This is something I have been waiting for: Ixus 50. My old Ixus 300 digital with 2,1 megapixels have served me well but I have got tired of long focusing times and low quality night shots. The new top line model is available from April 2005 from 399$ upwards.
Barely can wait to test the piece for some cool target like the Sphinx at moonlight.
It's very pleasant to find evermore comments and hard core experiences of VCs by entrepreneurs in blogs. Tom Evslin shares his wisdom with ten lessons.
Organisations are like us - they are dependent on their sensations. If there isn't enough or none they are self-created. Companies are living organs that are fed with information. People need to know where they are standing and how they are fit to the bigger picture. If the body is not feeding the head with sensations the head can make them up. In companies this works the another way around as well. Rumours start to circulate easily and people are seeing and filling gaps where there is none. More than often companies are not aligned due to this asynchronous information. No wonder if it is often senseless :-)
How much to leverage the company with debt and hover the freshly injected equity back? Max Headroom by Private Equity Online.
Yesterday I attended a small presentation from an entrepreneur who built a company from zero to €50m revenues with some 300 employees over a decade or so. They raised VC rounds of considerable amounts (in tens of millions) along the journey and their investors included top notch names known worldwide.
Knowing the success case very closely and following them during the years I must agree to his verdict about VCs: don't if you can without. Continuously all the investors promise value added which is often not industry specific or plain simply non-existing. Lower costs and increase sales is a good advice but does not help much to carry out the specific company strategy properly.
Of course there are exceptions and VCs can provide good expertise especially in the early stage investments. Also process knowledge and expertise can be useful even for companies with few hundred employees and international operations. Often the founders are not that keen on streamlining and improving things - they rather create and build.
Still, one phrase sticked to my mind: "founders squeezed continuously". It's high stakes, no prisoners.
Joel Spolsky has critised the VC-biz model and thinks that it should be fixed. Spolsky makes it sound that VCs have all the fun and they can just play the roulette on the entrepreneurs cost. From my experience it is more chance and coincidences than pure rational reasoning and planning. Everybody has to meet up their targets and objectives and unfortunately the entrepreneur and the VC usually are not in synch and aligned. A VC has also some comments about the issue.
When does a software company need a plus $90m round of VC money? Burnham's Beat tries to figure it out and the results are not that appealing.
Expensive country codes on int. phoning will most likely reduce their significance and the winners will be large areas with cheap rates such as US and UK. Tom Evslin tells more.
Skype released its 1.0 versions just recently. Now there is already rumors of embedding the software for 3G mobile phones - not so good news for telco operators. (via TheFeature).