Category Archives: Uncategorized

“It’s not low quality reporting at all. It’s high quality reporting on low quality people. There’s a difference.”

Back in 2006 when Jason and I were working with some really talented people on a Digg-like social news version of Netscape, I called it Secret Project X. I even registered secretprojectx.com. I love that name. Some of the people from that same Netscape team were also busy working to get TMZ up and running on my old Blogsmith blog platform.Continue reading “Secret Project X”

I routinely mention the “three envelopes” story when talking to entrepreneurs about how startup CEOs often act when faced with a crisis. Many of them have never heard the story, so I’m recording it here for future reference: A new CEO was brought in to run a tech company. The CEO who was stepping downContinue reading “Three envelopes”

I had dinner with Brett Terpstra in San Francisco recently and it was so much fun that he asked me to be a guest on his Systematic podcast. Half of the show covered the upcoming return of Meet The Makers and the other half covered my quest to find a startup religion that worked for me.Continue reading “Brett Terpstra’s Systematic podcast”

Smart designers are asking why QWERTY keyboard layouts still exist on modern mobile devices. @mezzoblue Yep. Especially on smartphones where we don’t have decades of legacy muscle memory.— Mike Davidson (@mikeindustries) June 25, 2014 For a while now, I’ve been thinking that QWERTY actually does make sense on phones in a way that it neverContinue reading “The revenge of QWERTY”

I woke up on Sunday morning and saw four spam messages in my inbox from an old AOL account of mine that I almost never use. This isn’t a new thing, nearly every email address gets used to send spam via a process called “spoofing.” Spoofing happens because anyone can send email as billgates@microsoft.com via sloppy,Continue reading “AOL address books hacked”

If your embedded tweet has an image in it, that image shows up at the top of the embedded tweet. Compare a screen shot of one of my tweets on twitter.com with the embedded version of the tweet here on my site. On Twitter: That is one fine looking embed! As I recall, older versions had theContinue reading “Embedded tweets with photos are hot”

I met the Contently founders a long, long time ago when I was co-hosting the NYC Open Angel Forum. Of all the companies who pitched our audience of investors over Shake Shack burgers and beer, I think they’ve gone the farthest. I mean furthest. Anyway, they’re a great NYC startup success story and they interviewed me for theirContinue reading “The Contently Show: How Nimble Publishers Survive”

Kim LaChance Shandrow, a great writer I worked with in the early Crowd Fusion days, is now writing for Entrepreneur.com. She interviewed me about building mobile web sites. Some of my answers were too long to make it in: Invoca is a cloud-based service for tracking inbound call activity. When I first saw them years ago, theyContinue reading “Entrepreneur’s 10 Questions on Mobile”

Mergers are risky, and the chance for failure is high: Two-thirds of corporate marriages fail to produce enough financial gains to justify their cost. There’s some good advice from CNN Money on successful mergers today and it has quotes from Ceros CEO Simon Berg. When I talked to Simon about acquiring Ceros in early 2012, he hadContinue reading “CNN Money: How to survive a merger”