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The Gate is Closed
Update — Startup questionnaires go out this evening (Monday, May 17th). If you don’t receive one and think that you should have, please contact ma@cringely.com or courtney@cringely.com to that effect....
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The crowdfunding bubble of 2013
When President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act on April 5th, the era of crowdfunding began as individual investors everywhere were promised an opportunity to gain access to...
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The crowdfunding bubble of 2013 part 2 — crooks and con men
Legal crowdfunding is coming, as I explained in the first part of this series. Thanks to the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, investors big and small will soon have new ways to buy shares...
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The crowdfunding bubble of 2013 part 3 — how to make it successful
This is the third and final part of my series on crowdfunding. In part one we learned how important crowd funding can be for helping tech startups and the economy. In part two we worried about how...
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What if Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview isn’t available in my country?
Then you can stream it here. If you try this link from the USA or any other country where there is already a distribution deal for the film then you’ll just get a trailer. But if you are connecting...
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Ticked off: How stock market decimalization killed IPOs and ruined our economy
Well it took me more than the one day I predicted to finish this column, which purports to explain that dull feeling so many of us have in our hearts these days when we consider the U.S. economy. Our...
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Is the U.S. Startup Economy Failing?
As I’ve written here many times before, small companies and especially new companies are what create nearly all of the net new jobs in America, yet a new study released last week by the Hudson...
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Off with their heads! Why financial regulation stopped working
Thirty years ago, when I was working for a time in Saudi Arabia, I saw a public execution. I didn’t attend an execution, I didn’t witness an execution, I just happened to be there. There was in the...
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Geek Idol: A Competition to Promote Competitiveness
A couple weeks from now we’re going to start serializing my 1992 book Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date....
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Dr. Al explains the so-called “so-called fiscal cliff”
Most of us have had mentors and when it came to becoming a writer three of mine were the late Bill Rivers at Stanford who taught me to think and not just report, legendary book editor Bob Loomis at...
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Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize is another poorly conceived contest
So of course I wrote a letter to Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs. This went out January 11th and was delivered on the morning of the 14th. No answer yet. Dear Mr. Jacobs: As a professional blogger I’d...
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Accidental Empires, Part 4 (Chapter 1a) — The Demo God
ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES CHAPTER ONE THE DEMO-GOD Years ago, when you were a kid and I was a kid, something changed in America. One moment we were players of baseball, voters, readers of books, makers of...
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Accidental Empires, Part 6 (Chapter 1c) — The Airport Kid
ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES The Airport Kid was what they called a boy who ran errands and did odd jobs around a landing field in exchange for airplane rides and the distant prospect of learning to fly. From...
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Accidental Empires, Part 7 (Chapter 1d) — Our Nerds
The founders of the microcomputer industry were groups of boys who banded together to give themselves power. For the most part, they came from middle-class and upper-middle-class homes in upscale West...
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Accidental Empires, Chapter 7 — All IBM Stories are True
ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES CHAPTER SEVEN ALL IBM STORIES ARE TRUE I live in California in a house that I can’t really afford in a neighborhood filled with blue-haired widows and with two-earner couples who...
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The Startup Channel
We interrupt this book for a quick update on what’s happening in my so-called career. Shortly before beginning this serialization of Accidental Empires I explained that I would be doing some new...
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Accidental Empires, Chapter 8 — Software Envy
ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES CHAPTER EIGHT SOFTWARE ENVY Mitch Kapor, the father of Lotus 1-2-3, showed up one day at my house but wouldn’t come inside. “You have a cat in there, don’t you?” he asked. Not one...
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Accidental Empires, Chapter 9 — Clones
ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES CHAPTER NINE CLONES It was in the clay room, a closet filled with plastic bags of gray muck at the back of Mr. Ziska’s art room, where I made my move. For the first time ever, I...
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Accidental Empires, Chapter 10 — The Prophet
ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES CHAPTER TEN THE PROPHET The most dangerous man in Silicon Valley sits alone on many weekday mornings, drinking coffee at II Fornaio, an Italian restaurant on Cowper Street in Palo...
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Accidental Empires, Chapter 11 — Font Wars
Clearly, given the recent battle between Flash and HTML5, things changed later in life between John Warnock and Steve Jobs. There’s a story I’d like to understand better. Meanwhile, back in the early...
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