December 2009
23 posts
“SpinVox’s investors ended up with $0.50 cents on the dollar; the company raised...”
– -TechCrunch
Nuance acquiring Spinvox was a very interesting thing for me. Especially since this comes right on the heals of their (Nuance’s) aquisition of Jott. I have a lot to say about this as you might imagine but will refrain from doing it here.
One thing that I will say is that a...
Underwater Cellular Phone System
I saw this in Skymall yesterday. At first I thought it was a joke but then I realized that it was a real product. The first 2 sentences of their product description says it all, “Have you ever wanted to make or receive a phone call underwater? Talk with someone 15,000 miles away while diving a tropical reef or in your pool?”
Let me see, have I ever wanted to talk with someone...
WatchI wonder if this effected sales in a positive or negative way. I had not heard of the camera until the Youtube video came out.
My bet is that sales of the camera are a multiple of what they would have been without the Youtube video.
Middle School Innovation
Fred did a post this week titled “Getting Computer Science Into Middle School”. As always it is worth a read but basically it talks about teaching kids prprograming languages like Ruby on Rails and how important that is for the future.
I saw a great example of this reading Popular Science on my flight to Mountain View yesterday. A middle school kid from Hudson River Valley, NY named...
The solution to pollution
I was watching a show on HD Theater tonight called Future Car. One of the concepts companies that they were showing was a new hydrogen powered go-cart racing league called Formula Zero. The idea behind Formula Zero is that racing has a inherent competition to push innovation to win and in this case that push furthers technology that can help to produce zero emission green vehicles.
That got me...
Proper Twitter Etiquette
In the past I have written a few posts around what is appropriate when engaging in conversations on Twitter about your product. Today we had a bunch of Twitter chatter going on around PhoneTag.
It started with this post from Mark Suster: @bfeld @pkedrosky - if you’re willing to pay for voice transcriptions Phonetag is pretty awesome
Then, Brad Feld responded with, @msuster yeah -...
WatchThere is something so inspiring about some semi-crazy (and I mean that as a compliment) guy in Alaska just building shit in his spare time.
“Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors you need to one-up...”
– Getting Real by 37 Signals via Florian
PhoneTag is alive today because we always followed this methodology. It does not mean that you do not need to evolve but the cold war business model of adding features to always “one-up” your competitor might win in the press and make you feel...
WatchJosh and First Round really do the best video xmas cards every year. Here is last years for reference.
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Best Hotel Ever- Shutters Santa Monica
I am very fortunate that I have been able to stay in a lot of great hotels over the last few years. I am a pretty easy person, it would take a lot for me to complain about anything, so I basically like them all.
I find that most great hotels, FourSeasons, Ritz, Mandarin, etc., are pretty much the same, great service, great rooms and great food. Which is why it would be tough for me to pick a...
“The time to start iterating the product is if and only if sufficient customers...”
– Customer Development is Not a Focus Group « Steve Blank (via hiten)
YES!
“It has to be simple. I’d love a self service model where the developer agrees to...”
– Bijan
Oh does this speaks so deeply to my beliefs…
“Last night I was speaking with a man whose son just graduated from Stanford Law...”
– Gotham Gal (via fred-wilson)
If you are in that 30% send me your resume, I am hiring…
Blockbuster closed, who cares...
I saw a sign on the local Blockbuster that the store was closing. What surprised me more about the store closing was that Blockbuster is still even in business as a company. If there is ever a case study on a company that just could not evolve I think that Blockbuster would win the prize for that. Why would I ever go to a Blockbuster, we have Netflix, Netflix streaming (on the xbox), AppleTV...
No One Cares About Your Stupid Little Startup →
What a great title for a presentation but I would expect nothing less from Matt (co-founder of Xobni). Check out the whole thing, there is a lot of great insight in the below presentation.
No One Cares About Your Stupid Little Startup
View more presentations from brezina.
via hiten via caterpillarcowboy via dfdeshom
“I often wonder that the financial crisis that we are going through which is...”
– -Leo Laporte in TWIT episode 223
This statement from Leo really hit me when I was listening to the show this week. Did the next Bill Gates, Jonas Salk, Larry and Sergey, etc., use their brains in trying to arbitrage the market vs. building one of the next great technologies or cures for...
3 tags
What is the BigDeal?
I can not help but try out new companies and products, it something I have done since I was a little kid.
So when I saw that Josh Kopelman and First Round invested in a company called BigDeal I had to check it out. However unlike most web based businesses, this one cost me a few bucks, about $55 to really understand it.
Basically BigDeal is like eBay and Poker mixed together. So the eBay part,...