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01:03 PM Thursday, July 24, 2008
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Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference was held last week in Houston. If you didn't attend you can see videos of sessions here. There were over 10,000 people at the WPC this year. Microsoft loves partners, and over 90% of Microsoft's revenues is influenced by partners.
How to start partnering with Microsoft
Become a partner. The first step is to sign up on-line as a partner. Microsoft partners are eligible for lots of free on-line training that covers technology, support and business.
Marketing help. Visit the Partner Marketing Center to learn about how you can participate in Microsoft marketing campaigns and resources to help you build your own campaign.
Build your sales channel. Microsoft has a Partner Community program that helps you find appropriate channel partners and build alliances.
Get free software and support. The Empower Program for ISVs helps new software companies get software, consulting, and MSDN subscriptions for the low price of just $375. The software alone is worth over $10,000.
Join the ISV community. Microsoft has a special ISV Zone for software companies. Find partners, get leads, get beta software, and get involved in the community.
Microsoft Startup Zone. If you are a startup you should visit the Microsoft StartupZone. The StartupZone is managed by the Emerging Business Team which is focused on helping startups build a relationship with Microsoft. There is a special Partner Section of the StartupZone with lots more information about specialized programs that might be right for you.
Emerging Business Team. How can the Emerging Business Team help you? It depends on the stage of your company and what type of help you need.
If you are in the development stage we can sometimes help you get access to beta software or get you access to our performance labs and testing labs. If you are launching your product we can sometimes hook you up with a relevant Microsoft marketing campaign. If you have a product that complements a Microsoft product or adds functionality we can introduce you to the product team for a possible closer partnership. If you are already actively selling to customers we can sometimes introduce you to the Microsoft Account Manager for those customers. We can also refer you to Systems Integrators who might be interested in picking up your product.
Who can help my startup? The Emerging Business Team is organized by product area. Visit Microsoft StartupZone to see who covers each area, and an email address where you can reach them directly. They are all listed right on the front page.
Microsoft is serious about partners. There are thousands of people at Microsoft dedicated to helping partners succeed. Take the first step and join the partner program.
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10:55 AM Wednesday, July 23, 2008
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Me.dium is a web browser plug-in for Microsoft's Internet Explorer that turns web browsing into a social experience. It gives you a personalized map of the Internet showing where you are, and what web sites your friends are visiting in real time.  You can use it to discover new people and places that are relevant just to you. It also allows you to surf with friends in real-time. It's just like hanging out in the real world, but online.
How it works
Go to Me.dium.com and sign-up for a free account. Download the plug-in and install. You will be up and running in minutes.
After your account is set up you can add friends by either finding them on Me.dium or inviting them to join via an email invitation.
See where your friends are. Once you have built your friends network, and they have Me.dium installed, you can see what web sites they are on, and watch them as they move from site to site. You can go to the same site, see what they are looking at, and start up a chat discussion...all in real time.
Kris Olson from the Emerging Business Team sat down with David Mandell, VP of Marketing at Me.dium, to go deeper into how Me.dium works, their target audience, how people are using Me.dium, and future plans. Check out this video of the interview.
Video: Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program - Interview with David Mandell, Me.dium
Transcript as follows:
KRIS OLSON: So, we're here with David Mandell, the head of marketing for Me.dium at MIX, and I'm talking to David about how Me.dium got started, what it's really trying to do, who the customer is, how the team got together, and what marketing is like at Me.dium, because he has a really interesting bio on his Web page, and I want to hear more about that.
DAVID MANDELL: Sure. So, Me.dium is, from my perspective, a truly exciting challenge for several reasons. First of all, it's really about changing context. And, the thing that really turned me on, on the Me.dium side, is what people understand now about their online experience is a solitary experience. They sit in front of a computer, whether it's a Web site or a program, et cetera, and it's just them and the page, them and the program that they're dealing with.
As in the real world, there's always tons of other people out there doing similar things, looking at the same things, looking at other things that are relevant, and your friends are out there. But in your current context of online experience there's no way to access that information.
