Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
Amongst all the doom and gloom I’ve felt like slitting my wrists at points over the last couple of weeks so it was good to hear the positive sentiment coming from Google, IBM and Nokia yesterday.
Google’s earnings fell short of expectations, but that was due to increased expenses and reduced investment income and is therefore [...]
My last post of 2007 was entitled No predictions for 2008. I wrote that in part because I’m reading Taleb again and you can’t turn a page of his book without being reminded of how people are wrong more often than they are right when it comes to the business of forecasting the future, and [...]
In the words of IBM:
“The next five years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did. Increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are re-defining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked.”
From The end of advertising as we know it, IBM 2007.
Spot on. There are [...]
Lots of people are reporting that Facebook is turning over $150m and making $30m in profits. These are small numbers when compared with the rumoured $10bn valuation that Microsoft is considering for a $500m investment. As the Guardian points out that equates to $238 for each of their 42m profiles - which compares [...]
Check out this video of Sun’s Virtual Workspace. They have built a Second Life style collaboration environment focused on commerce. Very cool.
More detailed info is available on Sun’s site here. They call the initiative MPK20 (obviously not because they want me to remember it).
Being like Second Life, it is avatar based. [...]
I wrote quite a lot about Second Life around the turn of the year, but seem to have written less recently (all the archives are here). I think that is because my interest has moved from understanding whether SL has legs and is going somewhere (it is) to trying to figure out what that means [...]
I have been thinking for some time of writing a post in response to some of the chatter about the problems at Second Life.
You can read here and here about the extent to which Second Life is really an economy - it’s not, the extent to which it is all sex and gambling - it is, and for the academically minded [...]
In this IBM’s futurologist Irving Wladaswky-Berger posted this about the work IBM is doing in Second Life. He talks about how IBM hosted a meeting there, how they created a virtual Wimbledon there, and suggests that the virtual world phenomena might be as important as the internet overall.
It’s difficult to wrap your mind around how exactly, by [...]
