I really enjoyed the Boston Angel Boot Camp on June 1. A shout out to Jon Pierce for a job well done. Among the many great discussions, the most critical one in my mind centered on the impact that the source of money can have on an early, seed startup. The discussion covered two main […]
Continue Reading...Author: panthos
Google Buzz is an Outlook/Exchange/Azure killer
Google Apps has seen good but not crazy growth in the enterprise because as with most early products, its feature set is good but not great as compared to the incumbent Microsoft suite. Many of us have been willing to bite the feature bullet to move the care and feeding of Outlook and Exchange to […]
Continue Reading...Failure — Its not the entrepreneur who failed, its the business that failed
Much has been written about the value of failure in the entrepreneurial sector. But do VC’s value failure and if they do, on their own watch or on somebody’s elses? Those of us in the trenches understand how likely failure is with every startup we do. The odds are against us from the start. Add […]
Continue Reading...Market the Vision, Build the Product
The recent notice that Metaplace.com is going to shut their doors and refocus the company is an all-too-often refrain where very big visions are not realized in their first or even second incarnation. I expect we will see the same from another big vision play, Trion, in pretty short order. The phrase is a takeoff […]
Continue Reading...Web moderation, Synchronous Communication and Entropy
Robert Scoble has a great piece on what he calls the chat forum effect and why Twitter and blogs are much more useful as an information source than say a chat forum http://bit.ly/2PqD0b. And while he is absolutely accurate in his assessment, he is way too in the weeds to see the larger story. Synchronous […]
Continue Reading...Call it Something They Understand
Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2) We have all read that line in high school, or if we were really bright and possessed, middle school. But in today’s information overload world, names are harder and harder […]
Continue Reading...Know Thy Demographic – The Web Turns Lead Gen Upside Down
Since the beginning of marketing time, there has been a high correlation between the level of segmentation or specificity of the lead and the price of the lead. The more discrete and specific the list for a given set of leads, the more the marketer spent for each lead. Asking for females in the US […]
Continue Reading...Does Waltham Matter?
Scott Kirsner has written a very provocative piece in Innovation Economy which questions the value of the many VC’s in the Waltham 128 beltway especially compared to VC’s in Boston. Here is my response to his post…. Scott, Its great that you are shaking things up, much like taking a baseball bat to hit a […]
Continue Reading...The Limits of Vertical Integration — Microsoft Clip Art vs Google Images –
Microsoft created a vertically integrated product when they released Clip Art as an image repository for Powerpoint. For years, this integration worked beautifully, if for no other reason than there was no alternative or incompatible technologies. But again, like in so many other areas of Microsoft land, their idea of vertical integration is badly outdated. […]
Continue Reading...Differentiating in the Social Games Space
Its no surprise that the social gaming space is getting very crowded and getting more so every day. The latest social gaming stats shows who are he haves and have nots. http://bit.ly/NbnLM So if you are competing or looking to compete in this space with a game or two, how do you compete against a […]
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