Friday, July 31, 2009

What You've Been Missing

A couple quick headlines to remind you about the *new location* of the Innovation Economy blog (the new RSS feed is here, and if you are signed up for e-mail updates [see the box at right], you shouldn't have to do anything.)


See you over there...the URL is pretty simple, too: http://www.boston.com/innovation.

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Thursday, July 23, 2009

Moving Notice: Please Update Your Feeds

I started this blog in the summer of 2007, when I moved back to Cambridge from San Francisco, and started the "Innovation Economy" column on Sundays in the Globe.

Five hundred posts and two years later, I'm moving it over to Boston.com.

Why? I started the blog on my own because I wanted to get it up-and-running quickly. A really wonderful, smart, and supportive community has developed around it.

I'm moving it to Boston.com first because it makes sense for the blog and my Sunday Boston Globe column to live in the same place, and second, because I think it'll attract some additional traffic there. I was also part of the founding crew of Boston.com back in 1995, so it feels like a natural place to be.

The RSS feed for the new blog is here. The URL is pretty easy to remember: http://boston.com/innovation.

I won't abandon this blog, though it may get quiet. I'll keep it active because the blogroll is a pretty comprehensive list of who is blogging locally (the Boston.com blog pares that down to just seven "must-reads"), and also, I may need a more independent place to talk about community causes, events, and stuff that may be inappropriate for the Boston.com address.

My Twitter feed stays the same.

Hope to see you on Boston.com...Your feedback is always welcome here, via e-mail (sk at scottkirsner.com), or in the comments section on the new blog.

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Sunday, July 13, 2008

What Innovation Economy is All About

Welcome, fellow Bloggers! (And thanks to Google for including this as a blog of note for July.)

Innovation Economy covers the entrepreneurial ecosystem here in New England... it's the companion blog to a weekly Boston Globe column that I write, also called Innovation Economy. There's also a video series that goes along with the column.

Some posts that might interest you:


If this kind of stuff interests you, there are a few ways to subscribe to Innovation Economy via e-mail or RSS, up in the upper right corner of this page.

I also run another blog that focuses on how new technologies are changing the entertainment industry... that one's called CinemaTech, and it's also hosted on Blogger.

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Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Tech Blogs Event Last Night

The 'Tech Blogs' gathering last night at Cambridge Innovation Center was a lot of fun, and the food was really good (thanks go to Schwartz PR, Morse Barnes-Brown & Pendleton, and CHEN PR for picking up the tab.)

Dan Bricklin has posted a podcast and some photos from the event. (Dan was also kind enough to bring the sound system.)

The panelists were all really thoughtful, and there were a number of bloggers in the audience, like David Laubner from 93South, Mike Feinstein from The Fein Line, and David Cancel. Paul Gillin was there, and posted some notes.

One thing we did which I think kept it from being a traditional panel was to weave in comments, questions, and rebuttals from the audience throughout the night -- from the very first question. Chuck Tanowitz from Schwartz played Phil Donohue, running around with a wireless mic.

Don Dodge from Microsoft was very funny, telling a story of how he was nearly fired for criticizing Microsoft's attorneys on his blog...and I challenged Nabeel Hyatt to talk about a post that he headlined "Idiots at NY Times write about virtual goods and miss the entire industry." Is that a good way to make friends with journalists? (He said he e-mailed the writer of the NY Times piece, but never heard back.) Listen to the podcast...

I hope to do more free events like this, where we get together to talk about some aspect of the Innovation Economy in New England. Your ideas are welcome...

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Monday, October 15, 2007

Coming Up: Cool Events Around Boston

Some events that look good in the next week or so...

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Monday, October 8, 2007

Tech Blogs: A Conversation at Cambridge Innovation Center, on 10/23

This event will fill up soon, so RSVP now if you'd like to come...Here's the description:

    Tech Blogs: How are Blogs Changing the Way Technology is Covered?

