paidContent has the skinny on an imminent round of financing for the stealth, New York-based "distributed news" venture Daylife:
You’re reading it here first … After a year of mostly veiled references and speculation fueled by the involvement of Jeff Jarvis as an adviser and Craig Newmark as an investor, Daylife, the distributed news platform founded by Upendra Shardanand, is about to see the light of day—funded by roughly twice as many investors as it has employees.
Among the brand-name investors: The New York Times, Mark "TechCrunch" Arrington, Scott "Meetup" Heiferman, Dave "scripting.com" Winer, Azeem "I Don't Know Him But He's a Big Deal British Technology Guy" Azhar, and a handful of other technology mover-and-shaker types.
Upendra is a friend of mine, and he's been nurturing this project for quite some time. I have no inside knowledge to share (as opposed to the insiders listed above, who have knowledge they won't share), but it seems like the core mission—organizing news from multiple sources in idiosyncratically relevant ways—has been pretty constant throughout, and I'm keen to see how it's ultimately developed.
Between Digg, Reddit, Megite, Tailrank, et al, lots of people are trying to add some structure and value to the overabundance of news out there, but none of the crowd-based approaches seems to quite hit home for me. I still find myself working to pick the needles out of the haystack. A different approach couldn't hurt and might help.
Maybe it's just me, but if I were his situation, I think I'd be considerably less angst-y. Actually, probably not angst-y at all. I'd likely perch myself in a suit made of hundred-dollar bills atop the tallest building in town, playing Spinal Tap's Gimme Some Money on my accordion.
Update: Be sure to check out Aaron's prior article, The Aftermath.
While I don't often give in to the techie compulsion to have the latest and greatest gear, I think I purchase more tech stuff than the average non-techie, particularly when it comes to computers. Back when I was an independent software developer, I was always a little paranoid about having my computer go out of commission, and so I gladly forked over an extra couple of hundred dollars for the extended warranty.
In the past fifteen years, I've never had to make use of the extended warranty. I've had to make use of the standard one-year warranty twice: once with the faulty hard drive on a Toshiba laptop and once with a company-issued Dell Inspiron laptop whose video card preferred to display static.
That's to be expected. Many products, electronics included, generally fail either very close to the start of their working lives or at the end of their expected lifespan from wear, tear and regular use. The “bathtubcurve” is a term that's used by statisticians to describe the probability of failure of these products, and it looks like this:
I stopped buying extended warranties around 5 or 6 years ago because I was beginning to get the feeling that they were nothing more than a surcharge for the overly cautious. Between never having had to make use of them, constantly falling prices and the rather suspicious insistence of salespeople that I should buy one, even for items that cost less than 50 bucks, I was getting the gut feeling that they were a rip-off.
They're actually a profit center for retailers. The margins on electronics are very thin, but they extended warranty margins are as high as 80%.
It's a sucker's bet: you're betting against the bathtub curve and you're also betting against the trend of falling prices in the belief that the cost of repair will exceed the cost of replacement.
A Consumer Reports study shows that only 10% of digital cameras fail in their first five years. For the extended warranty to be valuable, it would have to be less than 10% of the purchase price, yet extended warranties often cost as much as 20% of the item's price. Besides, if you had a five-year old digital camera, you'd probably want to replace it, not repair it.
Last year, suckers spent $16 billion on extended warranties.
So take it from us (and the New York Times too): skip the extended warranty.
My first attempt to install Vista is documented in this entry, and my second attempt is here.
It Don't Bother Me Too Much
In a former life, back in the late 1990's, my friend Adam and I had a nice little consultancy in which we developed custom applications for small- to medium-sized businesses. In those days, we were busy enough to turn away potential clients, and as a two-man operation, we had to be jacks of all trades. Often, we'd have a client too small to have their own IT department, which meant that we got paid extra to help them with their IT woes. One common task was upgrading their operating systems to Windows 98 from Windows 95 or hoardy old Window 3.1, or maybe even DOS.
There's a point to all this exposition, and here it is: the difficulty that the Windows Vista installer had been giving me hadn't worried me thus far. I've actually had hairier installation experiences in the days before reliable plug-and-play, and as I've said before, the Wintel desktop at work wasn't my primary machine. At the end of my second install attempt, I was only a little annoyed.
As for the machine on which I'm installing Vista, it's not an old clunker. It's an IBM/Lenovo ThinkCentre desktop with a 3GHz Pentium 4 and half a gig of RAM that's six or seven months old. The likeliness of hardware incompatibility is rather low, and as a standard-issue large-vendor corporate computer that a white-collar worker-bee is likely to be assigned, it's likely to be in Vista's target machine set.
