Is Curation A Flash In The Pan? Posted by Tom Foremski - March 24, 2011 It's clear that the interest of Internet users can be very fickle indeed. Sites and services can have sudden boosts of popularity and then pretty much disappear from view. I'm thinking of Quora as one example. But also Digg, MySpace and many others... And whenever there is a burst of hype around a topic it seems to be a precursor to a shortened life span. Curation has recently emerged as a hot topic so does that mean it's days are numbered? Take a look at this Google Trends graph: You can see that interest in the topic was fairly level for much of last year but is now on a sharp upward trajectory since the beginning of this year. But is curation a flash in the pan? I don't think so. We're experiencing a media tsunami that search alone cannot handle.
Curation will do for search what search did for the web -- made it usable and useful to millions of people. Yes, we will eventually see fewer posts on the subject of curation. The Next Big Trend? EMC Loves Stat Geeks, “Oracle has the Most to Lose” - Quentin Hardy - At Your Servers. Slideshow: Top 10 Largest First Rounds for Internet Companies this Year. Forty-one million dollars for an Internet company. That’s what Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank invested in Color, which makes a social networking application that lets users share photos with their smartphones.
It’s an astonishing number. Financial blogger Paul Kedrosky tweeted: “Sequoia, et al gives pre-launch photo-sharing startup $41m, or ‘more than money than they gave Google’. That sound? Jaw hitting floor.” I did some checking in Thomson Reuters’ VC deals database and as far as I can tell, the Color deal is the largest first round for an early stage Internet service, software or content company this year and the third largest in the past 10 years. The only two companies that raised more in the past 10 years were: Volera Inc., a San Jose, Calif. For fun, I put together a slideshow of the 10 largest first rounds for early stage Internet service, software or content companies this year. Quoted: Zynga wants to be Player 2 in tax-break game | Good Morning Silicon Valley. Twitter tax-break plan may be tweaked : City Insider. The controversial proposed tax break for companies that bring new jobs into San Francisco’s Mid-Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods may be pared back.
Service Employees International Union Local 1021, the largest city employees union that wields substantial political clout, has been a vocal opponent of the legislation that backers hope will keep the Twitter micro-blogging company in the city. The union’s leadership rounds at City Hall Tuesday pushing the idea of carving the Tenderloin out of the legislation. ”Let’s contain the area, narrow the focus,” Roxanne Sanchez, the local’s president, told City Insider. She said that the idea of providing any corporate tax breaks is the wrong way to go but that she may be willing to support a scaled-down version that would target businesses along the economically depressed stretch of Market Street between Fifth and 10th streets. Mayor Ed Lee is a strong supporter of the plan. Renee Blodgett PR: RT @pud Seems many journal... Color: A $41m Bet On A Radical Social Mobile App.
Posted by Tom Foremski - March 24, 2011 Last week I was in Palo Alto, drenched by torrential rains but happy to catchup with serial entrepreneur Bill Nguyen and hear about his remarkable new startup Color, which today launched its iPhone and Android based mobile app. Color has raised $41 million from a stellar group of investors. This is a huge amount of capital for a seed/Series A round and it shows how much confidence there is in Mr Nguyen and his team. But this is no ordinary startup. Mr Nguyen is a serial entrepreneur, his most recent venture was LaLa, the cloud-based music service that he sold to Apple for about $80 million. The Palo Alto offices are behind a nondescript storefront but inside there are several large spaces where rows of developers sit behind huge Apple displays.
We sit on beanbags on a huge half-pipe — skateboards seem to litter the place. How will people use it? No one knows just yet but it shows the singular focus of Mr Nguyen's vision. The demo is intriguing. Coming Up: Poland Day Investment Seminar At - Facebook Palo Alto. Posted by Tom Foremski - March 23, 2011 This Saturday, March 26, the US-Polish Trade Council is hosting "Poland Day" a seminar focused on business investments and the relationship between Silicon Valley and Poland. The event starts promptly at 8am and finishes at 11.45am at Facebook, 1050 Page Mill Road, Building 2, Palo Alto, CA. There is also a dinner on Friday March 25 at 6pm at Hunan Garden Restaurant, 3345 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, cost: $45. To register for the dinner please contact Leszek Szalek at lszalek@gmail.com.
