All the talk about Silicon Valley being dead is bull. In fact many of the top VCs are actively investing like True Ventures, Norwest, Benchmark Capital, Foundation, among others. There are some top tier guys who are really hurting. I’ll post more on that later. Here is a post from Benchmark partner Bill Gurley. I first met Bill when he was an analyst years ago before he joined Hummer Winblad then Benchmark. Bill not that technical but is very skilled at analyzing and reading the market. I think his views are right on the money (pun intended). Bill says… What...
Nokia (NYSE: NOK) may be the largest handset maker in the world, but the big question is: will wireless incumbents like Nokia, or newcomers like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Google (NSDQ: GOOG), be the ones to thrive in an industry that is increasingly focused on the mobile Internet? Today, Nokia's unveiling the N97, which is the company's best chance at staying relevant in the fast-paced and increasingly competitive industry. Nokia has done a good job of keeping this project under wraps, so this morning will be the first time pictures of the phone and the device's specifications will be made...
Canadian startup Sayvee will "soon" launch a new service that allows artists to quickly and easily create their own websites to sell their art, build community, support positive political causes and more. That doesn't sound like a show stopper (unless you're an artist in need of a website) but the videos the company made to promote their service are awesome! We wish everyone put this much care into promo videos - then our jobs watching promo videos would be even more fun. And the serious business of promoting important web startups would overcome one of its most challenging obstacles -...
The two biggest security-software makers lost a big chunk of their market caps on Wednesday, November 19, 2008–and not just because of the bad day for tech stocks. Microsoft announced late Tuesday that it would offer free antivirus software starting in the second half of 2009. Microsoft didn’t land a solid punch, but tech-security companies felt it this morning Symantec (off 9%) and McAfee (off 7%) are out in full force spinning Microsoft’s move as an admission that it never belonged in the security business. (Rowan Trollope, senior vice president of Symantec’s consumer business, called it “a capitulation” in an...
Sezmi, a would-be competitor to cable and satellite television, seemed a bit too good to be true when it was announced in April -- a digital hybrid of over-the-air signals and broadband transmissions delivering live and on-demand TV for a substantially lower price than other pay-TV services. But if its vision eventually proves to be chimerical, at least its technology appears solid. The company has announced the successful completion of technical trials with three local broadcasters in Seattle -- Fisher Communications, which owns the local ABC and Univision affiliates; Tribune Broadcasting, which owns local Fox and MyNetwork affiliates (and is...
“VoIP is dead,” Skype General Manager of Voice and Video Jonathan Christensen declared at an industry conference a few weeks ago. He spoke figuratively, of course, but he may well have been right. While Voice-Over-Internet Protocol proponents had long promised a decade of creative destruction, they themselves appear to have become the victims. The full potential of a technology is not always realized once it converges with market forces. In this case, the gravitational pull of the incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) has always proven difficult to resist. Most of the VoIP industry, while loudly proclaiming the SIP era...
