Roger McNamee is a smart guy and a very successful investor as a co-founder of Elevation Partners. He made a breakfast presentation last month at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles that is well worth watching. I could probably get half a dozen columns out of this one speech, but the part I want to concentrate on here is McNamee’s claim that when it comes to social media, Facebook (in which he was an early investor) has already won. I’m not here to say Roger is wrong, just that I am not exactly sure what Facebook is winning.
The core of McNamee’s speech didn’t have to do so much with Facebook as with Microsoft, Apple, Google, and […]
Today, if you have a few million bucks to spare, the Federal Communications Commission will be
Nortel Networks, the bankrupt Canadian telecom company, came that much closer to disappearing completely yesterday with the cash sale of its portfolio of 6000 patents for $4.5 billion to a consortium of companies including Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion (RIM), and Sony. The bidding, which began with a $900 million offer from Google, went far higher than most observers expected and only ended, I’m guessing, when Google realized that Apple and its partners had deeper pockets and would have paid anything to win. This transaction is a huge blow to Google’s Android platform, which was precisely the consortium’s goal.
Search is a fundamental component of intelligence or even thought. Maybe that’s why Google is now calling it knowledge. Our brains are already good at search. Look around a room and every object your eye passes is identified in your brain. Something out of place? It catches your eye. That is where we are headed with Internet search, though not exactly the way one might expect.