Tag Archives: startups

MIT 100K Startup Competition Kicks Off

The mother of all university startup competitions, the MIT 100K business plan competition, kicked off last night at the funky Stata Center at MIT. The competition takes three months–the finals are on May 14. I had a chance to talk … Continue reading

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Strategies For Startup Success

I gave at talk this morning at Yankee Group. It was part of the SmartSpeaker series that CEO Emily Green has been organizing for a few months now. Many months ago, over breakfast, Emily asked me to give a talk … Continue reading

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Polaris Digital Media Summit

I spent the last few days in Deer Valley, UT at the annual Polaris Venture Partners Digital Media Summit or PVPDMS08 as we casually refer to it (right). It’s a great event where the CEOs of our digital media companies mix … Continue reading

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Going For It

In a startup environment favoring fast, relatively cheap exits instead of building sizeable companies, it is always interesting to look at the choices startup founders and CEOs make when they have the option to sell the company or build it … Continue reading

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Good Luck, MySQL–You Will Need It

Sun buying MySQL is truly a mixed blessing. Sun has the resources to invest to make MySQL a “real” database and knows a lot about what enterprises would want to see in it. On the other hand, Sun has had … Continue reading

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Bringing Security to the Masses

Xconomy did a good write up on Veracode. Matt’s point below is spot on: the only way to address the application security problem is (a) through technology as opposed to people and (b) through easy-to-adopt SaaS solutions as opposed to … Continue reading

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OpenSocial: The Lowest Common Denominator?

Google’s OpenSocial is becoming the lowest common denominator for application integration in the social media space. That’s actually not that great for Google as it is rarely the case that the most successful applications run on the lowest common denominator … Continue reading

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Ooyala wins

Ooyala won the Amazon Web Service Startup Challenge last night. The company has a video hosting platform integrated with an ad network and some interesting bells and whistles built around the notion of using computer vision to provide better ad … Continue reading

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Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge

I’m heading to Seattle tomorrow for the AWS Startup Challenge finals. Many entered the competition with the hope of winning fame & glory, $50K in cash, $50K in AWS credit and an investment offer from Amazon (the details of which … Continue reading

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Shifting The Cost/Benefit Conversation

Had a great dinner last night in the Valley with a group of founder/CEOs. At one point in the evening the conversation shifted to a topic that’s near and dear to my heart as I continually find myself challenging entrepreneurs … Continue reading

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