Yesterday I had the good fortune to chat with a group of largely freshman an sophomores interested in tech entrepreneurship from Princeton and Penn. About 1/3 were computer science majors and te remaining 2/3 were liberal arts students hoping to do everything but code. I envy them. I wish I could be 19 again. Don’t get me wrong it’s about [...]
Salinger’s passing reminds me of when I was 15 and first introduced to the world of adult business through my internship at Disney Imagineering. It’s also when I met my first of 3 important career mentors, President of Imagineering Research and Development Dave Fink. From Dave, I leared to tackle my insecurity. Dave explained that just because I didn’t know [...]
As soon as the tablet comes out, I’m dumping my iPhone and going to use a Blackberry or Nexus One for mobile phone and email. I’m then going to get the 3G tablet, which will be ideal for web surfing and applications. The upside of this configuration is that the iPhone is a terrible product for voice and only a [...]
The google voice iPhone site that launched yesterday shows just how much you can do with html5 and browser side storage on the iPhone. Like the gmail site and techmeme mobiles site before, the “site” feels like an app. I’m not one of these anti-app folks that thinks everything should be in the browser. It’s just that for casual experiences, [...]
As a young man, I had an internship at Sony Retail Entertainment. One day I walked into an executive’s office who had a placard on his desk, facing incomers that read “Assume Nothing.” I’ve always remembered that sign, and Jill is fond of saying,”never assume, it makes an ass out of u and me.” With that said, there can be such [...]
We’re moving, and I’m thrilled to be getting out of my Fios contract without a cancellation fee (our new building doesn’t have Verizon Fios, and if that’s the case they let you out). I didn’t find the HD picture quality on Fios to be superior to Time Warner HD, and while we were on the 2/20 bandwidth plan, the speed [...]
Last week, on roughly January 15th, we crossed the 2 million checkin mark on SocialGreat. We just crossed 1 million checkins around December 9th. We started gathering data for Socialgreat on July 1 and launched shortly thereafter. So it took approximately 161 days to get the first 1 million checkins and 37 days to do the next million. That’s 435% ecosystem acceleration. [...]
Last night, my colleague Ryan Spoon, organized an event for 150 people at Dogpatch Labs SF on Facebook Connect. 13 companies were to present followed by Q&A with Facebook. Ryan’s post on the event is here. With 150 people at Dogpatch, ten minutes before the presentations were to go on, power went out in the entire SOMA district. The Polaris [...]
I’m really excited that Polaris will be one of the partners in Seed Start summer incubator program headed up by Owen Davis at NYC Seed (a branch of the New York City Investment Fund). The other partners heading up the program are: Contour Venture Partners, IA Ventures (Roger Ehrenberg), RRE Ventures, Fish and Richardson, Manatt, Phelps and Phillips and SVB [...]
