SoCal CTO
DECEMBER 1, 2007
I generally am working as an acting CTO for about 3-4 start-ups or other companies at any one time. I was just talking with someone who asked me to define how that could work and what they meant. Great question. I also found this interesting graphic of the changing needs around the CTO role in different size/type companies that somewhat echoes my experience. ( Roger Smith ) This helps explain where I normally play.
Frank Addante
MAY 24, 2007
OK, as I eluded to in my previous post, I have decided to take the plunge, yet again, and start another company. So, I am on to Startup 6.0. This one is so new, we don't even have an official company name, yet. So, we decided to code name it "the Rubicon Project". Rubicon is a popular idiom that means to "go past the point of no return". The phrase "crossing the Rubicon" has come to represent.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
SoCal CTO
SEPTEMBER 25, 2007
For some reason over the past week, I've been asked by three different people I know about job opportunities that might fit them. Since, I've given them the same advice, I thought it was worth putting in my blog. I personally believe that the best way to hire, find partners, and find a job is through a network. So the key question is: How can I leverage my network?
SoCal CTO
NOVEMBER 2, 2007
I had already written about OpenSocial ( OpenSocial and Facebook as Platforms) and frankly I was hoping for a lot more in the announcements and APIs. I only have a cursory understanding of OpenSocial from reading various posts and from crawling through the API definitions, but it appears that OpenSocial has a long way to go before it's going to be useful for several of the applications we are working on.
Advertiser: Aggregage
Office leases are one of companies’ largest expenses, and if your whole team is working from home with no clear end in sight, you may be wondering what to do about your lease.
SoCal CTO
OCTOBER 31, 2007
We finally are starting to hear what Google's anticipated alternative to Facebook as a platform. If you've talked to me in the past few months, you probably know that this is something I've been grappling with across a variety of projects/domains. I've talked about this issue in: Facebook Platform and Facebook as a Learning Platform. With Google's entry, there's a nice alternative to Facebook and the key word is "open.
SoCal CTO
OCTOBER 27, 2007
I was on a panel yesterday at StartupLA. The event was a good event and I ran into a few folks that I hadn't seen in a while and meet a few new people. One thing that was interesting is that I'm finally starting to run into folks in Los Angeles who run in technology circles and who have blogs. This is something that I've been having a hard time finding.
Southern California Tech Central brings together the best content for technical professionals in Southern California from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
SoCal CTO
OCTOBER 23, 2007
I went to an event by Amazon on their Amazon Web Services in Santa Monica today. The focus was S3 - storage service, EC2 - their compute cloud, their queuing system, and their flexible payment system. The S3 system is not a transactional object system, it's for larger objects, larger updates. The EC2 is very similar to having a Linux box in a colocation facility.
SoCal CTO
OCTOBER 17, 2007
On Ben Kuo's blog, he posted about Entrepreneurs in Southern California and pointed to a post by Will Johnson, a Southern California entrepreneur and blogger. Will's post talks about lack of interest in working for startups here in Southern California, saying: we probably’d don’t have the: a) same support infrastructure (meet-ups, networking events, etc.); b) history of success; and c) abundance of start-up companies (so if one fails there is another to jump on).
SoCal CTO
OCTOBER 7, 2007
I've been reading or hearing quite a bit about how startups these days don't take nearly as much capital to create as they used to. What used to cost $1M now takes $100K. If that's actually true, then it creates New Rules Of Technology VC. In this post RWW talks about some of the new kind of approaches to funding: Y Combinator is creating tech companies with a tiny (10-20K) seed investment; Charles River Ventures started a Quick start program; Jeff Clavier launched a 12M fund for tech startups.
SoCal CTO
SEPTEMBER 26, 2007
Found this through Ben Kuo's blog: Media Matchmaker: autopsy of a failed startup from the Frank Peters show. Good stuff! It's worth hearing Betsy and then hearing the investors take on execution (roughly 45 minute mark). Quite a contrast. We had talked to them when they were getting started. Sounds like its good we didn't end up working with them. Still I think the concept is fantastic if the model can be figured out to make it work.
SoCal CTO
SEPTEMBER 13, 2007
I've been remiss in posting to this blog. Very busy on a couple interesting start-ups. More on them in a couple months. In any case, I went by Lunch 2.0 in Santa Monica last Friday. It was way too crowded (250 people in a tiny space). But saw a few folks I hadn't seen in a while and connected with a couple of new people. I saw that Ben Kuo wrote about it: More networking events His comment that the turn-out suggested that there likely would be more of these is probably true.
