Archive for February, 2009
I had a great visit yesterday with John Pleasants, the COO of EA. John formerly was CEO of Ticketmaster, where he helped steer the company’s successful transition from offline ticketing leader to becoming the leader in online ticketing.
Now, he is trying to do the same at EA. If anyone is equipped for the job, it should be John.
But it is not an easy task. How does a company which has built such prowess in one business infuse its organization with the radically different thinking and skills needed to win in a dramatically different business? Are the skills which enabled EA to dominate the console videogame business readily translatable into what it takes to build a dominant online games business?
The very same challenges clearly are playing out across the media industry, where mainstream media giants are struggling to plat catchup on the web. And, for that matter, even first generation web companies like Yahoo and AOL seem to have missed the emergence of the new social web.
Can you think of examples where the 1.0 leader successfully won in the transition to 2.0?
The growing online presence of premium video is starting to get the attention of the cable operators, who no doubt see the lines converging between cable VOD, IP delivered video, and broadband video.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Comcast and Time Warner are in discussions with the major television networks to make their programming available online, but only to viewers who already have a cable subscription. An interesting model, which would offer a wedge for breaking through the bind the networks find themselves in between the MSOs on the one hand and broadband video aggregation sites on the other. That’s the good news. The bad news is that such a scheme would seemingly prevent broadband video from becoming a cable end-around, which, after all, for many is the greatest appeal to broadband video.
Fun one from Time:
Facebook is five. Maybe you didn’t get it in your news feed, but it was in February 2004 that Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, along with some classmates, launched the social network that ate the world. Did he realize back then in his dorm that he was witnessing merely the larval stage of his creation? For what began with college students has found its fullest, richest expression with us, the middle-aged. Here are 10 reasons Facebook is for old fogies:
1. Facebook is about finding people you’ve lost track of. And, son, we’ve lost track of more people than you’ve ever met. Remember who you went to prom with junior year? See, we don’t. We’ve gone through multiple schools, jobs and marriages. Each one of those came with a complete cast of characters, most of whom we have forgotten existed. But Facebook never forgets. (See the best social-networking applications.)
2. We’re no longer bitter about high school. You’re probably still hung up on any number of petty slights, but when that person who used to call us that thing we’re not going to mention here, because it really stuck, asks us to be friends on Facebook, we happily friend that person. Because we’re all grown up now. We’re bigger than that. Or some of us are, anyway. We’re in therapy, and it’s going really well. These are just broad generalizations. Next reason.
3. We never get drunk at parties and get photographed holding beer bottles in suggestive positions. We wish we still did that. But we don’t. (See pictures of Beer Country in Denver.)
4. Facebook isn’t just a social network; it’s a business network. And unlike, say, college students, we actually have jobs. What’s the point of networking with people who can’t hire you? Not that we’d want to work with anyone your age anyway. Given the recession — and the amount of time we spend on Facebook — a bunch of hungry, motivated young guns is the last thing we need around here.
5. We’re lazy. We have jobs and children and houses and substance-abuse problems to deal with. At our age, we don’t want to do anything. What we want is to hear about other people doing things and then judge them for it. Which is what news feeds are for.
6. We’re old enough that pictures from grade school or summer camp look nothing like us. These days, the only way to identify us is with Facebook tags. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)
7. We have children. There is very little that old people enjoy more than forcing others to pay attention to pictures of their children. Facebook is the most efficient engine ever devised for this.
8. We’re too old to remember e-mail addresses. You have to understand: we have spent decades drinking diet soda out of aluminum cans. That stuff catches up with you. We can’t remember friends’ e-mail addresses. We can barely remember their names.
9. We don’t understand Twitter. Literally. It makes no sense to us.
10. We’re not cool, and we don’t care. There was a time when it was cool to be on Facebook. That time has passed. Facebook now has 150 million members, and its fastest-growing demographic is 30 and up. At this point, it’s way cooler not to be on Facebook. We’ve ruined it for good, just like we ruined Twilight and skateboarding. So git! And while you’re at it, you damn kids better get off our lawn too.
Appsavvy CEO Chris Cunningham has a good post sharing his view that social network apps are maturing from low utility novelties to higher utility services. Worth a read. And, IMHO, dead on about what needs to, and is beginning to, happen in the space if it is going to evolve into a real platform that warrants venture funding.
