This is a blog with occasional postings from John Borthwick. I work in the technology, communications and media space — as an entrepreneur, a builder and an investor — focussed on the early stage. My interests are in building great companies and understanding about how media evolves. The companies I am working with are listed on the betaworks site. I work with these early stage companies to help them grow and accelerate development — in the case of Fotolog, which has grown into a top 20 website, I served the company as CEO from Jan 2007 to Novemeber 2007. In November of 2007 we sold Fotolog to Hi Media.
Prior to launching betaworks I spent three and half years as Snr. VP of Technology and Alliances at Time Warner. In this role I worked with the executive team at Time Warner and the divisional CTO's to drive technology deals and strategy across the company. Before that I did technology and new product development work at AOL. I landed at AOL in early 1997 when they acquired the company I had started in 1994. The company they acquired was WP Studio that created a series of advertising supported web sites, including Total New York (one of the first local city guides), äda 'web (an art related site dedicated to ada byron lovelace) and spanker (a pre blog, daily journal of the occasionally twisted mind of Carter Adamson).
Companies with whom I have done early stage investments include: Blogger, Fotolog, Return Path, Daylife, im in like with you, Tumblr , Social Science, MyWebOS , Ideeli , Divmod and Lending Tree. I also sit on the board and advise several companies, including New Journalist , Dabble and Coburn Ventures. For the most current list of betaworks projects visit the betaworks site.
This blog contains occasional posting and thoughts, it is not a high frequency daily blog.
This web log is published on WordPress, wonderful as ever, using the Simpla theme originally designed by Phu. I believe I saw the theme first on a wordpress blog by Dave Winer. Borthwick.com was published on iWeb, a great client side tool, fast as and easy but limited as can be. I use a lot of plugin's on this site. The list includes:
| Akismet | 1.14 | Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days. Hat tip: Michael Hampton and Chris J. Davis for help with the plugin. By Matt Mullenweg. | |
| Exhibit | 1.1b | A photo gallery plugin for WordPress posts. This code is licensed under the MIT License and is Copyright 2004 Owen Winkler. By Owen Winkler. | |
| EditorMonkey (Compatible) | 2.4dev | Turns the normal WordPress textarea into a WYSIWYG editor using TinyMCE or FCKeditor. Also integrates spell checking into the editor interface using the FCK Speller Pages plugin and ieSpell. Supports custom dictionaries.This is a restricted version which retains compatibility with PHP 4.3 and/or overly strict server configurations at the expense of some features. By Raj Prasad. | |
| Simple Asides | 0.2.2 | Displays posts from a specified category as an ‘aside’ described by Matt’s asides page. Display of the aside can be modified through CSS. Configuration of this script is in Options >> Simple Asides. Tested on version 1.5.2 with default Kubrick theme. By Michael Huynh. | |
| Ultimate Tag Warrior | 1.3 Legacy | Add tags to wordpress. Tags and tag/post associations are seperated out for great justice. By Christine Davis. | |
| Weighted Categories | 1.2 | Template tag to display a weighted list of category links By Matt Kingston. | |
| Google Search widget | 1.0 | Adds a sidebar widget to let users search your site with Google. By Automattic, Inc.. |
And bubble tool tips!
Thats all for now.