search technology Archives - The Grassy Road

It’s not a bubble – the difference between valuation and long term value

Living in Silicon Valley, running a software company with big ambitions I hear the question a lot. Is this another tech bubble? Isn't is going to burst again? The short answer is no. Pundits covering tech tend to confuse valuation with long term value. We may well be in a valuation bubble but unlike the 2000 tech bubble the companies in question have deep, sustainable revenue models. There are certainly some high valuations - per Fred Wilson's view of frothy valuations in April - and these are driven by investor [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:04:29-08:00August 22, 2011|Boards|1 Comment

The Enron of Norway

When Microsoft bought FAST it was clear they were building a search arsenal to compete with Google. What wasn't clear was just how much of a financial mess they were taking on.The recent article in Portfolio.com The Fast and the Curious describes the tangles around FAST's issues: "Three weeks before it embarked on its blundering attempt to acquire Yahoo, a Google-obsessed Microsoft agreed to pay a juicy $1.23 billion for a Norwegian tech company mired in enough accounting problems, regulatory probes, and conflicts of interest that it had become known [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:26:59-08:00May 22, 2008|Boards|0 Comments

Defining IP in search-driven research

Intellectual property in a business like ours typically refers to software technology. Code, algorithms, patents, methodologies – all required to recreate and build the product and protect it under IP laws.In the business of search-driven research, it turns out that models are as significant a part of our IP as the traditional software code is. We have an excellent search engine and surrounding systems, but more importantly we have models of what’s interesting to the professional user. For every “topic” that’s to be detected we build adaptive market models which [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:33:31-08:00December 4, 2007|My Personal Journey|0 Comments

Web transparency on management

As we ramp up our sales team (we've doubled it in the last 90 days), I’ve spent the last few months in New York interviewing candidates. The intensity with which the good candidates ask questions about the executive team has reminded me of how much employees, as well as investors, pay attention to management.Our headquarters are just one exit up Hwy 101 from Oracle, and the recent notice given to Larry Ellison’s stock sales made me wonder about all his actions that are now public because of the Web. Whether [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:34:03-08:00November 27, 2007|Career Advice|0 Comments

Search vs. Discovery

Recently, Silicon Valley startup Powerset has made waves by promising to use natural language and sentence parsing to better search the web. They claim that by better understanding the intention of a user's question and the meaning of a document's content, the search results can be better matched to a user's need. So, they are betting that searchers will be willing to put (arguably) more effort into composing their search, to retrieve documents keyed exactly to their well formed English question. First, this is not a new concept. Companies like [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:52:03-08:00October 9, 2007|My Personal Journey|2 Comments

Tech blogs: The Canary in the Coalmine

The pending demise of Red Herring (hinted at in Forbes earlier this week) is hot gossip in silicon valley these days as - not surprisingly – tech blogs eat away at tech pubs revenues. It’s simple and fast to develop a blog and in a world where everyone is connected 24/7 and cocktail party conversation is about technology it’s very comfortable for pundits and journalists alike to turn to blogs as a way to publish content and opine.However we see such strong growth in blog content across all markets that [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:54:18-08:00July 19, 2007|My Personal Journey|0 Comments

Why Investment Research is a Long Tail problem

Since the term “Long Tail” was first coined by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine three years ago, many articles have been written about new businesses developing using technology to solve the problem. Examples abound in internet companies, the movie industry, simulation systems, network traffic to name just a few. In the case of the internet companies Amazon, eBay, Google, Netflix - these businesses release value in their markets by giving consumers access to products (in these cases books, auction products, general information or movies) that live in the long tail [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:54:28-08:00July 15, 2007|My Personal Journey|0 Comments