All about vp - Matoumba

Fishwrap: Can Silicon Valley Save the World Economy? Dont hold your breath . . .

Silicon Valley Watcher--reporting on the business and culture of disruption

- 22 hours and 26 minutes ago

[Wrapping up the week in three dots . . .]

. . . The Conversation Group celebrates its one year anniversary. Congrats!

. . . Reuters star reporter Eric Auchard is leaving San Francisco and will work from London. After many months of delays Eric finally got his papers through and leaves very soon. I'll see you in London Eric!

. . . Max Levchin, ex-PayPal, now Slide and Yelp, is no longer one of Silicon Valley's most eligible bachelors. He recently got married to Nellie Minkova at the St. Regis, just around the corner from his loft apartment and Slide's offices.

. . . Sramana Mitra writes in Forbes An SOS To Silicon Valley calling on our VCs to rejuvenate "an economy in dire straits." And she also wants VCs to figure out the healthcare problem, and also education.

In 2007, the U.S. spent about $2.26 trillion on health care, or $7,439 per person. It spends $1,000 per year per person in administrative costs, which puts the cost of the system at over $250 billion. This jaw-dropping number stares at me like a bottomless sewage pit of wasted resources, yet it's also an indicator of where technology can make huge improvements.

Education faces similar problems. Administrative costs eat up budgets, leaving little left over for teachers.

. . .Leaders of Silicon Valley, your answer to all these questions should be "yes." Don't let the current miasma of fear slow you down.

You have to lead. You have to create. You have to build. You have to invest.

You, Silicon Valley, need to pull the U.S. and world economies out of the mess that Wall Street and Washington have created.

I know you can do it.

Good luck with that Sramana, you are looking for help in the wrong place, imho. Our VCs won't do anything unless there are substantial profits to be had.

. . . VentureBeat continues to look for a VP of business Development--must have strong online marketing skills.

. . . GigaOm raised $4.5 million for expansion. Mike Arrington warns: GigaOm Ignores My Advice, Raises Another $4.5 Million

Maybe GigaOm is going to be doing a roll-up strategy, beating Mr Arrington to the punch?

. . . I'm fed up with (lil) green patch requests on Facebook! It's an ad network masquerading as a save the world service.

Weekend Watcher:

Friday evening I'll be at Workspace Limited on 2150 Folsom Street for a free open studios preview party.

7:30 Allison Lovejoy, piano and cabaret

8:30 Go Van Goth, danceable country middle eastern http://www.govangogh.net/

9:30 Cabaret Electronica - Allison Lovejoy and Groove Yantra

10:00 More Go Van Goth

11:00 Groove Yantra, electronica dance set

Fleet Week this weekend in San Francisco. Feel what it's like to be in a battle zone as fighter planes scream over head!

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dire straits,imho,vp,economy,cabarets

Ce nest pas un krach, cest pire

BlizzCon: StarCraft 2 To Release As Trilogy Of Games

Breaking Panel Finds Palin Guilty, Abused Power

Entellium Scandal Gives Ignition Partners a Black Eye

TechCrunch

- 1 days and 2 hours ago

Just because you run a private company that does not have to file quarterly financial statements with the SEC does not make it okay to cook your books. The CEO and CFO of Seattle-based CRM firm Entellium found that out the hard way. They were arrested by the FBI earlier this week for inflating their revenues and then lying to their board about it. The company appears to be toast. It fired two thirds of its staff of 60 people in Seattle, and its Website is down. We are putting it in the deadpool.

The CEO, Paul Johnston, and CFO, Parrish Jones, kept two separate set of books. One they showed the board, and the other was the real one. The fake one inflated revenues by $11.7 million over the past three years. For instance, in 2006 they told the board that revenues were $3,950,362, but they were really only $582,079. In 2007, the fake revenue number jumped to $6,291,705, whereas the actual revenues were only $1,446,238. This deception continued until September 26, 2008 when the VP of human resources, Melisah Wojtacha, came across the fake board books while cleaning out the desk of a former sales VP.

