BeyondVC » Web/Tech

In early 2006, I wrote a post titled "The next generation web, scaling and data mining will matter."  In it, I highlighted some thoughts on the future: I truly believe the next battleground will...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2010/04/the-ongoing-data-revolution.html

I had lunch with a friend last week when we were talking about the days years and years ago where it was cool to have an email address on your business card.  In fact, I remember picking attorne...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2009/01/going-old-school-how-to-reach-people-effectively.html

I had some interesting meetings yesterday and as I reflected on them this morning, one common theme emerged which is that the next generation of the web will be built on data mining and extractin...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2008/05/the-next-genera.html

Chris Anderson does a nice job of summarizing the rise of the "free" business model starting with the Razor/razor blade to the world of the web where he argues that all services eventually get pr...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2008/02/the-free-busine.html

What a great move by Microsoft! This has been floating around for awhile and the last time I wrote about it was in May of 2007. Anyway, I thought I bought at the bottom for Yahoo months ago in wh...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2008/02/what-a-microsof.html

I am helping a friend who has the most popular books on baby naming bring it all online. Our development on the backend is close to complete, and we are looking for a great web designer who can c...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2008/01/freelance-web-d.html

As you know, I am a huge believer in open standards and that open standards (over time) will usually prevail over proprietary, closed networks.  And my one wish from a social networking perspect...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2008/01/openness-and-so.html

We have had quite a resurgence in the web market during the last few years.  A number of great companies have come out of nowhere to become household names, and it seems that everyday we are inu...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2007/11/picks-and-shove.html

Tim O’Reilly has a great post on Google’s OpenSocial.  At the end of the day, I couldn’t agree more with Tim’s thoughts that OpenSocial is great for developers but a who cares for users....

https://www.beyondvc.com/2007/11/thoughts-on-ope.html

I am definitely the first one to understand that there is no free lunch on the web.  At the end of the day, someone has to pay for all of the great services and content out there.  To boot, I a...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2007/09/the-constant-ba.html

I wrote about Club Penguin a few times in the past (here and here) and it looks like Mike Montgomery at Montgomery and Co was able to find an even better buyer than Sony, DIsney for $350mm in cas...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2007/08/club-penguin-an.html

Congratulations to the Answers.com team on the announcement of this deal!  Since I am a board member and it is a public company (NASDAQ: ANSW), there is not much commentary I can add except that...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2007/07/answerscom-to-a.html

I signed up for LinkedIn in mid-2003, and since then I have not been very active on the service other than accepting invites as they came to my inbox.  Over the last couple of weeks, I have noti...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2007/06/linkedin_crossi.html

The kids space is hot.  Techcrunch just reported on rumors that Montgomery and Co or Monty was working with Club Penguin on a sale to Sony for $500 million.  Montgomery is the same investment b...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2007/05/second_life_for.html

Congratulations to my friend Gary Vaynerchuk of the Wine Library for his acquisition of Cork’d (see Mashable and the Alarm Clock for coverage).  When I had dinner with Gary a few months ago we...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2007/05/the_3_cs_are_ba.html

The rumors of a pending Microsoft-Yahoo deal are out in the market again today (see NYPost and Techmeme).  Who knows if it will happen but rest assured if it did, Microsoft would be in a pretty ...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2007/05/what_a_microsof.html

The alarm bells are ringing in the web world (see the Techmeme discussion) – one of the gorillas in the space is flexing its muscle and protecting its turf as MySpace is preventing Photobucket ...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2007/04/from_web_20_to_.html

As a VC that invests in early stage companies, part of my job is to discover new opportunities and business models.  While much of today’s online and social networking growth is being driven b...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2007/04/second_life_for-2.html

Matt Marshall (amazing how he does it!) recently broke the news on my fund’s (Dawntreader Ventures) latest investment which is still in stealth mode.  Now that the news is out, all I can say i...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2007/03/algorithmic_tec.html

We all know that there is something different this time about the web startup market.  As I have written before, it costs next to nothing to get a service on the web (look at MyBlogLog as an exa...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2007/01/bring_out_yer_d.html

If you are a big company getting your butt kicked, it seems like the thing to do is issue a memo.  Bill Gates did it after Microsoft lost out on the first wave of the Internet.  Ray Ozzie wrote...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/11/if_you_are_a_bi.html

Greg Linden has a great post summarizing a talk that Marissa Mayer of Google gave at the recent Web 2.0 conference.  I encourage you to read it because Marissa talks about how Google ran a user ...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/11/consumers_want_.html

In an earlier post titled "When Competitors are acquired" I discussed that rather than sulk and wish it were you who was bought, smart companies will go out and capitalize on the opportunity as t...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/11/when_competitor.html

Mike Masnick of Techdirt has launched a new service called the "Techdirt Insight Community."  Mike is an active blogger but also has run a corporate intelligence service for awhile mining the we...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/10/techdirt_insigh.html

It is always great to see hard work rewarded.  Congratulations to Steve Klein, Pierre Berkaloff, and the rest of the Colloquis team (my partner Ned Carlson is on the board) for building the comp...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/10/microsoft_acqui.html

I must admit that I have seen way too many social networking related plays that want to be the next MySpace of some niche market.  When asked about monetization the standard answer is they have ...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/10/social_shopping.html

Congratulations to George Cigale and his Tutor.com (full disclosure – portfolio company and my partner Dan DeWolf is on the board) team for the launch of their direct-to consumer service which ...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/09/live_homework_h.html

While reading the Wall Street Journal this morning, the Facebook story caught my eye.  Facebook has clearly built a huge community and is one of the leading social networks on the web.  However...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/09/facebook_and_pr.html

