Software, Digital Content, Geopolitics, Economics & More from of a Libertarian Serial Expat and Entrepreneur
Jon Iverson: "To revitalize the CD, [president and CEO of retailing chain Hastings Entertainment] Marmaduke insists, "We must reduce wholesale prices immediately as unit volume declines. This lesson will be hard to learn for the European multinationals who think American CD prices are too low and the secret to high profit is a slow ratcheting-up [...]
In: search engines
23 Oct 2001BusinessWeek: "Web surfers swear by the world’s most popular search engine, but established rivals put the upstart at a disadvantage in the corporate market." This article estimates Google’s revenue and expenses at about $50M a year. Its point is that no matter successful how Google is, the company is positioned on a relatively small market.
In: web services
23 Oct 2001WebServices.org: "The Microsoft PDC 2001 kicked off yesterday at the Los Angeles Convention Center with pre-conference talks and press briefings. Much of the emphasis of this convention is .Net My Services, and Bob Muglia from the Services Platform Division gave an overview of the .Net My Services strategy.
InformationWeek: "[M]any CIOs and other business-technology leaders are probably asking themselves a new set of questions: Do I need to buy a lot of new stuff, or do I just need to apply the stuff I already have more effectively? Is EAI the answer? Do I need to buy or own everything, or is there [...]
In: search engines
18 Oct 2001Wired: "Google’s built a no-nonsense path to profitability by treating advertising just like search. The secret? Three words, ranked by relevance: Results. Results. Results."
JY makes a relevant connection between Nielsen’s The End of Homemade Websites and Spolsky’s In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome. It’s true that companies will be able to source web services and use them to build their own sites, but that in itself will require integration work, and you’ll still have to do some custom development [...]
In: search engines
18 Oct 2001Google May Get Personal: "With last month’s acquisition of Outride, Google may be poising itself to go into an area of search refinement that no major player has gone successfully before: personalized search results."
NYT: "With the demand for online advertising continuing to fall, Yahoo has put much more emphasis on developing services for which businesses or consumers will pay fees. Indeed, revenue from such services increased 3 percent in the quarter, to $34 million, even as advertising revenue declined 11 percent, to $132 million." We’re closely monitoring the [...]
NUblog: "What are the odds of a reviewer of business books and two authors of such a book all managing to understand that the Web is about maniacally hyperdetailed
ClickZ: "How do you keep customers coming back? Be a resource, not an event. Make users, once they’ve bought (or considered buying) your product, want to come back. Make them want to form a relationship because they need the value of the intangibles of your site: the tools, the advice, the content."
I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.