This post about competitive dynamics has been stewing in my mind for months now and it’s still a work in progress.  At its heart is a framework for thinking about a common type of tech company:  the aggregator.   The aggregator takes disparate items, gathers them, and presents them as a unified front.
Aggregators can exist for [...]

(This is the first in a two part post. Part one contains a profile of a startup.  Part two contains numbers and analysis related to that startup.)
Mobile Spinach is a small and ambitious Bay Area startup focused on the mobile coupon space.  The company is still at a very early stage — seed funded [...]

Online restaurant reservations company OpenTable filed for an IPO on Friday, revealing their finances for the world to see.  The SEC filing contains all the financial figures you would expect: revenue, expenses breakdown, details of the public offering, and also operational data. 
Brett Emerson wrote a fantastic blog post a few months ago (Behind the [...]

Mint, Thrive, Cake, Yodlee, Quicken Online, Buxfer, Geezeo, Wesabe, and Moneytrackin‘.
These are just a few of the many companies in the crowded field of web apps for personal finance management (PFM).  These consumer sites all perform the same basic service: aggregating data from disparate financial accounts (savings, checking, credit cards, loans etc), helping users monitor [...]

Among the startups I’m watching closely is Yodle, a company focused on local online advertising.  The company is poised to expand into the huge market void/opportunity created as newspaper and yellow page advertising increasingly go the way of the dodo.  How big of an opportunity?  “$20 billion…big enough to support one to three public companies” [...]