Archive for the 'Startups' Category

Intel Capital Makes Fantastic Investment - Buys Into VMware IPO

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on July 9, 2007
in Startups and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

Intel Capital steps up to an interesting and brilliant investment by buying a 2.5% stake of VMware in their coming IPO. Intel Capital will invest $218.5M into VMware and take a seat on the board. Excellent coverage of the news can be found at Data Center Knowledge and at Intel.

Simply.

Brilliant.

Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge notes that the VMware IPO is expected to raise $741M, with shares priced between $23 and $25. Simple math says that if Intel Capital pays $218.5M for a 2.5% stake, then they have valued VMware at a cool $8.74B. That is a perfectly reasonable valuation for VMware, given that they are now in the elite few software companies with >$1B annualized revenue run rate.

From my perspective, this is fantastic news for Intel Capital. This one investment will easily return 3-4x for them in the next 5 years. That’s a seriously big return on a very large investment. Congratulations to the Intel Capital team for landing this one!

I’ve written about the VMware IPO previously here and here.

I’d love to get a guaranteed price at the low end of the VMware IPO range. VMware folks: You have my number. Call me!

Tags: brianberliner, Brian Berliner, VMware, IPO, EMC, Intel, Intel Capital



The Power of the Blog

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 3, 2007
in Blogging, Personal and Startups
. 2 Comments

I was out in Colorado last week.

Before departing from San Jose, I wrote a blog entry and invited folks that are reading my blog in Colroado to contact me for a face-2-face meeting.

I admit, it was a bit of a test of my readership. And, the test passed with flying colors.

From that one blog article, I was able to arrange and meet with 16 old/new colleagues/friends. And, a few schedules could not be coordinated (I’ll get you next time).

The Power of the Blog. Very cool.

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Zooomr Offers FREE Pro Account to Bloggers

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 8, 2007
in Blogging, Photography and Startups
. 0 Comments

Zooomr is offering 12 months of FREE Zooomr Pro account access to Bloggers. This FREE upgrade includes 4GB of photo uploads each month. Plenty for me. Thanks, Zooomr!

All you have to do is follow these instructions. I like that Zooomr support OpenID authentication and that they are implementing the Flickr API for uploading photographs to their site. And, that they are giving me some FREE photo storage. Very cool.

Here’s my first photo (required to get the FREE account):

DSC02173_2

Best of luck to the Zooomr folks.

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Final Thoughts on EclipseCon 2007

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 8, 2007
in Open Source, Software and Startups
. 0 Comments

So, EclipseCon 2007 has wrapped up today. Some final thoughts.

  • The conference was well attended and organized. Near as I could tell, everything went off without a hitch. There were some problems accessing wireless from the Hyatt, but I was only out there once. The food and booze was good. And, yes, I packed on a couple more pounds with the ever-present cookies and brownies. Ugh. Conferences. Sheesh.
  • Eclipse used to be just an IDE for developing Java applications. Now, it’s so much more. It’s now a really, really good IDE for developing Java applications. It’s also a platform for applications to run on top of (see Eclipse RCP) used by tools like Azureus and the Actuate BIRT Report Designer. Even more, the Eclipse Foundation brings together all the projects and makes sure that everything is legal and structures. When you say "Eclipse", you really are saying a mouthful.
  • The conference had the expected amount of talk focused on Eclipse and a variety of the extension work being done either directly in Eclipse, or as a plug-in, or on the platform.
  • All 3 of the Keynote talks were very good and entertaining. None of them focused on Eclipse or the Eclipse ecosystem, but they were all very good nonetheless.
  • Additionally, I was pleasantly surprised to see all the focus on OSGi at the conference (OSGi was formerly the Open Services Gateway initiative, and is now the OSGi Alliance). There were numerous really good sessions talking about the current progress of the OSGi Alliance and related projects. This stuff is finally maturing. Lots of Open Source technologies available now, like Equinox, Knopflerfish, Apache Felix, and Newton. There is even talk about getting Spring and OSGi working together with the Spring-OSGi project.
  • Looking downstream, however, it may make the most sense to combine OSGi, Spring, and SCA (the Service Component Architecture) to form the best-balanced service fabric. Paremus appears to be leading the charge here, and announced such a product, Infiniflow, at the conference. Very cool.

