Hey, I’m a geek.  I’ll admit it.  An alpha geek, mind you.  So I love the latest geek gadget as much as the next guy.  Consider a RAID array to replace your hard disk that is so powerful you can load and open every single MS Office application in half a second.  Whoa!  I gotta get ...

Fascinating story by Charlene Li (Groundswell author) and others about Skittles and their new approach to branding via Social Media.  Essentially, Skittles have modified their home page for www.skittles.com so that it consists largely of a mashup between various Social Media and a little bit of res...

Two great Kindle articles awaited me in my feed reader this morning.  First up was a Techmeme with a NY Times post by Roy Bount Jr called, “The Kindle Swindle?� Roy is up in arms over Kindle’s ability to read the text of a book aloud: Every title is an e-book and an audio book rolled into one...

A stimulus plan for Silicon Valley is needed, despite what Sarah Lacy and Fred Wilson may think, but it isn’t in the form of the $20B author Thomas Friedman writes for the NY Times.  It’s much cheaper and simpler than that.  Change Sarbanes Oxley so small companies can afford to go pub...

Hulu’s decision to cut off Boxee from being able to display Hulu content is driving some consternation in the blogosphere. Fred Wilson, an investor in Boxee, thinks people just don’t understand and that Hulu should come back to the table.  Understandably its a blow for Boxee that is tou...

Coghead has shut down.  Techcrunch has a copy of the letter sent to customers announcing the shutdown.  Customers will be able to run their apps without support until April. Meanwhile, SAP of all places has acquired the technology.  I can’t imagine anything further removed from SAP than a t...

Maybe.  Simply emulating what appear to be the reasons for other’s success without understanding why it works or what the ramifications of a particular strategy may be is certainly likely to fail. Jason Cohen is tired of being lectured by others on how to run his startup.  Based on the indis...

There is an old story about three blind men and an elephant that is said to have originated from India.  Each one touches a different part of the elephant, one the trunk, one a leg, and one the tail.  None of them can agree on what an elephant really is. Here is a modern parable based on the eleph...

Om Malik recently tweeted: I think google has no big ideas. this morning they announced a to-do-list. FGS. [For God Sake] Remember the Milk MUCH better. This touched off a backlash from Google’s ardent supporters who beg to differ, and Om writes about it this morning. I like Om’s definit...

These are confusing times at best, and depressing times at worst for some.  Patterns are hard to come by.  I spend a lot of time keeping my ear to the ground via networking.  I look for underlying trends and try to make sense of what they mean for strategy.  Often the pressures of the bad econom...