We all know about the groundbreaking work from Chris Anderson from Wired about the Long Tail. In theory it makes a ton of sense – on the web, companies have no inventory costs and can stock as ...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/07/how_long_is_the.html

Having invested in a couple of security companies, I am pretty adamant about security when it comes to my personal computers.  Until now, I have been using Norton Antivirus, ZoneLabs ZoneAlarm S...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/07/i_hate_shitty_s.html

I am always looking for new tools and services to help me better understand who my readers are, what they like to read, and where they like to go.  Besides the more active participants that like...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/07/knowing_more_ab.html

Microsoft released its third quarter numbers the other day and while revenue growth was strong, the stock got hammered and dropped over 10%.  Why? Microsoft plans on investing for the long term ...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/04/can_microsoft_r.html

As I wrote last year, this "web as platform" gospel is starting to spread quickly from consumer to thoughts on the enterprise.  In my mind, what has enabled this enterprise web phenonomenon has ...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/04/web_as_platform.html

In 1994, the smartest guys in the financial trading and academic world got together to start Long Term Capital.  John Meriwether from Liar’s Poker fame assembled a stellar group from Wall Stre...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/03/remember_long_t.html

We are all enjoying the benefits that come with the commoditization of existing hardware and software infrastructure.  It is true that it costs exponentially less to launch a business today vers...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/03/the_next_genera.html

Sure, the next-generation web is cheap.  It is about cheaper bandwidth, cheaper hardware, free software, and better tools.  In other words, you get much more done with much less than in years p...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2006/01/the_arms_race_f.html

As I have written before, most of the talk about this next generation web has focused around consumer applications.  I, however, have always believed that we should not forget the enterprise.  ...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2005/12/web_as_platform-2.html

I was in California 3 weeks ago when Jeff Nolan told me he was leaving SAP Ventures and moving to a new group within SAP desgined to "Kill Oracle."  We talked about all of the great innovation h...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2005/10/vc_blogs.html

Angus Bankes, CTO of Moreover, recently introduced me to Jeremy Ruston, the creator of TiddlyWiki.  I honestly did not really get it at first, but I have been using TiddlyWiki since last weekend...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2005/10/tiddlywiki.html

Like Nick Denton and David Galbraith, I can’t comment on the acquisition.  What I can say is that Moreover was a pioneer in the early use of weblogs via newsblogger, news search, and content s...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2005/10/verisign_acquir.html

I am out in the Bay area the next couple of days but unfortunately will not be at Web 2.0.  That being said, I suggest staying up-to-date on next-generation web applications and services through...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2005/10/nextgeneration_.html

There has been lots of discussion about Tim O’Reilly’s Web2MemeMap. This is a nice graphical representation of what is happening in this next wave of the Internet.  As an add-on to this, I t...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2005/09/web_as_platform-3.html

From day one, I got into blogging not knowing what to expect and figuring out the best way to learn about a market is to dive into it and become a user.  So I did that 18 months ago assuming tha...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2005/02/rss_ads.html

A number of companies are developing software and sytems which rely on packet processing at high speeds to deliver their respective functionality.  This includes companies in the networking and ...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2005/02/speed_versus_fl.html

There is obviously lots of innovation happening in the search space.  Luckily, I have 2 portfolio companies that I respectively invested in during 1999 and 2000 which survived the nuclear winter...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2005/01/dont_forget_the.html

A number of my readers alerted me to the fact that Fast Company has a survey on the best VC blogs.  Considering that VCs can be quite competitive and my cohorts Brad and Jeff are already stuffin...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2004/12/best_vc_blogs.html

Fred Wilson and John Battelle have some interesting posts on the future of television and advertising. Fred and John both seem to believe that the concept of paid search will eventually work its ...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2004/10/customized_ads_.html

Here is an interesting article from Business Week about why Microsoft is not so scary anymore. While I do not necessarily buy the argument that a company with billions of dollars of cash on its b...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2004/10/microsoft.html

Unfortunately I could not make it to the west coast for the Vortex or Web 2.0 conferences. However, I have been following Vortex via Jeff Nolan and Web 2.0 through a variety of bloggers. As I rea...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2004/10/vortex_and_web_.html

There has been lots of discussion about the web as the new platform so none of what I am saying is new. However, I recently came across Adam Bosworth’s take on this which is quite interesting g...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2004/10/the_webbased_pl.html

Jeff Nolan has an interesting post about how a US General views blogs as an excellent source for unfiltered information. Jeff goes on to postulate that CEOs could also get unbiased information fr...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2004/08/getting_the_rea.html

If I were a startup, one great and cheap way to build buzz and excitement is through the blog community. I call this “influencing the influencers.” Think about it – many of the more well kn...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2004/07/influencing_the.html

Another day, another politician or high profile executive launches a blog. This time it is FCC Chairman Michael Powell and Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz. According to Michael Powell, he decided to bl...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2004/07/fcc_powell_laun.html

As you all know, part of a VC’s job is to promote their portfolio companies. And yes, even though Expertcity is no longer a portfolio company since it was bought by Citrix, I would like all of ...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2004/05/portfolio_compa.html

Google just launched a new version of personal search based on user preferences. In early 2000, we seeded a Xerox PARC spin-out called Outride (formerly called Groupfire) which aimed to bring per...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2004/03/personalized_se.html

Like many of you, I suffer from information overload. I have a hard enough time keeping up with email, let alone the increasing volume of news and blogs. During the last 6 months, I have been exp...

https://www.beyondvc.com/2004/01/great_news_aggr.html