Archive | November, 2006

What startups can learn from Nintendo

Nov 28, 2006
in Entrepreneurship

James Surowiecki has a great article in the New Yorker this week about the new Nintendo Wii system, titled "In Praise of Third Place."  What James really asks is if you are a distant third in a market, how do you compete with the big boys?  In this case, Nintendo is slugging it out with [...]

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The future of television advertising (continued)

Nov 21, 2006
in Digital Media

A little over 2 years ago, I wrote a post about the future of television advertising.  While I have always been bullish about broadband video advertising, I have never believed that the $60b television advertising industry would disappear overnight.  In fact, before the Internet dominates all advertising why couldn’t one bring the tools of the [...]

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Yahoo’s manifesto for change

Nov 18, 2006
in Web/Tech

If you are a big company getting your butt kicked, it seems like the thing to do is issue a memo.  Bill Gates did it after Microsoft lost out on the first wave of the Internet.  Ray Ozzie wrote one for Microsoft about the importance of software as a service last year (see an earlier [...]

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Is the bar lower for a tech IPO?

Nov 17, 2006
in Investing/Markets, On Demand

I am not sure if you saw the news, but Salary.com recently filed for an IPO to raise up to $50 million. On the book is Thomas Weisel Partners, William Blair, Needham, Pacific Crest, and Wachovia. According to the S-1 filing:Salary.com is a leading provider of on-demand compensation management solutions. Our comprehensive on-demand software applications [...]

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The state of consumer security

The state of consumer security

Nov 15, 2006
in Security

I had the pleasure, and I mean pleasure, of recently rebuilding two of my home PCs running Windows XP because of performance degradation and other issues.  I ended up doing a clean wipe of the hard drives and reinstalling Windows XP from scratch.  Once I got the machines up and running with broadband connection, I [...]

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Consumers want instant gratification

Nov 11, 2006
in Web/Tech

Greg Linden has a great post summarizing a talk that Marissa Mayer of Google gave at the recent Web 2.0 conference.  I encourage you to read it because Marissa talks about how Google ran a user test where users wanted more search results.  Surprisingly, traffic and revenue dropped by 20% and what Marissa discovered was [...]

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CBS going early

Nov 6, 2006
in Digital Media

As I wrote early last year, my perspective is that one must go early, go late, or go home to make money in the venture market.  Given that we at Dawntreader have always been early, that is where we will continue to focus.  What is interesting is that on the heels of the new seed [...]

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Utility computing for the web and startups

Nov 3, 2006
in Entrepreneurship, On Demand

There is a great BusinessWeek article outlining Amazon’s ambition to be a utility for web businesses.  This reminds me of a conversation I had last month with a founder and former CTO of one our of our prior portfolio companies who said his goal was to have a highly successful SAAS play with 1 operations [...]

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When competitors are acquired…Socialtext and Jotspot

Nov 1, 2006
in Entrepreneurship, Web/Tech

In an earlier post titled "When Competitors are acquired" I discussed that rather than sulk and wish it were you who was bought, smart companies will go out and capitalize on the opportunity as their competition is temporarily distracted and inwardly focused on creating synergies.  Rather than comment on the whys of the Google Jotspot [...]

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