March 2009
23 posts
4 tags
Brand Advertising and New York City's Economic...
Yesterday morning, I participated in another meeting sponsored by the Mayor’s office and the NYC EDC to talk about the economic future of New York City. Up for discussion this time: the media industry. There is a lot of concern about employment in “old media” disappearing more rapidly than jobs will be created in “new media” (I have put these terms in quotes since I...
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A Coming Paradigm Shift in (Online) Music?
I have been reading Steven Johnson’s fabulous “The Invention of Air” which has made me aware of many connections I had never previously known existed. In a funny way it also provided a really useful perspective on something I have been thinking about recently: the future of music. Steven writes at length about what spurs “runs” of new ideas in science and identifies...
AIG Bonus Debacle: The Inside-Outside Gap
Shortly after graduating from college, I was the youngest founding team member of a management consulting firm in Germany. After rapid growth and landing some top tier clients, the firm got embroiled in a controversial project to help the city of Berlin with its application for the Olympic games. I will at some point post more detail on this since it was a huge lesson on many fronts. One of the...
“So, this must be a terrible time to fund a start-up company. Correct? Au...”
– Spark Capital | Start
Santo Politi on why Spark created their Start@Spark seed program. Since I believe that there is no such thing as too much seed capital I am happy to see another source on the East Coast (especially given that YCombinator is now West Coast only).
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Some Pitfalls of Biz Dev 2.0
I believe it was Caterina Fake who coined the term “Biz Dev 2.0” to describe a strategy of making APIs available, letting others integrate and then turning the most promising of these into commercial relationships. I have recently seen two potential pitfalls of this approach. First, if you expect to be paid, you might want to consider asking for a credit card early on. Simply having...
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Starting a Disruptive Bank (Cont'd)
I got quite a few comments on Friday’s post about starting a disruptive bank that questioned how such a bank could make money without lending, especially given that many bank accounts advertise that they are “free.” The answer has to do with the fact that there is no such thing as a “free” account, there are just accounts with hidden fees, which come in three guises:...
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It's a Great Time to Start a (Disruptive) Bank
The WSJ recently ran a story titled “It’s a Great Time to Start a Bank” which talked about a couple of recent local banking startups. It’s definitely true that when the existing players are on their backs it’s a good time for innovators. But it was disappointing to see the WSJ article focus about bank startups that look pretty much exactly like the banks we have had...
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The Return of the Browser Wars
So Google dropped any pretense of Chrome being anything other than a full fledged entry into the browser market by introducing extensions. At the same time Microsoft has released IE8 as the latest installment for Internet Explorer and something tells me that automatic upgrades are on their way. Welcome to the latest installment of the browser wars.
This wil ultimately be good news for endusers...
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Getting Better All the Time (iPhone OS3)
I am a huge fan of getting stuff out and then improving it over time. Sure, people complained about the lack of cut & paste, but it sure would have been a huge mistake to delay selling the iPhone over that. With OS3, all the really big omissions will be taken care of: Cut & paste, search, landscape keyboard & MMS (personally I use the first two heavily on my Blackberry and found the...
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AuthSMTP to the Rescue
More and more ISPs block port 25 and it’s a pain to begin with to figure out which smtp server to use, especially on a laptop that’s moving around a lot. Initially I had configured Susan’s machine to send via gmail, but despite having her DailyLit email address in the “send as” account configuration, when connecting via SMTP gmail sent all the mail as coming from her...
All Mac Household Now
Following my successful switch to a MacBook, I also moved Susan to a Mac last night. She now has an Air with what I hope will be a great setup. All her email runs through gmail which syncs with both her iPhone and mail.app. Contacts and calendar are also kept in Google and sync’d to iPhone via push and to Mac address book and iCal via a program called ‘Spanning Sync’. This means...
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Cloud Competition is Great for Startups
Another announcement from last week that got strangely little attention was Amazon’s introduction of EC2 Reserved Instances. Now reserved instances in the cloud may sound like an oxymoron but it is simply guaranteed capacity. You pay an upfront fee for the guarantee that your instance will be availabl and then a lower ongoing usage fee.
Amazon clearly has a ton of usage information on EC2...
“The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to...”
– Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky
Just one of many great quotes from Clay’s wonderful piece
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Google Friend Connect Now Serverside
Maybe yesterday was a big news day or maybe this has been known for a while and I simply wasn’t aware, but I thought that Google’s announcement yesterday of the Google Friend Connect API was a big deal (and yet seemed to pass virtually unnoticed — was off Techmeme within hours). When Friend Connect was first announced, I was pretty negative about how they had chosen to implement...
1 tag
Identity and Smaller Sites
There have been some complaints that the big sites want to be providers of identity but don’t want to accept identity from smaller sites. I happen to think that’s (mostly) OK for right now but also constitutes an opportunity (see second paragraph). To become trusted providers of identity the large sites (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Amazon?, eBay? et al) will have to make significant...
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Reblogs and Comments in Peace and Harmony
Yesterday, in my Tumblr dashboard, I saw a post by Marco about spam from Parallels. In it he says
I can confidently say that VMWare’s is the far better product. It’s much more polished, and most importantly, much more stable than Parallels
Now I have been running Parallels 4.0 since I switched to my Mac and I have been very happy with it (it has continued to be stable since I wrote my post). ...
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Turning Newspapers into Platforms
The New York Times has an API and developer network. The Guardian just announced the Open Platform. These initiatives are critically important in keeping the NYT and the Guardian relevant. Opening up and giving access to the existing articles and data is a great first step, but the trick will be to turn these into real hubs, which also allow for inbound news and data. The Guardian has taken a...
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The Coming Resource Glut: Doing More with Less
So that’s probably too sensationalist a title, but I was struck over the last few days by how many times I encountered the same theme in different guises: using the web to do more with less! Here are just a few of the examples:
A major article about Zipcar in this weekend’s New York Times magazine titled “Share my Ride”
Young entrepreneurs coming to visit us and...
Where is eBay?
Short post today as I am on BlackBerry only and headed to Hacking Education. I just have a simple question - where is eBay? This crisis ought to be fantastic for eBay as folks are looking to unload stuff they don’t need and buy things for cheap at auction. Instead the WSJ today has one article about women selling their old clothes out of their closets and another about Amazon opening a game...
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The End of Privacy! (Cont'd)
Yesterday, I met with someone launching an exchange for privately held companies . The idea is to have a marketplace that is somewhere between the inefficient one-off negotiation of secondary sales on one end and going public on the other. Pretty quickly our discussion turned to the disclosure of information about these private companies. One of the reasons given for being a private is so as...
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The End of Privacy!
About a year ago, I wrote a post with the same title, except that it ended in a question mark. Since then I have become convinced that solving the problem of our ever growing data trails will require a reshaping of what we mean by and expect from the idea of privacy. Two things happened this week that brought this issue back to mind:
On Monday in our partners meeting we got to talking about...
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Disrupting Class
Disrupting Class is a book by Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson and Michael Horn that applies Christensen’s theories around disruptive innovation to schools. First up a confession: I started this book twice and did not get past the first chapter! But after having read the two books mentioned in yesterday’s post, I decided to give it another whirl. As soon as I got into the second...
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Thinking about Education and Learning
I have been having a great time thinking about education and learning. My interest in this topic started with a blog post I wrote on the Union Square Ventures blog about the transformative power of the Internet. The process that unfolded from there is illustrative of what is possible today. The initial post and subsequent ones (including ones by Fred) attracted a lot of comments which pointed...