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HomeVSSVOnMediaOnDemandSVISOnHollywoodAO EventsAbout AO Witch Hunts and Public DataUnion Square's Fred Wilson believes radical transparency is, over the long term, a force for good, not evil, and we'll see more of it not less in the future.Read more...The Power of Cloud TransformationCloudVelocity's Greg Ness acknowledges that events in the last few months have started bringing him closer to the vision of the public cloud, although he still thinks the hybrid cloud will win during the next decade.Read more...Unicorns and MBAsFlybridge Capital's Jeff Bussgang loves bucking conventional wisdom, and while there is no single model for success, he is more and more convinced of the value of an MBA entrepreneur.Read more...How to Deal with Pure Recruiting MistakesUpfront Ventures' Mark Suster talks about the unavoidalbe realities of the previously undetected recruiting error, and how to quickly eliminate the person before pervasive damage kills your startup.Read more... Featured Posts The AlwaysOn OnMedia 100 Top Company Competition November 28, 2013 | No Comments | AlwaysOn Awards The eighth annual OnMedia 100 private company and 50 Companies to Watch competitions have begun! Nominate your favorite digital media companies and check out the list of companies that have already been nominated. The OnMedia 100 represents the top emerging companies that are creating new business opportunities in the world of media, advertising, marketing, branding, and public relations. The winning companies are staring down the entrenched, legacy institutions that have long dominated Madison Avenue and creating new ways of reaching their sophisticated and increasingly mobile audience.Today’s digital media, advertising, and marketing startups are shifting to take advantage of the trend toward both socialization and personalization. Consumers are demanding a new type of advertising—one that brings the products and services they want to them. Read On » Who Are the Power Players in Digital Media? November 28, 2013 | No Comments | AlwaysOn Awards The third annual Power Players in Digital Media competition has begun! Nominate your favorite champions of digital media and check out the list of players that have already been nominated. The AlwaysOn Power Players in Digital Media list honors the most influential people in the banking, venture capital, legal, and accounting world who support technology entrepreneurs that are bringing massive technology breakthroughs to the digital media world. These individuals and their firms are the infrastructure workhorses behind the ideas that make the Global Silicon Valley an incubator for success, creating strong companies that are building forward-thinking, indispensable products. Read On » The AlwaysOn OnDemand 100 Top Company Competition November 29, 2013 | 1 Comment | AlwaysOn Awards The fifth annual OnDemand 100 private company and 50 Companies to Watch competitions have begun! Nominate your favorite cloud infrastructure, on-demand, and SaaS companies and check out the list of companies that have already been nominated. The OnDemand 100 represents the top emerging companies that are creating new business opportunities in the world of on-demand, cloud computing, and SaaS. The winning companies are creating a complex world of interconnected business intelligence, merging valuable legacy data and systems with vital new streams of information. New application developers, especially those serving the expanding mobile market, now rely on cloud infrastructure to create, deploy, and manage their apps. Read On » Who Are the Power Players in the Cloud? November 29, 2013 | No Comments | AlwaysOn Awards The third annual Power Players in the Cloud competition has begun! Nominate your favorite champions of on-demand, Saas, and cloud computing and check out the list of players who have already been nominated. The AlwaysOn Power Players in the Cloud list honors the most influential people in the banking, venture capital, legal, and accounting world who support on-demand entrepreneurs that are bringing massive technology breakthroughs to the cloud, on-demand, and SaaS world. These individuals and their firms are the infrastructure workhorses behind the ideas that make the Global Siliconn Valley an incubator for success, creating strong digital media companies that are building forward-thinking, indispensable products. Read On » The AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Company Competition November 29, 2013 | No Comments | AlwaysOn Awards The 12th annual AlwaysOn Global 250 private company competition has begun! Nominate your favorite innovative technology startups and check out the list of companies that have already been nominated. The AlwaysOn Global 250 represents the top emerging companies that are creating new business opportunities in the Global Silicon Valley. These startups are opening up a new era in worldwide innovation that’s not only changing the way people live, it’s bringing a bright, new vision to the business world. Thousands of new ideas are making their mark, thanks to an expanding venture economy and a wide range of options available to entrepreneurs with the tenacity to take their idea from concept to market.With the unprecedented shift from desktop to mobile, cloud and infrastructure innovators are making it possible for an entirely new generation of application and software solutions to enter the technology marketplace. The