    Entrepreneurs, CEOs, VCs, journalists, and PR professionals are increasingly cranking out blogs, podcasts, and video dispatches. How does this change the way the tech sector gets covered? What does it mean for CEOs trying to get their stories out, PR firms trying to get coverage for their clients, VC firms touting their investments, journalists trying to cover important news, and customers tracking the market? (Not to mention the relationships between all of these players.)

    We'll bring together representatives from all four camps for a wide-ranging conversation (definitely *not* a panel) about the way blogs are changing the game in the tech world.

    Participants will include:

    - Don Dodge, Director of Business Development, Microsoft Emerging Business Team, and blogger, http://dondodge.typepad.com/

    - Jimmy Guterman, Editor of Release 2.0 and blogger, O'Reilly Radar

    - Barbara Heffner, partner at CHEN PR and blogger, http://clarklane.blogspot.com

    - Nabeel Hyatt, CEO at Conduit Labs and blogger, http://nabeel.typepad.com/

    - Scott Kirsner (that's me), Boston Globe "Innovation Economy" columnist and blogger, http://www.innoeco.com

    - Bijan Sabet, venture capitalist at Spark Capital and blogger, http://sabet.typepad.com/bijanblog/

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Saturday, October 6, 2007

Racepoint employee posts comment as fake Fake Steve Jobs

Todd Defren of SHIFT Communications has an interesting post detailing the dust-up over the fake Fake Steve Jobs.

Apparently, an employee at Waltham-based Racepoint Group, a PR firm, posted a comment to a blog, pretending to be Fake Steve Jobs. Racepoint represents the One Laptop Per Child Project, and this Racepoint employee, Kyle Austin, couldn't resist jumping in to defend OLPC, in Fake Steve Jobs' voice.

Valleywag has more.

Incidentally, Racepoint is part of Larry Weber's W2 Group, about which I posted yesterday. Here's a quote from Larry Weber's recent book, in which he criticizes Wal-Mart's use of fake bloggers to improve the retailer's rep:

    The harm it does to a company's reputation when the deception is revealed (which happens sooner than ever on the Web these days) cannot be offset by any short-term gain in sales or publicity.


I agree. To Racepoint's credit, VP George Snell took responsibility for the mistake on the company's blog.

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Sunday, September 23, 2007

Today's Globe column: Why VCs Do (or Don't) Blog

Today's Globe column deals with the ways that blogging is changing the relationship between entrepreneurs and VCs. From the piece:

    There's a bifurcation happening in the Boston venture capital world: Some firms blog, and some don't. And the divide isn't just about being hip to the latest trend. It signifies an important shift in the way VC firms interact with entrepreneurs.


The video is below (it features Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, Jon Radoff of GuildCafe, MIT Sloan student Sim Blaustein, and Mike Feinstein)... and after it, some additional thoughts e-mailed to me by VC bloggers Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Jeffrey Bussgang of IDG Ventures.




From Fred Wilson:


    [Blogging is] a huge benefit to our business. Of course it brings incremental deal flow, but it also filters the deal flow and makes it more targeted and more relevant

    Its also a great way to bring needed attention to the companies we invest in

    And its a way to do research on new sectors and learn about other companies that compete with our companies

    And its a great way to learn about emerging technologies. Check out the comments to my andreessen post yesterday or my post on AIR last week. You can't buy that kind of education and I get it every day for free

    I could go on and on. Its the best tool for vc investing that I've ever seen and I've been in this business for more than 20 yrs

From Jeffrey Bussgang:

    - Definitely less about deal flow and more about transparency and providing accessibility, humanizing the VC process
    - Open dialog helps me keep in touch with entrepreneur’s latest issues and hot buttons
    - Provides sense of accountability to the entrepreneur community
    - Helps me understand social networking, community, blogging, and many other Web 2.0 phenomenon from a practical standpoint as a practioner, not theoretical

Interestingly, one thing I didn't mention in my column... at least one Boston firm, North Bridge Venture Partners, has an internal blog that's visible only to their partners and entrepreneurs.

(In my blogroll at right, I think I have a comprehensive list of all the Boston-area VC blogs.)

