…fighting entropy one financing round at a time
From the VC grapevine comes word of a new innovation in startup funding in Portland (and elsewhere), Oregon: the unemployment department
From http://www.oregon.gov/EMPLOY/UI/ui_special_programs.shtml#Self_Employment_Assistance__SEA_
The Oregon Self Employment Assistance (SEA) Program helps eligible unemployed workers set up a business on a full time basis and still receive full unemployment benefits. …
To qualify for the SEA program, you must:
…
have [...]
I sign up for (let’s call it) 5-10 new web sites a week. It’s an occupational hazard.
(In fact, there’s an even weirder effect where sometimes there are web sites I know only from Webex demos or slide decks, and not from visiting the site itself. But I digress.)
As a startup, you SHOULD be [...]
One nice thing about having a (practically infinitely) divisble currency unit is that you can use arithmetic to sum your accounts and settle them on a “net” basis.
Sometimes, such as in CDS clearing situations, this gets a bit hinky: lots of counterparties, etc. Sometimes, with lots of debits and credits [...]
Was looking today at a Facebook email (yuck) exchange regarding heavy metal and hard rock with an overseas pen pal. One of the links traded was to Ronnie James Dio’s “Holy Diver” video, a rockin’-ass metal song with laughably horrific production values in the vid.
That video in question I had [...]
I know that large enterprises have traditionally taken a lot longer to get clues, both generally, and specifically around search. To some extent, this is just a factor of organizational size: Voyager’s awesomely successful enterprise search marketing company, SEMDirector, is helping enterprises learn to adapt to this brave new world, [...]
A quick thought: If you have responsibility for customer satisfaction at a company that relies heavily on the Web for customer experience, you should seriously consider making a practice of /reading the emails that come in to your “noreply” spambot addresses/. (Of course, you should /not have/ noreply addresses; it’s so [...]
Who here has seen The Office — American version? Yeah, I thought so: it a pretty darn worthwhile download. (Those of you who are puzzled at why I called it a “download” rather than a “TV show” had best get with the picture: “push” style TV is dead to an entire rising generation [...]
There are a lot of problems in software that aren’t solved well in a ubiquitous product (think PIMs, Personal Information Managers; they all suck royally despite everybody’s best efforts, and the OSAF Chandler project has taken years trying to redesign the very concept, with little to show for it to date). But [...]
Seattle-based Open Source startup Sourcelabs put together the Swik.net wiki a year or two ago. They seeded it with some links of moderate usefulness, and for a brief time, it was a decent, if hit-or-miss, way to find information about an open source project or tool that you were considering using.
[...]
I’ve been using an “el cheapo,” $15 / month, 64M RAM Debian GNU/Linux VPS from Spry for a couple weeks now. Some things to note:
You get X amount of RAM with “burstable” extra ram, but you’re not going to get any from the burst. Everyone else is using it.
There is [...]