Charles Hudson’s Weblog

I’ve had Facebook on the brain lately – not surprising given that I work at a company that builds games for the Facebook platform. One of the more interesting things I’ve been trying to figure out is the use case for a “Pay with Facebook” or Facebook payments solution off the Facebook platform.
Changing the [...]

This is a quick post based on my experience using CloudContacts. I first heard about CloudContacts a few weeks ago and was intrigued. In a nutshell, I think of CloudContacts as a business card scanner as a service (as opposed to business card scanning as a product offered by CardScan). The process for getting your [...]

This is more of an open thread than a blurb. I’ve been looking at the dismal data on venture capital exits and the growing swirl of rumors about Twitter getting acquired. One thing I’ve always wondered is whether a situation where a big company buys a small company for a large sum (say north of [...]

In the last few days I’ve talked to three people who’ve been debating setting up Facebook Fan Pages for some cause / group they like or support. They’ve also asked about Twitter. I saw this post about the pending re-launch of the Facebook Pages with a new-and-improved experience for brands. I’ve been using Twitter [...]

I’ve now posed roughly 30 questions to Aardvark and I think it’s one of the more useful services I’ve used of late. In addition to being useful, I also think it has a reasonable shot at becoming an interesting business as well. In the interest of fair disclosure, it’s worth noting that Aardvark has good [...]

I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to offer products that are free or basically free to users on the web. I try not to get religious about free – there’s nothing inherently right or wrong about choosing a business model that incorporates a free component so long as you understand [...]

I had been thinking a lot about personal finance this past few weeks and then I saw a TechCrunch post on how Mint raised more money and has been growing nicely. So I posted a tweet over the weekend with the following comment:

i’m not sure people are ready to hand over financial creds to web [...]

I have been noodling on this whole idea of social shopping, which I think is still a poorly-defined concept. I have to warn you in advance that this is a fairly academic-style post.
What does it mean to “shop socially”?
To me, social shopping is about leveraging the collective wisdom of others, be they friends or [...]

I read this article (apparently I was late to the blogosphere party on this one) Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far – New York Times in the Sunday NYT and I wasn’t really sure why this was news. As far as I can tell, the basic thrust of the article is that the mobile [...]

I’ve been reading a bunch of posts on how Twitter got funded without a business plan or a business model. I think the logic of these posts is largely true in only one case – if you’re an early-stage company in tech where you have lots of adoption, good growth, and attention from the “right” [...]