BeyondVC

MAY 30, 2007

As an early stage investor and board member of several companies, I am fortunate to get the opportunity to work with some great entrepreneurs and also pattern match and observe trends, both good and bad, in early stage companies. I am not here to throw platitudes at you but simply to share an observation of the differences between some of the better run companies and the ones that have less than stellar execution.

Early Stage 60

Early Stage Startup Engineer Portfolio 60

SoCal CTO

MAY 1, 2007

I've worked with several businesses that were essentially based on driving traffic via search engine optimization (SEO). There are a wide variety of techniques that can be used, but getting high rankings is not easy and highly volatile. I just saw a Forbes article talking about Google Hell - getting placed in the secondary index. Bottom line - if you are basing your business on high rankings via organic search, there's pretty incredible risk.

SEO 150

SEO Search Engineer 150

Occam's Razor

MAY 21, 2007

It is a bit hard to believe that it has taken a year to talk about measuring effectiveness of individual pages on a website. It is perhaps a reflection of my belief that we already focus way too much on micro reporting on our websites, most of which is comprised of too much page level analysis. [For my point of view on how to start your analysis please see this post: Getting Started With Web Analytics: Step One - Glean Macro Insights.].

Analytics 90

Analytics Web Metrics Search 90

aweissman.com

MAY 14, 2007

skip to main | skip to sidebar. aweissman.com. Maximizing the serendipity around you. May 14, 2007. Online video advertising -- halfway there. This weekend I read about two interesting companies developing advertising platforms for online video providers and publishers. ScanScout s technology scans video content, creates intelligence about the clip and then dynamically matches ads to the content and intelligence it has just created.

Advertising 21

Advertising Video Matching Community 21

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

BeyondVC

MAY 15, 2007

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 talked about how the next big opportunity for e-commerce was to weave social networking and blogging tools into the existing infrastructure to directly drive transactions (see excerpt below from an earlier post on social shopping ).

Database 60

Database Technical Review Social Network Acquisition 60

BeyondVC

MAY 18, 2007

Wow-what a past couple of days! First I would like to say congratulations to David Moore, CEO of 24/7 RealMedia, on the company’s pending sale to WPP Group for $649mm. I first met David in 1996 when he made his move from offline to online advertising as my prior fund invested in the initial round of 24/7. We have stayed in touch throughout the years and what has impressed me most about David is his perseverance, sticking with the company through a few near-death experiences, struggling to

Internet 60

Internet RSS SEM Advertising 60

BeyondVC

MAY 4, 2007

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 good position to take on Google with Yahoo’s user and advertising base combined with Microsoft’s strength in development tools and aggressive strategy to go grassroots and emerge as the platform of choice to build next generation web sites and applications.

Startup 60

Startup Advertising Web Revenue 60

BeyondVC

MAY 3, 2007

OK, I am biased since I am an investor in Sipphone/Gizmo Project but this service from T-Mobile sounds pretty lame. The "breakthrough offering" from this carrier is that you can make calls on your mobile handset and seamlessly switch between T-Mobile’s cellular network and your home network. The catch is that you have to pay an extra $20 a month to use the service and you are locked in to using your home network or in the future a T-Mobile hotspot.

Mobile 60

Mobile Networking Web 60

aweissman.com

MAY 31, 2007

skip to main | skip to sidebar. aweissman.com. Maximizing the serendipity around you. May 31, 2007. Why I love Mahalo. Jason Calacanis has a new venture, Mahalo , and I love it. Its not because I think the idea of the "first human-powered search engine" is a necessarily novel or a good one -- I have no idea if this is new or even interesting. (that being said, one of the first human-powered pages they put up is a nice set of content and links about the Grateful Dead , so something right is going

Viral 20

Viral Naming Engineer Search 20

aweissman.com

MAY 21, 2007

skip to main | skip to sidebar. aweissman.com. Maximizing the serendipity around you. May 21, 2007. POTS -- Plain Old Text (sites, services). Atif Rafiq , in an essay called "In Defense of the Text Web, writes that: "[I]t’s simplistic to believe that anything produced in text today can be better consumed in video. The written word is and will remain the optimal form for a lot of content.

Bandwidth 20

Bandwidth Video Web Naming 20

BeyondVC

MAY 2, 2007

There is an interesting interview in the WSJ today with Dave Rosenblatt, CEO of Doubleclick. While talking about industry trends, Dave clearly lays out the fact that it is still early days in terms of broadband video advertising. In general, video advertising as a trend is pretty firmly in motion. In spite of that, though, it is still very small. There are somewhere between half a million and a million search advertisers in the market, there are probably only a couple to five thousand graphical

Advertising 60

Advertising Video Search Acquisition 60