An excellent article from Businessweek surveying some of the great tech companies that were founded during a downturn.
My favorite quote:
“Talk to the entrepreneurs who built great companies during bad times, and they’ll tell you there are a number of lessons that help explain their success. Atop the list: Founders of the most successful companies are motivated less by the lure of riches than the dream to solve an important problem and benefit the world.”
I quickly need some data comparing pageviews and revenue for display vs. search advertising. I am in my car, driving (late) to a 2 pm meeting, and thinking about where I can get this data in time to plug into a presentation I need to give about 3 minutes after I return from this meeting. Hmmmm….
At 2:02 pm, I send this Tweet out from my car (I was at a red light):
“HELP!! Anybody have data for: 08 ttl search revenue and ttl search impressions vs 08 ttl display rev and ttl display impressions?? Thanks!”
This automagically goes out to both Twitter and my Facebook status update.
At 2:04 pm, I get a Facebook comment back from Slide exec Keith Rabois, pointing me toward Mary Meeker’s Web 2.0 Trends Report. I do a Twitter search on “Mary Meeker,” immediately find like 20 links to Meeker’s report, and get the data, presto.
Who says all this social media stuff is a waste of time??
Thomas Friedman has been opining that the federal bailout ought not to be limited to old school industries like finance and autos, and that the federal government should also be spurring innovation by putting capital to work through VCs.
While I can appreciate the need for dramatic actions to save our banking system and the auto industry, Friedman’s proposition scares the hell out of me, and, I’m sure, every other VC out there who is worth even a fraction of their salt. Bill Gurley, Fred Wilson, and some others from VC-land have also spoken out. As Fred aptly states:
The top venture firms don’t want, don’t need, and are never going to take government money.
I have actually had the pleasure of 5 years in the public sector in DC. And, having seen the cesspool up close and personal, no businessperson should want the federal government’s “help” unless the situation is really, really, REALLY dire. And, even then, only if there is a compelling national interest at stake.
So Mr. Friedman, while I have enjoyed several of your books and columns, this time I have to say you’ve hit upon a really lousy idea.
Since becoming a Twitterer, I ‘ve been looking for a simple way to automagically send a Tweet everytime I enter a blog post.
Automattic’s VP of lotsa stuff Raanan Bar-Cohen has come to the rescue. He got me set up as a “VIP” account on WordPress — which means I can stay on the hosted WordPress.com platform but also tap into the rich pool of WordPress plug-ins. And then he got me set up with WordTwit, which, I am told, will send out a tweet whenever I blog. This will be my first WordTwitted post, let’s see if it works…
I re-engaged with Twitter over the New Year, and as I have previously posted, am finding Twitter useful and perhaps even important. It now ranks ahead of my feedreader as the goto source for catching up on the day’s news.
As a newly avid reader of Twitter, I also am giving a college try at being a regular tweeter as well.
Which leaves me with the dilemma of when to tweet and when to blog. Oftentimes the same idea seems appropriate for both, for example when I want to note something interesting I just read. Seems to me that in these instances I want to be able easily to write once and distribute everywhere – my blog, Twitter, Facebook.
I would love WordPress and Tweetdeck both to allow this.
Video aggregator phenom Boxee.tv (which counts me amongst its recent converts) was recently notified by Hulu that it must not include Hulu content on its platform.
At the source of the issue is NBC and Fox’s delicate but life-sustaining relationship with the major cable operators, who aren’t thrilled that the content for which they pay the networks hundreds of millions of dollars is, courtesy of Boxee, showing up on people’s TV screens for free, and in a much more usable and intuitive interface at that. And so, as Hulu CEO Jason Kilar posted earlier, NBC and Fox forced Hulu to take this action in order to avoid disrupting their own negotiations with the likes of Comcast and Time Warner.
For me, what is more interesting and newsworthy is the fact that the Hulu-Boxee brouhaha is currently the no. 1 topic on Twitter, and the comments are overwhelmingly angry at Hulu. This is pretty darn telling. Something tells me that, with the weight of adoption and support Boxee is seeing, they will ultimately prevail. But it will take time – and money. And I’ve spoken with one very high-ranking media exec today who agrees — on both counts.
