Technology Archives - Page 35 of 39

Techdirt Greenhouse: It’s all about the Participation

Posted on June 13, 2006 ·

The success of traditional conferences largely depends on the quality of the presentations: that’s not the case with the Techdirt Greenhouse. Techdirt’s secret sauce is to minimize “presentation” time, and get everyone involved in lively discussions/debates. Add to this an innovative scheme of randomly rotating participants through different groups, and you get maximum networking effect. A perfect mix for a great unconference.

But instead of me describing the “secret”, get it right from the source: Mike Masnick, Techdirt’s Founder & CEO was interviewed on CNET/News.com.

The crowd was a mix of startup-types, service providers to them (consultant, lawyer..etc), venture capitalists, media types…a good mix. For example at one of the breakout-groups tackling the issue of “What is the place for traditional media in an environment where the public is making their own entertainment” we mostly had entrepreneurs, but there were 2 participants representing “old media’, which provided a good balance.

The quality of the presentations or simply their relevance to the predefined, more generic question is always the unknown factor, and this event was no exception.

Jeff Nolan does a good job of explaining what went wrong with the first presentation. Before we knew what was going on, we were deep into looking at features, the presenter typing away live, when all she had was 5 minutes. I would have spent that 5 minutes describing the business, the problem I am solving – basically focus on the what and why, rather than the how.

I few other presenters insisted on using their Powerpoint slides, despite Techdirt’s explicit request not to. Mike, if you don’t mind me giving unsolicited advice, these are issues you can handle in advance: guide your speakers whether you expect a product demo or overall intro, and most importantly, stick to your own rule: No Powerpoint means exactly that, No Powerpoint. If someone cannot speak for 5 minutes without the slide, they are likely not the right presenters, so move on.

Initially I was baffled at some of the selected presenters/subjects, for example Alignent, a company developing a process management/control product around innovation at large corporations. Now, in my world, innovation and structure, process, control do not belong in one sentence. (see Jackie’s comments here). But it turned out to be a good choice, after all, the key tenet of the Greenhouse is that it’s not about the presentations: we spend most of our time on the breakout groups, and this presentation provoked quite a lively discussion.

I will write separately about some of the discussion topic I lead or participated in .

While on the subject of discussion I’d like to believe it’s not over .. in fact we just started something that will live on. The intensity level of the debates, the energy level in the rooms was fantastic, and we often felt we were just warming up by the time we had to wrap up… so why lose that energy? In fact why not widen the group of people and involve many others who could not make it California last Saturday? Everybody, please feel invited to participate: the Techdirt Greenhouse Wiki is open, waiting for you. There are two ways to contribute: adding comments to the relevant pages, which is like using a typical discussion forum, or clicking on “Edit” which allows you to modify the original entry. Yes, there are no controls – it’s an open social experiment. (Thanks to WetPaint, whose easy-to-use platform will launch in the very near future)

Summing it up: I enjoyed the the second Techdirt Greenhouse just as much as the first one: Mike, when is the third one?

Update (6/14): Special thanks to Sean Murphy, who keeps on updating the wiki with valuable information, and is doing a lot of mundane background work, to include all attendee’s URL’s, links to presenting companies sites, as well as related ones.

Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Technology ·

Time to Load up on Flat Panels?

Posted on June 12, 2006 ·

DisplaySearch reports that “LDC desktop monitor market seasonal decline was greater than had been forecast for the first quarter of 2006….As LCD panel production continued to ramp in the quarter, LCD monitor panel inventories continued to build“

Hm, sounds like a buying opportunity… I want to see hot flat screen deals

Talk about deals, Dell p***ed me off. Not in the personal way they did with Jeff Jarvis, just with their print promotions. The May catalogue arrived in the last days of the month (this is by design, Dell prints delivery date of May 24-26 on it), with travel and everything it took me a little while before checking it, but by now the promo codes are not valid, and the deals online are far worse than in the catalogue.

Now, I understand sometimes “hot online deals” only last hours… but shouldn’t print media promotions last a few weeks? Oh, well, I am not getting a Dell.