Palo Alto, CA, Poland Day during Global Technology Symposium 2011 Here is the agenda for Poland Day: Mark Cuban Changes His Tune On Curation. Technology Trends - 10 trends shaping business and IT in 2011 | Deloitte Consulting. Create an Effective Presentation - Video. Travel Without Baggage. Can you seriously travel with no luggage at all? Yes you can. I’ve done it. Traveling with no bags is gloriously liberating. You move fast, close to the ground, spontenously. You feel unleashed, undefined by your possessions. It is just you and the world. I’ve done a few very short trips this way, and once I took a month-long journey in Sri Lanka without baggage. There are four modes of no-baggage travel these days: 1) Total Nada 2) Just Pockets 3) Day Baggers 4) Minimalist Borrowers Total Nada. But a number of folks sail off this way every year. I just completed a month-long, bag-free trip through Central America. Just Pockets. Rolf Potts, an influential travel blogger, was inspired by Yevin’s 30-day no-bag travel and others to completely circumvent the world with no baggage.
What a pocket person carries. Since we aren’t carrying much with us and it all easily fits into our pockets, why bring a bag along? I also emailed Rolf Potts a few questions about pocket-only travel: Day Baggers. Association of Research Libraries :: New Roles for New Times: Digital Curation for Preservation, Published by ARL. Amazon, Lendle and the Danger of Using Open APIs: Tech News and Analysis « Updated: Lendle, an ebook-sharing service that allows users to find and trade Kindle books, sounds like a great idea — except that it doesn’t work anymore, because Amazon pulled the plug on the site by blocking access to the Amazon API. According to Lendle co-founder Jeff Croft, there was no warning from the online retailer, only a cryptically worded email. So Lendle becomes the latest poster child for a simple maxim: Building your service on top of someone else’s API, no matter how “open” the API is supposed to be, is a very dangerous road.
Update: Lendle has posted an update on its blog to say that it has modified its service as requested by Amazon (removing a feature that allowed Lendle users to synchronize their books with their Kindle account) and API access has been restored. However, the company also said that as a result of the incident it had “come to realize we need to work towards a Lendle product that does not rely on APIs provided by Amazon or any other third party.” New Rules for the New Internet Bubble. Carpe Diem We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear: seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble.
The rules for making money are different in a bubble than in normal times. What are they, how do they differ and what can a startup do to take advantage of them? First, to understand where we’re going, it’s important to know where we’ve been. Paths to Liquidity: a quick history of the four waves of startup investing. (If you can’t see the slide presentation above, click here.) If you “saw the movie” or know your startup history, and want to skip ahead click here. 1970 – 1995: The Golden AgeVC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter. Startups needed millions of dollars of funding just to get their first product out the door to customers. Lessons Learned. 5 technologies your smartphone was meant to kill but hasn’t – Nokia Nseries.
The 4-Hour Body? Not So Much - Alexandra Samuel. When the SXSW Interactive conference begins later this week, it could look very different from previous tech gatherings. That’s because the geek-iarchy has a new book on its shelves, wedged in between Getting Things Done and The ClueTrain Mainfesto. This year’s big nerd book is The 4-Hour Body, by Tim Ferriss. It’s a successor (though not a sequel) to the author’s previous hit, The 4-Hour Workweek. Workweek resonated because it showed how the information age created the conditions to liberate professionals from the chains of the office, spelling out the steps your average professional could take in order to create a “lifestyle design” that let them work wherever, whenever and, ideally, as little as possible. Its liberation methodology was especially viable for professionals with highly specialized skill, like IT geeks, who ate it up. SXSW may provide a very tangible demonstration of Ferriss’ impact, if the geek crowd shows up looking slimmer, trimmer and stronger.
Dr. As for the binges? Twitter Locks Down, Ending Its Reign as the Next Big Thing - Alexandra Samuel. By Alexandra Samuel | 2:06 PM March 17, 2011 When we started building online communities six years ago, we told our early clients that they had a limited window for launching their own customer or supporter communities. After all, people are only going to spend so many hours of the day online, and in 2005, people were starting to make choices about where to spend that time.
If you got in quickly and provided your audience with a reason to make your community one of their daily destinations, you’d get them invested in a set of relationships that would make it hard for them to leave. If you took your time, they’d make that investment elsewhere, and you’d have a hard time wooing them away. Facebook proved us right, and then Twitter proved us wrong.
