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In-depth analysis and expert insight into the 140-character real-time information network.People Are Easy to Uniquely Identify
This research indicates that people can be uniquely identified with a tiny set of data: “87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {date of birth, gender, ZIP}.” That’s what you get as a proof of concept—imagine how much more precise it is when there are ad dollars at…
Statistical Errors and Lifetime Value
Custora, a churn analysis and lifetime value calculation company, notes the results of not segmenting customers by churn rate. This is usually a bigger hypothetical than real problem, since different user categories aren’t usually quite so differentiated. But the hypothetical does illustrate the risks of simplistic user retention analysis.
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Two of the most conventional business models online are doomed to collapse:
“Let’s let users upload media in digital form, and then sell it back to them in print form!” “Let’s get famous online so we get a book deal / TV show!”
These models are easy to understand, and the second model is especially…
“Tweeting’s so yesterday,” declared a headline in China Daily from June of last year, an obvious pronouncement in a country with Twitter blocked and only 10 million of its one-billion-plus population on microblogs. The story featured Sina Weibo, a new microblog platform from a company better known for its news portal, and talked…
Skype Buys GroupMe
Skype has purchased group-texting service GroupMe for about $85mm, a nice exit for the year-and-a-half-old firm. It’s also an interesting combination: one of Skype’s big strengths is its peer-to-peer structure, which basically coopts users’ computers to keep things running smoothly. GroupMe uses Twilio, which is basically an API for anything a standard…
HP’s Immaterial Move
HP is spinning off their hardware business and shutting down their WebOS products. It’s hard to interpret this in a way that matters to anyone not directly involved: for the web, Apple is still the macro situation. Everything else, including HP, is comparatively commoditized.
TechCrunch says that Apple beat them, but that’s…
PR guy Peter Shankman wrote up the epic tale of how he asked for a steak to be delivered to the airport, and got it. That’s great! And it perfectly illustrates what might be called the Iron Law of Irrelevant Anecdotes:
In a world with social networks whose follower counts have a power-law distribution, the…
Developers make more than they used to. Accounting for salaries, options, perks, and morale-boosting strategic decisions, developers are the most expensive part of most Internet companies. The cost of developers hasn’t just increased—the cost has become more of a variable cost than a fixed cost, and the increase is predominately in pay for the best,…
Quinstreet’s Earnings Beat
A few days after Demand Media beat their earnings estimates and saw their stock price promptly collapse, Quinstreet barely beat estimates and saw their stock rise as much as 22%. The lesson, of course, is to report earnings on a day when the market’s doing great.
Carbonite’s Daring IPO
Carbonite actually priced their IPO,…
Demand Media’s Bizarre Price Fluctuations
After-hours on Tuesday, Demand Media’s stock spiked up 17% before settling slightly down for the day. On Wednesday morning the shares hit $10.75, but closed at $8.45, again down slightly for the day. This, after a very positive quarter. One reason is the combination of their lock-up expiring and the…
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