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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
monetization
Building the Electronic Arts of Casual Gaming: PlayFirst CEO John Welch (Part 9)
SM: Describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now? JW: The first hire was the toughest. We raised $5 million on a PowerPoint deck and the promise that we knew the industry better than anyone. But then weeks went by and we couldn’t seem to find the right people to
Building the Electronic Arts of Casual Gaming: PlayFirst CEO John Welch (Part 5)
SM: What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? Competition? Competitive Positioning? JW: There was no formal publisher in the casual games space prior to PlayFirst’s entry. It was like authors not only writing books with no editor and no research staff but also having to scurry around from bookstore to bookstore
Building the Electronic Arts of Casual Gaming: PlayFirst CEO John Welch (Part 4)
SM: Sounds like Shockwave was a great place to experiment and learn! JW: During this time I built a friendship with the principal software architect of the project, Brad Edelman, who is now co-founder and CTO of PlayFirst. I also met three other great people who now work at PlayFirst. Unfortunately, Shockwave spent most of
Facebook’s Monetization Strategy (Part 3)
I’ll give you one more vertical, and then stop. You can figure out the rest yourselves. Travel is a great vertical for Facebook, and in fact, creating contextual services like Group Travel could be very cool. According to the latest data published by eMarketer, online travel sales zoomed to over $78.8 billion in 2006 in
Did Digg Just Dump FM?
Digg has announced a deal with Microsoft. In a big win, Microsoft will manage their ad inventory as exclusive provider of banner, display and paid search advertising, replacing Federated Media and Google. FM will continue to provide other types of advertising on Digg, including integrated campaigns and sponsorships. What are we seeing here? Is FM
Facebook’s Monetization Strategy (Part 2)
I would, personally, like to see them dominate not only Online Jobs, but also Online Photo Sharing. News Corp recently bought Photobucket as one of MySpace’s Monetization efforts. Photo sharing is one of the top segments and in the US the top 10 photo sharing sites draws around 50 million visitors each month. I have
Jim Satloff & Neal Goldman’s AI Engine, Inform (Part 1)
It turns out that both Jim Satloff and I happen to be Artificial Intelligence aficionados. What you read here is a discussion on Inform’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) based technology that attempts to create an interesting value proposition for publishers on the web. AI has been a notoriously difficult technology genre with big promises and
Entrepreneurship Case Studies
You have read many of my interviews on this blog. Here’s a synthesis of some of the case studies I have done, in an interview format. These differ slightly from the series that I have titled Role Model Interviews, since in this series, I go into the company and its strategy, market, financing, etc. in
