alizaki

I’m very sorry to hear. An old copy of Accidental Empires was one of my introductions technology + capitalism

Indeed. What a deep cut

His PC magazine column was the first thing I read when I was able to get hold of old PC Magazines.

Even in the fast cycle of PCs in the 90s, you could learn something reading yesterdays newspaper from his columns. RIP

There is no “Chinese LLM”. Each “lab” is distinct and their models behavior is as unique as those from OpenAI and Anthropic

I'm not sure if identifying pain is the opposite of creating need. The pain here was fast foods need for cheap fish that has a reliable supply. The need was created when he was able to convince these companies that his fish supply chain was their best solution.

the like/share/repin/rate/review buttons are a form of natural curation built into the fabric of the social web.

A work/travel-program for knowledge professionals to travel the world and work a set number of hours a week on projects to pay their way. Air tickets, budget, airbnbs/apartments all paid for. Then you resell services to clients.

You could probably keep a high enough margin by saving through smart purchasing/renting of travel along and picking lower cost/highly desired destinations (south east asia comes to mind, for example).

a business of lifestyle, if you will.

the irs would hit any partners you use to transfer funds very quickly with deep audits at the very minimum if this gets even a little traction, i'd think

This is a bridge round led by an outside investor. Not uncommon, especially between Series A and B. I don't get much of the hard decision here, seems pretty common. I do appreciate her honesty though.

The problem with such advice is that some of it is always right. But you just don't which part. And you can't do it all.

You're probably right, FB prices went up for Zynga more so than others because they saturated their market (which just took longer cause it was bigger). However, anecdotally, I've seen FB prices rise 25 - 35% over the last 18 months.

I think this misses the point entirely. Zynga is not failing because their products are cheap to recreate. Plenty of companies, in tech and beyond, have easily recreatable products but do just fine. Zynga is "failing" (if you can call it that) because they depended on cheap user traffic from Facebook - both through free virality and later cheap ad buys. Facebook is maturing as a business and ad prices are going up. And Facebook realized that all that game spam was just not worth the 30% vig they charged (probably the hard way - through testing for user engagement). Take away those temporary advantages and Zynga is just like any other gaming company.

This is a right sizing of the company and its revenues to reflect the games they own, once you take away the cheap/free traffic.

A lot more tech companies are started now than maybe, 3 years ago. Also, it takes companies time to reach $100M in revenue.

I always wondered why everything related to my computing devices seems to follow some variation of Moores law but the battery. This explains it.

I think a fundamental assumption in this article is flawed: "The most popular games are still pretty simple, but mid-core games like strategy simulator War Commander are gaining steam. Some people who used to be content clicking FarmVille crops have moved on to more complicated games."

So called "mid core" games on Facebook are generally male focused war/strategy titles. Most Farmville/Cityville, etc. players are women. They haven't "moved on" to more complicated games. They've just grown tired of the same formula.

Shoedazzle pioneered this but had to get rid of the subscription and flip to a per-item charge because of scam complains.

Red Herring used to be a major tech magazine back in the day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Herring_(magazine)

Why does Apple warn users that they must be at least 17 to download a browser. Or for that matter say that Axis may contain:

    Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor
    Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
    Infrequent/Mild Simulated Gambling
    Infrequent/Mild Horror/Fear Themes
    Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
    Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes
    Infrequent/Mild Realistic Violence
    Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity

This is way too generic. There can be no one best place for entrepreneurs because the natural ideal location is where your customers are (as a startup, you'll more often than not tend to have real customers in one specific geography first). That's your best place.

I think this should read: if you're customers are in South East Asia, you're amongst the luckiest entrepreneurs in the world.

Wrong. Social games are not regular media. What is a media company? Media companies deal in information - it could be the news, analysis, up-to-the-second stock information or celebrity photographs. Media companies battle comodotization and charge through ads or subscriptions of some sort. Game (traditional) companies are like studios. You build something (you think) people want, market it and boom, you make money. Once someone buys your box/downloads your game on Steam, you're only concerned with how long they play (i.e. amount of fun they have) in the context of the sequel. As with movies and music, there are indie surprises (exceptions which prove the rule).

Social games companies (and many of the apps) only gets paid when people actually play their games (I'm simplifying this, because a lot of other factors add in, e.g. geography. But it's more of less true.). This is why they measure revenue by DAU (daily active users). You can bring this engagement around by analytics, behavioral science (social compulsion) or by making a damn good game, any which way you want. But you're in the business of making consumable experience which leave the user wanting more eventually. So social games have more in common with the drug trade than media companies/traditional games.

hear hear

I think news sites think of Most Popular, Most Emailed, etc as ways to generate more pageviews, which is basically revenue. They're not based off any personal relevance to the user. Which is why in the authors model of things, they can be disposed of.

RIM needs to become a services company and focus on what they did best - enterprise class connectivity on the go. Take your set of tools and apps across devices - and email is just one of the many things they can offer. IT Depts dont really want to choose the phone people carry but have to standardize. The Apple and Android divide will only get more polarized, if Windows Phone does well, all the more better - imagine one set of RIM tools integrating with every device in your company to offer secure email, security + wipe clean, documents, BBM, social features, etc. For that though, RIM will have to become a software company. And they suck at that. The opportunity is big enough to support a $30Bn company, for sure.

Oh and they should forget about consumers. That whole thing was just dumb.

When I was still in college a few years ago, I fell for this on a trip to Guangzhou. I believe those were supposedly 8GB flash drives with 32MB of real memory, selling for less than 5 bucks each. Being the immaculate hustler I am, I bought a sackful of those to haul back home to sell, only to learn that if it's too good to be true...

I will have to abstain here, just because there is nobody who can maintain a neutral reaction with all thats written. I bet half the people here havent even tried the app.

Coke could open source their cola tomorrow and nothing would change. I dont get this fascination with their secret recipe. Their strength is distribution and marketing of course. It would be the equivalent of Nike telling you how to make a shoe.

did anybody else read this and think, Anonymous?

AdSense, to my knowledge, doesn't only optimize for maximum CPC but rather for max earnout for Google, a large part of which is the likelihood of you clicking the ad. This is a fair determination of the quality of the "deal"/ad, I suppose.

Close your eyes and imagine that you took a sum of money from friends and family, gave it your best shot and burnt through it. Would you be able to face them positively after? Would it undermine your relationship with them in any way? If it would, then it's not worth it. If your idea is any good, there will be a lot of opportunity for investments in this market.

Bounce by Matthew Syed. Highly recommended read in the same vein as Outliers without the need to find continuously interesting anecdotes every 5 pages and with some science.