SoCal CTO
JULY 12, 2007
Interesting attempt to create a start-up over the course of a weekend. They failed to get it done in time and they make it sound like they are surprised that it might take longer than a day of programming to build something. It's funny how this expectation around start-ups persists that things can magically be built much, much faster. They also ignored that a large group of developers can't necessarily build something much faster than a small group.
SoCal CTO
JUNE 19, 2007
From Ask the VC - What are typical compensation numbers?
SoCal CTO
MAY 1, 2007
I've worked with several businesses that were essentially based on driving traffic via search engine optimization (SEO). There are a wide variety of techniques that can be used, but getting high rankings is not easy and highly volatile. I just saw a Forbes article talking about Google Hell - getting placed in the secondary index. Bottom line - if you are basing your business on high rankings via organic search, there's pretty incredible risk.
SoCal CTO
APRIL 20, 2007
I've somewhat fallen off the map on this blog. Been traveling and consulting with a bunch of early-stage and growth companies. Really fun stuff these days. One of my recent fun experiences was doing a presentation at Harvard Business School (HBS) on the implications of Web 2.0 type tools (Blogs, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, RSS, RSS Readers) on corporate learning and someone like HBS.
SoCal CTO
MARCH 22, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Thursday, March 22, 2007 Discussion Creation Among Bloggers - LinkedIn, Blogging and Discussion Groups Ive been participating in a Yahoo Group that are users of LinkedIn and who are Bloggers: [link] Its an interesting group of folks from diverse backgrounds. Its also been interesting to see the interaction of tools involved - Social Networking, Blogging and a Discussion Group.
SoCal CTO
MARCH 20, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Tuesday, March 20, 2007 Time Rich, Time Poor and Apple Jeremy Liew at Lightspeed Venture Partners has an interesting post: Time Rich or Time Poor? In it he separates web consumers into: Time Rich (more time than money) and Time Poor (more money than time). He tells us: If you’re starting a new internet company, its important to know who your audience is, and to make sure that you don’t let your own experience and that of other Time Poor people
SoCal CTO
MARCH 20, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Tuesday, March 20, 2007 Realistic Entrprenuers Guide to Venture Capital Seths guide is worth reading - The realistic entrepreneurs guide to venture capital Posted byTony Karrer at 2:43 PM 0comments: Post a Comment Newer Post Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) About Me Tony Karrer Dr. Tony Karrer is CEO/CTO of TechEmpower , a Los Angeles Web Development firm, and is considered one of the top technologists in e-Learning.
SoCal CTO
MARCH 20, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Tuesday, March 20, 2007 Kevin Federline Search Engine Just saw a post - Sleep with a pop star, get your own branded search engine. - talking about Prodeges Search with Kevin Site - [link]. I actually think this is a pretty innovative model. Take a look at other sites: [link] But the overall idea is to provide branded search in order to get merchandise from your artist, star, etc.
SoCal CTO
MARCH 13, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Tuesday, March 13, 2007 8 Ways the Internet has Changed Software Marketing Great post - 8 Ways The Internet Changed Software Marketing - is an interesting take on how different it is these days to market software. Good stuff. Posted byTony Karrer at 6:58 AM 1 comments: Jon Miller said. Glad you liked the post.
SoCal CTO
MARCH 12, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Monday, March 12, 2007 MyShape Article - Analyst Misses the Point The NY Times did a piece today on MyShape, a start-up in Pasadena - Log in Your Measurements, and the Clothes May Fit. I had to laugh when an analyst with Forrester said in the article - As impressive as these results may be, myShape’s approach will probably fail to gain a mass audience unless the company can somehow simplify the measuring process, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst w
SoCal CTO
MARCH 9, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Friday, March 9, 2007 Map of VC Investments Found this Map of 2006 VC Investments post. Some very interesting graphics including this heat map: Very cool visualization tool! Posted byTony Karrer at 9:30 AM 0comments: Post a Comment Newer Post Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) About Me Tony Karrer Dr.
SoCal CTO
MARCH 5, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Monday, March 5, 2007 Open Source Business Model A recent spate of posts on the challenges of running an open source business is interesting ( Tosh , Siemens , Downes , Tosh 2 ) and quite heated as one of the founders of elgg - a social networking platform aimed at the educational space - Dave Tosh laments - Elgg is the most popular white label social networking platform in the world powering over 2000 networks.
