GigaOM

Entrepreneurs often focus so much on running their companies that they don’t have time to worry about events in the outside world. Normally, this is how it should be, but the credit crisis slamming Wall Street right now is an exception, and it has deep implications for any startup.

The current mayhem actually began back in 2001. In an attempt to mitigate the economic impact of the dotcom collapse and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Federal Reserve began a series of interest-rate cuts, slashing the cost to borrow money to 1.75 percent from 6.5 percent. This was great at first: Entrepreneurs could borrow cheaply to build new businesses; consumers could borrow cheaply to spend money on our products.

There was an unexpected result, too. People began using the cheap rates to buy houses. Lots of houses. Investment banks then repackaged the new mortgage debt into all kinds of new securities that supposedly separated risky loans from safe loans. The result was cataclysmic: As housing prices plummeted, suddenly financial institutions had trillions of dollars of asset-backed securities that couldn’t be valued at all. Unable to borrow money, some of these banks are now failing, making credit hard to come by for everyone, including entrepreneurs.

If you are lucky enough to have customers, your customers are going to be less inclined to spend now. If, like most startups, you have no customers, you’re in worse shape: The angels and VCs competing to give you money last year will be far less willing to invest now.

So, what’s a founder to do? Continue »

In December 1994, I was managing the new product development process for a long-distance carrier. We were in the midst of being acquired, with the new combined company becoming a credible threat to the Big Three. My soon-to-be CEO asked for a review of the product development pipeline, about a third of which was Internet related. His response? “That Internet stuff –- shut it down. The Internet’s a toy, businesses will never pay for it. Shut it down.”

I lead with this story for two reasons. First, to remind us of how quickly things can change. Second, to set the stage for a much longer, still evolving story. Continue »

From left to right: Chester Roh, Chang Kim, and author Joyce Kim. Photo by Joyce Kim.

Google has acquired South Korea’s TNC, maker of the open-source blogging and publishing platform Textcube, co-CEO Chang Kim said on his personal blog today. I met with the TNC team back in March, when I was visiting Seoul. I liked the company so much that I talked about it on an episode of The GigaOM Show and wrote about Textcube on my own blog.

Everything I saw during the demo TNC gave made me want to move my own blog onto Textcube. I was impressed not only with how easy it was to add photos, videos and podcasts, but with the incredible drag-and-drop feature, which made it very easy to upload images in bulk, create slide shows, resize images and format text around the media object. TNC had also recently restructured its commenting system to resemble an email inbox, a format whose familiarity will undoubtedly prove more accessible to bloggers and readers alike. And its default analytics system offers Google Analytics-like information and results without the hassle of installing plug-ins.

Overall, TNC is a great product to bridge the gap between first-time bloggers, who want maximum simplicity, and professional bloggers, who want to customize every last detail. And as blogging becomes more prevalent, this mid-market may emerge as the biggest of the three. Continue »