techcrunch

Oct 31 2008

How Sun Will be rescued

I probably ranted a bit too much on the marketing push that Sun has been trying to make into the Open Source community.
The economical situation isn't really perfect so Sun does deserve some credit too.

Yesterday Techcrunch published an exclusive interview with Jonathan Schwartz on the future of Sun and how Sun will be rescued .

[YouTube Movie Embedded]

More details are here

Sep 10 2008

Innovation in Startups

I`m absolutely astonished when I see some of the ideas / concepts people are trying to build a busness around , call it a cool startup and expect VC capital.

But I`m even more suprised that a big part of the world and even the VC world is falling for these ideas, or thinks that the general public will pay for such a product or service.

Let's have a look at some TechCrunch 50 startups.

Michael blogs about OtherInbox, when looking at their site my first reaction was: Hasn't google been doing that for ages ?
The ivo.rentoren+spamfromblog@gmail.com or ivo.rentoren+cocacola@gmail.com or ivo.rentoren+chanel@gmail.com type of addresses ?

On which you can base filters etc ? So what's new ? From reading their website I fail to see where they are differentiating.

2 articles down the road I learn from Brady that a company called Yammer which provides a hosted version of Twitter is also launching at TechCrunch... Now the idea of an enterprise Twitter version isn't stupid, but with a tool like Laconi.ca already available in open source it is something everybody with a functional brain can implement in his own company. Question arises obviously if Twitter itselve shouldn't host this :)

Yammer seems to be a spinoff of a much more interresting tool that I'm actually using Geni now that was/is a groundbreaking and interresting tool to use for which I haven't found an equally strong alternative.

Having had a couple of ideas before where I usually killed the potential project after thinking about the business model I wonder if I just should have pursued the projects even though I myselve would never become a customer at such a company.

We belgian people tend to be to critical for ourselves it seems, we think a project can't succeed to fast, so maybe we should start more stupid ideas and see how the rest of the world react. Afterall.. Reinventing the wheel seems to be a popular hobby of a lot of people these days