Next Strategy Roundtable Is Thursday, May 14

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Disney Should Study Slumdog

There was a little less sparkle in the Magic Kingdom this quarter with the announcement of Disney’s Q2 results. Revenues fell 7% to $8.09 billion, which was slightly lower than the Street’s expectations of $8.15 billion. EPS of $0.43 was marginally higher than the market’s expected $0.40. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Vindicia

Today’s Deal Radar showcases a very impressive SaaS company that solves an important problem in an already large and growing niche: intangible goods. Vindicia’s on-demand billing and fraud management solution, Vindicia CashBox, aims to transform billing into a strategic advantage for online merchants. The company provides a hosted solution that integrates with other core elements of a company’s e-commerce infrastructure, from payment processors to accounting systems to shopping carts, which aims to provide a seamless experience for customers. >>>

Shervin Pishevar’s Dream: Social Gaming Network (Part 7)

SM: What about Iran? What is happening there and what is your relationship with Iran today?

SP: There is so much talent there. Sharif University is like MIT, and they send a lot of their students to Stanford. We are blocks away from Stanford, so I am recruiting students who have grown up in Iran and immigrated here for their PhD’s. Hopefully Obama can find a way to solve whatever is happening between the countries. That would open a huge pool of talent. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: UserVoice

With today’s Deal Radar installment we bring our focus back to web startups. UserVoice offers customer support service for any website and allows users to give votes to their favorite suggestions. Founders Richard White, Marcus Nelson and Scott Rutherford—all serial entrepreneurs—modified Digg’s principles of crowdsourced news, or social news to come up with UserVoice. The idea was simple: take some of the crowdsourcing principles that worked for news and apply an added constraint (a voting limit) to help limit the vocal minority, a bane of customer feedback. >>>

Shervin Pishevar’s Dream: Social Gaming Network (Part 6)

SM: I recently watched a program on 60 Minutes about lions being poisoned in Africa. Over the holiday, we were in a forest which is the home of the Royal Bengal tiger. In that forest there are 274 tigers left. The idea of doing social causes with your gaming networks is very interesting.

SP: If we could find a group that is taking care of those tigers, we could create a pet that is the Royal Bengal tiger and then have physical and virtual proceeds from that sale go to that foundation. If you have the connections, it would be an interesting experiment to see what games can really do. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Infinia

Today’s Deal Radar brings cleantech and solar energy back into the limelight with Infinia. The Kennewick, Washington-based company is an energy technology company whose Stirling Solar products convert solar energy into electricity. As a company, Infinia has been around since 1985 and has successfully commercialized the Stirling engine for a number of applications, including combined heat and power and as a heart pump. >>>

Shervin Pishevar’s Dream: Social Gaming Network (Part 5)

SM: What was the genesis of a company based on social applications? How did you arrive at the thesis that it was a sustainable market?

SP: I organized a hack-a-thon at our offices at FreeWebs. We told every developer to build what they wanted on the Facebook platform for FreeWebs. I started advocating getting everyone on Facebook. >>>