Paul Allen – Keynote Speaker, Tech Visionary, Soar.com & Ancestry Founder
My brother pointed out to me that my name shows up (finally!) on a US patent application search.
At MyFamily.com we had many ideas and applied for multiple patents. I\’m not sure any has issued yet; but at least one is now visible at the USPTO web site.
(Note: these are my notes from Alan\’s Hall speech at the E Station ribbon cutting. They are his words, as well as I could capture them, not mine.)
I hope that in the future we\’ll look back on this date and realize that this initiative has been a success.
If just one great company comes out of all this investment, perhaps the size of MarketStar, then we would count this as a great success. But we think we have a secret sauce and have the ability to create many successful companies.
Some of the smartest people I know are meeting for a geek dinner Wednesday night at Los Hermanos in Lindon. All other geeks are welcome. Please check this out.
The registrations doubled today to 23 or so, and we hope to get another dozen or two people signed up before this is over.
Utah Geek Dinners are a brainchild of Phil Burns, COO for our soon-to-be-christened Provo Labs. (Provo Labs will replace Infobase Ventures as our internet business incubator).
One of the things I love about running an incubator is that knowledge is worth more to us than it is in the hands of a single startup company.
Why? Because if we learn something or discover something of value, then we can apply it multiple times, not just once. If a new tool creates value, or if a new process cuts costs, it\’s great to be able to apply it to every business where it would increase revenue or margins.
In the past when I found a new idea, I could usually only apply it once.
I\’m sitting inside the old greyhound bus station on Ogden\’s infamous 25th street.
But it isn\’t a bus station anymore. Utah visionary Alan Hall and his team at Grow Utah Ventures have purchased the old bus depot. They are renovating it and today are christening it the \”E Station.\”
E, of course, stands for entrepreneur.
Alan Hall\’s vision is for Grow Utah Ventures to be the most influential private sector force for economic development in the state of Utah, with a focus on Northern Utah.
I am spending a good deal of time trying to determine where mobile technology is going. Several of my companies are going to be involved in delivering content or services to mobile devices including cell phones.
So it is a bit frustrating to keep finding research analyst reports that are priced in the $2-5,000 range. Here\’s a 53 page report on the future of mobile phones selling for $3,495.
I have a friend who uses Zoovy for her e-commerce system. That is the only way — until today — that I had heard of the company.
But today I was very impressed to discover that they have already integrated their e-commerce services with Google Analytics, Google Base and Google Site Map.
My friend really likes Zoovy. Now I can see why.
Interesting to add up the market caps of the 4 leading internet companies and compare them to 30 year old Microsoft.
Google: $124.9 billion
eBay: $66 billion
Yahoo: $61.2 billion
Amazon: $20 billion
Total: $272.1 billion
Microsoft: $297.7 billion
I blogged in 2004, months before Google went public, that within 10-15 years Google\’s market cap would surpass Microsoft\’s.
Librarian of Congress James Billington is proposing a World Digital Library project that will provide free access to millions of important documents from around the world.
Google is donating $3 million to the cause. Others will join it. The American Memory project from the Library of Congress already provides free access to millions of pages of American history content.
I am going to subscribe to either Hitwise or Comscore in the next couple of weeks. For many years I used Media Metrix, Nielsen Netratings and then Comscore. I liked all of them, but in the end I used Comscore most because its data covered the top 10,000 sites each month.
Hitwise covers 500,000 sites in 160 industries. I\’ve never used it before, but I\’m tempted to use it.
Has anyone out there used both Comscore and Hitwise? If so, can I talk with you and ask you about the relative strengths and weaknesses?
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