a pretty new concept – companies in the past were extremely protective of their…
Should I quit my venture job?
Perhaps it’s just a sign of a bubble, but I’ve had several people (entrepreneurs, partners at venture firms and junior partners/senior associates) ask me in the past month whether I was thinking about leaving venture capital to join a company. Their thinking generally follows the logic that given the new Web 2.0 paradigm (presumably they mean the idea that you can build a net business relatively inexpensively, generate sometraffic and either cash flow it or sell it off) there’s a better chance to create wealth in the next 2-4 years by working on the operating side of the world than in venture capital. Given how difficult it is to land a job in venture capital (not to mention how…
What DON’T you do?
Companies – and start-ups in particular – spend a lot of time working through market analyses, product positioning and the like, trying to figure out how to tell the world what it is that they do (and differentiate that from what everyone else does). It is, of course, a very worthwhile and important effort. One thing few companies spend much time on, however, is the opposite question – what do you NOT do. Not the broad question of what you don’t do (we don’t make toasters is not very helpful), but focusing in on the gray areas between what you clearly do and clearly don’t do and deciding where you draw the line. I watch companies struggle over decisions (product extensions, sales targets,…
TypePad and Feedburner integration
Finally! FeedBurner and TypePad are now integrated. Before yesterday, if you had a TypePad blog (like mine) and burned your feed through FeedBurner you were only taking partial advantage of FeedBurner’s services (TypePad generates a number of feeds in different formats, and up to now, FeedBurner only captured one of these feeds). Not only will this give you a better view of your subscriber base and their behavior on your blog, but it will also allow TypePad bloggers to take full advantage of FeedBurners’s advertising and feed management services. You can read the FeedBurner announcement here and the SixApart announcement here (along with instructions on how to get your TypePad account fully integrated).
Syndicate NYC Thoughts
Here are a couple of high level thoughts on the Syndicate Conference held a few weeks ago in New York (ok – I’m weeks late getting this up, but the next Syndicate conference isn’t for another 6 months, so from that perspective I’m early!). First – Here’s the conference website Next – Here’s IDG’s marketing spin post conference (which does highlight some of the announcements that came out of the week) Finally – Here’s the conference blog site My quick 3 take-away’s were as follows: there was a lot of traditional media there (Hearst, USA Today, etc.) – early adopters but mainstream nonetheless there were a number of large companies poking around (for example both FedEx and UPS where there)…