The scandal in Seattle is particularly embarrassing for Ignition Partners, the VC fund made up of former Microsoft hotshots who put in $19.7 million of the total $50 million that Entellium had raised. Ignition’s Jonathan Roberts sat on Entellium’s board (as did former Cisco CIO Pete Solvik, now a managing director at Sigma Partners). Did they not have outside auditors verify the accounting?

Ignition can kiss that $20 million goodbye.

Entellium Complaint - Upload a Document to Scribd

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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Industry Moves: MSLO Hires InStyle.com's Horwood To Chart Online Editorial Strategy

paidContent.org

- 1 days and 6 hours ago

pMartha Stewart Living Omnimedia (a href="http://finance.paidcontent.org/paidcontent?Page=QUOTETicker=MSO" class="ticker" title="MSO"NYSE: MSO/a) has named former InStyle.com exec Gail Horwood to the new role of SVP Digital Programming and Strategy. Horwood will oversee MSLO's digital properties, including MSLO sites a href="http://www.marthastewart.com" title="marthastewart.com"marthastewart.com/a and a href="http://www.wholeliving.com" title="wholeliving.com"wholeliving.com/a. In addition to guiding the sites' editorial strategy, Horwood will work with the merchandising team on driving the online retail business.nbsp; /p p Horwood is the first major digital hire since Wenda Harris Millard and Robin Marino were named co-CEOs after Susan Lyne a href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-mslo-ceo-lyne-steps-down-millard-and-marino-named-co-ceos/" title="stepped down"stepped down/a this summer. (The company has made one other executive hire since the Millard and Marino took over: Patsy Pollack was brought in as EVP of Merchandising in August.) Before serving as executive director at InStyle.com, Horwood was executive director, creative development at Time Inc. Interactive and VP, global content at Zagat Survey and editor-in-chief of CondeNet's food site a href="http://www.epicurious.com/" title="Epicurious"Epicurious/a. a href="http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=96022p=irol-newsArticleID=1208293highlight=" title="Release"Release/a /p pstrongRelated/strong/p ul class="related" lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-mso-co-ceos-millard-650k-base-salary-100-percent-target-bonus" title="Filings Watch: MSLO Co-CEOs Millard; $650K Base Salary; 100 Percent Target Bonus"Filings Watch: MSLO Co-CEOs Millard; $650K Base Salary; 100 Percent Target Bonus/a/li lia href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-mslo-ceo-lyne-steps-down-millard-and-marino-named-co-ceos/" title="Industry Moves: MSLO CEO Lyne Steps Down; Millard and Marino Named Co-CEOs"Industry Moves: MSLO CEO Lyne Steps Down; Millard and Marino Named Co-CEOs/a/li /ul piCheck out the best business jobs in digital media. a href="http://jobs.paidcontent.org/"Go here/a for paidContent.org Job Board./i/p pa href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?a=OBb503"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?i=OBb503" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=ry3LM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=ry3LM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=WfqdM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=WfqdM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=oO0Om"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=oO0Om" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=Ii07M"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=Ii07M" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=RkpyM"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=RkpyM" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pcorg/~4/416885449" height="1" width="1"/

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evp,vp,stepped down,jobs,salary

National Geographic is embracing user-generated content with photo and music sharing

