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Desktop virtualization
By 2011, there could be more than 660 million virtualized desktops. John Whaley, CTO and Founder of MokaFive, talks about the issues surrounding current ...
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Mobile virtualization
Mike Seashols, Chairman of VirtualLogix, talks about implementing virtualization technologies onto mobile platforms. He says there are many issues that mobile providers have to ...
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Nurturing sales leads
Phil Fernandez, President and CEO of Marketo, says that many companies today are not managing sales leads effectively. He suggests ways to utilize the ...
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Managing Internet growth
The Internet is growing by 1 zettabyte a year, fueled by images, videos, gaming, and peer to peer file sharing. Pieter Poll, CTO of ...
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Online ad strategies
There are more than 300 ad networks that focus on monetizing Web sites, so having a strategy is key. Ren Chin, marketing vice president ...
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What is semantic search?
Semantic search uses the science of meaning in languageinstead of just searching keywords, it checks the context of the words to return more relevant ...
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Next generation of business intelligence
Data warehouses collect gigabytes of data everyday but the information is not always meaningful. Why? Angela Shen-Hsieh, President and CEO of Visual I/O, says ...
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SIP trunking 101
Voice, instant messaging, and video no longer have to be islands of collaboration. Kenneth Kuenzel, founder and CTO of Covergence, shows how SIP trunking ...
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Wireless inside the enterprise
With the rise of PDAs, Blackberries and mobile phones, the demand for wireless service inside large buildings is increasing every day. Leila Nouri, director ...
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Intel® vPro™ technology and cost savings
Randy Nystrom, an IT systems engineer at Intel, shows how vPro saves time and money by diagnosing PC problems remotely. The content for this ...
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Intel® vPro™ technology and manageability
Limited technical support hours and powered down PCs can make it difficult to manage large numbers of PCs. Randy Nystrom, an IT systems engineer ...
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Application streaming
Updating applications can be time-consuming for both users and administrators. Christian Black, an IT systems engineer at Intel, explains why application streaming is a ...
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OS streaming
Christian Black, an IT systems engineer for Intel, spells out the many benefits of hard-drive virtualization, or operating system streaming, including faster boot times ...
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Enterprise 2.0
Vince Casarez, vice president of product management at Oracle, explains how Web 2.0 technologies, such as tags, wikis, and mash-ups, can be applied within ...
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Secure file transfers
John Thielens, vice president of technology at Tumbleweed, talks about the need for managed file transfers that are not only secure, but auditable and ...
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What is LEED?
"Going green" is becoming commonplace in the corporate world. Paul Holland, general partner at Foundation Capital, explains LEED, the metrics used to certify the ...
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Unified communications
With desktops, laptops, PDAs and mobile phones, our communication systems have become fragmented. David Leach, senior public consultant for Siemens Enterprise Networks, explains how ...
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Virtual business
Brent Arslaner, VP of marketing at Unisfair, explains how virtual environments can increase productivity in marketing, sales and human resources departments within a company.
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Automating virtualization
Richard Whitehead, the director of product marketing at Novell, explains how automation can bridge the gap between physical and virtual machines.
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Greening the data center
John O'Brien, CTO of Dataupia, explains how carbon footprints are calculated in the data center and discusses ways to tame these power-hungry machines.
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What is SOA?
Service oriented architecture may be over-hyped, but it does offer lower-cost and easier integration.
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What is a mashup?
Developers are getting creative, taking APIs from multiple Websites and merging them to form new, innovative applications. Frozenbear.com merges Google maps and Singles to let you know where the single people are in your neighborhood. Parkingcarma.com helps you track down parking spaces in the Bay Area. ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind says mashups are the fastest growing ecosystem on the Web and that by 2007, there will be 10 new mashups per day.
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Desktop virtualization
By 2011, there could be more than 660 million virtualized desktops. John Whaley, CTO and Founder of MokaFive, talks about the issues surrounding current infrastructures and says that organizations deploying new systems need to think about four things--management, offline use, cost, and the user experience.
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Users-to-tech support ratio
How many employees should one tech support staff person oversee? CNET's Justine Nguyen explains the golden ratio of users to tech support staff, and what factors contribute to it.
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What is virtualization?
Data centers are commonly filled with large numbers of servers that require a tremendous amount of time and money to maintain. Dan Chu of VMware shows how virtualization can optimize fewer servers to run at higher performance levels.
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Energy-efficient transistors
Rob Willoner, a technology analyst at Intel, explains how smaller and more energy-efficient transistors are resulting in faster and more powerful CPUs.
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First steps to SOA
What does it really mean to introduce SOA into an organization? Ross Mason, CTO and co-founder of MuleSource, explains how an enterprise service bus allows different applications to communicate with each other.
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Desktop vs. workstation: Introduction
Sponsored: Dave Buckley, product line manager of workstations at HP, explains the differences between desktops and workstations, and how these differences influence purchasing decisions. The content for this video was sponsored and provided by HP.
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A load of C.R.A.P.
ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind suggests that CRAP or Content, Restriction, Annulment, and Protection, is a catchier phrase than DRM - Digital Rights Management. Why does he think this technology is crap? Once you've bought music or other content to play on one device, it won't play on any other device because of the proprietary layer of CRAP.
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SEO 101
How do you get your Web pages to rank high on search results? CNET's Laura Lippay offers some guidelines for Search Engine Optimization, including how to structure your site, where to position content on your page, and how to increase traffic.
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VC Funding 101
Venture capital is the lifeblood of a start-up company. Paul Holland of Foundation Capital runs through the gauntlet of steps a prospective company typically goes through to get funded, and explains what capital investors are looking for.
My name is Paul Holland. I'm a General Partner with Foundation Capital. I'm here today to talk to you about Venture funding 101. Often we get asked, "how can I get my start-up funded?" Well let me walk you through the process of what it is we do and then try to take you out the other end to see how it is it might fit within your desires to get your start-up funded.
One of the places that we tend to see many of our leads come from are our portfolio companies. Our existing companies that we've already funded, we already have a very strong belief in their tastes and preferences. They refer people over to us and then we take the time to meet with them and find out what they've got. So we might see, well, let's say 250 companies a year that might come to us through that source.
From there, other venture capital firms. We often syndicate most of our projects, which means that we do half the project, they do half the project, we each put in half the funding and split the equity and so forth. And so we might see, let's call it 150 projects a year that will come as referrals from other venture firms and we refer other projects to them, too.
Job candidates-one of our major part of where we spend our time are recruiting executives for our portfolio companies. In the course of doing that, we might find a really compelling executive and sadly for us, they might not choose to go to work for our company, and then we find out where they went to work and we decide maybe that's a good company to fund, because a high quality person often makes really good choices there. So maybe a couple hundred a year that we'll see from that.
And then angel investors. That's a very important source for us of leads in terms of new projects that we'll fund, and we have a great pool of people that we've worked with in the past and they'll probably get us 150 or so leads.
And then finally, entrepreneur in residence, so EIR. What we'll do here is we'll take a very talented entrepreneur, often someone we've worked with in the past or maybe funded in the past. We'll bring them in and we'll work in our offices for six months and incubate an idea. So these fellows, between the people they know who are also entrepreneurs and the work that they're doing, they might surface a couple hundred leads or so for us each year.
So roughly speaking that gets us to about a thousand of these raw leads coming in. And then that's when the funnel process begins to start. So then we start to push these through here and then we'll go to work. And so for us, that means maybe out of that initial thousand, we'll take, say, 600 meetings. So we'll do the first meeting, and then to go from say the first meeting to what we would call our screening process then that's going to cut out about half of that number.
So what happened here? Well, either we found out that the idea wasn't as compelling as we might have thought when we got the initial referral, or the market size isn't big enough or the technology is not compelling enough, it's an IT company. Or potentially the team isn't strong enough to get through our process.
So we'll go down into the screening process and then from there decide after doing a bit more work, we'll take second meetings with maybe 150 of those thousand companies. And then from that second meeting point, if we get excited about the company, we'll push it into what we call the due diligence process.
So due diligence, as many of you know, is when we start to call your customers or we introduce you to potential customers. We start doing reference checks. We start looking at your technology. We might bring in five or six of our VPs in engineering in our existing company and have them come spend some time with you so we can understand what your technology looks like when we really look under the hood.
From there now we're getting down to the meat of the matter here, and now we're at the partner meeting level, which means that when all of us are together in our process we have to be all together and each of us has to see a company before we fund it. That's very common across the venture industry, and you know you're making real progress if you're in front of all the partners in a firm.
From that we might do 40 or 50 of those a year, and then we'll invest in about ten of those companies. So that gives you a sense of kind of how the funnel works and how to walk through the process at a mechanical level.
Now let's take a look at what are the attributes that we're looking for, sort of what's the right stuff here in terms of a start-up. So the major element here we're looking for, the first thing that you've got to satisfy is going to be the market size. And, there's a couple reasons for that. One, for us to get the kind of return we need and the kind of return we want that we want for you as an entrepreneur, you need to be going after a very large addressable market. And the other thing is that why this has to be the first thing in terms of going through the process is we can't do anything about this. If you've chosen a market that turns out to be too small, we can't move mountains. So we can't do a whole lot to change that.
The second thing that we're looking for here is going to be the technology, the strength of the technology. And as I mentioned before, we have a lot of different ways that we can vet the technology and decide whether or not we think you have something very unique. Do you have barriers to entry, whatever it might happen to be.
So taking a slight aside here, talk about an example, we funded a company, gosh, now ten years ago called Atheros Communications. Atheros was literally a research project out of the labs at Stanford University. We took the professor and her team and we put them in our offices and incubated that company. That company later went on to pioneer the area of Wi-Fi communications and many of the PCs that we have today have their chip sets inside of them. Very successful company later went on to go public.
And then finally the people, how strong are the people, how passionate are they, have they had some success in the past, do they know what the movie looks like as it were. So market size, technology, people. Once you get through that, then come down the bottom, make it out, then you've got a great chance of being funded.






























