The OnMedia 100 represents the top emerging companies that are creating new business opportunities in the world of media, advertising, marketing, branding, and public relations. The winning companies are staring down the entrenched, legacy institutions that have long dominated Madison Avenue and creating new ways of reaching their sophisticated and increasingly mobile audience.

Today’s digital media, advertising, and marketing startups are shifting to take advantage of the trend toward both socialization and personalization. Consumers are demanding a new type of advertising—one that brings the products and services they want to them.

The AlwaysOn Power Players in Digital Media list honors the most influential people in the banking, venture capital, legal, and accounting world who support technology entrepreneurs that are bringing massive technology breakthroughs to the digital media world. These individuals and their firms are the infrastructure workhorses behind the ideas that make the Global Silicon Valley an incubator for success, creating strong companies that are building forward-thinking, indispensable products.

The OnDemand 100 represents the top emerging companies that are creating new business opportunities in the world of on-demand, cloud computing, and SaaS. The winning companies are creating a complex world of interconnected business intelligence, merging valuable legacy data and systems with vital new streams of information. New application developers, especially those serving the expanding mobile market, now rely on cloud infrastructure to create, deploy, and manage their apps.

The AlwaysOn Power Players in the Cloud list honors the most influential people in the banking, venture capital, legal, and accounting world who support on-demand entrepreneurs that are bringing massive technology breakthroughs to the cloud, on-demand, and SaaS world. These individuals and their firms are the infrastructure workhorses behind the ideas that make the Global Siliconn Valley an incubator for success, creating strong digital media companies that are building forward-thinking, indispensable products.

The AlwaysOn Global 250 represents the top emerging companies that are creating new business opportunities in the Global Silicon Valley. These startups are opening up a new era in worldwide innovation that’s not only changing the way people live, it’s bringing a bright, new vision to the business world. Thousands of new ideas are making their mark, thanks to an expanding venture economy and a wide range of options available to entrepreneurs with the tenacity to take their idea from concept to market.

With the unprecedented shift from desktop to mobile, cloud and infrastructure innovators are making it possible for an entirely new generation of application and software solutions to enter the technology marketplace. The enterprise world has endured a long ramp-up to the cloud, but is now flocking to it with alacrity.

AlwaysOn is proud to announce its seventh annual OnHollywood 100, representing the top companies that are disrupting the establishment and creating viable business models for the digital entertainment marketplace. The AlwaysOn editorial team, along with partners in the venture capital and investment community and entertainment industry experts across the globe, went out into the entrepreneurial ecosystem to find the top 100 private companies in digital entertainment that are continuing to innovate an increasingly digital Hollywood and disrupt an entrenched legacy institution.

I was reading a thread on Hacker News this morning and came across this gem of a comment:

One of the consequences of a public transaction chain is the great potential for witch hunts. Here’s one of the first examples, but it surely won’t be the last.

The backstory here is a couple researchers posted a paper suggesting that Satoshi (the inventor of bitcoin that nobody knows) had done a large transaction with the founder of Silk Road. That was picked up by the New York Times last weekend. Well it turns out that was not what happened. What happened in fact was this.

One of the unavoidable realities of building a startup is having to fire people.

In a normal business you can often sweep bad performers under the rug and not deal with them. When you have millions or billions of dollars of revenue you can suffer a few bad performers or bad apples. You can miss a quarter’s target and not cull the inefficiencies. I’m not saying you should, but you could.

Let’s face it, over the years I’ve been pretty hard on the public cloud dream and the vision of running production apps exclusively in the cloud. I’ve been critical of Amazon “over marketing” the public cloud and promoting the idea of the enterprise w/o data centers.

Events in the last few months have started bringing me around much closer to Amazon’s vision, albeit I still think that hybrid cloud will win over the next 5-10 years.

I like being a contrarian. As a kid, if a certain TV show was popular amongst my buddies, I’d purposefully ignore that show and search for other shows that were less well known (e.g., Hogan’s Heroes was a personal favorite that never hit mainstream). When someone declares something is conventional wisdom, I look to poke holes and challenge the underlying assumptions.

