Friday, January 18, 2002

Smart Design is Simple Design. In Business Week, designer Dennis Boyle on technology design -- he says keep it simple. No manuals. No functions that aren't needed. He says techies err when they think, "If it can play MP3s, why not have it make toast too?" I say amen. I can't even stand toaster ovens. Making toast should require putting in bread and pushing down the handle. I'm bummed when I come back to the kitchen for my toast and find nothing's happened because the selector dial wasn't set to toast and the thermostat was set to warm. I don't long for the day when making toast requires me to write a macro in Visual Basic or buy toaster virus protection from Symantec in case I use someone else's macro. 5:46:52 PM

One radio chip, many standards: "Amphion creates a radio chip for 5 GHz that can support either 802.11a or the European HiperLAN2 standard. This is a good development as it further abstracts the differences  between standards, reducing cost of deployment."  80211b News] 3:48:11 PM

Where's the Money Hiding?   These guys say "VC Fundraising Falls 52% in 2001."  But Venture Wire described a much smaller drop.  This report says $35.7 billion was raised last year, Venture Wire said $55 billion.  What gives? This report also says only six funds closed at a billion plus.  Venture Wire said there were 18 of 'em.  It would be nice to believe someone's reliably reporting on venture capital. In a sense, though, it's moot.  I stand by what I wrote yesterday - when the NASDAQ rises enough (and it's showing pressure in that direction) there'll be an IPO market again.  And when there's an IPO market, venture money will flow, both into and out of VC funds.  3:27:30 PM

Word of the Day.  Have a friend named Isobel.  Asked her what it means.  She said it's a line such that the perceived loudness of a dinner gong is equal at all points on the line. 1:48:37 PM

Every Little Thing Matters. I was delighted to see that I passed Winer on the Rankings by Page Reads page.  Then I made the mistake of wondering what he'd written lately.  Clicked over to his blog.  Came back to the rankings page and he'd passed me! By one page read! Reminds me of the old "McDonald's Hamburgers" song.  Anybody remember it?  Gonna go downtown./Gonna to go to McDonald's hamburgers/Gonna stand in line./Gonna order one billion hamburgers/Gonna watch 'em change the sign. 1:33:40 PM

How I Found Radio  I'm completely new to blogging.  Used Blogger for the first time a few weeks ago, Radio just this Tuesday.  Now I'm hooked.  How did this happen?  It goes back to the summer of '98.  I was working for Harbor Research, a strategy consulting firm that did (and does) quite good work for tech companies.  I was in the process of launching a strategy newsletter for them.  I had a chat with Finisar's chairman and CTO, Frank Levinson, about how to position the newsletter.  In the course of the conversation, he suggested I subscribe to the email version of Davenet.  I did, and then subscribed to Scripting News as well.  I get a lot of email.  I get a ton of email.  I've unsubscribed to a good 96% of everything I've ever subscribed to, in order to keep my inbox manageable.  But for some reason, I never unsubscribed to Davenet or Scripting News.  Odd, given that the vast majority of what Dave writes about means little to me.  (I bought Frontier, but I don't manage enough content to be worth climbing the tool's learning curve.) I hung in there simply because I liked much of Winer's thinking.  The article "I Do" alone impressed me enough that I'd have kept the subscription for decades in case he wrote anything that good again, or followed up that train of thought.  A few weeks back, I went to my friend David Coletta's site (where he happens to have a picture of me wearing abundance of purple), and discovered it had completely changed.  His home page was now a weblog, managed by Blogger.  I checked out Blogger and liked it.  Somehow, it wasn't quite enough to snag me.  Then came last week's very short Davenet piece.  "If you like cool Internet software."  I was ready.  Here was a simple publishing tool with the power of Frontier behind it.  Forty bucks.  How could I go wrong?  Well, I could, and did, go wrong by test driving something so addictive.  My life has changed and will go on changing.  I'm not sure of all the ways it will change.  In fact the mind boggles, thinking about ways to use Radio.  And here I am, at the beginning of this road.  I don't know where it leads, but I expect it to be good. 12:28:51 PM

Money Is, Work Shall Be.  So, is this stock market sick, or what?  Everything's still trading at huge P/E's, while the economy goes on stinking.  When is all this money going to turn into tech jobs again?  Economists are warning us it could be a slow recovery, but for the many unemployeds in high-tech, I think hope is on the horizon.    About year's end the US had $5.6 trillion in MZM (money at zero maturity, i.e. fully liquid and spendable.)  VC's didn't invest much last year, but kept building funds, about $55B of them.  That's $150M a day for a year that's available to fund newcos.  And they were already loaded with cash idling since mid-2000.  It'll flow when there's an IPO market, which will be when there's a healthy NASDAQ, which will be sooner than we think.  Meanwhile funds just get fuller.  Maybe when happy days return, there'll be more for biotech and less for the internet.  But whatever the mix, those days are coming, and not too much longer, either. 12:37:03 AM

Stop Me Before I Click Again!  All right, I'll admit it's sick.  Past bedtime and I'm up seeing how many people come to my site referred by Scoble.  I post.  I read someone else's blog.  I try, really I do, not to click on Ranking by Page-Reads over among the cloud links.  I try not to care if I'm in the top 20.  But I can't stay away.  Last time I looked (48.3 seconds ago, but who's counting?) I was ranked seventeenth for the day, 70th since October.  Only five page reads will move me up a place.  Come, world.  Read me!  Click me!  Do it before I succumb again, so when I do I'll be 16th.  Help me out here. 12:12:34 AM

You Wanna Blog.  I Know You Wanna. One of many sibs driving round the bottom of the Bay, calls me on his cell phone tonight while I'm blogging.  Asks what I'm doing and I tell him.  Non-blogger (like I was last week), doesn't get it.  Gives me his new email address (escaped the clutches of AtHome), tells me to send him the URL of my weblog.  I send it while we're talking.  Tell him when you get the concept, just click on the coffee mug to order Radio for yourself.  Sibling rivalry can take the form of dueling blogs!  World, prepare to know lots about Bay Area theatre! 12:01:58 AM