Netizen

Saturday, October 09, 2010

More Entrepreneurs Should Blog

OnStartups.com: Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write and 9 Tips To Get Started: If you asked me to tell you a list of three of the best decisions in my life, I can certainly tell you that regularly writing is one of them...... Writing on a regular schedule takes a lot of discipline, just like going to the gym or practicing a new martial art. ..... If you keep yourself dedicated to writing on a consistent schedule, those important values will carry over to other facets of life including startups. ..... By putting yourself out there and making yourself open to meeting as many people as possible, serendipity is much more likely to happen. ..... The majority of good things that have happened to me in business can be traced back to my writing

There are more great VC bloggers than there are great entrepreneur bloggers, and I have long wondered why. I have also long felt that situation needs to be rectified.

Social media is so essential. You need to do your own getting the word out. Most of your communication will be small group and perhaps intense. There will be a lot of in group communication. That is why social media is called social media and not mass media.

Updates that can sound bizarre to strangers are necessary staple to intimates.

But then there is also the matter of reaching out to people you might not be able to meet in person. Long form blogging is my favorite social media platform. It allows you to dip into far flung conversations. Meaningful participation becomes possible.

The VCs just have done a better job. I feel like I am half way to becoming a VC myself just from reading the many VC blogs. I have a pretty good feel of the churn that is going on in the VC industry right now.

Even former entrepreneur VCs will tell you, the real action is in creating companies, not in funding them. "All I do is write checks," Fred Wilson once said, which is an understatement, but it is the half truth.

I would go so far as to say every tech entrepreneur ought to blog. None of the top ones do. And I wonder why.

The list is not all that big. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress/Blogger, and FourSquare, and I think you are all set. If you are active on those five platforms I think you are really into social media. And you are reaching out to people you need to be reaching out to.

Regular writing is like working out for the mind. When you blog regularly, you read your news differently. You also read more.

HP Keeps Making News

Image by plαdys via Flickr

Ben's Blog: Ben Horowitz: In Defense of Standards, Ethics, and Honest Financial Reporting at Hewlett-Packard: my business partner, Marc Andreessen, is on the board of directors of Hewlett-Packard. I note that I have no inside information, and this blog post is based purely on published material. In 2007, I sold Opsware, the company that I founded and ran to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6B. I worked at Hewlett-Packard from 2007 to 2008 as an executive in the software business. Recently, my old company Hewlett-Packard has been in the news—and not in a good way. ....... HP employs over 300,000 people. ..... Jodie Fisher had more access to the CEO and was paid more than 99.9% of HP’s workforce, despite having no traditional qualifications. ...... It is not an easy thing to fire a popular, highly successful CEO.

Something tells me this drama is far from over. The Oracle-HP alliance is now a full blown rivalry. This is about money. Like they say, follow the money. Oracle is now firmly in the hardware business as well, and HP feels eaten up. Oracle can do hardware, but could HP do Oracle-like software?

This is not about people getting along, or not getting along. This is about the money. And Larry Ellison might be dramatic, but he is first and foremost a businessman. His flare ups are market signals. Watch them and you are watching an industry churning.

This fight has quite a few rounds to it.

The Leo Apotheker Is Human Drama

New York Times: A Double Standard at H.P.: Oracle and H.P. had once been the closest of partners, with the latter selling the industrial-strength hardware that ran Oracle’s industrial-strength software. But that partnership appears to be dissolving. ..... Larry Ellison, Oracle’s flamboyant founder ..... “Hiring him had nothing to do with fighting Oracle,” said Ray Lane, the former Oracle (!) president who is set to become H.P.’s chairman next month. “The board chose Léo because he was the best available athlete.” .... Apotheker was likely to further traumatize the already demoralized H.P. staff. ..... “If you wanted to find someone who represented the diametrical opposite of the H.P. way, it is Léo,” said Jason Maynard, a veteran technology analyst with Wells Fargo Securities. “He is tough as nails and chews glass for breakfast.” ...... the same board that viewed Mr. Hurd’s minor expense account shenanigans as intolerable has chosen as its new C.E.O. someone involved — however tangentially — with the most serious business crime you can commit. ..... the chance to embarrass H.P. and its new C.E.O. is likely to be irresistible to Oracle and Mr. Ellison. Which will mean yet more egg on the faces of the H.P. directors.

Thursday, October 07, 2010

Al Wenger Wants To Learn Scala

And so should you.

I came across this post by Al on Tumblr - my idea of TV - not long back and was the first person to reblog it there. Yes!

It is an honest, relatable, inspiring post. And I said so in a comment.

To those of you who might not know - I do have a global audience - Al Wenger is a top notch VC in New York City.

I promptly created a Scala page. This is still early. I first blogged about Scala back in May, and Google still shows only a handful of websites dedicated to Scala. Wow.

Al, I am with you now.

