February 2012
1 post
What HootSuite has taught me about freemium SaaS
With HootSuite surpassing 3m users and generating significant revenue, I thought that this would be a good time to reflect on the investment we made back in December 2009 and share what I’ve learned since.
For quick background, I reached out to Ryan, the CEO and founder, in spring 2009. It was apparent that this thing called ‘social media’ was going to be big, but from a risk profile and...
June 2011
2 posts
PayPal Security is Awful-An Update on my Robbery
So as many of you know, someone hacked my PayPal account for $6,000. Here is what I have been able to piece together.
1) Sometime on Sunday, someone used a blackberry device (which i do not have) to access my PayPal account with my username and password and send $6k to another PayPal account. The belief by PayPal is this person got the information from another site with less security and tried it...
Horrifying PayPal Fraud Tale (Beware)
I’ve been a happy user of paypal for many years…UNTIL TODAY. Upon logging in to my bank account to grab information needed for my ongoing mortgage application process, I noticed a $6,000 withdrawal from PayPal. Immediately, steam emitted from my ears as I had not made any such payment and have never made any payment over a few hundred bucks via PayPal. Some type of fraud had obviously...
April 2011
2 posts
In the last few days, I drove by st. Vincents hospital in west village and north general up in Harlem. Both are now shuttered and completely abandoned. I have to imagine we will see more hospital closures and that this phenomenon is not unique to NYC. Meanwhile millions of Americans don’t have access to healthcare and costs are going thru the moon. How about instead of closing these...
Trying to return a computer to dell and have been shipped around to 3 different departments who all ask the same questions. Isn’t there a way to store all of it I don’t have to repeat myself over and over again…
http://amplify.com/u/byfef
October 2010
2 posts
Something about this #MTA fair hike plan just doesn’t seem right. They are punishing those that ride the subway every day. Seems like they should hit those who just use it infrequently. Raising the single fair price and increasing the discount on monthly and weekly would make more sense. So would charging even more for every new card you needed. The best and long-term solution though is...
What becomes a more popular product: an apple branded tv set or an android powered desktop? http://amplify.com/u/bx91
May 2010
1 post
Groupon’s Biggest Threat? Not Local Publishers.
I found this post by Jim Moran, one of the founders of YipIt, quite interesting and wanted to write a longer post to share my thoughts. In it, Jim suggests 4 ways that local publishers can compete with the likes of Groupon and Living Social in the local deals space. While I agree with all of his suggestions, including leveraging existing email lists and content, I think it is worthwhile to...
March 2010
2 posts
Internet Businesses Don't Work?
I’ve recently spoken to a number of people at traditional media companies and there seems to be an increasing sense at the highest levels of these organizations that this ‘Internet thing’ just doesn’t work. In many ways, you can’t blame them either with Scripps recently selling off uSwitch at a fraction of the price it paid. Things seem to be going so badly at Bebo...
It Get's Late Early; The Current Challenge for...
For those reading that don’t know me, I work in the venture capital group at the Hearst Corporation. We play the role of a patient, growth capital investor for startups looking for validation from (and partnerships with) a traditional media company. As a result, the majority of our capital is invested in Series B and Series C rounds in startups that have been operating for at least a 18 to...
February 2010
3 posts
January 2010
9 posts
Social Media Strategy 1.0; Assistance Needed!
I’m working with an editorial-based property to help develop its social media strategy and have put together the following outline to kick off our conversation on the topic. I thought it would be interesting to post it here and I’d greatly appreciate any and all feedback. Please note that this is still a work in progress and that there is no budget for social media so this just covers...
Even VC's Should Learn to Fail Fast
For the 3+ years I’ve been in the venture business, my biggest challenges have been building credibility and finding quality deal flow. In many ways they are linked with the better the reputation, the higher quality deals that come across one’s desk. Speaking frankly, I’ve struggled mightily on both accounts and, until recently, relied on bankers and ‘friends’ at...
So what else can the NY Times learn from Zynga?
