“I mean every time, and unfortunately it’s fairly often, I fly in and out of Kennedy Airport to any other airport in the world that you might fly to from Kennedy — you can fly to Europe, you can fly to Asia, any of those places, and you compare Kennedy Airport with the airport where you land, and you ask yourself which is the airport of the greatest country, richest, most powerful country in the world?” - Larry Summers
Somehow Kickstarter has made it not annoying to opt-in to 9 required checkboxes
Reports are out about FB partnering with Spotify (amongst others) to integrate a music service. A way I think they could catalyze growth initially will be to take all of a user’s existing song “Likes” they’ve made in the past - and automatically turn it into a playlist and make those songs streamable from FB (via Spotify streaming).
This helps the feature “Provide standalone value for the base product” as described by cdixon prior to a user’s friends adopting it. In other words, make it an appealing “unsocial” product before it becomes a truly social experience
On repeat: Tokimonsta (from Torrance, CA)
Seems like the advancement of social media has made us all better watchdogs in the prevention of another tech bubble. The first case study came with announcement Color, which also coincided with the announcement of their $41MM funding despite having no community, revenue, or even a good product. Twitter users, bloggers, etc quickly jumped on those announcements, pinned the company to a corner, and forcing their founder to explain they are really a “data mining company” (by the way, when a new company offering a consumer product calls themselves a data company, it only means they don’t yet have traction and are being pressured to legitimize themselves).
Fast forward a few months, and we see another example with the Groupon IPO filing. The online community immediately deconstructed the S-1 (more: here, here) shedding some light on why it could be a risky investment. It’s unclear how Groupon will respond to this, but it’s probably not going to help their stock prices (although I still imagine they will fair well in their IPO).
I may have been too young to recall, but in the last tech bubble it seemed that because we were still getting a majority of information from a small group of large media entities - it was much more difficult for us to form a bottoms-up opinion on these things and analyze them collaboratively.
You must check this out if you have 10 minutes and good bandwidth. It’s a crazy cool interactive Anime/Game experience. Such a cool concept, and it was all a part of a French anti-smoking campaign!
As I predicted would happen in a previous post, FB is building an alternative payment method separate from Credits w/ a much lower tax (< 30%)
http://www.businessinsider.com/ecommerce-giant-ready-to-start-paying-facebook-for-transactions-2011-2?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+businessinsider+(Business+Insider)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
Facebook is becoming less social game-centric?
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/24/facebook-to-make-facebook-credits-mandatory-for-game-developers/
Not a shocker since most of the revenue from Facebook games are already through FB Credits. However, with a payment infrastructure in place and millions of saved credit cards on file… why not develop an additional payments system? Like a competitor to PayPal (for real world dollars instead of virtual currency)? If I’m already using a Facebook Login on half the sites I use on the web, why not carry my credit card with me and enable one-click payments everywhere?
BTW why hasn’t Apple already created a PayPal competitor using Apple ID? They have over a hundred million credit cards on file from itunes… seems like low hanging fruit there.
