Too Many Would-Be Entrepreneurs Are Thinking About Their Ideas, Companies, and Investors All Wrong
As so often happens, the serendipitous intersection of one too many notes from the same chord in a short time have prompted me to post. In this case, I am seeing a lot of evidence that would-be entrepreneurs just don’t think about their ideas, their companies, or investors as they should. Case in point: I [...]
Om Malik Boycotting Google Keep Because of Google Reader
Om’s boycotting Google Keep, and he’s damned right–every word he wrote. Here’s the money quote for me: It might actually be good, or even better than Evernote. But I still won’t use Keep. You know why? Google Reader. I spent about seven years of my online life on that service. I sent feedback, used it to [...]
Google’s Story That Google Reader Traffic Declined Is BS When You Put That Traffic Alongside Google+
It wasn’t hard to read between the lines–I’ve been calling Google’s decision to drop Google Reader a Microsoft-esque decision made to try to push customers to their other products, and especially to Google+. Google’s story that it needed to be done because of declining traffic is BS when you look at the real numbers. Buzz [...]
6 Ways The Pundits Are Dazed and Confused About Google Reader and RSS
One of the you-betcha-surefire Pundit strategies is that when something is getting a lot of heat, like the current flap over Google dropping Google Reader, you can get a lot of attention by disagreeing with the crowd. You want to do so in the most colorful possible way, in fact. It’s a common form of [...]
Google, If You Think I’ll Move From Reader to Another Google Product, Drop Dead
Just got the news that Google Reader will be turned off July 1. Realistically, I should’ve moved after the first time they brain-damaged it and I railed about it, but I stupidly stuck to it. Now I’m sorry. I’m not the only one, Om Malik says it is his second most used Google application after Gmail. [...]
Check on Your SaaS Company’s Hosting Provider, Avoid Firehost
My CNCCookbook blog is experiencing it’s second outage so far this month. That’s a cause for visitor unhappiness and potentially lost business. I use Page.ly, because I believe in SaaS services. CNCCookbook is bootstrapped, and I try not to spend any of my time at all doing something that I can easily have done for [...]
Charging for Your Product is About 2000 Times More Effective than Relying on Ad Revenue
I was reading Gabriel Weinberg’s piece on the depressing math behind consumer-facing apps. He’s talking about conversion rates for folks to actually use such apps and I got to thinking about the additional conversion rate of an ad-based revenue model since he refers to the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. Just for grins, I [...]
How Many Software Companies Monitor Their Software as Well as Tesla Monitors its Cars?
The unfolding story of how the New York Times’ negative review of the Tesla Model S may have actually been faked is a cautionary tale for software vendors. Basically, there is enough instrumentation and feedback built into the Tesla S that Elon Musk was able to “shred” the review, as Dan Frommer writes. The graphical [...]
Big Data is a Small Market Compared to Suburban Data
Big Data is all the rage, and seem to be one of the prime targets for new entrepreneurial ventures since VC-dom started to move from Consumer Internet to Enterprise recently. Yet, I remain skeptical about Big Data for a variety of reasons. As I’ve noted before, it seems to be a premature optimization for most companies. That post [...]
Career Advice: When They Replace the CEO At Your Company, It’s Time To Move On
A word of warning: VC’s and CEO’s may hate this post, though more the former than the latter unless you’re the New CEO replacing the Old CEO. I must also say that the Valley has gotten better in recent years as it has realized that replacing a CEO is no small thing. Many now conceed [...]
