I got the following email from a smart entrepreneur friend I respect a lot.
I subscribe to your blog’s rss feed and read it regularly. I have a suggestion to make – it would be great if you could put a simple explanation of the many different products/technologies you plug, when you plug them.
I have to admit that I have NO idea what you are talking about or why I would be interested about 80% of the time you mention something. For example, Me.dium (which based on the stupid name, I would have no interest in exploring on my own based on your mention 🙂
Not sure if I’m your target audience or not, but I thought you should know that most of your references are opaque to at least one reader. So, while I am aware of many companies you are involved in, and the fact that you like them, I couldn’t tell you or (more importantly) anyone else, what they do.
While I don’t really have “a target audience” (I’m regularly fascinated by the spectrum of folks that read this blog), the fact that my company references are opaque to a smart, tech entrepreneur means that there’s probably some subset of you who are saying “thanks for the company pimping, but so what.”
I’ll try to do a better job of explaining why I (and you) should (or might) care.
Let’s play another quick game of “Where is Brad.”
I got a private tour of the West Wing on Sunday. I can’t remember ever going on a tour of the White House, although deep in the crevasses of my mind I vaguely remember possibly doing something with my parents once.
I had plenty of expectations about what it would look and feel like – none of them were accurate. The most inaccurate was the Situation Room which was much smaller than I expected it to be. The Oval Office was closer to what I thought it would be like, but felt a lot different when I was standing there staring into it.
I recommend every American – regardless of party affiliation – try to visit the White House at least once in their lifetime. It’s a powerful experience.
Me.dium had a release over the weekend – if you are a Me.dium user make sure you get the latest Firefox plugin. If you aren’t a Me.dium user, feel free to bypass the private beta by using my magic invite code.
Phil Butler at Mashable has a nice blog post on the update. There are plenty of under-the-hood changes – especially around performance and scalability (the really hard mysterious stuff), but there are a bunch of neat UI enhancements on the Firefox plugin (including one that I really wanted – moving my logged in friends to the top of the friends list.)
My friends at FeedBurner have been cranking. Last week they released an updated version of FeedFoundry – their heavy duty feed management service for large multi-feed commercial publishers and blog networks. As part of this release they announced a couple of new customers including NPR and Circuit City. To see more, check out the FeedFoundry screencast.
On Friday, FeedBurner announced that they are now managing all the feeds across the AOL Network. Yes – they are using FeedFoundry for this – and join an extensive list of other established companies including Dow Jones Online, Geffen Records, and USAToday.
When I invested in FeedBurner in 2005, I’d heard that several of the major media companies had said “we’d never outsource our RSS to anyone.” I wasn’t sure they knew what “an RSS” was and was quickly proven correct when several of them became FeedBurner customers within the next six months. AOL took a little longer but I know the gang at FeedBurner is proud to count them as a publisher.
I’m FeedBurner publisher 699 (start date 4/8/04.) Three years later there are 388,095 publishers (AOL makes 388,096.) Wow.
As Judy’s Book has shifted from a Local Search site to a Deal site, several interesting vertical search opportunities have emerged. The first one is online coupons – and the folks at Judy’s Book have rolled out a vertical site called CouponLooker.
Dave Naffzinger has a great overview of CouponLooker. While the web is full of “coupon sites”, no one does the hard work to search across them, dedupe them, rank them, and make it easy to find online coupons for specific items. Oh – and the coupons expire quickly so keeping the database fresh and current is non-trivial.
Of course, what would a vertical search site be without a widget.
Nope – taxes (or extensions) aren’t due then this year. However, the deadline for voting for the Engaget Home Entertainment Device of the Year is 11:59pm on Sunday, 4/15. If you love your Slingbox as much as Ryan and I do, please vote.
Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion indicates that we aren’t in Kansas anymore. Fred has a good riff titled The Banner Is Back and the WSJ does a good job decomposing the return for private equity firm Hellman & Friedman. Finally, Paul Kedrosky weighs in with some interesting “Microsoft vs. Google” speculation and a suggestion that we are looking at a 12x FTM revenue multiple for ClickClick.
For those of you too lazy to clickclick once through to the WSJ analysis, H&F bought DoubleClick for $1.1b in 2005, although it appears they only used $330m in equity for the purchase. They sold off several pieces of DoubleClick (Abacus for $430m and the email business for about $100m) resulting in a return of over $3.6b for an investment of $330m less than two years ago.
No one has mentioned any cash dividends that H&F might have taken out of the business so the number could be even higher (and – depending on how things are structured – the investment basis might be even lower.)
There’s only one word for this. “Score!”
I’ve had my share of experiences with DoubleClick over the years (competition, acquirer of one of the companies I was an investor in, and investor of another company that I’m an investor in.) Now that they are destined to be part of Google, it’ll be interesting to see if they finally live up to their potential or if this is merely yet another chapter in the long and convoluted story that is DoubleClick.
I’ve been traveling a lot lately. A lot. So – I’ve gotten to experience airport security in many different forms throughout our beautiful country. Today’s experience in Boston reinforced how silly this whole thing has become.
Amy and I are heading to Washington DC. The line is short as this part of Logan is pretty empty today (not many US Air flights mid-afternoon on a Saturday.) As a result, the TSA guy has come up with a few new rules and he’s repeating them as steadily as your favorite metronome. “Put your shoes, liquids, and bags directly on the conveyer belt. Do not put them in the plastic trays. If you have a drink, you can you drink it on that side security but you must throw it away before you come through. Put your id’s away.” Over and over again. Instead of getting through security in three minutes, it took about ten as everyone forgot to take the purses, their liquids, or their shoes out of the little plastic trays.
All I could think of was my Acela train trip from Baltimore to NY. We bought a ticket in the train station, zero security, bought some drinks in the train station, and walked on the train. There were more people on it than on the airplane I was on from NY to Boston on Thursday night. Our ending point was Penn Station. No security – go figure.
I also thought about John Corzine’s (the NJ Governor’s) horrible car crash yesterday and how easy it is to either have a random (or deliberate) car accident.
Our government is spending an incredible amount on airport security and I’ve yet to feel fundamentally more secure than I used to. Maybe it’s just me and I’m cynical, but this pet peeve gnaws at me.
It seems like there’s a regular rhythm to the magnitude of “great posts from entrepreneurs and VCs” – Wednesday is the magic day. I woke up to a bunch of great stuff in FeedDemon – including:
The sun is up, Camden Yards is out my window, I had a great run, and it’s time for another day.