Posts by: Byrne Hobart
How Startups are Outsourcing Distributed Spam Attacks
There are two practical reasons not to spam:
If you’re using your own server, your ISP will quickly identify you as a pest and shut you down. If you’re paying to use a mailing service, they will identify you as a pest before your ISP gets around to it.
The…
Web.com has announced that they’re buying Network Solutions for $405mm in cash, and shares worth $155mm (or $207mm post-announcement—more on that later).
As ReadWriteWeb notes, this is less than the $800mm that General Atlantic paid for it in 2007. And much less than the $21bn that Verisign paid in 2000. There’s a decent chance that General Atlantic…
One of the surprising effects of blogging culture and social media is that articulate and/or popular people have a vastly different experience than the rest of us. Just look at the EJ / AirBNB saga. Here’s how EJ started her story:
I am crouched low on the carpeted steps of my apartment building’s old staircase,…
LivingSocial Updates
Even a few months ago, LivingSocial seemed like the definition of an also-ran: Groupon got PR, small group-buying competitors got PR, and when those small companies got written up, LivingSocial could hope that the phrase “Like Groupon and LivingSocial” would appear somewhere in the copy.
But they’ve recently been recognized as a player…
If there’s one way to sum up the resurgence of display advertising compared to search advertising in the last few years, it would be this: Display is finally a market. Like a financial security that can be split, swapped, sliced, diced, packaged, unpackaged, and hedged, ad space is being matched to the exact right bidder,…
AirBNB’s Drastic Crisis Response
Hot on the heels of VC Charlie O’Donnell’s rousing defense of AirBNB, the company announced a new, dramatic policy: $50,000 in de facto insurance for all hosts. This opens AirBNB up to significant fraud risk; they may impose some pretty strict hurdles, or end up paying the $50,000 mostly to people who…
Alipay Settlement Doesn’t Impress Yahoo Shareholders
Yahoo’s Alipay settlement, announced early Friday morning, initially pushed the stock up. By the end of the day, Yahoo was down slightly. This was due, in part, to negative comments from analysts, who are still concerned that Yahoo essentially gave away part of an extremely valuable business.
Epocrates:…
Most popular web-based businesses are deflationary. They substitute expensive forms of content consumption for cheap ones, they make it logistically easier to deliver discounts to people who will respond to them, and they create numerous financially cheap forms of social status. As more activity moves on to the web, the main effect on the economy…
Quarterly Earnings Update
A few search- and social-driven companies have reported their earnings this quarter. An update:
Overstock.com had weak sales growth and lower gross margins, with a drop in sales and marketing expenses and an increase in technology spending. The press release has details. Early in the quarter, they were penalized by Google, which may be…
People who talk about search engines act as if Google owns the market. “Don’t do that. Google won’t like it.” “Do that—you’ll rank better on Google.” Google does own a big piece of the market—66% in the US, more in most other places, and it’s a contender even in the few countries where it’s not…
Recent Research
Digital Due Diligence Weekly