Update (6/13): Read Techdirt on Dell.

Technorati : Flat screens, LCD Monitors, dell, dell discount, dell promotion

Filed Under: Misc, Technology ·

Microsoft – Adobe: Much Ado About Nothing

Posted on June 2, 2006 ·

There is a lot of fuss about Adobe blocking Microsoft’s plans to incorporate “save to PDF” functionality in Office 2007.

Much Ado About Nothing. Legally Adobe owns the PDF format, but it has long been openly available.

A little known fact: the first company breaking Adobe’s monopoly may have been Intuit, introducing TurboTax print-to-pdf years ago. I’m sure they had a deal for that with Adobe, but I doubt they considered the fact that the PDF driver remains on one’s computer years after Turbotax has been uninstalled, and is quite accessible to any other programs. But that’s history now.

Today any Mac OSX user can save to PDF, OpenOffice creates PDF formats, Zoho Writer (which I recently featured), Writely both do it. And if you’re still stuck in Microsoft-prison, there are a number of free PDF-creators, including my favorite Paperless Printer which can convert almost any application data to PDF, HTML, DOC, Excel, JPEG or BMP including those created with drawing, page-layout, or image-editing programs.

Adobe, it’s gone, let go of it! Be happy to have become the standard, which allows you to charge for extra functionality. End of story.

Tags: adobe, microsoft, pdf, office2007, msoffice, openoffice, zoho, zohowriter, writely, paperless printer, zoliblog

Filed Under: Business, Software, Technology ·

TiEcon 2006: Software Luminaries Panel : The Software Richter Scale: 1, 3 or 7?

Posted on May 16, 2006 ·

Liveblogging the Software Luminaries Panel at TiEcon 2006. (Note: I am obviously publishing this, as well as other TiEcon posts after the Conference, but will only do very basic editing, and some linking, essentially posting my original notes. I’ve also deviated from the role of passive note-taker here, as this is a subject where I am somewhat competent, and can’t help but insert my own comments here and there – you will see those in italics. I invite Panelist, participants to feel free and correct / add to my notes in the form of blog comments. Thanks).

There were parallel sessions run with industry luminaries in ballrooms next to each other. Moderator M.R. Rangaswami opened on the humorous side: the audience picked the right session, as he peeked into the next room where the Semiconductor luminaries session would take place, and saw a sign there saying “semi-luminaries” 🙂 M.R. is Co-Founder of the Sand Hill Group and host of the recent Software 2006 conference (an annual event). .

As introduction he uses his Software 2006 slides about Software’s quiet revolution. Three major realities:

Changes represented by SaaS , Open Source, while CIO’s indicate increased spending on software.
Real business is in the Enterprise (but consumer technologies find their way into the Enterprise)
Thriving ecosystem critical

Panelist(s)

Larry Augustin , Angel Investor, Founder VA Linux, SourceForge …etc.
Amit Chatterjee , VP Strategy SAP
Mark Gorenberg , Partner Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Jason Maynard , Research Analyst Credit Suisse
Zach Nelson , President and CEO Netsuite
Sanjay Parthasarathy , Corporate Vice President Microsoft Corp. (Chief Evangelist of Microsoft Church)

Starting with a few canned questions for warmup, then taking audience questions.

Question: Will there be a billion-dollar software company in SaaS?

Jason: Yes, Salesforce, NetSuite to begin with.. Client-server, on-premise screwed customers, overpromised, underdelivered. SaaS will be huge, it has barely scratched the surface so far.

Mark: Agrees. Hummer Winblad did 12 pure-play SaaS investments. SaaS is most disruptive. Siebel was the uncontested market leader and the appearence of Salersforce.com killed it. (I can’t help but insert my own opinion here: Sure, Salesforce squeezed Siebel from the bottom up, but two other factor were just as significant in their demise: the “overpromise, underdeliver” syndrome, i.e. customer dissatisfaction after expensive and lengthy projects; and the fact that SAP that already owns the Enterprise market significantly improved their own CRM offering, and the integrated approach offers a better value proposition to their customers then the standalone Siebel CRM-only solution).