If Microsoft should be worried about anyone getting a bad impression about Vista, it should be people who don't eat, sleep and breathe computers like my colleagues and I do. These are the people who might not have an idea of what to do when confronted with the results of my first attempt to install Vista: that single line of garbage DOS text from my first install attempt.
And now, the final chapter in the Area Man Attempts to Install Windows Vista trilogy.
Shut Up and Reboot
Every IT worker knows this quick fix that handles about 90% of all computer problems: Shut up and reboot. This mantra has been repeated so often that it's been used as a gag on t-shirts and in at least one television show, The IT Crowd:
So that's what I did. I rebooted the machine, making sure that it booted from the DVD. I deleted the existing disk partition on the drive, created a new one, formatted it and selected it as the target for the Vista Install.
Lo and behold, it looked like it was working! Apparently, as it is with Windows software, one should always wait for the third version.
Here's what my Vista desktop currently looks like:
I've been working with it on and off for about two days now, and I'll post my impressions here as I continue working and doing some software development in it.
A little late to this item, but I think it's a bellweather for the startup market, so I'd be remiss in not commenting on this story from VentureBeat:
Charles River Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm, has launched a new investment strategy, offering rapid but tiny $250,000 checks to Internet start-ups.
The program, called QuickStart, recognizes times have changed, and that Internet companies no longer need the vast amounts of cash that most venture capital firms want to give to them. The CRV program also offers entrepreneur the friendly terms of the “convertible” seed round.
Of CRV’s last five deals, four were seed rounds (three consumer Internet companies, and one chip intellectual property company). The partners acknowledged that some deals — such as solar companies — need millions. But they said a majority of the deal leads they see these days falls into this seed category.
CRV is just reacting to the fact that conditions are very different for startups today. They don't need to spend a lot on non-differentiating infrastructure and platforms, they can rely on a lot of individual word of mouth for marketing driven by blogs and wikis, and it's easier to deliver rich user experiences through standard browser clients. All of this lowers the barrier to entry in the software business to historically low levels. You don't need millions to invest in deep, proprietary platforms on which you'd build your business. VCs whose stock in trade was raising billions and investing millions were getting themselves frozen out of this segment of the market.
The reaction to the CRV news has mostly been positive, but two of the more prominent early-stage VCs have made a couple of interesting observations. Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital says:
I've always believed that one of the key roles a seed-stage investor plays is to help theirportfolio companies raise a Series A round. One of the reasons I don't like bridge loans, is that there is not alignment of interest between the lender and the entrepreneur. As a lender, I would convert into the price of the next round — motivating me to keep the next round valuation low. As a shareholder, my motivation is aligned with the entrepreneur — we both get rewarded by a higher second round valuation.
In other words, as a lender with an option to convert into an owner, a Series A financing has your seed lender acting like a potential investor, rather than as an existing owner. The difference is simple and important: potential investors want to buy low, while existing owners want to sell high.
There's also the question, raised by Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures, of whether a big firm like CRV has the bandwidth to give these tiny opportunities the TLC they'll need to move from idea to product.
[W]e really want to engage with each and every investment we make. I read comments all the time on my blog and elsewhere that suggest that the new environment rewards firms that can make a much larger number of investments because web services are capital efficient and you can do more with less. Well that may be true, but we have been rewarded the most over the years when we engage deeply with a company and we are not going to lessen the engagement simply to get more names in the portfolio without thinking long and hard about the tradeoffs.
While some firms are quitting the scene, in part because of the new financial dynamics, it's nice to see another VC graybeard try to adapt to the new reality.
The National Hockey League has annunced a new multi-year video content deal with Google Inc., making full-length games from the '06-07 season and some classic games available for online purchase on a 48-hour, tape-delay basis.
"This is obviously an on-demand world where people want what they want, when they want it, and where they want it," said NHL Interactive CyberEnterprises President Keith Ritter. "Google is a place where we definitely need to be."
Discussions about a future video content deal with Apple are still ongoing, Ritter said, as are efforts to offer live streaming of games online.
No word on whether Don Cherry will get his own show on Google Video, where he criticizes European search engines.
With MLB.com being touted as the belle of the online sports media ball, it's no surprise that the NHL is trying to get their digital ice, uh, Zamboni-ed? Whatever. I'm just happy I'll be able to follow Les Habitants from afar without having to buy a whole slate of games that are of no interest to me.
The videos will be free for the next two weeks, so drop the gloves!
You’re reading it here first … After a year of mostly veiled references and speculation fueled by the involvement of Jeff Jarvis as an adviser and Craig Newmark as an investor, Daylife, the distributed news platform founded by Upendra Shardanand, is about to see the light of day—funded by roughly twice as many investors as it has employees.
The National Hockey League has annunced a new multi-year video content deal with Google Inc., making full-length games from the '06-07 season and some classic games available for online purchase on a 48-hour, tape-delay basis.