Promoted Tweets and the Next Ad Recovery
A lifetime ago I worked on an Eastern European telecom group’s IPO and one of my favorite slides in my deck was borrowed from Goldman Sachs to paint the picture of a Multimedia Cycle. Yes, I said multimedia, but right…
The Kleiner Perkins cleantech portfolio
More excerpts from my upcoming book, The New Polymath due in June. The book celebrates innovations of all kinds including those around sustainability. Here are some excerpts from the case study on Kleiner Perkins’ cleantech portfolio “Since 2003, Kleiner has evaluated more than 5,000 investment opportunities and has invested more than $1 billion in cleantech [...]
Tuesday’s Tip: Dealing With Vendor Threats To Charge For Back Maintenance Fees
Four Common Customer Scenarios Will Trigger Vendors To Raise The Back Maintenance Fee Discussion Back maintenance fees describe the amount an organization would have paid for maintenance if they would have continued to pay the usual stream required to access support, bug fixes, patches, and upgrade rights. As economic conditions have worsened, many organizations have [...]
Click… Click … #FAIL. The Microsoft Dynamics Obstacle Course
I guess I should start theme days. Yesterday it was passwords, today it’s a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, this time it’s actually 4 images, but they tell the full story.. no comment required.
Apple, Adobe, Punctuated Equilibrium, and Commoditization
Lots of kerfluffle around Apple’s refusal and downright blocking of Flash on its platforms. Developers like John Gruber are stating the obvious in explaining why Apple is behaving this way. Techcrunch is piling on, since Steve Jobs is referring people to Gruber. BFD, I explained all this years ago and in more than one post. It [...]
Travel Tuesday: The Supply Risk of Market Consolidation and Air Travel – US Airways and United
As I got ready for a trip to Philadelphia this week and investigated my travel options, three choices emerged with any regular frequency — United, US Airways and Southwest. All the tickets, about a week in advance, were about $500 and change, or roughly 2X what I’ve paid in the not-so-distant past (a sign certain [...]
Disregarding BRP is like being long on subprime CDOs
Now and then. If you, as a developer and vendor of products, create a new product that has the promise of value for your customer you’re onto something. Say going back a few years starting up Facebook or creating the…
iPray
As they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Oliver Widder’s Geek And Poke series is one of my favorites… and yes, one cartoon is often worth an entire post… the pic says it all. I just hope we won’t get in trouble.. now that the word “Pad” is on Apple’s ban list … [...]
Startups Need Starters
Just a short post for my Helpstream Learnings series today: Reading 37Signals latest book, “Rework“, has crystalized a few thoughts I’d been having since Helpstream. It’s a great read, BTW, if you haven’t already checked it out. This particular post is about Starters. The authors of Rework want to drop the term “entrepreneur” and switch to [...]