OpenID Gets SaaS-y: JanRain Works to Ease OpenID Adoption

Read/WriteWeb

- 1 days and 17 hours ago

pimg alt="JanRain" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/imgJanRain.jpg" width="150" height="68" /a href="http://openid.net" title="OpenID"OpenID/a adoption has been lopsided. Getting sites to offer OpenIDs has been relatively popular. Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, and countless others provide OpenID addresses for their users. Even AOL users have an OpenID. Far less popular? Allowing users to access their accounts on those services with an OpenID. /p pBut a href="http://www.janrain.com" title="JanRain"JanRain/a is hoping to change that with the release of a href="http://www.janrain.com/products/rpx" title="JanRain RPX"RPX/a, a new subscription-based service that simplifies implementing OpenID. RPX promises to result in more OpenID login opportunities on the Web - and a revenue stream for JanRain./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12126amp;cb=12126' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12126amp;n=12126' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pJanRain has been involved in OpenID development since 2005. During that time, it has received a wealth feedback on OpenID implementations. /p pEarlier this year, that feedback motivated JanRain to a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/openid_usability_problems.php"simplify the usability of OpenID logins for users/a. Now, they're turning that same "ease of use" attention to the sites that want to implement OpenID. The result of that effort? RPX, which provides plug-and-play OpenID logins for any site, delivered via a a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_Service" title="Software as a Service"software as a service (SaaS) model/a./p p"We've heard loud and clear that companies want to simplify the registration and sign-in process," said Tore Steen, VP of Business Development at JanRain. "They definitely see the value of accepting OpenIDs, but there hasn't been a clear path for adopting OpenID and other open authentication standards. With RPX, JanRain is providing that path with a simple SaaS implementation."/p pa href="http://www.janrain.com/press/2008/suitelaunch" title="JanRain RPX"According to JanRain/a, RPX makes accepting OpenID logins (and a href="http://oauth.net/" title="OAuth"OAuth/a requests) as simple as subscribing and making a few code changes:/p blockquoteIf your website can make HTTPS calls and can parse either XML or JSON, then it can use RPX. You can get RPX up and running in under a day. /blockquote pFor JanRain's customers, RPX carries the benefits of lowering implementation and maintenance costs. Companies gain access to the technology they want while the onus of staying up-to-date on the latest code changes and dealing with other maintenance issues resides with JanRain. /p pFor JanRain, however, the product solves a completely different issue: producing revenue. Offering OpenID services as SaaS, JanRain gains the ability to charge customers a subscription fee based on the number of OpenID logins in play. If the service takes off, so could JanRain./p pTo date, lack of use cases and general confusion about OpenID implementation techniques have been effective deterrents to more widespread OpenID adoption. It will be interesting to see if the introduction of JanRain's solution - combining ease-of-use with a subscription model that companies understand - breaks that logjam. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/openid_gets_saasy_janrain_work.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/IR7-eKII5E7Y4HcyLNNZK7J53l4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/IR7-eKII5E7Y4HcyLNNZK7J53l4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=G4QY11we"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=G4QY11we" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=xnu9HyUo"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=p7WfvQTf"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=p7WfvQTf" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=xBox3VxP"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=xBox3VxP" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=HncqnmFp"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=HncqnmFp" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/vOPTez_u-9s" height="1" width="1"/

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vp,xml,wikipedia,yahoo,subscriptions

VP-fem-Erikasaca

Fallout 3 PC Specs Revealed

Media continue to repeat Cindy McCain's comment about troop funding without noting her husband's own vote

Media Matters for America

- 2 days and 4 hours ago

In October 9 articles, The New York Times and The Washington Post quoted Cindy McCain's claim that Sen. Barack Obama's "vote to not fund my son while he was serving sent a cold chill through my body," but did not note that McCain himself voted against legislation to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as Obama pointed out during the first presidential debate on September 26. While both articles noted that Obama voted against troop funding because the legislation did not include a withdrawal timetable, they did not note McCain's vote.

Neither the Times nor the Post noted that McCain voted against a March 2007 bill that would have funded the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and would have provided more than $1 billion in additional funds to the Department of Veterans Affairs -- along with all but two of his fellow Republican senators.

During the September 26 debate, McCain stated that Obama "did the incredible thing of voting to cut off the funds for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan." Obama responded: "Senator McCain opposed funding for troops in legislation that had a timetable, because he didn't believe in a timetable. I opposed funding a mission that had no timetable, and was open-ended, giving a blank check to George Bush. We had a difference on the timetable. We didn't have a difference on whether or not we were going to be funding troops."

