A Venture Forth

Ideas about venture capital, investing, technology, and policy.

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Entries Tagged as 'Startup Ideas'

The Magic Paint Brush

November 29th, 2005 · Comments · Startup Ideas

From the MIT Media Lab: the I/O Brush. The idea is relatively simple. Take a regular paint brush and then add a tiny video camera, a few LEDs, and a pressure sensor to trigger image capture. Combine this with a touch-screen, and you get a device that can “paint” color, texture, and [...]

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Silicon Valley’s Hiring War–And The Impact to Startups

November 23rd, 2005 · Comments · Startup Ideas, Technology Trends, Venture Capital

The WSJ has a good article on Silicon Valley’s war for talent (paid registration required, unfortunately), which has been driven largely by Google, eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon.

Google, for example, is apparently hiring about 10 people a day. To do so, the company has increased the size of its recruiting team to about [...]

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The New Web 2.0 Bubble: The Pixel Wars

October 21st, 2005 · Comments · Business Models, Startup Ideas

Lots of discussion lately about a new “web 2.0 bubble“.
While most of us fully understand both the theory underlying investment bubbles and the potential for wealth-destruction, human behavior is such, it seems, that we often can’t avoid getting into bad situations. Of course, it’s hard to recognize a bubble until it’s too [...]

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BlogOn: The Death of Central Control, Tags, and Privacy

October 17th, 2005 · Comments · Blogging, Business Models, Startup Ideas, Technology Trends, Web 2.0

I’m at the BlogOn conference today and tomorrow. My takeaways so far:

From a panel with Jeff Jarvis: centralized control over brand and community identity is no longer possible. This is an interesting, scary, and empowering idea. Think about it: until recently, companies (especially large ones) could generally define and control their [...]

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Takeaways from the Web 2.0 Conference

October 9th, 2005 · Comments · Business Models, Startup Ideas, Technology Trends, Venture Capital, Web 2.0

A few observations from the Web 2.0 conference:

Google’s influence was almost everywhere. On the positive side, as Mary Meeker pointed out, Google has given many startups an advertising-based business model: while the company generated $1.4B in Q2 revenue, Google also paid out $494M in the same time period to thousands of partners (though programs [...]

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