Saturday, October 02, 2010

Paradise City

"There are not going be that many innovating companies coming from the web."
- Peter Thiel
new york craigslist > manhattan > gigs > computer gigs

Do you have the next Facebook? (Upper West Side)

Date: 2010-10-02, 6:09AM EDT
Reply to: gigs-zedgc-1984693979@craigslist.org

I am looking to provide capital and business guidance for the next great idea. I am a successful entrepreneur and can help take a business to the next level.

If you have a business or idea you have been contemplating and are looking for some type of assistance lets connect.

Shoot me an email to start.

Thanks!

Jeff

it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
Compensation: Funding
PostingID: 1984693979



Adoption And Missed Opportunities


Peter Thiel: We Would Be A Lot More Careful About Funding Facebook Today. But…: What he meant is that he would think twice about investing in Facebook again because there are not going be that many innovating companies coming from the web. He thinks that a lot of the current big guys, like Google and Yelp, will be at the forefront of innovation and that there’s not many game-changers emerging that will innovate on the web. He tells Lacy, “Yelp of cellphones will be Yelp, the Google of cellphones will be Google.”

TechCrunch: How Facebook Can Become Bigger In Five Years Than Google Is Today: Facebook will grow without needing to cut into Google’s core business of text ads, which are still 99% of Google’s profits ..... because Madison Avenue’s brands are less interested in targeting than they are in broadcasting to vast mother-loving buckets of demographically correct eyeballs, and Facebook has become the perfect platform for that. ...... Facebook already has more page views than Google. People already spend more time spent on Facebook than Google. ..... For many consumers, Facebook is the Web....... Facebook’s second-mover advantage affords the company the luxury of offering both types of Internet money-making product: Advertising and Commerce..... targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions feed into the next series of even-better-targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions ..... Television advertising represented $60 billion in 2009, or roughly one out of every two dollars spent on advertising in the U.S. ..... Facebook “is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. ..... brand advertising, which accounts for 90 percent of the $600 billion ad market. ..... . Yahoo just paid $1 per like, and buying fans is only going to get more expensive as the lifetime value of a “fan” is better understood. ...... Facebook Credits are poised to be this generation’s American Express .... Facebook is running the real mafia wars, taking 30% while letting the game developers do the heavy lifting. ..... PayPal’s 2009 revenue was $2.8 billion with 87 million active accounts ..... The most famous example of this in our industry is Microsoft’s inability to come to terms with the Web. When Windows and Office were making money hand over fist, text ads were as small as mouse balls. .... in 2004 when Jason Kottke boldly predicted that Google would become “the biggest and most important company in the world in 5-8 years” by selling access to the world’s biggest, best, and most cleverly utilized map of the web

Hunger, Vision, Money
That StartUp Mentality (2)
That StartUp Mentality
Web 5.0 Is Da Bomb

BlindType Reminds Me Of Swype






(Via TechCrunch, Source: BlindType)

The Leo Apotheker Is Human Drama

Image representing Sarah Lacy as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBaseMy favorite TechCrunch writer - Sarah Lacy - has a piece on my favorite character in tech: Larry Ellison. Coincidence?

This Leo Apotheker - (please do not ask me to pronounce the dude's last name) - move by HP is all human drama, and n-o-t-h-i-n-g to do with technology.

It is like after Bush 2004 burnt into John Kerry's forearm that he was a Mr. Flip Flop, Kerry duly delivered the line afterwards: "I actually voted for the Iraq War before I voted against it."

Losers have a way of falling into the mousetrap neatly laid out for them.

I mean, duh. What was the HP Board thinking? They are like, okay Larry, hit me baby one more time. HP has been primarily a hardware company. Name one HP software product, quick. You can't. Name one HP enterprise software product. I don't think such a thing exists. And they got Thepo. HP's days as an independent company might be numbered.



This Apothepo guy used to run SAP when SAP was actually competing with Oracle. SAP to this day prides itself in being an all software company. They think Larry going into hardware is a mistake. To Larry's credit he thinks SAP's very existence is a mistake. That is not a fight between equals. Ring the bells, end the fight.



(Video via A Slice Of Grice)

Larry's Antics
Larry Ellison's Personal Life
Larry Ellison's 1995 Network Computer Vision
Hurd: From HP To Oracle
Larry Ellison
Rich People's Kids
Wall Street Journal: Larry Ellison ‘Speechless’ Over New CEO of H-P: Larry Ellison, the outspoken CEO of Oracle, said he is having trouble finding words to describe his reaction to H-P naming former SAP chief Leo Apotheker as its new top man–and then found plenty of them. .... SAP, where Apotheker worked for more than 20 years, is Oracle’s largest competitor for business-application programs, and Ellison seldom misses an opportunity to take pot shots at the company. ..... When Oracle and H-P settled the lawsuit regarding Hurd’s hiring, both companies put out statements lauding the other as a valuable partner.

