Lewis Perdue

It’s almost midnight and you wake up realizing that the nightmare you just had about forgetting your Mom’s birthday tomorrow wasn’t a dream at all, but stark reality. Mom lives half a continent away and gets tired of the flowers you send every year because they aggravate her hay fever, but you can’t help it […]

The Sept. 9 VC Watch column on clueless people behind corporate news releases e-DUH!: How Can Smart People Be So Dumb? filled the e-mail box with a record number of responses, some of which are excerpted here with the writers’ permission. John Barbour writes: “Wouldn’t it be great if the conclusions/punch line were in the […]

Each of the VC Watch columns presents a snapshot of a hot new company or venture capital firm, but when you’re living on Internet time, they’re fast moving targets whose radar cross section is constantly changing on our screens. So it’s time to refresh the cache and bring you up to date on the notable […]

San Francisco venture capitalists Tony Hsieh and Alfred Lin think they have a ribbeting profit model ready to help early stage companies leapfrog their competition. Hsieh and Lin are the managing partners of Venture Frogs which also operates an incubator facility at 1000 Van Ness Street in downtown San Fran. Members of the team which […]

One of the biggest hazards to individual investors is the officially sanctioned and institutionalized hypocrisy that tilts the playing field in favor of large institutions. Big institutions and brokerages have long tipped off their biggest customers to the latest news, offering them the first chance to cash in on inside information before it eventually sifts […]

With supposedly private Hotmail messages being more widely read these days than some New York Times bestsellers, the issue of sending sensitive documents via e-mail has a lot of people worried, especially businesses that need to exchange documents and information vital to their competitive survival. HushMail thinks it’s got the shhhhhhhhhholution with a free e-mail […]

One of the first rules a basic chemistry student learns is that in order for a chemical process to produce a desired result, the concentrations of the reactants must be sufficient to sustain the reaction. If one of the ingredients is too diluted, the reaction may never take place, or could wander off toward some […]

In the old economy, vendors like Oracle (ORCL) and Sybase (SYBS) made billions by making databases expensive, complicated applications that were mind-boggling to execute on the desktop and nearly impossible to do on the Web. In the new Net economy, Flashbase believes it can make money by providing simple, free online database applications that are […]

Stick your tongue in a hot light socket and you’ll get a taste for the sort of charge that HotSocket wants to bring to the world of online direct marketing. In the legacy world, direct response merchandisers typically buy space ads in magazines or use direct mail or outbound telemarketing to get product offers in […]

When you walk like a duck and talk like a duck and are seen in the company of ducks, it’s awfully hard to convince people that you’re really an eagle. This is the marketing dilemma faced by Virtualis which describes itself as “a Web hosting service that has morphed into an application service provider.” While […]

An old proverb says the road to Hell is paved with the bricks of good intentions. So if this is true and you’re going there on business anyway, you might feel a little better if your company kept track of your progress with the new Internet and wireless GPS system from @Road. OK, maybe you […]

Call this column, “E-DUH!” And call the companies and people that follow “unclear on the concept.” After two months of writing VC Watch and enduring the IQ-damaging effects of poorly written news releases and badly constructed Web sites by Internet companies that should know better, it’s time to kick gluteus maximus and name names. I’ve […]