Sanjay: We’ve already seen billion-dollar SaaS companies: eBay and Google, just not in Enterprise.

Amit: SaaS by itself is not a business model… for larger organizations hybrid models work better …with increasing process complexity and integration requirements there is a need for a mix of on-demand and on-premise solutions.

Question specifically to Zach: Larry Ellison (Oracle CEO, owns over 50% of NetSuite, which is expected to pull off a billion-dollar IPO this year) stated that SaaS is only for SMB’s not for large corporations. Is that so?

Zach: He is generally trying to avoid speaking for Larry. (They clearly have an interesting relationship, Larry has to be somewhat anti-SaaS, and Zach can’t really get into a public debate with his absolute majority owner. It seems to me that Larry is betting on two horses at the same time) Nobody will switch software because they want to, or because SaaS ismore fashionable. First and foremost customers have a functionality challenge, which the software company has to meet.. Functionality is the primary consideration, and the delivery model supports it.

Sanjay: We shouldn’t be talking about software as a service, it’s actually software + service.

Mark: A number of companies are selling to both small and large organizations. What’s exciting is that this is the very first time when medium sized companies can get the same functionality as the large guys! ( I tend to think the same is true for small businesses, in fact that may be an even more radical change, and it’s a mistake that analysts often only think of the midsize market when they speak SMB )

Jason: Disagrees with SAP’s Amit on the notion of need for hybrid. Software needs to become a utility. There is no room for innovation in most corporate IT budgets, 80% of which is spent on running the infrastructure. Let go of thee server! I know it’s hard …it’s your baby … you may get visitation rights at your SaaS provider:-) (huge laughter at audience)

MR makes a comment/question on recent high-profile outages in the industry, largely at salesforce.com but elsewhere, too.

Zach: Not all delivery models are created equal. Sforce runs on “big iron”, (find article here) while Netsuite opted for a grid-like system based on cheap boxes. When a salesforce.com server goes down, it effects the majority of customers, when NetSuite loses a box, a maximum of 50 customers are effected. This setup also helps rolling out new versions smoothly, in a phased fashion, while Salesforce.com has to do it in “big bang” style. Zach predicts Salesforce moving to a grid-like environment soon.

Larry: It’s about ease of adoption. Software has become a lot easier to create, it’s acquisition is a painful process, and that’s the part that SaaS improves.

Sanjay: Service orientation helps picking best-of-breed solutions, mix and mach. The current trend of consolidation in the industry is actually contrary to it.

Amit: SOA is critical, some services in the cloud, others in the enterprise.

Zach: Picking composite applications to mix and match is difficult, especially as business processes get more complex.. Composite transactional applications are a fantasy – far to difficult to synchronize. Example: Microsoft CRM and Great Plains are hard to synchronize, even though MS owns the code for both. Integrated transactional systems are unbeatable – that’s why SAP owns the Enterprise.

Question: Consolidation, Oracle acquisitions .. getting bigger and bigger – is there room left for innovation?

Larry: Oracle is buying since it’s not doing a great job of innovation itself. Startups have the benefit of new distribution mechanisms, SaaS, Open Source, user base helps them.

Amit: Lot of room for innovation by partners id they participate in verticals. He “only” has 6000 developers, cant cover the whole world.(audience laughter) Larry interrupts: I’d like that problem, I have 12. With 6000 how can you NOT cover the world? (even bigger laughter). Amit: Citibank has more developers then SAP.

Question about data privacy, Security.

Zach: Especially for small, midsized businesses NetSuite’s security is better than running on local server next to coffee machine.

Larry: Security is still a huge unsolved issue.

Sanjay: The real data challenge is mashing structured and unstructured data. 80% of corprate data is unstructured without business processes: xml is the glue.

Larry: Html amplified the problem of huge amount of unstructured data, the future will be to move to have data in xml and html is just the presentation.

