Introduction to the Innovators Dilemma
In the Innovators Dilemma and the Innovators Solution, Clayton Christensen creates a framework explaining how established companies, with large amounts of capital and loyal customer bases, are disrupted and eventually replaced by smaller companies with little capital and no customer base. This model of disruption introduces several insightful concepts, but fundamentally [...]
Categories: Internet, Social Networks, Startups
Tagged: Advertising, All Advantage, Anderson, Christensen, Disruption, Flickr, Freemium, Innovators Dillema, Pandora, Skype
- Published:
- June 30, 2008 – 9:12 am
- Author:
- By seph250
There’s no doubt that with the fast rise of social networks, immense value has been created. Myspace now ranks as the fifth most popular website globally and Facebook ranks seventh. It’s unclear, however, if these services will be able to capture this value in the future.
Friendster
As one of the first social networks to enjoy [...]
Categories: Internet
Tagged: Complementary Assets, Facebook, Friendster, Internet, Myspace, Profit, Revenue, Social Networks, Value Capture
- Published:
- March 21, 2008 – 5:12 pm
- Author:
- By seph250
Online Social Networks have seen huge success in the last five years, going from less than one million users in 2003, to an aggregate of over 100 million users today. This market diffusion has been fueled by broadband penetration, mobile access, international expansion, product improvements and the obvious network externalities. This recent diffusion [...]
Categories: Internet
Tagged: Diffusion, Facebook, Friendster, Market Diffusion, Media Portal, Myspace, Ning, Open Social, Social Networks, Web 2.0
- Published:
- March 5, 2008 – 10:03 am
- Author:
- By seph250
One of the coolest things about going to business school at MIT is the General Catalyst Breakfast Series. Once a month, 10 MIT students and 10 HBS students wake up painfully early to go to General Catalyst’s office in Harvard Square to listen to a speaker give their take on entrepreneurship. Last Friday, we [...]
Categories: Internet, Startups
Tagged: Airline, Core Competency, Flight, Internet, Kayak, Lead Generation, Search, Startup
- Published:
- March 1, 2008 – 1:37 pm
- Author:
- By seph250
The term “social network” is pretty abstract with today’s social networks providing diverse ranges of functionality including entertainment, personal messaging, media sharing, self-expression, networking and gossip distribution. By “gossip”, I don’t mean negative or slanderous talk about others. More generally, I am referring to any casual information about other people in our social [...]
Categories: Internet
Tagged: Communication, Distribution, Facebook, Gossip, Myspace, News Feed, Social Feed, Social Networking, Updates
- Published:
- February 12, 2008 – 3:59 pm
- Author:
- By seph250
Business Week has an interesting article Generation MySpace Is Getting Fed Up suggesting that social networks are being hurt by attempts at monetization. It has some interesting data points to analyze:
The average amount of time each user spends on social networking sites has fallen by 14% over the last four months, according to market [...]
Categories: Internet
Tagged: Bubble, Comscore, Facebook, Internet, Myspace, Social Network
- Published:
- February 8, 2008 – 4:04 pm
- Author:
- By seph250
Marc Andreesen, successful entrepreneur (Mosaic, Netscape, Loudcloud) and investor (Digg, Plazes, Ning) provides a nice analysis of the potential effects of a Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition to the likelihood of smaller startups being acquired. His conclusion is that there will be no effect :
The Microsoft/Yahoo deal, if it happens, means very little for the entrepreneurial climate [...]
Categories: Internet, Startups
Tagged: Internet, Microsoft, Search, Startups, Yahoo
- Published:
- February 6, 2008 – 9:25 pm
- Author:
- By seph250
A recent article on the Wired Blog details the strong response E-Bay users have had to a recent change in E-Bay’s user feedback rules. Apparently E-Bay wants to make it harder for store owners to post negative feedback about their customers. E-Bay suggests that there is increasingly “retaliatory feedback”.
“We’ve seen a four-fold increase [...]
Categories: Internet
Tagged: Credibility, E-Bay, Internet, Product Reviews
- Published:
- February 4, 2008 – 1:48 pm
- Author:
- By seph250
When blogs first began to get traction – not sure when exactly, but several year back, I remember that the headlines and discussion really centered around how blogs were going to replace corporate news sources. The idea that anyone could produce, publish and distribute content was proclaimed to provide an end to the publics reliance [...]
Categories: Internet
Tagged: blogs, Internet, News, Reference
- Published:
- January 20, 2008 – 6:09 pm
- Author:
- By seph250