So, what Me.dium really does for the first time is give you access to all that information, all that social contextual value that you get in the real world, and bring that into your online experience. So, for the first time you can actually see who else is around you.
KRIS OLSON: So, you have a little window like listing your friends who are online at the same time, or what they're browsing or --
DAVID MANDELL: Sure. So, Me.dium gives it to you in several ways. The first thing you get is a real time map. So, when you're browsing, you glance next to your browser, and what you can see is all the other people out there in real time, and what they're looking at. You can bump into your friends, you can see where the crowds are, you can find recommendations based on the actual activity of other people. So, you're not sitting there by yourself in front of a Web page; you're now actually in an environment.
KRIS OLSON: It's kind of like Second Life and real life.
DAVID MANDELL: Yeah, but it is the real life --
KRIS OLSON: But it's your life --
DAVID MANDELL: -- and that's the thing
KRIS OLSON: -- exactly.
DAVID MANDELL: It's always been out there, right, but you could never access it. And that's really what Me.dium is about. Me.dium is giving you access to that interaction for the first time.
So, the challenge from a marketing perspective is what you really have to do is change someone's context. They're very comfortable right now, thank you very much, interacting with their computer in a solitary environment. So, in essence it's not cheaper phone calls, you're not giving someone something that they immediately see is missing from their lives, right? So, the challenge is getting them to understand that there is this whole new wealth of information and value out there that they just never had access to before, and how do you interact in that world.
KRIS OLSON: So, who's -- like who's your main target audience at this point? Who's kind of picking it up fastest and getting that?
DAVID MANDELL: So, it's very interesting, because it's actually a fairly broad swath of demographic at this point, and I think what most of the people that are picking it up right now are people that are looking for more, right? So, it's not really targeted -- it's not really been adopted by a specific age group per se, but more about people that spend time online and are used to spending time online.
Social networking plays a big part in it as well. There used to be social online. So, what Me.dium is doing is kind of combining the two, giving them that social interaction that they're used to on the social networks, but they're giving it to them in a real time environment, so when they browse, you can actually surf with your friend now for the first time, you can actually see who's around you.
So, moving forward, the marketing efforts will probably be more on the social networking group, so people that are used to managing their entire socialized online through things like Facebook and other social networks --
KRIS OLSON: Twitter, whatever.
DAVID MANDELL: Twitter, exactly.
KRIS OLSON: Yeah, I saw a mobile one today here. I can't remember the name of it, but it was like to go out -- it was an application where it helped you go out to parties, 100 percent mobile, like who was coming where, when did they arrive, which is the hottest place to go to tonight.
DAVID MANDELL: Sure, and that's a great example that it's all evolving.
KRIS OLSON: Yeah.
DAVID MANDELL: In my mind, what's happened now is, you know, kind of the first stage of the way was information based, right, and now it's getting more social and people-based. And currently that implementation is experienced through a Web site, okay, so -- or a social network, a destination, if you will.
And what's happening now is that's sort of disaggregating, right? So, I can get my Facebook updates on my phone now, I can interact whether or not I'm on the Web site.
But what I still don't have access to, which is really what Me.dium is bringing to the party, is that real time activity layer, so the people layer of the Internet. Being around those people really changes everything. So, for the first time you're not just by yourself online, right, you're truly in an environment with others, you're getting all the social and contextual value that you get from the real world, but in your online experience for the first time.
So, I can see what's going on next to my browser, I have a buddy list just like I would have in a chat client, but now when I interact with my friends on my buddy list, I'm actually having a contextual conversation with them.
So, when I send you a message, for example, I can just say, hey, have you seen this? And when you get that message, you know exactly what I'm talking about, and you can pop over on your map and see -- look at what I'm looking at, right?
KRIS OLSON: That sounds cool, yeah.
DAVID MANDELL: And I can actually see you come over into my view, say, oh, there's Kris, she's sitting right next to me, I wonder what she thinks about this page, right?