Question: Are there profitable SaaS companies?. Sforce is barely profitable.

Mark: Salesforce.com is barely profitable, .Rigthnow is making decent profit, employees (?_) is largely profitable.

Jason: Many are profitable, SaaS lowers the cost of distribution – there is price elasticity in the market. SaaS also helps reducing R&D, support costs – salesforce only needs to support one version, SAP, Oracle multiple ones.

Zach: When he joined NetSuite their sales model was direct. Now with success ecosystem develops. Typically start with direct, build customer base, then ecosystem develops.

MR‘s comment/question: Software 2006 had a panel: Open Source: money machine or money pit?

Larry: Open Source is a young model, there can not be a lot of profitable companies yet, Red Hat beng an outstanding example. On $10M in R&D Salesforce.com spends 100M in Sales & Marketing.. It’s cheaper to create software then sell it > Open Source helps eliminating the huge sales costs.

Jason concurs, sales is 80% of cost. Enterprise Software companies don’t make a lot of profit on software sales, their profit comes from maintenance. Smart Open Source companies jump out of this expensive sales cycle and focus on support only. They will increase botttom line while reducing top line.

Larry: There is also a culture change: people did not understand software, they had to be educated and had to pay for that education. Now everyone is computerized, carries a PDA, cellphone ..etc. This means the education need is reduced, good opportunity for Open Source’s pull model.

Question: SAP , MSFT will you be giving away your products free?

Sanjay: Fuzzy answer on giving away software and promoting distribution.

Amit: Support, explore Open Source, but not fully embrace. SAP does not have the distribution channel that MS has. SAP needs to build ecosystem.

Question: Will MS look into buying SAP? Tried. Jason: pragmatic approach: it won’t happen, if for no other reason, the fight with the EU..

Question: What Open Source opp’s exist?

Mark: Recently made two investments into companies that develop applications for the lamp stack. Issue: IP ownership, integration. Sales issue: agree with the Open Source effect on lead generation, but how to close sales? What happens when you move to markets that people don’t understand?

Question: any Open Source companies to go public?

Jason: Potentially MySQL. Markets pay 10-times sales, 30-times cashflow. Fewer, but better , more sustainable companies.

Question (more a remark) on SAP’s new compensation plan. Hasso Plattner recently announced he is aiming at doubling the market, if they achieve that, the top 100 execs will make 100’s of millions. Is that a realistic objective?

Amit: The announcement certainly helps: -) but the true driver for growth is product innovation.

MR askes the panelists for their final remark

Mark: We’re in the greatest disruptive times. Hummer Winblad invested more in the past few years than in the previous 17..

Sanjay: Software industry does not spend enough time with users.

Larry: Fantastic time to be a software entrepreneur. Small team , little $, reach to market – not possible 10 years ago

Zach: It’s a great time to start a software company, when you do it, remember you need a great application to run the business. (audience laughter; good plug for NetSuite …possibly the last one before going into pre-IPO silent period?)

Amit: Customers matter. SAP needs to focus more on the ecosystem.

Jason: MS announced spending additional $2B on emerging areas. Look at areas they are spending… go in those “white spaces”, since they are good in seeing the opportunities, but can’t exploit them properly.

Tags: tiecon, tiecon2006, conference, entrepreneurship, technology, innovation, venturecapital, vcfunding, startups, forum, paneldiscussion, netsuite, salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle, Siebel, software2006, CRM, ERP, enterprisesoftware, SaaS, opensource, SMB, SME, Microsoft, zoliblog

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, Open Source, SaaS, SMB / SME, Software, Startups, Technology ·

TiEcon 2006: Web 2.0 – Why Now?

