The beta syndrome - When does startup cross the chasm ?

Have you read Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the chasm ? To move from a technology driven to a customer driven model you have to cross the chasm of an early adopter community to a model where you address the "mass market". In short to move from R&D to a real product in operation.
For the web2.0 is often the time where thing goes wrong for Entrepreneurs and they tend to extend the happy days where they served geek without too much consideration of operational excellence, even if the product is already adopted and often top of mind. Google is a good example, did you notice that Gmail is still in beta ? I call it the beta syndrome of the web2.0, check in your own startup list and you'll notice how much are in beta mode... Why do I care ? Well the blog platform you are reading this post from just cross the chasm ! Congratulation Blogger...

Take over rumors in the business publishing world

It's funny to see how cyclic the rumors of take over bid are in the business publishing. In the industry, there is only 3 global players : Thomson, Reed Elsevier (mostly known for his brand Lexis-Nexis) and Wolters Kluwer (mostly known as CCH in the US market). Every 2 years there are rumors of either merge between 2 of the three or acquisition of one of them by the others. this time the market place was expecting Wolters Kluwer to acquire Reeds. Their Share event rose with 2% on the London stock exchange... In the mean time, EU regulation have already stated in 1998 that it would contradict competition rules and that merging those 2 dutch rivals in the same group, with the current set of activities was not possible. Now, WK put his education division for sales. You can apply for a price of 700m€...