BlogSat

The return to New York meant I started catching on my magazine reading this weekend. The first thing that caught my eye was this- Warren Buffett's Berkeshire Hathaway just bought Lubrizol . - Fine, I thought. It probably is a castle, and has a moat . - They bought it for $9.7B. What the?? What the hell does this company do?? Here's Lubrizol 's Wikipedia blurb. .. a provider of specialty chemicals for the transportation, industrial and consumer markets. These products include additives for engine oils and other transportation-related fluids, additives for industrial lubricants and additives for gasoline and diesel fuel. So they're in the business of optimizing the performance of a fuel and/or lubricant. And they were just valued (by Buffett - so someone very smart thinks its can be worth even more) for more than either Twitter or Groupon or both combined (give or take a billion or two; or a rumor or three...whatever your prefer.) I like these intermittent reminders -...

Kevin Kelly stopped by the Google office a few days ago to talk about the some of the ideas in his book " What Technology Wants " There are a lot of great ideas in there; one in particular gave me some food for thought on the train ride back home. The idea that (paraphrasing) "Simultaneous invention is inevitable, and proof that technological progress is inevitable." Kelly cites a number of examples through history where a number of critical inventions/discoveries were arrived at independently - from the electric bulb (picture above) to the theory of evolution, to the atomic bomb. This happened even though in most of these cases the inventors were working in isolation and didn't know about each others' work. He postulates A lot of things in technology and progress are just inevitable But the details (i.e. how we get there) aren't and that's what our work tends to determine For example: "The Internet was inevitable, but its decision decisions...

One of these days, hopefully sooner rather than later, I will have a magical and revolutionary device to call my own. However, I won't bother waiting till then to start reviewing the damn thing. :) I played with it for a little more than an hour at the Apple store next door to the office, and then some more when I'd visited the store again...and then again. Yes, I've heard of buying things on the Internet, but I'm determined to walk out of a store with one now. :) There are enough reviews out there and I'm joining the unwashed faithful that are buying the device to see what the hell it is. So instead, I'll list the reasons why I think I"m going to get frustrated by the device despite by plans to buy one soon; maybe I'll be proved wrong No multitasking is going to suck big time: I'm very used to music in the background while surfing. Apparently I'm going to have to wait till Fall till the update. Sigh. The screen size means I keep wanting to use...

I approve of companies with a sense of humor, but there's a thin line between being funny and evil. I think this prank falls on the right side of funny though.

A few weeks ago, Ray Kurzweil was at Google. I caught the screening of the documentary about him: The Transcendent Man and then stayed for a Q&A with Ray and the director. It was fascinating to say the least! I'm not even going to try and summarize his life and theories (that's what the Internet is for.:)), but what stayed with me most is a line from the documentary: "Ray's tool is the Exponential" Its easy to forget the power of exponential growth and accelerating returns , which mean technology grows at rates we simply don't take into account or easily accept because the implications seem so bizzare. Summary below: "An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed...

Through a thread at work, I was introduced to Kevin Kelly's site, and his Technium blog There's an incredible post about Moore's law that I just finished and highly recommend. I'm looking forward to finding the time to dig a little bit more into the site.

Yet more proof that the Sony-promoted Blu-ray format is winning over HD-DVD . I love seeing stuff like this, mainly because how wrong it proves "consensus." When the DVD format wars started a few years ago, almost everyone I knew was so confident while saying that Sony was going to lose this war, and that Blu-ray was Betamax repeated . I didn't know enough about the area to have a strong opinion one way or the other, but figured that all the blogs, magazines, B-School case studies, etc. couldn't be wrong. But as a friend of mine recently said, "....ecosystems are so complicated, value-chains so complex and different companies execute at such different level and with so much variance that its stupid to be confident in your predictions." I mean even up to a 4 years ago, I heard enough people say: "Its stupid to try to make money from web applications with advertising as the only strategy." Yeah! :)

Wow, just wow. Why on earth does anyone (except for the investment bankers involved) think this will end well? I really, really feel for Yahoo. I've always thought that it was a pretty great company (great doesn't imply at revenue-generation btw :)) , and would've always been seen as such if it weren't compared to Google. I interviewed at both companies at different points, and somehow I just have a hard time imagining a merger working well culturally, and on the strategy aspect of this....don't even get me started! Yikes! Update: I'd published this a couple of seconds after I heard the news, but took it down when it seemed liked the prudent thing for any Googler to do. Putting it back after being told no one could take anything I said vaguely seriously.

There's something endearing and noble about a company (especially a corporation) trying to serve the poor and bridge the Digital Divide. Something that can make you forget that, as John Mclane said , "Its always about the money." Of course, it is unwise to do so. That really explains the bad blood between Intel and Nicholas Negoroponte's OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project . VS I've been hearing about Negroponte's proposed project for years, though now it finally seems close to completion (shipping November-ish?). He's made a lot of noise about it, and has found a lot of interesting moral support. On the other hand, I hadn't heard about Intel's Eduwise computer until very recently and its already in production. Why is Intel so interested in fighting on what is perceived (at least) to be a socially-responsible project? A few years ago, Prof. C.K. Prahlad 's book " Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid ", explained and gave examples...

