The #hash economy
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 with the producers of products they like and use. …
January 31, 2013· 3 min read
Pricing models, the freemium myth and why you may not be charging enough for your product
image 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: …
August 12, 2010· 7 min read
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 wearing jeans, but that’s another story)… …
September 1, 2009· 2 min read
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. This presents problems for companies that are developing new services since there are very few options for lightweight databases and essentially no options for virtualizing these databases (at least nothing very robust and scalable). For the most part they’re stuck handling the set-up, implementation and maintenance of this technology themselves. The result is greater cost, more headaches and an inability to quickly scale if their business is successful. …
December 14, 2007· 2 min read
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 purchased movie tickets. When I really care is when I’m on Amazon looking for my next read or when I’m at Fandango about to buy tickets to see a film. More generally, when I hit a site, I’d love to know who else I know who has been there, where they surfed to afterwards and what other related sites I should be checking out based on the behavior of my network. When I’m on a blog, I’d love to see who I know who has left comments, how they’ve rated the content and if I’m reading something written by someone that’s a few degrees of separation from someone I know. I’d like all of my networks (my contacts, my LinkedIn connections, my Facebook friends, etc.) to be a part of this extension of the web and for it to inform and enhance my surfing. …
December 7, 2007· 2 min read
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 created the widget in the first place; I can’t create a library of widgets and turn them on and off at will; and my widgets are constantly breaking something on my site (apologies for those using my Lijit search last week, which I managed to inadvertently disable when I was moving a few things around on my sidebars). And because I use advanced templates in Typepad everything that’s designed to make at least some of this easier doesn’t work. …
December 6, 2007· 3 min read
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 writes a blog about the Colorado life science investing) has a nice post up on why BioWest went with EventVue. Go TechStars Go!
December 4, 2007· 1 min read
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
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