Posted on May 16, 2006 ·

Liveblogging Mike “TechCrunch” Arrington‘s Web 2.0 – Why Now? panel at TiEcon 2006. (note: I am obviously publishing this, as well as other TiEcon posts after the Conference, but will only do very basic editing, and some linking, essentially posting my original notes. My added comments appear in italics)

Panelists:

Manish Chandra: Founder, CEO Kaboodle, 5 jobs so far, started at Intel, then 4 startups
Emily Melton: Associate, Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Left DFJ in 2002, re-joined 2005
Kevin Rose, Founder, Digg. Prior to that Hosted national TV program, TechTV
Tony Conrad, Founder, CEO Sphere, also Investor
Jeff Nolan, SAP , Apollo Group,the “Attack Oracle” team (he actually has this on his business card), until recently with SAP Ventures, top blogger.

Mike: For warmup, let’s talk about the individual companies. Kaboodle is basically bookmarking, social shopping. Statistics show that 80% of all Internet activity is research, not transactions. Kaboodle does not close deals, trying to make money on research side. How did Manish come to the idea?

Manish: Was remodeling home, a lot of pain to find stuff – hence the idea (do all consumer sites really start based on personal experience, or are these just sellable stories?)

Emily: Since she is a VC, will talk about a portfolio company that she’s a Board Member of: Tagworld. Mike: That’s a little startup that’s going up against MySpace and others – how can it have any chances? (The little guy vs. big guy issue came up in the morning session as well) and Emily’s reaction is similar: people want to have presence on the web, relationships ..etc – Tagworld provides tools.

Mike: Huge fan of Digg:. 50% of TechCrunch’s traffic comes from digg. TechCrunch has significant traffic on its own, but when one of his articles gets digged, the combined traffic typically brings startup sites down. Kevin: It started as an experiment giving power back to community. Coolness is not determined by editors like it is on Slashdot, but by member votes – “diggs”. It’s also a social application, digging an item also bookmarks it to your name, you can share, set up friends…etc.

Tony: Sphere, the new blog search engine. Previously he invested in Oddpost, (acquired by Yahoo, fastest return of all his investments), that’s when idea started. He saw when celebrity bloggers like John Battelle and Dave Viner blogged about them, their traffic spiked: that was his “aha” moment re. blog-power. Blog search engines typically bring posts in reverse chronological order… trying to dig up interesting stuff using a more intelligent algorithm.

Jeff didn’t get to talk about his company (SAP), since it’s not exactly a startup or a Web 2.0 🙂 However, previously as VC he backed several startups and in his current role (or outside that role?) he is SAP’s internal Web 2.0 evangelist.

After the warmup round Mike moved on to audience questions.

Question to Mike on criteria for picking what gets covered in TechCrunch. –

Mike: anything new, exciting Web 2.0-related. What is Web 2.0? He has a user-focused definition. Web 2.0 is about conversation. In the years after the crash the Internet did not “go away”, innovation continued behind the scenes. Joe Kraus’s famous quote about how cheap it is to build a company (new cheap tools).

Kevin: Spent $99 on a shared server, used Open Source stuff … total pre-launch cost for Digg was less than $1K.

Jeff: LAMP stack important. Php, Python powerful. Tension between what developers built and what users want resolves itself in the increasing number of mashups.

Emily: There is a major mindset-change. everyone has access to computers, pdas, cellphones .etc. Even the kids have web presence. It’s become a lot easier to self-publish and even build applications.

Question: Is Web 2.0 real or a bomb waiting to go off?

Mike: There is real innovation. Web services, mashups.

Jeff: Web 2.0 is not really new, it’s the realization of everything that’s been happening for 5 years. Barrier of entry for startups is low.

Manish: Closed platforms are out of fashion , the trend to opening up leads to mashups. Power goes back to the individual. People create new shopping pages of their liking on Kaboodle. This is like walking into a store and rearranging the shelves the way we want it.

Tony: Brings up the example of the Chicago Crime Scenes mashup. Nice application, hugely popular, even useful, but likely not a business. Business opportunities are for those that open up their API. The Blog space brings about businesses (e.g Technorati) with significant core IP, but most mashups are just nice presentation layers without core IP.

Question: How to market? Importance of early adopters?

