Tim Oren's Due Diligence

Zoomies Funding Blog Analytics

Via John of Arggh!: The Air Force Office of Scientific Research is funding a $450,000 project that appears to be an analytics crawler to go after international blogs, since "there is too much actionable information for the analyst to properly analyze." (You can say that again.)

JibJab Takes The Boeing

According to today's VentureWire, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, the creatives behind JibJab's comic diversions from gruesome elections, have taken a round of funding from Polaris. According to the blurb, they want to become "...a platform for young comedians to launch careers" and will "...enable users to store funny videos, photos and written jokes on a personal page and then share them with friends."

Hey, I love the guys' stuff, but jumping straight from political satire shorts to a technology platform for yucksters and talent development play is perhaps a bit of a reach. Youtube and others seem to have at least part of that spot occupied. Best wishes, but is it OK to say that things could be a little frothy out there?

Update 6/29/06: Jeff Jarvis is having similar deja vu flashes.

Review: Two Books on Open Source Software Licensing

A short trip to the East Coast over the last few days provided an enforced opportunity (ten hours of flight time) to catch up on self-assigned reading. One area of interest, due to a current project, is the ins-and-outs of open source software licensing in the context of building a system that will be partially open and partially proprietary. There have been enough alarmist horror stories circulated by partisans on both sides (Viral! Unconstitutional! Free-riders! Corporate media stooges!) to have me believe this was a time to avoid the blogs and look for a text, Yup, a good ol' fashioned squashed tree book.

(Archival) Platform Wars: Net Wars 1993-1997 (4/30/1997)

(NB: I am moving some years-old writings into Due Diligence for future reference. This piece originally appeared in early 1997 on Howard Rheingold's old Electric Minds site. Little or no effort has been expended on cleaning up links broken in the intervening decade.)

The Way It Was Supposed to Be

A Microsoft strategy statement in the early nineties could have gone something like this:

"We have achieved dominance in desktop operating systems, and a large share in the associated programming tools and user applications. We need to keep growing the business, and to anticipate threats to our current market. Moore's law shows that 'desktop' machinery will soon have the power necessary to fill the roles of workstations and servers. The dominant operating system in these markets is UNIX, and the network capability implied by servers is supplied by TCP/IP. Collision is inevitable. We need a platform that we control, which has similar or superior capabilities, and is leveraged from our current competitive position."

(Archival) Platform Wars: The Clone Wars - 4/16/1997

(NB: I am moving some years-old writings into Due Diligence for future reference. This piece originally appeared in early 1997 on Howard Rheingold's old Electric Minds site. Little or no effort has been expended on cleaning up links broken in the intervening decade.)

In The Beginning

The dominant computing platform of the mid-seventies was IBM mainframe architecture. For those allergic to big iron, there were minicomputers from companies like DEC, Data General, HP, and, of course, IBM. Each had its own proprietary operating system. Programs often came from the platform vendors as well, or were custom-written in COBOL and FORTRAN, typically using features peculiar to the machine. The entire stack, from hardware to end user, was vertically integrated and highly specific.

(Archival) How to Make Platform War - 3/5/1997

(NB: I am moving some years-old writings into Due Diligence for future reference. This piece originally appeared in early 1997 on Howard Rheingold's old Electric Minds site. Little or no effort has been expended on cleaning up links broken in the intervening decade.)

Last time I wrote about platforms in general, and how they can create
great value for society and businesses. Now I'll focus on a battle for
platform definition that has been going on since the late seventies. The
objective for the warriors may be stated as:

Share dominance in the specification of programming and user interfaces
for general purpose computing and communications, leading to a role as
de facto market definer for all other players.

(Archival) Of Platform Wars, Monopoly, and Microsoft - 1/22/1997

(NB: I am moving a few years' old writings into Due Diligence for future reference. This piece originally appeared in early 1997 on Howard Rheingold's old Electric Minds site. Little or no effort has been expended on cleaning up links broken in the intervening decade.)

What's a Platform?

Let's try this first without any computers involved: If you live in North
America, take a minute and examine the nearest electrical appliance. Somewhere
on or by the power cord, you'll find printed or stamped something like the
following:

115-120 VAC 60Hz

Change Is Coming To Due Diligence

The vacation mentioned in the last post did not produce further posts, but it did permit some thinking about the direction of this blog and my writing in general.

That kind of introduction often precedes an announcement that the blogger in question is hanging it up. That's not the case here, but the nature of my writing is going to change. When I started the public version of Due Diligence, much of the material was by-product of research and analysis that I was doing for Pacifica Fund in the course of market and company level diligence (hence the title). Another substantial chunk of the material was my own reaction to seeing repeated misunderstandings or lack of knowledge regarding the venture processs among entrepreners and press, and was also the record of my internalizing the requirements of a new trade.

As the Fund's portfolio has matured, there's less open-ended investigation to recycle. The day-to-day information diet is much more in depth and focused on existing portfolio companies and their markets and opportunities. Perhaps needless to say, much of it is explicitly confidential, and very little is information that I'm going to tell over in a public venue. At the same time, the number of VC bloggers and the store of quality writings about the venture process have grown, and I see little incentive to gratuitously repeat myself or others in this venue.