So, now it's more like we're walking through the mall together. I can say, what do you think about this shirt? You can say, oh, I like this shirt better; or have you seen this toy for dad, because he'd like that?
But the point is you're now interacting the same way you would in the real world, as opposed to the way you've been limited to online, which is through e-mail interaction or short messages or non-contextual pieces of information that are asynchronous.
KRIS OLSON: So, as a marketing person, I'm curious about like how are you reaching people, what are you doing to let them know about this.
DAVID MANDELL: So, a couple of things. The first thing we do always is make the product as viral as possible. So, when you use Me.dium, we make it as easy as we can for you to invite your friends, and you get them to experience the interaction of Me.dium, because obviously it's much more powerful if you invite someone and explain to them what it is than if they're just listening to me talking about Me.dium.
The other thing we're doing is working with partners, so people like Microsoft, which give us access to a much bigger market, give us access to new tools and new ways of interacting, which is a huge help for us.
But at this point it's a very broad mix of marketing tools that we're using.
DAVID MANDELL: So, David Mandell from Me.dium.
What is Me.dium? What Me.dium is really about is enabling people to find information together. And we do that several different ways, the first of which is really about bringing the whole aspect of social interaction to your browsing experience, so when you're online it's not a solitary experience; it's about seeing who else is out there, seeing what's around you, browsing with your friends, getting information from all the social contextual value that you get in the real world, but in your online experience for the first time. So, that's really what Me.dium is trying to accomplish.
And working with the Emerging Business Team at Microsoft has simply been invaluable from our perspective, because what it's really let us do is get access to information that we never thought we would get before.
So, for example, we were one of the launch partners for IE 8 beta, and they just provided an invaluable stream of information back and forth as we tried to develop on the new platform. We got access to people at Microsoft that helped us both from a marketing and from a development perspective, we got access to intelligence from -- on the development side that helped us get the code written faster, helped us with questions we had.
So, from our perspective, what it really does is speed up development and speed up time to market, and as a startup, time to market is everything. So, it's been a crucial part of Me.dium and our development.
DAVID MANDELL: So, MIX has been a great experience for us at Me.dium for several reasons: First of all, just getting to feel the culture, rubbing shoulders with the people that matter, getting access to people that are using the code, using the product, sharing stories, swapping problems; but on top of that again it's been access to people, so not only seeing how people use your product, but also getting access to the people at Microsoft that you're trying to expose your product to, right, because they have -- they are the gatekeepers, they're the people that own the keys to the market of user adoption. And the more time you can spend with them and the more time you get input on your product and how to make it better integrated with the Microsoft suite, the more value you have down the road.
So, MIX has truly been an invaluable experience for us, and we plan to be here as much as we can.
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01:12 PM Saturday, July 19, 2008
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Failure is part of the maturing process in the startup world. If you haven't failed...you aren't trying hard enough, or you aren't "pushing the envelope" far enough. I have always said "Success is a terrible teacher. Success masks over flaws that may hurt you later."
Roger Ehrenberg - the co-founder of Monitor 110, wrote a story on the lessons he learned from this recently failed startup. [found via Fred Wilson] He lists "seven deadly sins" that lead to their demise.
- The lack of a single, "the buck stops here" leader until too late in the game
- No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
- Too much PR, too early
- Too much money
- Not close enough to the customer
- Slow to adapt to market reality
- Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board
In my opinion there are two key reasons Monitor 110 failed; first, no clear CEO leader, and second, too much money. Trying to run a startup as a group of friends or make decisions by committee will never work. Too much money allows you to waste time, ignore danger signals, and continue down a wrong path for too long.
More Lessons - But here is the story of GameClay, another startup failure at the other end of the spectrum. They didn't raise any VC money...and still failed. [Found via Jeremy Liew]
1. If your idea starts with “We’re building a platform to…” and you don’t have a billion dollars in capital, find a new idea. Now.