Wait, did I just say a line from The Godfather?

I could hardly call Al a friend, we have met in person but once. And I am strict about using the family metaphor. Some weirdos in Kentucky spoiled it for me.

Al to me is a VC and a blogger, and that is good enough for me.

One small but not unimportant fact I learned about Al during my one meeting with him is that he is Mayor of some horse place upstate.

How My Grandfather Became Mayor The First Time

Scala - Wikipedia: Scala stands for "scalable language", signifying that it is designed to grow with the demands of its users..... Scala code can call Java libraries (or .NET libraries in the .NET implementation). ..... Scala's operational characteristics are the same as Java's. .... Scala is a pure object-oriented language in the sense that every value is an object. .... In April 2009 Twitter announced they had switched large portions of their backend from Ruby to Scala and intended to convert the rest. In addition Foursquare uses Scala and Lift

Facebook's Location Patent

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - AUGUST 31: Georgia Lov...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

CNet: Facebook granted geolocation patent: Among the concepts it claims are the sending and receiving of location-based status messages (what are commonly known as "check-ins"), the technology to store these check-ins, the ability to sense a street address to store in a check-in, and the receiving of a friend's check-in.

What just happened? Is this troubling? Some experts are going to have to weigh in on this one. What's going on? Facebook was rather late to the location game and now it has the patent on the whole thing? How does that work?

I am opposed to the idea of anyone getting a patent on the inbox. I mean, I am opposed to the idea of even FourSquare getting a patent on the check in. What the.

What just happened?

The weirdest part of this story is going to be that (literally) the Einsteins at the patent office had never heard of FourSquare and had never checked in anywhere themselves. I will bet you roadside falafel that is the case.

$1 Trillion In Savings

Image via Wikipedia

CNet: Tech CEOs find $1 trillion in government savings: save $1 trillion over the next decade.

When I read this headline I thought someone came up with an app that will help people lose weight, because if America could somehow go to its 1980 obesity levels - which was bad enough - America would save $1 trillion in health care costs. But no, these tech CEOs have something else on mind.

This headline also made me think that although Obama 08 did a great job of grassroots campaigning, it pretty much wrote the book on it, we are not there yet when it comes to grassroots governing where everybody is involved. Just like Dean 2004 was not there yet when it came to grassroots campaigning, Obama 08 is not there yet when it comes to grassroots governing.

CNet: Tech CEOs find $1 trillion in government savings: First off, the organization believes the federal government should consolidate its many data centers to reduce IT overhead.

No kidding.

CNet: Tech CEOs find $1 trillion in government savings: Secondly, the organization contends that the U.S. government should "streamline" its supply chain and make goods-and-service procurement more standardized.

Talk about business sense.

CNet: Tech CEOs find $1 trillion in government savings: $200 billion could be saved over the next 10 years by analyzing payments being disbursed through Medicare, federal grants, and tax refunds. ..... the government should rely on "electronic self-service" to save $50 billion; sell or auction off many of the "14,000 excess, and 55,000 underutilized buildings in the federal inventory" for a $150 billion savings; cut down on energy use to save $20 billion; and migrate to more shared services for another $50 billion in savings.

The best part of these suggestions might not be that they are totally doable, and they will save a ton of money, but that in implementing them the US federal government will become more transparent, more agile, in short a better government. I say let's go do it.

eBooks: Yet Another Technology Looking For Business Models

Bill and Melinda Gates during their visit to t...

Image via Wikipedia

CNet: New study suggests e-book piracy is on the rise

It started with music. Movies and books will not be spared, are not being spared. It is a mindfood thing. The Internet is like this vast farm custom made for the production and consumption of mindfood in its various forms.

The first instinct of the industries has been to fight the technology. It is not true that people seem to have this unbeatable thirst to steal that which comes out during the night that is the internet. People like the convenience of the digital format. In digital formats these products - books, movies, music - take no space. Your device does not count, it is not music, it is not a book, it is no movie.

Just like the pharmaceutical industry does not have the same static price globally - it charges less in the poor countries and even gives it out for free in some - the textbook industry has to be the same way.

Maybe the price of that eBook is not $9.99. Maybe the price of that song is not 99 cents. Those prices have to go down. And they have to go even further down in the Global South.

And then the industry has to make peace with the fact that there will be some leakage. Like Bill Gates said a long time ago about China, "We want them to pay for our software, but if they are going to steal it anyway, we want them to steal our software." That has to be the spirit. Have you even been to a supermarket where some guy/gal is standing outside an eatery giving away free samples? It might be just one bite, but it is good business. I get the impression even free is a business model. When you are not raking in the cash, you are giving stuff away for free and you are building your brand.

Even when people don't give you cash, they give you mindshare. The whole advertising industry revolves around that mindshare. Don't complain when you get it.

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Another Trillion To Buy Real Estate?

