Lewis Perdue

With Thanksgiving now just a dim memory of excess and indigestion, VC Watch nominates a crop of holiday turkeys which have a bad taste far more persistent than holiday leftovers. These foul fowl range from the brainless to the clueless, from the crypto-illiterate to the endless strings of meaningless buzz words that add up to […]

In the new Internet economy, every user will be an e-tailer if Vstore.com and a rash of competitors have their way. Affiliate programs such as those offered by Amazon.com and CDNow have allowed site owners to sell each other their favorite words and music, but Vstore.com envisions an expansion of that model to nearly every […]

Despite this year’s Internet IPO slump, Dot.Com public offerings continue earning their reputation for instant escape velocity — at least on the first day. Indeed, a survey by Hoover’s Online Reports indicates that the ten largest IPO first-day gains in stock market history were made by Internet and networking companies and all of those happened […]

Can passion make sense as an investment strategy? Menlo Park’s Trinity Ventures thinks so. It could make a lot of sense, especially amid today’s glut of venture capital where investors frequently resemble a mob of Cosmos-crazed TV addicts lurching down the i-way mumbling, “Billions and billions and billions.” With every month setting a new record […]

About this time of the year, the cafes in Vienna and across the rest of Austria start serving a hot mulled red wine they call glühwein, which cuts through the chill and warms the insides in ways coffee only dreams about. The online wine competition is heating up as well with Wine.Com (formerly Virtual Vineyards) […]

Buying a used car has always been a lot like a root canal without anesthesia. First are the sales people with bad teeth, bad taste, bad manners and clothes so tacky that they defy parody. Then there is the car you want: Was it really owned by a little old lady who drove it only […]

“This devoted band called itself the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, and I believe they were sworn to secrecy. Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, […]

Consumers who think that long-distance telemarketers and ISP spammers really have no good reason to live may soon find hope in a new breed of Internet service portals which want to simplify the confusion of deregulation by offering a single point of contact for purchasing essential services of all kinds Burlington, Mass., start-up Essential.Com has […]

Most small businesses find the traditional bank loan process a painful, time-consuming, frustrating and frequently demeaning process that substantially diminishes the psychological rewards of entrepreneurship and can divert valuable resources from the task of actually making money. After a couple of assaults on the black granite ramparts of the banking system, most small business owners […]

The nation’s capital is experiencing a baby boom of sorts — in technology incubators that is. No sooner had VC Watch profiled the area’s first start-up hatchery Vencatalyst, than we get the birth announcement of CBD Labs LLC, located just over the Washington, D.C. line in the Beltway ‘burb of Silver Spring, Md. Founders Jomo […]

Today’s Internet China watchers are nervously whistling past what they hope won’t be an Asian investment graveyard following a top government official’s September 14 bombshell that the government would enforce its ban on foreign telecom investment including Internet services and content. The repeated statements by Wu Jichuan, Minister of Information Industry, has rocked the Internet […]

There’s no better example that one person’s hack is another’s privacy shelter than the fracas this past April between Intel Corp (INTC) and Zero Knowledge Systems. Back then, ZeroK was an unknown Montreal start-up specializing in the development of Internet privacy software which had the temerity to announce that Intel’s method of hiding the Pentium-III’s […]