Sponsor me in Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation walk
By Steve Poland • September 7, 2008 • No Comments »
Hello!
Evaluating Criteria for your Web 2.0 Business Idea
By Steve Poland • August 8, 2008 • 3 Comments »
I’d like to start a discussion about evaluating your business ideas — and determining which one to run with and build a start-up out of.
What criteria do you feel are important? How can each of those criteria be evaluated?
Here’s an initial list of what I’m thinking:
- Competition - who’s doing it, or similar, and what’s your competitive advantage?
- 1st User - how do you get user #1?
- Cost
- Time to market
- Ease or Difficulty of executing on the idea with your resources (team, funds)
- Virality - can it quickly grow
- Revenue - when and from where
- Content generation - will users be generating the content? will you?
What other factors do you think?
My Design Should Follow Me; “First Dibs” on my username
By Steve Poland • July 9, 2008 • 1 Comment »
On Twitter, you can customize how your profile design appears to other users. It personalizes my page on Twitter to others.
All services I’m on should allow this — well, at least the ones that are similar [microblogging; blogging; myspace; etc].
I think it’d be great if there was a centralized storage of my simple design attributes [colors; bg image; etc] that web services could tap into, to immediately personalize their service to me.
It’d be great if I also could get “first dibs” on the usernames I like to use on web services. [This could be a service that I pay $5/yr for, or whatever, and they’ll email me each day/week when they secure a login for me –for my preferred username– at some new web service. Maybe MyBlogLog or FriendFeed would do this for me, because they’d likely know whether or not I have an account already with the “new” web service].
You MUST hear this CD
By Steve Poland • June 20, 2008 • 2 Comments »
FYI to anyone that doesn’t have a clue and needs one — the new Girl Talk CD just came out at midnight. It’s called ‘Feed the Animals’ and it’s a 40-minute mashup of over 300 songs — you’ll know at least 100 of them. If you need a work-out mix, this is it. If you need to dance your face off, this is the CD.
No sophomore slump here — get his last one ‘Night Ripper’ if you like this one.
The new one is free or pay-what-you-want. IT’S AMAZING! I wish everyday was a Girl Talk CD Release party!!!
IDEA: Plugin to Sync Listening of a Song with Friends
By Steve Poland • June 18, 2008 • No Comments »
I use iTunes when I listen to songs. My buddy listens using Winamp. We both have Last.fm and PC’s. We have similar music collections, if not same songs here and there.
We like to instant message [IM] each other and listen to songs or entire albums together. He’s in Virginia, I’m in Buffalo.
To do this, we both IM each other and say “ok - hit play - NOW”. We do that, then we IM each other to get each other sync’d up - “10 secs”, “20 secs”, then we are basically in sync.
I WISH IT WAS EASIER. In fact, I wish I could just “tune in” to his music player. It wouldn’t even have to stream the song to me if I already have the same song on my computer, it just needs to start playing the song exactly sync’d with his.
This seems like a plugin that we could both install — like Last.fm, sitting in our system tray. Or maybe it needs to be in iTunes and Winamp.
I’d also love the ability for us to basically create a playlist that plays for both of us — let’s say it’s 10 songs long — he’d get to put 5 songs into the queue, and I’d get to put 5 songs in the queue. This way we could expose each other to new songs that we really love.
It’s basically like a radio station with interactivity and customization to just the people [friends] listening. This could be a few of my friends and I doing this together — exposing each other to the same songs.
I don’t know what the revenue model is — but maybe it’s “buy this track”, and if the thing really takes off you’ll probably have influencers and have data on what tracks are getting the most exposure between friends. But hell, I’d personally pay money for this software — but you’d likely need to make it free to gain traction.
Here’s an example IM session between us regarding a new track by Wolf Parade: [pardon the vulgarities] Read more
Google Acquiring Digg - Rumor
By Steve Poland • June 16, 2008 • No Comments »
Valleywag is reporting Google is digging around to acquire Digg. A few months ago I felt the best acquirer would be CNET — I wasn’t thinking of the bigger picture. I was thinking Digg/CNET would be a natural fit, given their focus on technology news [Digg is still primarily for the geek, but has slowly diversified].
Digg is the social bookmarking utility of the web for news. How many websites out there have a ‘digg this’ button on them? I have no clue, but it’s huge.
That little Digg image that loads on all those webpages loads from Digg’s web servers — meaning that Digg knows exactly when their Digg image loads (meaning a webpage load) and thus can see how many pageloads a specific webpage is getting and how often. If a Digg image was on every webpage of Techcrunch, Digg would know exactly how many pageviews Techcrunch gets. Digg would know what webpages a user views during a session across the web (on webpages that have a Digg image loading) and if that user was doing Google searches at the same time, Google could determine higher relevant results based on the user’s behavior.
Digg has a TON of data in the back-end — valuable data that shows them the most popular viewed webpages on the web at any given time — not to mention when their own users ‘digg’ a webpage.
But Techcrunch doesn’t have a Digg image/button on their webpages — they have an AddThis button on their webpages — which contains a Digg image, but it isn’t loading off of Digg’s servers, so Digg has no clue the total Techcrunch pageviews happening — AddThis does. Another competitor of AddThis is ShareThis.
