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.). …
November 24, 2007· 2 min read
The 20 worst venture deals of all time
InsideCRM has compiled a list of the 20 worst venture deals of all time. Not sure the methodology (I can think of a few that I might have added to the list . . .) but the deals mentioned are for the most part worthy of the designation. You can see the story here – definitely amusing reading.
November 20, 2007· 1 min read
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.
November 1, 2007· 1 min read
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 . . .
October 26, 2007· 1 min read
1980’s all over again
I’ve written a few posts about my general concerns over our economy (we save too little, have too much debt, etc.). I’ve received my fair share of feedback that outlined all the reasons why the world had changed, that certain leading indicators no longer mattered, etc. That’s all wishful thinking in my mind – we live in a world of real and repeatable cycles. And while overall the global standard of living has gone up over time and the duration of our periods of growth have lengthened, our economy and the world economy is cyclical and generally speaking follows repeating (if not predictable) patterns. …
October 26, 2007· 2 min read
AppExchange is the new black . . . again
The big news coming out of Web 2.0 (other than Facebook’s Evan Zuckerberg somewhat obliquely announcing that FB is going to create its own ad network and dodging a few questions about their developer agreement – see coverage here) was MySpace following in the steps of Facebook and opening up their site to developers. It’s no secret that MySpace has struggled – especially relative to Facebook (at Web 2.0 Murdoch also lowered guidance for MySpace revenue and there have been many reports of MySpace’s significantly lower growth rates than that of Facebook). Facebook’s decision this May to create a standardized development platform for 3rd party app builders has without question been a huge success. MySpace has now jumped on the platform bandwagon and will begin to better support their developer ecosystem. …
October 23, 2007· 3 min read
StubHub Rocks
Brad put up a post last night about how tight StubHub is (see “StubHub Seriously Has Its Act Together“). I promised a post on my rockin’ StubHub experience buying tickets to Game 4 of the NLCS in “Jumping on the bandwagon” so here goes: The thing about specializing in a specific vertical is that if you get it right, the experience is worlds better than your generalist competitors. When StubHub was started conventional wisdom suggested that eBay had a lock on all things auction. But it turns out that there are plenty of very specific niches for which the eBay one-auction-fits-all model falls short. Ticket sales is clearly one of them. If you’ve ever tried to buy or sell tickets on an eBay auction you know exactly what I mean. Tickets to an event are a highly specialized good – every ticket is not the same (each seat is different and each venue is unique in its seat layout), events are time specific (i.e., they occur at a very specific date and time before which the ticket is valuable and after which the ticket has zero value), there are major logistical challenges with shipping around tickets and ensuring they get where the are supposed to get when they are supposed to get there, and there are significant challenges in dealing with last-minute purchases (transferring the ticket from a buyer to a seller hours or minutes before an event). …
October 23, 2007· 3 min read
“Everything just works”
On a recent trip to Chicago I had the chance to visit Dick Costolo, former CEO of FeedBurner and now proud employee of Google. Brad and I took Dick out to a congratulatory dinner. Before we went out Dick gave us a tour of Googleplex Chicago. As we walked around the impressively decked out office (200 inch screen in the presentation room? Wow!) he told us how smoothly the operations ran at Google. “Everything just works” he said, demonstrating the video conferencing system. On top of that, the systems in the Chicago office are exactly the same as the systems in every other office. Learn how to do something in Chicago and you know how to do it in Palo Alto, Boston or Munich. Most of the offices even have the same look and feel. While it may be a bit formulaic, it’s productive. And clearly Google is all about maximizing the productivity of its staff. That . . . as well as the fact that they actually had a working video conferencing system that required no IT staff to actually set up a video feed . . . is pretty impressive. …
October 18, 2007· 1 min read
Jumping on the bandwagon
I admit it – I’m not a huge baseball fan. I used to love baseball. I collected baseball cards, followed the box scores and (in true nerd fashion – especially for that era) kept complicated spreadsheets tracking the stats of my favorite players. The Bill James Baseball Bible was my religion. That was before 1986. That was before, in the time between I left my neighbors house where I was babysitting to be with my dad to enjoy the Sox winning their first World Series since 1918, the world stopped, all reason was thrown out the door and I ended up pacing my room all night cursing the fate that had caused me to be born and raised in Boston. I pretty much gave up on baseball at that point, enjoying the game from a somewhat safer distance. I took a detour back into the fold in September and October of 2004 to finally enjoy the victory that should have long ago been. …
October 16, 2007· 2 min read
Echo . . . echo? . . . echo??
No . . . I didn’t die . . . I just stopped blogging for about two months. This wasn’t part of a master plan or some kind of anti-social experiment. I got incredibly busy, was traveling every week and got behind. Something had to give and unfortunately it was blogging. Ok – enough excuses. I’m back. I’m as opinionated as ever. I’m going to tell you what I think about things (even if you don’t ask). Thanks for hanging in with me.
October 16, 2007· 1 min read