So what’s the difference between MySpace and Yahoo? Perhaps not much from an advertiser’s perspective according to a recent article in the Financial Times. An eyeball is an eyeball and MySpace has 50 million of them staring at its homepage.
The Murdoch-owned social networking site is trying to persuade the big brands to substitute […]

An article in yesterday’s New York Times describes the on-going saga of mobile phones as wallets. It concluded two things that we have been saying for quite some time: the business model of NFC-enabled mobile wallets is lacking and it is unlikely that Americans will be using their cell phones at checkouts in the next […]

Adding to the hysteria over the financial crisis, Gretchen Morgenson tells us that banking as we’ve known it in the last couple of decades is not only dead but also good riddance. “A handful of arrogant greedmeisters blew up their institutions and took our economy off the cliff along the way.” I really wish it […]

I was in the Washington Regan National airport the other day and one of the weekly news magazines carried the headline “What Now?” under their photo of President-elect Obama. Other headlines on the newsstand covered Citibank’s makeover, Bank of America’s $20 billion capital shortage, and preparations for the inauguration, including 4,000 portable toilets for 2-3 […]

Fierce Wireless issued a bunch of mobile predictions this week, and this one relating to mobile commerce piqued my interest. It (boldly) states that 2009 is the year that mobile commerce will finally take off. What I found fascinating about this prediction and the examples the author cites is the absence of two key players […]

Nope, you read it right. The new year started with some old news: the newspaper industry is dying because fewer people are buying its product, those people are moving online to get their news and online ad revenues don’t fill the revenue gap. And, the industry’s death spiral is gathering momentum now that the […]

What do Randall Stross, Karen Webster and Aaron Strout all have in common? The same view on the prospects of “Friending” Your Toothpaste.
Would You Join a Toothpaste Community?
This post was co-authored by Bill Fanning and Aaron Strout.
A conversation I have somewhat regularly with our sales guys is the concept of whether or not a company […]

We live in the era of “Reality” shows. Have you ever counted up the number of reality shows past and present? There are so many of them that, now, there are numerous shows about reality shows. There are so many, in fact, that when my colleagues at Market Platform Dynamics and I decided to bring […]

So says an article in the NYTimes this morning which summarizes the jaundiced view that VCs now have towards anyone who comes in with a biz model that depends on online ad revenue. This realization was a long time coming. The problem with the notion that “ad revenues” solve all biz model problems is that […]