BP — the company accepting responsiblity for the current environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico began as Imperial Oil, became Anglo-Persian Oil with its discovery of vast reserves in present-day Iran, then Anglo-Iranian, then British Petroleum, and now just BP — a huge multinational company that includes two of John D. Rockefeller’s original Standard Oil companies — Amoco and Sohio. BP has a lot of America in it but remains in many ways a very British concern, which is to say plodding and bound by bureaucracy. They tend to rely too much on tradition and good luck.
I claim only modest expertise here, having for a few years written about energy and oil in particular. […]
These are the first 100 questionnaires from the Cringely (NOT in silicon Valley) Startup Tour. Yes, I printed them out and stapled them together. Sometimes a man just has to do such things, even in the Internet Age. It helps me to get a visceral sense of an editing job that lies ahead. Throwing piles of paper around and feeling their heft brings a much greater sense of reality to this job. These first 100 total somewhere between 900 and 1000 pages and there are close to 200 questionnaires still to go!
Next week Apple is expected to announce a nifty new iPhone with true videophone support, so AT&T — for now Apple’s sole iPhone network provider in the USA — has preemptively imposed new smartphone data plans with a lower base price but also what appear to be restrictive caps on the total amount of data users can send and receive per month. While pundits like me are arguing whether this is better or worse for iPhone customers, the real AT&T strategy is being so far overlooked. It’s to get us all using smartphones, stupid.
The last decade hasn’t been a very good one for venture capitalists, showing poor returns for their investors. There are many reasons for this including over-expansion, poor management, and a dearth of companies going public. Now to make matters worse