2. It’s a marathon, but it’s a marathon made of sprints
3. Initial conditions matter. A lot.
4. Developing in a vacuum never works.
5. Beware the chicken and the egg.
6. Prototype any 3rd-party libraries that you’ll be depending upon, before you base your product on them.
7. If you’re doing anything other than building your project and getting users, it’s premature.
8. The product will take longer than you expect. Design for the long-term.
9. People have an incentive not to crush your dreams. Take everything they say with a grain of salt.
10. Know your limitations.
Building a startup is the most difficult, and most rewarding, thing anyone can do. Sometimes you can even make some money at the end of it all. There are so many things that can go wrong it is a miracle when a startup actually makes it.
It is important to celebrate our successes, learn from our failures, and value them equally. Failure is important...because success is a terrible teacher.
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08:58 AM Friday, July 18, 2008
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Fri
Microsoft (MSFT) announced revenues topped $60 Billion for the year ended June 30, 2008, an increase of 18% over last year. This was the largest annual revenue growth since 1999. Profits were $17.6 billion, up more than 25 percent from a year ago.
Growing a Yahoo every year - Microsoft is strong and growing. Revenues were up $9 Billion over last year. Just to put that in context, Yahoo (YHOO) recorded total revenue of less than $7B for the whole year last year. Microsoft is growing more than a Yahoo a year. This is truly amazing.
All divisions reported strong increases. Here is the breakdown of the 4th quarter numbers by group;
Windows Client: Revenue $4.37 billion, up 15 percent;
Profit 3.23 billion, up 16 percent.
Server & Tools: Revenue $3.74 billion, up 21 percent;
Profit 1.37 billion, up 39 percent.
Online Services: Revenue $838 million, up 24 percent.
Business Division (Office): Revenue $5.26 billion, up 14 percent; Profit $3.34 billion, up 12 percent.
Entertainment and Devices (Xbox, Zune): Revenue $1.58 billion, up 37 percent. Profitable for the full year.
Strong Growth - Management offered the following guidance for the full fiscal year ending June 30, 2009:
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Revenue is expected to be in the range of $67.3 billion to $68.1 billion.
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Operating income is expected to be in the range of $26.3 billion to $26.9 billion.
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Diluted earnings per share are expected to be in the range of $2.12 to $2.18.
All divisions are doing well and forecasting strong growth next year. Microsoft's cash balance stands at nearly $24 Billion, and is growing at over $1B per month.
Microsoft has been repurchasing common stock on the open market, totaling $12.5 Billion last year, and $27.5 Billion the year before. These stock buy backs lower the number of outstanding shares, which in turn, increases the earnings per share.
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12:11 PM Thursday, July 17, 2008
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Blogs are going professional and replacing newspapers for insightful, fast breaking, news and analysis. The same thing happened to network TV news years ago. Chris Mathews, Tim Russert, Bill O'Reilly, and others replaced the "just report the facts" news casts with more personal, insightful, opinionated commentary.  TechMeme has several blog articles over the past week that made me think about the parallels between TV news vs. Meet the Press, and newspapers vs. blogs. The direction is the same. More personal and more opinionated. Chris Mathews, Tim Russert, and Bill O'Reilly are personalities that make the news personal, interesting, and sometimes controversial. Blogs do the same thing for text based news and commentary. Newspapers and magazines should pay attention. The smart ones already are.
The Industry Standard says the TechMeme Leaderboard of "A-List" bloggers is being replaced by professional publishers. "the old-school A-listers aren't being displaced by the many talented B-to-Z listers out there. Rather, the Leaderboard is increasingly populated by mainstream publishers, tech blog networks, and corporate blogs and PR sites." Fred Wilson, an A-list blogger and VC, thinks blogs are personal and that is what makes them unique. Fred says; "This blog is me and I am this blog. It's mine and will always be mine. I understand why many of the individuals who made blogging what it is are either moving on or turning their blogs into businesses. That's the way it is."
