Posts from April 2004

Back in 1999, we thought we should try incubating a company. It was all the rage at the time. I’ve since sworn it off and will rely on entrepreneurs to do what they do best and i’ll stick to the funding/mentoring part of the VC equation.

But it was a heady time. A guy named David Kent came to see me with an idea that he wanted to start a business around. He couldn’t be the entrepreneur because he was a practicing surgeon. David had a neat idea. He wanted to provide a free-email service for consumers that ran ads in the emails based on the content of the message. We bought into it. And incubated a company called FaveMail.

Needless to say, nobody has heard of FaveMail. Our execution stunk. The idea was years ahead of its time. And so we took the failed investment, used what was left of the business to buy a troubled email service provider called Bigfoot Interactive, brought in an experienced management team, and built a very nice company that is one of the leading email service providers. So there’s a happy ending to this story.

The lesson i take away from the whole thing is great ideas don’t make great investments – great entrepreneurs do.

You might think this post has to do with issues relating to racism. But you’d be wrong. Because my Uncle Tom has nothing to do with race relations.

But my Uncle Tom Engeman is probably one of the most recognized artists in the US. His work doesn’t hang in the MOMA or Met, but maybe it should. Tom’s art is ubiquitous and is known to all of us. Why? Because he designs stamps for the US Postal Service and has been doing it for years.

Here are some of his stamps. And this is but a very small sample that I got from Googling Tom. Try it yourself. I’d bet you’ve all seen at least one and probably more of these.

Apparently people are up in arms that Bob Dylan is hawking lingerie from Victoria’s Secret.

I love Bob Dylan and i find nothing wrong with this ad. In fact, i’d prefer to see ads like this on TV all the time.

Jeff Jarvis talks about John McCain’s comments on The Today Show. McCain, whom I like and admire, says we can’t leave Iraq.

Maybe he’s right.

But what I want to know is can we admit we were wrong to thumb our nose at our friends and allies? Can we do what it takes to get some help in Iraq? Can we let others have some say in what goes on there? Can we share the bloodshed? Can we do what it takes to let the Iraqis know that they are fighting the world instead of the jerks who run our country?

That’s what I want to know.

Babak Nivi, the primary blogger on Weekly Read, wrote recently that the next “killer app” will be written on OSX and one of his reasons was the excellent integration of VOIP and Video-OIP into the Apple OS.

While I don’t disagree with Babak’s assertion, I am not sure that the platform that the next killer app is built on is particularly relevant anymore.

And I think VOIP is a great example. Sure OSX has a great VOIP implementation, but as one of Babak’s readers points out, so does Windows CE. And there’s got to be some great open source libraries for VOIP that make it pretty simple to implement VOIP on any other platform that a developer might want to build on.

The reality is that core technologies like VOIP are getting commoditized more and more every day and the primary drivers of value in the technology marketplace are now applications of technology that solve real problems.

So I would not look at VOIP as an investment opportunity per se. But I would look hard for entrepreneurs who are using VOIP technologies to solve problems for businesses and consumers. If it costs almost nothing to allow two or more people who are connected via IP (wired, wireless, whatever) to talk to each other or even videoconference with each other, then what business problems does this solve? Are there problems in the healthcare system that can be solved with an elegant VOIP solution, are there problems in the financial services business that can be solved with VOIP, does my brother-in-law have a problem that VOIP will solve?

That’s how I am going to think about VOIP oppportunities. If they are built on OSX, great. But it won’t take much to port them to any other platform that matters. Look at iTunes.

John Battelle and Rafat Ali have deemed newsworthy the launch today of Revenue Sciences’ Audience Search product.

I am pleased at the increase in interest around behavioral targeting because i believe its the next big thing in online advertising.

I am somewhat biased because i am an investor in and on the board of Tacoda Systems, the market leader in behavioral targeting.

I think this is going to be a big year for behavioral and i am looking for lots of news from both Tacoda and Revenue Sciences over the next nine months.

I just bought a Panasonic HD Radio.

I was driving around Washington, DC this weekend and listening to a radio station that was promoting the fact that it was broadcasting in HD radio format. But I couldn’t listen to it. HD Radio provides CD quality audio in the FM band, FM quality in the AM band, song, artist, title information, and traffic and weather data on the display.

I’ve been an investor in iBiquity Digital, the developer of HD Radio for the past five year.

I figure its time the dogs eat the dog food.

John Battelle points to a new social networking service called Tune Circle.

This service uses the FOAF protocol to connect people of similar music tastes.

I have joined Tune Circle and if any of you want to connect to my music libary, join Tune Circle and connect to me.

Blogs can be powerful stuff.

My friend Tom Watson made me cry last night over the death of a woman i never met.

And then my friend Gordon Gould made my day over the birth of a baby boy – Oliver Jay Gould.