I just spent another amazing weekend at Foo Camp. It was even better then last year. Congrats to Tim and the rest of the O'Reilly gang for putting on an awesome event. The quality of conversation and interactions at Foo are second to none.
My brother has a new blog about traveling before college, it is pretty cool. He writes about he adventures in south America and Asia. I figured I would send him some link juice and maybe a user or two. His blog is certainly worth a look if you are interested in taking a gap year
I attended the Churchill Club's Ton Ten Tech Trends last night. It was a good event with:
Very top level stuff but certainly worth paying very close attention to.
I have been telling people for a while that the Big Media companies are about to make a huge move into the online space. Well, it looks like they are coming: CBS just acquired CNET. Now the interesting question will be what the other big bad old media companies do. It looks like we are in for an exciting summer.
The guys over at Venture Hacks have a post today about setting valuation on early stage companies. Since I know a little about this, I left this comment:
I would argue that early stage entrepreneurs should avoid valuation at all costs. You have nothing to gain from setting a valuation when the company is nothing but an idea and devoted people. If you set it too low you are losing money. But, if you set it too high you are going to have huge problems when it comes time to raise the next round. It is a lose-lose either way for the the entrepreneur. You are much better off using a note with a cap. Protect your investors on the upside- which is what they are looking for with a set value- without putting yourself in the position of having to maybe take a down round.
I really can't think of a single good reason why an early stage entrepreneur would want to set a value on a company that is nothing more then an idea.
Things have been so busy with Triggit since we launched that it has been really tough to do much more then hang on for the ride. Sadly this blog has been neglected. Its a great problem to have and I have been having a ton of fun. I'll be back posting here after things settle down a little.
Triggit is in the press today. Check out these stories. It is great to be out of stealth and showing people what we do.
Techcrunch's Review of Triggit
GigaOm's Review of Triggit
VentureBeat's review of Triggit
WebWare's review of Triggit
Shoemoney's review of Triggit
Ajaxian's review of Triggit
WebWare's Tumbler Review
Mashable's Review of Triggit
Schrade Blog's Review of Triggit
Alex Iskold of Adaptive Blue has a great post today on Read Write Web today. In his post Alex provides a brief overview of the semantic web, and comes to the conclusion that computer assisted contextual links have the greatest current potential to take semantic technologies to the mainstream. While it is certainly not surprising that he came to this conclusion, since Adaptive Blue is in the business of contextual linking, I think he is thinking in the right direction. We have a long way to go in bringing semantic technologies to bear, but it looks like computer assisted contextual linking has a lot of potential to make the web an exponentially more interesting and exciting place. To be able to identify, link and present related content across sites and accessing disparate data sources could take the web to a whole new level.
Keep up the great work Alex.
I am not sure why he wasted his great hoax on such a slow news day but FSJ has pulled off a beautiful gambit.
If you haven't seen it, check out his posts:
Here where he claimed to have been weighing an offer to shut down the blog in exchange for a buyout from Apple...
and Here where he follows it up with teeth-gnashing about the legal heavy handedness of apple lawyers, and the happy conclusion in one day where it all wrapped up. A slow news day captured beautifully.
Scott has a great post about it here
Advertising as entertainment is taking another interesting turn. If you haven't already seen it you should take a look at Elf Yourself. Its stupid, silly, worthless and blowing up the charts to become a huge website. Advertising as a method of capturing attention is taking some interesting turns these days..
Happy Holidays
