Imperial Oil

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. […]

A Different Kind of Love Story

Tomorrow’s column will be all about BP, the Gulf oil spill, and doom-and-gloom, but today we’re getting ready for the Startup Tour, which begins a week from Monday.

In addition to choosing the 24 companies to visit, these days see me still seeking a single corporate sponsor for the Tour, itself. So if your company (not a startup) wants your logo on the bus along with those of the Kauffman Foundation and an unnamed-but-enormous TV network, get in touch with me soon. It’s way cheaper than buying commercials on the series, we’ll hang out together on TV, plus you get free muffins.

During last summer’s RV trip Cole, who was then age five, bitched constantly about wanting to be home. But when we finally arrived home […]

Paper Chase

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!

The purpose of this post is to encourage those nominated companies that have not yet sent me their questionnaires to do so as soon […]

Semi-Smart

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 old iPhone plan gave unlimited data for a $30 monthly surcharge. The new data plans give users 200 megabytes per month […]

Carried Away

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 Congress is trying to take away the VC’s traditional greatest single source of income, called “carried interest” — their piece of the pie, so to speak. That is if there was any pie. I’m not here to defend carried interest, nor to condemn it. My purpose is to point out that the VC industry will just restructure itself to regain any lost income if carried interest is taken away.

Easy go, easy come.

Venture capitalists […]