Gates and Jobs gave a joint interview at the WSJ's D:All Things Digital conference. I haven't finished watching the entire interview yet, but its remarkable how complimentary they are of each other. The feel is almost like they're veterans reminiscing over a long-forgotten war they once had...kinda sweet. If you've seen Pirates of the Silicon Valley , it almost feels like this should be the end of the movie. As an aside, I was impressed by the range of videos available on the WSJ site, but even more so by the provider of the service: Brightcove . I can see why some people think that this will end up being the "enterprise YouTube", and it seems to be the provider of video services on so many sites that I visit. It's not even close right now though ( Compete graph below)

Charles Barkley continues to be my favorite thing on " Inside the NBA ." The show needs Ernie Johnson's Emmy-winning presence, Kenny Smith's credible insights and the frequent guest turns from Magic Johnson , but for sheer entertainment value nothing beats Sir Charles, who never restricts himself to just basketball, using the show to make glib, funny (sometimes unintentionally so) remarks on everything from race to fashion to anything else under the sun. He also takes being frequently mo cked by the other hosts really well. His latest gem; as the show was about to go to a video break sponsored by Microsoft's Zune , "So what the hell is a Zune?" After learning what a Zune is during the break, he goes: "OK, so when am I getting my free one? I love being rich. You never have to pay for anything." So this got me thinking about the Zune again, which I hadn't in ages (not a good sign for Redmond .) When it came out, I had been intrigued by MS...

Via the usual sources , I learnt about Charles River Ventures Quickstart program . The idea is simple: provide seed funding for a lot of small startups. Its not a bad idea: it's been done before. Y!Combinator has been the best example of this most recently. They provide amounts in the few thousands, generally to college kids along with some basic resources for generally a 5% stake in the company. This portfolio approach seems to have worked pretty well for them so far. This program is a similar idea, but different in that they're providing amounts to the tune of $250K as seed funding to startups. Here's the problem: this role is typically taken on by angel investors, and has been taken on by angel investors for ages. VCs typically come in a little later with larger investments and more ( warning: b-school phrase coming ) "value-add." Michael Arrington has a theory that given the low capital requirements and increasingly quick turnarounds of Web 2.0 startups, V...

Alright, I'm probably close to the last person on the planet who should be commenting on corporate mergers, but... OK, I'm going to take that back; I'll have a MBA degree in a couple of months, so I'm probably better qualified than 99% of the planet...but still.. you could do much better. Anyway, the Murdoch-threated WSJ reports today that Redmond is considering bidding on Yahoo . I don't understand it and from what I know it seems extremely unlikely to me that it'll happen, but that's what I thought about Google buying DoubleClick , and we know how that turned out. As far as I can tel l, there isn't a logical reason from Microsoft and Yahoo to merge, except some vague generalizations about how this will better place them to compete with the Big G in the area of Internet advertising. These are not good reasons to merge, and even if you managed to convince yourself they were, I'm not sure how a merger better helps you to compete. The spin-off joi...

As someone who will get a Finance concentration from the Chicago GSB , I've done my fair share of assignments/projects involving valuing companies. ( Note: I'm not claiming expertise, merely experience :)) A number of factors make this complicated ( hence the need to actually learn it, and the excuse to still struggle with it ) but essentially the value of a company is the expected value of its future cash flows. Acquisitions by companies are a simple way to understand not just what a company is valued at, but also a sense of how much revenue it might generate in the future, in a sense how "big" a part of the economy it currently is. I tend to be interested in, and get excited by, tech and media stuff, and tend to focus on reading about these sectors. I've always known at the back of my head that I'm ignoring other sectors that may in fact be much larger, and today was a stark reminder of that. So I've been thinking for the last couple of days: "Goog...

... which makes the marketer's job harder than it should be. Take for example my decision to finally install Google Desktop. Did I do it because I saw the benefits of all my data being indexed and so very searchable? Did I do it because maybe I wanted to use their cross-desktop file-sharing system (don't ask!) Hell no! I tend to be able to find files on my computer and when I can't Microsoft's default "Find" thingy does an adequate job. Quite frankly, there are many files on my computer that I never, ever want entering any index ...ever. Just so we're clear absolutely never..ever.....absolutely never...ever...ok, I'll stop. So why did I install it? Cricket. The World Cup started yesterday and I wanted to install the Cricket Google Gadget . So what did I learn from observing my own behavior (besides that fact that I'm weird)? That you never know what will make a consumer adopt a product, and so it's useful to try to develop an ecosystem around ...