I’m an avid player of Zynga’s Mafia Wars, having reached level 400 and spent about $100 over the last 12 months. While about half of that money has been used to extend my playing time (e.g. buying more energy) the other half has been used to purchase unique items that either improve my status or character’s abilities. While there has been a lot of talk recently about the NY...
Mark McGwire is a Juiced-up Dave Kingman
My Case for Why Big Mac Doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame
The exclusive purpose of this blog is to write about industry issues as it relates to my job as a digital media venture capitalist; however, Mark McGwire’s Hall of Fame status has always bothered me (even before the steroids allegations) so I figured I would use this forum to discuss it in public given all of the news about him in...
The Freemium Revolution
The Emerging Business Model is Working for Games and Music; Will News and Video be Next?
I have written a lot recently about the plethora of new social distribution platforms and the value of the user data that these generate; however, an equally important trend in digital media is the emergence of the freemium model in the US that has been exploited with a great deal of success by the likes of...
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Digital Footprints; Does Blue Horseshoe love...
Implications of Public User Generated Data on Public Company Investing
With the emergence of platforms such as Twitter, Blippy, Gowalla, Facebook, UStream, Flickr, TwitPic, Foursquare, Meetup, Digg, Brightkite, etc, there is now an explosion of public user generated content marking the events of one’s life. Through these lenses, we can now easily see where a person is every day and where he...
PPC Ads Don't Work for 90% of Local Businesses; So...
I came across some information recently around pay per click (PPC) advertising that I found pretty intriguing. Specifically, it confirmed to me that PPC advertising is not a feasible ad format for most small businesses (SMBs) and thus a different product will need to emerge in order for the much expected flood of SMB budgets to move online. Here are the first two data points:
At an industry...
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Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!
How user actions in social media will change the loyalty marketing landscape
Yesterday I saw the following post on Twitter from @lavidalibre:
Just won a $25 BART card from @SFBART for checking in on @foursquare!
While the idea of idea of rewarding loyalty has always been with us, the number of places where people are now able to publicly profess their loyalty to a brand or location is...
Friend, Follow, Foursquare and Find!
How the Explosion of Structured Location Data will Change Local Search
I recently started dabbling with NextStop and what really hit me is how much structured, user-generated content around location there now is on the web. For example, between foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla, Twitter, Facebook and now companies like NextStop and Blippy, there is a trail of all the locations that an individual visits,...
November 2009
5 posts
Twitter may have an ad business, how 3rd party...
Last week, Twitter talked more about its monetization plans for tweets. Robert Scoble wrote about how this implementation might work here:
http://bit.ly/8XvGuM
While I think that this is an interesting opportunity, I have a number of questions. The first is will Twitter have to cut in 3rd party application clients such as Seesmic, Tweetdeck, HootSuite and Twitterific on which most users actually...
You've sold me! Now I'm going to buy it online.
This weekend, my wife and I visited my sister in the suburbs of Boston. Given the difficulty of shopping in Manhattan (and expecting our first child in February), we drove to the local baby store to look at all of the different strollers on our list. After getting a fantastic product demo from an extraordinarily helpful salesman, we were sold on an overly expensive option from Bugaboo. Instead of...
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I paid $4.79 for each of my Facebook fans, now...
One of the things that I’ve been spending time looking into recently is the potential of the Facebook ad platform and the implications of that in my job as an venture investor. To the former, I recently ran two campaigns on Facebook with the purpose of increasing the number of fans to the associated fan pages. Campaign 1 was for a reasonably well known Hearst brand while Campaign 2 was for...
Twitter lists and will it lead to an uber Twitter...
While I think there is real value in Twitter lists, I believe that it may be even more important to have a place where people can just type into a Twitter search engine “NYC seafood restaurant” and have it pull up all the Twitter accounts that meet these criteria. Obviously WeFollow and others are trying to do this, but I have yet to see a good solution.
This is why I think it would be a great...
Should a media co buy an offer wall co?
With Zynga banning all offers yesterday and Google announcing its proposal for a micro-transaction platform for online publishers, I thought this question was a timely one to try to answer.
I believe that we are only at the beginning of a fundamental shift in how content is monetized on the web. Social gaming companies have mastered thefreemium model and proven that people will pay for online...