We so LOVE hot new products, the Geek and the Gadfly do. We’re getting pretty excited by Amazon’s new Kindle. Amazon has done an amazing thing with the Kindle, which is to get it right enough in its first version that you can see how it will play out and be a successful product. It is, indeed, the iPod for book readers. First clue: Multiple people from different walks of life who don’t know each other each have remarked to the Gadfly on how interesting and engaging they find the idea of the Kindle. The Geek (of course) was the first to do so, by ordering the Kindle early enough that he got one of the first. ...

Ribbit introduced itself formally to the world today. Talk about BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), but the company has adopted the line that it is “Silicon Valley’s first telephone company”. For the best coverage of the company’s proposition, read Techcrunch’s post, which goes pretty deep in understanding what’s possible. Ribbit is a classic (and wonderful) startup problem: How do you decide what to do when everything is possible. Ribbit has a killer advantage, which is that -- under the covers -- it has a Class 5 soft switch, the innards of a traditional telephone company that allows it to set up, route, and terminate phone calls. No other startup can duplicate that infrastructure in less than 3-5 ...

Last week, Cleversafe introduced a major update to its open source software. Cleversafe is a company with a big, hairy, audacious goal: transform the infrastructure for storing data. All data. Enterprise data. Consumer data. Internet data. Transform the storage of data by radically simplifying the underlying method of storing it and meanwhile making it much more secure and reliable, not to mention cheaper. Like many startups, Cleversafe has gone through significant transformations itself as it has figured out how to navigate toward this goal. A key decision the company made early on was to put its core software into the open source domain. But it realized earlier this year that ...