Blogs vs Newspapers - Big Differences - We are starting to see professional publishers (newspapers and magazines) get into blogging and make it a business. This makes perfect sense to me. But there are big differences. Blogs are personal. The author is the star, not the newspaper brand name. Blogs are news and commentary, not just news. Blogs are fast breaking stories that can be edited and updated later, not highly polished newspaper articles that get printed tomorrow. There will always be a place for network TV news, newspapers and magazines. Blogs provide another channel for the big media publishers to leverage their talented writers and brand, with several advantages. Blogs have the advantage of instant delivery over the Internet, and basically zero cost of distribution. It is generally accepted that blogs will be fast, unedited, frequently updated, and opinionated. Blogs are a conversation - Newspapers and print media are one way broadcasts. Blogs encourage conversation with comments and cross linking. The writers are accessible and responsive. This is why I get most of my news from online news sites and blogs.
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10:18 AM Wednesday, July 16, 2008
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WebInno, founded by David Beisel of Venrock, is a Boston based Web Innovators Group where startups can demo their stuff to the tech community.
Last night there were three startups that presented on stage (Main Dish) and eight other startups that showed their stuff at tables (Side Dish) around the perimeter of the room. There were hundreds of people, my guess is 800, in attendance.
Main Dish
- Totspot - a place for parents to publish a page about their kids and share with family and friends.
- Webnotes - a tool that helps you create and manage online annotations. Very similar to Onfolio.
- Zeer - a grocery product community that helps people “believe in what they buy.” Connects people to product information, consumer communities, and buying advice.
Side Dish
- 211me - Personalized mobile mashups
- WordChamp - Free online language learning
- PaperG - Local online advertising
- Creaturepark / Ingeeni Studios - Games
- YouCastr - Interactive sports streaming
- LuckyCal - Mixes together information from your calendar with public events to find events that might interest you.
- Snipd - Stealth mode. No idea what they are doing.
- Tikatok - Kids create their own stories – and publish those stories into books for friends and family.
The audience voted Zeer as the best presentation/idea. I liked WebNotes, but found myself comparing it to JJ Allaire's Onfolio, and asking what is different?
WebInno is a great Boston Web 2.0 networking event for upcoming startups and "all the usual suspects." I saw Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot), Ben Saren (CitySquares), Matt Douglas (Punchbowl Software), Shawn Broderick (TrustPlus), Karim Nurani (Trinet), Reed Sturtevant (Microsoft), Mike Tyrrell (Venrock), Mike Werner (Web Studio Project) and bloggers Chris Herot, and Pito Salas. I was surprised, and delighted, to see Kevin Marks from Google. Kevin is based in Mountain View and is the evangelist for Open Social. I am sure Scott Kirsner and David Cancel were there somewhere but I didn't see them in the masses of mayhem.
Thanks to David Beisel for organizing the WebInno event. In October I am organizing an event with David focused on web advertising networks - opportunities and challenges.
Upcoming Boston Events
Software Industry Conference 2008 - July 17-19 [Register] This is the Shareware Software conference hosted in Boston this year. Microsoft is a sponsor.
TECH Cocktail Boston 2, Boston - July 24th, 6:30PM
Tequila Rain by Fenway Park [ REGISTER ] I went to the Tech Cocktail last year and it was a huge success in terms of turnout. So many people it was hard to move around or carry on a conversation, but a great party, lots of technology people that you don't see on the conference circuit.
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11:57 AM Tuesday, July 15, 2008
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PubMatic published its monthly AdPrice Index for July 2008 and it showed ad rates declining in most markets, especially Social Network sites. PubMatic draws its data from 4,000 Web sites that take ad network advertising, 85% of which are based in the U.S. Surprisingly, small web sites can demand significantly higher CPM rates than larger web sites. This may be due to better targeting smaller niche markets that advertisers consider more valuable. 
