MediaWatch: Digital Disruption Continues At Financial Times - Where's The Funding Model For Serious Journalism? Posted by Tom Foremski - January 21, 2013 Newspapers face uncertain paths to a brighter future. The Financial Times said it would try to eliminate 35 editorial jobs through voluntary means and add 10 jobs as part of its focus on "digital" and a move away from news to "a networked business. " Lionel Barber, Editor of the Financial Times, announced the changes in an email to staff. He wrote that a trip to Silicon Valley in September had "confirmed the speed of change. " The FT plans to shift resources from the production of the print editions to its online news and services. The job cuts appear to be focused on restructuring production desks but it will depend on who accepts the voluntary redundancies. ...we must stick to the tested practices of good journalism: deep and original reporting based on multiple sources and a sharp eye for the scoop.
Mr Barber did not explain what type of "networked business" the FT is planning to build. Foremski's Take: Silicon Valley competitors. Crowdfunding Efforts Draw Suspicion. The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash | Science | The Observer. It was the holy grail of investors. The Black-Scholes equation, brainchild of economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, provided a rational way to price a financial contract when it still had time to run.
It was like buying or selling a bet on a horse, halfway through the race. It opened up a new world of ever more complex investments, blossoming into a gigantic global industry. But when the sub-prime mortgage market turned sour, the darling of the financial markets became the Black Hole equation, sucking money out of the universe in an unending stream. Anyone who has followed the crisis will understand that the real economy of businesses and commodities is being upstaged by complicated financial instruments known as derivatives. The equation itself wasn't the real problem. Black-Scholes underpinned massive economic growth. Black and Scholes invented their equation in 1973; Robert Merton supplied extra justification soon after. Black-Scholes implements Bachelier's vision. Association Française des Fundraisers. New Rules for the New Internet Bubble.
Carpe Diem We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear: seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. The rules for making money are different in a bubble than in normal times. What are they, how do they differ and what can a startup do to take advantage of them? First, to understand where we’re going, it’s important to know where we’ve been.
Paths to Liquidity: a quick history of the four waves of startup investing. (If you can’t see the slide presentation above, click here.) If you “saw the movie” or know your startup history, and want to skip ahead click here. 1970 – 1995: The Golden AgeVC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter.
Startups needed millions of dollars of funding just to get their first product out the door to customers. Lessons Learned. Global VC Blog Directory (Sept 2009) Marketing. You asked for it Arnold and 84 others (so far). So I'm gonna talk about marketing. I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra).
A very experienced and successful entrepreneur came into our office a week ago to pitch his latest company. At the end of his pitch he showed us some numbers. Normally for a raw startup we see almost all product and engineering expenses (headcount). But his plan had a monthly budget for customer acquisition. After he left, we talked about his plan and my partners focused on the customer acquisition number. So a few days later, I called him. Zynga has spent millions on customer acquisition and continues to do so. In my talk at Harvard Business School, I said "Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. 4) Events – Find live events to launch at. The 30 Most Respected VCs, By The Numbers [INFOGRAPHIC] Union of Arab Banks.