“We had a monster plan with bells, whistles and a cherry on top. Impossible to fund and even more impossible to get to market without a thousand moving parts. I can still feel the sting of our pitch to Selby Ventures when we got 30 seconds into the pitch and a partner shouted out “Not… Continue Reading

Back in the day, say 1998, I worked in New York with tons of newspaper and magazine companies that found it hard to believe a fuzzy blue (or green) screen would ever replace paper. Imagining that regular people would forsake glossy coated stock and long sheets of newsprint for electronic devices of any sort seemed… Continue Reading

My old boss at AOL and still friend Jim Bankoff’s pulled the covers off his stealth project, SB Nation (aka sports blog nation) and announced the funding he’s raised.  This is an interesting play worth writing about for a number of reasons. First of all, it shows Jim remembered what he learned from Brian Alvey,… Continue Reading

Here’s the list of speakers who happen to be women from the November 08 O’Reilly conference in SF: Nancy Duarte, Duarte.com Cathy Brooks (Seesmic), Penny Herscher (FirstRain, Inc.) Xeni Jardin (Boing Boing tv), Mary Meeker (Morgan Stanley) Anne Wojcicki (23andMe) Carol McCall (Humana Inc. ), Arianna Huffington (The Huffington Post), April Allderdice (MicroEnergy Credits) Rebecca… Continue Reading

So next week is the annual John Battelle/Tim O’Reilly conference, Web 2.0 Summit, and I am thrilled to join thousands of other digerati in San Francisco on November 5th, 6th, and 7th in what has to be the most somber and down to earth incarnation of this conference in recent years.  After all, as the… Continue Reading

It was thrilling when uber hard working Rafat Ali and team had the chance to cash out with a sale of Paid Content, and cool to see their conference business expand, but the recent problems I’ve had accessing the site make me wonder if one of those behind the scenes consolidating servers corporate endeavors is… Continue Reading

“My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.”… Continue Reading

This email is going out to NewsChallenge participants today: The deadline for the Knight News Challenge is nearly here! This year’s contest, giving away $5 million to digital news innovators, closes to all applications in just three days — at midnight on November 1st. You can’t win if you don’t submit an application! Remember that… Continue Reading

“This is the perfect storm for garage sales. We’re coming off a 20-year boom in which consumers filled ever-bigger houses. Now people need cash because of the bust.” –” Gregg Kettles, visiting professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who studies outdoor commerce, quoted in a NYTimes article about the thrift economy and the… Continue Reading

If you worked for a big company you hopefully have a severance package; if you worked for a start-up, or a small company, you hopefully had some stock worth something.  Either way, if you’re unemployed and looking for a job, or going out on your own, managing your spending is going to matter.  For one… Continue Reading