Hotel Aggregators Go Real-Time with Notifications

September 12, 2011

This summer while booking my trip to Europe I noticed something I hadn’t seen before across a number of hotel aggregator sites: the use of real-time notifications to ‘let you know’ who is also looking at the same hotel and when the last room booked was. I’m not exactly what I think about this tactic [...]

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Missed Opportunities?

September 1, 2011

Can you consider these startups ‘missed opportunities,’ or did they only come into being because the founder(s) left to work on something outside corporate walls?… Click image for full-size

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Visualizations as Business Intelligence

August 30, 2011

Very cool – I have recently noticed a number of startups such as Betterworks and Square making use of data visualizations as a form of business intelligence. These visualizations also make for compelling eye candy; I’m sure the press and investors eat this stuff up. I look forward to seeing if more startups adopt such [...]

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Notes from Abroad

August 1, 2011

Some notes following an awesome two week vacation to Spain (Barcelona, Rioja, San Sebastian and Bilbao) and London: The number of nice cars in London is outrageous Eating Pinxtos in San Sebastian is the best. Question: why does this style of restaurant not work in a City like New York? Health code? Food prices in [...]

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Search Query Statistics

May 20, 2011

WHAT PERCENTAGE OF SEARCH QUERIES ARE… Commerce or Product Related? Product & sercices ~19%  According to comScore Inc., eBay handled more than 2 billion U.S. product searches in the third quarter. 1 Amazon saw 847 million, while Google handled 226 million product searches over the same period. Source: http://www.ebayinc.com/content/p… Have “Local” Intent? Around 20% of all searches [...]

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2011 Thoughts

January 3, 2011

2010 was a challenging year for me personally and I took a fair amount of time off from blogging. I’m hoping to get back into the groove of writing this year. Initially I thought I’d write a lengthy retrospective about my year, but who wants to dwell in the past? So I’m going do a [...]

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Seth Godin on Doubt

December 5, 2010

The path to entrepreneurship is not an easy one. Sometimes we forget what truly makes an entrepreneur: [Living with doubt] is almost always more profitable than living with certainty. People don’t like doubt, so they pay money and give up opportunities to avoid it. Entrepreneurship is largely about living with doubt, as is creating just [...]

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Income Inequality Continues Relentless Ascent

November 7, 2010

Very interesting article in the New York Times discussing the growing disparity in income among Americans: The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent [article] on inequality, the United States now arguably has a [...]

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Pumpkinhead Launches as About.me

September 7, 2010

I never break news anymore. It’s near impossible these days to beat any of the mainstream tech blogs to the punch. However… It *appears* that the super stealth startup Pumpkinhead has now launched as About.me. Looks pretty neat. The founders of About.me include Tim Young (CEO of Socialcast) and Tony Conrad (Partner at True Ventures). Original TechCrunch [...]

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Founder Exchange Fund for Incubators?

August 29, 2010

Last year, First Round Capital made an announcement that I thought was pure genius: FRC was the first venture fund to offer an exchange fund for entrepreneurs. Portfolio company founders were given the option to trade a small piece of stock in their personal venture in exchange for a piece of the action of the larger pool of [...]

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