Tag Archives: Long Tail

The Rise of Social Infrastructure

I wrote this piece on social infrastructure last fall for the inaugural issue of Social Computing Magazine. As most startups, SCM was a little late to launch and hence some of the data and references in the article are dated. … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Media, MySpace, Social Commerce, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Long Tail Worries

Found an interesting study by Lex Miron from CIBC World Markets that tries to test for the existence of a long tail in interactive media properties using Nielsen Net Ratings (NNR) data. Lex measures user engagement as total number of minutes spent on a … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Media, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Widgets, Widgets, Everywhere

Widgets are the new cool. Everyone agrees they are a big phenomenon that’s here to stay. No, widgets are not new. They’ve been around for a very long time in multiple technology implementations. Some prior examples are in Brad Feld’s … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Media, Mobile, MySpace, startups, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Making Money From the Paradox of Choice

In parallel to 3GSM, Ogilvy runs a telco conference in the beautiful Dolce Sitges Hotel, about 35km from Barcelona where the main even is. Sitges is a vacation town for the Barcelonians, a quiet place fit for a more exclusive … Continue reading

Posted in Advertising, Digital Media, Mobile, startups, VC, Venture Capital, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Long Tail Aggregators

I’m at the AlwaysOn Media Conference in NYC today. At breakfast, Esther Dyson (who just recently left CNet), Chris Dobbrow (now at GoingOn, the platform powering AlwaysOn), Melinda Gipson (GateHouse Media) and I had an interesting discussion about how to … Continue reading

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Bob Metcalfe on Internet Video

Beet.TV caught up with my partner Bob Metcalfe and did a nice interview on the evolution of the Internet to the video Internet. Bob makes three key points: The Internet has been getting richer since the days of uppercase ASCII As communication … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Media | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Attention Battle

Many virtual worlds, from Club Penguin to Second Life, combine the best of social networking and immersive gaming to create a great user experience. One of the most interesting aspects of the result is that it requires focus (a fact, … Continue reading

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Mobile Advertising: Not If, But When And How

People seem to fall in two camps with respect to mobile advertising: those who see it as an imminent opportunity of significant size and those who say it’s a few years off. No one is willing to say that mobile advertising … Continue reading

Posted in Mobile, startups, VC, Venture Capital | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Metcalfe’s Law: more misunderstood than wrong?

The industry is at it again–trying to figure out what to make of Metcalfe’s Law. This time it’s IEEE Spectrum with a controversially titled “Metcalfe’s Law is Wrong”. The main thrust of the argument is that the value of a … Continue reading

Posted in Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , | 31 Comments