The story of Olsen and DEC formed the heart of my book Creative Capital. I’ve been meaning to get around to publishing a blog post explaining why Ken Olsen still matters.

In the meantime, here are some of the best links to obits and memorials of Olsen, who Fortune magazine in 1986 called “America’s Most Successful Entrepreneur.”

Ken Olsen, Who Built DEC Into a Power, Dies at 84 by Glenn Rifkin of The New York Times

Innovator’s Dilemma by Steve Syre of The Boston GLobe.

Remembering Ken Olsen by Paul Kedrosky of Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Remembering Ken Olsen by Bruce Richardson

Ken Olsen Memorial by John Furrier of Silicon Angle

Obit by IDG News Service

Obit by Chris Mellor of Channel Register

Memorial by Robert Lenzner of Forbes

Obit by Gregory T. Huang of Xconomy

Memorial by Gordon Bell on Xconomy

Deadly sins the tech industry can’t seem to shake by Bill Snyder of Infoworld

However, the story of Georges Doriot continues to resonate. Over the last 10 months, I have seen more than 100 Websites or blogs make reference to Doriot or feature him in a post. Here is a select list of those links:

* Fisher Investments profile of Doriot. Each week, it profiles an important figure in market history, highlighting the fascinating and often irreverent lives of key figures that influenced how capital markets came to be. (April 30, 2010)

* Finance and Business history of venture capital highlighting Doriot. (May 1, 2010)

* Creative Capital Makes Top Book List of Pittsburgh Ventures. Good synopsis of take-aways. (May, 5, 2010)

* Investing Principles of Doriot by Rocky Top MBA. (June 25, 2010)

* Great Comment on Doriot’s Belief in Importance of Manufacturing on ZDNet blog post. (July 7, 2010).

Well, the short answer is I’ve been working hard at my new day job as Deputy Bureau Chief of The Wall Street Journal, which takes up most of my working hours.

Given how busy I am at WSJ I have decided to take a temporary hiatus from regularly blogging on Creative Capital. That may change in the future but for now if you want to keep up with my work please subscribe to my Twitter feed where I post links to many if not all of my WSJ stories.

Thanks to everyone for coming by to read this blog. I started it back in 2008 to help launch my book, and then it evolved into a publishing vehicle for a broader set of stories related to the book and my work as a technology and finance journalist.

I am not sure how it will evolve going forward but I am grateful to everyone who dropped by and contributed to the conversation. Onward ….

By SPENCER E. ANTE

As smartphones and the applications that run on them take off, businesses and consumers are beginning to confront a budding dark side of the wireless Web.

Online stores run by Apple Inc., Google Inc. and others now offer more than 250,000 applications such as games and financial tools. The apps have been a key selling point for devices like Apple’s iPhone. But concerns are growing among security researchers and government officials that efforts to keep out malicious software aren’t keeping up with the apps craze.

In one incident, Google pulled dozens of unauthorized mobile-banking apps from its Android Market in December. The apps, priced at $1.50, were made by a developer named “09Droid” and claimed to offer access to accounts at many of the world’s banks. Google said it pulled the apps because they violated its trademark policy.

The apps were more useless than malicious, but could have been updated to capture customers’ banking credentials, said John Hering, chief executive of Lookout, a mobile security provider. “It is becoming easier for the bad guys to use the app stores,” Mr. Hering said.

Unlike Apple or BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., Google doesn’t have employees dedicated to vetting applications submitted to its Android store. Google said it removes apps that violate its policies, but largely relies on users to alert it to bad software. “We check reactively,” said a Google spokesman. “There is no manual bottleneck.”

As more companies, governments and consumers use wireless gadgets to conduct commerce and share private information, computer bad guys are beginning to target them, according to government officials and security researchers.

Read the rest of the story here.

Qwest Deal Is One of CenturyTel Chief’s Riskiest Moves
By Spencer E. Ante and Joanne Lublin

Glen F. Post III just bagged his biggest duck.

The experienced hunter and little-known chief executive of CenturyTel Inc., a rural phone company based in Monroe, La., agreed Thursday to acquire Denver-based telecom giant Qwest Communications International Inc. in a $10.6 billion all-stock transaction.

Jay Carrier/ Bloomberg News
GLEN F. POST III

The deal, one of the largest telecom acquisitions in years, will create the third-biggest U.S. provider of local phone service, with operations in 37 states, 17 million access lines and five million broadband customers.

