East Coast

Bill Gurley’s ex­cel­lent piece on Silicon Valley IPO Anxiety in­spired me to take a com­pan­ion look at the East Coast, par­tic­u­lar­ly Massachusetts and New York, and eval­u­ate the health of the lo­cal IPO econ­o­my and prospec­tive pipeline.  To­day, I'll cov­er Massachusetts; to­mor­row, New York. I first came across Bill when he was a Wall Street an­a­lyst and cov­ered my com­pa­ny Open Market (IPO 1996).  I al­ways ad­mired his per­spi­cac­i­ty, even if he didn’t like our stock all the time!  For pur­pos­es of this (...)

Insane: the word that comes to mind when I first saw the work of Anselm von Seherr-Thoss. I hap­pened to be ca­su­al­ly check­ing out videos on Vimeo, and some­how I stum­bled upon his vi­su­al ef­fects show reel. I was so im­pressed, in­spired; ec­stat­ic at the thought of pos­si­bly in­ter­view­ing him. After get­ting in con­tact, I knew he’d be per­fect for an in­ter­view. What a great guy, he’s very knowl­edge­able in his field; sim­ply put, he knows what he’s talk­ing about. Without fur­ther ado, I pre­sent to you an (...)

Posted by Aaron Wheeler I don't know about you, but I have an in­cred­i­bly short at­ten­tion span. Well, ac­tu­al­ly, I do know about you - I read about 1/16th of those ar­ti­cles about hu­man at­ten­tion spans, un­til I got bored and watched Conan's ren­di­tion of Oprah's se­cret plan for world dom­i­na­tion. Oh, Conan! Now there's a man who knows how to share his con­tent. This week, Rand helps the rest of us fig­ure out how to do the same: cre­ate con­tent that's not on­ly in­ter­est­ing, but is easy to read and (...)

Wow – I had a deeply awe­some week off the grid.  I re­al­ly re­al­ly re­al­ly need­ed a break.  I had a mag­nif­i­cent birth­day (thanks Amy and ev­ery­one who came and hung out), ran for 10 days straight (in­clud­ing Thanksgiving – boy does it feel awe­some to be run­ning again), and fi­nal­ly got enough rest to feel nor­mal again (or at least as nor­mal as I ev­er feel.) As with most birth­days, I spent a lot of time re­flect­ing on turn­ing 45.  I’ll toss out some posts about this in a bit, but one thing I re­al­ized (...)

Last week­end the re­gion­als of the Bing National Tailgate Championship moved to Denver's Mile High, where team Bronco Bus won the bat­tle for tail­gate suprema­cy. Chase Boswell, own­er of the ve­hi­cle that gave the team its name, said the team has spent count­less week­ends up­grad­ing the bus which has be­come a park­ing lot fix­ture in Denver. The Bronco Bus will be hit­ting the road to com­pete in the fi­nals in Dallas/Fort Worth on February, 3rd Next Sunday, the next event will roll on­to New (...)

The mo­bile ad mar­ket may be start­ing to bloom thanks to the ef­forts by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Google (NSDQ: GOOG), but Neeraj Khemlani, VP and 
spe­cial as­sis­tant to the CEO for Digital Media 
at Hearst Corp., feels that the cre­ativ­i­ty of app ads has yet to match the pace of me­dia com­pa­nies in adapt­ing to the new for­mats avail­able. At a gath­er­ing last week of ad­ver­tis­ers to mark the roll­out of Hearst’s App Lab, which is in­tend­ed to serve as a “think tank” where the pub­lish­er and agen­cies can (...)

<img align='left' src="http://pho­tos.mac­nn.com/news/1011/imapc.jpg" bor­der='0' width='176' height='120' /Microsoft faced an un­in­ten­tion­al but sym­bol­ic loss on Friday as Sean Siler, one of the key stars the "I'm A PC" ads, was con­firmed to be leav­ing the com­pa­ny. In an e-mail sent out to co-work­ers, the IPv6 lead not­ed a "fam­i­ly si­t­u­a­tion" re­quired that he move to the East coast and that Microsoft couldn't of­fer him a job in the area. He char­ac­ter­ized the ex­it as am­i­ca­ble and saw the (...)

Sean Siler, IPv6 Program Manager at Microsoft, is leav­ing the soft­ware com­pa­ny, re­ports Seattlepi.com. Who? Sean Siler, that’s who! He’s the guy who starred in some of Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” com­mer­cials, which were ob­vi­ous­ly cre­at­ed in re­spon­se to Apple’s an­ti-Microsoft “Get a Mac” ad­ver­tis­ing cam­paigns. Sorry, Apple fa­nat­ics, he’ll still be a PC and has mu­cho love for the Redmond soft­ware giant, he tells Seattlepi.com. Today is his last day – here’s the email he sent to his cowork­ers (again, via (...)

It’s 8:47 pm PST, near­ly mid­night on the east coast and 2,000 peo­ple have just left a com­ment on a Lowe’s Facebook post that went up five min­utes ago. Why? Because in just a few min­utes, Lowe’s is go­ing to launch their Black Friday Sneak Peek Party where they say they’ll be giv­ing out coupon codes for up to 90% off items at Lowes.com. The deals will be off speci­fic items and lim­it­ed in quan­ti­ty which means bar­gain hunters have to vir­tu­al­ly stand in line and fight the crowd if they want to get (...)

As Election Day went on, peo­ple con­tin­ued to come to Google for in­for­ma­tion and, im­por­tant­ly, up­dates on re­sults. Starting around 8pm PT yes­ter­day, Nov 2, and con­tin­u­ing through­out the night and in­to the morn­ing, more than half the terms in Hot Trends were re­lat­ed to the elec­tion. People searched for [live elec­tion cov­er­age] as well as news sites like [fox news] and [drudge re­port]. Most of the pop­u­lar search­es, how­ev­er, were for cer­tain races and can­di­dates, start­ing most­ly with races in (...)

Truly an in­spi­ra­tion, Anselm von Seherr-Thoss is one of the top vi­su­al ef­fects and 3D par­ti­cle artists around. Not on­ly has he spent years with­in his craft, he’s worked on fa­vorites like James Cameron’s “A­vatar” and “The A-Team”. Visual ef­fects is quite the tough in­dus­try. Anselm has worked his way to the top, though his jour­ney wasn’t easy. After work­ing at Frantic Films, which even­tu­al­ly be­came Prime Focus, he broke off to form his own com­pa­ny, Incendii. Larger vi­su­al ef­fects com­pa­nies (...)

Election Day is fi­nal­ly here in the U.S., and many peo­ple are turn­ing to the web to get in­for­ma­tion be­fore head­ing out to vote. On Hot Trends at 1pm PT to­day, 13 of the top 20 search­es were elec­tion-re­lat­ed, most of which had to do with fig­ur­ing out where to vote. Terms like [polling place lo­ca­tor], [vot­ing lo­ca­tions by zip code] and [where do i vote] have been pop­u­lar all day, as well as state-speci­fic search­es like [nc board of elec­tions] and [where to vote in min­neso­ta]. Others are (...)

It’s an in­ter­est­ing thought ex­per­i­ment: how do our mu­si­cal venues af­fect the type of mu­sic that’s ac­tu­al­ly cre­at­ed and played. Do large con­cert halls and sports sta­di­ums change the com­poser’s pro­cess in the type of com­po­si­tions he or she cre­ates? David Byrne most def­i­nite­ly thinks yes as he walks us though cathe­drals, small clubs and the rain forest to ex­plain how acous­tics are af­fect­ed by en­vi­ron­ment. Transcript This is the venue where I, as a young man, some of the mu­sic that I wrote was (...)