Five Network Services You Need To Use
Here are five network services that I use, consume, promote and on which I rely heavily. My affiliations with them are purely tangential (I’m on the board of the MIX, which does indirect business with kiva.org; and a friend works for Evernote) and this isn’t paid or promotional; I just felt like vamping on where [...]
Enough Complaining About Facebook’s IPO
Enough already of the special Facebook ticker on CNBC, and the constant yammering on the financial news channels about its “botched IPO”. There was nothing botched about it — FB went public, the bankers collected their fees, they extracted the maximum value for their client, and they (seemingly, reasonably) complied with the Byzantine regulations governing [...]
Valuing Facebook
I was in Times Square Friday, watching the news camera crews setting up for shots with the NASDAQ 7-story high marquee behind them, toting the new FB listing. I had actually written this Thursday night, and held off posting it because as much as I thought the Facebook IPO was over-valued, I prefer not to [...]
Facebook Ads and the Long Tail
In advance of the first tick on Facebook stock at the NASDAQ open tomorrow, it seems everyone has a comment about their revenue model and whether it supports a $100B valuation. Unfortunately, a lot of the criticism leveled at Facebook comes from an advertising world that still hasn’t figured out the long tail effect. Forbes’ [...]
Formative Economics
I’m a big believer in formative economics – the process of bootstrapping a network of consumers, producers and markets where there is little infrastructure. We are often quick to send money; it’s what my daughter Elana calls the “good intentions of the muzungu“ (Kinyarwanda for “white person”, in a purely descriptive way) to give money [...]