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Geni: Addictive, Yes, BUT $100 Million Valuation?

Posted on Tuesday, Mar 6th

George Zachary just invested $10 Million in Geni at a $100 Million valuation. Geni has already received a lot of coverage, so instead of reiterating its basics, let me just point you to a few: Venturebeat, NextNet, Techcrunch . It’s certainly not first to market. Acc. to Venturebeat, “Geni is the latest in a long

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Leapfrog’s Turnaround Strategy

Posted on Thursday, Mar 1st

Leapfrog (LF) seems to be in desperate need of a turnaround. Given how good a brand it has, this is a sad state of affairs. The company has had a recent CEO change, and I am happy to see that the new recruit comes from the Online world. My own thesis on Leapfrog is that

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Concept Arbitrage: Web 3.0 & Enterprise 3.0

Posted on Wednesday, Feb 28th

Last summer, I wrote a Concept Arbitrage series focusing on the Indian market. The market has moved, and Consumer Internet and Mobile Value Added Services, which were turning hot then, are much too hot now. Valuations are very high. Much too high. At this rate, I dread to think how long it would take to

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SME ERP: Netsuite + (eBAY AND AdSense)

Posted on Sunday, Feb 25th

Recently, I pointed out that there are 20 Million businesses in the US that don’t have any employee. These include ecommerce businesses that thrive on eBAY and small publishing businesses that leverage Google AdSense. I have also discussed the SaaS trend at length, and covered the NetSuite IPO that is coming. Netsuite has recently done

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Web 3.0 = (4C+P+VS) = YahooBAY

Posted on Monday, Feb 19th

On September 8th, 2005, I wrote a piece called YahooBay, not SkypeBay, as eBAY prepared to buy Skype. Since then, eBAY has stabilized, their core auction business is doing better, although Skype still remains a relatively unmonetized asset. I hope this changes relatively soon, since I am a shareholder, but I still maintain, it is

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SaaS: How About a Middle Ground?

Posted on Friday, Feb 16th

Last Fall, I wrote a widely read piece called Venture Capital in India, in which I pegged the Indian venture boom to be largely in Real Estate, Retail, and to an extent in Consumer Internet, not much in actual technology. Last week, Sujai Karampuri made a well researched case for technology product companies in India.

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Netflix+Flixster = (4C + P + VS)

Posted on Monday, Feb 12th

Recently, I wrote 4C: Yahoo’s Turnaround Formula, in which I suggested that Yahoo organizes itself by segments, and puts the 3C (Content, Community, Commerce), in Context (4th C), and layers on Personalization (P) and Vertical Search (VS) on top it. Here is a very good analysis from Read/Write Web on Flixster, where the Context =

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Who Would Have Thought?

Posted on Wednesday, Jan 10th

Imagine you are a venture capitalist, and some little punk entrepreneur comes in and presents a business plan that projects that little kids would be adopting virtual pets. Instead of parents having to clean poop and puke, when children come calling for a chocolate lab puppy, they would introduce the little ones to virtual pets.

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