http://www.digitalgoggles.com Random thoughts around technology, the internet and startups Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:27:04 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Google launched its new social experiment called Buzz yesterday. It has been labeled a Twitter and Foursquare killer by some, and lame and boring by others. Most of the launch was media hype, but it got me thinking about how startups must feel when they see new product announcements by ... http://www.digitalgoggles.com/2010/02/10/how-startups-can-compete-against-google/ TechCrunch posted an article this past weekend on the startup Blippy and how Amazon is insisting that the company stop collecting user purchase data and erase all data that was previously collected. The article got me thinking about our personal data streams, the implicit web and ownership. Many investors and ... http://www.digitalgoggles.com/2010/02/08/do-you-own-your-data-stream/ Most VCs have a standard protocol for evaluating investment opportunities, but entrepreneurs vary greatly in their evaluation of VCs. Experienced entrepreneurs have been through the fund raising process before and know what "potholes" to avoid. There a few questions that entrepreneurs should ask of their potential VCs and some do, ... http://www.digitalgoggles.com/2010/01/20/top-questions-that-dont-get-asked-when-raising-capital/ Boy has the financial services landscape changed over the past year. Collapse and utter failure are the first words that come to mind. AIG, Lehman, Merrill Lynch the list goes on and on. At the same time, a few survivors like Goldman are thriving in this environment and getting ready ... http://www.digitalgoggles.com/2009/10/29/is-fintech-dead/ Cleantech has been one of the few bright spots in terms of venture capital investment in 2008. According to The Cleantech Group, a market research and financial services firm, Q3 brought a record-level of $2.6B invested across 158 companies located in North America, Europe, China and India. That's a 37% ... http://www.digitalgoggles.com/2008/12/21/cleantech-software-opportunity/ I had the pleasure of recently speaking with fellow Rutgers alum Dev Ittycheria. Dev is President of the $1.2B Enterprise Service Management business and a member of the executive management team at BMC Software. He was formerly CEO and co-founder of BladeLogic, a data center automation software company acquired by ... http://www.digitalgoggles.com/2008/11/28/bladelogic-interview/ Update : I've reposted some of my findings in the spreadsheet below. Let's just say Google Finance isn't the most reliable. How are public SaaS companies faring in this economic environment? Here are some stats that I put together based on Q2 '08 earnings data from ten SaaS companies, including SalesForce.com, ... http://www.digitalgoggles.com/2008/10/11/saas-earnings-update/ Sequoia Capital recently made a presentation to its portfolio companies about how to try to survive an economic downturn. Definitely worth a read. View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: depression recession) http://www.digitalgoggles.com/2008/10/10/sequoia-capitals-advice-to-startups/ Research firm Datamonitor released its annual survey of IT spending this week and predicted that 50% of organizations will be freezing their 2009 IT budgets with another 13% anticipating cuts. Given the turmoil with the nation's economy and troubled financial markets this didn't come as a surprise to anyone. So, how ... http://www.digitalgoggles.com/2008/09/27/saas-it-spending/ I've been thinking about Virtualization Management for a while so I thought it would be a good time for a blog post, especially since my blogging pace has steadily declined to a crawl. Virtualization has been all the buzz these days in the enterprise. Gartner expects the number of virtual ... http://www.digitalgoggles.com/2008/07/19/virtualization-management/