The Catalyst Code

EBay reported 22% growth Wednesday, exceeding Wall Street expectations. While a number of factors are involved in its strong showing, eBay’s new CEO has recently implemented a number of changes to the site to make it more competitive with sites such as Amazon.com.

With Google’s stock down 40 percent since the beginning of the year you have to wonder whether some investors have misunderstood how Google makes money all along. Google’s stock too a big whack a few weeks ago when ComScore released stats showing that number of clicks the search-ad giant was getting were down. What the […]

Media companies are engaging in a bit of co-opetition as they form ad networks for selling advertising across member properties. (See the recent AP article Media Groups Share Content in Ad Deals.)
Sometimes competitors are getting in bed together because they figure, I guess, that they don’t want to lose the money for selling […]

A recent blog post ponders the future of Amazon’s Unbox video service given its reported inability to “make a dent in Amazon’s business.” This service, which was launched nearly 18 months ago, is a movie download service that allows movies to be downloaded right to set-top boxes (thanks to a partnership with Tivo). Recently, Amazon […]

Some of eBay’s sellers have organized a strike of the giant auction site for having raised prices to them. Like any company, eBay has to abide by the law of demand (if customers don’t value your product enough they’ll go somewhere else) and the law of the jungle (competitors will eat you alive if […]

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 […]