Two days ago I wrote a post explaining why I am bullish on crowdfunding and skeptical on micropayments as an alternative to funding content, especially journalism. The explanation was a bit dry and abstract, but in the comments I provided a more concrete example that seemed to resonate, so here it is:Would you pay $2 for a joke you haven’t heard yet? No because you don’t know if it will be funny. What is your incentive to pay after you have heard the joke? It is much diminished. What about 1 ...

Recently, someone (I believe it was Nicholas Carlson) said to me: “what most people forget about the iPhone is that it is also a very capable iPod." This was said in the context of a discussion of how successful Android will be this year. Now this is an interesting alternative view to Bill Gurley’s assertion that the head-on comparison is wrong because Android aims at the much broader market of folks who have feature phones today. But: for everyone who wants to upgrade from a feature phone an...

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story that described the paper’s strategy as trying to be the Last Man Standing. Nicholas Carr today picked up on that in his post on newspapers today and writes:Make sure you have enough cash to ride out the storm, trim your spending, defend your quality and your brand, expand into the new kinds of products and services that the web makes possible and that serve to expand your reader base. And then sit tight and wait for your weaker competitors to fail.He ...