I was reading Nicholas Carr’s review of Douglas Coupland’s latest book: Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! “He heralded the global village, and was genuinely excited by its imminence, but he also saw its arrival as the death knell for the literary culture that he revered. The electronically connected society would be the… [Read more…]
February 26, 2011
Interesting read over on Fred Wilson’s blog on the value of marketing to a start-up “I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more… [Read more…]
February 26, 2011
You have probably already caught up with Aaron Maxwell’s post on Mashable yesterday asking the question Is developing a Mobile App worth it? His rough calculations suggest the ROI is 2839 people per dollar invested (UPDI) spent on a mobile web site, 527 UPDI for an iPhone apps and 599 UPDI for a universal mobile app. Which suggests that the… [Read more…]
February 25, 2011
Interesting op-ed piece by Om Malik today about how Old Media Is Being Unbundled, Just Like Telecom Was. In the media industry, we’re seeing an unbundling of a highly vertical business, with the most lucrative parts being siphoned off by Internet-based low-cost rivals. – Om Malik Unfortunately it is something of a misreading of how media… [Read more…]
February 24, 2011
I was taking a look this evening at Think Big’s series on Search from earlier this month. It was a round table on what works, what doesn’t and what’s next from the search industry’s best minds. Having read both Freeman Dyson’s excellent review of James Gleick’s latest book “The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood” and Jeremy Dauber’s ”The Lure of… [Read more…]
February 23, 2011
It was only last month that we witnessed the passing of Denis Dutton. One of the pioneers of the heroic age of the web and in that post I quoted from Virginia Postrel’s 1994 article on The age of editors. The one in which she declared “It is the age of the editor. And the age of new media communities“.… [Read more…]
February 23, 2011
I was catching up with Benjamin Palmer’s take on the impact of Facebook on the advertising industry and, although it struck a chord, what I found more interesting was a suggestion made in one of the comments. “Sometimes it seems like all the reblogging and reposting and retweeting is a bit of a Ponzi scheme… On Facebook, for… [Read more…]
February 22, 2011
I have just finished reading Adam Greenfield’s Nokia: Culture Will Out. It is an informative insider’s take on what went wrong at Nokia. “Nokia’s problem is not, and has never been, that it lacks for creative, thoughtful, talented people, or the resources to turn their ideas into shipping product. It’s that the company is fundamentally,… [Read more…]
February 21, 2011
One simple chart to tell the story of the MobCon so far. It illustrates the relative ARPU’s (adjusted for inflation and the growth in the total number of internet subscribers over time) of the biggest brands on the web from the four key categories of eComm, Search, Portals and So.Me. It also clearly illustrates by the numbers… [Read more…]
February 21, 2011
As usual I was a bit early with my post The LOng blusTer of the bLOcKed tALe? The subsequent bankruptcy of Borders last week would have been a for more opportune time to write about the economics of the publishing. “Borders Group does not have the capital resources it needs to be a viable competitor and which… [Read more…]
February 28, 2011
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