Archive | May, 2007

Transitioning from startup to growth phase – don’t be afraid of process

May 30, 2007
in Entrepreneurship

As an early stage investor and board member of several companies, I am fortunate to get the opportunity to work with some great entrepreneurs and also pattern match and observe trends, both good and bad, in early stage companies.  I am not here to throw platitudes at you but simply to share an observation of [...]

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Internet Ad Frenzy – what’s next?

May 18, 2007
in Digital Media

Wow-what a past couple of days!  First I would like to say congratulations to David Moore, CEO of 24/7 RealMedia, on the company’s pending sale to WPP Group for $649mm.  I first met David in 1996 when he made his move from offline to online advertising as my prior fund invested in the initial round [...]

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Second Life for Kids (continued)

May 16, 2007
in Digital Media, Web/Tech

The kids space is hot.  Techcrunch just reported on rumors that Montgomery and Co or Monty was working with Club Penguin on a sale to Sony for $500 million.  Montgomery is the same investment bank responsible for selling Intermix (MySpace) to NewsCorp and Grouper to Sony so they have been building a nice practice in [...]

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Social Shopping (continued)

May 15, 2007
in Web/Tech

Congratulations to my friend Gary Vaynerchuk of the Wine Library for his acquisition of Cork’d (see Mashable and the Alarm Clock for coverage).  When I had dinner with Gary a few months ago we talked about how the next big opportunity for e-commerce was to weave social networking and blogging tools into the existing infrastructure [...]

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What a Microsoft-Yahoo deal would mean for startups

May 4, 2007
in Entrepreneurship, Web/Tech

The rumors of a pending Microsoft-Yahoo deal are out in the market again today (see NYPost and Techmeme).  Who knows if it will happen but rest assured if it did, Microsoft would be in a pretty good position to take on Google with Yahoo’s user and advertising base combined with Microsoft’s strength in development tools [...]

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Nice Try T-Mobile

May 3, 2007
in VOIP

OK, I am biased since I am an investor in Sipphone/Gizmo Project but this service from T-Mobile sounds pretty lame.  The "breakthrough offering" from this carrier is that you can make calls on your mobile handset and seamlessly switch between T-Mobile’s cellular network and your home network.  The catch is that you have to pay [...]

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Broadband video is hot…where are the advertisers?

May 2, 2007
in Digital Media

There is an interesting interview in the WSJ today with Dave Rosenblatt, CEO of Doubleclick.  While talking about industry trends, Dave clearly lays out the fact that it is still early days in terms of broadband video advertising.In general, video advertising as a trend is pretty firmly in motion. In spite of that, though, it [...]

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