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Scott Adams on Dilbert at EclipseCon 2007

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 7, 2007
in Entertainment, Software, Startups and Venture Capital
. 1 Comment

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, did a great job with the EclipseCon 2007 Keynote talk on Tuesday.

While the talk was certainly entertaining, the thing I liked most about his talk was the focus on things like "failure", "timing","luck", and "persistence".

Scott pointed out that his "list of failures" got to 29 items before he stopped counting. Of those 29 failures, most would have been successes had they been shifted forward or backward in time by as little as 5 years. As I’ve said before, timing is everything. Startups are often too early to market. Lots of VC-backed startups do not have the patience to wait for the market to catch up to them. Patience.

In addition to his 29 failures, Scott did recognize 3 successes. And, certainly, a bit of luck played a part in the successes.

However, Scott’s spin on "lucky" and "unlucky" people was interesting. Lucky people are those that expect success to happen to them and, as a result, they have a broader perspective of the world around them. Unlucky people do not expect success and often miss the signs that would otherwise drive them toward the right opportunity. Interesting. Don’t forget to look around.

Finally, don’t ever give up. Be persistent. Create a "product". Create lots of products. Something will eventually stick, perhaps with that component of "luck" playing its part when you least expect it.

Nothing in here about Eclipse or EclipseCon 2007. Still, very well done, informative and entertaining.

Be sure to take a look at the Dilbert Blog.

IP Issues - Mixing Commercial and Open Source Software at EclipseCon 2007

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 6, 2007
in Open Source, Software and Startups
. 0 Comments

Panel of Palamida, OpenLogic, Black Duck Software, IBM, and BEA Open Source licensing experts at EclipseCon 2007.

Some takeaways:

  • Lots of organizations have no idea how to make the risk/reward analysis of when they should use Open Source Software and when they should not.
  • Some companies go so far as to have policies that forbid the use of Open Source Software within their products, or even block access to sourceforge.net from the office. None of these tactics work to stop the developer from bringing the code in anyway.
  • Most organizations really have no idea how much Open Source Software they are using in their product, or which licenses those products are using.
  • TiVo, Linksys, and Progress Software/MySQL case identified as some big/well-know cases of companies using Open Source with some kind of legal action taken against them with respect to their use of Open Source Software, Check out gplviolations.org for more information (at least within Germany).
  • Companies should have Open Source areas of expertise. An individual or group that understands these IP and licensing issues and can communicate with executive management, engineering,and the legal department effectively. Or, companies should use an Open Source consulting firm, like the Olliance Group.
  • The major Open Source communities have gotten really good at certifying the originality of the work that is contributed. Buyer must still beware, however. There is risk associated with any software that is developed through an open, community process.

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At EclipseCon 2007 - Look Me Up!

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 5, 2007
in CVS, Open Source, Software, Startups and Venture Capital
. 1 Comment

I’m at EclipseCon 2007 this week, in sunny Santa Clara, CA. I’m very much looking forward to the event. Lots of great sessions lined up and this year’s conference looks to be bigger than ever.

The ecosystem that has developed around Eclipse is remarkable. Definitely shows the power of Open Source within the developer community (something I was lucky enough to contribute to with CVS).

If you’d like to chat/meet, please drop me an email.

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FeedBurner Validates Google Reader Domination

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on February 28, 2007
in Blogging, Software and Startups
. 0 Comments

The folks over at FeedBurner released a nice overview of how they see the web-based RSS/Feed reading market. I.e., which web-based clients are reading the most feeds/articles. Great article.

It pretty much confirms what I expected. I previously wrote about my switch to using Google Reader. Apparently, many others have as well.

