Trouble @Twitter Boardroom power plays, disgruntled founders, and CEO switcheroos are clipping the wings of this tech high flier. By Jessi Hempel, senior writer FORTUNE -- In March, shortly after Jack Dorsey went back to work for Twitter, the company he co-founded four years ago, he did a Q&A session with an entrepreneurship class at Columbia Business School. Dorsey laughed lightly and replied, "You know, we're just individuals. There's no shortage of drama at Twitter these days: Besides the CEO shuffles, there are secret board meetings, executive power struggles, a plethora of coaches and consultants, and disgruntled founders. One of Twitter's earliest and most avid users, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), confers with company co-founder Dorsey. Just two years ago Twitter was the hottest thing on the web. To be fair, Twitter's founders didn't set out to build the next Facebook: Consumers turned it into a social phenomenon and kept signing on to see what it was about. Twitter's rocky road to social-media stardom
The Long Tail Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:46:19 “Priced and Unpriced Online Markets” by Harvard Business School professor Benjamin Edelman. Discusses tradeoffs in market such as email, IP addresses, search and dial-up Internet. “Reminiscent of the old adage about losing money on every unit but making it up in volume, online markets challenge norms about who should pay, when, and why.” I found this typically academic: dated, dry and pretty unilluminating. But it got published in The Journal of Economic Perspectives. Mon, 31 Aug 2009 01:53:50 From Mashable: “Freezly is a lot like Tweetmeme in that it finds link and tweets and shows you their popularity based on retweets. Fri, 28 Aug 2009 02:08:25 From Cellular News. Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:54:23 From the LA Times: “Industry insiders estimate that since 2007, revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined 30% to 50% and the number of new films made has fallen sharply. Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:07:00 Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:09:38 Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:37:31
Spotify Is the Coolest Music Service You Can't Use | Wired Magazine Illustration: Tom Whalen On the first Monday in October, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave a speech to students at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The lecture hall—”one of the most vertical auditoriums I’ve ever been in,” Ballmer told the group—was all blond wood and sensible lighting, simultaneously modern and venerable in that distinctly Swedish way. After discussing cloud computing and extolling the joys of playing Xbox volleyball, Ballmer brought out a special guest who was sure to ignite the crowd: Daniel Ek, CEO of the Swedish startup Spotify. A soft-spoken, balding 27-year-old Swede, Ek took the stage to enthusiastic applause, all but outshining the Microsoft chief. If you’ve never heard of Ek or his company, you can’t be blamed. Spotify is an elegant application, by far the simplest, easiest way to listen to digital music. But, thanks to resistant labels and archaic rights systems, Spotify isn’t available in the US.
Netflix Inside - DanielRoth.net Three days later, at an all-company meeting in the same amphitheater, Hastings announced that there would be no Netflix Player. Instead, he would spin off the device, letting developer Anthony Wood take the technology and his 19-person team to a small company Wood had founded years earlier called Roku. But Netflix, which had already begun streaming movies to users' PCs, was hardly giving up on the idea of streaming them to televisions as well. Instead, the company would take a more stealthy—and potentially even more ambitious—approach. Today, nearly 3 million users access Netflix's instant streaming service, watching an estimated 5 million movies and TV shows every week on their PCs or living room sets. And the devices won't just be streaming remaindered basic-cable or art-house fare: Already, Netflix customers can call up just about any episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, The IT Crowd, or Lost whenever they like. You'll never hear Hastings point that out, however.
tim/articles/paradigmshift_0504.html by Tim O'Reilly This article is based on a talk that I first gave at Warburg-Pincus' annual technology conference in May of 2003. Since then, I have delivered versions of the talk more than twenty times, at locations ranging from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the UK Unix User's Group, Microsoft Research in the UK, IBM Hursley, British Telecom, Red Hat's internal "all-hands" meeting, and BEA's eWorld conference. In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published a groundbreaking book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn referred to these revolutionary processes in science as "paradigm shifts", a term that has now entered the language to describe any profound change in our frame of reference. Paradigm shifts occur from time to time in business as well as in science. One such paradigm shift occurred with the introduction of the standardized architecture of the IBM personal computer in 1981. However, the executives at IBM failed to understand the full consequences of their decision.
Amazon changes its prices more than 2.5 million times a day An analysis of retail pricing habits run by price intelligence firm Profitero revealed a pretty staggering statistic: Amazon changes its prices more than 2.5 million times a day. By comparison, Walmart and Best Buy changed their prices roughly 50,000 times each in the entire month of November. Amazon’s business relies on its ability to offer as much as possible, as cheaply as possible, so constant price discounting shouldn’t come as a surprise. Over the past 12 months alone, Amazon has increased its number of daily price changes ten-fold, Profitero noted.
These Three Graphs Prove That Bitcoin Is a Speculative Bubble Bitcoin is a speculative bubble, and I have the graphs to prove it. Surprisingly, I just need three of them. All my numbers come from blockchain.info, whose data is independently verified by — you guessed it — the bitcoin blockchain (explanation here). When compared to the regular economy, bitcoin’s macroeconomic figures are vastly more accessible and reliable: all bitcoin transactions are publicly registered as to quantity and time, and that’s a standard that the U.S. dollar can’t hope to meet. In bitcoin, all your transactions are anonymous, but they’re also made in public. My first graph shows the daily number of bitcoin transactions per U.S. dollar of bitcoin’s total market capitalization: This chart shows a dramatic reduction in the total number of transactions, irrespective of size, per dollar of bitcoin’s market cap, from December 2012 – December 2013. This is not a growing economy. This is an attempt to look at the velocity of bitcoin. No one ever keeps their books in bitcoins.
Putting a Number on Online Reputation | Marvels Data open doors to financial innovation The exposed brick walls, open work benches and large flat screens in the San Francisco office of Sasha Orloff’s start-up make it feel like any other trendy young Californian internet company. But Mr Orloff is not tinkering with the photo-sharing apps or other consumer trivia that litter the start-up landscape: his company, LendUp, has just joined the payday loans business. A practice at the bottom of the lending scale that turns on advancing unsecured money to people with little or no credit standing, this is an industry whose more familiar public face is a ramshackle store with large dollar signs over the door. <div class="storyvideonojs"><div><p>You need JavaScript active on your browser in order to see this video.</p><img alt="No video" src=" /></div></div> Some of Silicon Valley’s brightest think they have a better approach. Number crunching on an epic scale is not new to consumer finance. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014.