Similarly, MSNBC played the clip of Cindy McCain's claim on the October 9 edition of Morning Joe, and co-host Mika Brzezinski stated: "There's been so much talk about the strategy of the McCain campaign; that to me seems like a smart one. I mean that's real, relevant." Co-host Joe Scarborough agreed, saying, "That's smart, that's relevant, that is -- that's legitimate, and that resonates much better than William Ayers." However, neither Brzezinski nor Scarborough noted McCain's vote against the March 2007 bill. Later in the segment, Scarborough asked Obama campaign communications director Robert Gibbs, "[I]s it unfair to make the kind of statement that Cindy McCain made about Barack Obama -- abandoning the troops in the field by not voting to fund them?" Gibbs replied, in part: "I can't imagine what Cindy McCain's reaction must have been when John McCain walked down to the Senate floor and also voted against funding the troops in Iraq."

By contrast, on the October 8 edition of NBC's Nightly News, chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell played a clip of Cindy McCain's comments and then noted: "In fact, Obama voted against money for the troops once, in May 2007 -- he said because the bill didn't include a timetable for withdrawal. But John McCain also voted against a troop-funding bill two months earlier for the opposite reason: because that bill called for a troop withdrawal."

From the October 9 New York Times article:

''The day that Senator Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son while he was serving sent a cold chill through my body, let me tell you,'' Mrs. McCain said. ''I would suggest that Senator Obama change shoes with me for just one day.'' Mrs. McCain was referring to a vote against troop financing that Mr. Obama cast in 2007 because the legislation did not include a timetable for withdrawal; Mr. Obama has voted for all other war-spending bills since he entered the Senate in 2005.

From the October 9 Washington Post article:

The McCain campaign's attacks on Obama's judgment and readiness came often and from a number of surrogates. Cindy McCain led the way, accusing the Democrat of voting against funding U.S. troops in Iraq, which at one time included the McCains' son.

"The day that Senator Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body," Cindy McCain told a crowd of several thousand supporters in Bethlehem, Pa. "I would suggest Senator Obama change shoes with me for just one day and see what it means to have a loved one serving in the armed services."

The Obama campaign said McCain has distorted his vote, which was an attempt to force Bush to come up with a plan to withdraw troops from Iraq by setting a cutoff date.

From the October 9 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe:

CINDY McCAIN [video clip]: The day that Senator Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body. Let me tell you, I would suggest Senator Obama change shoes with me for just one day.

BRZEZINSKI: Welcome back. There's been so much talk about the strategy of the McCain campaign; that to me seems like a smart one. I mean that's real, relevant.

SCARBOROUGH: That's smart, that's relevant, that is -- that's legitimate, and that resonates much better than William Ayers.

BRZEZINSKI: I wonder who we can ask about that.

SCARBOROUGH: And, also, Joe Biden made the same charge, basically, during the Democratic debates, so you can go there. That being said, if this race were being run on Iraq, military issues, the war on terror - John McCain would be ahead. It's the economy, the economy, the economy, but that's been the problem.

BRZEZINSKI: Well, we could ask the campaigns about this.

[...]

SCARBOROUGH: Robert Gibbs, is it unfair to make the kind of statement that Cindy McCain made about Barack Obama -- abandoning the troops in the field by not voting to fund them?

GIBBS: Well, look, Barack Obama obviously understands and honors the commitment and the sacrifice that our men and women in uniform make. I can't imagine what Cindy McCain's reaction must have been when John McCain walked down to the Senate floor and also voted against funding the troops in Iraq.

From the October 8 edition of NBC's Nightly News:

BRIAN WILLIAMS (anchor): Now, a related topic: presidential politics. And about last night -- looks like 63 million of us watched on television, more than the first presidential debate, but fewer viewers than that Biden/Palin VP debate. There were no devastating or towering moments in the Obama/McCain debate in Nashville last night. All we heard beforehand was that McCain was most comfortable in the so-called "town hall" format, though many viewers saw something less than that. As it turned out, two moments from last night loomed large today as the campaigns went back on the road with just 27 days to go now until the election. Our report tonight from NBC's Andrea Mitchell.

MITCHELL: In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, today, the Republican candidate's wife, Cindy McCain, accused Barack Obama of not supporting the troops in Iraq, including her son.

CINDY McCAIN [video clip]: The day that Senator Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body.

