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Sep
28
2010

  • with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free

    After taking so many knocks, it's easy to be disheartened. But why not at least give this a go? It doesn't involve a large engineering investment - just charge for what you already offer! When the alternative is shutting down, where existing users need to move on anyway, you might as well. Those users might appreciate the value of what they have now that it is about to disappear...

  • Maybe it's because it creates an obligation for them to continue the service for a reasonable amount of time.
  • 10 more annotation(s)...
May
28
2011

  • Plixi is an enormously popular social photo sharing application that serves more than 1 billion photos monthly. The startup rebranded from “Tweetphoto” last year, as the photo sharing network expanded beyond Twitter to other platforms like Facebook and MySpace and added location-based check-in features. While Plixi offers a standalone web and iPhone app, more than 300 developers have integrated Plixi’s photo sharing technology, including Seesmic, TweetDeck and others and the startup handles more than 67 million API requests daily.
  • Over time, Lockerz and Plixi plan to developing new media sharing features to engage customers, such as the ability for Lockerz members to share their activities, photos and videos
     on other social networks. The newly combined company will also focus on increasing and
     enhancing celebrity content.
Aug
15
2010

  • With all due respect I think you miss the point of punditry.

    The point of good punditry is not to convince someone you are right and have them follow you blindly. It’s to take an insight that you have and transfer that insight to other people by explaining the thought process that led you to that insight. In doing that a good pundit expects the people who receive their insight to then evaluate it on an on-going basis and those people need to use their own knowledge to judge the original insight’s accuracy.

    So it isn’t about having the reader say “that guy is right” as much as it’s giving the reader something to think about.

    To use this as an example I think this guy was right when he wrote the piece. He had no way of foreseeing the iPod/iPhone/iPad and their halo effect. But as a reader in 2001 people should have taken this piece with all the negatives it lists and weighed it against Apple’s strengthening product line. Then used all that knowledge to form a new opinion based on it.

  • Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.

    Did Google believe that this was going to succeed as a consumer product, à la Facebook?

    Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for corporate communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes. Eventually, as a protocol, it had the potential to transcend email.

    Maybe Google just hoped Wave would appeal to a different market than it really does.

    ----

    PS #1: I'm sure that corporate uptake of Wave in its current form was limited as well because of the absence of a reasonable client/server that you could run on your own network.

    PS #2: Hopefully there are enough of us who like the protocol that, over a number of years, we can build Apache Foundation-quality F/OSS implementations of the needed components.

    PS #3: It would be truly ironic if, say in 10 years time, Google finally integrated the Wave Protocol with Gmail because there had been enough private (but federated) uptake as an email replacement.

Jul
10
2010

  • The highest ranked answer on that thread, though it contains some interesting details, is way off. Managing VCs well was not what made Google successful-- or what makes any startup successful. The real key decisions were things like realizing search itself was important, at a time when all the other search engines thought it was unsexy, and were trying to get people to start calling them "portals" instead; designing the architecture to work on large numbers of unreliable, cheap computers; understanding how important speed was; making the site uncluttered; deciding to hire only very smart people; etc. That's what made the company valuable, and if it hadn't been valuable it wouldn't have mattered how well they'd avoided dilution.
  • It's also full of inaccuracies. The "interesting details" are largely wrong. Unfortunately it's written in an authoratative style, so people assume it's true and upvote, demonstrating one of the major flaws in vote based systems.
Jul
3
2010

  • “It is impossible to overstate” its impact, saays Westergren. When the iPhone app launched in 2008, it was an instant hit, and it “almost doubled” Pandora’s growth rate “overnight,” says Westergren. But more than that, it freed up Pandora users from being chained to their desks. Now with the ability to run in the background, its usage on the iPhone should continue to soar. In the first clip below, Westergren talks about Pandora’s iPhone and the iPad strategies. In the second clip, he explains to Rose, Pandora’s underlying Music Genome project.

  • The purchase price was somewhere between $22 million and $50 million, we’ve confirmed via multiple sources. Employees, say one source, appear to be getting paid based on that lower number. But there is clearly an escrow and an earnout as well that is bumping the total price, if that money is paid out, to something over $30 million. Our best guess is the total price is somewhere around $35 million.

     

    That’s not bad for a company that’s raised just $2.8 million in funding. But Tapulous was profitable almost immediately and didn’t need to raise a lot of money to scale. Revenue comes from multiple sources – ads, song downloads referred to iTunes, song downloads into the game, among others. Last year revenue was around $5 million. This year they are already hitting $1 million/month and will likely have $15 million of so in revenue for all of 2010.

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