startup

The guy who created Hotmail is back with a new set of applications that are a direct clone of MS Office delivered through a browser. My initial reaction: Who cares? We already have at least 10 companies doing the same thing, including Google who have the biggest footprint...but read on:

Live Documents is similar to Google Apps, launched in February and used by companies including Proctor & Gamble, General Electric and Capgemini as a cheaper alternative to Microsoft. However, Mr Bhatia claims that his product is superior to Google?s in its range and quality, most crucially because it … Read more

Nothing like a little dose of harsh reality in the morning.

InsideCRM has a list of what it thinks are the twenty worst VC investments of all time. I'm not really sure why InsideCRM would be the expert on this, it's still pretty interesting.

1. Amp'd Mobile: $360 million raised, ended in bankruptcy. 2. Procket: $272 million, sold for $89 million. 3. Webvan: Valued at $1.2 billion, went bankrupt in 2001. Ate through $800 million in venture capital, ended with $830 million in losses.

For even more depressing fun, check out the massive list of 4300 … Read more

The Web 2.0 style IT management tool, Paglo launched in beta on Monday.

Paglo is essentially an IT search engine that indexes a ton of information about the network you are managing. For example, if you are concerned about how many copies of Microsoft Office are installed on computers at your company and want to make sure that you are complying with your license, Paglo allows you to view that statistic in real time.

There are three key elements to Paglo: the Crawler, Search Index, and UI. If you are a network administrator, for example, you install the Paglo … Read more

Paula Abdul doesn't have anything on Marissa Mayer.

Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, will be on a panel of expert judges for YouBeTheVC.com, where people vie for venture capital funding though an online contest. The contest is something like American Idol meets The Apprentice.

Would-be entrepreneurs submit their business ideas online and the judges give them report cards. Members of the public then choose the winners from semifinalists picked by the judges.

"We're really excited about this contest because we really like the idea of being able to see what'… Read more

We haven't heard much from the social news and analytics site, Spotplex, since the initial preview in February. Today, it launched an improved version of the site.

For those who are not familiar with Spotplex, it offers up a snippet of code that blog owners can install on their site. That snippet does two things. First, it provides information about its traffic to the blog owner, much like Google Analytics. Second, and most interesting, it uses traffic data from the sites that have this code snippet installed to determine the most popular stories in a variety of categories. One … Read more

I am in Tokyo this week as we launch MuleSource in Japan. Pics and posts to come as I recover from the 11-hour flight. Somehow I managed to forget my watch, so I am not convinced that the flight was only 11 hours. It felt like multiple lifetimes.

At our Wii-off last week several people asked me if they should start considering expansion into global markets and specifically Japan. The answer is if your company is doing less than $10 million in revenue, probably not. The reason we're going for it is because there is a big push of … Read more

My colleague Hunter Smith of frog design has used his entrepreneurial spirit to launch a budding start-up based on his two greatest passions: eco-design and skateboarding. Hunter's company, aptly named SuperGreen Boards, employs some of the most advanced eco-friendly technologies for producing custom longboards, slalom, and speedboards.

SuperGreen Boards uses bamboo, which is not only beautiful, strong, and flexible but is also sustainably harvested. Maple wood, known as the gold standard for skateboards because of its strength under the pressure of the rider, takes a minimum of 100 years to mature before it can be used. Bamboo, in comparison, … Read more

It was just over a year ago that Facebook opened up member restrictions to move from college kids to the rest of the world. This was clearly a good strategy as Facebook now has an astronomical valuation and a huge userbase. The question is what was/is the impact on the core audience (college kids) that made the site what it is today?

There are a number of sites that have sprung up like College Tonight and ConnectU, but none of them seem to be as captivating as Facebook itself. As TechCrunch's Mark Hendrickson writes:

For my first post I had originally planned something clever, maybe a self Q&A, or an anti-Microsoft rant or something totally random, but I realized I had already done those things already.

For those of you who don't know me, I am the CEO and Co-founder of MuleSource, an open source company. We develop infrastructure and integration software that competes with BigCos at somewhere between 10-20% of what they charge. We are considered a market disrupter as we provide a product that is both innovative and competitive to incumbents at a fraction of the cost. … Read more