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Startup Voodoo: Turning Users into Evangelists
If you can pitch a user and convert them in under an hour, you’ve got a great product. If you listen to your users recruit other users without prompting, you’ve got a kick-ass company. Last year at Gnomedex, I discovered Lijit for the first time and the concept behind trust-based search clicked in my mind…
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DC Needs a Fred. Any Takers?
Profiled in Sunday’s New York Times, Union Square Ventures‘ Fred Wilson is a legend of contemporary venture capital — a title previously reserved for West Coast luminaries like Moritz and Doerr, and maybe a couple others. At Web 2.0 Expo in New York last week, Wilson was greeted with cheers usually reserved for celebrities. .…
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Sweet Caroline in Vegas
I’m still in travel mode. Long story, but I’ve been in Las Vegas since last Wednesday and don’t leave until tomorrow. While this has been a fantastic trip, the process of writing serious posts requires some time to process everything from the week. That processing of data doesn’t happen when you get together with Jeremy…
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Network Management – deadlines and rhetoric
Another filing deadline, another blast of press releases about the Comcast “network management” debacle. To quote the great philosopher Rodney King, “can’t we all just get along?” No, really. This topic gets people in an uproar, whether it’s the good and well-meaning people at Free Press and Public Knowledge, who brought the complaint, or the…
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What's a Social App Developer to do?
To Mike Lazerow, CEO of new-age ad agency BuddyMedia, Facebook is the future. Big brands trying to reach the world’s 500,000,000 social network members are ringing his phone off the hook, because his firm has the skills to create branded apps — what he calls ‘the new ad unit.’ But what might they bode for…
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Vegas Casino Rocks the Social Media
Earlier in the week, I caught wind of LuxorLV on Twitter. By now, many companies are jumping on the social media bandwagon, recognizing that there’s something there to use in their marketing efforts. Some companies just “get it” and some companies literally struggle along trying to figure it out. Knowing I was coming to Vegas,…
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The Rise and Fall of Friends
We have been transformed. We have been transformed from a culture of Leave it to Beaver, where friends were next door neighbors or maybe work or church associates, into a culture where “friend” is a status symbol peddled by the gazillion social networks. It’s not uncommon to hear someone at a tech conferenct like Blog…
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Lessons Learned — Scaling Social Systems
My charter with Venture Files is to contribute to and promote entrepreneurship and the startup scene around DC in general. Now, as I’ve warned, my posts may reveal my bias towards the Web 2.0 world. (It’s what my startup is about.) But heck — I’m at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC, so . .…
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Tech Policy is the new Economic Policy.
So, has anyone else been watching Wall Street do the 2000 style dot-com dance while the TechCrunch-watching, TechMeme-obsessed crowd throws parties like it’s 1999? I feel for the guys at Lehman and AIG, some of them my age, now out on the street. In fact, I feel even more sorry for them than I did…
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Working the Workshops
There are tons of informative sessions at Web 2.0 Expo. I especially like the Day 1 workshops. Maybe it’s the no-break, three-hour block . . . the fewer tracks . . . or the reduced traffic, since a good many folks opt out of Day 1 to save money. Shame. If you’re a coder, there…