Cisco’s chief John Chambers routinely says “Market transitions are built on catching them right, and if you miss them it’s almost impossible to recover.” Hence Cisco hopes to capitalize on the next market transition by teaming up with Russia’s Almaz Capital Partners to create a $60 million fund for the region’s technology, media and telecoms sector. “Targets could include communications service providers, media companies, and content development companies,” said the More»

Labels: cisco, startups, web

Bill Gates has reneged on his promise to donate £1 million to Charles’s charity, the Prince’s Trust. Instead Mr. Gates donated £250,000 worth of software which Microsoft sources claim to be worth £5 million.
Tea Will Not Be Served: Either way Charles’ mummy Queen Elizabeth was not very happy with Mr. Gates. Mr. Gates had agreed in principle to give the money to the organization’s Business Program, which helps young people start their own companies. But negotiations between Microsoft and the Prince’s Trust broke down and the More»

Labels: Bill Gates, Microsoft, software, startups

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

Startup Camp 5 kicked off today in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. An impressive roster of attendees indicates that this conference has really gained some traction and generated interest since the first Startup Camp was held in November of 2006.
These unconferences offer enormous amounts of information and insights into new startups and give startups a great chance to show off to a well informed, influential audience.
Om Malik is reporting that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz hinted in the keynote that Sun and Amazon have a major initiative planned that will be announced very soon More»

Labels: Jonathan Schwartz, San Francisco, startups, sun microsystems

Social network creator and aggregator Ning, founded by Marc Andreessen, has landed another $60 Million in investment giving the company a post money valuation of about $560 Million. Andreessen reports some of the details of the recent dealings at his blog.
According to Andreessen’s blog Ning is growing by over 1000 social networks per day with over 230,000 networks currently online via the Ning infrastructure. Ning allows anybody to quickly create a robust social networking environment without any programming or technical expertise.
More»

Labels: ning, startups

Venture capitalists are often contemplating the most intriguing questions in the technology community, and this post from Paul Graham is a wonderful essay speculating on how programmers react to their environment.
Graham is a VC involved with Y Combinator (not to be confused with Yahoo’s startup division). Y Combinator is a very interesting early funding structure for new companies that combines a modest level of financial support with a fairly good dose of team building and advice from experts. The financial support is usually $5000 + 5000 x the number of founders involved, so More»

Labels: developers, programmers, sociology, startups, technology, VC, venture capital

WebGuild will be covering Mashup Camp 6 in Mountain View with live blogging and company profiles for the many startups as well as established companies.
The Mashup conference is actually an “UNconference” as Mashup Camp follows an open conference format where participants determine the content and flow of the the sessions which generally cover topics related to the combination of varied data sources into one website or application.
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo will all be in attendance as well as many other key providers of API “Application Programming Interfaces” which allow data sharing and distribution. More»

Labels: mashup camp, mashups, startups

The launch of Alltop.com has been announced by startup guru and former Apple PR mastermind Guy Kawasaki. Alltop is a new website that aggregates media from many online sources.
Today on Kawasaki’s blog he wrote:
A good metaphor is that Alltop is an “online magazine rack” that displays the news from the top publications and blogs. Our goal is to satisfy the information needs of the 99% of Internet users who will never use an RSS feed reader or create a custom page.
Alltop carves up their information space in a somewhat unique way, starting with the More»

Labels: alltop, Apple, kawasaki, startups

A recent post by internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis suggested 17 tips for startups to use to save money and maximize productivity. These included everything from a fridge full of coke and an expensive espresso machine to outsourcing IT and firing people “who are not workaholics”.
The firing workaholics tip generated so much controversy that it has been softened to “fire people who don’t love their work…” , which appeared to be partly a response to a TechCrunch post titled: Calacanis Fires People Who Have A Life.
What I found very interesting though was how positively many successful startup More»

Labels: calacanis, startups, techcrunch