Wednesday, November 30, 2005

14,159,265

Why Google offered exactly 14,159,265 shares for sale?
Because (pi - 3) * 100,000,000 = 14,159,265.

Read full story here.

IPOs of super successful technology companies






























































Company nameYear of IPO$ per share
AppleDec 12, 198022
MicrosoftMarch 13, 198621
OracleMarch 12, 198615
Sun MicrosystemsMarch 4, 198616
DellJune 22, 19888.50
Yahoo!April 1996Click here
Amazon.comMay 15, 199718
eBaySeptember 24, 1998Click here
GoogleAugust 18, 200485

Monday, November 28, 2005

10 rules for web startups

Click here to see the 10 rules for web startups.



Saturday, November 26, 2005

Google AdSense "click fraud"

Google executive calls click fraud the biggest threat to the Internet economy, urges quick action.
"I think something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model," Google Chief Financial Officer George Reyes said.

I always wondered if the pay-per-click model of revenue is for real. Its pretty funny to see that a giant Internet company like Google relies on just "ads" for revenue, though the beauty of Google's ad revenue is that it creates ads specific to key word search.
I also doubt it if advertisers really increase their sales by using Google's AdWords program given the rampant click fraud.

Friday, November 25, 2005

Google threatens

Wired has an interesting article on why almost all tech companies need to be threatened by Google. The following is an excerpt from the that article relating to Google's foray into online classifieds.

CLASSIFIEDS

When secrecy-obsessed Google let news of "Google Base" slip, it looked like an aggressive entrée into online classifieds. The test service can search ads like used-car and personals listings, which would mesh with Google Local and might even kick-start Orkut, Google's social network.

Who's threatened: craigslist, eBay, Monster, Tribe.net

Signs of panic: Within hours of the Base bombshell, eBay's market value dropped by almost $2 billion. And even before that, the classified sites were nervous. CareerBuilder and others fretted about letting Google host their feeds.

Reality check: This may be an extension of Froogle rather than a stand-alone product. But it could expand to everything from travel to eBay-like offerings.

Saturday, November 19, 2005

The Web - What it can and can't

Amazon, eBay, rediff and almost all e-commerce companies are built on the idea that people will buy goods "through the Internet". This is absurd, because the web can't deliver goods or anything tangible. The web can only deliver information.

Claude Shannon is known as the father of information theory. He defined information as the reduction of uncertainity.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Google Base launched

Google Base has finally been launched. I'm not impressed by the way it works. I was expecting something much better from Google.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie on software as a service via Internet

Bill Gates' e-mail:

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2005 9:56 PM
To: Executive Staff and Direct Reports; Distinguished Engineers
Subject: Internet Software Services

Microsoft has always had to anticipate changes in the software business and seize the opportunity to lead.

Ten years ago this December, I wrote a memo entitled The Internet Tidal Wave which described how the internet was going to forever change the landscape of computing. Our products could either prepare for the magnitude of what was to come or risk being swept away. We dedicated ourselves to innovating rapidly and lead the way much to the surprise of many industry pundits who questioned our ability to reinvent our approach of delivering software breakthroughs.

Five years ago we focused our strategy on .NET making a huge bet on XML and Web services. We were a leader in driving these standards and building them into our products and again this has been key to our success. Today, over 92% of the Fortune 100 are utilizing .Net and our current wave of products have XML and Web services at their core and are gaining share because of the bold bet we made back in the year 2000.

Today, the opportunity is to utilize the Internet to make software far more powerful by incorporating a services model which will simplify the work that IT departments and developers have to do while providing new capabilities.

In many ways this is not completely new. All the way back in 1998 we had a company meeting where we outlined a vision in which software would become more of a service over time. We've been making investments since then -- for example, the Watson service we have built into Windows and Office allows us and our partners to understand where our users are running into problems and lets us improve their experience. Our On-line help work gives us constant feedback about what topics are helping our users and which we need to change. Products from MSN like Messenger and Hotmail are updated with new features many times throughout the year, allowing them to deliver innovations rapidly. Our Mappoint service was a pioneer in letting corporations connect up to a web based API on a subscription basis.

However, to lead we need to do far more. The broad and rich foundation of the internet will unleash a "services wave" of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet to millions of users. Advertising has emerged as a powerful new means by which to directly and indirectly fund the creation and delivery of software and services along with subscriptions and license fees. Services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions will dramatically change the nature and cost of solutions deliverable to enterprises or small businesses.

We will build our strategies around Internet services and we will provide a broad set of service APIs and use them in all of our key applications.

This coming "services wave" will be very disruptive. We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us – still, the opportunity for us to lead is very clear. More than any other company, we have the vision, assets, experience, and aspirations to deliver experiences and solutions across the entire range of digital workstyle & digital lifestyle scenarios, and to do so at scale, reaching users, developers and businesses across all markets.

