Occam's Razor
NOVEMBER 1, 2006
On this blog we have talked about the importance of the “Why” often. Web Analytics usually simply helps us understand the “What” Clickstream data typically does not tell us why something happened. We have stressed how important it is to know the Why in order to derive actionable insights around customer behavior on the website and outcomes from that behavior.
BeyondVC
NOVEMBER 28, 2006
James Surowiecki has a great article in the New Yorker this week about the new Nintendo Wii system, titled "In Praise of Third Place." What James really asks is if you are a distant third in a market, how do you compete with the big boys? In this case, Nintendo is slugging it out with Sony and Microsoft and rather than going into hand-to-hand combat, Nintendo has changed the game and the stakes – forget about being the most powerful and fastest machine but how about focusing on bei
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Occam's Razor
NOVEMBER 12, 2006
The topic of my speech at the E-consultancy Online Marketing Masterclasses 2006 in London ( sign up here ) is "Conversion Rate Optimization: What, Why, How" While working on one of the slides (Tip # 9) the realization dawned that we measure conversion rate rather sub optimally and in a way that grossly overestimates the improvement possibilities.
Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic
Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in
BeyondVC
NOVEMBER 20, 2006
A little over 2 years ago, I wrote a post about the future of television advertising. While I have always been bullish about broadband video advertising, I have never believed that the $60b television advertising industry would disappear overnight. In fact, before the Internet dominates all advertising why couldn’t one bring the tools of the web to the television world making TV advertising more effective, targetable, and measurable – in effect changing it from a mass media to a more
BeyondVC
NOVEMBER 18, 2006
If you are a big company getting your butt kicked, it seems like the thing to do is issue a memo. Bill Gates did it after Microsoft lost out on the first wave of the Internet. Ray Ozzie wrote one for Microsoft about the importance of software as a service last year (see an earlier blog post ). The most recent memo is from Brad Garlinghouse of Yahoo ( see WSJ Article – annoying that it is password protected) who wrote a "call to arms" for Yahoo to stop doing everything and to focus
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BeyondVC
NOVEMBER 14, 2006
I had the pleasure, and I mean pleasure, of recently rebuilding two of my home PCs running Windows XP because of performance degradation and other issues. I ended up doing a clean wipe of the hard drives and reinstalling Windows XP from scratch. Once I got the machines up and running with broadband connection, I recognized that I was completely naked on the web with no protection.
BeyondVC
NOVEMBER 11, 2006
Greg Linden has a great post summarizing a talk that Marissa Mayer of Google gave at the recent Web 2.0 conference. I encourage you to read it because Marissa talks about how Google ran a user test where users wanted more search results. Surprisingly, traffic and revenue dropped by 20% and what Marissa discovered was that load times for less searches was.4 seconds and load times with more searches was.9 seconds.
BeyondVC
NOVEMBER 6, 2006
As I wrote early last year, my perspective is that one must go early, go late, or go home to make money in the venture market. Given that we at Dawntreader have always been early, that is where we will continue to focus. What is interesting is that on the heels of the new seed funding plan that Charles River Ventures recently announced, CBS just brought in an Allen & Co deal maker to head up its Interactive division with an eye on going early as well.
BeyondVC
NOVEMBER 3, 2006
There is a great BusinessWeek article outlining Amazon’s ambition to be a utility for web businesses. This reminds me of a conversation I had last month with a founder and former CTO of one our of our prior portfolio companies who said his goal was to have a highly successful SAAS play with 1 operations guy instead of 20. When I asked him how he would do it, he quite simply said Amazon – Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and Amazon S3 for storage.
BeyondVC
NOVEMBER 1, 2006
In an earlier post titled "When Competitors are acquired" I discussed that rather than sulk and wish it were you who was bought, smart companies will go out and capitalize on the opportunity as their competition is temporarily distracted and inwardly focused on creating synergies. Rather than comment on the whys of the Google Jotspot deal, I would rather point out what smart competitors like Ross Mayfield of Socialtext are doing to capitalize on the deal.
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