SoCal CTO
MARCH 1, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Thursday, March 1, 2007 Entreprenuer Network Great post by Ben Kuo - The Importance of the “Network&# to Entrepreneurs - the informal connections between people in the technology industry here who have a vested interest in helping entrepreneurs take their companies to the next level. Whether that’s pointing new entrepreneurs in the right direction–toward an attorney, an angel, or venture capitalist–or whether it’s helping a s
SoCal CTO
FEBRUARY 28, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Wednesday, February 28, 2007 Google Maps Mobile I recently downloaded Google Maps Mobile for my Treo. Its works great. And there was a big surprise. It includes traffic! This is something that Ive wanted on my wifes GPS for a while. If you havent checked it out, its pretty amazing. My only minor complaint is that it doesnt have a menu option to disconnect the phone from the data connection.
SoCal CTO
FEBRUARY 27, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Tuesday, February 27, 2007 Stanford Podcasts - eHarmony - Greg Waldorf I was just pointed to a set of great podcasts done by Stanford B-School and particularly, I just listed to the podcast by eHarmonys Greg Waldorf. Having been involved with eHarmony from its founding days as an acting CTO , it was interesting to hear how far theyve come.
SoCal CTO
FEBRUARY 25, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Sunday, February 25, 2007 Challenge of Predicting Winners I just read a bit on the payout to YouTube from the Google Acquisition ( Internet News , CNN ). Part of the discussion around this is the talk about the founder who only got $83M (as compared to $3xxM for the other founders) who bailed out early and choose to go back to school.
SoCal CTO
FEBRUARY 25, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Sunday, February 25, 2007 Interesting Model for University President Saw a post by Paul Kedrosky pointing us to Graeme Thickins on How Stanford Does It. Its interesting to think about how universities might want to have their staff better aligned with moving ideas from the lab to start-ups. In my experience, this has been really hard to do successfully.
SoCal CTO
FEBRUARY 23, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Friday, February 23, 2007 Events and Networking in Los Angeles One of the issues I discussed in Innovation and Geography was that the geography and traffic in Los Angeles generally makes it more difficult for networking. In fact, I would say that over the past few years, it has become harder to produce or find events that will attract a good audience.
SoCal CTO
FEBRUARY 20, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Tuesday, February 20, 2007 Innovation and Geography I ran across a post in Read/Write Web - Does Location Matter in Web Innovation? that talked about a recent NY Times article When It Comes to Innovation, Geography Is Destiny. Reading the articles and the comments is probably worth it, but I personally think that the NY Times is overstating the advantage of being in Silicon Valley with a couple of exceptions.
SoCal CTO
FEBRUARY 17, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Saturday, February 17, 2007 About this Blog Ive been thinking about doing a blog with my thoughts on technology and whats happening in the Los Angeles area technology scene for a while, but it was Ben Kuos recent start of a blog that inspired me to actually go ahead and do it. Thanks Ben. Posted byTony Karrer at 6:56 AM 0comments: Post a Comment Newer Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) About Me Tony Karrer Dr.
SoCal CTO
FEBRUARY 17, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Saturday, February 17, 2007 A Different Kind of Incubator - The Hive I recently met with The Hive a new incubator in Orange County. This company was started by Victoria Duff (who many of us know from back in the late 90s), Phillis Lane (who I have known for quite a few years) and Jon Bukosky. What I really liked in my conversations with The Hive is that they are willing to work with and fund ventures that would never get VC dollars.
SoCal CTO
FEBRUARY 17, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Saturday, February 17, 2007 Where LinkedIn Works for Me Ive been a long time user of LinkedIn , but only recently have started getting the benefits I always expected. Im sure that many of you have read Guys article Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn. His suggestions are all good suggestions, but what Ive been finding is that I end up using linked in primarily for two kinds of things: Keeping track of who I know (and keeping their emails updated), and Finding people
SoCal CTO
FEBRUARY 17, 2007
skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Saturday, February 17, 2007 Finding Good Developers in Los Angeles? Im part of a CTO group that meets once a month to discuss various topics. About 18 months ago, the entire group began to mention that they were having more difficulty finding good developers. Since then it has become much harder to find people and while we are talking about hiring relatively small numbers of people, the typical sources of candidates dont seem to be working.
Frank Addante
DECEMBER 26, 2007
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth? The Internet is quickly turning into a mutli-media platform, giving businesses the opportunity to express themselves in ways that were never possible before. Personality is now possible. That is, giving a personality to your business, something that is very hard to do with only text on a website.
Expert insights. Personalized for you.
231 
Let's personalize your content