Blog Entries - March 2008

$100M For 0.5% of Facebook

admin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Look, this is not something you can write on 1-Apr and have anyone believe it:

Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong billionaire and CEO of telecommunications conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa, has increased his investment in Facebook in excess of $100 million.

Man, that is some walking-around money to throw around. Or away. I know this cat is several billion dollars smarter than I am, but look at the [...]

Entrecard and Almost VC Money

admin — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I was over on Mixed Martial Arts and saw the best google ad in a long time:

It'd take a long time to make a million bucks at $20K/month!

But, for some reason, it seemed very apropos given that the topic was Entrecard taking $112K on a pre-money valuation of $998K. It wasn't the odd numbers that caught my attention because that sort of thi [...]

More Almost Good Cari.Net Customer Service

admin — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Sigh. Once again they almost avoid being the rotten apple of my eye. My not so snarky comments in red.

This evening Cari.net will conduct an emergency maintenance window to provide additional protection and redundancy for the C2 Data Center. [Planned emergency maintence window. Nice!] Every attempt is made to provide advance notice of these windows; however, in the inter [...]

Do Not Make Mad Decisions You Will Regret

admin — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Earlier this week I had a perfect storm of things go wrong at work, any one of which would have been likely to infuriate me on a normal day. Combine them all together in a row, thrown in a quick round trip flight on United Airline (motto: You Think K-Mart Has Lousy Service?) and then add in several off-diet expensive-but-yucky airport food meals that made me gain three pounds. Result: One Ready To Explode Guy.

Bad Te [...]

Being Careful What You Ask For

admin — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I enjoyed Don's article on firefighting and it reminded me of something so true we forget it all the time: be careful what you ask for. Or, put differently, people will do what they're incented to do.

Y2K

Back in the days when Cobol breathing dinosaurs roamed the earth there was this problem we were trying to fix and verify all the issues. I had a fat [...]

Fire Fighting

Don — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Seth Godin had an interesting article, Managing Urgencies. Here's one of many money quotes:

The problem, of course, is that most organizations are on fire, most of the time....Add up enough urgencies and you don't get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along.

Several years ago on [...]

Social Heartbeat Monitor First Analytics

admin — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I've been having a right proper geek fest with Excel, PivotTables, and the output from our Social Heartbeat Monitor of 2,000+ Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites.

Actually, that was hard to type as my hands are kind of cramping up.

I'm still pondering what this all means, and it'll get a lot more interesting when we start having week-on-week data. But here are some interesting graphs....