chapter four – my 30s
Acquisitions and strategy Web acquisitions are not strategy. Acquisitions are usually financial gymnastics showing value. Personally, I think when a big company buys a smaller innovative company there’s a good chance that innovation in the acquired company dies. Google was guilty of this with its acquisitions of Blogger (nothing new there, WordPress, six apart innovative), [...]
I found it really interesting to see that Union Square Ventures was recruiting their new analyst through their blog. Fred and his crew really get it. I really like the evaluation methodology – candidates were asked to send a link showing their web profile. Personally, I think the best way to tell if someone gets [...]
I like Jeff Jarvis. I think he’s smart, articulate and he usually has some really interesting things to say around technology, business and journalism. I used to read Buzzmachine, his blog, quite a bit, but in recent times it’s fallen off my radar a bit. So when I read his comment piece on the Guardian [...]
Miss N and I went to hear a debate featuring Andrew Keen, author of the “Cult of the Amateur” at the RSA. Keen is a critic of Web 2.0, claiming that its radical democratization is undermining real quality. He was joined by Tim Montgomerie of the Conservative Home website, a pro web 2.0 guy. The [...]
I read a posting on mashable for chess.com a few weeks ago, and I can’t shake the thought that vertical social networks are a waste of time. I know that some vertical social networks are turning a profit and closing vc rounds and getting a lot of pub (like Dogster and Catster getting a $1Million), [...]
Mashable had a post outlining LinkedIn’s plan to introduce APIs on its “business networking platform” in reaction to the growth of facebook and its application popularity. This really got me thinking about how mature social networking is today? If we consider social networking an industry, then we would assume that it goes through the normal [...]