Current Affairs

Both were compelling for sure, but what did the Twittersphere have to say about it? Buzz monitoring company Retrevo put together some stats which suggest that wile the Apple announcement was big (topping out at 7,000 tweets per minute), the President edged the iPad out (peaking at 9,000 tweets per minute). I’d love to see the graph below with an overlay of what topics caused each of the spikes (they have this for the iPad announcement, but not the State of the Union Address – click through to the article to see the detail).

Damon Darlin argues in an article earlier this week in the Times that serendipity has become "lost in the digital deluge". His premise is essentially that through services like Twitter, Facebook and others we’ve essentially crow-sourced content discovery and lost is the beauty of discovering "something we never knew we wanted to find" (he uses the example of browsing a friend’s CD or video collection as something that the digital age has killed).  Even services like StumbleUpon or UrbanSpoon, which are designed to surface information that users typically wouldn’t find themselves – Darlin argues – really just gravitate to the mean. What?!? The Internet that gives us almost unlimited access to almost unlimited information, which allows us to browse for…

The initial signs of hope in a market are often just the sense that things are swinging in the right direction. This is why measures such as "consumer sentiment" are so important to the outlook of an economy – when people think things are going well, they often do (and because consumers power over 70% of our economy how people are thinking about spending has a pretty material impact on how the economy actually does). There’s no venture capital equivalent to consumer sentiment (and frankly how could you poll a group of VCs and get them to agree on something anyway) but I feel that things are on the upswing – at least in the world of early-stage investing. Here’s…

Reposting from my partner Jason Mendelson’s blog about an upcoming event at CU Boulder featuring Sam Zell. This will be a great event.   In the continuing Entrepreneurs Unplugged series, next week Sam Zell will be visiting the university. April 22nd, at noon in the large (Boulder NewTech Meetup) courtroom at the law school.  More info here.  It is free, but you must register, so keep that in mind. Sam is always an interesting interviewee and speaker and even more so this year with his recent sale of Equity Office Property and sell of the Chicago Cubs.