If you want to get a first and fast look at some of the new startups in Silicon Valley that are showing off over at Startup Camp 5 here is the link to the “speed geeking” sessions where startups have 5 minutes to showcase themselves to small groups that travel from table to table.
The little startup pitches are usually fun and fast paced, and surprisingly you can usually get enough information in a few minutes to really understand the concept and implementation of even a large scale project.
Although I’m not at this Startup camp I’m enjoying More»

Labels: companies, silicon valley, startups

One of Google’s most brilliant strategies to conquer the online world hasn’t made them more than a trivial amount of revenue and perhaps never will. But they’ll be OK with that, because Google is slowly encroaching on Microsoft at a game that company has dominated for over a decade with the Microsoft Office Suite.
Google Docs are still a small part of both the home and enterprise software market but they appear to be slowly getting incorporated into home desktops and enterprise applications around the globe, and this poses a huge threat to the Microsoft Office dominance in that More»

Labels: 700mhz auction, companies, enterprise 2.0, Google Docs, Microsoft

Time Warner has announced that they’ll be divesting themselves of the substantial stake they have in Time Warner Cable in what Stacy at GigaOm suggests is the beginning of a “Death by 1000 Cuts” where the ailing Time Warner empire will crumble via attrition as they sell themselves off piece by piece.
Although I’d suggest it is far too early to predict their ultimate fate, it would seem that the Time Warner approach is not what you’d expect from a company that wants to ultimately prevail in the media business. TW was one of the few More»

Labels: AOL, broadband, cable, companies, Time warner

Online voice enabling technology JaJah, which offers ways to integrate phone calls and websites via widgets and other methods, will partner with Yahoo soon in what appears to be a huge deal to voice enable Yahoo websites.
From the company website we learn a bit about JaJah’s corporate philosophy:
JAJAH is dedicated to bringing the world vastly improved telephony solutions at a fraction of the traditional price. We want to provide basic phone calls for free - and we truly believe it’s possible. We believe that by bringing together the best of the internet with the best of the traditional telephone More»

Labels: companies, VOIP

If statistician and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb is right in this Forbes article, we tend to underrate the power of random tinkering and events that are outside of our control with respect to business failure and success:
Random tinkering is the path to success. And fortunately, we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing it–thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, confused scientists and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system.
[thanks to WebGuild commenter Atolley for the heads up on this author]
Randomness is a major component of biological evolution and I would suggest More»

Labels: business, companies, web 2.0

Twitter quickly moved from internet obscurity to one of a handful of key online social media players. Past concerns over Twitter’s infrastructure and reliability came to a head this week as key Twitter IT architect Blain Cook has left the company amid a swirl of blog commentary and criticism over his performance at the company.
As Matt Ingram notes in his reasonable take on things, it is ironic that Cook will be speaking soon at a Web 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley about how to scale up large online applications.
I’m a big fan More»

Labels: companies, Social Networking, Twitter, web 2.0

Cisco is facing a lawsuit after an employee - who happend to be in charge of Cisco’s Intellectual Property Division - criticized other companies on his personal blog. The companies that came under fire are now suing the company, claiming the employee should have disclosed his Cisco affiliation.Anne at CNET wonders today if a new spate of blog lawsuits may be coming as employees are increasingly given, and taking, the freedom to discuss company issues. My guess is that companies have little to worry about. Several prominent bloggers More»

Labels: Blogs, cisco, companies, lawsuits, liability

The Amazon startup contest has video profiles of the seven finalists in their web company contest that helped showcase users of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a very robust technology platform using Amazon’s substantial infrastructure.
Jeff Barr, Amazon’s great tech evangelist, noted the finalists on Amazon’s blog as well.
These look like some really interesting companies. One is measuring brain networking, another is providing 19 usability testing (this is brilliant for the small website market!) One is optimizing PPC campaigns (hmmm - but won’t Google analytics do that extremely well?)
More»

Labels: Amazon, companies, web 2.0

There is a great summary at Business Week of the remarkable rise and pending potential fall of Silicon Valley’s newspaper - the San Jose Mercury News. BW notes that in many ways the Mercury News saw it all coming, but still failed to position itself to profit from the migration of offline info to online info.
Although the article does not make this point, I’d suggest that the failure supports the idea that paradigm shifts do not come from old systems evolving into new ones even when the old systems “get it”, rather More»

Labels: companies, Facebook, IBM, Newspapers, San Jose Mercury News, Yahoo