Deal Radar 2008: GigaOM

Blogs have changed the face of the web dramatically over the last few years. GigaOm is a network of blogs published by GigaOmniMedia, Inc. You could read my interview with founder Om Malik here to get a flavor of how he pioneered blogging in the early years of the millennium.

Deal Radar 2008: Federated Media Needs to Focus

I was recently at a dinner party where a venture capitalist asked me about Federated Media, and whether his firm should invest in the company. Federated, if you haven’t yet figured this out, is on the funding trail at the moment, trying to raise money.

Deal Radar 2008: InsideView’s Clever Maneuvering

InsideView — headquartered in San Bruno, California, USA and operations in Cincinnati, Ohio and Hyderabad, India—was founded in 2005 by Umberto Milletti and Richard Horn. The company has been featured here before and you can read my interview with Umberto here.

Pushing the Performance Edge of Your Business Model

By Michael Kanazawa, Guest Author Many companies play it too safe within the confines of their business model. That’s a fancy way for saying they often accept too little in terms of pricing and don’t fully leverage their purchasing power. For private equity investors, one driver of finding new value in existing companies is to

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Building a New Venture Firm: Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 3)

SM: There was a piece of the services industry that is well known, which is consulting services. That is not what you have in mind when you say services. BJ: Correct. We are talking about technology companies that use their technology to provide a service and usually they are using a network to deliver that

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Stardoll for Little Girls: Mattias Miksche (Part 2)

SM: How did Paperdollheaven come about? MM: Some of the ideas were already there – the initial magic of paperdollheaven.com was all because of Liisa, our original founder and her vision of a fun, creative place for a forgotten demographic on the web: young girls. The new team then added the idea of personalized avators

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Deal Radar 2008: Groople, Interesting Use of Context

Groople is an online group travel site, which helps with searching, planning and booking group travel. (Read my Interview with Groople CEO Mike Stacy) Groople is different from Expedia and Kayak in that it serves only group travelers, no individuals, and is thus a great focus on a specific “Context“.

Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 9)

SM: What is your business model? What is the pricing model? MG: The pricing model in the enterprise space, for companies with more than 3,000 employees, is that we charge by the number of employees in the company. It is not a transactional pricing system. We use multi-year contracts; most of them are three years

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