BeyondVC

DECEMBER 22, 2006

A friend of mine called me the other day to ask for advice on what services (email, voice, apps) he should use to run his business with the caveat being that he wanted to spend as little upfront capital as possible and also have minimal ongoing maintenance headaches. As I started thinking about his question, I remember what it was like setting up our office in 1998 and the headaches and cost of buying a Nortel phone system and phones and hiring a Microsoft networking expert to get our office set

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Cracking the Code

DECEMBER 16, 2006

Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Saturday, December 16, 2006. Why I disagree with Tony Zingale on the future of SaaS. A couple weeks ago, I attended the 13th Silicon Valley Annual VC/Entrepreneur luncheon organized by NVCA. The guest speaker was a well known and highly successful Silicon Valley veteran: Tony Zingale, President and CEO of Mercury Interactive.

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aweissman.com

DECEMBER 31, 2006

"More website business owners will realize there is this thing called Social Networks and panic when they can’t be measured. Rest assured, targeted solutions will follow in 2007. " Avinash Kaushik , December 29, 2006.

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Cracking the Code

DECEMBER 28, 2006

Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Thursday, December 28, 2006. Best Venture and Technology Podcasts for 2007. Being a San Francisco-Menlo Park commuter, I spend an average of 90mn per day on the road. I make the most of this time by listening to my favorite tech and venture podcasts.

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Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

Startup

Cracking the Code

DECEMBER 16, 2006

Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Saturday, December 16, 2006. Betting on the right guy. Venture Capital is about investing in the small, fast and agile company hoping that it will beat the large and slow incumbent. In this game, sometimes you win and sometimes you loose.

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Software Review Venture Capital Technical Review Europe 48

Cracking the Code

DECEMBER 9, 2006

Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Saturday, December 09, 2006. McKinsey highlight #1: the art of cost cutting or how to save 70m with a measuring spoon. Paris, November 1998. First week on the job. The phone rings - it was the staffing manager: "Philippe, come in my office, your life is gonna change!".

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Cracking the Code

DECEMBER 2, 2006

Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Saturday, December 02, 2006. Cracking the SMB code. Small and Medium businesses have been the holy grail of High tech and software companies for quite some time now, but the quest is far from ending. "If you would ask me what part of the market is most underserved by technology companies today, Id tell you its small and medium sized business. and so I think its a v

Software Review 48

Software Review Technical Review Europe Software 48

BeyondVC

DECEMBER 20, 2006

I had an interesting call this morning with an entrepreneur who had been up until the wee hours of the morning reviewing legal documents for a big strategic partnership. He apologized about his state of mind which wasn’t exactly calm and cool, and we proceeded to discuss the issues and parse out the major ones from the minor details. As I reminded him of a conversation I had with my wife several years ago, we all had a good laugh.

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BeyondVC

DECEMBER 6, 2006

It is near the end of the year and I would hope by now that most companies have been through a revision or two of their strategic plan and budget for 2007. While strategic planning and budgeting is a task that some may find quite onerous or even useless, it is an imperative process and one that will help align your team and continue driving the growth of your business.

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BeyondVC

DECEMBER 31, 2006

There are many things that I am thankful for this year, but one of the best things that could happen to the New York tech scene is the growth of Google. Last year Google opened a huge office in Chelsea and moved about 500 employees into the new location. While I initially thought that most of the staffers would be associated with advertising sales or content business development, through my various visits to the office I was surprised to learn that there were lots of engineers working on some si

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BeyondVC

DECEMBER 21, 2006

In my last post on television advertising , I mentioned that while video advertising on the web will grow rapidly over the next few years, the $60 billion currently spent on television advertising per year will not go away overnight. What is needed for the industry is a way to make television commercials more relevant, targeted, and dynamic. In other words, some of the best practices and technology from Internet advertising should be brought to television advertising.

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BeyondVC

DECEMBER 7, 2006

Thank you EMI for releasing music singles without any DRM protection on it. While I continue my love/hate relationship with the IPod, I do believe that my music needs to be portable and free. I recently bought the new Treo 680 for my wife and was in the process of loading music on her device when I remembered that my selection was limited. I also have the same issue with the new Blackberry Pearl I just bought for myself.

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aweissman.com

DECEMBER 27, 2006

Scott Karp wrote last week that innovations in online advertising could dethrone the page view as the metric of choice. Jarvis picks up on it today, from a different angle. This followed up on a post Karp wrote back in September about the middle -- and large -- area of online advertising that is in-between, so to speak, branding and direct response, where, he writes: "Traditional approaches to advertising, rooted in TV and print, still hold sway over branding.

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aweissman.com

DECEMBER 27, 2006

“When Picasso reworked Velazquez, Delacroix, and the other Old Masters, he seemed to be devouring them, appropriating and digesting for his own use their mysterious essence.” -Calvin Tomkins.

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aweissman.com

DECEMBER 22, 2006

Watching this video of American Apparel CEO Dov Charney on Charlie Rose (I think from July 2006), I was struck by these comments Charney made in response to a question about why American Apparel was so successful (my transcription): "Its the easiest thing for us to do, in the sense of the way we've set up our business. We have our own retail stores and we have our own manufacturing and we've integrated the two and I can't imagine doing it any other way because its the easiest way to populate our

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aweissman.com

DECEMBER 18, 2006

A common topic of conversation these days seems to be whether or not we are in another tech/Internet bubble. Famous industry names have weighed in such as Forbes/Karlgaard (not sure), Scoble (yes but its different this time), Kedrosky (not only is it not different, its actually riskier this time). While I don't pretend to be smart enough to begin to analyze such an esoteric question, having been involved in technology venture capital since 1998, I will make a few, lightweight, observations: -At

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aweissman.com

DECEMBER 18, 2006

Unable to know is a condition I’ve lived in All my life; it is a poverty Of imagination about the life of another. This is, I think, the case with everyone. It is because there is a silence that we Are all of us forbidden to cross, not only The silence that divides the dead from the living But, antecedent to that, it is the silence There is between the living and the living, Unable to reach across that silence through The baffling light there always is between us?

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aweissman.com

DECEMBER 18, 2006

Carmun is a wonderful service ( where I am a founder/investor) with alot of potential. Call it social networking for brainiacs , the yin to the Facebook yang, whatever. but its goal is to create an online community for college and grad students by making the task of doing academic work easier. A nice social purpose, with a profit motive of course. Cesar Brea wrote a nice post about Carmun , wherein he wrote: Carmun is (my words) "social citation search", principally for academics, but also for a

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aweissman.com

DECEMBER 29, 2006

"In rock, 'progressive' doesn't mean writing about the future; it means writing about a past that never happened." - Chuck Klosterman, Klosterman IV.

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aweissman.com

DECEMBER 18, 2006

Take an old blues/jug song , combine some John Phillips Monterey Pop mojo with a few music freaks from the penninsula, and this is what you get:

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