MITCHELL: In fact, Obama voted against money for the troops once, in May 2007 -- he said because the bill didn't include a timetable for withdrawal. But John McCain also voted against a troop-funding bill two months earlier for the opposite reason: because that bill called for a troop withdrawal.

The day after their second debate, John McCain also kept up his attack on Obama.

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john mccain,senate,republicans,repeats,mika

Lisp50: Warren Teitelman will speak at Lisp50

Planet Lisp

- 2 days and 5 hours ago

a href="http://www.lisp50.org/schedule/schedule/teitelman_files/conference.jpg"img src="http://www.lisp50.org/schedule/schedule/teitelman_files/conference.jpg" border="0" alt="" //abr /spanWarren Teitelman/spanbr /Dr. Warren Teitelman received his B.S. in Mathematics from CalTech in 1962, and his M.S. in 1963 and Ph.D. in 1966 from M.I.T., there being no program in computer science at M.I.T. at that time. He joined Bolt Beranek and Newman in 1966, where, as DARPA principal investigator, he was responsible for the design, implementation, and support of BBN-Lisp. He left BBN in 1972 to join Xerox PARC where he continued as DARPA principal investigator now responsible for Interlisp. Interlisp pioneered many of the concepts and functionality of modern IDEs (integrated development environment).br /br /For this work, he received the ACM Software Systems Award for 1993: "For pioneering work in programming environments that integrated source-language debuggers, fully compatible integrated interpreter/compiler, automatic change management, structure-based editing, logging facilities. Interactive graphics, and analysis/profiling tools in the Interlisp System."br /br /Dr. Teitelman left Xerox Parc in 1984, and joined Sun Microsystems where he was a Distinguished Engineer and Director of Window Systems, responsible for SunWindows, Sunview, Open Windows, XView, Open Look Toolkit, News, X11-News server, The News Toolkit. In 1990, he became Sun's Director of Multimedia.br /br /He left Sun in 1992, and after brief stints at Rational Corporation - Director of C++ Development Environment, Lucid Corporation - Vice President of Engineering, and Caere Corporation - Vice President of Engineering, he joined BayStone Software in 1995 as VP of Engineering and CTO. BayStone was acquired by Remedy Corporation in 1998. He joined Google in 2003.br /br /spanTransforming Lisp into a Programming Environment/spanbr /Dr. Teitelman was first introduced to Lisp during his graduate studies at M.I.T. He wrote the software portion of his dissertation using Lisp 1.5. on MIT's CTSS (Compatible Time Sharing System). As a result of that experience, he became interested in transforming Lisp from a programming language into a programming environment. His talk will describe this passage which covered the years 1966 - 1980, and saw the introduction of many innovative features, such as history, spelling correction and undo, analysis and profiling tools, integrated interpreter and compiler, the first Lisp-based client-server window system, and more.

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acm,darpa,rational,vp,toolkits

Greenbox Keeps a Constant Eye on Home Energy Use (The Startup Review)

Mashable!

- 2 days and 6 hours ago

Company Name:

Greenbox

20-word Description:

Greenbox Technology is creating an interactive energy management platform that enables households to save money and reduce their carbon footprint.

CEO’s Pitch:

Greenbox founders tackle the challenge of global warming by designing an intuitive, information-rich, interactive Web-based platform that homeowners can use to track energy use in real time. Even small reductions in energy consumption can collectively amount to billions of dollars in savings. The Greenbox platform will also feature community interaction tools, making energy use reduction a neighborhood challenge.

Mashable’s Take:

Based out of San Bruno, California, and launched as a limited trial in the first half of 2008, Greenbox is premised on the simple idea that the ability to monitor one’s energy usage in the home, matched with per-client solutions on how to cut down on the proverbial carbon footprint, will help to propagate green living in a substantive way.

As many homeowners now recognize, the cost of energy is quite high. To the point that it’s financially beneficial to adjust consumption. Greenbox’s role as an Web-based energy monitor is to put a stream of data in the hands of its users in order that they keep informed of activity, rather than, say, having to consult with efficiency specialists as to their particular situation. Yes, the popular lightbulb swap to less hungry and more long-lasting lamps helps matters, but Greenbox’s place as consistent watchdog, so to speak. “We remove the guesswork,” is how the company phrases it.

