The Catalyst Code

“Like many industries facing extinction through disruptive innovations, the newspaper industry has studied its predicament from within, trying desperately to save a business model that simply cannot be saved, ” according to Terry Heaton’s insightful article. (Yahoo’s TV News in a Postmodern Era). He goes on to critique a more out-of-the box strategy–Yahoo’s consortium […]

For centuries, advertisers have operated on a wing and a prayer. They ran ads and hoped for the best. Other than looking at monthly sales figures which told them nothing about the role of advertising in motivating a consumer’s decision to buy, advertisers never understood whether ad spending really drove sales.
Google has changed […]

We’ve just come across some interesting comments on Catalyst Code in a column in The Manila Times. The author, a management consultant named Rey Elbo, says, “If you don’t think the Code would be helpful then you are, no offense meant, probably a man (or a woman) who is due to retire in two […]

Is Sony going to flameout AGAIN with its Blu-Ray standard? Dreamworks and Paramount have just signed exclusives for HD-DVD (Dreamworks and Paramount Go HD DVD) and Gizmodo reports that the two new disc standards are neck to neck with the studios (Gizmodo on Blu Ray.) I still think it is too close to call but […]

Last week’s $50 price cut on the Xbox 360 console illustrates the delicate pricing balance act that catalyst businesses have to play to keep their key customer groups engaged.
Game console companies make their profits from royalties they get from game publishers or from the sales of games they produce themselves. They seldom price the console […]

Getting everyone on board is one of the biggest problems faced by the catalysts that are trying to shake up and create new industries. Randall Stross’s article in Sunday’s New York Time—Pass the Popcorn. But Where’s the Movie.—highlights the problem faced by video-on-demand. The cable television guys needed to get content owners—the studios that make […]

Smart entrepreneurs continue to find creative new ways to use the internet to create catalysts – to facilitate value-creating interactions among distinct customer groups and to profit by appropriating some of the value they create. (Social-creature has some interesting recent thoughts on this.) The latest interesting new model I’ve seen is the Gay […]

So how is Google News going to make money for Google? I started looking into this when as a result of the wave of publicity this large news aggregator has gotten over the last couple of days for its new feature–anyone mentioned or quoted in the article can send in a comment that Google will […]

Steve Rubel’s recent post on Adage.com, The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Blogosphere, highlights a couple of issues I mentioned in my recent post on the economics of blogging.
Blogging takes a lot of persistance and isn’t for the faint of heart. Relatively few people who start blogs are able to keep them up […]

The blogosphere is one of the biggest and most influential global industries created in the last decade. Technorati tracks almost 100 million blogs and estimates that about 20 percent of blogs are active in the sense that they were updated in the last 90 days. Hundreds of millions of people globally either operate blogs or […]