There’s a lot of speculation about the recent move by

“Network effect” strategy – once you tip the scale, growth is (hopefully) soon to follow. At least that’s what long time platform master Microsoft has experienced and what

Lots of people have been talking about social sites cannibalizing search. I’ve addressed this in a prior post since it comes up a lot. eMarketer published a report today that has two interesting findings. First, Google, Bing and Yahoo have little to worry about. They still represent nearly all (like 97.8%) of the search traffic […]

Just when there seemed to be landslide support for charging for content among struggling publishers Yahoo has thrown some cold water on the faces of the eager mob. Of course talk is cheap and online publishers have been approaching subscription models with great trepidation.
So what’s the cold water? The Financial Times today has a […]

I have a feeling that the current economic environment is causing some merchants to rethink their approach to loyalty and rewards. Here’s why.
There is a very large, well known player in the grocery segment here in the Northeast that has long been regarded as a loyalty program innovator. They were one of the first to […]

Current thinking in the newspaper biz is that the cure to what ails them is to figure out how to get some of the people to pay for some of the content. In other words, keep some stuff for free, but charge for the stuff that people really want. Not a bad strategy, and […]

Yesterday’s article about Facebook’s new search feature was as much a discussion of its strategic direction as it was the new feature. The article spent a lot of time explaining the travails around Facebook’s attempt to be more like Twitter and how its next update will eschew that in favor of the features that existed […]

I had the opportunity a month or so ago to moderate a CTIA panel of really neat people who wanted to talk about mobile social networking. Panelists ranged from execs from online gaming companies to those who operate online walled gardens (around dating and gaming and just general networking) to a company that aggregates […]

Really interesting article in yesterday’s NYT Magazine on the value (or lack thereof) of reader-posted comments to news websites. The author makes her case that reader generated comments are nothing more than the rehashed rants of the fringe who don’t really read the post but instead use the comments section as a forum to posit […]

Last week, Connor Mulcahey, 13, downloaded Bump onto his iPhone. Bump let’s you trade contact info and other stuff like photos on your iPhone to a nearby iPhone. Using an internet connection you select what you want to share with your chum and then you bump your phones together or wave them nearby. […]