Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
It will happen this autumn and cover argument. Check out this post for details. The video is comedy.
Watching this video made me think that my interest in real/alternate world convergence may be running way ahead of any chance of commercialisation. It brings home how hard it is to make things happen in SL.
There is a good profile on Facebook, the second largest social network here. Of interest:
It is entirely advertising/sponsorship focused
Unlike all its competitors it is only available to a closed group - College Students
Their usage stats are amazing - 85% of college students have an account and 60% log in daily
It has had $40m in VC
Photos [...]
Peter Rip of Leapfrog Ventures in the US last week started a series of posts on the evolution of the venture capital model from a US perspective. The first post is a great backgrounder which sets out how the venture capital cycle has worked over the last 40 years and gives the main reasons it will [...]
In all my posts today on this subject I have been missing a key point - traditional internet ad spend is a tiny proportion of marketing spend on social networks. The vast majority goes on profile pages and sponsorship.
To put some numbers around that estimates of spend on banner ads on MySpace built up from Nielsen/NetRatings [...]
You are not alone.
Data I have just seen has comScore Media Metrix and Nielsen/NetRatings differing by 20% on the number of unique visitors to MySpace.com and by 35% for YouTube!
Then there is all the talk I keep hearing about Alexa “being a little bit off lately”.
I think all you can infer from the precise data [...]
This is from eMarketer - analyst Debra Williamson.
She says ad spending on social networks in 2006 will be $280m in the US and $70m in other markets. This is mostly on profile pages and sponsored promotions. Social network ad spend will be 1.7% of total online ad spend in the US this year.
This is actually a [...]
The inspiration for this came from Thomas Power - Chairman and Founder of Ecademy. A key value driver there is the large number of face to face meetings they organise between members.
Meetings are good because they encourage loyalty and you can charge for them. They are a bit old school and are difficult to organise [...]
One of the problems of advanced western society is that people struggle with their sense of identity. In times gone by people found their identity in their religion, their standing in the local community or from their work. To a greater or lesser extent these have all ceased to work for large portions of the [...]
In an insane rush for traffic MySpace and YouTube are going toe to toe to see who will be the BIGGEST video site - see Mashable.
As everything goes full circle and I will become dust again when I die so we seem to be valuing businesses on eyeballs again.
All good fun though, and lots of [...]
Caterina of Flickr posted on how QOOP dealt with Flickr simply by building a service on their API rather than pursuing formal partnering and concluded with the following paragraph
Traditional business development meant spending a lot of money on dry cleaning, animating your powerpoint, drinking stale coffee in windowless conference rooms and scouring the thesaurus looking for [...]