Indeed, this is not a referral service, pointing you in the direction of products and services that will help you to quickly satisfy your eco-conscious mind. Greenbox is really akin to having a personal pedometer for the roof over your head, telling you how far you’ve gone with energy usage at any given moment. You can watch it any time you please, or register for email and/or SMS alerts relaying information regarding “high or unusual usage or changes in electricity prices”

Greenbox is still developing a very limited trial rollout to select registrants. VP of marketing Matt Smith said to The New York Times earlier this week that just two dozen households have reported lower energy bills as a result Greenbox’s implementation. But it invites people to sign up to be notified as to developments in their particular area or residence. It expects to be “regionally available” in the months ahead.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

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energy consumption,energy usage,vp,email,two dozen

Who Really Uses Mint.com (And Other Banking 2.0) Services Anyway?

Read/WriteWeb

- 2 days and 7 hours ago

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/mint_logo.jpg" /Given the U.S. economic crisis, people are looking for new and better ways to get a handle on their personal finances. We recently profiled a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/banking_20_money_management_in_the_cloud.php"10 money management web applications/a that promise to do everything from analyzing your spending behavior to saving you money by negotiating lower rates on credit cards./p pThe proliferation of these types of apps would have you believe there's a big demand for web-based financial tools. But is there really? We would hope so, considering how their advanced technology can provide detailed analysis about your money (or lack thereof). However, we secretly wondered if the only people logging in to sites like Mint.com and the like are the young kids of Gen Y. Do adults with mortgages, credit card debt, and 401Ks even know how to use these tools? /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12117amp;cb=12117' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12117amp;n=12117' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p h2Are Banking 2.0 Users Really That Young?/h2 pTo find out who's using the banking 2.0 tools and why, we started with a href="http://www.mint.com"Mint.com/a, who recently gave us a peek into their company's data. As a href="http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/06/mintcom-users-are-feeling-the-hurt-pinching-pennies/"VentureBeat/a noted, Mint.com's nearly 500,000 users are cutting down on expenses - they've spent an average of $300 less per month in August than in January this year, a 6% drop. However, they believed that early users of this site and those like it were sure to be emyounger/em and more emtech-savvy/em. We believe they are tech-savvy, too, since it does require the use of computer and browser, and we know that a href="http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/obama-campaign.html"not everyone can handle such complications/a. But we wondered: how young are the users really?#160; /p h2Mint.com Is Slowly Aging/h2 pAlthough a href="http://www.mint.com"Mint.com/a doesn't require you to fill out anything more than a zip code and email address in order to sign up, they've conducted multiple user surveys in order to get a grasp on their company's demographic data. The end result of those surveys has given them a good idea of who uses the site. /p pMint.com admits that they, as a web company, did indeed "launch young." In the beginning, their audience was primarily Generation Y. However, over the past year, their user base has been gradually aging. At launch, the average age of the user on the site was 27, the same as their CEO at the time, Aaron Patzer. Today, the average age is 28, only a year higher, a year later. So are they really growing up?/p pMaybe they're not aging overall as a site, but when you look at the breakdowns by age range, you can see that some of the older age groups are trending upwards. Look at the 40-year-olds and up, for example - there is some growth to be seen there. Below, you can see a chart that tracks changes between September, 2007 and July, 2008:/p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/mint_user_chart.png" //p pAnother trend that points to the aging of Mint users is the fact that more users now report owning their primary residence. strongIn December 2007, that number was 39%. Today, 43% report that they own their own home./strong /p h2Why It Works: You Can emActually Save Money/em/h2 pimg align="right" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/money_cash.jpg" /a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mint_launches_site_redesign.php"When we first reported/a Mint.com's announcement that they had saved users over strong$100 million while managing $12 billion in transactions/strong, a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mint_launches_site_redesign.php#comment-64014"some of you/a were skeptical. But the company is maintaining those numbers are accurate. This is in part to due the fact that when you take into consideration the number of accounts maintained at Mint (checking, savings, credit card, 401K, mortgages, car loans, etc.) and the number of users (now about half a million), it isn't very hard to push that number up. However, it's also high thanks to Mint.com's wealthier-than-the-average-American user base. As of July 2008, the user's average income level was over $100,000/year and 