Note: I'm switching the format of my postings today, usually I just dump the link in the post but I'm going to switch to the more common blog format of linking words or references in my own commentary. Let me know if you like it the old way better.
- article in the WSJ this morning about mobile phone video game companies attracting VC money. I have a pretty cool phone that is optimized for games (I bought it cuz it looked neat), and I have found that I have been playing games on it with increased frequency. It's not about the quality of the games or the experience (hell, chess is not a video rich game), it's something to do to pass the time. I just don't know if I would pay for a game for my phone.
- counterpoint on the above mobile gaming story. Too much money is a bad thing.
- this article on best practices vs. best strategy in McKinsey hits home for me right now. I've been working with one of my portfolio companies to come up with a set of key performance indicators. In the back of my mind I have the concern that mgmt could react too strongly and focus exclusively on moving the needle on the benchmarks, which in itself is not bad but it is if the focus on the benchmarks become exclusive. In other words, you can perform great on benchmarks around a bad strategy and still fail... but the opposite is true as well, a great strategy with poor performance, or no indicators on how well you are performing, is also a recipe for failure.
- this development of solar sails is an exciting technology breakthrough that has widespread benefit... think about it for a second: harnessing the power of the sun for motion.
- how technology is undermining the Olympics. Just wait until gene therapy goes mainstream.
- low power, low bandwidth Zigbee (802.15.4) is exciting stuff for home automation and home control. MIT spin-off Millenial Net is rolling out Zigbee router, endpoint, and gateway.
- interesting followup to my post yesterday about teams and superstars. HBR has an article about problem solving and groups, not surprisingly they state that groups make better problem solvers than the best single problem solver in the group.
- a look inside an Al Qaeda hard drive.
"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing" -Albert Einstein
- Bloglines has indexed 100 million blog and newsfeed articles since launching a year ago. Phenomenal.
- anyone who was a kid in the 70's knows that this is hands-down the coolest bicycle ever. Of course, mine came with the sissy bar option, which did improve your wheelie abities substantially.
- mobile feed reader for your Blackberry.
- wireless microsensors and tiny batteries
- insight into what TiVo is going to do with Strangeberry, the startup that they acquired a while back.
- Olympics organizers shutting down streaming broadcasts that didn't pony up. Did you notice how EMPTY the stands are at the events, it must be a real bummer to be an athlete playing to an empty house.
- WiMax, better cheaper Net access. Couldn't agree more. It's going to be interesting to see what happens to the infrastructure heavy RBOCs as wireless access continues to make their last mile advantage irrelevant.
- Real Networks slashes price of music downloads. For all of the kicking and screaming that the music industry did about file sharing, they ended up in a business model where consumers buy the content ala carte and the price is damn near free.
- Women entrepreneurs and venture capital. via Kirsten
- this new Shelby Ford is a seriously good looking car.
Comments