Digg should be an AddThis/ShareThis, and allow users to easily ‘del.icio.us’, ‘twitter’, ‘facebook share’, etc, the webpages — because as websites replace their Digg button with an AddThis or ShareThis, Digg loses tons of valuable data — and tons of value.
Back to Google acquiring Digg — this is like Google acquiring Feedburner. There’s not much of a business model now, but the back-end data will improve the relevancy of Google’s search results, which is worth a lot to Google.
…or Yahoo …or Microsoft …or Ask …
The MSFT/YHOO/IACI Paid Search Consortium
By Steve Poland • June 13, 2008 • No Comments »
Since Yahoo just threw in the towel to Google, and Microsoft threw in the towel on acquiring Yahoo, and Ask.com hasn’t made any progress in market share in how many years…
The losers need to get together and join forces in a competitive effort against Google. Banded together, MSFT/YHOO/IACI would reach ~33% of all US searches. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
They need to pool their resources and focus on one platform. I’d create an independent company and pool the appropriate human, technological, and financial resources to it. Either take MSN AdCenter or Yahoo’s Panama and make that the lead horse, then make it the better horse against Google.
I’ll now include the only video clip Microsoft, Yahoo, and IAC executives need to watch together:
“We either heal… NOW… as a TEAM…… or we will die, …. as individuals.” - Al Pacino, Any Given Sunday
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The Yahoo & Google (and AOL!) debacle
By Steve Poland • June 13, 2008 • 2 Comments »
Yahoo has now signed a paid search agreement with Google. People are saying the obvious - this gives Google monopoly power - and will drive down bid prices on Yahoo, which will make Yahoo need Google even more in the future. I can agree with that, but given Yahoo’s beating, it’s tough for them to turn down the increased revenue they’ll be seeing from the Google deal.
Yahoo basically did say “we give up” in regards to the paid search market. Such a shame too, considering they were the leader [and purchased the founder of this technology - Overture].
But what I’d like to see now is Yahoo and AOL merge. They are so alike, it’s sick. And they control nearly all the display advertising companies that exist (aside from Google’s Doubleclick and Microsoft’s aQuantative).
And since Google now has the deal with Yahoo, Google likely wouldn’t oppose an AOL/Yahoo merger (given Google’s 5% stake in AOL). Then, Yahoo/AOL would have a combined XXXmm daily pageviews and YYYmm monthly unique visitors.
I think privacy concerns have lessened these days and they could put that combined power into delivery very targeted display ads. I’d also get in cahoots with the ISPs and track users’ webpage viewing habits even more precisely [knowing every single webpage a user visits, not just those that have Yahoo/AOL display ads on them].
IDEA #86: Mint.com but for Health & Fitness
By Steve Poland • June 12, 2008 • 3 Comments »
I don’t actually know much about health/fitness web startups, so maybe this is already being done but I’m just unaware. I know some people publicly are “fatblogging” (the practice of blogging about their daily struggle to get in better shape).
Mint.com is a cool service for your finances — and it doesn’t require much work at all; it automatically goes into your financial accounts, pulls information for you, and puts that data into context that actually means something to you.
Health/fitness is a different animal that would require the user to input their habits daily, but I think it could be made simple. This website would allow me to easily input what I eat during the day [quickly/easily], what I drink during the day, and what exercise I do during the day (and duration). It can then estimate the calories and fat [and other nutritional info - vitamin c, iron, etc]. And based on knowing my shape, size, weight, height, and body fat (maybe that is calculated at a health club; or via one of those scales you can buy at the store). Daily or weekly it could also ask for your weight — and maybe it’ll be able to more accurately calculate calories burned and such at that point.
It could put you on a plan to “budget” your eating, drinking, and work-out habits. You could set goals — losing 10 lbs in 10 weeks, or something. During the 10 weeks, it can tell you if you’re ahead of the curve, or behind, or on a good pace. It’ll estimate calorie/fat intake you need.
The interface would be super simple. I could input eat/drink/work-out stuff easily via my webpage [and see what my peers are up to — kind of a Twitter but for health/fitness stuff]. Heck, I could even Twitter when I eat/drink/work-out [i.e. “@healthy just drank 12 oz water”].
It would show me all these pretty charts and such. It would be my website for my fatblogging. It would give me tips on what I’m eating — if I’m eating white bread, it’ll suggest wheat bread to increase my fiber intake. If I’m drinking too much coffee, it’ll suggest I try cutting down on that. Kind of like Mint.com does with my finances [i.e. “get a better interest rate with X credit card instead”].
Revenues come from any advertisers related to health [healthy foods, gym memberships, free food samples, etc].
If this is already being done, great! Please let me know in the comments as I’m looking for something like this.
The Best Viral Idea I May Have Ever Seen
By Steve Poland • June 11, 2008 • 2 Comments »
Birthday Alarm. You go to the website, it crawls through your address book, sends out an email to all your friends and simply asks them for their birthday. Free sign-up, or users pay $14/yr to have ecards they can send to those friends.
Such a simple idea. Has 50mm users right now grossing $4mm revenues/year. Had 50mm more users years ago — might not be an opportunity to get those other 50mm (given Facebook, Bebo, MySpace these days), but I think there is the opportunity still.
More info at TechCrunch.
