The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 05/15/2008
Some of the best minds in technology gathered at for The Churchill Club's annual dinner. Eric Savitz of Barron's covered the event in detail. VentureBeat also has a nice summary including audience votes on the trends. The highlights, excerpted from Eric Savitz article, were; The rise of the “implicit” Internet....
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 05/13/2008
Xobni - is an organizer for Microsoft Outlook email. The beta is now available to the public. I have been using Xobni for 6 months and love it. Xobni is inbox spelled backwards. Xobni compiles a summary for each email sender, extracts phone numbers, photos, organizes attachments in several different...
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 05/13/2008
Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Beebo, Plaxo, Orkut, and MSN Spaces are the biggest well known social network spaces. But what about the 800 other sites scrambling for audiences in the social network space? Can they generate $1M in advertising revenue per month? Will they ever be profitable? USA Today says "Social...
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 05/10/2008
The blogosphere has changed a lot in the two years that I have been posting here. Blogs used to be like online diaries for individual people to share their thoughts and observations. They still are, but the popularity and reach of blogging has not gone unnoticed. The big media guys...
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 05/10/2008
Fred Wilson has a post today "Three reasons to use Disqus" which prompted this post "Three reasons to use IntenseDebate". For the uninitiated, Disqus and IntenseDebate are blog commenting widgets that manage comments in interesting ways. This week my friend Brad Feld asked me to try IntenseDebate. A while ago...
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 05/09/2008
John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Mike Moritz of Sequoia are giants in the VC world. They interviewed each other at the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) annual meeting this week. It was a humorous, nostalgic, and insightful discussion. I had the pleasure of sitting next to Pat McGovern, founder...
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 05/05/2008
If you had to choose between selling your company now for $100M or continuing on for another 5 years or more and maybe selling for $ Billions, what would you do? Every entrepreneur hopes to have this dilemma, but when it happens it is a difficult decision with many different...
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 05/02/2008
Eran Egozy, co-founder and CTO of Harmonix Music Systems was on a panel at the Nantucket Conference entitled "Tipping Point: The keys to getting new ideas to take off". Harmonix is the maker of Guitar Hero, the wildly successful video game. Guitar Hero was an instant...overnight success, 10 years in...
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 04/24/2008
Database pioneer Dave DeWitt has joined Microsoft as a Technical Fellow, and will head a new research lab called the Jim Gray Systems Lab. Jim Gray was a legend in the database world, and was tragically lost at sea in January of 2007. Ted Kummert, Corp VP at Microsoft said...
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 04/19/2008
The Future Of Social Networking was the topic of a panel at Microsoft's ReMIX Silicon Valley. Will social networks consolidate into a few big players like Facebook and MySpace, or will it splinter into thousands of special interest social networks? The opinion of the panel and audience was split. What about the financial success of social networks? FastCompany published a timely article about Ning...
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 04/16/2008
Paul Graham wrote an interesting essay "Why There Aren't More Googles" where he basically places the blame on reluctant VCs who won't invest small amounts on tiny startups. So what's the real reason there aren't more Googles? Curiously enough, it's the same reason Google and Facebook have remained independent: money...
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 04/10/2008
Venture Capitalists have been in a very good mood lately. That is because 2007 was the best year for VC returns since 1999. I have been following the investments and returns (IPO and M&A) for a long time. See the chart below, all figures in $Billions; Investments Returns Year VCs...
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 04/09/2008
I first saw MatchMine at DEMO Fall 2007, just over 6 months ago. MatchMine, based in Massachusetts, is a media discovery service that delivers personalized recommendations for movies, music and other online content on the Web. I saw the potential in the service then, but they had some kinks to...
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 04/09/2008
MIX08 in Las Vegas was sold out to rave reviews. Over 3,000 designers and developers attended MIX08 in Las Vegas, and many more wanted to attend. Now you have another chance to attend a condensed one day version of MIX in Silicon Valley on April 17th. Here are the details...
The Next Big Thing (Free subscription) | 04/08/2008
Boston loves startups. The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council is doing a great job setting up events. Watch the MTLC site for future dates. Here are just a few of the upcoming events this week and next. Tech Tuesday - is a regular monthly meet-up organized by Dan Bricklin, of Visi-Calc...