World Trade Organization accession and membership

Image via WikipediaI have not followed the Fed's corner of the house as closely as the president's corner, but I get the impression the Fed put a trillion into real estate already and is about to put another trillion into it. This sounds like madness.

The wise guys on Wall Street cooked up nefarious schemes that inflated real estate prices, created a bubble, brought the economy down, and now the Fed is supposed to keep those artificially inflated prices propped up?

Why? Because a broken political system will not allow the president to instead pump a trillion into the 2010 version of the New Deal, but it will allow the unelected Fed chair to play around with a trillion dollars?

Many have speculated this is the Roman empire collapsing. Those who the gods seek to destroy, they first make them mad.

I am for a second stimulus bill of perhaps a trillion poured into drastic job creation.

And all the work of creating the global institutions for the next phase of globalization is yet to be done. There can be no real recovery without that.

Those who say this is like the Great Depression are right. Where they get it wrong is when they don't face the fact that now the entire world is a stage. It is one world. The reason people acted surprised when the bottom fell out was because they had their US goggles on. Put on world goggles. Then you can see.

Can a democracy make its people lose weight? That is the challenge. Instead the democracy continues to gorge on French fries and tea parties. Some hard choices are going to have to be made.

BusinessWeek

Germany At 20: Special Report
Germany's Growth: New Rules, Old Companies: As most developed nations stumble in the race against emerging nations, here's how Germany has succeeded in keeping skilled labor working in good jobs....($3.23 trillion) gross domestic product .... , labor market measures begun in 2003 under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder made it easier to hire and fire workers, and Germany's Mittelstand have proved nimble competitors ...... German labor unions gave up wage increases in return for job security. ..... The Mittelstand companies, which typically employ fewer than 500 workers, comprise more than 70 percent of German workers and contribute roughly half of the country's GDP. The Mittelstand also embodies the German approach to business practice—paternalistic, consensual, conservative, and arguably more effective over the long haul than what Germans sometimes dismiss as American-style cowboy capitalism...... Mittelstand companies have emerged as successful models in an era of globalization—agile creatures darting between the legs of the multinational monsters..... Rather than firing workers, companies reduced hours, saving almost half a million jobs. ..... a system of worktime accounts that enabled employees to work fewer hours without a reduction in pay, in exchange for promising to work more hours without a salary increase when business picks up..... By May of this year, unemployment in Germany was at 7 percent, a 17-year low..... they prefer bank loans to selling bonds or issuing stock ..... it was wage restraint over the last 10 years that's responsible for Germany's success

Goldman Sachs Says U.S. Economy May Be ‘Fairly Bad’: “A fairly bad one in which the economy grows at a 1 1/2 percent to 2 percent rate through the middle of next year and the unemployment rate rises moderately to 10 percent, and a very bad one in which the economy returns to an outright recession.” ...... The Fed bought $1.7 trillion worth of Treasury and mortgage debt in a program that ended in March. The purchases helped push mortgage rates to historic lows. ... Bernanke said Oct. 4 that restarting large- scale asset purchases would probably spur growth

China Hardens Opposition Over Yuan Gains, Tells EU to Back Off: “Europe shouldn’t join the choir” ..... If we increase the yuan by 20-40 percent as some people are calling for, many of our factories will shut down and society will be in turmoil.” ..... Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega warned of a global “currency war.”

Book Excerpt: The Mesh

India Can Help Obama Reach Export Goal: The last time U.S. exports doubled in five years was 1981-1986, when Ronald Reagan was President—and Japan, not China, was the economy Americans feared most. ..... China, India, Brazil, Canada, and Mexico. ..... the Indian economy is the world's fourth-wealthiest—based on purchasing power parity—after the U.S., Japan, and China. ....... the country will keep growing at close to 10 percent in the next decade ..... "Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of the U.S.?" Some 76 percent of Indian citizens responded affirmatively. ..... Americans are better-liked in India than almost anywhere else in the world ........ Today the U.S. is the world's breadbasket. In India you will find Washington State apples as well as California almonds and pistachios ..... India now hopes for a trillion-dollar upgrade of roads, bridges, power plants, harbors and more. .... Carter was the last President to travel to India within two years of taking office

Volcker Says Nations May Face Prolonged Unemployment: the U.S. and other developed nations face the prospect of protracted joblessness. ..... “This has not been an ordinary recession,” Volcker, 83, said today in a speech in Toronto. It’s “very difficult to find a sector in the American economy that has any spark to it” ..... the Chinese are stuck with dollars and we’re stuck with indebtedness.”

Google Chrome OS Netbook Assault Imminent

Image via WikipediaApple had its iPhone moment. Google had its Android moment. Apple had its iPad moment. There will be a ton of Android tablets, but Google's equivalent of the iPad moment, I believe, we are about to see: the arrival of the Chrome OS netbooks. The netbooks will aim at the tablet - where's the keyboard? - and they will take aim at Windows: why is the machine taking so long to startup?

