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30 Dec This post is from from my other blog here The WSJ has a good article on the " new VC" model. In a nutshell, since it takes a lot less to get a startup to traction now versus late 90's it has spawned a new age of VC'. Since I started and sold 2 companies during the "bubble of 90's era" I can give you some perspective as to what's cheaper and why is it a lot less expensive. The number 1 cost in any software / Internet startup is people (initially until you get traction). Another big area of cost is infrastructure and G&A etc.1.
29 Dec This post is from from my other blog here Lois Kelly talks about 10 ways to overcome the boss’ objections to social marketing. Most of the items are a good starting point if one of your 2008 goals is to engage with your customers by leveraging social media. There's one point that I disagree with though:
29 Dec This post is from from my other blog here  In a highly anticipated move to prevent multiple people from reading the same newspaper, the NAA (Newspaper Association of America) followed the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) in suing over 12 Million readers who purchased newspapers. NAA spokesperson Eyedon Knowitall said "People are purchasing our newspapers and tearing out sections to give it to others. This is not fair use". Going after key bloggers who quote sections of the newspaper in their online blog is the next anticipated move.Newspapers have been very concerned that like the RIAA they are under attack from bloggers and indifferent readers resulting in falling subscription rates. This in addition to several experts calling newspapers "vertical monopolies" has them in a very aggressive mode said Knowitall. The RIAA case in Arizona has been extensively reported by several notable newspapers. "Many bloggers were convinced after seeing the "BETA" mode on the NAA website that they had no clue what they were doing and still needed a lot to learn from the RIAA.
28 Dec
22 Dec This post is from from my other blog here If you have not seen the statistics yet, a quick preview:  1. US spends almost 16% of its GDP on healthcare - $2 Trillion. This equates to approximately $6697 per person. No other country spends more.2. Over 56% of us insured are covered by employer sponsored plans, about 30% by Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP. The rest (14%) are insured.3. Healthcare costs have been increasing 2.5% more than US GDP and more than double the rate of inflation over the last 30+ years.4. Spending on drugs (prescription) is about 10% of the total spend.There are 5 major constituents in the healthcare "space" - Patients, Providers (Physicians, Nurses, etc.), Payers (Insurance providers), Government & Pharma/Biotech/Drug companies. There are several others (Employers, etc., but the 5 major ones influence it to a large extent.The major trend is towards "consumerization" of healthcare - providing and arming patients with more information at their fingertips so they can make better choices. Hence online communities (where patients, doctors, etc.) can connect and get information quickly so they can make decisions or get second opinions.Over the next few weeks I will have a series of posts on the healthcare community space, but here are the companies I am reviewing.There are several (about 50) broad and niche sites focusing on several disciplines or diseases so its going to be difficult to categorize them. For policy information I recommend the Healthcare Blog. Others talking about it more eloquently than I do are Paul Krugman and also do visit the Kaiser Foundation.Here's the list of communities that I have reviewed. There are several more for sure, but I am looking at comScore and other metrics to get a sense for the ones with traction / traffic before I dig deeper.
21 Dec
20 Dec This post is from from my other blog here Indians have founded more engineering and technology companies in the U.S. during the past decade than immigrants from Britain, China, Taiwan and Japan combined (Source: Where The Engineers Are, Vivek Wadhwa, 2007).
20 Dec This post is from from my other blog here Following up from my Moving away from Office on the desktop to Office on the cloud, where I wanted to give up Word, Excel and PowerPoint, today I completely switched off from Microsoft Outlook. Cold turkey. Gone. Dead. End of Outlook.Moved to Google Applications for my domain. Done. (It was a lot of work though, changing MX records and CNAME records, etc.)No more desktop applications. Everything is in the "cloud".BTW I prefer Zoho applications to Google for now, (mostly for application offline support) but over time I can give up even that for Google applications only.Right now Zoho's my productivity application and Google's my organizer.