Advertising rates vary in each market space too. News sites and gaming sites traditionally have the highest ad rates...Social Networks have the lowest rates.  The average CPM rates across all web sites and market segments is just $.36 per thousand page views. How many page views are required to generate $1M in advertising revenue? Based on this average CPM of $.36 it would take 2,777,777,777 page views, or about 2.8 Billion. Now you know why Steve Ballmer says the advertising business is all about scale. It takes billions of page views to make any money. The more page views and scale you have, the more advertisers want to advertise on your ad network. The more advertisers you have competing...the higher the ad rates.
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11:03 AM Tuesday, July 15, 2008
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 Bambi Francisco left CBS MarketWatch about a year ago to launch her own company, Vator.TV. Last week VatorTV announced a new design and new contributors to its Newsroom. I am one of the new contributors along with Mark Cuban, Fred Wilson, and several others.
The new design will make it easier for users to uncover the hundreds of video interviews, blog posts and community comments that have made the site a go-to resource for startup news and information. For instance, VatorNews has a couple hundred videos of lessons from entrepreneurs and investors, sharing advice about what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur and what investors look for in an entrepreneur.
The newsroom will also highlight video and text-based content generated by Vator's growing community of contributors. Recent contributors include venture capitalists Jeremy Liew and Fred Wilson, and technology executives like Microsoft's Don Dodge. Each contributor will now have their own channel that readers can subscribe to.
I wrote an article "Does Web 2.0 = Bubble 2.0?" that has generated a lot of interest and comments on VatorTV. You can find my "channel" on VatorTV here.
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10:35 AM Wednesday, July 02, 2008
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02
Wed
Microsoft announced yesterday the acquisition of Powerset, a natural language search engine. Techmeme has lots of stories about the acquisition. Today the stories are all a bout Microsoft/Yahoo potential deals. But lets take a step back and look at how Powerset works and why it is an important development in search.
There are two key things to consider;
- Powerset technology is more about indexing the content and understanding its meaning, than the query itself. This has enormous implications.
- There are many lucrative markets for this technology...not just consumer web search.
How does natural language search work? There is a lot of linguistic rocket science to this but basically it breaks the search problem into two parts. First, understanding the intent of the user's query by using (NLP) natural language processing. Second, training their search index algorithm to parse the structure and context of individual web sites, and add meta data about the pages to the index.
Powerset is using linguistics and (NLP) to better understand the meaning and context of search queries. But the real power of Powerset is applied to the search index, not the query. The index of billions of web pages is indexed in the traditional way. The big difference is in the post processing of the index. They analyze the indexed pages for "semantics", context, meaning, similar words, and categories. They add all of this contextual meta data to the search index so that search queries can find better results.
Who is the best ballplayer of all time? Powerset breaks this query down very carefully using linguistic ontologies and all sorts of proprietary rules. For example, they know that "ballplayer" can mean Sports. Sports can be separated into categories that involve a "Ball". Things like baseball, basketball, soccer, and football. Note that soccer does not include the word ball, yet Powerset knows this is a sport that includes a ball.
Powerset knows that "ballplayer" can mean an individual player of a sport that includes a ball. They know that "best of all time" means history, not time in the clock sense.
Powerset understands the intent of the query, but more importantly, it understands the meaning and context of all the relevant web pages. Rather than just match keywords from the query, Powerset looks for "semantic" matches in its index of billions of web pages.
Why hasn't this been done before? Powerset uses all these rules and linguistic approaches to analyze billions of web pages, and adds "meta data" hooks into each word on each page. As you can imagine this is a huge scaling problem, that has been impossible to solve economically until now. With Moore's Law applied to constantly reducing the cost of computing, storage, and bandwidth, it is now possible to solve this problem, although it is still very expensive.
Where else could Powerset technology be used? Consumer web search is one obvious market, but there are many more.
- Enterprise search, companies searching their own internal documents and information, is a huge market that would benefit from Powerset technology. Enterprise search is a multi-billion dollar market.
