Palo Alto, CA, 12 December 2011

Today is an exciting day at Archimedes Ventures. We have some announcements to make.

Firstly, going forward we will be known as Archimedes Labs LLC. This is to make clear that we are an incubator, not a venture capital company.

Secondly, we can now announce that in August this year I established a managing entity – Escondido Labs LLC. It has been the sole manager of Archimedes since that time.

Thirdly, we can reveal that in the future investors will be added at Archimedes Labs as partners in the entity.

Finally we are announcing the following members (aside from myself) at Escondido Management LLC:

Kambiz Hooshmand – Former senior executive at Stratacom which Cisco acquired for over $4 billion in 1996; Cisco SVP; and CEO at Applied Micro (AMCC), Kambiz is now CEO and a General Partner at Escondido Management and runs the management of Archimedes Labs.

Jay Borenstein – Lecturer at Stanford University, teaching CS210, former CEO at Integrated Appliance Inc, Jay is a highly technical guy, focused on building great companies. He is a mentor at StartX, the Stanford Incubator.

Patrick Gannon, a founder at Lending Club, Patrick is Chief Investment Officer at Escondido Management.

Kevin Doerr, VP and Chief of Staff (Products) at Yahoo.

Matt Kaufman, VP Product and Engineering at Oodle.

Bess Ho – Mobile Architect, Lecturer & Book Author.

See the team page for more details.

In the first 11 months of 2011 we have incubated just.me, entered into an acceleration agreement as a co-founder at Blurtt and invested in Quixey, Incident Technologies and Broomstick Productions.

In 2012 we intend to do more incubations and accelerations.

Happy Holidays to all….

All founders need a shrink… I know, I have been a founder many times and it doesn’t get any easier to figure out who is blowing smoke and who is giving sound advice….And even though you are Superman to your team, you know you are mortal.

So… in the past few weeks I have started offering up an event called “The Founders Couch”. It has proven to be wildly popular, and the best thing, if we agree to do it, it is free.

What is the Founders Couch? Well, it depends. For some it is a mentoring session, 1 on 1, with the founder and myself. For others it has involved bringing in the whole team. It focuses on your core issues around your company or your product. Those can be funding strategy, partnerships, technical issues, design issues, features, virality, market focus or anything else, so long as they are your core issues.

If you are interested ping me on email.

I have posted an essay on my personal blog covering this weekends controversy about scraping and stealing content.

Google launched GoogleBase last night. What a disappointment. Whilst Google Reader clearly points to somebody at Google “getting” the importance of edge published content and real-time indexing, GoogleBase is a throw back. Basically a dumb flat-file database system for the world to throw content into. It’s actually embarrasing for the whole of Silicon Valley. I know insiders who desperately do not want their name associated with it. Can’t say I blame them.

Not to be abusive but why would millions of people who run web sites, and databases, and blogs, suddenly feed stuff into GoogleBase (an act of duplicating their already web based data into another database run by Google)? Maybe to get better search results. But this is an act of pure laziness from Google. The same results could be achieved in a manner far more consistent with the distributed data model that the world is currently flocking to. Google, just define a few extensions to RSS, make it easy to publish a feed with those extensions, and suck in the feeds. It works!

Oh well. Back to work

Update: well I guess the primary reason this is disappointing is that we expect Google to innovate. This just isn’t innovative. See Mike Arrington’s assessment on TechCrunch

Microsoft announced a major reorganization this week. the crux of the reorg seems to be that the MSN and Windows divisions are being unified, and as part of this Jim Allchin is retiring. A new “Platform Products and Services Division” is the result. It will be led by Kevin Johnson once Allchin retires.

There will also be a “Business Division” led by Jeff Raikes. This includes the Office line of products and it’s “Business Solutions and packaged applications group”.Robbie Bach wil head the third group – “Entertainment and Devices division”.

Many commentators are interpreting the changes as having been motivated by Microsoft’s need to modernize itself to better compete in a Web 2.0 world.

There are many good reasons for Microsoft to be concerned about the changing architecture of computing, and particularly the architecture of the network. However many of the commentaries about this fail to nail the essence of the changes and why they are threatening to Microsoft’s franchise. It is our view that Microsoft’s reorg is insufficient as a response to the threat. It is however motivated by at least a partial understanding of what the risks to its future are.

This isn’t the place for a full analysis of the emerging architecture of the network however one thing is clear, the edge of the network (a user, his PC and his publishing) is becoming more significant as a point of innovation whilst the center of the network is having to adjust to meet the needs of the new edge. A great example of this is the emergence of publisher tagging and the efforts of the search engines to take tags into account in providing relevant results. A bottoms up, edge driven, phenomenon is leading to an evolution at the center of the network. For the most part the center is trying to “bolt on” features that address the new edge, rather than reinvent itself around those changes. This can’t be a good long term strategy.

The same process also drives clients, particularly those that publish or consume edge-published content, to change.

One thing is certain, the big centralized internet companies of 1995-2004 need to change in order to stay relevant. Yahoo! seems to be aware of this. Ebay, Amazon, Microsoft and Google all seem slower to understand. Meanwhile there are many new companies helping to fill the gaps and to shape this new eco-system. We profile many of them on TechCrunch.

One such company is Writely. It has developed a lightweight web-based word processor service linked to a simple storage and sharing service. It is a joy to use. Others are are working on a similar services for calendar, contacts, email, spreadsheets and slide publishing and sharing.

Microsoft has not included it’s Office division into its new MSN and Windows organization. One wonders why not! Surely Windows is under threat as a development platform by web API’s but so to is Office as a publishing and sharing platform. Strangely Microsoft is evangelizing a new suite of Office “servers” aimed at providing sharing and storage services to the enterprise at the very time these services are most likely to move out from the data center into the cloud.

Enough here for now, but it would appear that Microsoft’s awareness of current trends is good. However, notwithstanding its embrace of RSS and its unification of its Windows and MSN divisions, it’s response seems less than one would think is needed as a reaction to the threats to Office, and to Windows as a development platform.

There appear to be many opportunities for new companies to develop edge based applications, and center of network services that bind together to enable new gains for users and developers alike. It’s going to be a fun time ahead.