The Most Interesting Online Video Trend & Where It’s Headed
By now many of you know the Harlem Shake but what you may not appreciate is the broader trend behind the video and it has mirrored my general views on how TV will work in the future Harlem Shake is a YouTube phenomenon that in just 2 weeks has gone from nothing to on air on both [...]
A Conversation on Open Cloud–Google+ Hangout
The discussion around open versus closed in the cloud is reaching fever pitch but what does it all mean? Many people have but the loosest understanding of what open cloud means and the differences between open source, open clouds and federated clouds. I’m in the process of writing a paper
Want to Know How to Better Partner With, Raise Money From or Be Acquired by a Big Media Company?
This is one of the best episodes of This Week in VC for a long time. I had the chance to speak with Andrew Siegel who runs corp dev & strategy for Condé Nast (aka Advance Publications). In case you don’t know, they are one of the biggest media companies in the world. They are [...]
Google+ Hangouts On Air and SMBs
Yesterday Google unwrapped the Google+ Hangouts on Air to general public with relatively little fanfare. This is part of Google’s social strategy but the product has the potential to disrupt many startups in the space, especially the ones targeting consumers and SMBs. Google could flex their Youtube muscle to literally shove them away. Google+ hangouts [...]
Why Socialcam Will Fail*
* Yes, the title of this post is blatant linkbait. But it’s a serious topic. Over the past few days, I mentioned the topic of my post to a number of smart people in the industry, who all had the same reaction: “I don’t get Socialcam, and I want to r…
Facebook, Employers, and your username and password as a federated identity
This has been a very interesting week for employers and Facebook. I have been writing about this story over on Toolbox, here and here if you are interested in reading, but on this site I want to go a little deeper into the idea of asking prospective employees for a username and password to any [...]
I wish that Klout allowed for divergent systems
I like Klout; it is an interesting system that can be easily tweaked to work with the major social systems out there. Klout support most of the major systems such as Facebook, Blogger, Flickr, and others to try to put together a bird’s eye view of how your influence and supporters/followers tend to influence others [...]
The Enterprise Social Goodness
Ever since the word “social” became a famous consumer token that is overused and overhyped every minute of every day, the business world started wondering about how to build an enterprise social network that had all the right and relevant component…
What Every Entrepreneur Could Learn from Justin Bieber
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. I know what you’re thinking – link bait title, right? Wrong. I will stand 100% behind my assertions in this post. Justin Bieber is unbelievably entrepreneurial and most of you will never know it because he serves a target demo that doesn’t include you. I promise you can [...]
Want to know why charging $12 / year converts higher than $9.99?
As many of you know I run a weekly webcast called This Week in VC that’s getting between 25-35,000 weekly views across ThisWeekIn.com, YouTube & mostly iTunes. Yesterday’s show floored me. I consider Gregg Spiridellis a good friend. We’ve hung out periodically over the past few years and I have enjoyed debating many startup topics. [...]
Why Hulu is the OPEC of Online Video
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. The formation of Hulu was defensive – designed to stop another YouTube or Napster from emerging and causing disruption to the TV industry. The idea was that if you could put up a consumer site that was seen as the best place to consume content then people wouldn’t go [...]
When You Can Innovate With browser, Why Do You Need Native Apps?
Browser based apps or native apps? I am going to harp on the same topic I touched yesterday again but from the desktop angle. I apologize if it appears to be repetitive but I want to drive home this point again. To begin with, let me give some background on the debate and go on [...]
YouTube and Community Guidelines could mean being locked out of your account
Two years ago I did a number of videos about using Google Hacking and how simple it was to use Google as an intelligence vehicle for sites and people who did not properly secure their infrastructure. Over the last month two of those videos were flagged by the community as inappropriate with the end result [...]
The Strangest Enterprise Software Ad I’ve Ever Seen
I’ve seen some strange ads before, but this one by Enterprise SaaS provider SuccesFactors is beyond imagination – not the ad itself, but where it is placed: Yes, it is on Youtube, and the video shows a seahorse giving birth. Seahorses are rather unusual species, the male gets pregnant and gives birth to 100-200 babies [...]
Bring On The Inquisition! Judge Should Not Let Google Evil-doers Get Away!
<rant> Italian Judge Oscar Magi (photo @ TechCrunch , but I am not showing it for fear he might slap me with a privacy-invasion charge) has no idea what he’s dealing with. He’s just allowed evil witches get away with only 6 months suspended jail sentence. (C’mon, why would their employer insist on covering up [...]