Entries from November 2006
Along with about 20 million other East Coasters, we are trekking down, and then up, I-95 for the Thanksgiving holiday.
The Hirshland family minivan made it down to NYC Tuesday night around midnight. After a couple hours sightseeing, we spent the night in our favorite New York spot — the Times Square DoubleTree.
After a breakfast meeting with Simon and David at Heavy, I joined the family for a quick and indulgent visit to the Hershey Chocolate store, then packed ‘em up and headed back to I-95 and on our way down to Grandma’s house.
Wishing a happy Thanksgiving to all my faithful readers (yes, both of you…)
Categories: venture capital
Senior Yahoo! Exec Brad Garlinghouse recently wrote a memo to senior management sharing his thoughts on what is wrong with Yahoo! and what he things it will take to fix it.
I don’t know if this was intended or not (I suspect it was), but this so-called “Peanut Butter Manifesto” (his point is that Yahoo! is spreading itself thinly across everything) showed up yesterday in the Wall Stree Journal.
It is worth a read, I guess, though nothing in it comes as a surprise.
More interesting is this bold move by Garlinghouse. I’d put money that he is shortly either going to be running the joint or joining the list of Internet execs out on the street.
Categories: venture capital
Gaping Void has a good “Marketing 2006″ cartoon.
Once I figure out how I’ll post it here directly.
In the meantime here is a summary:
Marketing 1.0 (2002): “Markets are conversations”
Marketing 2.0 (2006): “Markets are getting TechCrunch to blog your sorry ass!”
Marketing 3.0 (?): “The conversation is temporary. Go read a tree.”
Categories: Marketing · gaping void cartoons
Just got home from Rafat’s PaidContent mixer in downtown Boston (which we sponsored).
Weather and traffic both sucked, but the event was really good.
The Boston VC and entrepreneurial community is, as a whole, much less into networking than our peers in the other hubs, so it was really good to see everyone out and about.
Thanks to Rafat and the ContentNext team for coming to our fine city!
Categories: venture capital
Seems like every day is bringing more changeover at the top ranks of digital media organizations.
Last week Larry Kramer (CBS) and Mark Jung (COO, Fox Interactive) announced departures.
Then Jonathan Miller.
And today Fox announces the departure of Interactive Chief Ross Levinsohn while unconfirmed but rampant rumors report that Jason Calcanis is leaving AOL.
Wow.
Categories: venture capital
Amidst all the murmurings over Google’s march across the advertising landscape, John Battelle had a comment I liked:
But in the end advertisers are not computer programmers, they are marketers, and while it’s true that the approach of AdWords and AdSense pushes remarkable efficiencies and opportunities into the practice of marketing, I posit that the practice of marketing is about more than efficiency. It’s also about emotion, passion, and conversation. And no matter how hard you try, you can’t automate conversations.
Categories: venture capital
After spending 3 days out at the Web 2.0 Conference I think I probably saw about 50 early stage Web 2.0 companies.
Like most at the conference, I generally was more struck by how many of these startups were really “features” as opposed to real business opportunities.
One company, though, did get me excited — Clearspring Technologies. Led on the technology side by one of the WebMethods founders, these guys are a “widgetizer.” In other words, they make it very easy for content owners and web developers to create widgets so that others can incorporate this content or application into their own sites, blogs, spaces, etc.
As I’ve posted before, I think the whole notion of syndicating/distributing web content is one of the more important trends we’ll see over the next couple years, and I think there is a great opportunity for someone to make a lot of hay out of being a horizontal value added enabler in this value equation.
Unfortunately for me, VCs were flocking all over these guys at the show. In fact, at one point I was chatting with Clearspring CEO Chris Marentis at the show when Vinod Khosla comes up and, with nary a word to me, drags Chris off into a separate room. Funny, I thought Vinod was out of the web and into energy investing these days??
Categories: clearspring · startups · venture capital · widgets
John Markoff has an interesting piece in this morning’s NYT on “the semantic web.”
The basic idea is of the web moving from a catalog with reams and reams of information (and search results) on any particular subject to a guide that actually gives you answers to your questions that are tailored to your particular tastes and preferences.
Lots of artificial intelligence experts out there have been working on this for years, and, as Markoff details, many think this field is getting closer and closer to bearing commercially relevant fruit.
Others, though, are looking not to computer driven artificial intelligence but rather to the wisdom of the crowds, and, more specifically, the ability of now common Web 2.0 tools like tagging to collect and then repurpose the crowd’s tastes to particular users. Take what Amazon does, for example, to make personalized book recommendations, and apply that across the web.
A great specific area where this debate is playing out is in the area of video search. Some folks out there are hard at work developing technologies like face and voice recognition to help us find the videos we are looking for. Others are more focused on using the tags of video users to make it easier for future viewers to find what they are looking for.
I am sure there is a role both for computer- and user-generated information in solving this problem. My vote, though, is that making sense out of the crowd’s wisdom will be the more important of the two.
Categories: john markoff · semantic web
My friend Josh Kopelman and his fund First Round Capital got the savvy sponsor award at Web 2.0.
Polaris, along with a couple other funds, sponsored the “Launchpad” at Web 2.0. I am glad we did. The panel of Launchpad advisor-judges was a great group, we saw some interesting companies, and we had a fun lunch just before the event kicked off.
I actually had asked Josh if he had any interest in being a sponsor along with us. He declined.
In the end, Josh had a far more clever idea. Instead of paying the pretty penny required to be a sponsor, Josh simply rented one of the rooms right off the main hallway at the Conference, which ended up being one of the prime hang-out / meetup spots. One of his companies, Mashery, even launched in this room, “at” the conference, even though they weren’t even attending the conference.
Brilliant!
Categories: venture capital
