Lisa to Bloggers: In the absence of a repressive milieu your societal nature’s been co-opted.

So I get this question from my friend: 'Brij, what's up with blogging slogging?'
This friend got hit by news will find you trap and found this I-quit-blogging announcement by Jason Calacanis unnerving.
There have been rumblings of sorts on where this whole blogging slogging is going. Today also on Techmeme I saw two posts analyzing [...]

ConsumerWatchdog.org email campaign - Send Your Gasoline Bill To Congress!

Gas pump adventure continues.  With gallon costing close to $4.60 in California, this everyday pain is now ready to generate serious comedy (and political campaigns as well). 
I received this email (see below) from ConsumerWatchDog.org organization urging me to send complaints to  local congressmen. Which I am not sure I will do.
Email campaign is [...]

Formula - low cost, sell first, take innovation risk and run marathon

There is no ideal profile. Entrepreneurs can be gregarious or taciturn, analytical or intuitive, cautious or daring - Amar Bhide
Never met him personally but I have been following Sridhar Vembu’s companies for quite some time. First time in 2003, during my first startup project (AssuredWeb). Back then I was amazed by the business model of [...]

Advice on how to clear the market

Venture Hack has best advice on fund raising tactics and in particular I believe there is a big message in this insight -
You can’t clear the market in series
More so when we are faced with the combinatorial explosion of startup ideas.

Factoring in opportunity cost

Entrepreneurs essentially work for the market. Markets have opportunity cost which cannot always be measured in monetary terms.

Lot of my recent decisions were driven by highlighting the importance of opportunity cost. We have consciously moved away from our comfort zone and now placing all our bets in the high return( also high risk) initiatives.

Customer tool kits and context orchestration

Don Tapscott in Wikinomics:
Forget about static, immovable products. If your customers are going to treat products as platforms anyways, then you may as well get ahead of the game. Make your products modular, reconfigurable, and editable. Set the context for customer innovation and collaboration. Provide venues. Build user-friendly customer tool kits. Supply the raw materials [...]

Internet Is Dead, Boring And Half Of That Is Not In Your Language

Internet is all about numbers. Number of nodes connected, number of folks connecting to it, connectivity speed, number of applications, number of browsing hours and number of communication events going across it and many other related numbers.
All those numbers are growing and will increase dramatically as China and India gains broadband penetration. Population matters and [...]

You be the VC! We just need a geek Simon Cowell now

Bumped into this interesting description on MIT conference page

You Be the VC
Take one part venture capital firm and one part American Idol; mix them together and get You Be the VC. You Be the VC is a groundbreaking competition showcasing top entrepreneurs from around the globe. Leveraging crowd-sourcing methodologies and expert advisors, the companies [...]

First big Facebook application acquisition

Inside Facebook has the scoop on TripAdvisor acquiring Where I’ve Been for a whopping $3 million.
Having followed all the hoopla around F8 right from the begining I can say this is a beginning of a new type of startup building. Call it Startup-dgets (along the lines of widgets and pronounced like startup-jets). Speed of [...]

Parakey goes to Facebook

Justin Smith has a breaking news about Facebook acquiring Parakey:
Just received word from Facebook that the company has made its first acquisition: Parakey, a startup founded by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, co-founders of Mozilla Firefox.  Ross and Hewitt will join Facebook immediately to work on the Facebook Platform.
I have been following [...]