hedge funds
“There was a time when we were the disruptors.” I was having lunch earlier this year with an old friend who had gotten in early with hedge funds, and he was stuck. “We used to go into meetings with company management, elbow our way past sleepy mutual fund investors and
AI
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have fully transitioned from academic concepts, to venture capital investment trends to a suffix on the title of an executive in a large enterprise. Just like we ended up with heads of big data or data science, we’re now starting to see heads of
crowdfunding
What happens when we think about Kickstarter and IndieGoGo as fan communities rather than just marketplaces? Funders and founders still congregate in an exchange of money for projects, but a simple qualification introduces us to the superfans who make crowdfunding unique and may stitch the whole thing together. Crowdfunding sells
crowdfunding
Crowdfunding promises to redraw the geography of financing and shift its center from institutions toward individuals. The megabanks and institutional investors aren’t going away; they’re just going to have company. The role of individual investors will expand through crowdfunding platforms that promise to match pent up demand with
crowdfunding
For all its breakthroughs, crowdfunding has realized a slow accumulation of hard truths. Things don’t always go so well. Production gets delayed. The project founders may not be prepared to handle a boisterous and demanding crowd. And then come the cries of fraud and failure. The excitement over seeing
crowdfunding
Dalton Caldwell sparked a debate about what Twitter could have been the other week. Like a disappointed uncle, he waxed on about the two paths Twitter could have taken, and how saddened he felt by their decision to become a media property, organized around advertising. But that wasn’t the
crowdfunding
When people think about markets, they think about stocks, trading, indexes, the closing bell. They think about transactions and money trading hands. But markets are as much about money as they are about information. And crowdfunding sites are no different. Information is essential. Without liquid, reliable information, markets function poorly,
search
We would love to have better access to data that’s out there. We find it frustrating that we don’t. –Larry Page, via Bloomberg Let’s just unpack that statement for a minute. Larry Page, CEO of Google, sees a meaningful void in the data it collects, and the
News
Some 32% of readers get their news from Google or some other search engine It’s a close follower to the 36% that go directly to a news-media-site or app, but it still exceeds the 29% share held by news aggregators or, as the Pew Research Center likes to call
Google+ is the social network everyone loves to hate. Nick Bilton of the Times brought some equanimity to the discussion and suggested, the most we can assert is that opinions are split. But that won’t help Google build their Facebook-killer, so Bilton aimed to isolate the root-cause of why
Is Pinterest the napster of images? Tech circles have bruised themselves wrestling with this question since a sometime photographer and attorney raised it late last month. Kirsten Kowalski, who asked the question and also asked not to be quoted, in whole or in part, made a–to paraphrase–lachrymose parting
The perceived insensitivity of Search Plus Your World. A rousing response from Twitter. Recently accused in a gotcha moment captured by the Wall Street Journal of flouting privacy policies and infiltrating iPhones everywhere. It hasn’t been a good start of the year for Google. But what’s remarkable about