The deal is also one of Mr. Post’s riskiest bets. While the combination will give CenturyTel greater potential to cut costs and to sell more lucrative services, such as television and long-distance data transport, it also expands the company’s footprint in the shrinking land-line business, which has been in an inexorable decline since the rise of the cellphone.

Mr. Post is also lashing his company to a bigger and more indebted enterprise. Standard & Poor’s said Thursday the deal would likely cost CenturyTel its investment-grade credit rating. Moody’s Investors Service disagreed, but said CenturyTel faces a big challenge integrating the companies and steering through the sector’s decline.

Mr. Post, a 57-year-old native of northeastern Louisiana, has been an unlikely but aggressive consolidator. He has built his small company into a national competitor by scooping up the assets of other rural phone providers, and in recent years by taking over bigger players.

Read the rest of the story here. (Subscription may be required.)

Thanks Thomas!!! It’s nice to know that two years after its publication, the book is still striking a chord with readers.

Thomas continues: “While the book is centered on Georges Doriot, it weaves numerous themes from beginning to end
* the creation of the European automobile industry
* the imperfections of the US capitalist system, first with a shortage of capital for young companies then with the difficulty of regulatory agencies grasping a new, potent business model
* the rise of Harvard as the world’s leading graduate school of business
* the creation of INSEAD, Europe’s leading graduate business school
* the application of science and technology to the art of war
* the proactive involvement of a teacher as a mentor to students in and out of the classroom
* a lifelong storybook romance
* the creation and evolution of the venture capital industry
* and the value of living one’s life to better oneself, his/her family, and society.

Click here to read the rest of the review.

And so …. I am thrilled to announce that I will be joining the Wall Street Journal as Deputy Bureau Chief of its New York Corporate Bureau, starting April 12. Keith Kelly of the New York Post wrote up an item about my new gig in today’s Media Ink column.

This is a new bureau that was formed this January to oversee reportage of big companies such as General Electric, IBM, Procter & Gamble, and several big beats, including telecommunications, New York retail and fashion, and recruiting and management.

“We formed the New York corporate group to focus on the importance and raise the visibility of the main corporate beats that the Journal covers. This group will also help to strengthen the cooperation between Newswires and Journal reporters,” said Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones & Company and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, announcing the formation of the bureau.

I will be reporting to Bureau Chief Andrew Dowell, and have a few big priorities:

1. Supervising telecom coverage as a writer and editor
2. Helping to beef up coverage of big tech companies in the region such as IBM, EMC and RIMM
3. Covering New York’s entrepreneurial scene of startups and venture capitalists
4. Helping to beef up WSJ.com’s Digits blog through editing and reporting

I loved working at BusinessWeek for the last decade. And now I am stoked to join the Wall Street Journal at this unique time. Under New Corp., there’s a lot of energy and excitement pulsing through the newsroom as the Journal pursues an ambitious expansion. I hope to play one small part in making a great place even greater. Onward . . .

I am no longer working for BusinessWeek. I wanted to leave, and am excited to be moving on to new opportunities and different challenges. It was a great 10-year run, and an experience I will always treasure. I met many incredible and super-talented people, learned a lot about a lot of things, savored the opportunity to cover some of the biggest stories of the decade, and made a few good friends along the way. I wish all of my former colleagues the best in their endeavors.

Watch this space for updates on my situation. Onward and upward . . . .

The heart of the package is a feature story and a super-duper two-page info-graphic detailing the ascendance of the Google angel investors–all of the wealthy folks such as Aydin Senkut, Chris Sacca and Andrea Zurek who have come out of Google and are seeding the next wave of tech innovation. Silicon Valley has always been fueled by angel investors coming out of successful startups, but the Google alumni network is the most powerful network the Valley has ever seen, I believe. Check out the story here, written by myself and Kimberly Weisul.

We’ve also compiled a ranking of the most powerful angels in all of tech investing through a partnership with private company researcher YouNoodle. Angel investors are playing an increasingly important role in the economy so I am stoked we are first to market with this kind of list. In case you are wondering, the top three in our ranking our Chris Dixon, Ron Conway and Reid Hoffman.

Last but not least, we’ve got an email interview with Peter Thiel, the godfather of the other prominent Valley network, the PayPal Mafia.