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Friday, October 01, 2010

I Gave In: Facebook: The Movie

Mark Zuckerberg, May 2007Image via WikipediaI was strolling around in Murray Hill, and I happened to walk by the movie theater on 32nd Street and Second Avenue. I walked in, looked around, checked out the movie times. One time slot for The Social Network was sold out.

I walked out. Spent some time in the bookstore next door. I had quietly noted down a time slot that might work. It was close to 7PM.

I walked in again about 15 minutes before that. I bought a ticket. I am glad I did.

This actually is a very well made movie. It is a movie. It is a fictionalized version of what happened, but there are too many parallels.

It is good drama. Kevin Spacey is the executive producer. That adds to the weight, I believe.

Facebook has become too big a cultural phenomenon to have been able to avoid a movie like this made. Too many people who will not pick up a book on the topic want to know what happened.

The dramatizations aside, I did not feel Zuck got demonized or anything like that. The lawsuits were but harassments posssible in murky legal environments.

Mark Zuckerberg did not steal the idea from anyone, those guys should never have received any money. Those were bogus lawsuits. He got blackmailed, and the system allowed that.

The best line of the movie is when Zuck says: "You have a part of my attention."

The guy presented as cofounder was not a cofounder. Zuck wrote all that early code.

A big omission in the movie is Zuck's steady girlfriend of so many long years. She is not shown at all.

And of course the movie totally misses out on the engineering behind the phenomenon called Facebook.

But then movies perhaps are supposed to be drama, and hence the total focus on the lawsuits. Lawsuits make for friction make for drama.
Kevin Spacey, at the HBO post-Emmys party, in 2008Image via Wikipedia
The movie is well made, it is not accurate, was not meant to be, although most people will believe most details.

Facebook the company has no big reason to dislike the movie, really. There is much dramatization, not much demonization.

The basic movie ingredients are actually in top form. I can see this movie making a lot of money worldwide.




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The Social Network: Before Seeing The Movie

Facebook founder Mark ZuckerbergImage via WikipediaI have no plans to go see the movie. I stand in solidarity with Mark Zuckerberg on this one. That is not saying I might never see the movie. At some point I will. This is fiction. This is no documentary. This is not a book.

The Facebook story fascinates me. Just like the Google story fascinates me. Just like the Microsoft story fascinates. Larry Ellison fascinates me. If I watch the movie, I think I am going to come out hungry for books on the subject.

This movie is a dramatization. This is Hollywood trying to figure out something it has not been able to figure out. Hollywood has been at war with Silicon Valley. Hollywood has so far not figured out business models that Silicon Valley technologies ask for. But this movie is not Hollywood assaulting the valley. Hollywood is too disorganized to do such a thing. But some organizing takes place at subliminal levels, like when Tea Party white people talk code to rally against Barack Obama's blackness.

At the end of the day, this is just a movie. In the mean time, go read Sree's review.






Sree Srinivasan: Six Things Learned Watching 'The Social Network': I am not a movie critic and, thanks to my 7-year-old twins, I don't get to see a lot of non-animated movies. .... Oscar winner Kevin Spacey is listed as a producer. ..... Parker helps speed up the estrangement between Zuckerberg and Saverin in the movie and also suggests changing the name to just "Facebook." Timberlake is a scene stealer. The pop star appears to had a lot of fun playing a guy out to make lots of money without much regard for morals and rules. .... smartphones confiscated from those attending that screening ...... a lot of people did manage to take phones into the theater, as there were various glowing screens in the darkened theater. A security guard marched up and down the aisles and shined a flashlight on the offenders until they put away their phones.

Redfiff: Aseem Chabbra: How Facebook Came To Be: a curly haired, Jewish American Harvard University undergrad, and a cocky genius Marc Zuckerberg. ..... Harvard authorities caught up with Zuckerberg accusing him of hacking and breaching the university's secure systems and he was placed on probation. ...... Following the probation, as Zuckerberg's name spreads in the hallways and the courtyards at Harvard, he is approached by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss -- twin brothers ...... and their Indian American friend Divya Narendra from Queens, New York .... Zuckerberg stalls the project by sending unsubstantial emails to the three, while developing the prototype of what he eventually called The Facebook. He later drops "The" from the name of the company on advice of his mentor -- Napster co-founder Sean Parker .... Zuckerberg is a programming genius with little business sense. .... intrigues, jealousies and deceptions.

AllThingsD: Kara Swisher: The Facebook Movie: Sorry, Mark–But Critics Like It, They Really Like It! (Plus the Taiwanesed Version!): there is bathroom sex, beatings, peepholes and–say what?–a gay love triangle.



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