Archive for April, 2008
Rebecca Fannin on Chinese Web Entrepreneurs, 2008-4-24
Posted by Craig Fisk in Chinese, marketing on April 30, 2008
Rebecca Fannin, author of Silicon Dragon: How China is Winning the Tech Race (McGraw Hill Professional, 2008), spoke April 24 for the China Business Network of the Northwest China Council in Portland on the founders of some of the leading high tech entrepreneurs in China. There is a good interview with Fannin about the book in Forbes.
Fannin is a journalist who has covered tech business in Asia since the mid-1990′s, first with Red Herring magazine and later with the Asian Venture Capital Journal and writing for diverse tech business publications. She also has a great network into the investors and drivers of new businesses in China, as well as India and elsewhere in Asia. She has a nose for “the story” on companies in a way that a lot of tech business publications don’t always capture and her talk put a personalized spin on companies like Baidu, Alibaba, and DangDang.
Since recently joining the board of the Northwest China Council, an Oregon 501(c)3 non-profit which puts on a series of China Business Network events, as well as intensive Chinese courses and cultural events, I’ve been working to bring more focus on technology business, as well as looking at ways to leverage web technology for this organization.
Startupalooza
Posted by Craig Fisk in Linux, open source on April 14, 2008
The Saturday, March 29, 2008 Startupalooza event at Cubespace in Portland (thank you, Todd Kenefsky, who organized it, and Eva and the rest of the Cubespace hosts) was the lowest BS-quotient startup confab I’ve ever seen.
The format was PowerPoint overviews, mostly of what companies or projects were doing, but instead of puffery and pitches, the approach was almost from the perspective of a confessional. Pretty much everything was interesting and well done, but most memorable for me were GarageGames (evolved from game software contract work to web-based distributed games building platform) and Jive Software (evolved from Jabber-based chat to a broader platform solution for customer communications – see Matt Tucker’s XMPP posting from January on Jive’s potential direction), as well as projects, like Unthirsty.com (happy hour mashups on Google Maps), which spawned Knitmap.com (same idea, but for knitting supplies).
It was striking that none none of these had been successful on the first go – sequential failure (or maybe I should really say “less than complete success,” “aborted success,” “undermined success,” “unleverageable success,” etc.) over many years was the norm – not that I’ve experienced that 
. Also, none were heroic solo successes. Each was driven by multiple people who had somehow found others that complimented themselves.
A few weeks later at an Oregon Entrepreneurs’ Network forum, I couldn’t help thinking that the contrast with Startupalooza was like the contrast between 90′s, Microsoft-like software and 00′s open source.