Disqus - Latest Comments for xfreemarko

Re: Personal note: A job change for yours truly

xfreemarko — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:04:23 -0000

Having been a reader of your blog and a follower on twitter for quite some time, I believe this is a great choice by the Globe to actually put someone in a position like this who understands the space. Good luck and don't lay off the tweets.

Re: Sorry, the iFund is most likely NOT for you.

xfreemarko — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:08:20 -0000

Interesting thought here. Yes, its true that VC's want you to get them a large return, partially because not all of their investments will work out and partially because, well, they exist to make big profits for the founders.
But what pressure to be under from day one if you take VC funding, knowing that they expected return on investment is in the 30x range?
What something like the ifund should do is take some % of the fund and offer it as grants (perhaps with some first refusal rights on grantees if they seek further funding) that will help many one man/woman dev shops an ability to see if they can prototype a product that might work instead of scoping them out for their business savvy and experience from the get go. Give a developer $100k and tell them to take a year to come up with something and then see what the product turns out to be.
Too much concentration on the ROI and not enough thought about what the product should do and be often leads to more things that no body wants being developed

Re: Pinch Media - Investing on a New Platform

xfreemarko — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:27:07 -0000

This is interesting stuff, I've been discussing the need for analytics on mobile devices (particularly native apps on the iphone) over the last couple of weeks.

It would be great if you could add a sharing tool that allows you to easily Twitter such announcements. With Fred's avid use of the service it'd be a cool addition.