Brad Feld

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Connecting Stuff, Widget Stats, iPhone Apps, and Entrepreneurship

Nov 09, 2008
Category Investments

On the heals of a really awesome Defrag conference, many of the companies I’m an investor in are plowing ahead aggressively regardless of the rumors and innuendo about technology entrepreneurship.  I’ve got a post in me titled "The Four Types of Companies" – look for that soon to help explain how I categorize venture-backed startups in the current environment and what I think they should be doing.  Suffice it to say, the companies in this post are all in a happy place.

  • Wonder what Gnip does?  Read the post titled More examples of how companies are using Gnip by Gnip’s VP Product Shane Pearson.  Or check out the video interview of Jud Valeski (Gnip’s CTO/co-founder) titled Zeroing the Latency With Gnip on YDN.
  • Who dominates blog widgets?  Lijit has a new version of their periodic widget report up in the post titled Widget Statistics Revival 2.0 which is data from the blogs of over 185,000 active publishersThe rankings and patterns are pretty interesting.
  • Are you a content provider who wants an iPhone app with your content on it?  Sign up for NewsGator’s free webinar titled Transform Your Content into a Profitable iPhone App.  Look for the Feld Thoughts iPhone app soon to be available soon.

I think entrepreneurship is the fundamental "reinvigorator" of our economy.  So does Mark Cuban in his post PE Obama’s 1st Big Mistake.  Cuban voted for Obama even though all of his other votes went to Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents so his criticism definitely falls in the "constructive feedback" category.

Sramana Mitra also has a great article about this in Forbes titled President Obama: Listen to Entrepreneurs.   In it, Mitra says "You want to create 5 million new green jobs–a great goal. To create 5 million jobs, you need at least 50,000 entrepreneurs–leaders–to step up to the plate."  Mitra has some great stuff in this article.

On Wednesday, the conversation shifted immediately from "the past" to "the future".  Time to get going.