http://davidcancel.com Making something from nothing. Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:02:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Note: This is cross-posted on the Ghostery News site. Please go there to read the entire post. This is the first in a series of posts coming this week on the Top Web Bug Trackers we saw at Ghostery last month. What surprised me: Google's utter domination of the Top 10 list (Google ... http://davidcancel.com/ghostery-top-10-web-bug-trackers-on-the-web/ The common theme that runs through every startup that I've started, or been a part of, is the need for "big data" analysis. "Big data" analysis is the area where off-the-shelf software tools breakdown, where statisticians, analysts and developers meet and where normal number-crunching turns into "supercrunching". At my last two ... http://davidcancel.com/is-hadoop-performance-optimization-the-next-big-thing/ This graph shows what the greybeard VCs and angels have known for a while. If your company has VC investors, they will reduce the probabilities of an exit that would produce a 1-5x return for the angels. That exit might have produced a 100x return for the entrepreneurs because they ... http://davidcancel.com/exits-with-vc-and-angel-investors/ Listening to the Dave Ramsey podcast today when I heard this gem: "In business about 90% of your ideas suck and about 10% of them actually work. And we never know which is which. So you have to survive your bad ideas and when you borrow money to do them ... http://davidcancel.com/90-of-your-ideas-suck/ I was reading Jeff Ready's McStartup blog today and his explanation of "Product Development" jumped out at me. At Compete and now Lookery, Product Development was the key difference between good products and mediocre ones. The greater the distance between clients and developers the worse the product became. At Lookery, Elias, ... http://davidcancel.com/product-development-is-what-your-startup-needs/ My partner Scott Rafer dropping some startup science during an interview at e27 in Singapore, worth reading the entire post. Lookery looks really great, maintaining steadfastly on permission marketing and not taking users for granted, very similar to Google’s Don’t be Evil mantra. I like that! Would you like to share ... http://davidcancel.com/great-ideas-company-culture-and-demographics/ Yesterday I asked my fellow Twitterers this question: “If VC firms shrink and Wall Street doesn't recover soon where do all the freshly minted MBAs land?“ Here are some of the replies I received: If you are interested in starting a company I recommend following nealrichter, changds, daynagrayson, robgo, kirilnyc, and ... http://davidcancel.com/advice-for-recent-mba-grads/ This morning we heard that Oracle is buying its closest friendemy, Sun Microsystems. The reasons for doing so appear obvious but I think it’s because their users didn’t care about the alternatives. Acquiring MySQL was Sun’s hedge bet against Oracle. Oracle’s investment in Linux was their hedge against Sun. ... http://davidcancel.com/your-users-dont-care/ [caption id="attachment_172" align="alignright" width="180" caption="by Miller Info Commons"][/caption] Are you thinking of raising venture capital to fund your startup? I did in order to start Compete and at my previous companies, so I know the process  intimately. With Lookery I'm doing things differently this time. Raising any capital is going to be more challenging ... http://davidcancel.com/raising-venture-capital/ Ghostery is a FireFox Add-on that analyzes the page you're on and shows you if it contains any web bugs. Ghostery originally started out as GreaseMonkey script I created last year called Invisible Web. Turning it into a Firefox extension made it a bit more user-friendly and made updating the definitions ... http://davidcancel.com/announcing-ghostery/