Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Andy Bechtolsheim: 100K To 1.5 Billion Through Google

This is a remarkable story. A hundred thousand dollars turned into a billion and a half dollars in a decade: that is utmost remarkable. There is no lottery, no Vegas that can give you that kind of a return.

A lot of people could cough up the 100K if they had to. The question is what was Andy doing at the right time at the right place? What was he doing at that Stanford faculty's home that particular morning?

Facebook: Mobile, Social, Local, Deal, Check, Deal

Watch live streaming video from facebookinnovations at livestream.com

(Via Rachel Sterne)

Facebook's Aggression

Facebook Blog: Making Mobile More Social
Search Engine Land: Big Deal: Facebook Emerges As Major Player In Mobile And Location-Based Services
TechCrunch: Facebook Revamps The Mobile Log-In Process With Single Sign-On
BGR: Facebook has 200 million active mobile users, improves iOS and Android applications
TechCrunch: Facebook Gives All Developers Access To Full Set Of Places APIs (Including Their Venue Database)
Inside Facebook: Facebook Launches Local Deal Service for Places

Animation of the structure of a section of DNA...Image via WikipediaFacebook's out to conquer the web. Facebook is the biggest competitor that Google ever had. It is not Microsoft. To compete with Google, you needed to be online, and Microsoft is not exactly online. And this competition did not come from search, it did not come from the government stepping in with some anti-monopoly lawsuit.

After Party


I have missed three NY Tech MeetUps in a row. That is uncharacteristic of someone who used to show up when the NY Tech MeetUp was half a dozen people at a Lower East Side bar. But I missed. And livestreaming does not work for me, I never really went that route. So I showed up for the after party last night: 218 Sullivan. No presentations, and no beer, I decided, and it was such great fun. I worked the room like a politician.

Paywalls Make No Sense

Clipart of bills and coinsImage via Wikipedia
TechCrunch: The Times UK Lost 4 Million Readers To Its Paywall Experiment: saw its online readership decline by 4 million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop. Pageviews fell off an even steeper cliff, plummeting 90 percent from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to 4 million in September, 2010. People did what you’d expect them to do when faced with a paywall at a news site. They said, “No, thanks” and clicked away to another site.
Paywalls make no sense at all. The internet is a global medium. People anywhere should be able to come over to your site. Just like net neutrality is so basic to what the internet is all about, the idea of paywalls runs counter.