On January 30, Macmillan CEO John Sargent took the unusual step of going public in his company’s dispute with Amazon.com. To explain why Macmillan’s books were taken off of the Kindle and Amazon.com, Sargent took out an advertisement in Publishers Lunch, an increasingly influential blog that covers the publishing industry.

The heart of the war is increasing tensions between publishers and Internet retailers such as Apple and Amazon over the pricing of books in the digital age, an issue that I focused on in my BusinessWeek feature, eBooks: Averting a Digital Horror Story. Amazon has deeply discounted ebooks, typically charging $9.99, and sometime going as low as $7.99. However, publishers don’t take a loss. They are typically paid about half the hardcover’s retail price, whether a digital book or hardcover is sold. But Amazon has been pushing to pay them less, and many publishers think cheap digital books undervalue their product and will open the door to lower industry revenues in the future.

That’s the problem that Sargent tackled in his note. In the ad, Sargent proposes moving to a different business model in which publishers set the price of ebooks and split the revenue with retailer, with the publisher keeping 70%, and 30% going to the retailer.

This is precisely the type of business model and revenue split that Apple is reportedly offering publishers who offer ebooks on its new iPad tablet computer. The growing battle between Amazon and Apple over digital content distribution is going to be one of the most important tussles of the Digital Age. It will shape the future of electronic culture. This is just the beginning.

And publishers should be careful what they they wish for. Many publishers are worried that Amazon will end up with the same kind of pricing power in books that Apple has in music, and that the book industry will suffer the same kind of bruising decline. Now, with the iPad, they are clearly trying to use Apple as a wedge in that fight. But as Tim O’Reilly told me, Apple could very well end up being the dominant player in ebooks.

One reason: More than 50 million people have the company’s iPhone or iPod Touch, which can be used to read digital books, compared with just four million who have electronic book readers. O’Reilly says his company is generating far more sales from Apple customers than Kindle users. O’Reilly currently offers 500 books on the iPhone, compared with 350 Kindle titles. Another 500 iPhone titles are in the works. the iTunes/App store and the iPad.

Whether one company will end up benefiting content providers more than another over the long run is the big question.

Check out Sargent’s letter:
Editors’ note: This message ran as a paid advertisement in a special Saturday edition of Publishers Lunch

To: All Macmillan authors/illustrators and the literary agent community
From: John Sargent

This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles. By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon they informed me that they were taking all our books off the Kindle site, and off Amazon. The books will continue to be available on Amazon.com through third parties.

I regret that we have reached this impasse. Amazon has been a valuable customer for a long time, and it is my great hope that they will continue to be in the very near future. They have been a great innovator in our industry, and I suspect they will continue to be for decades to come.

It is those decades that concern me now, as I am sure they concern you. In the ink-on-paper world we sell books to retailers far and wide on a business model that provides a level playing field, and allows all retailers the possibility of selling books profitably. Looking to the future and to a growing digital business, we need to establish the same sort of business model, one that encourages new devices and new stores. One that encourages healthy competition. One that is stable and rational. It also needs to insure that intellectual property can be widely available digitally at a price that is both fair to the consumer and allows those who create it and publish it to be fairly compensated.

Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digital media businesses). The price will be set the price for each book individually. Our plan is to price the digital edition of most adult trade books in a price range from $14.99 to $5.99. At first release, concurrent with a hardcover, most titles will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99. E books will almost always appear day on date with the physical edition. Pricing will be dynamic over time.

The agency model would allow Amazon to make more money selling our books, not less. We would make less money in our dealings with Amazon under the new model. Our disagreement is not about short-term profitability but rather about the long-term viability and stability of the digital book market.

Amazon and Macmillan both want a healthy and vibrant future for books. We clearly do not agree on how to get there. Meanwhile, the action they chose to take last night clearly defines the importance they attribute to their view. We hold our view equally strongly. I hope you agree with us.

You are a vast and wonderful crew. It is impossible to reach you all in the very limited timeframe we are working under, so I have sent this message in unorthodox form. I hope it reaches you all, and quickly. Monday morning I will fully brief all of our editors, and they will be able to answer your questions. I hope to speak to many of you over the coming days.

Thanks for all the support you have shown in the last few hours; it is much appreciated.

All best,
John