Charles Hudson's Weblog

I read this article (apparently I was late to the blogosphere party on this one) Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far – New York Times in the Sunday NYT and I wasn’t really sure why this was news. As far as I can tell, the basic thrust of the article is that the mobile [...]

I’ve been reading a bunch of posts on how Twitter got funded without a business plan or a business model. I think the logic of these posts is largely true in only one case – if you’re an early-stage company in tech where you have lots of adoption, good growth, and attention from the “right” [...]

I´m at a random internet cafe in Spain and a nice British man just saw me browsing Facebook and asked me if I thought they were in any position to go public anytime soon. I don´t want to beat a dead horse, but I think Facebook should focus on finding their version of AdWords, eBay´s [...]

I’ve been clipping stories about companies who have raised fairly large (as in greater than $10 million) amounts of venture capital for consumer web services prior to launch. I am not sure that three data points constitutes a trend, but I noticed that Avvo in Seattle (link here), Powerset here in the Valley (link here), [...]

Lately I have been getting really interesting data and research papers sent to me by friends and colleagues. Here is another one for all of you data junkies out there. I found this one on the Private Equity Spotlight website. The article on page 5 talks about how past performance can be an indicator of [...]

I was poking around on Wikipedia and came across what looks like a comprehensive list of acquisitions and substantial equity investments that Yahoo! has made since 1997. I am not sure that the table is accurate, but the trend is interesting. I took a look at the total number of announced deals (according to this [...]

Today, getting a mobile phone service agreement is a real pain. To me, it’s kind of like buying a used car — no matter what you pay, there’s always that nagging feeling that you’re getting ripped off or not getting the best deal possible. When you add in the fact that it feels like every [...]

It’s been awhile since I was actually investing money for a living, so this post might be a bit off. Lately I have been hearing a lot of feedback about how web 2.0 is over and done with and investors are moving on to the next thing. I’m not totally sure, but I think there [...]

This is really more of a blurb than a post. I have been talking to quite a few folks in the market today who have really fast growing web 2.0 or mobile applications where a significant portion of the traffic, pageviews, unique users, and usage comes from the developing world. In almost every case, the [...]

After two full days at AlwaysOn Media, which was a lot of fun, I was reminded of one thing that I always notice whenever I leave Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, technology (life sciences, IT, clean tech, etc) attracts a disproportionate share of the top talent in the region. This is not to say that [...]