But in order to execute on this opportunity, as we've done before we must act quickly and decisively. This next generation of the internet is being shaped by its "grassroots" adoption and popularization model, and the cost-effective "seamless experiences" delivered through the intentional fusion of services, software and sometimes hardware. We must reflect upon what and for whom we are building, how best to deliver new functionality given the internet services model, what kind of a platform in this new context might enable partners to build great profitable businesses, and how our applications might be reshaped to create service-enabled experiences uniquely compelling to both users and businesses alike.

Steve and I recently expanded Ray Ozzie's role as CTO to include leading our services strategy across all three divisions. We did this because we believe our services challenges and opportunities will impact most everything we do. Ray has long demonstrated his passion for software, and through his work at Groove he also came to realize the transformative potential for combining software and services. I've attached a memo from Ray which I feel sure we will look back on as being as critical as The Internet Tidal Wave memo was when it came out. Ray outlines the great things we and our partners can do using the Internet Services approach.

The next sea change is upon us. We must recognize this change as an opportunity to take our offerings to the next level, compete in a manner commensurate with our industry responsibilities, and utilize our assets and our broad reach to reshape our business for the benefit of the users of our products, our customers, our partners and ourselves.

Bill

Click here to read Ray Ozzie's memo.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Ten Technorati Hacks !

Explore the ten powerful Technorati hacks here.

Mr. Google vs Mr. Gates

Mr. Google: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accesible and available."

Mr. Gates: " Google is great, they are smart people, the press should continue to feed their arrogance as much as possible,’ he says.
‘They say they are going to organise the world’s information. Well, we don’t think that is our job. We think you need to get tools to editors and subject experts to let them organise the world’s information. There is a bit of a philosophy difference here. The only sure winner is the consumer.’ "

There is an interesting difference in the way the two companies approach the concept of delivering information.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Windows to Mac converts

AppleInsider reports:

The momentum generated by Apple's iPod digital music players and related products continues to translate into new Macintosh sales according to one Wall Street analyst who estimates that over one million Windows users have purchased a Mac in the first three quarters of 2005.

"If we assume that all of the growth in Mac shipments during the past three quarters resulted from Windows users purchasing a Mac, then purchases by Windows users exceeded one million," the analyst said. "Indeed, the number of Windows users purchasing Macs in 2005 could easily exceed our forecast of 1.3 million switchers in 2006."

Read the full story here.

Saturday, November 05, 2005

Where to get ideas for startups?

Paul Graham gives an elaborate explanation of "where to get ideas". He says:

"I think people believe that coming up with ideas for startups is very hard-- that it must be very hard-- and so they don't try do to it. They assume ideas are like miracles: they either pop into your head or they don't.

I also have a theory about why people think this. They overvalue ideas. They think creating a startup is just a matter of implementing some fabulous initial idea. And since a successful startup is worth millions of dollars, a good idea is therefore a million dollar idea.

If coming up with an idea for a startup equals coming up with a million dollar idea, then of course it's going to seem hard. Too hard to bother trying. Our instincts tell us something so valuable would not be just lying around for anyone to discover.

Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless."

What I believe is, successful startups and companies were not built on ideas that popped into the founders' heads but, they were built on a vision. You feel something is wrong with the way a particular thing works or the way certain task is accomplished and you want to express everyone what is the right way of doing things -- this is how successful companies were born. And one more thing I feel is, you should have a genuine desire to help or serve people a desire and passion to create some excellent product or service that will allow people to do things in a better or easier way.

"I actually think there's actually very little distinction between an artist and a scientist or engineer of the highest caliber. I've never had a distinction in my mind between those two types of people. They've just been to me people who pursue different paths but basically kind of headed to the same goal which is to express something of what they perceive to be the truth around them so that others can benefit by it." -- Steve Jobs.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Windows Live

Microsoft has unleashed its next killer application. Its called "Live". Microsoft boss, Bill Gates calls it the "live era" of software. At a press event in San Francisco, Chairman Bill Gates kicks off Microsoft's "live software" push. He details the upcoming "Windows Live" and "Office Live" products, a fusion of software and services that are delivered across the Internet. Read the complete news about "Live" here.

Live.com the website: Its just awesome. Full of AJAX programming, you find everything you want from your e-mail to weather in any city to news about anything on a single webpage. This is really something Google has to worry about. www.live.com

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Steve Jobs on TIME magazine cover again.

Steve Jobs appeared on the cover page of TIME magazine dated 24th Oct, 2005. TIME takes a look at how Apple manages to create great products again and again. Read the full cover story here.

.NET will conquer the world.

The reason so many Microsoft standards have become de facto development standards is that Microsoft uses those technologies internally. COM's popularity was driven by the degree to which Microsoft used COM in its own products. This made it a business requirement for competitors to support COM, simply because their products would look less feature-rich without the reusable, cross-language COM functionality offered by Microsoft products.

Click here to see how .NET will conquer the world.