Mike: refers to the Same 50K people meme – echo chamber. TechCrunch readers themselves often re-blog his posts. They are all early adopters, which is demonstrated by the browser stats: 65% use FireFox.

Emily: VC’s also check out TechCrunched applications – then forget them, don’t come back (I have positive personal experience on this, when VC’s who earlier heard about SQLFusion came back with renews interest after the Open Source Fusion beta. So it does not hurt to to get on VC’s “keep an eye on” list). Emily: Simply quoting high registration numbers is not compelling to her – repeat user base is.

Manish: Blogs can create good initial exposure, then incresingly use SEO, SEM… early days 6-7% was organic search (google, yahoo), now it is 20%. Real viral effect occurs when people start marketing your product.

Tony: Despite the criticism, the early adopter crowd makes sense, after all we’re in tech businesses, of course we attract the geek crowd… like if you’re in the sailing business, you go after sailing enthusiasts.

Mike: Asking Panel for example of successful marketing that gets beyond early adopters.

Tony: Flickr is definitely way beyond the early adopter crowd. Mike: Flickr is geeky, overall it has a lot less users than Yahoo photos (even though Yahoo acquired Flicker, they are treated as two separate domains for now), or even Easyshare by Kodak.

Short debate between Tony , Jeff, Mike on the role /importance of early adopters. Tony : blogging needs to get into topics that attract the mainstream, be it the Chicago Cubs, christianity .. whatever.

Manish: Skype forced adoption by uncles & aunts in Chicago, Ohio …etc. since it has a very attractive value proposition compared to expensive telephone services.

Jeff: many companies are building features ONLY for the early adopters – they will not transition to mass market, will not become businesses, just features.

Kevin: Digg has 9 million page views, 1 million unique users a day, with $0 spent on marketing. He still thinks they are early adopters, the site hasn’t hit mainstream yet.

Tony : Sphere received 1 million pageviews in the first week, from 136K unique users.

Jeff: Blogs are key in early adoption: Even if you’re not a techie you will search on a car, a new TV ….etc, you’ll get blog entries mixed with other search results (My personal experience confirms this, blogs even penetrated news at “elite” positions).

Tony: Bloggers have huge influence. Rob Hof is here in the audience, he is the Silicon Valley bureau chief for Business Week and also writes a personal blog. Jeff: Matt Marshall is here, too – I don’t read the Merc anymore, but SiliconBeat.

Manish: Print media still has bigger effect. He suggests Web 2.0 companies should look at both print media and blogs for marketing.

Mike: The New York Times is crap. .

Question: Can open API’s can bite you in the ass? (pardon my French, I’m just quoting here) Giving away your best stuff, people won’t come back to your site – i.e. Google or Craigslist if the mashup is better.

Manish : Open API’s bring huge adoption. Get users first then figure out how to make money.

Mike: At the same time ate least you can’t have negative margin – this could be Youtube’s problem. There are essentially three types of business models:

advertising revenues
fees
no revenues at all

Tony: There were debates in the early days about email as a business, since it’s supposed to be free. But would Yahoo exists without email?

Jeff on network effect: Flickr, del.icio.us are used in a lot of other applications..

Question: Is the barrier of entry different between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0?

Mike: It’s become easy to to recreate applications. I could hire offshore programmers and recreate Digg cheaply (especially considering Kevin’s own statement that it cost less then $1K to launch). This is where the network effect and being first to market becomes important. We need to understand how network effect and first to market are related. Tony has the 8th or 9nth search engine (Sphere), Emily’s Tagworld is also a “latecomer” yet they have a chance to make it, they are not dependent on the network efffect of the huge existing user base, and they have new IP. Digg is a different story, it’s not core IP, it’s all about the huge network effect.

Kevin: There are too many copycats doing he same things…like online notepads… Disagreeing with Mike, does not see value in being a me-too, startup should do new things.

Out of time, (session got cut short due to security for the Schwarzenegger keynote) Mike asked all panelists to name their favorite Web 2.0 companies (except their own). The list:

Flickr, Myspcae, Digg, Digg Spy, (yes it is part of Digg, but Emily made the point of specifically listing Spy) TechCrunch, Youtube, Akismet, WordPress, Del.ici.us, Riya, Skype.

