A few years back something curious happened with the advent of the internet. Thanks to the business press, ordinary, even pedestrian businesses suddenly became glamorous technology companies. Even today, sites that do little more than sell shoes are talked about as the next big technology IPO and their CEO’s are extolled as visionary because they […]

Time for More Predictions… Well, it’s that time of year again, Q4’s are closing, burn rates are burning, time for more predictions. One of the biggest trends in 2015 was collectively referred to as Big Data, Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics. The analysts love this space and some have called it the biggest thing since […]

Ad blockers, content and consumers. Oh, My! Well, here’s something that you don’t see everyday. Marco Armet, a coder, blogger, Tumblr co-founder and inventor of an enormously popular app called Peace just had a change of heart and withdrew his ad blocker from the Apple App store just when it was poised to realize enormous […]

Lies, damn lies and accounting… Years ago there was an old joke about a CEO who needed to hire a new CFO. The interview consisted of a single question. Having narrowed the candidate pool down to three individuals the CEO decided to conduct the final interviews in person. So he asked the first candidate, a […]

Google’s recent admission that Youtube hasn’t turned a profit must have put a whole bunch of VC’s, and their vaunted valuations, on full pucker. The generally accepted premise behind most social media business models is a rudimentary production function. The simple idea that users generate content that drives activity that drives traffic that in turn […]

Ronald Coase has taken his leave, leaving behind several intriguing propositions that still twist in the crucible of the Internet…. Years ago with the advent of the World Wide Web all sorts of experts proclaimed that we stood on the threshold of a new economy, see The New Economy Primer, before us was a world whose […]

The future belongs to the brave, the bold and those few who can still do simple math. So today’s WSJ along with every other business media outlet reported that Yahoo! bought Tumblr for $1.1B in an all cash deal. According to the Journal: “New York-based Tumblr, founded in 2007, has 175 employees, more than 108 […]

OpenStack….monetizing enterprise computing won’t get easier but maybe other things will. Several years ago I was having a cup of coffee with a business development exec from Jamcracker, back then an early instance of a rentable hosting environment. The proposition on the table was the incorporation of an open source operating system where the revenue […]