When Does Crisis Become Opportunity?

December 7, 2008

The New York Times has an article in today’s Real Estate section containing the following:
Five or 10 years from now, when the financial crisis has ended and housing prices are up smartly once more, we will look in the rearview mirror and realize that we missed a golden age for first-time home buyers.
Then, everyone who [...]

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Is There a Future for Air Applications?

December 4, 2008

It seems more and more likely to me that all the buzz over building desktop applications in Adobe Air is just that: buzz.
I find myself increasingly using my mobile device (iPhone) in the same capacity I would have used a desktop client, pre-iPhone. While I initially played around with running Twitter in Twhirl, an Air-based [...]

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Two Stocks I Like

November 28, 2008

At Thanksgiving my friend Dan asked what stocks I liked, if any.
I don’t know stocks or trading well and I have been very negative on the market for a number years. It’s been my belief that the market is no longer suited for small-time individual investors: buy-and-hold is dead, no company can be trusted long-term. [...]

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Twittering Micro Voicemails

November 26, 2008

Yesterday I was thinking how often I receive Tweets where I want to follow-up or respond, but in a more personalized manner and/or with greater detail than is possible with only 140 characters of text.
So…I was thinking that it would be great to have the ability to follow-up on a Tweet by leaving a micro-voicemail [...]

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Startup Mind: Seasonality

November 25, 2008

As we move into the Holiday season I thought I might point out an often-overlooked aspect of startups: seasonality. More than many other businesses startups can be greatly affected by seasonality for four primary reasons:
Fundraising. Many entrepreneurs think that raising money is raising money; the time of year does not matter. This is wrong. The [...]

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Emailing Important People

November 20, 2008

I wanted to share my thoughts on sending emails to potential investors, or more broadly, to anyone you deem ‘important.’
It’s my belief that email is poor medium to ‘launch’ a relationship. What I mean by this is not that you shouldn’t cold call or meet people via email – in fact, email is probably [...]

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Would Google Pay My SMS Bill?

November 14, 2008

I was thinking this morning how much I’d like to have all my text messages forwarded into the cloud, storing these conversations and allowing me to search against them much like Gmail does with email messages.
It also got me thinking that if Google picked up my tab for SMS ($5/mth) I’d gladly allow them to [...]

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Is Advertising at the End of the Road?

November 14, 2008

Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it’s in now, when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising….
…No one needs advertising, and there are much better ways to sell products.
Remember that perfectly targeted advertising is just information…
-Dave Winer

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Bank Failures: Blame the Republicans

November 8, 2008

Peter Thiel with some interesting insights on the root cause of the 2008 bank failures…
… Peter explained, he recognized that the leading investment banks were in much deeper trouble than their share prices reflected. How might a hedge fund profit from that insight? Betting against the entire sector would have been clumsy. What a fund [...]

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Interview with Mike Velotta of Lore Systems

November 7, 2008

I am happy to announce a new sponsor to LeveragingIdeas: Lore Systems
Lore is in the managed services space, providing hosting, consulting and infrastructure services to businesses of all sizes. I am super psyched to have Lore on board because I personally know the company and they are doing some really interesting stuff. I am hoping [...]

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