Ok – short post on a real pet peeve of mine. The word “data” is plural. See the following examples: Incorrect: Them data is cool! Correct: Them data are cool! It’s a minor annoyance and, coming from someone who can’t figure out when to use affect vs. effect, perhaps you should just ignore me . . . but really – data are plural.
Archives / February, 2005
NewsGator and VNU
Ok – I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I promised NewsGator that I wouldn’t forget to drop a post on their recently announced deal with VNU (see the press release here; Brad has a post on the announcement as well – view it here). The two companies are going to co-brand an RSS aggregator for 7 European markets(VNU is a big tech publishing house in Europe). It’s a great deal for both companies and an important step forward for NewsGator in their continued development. Someone asked me the other day with all the noise in the RSS aggregator market, what is going to set NewsGator apart? There are multiple parts to the answer to this…
Conveying Information Effectively
Here’s an interesting experiment to try. Get a friend. Think of a song (one that you would reasonably expect your friend to know as well). Tap along with your finger while you play the song to yourself in your head. Now ask your friend what song you were taping out. It turns out that the taper’s estimate of how easy it will be for someone to guess what song they are tapping is vastly greater than the success their friend will have in actually coming up with the correct song. The taper believes they are conveying much more information than they really are. (Apologies for not being able to find the actual study reference I was looking for – I couldn’t find it on Google…
A small step?
This is a totally vain story, but I’ve been asked about this a few times, so I’ll repeat it here – plus it goes to the heart of why I blog which is something I realized in looking over some of my posts that I haven’t been writing much about. (This reminds me that still haven’t finished my post on ‘is blogging about vanity?’ yet – not sure what’s keeping me from doing that . . .). Over the past couple of months I’ve been asked how I might measure my success as a blogger. I’m blogging for two primary reasons: 1) I want to make a name for myself. I’m a young VC who wants to stay in the…
What it takes to go public
I’ve sat through a few presentations by investment bankers recently on what it takes to go public (most recently at VC in the Rockies – see my post about the conference here). I thought I’d throw out some of my notes so you could see what I’m being told it takes to get public in the current market. The VCIR panel I sat through included some thoughts on the state of the m&a market, so I’ll include those notes as well. Company ‘Requirements’: – Revenue: ‘Bigger the better’; minimum of $60m/year annualized (so $15m/quarter at the time of the IPO; however 60% of 04’ IPO’s were < $100m in revenue (up from only 30% in the depths of the market);…
Who vs. Where
I recently wrote a blog – The Power of Location – about Quova (one of the companies I work with) and the idea of “place” on the Internet. In response, Dimitar Vesselinov (who has a great blog) dropped a couple of comments to the post. My sense is that not everyone pays attention to the comments section of blogs, so I thought I’d post the links he suggests here. I also want to be sure I’m clear on the differences between digital identity (the subject of Dimitar’s comments) and geolocation (the subject of my post) as well as how the two ideas overlap. First the comments. Below are some sites that Dimitar sent over for those interested in learning more…
Steppin’ Up
I took an important step in my life as a venture capitalist today when I attended my first board meeting as an actual board member (rather than a board observer – see my post on this distinction from last month). While the earth didn’t exactly shake off its axis, I can’t help but feel that today was a real milestone in my life as a venture capitalist. I’ve worked with a lot of companies since joining Mobius, but this is the first deal that is really my ultimate responsibility. Today’s board meeting wasn’t unlike the hundreds of other board meetings I’ve participated in over the past 3 years, but there was no question that there was something a little different…
Venture Capital in the Rockies
I spent the much of last week attending the annual venture conference sponsored by the Colorado Venture Capital Association. The purpose of the event is to attract out of state VCs to take a look at Colorado venture deals that are in the market (click here for a link to the companies that presented this year). I’ll talk about Colorado’s venture capital market in a separate post, but suffice it to say, it’s important to the local VC community to have financial support (at least on some deals) broader than the local community can provide. While each of us has relationships with firms out of state that we syndicate deals with, as a group this is our one annual chance…
The Masses Speak
A couple of days ago the following story hit my inbox from Marketwatch (story below, link here): WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — While you watch the Super Bowl, dozens of online-savvy consumers and Web loggers will be watching the Net to see how the game’s TV commercials are playing in Peoria. Intelliseek Inc. of Cincinnati and New Media Strategies of Arlington, Va., have lined up dozens of people to surf Web sites, blogs and message boards to get a fast read on the effectiveness and popularity of marketers’ commercials. With TV costing as much as $2. million for a 30-second spot, companies want to know whether their money was spent wisely. As people post comments about the ads on the Web, the…
The Power of Location
The Mobius web-site was spoofed recently. Someone – presumably looking to pass themselves off as a legitimate venture capitalist and needing a web-site to do so – copied our site and changed the name of the firm as well as some of the biographical information (contacts, team, etc). They even went so far as to pull live feeds from our site that updated our portfolio ticker. We looked up information on the domain on whois and on some of the registry sites, but the most interesting data came from one of our portfolio companies – Quova. Quova has mapped the IP space of the internet for physical location. If you give them an IP address, they can tell you where…