It was a big day for football fans, with both the AFC and NFC Championships taking place this afternoon and this evening. The games grab more than a few eyeballs every year — last year’s championships grabbed 54.8 million and 51.9 million viewers, respectively. While the numbers aren’t out yet for today’s games, the viewership is expected to be equally as enormous.
That’s why so many in the Twittersphere have been so quick to point out that, nestled quietly behind a hotly contested NFC Championship between the New York Giants and the San Francisco 49ers, was a fairly huge announcement for the maker of BlackBerry, Research In Motion. During the game, RIM announced that its co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, are stepping down and will be replaced by current COO for products and sales, Thorsten Hein. → Read More
I suppose some might have seen this coming. In December, Research In Motion (RIM) released their third quarter earnings, which were yet another disappointment for the struggling maker of BlackBerry. RIM Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis announced subsequently that they would only draw yearly salaries of $1 to help combat the company’s financial woes.
Today, it seems the pressure has become too great, and a management shuffle is under way. The Globe has reported that the co-CEOs, after a year of pressure from investors and stockholders, have stepped down from the position. Company insider and current COO Thorsten Heins will be replacing them as the new chief executive. → Read More
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Owning a small business is tough. Carissa Reiniger has been working in small business development for over seven years and says she’s seen countless entrepreneurs and small business owners run into what she calls the “cash flow catch 22″: If I had more money, I could make more time — and vice versa. What’s more, the large majority of startups and small businesses that fail, she believes, don’t hit the deadpool because their ideas were terrible, but instead because their owners’ health declined, or their spouses were fed up with them working 80 hours a week, or they didn’t have the stamina or resources to push on.
That’s why Carissa founded Silver Lining — to help small business owners make enough money so that they can keep doing what they love. To help jack up the success rates of SMBs, she and her team created “The Slap”, or the Silver Lining Action PLan. → Read More
On Friday The House withdrew the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) from being put to a vote and the Senate postponed voting on its version of the bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA). As the debate continues over the best way to shield copyrighted material from being pirated, we invited David Sohn, General Counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology and Viacom’s General Counsel, Michael Fricklas to discuss language that should be included in any future SOPA/PIPA legislation. → Read More
As much as we all strive to build sustainable and stand-alone companies, we’re living in a period of massive transformation and thus, consolidation and acquisition. As a result, many entrepreneurs build their businesses with potential acquirers in mind, choosing to grow at any cost instead of actually building a sustainable business that is solvent and profitable.
GRP VC Mark Suster (and occasional Techcrunch contributor) published an article on this theme
recently. The very short version of the post is: “Most companies (98+%) in the world (even tech startups) should be very profit focused. Being profitable allows you degrees of freedom you don’t have when you rely upon other people’s money.” → Read More
Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that’d help people get together in real-life rather than simply helping them connect online as most social networking applications had done.
Alas, our efforts began to stall after several months post-launch, and we were never able to scale beyond a small early adopter community and into critical, mainstream usage. While the initial launch and traction proved extremely exciting, it misled us into believing there was a larger market ready to adopt our product. This post-mortem is an attempt to describe the fundamental flaws in our product model and, in particular, the difficulties presented by events as a content type. → Read More
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It’s only day one of DLD, the annual TED-like conference in Munich thrown by German media giant Burda, and already we have a few misunderstandings brewing. Amid the furore surrounding the SOPA protests and lobbying form media companies, at the other end of the debate-spectrum, the European Commission, in the shape of EC vice-president Viviane Reding, has been looking at harmonising privacy and personal data in Europe.
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Today two musicians sat down with me to have a chat: Andy Ross of OK Go, and Eytan Oren of Eytan and the Embassy. But we weren’t there to talk music.
The dynamic duo actually built an iPhone app called InBloom — a Yelp-style application that offers up sustainable businesses and eco-friendly/dietary food retailers based on location — and sat down with me to tell us how it came to be, and what it’s all about. → Read More
Earlier this fine Sunday afternoon, Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey took the stage at the DLD Conference, the annual pre-Davos meeting of minds held in Munich, Germany.
In an interview with not one but two journalists (Holger Schmidt from FOCUS Magazine and Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick), Dorsey talked a great deal about Twitter and a little bit about Square.
Dorsey didn’t reveal anything spectacular about either company, emphasizing once more how Twitter is not your traditional social network (here’s my counterpoint) and that its business model works, thanks very much for asking. → Read More
For Box, 2011 was a huge year in terms of customer acquisition. Box ended the year with 77% of the Fortune 500 using the company’s cloud storage offerings. Procter and Gamble marked one of Box’s largest deployments for the year. While Box is still continuing to focus on cloud solutions for the enterprise in 2012, the company has set its sights on a potentially huge fish for the year—the federal government.
Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie tells me that there is a huge opportunity for Box in procuring cloud storage options for government agencies. “There’s going to be a big shift in public sector using cloud services this year,” Levie explains. “With so many agencies having to collaborate with public and other organizations, it’s more efficient to do this in the cloud.”