20 Dec This post is from from my other blog here The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two
20 Dec
20 Dec This post is from from my other blog here David Lazer has a great pointer to a NY Times article on Silicon Valley - Shaped by Technology and traffic.Some important quotes:“For a consumer Internet company, this is where everything happens,” he said. “It’s true that things can be done anywhere on the Internet, but at the end of the day it’s still a people business.” The shared backgrounds, interests and schools make for frictionless communication that fosters rapid innovation.“But in general, the nerds with minimal social lives like me are well down in the Valley, and the cool kids with the trendy glasses and Prada shoes who like to go to parties are in San Francisco,” Mr. Andreessen said in an e-mail message. “You can guess who has the leg up in building companies.” Now David's point , in particular caught my eye. The potential downside, one would think, is that these homogeneous clusters do not foster the innovation that is the result of different, complementary, backgrounds; of the recombination of existing ways of thinking (cf Reagans and Zuckerman 2001 on the role of diversity on teams)."I am torn on this one. On one hand its MUCH quicker to start a community when you have people with a lot of things in common. At the early stages of the community you need this "special bonding sauce" to keep people together. Once you get past that early stage, getting people with "clusters" and "more diversity" helps.What do you think?
20 Dec
19 Dec This post is from from my other blog here Christina Wodtke has a good (long, 73 slides) presentation on communities. Good place to start. 
19 Dec This post is from from my other blog here Forecaster Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service (SNS) has published his top ten predictions for next year. As a context for his predictions, Mark noted that IT spending outside the U.S. will help bolster companies with the U.S. economic growth slow
19 Dec This post is from from my other blog here Here's a list of events that are all focussed on online communities, social networks and social media for 2008.I will try and keep this updated as frequently as possible. Please let me know via email if you would like to see any event added.
19 Dec This post is from from my other blog here
18 Dec This post is from from my other blog here Our current system of health insurance and health care is financially unsustainable and threatens the health and financial security of the American people. Small-business owners and their employees are especially vulnerable to the weaknesses of our curren
18 Dec This post is from from my other blog here Reuters pictures for 2007. Cool list of about 20+ pictures. After that it get annoying.
18 Dec This post is from from my other blog here I have been a Google Reader user for little over a year now (Switched from My Yahoo!). Here's a picture of my Google Reader trends.  Here's what I think it tells about my reading habits:1. I read more on my Blackberry and Iphone than on my computer.2. I love everything about finances and investing - Notice Seeking Alpha, Business Week, Marketwatch and Economics on top.3. I still read more "Main stream media and influential bloggers" than individual blogs.4. I still like Fake Steve Jobs.What surprised me:1. The number of individual blogs I subscribe to is enormous - close to 250, but I still read more the main stream stuff. Wonder if its to do with the titles?2. The best way for me to catch up on technology and the valley is Techmeme. A year ago it was email to a bunch of friends weekly.3. I email more than I share blog posts. Still can't get many of my friends to switch to an RSS reader.My wife would have told me all this without the year of experimenting I guess.So what does your Google Reader tell you?
18 Dec This post is from from my other blog here Chip has a very good (I tend to agree with a few but not all) list of his contrarian views. Several self proclaimed pundits of social media, claim many things that I tend to agree initially but on further evaluation, notice its not the reality.E.g:1. Agree:
18 Dec This post is from from my other blog here As a creature of habit, most folks are just "happier" using Word, PowerPoint and Excel for productivity on the desktop. I said "happier", since I am not sure its about being happy anymore. I had a great discussion with Sridhar of Zoho at the office 2.0 conference about applications on the cloud.I have never purchased a computer so far for personal use alone. All of them have been provided by the company I worked for or in many cases (when I started my own company) had my co founder source for me. I admit all of them came with all the bells and whistles included - Office, Outlook etc.This week as I start again on my own I do have my old laptop 2003 DELL PC (yes its a PC and still works after all these years) and I have the same applications on them. I am inclined to use Google applications since I had a VERY bad experience with Office 2007. I am more of a keyboard user and the new 2007 suite made me unlearn a lot of keyboard strokes I had known and used for a long time.So I took the plunge and uninstalled Office 2003 from my laptop.A week of usage of Google applications and my top observations are:1. Its just simple. It has all the features I need and the ones it does not have I am beginning to not miss any more.2. Its much easier to share. I was sending my editorial calendar around (bad Mukund) via email as a PDF file, but I could have just as easily pointed folks to the online version.3. At some point my laptop will fail and when I get my new PowerBook Pro I doubt I'll ever go back to Office if its not already installed.My kids use the online Google docs (for fun typing stuff) and they dont notice that its not on the laptop.Its a matter of time is my sense. A long time (10-20 years) and many things will happen between now and then, but I like things on the cloud better.
17 Dec This post is from from my other blog here History and emergence of online communities catalogs the virtual interaction environment. Its old but a good starting point and fairly concise.http://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/paper/6%20Final%20Enc%20preece%20et%20al.pdf
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