enterprise world has endured a long ramp-up to the cloud, but is now flocking to it with alacrity. Read On » Announcing the 2013 OnHollywood 100 Top Private Companies November 3, 2013 | No Comments | AlwaysOn Awards This year's 100 top companies have freed themselves from the confines of traditional Hollywood and are inspiring artistic innovation to serve a new kind of consumer audience. AlwaysOn is proud to announce its seventh annual OnHollywood 100, representing the top companies that are disrupting the establishment and creating viable business models for the digital entertainment marketplace. The AlwaysOn editorial team, along with partners in the venture capital and investment community and entertainment industry experts across the globe, went out into the entrepreneurial ecosystem to find the top 100 private companies in digital entertainment that are continuing to innovate an increasingly digital Hollywood and disrupt an entrenched legacy institution. Read On » Latest Posts Witch Hunts and Public Data December 6, 2013 | No Comments | Guest Posts Union Square's Fred Wilson believes radical transparency is, over the long term, a force for good, not evil, and we'll see more of it not less in the future. I was reading a thread on Hacker News this morning and came across this gem of a comment:One of the consequences of a public transaction chain is the great potential for witch hunts. Here’s one of the first examples, but it surely won’t be the last.The backstory here is a couple researchers posted a paper suggesting that Satoshi (the inventor of bitcoin that nobody knows) had done a large transaction with the founder of Silk Road. That was picked up by the New York Times last weekend. Well it turns out that was not what happened. What happened in fact was this. Read On » How to Deal with Pure Recruiting Mistakes December 5, 2013 | No Comments | Guest Posts Upfront Ventures' Mark Suster talks about the unavoidalbe realities of the previously undetected recruiting error, and how to quickly eliminate the person before pervasive damage kills your startup. One of the unavoidable realities of building a startup is having to fire people.In a normal business you can often sweep bad performers under the rug and not deal with them. When you have millions or billions of dollars of revenue you can suffer a few bad performers or bad apples. You can miss a quarter’s target and not cull the inefficiencies. I’m not saying you should, but you could. Read On » The Power of Cloud Transformation December 4, 2013 | No Comments | Guest Posts CloudVelocity's Greg Ness acknowledges that events in the last few months have started bringing him closer to the vision of the public cloud, although he still thinks the hybrid cloud will win during the next decade. Let’s face it, over the years I’ve been pretty hard on the public cloud dream and the vision of running production apps exclusively in the cloud. I’ve been critical of Amazon “over marketing” the public cloud and promoting the idea of the enterprise w/o data centers.Events in the last few months have started bringing me around much closer to Amazon’s vision, albeit I still think that hybrid cloud will win over the next 5-10 years. Read On » Unicorns and MBAs December 3, 2013 | No Comments | Guest Posts Flybridge Capital's Jeff Bussgang loves bucking conventional wisdom, and while there is no single model for success, he is more and more convinced of the value of an MBA entrepreneur. I like being a contrarian. As a kid, if a certain TV show was popular amongst my buddies, I’d purposefully ignore that show and search for other shows that were less well known (e.g., Hogan’s Heroes was a personal favorite that never hit mainstream). When someone declares something is conventional wisdom, I look to poke holes and challenge the underlying assumptions.Recently, the conventional wisdom in Startup Land has been that young, technical founders are the prototype for creating valuable companies. The formula, this theory goes, is to find a hacker in a hoodie and bring out the wheelbarrow of cash to back them. Read On » How Investors Evaluate VCs December 2, 2013 | No Comments | Guest Posts Forward Investment Partners' Nic Brisbourne looks at how LPs make their difficult decisions when evaluating venture capitalists, with the suggestion that selection aptitude be added to the list. LPs, the investors in VC funds, have a difficult job to do, largely because they have to work with poor quality data and only a small fraction of VCs deliver the returns that make them worth investing in. The problem is made worse by the fact that LP demand to invest in the handful of serially successful VCs well outstrips supply and most LPs have to invest most or all of their venture allocation in other VC funds. Read On » Digital Hollywood Combats an Intellectual Wasteland November 29, 2013 | No Comments | Guest Posts At OnHollywood, Bridge Bank's Ed Lambert sees promise in this year's crop of digital entertainment startups, as they blend cool technology with smart content to stimulate a new level of social interaction. OnHollywood 2013 represents the second time this year that AlwaysOn’s Tony Perkins and I decided to eschew the traditional conference format of many people seated in rows for cabaret-like intimate seating. Sitting in the main room of the beautiful Bel Air Bay Club in subdued lighting with the view of the ocean and a plethora of picture windows made me feel like I was hanging out at the