Do You Think Your Business Idea Is A Head of It’s Time?

March 16, 2012 by Leave a comment


A few month after Yurie systems, my first startup employer was sold to Lucent for a cool $1.23 B, as employee number 8th, I cashed out my stock options and lunched telezoo.com back in 1999.  telezoo.com was the first B2B social networking site on the web years before myspace and Facebook of the world. I remember I ended up hiring  at least ten sales guy and wasted  a third of our series A funding, a cool $1 m on advertising to get the attention of the companies.  We rarely managed to get 300 companies to utilize the site.

Getting the companies to leverage the power of social networking to market their solution offerings and get engaged with their existing and potential clients online was something totally unheard of and premature.  Many of them even thought I was on dope :) We had a good run with it till 2004 though. Read more of this post

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Is Huffington Post Copying Awesome DC?

October 22, 2010 by 3 Comments

Starting from the left: Smoking hot dude (that would be me), a random chick, a British looking dude, Arianna Huffington

A long time ago the English cleric and writer Charles Caleb Colton said that “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” (well actually the word ‘form’ was added sometime later to the quote). Based on that I must be smoking hot!!!

I just received a note from a friend of mine that pointed me to an article on Huffington Post. They have apparently added a new feature called “HuffPost’s Greatest Person Of The Day”. This only 2 weeks after I had the pleasure of talking with Arianna Huffington during the FedTalks 2010 in DC and telling her about our “Awesome Washingtonian of the Day” feature!!! And they just launched this feature last night!

You nutty Arianna! You bad girl! It’s ok though. I take it as a compliment that your well known News website takes the idea from the little Awesome DC. Besides, we love you too much to get pissed at you. You have been doing a great job for this country and I applaud you for that. Read more of this post

Filed under Online Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Awesome Washingtonians Welcome Awesome New Yorkers!

October 7, 2010 by Leave a comment

As a we previously reported, Arianna Huffington promised on the “Daily Show” the Huffington Post will be providing round-trip transportation from New York to Washington for all those who need a ride to Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” on Saturday, October 30th in Washington, D.C.

Those of you New Yorkers interested in joining us, here is the form for the Free round trip bus. You got time till this coming Friday to sign up. And PLEASE, do sign up. Read more of this post

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Huffington Post Counterbalance to the Right leaning Polling Companies – Acquires Pollster

July 8, 2010 by Leave a comment


In an effort to beef up the political coverage, the Huffington Post has  made its second acquisition in a month, as The New York Times reported on Wednesday the online publisher has purchased Pollster.com, an aggregator of poll data, from YouGov Polimetrix. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The acquisition of Pollster which is hosted on NationalJournal.com, comes at a time of intense competition among media outlets vying for influence in Washington’s saturated online media market. Pollster.com has provided polling data to Atlantic Media’s National Journal. Read more of this post

Filed under Business & Finance, Online Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wow! 100,000 Daily Comments on Huffington Post?

June 18, 2010 by 4 Comments


Only if I knew introducing my freelancers/journalists  friends including the recent one Sharmine Narwani to our beloved Arianna would generate such a high traffic to her Huffington Post, I would have asked for my Advertising $$$ cut.  :-)   Of course, I am kidding  Mrs. Huffington ;-)

The traffic and number of comments on Huffington Post gone so out of control that she just had to acquire a company called Adaptive Semantics to put a leash on the daily 100,000 comments on their site. What an awesome problem for an online media to have. Looking forward to see such a headache for AwesomeDC website :-)

This is  Huffington Post’s first pure technology company acquisition.   The two-person startup tech company provides a semantic analysis engine (aka JuLiA) already used by the Huffington Post to help moderate the thousands of comments published on the blog every day. Read more of this post

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What We Pay For Online

February 19, 2010 by 13 Comments


by Elias Shams
An interesting survey of 27,000 consumers across 52 cities and countries was recently released by Nielsen that shows the type of content we, the consumer, are willing to pay for online and the ones we aren’t. I wonder how many of them were from DC. The report shows 85% of respondents would like to see free Web content stay free. Contents like movies, music, and games are the types we are willing to pay for, but not for the blogs, podcasts, and video which is right along our tradition pre internet era. We have always been willing to pay for entertainment, but not for information.

This is actually the first time I see something close to comprehensive study around the actual market for e-commerce content. I just wish they had also included books, TV shows, gambling, football bets, and of course my favorite, the porn. :-)   Last time I checked, we,  men have always been willing to pay for porn regardless how broke we are. Read more…

Filed under Online Media, Tech Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Iranian Washingtonians Getting Ready To Party! Is Ayatollah Khamenei Taking Off? Really?

December 29, 2009 by Leave a comment

Iranian Americans of Washington, DC and the rest of the world are cautiously happy and getting ready for the good News to be confirmed :-)

According to Radio Netherlands, A Dutch Radio News, Shahrzad News (in Farsi), an Iranian News site, and a brief coverage of it on Huffington Post, Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei could flee to Russia should the situation in his country continue to spiral out of control.

If the News turns out to be true, it will be a fantastic News for the people of Iran living in and out of the country. For sure, it will be a good News for the region and the rest of the world.
But wait, there’s more

Filed under Human Rights Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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