Thanks, Greg, for pointing me to this post from Murthy Nukala, CEO of Adchemy, about company values. Murthy is one of the savvier minds in online advertising, and I always enjoy immensely our conversations. Building a company is about so much more than just getting the products right or even getting the smartest people on board, it’s about motivation, culture and being able to really act and think like a team without falling into the “groupthink” trap. There are many examples out there of getting it horribly wrong, or getting it right and then letting it fall apart. Taking some time to think about what your personal and professional values are is well worth it. In my opinion, weaving those into the framework of the organization you are building is essential.

Okay, having an ADTECH party at ad:tech is a bit weird…. even for a new Time Warner acquisition (they’re German though).

Wow, if all of these outages, now including craigslist are as a result of shenanigans at that one colocation facility in SF, then the “interweb” is probably far more vulnerable than I’d thought!

This sounds like a great event! I’m a big fan of these types of events - they always generate great energy and more than a few awesome (investable) ideas:

“Women 2. 0 Napkin Business Plan Challenge”
Deadline to submit MARCH 30, 2007

Win a 30 minute meeting with Tim Draper (Draper Fisher Jurvetson) or Michael Moritz (Sequoia) and a $1000 cash prize! Women 2.0 invites you to submit your business idea on a paper napkin no larger than 5 inches by 5 inches. Put it down, mark it up, and propose to us your most innovative solution, an emerging technology, a way to save the world, a way to become rich!

Visit www.women2.org for more details.

Finalists will pitch to a panel of 12 Judges of top shelf VC’s and entrepreneurs on April 25, 2007 in San Francisco. Finalists must be present on this day. Submissions accepted worldwide.

Sponsors
GOOGLE | AOL | SPOCK | LIVE365 | JIMMYJANE | ONSET VENTURES | DRAPER FISHER JURVETSON | TRINITY VENTURE PARTNERS | MOHR DAVIDOW VENTURES | WOMEN’S TECHNOLOGY CLUSTER

See you there!

In case you may not have noticed yet, I am a keen watcher of big online ad placements. Today, for example, JC Penney bought out Yahoo!’s marketplace links (probably about $150k I’d guess) while Discover bought their mantle placement and they created another special placement alongside it to cover the width of the screen. That aside though, I’ve noticed recently that Dell, who is one of the biggest advertisers around, has been making some missteps that show a lack of attention to detail. This is always a worrying sign for me when I see it happening again and again with big brands. A few small “oh anyone could make that mistake”s later and you’re a different organization. Maybe it was the misspelled “Geniune [sic] Windows XP” software they were offering on the front page of the Dell site a few days ago, or the above missing file on the page that resulted from a click on the $250k-per-day front page of MSN placement — but the mistakes may slowly be piling up for the Dell guys…

Update: here’s the Geniune picture… couldn’t believe it was still there, has been there for more than a few days…

According to rumors that I have not and would not seek to substantiate, looks like a certain comparison-shopping and lead generation company apparently did another round of private financing to allow the founders to cash out some more of their stock.

Looks like Microsoft is no longer interested in Claria, scared away by possible bad publicity. It’s a shame that Claria still has the Gator popup stigma — because I bet that in the next 6 months many companies including Google will be doing things (”behavioral targeting” if you like) just as ‘intrusive’ as Claria is/has been.

Microsoft wants to devote more resources to capturing the small business market. This is a big area of growth as the number of small businesses will just continue to increase as technology allows you to do “more with less”.

Came across the blog of Collective Intelligence while looking for info on the below blog entry. Not quite sure what all they’re trying to say, but then again perhaps I need to get with the Collective then!

Funny blog post from Joe Laszlo - apparently the brand new multi-function (retail, office, residential) Time Warner building has its cable television supplied by RCN. Now there’s some organizational synergy, as usual.

From Edward R. Tufte’s excellent essay, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” which I just received in the mail after ordering it from his website… (I saw an advertisement for it in the Economist):

“Gerstner’s idea, ‘Let’s just talk about your business,’ means an exchange of information, an interplay between speaker and audience. Yet PowerPoint is entirely presenter-oriented, and not content-oriented, not audience-oriented.”

Tufte rails against the excessive use of PP in business, the horrible ways in which it corrupts the presentation data, reduces the richness and density of information and thus lowers the IQ of business discourse and I largely agree. As someone who has been on the giving and receiving end of thousands of PPT slide decks, I sympathize. Part of the problem is not just the laziness of the presenter, but also of the audience. Expectation is nine-tenths of the law, one might say, and often by the time the presentation starts it might be too late to manage those expectations. It will be a slow process to convert the slideware masses to richer interactions…