Henk Rogers is an entrepreneurial video game designer who began with The Black Onyx, which he published through Bullet-Proof Software in Japan in 1983. In 1988, he successfully led the effort to secure Tetris rights for the Nintendo. Since then he has founded Blue Planet Software and Blue Lava Wireless. SM: Henk, let’s go back
IngBoois a web start-up that provides consumers with a simple, free way to organize their ‘Web activities’ in one place. These activities can range from reading news from multiple sources, finding a job on different job sites, tracking deals on Craigslist, monitoring searches on Google and YouTube or getting Twitter and Facebook updates. Users can see
SM: In your eyes, what is special about Silicon Valley? RK: Silicon Valley is unique in the US and the world. The reason is that this community has taken 70 years to build. It started with Terman at Stanford. It was an experiment that he ran effectively that became the innovation industry.
Thanks to all those who pitched at today’s telepresence roundtable. Hope you found the feedback useful. If you have comments, please feel free to share them. The next roundtable is on Sept. 23 on DimDim. Please register here. Throughout the fall, we have another six roundtables scheduled, which means 30 more slots to pitch. You
I said earlier that we’d start seeing SaaS acquisitions this year. Intuit predictably picked up PayCycle this spring. Adobe, unpredictably, now picks up Omniture for $1.8 billion. This is a very interesting acquisition moving Adobe towards an enterprise SaaS strategy rather than its original creative professional orientation. More analysis to come on this shortly.
SM: I think there are opportunities in both developing economies and in Western economies. I am working on a forward-looking book about India right now. RK: Perhaps. I see energy as a good example. If India can resolve their unique energy issues in a way that only India can do it, then they would have
Established in January 2008, socialDeck was founded with the vision of enabling “anywhere, anyone, anytime” gaming – enabling players to consume their games wherever, whenever, and with whomever they seem fit. Founders Anish Acharya and Jeson Patel left their respective positions at Amazon.com and Microsoft to fulfill their ambition of starting a technology company.
SM: What about clean tech or green? How important is that for you? RK: Green is a different sort of investment. It is capital intensive and it is not an order of magnitude investing like other areas. In other investment areas, you are looking for order of magnitude decrease in cost, order of magnitude increase