If you were a panelist /participant in the discussion and I misinterpreted you, please feel free to correct / expand on your ideas in the form of comments. Thanks.

Tags: tiecon, tiecon2006, conference, entrepreneurship, technology, innovation, startups, marketing, forum, paneldiscussion, techcrunch, kaboodle, digg, sphere, web2.0, tagworld, oddpost, opensource, mashups, flickr, networkeffect, blogs, blogging, zoliblog

Filed Under: Bay Area, Blogging, Business, Marketing / PR, Open Source, Software, Startups, Technology ·

TieCon 2006: John Doerr, VC, Enviromentalist, GreenTech Evangelist

Posted on May 13, 2006 ·

(Updated)
I’m at TieCon 2006 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Trying to park was a nightmare: 15 minutes circling in the parking structure. Last time I was here for Software 2006, I parked right next to the stairs. Finally got in, sitting in the back of the conference room (power source!), flip my laptop on, and Voila! – free wi-fi available… as it should be (at Software 2006 it cost $26/day)

Michael Malone, introducing John Doerr just made the same comment – he parked in Great America’s overflow parking …. 3,000+ participants. Entrepreneurial spirit is definitely back.

Raw notes from the discussion with John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, a Silicon Valley VC Legend:

If you’re thinking of coming to KP just for money, it’s expensive: don’t come. Come for the networking resources, experience.

This being TiE, a few India-pecific questions. Response: Kleiner backed 100 companies over the past 4 years and half of those have Indian leadership. They are passionate, have a sense of wanting to give back to India and the world. KP is also active in in India, which happens to produce the largest pool of engineering pool in he world, English is spoken and it’s a democracy. KP made two recent investments in India.

New subject: Technology – what’s coming next? John Doerr: Biology. This is what he really wants to talk about, now he gets passionate. He talks about soon-to-debut “Inconvenient Truth” and shows a few powerful slides about Greenland shrinking, due to ice melt. If Greenland melted all, the oceans would rise by 20 feet. Just how much is that? – we get a feel when he shows a few slides of the Bay Area – oops, there goes the convention center we’re in…

So what can we do about it: need to reduce carbon emission. Opportunity for engineers, innovators, politicians: get efficient, produce growth requiring less energy, less pollution.

Kleiner Perkins has invested in 7 stealth GreenTech companies in the past 5 years. – $57M total invested in those. Huge potential business, ROI eventually may be bigger than “traditional” tech. areas, but wait for payback longer.

Tom “World is Flat” Friedman’s next book, Green is the New Red-White-blue: the current biggest enemy facing this country is not Islamism, Communism, or other such ideologies, but Petrolism. We need petrol tax to encourage getting energy efficient. It takes guts, not for the “girlie man”. (Timely quote from the Gubernator due to appear on a panel this afternoon.)

We’ve had no major innovation in energy for the past 30 years. China has higher automotive emission standards than the USA. If India and China develops the way the US has, we’re choking the world. We need to innovate.

Michael Malone: “you’re working with your heart, not your mind”. John Doerr: no, this will be the largest economic opportunity in the world.

On to the issue of the Pandemic Fly: Something of this magnitude happens 2-3 times in a century. Shows some slides of the devastation of the Spanish Flu. What can entrepreneurs do? Improve surveillance and diagnostics. KP backed startups working on inexpensive diagnostic devices, and vaccine expected to be 10 times more effective than Tamiflu. He is calling for backing entrepreneurs in this area. Distribution, pricing: give it away free or cheap in the developing world, sell it in the developed world..

On Social Entrereneurship: double bottom line. Build a sustainable operation and eliminate poverty. John Doerr has some more personal involvement in this area, not through Kleiner.

Politics: Silicon Valley traditionally was doing best by staying out of politics. John sees politics playing a bigger role. Advocate for policies that reduce the climate crisis and increase energy innovation.” Let’s have a President who will make “green ” a priority.

