Main Dish:

- Dan Gillmor has a new blog

- Venture capitalists say the fat lady is not singing yet, stock options are not gone yet. Obviously I am a proponent of leaving the current system more-or-less intact, at least from my previous writings on this you would gather that. Not only do I think it's disincentivizing a good thing, but will actually add more layers of complexity to the financial reporting that is the real boogyman in this. Public companies will issue pro-forma financial statements to detail what their earnings are without the stock compensation charges and nothing will change.

- California's PUC is hell bent on taxing regulating VoIP, they are going to court to overturn a previous ruling prohibiting them from taxing regulating VoIP.

- Feedburner has a mobile feed reader for Blackberries

- here's the Carnival of the Capitalists schedule for the year.

- Brad has a post on valuations in term sheets. I'm sensitive to price like everyone, but I'm more sensitive to the amount of capital being raised so I'll move upward on price if it means the company will raise more money (providing I think they will need it). In other words, the valuation is useful only in the context of how much of the company is being sold.

- home automation is going mainstream... heard it before so color me skeptical. I think it will happen but until the complexity factor in home electronics is significantly reduced it will never be mainstream. Witness my recent travels to get HDTV for the LCD flatpanel in our bedroom. Comcast gives me a box that has component video and DVI outputs but because they are cheap they only give me component cables, which drives the flat panel at 480 lines of res, which is not that great for HD. Compounding this is that newer flat panels don't have DVI, they have HDMI connectors... so I have to spend $100 on a special cable to convert the DVI-to-HDMI. Problem is that HDMI carries audio, while DVI doesn't and the flat panel ignores all the other connectors when it senses the HDMI is hot, so I have to buy a separate AV receiver and speakers to process the audio, cha-ching. So now I have a nice flat panel LCD bolted to the wall, a cable set top box, an AV receiver and a DVD player, along with 4 frickin remote controls and no hope that my wife will ever be able to figure out the byzantine sequence of buttons you need to hit just to watch tv. Yeah, and the consumer electronics industry is going to help me automate my home! To add insult to injury, Comcast is giving me a grand total of 8 HD channels, wow.

- defining modile internet.

- The German nanny state is preparing to add a €12 tax to every PC that is sold in an effort to compensate copyright holders who are being infringed upon by computer users. Actually, it's not even attempting to compensate for illegal copying, but rather fair use that is already legal under German law because computers could possibly be used to infringe on copyrighted words. So basically, the Germans are taxing users to device that is used for a legal activity becuase it could be used for an illegal one. Wonder if they will add a special tax to every automobile in the country because they could possibly be used to speed with?

- Year of the enterprise Wiki. I sure hope so.

- Topix has a number of new channels for VC and startup activity, including this, this, and this.

Comments

[Steve Shu]

Interesting post by Dan Gillmor on the state of blogging ...

http://dangillmor.typepad.com/dan_gillmor_on_grassroots/2005/01/a_medium_coming.html

Don't know if this was before or after your post.
As a blanket off-the-cuff thought, I've felt that there is currently an oversupply of bloggers ... but the chart on Gillmor's site seems to imply readership is growing faster than authors. In actuality, I guess my blanket thought (not supported by data) would really need to be addressed by trying to get at a measure of supply vs. demand and the economics within a particular subsegment. Maybe some of the data in the original report could be twisted to get closer to this. I'll have to read more. Thanks for pointing this blog out.

[jeff]

I think the oversupply question may boil down to a quality vs. quantity question. I would also dig into that Pew data to see how frequently the average blog is updated, which may answer part of the supply-and-demand discussion.