Please sir….may I have more targeted advertising
A few days ago I received a note from Plaxo in my inbox that said in part: As you probably know, Plaxo was acquired last year by Comcast and is now a business unit of Comcast Interactive Media (CIM). Not surprisingly, given the above focus, we’ve been working on enabling interoperability between Plaxo and other CIM Websites. In advance of rolling out this common identity system, we’ve developed a unified Terms of Service and Privacy Policy that will apply to Plaxo and the other participating Comcast Websites, providing consistent protection and eliminating the complexity and potential confusion of having different terms and policies for each Website. …
September 4, 2009· 3 min read
VCs and social media
I recently participated in a Thomson Reuters webinar entitled “Boosting Returns with Web 2.0 Technology”. The seminar was targeted to VC and Private Equity professionals and focused on how investment firms can use social media in managing their investment business. I was reminded of the mew media technology bubble that I live in a few months ago when I spoke on a similar topic at the PEI Investor Relations and Communications Forum. When I asked the crowd of about 150 people how many were on Twitter and a single hand went up I realized that I had my work cut out for me (I might have guessed that that when I walked into the room and was the only person wearing jeans, but that’s another story)… …
September 1, 2009· 2 min read
AT&T reminds you not to use your phone
My wife received an email this morning from AT&T that said in part: Our systems have detected that you are transmitting a substantial amount of data while roaming in areas not directly served by AT&T. The Terms and Conditions of our data plans (including unlimited plans) provide an “off-net usage” allowance that is equal to the lesser of 24 megabytes or 20% of the megabytes included in your plan. I was surprised by this, not only because I hadn’t completely read the terms and conditions (I subsequently did and it’s in there – they can go so far as to cancel my account if they don’t like my network usage – on net or off, voice or data) but mostly because our phones were registering that they were on the AT&T network in all of the places that we travel to regularly. …
September 1, 2009· 3 min read
Community Hours
Brad, Jason and I are going to try something new in Boulder starting this fall – Community Hours at the TechStars bunker. We’re all fans of “random meetings” – taking meetings from people that have been referred to us or have taken the time to write to ask to get together – but sometimes struggle to fit them into our schedules (I’m particularly poor at this – scheduling them generally at random and breaking up many days with too many meetings and not enough time at my desk). …
August 28, 2009· 1 min read
Email closings
I wrote a post a few years ago poking fun at how people (myself included) sign off on their email correspondence. Ben recently pointed me to a Post article on the same subject (written a little more seriously than mine). I continue to find amusing the myriad of ways people use to sign their emails – especially now that social media “coolness” has invaded the tech circles that I run around in (i.e., where there’s more pressure than ever to be seen as cool and with it in the tech world). This has only served to increase the craziness of email sign-offs. Here are a few of my favorites along with my interpretation of their meaning (updated with a few new ones). I’m curious to hear any outlandish or amusing sign-offs that readers have received. Let me know. …
August 28, 2009· 2 min read
Are you a PPC expert? Read on…
One of our portfolio companies (a heretofore stealthy one at that) is looking for Pay Per Click stars (Google AdWords Qualified or SEMPO Institute training preferred) to join their crowdsourced PPC marketplace. If you’re a PPC marketing expert click here to find out more and sign up. Lots more on Trada (which we haven’t yet been talking about broadly) in the coming months as they really start to open up.
August 27, 2009· 1 min read
Finding your peeps
One of the companies I work with recently sent the following email to the CEO’s of a number of similar companies (I’ve redacted the email a bit to preserve the privacy of the company): I’m the CEO of [really cool portfolio company]. We’re a [insert company attribute/industry here] company as well I have been talking to a number of other [attribute/industry] players and I think we all are facing some similar issues as we try and both mature our businesses and the [attribute/industry] industry at the same time. I’m pulling together a private discussion group for a select set of these businesses where we can have open conversations with each other about issues we face and how we are dealing with them. I feel like we’re all treading a lot of the same ground right now. For example, how do you [list of things that we’re dealing with].. I feel like CS industry is a bit where the Open Source industry was 5 years ago. Lots of standards to learn still. …
August 27, 2009· 2 min read
How much does Google really know about you?
In case you were wondering what goods Google has on you check out http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/ from the browser you typically use for web browsing and search. If you scroll down you’ll see what interests Google has you pegged for and get to see the data they have collected on you in your cookie. For me the most interesting part wasn’t the data they had on me, but looking through the Google interests taxonomy at the bottom of the page. There are specific tags for individual car brands, for your love of Bollywood movies, pest control, screensavers, etc. It’s an interesting glimpse into how Google thinks about the world (and more importantly into what categories Google thinks it can make money by trafficking).
August 14, 2009· 1 min read
Is serendipity lost in the digital age?
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. …
August 6, 2009· 2 min read
Power to the people
Over the last 6 months I’ve noticed a large number of business plans that are incorporating some form of “crowdsourcing” into their business models. Crowdsourcing, popularized by James Surowiecki excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds, seeks to harness the power of the masses with the idea that the “crowd” can often produce a better result than any given individual (in the classic crowdsouring example a large group tries to guess the number of gumballs in a jar; typically the average guess is closer to the right number than any individual guess – the crowd as a whole is better than even it’s smartest individual member). …
July 23, 2009· 1 min read