Social Entrepreneurs build should build scalable and sustainable businesses, but they don’t have to be profitable, just self-sustaining. Do you want to built an inconsequential Enterprise Software company or do something big? (This reminds me of Steve Jobs famous challenge to John Sculley: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want to change the world?”)

In conclusion, John Doerr sums up what he is passionate about: “I want to revolutionize the energy industry, make investments in : fuel cell, solar, bio-fuels.

John’s call for action to the audience: If you’d like a copy of these slides, email me the titles of your three favorite books.

References:

Tags: tiecon, tiecon2006, conference, entrepreneurship, socialentrepreneur, greentech, cleantech, environment, pollution, pandemic, technology, innovation, venturecapital, johndoerr, zoliblog

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Politics, Social Networking, Startups, Technology ·

$250K Buys a lot of Fahrvergnügen

Posted on April 30, 2006 ·

Oh, boy, and I thought $85K was way too much for a Volkswagen .. was I wrong! Apparently you can spend $250K to get your very personal Fahrvergnügen (not to be confused with this)

That’s how much Ron Patrick, owner of Sunnyvale, CA Engine Control and Monitoring spent to build his jet-propelled VW bug. “The purpose of this car is to have fun and be stupid,” he says with a laugh. “This is entertainment. It’s a toy, a toy for silly boys.”

The Flying (well, almost) Bug is street-legal, but he cannot fire up the jet… although “Patrick says that once in a while he puts on a crash helmet (mainly as a sound muffler), takes the car out on nearby Highway 237 in the wee hours of the morning and fires it up for a brief and hopefully cop-free run.”

His next project: digging up his garden to build a missile silo. Can you spell Nucular Proliferation? He has already purchased an SA-2 for a thousand bucks at an abandoned Polish air base and is now trying to get it cleared through Customs. Good luck with that.

(source: SF Chronicle)

Update (5/9): See Matt Marshall’s post on the X1.

Tags: Fahrvergnügen, Fahrvergnugen, VW, Volkswagen, jet-propelled car, VW Bug, Car Enthusiast, Missile, Silo, Air-Defence, Humor, x1, zoliblog

Filed Under: Bay Area, Misc, Technology ·

Shut Up

Posted on April 17, 2006 ·

No wonder, check out the stat’s. (hat tip: Jeff Nolan)
(if the embedded video does not work in the feed, watch it here.)

Tags: Firefox, IE, IE6, IE7, browsers, browser wars, humor, youtube

Filed Under: Humor, Software, Technology ·

Online Backup and Desktop Search

Posted on April 12, 2006 ·

Friends Don’t Let Friends Lose Data says Chris, and I agree, so I followed his recommendation and signed up for the Mozy online backup service – now I can sleep at night. Previously I used FolderShare to sync data between my multiple PC’s, but now I am left with one laptop, so the free 2G storage and automated backup is now a real(data) life-saver.

However, I noticed it makes full backup every day, instead of doing it incrementally, as it’s supposed to, after the initial backup. Other users don’t seem to have this problem, which makes me look for the culprit elsewhere. I could not imagine (digital) life without Desktop Search anymore, and I tend to believe Copernic is by far better than any of the GoogleYahooMicrosoft products.

I wonder if Copernic Desktop Search causes files look “changed” during the reindex process – that would explain while they get backed up again. I am an early beta tester of their 2.0 release, so end up reindexing quite often.

This post is also an experiment in effectively using the “edge” – sure, I could go to Mozy’s site, register, describe the problem there, then go to Copernic and do the same, and probably play messenger-boy for a few rounds between the two companies – let’s see if they pick this up and find a resolution.

In the meantime I am patiently impatiently waiting for Box.net to add their long-awaited synchronization feature.

Tags: backup, data backup, online backup, data sync, data synhcronization, desktop search, copernic, copernic desktop search, cds, box.net, mozy

Filed Under: Blogging, Customer Service, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·