Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Off topic, but worth noting: there’s a great article in the New York Times talking about how bloggers are working themselves to death.

There’s a tradition in the media of publishing “April Fool’s” articles — false articles which are meant to fool or surprise a reader. Unfortunately–and maybe I’m in the minority–blog sites and new media sites have also gotten into the game, and posting legitimate articles which are actually April Fool’s jokes. I know it’s “all in good fun” but given the yet-fully-proven legitimacy of online media outlets, I think it’s only detrimental to bloggers to post fake news and articles.

For one thing, April Fool’s — which is a very western thing — is not observed or understood fully in the international audience which is the web. What — to someone in the US — is an obvious April Fool’s day joke may not appear so to someone in many other countries where April Fool’s isn’t a tradition.

For another, the lifetime of articles on the Internet means that often, something posted on April Fools shows up as what may appear to be a legitimate article later–often with a difficult to see or obscured date–which makes it very tough for someone to realize that an article was false. Unlike a traditional newspaper, which was printed and thrown away April 1st, that blog/news post now stays forever floating around the Internet.

Anyway, my own humble opinion.

Okay, we’re back temporarily to our old home page layout. It seems that we might have triggered some issues with Google indexing due to the home page changes (or perhaps something else; we’re still looking into this –anyone at Google who might be able help, feel free to email me).

This morning, we posted an article from Omid Rahmat — – former CEO of Tom’s Guide — speculating on the future of online content. It’s well worth a read. Omid writes:

The shark will have been jumped the day a blogger is valued at over $100 million (I wanted to say $50 million, but apparently, that has no shock value). That’s when the wall is going to hit hard. We’ll get through it, but it is going to hurt like hell.

Gary Augusta, CEO of OCTANe, the Orange County-based organization focused on bolstering the county’s high tech industry, has just launched his own blog. Augusta writes:

What will I write about? Well it will MOSTLY be about various issues related to entrepreneurship, capital, university, medical devices, digital technology, finance, clean and green tech, innovation, communications and similar science/tech/money topics and people.

One of the helpful angel investor groups here in the region has recently opened up a new blog, focused on providing useful advice to entrepreneurs. The group has launched Ask The Angels. Pasadena Angel Joe Platnick describes the blog:

Each week one (or more) of our team members will be writing about a topic of particular interest to entrepreneurs. And they’ll also be available to answer your specific questions on a wide array of topics. Over the next few months, you’ll see a number of noteworthy guest contributors as well.

The members of the Pasadena Angels are heavily involved in a number of efforts within the Los Angeles area to bolster entrepreneurs and high tech companies; the group, which is centered around Pasadena, also makes investments in the greater Los Angeles area as a whole, and members can often be seen working alongside the Tech Coast Angels.

Inagural posts include one by Steve Yeich on A Silver Bullet For Early Stage Marketing, and one from Barry Paulk on Recruiting and Team Building.

William Quigley, a venture capitalist at Clearstone Ventures, has just started up a blog, “The Quigley Report.” William is one of just a very few angel and venture capital investors in Southern California with a blog. Some recent posts: What Startups Should Do About the Recession, the Value of Angel Investors, and The One Thing I Love To Hear In A Pitch.

Other blogging investors in Southern California you ought to be aware of:

• Marc Averitt - venture investor - Okapi Venture Capital
• Matt Ridenour - venture investor - Momentum Ventures
• Sid Mohasseb - angel investor - Tech Coast Angels
• Jim Butz - angel investor - Keiretsu Forum
• Frank Peters - angel investor - Tech Coast Angels
• Ken Hayes - angel investor - Pasadena Angels
• Michael Jones - angel investor - Userplane/AOL

(Disclaimer: Clearstone sponsors this blog, but I wasn’t aware of William’s blog until today when I discovered by happenstance…)

Valleywag posted this amusing piece on the lack of posts on Yahoo’s corporate blogs this morning, pointing out that most of Yahoo’s “official blogs” haven’t been updated in months.