- Advertising targeting. It is easy to target ads to search terms, but extremely difficult to target ads to general web content or User Generated Content. Today ad targeting technology does a poor job of understanding the context and meaning of a news article, a blog post, or magazine article. Powerset technology could be used to better understand this content and better target more relevant ads. This is a multi-billion dollar opportunity.
- Vertical Search - News search, medical search, people search, resume search, and basic knowledge search could be dramatically improved with Powerset's "semantic" search indexing.
I am sure you can think of many other places Powerset's semantic technology could be used. The technology will improve and expand over time. There is enormous potential here, more than a small startup with limited funding could hope to address. This is why Powerset joining forces with Microsoft makes so much sense.
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03:57 PM Tuesday, July 01, 2008
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01
Tue
Microsoft has agreed to acquire Powerset, a Natural Language search engine, founded by Barney Pell. Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal, and Advertising said on his blog;
Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.
More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco.
Powerset said on their company blog post;
"With any start-up, the challenge is to take the seeds of an idea and grow it into a viable company," he wrote. "At Powerset, we transformed our idea into a world-class semantic search platform, demonstrating the future of search with our Wikipedia search experience. But building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine...We believe that this is the fastest way to bring our technology to market at a large scale."
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11:55 AM Tuesday, July 01, 2008
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Tue
Over 600,000 laptops are reported lost or stolen every year at US airports according to a ComputerWorld story. The story, based on a survey by the Ponemon Institute says that 65% of them are never recovered. Laptops are most often lost at security checkpoints. Hotels and taxi cabs are also prime locations for losing laptops and cell phones.
Close to 10,278 laptops are reported lost every week at 36 of the largest U.S. airports, and 65% of those laptops are not reclaimed, the survey said. Around 2,000 laptops are recorded lost at the medium-size airports, and 69% are not reclaimed. The institute conducted field surveys at 106 airports in 46 states and surveyed 864 business travelers.
Millions of dollars are spent each year on sophisticated information security products. Simple things like stolen laptops and lost memory sticks / thumb drives are a major security vulnerability.
The Washington Post reports that data breaches are up 69% this year.
The Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego tracked 342 data breach reports from Jan. 1 to June 27. More than one-third of the reports came from businesses, a 27 percent increase over business breaches for all of 2007.
The center found that data breaches among health-care providers and banks also increased. They now account for 15 percent and 10 percent of the breaches, respectively. Breaches from educational institutions, government entities and the military declined for the third year in a row, the center found.
Hacking was the least-cited cause of data breaches in the first six months of this year. Instead, lost or stolen laptops and other digital storage media remain the most frequently cited cause of data breaches, accounting for more than 20 percent of all reported cases, the center found. The inadvertent posting of personal and financial data online prompted roughly 15 percent.
The Industry Standard reports that losing cell phones is even more common. And, the newer Smart Phones contain contact lists, pictures, documents, confidential emails, links to sensitive information, etc.
I didn't mean for this to be an alarming post about information security breaches. I just did a simple web search and these were the top three links in the search results. It looks like there is a lot of work yet to be done in the Information Security area.
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02:23 PM Monday, June 30, 2008
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Microsoft is making a big investment in innovation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has a front page story about Microsoft's new Concept Development Center led by Reed Sturtevant. Reed was recruited by Ray Ozzie and his brother Jack to build the new lab. The Boston Globe story says; Boston software legend Ray Ozzie replaced Bill Gates as Microsoft's chief software architect in 2006. Ozzie has been pushing for a transition from the desktop software that accounts for the bulk of its revenue to the Internet services that are the wave of the future.
"Microsoft is making a big investment in Massachusetts," said Reed Sturtevant, 51, the director of the Boston Concept Development Center, who worked with Ozzie in the 1980s at Lotus Development Corp. and joined Microsoft last fall. He's spent most of his time so far recruiting. "There's a huge amount of talent in Boston," he said, "and the question is, how do you bring new talent into Microsoft?"
