Bush says Kerry disrespects our allies, by saying he’s “going it alone.” Kerry: Eight countries have left the coalition. “If Missouri were a country it would be the 3d largest country in the coalition.”
There he goes again: The President just repeated that the Duelfer report showed that sanctions didn’t work…
“I hear there’s rumors on the, uh, Internets.”
Something tells me our president does not spend a lot of time online.
The president says “I listened to my generals,” but given that Kerry just pointed out that Shinseki was retired for asking for more troops, he probably should have said “I listened to my generals after I sacked the ones who didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear.”
Bush just said this. I am not making it up:
“Of course I listened to our generals, that’s what a president does.”
How the president of the United States can stand up in front of the country and say “sanctions were not working” in Iraq, as he just did, when the commission he personally chose to resolve that question just reported to the country that sanctions did work is simply beyond me.
Kerry just zinged Bush on this, but it calls for something more than a debate retort. It calls for, I don’t know, medical care. This is not politics; it’s psychosis.
Live-blogging the debate
I’ve got some after-the-fact thoughts on Web 2.0 to post soon. But first, there’s this debate…
Lost connections
I lost my Net connection for the final parts of the morning here. Jeff Jarvis, Jeremy Zawodny and no doubt others have been doing extensive blow-by-blow blogging.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Christopher Alden presented Rojo, a new Web-based RSS aggregation service with social-software features built in, yesterday at Web 2.0. Alden, a former exec from Red Herring, gave a good presentation, and some of the Rojo features look cool — particularly, the ability to send specific RSS posts to contacts, so that you’re basically building a reading list for colleagues or friends.
But look at this photo — specifically, the fine print at the bottom:
Memo to presenters: don’t label the documents you’re presenting in public as “confidential”!
This is, of course, the exact label you see on presentations intended for potential investors, and no doubt it made its way onto a public screen by accident, when slides from just such a presentation got repurposed.
But still, the little slip was illustrative of the unusual dynamic here at Web 2.0: It’s definitely a wary mating dance between the tribes of the geeks and the suits, whose customs are not fully in sync.
What we’re seeing is that a lot of the ideas and technologies that have incubated over the last couple of years, and have been showcased at places like the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, are now on the radar of the venture-capital world. Ideas for new web companies built around RSS syndication and blogs, wikis and social software, innovative search technologies and mobile applications are hatching. And once more we’re witnessing the strange, messy process by which the enthusiasms and ideas of technologists are packaged, streamlined, prettified, sometimes improved and sometimes wrecked, as business people struggle to figure out how to make them work for the general public — and how to make money from them.
In terms of the evolution of the Web as a collective human endeavor, this conference’s name is a little off — I’d say we’re on Web 6.0 or 7.0 by now, at least. But in terms of the evolution of the Web as a place for people to try to invest, for a lot of the people here — “scarred veterans,” as William Janeway just described them, of the turn-of-the-millennium speculative frenzy — I guess it feels like only the second time around.
Bubble 2.0?
John Battelle is moderating a panel of financial guys. (Yes, they’re all guys.) It’s titled “So is this a bubble yet?” Starting with the Google IPO.
William Janeway of Warburg Pincus: Google was making lots of money, they had to go public to create liquidity for stakeholders, and because they’d reached the point where legally they had enough owners that they had to start reporting anyway. That’s different from the situation in which VCs are basically arbitraging companies, trying to sell them off to the greater fool. As happened during the bubble. I doubt that anyone in this room will be active professionally when the next true bubble comes along.
Safa Rashtchy of Piper Jaffray: Today, only 25% of the use of the internet is for consumer content, 75% is as a utility — for communication, essentially.
Janeway: We funded enormous productive waste. Trial and error. How many startups were funded in order at the stsatrt of Web 2.0 we could have Amazon, Ebay, Google, Yahoo? There will be a lot of smart people productizing smart ideas that will be acquired.
Janeway: One of the things we like about this environment is the number of scarred veterans who survived the bubble and are actually building businesses today. Theyu’re expecting it’ll be a 5-7 year time horizon. If we do that, build a real business, generate positive cash flow, we’ll be rewarded. That’s what the Valley requires.
Lanny Baker of Smith Barney: The overall market cap of internet sector is smaller than at the peak of the bubble. Companies are generating more cash. The jokesters running the scam companies have probably been weeded out. It’s a safer pool to swim in.