The 2010 Social Business Landscape
The blurring of the lines between the consumer Internet and the business world has continued apace this year. I’ve begun referring to this phenomenon as CoIT when it happens in the workplace, but that’s not quite the full story either. What has happened is that social media has become one of the biggest mass changes [...]
Stamping Out Procurement Fraud in the UK and Beyond
I remember as a kid, when my father, who ran the printing and copy shop for a major university, told us about the good-will gestures that various vendors made to him. Fortunately, to the best of my knowledge, he turned down all of…
Arbitrage
I just read Paul Graham’s excellent post on what happened to Yahoo and this one paragraph jumped out at me: I didn’t realize the answer till later, after I went to work at Yahoo. It was neither of my guesses. The reason Yahoo didn’t care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic [...]
The Kno is Not a Tablet. It’s a Workout Device
Seriously. At 5 and a half pounds it’s not exactly a lightweight tablet you would want to hold for hours. I have a very simple test for you: if you have an average 14”-15” laptop around, flip it open, hold it vertically, just like this: … and tell me how long you could comfortably hold [...]
The Bootstrappin’ Team: All Starters
This is my third post on Bootstrapping a Company in the Internet Age. We started with Bootstrappa’s Paradise where I explained why whether you plan to raise VC or bootstrap your idea all the way, both roads are bootstrapping. The world will no longer give you a pile of money for an idea, a slide show, and [...]
Marketing… with user manuals?
We’ve been talking about how effective marketing is increasingly shifting from “interrupt and repeat” to a value exchange, i.e. the marketer gives you something you want in return for your attention. It’s a fairly simple (though still somewhat revolutionary) concept, and we have seen some incredible results using this approach in our emerging area of [...]
Tracking Ariba’s Third Quarter Fiscal 2010 Earnings Report: Three Perspectives (Part 2)
In the first post in this series, I summarized and provided perspective on Ariba’s solid recent quarter. But the numbers only tell a small portion of the overall picture of where the customer and competitive market is really headi…
