Experiment: Living a Cashless Life (Or What Happens When You Lose Your Debit Card)

January 17, 2012 in Digital Market Commentary with 4 Comments

On Sunday morning, I woke up to a call we all hate to get – fraud prevention at Wells Fargo.

And while I’m not financially responsible for the few $1,000+ purchases that occurred in Green Bay Wisconsin (Weird Place for Internet Criminals?), it does mean that I will be waiting 5 – 10 business days for a new debit card to arrive in the mail.

Turning oranges into orange juice, Bryan Jowers of Giftiki suggested that I use the opportunity to test living life with just credit cards and other forms of digital payments.  (Unfortunately, he did it over a large group brunch on Sunday where they wouldn’t take multiple credit cards to split our bill and ended up paying for my meal)

Continue Reading…

Getting Ready for 2012 (New Year, New Theme, New Goals, and Lot’s of Excitement)

January 8, 2012 in Other Experiences with 1 Comment

No long introduction for this post (it’s already 2 weeks late) – but as a continued promise to myself, wanted to make sure to reflect and publicly post my goals and ambitions for the year.

This year’s broad theme is focus – selecting fewer projects and working on going deeper in my learning and experience.  For ease, I broke them into three categories – Fitness, Fun, and Professional.

Looking forward to CES this week and another great year together!

Continue Reading…

Great Companies are Always Bought (or Why Its Hard to Sell a Company)

December 9, 2011 in Digital Market Commentary with 0 Comments

Last week, I attended the monthly Startup2Startup dinner down in the South Bay.

In general, Startup2Startup tends to be one of my favorite startup events with high quality speakers and engaging small group conversation over dinner and last week’s event was no exception.

This month’s theme was “How to Sell Your Startup” and featured a panel discussion from Jack Abraham of Milo (recently acquired by eBay), Brian Mason of Typekit (recently acquired by Adobe), and Leonard Speiser of Clove (who sold his previous startup to Yahoo!) discussing the details of their acquisitions and best practices for selling a company.

Continue Reading…

The Difference Between Broadcasting and Tracking (or What Facebook Still Hasn’t Learned about Personal Data)

October 5, 2011 in Digital Market Commentary with 3 Comments

Last week at f8, Facebook announced a whole bunch of new features (and had a raging party to celebrate.)

However, missing from the ensuring press love was more context and thinking around the most dangerous new feature: Activity Broadcasting

For background, Activity Broadcasting (as it is today) is exceptionally similar to the failed experiment called Beacon which publicly shared all your data from launch partners such as Netflix.

While, the press loves this (and the many other new features) today – the re-releasing of this feature (in an almost identical manner) demonstrates how Facebook still hasn’t learned the key difference in how people think about and want to use their data.

In the simplest form, this difference is represented in the delta between:

  • Tracking, and
  • Broadcasting

Continue Reading…

Themes for Q4 2011 – What I’m Researching Now

September 28, 2011 in Digital Market Commentary with 0 Comments

Every quarter I try and do a quick write-up of what markets I’m spending time researching or diving deeper into.

As always, I’ve included some brief notes on themes and trends that I’m watching – but I’d love to hear from you in the comments or via email with what you think or if there are people or companies I should be talking to.

Continue Reading…

Solving Identity Online (Or Why a Universal ID Won’t Work)

August 24, 2011 in Digital Market Commentary with 0 Comments

This morning saw two great posts Christina and Fred at Union Square Ventures on online identity.

Why I totally agree with them that your online ID is contextual (check out my post on why Facebook comments won’t work here), I disagree with their approach in how they believe online ID should be handled.

To summarize really briefly from Fred’s post:

So what I want is a layer that sits on top of all these services, aggregates up all of my URLs (identities), and then provides authentication in the same way that Facebook, Twitter, and Google do today.

And the main reason I don’t agree with it is that I don’t believe it’ll work in the scenario he describes below:

So maybe the big three can get together and cooperate on building this authentication layer on top of their services and promoting is as an indepedent way to authenticate and provision identity and related data to web and mobile services. I’d love to see that happen and I suspect the Internet would be a better place because of it.

For me, it comes back to incentives and who has the power in driving online identity.

Continue Reading…

Web 3.0: The Data App (or The Year of the Data Scientist)

August 24, 2011 in Digital Market Commentary with 11 Comments

I love personal data tracking.

Some examples of what I use on a daily basis:

  • Fitbit – General Health
  • Zeo – Sleep Data
  • RunKeeper – Running
  • Ginger.io – Wellness
  • Pandora Favorites/ Last.fm – Music Playlists
  • iFitness – Workout Data
  • RescueTime – Productivity

And the list goes on and one all the way to just simple pen and paper (which works really well for most things.)

For this post, I counted the number of devices and applications I own solely designed for passively tracking my life data.

The count: 12

Continue Reading…

Tracking burnout at Turntable FM (or How to Solve the Dopamine Problem on the Alive Web)

August 24, 2011 in Digital Market Commentary with 0 Comments

At the end of July, we saw two articles showcasing the burnout affect of the Alive Web

To summarize, while early usage of Turntable FM followed the typical pattern of a consumer web application (heavy weekday usage with a slight decline in overall usage on Saturday and Sunday) – the last month has seen a significant drop off in during the week listening activity – with users only listening during their weekend.

Continue Reading…

Monetizing the Alive Web (or What We Can Learn from World of Warcraft)

August 24, 2011 in Digital Market Commentary with 1 Comment

For the past few weeks, the biggest topic on the web was the emerging “Alive Web” stemming from the success of new services such as Yobongo, Turntable.fm, and Namesake.

For some great background on the market, challenges, and what people are doing about it you can check out my posts here and here.  However, for today, I want to discuss something that’s been entirely untouched in the conversation about the “Alive Web” going on today:

Monetization.

It all started with this tweet:

Continue Reading…

The Data Driven Web (or Why What People Say and What People Do Are Different Things)

July 5, 2011 in Digital Market Commentary with 1 Comment

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the always awesome SF Music Tech Conference.

More about the music industry (and why its really in trouble) in a future post, but for today I wanted to riff on something Steve Jang of Soundtracking (previously Imeem) said during his panel on Location Check-ins.

For background, Imeem was one of the early players in the music discovery space.  Users would sign-up and both passively track the music they were listening to as well as create playlists to share with other users with the end goal of discovering new music to listen to.

As part of the panel, Steve explained the real issue with explicitly selected interests:

“Users would sign-up and create these amazing aspirational playlists – lots of independent music and off the beaten track bands.  But then we would watch what these users were playing in the background and it was usually just Madonna or the new Snow Patrol album on repeat.”

The problem:

  • Interests change over time (both in degree and type)
  • Consumers are actually really bad at selecting what they like
  • There’s no context for that interest (with degree or specific type)
  • Users have a view of themselves that may not be entirely true

Continue Reading…

Page 1 of 512345»