It seems that every web 2.0 start up today is striving to become a “platform”. Obvious examples are Facebook and Twitter. By building a product that othercompanies will build their businesses on top of, a company could become an irreplaceable part of the internet’s architecture. Microsoft Windows is a great example of this working [...]
Categories: Internet,Social Networks
Tagged: Facebook, Google, Internet, Outsourcing, Platform, Twitter, Web Services
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 [...]
Categories: Internet
Tagged: Complementary Assets, Facebook, Friendster, Internet, Myspace, Profit, Revenue, Social Networks, Value Capture
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 saw [...]
Tagged: Airline, Core Competency, Flight, Internet, Kayak, Lead Generation, Search, Startup
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
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 [...]
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 in [...]
Categories: Internet
Tagged: Credibility, E-Bay, Internet, Product Reviews
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