My friend Alexis Richardson is a provider of elastic to the financial world. Well, a provider of “Elastic Servers” that is, which are collections of applications packaged as virtual servers. The company he co-founded, Cohesive FT, has just appeared in InfoWorld’s top 10 tech startups for 2008. Hurrah! The company name and corporate web pages [...]

I drank a bottle of wine yesterday – not much news in that really, since it’s a regular occurance. But, I happened to browse the verbiage on the back of the bottle and I noticed that part of the label was detachable. It had a tab that read ‘TO REMEMBER PEEL HERE’… and it had [...]

In March last year I visited London and to start a conversation about ‘UK vs US’ entrepreneurialism, and in a small way I helped pushed along this idea of a trade mission. Ideas are easy, execution is hard. Congratulations to the team that put this together: Oli Barrett, Julia French, and Jim and Bron.

Redefining search… with a red animated zebra? http://www.redzee.com The result of applying the ‘Cindy Crawford’ test has her homepage at position 11 in the results. Not so good.

Cuill announced its funding today – $25 million from Madrone and $8 million from Tugboat and Greylock.

Ahh – there’s nothing quite like waking up in the morning, strapping on some chaps and riding a desk all day. I’m building a distributed query processor. It’s a continuation of my work on Berkeley DBXML and on the Netscape Directory Server. At Cuill we have a lot of data, and we have a lot [...]

I first read about the Orders of Ignorance in an ACM article written by Phillip Armour in 2000. Since that time they have proved a valuable guide to both my software development and business decision making. I’d love to paste the whole thing here, but it’s (c) the ACM, and I don’t want to infringe [...]

Julia French of Covered Communications has arranged a workshop event about the effect of Social Media on society. I’ve been supporting this effort as I believe that entrepreneurs will save the world and that effecting positive social change through social media is key way to empower the economically and politically disadvantaged. There’s some cool people [...]

I’m in London this week meeting with business angels, venture capitalists, journalists, bloggers, and entrepreneurs: the people that comprise the startup eco-system. The topic I’m exploring is ‘UK vs US Entrepreneurship’ – the similarities, the differences, the problems, and the solutions. I think there are problems and I’d like to be a part of the [...]

I was recently interviewed by Lana Clements of Emigrate magazine about my experience moving to the states. Her questions centered around ‘The American Dream”, which I had never really thought about in relation to myself. It was quite thought provoking. Lana: When did you move to America and on what visa? John: I’ve moved twice. [...]

Kiva.org puts a face on micro-finance. Micro-finance means small loans. Not very remarkable, except in comparison with direct aide to developing countries. It turns out that bottom up grass-roots investments at the local level is more capital efficient and more effective at generating economic sustainability than top-down grants to governments and international NGOs. Loans rather [...]

I was interviewed by David Smith of The Observer about Brits abroad doing the entrepreneur thing in Silicon Valley. I was quoted a few times in his article The New Revolutionaries. He asked where I was from. To which I replied ‘international man of mystery’. He jotted down ‘Yorkshireman’. Oh well. If you like the [...]

I met with Kimbal Musk who has founded a Boulder, CO based startup, me.dium.com. They have combined social networking, instant messaging and web browsing to create a compelling application that suggests the cyber-punk future presented in Snowcrash and Accelerando. My interest was piqued because of the intersection here with digital identity and mobility. The client [...]

My friends at MediaGraft are seeking a US based Advertising Sales Executive…. A great team and a great opportunity… Mediagraft is a digital download business which is making audio and video content available to consumers free of charge, funding the download through advertising. As our content portfolio grows with best of breed music, commentary, comedy [...]

Fond memories of ‘eTime Capital Inc’. Originally uploaded by merrells. Alternative Title: ‘Nice-guy George, the investor sponsored CEO, looks on as specious founders gorge on VC cash.’ I wonder where they are now? eTime Capital, a 1999 startup, burned through ~$40m of cash before smacking itself into the side of a mountain. The mission was [...]

blue_servers_web.jpg Originally uploaded by merrells. My friend David Boreham, one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met, has been quietly working away on something very cool. Blueshoo This week he’s been teasing some VC’s with it. Apparently, “Valley VCs are talking about it between the stalls as they urinate this week.” That’s his test for [...]

Too damn busy to blog. Given that complexity and change are the only constant in my life… I’ve decided to switch from declaring my plans to reporting what’s happened. My last declared plan was for a move to London to start on a new venture, but what actually happened was a move back to California. [...]