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The content farms are coming !
June 27, 2010The French intelligentsia has discovered the content farm model, and it’s not happy. Well-financed, maturing, and in some cases reaching the liquidity climax (Demand Media’s approaching IPO, Associated Content’s acquisition by Yahoo), the content farm model in the U.S. is not without its critics. But as evidenced by Yahoo’s commitment, AOL’s birth of a business [...]
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Too big to care
June 22, 2010There is a subtle but insidious trend burgeoning within France’s private equity industry. This trend is a shift in fund objectives from a “capital gains generation” model towards a “fee generation” model. In other words, the financial benefits accruing to private equity GP’s are increasingly coming more from management fees than from carried interest. As [...]
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Tango with the taxman
June 15, 2010It would be disingenuous for me to deny being one of the initial skeptics, but well, we did it. Or more accurately, my colleagues did it. As of today’s June 15 deadline, Truffle had officially raised approximately 40 M€ via an innovative tax-incentivized retail investment vehicle loosely translated as a group of “Incubator Holding Companies.” [...]
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The french google
June 11, 2010Remember Chirac’s initiative that was met with rancorous laughter to launch a government-backed French Google competitor? That adventure, dubbed Quaero at the time and today known as Exalead, received 19M€ in tax-payer subsidies. I think it was written off by most of the investment community as a classic subsidized zombie company since the venture never [...]
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A game for the ages (literally)
June 8, 2010I’ve written in the past about the perennity of casual games like Bejeweled and BubbleShooter, and their inevitable shift toward mobile. Then about two weeks, Google featured a Pac-man applet on its home page, which resulted in an estimated $120 million of lost productivity, but gave me a boatload of enjoyment while I was waiting [...]
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Your brain on technology
June 6, 2010Today’s New York Times Technology section holds an article about the effects of digital overload on the human brain. Bursts of information from bouncing between social media, email, mobile apps, rss feeds, and phone calls undermine a person’s ability to focus (no surprise there). Humans have a primitive impulse to prioritize urgent items over important [...]