The Equity Kicker

Smartphone platform owners control the advertising – is that good?

Apple announced on Tuesday that it was acquiring mobile ad firm Quattro for $275m, which follows Google’s $750m acquisition last year of Admob (a DFJ portfolio company), in which Apple was apparently also interested. Assuming these two deals are completed the owners of the leading and most promising smartphone platforms will also control [...]

A deep commitment to data analysis is key

Companies have more and more data at their disposal which has opened up a new battlefront for competition, and as I wrote back in November it is increasingly true that The best companies are analytical.

I’m returning to that theme today having read a post on affiliate blog Shoemoney about Scaling Facebook campaigns. [...]

Google’s YouTube gamble is vindicated?

Image via CrunchBase

The FT ran this great-to-read headline on New Years Day (minus the question mark which I added for headline integrity). It was great to read because as I’ve noted before, today’s startups need yesterday’s acquisitions to have been successful, otherwise the buyers won’t come shopping again. [...]

Google fail, content farms and point in time business models

Back in December John Battelle posted that Google is failing more and Paul Kedrosky wrote about Dishwashers, and how Google eats its own tail – both posts about how Google doesn’t return the results we want any more.

There are a couple of steps to this argument. I’ll take content farms first. The [...]

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-03

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-27 http://goo.gl/fb/5ZEp # Elephant.co.uk breakdown recovery service should be renamed the 'phone and wait' service # Great presentation from Intel Capital showing tech innovation requirements going forward: http://bit.ly/4CAUVg # Setting up my new Withings scale. This could be the start of a lot of body monitoring. # Blown away [...]