Archive | October, 2006
Dual mode phones – convergence of cellular and wifi

Dual mode phones – convergence of cellular and wifi

Oct 30, 2006
in VOIP

I have seen the future of VOIP and it is not about making calls from a headset on my computer or buying a new VOIP phone to carry around with me – it is seamless integration of VOIP with your existing cell phone, it is one device which gives you the flexibility to make calls [...]

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Where are your sales boulders and how are you going to move them?

Oct 24, 2006
in Entrepreneurship

I had 2 board meetings last week, and it seemed that we spent a fair amount of time digging into each company’s sales process, understanding and mapping out each phase of the sales cycle from sales lead to to actual installed customer.  Many times one can focus too narrowly and only look at a sales [...]

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Back to the basics – more questions for entrepreneurs

Oct 17, 2006
in Entrepreneurship

On the heels of my earlier post on questions "entrepreneurs should ask themselves," I got a flurry of emails from readers about other points that I did not address.  Anyway, I strongly believe that we can sometimes get too enamored with our own technology and not do enough market assessment in the real world.  Later [...]

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Techdirt Insight Community -Gerson Lehrman for the information age?

Oct 14, 2006
in Web/Tech

Mike Masnick of Techdirt has launched a new service called the "Techdirt Insight Community."  Mike is an active blogger but also has run a corporate intelligence service for awhile mining the web for customized news and insight tailored for your company (think competitive analysis, updates, reviews on your products, etc. – check out Jeff Nolan’s [...]

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Questions entrepreneurs should ask themselves

Oct 13, 2006
in Entrepreneurship

Andy Sacks, CEO, of Judy’s Book has an excellent post of what simple questions management can ask themselves to assess their current state of play.  If you are an entrepreneur, I encourage reading his post and some of his follow up commentary (Andy’s questions below).What are the hardest problems in our current business approach – [...]

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Microsoft acquires portfolio company Colloquis

Oct 12, 2006
in Web/Tech

It is always great to see hard work rewarded.  Congratulations to Steve Klein, Pierre Berkaloff, and the rest of the Colloquis team (my partner Ned Carlson is on the board) for building the company over the last few years and making this happen.  For any startup there are always a few missteps along the way [...]

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The next tech powerhouse?

Oct 12, 2006
in Globalization

In a recent Barron’s article on Cisco titled "Getting the World WIred (sorry, sub required)" is an interesting comment from CEO John Chambers:While these new technologies are giving Cisco’s current customers reason to upgrade, Cisco also is seeing growth of nearly 50% a year in its sale of networking systems in emerging markets like Saudi [...]

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Google and YouTube – don’t mess with success

Oct 10, 2006
in Digital Media

By now, everyone knows about the Google – YouTube deal, $1.65 billion for a leading online destination video site.   There is not much I can add, but I did find this comment interesting from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s NY Times article:The idea of a deal had been broached a few days earlier. The setting was classic [...]

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Social shopping

Oct 6, 2006
in Entrepreneurship, Web/Tech

I must admit that I have seen way too many social networking related plays that want to be the next MySpace of some niche market.  When asked about monetization the standard answer is they have a much more focused audience than MySpace with highly targeted CPMs.  Guess what, if MySpace is only monetizing a fraction [...]

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Revolutionary technology with evolutionary implementation

Oct 5, 2006
in Entrepreneurship, On Demand

I was riding on the train this morning and was talking to a friend about one of my fund’s portfolio companies.  She mentioned that the management team had done a great job during a recent sales presentation because instead of going for the "rip and replace" strategy, they went with the "co-exist" philosophy.  Too often, [...]

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