39% had investment assets over $50,000. /p pBut that's not to say that Mint is only a tool for the wealthy tech elite - emanyone/em can save money with the service. According to a company representative, strong1 out of every 10 Mint.com users changes accounts/strong after signing up for the service. This means that those users are tapping into Mint.com's feature where the service recommends them a better offer. For example, a person with a credit card who charges a lot of airline tickets might be offered a different card with travel points. Another person might be recommended to switch from their Bank of America savings account to ING where they would get a better rate, perhaps. And yet another person might be recommended a credit card with a lower rate. And don't be mistaken - those recommendations aren't simply taking into account the introductory period where the credit card company slashes the rate to entice you, but looks at the credit card rate over the course of an entire year before determining whether it would really save the user money. /p h2What About The Other Startups In This Space?/h2 pGiven Mint.com's user base of around 500,000 and their traffic numbers, they are one of the biggest, if not the biggest, personal finance/money management web service. They achieved this growth through smart advertising campaigns that reached out to the mainstream, especially women, in magazines like SELF, Real Simple, and Reader's Digest. That appeared to have worked - today, strong40% of new users on the site are women/strong. /p pSo, what about the others? We reached out to some of the other banking 2.0 sites to see what sort of data they had, too. Out of the ten apps we previously featured, only Wesabe, Rudder, Geezeo, Xero, and Expensr had data on hand. a href="http://www.shryk.com/Default.aspx?tabid=100"iThryv/a is still preparing to launch and the rest did not respond to our request. /p pustrongHere's how those sites compared:/strong/u/p pa href="http://www.wesabe.com/"Wesabe/a/p ul liOver 100,000 users/li li56% male, 44% female /li liMedian income: $60-80K /li liAge: 60% are 30 or younger /li liMisc. - 75% have a college degree or higher, 43% are married /li /ul pa href="http://rudder.com/"Rudder/a/p ul liThe company just launched at DEMO last month, but already have 15,000 users./li liThey don't collect demographic info./li /ul pa href="https://www.geezeo.com/"Geezeo/a/p ul li30,000 users/li li54% male, 46% female/li li30% 18 - 34 years old/li li38% 35 - 49 years old/li liSite attracts a href="http://www.quantcast.com/geezeo.com/demographics"less affluent/a users /li liMore info a href="http://www.quantcast.com/geezeo.com"here/a/li /ul pa href="http://www.xero.com/"Xero/a/p ul lia href="http://www.nzx.com/markets/NZSX/XRO/announcements/4712542"Xero has/a 2200 paying customers/li liTheir number of customers has grown 132% since March 31, 2008/li liXero will not disclose demographic data./li /ul pa href="https://www.expensr.com/"Expensr/a/p ul li25,000 users/li liUsers in their 20's: 66%/li liUsers in their 30's: 24%/li /ul h2Great Tools, Now If Only Banks Would Tell People They Existed.../h2 pOverall, we can tell there are some general trends here - banking 2.0 sites are still young, but are starting to gain traction among older users. More women are starting to use these applications which makes sense, give that they are typically a href="http://adage.com/article?article_id=47030"the ones holding the household purse strings/a. /p pHowever, we think that there should be more of a push by financial institutions to recommend these types of tools to their customers, instead of sticking with the old stand-bys that include desktop software applications like Quicken. As Alistair Newton, Research VP and Industry Services Director at Gartner a href="http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=619512"noted earlier this year/a, em"with banks coming under increasing pressure to deliver a range of short-term cost savings, the ways that banks interact with their customers will become increasingly important in managing costs downwards. There are a variety of ways in which banks can help customers save money and better manage their exposure to debt while saving the bank money by encouraging greater use of self-service applications."/em /p pGartner also maintains that communities such as Mint.com, Wesabe, and Geezeo can be of long-term benefit to banks, especially as they help the more debt-exposed clients to manage their funds more effectively. /p pWe couldn't agree more. Our hope is that in light of the country's economic meltdown, these apps will get the push they deserve. /p psmallemImage credit: Cash, courtesy of: a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/spcbrass/"spcbrass/a/em/small/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/who_really_uses_mint_anyway.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/i3S6l9eNsRqBzWaAmrdMtxu1jOM/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/i3S6l9eNsRqBzWaAmrdMtxu1jOM/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=CVWRZoVl"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=CVWRZoVl" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=v6uKoL6M"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=J6ZvnWNX"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=J6ZvnWNX" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=V106NeHa"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=V106NeHa" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=Xpl84GqD"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=Xpl84GqD" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/aGh9mVv0X38" height="1" width="1"/

