Radical Transparency vs. the West Wing

Thursday, November 13 2008 - 0 comments

I don’t know who the dude is in the photo above, but he can forget about getting a job in the Obama administration. As the New York Times reports today, the seven-page questionnaire that the Obama folks are using to vet prospective appointees for high-ranking positions, including questions about immediate family members as potential sources of embarrassment, is the most invasive ever. The comprehensive, 63-question request for information includes, “…any e-mail that might embarrass the president-elect, along with any blog posts and links to their Facebook pages.” Former...

Headline of the Day

Thursday, June 19 2008 - 0 comments

This one from a few weeks ago, but the Earth-shattering truth revealed by the Financial Times: Web 2.0 fails to produce cash Bummer - see here . The best part is the quote from non-money-making browser shop Flock (“ These are challenging macro-economic conditions ”), whose $15M venture round was covered by FT the previous day under the headline, " Social browser moves into money-making mode ." When a 3-year-old company's move into "money-making mode" is newsworthy, that's when it gets weird....

Crazy about the iPhone

Thursday, June 12 2008 - 0 comments

Those wacky VCs are at it again, and this time they're high on the iPhone. As Om Malik wrote yesterday, iPhone startups are all the rage on Sand Hill Road, with Kleiner's $100 million iFund surely to be followed by other private equity heavyweights. Given the iPhone hype, cult of Mac, and numerous other gut-feel indicators, this all makes sense, except for one minor problem...according to a survey of developers attending Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference conducted by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, "We found the average cost of iPhone apps on the App Store to be $2.29, with 71% being...

Just for Fun

Thursday, June 12 2008 - 0 comments

I did a blog post back in September suggesting that 'platform' is to today's Web economy as 'eyeballs' was to the insanity that was Web 1.0/'the dot-com boom.' In other words, 'platform' has become the anchor point for what can only be described as irrational exuberance (with all due respect to Alan Greenspan). The topper for me was the move by Accel and Founders Fund to put together a $10 million kitty for Facebook apps, followed by Bay Partners upping the ante with their $25 million Facebook app fund. Anyway, today I happen upon this post by CNET blogger Caroline McCarthy: Study reveals shocking...

One Hundred Million Dollars

Thursday, June 12 2008 - 0 comments

One thing I admire about IBM is their ability to simplify marketing messages using nice, big, round, easy-to-understand numbers. I was reminded of this today when I saw the following headline: IBM Commits $100 Million To Midmarket Cause I swear they've thrown around that figure before, but couldn't remember where, so I put "IBM $100 million" into a search box, and was reminded of how truly disciplined the IBM PR machine really is (headlines as they appeared in press coverage)... IBM Invests $100 Million in Collaborative Innovation Ideas IBM Pledges $100 Million to Workplace on Linux IBM to help...

Kid Nation

Thursday, June 12 2008 - 0 comments

It started off innocently enough - Cap 'N Crunch commercials during Saturday morning cartoons back in the 70's - but set off a wave of spending in my house on sugary breakfast cereals that was exactly what their marketers had in mind. Of course in today's world, running ads for kids during cartoons on Saturday morning without a grown-up within earshot nonetheless influences some very grown-up spending levels on everything from breakfast cereals and video games to Disneyland vacations and Hummer SUVs. Psychologists have long-argued the ethics of marketing to kids, whose innocence and vulnerability...

E-Z Pass

Thursday, June 12 2008 - 46 comments

If you drive on Northeast US tollways, you're probably familiar with the E-Z Pass: an electronic gizmo inside your car that lets you blow thru a tollbooth at 60 miles per hour. When marketers in the tech industry unveil their wares under the banner of "open," there are plenty of tolls to be paid: community scrutiny, skeptical reporters, tech bloggers and other OSS digirati. So where does Google get its E-Z Pass? Between OpenSocial and the Open Handset Alliance that was announced alongside Android, there seems to be no shortage of positive press coverage, centered in large part on the openness of...

Headline of the Day

Thursday, June 12 2008 - 172 comments

"Communists switch to open-source software" See here . The open source community has often used "free, as in 'speech,' not as in 'beer' " to describe the true spirit and intent of OSS, so needless to say, communists switching to open source is dripping with irony. This particular deal involving the government of Vietnam begs for a definitional level-set (courtesy of Wikipedia ) on the ideology of open source... Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge. OK, fair enough. But reading further offers a more expansive view...

New Eyeballs

Thursday, June 12 2008 - 113 comments

Most of us remember the late 90's, when the entrepreneurial call to action on the Web was to capture as many eyeballs as possible, and worry about monetization later. It was justified at the time as an exercise in brand-building, supported by the belief that if you build it, they will come. It seems that people have been reminiscing about this more and more lately as part of the Bubble 2.0 chatter that has been going on for well over a year now. But a new meme has come to the fore in recent months, catalyzed in large part by Facebook's decision to allow developers to build third-party apps on top...

Sincerest Form of Flattery

Thursday, June 12 2008 - 168 comments

Let's face it - fast follower is a proven go-to-market strategy that companies in virtually every industry have used since the origin of the market economy. But some companies are more forthcoming than others about the inspiration for their product plans. In the case of Nokia, I wouldn't call them 'fast' by any means, but they seem fairly unfazed by the 'follower' label, as we see in this quote from the company's Nokia Music Store announcement: "I don’t know what is copying and what is original but if there is something good in the world, we copy it with pride,” said Anssi Vanjoki, head of the...