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• You don’t change the world with a marginally better mousetrap

  For those of you paying attention, Cuil , a new search engine taking aim at Google, launched with much hype. Much of that hype comes from the fact that it was founded by former Google search architect Anna Patterson and her husband, Stanford professor Tom Costello. That hype and good press didn’t last long though. WebWare says they showed us how not to launch a search engine . Forget the hype and whether Cuil is or isn’t better or different or whatever than Google and all the rest – the real point is that it just doesn’t matter . As Jeff Nolan puts it , “you don’t beat Google just by being marginally better than Google”. I wrote recently that technology only matters when it creates new possibilities . Here, Cuil doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. Cuil claims to be be “bigger than Google” in terms of what it indexes, but it doesn’t really matter since most us of never get past the first page of results. Even though the This also underlines part of why Microsoft and Yahoo! can... Posted Jul 30 2008, 11:40 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Rants, Business, Microsoft, Google, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Venture Capital, Facebook

• Facebook: Lawsuits, IPOs, and Acquisitions

  ConnectU is suing Facebook for, among other things, copyright infringement, breach of contract, theft of trade secret. (It should be noted that Facebook is counter-suing for business torts and unfair business practices). ConnectU (which started at Harvard Connection) alleges that Mark Zuckerberg was brought on as a member of the ConnectU development team, given access to the existing code base and business plans, and eventually "stole" them. For more details, read the full set of complaints and other filings . Rob is wondering why no one is covering this lawsuit ... it's certainly a big deal given the recent valuations and talk of an IPO. As Mike Arrington notes , "this isn’t a case of plaintiffs looking for a quick buck as billion dollar valuations are discussed" - this is actually a long-standing dispute that commenced long before we were saying "Facebook" and "billions" in the same sentence. Facebook recently acquired Parakey , a as-yet-launched... Posted Jul 24 2007, 07:19 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Web 2.0, Business, Microsoft, Google, Startup, Venture Capital, Facebook