The Wall Street Journal recently asked a highly poignant question: “Who’s going to fund the next Steve Jobs?” The Journal asks the question in light of a startling piece of trivia: The second quarter of 2008 marked the first time in 30 years that no venture-backed companies went public. Not a single one.

Why? Through punitive regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, we may have dried up the appetite for public exits, given that a private buyer means less red tape:

This is bad news for the U.S. economy. Does anyone think that we would be superior off if Bill Gates and Michael Dell had sold out to corporate behemoths early in their careers, instead of leading their firms for years as public companies? Would consumers enjoy the same vibrant market in Web services if Yahoo had gobbled up a nascent Google? How powerful would our computers be if Intel had become an IBM subsidiary, instead of going public in 1971?…

… Source:The Open Road

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Filed under: Blogging, Internet Tools, iPhone, App Store

Just a tiny while ago I wrote about Typepad’s native iPhone app, which I quite liked. Many folks thought it looked neat, but they were either running their own WordPress blogs, or using Wordpress.com’s hosted service neither of which are compatible with the Typepad app (for obvious reasons). Luckily for them, the good folks at WordPress have posted some information about the forthcoming WordPress iPhone application.

The app is ready, and pending addition to the App Store. It will work with both self hosted WordPress installs and blogs hosted on WordPress.com. You can do all the things you would expect: upload pictures, write blog posts, and edit existing posts.

The app should be available soon on the App Store for free. Once it is available I’ll be taking it for a spin and posting my thoughts.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

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Arjen Lentz spotted an interesting comment on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog, which advocates that Oracle might have cause for concern in its competition with MySQL:

I work for a major Fortune company, and we’re in the process of putting Oracle on a “sunset” list of restricted vendors.

… Source:The Open Road

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Just when you thought the Open Season podcast couldn’t offend anyone else, Episode 20 rolls in. We take on Ubuntu (Does it taste as good as it runs?), Sun (Will it make it?), Apple (Rampant disappointment at its launch snafus over the past few weeks), Linux desktop (Blame the …

Source:The Open Road

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(Credit: Matt Asay)

Anyone else see this notice today? The site has been down before, but not recently. It’s now back online, fortunately, so I have the ability to get my ticket.

Anyone know why it went down?

Source:The Open Road

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