Dry Powder
There are approximately two weeks to go for nominations to the Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour. With just under 400 companies nominated so far, both in the open and in stealth mode, my goal for the next two weeks is to break 400, making it that much harder to decide on a final 24.
Our model for the tour is evolving slightly. I have venture capitalists and angel investors now asking to tag along, guessing that what I find worth writing about they may find worth investing in. This is small but serious money, by which I mean that while I can’t lay direct claim to the zillions these participating outfits manage, if the […]
Everything I know about Stephen Hawking I learned one evening a couple years ago at the old Claremont Hotel on the border between Oakland and Berkeley, California. I was there to give a speech and was late for the gig, so instead of waiting for an elevator I took the stairs down a couple floors in the old wooden hotel. Bursting through the doors at the bottom of the stairs and into the lobby I almost crashed into Stephen Hawking! Killing a world-famous physicist in a wheelchair is not what I wanted to be remembered for so it was lucky I was able to roll a bit to one side and avoid — just barely […]
What are the odds that this week’s story about the next-gen iPhone “found” in a Bay Area bar came about by accident? A quick survey of former and current Apple employees (okay, it was only four of them) came out 100 percent on the side of this being no accident but a deliberate plant on Apple’s part.
This column was finished before I realized that this week is Twitter’s Chirp developer conference in San Francisco where Twitter will supposedly (and finally) explain how it intends to make money. As you can see below I have my own ideas on this. Let’s compare my ideas with Twitter’s later in the week and see whose are more fun.