Above the Crowd

“Well I was born in a small town And I live in a small town Prob’ly die in a small town Oh, those small – communities” — Small Town, John Mellencamp While “Social-Mobile-Local” is certainly an overused buzz phrase, most of the attention has been placed on the “social” and “mobile” parts of the phrase. In social, the spectacular rise of Facebook and Twitter is clearly a disruptive and critical trend. In mobile, the adoption of the smartphone (led by Apple’s iPhone and now catapulted forward by Android) is also a fundamentally important platform transition. Much less attention has been paid to the third concept, […]

Back in October, Techcrunch announced that Dropbox had raised $250mm at a seemingly absurd valuation. Many firms, including my firm Benchmark Capital, participated. When this happened, many people asked us why this was a special company that would cause us to break our standard investment paradigm. They didn’t quite understand why this was a company that deserved once-in-a-generation special attention. The first answer to this question is rather straightforward, but not earth shattering. Drew Houston and his team had taken a hard problem — file synchronization — and made it brain dead simple. Anyone that had used previous file synchronization programs, including Apple’s own iDisk, constantly encountered state problems. Modifications in one […]

In addition to inspiring others and building breakthrough new products, he also lit up the biggest scoreboard in business…the company’s market capitalization…(courtesy of Forbes):

[Follow Me on Twitter] “People get ready, there’s a train a comin’” – The Impressions From  Zacks via Yahoo : Mark Vickery, On Thursday March 24, 2011, 4:58 pm EDT “BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (NasdaqGS: RIMM – News) beat its fiscal 4Q EPS estimates by 2 cents per share, but missed slightly on quarterly revenues and offered guidance well below the current consensus. This has sent RIMM shares down nearly 10% in after-market trading…” Yesterday, after the market closed, Research in Motion, the makers of the Blackberry device, announced that they would be lowering their current quarter earnings due to lower average sales prices. In a  separate announcement […]

[Follow Me on Twitter] In a recent New York Times article , Kathryn Huberty, a Morgan Stanley analyst was quoted suggesting that Apple’s iPhone is the key catalyst for an important new technology trend. “Applications make the smartphone trend a revolutionary trend – one we haven’t seen in consumer technology for many years.” This argument rings true in that the “after iPhone” smartphone market is dramatically more interesting than the “pre-iPhone” smartphone market. Later, Ms. Huberty made an even bolder statement, “The iPhone is something different. It’s changing our behavior…The game that Apple is playing is to become the Microsoft of the smartphone market.”  Or perhaps not. Many analysts and bloggers have […]