Microsoft's presence in Massachusetts is growing with the acquisitions of Groove Networks, Softricity, and Danger Inc. Microsoft is also growing internal product groups in the Boston area and consolidating many of the groups at One Memorial Drive in Cambridge. Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, and founder of Groove Networks, has lived and worked in the Boston area most of his life and wants to see Microsoft build a much larger presence over time.
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02:17 PM Saturday, June 28, 2008
Jun
28
Sat
Not one single VC backed company went public in the 2nd quarter of 2008 according to the New York Times. The last time that happened was 30 years ago. However, 2007 was one of the best years for IPOs since the dot com bubble of 1999. Such are the cycles of VC investing and IPO exits.
| |
Investments |
Returns |
|
| Year |
VCs |
M&A |
IPO |
| 2001 |
$32.1 |
$16.8 |
$3.5 |
| 2002 |
$22.1 |
$7.9 |
$2.1 |
| 2003 |
$19.6 |
$7.7 |
$2.0 |
| 2004 |
$22.4 |
$15.4 |
$11.0 |
| 2005 |
$23.7 |
$16.0 |
$4.5 |
| 2006 |
$25.5 |
$17.1 |
$5.1 |
| 2007 |
$29.4 |
$25.4 |
$10.3 |
| |
|
|
|
| Totals |
$174.8 |
$106.3 |
$38.5 |
Fear is temporary, greed is permanent. We are in a "fear" cycle now. There is fear in the public IPO markets due to slow growth, high oil prices, and recession fears.
VCs continue to raise funds and invest aggressively. Last year VCs invested nearly $30 Billion, the most since 2001. VCs have a long term view. They don't expect their investments to pay off for at least 5 years, sometimes much longer.
Fred Wilson has an interesting post today that includes this 10 year chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the 1970s.
The Dow tanked in 1974 when OPEC put on an oil embargo that caused wide spread shortages and gas prices to sky rocket. The 70s were a dismal decade for business and investing. The Dow hovered around 900 and hit 1,000 just twice in the decade. It is hard to imagine now with the Dow around 12,000, but we have seen massive swings, up and down, in the 30 years since the last oil crisis.
Is this IPO market "goose egg" a one time thing? Will M&A transactions remain strong? What do you think?
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01:20 PM Friday, June 27, 2008
Jun
27
Fri
Dan'l Lewin is Microsoft's Corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business, based in Silicon Valley. I work in Dan'l's organization so it was a treat to read a story in the Chronicle about Dan'l's work with VCs and startups around the world.
Dan'l is a legend in Silicon Valley where he was one of the early employees at Apple, and later started Next with Steve Jobs.
Dan'l (that is not a typo, that really is his name) was hired by Steve Ballmer almost 8 years ago to oversee Microsoft's global relationships with venture capitalists, startups and Microsoft technology partners as well as industry and community organizations in Silicon Valley.
Great quotes from Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital "He ensures nothing gets lost in translation between here and Redmond" and Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt "Were it not for Dan'l - if we just knew Microsoft by reputation - I don't think we'd be working with them nearly as closely as we are."
The Chronicle story goes into how Microsoft works with VCs and startups, what areas are hot now, and how Microsoft handles acquisitions. You can read the whole story on SFgate, the Chronicle web site.
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09:59 AM Friday, June 27, 2008
Jun
27
Fri
Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis asked me again this year to participate on the TechCrunch 50 panel of experts. TechCrunch announced yesterday that Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff, and I will be on the panel. I am humbled…and honored to be mentioned with those guys.  The complete list of “experts” is listed here. They include; Mark Andreessen, Marissa Mayer (Google), Jeff Weiner (formerly Yahoo), Chris DeWolfe (MySpace), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO), Kevin Rose (Digg), and journalists Dan Farber and Om Malik. TechCrunch 50 will be on September 8-10 in San Francisco. Companies can submit applications to participate here. The panel of experts will sort through the hundreds of applications and narrow it down to 50 companies who will present at the conference. We will also judge the company presentations at the conference and select winners in various categories. TechCrunch40 sold out quickly last year. Register here for TechCrunch 50.
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