Weekly Spark Missive

Week Ending January 22, 2010

What Tongues are Wagging About

• Google, China and Cybersecurity continues to heat up as Hillary Clinton makes speech on Internet censorship: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-22/china-says-clinton-remarks-on-internet-censorship-damage-ties.html
• Human “bed-warmers” at Holiday Inn: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60K50020100121?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a49:g43:r1:c0.268041:b29955390:z0
• Digital Chocolate’s Hawkins plans to develop games for Facebook and take on Zynga: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-22/digital-chocolate-s-hawkins-looks-to-facebook-games-for-growth.html
• Watch for Google Fast Flip… it’s growing fast. 90 publications already. Google is investing in it big-time. Use it yet? http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/
• What happened in the Internet in 2009? http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/01/22/internet-2009-in-numbers/
• comScore Reports Global Search Market Growth of 46 Percent in 2009: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/1/Global_Search_Market_Grows_46_Percent_in_2009

Event Recaps:

• Bloomberg 2010 Outlook
• Lise Buyer cautioning not to get too hyped up for IPO mania this year. The majority of the IPOs will be companies that aren’t well known. She also said that SARBOX is actually good for IPOs – about 80% of companies that went IPO in the past 10 years are trading below their opening price.
• Twitter COO said wireless is underhyped and the ecosystem for Twitter is producing fascinating applications. LBS+ Real time web hasn’t even begun to take off, and has myriad business applications. Said Twitter is nowhere near going IPO
• Cisco: We are going to continue to acquire and make a big push with our Tandberg acquisition
• Silverlake guy said that companies still want to go public on US stockmarkets. Also indicated there would be big news from Skype in 6-8 weeks.

Press Riffs

• Met with Bloomberg editorial team who says they are very committed to strengthening tech coverage and now have 20 tech reporters out here
• Contact at BusinessWeek said the dust is still settling at BusinessWeek and the editorial calendar is “very much in flux right now”
• David Lawsky no longer at Reuters
• Computerworld no longer covers appdev and only barely open source. Of course they have not announced this.

Awards

• InformationWeek 500 due April 30, 2010 – tracks the technology, strategies, investments and administrative practices of some of the best-known organizations in the country and wcompanies selected at the top of their industries will be recognized, as well as organizations demonstrating the most innovative uses of technology in the essay portion of the application. http://informationweek.2010informationweek500.sgizmo.com?iwid=PR