Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Such a small world - even online

I was writing a piece about my latest investment, Kongregate, and was reading Ryan Olson’s piece about the company when I stumbled upon that ad being displayed on the page, just below one of my quotes. It shows Dogster’s Ted Rheingold, in his now world famous dog suit. Dogster is of course another one of my investments.

By the way, if you have a dog or a cat, and they don’t have a Dogster/Catster account, be ashamed! Redeeming yourself is just a click away .

So funny!

Public Speaking 101: Turn off your microphone before a loo stop

You might heard of the story of the CNN anchor, Kyra Phillips. who went to the loo with her microphone still on… the air, and whose chatter ended up as a voice over on a segment about Georges Bush. The chatter was relatively benign - she just bitched about he sis in law – as portrayed in some comedies. She then went on to appear on the “Late Show with David Letterman” (a very popular late night show on CBS), and presented the “Top 10” segment with… her top ten excuses regarding the incident, courtesy of  the Washington Post:

10. "Still haven't mastered complicated On/Off switch."

9. "Larry King told me he does this all the time."

8. "How was I supposed to know we had a reporter embedded in the bathroom?"

7. "I honestly never knew this sort of thing was frowned upon."

6. "Couldn't resist chance to win $10,000 on 'America's Funniest Home Videos."'

5. "I was set up by those bastards at Fox News."

4. "Oh, like YOU'VE never gone to the bathroom and had it broadcast on national television!"

3. "I just wanted that hunky Lou Dobbs to notice me."

2. "OK, so I was drunk and couldn't think straight."

1. "You have to admit, it made the speech a lot more interesting."

Pretty darn funny, and a gutsy move as you can imagine how petrified she must have been at 1) what happened, and 2) how much worse it could have been.

Bonus: the footage during which you hear Kyra’s voice over – on YouTube.

Photo credit: NewsBusters

FeedBurner's “-blogger_feel_good” option

Ah! Check this out.

That is a bug that I am not unhappy with for once: suddenly my FeedBurner FeedCount has grown 900% to a TechCrunch-like subscriber number.

(Gee! Mike is at 62K subscribers now. Sounds like this whole re-design brouhaha did not have much impact after all, did it ?)

So I know it is a wrong number, but many thanks to my FeedBurner friends for introducing this “”-blogger_feel_good“ command line option,  or to one of the many RSS readers out therefore for reporting an (obviously outreagously) inflated number .

Update: it is now clear from the FeedBurner subscribers statistics page that ”the issue“ is NetVibes, which is reporting 51,328 users reading my feed.

Tags: feedburner, netvibes

EgoSurf: EgoSurfing without the guilt - they say...

Bloggers beware! Here is a new measurement tool - EgoSurf - for egotistical blogger (i.e anyone clicking on this link to run the tool on his/her blog :-P). As explained in the FAQ, the system runs a set of searches on Google, Yahoo, MSN and del.icio.us, and then tells you if you are out of control or not according to a secret formula of theirs.

Though I am not too sure what it means, it sounds like that I am in the red on Google and del.icio.us... And according to the system, I am “So-so” (WTF) and have the fifth biggest ego. Doh!

C'mon A-listers, please get me out of the Top 10!

PS: Note that the Technorati search produces zero results.

[via Pierre Chappaz - in French]

Tags: egosurf

Quote of the day

As previously mentioned, I judged a session of the Under the Radar event on “Why Web 2.0 Matters”. It was a great event actually, very well attended.

During his demo, one of the CEOs saw that his Web-based application was taking quite some time to appear, and he gave that fabulous excuse: “Ouh, the Internet is pretty slow today!”.

The Circle of Envy

You can read the long version of the story on Jeff Bussgang’s blog, but in short, the “Circle of Envy” in Private Equity is spelled out the following way:

• Entrepreneurs envy VCs b/c they get to make a lot of money collecting management fees, and not working too hard to earn their salary.
• VCs envy Buyout investors, who get to manage much (much) larger funds with similarly large management fees to enjoy, and an even easier life.
• Buyout investors envy hedge fund managers who get to cash in their carried interest every year, and who enjoy quicker path to liquidity for their investments. Think about it: getting VC-like carry (typically 20%) to play in the public market.
• Hedgies envy… entrepreneurs – who get to build companies serially every 5/6 years, make a ton of money and can take long breaks in between startups.
• Entrepreneurs envy… you get it.

An amusing read, with a few real traits. Update: note that I am not agreeing with the claim that investors don't work hard - many of them really do.

We knew Mike Arrington was the Pope of Web 2.0...

and here is the corresponding Tech Church.

Amusing and sympathetic.

Why do you blog again ?

How many times has this question been asked to you, most often with genuine interest and sometimes with a hidden notion of “Don't you have anything better to do” ?

Here is Hugh Mc Leod's answer, which sums it all up.

[via Loic]

The GapingVoid on Business Models

I met and hung out with a ton of cool people during my trip to Paris, and one of them was Hugh MacLeod from GapingVoid fame. We had crossed each other's path at Les Blogs 2.0 a number of times, and had a chance to chat for a while at Fon's Martin Varsavsky's place. Hugh was kindly drawing some of his famous cartoons for some of the guests, and inherited this one - based on some of the topics covered during my panel.

No comment :-P.

Also worth the read: Hugh's thoughts on Les Blogs.

Yahoo RSS Reader: I heart Firefox (IE, what IE ?)

I am sure that this is a temporary bug (or even buguette), but I can't get the new Yahoo RSS Reader to display my feeds on Internet Explorer (V6 with latest patches, both on Windows 2000 and Windows XP) whereas it works great on Firefox. I am all for Firefox but developers should at least test Internet Explorer a little bit :-P.

 

                   Firefox displays RSS Feeds properly                                     No feeds in IE

Tags: sarcasm