Friday, July 11, 2008

Business TN hack job on Digital Reasoning

So I got forwarded this article from Business TN about the company I work for. At first the terrible journalism standards in it made me angry. I used to run a blog that followed the terrible and sensational journalism used in the Natalie Holloway Case. Then I had to sit back and laugh.

My favorite line is an un-cited quote about the CEO's mother (who is a board member) "calling all the shots." Ok lets deconstruct this. First, the poor woman has not been well for many months and has been in treatment. While she is recovered now she pretty much hasn't called any shots for the last year. Second, lets say for a second she was quite influential. What exactly is the problem? Is it that she is a woman? Is it that she is a mother? Really? Come on - how old school is that? It really goes a long way to prove Tim's original assertion that Venture Capital in Middle Tennessee is not really capable of evaluating a good thing when they see it and is driving good business ideas out of this state.

Frankly, if Tim moves the shop I would follow. DRS has great technology that has been proven in the field of battle. It needs to be in the hands of civilians now. Where as we will eventually develop something out of what we are doing with the government, that is a slow process. I have to shrug my shoulders. If that uncredited person actually did say the problem was Tim's mother then there really is no helping the local VC crowd as they are hopelessly short sighted and frankly misogynistic. It is well they weren't named because any female entrepreneurs in state who read their comments would instantly cross them off the list of people they would trust.

The fact that they go un-cited however makes me question the entire article itself however. I wonder how much of that is really just the invention and belief of the author. Now you would be right to say where do I get the right to critisize him when I blog. Well for one, I know bad journalism when I see it. Second I have left open the comments on this blog so if you want to call BS on something I wrote I would gladly engage in that. There are a lot of things in this blog that are opinion and not fact and sometimes I am not as careful to distinguish between them as clearly in my writing as I should.

I'd be glad to hear from anyone in the NLP field that also finds that the VC in their area don't get what they do and don't invest in innovative startups. I am sure it is not just Middle Tennessee. When you do a map of the location of the top 30% of the data mining/text analytics companies they are not surprisingly centered on a short list of hubs.

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