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Entellium Execs Simply Made Up Revenue

Techdirt

- 2 days and 8 hours ago

It always surprises me when I hear about various tech startups that eventually resorted to outright scamming. I can understand the pressures of running a startup as things get tough, but I can't ever imagine resorting to outright making up revenue. Yet, whenever an economic downturn hits, these stories start popping up. You may recall back in 2001 when the hot startup Critical Path was caught a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20010405/1726215.shtml"making up about 10% of its revenue/a. A day later, one of the biggest speech recognition companies of the time, Lernout #038; Hauspie, announced that its Korean division a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20010406/1055246.shtml"had made up almost all of its revenue/a. In that case, it resulted in the end of L#038;H completely, as well as a href="http://www.crm-daily.com/perl/story/10138.html" target="_new"jailtime/a for the CEO. br /br / It looks like we may be getting another such story. Just a few weeks ago, CRM provider Entellium was a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/entellium-launches-rave-crm-storefront/story.aspx?guid={B1DAFCAC-3405-4478-BDEC-0EAF6DE2B23D}#038;dist=hppr" target="_new"announcing new products/a (which they spammed us with a press release about). On October 1st, we received another email pitch from Entellium, urging us to download its software for a free 30-day trial. That same day, the company's a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008221247_webintellium02.html" target="_new" target="_new"CEO and CFO suddenly quit/a. A couple days later, most of the company's employees were a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008227093_entellium04.html" target="_new"laid off/a and told that the company was out of money. br /br / The whole thing seemed quite odd, especially considering that the company had raised over $50 million, had just launched this product and everything seemed to have been moving forward. Late Wednesday, however, the details came out. It turned out that the two execs who quit, Paul Johnston and Parrish Jones a href="http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g8gBlkOTAlAvnpngy8_81fpcsknAD93MLV7O0" target="_new"had been flat out lying to its board and its investors concerning revenue/a for years. For example, since 2006, the company made less than $3.8 million, but told the board it brought in $15.5 million. That's not just a slight fudging of the numbers -- that's extreme fraud, which was used to help the company raise that $50 million. br /br / The biggest question, though, is where were the board and the investors on this. It's difficult to see how investors would hand over more than $50 million without ever conducting an audit. They simply believed the two execs. It's also worth noting how the fraud unraveled. Apparently, the VP of HR was cleaning out the desk of the former head of sales, and discovered the bogus set of books that the CEO #038; CFO had been showing the board. She turned them over to the company's comptroller, who gave them to a board member -- which resulted in the board pretty quickly calling the CEO to let him know that they were sending over their own "contract" CFO to "check some things out." That was the point at which the two execs resigned. br /br / You always hope that these stories are simply cases of bad seeds, and that there aren't others doing the same, but it'll be worth watching to see if we start hearing other similar stories. They seem to come in bunches. br /br / a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081008/2148102498.shtml"Permalink/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081008/2148102498.shtml#comments"Comments/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20081008/2148102498op=sharethis"Email This Story/a br / br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=2f1d2858913c1e4722de2fd710f576f0"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=2f1d2858913c1e4722de2fd710f576f0"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=2f1d2858913c1e4722de2fd710f576f0" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?a=05m0m"img src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?i=05m0m" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~r/techdirt/feed/~4/415755492" height="1" width="1"/

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