Somewhere in the back of your mind, there’s likely an idea for a startup that rears its head from time to time. Perhaps it’s an iPhone app that reads minds, a search engine that’s better than Google, or it could even be the best way to buy music online. I can’t tell you how to [...]

A while back I wrote a piece for The Battery Charger, my firm’s quarterly newsletter, about our investment focus within the Internet and Digital Media sectors. As I noted in that article, we invest in both consumer-facing media properties and enabling technologies. In my meetings of late, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend amongst companies that [...]

Ev Williams, chief executive of Twitter, explains why he rejected a buyout offer from Facebook and discusses the future of the microblogging service.

Make money: not by building an internet company, but by using the net as a tool to create value and get paid. Use the internet as a tool, not as an end. Do it when you are part of a...

At a recent presentation at Harvard Business School, Adeo Ressi argued that the VC model is broken. That is nothing new for Ressi, who is the founder of the VC-rating site theFunded. He is kind of like the Nick Denton of the VC world, always saying that the sky is falling. It's just that at this moment he happens to be right. The slides from his presentation are embedded below, but really all you need to look at is the one above. It shows that the money going into VC funds is now more than the money coming out ...

Kevin Rose is the founder of Digg, and not a co-founder, a Digg PR rep recently informed us, when we mistakenly described Rose as a "co-founder" in a blog post. It didn't strike us as weird or unusual until we...

I haven’t run into any surfers with iPhones, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. Today, Oakley (the guys that make those hideous Thump sunglasses) and Surfline announced their free app: Surf Report. There’s only one other surf-forecasting app, GreenRoom Surf Forecasts, available today and it costs $2.99. It’s limited to spots in California, [...]

China announced plans to spend billions on a wide array of infrastructure and social welfare projects in a bold move aimed at bolstering its economy.

Don't blame Nathan Myhrvold for taking advantage of the culture of rampant patent litigation in this country. He is only doing what large companies with vast patent portfolios such as IBM and Microsoft do on a daily basis: use the threat of patent infringement litigation to strike lucrative patent licensing deals. Except Myhrvold, who used to be Bill Gates' right-hand man at Microsoft during the 1990s, does it through his patent-gobbling fund, Intellectual Ventures. The fund has collected more than 20,000 patents on the cheap from universities, inventors, and bankrupt companies, which it then uses to extract hefty ...

There is one major problem on Wall Street, that until solved, will result in meltown after meltdown in future years. I can't say if the meltdown monkey will hit every 2,3, 5 or 10 years. But I can say with certainty that it will happen again. Why ?

Because Risk and Reward have been decoupled for CEOs on Wall Street.

If you are the CEO of a major public company, once you qualify for your golden parachute there is absolutely no reason not to throw the Hail Mary pass, and do high risk deals every chance you get.

If ...