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As I watched Apple’s iBooks event in New York City last week, my mind began to race about the ramifications of such announcements. Everyone had a pretty good idea for weeks (or months if you read the Steve Jobs biography) that textbooks would be a focal point for Apple, but there wasn’t much thought given to what this would mean. During the event itself, I just kept thinking, “wow, Apple just incentivized every college student to get an iPad”.
Except, they didn’t. Not yet. → Read More
Before SOPA was pulled from the House yesterday, opponents of the bill argued (among other things) that sites accused of making copyrighted material available could be shut down without being given full, adverserial, due process. Was this an accurate assessment? Viacom’s General Counsel and EVP Michael Fricklas and David Sohn, General Counsel and Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology defend their respective positions in part II of TCTV’s SOPA/PIPA debate.
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When social news startup Summify announced Thursday that it was being acquired by Twitter, it looked like the Summify’s existing users were out-of-luck — the company said the current version of the service would be shut down.
Enter News.me. The company is best-known for its iPad newsreading app (which was developed at The New York Times, then commercialized by incubator betaworks) but it also offers an email digest of news from your Twitter stream, similar to Summify. It sounds like jilted Summify users jumped on News.me as an alternative, so the company published a blog post telling Summify users, “We’re here for you,” outlining upcoming features like Facebook integration, and asking for feedback. → Read More
How much does Google make in advertising from mobile? Cowen analyst Jim Friedland estimates that Google is generating $7 per year from each smartphone (and tablet). This includes both search and display advertising in mobile apps on both Android and iOS (iPhones and iPads). Thanks to the rapid growth in smart mobile devices from an estimated 509 million last year to nearly double that in 2012 to an estimated 914 million, Google’s mobile ad revenues are expected to more than double from an estimated $2.5 billion last year to $5.8 billion in 2012 (see chart).
This is a guest post by Ryan Spoon (@ryanspoon), a principal at Polaris Ventures. Read more about Ryan on his blog at ryanspoon.com.
For startups, it is dangerous to entirely separate product and marketing – both strategically and organizationally. A great product isn’t overly useful without an audience. And a great marketing strategy can’t save a poor product. Product and marketing have to coexist.
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In recent months, there’s been some hand-wringing about a “Series A Crunch” — namely, a glut of startups raising seed and angel funding, then struggling once they need to raise a proper Series A. But in a recent interview, 500 Startups founder Dave McClure said the complaints are misguided. → Read More
Nobody wants to be told that their business model is obsolete. Ask Kodak. Or Hollywood. And the publishing industry is slower on its feet than most. Bookstores don’t want to believe that they’ll ultimately lose 75% of their pre-e-book business to that scourge plus Amazon delivery. (I’m assuming e-book market share will eventually plateau somewhere north of 50%.) Meanwhile, publishers cling to the model wherein readers purchase books individually, usually before they’ve been read: a model so entrenched that many seem to find it literally impossible to believe that alternatives might exist.
I’ve been lamenting that paucity of imagination in my columns here for some time now. It’s why publishers have lashed out so ineptly at any suggestion of a subscription model. But I’ve also been saying for five years that publishing’s business model will ultimately become even less restrictive than that. In the end, lo these many decades from now, most books–and all novels–will be free to read, and their readers will decide whether and how much to pay for them after reading them.
I know, big talk, no action, right? So: → Read More
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We all had them: times you reached for a camera to stop life for a second, to grab a memory. For decades, Kodak was the rock solid standard in photography and as the 131-year old company files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, “Kodak moments” may be all that’s left of what was once one of the most powerful companies in the world. Kodak can’t compete let alone survive in this new world. The only thing keeping them alive is a trove of 11,000 patents, and even those don’t seem to be piquing anyone’s interest.
Click.
From household name to also-ran in a few years. This isn’t a story of a stubborn buggy-whip manufacturer going out of business for refusing to change. This is a carriage maker making a seemingly successful transition to the automobile and then, just as quickly, failing catastrophically.
So what happened? → Read More
The word “lobbyist” surely doesn’t have the best connotation in the world. Depending on your reading of the definition, it generally signifies an attempt to influence government decisions, traditionally by targeting legislators or regulators. What isn’t often taken into consideration, however, is that while there are lobbyists in dark suits roaming the halls of Congress funded by entities such as big oil and pharmaceutical companies, “lobbying” is also conducted by nonprofit groups funded by different kinds of special interests. We think of efforts, however, as “activism,” but at the end of the day, they’re just another form of lobbying.
Now, a new form of “lobbying” has emerged, but instead corporate checks or individuals donations, the currency has shifted from cash to social connections, where financial power will be trumped by network power: “social lobbying.” → Read More
So, there’s been some hubbub around Electronic Arts over the last few days, as the company ramps up for the release of its third quarter earnings on February 1st. Yesterday, EA’s stock closed at $17.54 per share, which, in context, meant that the gaming goliath’s stock was down 30 percent since hitting its 52-week high in early November. This drop was mostly due to the collective shock relating to the news concerning its recently released title, Star Wars: The Old Republic, which now has a ridiculous price tag attached to it — as Wall Street is estimating the cost to be between $150 and $200 million. → Read More
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