PCR: Google preps Chrome OS netbook assault: a number of Chrome OS devices to arrive from Samsung, Acer, Asus, Toshiba and HP..... people looked to the web for most of their entertainment, communication and productivity tasks..... the lightweight, low power and low cost netbook ...... a spring clean in order to improve OS start times....."Android is very focused on the best mobile experience there is, Chrome is very focused on the best web experience there is." ..... the minimalist school of design ..... Chrome OS powered netbooks will be available for under $400. ..... 10-inch

There is talk this last decade belonged to Google and Apple, this next belongs to Facebook. I think this next belongs to Facebook and Google. To have both Android and the Chrome OS is pretty phenomenal. Google is running strong still. Windows, on the other hand.

I want the Chrome OS netbook to be super light, super cheap, and I want the screen to be big enough. This has to feel like a mobile device, something you feel okay carrying around. And there should be a small smartphone like screen that you see even when you have it shut. You should be able to place calls. Or a tablet-netbook two in one. Or a three in one: smartphone, tablet, netbook. I want my Chrome OS close, I want my Android closer.

Chrome OS Site: Chrome OS To Arrive In October: actual device sales will be much latter on in the year, most probably just before the Christmas holidays.

Facebook Needs To Revamp Email Next

Image by Ian Muttoo via Flickr

Mark Zuckerberg: The Facebook Blog: Giving You More Control

Facebook's revamping the Groups feature is pretty fundamental. This has been a demand a long time. People have been saying that Facebook thinks people have only one social graph, the truth is people have many social graphs. I have not used the feature yet, just read about it, but looks like Facebook now lets you have your many social graphs.

And the download feature is Facebook nuking Diaspora. This is a preemptive strike and a pretty big one too. On the other hand now suddenly there is room for some smart aleck startup to do something pretty phenomenal. This is Diaspora's death sentence or its godsend. Is the glass empty or full? I don't know. Let Diaspora decide.

What got my attention though is what is missing. Facebook has not yet revamped its email program. It needs to. 2010 is the year of The Dreaded Inbox. The original app of the computing experience has become a monster. And I think Facebook is uniquely positioned to tackle this huge problem.

How about giving every Facebook user a Facebook email address? So I might get paramendra@facebookmail.com. And give each user three inboxes. Inbox 1 is for people who are in my social graph. Inbox 2 is for people who are not necessarily in my social graph, but they are on Facebook and they are sending the email while they are logged into Facebook. Inbox 3 is for people who are neither here nor there, as in they are maybe sending you email from their Gmail account, maybe.

That simple, doable step would solve a lot of inbox problems for a lot of people.

Email has to be a scalable experience. Right now it has stopped being an experience for most people. And so people go hide. They hide on Twitter, and Quora, and, yes, Facebook.

Inbox 2 perhaps should have bells and whistles. You can email someone not in your social graph, but when you do, you are giving them permission to take a look at your full profile for perhaps one day of opening the email.

This is akin to the priority inbox concept. All emails are not the same. All human beings are equal, but that does not apply to emails.

I think the best part of the new Groups feature for Facebook might be that people now have the option to create robust Facebook work groups, and Facebook can now go Facebook Enterprise. Do you smell money?

Father Of India Dot Com Craze Gives A Thumbs Up To America

Esther's been a member of our board for some t...

Image via Wikipedia

Rajesh Jain is the guy who started the dot com craze in India when he sold his dot com for I believe over a hundred million dollars to a local big shot Indian company. Rajesh got his education at Columbia University in New York City. Then he went back to India and has been doing big things since.

The first time I met Esther Dyson was at a NY Tech MeetUp. And she mentioned Rajesh Jain's work in that very first conversation.

Crisis: Opportunity For Greatness For Obama

Rajesh and I have exchanged emails over the years. I like to drop by his blog when I can. He is on my must meet in person some day list.

Rajesh' blog post today is one that many Americans could benefit from reading.

Rajesh Jain: The Secret Sauce of the US: The entrepreneurial energy in the US is still alive and kicking. That is what creates companies like Google, Apple, Cisco and Facebook. ..... There is that inherent belief that the world needs a better mousetrap - and they are the ones to do it.

Bloomberg: India's Economy May Expand 9.7% This Year, More Than Forecast, IMF Says: “Low reliance on exports, accommodative policies, and strong capital inflows have supported domestic activity and growth,” the IMF said in the report. “The rapid pace of domestic activity, evidenced by rapidly rising inflation, led the central bank to increase the repo policy rate.”

Connect, Communicate, Conquer

(Via CaseyCulture)

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Saturday, October 09, 2010

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Thursday, October 07, 2010

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Wednesday, October 06, 2010

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