Now imagine that instead of buying the Apple PowerBook in 1997, you decided to spend $5,700 on Apple stock. You would have done a little better. Indeed, today your Apple stock would be worth $330,563. Probably makes you think twice buying about that laptop.
— If You Bought Apple Stock Instead of Products - NYTimes.com
There is a very pervasive product-centric thinking,” he said. “There needs to be more of a business-model-centric approach.” Osterwalder isn’t saying that you shouldn’t have a product or obsess about making it awesome. What he is saying is that as a startup, it behooves you to be aware of business model options, even if the answers aren’t obvious right away.
— What Is Twitter’s Problem? No, It’s Not the Product: Tech News and Analysis «
This “invisible algorithmic editing of the web,” as Pariser describes it, “moves us to a world where the Internet shows us what it thinks we need to see, but not what we should see.” Beyond Facebook, Pariser notes the huge diversity of search results his friends find on Google about topics like Egypt, where one friend sees news about recent protests and Lara Logan, while another sees results about travel and vacations.
in America the worst effects of the property crisis are probably over. The banks with the biggest exposures to dud commercial assets are smaller lenders, and the government is willing to provide support to residential markets. But prices are likely to keep falling this year, so economic recovery will lack one of its usual booster rockets.
— A special report on property: Between a rock and a living space | The Economist
More than 80 percent of the televisions, computer products and cell phones that reached the end of their life in 2007 were disposed of, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with most of them getting tossed into landfills. Only 18 percent of the 2.25 million tons of electronic products were recycled.
A recent study by Deloitte of 2,000 American consumers ages 14 to 75 found that 42 percent sometimes surfed the Web while watching TV, and 26 percent sometimes sent instant messages or texts.
— TV Industry Taps Twitter and Facebook for Viewers - NYTimes.com
Some of the really savvy new media efforts like Flipboard are exciting, but after the initial “wow” factor wears off, these apps mainly serve to remind me that there’s already too much good stuff to read out there, and that my life is slipping away from me in an infinite stream of interesting bits about smart animals, dumb criminals, outrageous celebs, shiny objects, funny memes, scientific discoveries, economic developments, etc.. I invariably end up closing the app in a fit of guilt, and picking up one of the truly fantastic dead tree or Kindle books that I’m working my way through at the moment, so that I can actually exercise my brain (as opposed to simply wearing it out).
Most companies put an implicit value on size for the sake of size, and doing any cheap viral game in the book to get there, even if it means a low percentage of users ever engage with your app or return to your site again. In the last five years the value of a unique user has been almost completely eroded. Instead, many of these companies take a cue from the way Facebook rolled out with a deliberate controlled pacing that allowed it to scale as it went from just Harvard, to include Ivy League schools, high schools, work places, and eventually the world. Facebook had a confident sense of not being in a hurry, that helped keep its community from becoming overrun and eroded.
When companies start to flail they nearly always do a couple of things. First, they trash the competitors. Then they talk about how hard the problem is and that the solution is a long term one. Altavista did a lot of that in the late nineties. Right before a competitor came in and fixed the AltaVista problem permanently. Yes, search is very hard. But Silicon Valley is really good at doing hard things. The real problem right now is that there’s a perception that Google is untouchable in search.
Rovio certainly doesn’t lack ambition. At a conference in Munich last month, Peter Vesterbacka, the company’s head of business development, boasted that Angry Birds was “bigger than Mickey Mouse”. He was referring to the number of times the two terms were searched for on Google, but said he intended eventually to be “larger than the brand itself”. In fact, Rovio no longer describes itself as a games developer. It sees itself as a media company focused, as Mikael puts it, on “building really strong brands” of which Angry Birds is only the first.
Even if you don’t mind having all of your accounts linked to Facebook, having the same list of friends across multiple sites is still a problem. As I said, Facebook is more personal, and contacts from a site for a specific purpose (like churning out cheap content) may not be the same people that belong on a personal friend list3. This is only one site, but if more sites merge their friend lists with Facebook’s, Facebook will quickly become overcrowded. If everyone I follow on Twitter, Quora, Flickr, etc. started showing up in my news feed, I’d hardly ever see the kind of personal items I actually care about.
— eHow goes Facebook exclusive for logins and profiles, and here’s why it’s bad
Facebook’s platform focus in 2010 was about improving user experience, Taylor said, and he considers that effort a success. He said Facebook reduced spam (aka unwanted posts about games like FarmVille and other applications) by 95 percent last year through policy simplifications.
— Facebook Sets Mobile Sights on HTML5 | Liz Gannes | NetworkEffect | AllThingsD
In 2010, Goldman’s 35,700 employees took home an average of $430,700.