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Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Intruders.tv Videoblog

The US edition of the videoblog Intruders.tv launched in July; part of their goal is covering Web start-ups in the Northeast. (The name Intruders, editor Bruno Langlais explained to me, refers to the fact that they consider themselves outsiders -- not part of the "old boys network" here.)

They've already posted video interviews with Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, David Beisel of Venrock, and -- their first big mistake -- me. We talked about the differences between the tech scene on the East and West coasts, and why it sometimes seems that Web 2.0 start-ups like Twitter, which are headquartered in SiliValley, get more attention and momentum than similar start-ups like Going, headquartered in Boston.

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Monday, August 6, 2007

Fake Steve Jobs is a Bostonian


The real Steve Jobs lives in Palo Alto, California.

Fake Steve Jobs, it turns out, lives in Boston. The New York Times has outed Forbes senior editor Daniel Lyons (photo at right) as the author of the hilarious (and heretofore anonymously-written) blog "The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs." The publicity may not hurt, since a book by Lyons called "Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs" is on the way in October.

Here's a just-posted Forbes Video (chock full of plenty of ads) featuring Lyons calling in from his vacation place in Maine.

Back in 2005, Lyons wrote a widely-read Forbes piece on the increasingly vitriolic blogosphere. He also used to run a blog called Floating Point, which focused mostly on Linux and open source.

Here's some interesting Apple commentary from a Forbes opinion piece Lyons wrote in March 2006 on Windows Vista:

    Given Microsoft's delays I can't believe open-source stuff still hasn't caught on for desktop computers. It's amazing, but people will wait months and months for products that are so complicated that no ordinary person can figure out how to use them.

    Why not at least switch to an Apple Computer Mac? Apple's new operating system is stable, reliable and easy to use. The applications are simple, gorgeous and work well together. And they're here. Today. Steve Jobs must be waking up a happy man this morning.


(News.com has a reaction piece that I totally agree with: what's wrong with people writing anonymously, when no one is being hurt by it?)

One comment I can't resist: has the real Steve Jobs ever owned a button-down shirt and a boring rust-colored tie? This Dan Lyons is clearly a true Bostonian...

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Thursday, August 2, 2007

Dirty Little Secrets About VCs

After covering venture capitalists for about ten years, I've finally learned two things (I'm a slow learner):

    1. They need to hear about companies before their competition. (As a journalist, I can relate.)
    2. They compete fervently with other VCs to get their money into the best start-ups at the right valuation

Though they like to portray themselves as omniscient and omnipotent, they're actually quite anxious about missing the next big deal.

Blogging is still a new phenomenon among VCs here in Boston. (Jeff Bussgang at IDG Ventures has been at it the longest, as far as I can tell.)

One major purpose that blogging serves for the less-established VCs who do it is to raise their profile among entrepreneurs, to show entrepreneurs that they understand a particular space, that they are totally in sync. Older, more established VCs have a reputation, and entrepreneurs are magnetically pulled to them because of their track record, or because successful entrepreneurs make an introduction -- go see Mr. Greybeard, who's a partner at Established Venture Partners at the Bay Colony Center. They don't have to blog. (Yet.)

But the less-established VCs blog, and I suspect that is going to make them appealing to a new generation of not-yet-proven entrepreneurs with compelling ideas...and help them hear about these ideas first. On the West Coast, David Hornik of August Capital is the best example of a VC who has built his reputation atop his blog. Entrepreneurs know who he is.

I think the same is beginning to happen out here with the VC-bloggers (there's a list of them at right). The Rolodex and schmoozing and personal connections are still going to be important, but a blog is a great way to broadcast that you understand what's changing in the tech world -- both to entrepreneurs in New England and elsewhere.

What got me thinking about this was David Beisel's great post on "Seven Coming Digital Uber-trends which are Ripe for Startup Opportunities." This kind of stuff is flypaper for entrepreneurs; I know David's going to get e-mails from a bunch of start-ups saying, "Hey, I'm working on trend #2, can we set up a meeting?"

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