December 12, 2006

There were 3 posts published on December 12, 2006 (this is page 1 of 1).

Accipiter: Everything Old Is New Again

Ten years ago, I was one of the original startup employees at Accipiter, the web advertising software company. Accipiter was founded by Raleigh entrepreneur Chris Evans and soon grew on the edge of the web advertising boom.

That Accpiter company got sold to CMGI, a smoke-and-mirrors dot-bomb company that soon cratered in a big way. Accipiter became part of CMGI’s company Engage Technologies, being renamed Engage.

CMGI went bust when investors got wise to dot-com companies. (If your company ever gets bought and your New Overlords can’t stop calling the founder a “visionary,” run – don’t walk – to the exits!)

Engage’s offices on Highwoods Boulevard sat vacant for years. In 2002, someone at Engage talked management into spinning Accipiter off again. They did, and lo and behold Accipiter was reborn.

Yesterday, the new, improved Accipiter was sold once again, this time to a company called aQuantive for $30 million in cash.

No one I worked with at the original Accipiter appears to be with this Accipiter. Looks like the same name and product but an entirely different team. I find it funny to see this company’s name in the press again, so many years after it was first assimilated.

On a similar note, I wonder what Chris Evans is up to nowadays.

Arctic Ice To Be Gone in 30 Years?

At a recent dinner party, a few colleagues and I were discussing the problems of the world. Someone asked me what global problem was on my mind. I had just read Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and knew right away what my answer was: the melting of the Greenland ice shelf.

The Greenland ice shelf is melting at an unprecedented rate. Should it finally slide into the ocean, the world’s maps will have to be redrawn, to quote David King, a science advisor to Tony Blair. Sea levels would rise twenty feet overnight. A similar rise in sea levels would occur if a threatened ice sheet on western Antarctica breaks up.

Today I read that the ice surrounding the north pole in the Arctic Ccean could be gone in 30 years due to global warming. Some scientists say even 30 years is optimistic.

Hang on for some bumpy climate changes, folks.