Having lived both here in Southern California as well as in Palo Alto and the heart of Silicon Valley, I have a story I like to tell people about what I sometimes think of as the “Starbucks Effect” and how it exists in places like Palo Alto (and I’d argue, places like Boulder and Seattle) [...]
We posted an interview today with Sherry Gunther, CEO and founder of Masher Media, which is developing a virtual world for kids, MyMiniPeeps.com. The firm is not the first–nor will it be the last–virtual world to surface out of Southern California’s technology landscape. Does Southern California have something which seems to encourage virtual world companies? [...]
One of the big joys of helping the Southern California technology community is the wide range and level of support we get from the community at large for our efforts. Because of that, we’ve always had broad support from companies serving startups and the local high tech industry, which makes it possible for us to [...]
Mark Suster, a venture capitalist at GRP, has been (very) busy providing useful information and advice to entrepreneurs in his blog, Both Sides of the Table recently, and comments today on how to best gain the interest of an angel. Among the many tidbits of advice he gives, is that a company needs to not [...]
One of the interesting things about Inc. Magazine’s “Inc 500″ list is it helps to identify all of those big, private companies — who, in another world, might have been public. It’s interesting to note the large number of Southern California firms with very big revenue numbers who are private — in fact, if you [...]
Can’t share your every thought with the world, because Twitter is down? You could always do what Justine Ezarik (iJustine) and Richard Rosenblatt (of Demand Media) –two of local Twitter users–did, and get quoted in the Wall Street Journal’s “middle column” this morning.
Just a quick note (since using Twitter is fairly difficult still today), our auto-tweeting of our news items to Twitter is still down (even though Twitter says the service is back up). So you’ll have to (gasp!) get your news via RSS, our web site, or email. Also — even before the distributed denial-of-service attack [...]
Investors and advisors in the high tech business are very familiar with the idea of “me too” companies, but I find many entrepreneurs–particularly new ones–all too often fall into the trap of being the next-incremental-improvement-on-a-hot-company. This is pitched as: We’re the “next YouTube” We’re the “next MySpace” We’re the “next Twitter” We’re the “next Facebook” [...]
What’s out, and what’s in as a theme for venture investments? From the sounds of things, social networking is out, and travel might be up. An article posted on the WSJ site talking about an increase in VC interest in travel quotes local venture capitalist Jim Armstrong, of Clearstone Ventures, who says: “We’re excited about [...]
I’ve noticed a renewed trend nowadays in companies pulling out those traffic numbers (and people asking about them) as a indicator of success of their startup. In fact, at Twiistup, I heard at least one audience member ask a panel “what kind of traffic should I be getting” as an indicator of success of their [...]
Thoughts and commentary from Benjamin F. Kuo, publisher of socalTECH.com.