Burning Questions • FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market

TopAggregatorsByView.gif

Notes yet again:

 

  • Given the way Google Reader renders HTML (see here for an explanation on our Publisher Tips blog), the 59% figure is actually conservative. Since Bloglines and other clients render all HTML on a page at one time, rendered item views are likely greater than the actual number of stories “read” by their users.
  • The top 4 aggregators as measured by views - Google Reader, Bloglines, NewsGator and Netvibes - account for 98% of all item views recorded.

There are still many features that I would like to see added to Google Reader. Customized search through my feeds is a big one. As well as "smart tags" which would do such a search and dynamically organize it under a tag. Maybe some day. For now, Google Reader works pretty well. And, I’m not alone in that belief.

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OpenID Enabled

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on February 27, 2007
in Blogging, Open Source, Software and Startups
. 1 Comment

I’m OpenID enabled. Check out the Wikipedia OpenID article for a great overview. The high points include:

When you post on a blog using OpenID, the blogger’s site asks your OpenID provider to log you in; when your provider verifies you, you are guaranteed a unique identity without maintaining an account for that blog.

On OpenID-enabled sites, Internet users do not need to register and manage a new account for every site before being granted access.

Sounds pretty good to me! Also, take a look at the Simon Willison Screencast on How to use OpenID.

The other thing I like about OpenID is that I can make my website/blog address be my OpenID. I.e., my OpenID is brianberliner.com. So, what do I get with this:

  • An easy username to remember that works on multiple web sites.
  • Muy OpenID maps to me, my brand.
  • No need to create yet another password to forget (there’s only ONE PASSWORD) to manage.
  • My very personal OpenID URI will only authenticate to me.
  • I can change the back-end provider that does the actual authentication at any time, and the OpenID that the rest of the world sees does not change.

So, how did I do it?

1. Check out Simon Willison’s article on How to turn your blog into an OpenID.

I chose VeriSign Labs as my OpenID provider, since I trust the VeriSign brand. They are the one’s that will do the heavy lifting of securely authenticating me on multiple OpenID-enabled sites using my single sign-on password (yes, ONE PASSWORD!). I’m
brianberliner.pip.verisignlabs.com.

2. Configure your website/blog software to include two additional links in the header.

I edited my Wordpress 2.1 theme to add the following two lines to the <head> section:

<link rel="openid.server"
    href="https://pip.verisignlabs.com/server">
<link rel="openid.delegate"
    href="http://brianberliner.pip.verisignlabs.com/">

And, that’s it! Do these two steps and you too can be OpenID enabled.

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Fred Seibert of Frederator Studios and Next New Networks

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on February 23, 2007
in Blogging, Startups and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

I don’t listen to many podcasts. Way too time consuming, and not particularly searchable (and, they play back at a constant speed). However, from time to time, I will find one and play it in the background while I work.

And, occasionally, I hit an episode that is brilliant. I really enjoyed this 1.5-hour (yikes!) podcast with Fred Seibert of Channel Frederator.

Quoted from Venture Voice: VV Show #43 - Fred Seibert of Frederator Studios and Next New Networks:

VV Show #43 - Fred Seibert of Frederator Studios and Next New Networks

Download the MP3.
Before the rise of the Internet, cable TV was the new form of distribution remaking the entertainment business. Life-long entrepreneur and former jazz producer Fred Seibert pioneered that field, and is known in the industry for branding MTV (remember their ever-changing animated logo) and Nickelodeon (remember Nick-at-Nite). While he was figuring out what to do next, Ted Turner hired him to be president of the then-struggling Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio. Fred turned the famous studio around and kept his hand in the cable business until some friends dragged him into the Internet business. He now runs Frederator Studios which produces several cable and Internet TV shows. He also just launched a new well-funded startup called Next New Networks to create Internet TV networks.

Good storytelling. Reminds me that things sometimes work, and sometimes they don’t. In any case, you’re always learning and always moving the ball forward.

Enjoy!

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