La French Tech
3 Top Reasons Startups Fail: Obvious But the Numbers Suggest Not
These Reasons May Seem Obvious… Yet Few Seem to Grasp Them Because Such A High…
Anonymous
The Challenge of Entering Foreign Markets
Even Facebook and Google Have Failed In Foreign Markets Failure to Research and Understand Foreign…
Anonymous
A Cautionary Tale
A crucial part of running a startup company is developing customers, sometimes much larger customers. This can lead to very lucrative revenue and growth. Also, a common exit option is to be acquired by a larger company. However, I want to offer a cautionary tale from my experience. A large engineering company whose products were lagging began buying large amounts of the newest product technology from our startup in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that the large company’s strategy was to not pay their invoices, assuming that our company would become starved for cash, and eventually, the large company might be able to acquire our startup’s technology for a very small price.
France
Could Macron and Brexit make France Europe's tech capital? 🇫🇷
French President Emmanuel Macron’s vow to make France a ‘start-up nation’ amid the uncertainty over Brexit is raising the question of whether Paris could supplant London as the capital of European tech. Since his election, Macron has wooed tech entrepreneurs with a string of initiatives in the form of lavish tax breaks, subsidies, and credits for research. In March 2018, he promised to invest €1.5 billion into artificial intelligence research through 2022. Some of these initiatives, in addition to Macron’s dynamism, have lured British tech companies who are looking to gain a foothold in Europe.
Wikileaks
Does the U.S. have a case against Julian Assange?
UPDATE November 8, 2018: This mayo615 post from October 2016, discusses the legal complexities of…
Wikileaks
Does the U.S. have a case against Julian Assange?
UPDATE: This mayo615 post from October 2016, discusses the legal complexities of a potential espionage or conspiracy charge against Julian Assange by the United States. My reading that such a charge was likely and possibly imminent, is now fact. Ecuador’s newly elected government insistence that it will continue to provide Assange with diplomatic protection is becoming very thin. It is more likely that time and diplomatic pressure will force Ecuador to give up Assange and cause his extradition to the United States by Great Britain. The increased likelihood of moving against Assange has been heightened in my opinion, by two factors: Obama’s announcement on October 7th that the United States officially holds Russia responsible for the cyber theft of the Democratic National Committee documents released by Wikileaks, and Assange’s own statements of his intent to harm the United States, most recently in a video interview with Bill Maher, which are now coming back to haunt him.
ISIS
Anonymous, Chinese Hackers, RickRolling and ISIS
Anonymous, the murky global and leaderless hacking group has struck out on a campaign to disrupt ISIS’ sophisticated use of the Internet and social media. It claims to have disabled over 11,000 identified ISIS Twitter accounts with looped Rick Astley videos. For those of you not familiar with Rick Astley, he was a 1980’s British pop star of limited talent, whose videos are sometimes painful to watch. For unknown reasons, Astley’s videos have been used in a variety of online pranks and hacking incidents. So Anonymous did the convenient thing and used old Astley videos, a tactic now known as “RickRolling”, to disrupt and confound ISIS Twitter and other social media accounts. I like it. Striking back in this way is probably causing smiles in the French Intelligence Service, U.S. Defense Department, NSA, and GCHQ in the UK.