Recently, the conventional wisdom in Startup Land has been that young, technical founders are the prototype for creating valuable companies. The formula, this theory goes, is to find a hacker in a hoodie and bring out the wheelbarrow of cash to back them.

LPs, the investors in VC funds, have a difficult job to do, largely because they have to work with poor quality data and only a small fraction of VCs deliver the returns that make them worth investing in. The problem is made worse by the fact that LP demand to invest in the handful of serially successful VCs well outstrips supply and most LPs have to invest most or all of their venture allocation in other VC funds.

OnHollywood 2013 represents the second time this year that AlwaysOn’s Tony Perkins and I decided to eschew the traditional conference format of many people seated in rows for cabaret-like intimate seating. Sitting in the main room of the beautiful Bel Air Bay Club in subdued lighting with the view of the ocean and a plethora of picture windows made me feel like I was hanging out at the Hotel California (or at least, hanging out in Joe Walsh’s living room, getting ready to hoist a gigantic cocktail or three).

Everyone focuses on the price of Bitcoin these days and it is no wonder why. But for Bitcoin to be anything more than a store of value, we need to see a transactional ecosystem develop. When the citizens of the world will be able to buy and sell from each other and from retailers of all shapes and sizes via Bitcoin, then we will have truly realized the potential of a global digital currency.

Furthermore, transactions can help stabilize what is a very volatile currency today. There is an imbalance of supply and demand right now.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is having its moment. Customers, entrepreneurs, and capital markets are all enamored with the SaaS model– with good reason. For customers, software as a service can yield dramatic reductions in total cost of ownership, quicker time to value, and pricing models which let you pay for only what you need and as you go versus all up-front. For entrepreneurs, the recurring nature of subscription pricing gives more forward revenue and cash flow visibility, enables new customer acquisition models (such as Freemium), and the single code base for all customers is significantly easier to support than custom installs on-premise or supporting multiple generations of packaged software releases (and the Operating Systems they run on.)

The AlwaysOn X Fund dropped 3.6% last week, while the NASDAQ was up just 0.1%, and the S&P 500 advanced 0.4%. Year to date, the AO X Fund is up 62.8%, the NASDAQ is up 32.2%, and the S&P 500 is up 26.5%.

Big data analytics leader Splunk reported strong Q3 results, beating analyst expectations by 1 cent, and posting 51% revenue growth. In the last three months, Splunk signed more than 450 new customers and has a total of more than 6,400.

In my mid-20s I was part of an amazing experience called Birthing of Giants. It was a gathering of 60 entrepreneurs over four days (for three years) who were all under 40 and founders of companies with more than $1m in revenue. It was the first time I discovered my peer group and while I was young (24 years old) and small ($1m in revenue) I felt like I immediately fit in.

One of the guys in the group from from Brazil. He had this delicious accent and intense passion whenever he spoke. I remember being across from him in some conversation when he pounded on the table in reaction to something and said “focus focus focus.” But it came out as “fuck us fuck us fuck us.” And I’ll never forget that moment.

A sales pitch I hear as an owner of a small business = “I’m in your HQ’s neighborhood. Stop by?!”

Heck no, you can’t sit with me

GPS based, social networking apps do and replicate that exact bad dynamic. Highlight and Sonar and FourSquare broadcast locations and check-ins. My point of view: IT’S A BAD SOLUTION SEARCHING FOR A PROBLEM.

When scientists and engineers who’ve been working in the lab for years try to commercialize their technology they often get trapped by their own beliefs – including who the customers are, what features are important, pricing etc.

One the key tenets of the Lean LaunchPad class is that every week each team gets out of the building and talks to 10+ customers/partners to validate a new part of their business model. Back in class they present their findings to their peers and teaching team in a 10 minute Lessons Learned presentation. One of the benefits of the class is that the teams get immediate unvarnished feedback on their strategy.