Having worked at, and worked with, corporate marketing departments, the problem with corporate blogging is that generating content is hard work, bloggers generally write what they are passionate about, and most corporate cultures aren’t all that supportive of passionate/non-edited/non-reviewed/non-sterilized content being posted by their employees. To compound the problem, often times companies assign interns or others who aren’t all that passionate about a company to write blogs for them and want to control every single word posted on their blog.

The result is–with the exception of small startup companies and the personal blogs of founders–most corporate blogs are stilted, infrequently updated, and rarely connect with their readers. The exceptions are the ones that give a blogger free reign and “ownership” of the blog; set up general guidelines and rules ahead of time for posts, but do not exercise post-by-post approvals; identify the blog with a specific employee (or group of employees), by name; and find the most passionate, involved, employees with the capability and interest in blogging about the company.

I don’t know if any of these issues are what is up at Yahoo, but it probably doesn’t help that the company is looking to lay off hundreds of employees. It’s hard to find employees who are passionate and interested under that situation…

Sid Mohasseb is the new President of the Tech Coast Angel’s Orange County chapter. Sid has been adding his voice to the local tech community through his blog on entrepreneurship (which I’ve pointed to before) and runs local tech acceleration firm Venture Farm. Sid is not the only Tech Coast Angel with a blog, of course — Frank Peters (President of the overall TCA network) also runs his own podcast, the Frank Peters Show. It looks like the Orange County chapter of the Tech Coast Angels is winning so far in terms of blog/podcasting efforts. There are, however, a few other angel investor bloggers here in Southern California, including Tech Coast Angel member Toni Dasgupta, and the Pasadena Angel’s Ken Hayes.

Someone was asking me recently about the technology blog interest in startups and high tech companies, and the almost exclusive focus on consumer-facing Internet services and consumer electronics. Rarely do you see coverage from the technology blogs on software firms, biotechnology, hardware, or semiconductors.

The reason for this, of course, is that — unless there is a large exit or particularly notable investment — it’s much easier for writers and editors to focus on things they use, can understand, or they have a deep interest in. That’s why (I believe) you see so much more attention to companies like Facebook, or the latest Web 2.0 startup than you ever would see for a company developing non-consumer facing hardware, enterprise computing software, or semiconductors. Frankly, with the exception of consumer hardware, few people–including technology writers–understand or are interested in the latest enterprise software trends, semiconductor technologies, or biotechnology advances. In fact, I’ve found — with a few exceptions — that the vast majority of reporters, editors, and writers are liberal arts graduates with little or no technology background (which is why they are reporters, editors, and writers, rather than engineers or scientists). So it makes sense that  they’d be more interested in something they can use as a consumer, rather than trying to decode the importance (and meaning) of your e-discovery software, clockless timing circuits, semiconductor floor planning software, enterprise MRP suite, or whatever else you might be working on.

I think that might be why, for example, a technology rich area like Orange County gets lots let attention nationally than, say, Santa Monica. Orange County has many large technology firms, like Broadcom, Emulex, Epicor, Jazz Semiconductor, Kingston Technology, Mindspeed, Qlogic, Quest Software (not to mention countless medical device firms like Intralase, etc.) — but, very, very few consumer facing Internet firms.  But, you get a very consumer facing, readily understandable web site like MySpace, and you get lots and lots of coverage.

Of course, I think this is the same thing you see in Silicon Valley; there are many electronics and semiconductors firms, who employ a very substantial amount of the workforce in Silicon Valley, yet you’ll see more attention to the small Palo Alto startups with the latest “cool” Web 2.0 web site who only have a handful of developers.

So, what do you do if you’re not a consumer facing startup and hoping someone might care you exist?

• Relate how your product or service impacts the world as a whole - ie, why should we care, personally, what you are creating?
• Avoid pitching writers with industry specific buzzwords and highly technical details - whether your device runs at 500Hz or 600Hz, the throughput and bandwidth, etc. - most of that is gobbledygook.
• Focus on the people, track record, and financial - human interest is bigger than technical interest, in most cases.
• Realize you’ll have to do more explaining - unless you are talking to someone who regularly covers your competitors and industry, expect to have to explain more about what you do and your industry.