As a companion effort to my recent deep dive on messaging, I’ve been trying to get smarter about the online collaboration / groupware space. Unfortunately, the closer I get to it the muddier it seems. I’ve now fallen back on the penultimate refuge of scoundrels, the 2-by-2 matrix, to try to create some order in continue…
I have a new obsession (more on that below) and have been scouring the Web to see who else is already working on it (there’s always someone). The bad news is, in terms of running code, versions of the idea have been “in market” for years. The good news is that these products were developed continue…
Continuing on the “messaging” theme I started in on a while ago, here’s a deeper dive on the role of contacts and contact management, a.k.a. “Personal Relationship Management” (thanks to Om Malik for pointing me to a topical post by Tristan Louis). Here’s how Tristan defines it: “…provide me with a high level contact overview continue…
Yesterday I bookmarked, and today I took the time to read a long and thoughtful post by Bernard Lunn on Read/Write Web. His thesis is that the coming (current?) recession is accelerating the transition to a new phase of Web innovation he calls the “Main Street Web”. In his view, this phase will be characterized continue…
In a post from earlier today Read/Write Web pointed to this piece by Google alum Bret Taylor titled: “We need a Wikipedia for data”. His premise is that an open, public storehouse for “useful” datasets would unleash entrepreneurial creativity globally, leading to the creation of both social good and business value. I was beating a continue…
One of the best things about my involvement in Colligent (f/k/a IndieMarketer) is the ringside seat it offers me on the digital music business, and on digital media in general. From a macro trends perspective, anyone hoping to make money selling access to digital media, whether it’s music, film, still images or text, had better continue…
You know how once you get an idea in your head you start seeing examples of it everywhere? Last week I posted about using peer-comparison marketing (e.g., “peer pressure”) to drive reductions in residential energy consumption. Two days later Read/Write Web (one of my favorite group blogs on the future of the consumer web) posted continue…
Just saw this article in today’s New York Times. A pilot project in Washington State gave ratepayers live data on their energy consumption and let them make consumption changes (e.g., furnace and water heater thermostat adjustments) remotely in response to market conditions, resulting in an average 10% reduction in consumption across the sample. This is continue…
You can tell I’m catching up on my feeds post-holiday, can’t you? This piece from Mark Hopkins at Mashable is (from my perspective) missing a crucial point: Amazon has built a very slick Roach Motel for your purchasing history. What they need to do next is give you the option of downloading (and/or feeding over continue…
I can’t possibly do justice to his great post, but Andrew Chen has been doing user interviews to understand how people think about their web of personal relationships, and his conclusion matches up well with my own intuitive sense for where the useful social graph really lies: it’s not Facebook, it’s not the inbox, it’s continue…