Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Paywalls Make No Sense

Clipart of bills and coinsImage via Wikipedia
TechCrunch: The Times UK Lost 4 Million Readers To Its Paywall Experiment: saw its online readership decline by 4 million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop. Pageviews fell off an even steeper cliff, plummeting 90 percent from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to 4 million in September, 2010. People did what you’d expect them to do when faced with a paywall at a news site. They said, “No, thanks” and clicked away to another site.
Paywalls make no sense at all. The internet is a global medium. People anywhere should be able to come over to your site. Just like net neutrality is so basic to what the internet is all about, the idea of paywalls runs counter.

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Intelligent Manufacturing


Factories getting carted away to Mexico was that "huge suction sound" Ross Perot heard way back in 1992. That image still persists. The Great Recession has made those fears much more concrete and real. Those jobs that are gone are gone. That seems to be the thinking.

The Mobile Web, The Audio Medium, The Global South

the human in the loop: The Audio Medium: A Third World Revolution Waiting to Happen Even a cheap feature-phone can be made to play audio content. And cellphones have high penetration in the developing world .... Cellphones will need to support easy phone-to-phone transfer of audio content ..... Podcasts may be a niche medium in the U.S., but there will be enough demand for audio content in the developing world that it will be as ubiquitous as blogs are in the western world. And like blogs and other long tail text content, content publishers will create content without the expectation of revenue; this audio content will be free and/or ad-supported...... All the existing content in text form can automatically be converted into audio form. This is huge, because it makes all existing text content accessible to the developing world...... 5 centuries ago, the written word replaced the spoken word as the dominant means of information transfer. I am rooting for the spoken word to stage a comeback.

Monday, November 01, 2010

Lykke Li: Get Some



(Via Fred Wilson)

Dropio Acquired

Image representing Sam Lessin as depicted in C...Image by jessica vascellaro via CrunchBaseI was just over at Mark Peter Davis' blog for this blog post and learned there Dropio has been acquired - wow - and by Facebook? Congrats, people.

FourSquare Office, Dropio Technology
Digital Dumbo: Here I Come
Venmo And Frictionless Payments
Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever
The Far Future Of Databases At The Dropio Offices
A MeetUp Has Me Excited: Y + 30

How Companies Get Valuated

I don't know a whole lot on the topic. I have a broad idea. I get the concepts. But I have not bothered to master the details. There are too many versions, too many ways they get done. Android is not fragmented, what is really screwed up and fragmented is how companies get valued.

How companies get valuated reminds me of when they taught me several pre-Charles Darwin theories of evolution at high school. They were all over the place. They all lacked the basic beauty of Darwin's theory of evolution.

Dave McClure: Super Angel: Foulmouth

Master Of 500 Hats: July 2010: MoneyBall for Startups: Invest BEFORE Product/Market Fit, Double-Down AFTER.
Super Angels are a recent enough phenomenon that even Paul Graham only very recently wrote about it. There used to be angels and venture capitalists. Super angels have wedged themselves between the two, supposedly wanting to threaten both. Super angels are not your rich uncles, they are not family and friends, they have millions of dollars that they themselves raised, but they are not VCs. They pay way more attention to you than VCs can, they are agile, they have way more money than the traditional angels, and in many cases they are out to make quick money. They are not looking for the next Google, they are looking for the next company Google will buy.

Priority Stream

Join us on FacebookImage via WikipediaGmail came up with the idea of a Priority Inbox. People have loved it. Finally a cure for the common cold, aka too much email.

Facebook Alternative? Dave McClure Is Full Of It

I am not thinking in terms of a Facebook alternative any more than I am thinking in terms of a Google alterntive, or an alternative to the high end giant Apple. These are stellar companies. Although I do think social is a pendulum swing. Just like social came after search, social is not the final word. There will be a paradigm shift of some sort in a few years. Facebook will also become a giant that no longer occupies the buzz center.

But that is not what Dave McClure is saying. He is talking in terms of an alternative to Facebook itself, another social network that is not Facebook, that is not Twitter. I don't agree, I think Facebook has got the social right, and it keeps innovating the way only having a founder CEO in the driver's seat ensures.
500 Hats: How to Take Down Facebook -- Hint: It Ain't Twitter. (aka: An Open Letter to the Next Big Social Network): Facebook has firmly fixed itself into the fundamental fabric of our friends & families

The Microfinance Fishing Net

"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”
Microfinance is magic. It is the ultimate fishing net. Poverty is artificial. Microfinance proves that.

Mac App Store: Bullshit


Steve Jobs is this genuinely amazing guy who I have fundamental philosophical differences with. After having replaced the browser with apps on his smartphone he has started to talk in terms of an app store also for the Mac computer. We are going backwards in time, folks, if we keep following the pied piper.