I’m on the Board of the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) and the team has put together a really impressive looking event that features a panel of interesting young leaders / founders of some of my favorite tech companies. More details below – I encourage you to register soon as I expect this one will sell […]
Month: January 2009
Best Customer Service Email from Amazon on My Pending Kindle
This might be the best customer service response email I’ve ever received. It’s not really the kind of thing I would normally blog, but it was so entertaining I had to share it. I wrote to Amazon to ask them if the Kindle 2 rumors are true (full disclosure: I have a pending order in […]
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I’m Speaking at the Engage! Expo – Save Money and Use the Discount Code
I wanted to let you know that I’ll be giving a talk about virtual gifts and virtual gifting at the Engage! Expo in New York on March 10th and 11th. They’ve been kind enough to provide me with a discount code, so I’m sharing it with all of you. If you register using the discount […]
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I’m Bullish on Aardvark (and Twitter should take notes)
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 […]
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The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire – Good Article in Wired
I rarely just reblog someone else’s post, but this is a really fascinating article on Brock Pierce and the early roots of real money trade in virtual goods as a business opportunity. Really interesting story here and a well written piece overall: The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire.
My Search for the Best iPhone 3G Music Headset
I am a heavy iPhone user and I can’t get the factory issued iPhone earbuds to stay in my ear. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying out different headsets to figure out which ones might work better for me. I commute using public transportation at least 5 days a week, so the ideal headphones […]
Short Blurb – The Trinity of Cheap and Social Web Utilities
Quick blog post as I continue to process a lot of things I thought about while I was away on vacation. These two things are unrelated but I have been thinking about them both quite a bit: I have seen a lot of products in the social media space that bill themselves as utilities of […]
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Thoughts on Free Powered Business Models and Why Time Beats Features
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 […]
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Why Social Nets are Shying Away from Payments
I was reading Justin Smith’s good post on Faecbook’s delayed payment system and I thought I’d share a slightly longer version of what I left in the comments on his blog: I do think most of the major social networks have looked at payments and decided it’s a tricky business for them to tackle for […]