Back in the late 90’s I started noticing URLs at the end of many TV advertisements. They started as general company URLs (and were relatively infrequent) and eventually because almost ubiquitous leading not just to company home pages but eventually to product pages or other ares of a company’s site were one could get more information about whatever was being hocked on TV (or in a magazine, etc.). Fast forward a few years and we saw the same phenomenon with brands and their Facebook pages. And then Twitter. These were/are great ways for brands to get more information to people interested in their products. And to some extent through Twitter and Facebook “engage” with people so inclined to interact in that way…
Category
NexGen Web
Pricing models, the freemium myth and why you may not be charging enough for your product
I’ve been pulled into a number of product and pricing meetings recently (for reasons unknown I’ve become the Foundry pricing and productization guy). I thought it would be helpful to put some of my thoughts into a blog post and hopefully spur some conversation in the comments and over email. With any broad topic, there are always exceptions to the general rules. There are also few absolutes and much of this advice varies depending on your specific product and market. And keep in mind here that I’m dealing generally with web services of some kind in the advice below (not consumer apps and not enterprise software). With those caveats, here are some ideas on pricing models: – Beware of too…
VCs and social media
I recently participated in a Thomson Reuters webinar entitled "Boosting Returns with Web 2.0 Technology". The seminar was targeted to VC and Private Equity professionals and focused on how investment firms can use social media in managing their investment business. I was reminded of the mew media technology bubble that I live in a few months ago when I spoke on a similar topic at the PEI Investor Relations and Communications Forum. When I asked the crowd of about 150 people how many were on Twitter and a single hand went up I realized that I had my work cut out for me (I might have guessed that that when I walked into the room and was the only person…
Revenge of the database
I had a note from a break-out session I led at defrag a few months ago that read "database is back". It was by far the biggest take away from the two-day conference for me. While a significant infrastructure has developed around simplifying and virtualizing pretty much every aspect of the technology stack, the common denominator to all NextGenWeb, Web 2.0, social networking, aspiring platform companies is the database. And while the other elements of the technology stack are getting all of the fanfare the very unsexy database that back-ends all of this great new stuff is the real hero. After all, many of the companies in the categories I mention above are really just fancy front-ends to a large. …
The missing social network
Facebook trying to co-opt the web into Facebook highlights for me how backwards the social networking world is today. I’m a fan of the platform idea, but the more I think about this, the more I come to the conclusion that the world already has the greatest platform yet developed at its fingertips – the Web itself. I understand why Facebook is trying to enable the reporting of external content all over their site but what would really be great is if rather than trying to port the net into my social network, my social network extended onto the net. When I’m in Facebook, I don’t really care that much if Brad just bought Book A or if Chris just…
Widgets are s-l-o-w-i-n-g m–e d—o—w—n
The great thing about having a bunch of widgets on my blog is that every time my site slows down I have my choice of people to blame. Shame on me for having so many widgets, I guess, but really – there has to be a better way of managing this. From start to finish, the experience of inserting a widget on my blog is unsatisfying. I have to configure each separately (so it’s hard to make them consistent in look and feel); I have to manually insert the javascript on my blog; to change attributes or location of the widget I have to mess around with the code again or have to go back to the site where I…
BioWest with a ‘Vue
One of the best parts of being a part of TechStars this summer has been watching the companies make their way onward and upward now that TechStars 2007 is fading into memory. While most are still in some form of beta (meaning that their sites don’t tell you much about what they are up to) a good handful are making real progress. A great example is EventVue (also still in beta), which provides conference attendees a way to interact before, during and after a conference (which is really the main reason anyone attends a conference in the first place). BioWest just announced that they would be using the platform to support their upcoming conference and my friend Adam Rubenstein (who…
The gentrification of FaceBook
I first signed up for FaceBook about 8 months ago, interested in checking out the platform and to playing with the technology. I was happy to find a handful of my geek Boulder friends already there as well as a few colleagues and one or two college buddies. The TechStars guys (most of whom were under 25) were, of course, well established on FB already and happy to point me in the right direction (download this, pull your blog into your news feed, see your contacts this way, etc.). Over the first few months I noticed some of my VC friends join up as well as more of the Boulder tech crowd. Then I started seeing a few more people…
They get it
There’s no question that OpenSocial supports exactly what I was talking about last week. Check out Marc Andreessen’s post on the effort here – a must read for anyone who cares about open platforms.
Web2.0 social-networking SaaS is the way to go!
Someone joked with me the other day that after a recent experience trying to get funding for an old school enterprise software business they were going to reposition themselves as a Web 2.0 social networking SaaS company to see if that helped. Ahh . . . bubble humor . . . it would be even funnier if it didn’t ring so true . . .