Hotel California (or at least, hanging out in Joe Walsh’s living room, getting ready to hoist a gigantic cocktail or three). Read On » Buying Your Holiday Gifts With Bitcoin November 27, 2013 | No Comments | Guest Posts Union Square's Fred Wilson encourages a new way to shop this holiday season by using Bitcoin to help realize the potential of global digital currency. Everyone focuses on the price of Bitcoin these days and it is no wonder why. But for Bitcoin to be anything more than a store of value, we need to see a transactional ecosystem develop. When the citizens of the world will be able to buy and sell from each other and from retailers of all shapes and sizes via Bitcoin, then we will have truly realized the potential of a global digital currency.Furthermore, transactions can help stabilize what is a very volatile currency today. There is an imbalance of supply and demand right now. Read On » Goldilocks and the Three SaaS Go-To-Markets Models November 25, 2013 | No Comments | Guest Posts Venrock's Brian Ascher explains why the love affair with SaaS is likely to continue for a long time, with more than a decade of disruption and growth ahead. Software as a Service (SaaS) is having its moment. Customers, entrepreneurs, and capital markets are all enamored with the SaaS model– with good reason. For customers, software as a service can yield dramatic reductions in total cost of ownership, quicker time to value, and pricing models which let you pay for only what you need and as you go versus all up-front. For entrepreneurs, the recurring nature of subscription pricing gives more forward revenue and cash flow visibility, enables new customer acquisition models (such as Freemium), and the single code base for all customers is significantly easier to support than custom installs on-premise or supporting multiple generations of packaged software releases (and the Operating Systems they run on.) Read On » Tesla S Hits Consumer Reports Top Spot November 24, 2013 | No Comments | Guest Posts Tesla is still being negatively impacted by recent Model S crashes, but that didn't stop Consumer Reports giving the car its top ranking, with a 99 out of 100 score. Check out this week's best and worst performers. The AlwaysOn X Fund dropped 3.6% last week, while the NASDAQ was up just 0.1%, and the S&P 500 advanced 0.4%. Year to date, the AO X Fund is up 62.8%, the NASDAQ is up 32.2%, and the S&P 500 is up 26.5%.Big data analytics leader Splunk reported strong Q3 results, beating analyst expectations by 1 cent, and posting 51% revenue growth. In the last three months, Splunk signed more than 450 new customers and has a total of more than 6,400. Read On » Focus Focus Focus November 24, 2013 | No Comments | Guest Posts Foundry Group's Brad Feld urges startup teams to go beyond the clever idea and focus on the core elements of their emerging startup. Who is your customer? What are you selling them? How are you selling them it? Why are they buying it? In my mid-20s I was part of an amazing experience called Birthing of Giants. It was a gathering of 60 entrepreneurs over four days (for three years) who were all under 40 and founders of companies with more than $1m in revenue. It was the first time I discovered my peer group and while I was young (24 years old) and small ($1m in revenue) I felt like I immediately fit in.One of the guys in the group from from Brazil. He had this delicious accent and intense passion whenever he spoke. I remember being across from him in some conversation when he pounded on the table in reaction to something and said “focus focus focus.” But it came out as “fuck us fuck us fuck us.” And I’ll never forget that moment. Read On » Innovating Sonar and Location Based Networking State of the Industry November 24, 2013 | No Comments | Guest Posts Duck9's Larry Chiang DJs familiar tech tools a method, technique, and manner like a music mash-up, putting you in the midst of the action without revealing your location. A sales pitch I hear as an owner of a small business = “I’m in your HQ’s neighborhood. Stop by?!”Heck no, you can’t sit with meGPS based, social networking apps do and replicate that exact bad dynamic. Highlight and Sonar and FourSquare broadcast locations and check-ins. My point of view: IT’S A BAD SOLUTION SEARCHING FOR A PROBLEM. Read On » Well, They “Should” be Our Customers November 22, 2013 | No Comments | Guest Posts Guest Blogger Steve Blank helps scientists and engineers who've been working in the lab for years commercialize their technology instead of getting trapped by their own beliefs. When scientists and engineers who’ve been working in the lab for years try to commercialize their technology they often get trapped by their own beliefs – including who the customers are, what features are important, pricing etc.One the key tenets of the Lean LaunchPad class is that every week each team gets out of the building and talks to 10+ customers/partners to validate a new part of their business model. Back in class they present their findings to their peers and teaching team in a 10 minute Lessons Learned presentation. One of the benefits of the class is that the teams get immediate unvarnished feedback on their strategy. Read On » 123»Last » AdvertisingTweets by @alwaysonAlwaysOn Network Sponsors Become an AlwaysOn Network PartnerAdvertising HomeAOEventsAbout AORSS Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Powered by Peer-to-Peer Fundraising © AlwaysOn Network, Inc 2003 - 2020