Venture Chronicles

EPIC 2014

Kirsten sent me this.

"The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news?"

Link: EPIC 2014.

Business - CalPERS cuts state payment - sacbee.com

why couldn't CalPERS do this without the threat by the Governor? Also, the problem with defined benefit vs. defined contribution retirement plans is structural not tactical. All State of California employees should be covered under a single retirement plan and it should be a 401k. Better yet, include all municipal employees as well, just like North Carolina, they are producing a return 2x of what CalPERS is doing.

Link: Business - CalPERS cuts state payment - sacbee.com.

CalPERS is hoping the plan will fend off calls from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other Republicans to replace traditional retirement plans that guarantee set benefits with 401(k)-style investment accounts.

Pepsi faces a Blogstorm

if there was any question to the notion that corporate entities should pay very close attention to the blogsphere, this should settle it. Go check out the Yahoo message board for Pepsi (NYSE:PEP) following the ugly commencement speech that CFO Indra Nooyi gave to Columbia's MBA graduating class recently. This story erupted in blogs over the last week, not a word spilled about it in the MSM (nor would there be considering what Nooyi was saying in her speech.) The firestorm caused Nooyi to put a statement on Pepsico's website first suggesting that her comments were misconstrued, but today there is a statement on the homepage expressing that she is "deeply sorry".

Link: Yahoo! PEP.

HEMI to power everything - Autoblog - www.autoblog.com _

grill envy. period.

while I'm on the topic of grills, check out this Talos grill "suite"

Link: HEMI to power everything - Autoblog - www.autoblog.com _.

Tyke's Trike Becomes a Bike

pretty cool design. The only issue I see is that there is a right of passage involved with taking off the training wheels. It would appear that there isn't a way to transition with this bike, and as such there wouldn't be an incentive for a little one to lose the training wheels because you literally can't with this bike.

Link: Wired News: Tyke's Trike Becomes a Bike.

A new dual-mode tricycle-cum-bicycle promises to make learning to ride a bike truly easy, according to its inventors.

Called Shift, the three-wheeler bike transforms into a bicycle and back again depending on how the person riding it distributes his or her weight.

Google Desktop Search Enterprise Edition

look like regular 'ol desktop search with some IT management features for easier deployment. I still like Copernic better.

Link: Enterprise Edition.

Google Desktop Search for Enterprise helps you easily manage the ever-growing mountain of information located on your computers and includes key standards-based administrator features that provide enhanced security, centralized configuration and easy company-wide deployment. Perhaps best of all—it's free.

Venture Capital to disappear

good thing I'm getting my real estate license...

Link: Venture Capital to disappear.

While we accustomed to keep getting reports here about too much VC that do nicely reverse into not enough VC there is a new opinion on the block - there will be 50% less VCs soon. Sometimes the exaggeration of this industry is enormous especially in self …

Bloglines CEO promises top blog search by summer

Link: Bloglines CEO promises top blog search by summer.

The CEO of Bloglines (now a division of AskJeeves) says that his company will release a blog search engine this summer which will surpass the likes of Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub. "The challenge," he says, "is to create world-class blog search, which we don't think exists now."

CEO Briefing with Mark Leslie

Dave Chase posted this as a comment to another post, but it's an excellent link to a great presentation on the "Sales Learning Curve", so I'm bumping it up from the comments section. Thanks.

Link: CEO Briefing with Mark Leslie.

Our guest speaker, Mark Leslie, presented on "The Sales Learning Curve - Why it Always Takes Longer and Costs More" at the Columbia Tower Club on January 28. Mark, currently a professor at Stanford Business School, is working with Altus Alliance to study the stage of growth between new product release and the revenue inflection point - a critical point in the growth of any business.

Software piracy costs companies $33B - 2005-05-18

speaking of studies and surveys, the BSA released their annual estimate of how much money is lost to software piracy featuring more numbers that nobody is going to believe.

Link: Software piracy costs companies $33B - 2005-05-18.

Despite the slight drop in the number of illegal software programs in use, the Washington, D.C.-based association, whose members include Apple Computer Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), says losses attributed to piracy increased from $29 billion in 2003 to $33 billion in 2004.