Archive for the ‘strategy’ Category

People power

18Sep10

The potential of the Internet lies in the linking of both people and machines. There is power in the cloud and there is power in the crowd. People power seems to have become synonymous with “social networking.” But this is missing the big picture. Yes, social networking is a widely adopted example of people power. [...]


It’s every entrepreneur’s moment of truth. You’ve earned a leadership position while battling three or four start-ups for attention in your space and then one of the big players in your world — the one that already has mind boggling critical mass — copies the central feature of your product. When Facebook launched Places last [...]


For digital properties, engagement is like gravity. Engagement is the force that keeps users looking at content on your site — measured in page views per visit or time spent on your site. There once was a simplistic school of thought among content creators that the “stickier” and more engaging your content, the better for [...]


I’ve worked in companies in almost every stage — start-up, “early stage,” scaling, hyper-growth, mature. The most challenging by far is the Messy Stage. The Messy Stage is when your turn-around isn’t turning. When your start-up is stopping. Your hyper-growth is sputtering. When your leadership is transitioning. When your company’s for sale. And when your [...]


The Posterous Switch Campaign is a brilliant piece of product marketing. If you’re not familiar with Posterous, here’s the background. Posterous has been duking it out with Tumblr for the “micro blogging” crown. The premise behind both sites is that microblogging is a new format for communication — falling somewhere in complexity and commitment between [...]


web + mobile

22Jun10

As if there wasn’t enough convergence in the digital realm, we are navigating a further concatenation — the merging of the web and mobile. As these worlds have developed they have manifested conflicting methods and metaphors. I’ve tried to capture the primary differences in the graphic above. Web in green, mobile in blue. New sites [...]


I met Steve Jobs just before the launch of the Macintosh in December 1983. I was a cub reporter at Forbes with my editor and Steve in a dark conference room in Cupertino. A young, intense and already famous Steve Jobs pulled the Mac out of its case to our virgin eyes, pointing out its [...]


Serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer created a thought-provoking blog post about fast growing Gilt Group and Groupon. They thrive, he says, because they ignore search and the open web and deliver their product through a closed system — email. Keeping the “good deals” for consumers out of search, insures a better supply of deals from vendors [...]


This week facebook dipped its toe into the tar pit that has trapped many Internet behemoths such as AOL, Yahoo and Google. Facebook has succumbed to lure of web domination. It seems that every rising Internet company is tempted into the deadly muck by the promise of Microsoft-like dominance. AOL got stuck while trying to [...]



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