Month: June 2013

Hasta La Alta Vista, Baby.

I just saw the news that Yahoo! is “sunsetting” Alta Vista, one of the first “good” search engines. This makes me a little misty, as Alta Vista was the search engine I used BG – Before Google – and it had a real shot at *being* Google, had its various owners not utterly screwed it up over the years. Did you know, for example, that at one point Alta Vista was the largest and most widely used search tool on the web? Its driving force, Lois Monier, once told me “search should be a pencil” – he was adamant that Alta Vista not become a portal.

But Alta Vista was owned by DEC, a now dead computer company, which was bought by Compaq, another now dead computer company. And they made it a portal. And through the now defunct Overture, the assets of Alta Vista made their way to Yahoo!, a still alive portal. But now, Alta Vista is going to truly be dead.

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Excellent Content Marketing: Dear NSA…

This short Slideshare deck, an extremely clever satire of the now infamous NSA slide deck, should be Slideshare’s marketing calling card. It’s a promotional gift to the service, timely, clever, and leveraging the product perfectly. If this ever happens to you, use it in your marketing!

Echoes of the Tide and Oreo executions that are getting such plaudits recently. Love it.

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The Book Lives On

Faithful readers will recall that about three months ago, I announced my return to FM as CEO. I also mentioned that the projects I’d been working on – notably OpenCo and The Book, would have to be retooled given my new commitment to the company I started back in 2005 (when I last wrote a book). In the post, I wrote:

I love the book I’m working on, and I don’t plan to abandon it (I’m bringing on a co-author). And I love the conferences I do, and I’ll still be doing them (though I’ll be hiring someone to run them full time). But my first love is the company I started in 2005, whose story is not only unfinished, it’s at the height of its running narrative.

I’m very, very pleased to announce that I’ve found that co-author – her name is Sara M. Watson, and she’s simply the perfect partner for me to be working with on this book. You can read her post about it here. Sara and I met over Twitter, after she noticed the theme of the CM Summit – “Bridging Data and Humanity.” We spoke on the phone and I learned that the intersection of society and data was her passion – and that her background was an awful lot like mine. She started her career as a liberal arts major from Harvard (during the time Facebook was just a dorm room project), toiled in the narrative fields of enterprise IT, became fascinated with the story of information, and decided to head to graduate school to study it (she’ll finish her Masters from Oxford in a few months). After Oxford, Sara has some amazing plans lined up (I can’t talk about them yet) that dovetail perfectly into our shared work.

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Mary’s Annual Internet Trends

Waaay back in the late 1990s, I started a conference called the Internet Summit. My co-producers were Bill Gurley, who remains one of the giants in venture over at Benchmark, and Mary Meeker, who was at that point the best analyst in the Internet space, at Morgan Stanley. The Internet Summit had its last event in July of 2001, and the space was taken over by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who went on to launch All Things Digital, which has thrived to this day. I went on to launch the Web 2 Summit in 2004, and it was at that event that Mary started presenting her annual Internet Trends deck. I put her in one of my typical “High Order Bit” slots, ten minutes max, and each year Mary would lobby for more time, and cram more and more data and insights into her alloted time (by the last time Mary did it with me, it was 15 minutes and about 90 slides).

I stopped doing Web 2 in 2011 (OpenCo is the new black, natch), and Mary migrated her job to Kleiner Perkins and her presentation to All Things Digital, both great moves. Last week she unveiled her latest work, and I notice it’s gotten up to 117 slides. I missed All Things D due to a client event at P&G, but I bet she got more than 15 minutes to present it!

This deck is always worth the time to review. You can download it on KPCB’s site, and I’ve embedded it below.

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