GigaOM

this is definitely a good thing, and great to hear that yahoo is thinking hard about giving bright and creative technical minds the ability to think beyond short term business goals…take a bunch of smart folks, set them loose for some (or most) of the time, and you’re bound to turn up with some interesting and useful applications…isn’t this basically what elgoog has been doing? their 20 percent might yield a lot of crap, but alongside the crap comes a few nifty little apps and tools…it only takes one, right?

I think innovating from within and using the talent they have brough in from acquisitions will allow them to play catch up to their competitors. Yahoo may finally grow thru R&D than through acquisition which essentially could be cheaper and more efficient.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of that Incubator - I know Flickr has had some very cool 3rd Party apps created & that bodes well for the whole Web2.0 space. A lot of interesting Widgets & Mashups can be quickly developed & then easily dispersed across the Blogoshere.

Not like the Old days of waiting years for a new version of Windows Word to come out - oh thass right we’re sort of kinda waiting for Vista!!

NOT

;))

I wish them luck with this. I was involved in trying to do something similar in one of MSFT’s divisions a few years back but it didn’t take. The tech slowdown meant less money for corporate experiments and fewer employees with an appetite for risk.

I’m interested to understand more about how Yahoo is going to define the success of this initiative and see whether they gives this the resources and time needed to demonstrate success (or failure).

Having jumped off the mother-ship a few times myself, I applaud Yahoo’s effort. When well funded and truly independent these arrangements can provide incredible leverage of the best and brightest. However, it’s a tough balancing act. It’s always tempting to pull folks back in to rescue faltering programs. Plus, projects that compete with large internal objectives often get starved.

“..especially those like Fake, who were brought in through acquisitions…”

You meant Flake, right :)

Most of the companies that were “incubated” in the past were “aborted”
This time it is different?
Where have you gone Terry Semel?

They were a bad idea during the first bubble and they’ll be a bad idea during this one. Why would you try and hold onto someone who created a nifty little site but clearly doesn’t have big company dna? Other people can be just as creative, but they didn’t have the luck of being unemployed in 2001 and able to code AJAX. The tech industry is whacked.

the real bottom line issues - $$$ / comp / payola.

for a truly hot idea, Yahoo won’t be able to pay these guys anywhere near what they’d make externally. Why stay?

for a mediocre idea, well, what’s the point.

while incubating an idea - angel funding + an ok paycheck while exploring isn’t too hard to come by these days.

It’s hard to truly square the circle here.

I always think its funny the way big companies and VC’s think the entrepreneur behind a successful web start up are the genius behind the next big idea. Look. Rose did digg, it’s awesome and everyone loves it. It’s not the next NYTimes and he isn’t the second coming of bill gates or steve jobs. He had a cool idea and built it. Same thing with Fake. Everyone loves Flikr, nice job. But don’t expect her to come up with the next Flikr, she already did that. Anyway, it’s like Hollywood making sequels, they are never as good as the original and somehow cheapen the whole first.

I’ve come to beleive that the best way to deal with this is to let the people go, maybe even give them a small amount of funding in exchange for a piece of the venture and an open channel of communication. If they end up doing something else great that fits with the motherships business, the mothership can acquire it. Everyone wins. The entrepreneur and any other investors get a payday, and the mothership gets a known quantity, rather than a promise.

Go Caterina go.

Most innovators would much prefer the relatively low risk/reward and abundant resources of a large company given an earnest opportunity to pursue Christensen-esque disruptive innovation. Few innovators are adept, deliberate or even willful entrepreneurs, rather they are beholden to do-it-themselves in absence of a pragmatic alternative.

Go go go!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

Perhaps a good plan but I wonder if innovative brilliance is best nurtured in a freewheeling, experimental, small business market where millions of ideas are whittled down to thousands of “good ideas” which are then tested to reveal a few “great ideas” that can yield a viable business?

Creatively retaining talent…

GigaOm highlights Yahoo’s new attempt at retaining top talent. Called Brickhouse, the project is essentially an in-house incubator meant to give it’s entrepreneurial employees another reason to stick with the company. Not altogether differe…

She’s Mighty Mighty, Just Lettin’ It All Hang Out…

Senior decision makers at Yahoo appear to have a thing for old Commodores songs. Liz Gannes, a staff writer for GigaOM has this scoop for us: Yahoo is in the process of setting up an in-house incubator in an attempt…

Yahoo hired Dave Beckett over a year ago, whose contribution to the Semantic Web is immesurable.

I see the big search engines in a Semantic Web war, as Google has R Guha, co-creator of RDF (Beckett has guided RDF for many years at W3C).

Google Coop and Base are examples of “labeling information to be shared”, a step towards it, perhaps..

Google also has a “founder’s program” where a team can get a paid as if if they were “getting aquired” if they build an amazing project for Google.

Web 2.5: The Social Enterprise - Part II…

The Software technology industry is curiously different from most other large industries, in the sense that large Enterprises in this space often lag behind small startups and even individuals in adopting cutting-edge technologies. It is hard to see th…

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