The very latest new and improved whiter than white venture capitalist trend is (drum roll) – “The Consumer Internet”! “Every other venture capitalist one encounters in Silicon Valley now seems eager to reinvent himself as an expert who can spot hot new consumer-driven Internet ventures” writes Gary Rivlin of the New York Times. “The problem is that you’ve got all these software V.C.’s, they don’t know what to do with themselves…They say, ‘These are deals that make people a lot of money, and enterprise software is largely dead.’ So now they’ve decided they’re consumer Internet venture capitalists.” (George Zachary, Partner at Charles River Ventures).
Now, I know that you’re reading this blog while shopping online, running your RSS feeds of the latest stock news, IM’ing to a friend, VOIP’ing on a conference call with a client, and secretly watching a movie you got from a p2p site. But did you know that you are a part of the consumer Internet and that there’s money to be made off of you? Are you surprised yet? Are you holding your wallet tighter?
Daleks are fearsome creatures, indistructable, flustered by stairs, and good dustbins in a pinch. Perhaps that’s why one disappeared from storage recently. “A spokesman said: ‘There may be a black market out there for Daleks – but it’s still a strange thing to steal’.” (BBC News). So if you see something with an odd British accent saying “Exterminate”, cheer up – it may be worth $500 pounds.
Finally, for the last word on the Apple-Intel alliance (a slashdot reader) :
“I felt something, a disturbance in the network, as if a million Mac zealots cried out in horror and were suddenly silenced.”