May 19th, 2012 § § permalink
it’s always wise to check and keep in mind data from the wider field, not just the outlier. everyone fascinated by instagram and facebook should know all these other acquisitions by heart before talking about ‘the bubble’:
Instagram’s billion-dollar sale to Facebook raised eyebrows yesterday, renewing cries of a new bubble. But relative to other major acquisitions of the past, how does it measure up? I crunched the numbers, pulling together data from a selection of 30 notable internet acquisitions over the last ten years, from Broadcast.
via: waxy.org
May 14th, 2012 § § permalink
all the entrepreneurs and VCs are drinking the same cool aid most of the time, and some get away with it. most have to come back to earth sooner or later and actually build business that provide hard value.
I find this metaphor of startup steroids very telling:
Startup steroids: Pinterest feels the burn of Facebook‘s Open Graph By Ben Popper on May 3, 2012 09:30 am 23Comments A packed room of more than 200 founders, VCs and internet bankers took a moment to look up from their iPhones and listen in hushed reverence as one of Silicon Valley‘s top investors explained what he looks for when choosing the…
via: www.theverge.com
… another buzzword in the valley these days is ‘virality engineer‘. everyone want one, who will save the startup by providing the growth everyone wants to see.
it’s great that we are aware of the users and obsessed with them, but the hockey stick is the end goal. the goal of an entrepreneur should be to create a sustainably growing organization, mix of products, people and processes that ensure continuos creation of value, with or without the original entrepreneur.
April 12th, 2012 § § permalink
Onomatopia "Whack" hitting ball. Created in Adobe Illustrator by Jeremy Kemp, 2/24/05 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
the wild wild web is not a romantic place, it’s just senseless, and here’s another proof:
Not only are an average of 31% of display ads never even seen , but there’s little to no correlation between the CPMs sites are charging and the value they’re delivering to the advertisers – where value is defined as ads being viewed and delivered to the primary demographic target.
via: marketingland.com
as a geek i’m sad that in a world driven entirely by data and algorithms, well on the way to the promised land of perfection and frictionless and justice, such stories are a normality, rather than anomaly.
meh.
April 11th, 2012 § § permalink
this story reminds me of MyBlogLog – acquired for $10M after 9 months in 2007, only 4 years later and 2 zero-s added:
On October 5th, 2010, Instagram launched My first instagram photo We’re really excited to launch our first version of Instagram today, free in the App Store. Instagram makes mobile photos fast, simple, & beautiful.
via: swizec.com
Instagram (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
when I saw this news on TV, and sitting trough the whole story, it felt like they were announcing a war or a new terrorist attack. it was not good news for anyone but those three founders.
these valuations have only market-sense, but no connection to the real world. Lot’s of friends have been talking about new bubble for over a year now, and I couldn’t agree with them. I believed that this time it’s different, that everyone is building real companies, with real value, and that exits happen only after they prove it or run out of resources.
not anymore apparently. instagrams valuation makes sense only in relation to facebook’s valuation, not in relation to the world or the users.
i am not saying that they are useless, like some bubble 1.0 ideas were – not at all. instagram figured out how to make pictures of urban reality, full of smog and with poor natural light, beautiful again. it gives a chance for new kids to live in a visually nice world again. like bauhaus did a century ago.
but that on it’s own is not worth 1/30th of world hunger.
March 14th, 2012 § § permalink
Image via Wikipedia
I spent some time last weekend creating my first e-book. I’ve done hardcopy books before, but e-pub is a new thing for me.
Converting couple thousand pages of text into a book that I can read on my iPhone was fun, and it remembered me just how much work goes into getting all the details just right. If you don’t do them, it’s not a book anymore – table of contents, named index, both cross-linked to correct pages, cover design, font sizes, headers and footers,… as a reader, i really appreciate these ‘features’, and I miss them when they are not in.
As I was programming these features (because doing it manually in some Adobe software would be just too long give the size of the book), I realized that it’s not much different than programming a web site – getting core content online is easy, but these days to actually call it a website, it has to have so many more features working hand in hand with the content, that it takes 5x longer to do it than it did 10 years ago.
and I realized it’s the same with any creative industry / work – there’s so many details in every good picture or motion picture, that a random viewer can’t really grasp, but she will nevertheless recognize ‘good’ from ‘bad’ based on them. Print is just the oldest ‘industrialized’ creative industry, and web the youngest.
This is why this is sad news – there will never be as much effort put into making such large volume so useful, as EB was for over 200 years.
Encyclopaedia Britannica will stop publishing print editions and go digital-only – a huge step for the encyclopedia which has been in print since 1768. The sales of Britannica print editions has been on the decline since 1990, when 120,000 32-volume sets were sold.
via: mashable.com
February 15th, 2012 § § permalink
Didn’t get a chance to write about them earlier, but this Ljubljana-based company is truly amazing.
the little case you see on the picture bellow – it’s made of 17 different parts and materials. I was privileged to see the drawer with all the variations they’ve built for testing purposes – 3 feet long row of cases of all shapes and sizes, with one common denominator: they all fit the phone perfectly, and they are all without a sew.
I’ve been heavily testing (read: beating up) a new Calypso Case for more than a month and it’s easy to say simply put, I’m impressed. Based in Ljubljana, Slovenia the founders are hand making iPhone 4 cases which are simply perfect in fit, function and design. They’re made of conite, titanium, leather and specially designed microfabrics.
via: joshspear.com
great work guys!
February 14th, 2012 § § permalink
Image via CrunchBase
amazing, i didn’t even know about it! if you like reading short stories, this is perfect!
i’m happily finishing my first real e-book now – 1Q84 – a 1000 pages of fantastic fiction, and was thinking about what to read next. after i’ve read all murakami’s, i’m actually in a state of void – a readers’ dilemma – should i try finding the next author, and risk a few months of agony of trying different ones, or should I go read Proust‘s In search of lost time, and have guaranteed a few months of agony? I think i’ll try with short stories for a while 
Wattpad, a Union Square Ventures-backed platform for sharing stories and interacting with writers, has been growing steadily, and it hit a nice milestone in January – during that month, users spent more than 1 billion minutes on the service.
via: techcrunch.com
now, if only they had better recommendation engine… hm hm hm…
