Paul Allen – Keynote Speaker, Tech Visionary, Soar.com & Ancestry Founder
If you run a business with an internet strategy, hopefully you\’ve started thinking about a mobile strategy as well. You need to skate where the puck is going and not where it has been.
IDC estimates that 24 million US mobile phone users will pay for some kind of TV/Video content or services by 2010, up from 7 million this year. That is a sizeable market share. And it will only get bigger.
Bob Young, the founder of Red Hat formed lulu.com a few years ago to enable authors to self publish books. The site has an Alexa ranking of 3,386. It has a nice 3-year Alexa chart.
Because I was highly involved in the online content subscription business of Ancestry.com in the late 90s and early 00s, I thought I was pretty smart. When Apple jumped into the music industry with its iPod and iTunes service, I thought they were pretty smart, but I also thought that everyone else ganging up on Apple would cause a big dent in its music business, and that eventually the iPod would go the way of the Mac, and end up with a relatively small market share. I especially thought Steve Jobs was wrong when he said customers wanted to own their own music and not rent it.
A million things have gotten in the way of my blogging during the last month. But I haven\’t completely disappeared. I\’m working on some lengthy and thoughtful posts about subscription business models, company culture, web site usability (and how overlooked it is), building community online, an update on Provo Labs incubator portfolio, and more. I have several in draft mode right now.
Michael Robertson, founder of mp3.com, is launching a webservice called Ajaxwrite.com, which allows you to create documents in an online word processor and save them to your hard drive in Word format in the event that you need to share them with anyone who uses Microsoft Word.
Provo Labs\’ business model is becoming more clear. We will be acquiring a huge amount of content (text, images, audio and video) in selected vertical markets. (First two examples: ldsmedia.com and worldhistory.com).
Content Spending Reaches $2B, Q4 a Record $534MM
Downloadable music and video purchases helped propel U.S. consumer spending on content to $2 billion in 2005, a 15 percent increase from 2004, writes MediaPost, citing new research by the Online Publishers Association. In 4Q05, spending reached $534 million – a record, and 13 percent more than the $472 million in 3Q04.
Bill Nguyen\’s latest company: La La
Bill Nguyen is one of the smartest entrepreneurs I\’ve ever met. (Ranks up there with Josh Kopelman.) I met him when MyFamily.com partnered with him in 1999 to provide his Onebox.com email/audio unified messaging service to our users. He is full of ideas and boundless energy.
Google pays \”tens of millions\” of dollars in AdSense revenue to Mozilla Corporation, because Firefox defaults to Google search.
One of my readers alerted me to this article in the April 1996 issue of Fast Company about the open culture of Whole Foods, a company that was approaching $1 billion in annual sales back then. The author called their approach \”the future of democratic capitalism.\”
Today the company\’s market cap is $9 billion and sales will exceed $5 billion this year. This company is doing a lot of things right. Its non-heirarchical open culture is fascinating. Here\’s a quote from the 1996 article:
Anticipation of Ethereum’s move to proof-of-stak...
RT @Julian: The most interesting thing I learned l...
Underrated quote.