My answer: There will always be a next thing, but there may not be a Next Big Thing. But then Twitter proved me wrong again. The announcement told Twitter developers to stop building new consumer-oriented Twitter client applications. Robert J. Majteles: Likely=a team that nails t... Here's Why GOOG Should Bid For T-Mobile... Posted by Tom Foremski - March 21, 2011 Foremski's Take: The potential acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T [T] is bad news for Silicon Valley with its strong focus on the consumer: search, social networks, and a spectrum of cloud based services. The reason is that the distributors of all that wonderful Silicon Valley content and services, from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a myriad other companies, will have to travel through fewer owners of the distribution networks. And if those distribution networks fail as a level playing field for all -- then innovation in Silicon Valley by both large and small will be drastically curtailed. Startups will have to pay for access to consumers and that will raise costs and the amount of startup capital needed -- it's at an all time low currently.
I'm surprised that Google didn't make a bid for T-Mobile. . - The wireless carriers have a big influence on what features and services they will support in handsets. - customer service. No editors were used. Maybe. Twitter Is 5 Years Old - What's Its Future? It's In The Tweets... In Defense of Wasting Time. “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” ~Socrates Last night, I was telling my husband that I had spent several hours teaching myself the very basics of HTML code in order to edit my blog’s layout precisely according to my vision for it. I had actually enjoyed the time I spent on this puzzle, but nevertheless commented to him that I couldn’t help but resent wasting some of my day off clicking away in front of the computer screen.
“Why?” He asked. “You enjoyed it, right?” Yes, I replied, it was fun delve into something new, and fascinating to glimpse the buried inner workings of the virtual world, but still…. “Right, so you spent some time in the flow, working on something and losing track of time, and now you know a little bit more about how the world works than you did before. How true. When I realized this, my first impulse was to think of it as something negative—wasted time!
As I thought about our conversation, it occurred to me: Too often, I am far too acutely aware of time. Death of Moore's Law will cause economic crisis. Gordon Moore’s famous law about the doubling of transistor density and power every two years will not only end it could bring economic disaster in its wake, respected scientist Michio Kaku has predicted in a new book, Physics of the Future. Kaku sets out the crunch moment as being the point at which ultraviolet light can no longer tuned to etch ever smaller circuits on to silicon wafers, which on current trends will kick in less than a decade from now. From that moment on, Moore’s Law will gradually diminish, and the effects will not only be technological but economic. He argues that the computing industries depend on a conveyor belt of new products which roughly double the power of each new product from the equivalent a year or two earlier.
With no Moore’s Law to propel this rise in computing power, this upgrade culture will grind to a halt causing consumer interest to wane. His point is stark. “Hitler, Churchill, or Roosevelt might have killed to get that chip. Dafina Toncheva’s Impressive Journey from Communist Bulgaria to Silicon Valley « TechFemme. Dafina Toncheva, Partner, Tugboat Ventures There are few women working in tech and even fewer women working in Venture Capital. And women partners at Venture Capital Firms focused on technology? Fewer still. But that’s not all that makes Dafina Toncheva (Partner, Tugboat Ventures) extraordinary. From her 1550 SAT score to her co-authoring multiple key patents while working at Microsoft, there’s no denying her intelligence. Now she’s using her brains, tech background and business acumen to help Tugboat Ventures “help the highest potential entrepreneurs bring their dreams to life.” TechFemme: How on earth did you get from Bulgaria to Silicon Valley? Dafina Toncheva: I left Bulgaria when I was 18.
TF: How did that bring you to the USA? DT: I sent handwritten letters to 100 colleges asking them how to apply and they all responded with standard application forms. TF: How did you get into technology? DT: In 1998, I started at Harvard, majoring in Computer Science. TF: Any ideas why? Like this: Is a “huge wave” of M&As, financing deals about to hit Silicon Valley? Investment banks are scrambling to open branches and make their presence known in the Silicon Valley area because they are expecting a “huge wave” of mergers and acquisitions and financing deals in tech and media over the next two years, Kevin Covert, president and co-founder of boutique I-bank Covert and Co., told VentureBeat today.
Covert launched his own new bank today after leaving investment bank Montgomery & Co., because he says the opportunities right now for investors looking to capitalize on a white-hot startup climate on the West Coast were just too great to pass up. “[I think] the media and tech industry will be leading the nation out of recession from the financial/housing crisis, because acquirers are now streamlined, flush with cash, and highly competitive,” said Covert. Covert was the primary architect of Montgomery’s investment banking business and helped establish the core M&A and private placement practices of the bank over the span of 10 years. Google accuses China of interfering with Gmail email system | Technology.