“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

David Evans’ paper, Markets with Two-Sided Platforms, discusses how these two-sided platform businesses serve distinct groups of customers and need each other in some way. They provide these customers a real or virtual meeting place, and they facilitate the interactions between members of these customer groups. They essentially act as intermediaries between the two groups […]

It costs a bloody fortune to produce a television series like Mad Men. All those cast members, the period costumes, the smart writers. Right now production companies make these efforts profitable by doing deals with networks like A&E that sell advertising spots. Many of us are recording our favorite shows and watching them later, […]

The application wars in the mobile phone business are heating up. They will result in significant threats and opportunities for the payments biz.
Just recently the Apple iPhone topped more than 100,000 apps. It was just two years ago, on October 17th, that Steve Jobs announced that Apple was going to allow third-party developers to build […]

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 […]

Perhaps not much of a surprise to those in the know, but Bloomberg announced this morning that it is buying the beleaguered Business Week property for somewhere between $2 and $5 million dollars, or the price of a nice apartment on the Upper East Side. Business Week is a media asset owned by McGraw Hill […]

Have I got a deal for you. I have a new killer app for the Internet. Now it happens to be in a space in which each of the last several inventors of a killer app was leapfrogged by someone just like me. Now I’m not making any money at all and I’m not really […]

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 […]

Interesting article yesterday on the notion that time spent on-line by adults in the US is flat, after years of rapid growth. The article cites a Forrester Survey that states web surfing now takes up about 12 hours of our week (double what it was in 2004) but did not see significant growth from last […]

eMarketer’s report on social networks and ad spending concludes that 2010 will see a slew of increased “activity and deployment” of social strategy – and that 2009 marks the end of “experimental” social marketing. The implication is that social strategy will become a more vital component of how brands engage with their customers.
I agree, […]