Legendary Entrepreneur and Author Judy Estrin (Part 1)

Estrin has been named three times to Fortune Magazine’s list of the 50 most powerful women in American business. She sits on the boards of directors of The Walt Disney Company and FedEx Corporation as well as two private company boards – Packet Design, Inc. and Arch Rock. For more background review her bio. SM:

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Deal Radar 2008: WiZiQ

I spoke at length this morning at my INSEAD Global Entrepreneurship Forum talk about entrepreneurial opportunities in the educational technology space. Today’s Deal Radar post focuses on WiZiQ, an online tutoring technology startup that offers a learning center and an online collaboration tool for teachers and students for a wide range of subjects and grades. The

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Postcard From Singapore

I have been in Singapore this past week at the INSEAD business school’s Asia campus. Today, I spoke at their Global Entrepreneurship Forum, which gave me an interesting window into entrepreneurship in East Asia. The interest in entrepreneurship and the energy is great. The ecosystem, of course, is significantly less mature. What VCs want to

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Enabling Ecological Data Centers: Rackable Systems CEO Mark Barrenchea (Part 7)

SM: Based on your core market where you are selling into the $350 million install base, how far can you go? Can you double that? MB: Assuming a $1 billion business, I would like to see the Internet as 40%-50% of my business. The remainder should come from a mixture of other businesses.

Enabling Ecological Data Centers: Rackable Systems CEO Mark Barrenchea (Part 6)

SM: Are you going to take it to the enterprise data center? MB: Actually we won’t. We do not focus on running SAP, Oracle or databases. We are trying to take all the redundancy out of hardware that we can. We know servers are going to fail. Our view is that you should let them

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Deal Radar 2008: Carbonetworks

Carbonetworks helps companies develop effective carbon strategies by providing a software platform to find solutions to reduce costs and monitor energy usage. The software monetizes a client’s carbon inventory and provides a clear view of whether carbon represents a financial asset or liability to the company in the future, given its planned investments and business decisions.

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Enabling Ecological Data Centers: Rackable Systems CEO Mark Barrenchea (Part 5)

SM: Your retirement became more of a sabbatical. MB: It sure did. I thought I was retired, but in Silicon Valley there is no such thing as retirement. I decided to sit on the board of a public company. I was looking for smaller public companies or for troubled companies that I could help.

Newspapers Struggling: GCI, NYT, MNI

Poor economic conditions are plaguing all industries and companies alike. In late October several newspaper stocks announced their Q3 results, and, as in Q2 of this year, all of them turned in a disappointing performance. Given that during Q3 viewership was up on account of the US presidential campaigns and the Beijing Olympics, the results were positively

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