March 2010
29 posts
“Search is great for harvesting demand, not creating it”
– Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, on Freemium
1 tag
“To me they prove that the iPhone’s screen is still too small to really enjoy a...”
– Scott Rosenberg on iPad+content+money.
“If you’re worried that your current job is rotting your brain, it probably...”
– Paul Graham on great hackers.
“So seriously, we ask you, in an age where content is king, are you really going...”
– Engadget on Kindle for iPad
“I know it sounds scary, newspaper owners, but you’ll just have to trust me on...”
– Paul Carrs on why columnists are the saviors of news publishing.
1 tag
Getting started early
The other day I read some astounding statistics on Swedish university graduates. Apparently, something like 40% want to become “entrepreneurs”.
However, less than 1/10 of these students will ever start a company with one employee or more, but most troubling is that many will never even try. In fact, most people will never ever be involved in any kind of startup activity.
I usually...
“The best markets are usually the ones in which competition is fierce because the...”
– Ben Horowitz in defense of the fat startup. Most companies solving high value problems can probably relate to this challenge. It’s one thing that Twitter can stay lean when it comes to getting P/M fit on one side of it’s business - starting to build an audience - but claiming that they...
3 tags
“Boatload is a subjective term. So is traction. So is product market fit. And so...”
– Fred Wilson sorts things out, in a great blog post in reply to Ben Horowitz’s fat startup post. They both seem to have another definition of what is considered “lean” than we do here in Sweden ;) Lean in our terms, would be considered starving by their standards.
2 tags
WatchAnother interesting example of attaching motion to still images. Maybe tablets will be a turning point for immersive multimedia full page experiences - à la advertising “campaign sites”?
“Whats the difference if the gatekeeper MicroSoft/Google/Apple rather than...”
– Some dude asking questions following a panel featuring Marc Cuban. Dead on.
4 tags
Why survey.io works
Lately, Burt has been using a tool called Survey.io, a dead simple tool developed by Sean Ellis, Hiten Shah and the rest of the good people over at Kissmetrics. We use Survey.io to send out a couple of standardized questions to our users, learn from their response and use the input to improve faster and with a better sense of priorities. Being six guys managing three products, while trying to keep...
“When I was a student at MIT, you did have to be an engineer to use the computer,...”
– Ray Kurzweil gives a rare interview over at iMedia Connection.
WatchTomas Saraceno at Bonnier Konsthall is magic.
On monetizing news →
Advertising craves attention, and apparently news readers spend 95% less attention when reading news online than they do when reading good ol’ print. In the light of this change in behavior I would argue it’s surprising they make any money at all.
Their primary problem seems to be one of user engagement, rather than usage monetization…
“The best way to get to the point of needing more is by optimizing for today. Use...”
– From an old 37signals classic by DHH. Worth considering for things beyond software development. Advertising for instance.
“There’s a prisoners’ dilemma problem with ad blockers, where it doesn’t matter...”
– John Gruber weighs in on ad blockers. Clever as a fox.
“Find a way for advertisers to reliably audit site-served ads, and you’ve got...”
– Rob Sayre writes the smartest post in the recent ad blocker discussion.
“No matter how many iPads the Apple sells, the Web will always be the bigger...”
– Marc Andreesen brings things into perspective over at Techcrunch.
2 tags
“Initially, Omniture and Facebook will focus on the ability to automate Facebook...”
– From Techcrunch. Wow, great business development move by Omniture.
Reducing creative risk in online advertising
This is a longer version of the thought piece published last week by M&M global.
Research consistently shows that in online media, creative is the most important component for driving effect. Some studies indicate that the quality of an ad can actually be responsible for up to 75% of a campaign’s total impact.
This might sound like much, but the importance of quality is really no...
3 tags
On Facebook - revenues, profit, P/E and valuation.
So Facebook is apparently on track to do $1B in revenues in 2010, a growth of 60%, and earlier they’re said to be cashflow positive. I guess one could argue that it’s astounding that it’s not better, considering their massive user base. Maybe Bo Peabody is right, after all.
By comparison, Google managed to maintain triple digit growth rates, for both top and bottom line, well...