GigaOM

At each year’s end, Inc. magazine elects its “Entrepreneur of the Year.” Deal flow being what it was in 2007, we might have expected the honor this year to grace Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. But maybe he’s gotten too much “ink” already. Instead, the magazine’s editors have picked Elon Musk, and it’s not a bad choice. This guy is innovative, and active. Count up his current projects:

SpaceX, which aims to be the Southwest of space exploration; electric speedster shop, Tesla Motors; and SolarCity which designs and installs solar panels. And don’t forget his original hit, Pay Pal (now eBay).

The profile of Elon is nice, but the best tidbit comes in the sidebar “10 Questions for Elon Musk”:

If you could go back in time and do one thing differently in your business, what would it be?
The whole back-in-time thing is hard for me, because I’m pretty happy with the way things are right now. I would have liked to remain as CEO of PayPal. I think it could be a $50 billion, $60 billion company.

Pretty happy!? Uh, that’s $1.5 billion-happy; the price eBay paid for PayPal in 2002. I find it hard to fathom that, given the chance, Elon might rather be suffocating inside the sclerotic halls of eBay, trying to grow PayPal — oh, … hang on, he means he wishes he’d never sold to Meg Whitman, et al. Now, that makes sense.

But, get this… Continue »

The exodus of senior management at Cisco Systems (CSCO) continues. Today, Chief Development Officer Charlie Giancarlo and the #2 man at Cisco resigned. He is joining buyout shop, Silver Lake Partners. He was amongst the trusted lieutenants of CEO John Chambers, but like many others before him faced the prospect of being the crown prince for a long long time. Earlier Mike Volpi, long thought to be a CEO candidate, left Cisco and took over the reigns at P2P TV company, Joost.

Giancarlo, one of my favorite Cisco executives, was company’s first Vice President of Business Development, and helped build company’s merger and acquisition strategy, playing a big role in Cisco’s first 18 acquisitions and 20 investments. He joined the company when Cisco acquired Kalpana. That was back in the day. His most recent success was Linksys, which he helped integrate into Cisco. The rumors of Charlie’s exit have been doing the rounds for past couple of days.

Related Posts:

• At Cisco, Nowhere to go but out.
• Cisco’s born again consumerism

Jakob Nielsen, the former Sun Microsystems engineer who became a pioneer of “User Advocacy” on the Web and an early guru of experience-centered site design, posted an essay on his blog Monday that suggests Web 2.0 can be dangerous for your profits.

It isn’t that Web 2.0’s bells and whistles are inherently bad, Dr. Nielsen writes, “[t]hey can be highly effective…But it’s more common to find Web 2.0 ideas that either hurt users or simply don’t matter to users’ core needs.“ (Emphasis ours.) And ignoring your users’ core needs is bad for your bottom line, Dr. Nielsen argues.

AJAX, rich Internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content often add more complexity than they’re worth. They also divert design resources and prove (once again) that what’s hyped is rarely what’s most profitable.

We’ve known Dr. Nielsen’s work for nearly 10 years. Continue »

Updated: With Santa Claus about to come to town and 2008 just around the corner, I wanted to ask our community of readers what, from a purely technology perspective, you’re looking forward to in 2008.

Continue »

This just in: Google’s $3.1 billion merger with DoubleClick has been cleared by the Federal Trade Commission, which said it saw neither current nor potential competitive problems with the deal. Australia and Brazil have already cleared it as well, but Google cannot close the acquisition until the European Commission, which is still examining it, gives the OK.

Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google, in a statement said, “We hope that the European Commission will soon reach the same conclusion, and we are confident that this deal will deliver more relevant ads for consumers, more choices for advertisers, and more opportunities for website publishers.”

Hulu has come a long way from its genesis as a “YouTube killer” pie-in-the-sky idea earlier this year. It survived Om’s “NewCo Wreck Watch” to earn a mea culpa and a “brilliant” assessment from our acerbic founder. But the video site — which features mostly NBC and FOX TV shows in full-length streamable glory — is still only available to a limited group of U.S.-only testers (albeit with some back-door ways to experience its content).

Well, Hulu’s not opening up today, but they’re doing something nice. The company contacted us to give away some 2,500 beta invites to U.S.-based NewTeeVee and GigaOM readers. Apparently all you have to do is go to this site and enter your email address. So what are you waiting for? Go check it out.

(Cross-posted at NewTeeVee.)