I started off my morning by reading the Declaration of Independence . I never get tired of reading it or pondering what was going on at the time. It’s hard to transport myself back to July 4th, 1776 but it’s pretty remarkable to think about what was going on that caused 56 people to sign this brilliant document and in one moment start our country on amazing course over the next 236 years that have had a profound impact on the history of the world. ...
Recently, two bills have been introduced into Congress that – if passed – will do irreparable damage to the Internet, entrepreneurship, free speech, and job creation as a result of the continued entrepreneurial activity around the Internet. Fred Wilson has a strong post up titled Protecting The Safe Harbors Of The DMCA And Protecting Jobs that explains the situation. Go read the post now – it’s an outstanding summary in plain English of what is going on. ...
Suddenly the VC/entrepreneur meme for Q1-2011 is “The Quora for X.” Here are two examples from the past few days: Google Ventures Leads $600K Investment In LawPivot, A Quora For Startup Legal Advice Hipster Is Quora Plus Location – Or Q&A For Where You Are Lest you think this is a TechCrunch phenomenon, I’ve received a half dozen emails in the last week pitching companies as “Quora for X” or some derivative of this (often “The Quora for X”). Of course, Joshua Schachter very cleverly suggested last night via Twitter that we create the “Quora for XXX “. Given the presence of PornoTube and YouPorn in our universe, I expect some clever porn purveyor will quickly figure this one out. ...
Remember rock / paper / scissors? It’s a beautiful kids game that unlike tic-tac-toe regularly results in a winner. Paper always beats rock. Rock always beats scissors. Scissors always beats paper. But what happens when you only have two – say “software” and “network”. Whenever I’m at a Silicon Flatirons event, I always get into an argument with someone from the telecom world about “what the Internet is.” Most of the time I try to listen patiently for about 30 seconds as the telecom person explains to me how without them there would be no Internet and the applications that exist are merely “traffic” on “their network.” They then try to tell me crazy things like “no one will ever need more than 100 Mbps” and say snarky things like “who knows, maybe Google will spend more on their 1 Gbps buildout then they did on the 700 MHz spectrum.” I try to remind them that when I was 13 someone told me “you’ll never need more than 48k of RAM” and then again when I was 18 someone told me “you’ll never need a hard drive bigger than 10MB".” Oh, the things people say in the throws of competitive pressure. Innovation? Who needs innovation. Let’s take a big helping of regulation instead. ...
On the eve of the passing of the massive “economic stimulus package” (I was really hoping it was going to be more than 1 trillion so Dr. Evil could start saying “1 trillion dollars”) we are hearing “broadband broadband broadband.” I’m going to be spending the day tomorrow at the Silicon Flatirons Conference titled The Digital Broadband Migration: Imagining the Internet’s Future and I’m speaking at 9:45 on the panel titled Overview Panel: The Internet’s Challenge to Policymakers. It’s clear that I’ve been set up as my co-panelists are: ...