The Equity Kicker

Sweet to tweet

In another sign that Twitter is crossing the chasm, or at least getting close to it, the FT today had a full page analysis on the company and its prospects under the heading Sweet to tweet, which made me think again about how the business will scale.

That thought process took me back [...]

Realtime search meme gaining traction

With interesting posts today from John Battelle and Mercury News. See also this Battelle post from last December which explains the use case.

I like the way he recasts Google’s acquisition of YouTube as simply moving with the searches, with it’s obvious implication.

Ten reasons why startups fail

From our own Tim Draper.

I’ve been on the sharp end of a few of these before

If you love your customer set her free

There is a great story on Jared Spool’s blog of how a desire to build a relationship with customers can be counter-productive (thanks to Joe Andrieu for the pointer).

The un-named etailer made the mistake of asking customers to register with the site before they checked out – I can fully understand the impulse [...]

It is tough founding a business

The Wall Street Journal today has a great article designed to help potential entrepreneurs figure out whether they are cut out to found their own businesses. If that is you then the whole piece is well worth a read. Being an entrepreneur can be a fantastically rewarding occupation both financially and at a [...]

The potential in realtime

The life of the VC is a perennial search for the next big thing, and Steve Gillmor had a great post on TechCrunchIT yesterday arguing that it will be ‘realtime’. He puts it thus:

As Marc Andreessen reminds in his fascinating conversation with Charlie Rose, the Internet didn’t take off until the browser. The [...]

Comment system

In the words of Bono “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” – but I saw it on someone else’s blog tonight. I would like a comments box like the one in the picture below, which is taken from TechCrunchIT which also features threaded comments. On top of that email approval is a [...]