Austin Ventures named Thomas ball, formerly CEO of Openfield Technologies and founder of eCoupons.com Inc., as a new venture partner. Thomas also has investment experience with Discovery Capital and Mitchell Madison. Read the press release. I think they will need the help as they recently closed on their ninth fund ($525MM).

Former Boston Consulting Group consultant, Alex Nesbitt (now of Bella Ventures), claimed the current market for Podcasting services and tools is worth $2MM USD per year. He predcits that podcasts will generate $40MM in business from software, hosting, search and aggregation in the next year. Books on Podcasts will be a huge segment – today [...]

[via Scobleizer] He basically bashed Evan. Check it out: “Now, before I get to the other two podcast-tools-makers-who-eat-their-own-dogfood there’s a fourth one, Evan Williams, the guy who started Blogger. He gave me a demo of his tool, Odeo, last week at Supernova. I don’t know why his tool is getting so much hype when there [...]

You may have read an earlier entry I made regarding an article I was quoted in Entrepreneur Magazine. This time I was interviewed and quoted for the July edition of Black Enterprise Magazine for an article titled Rubbing Elbows in Cyberspace. I was surprised that B.E.M. was interested in my experience using LinkedIn given my [...]

Frederico Oliveira is a 22 year old blogger and I have his blog, We Break Stuff, in my RSS reader. This after noon Fred asked the question, “Is the Bay Area the center of the world?” It would seem that it is for Web 2.0 projects and companies. Having just returned from SuperNova2005 in San [...]

Brad Feld of Mobius Venture Capital, Scott Maxell of Insight Ventures and Texan Chris Pacitti of Austin Ventures were selected for the American Idol of Programming in Yokohama, Japan. Microsoft is holding the Imagine Cup Programming Competition at the end of July. [via Brad Feld]

.flickr-photo { border: solid 1px #000000; } .flickr-frame { float: right; text-align: center; margin-left: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Dean Machamovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Longhorn project, wore this sneaker today at Gnomedex and announced that Microsoft will support RSS. Steve Rubel indicated, “On June 24, 2005, the users [...]

I listened to several Podcasts today on the flight from SFO to DFW thanks to Odeo. As a follow-up to my previous post – Odeo First Look – I have no complaints. I did wonder how Apple’s iTunes version 4.9 was going to impact Odeo – I bet Evan and the guys have thought more [...]

I think the best way to describe Web 2.0 is to point you to the Wiki: Web 2.0. If you are looking for a blog that follows Web 2.0 developments I would suggest: TechCrunch. And for those of you who are ready for Web 3.0 you can check out this blog (no warranty on accuracy).

The New York Times ran an article today on the Chinese government’s (through state controlled corporations) most recent offer to buy Unocal for $18.5 billion. This follows an earlier bid this week to buy Maytag for $1.3 billion. Last month they acquired IBM’s personal computer business for $1.7 billion creating the world’s third-largest computer maker. [...]